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The baby bridesmaid with hands clamped firmly over her ears and a fretful frown notched across her brow is Grace van Cutsem, the 3-year-old god-daughter of Prince William, and an internet-meme in the making.

Like a high-class infant photo-bomber, little Gracie has managed to spoil enhance a historic image with unexpected panache.

The poor mite seemed pretty unhappy with the level of noise going on, initially the result of lots of raucous cheering from the crowds as Wills executed his long-awaited smooch with the new Duchess of Cambridge.

As if that wasn’t enough, there followed an eardrum-shaking fly-over by World War II era planes - including a Spitfire, Hurricane and a Lancaster – which did not appear to improve Grace’s mood – see photo no.2.

Perhaps she is simply getting tired of the whole rigmarole of being a bridesmaid, for she is clearly a flowergirl-of-choice when it comes to a certain kind of wedding – see here and here for two previous engagements.

Here’s hoping that in the formal photographic mementoes of the day, the adorably pouting Ms Grace is not cropped out.

Detective Sarah Lund, played by Sofie Gråbøl

If you’re not already watching The Killing, the stylish Danish police thriller showing on BBC4, you’ve got a treat in store.

Head down to the iPlayer where you’ve got a month to catch-up on the 10 episodes you’ve missed so far – episodes 11 and 12 are on Saturday night.

The plot may tread familiar territory – a teenage girl goes missing, a couple of quarrelsome detectives get on the case – but in execution, the show’s Danish creators have done something exceptional.

They leaven the dark tragedy of Nanna Birk Larsen’s disappearance with a parallel story of political intrigue, set against the backdrop of Copenhagen’s mayoral election.

Troels Hartmann, a troubled candidate for city mayor, played by Lars Mikkelsen

And they counter-balance the familiar science of the police procedural with an insight into the broader impact of the girl’s disappearance.

Thus we spend almost as much time with the family of 19-year-old Nanna – her stalwart, hard-working father Theis; her warm, loyal mother Pernille – as we do with the two detectives searching for her.

Most importantly, by casting the subtle, magnetic Sofie Gråbøl in the role of detective Sarah Lund, the producers have provided a deeply watchable lead who acts as a centre of gravity for each episode.

As Lund wades deeper into the mystery, she never loses our attention and rarely tests our sympathy – except perhaps in her personal relationships, which increasingly suffer from her workaholic devotion to the case.

A kind of yang to Lund’s yin, Lars Mikkelsen, with his blonde good looks and striking cheekbones, is equally compelling as the liberal politician Troels Hartmann, whose campaign to become mayor is constantly on the brink of being derailed by unknown forces.

At times it’s hard not to compare The Killing to the BBC’s State of Play, another gripping TV series that begins with a tragedy involving a young woman, but which is more deeply embedded in the political world. The Killing does not quite match the compact panache of the BBC series, although that is partly by nature of its far longer running time – 20 episodes compared to State of Play’s six. It does offer comparable levels of suspense. Ten episodes in, we still don’t know what happened to Nanna on the night she disappeared, although pieces of the jigsaw are beginning to emerge.

But while I’m a fan of her picturesque settings, thoughtful pacing and eminently stylish fittings (music, clothes, actors, it’s all good) there’s something about Ms. Coppola’s favoured plotlines that niggles. Granted, I haven’t yet seen Somewhere, so I’m pretty much going by the trailer and the poster – risky. Still.

What do we know? Our two lead characters, played by Stephen Dorff and Elle Fanning, are not just ‘somewhere’. They spend their time in environments of extreme luxury. They have their every whim catered for. They bask in sunshine, swim underwater, lay about in bed ordering room-service, eating ice-cream and watching films. Sometimes, beautiful, slender, glamorous people enter their lives.

Most of the time the main protagonist is troubled – in spite (in spite!) of his luxe life. Who would have guessed it? And who would have guessed that spending ‘quality time’ (that means, basically, any time at all) with your beautiful, talented, playful daughter might make you a little bit happy?

I enjoyed Lost in Translation. I surprised myself by enjoying Marie Antoinette, quite a lot. I’m sure I will enjoy Somewhere. But my problem is: how could one not? It’s furniture porn, hotel porn, fashion porn, travel porn, all parcelled up with a cool soundtrack.

Perhaps this isn’t fair. After all, great art often comes from telling stories about the places you know best, and Coppola apparently based Somewhere partly on her own experience, travelling around hotels with her father.

