A short drive from Los Angeles’ towering LAX Airport sits an apartment where I, one of The List’s most vulnerable journalists, am banished for six months of the year to entertain a parade of stars who beg me to review their latest projects. I reached the abode a few days ago to find three bottles of wine and a note reading, ‘Snoop Dogg, Kylie Minogue and Gary Barlow here. Review our celebrity wines or we’ll fill this place with Gary’s Poundstretcher songwriting until you go insane. We’ve locked the doors. Thx xxx.’

Shorn of my usual celeb companions, I began alco-courting Snoop Dogg’s Cali Red, which supposedly ‘embodies the timeless values of perseverance and redemption’. What Deputy Dawg delivers instead embodies ‘serviceable booze’ and ‘high acidity’, with a top note of fruit so strong it gives the experience a palpable weightlessness. Ip-Dipp-Doggy-Dogg won’t set the world alight with this foray into wine, but at least it’ll stop him making a follow-up to Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle (top tip: don’t google that reference on a work computer).

Next is bin-bag balladeer Gary Barlow’s Organic Rosé wine, a dreadful drink from a Marks & Spencer cardigan of a man. Gaz has trekked the globe to find a concoction that sits somewhere on the sniff-o-meter between ‘feet’ and ‘feet with bits of old food grated over them’, and fares no better on the taste scale. It’s also ‘organic’, but that phrase is patchier than Barlow’s financial arrangements.

Onto Minogue. A VHS of her early music videos was a mainstay of my childhood and I knew the dance moves to ‘The Loco-Motion’ off by heart, so I’m holding out hope she won’t forsake me like a grape-swigging Brutus. Thank our patron saint Pete Waterman that Kylie Minogue Rosé is passable, the kind of bottle you’d bring to a barbecue, share with pals and enjoy. Phew. With my review duties completed, the doors of my luxury apartment unlocked. I walked onto the porch to find Dogg, Minogue and Barlow staring back at me. Dogg and Minogue received a close embrace, before I declaimed, ‘et tu, Barlow’. And like a crumpled sad sack of a man, he fell to his knees and cried, his tears tasting better than the wine he had made me drink.