What better place to store wine than in a labyrinth of chalk corridors where the temperature is a consistent 12C and there is no sunlight or vibrations to spoil or disturb the stock?

I am speaking of the Old Chalk Mine in Knowl Hill, near Henley, where the Milton Sandford Wines stores its stock hundreds of feet underground. As the chalk mine is neither too hot, too cold or too bright, it is the perfect place to keep bottles in tip-top condition. It is also perfect for wine-tasting sessions, such as the one I was invited to last week. The event was named Cork, Chalk and Cheese for obvious reasons.

Milton Sandford Wines has stored its high-quality boutique wines in the mine since 1990. The aim of the event was to provide their clients, who manage some of the UK’s top hotels, restaurants and gastropubs, with a chance to taste new acquisitions from all over the world. Jolly fine cheese and delicious bread was laid out for their guests to taste too, along with some quite remarkable potted meats.

The potted meats and pâtés were supplied for the occasion by Ross and Ross Foods, a relatively new company run by friends Ross Bearman and Ross Whitmill, whose enthusiasm for fine food means they have more in common than their Christian names.

They both have an impressive catering background, Ross Whitmill having worked at the Petit Blanc for Raymond Blanc and also several establishments within the innovative Peach Pub Company, while Ross Bearman has worked in the food industry for more than 16 years, most notably at Malmaison. It was while working with Peach Pubs that they met and got on so well they decided they had the makings of a great partnership — but starting up a new company is not easy these days. Their dream of opening their own shop or eatery was frowned on by the bank manager. He did however, suggest they begin by making their own products and then prove their worth by getting them out there into the marketplace, which is exactly what they have been doing for the past year. Customers now include several leading Oxfordshire hotels, also Harrods, the prestigious London store for whom they are now making several gourmet preserved meat products which carry the store’s brand and include luxuries such as chicken liver parfait flavoured with black summer truffles.

Ross and Ross admit it took some time to get the flavours right for that order. Harrods demanded a perfect product — nothing second-rate would do. A contract with Harrods includes 23 pages of terms and conditions, even rules on exact delivery times. Get one thing wrong and they could lose the contract or be fined. They say they can cope with that. Such discipline is good for them, particularly at this point of their company’s development.

The premises they found to act as the nerve-centre for their exciting enterprise is based at Chipping Norton. Although it’s a small industrial unit, the kitchen is state-of-the art and there’s enough storage space to serve their needs.

The products that they were displaying in the chalk mine included jars of pork and duck rillettes, and liver parfaits, each of which comes paired with its own sauce. Rillettes are a traditional dish prepared from meat salted and cooked slowly in fat until tender enough to be shredded, then cooked again with enough of the fat to form a paste. It is rather like a rustic pâté, and certainly very tasty when spread on toast. Some chefs refer to rillettes as a brown jam.

Potted meats such as theirs are a traditional preservation method known as charcuterie, used in the days before refrigeration, particularly by the French who have been preserving meat this way since the 15th century.

It was after spending some months studying traditional charcuterie, cooking and tasting and then cooking again until they had perfected the recipes, that Ross and Ross were convinced they had finally come up with some first-class products good enough to grace any menu.

They say the main challenge lies in the skill needed to preserve meats in a flavoursome way, while ensuring the dish was free of bacteria and harmful moulds. While we no longer have to rely on charcuterie to preserve our food, the flavours that meats take on when prepared this way certainly ensure they will remain popular.

It was a couple of days after the Cork, Chalk and Cheese event that I then bumped into Ross and Ross at the Thame Food Festival, where they were selling baps filled with scrumptious pieces of Cotswold slow-roast lamb, served with a Salsa Verdi salad — delicious!