And there are moments of genius: the shot of Stephen Dorff having a plaster mask made of his face is a great natural metaphor, full of pathos.

The truth is, I would really like to see Sofia Coppola, who is undoubtedly talented, make a film that isn’t set in five star surroundings. There is something so hypnotic about watching these poor rich people with their neuroses, their addiction to opulence, their everyman need to be loved. It’s fun to watch them just traverse the locations, like watching an exclusive travel show. But I’d like Coppola to challenge herself and her audience, by going somewhere that isn’t naturally beautiful, and then making us watch.

Most importantly, I didn’t miss the two acts I was most excited to see: Laura Marling and Mumford & Sons.

Ms Marling was pretty electrifying as usual: her voice so pure and clear and never missing a note that the whole room seemed to hold its breath while she sang. Mumford & Sons were also feet-tappingly excellent.

Neither act won the prize, although it was interesting to hear how many of the nominees fell somewhere on the indie-folk spectrum. In contrast, the winners – the xx (which as the Guardian tells us, is strictly lower-case) – aren’t folky, but have a unique sort of spare, electronic sound.

The most exciting bits of the evening were hearing bands I didn’t know anything about and realising I liked them. One example was Foals singing Spanish Sahara, which has this insistent, growing beat and beauty that quickly becomes hypnotic.

I Am Kloot’s Northern Skies was sweet and listenable, and Becoming a Jackal by Villagers is a beguiling mix of melancholy and mischief. Corinne Bailey Rae was amazing to hear, because her voice was so malleable and she sang like a jazz queen, although when I later listened to parts of her album online, they seemed overproduced: live, her talent is far more stunning.

All in all it was a good night and I’ve since bought all the tracks above. To that extent I have fallen into the trap that is the true function of the Mercury Prize – to sell records by raising awareness – but that’s ok: my music collection is all the richer for it.

He followed that up with Insomnia, which pitted Al Pacino against a villainous Robin Williams in a perpetually light Alaska. Though somewhat less original than Memento, it still did the job of a psychological thriller very well.

I wasn’t super keen on The Prestige, with Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman as rival magicians, but with Batman Begins, and later, The Dark Knight, Nolan returned to the visionary filmmaking he demonstrated in Memento.

I’m hoping that Inception, with its stellar cast and mindboggling conceit – Leonardo DiCaprio can mess with your dreams (like a better looking version of the BFG?) – will prove to be another Nolan masterwork.

French filmmaker Thomas Balmes has made a documentary starring four babies, born and being raised in four very different locations: Mongolia, Namibia, San Francisco and Tokyo.

Look out for ace Namibian baby balancing a pot on head while walking.

[P.S. I know it's been a long time since I last posted anything, indeed SO long that even my DAD wants to know what's going on... to which my only excuse is that I've been busy learning things, about the retail sector, and then the media sector. But with the summer lengthening of the days, I am hopeful I will find time to blog more often.]

The Rhone river, seen from a Domaine Vernay vineyard

Christine Vernay was on holiday in Missouri when she got the call. It was August 12 2003 and the French vineyard owner was not due to return home for 10 days; the harvest on her Rhône valley estate would begin in late September. But then a friend from Condrieu called her husband’s mobile phone.

“The grapes have ripened early. You need to come home now,” he said.

France was sweltering in the most extreme heat wave on record. Christine and her husband, Paul Ansellem, caught the first flight back but by the time they reached the vineyards most of the grapes in their 18 hectare estate had shrivelled on the vine.

Instead of rows of plump, light golden fruit, the couple found shrunken berries, burnt brown by the sun. “We’d never seen anything like it,” says Christine, a petite 52-year-old mother of two, who took over the renowned Vernay estate from her father in 1997. She scrambled to arrange a harvest within three days of their return. Even so, the vineyard produced only half its usual volume of wine that year. The grapes were simply too desiccated.

Ms Vernay’s experience offers a stark preview of what scientists say could be the future of the wine industry in southern Europe. Heat waves like that of 2003 will occur with increasing frequency in coming decades, they predict, while average yearly temperatures will continue to rise.

Martin Beniston, a senior climate scientist at the University of Geneva, and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says: “Current research suggests that by the end of the 21st century, one summer out of two will be at least as hot as 2003. Which implies that certain summers may be even hotter. Where one heat wave summer can have a beneficial effect on some grapes, several in a row would take a heavy toll on all but the most robust species.”

Since 2003, every summer but one – 2007 – has been hotter than the average of the 30 years before, according to France Météo, the meteorological office. This summer was France’s fifth hottest since 1950, with the average temperature 1.3° C above normal.

