One of the things I enjoy most about writing Drinks Diaries is that there really are no boundaries to what might end up in my glass. This time we travel from the vineyards of West Sussex to the shores of Lake Geneva, through Tuscany, Austria, Portugal, and the far south of Italy, before heading north to Islay and Skye. There are familiar grapes in unfamiliar places, including a Tuscan white from a region better known for Sangiovese, alongside Chasselas from Switzerland, a country whose wines we rarely get the opportunity to drink in the UK.

The Suzuki GSX-S1000GT is Suzuki's sport-tourer that replaced the older GSX-S1000F. It takes a legendary superbike powerplant and houses it in a sporty but comfortable, long-distance chassis built for high-speed touring and spirited backroad scratching, and boy, does it deliver.

My bike was the GT+, which includes factory colour-matched 36-litre hard panniers (capable of holding a full-face helmet in each side), and heated grips as standard.

There is a special kind of magic that settles over West Sussex in the height of summer, where for one weekend, a narrow 1.17-mile ribbon of tarmac is transformed into the most revered stage in global motorsport. The Goodwood Festival of Speed is a fleeting, three-minute visceral punch—a 304-foot ascent where the analytical mind takes a back seat to pure adrenaline, and I was invited to experience it for myself as the guest of Honda motorcycles.

Bentley has unveiled its first fully electric car. The Torcal is a five-seat SUV with up to 876 bhp, a claimed range of 375 miles and a rather elaborate answer to the question of what a Bentley should sound like without an engine. It involves a viola. We shall come to that.

Anyone who has made the pilgrimage to Campbeltown knows the journey demands commitment. Stepping off the Twin Otter, a rugged propeller plane with a single seat on either side of the aisle and not an overhead locker in sight, onto that exposed coastal tarmac feels like crossing into a different era.

The High Slopes of Excellence: Inside Weyborne Estate

High on the South Downs, Weyborne Estate looks across the Sussex countryside from slopes that rise towards a thousand feet above sea level. Its history reaches back to around 1600, when an early ironmaster used local ore to forge axes and spikes. By the mid seventeenth century, the estate was held by William Yaldwin, a Parliamentarian who hosted Oliver Cromwell during the Civil War.

We loaded up the Harley-Davidson Road Glide Limited, and I swung my leg over the sumptuous leather seat and thumbed the starter. The fabulous Milwaukee-Eight 114 engine fired into life, settling down to a melodic, rhythmic throb. Kate jumped on behind me, and off we went, leaving the historic grandeur of Boringdon Hall behind. The second leg of our journey took us southwest, out of Devon and into Cornwall, toward the quiet waters of the Helford River near Falmouth.

Set just outside the ski resort of Obertauern in the tiny village of Untertauern, less than an hour’s drive from Salzburg airport, Lürzerhof makes an immediate impression. The lobby alone is vast, all polished wood, stone and light, with the sort of scale that tells you this is not a small, sleepy alpine guesthouse but a serious operation. It’s family-run, but with the confidence and infrastructure of somewhere that has grown steadily over time and knows exactly how to look after its guests.

Loch Lomond possesses a distinct aura that few bodies of water can match. As the largest expanse of fresh water in Great Britain, it straddles the Highland Boundary Fault, splitting the calm pastoral Lowlands from the rugged wilderness of the north. Its eastern shore belongs to the raw solitude of the West Highland Way, while the western banks harbour quiet enclaves of extraordinary wealth and discretion, most notably the ultra exclusive Loch Lomond Golf Club, where billionaires and world leaders arrive by boat or helicopter, shielded behind gated lochside paths.

Seaplane to Shaviyani Atoll: Barefoot Pilots and the Finest Commute on Earth