In August, for five days in a row, temperatures in southern France reached 40° C; in Languedoc and Beaujolais, grape-picking began in late August, while even in northern France wine growers are preparing for a premature harvest.

“It will be a very early vintage, without a doubt,” says Jean-Louis Vézien, director of CIVA, the Alsace organisation of wine growers and handlers.

Franck Thomas, European sommelier of the year in 2000, believes the result is already altering French wine “profoundly”. “If you harvest earlier . . . the alcohol content is higher [and] it unbalances the wine. For instance, with red wine, you have the maturity of the alcohol but not the tannins coming from the skin. So you lose the freshness, and the wine becomes tart and unpleasant.”

He is not alone in his concern. In August, Thomas and 49 of France’s top chefs, sommeliers and wine producers wrote to Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, arguing that climate change was threatening the survival of the wine industry and pushing for France to demand a 40 per cent cut in global carbon emissions by 2020 at this December’s Copenhagen conference.

“French wines, jewels of our shared, cultural heritage, elegant and refined, are in danger,” they wrote in the letter, which was published in Le Monde. Their fear is that rising temperatures in southern Europe could render centuries-old practices of wine growing irrelevant. Grapes across the Mediterranean would roast on the vine before reaching full maturity.

France’s position as a revered producer of wine is thanks to centuries of cultivation, after the Greeks and the Romans imported techniques of viticulture into the Burgundy, Bordeaux and Rhône regions. But it rests on the delicate balance of climate and soil.

“France’s primacy at the top level of winemaking is an accident of nature,” says Alun Griffiths, wine director at Berry Brothers & Rudd. “France just happens to be in the perfect position to make a range of fantastic wines. It’s considered a reasonably marginal climate – just a bit farther north in Britain it’s not quite hot enough; Africa is too hot.”

If that changes, the specificity of certain wines could be destroyed for ever, according to Franck Thomas. “In 2003, the wines lost their identity. It was very bizarre. Wine from the Loire valley tasted like wine from the Rhône. If we don’t do something now, in 30 years we will have that problem every year.”

The village of Condrieu is about 40km south of Lyon, and overlooks the wide Rhone river at its only turn. Curving upwards from the Rhone are rounded, lumpy hills; not terribly high, but steep.

As far as the eye can see, vineyards stipple the light brown hills with green. The vines grow in orderly, narrow rows, defying the inclines, as if someone has combed the hills with a green-fingered brush.

Ms Vernay’s father, Georges, made 54 harvests before handing over the running of his Condrieu estate to his daughter. In all but two of those years, the harvests fell at the end of September. Now that has changed.

“Since I took over we’ve had 10 consecutive years in which our harvests have been about 10 days earlier than normal,” says Christine Vernay. “The vineyards are a witness to climate change as it is happening now. Of course we can think of ways to adapt in the short-term, but it’s most important that we start stopping or slowing down the change in climate. Otherwise we are facing real catastrophe.”

This article was first published in the Financial Times, here.

There were the stalwart inheritance tracks; the music that I work to; the music I go to sleep to when my brain’s still working. Let’s just say the churn rate was very low.

Imagine my surprise when one artist and his one and only album managed to supercede every other track on my ipod after just three months, taking not just the no.1 and no.2 and no.3 spot in the most listened to list, but every other spot until the album runs out.

If you know Bon Iver, and his 2008 solo debut, For Emma, Forever Ago, you may understand. It’s an incredibly beautiful album.  

It’s not brash or pushy. The first time you hear it, it doesn’t get you in a stranglehold; it’s more of a gradual, stealthy bewitching. By the third and fourth times you don’t really want to hear anything else. I didn’t consciously listen to the whole entire album on repeat hundreds of times, but that’s what must have happened.

The ‘Iver’ in Bon Iver is pronounced like the French ‘hiver’ for winter. His real name is Justin Vernon, and the story of For Emma – how it came about, from what pain and solitude it sprung – is beautiful and worthy of myth-making in its own right.

You can learn about it here, in a short, sweet video interview Vernon did with the Guardian, that includes an acoustic performance of one of the album’s best tracks.

You can also listen to track 3 on the album, Skinny Love, here.

The Guardian’s latest audio slideshow: a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the set design for A Streetcar Named Desire, which is currently playing at London’s Donmar, starring Rachel Weisz.  It’s informative, beautiful and brief enough to enjoy in a coffeebreak at work. Plug in your headphones and press play.