The problem with a session of apres-ski is that a quick glass or two of Gluhwein in a unpromising Cuckoo clock bar can so easily turn into a very late night session at the resort disco, dumping you back into your chalet bed only a few hours before sunrise and that elusive first lift you've planned on boarding. You didn't envisage it this way – dancing on the table to Ace of Base records in your Salomon boots – but high altitude ski villages seem to have a habit of turning even the sanest urbanites into frugging goons once they have a couple of alpine tinctures inside them.

For many years Christmas card-pretty Verbier offered the best and worst of apres-ski culture, its most notorious disco, The Farm Club, personifying the tawdry excesses of badly behaved, middle class Brits in the snow.

The London restaurateur Mogen Tholstrup has a place in Verbier. So do the super rich Portman and Fleming families (you know the Flemings? … bankers, one of them wrote rather successful spy books). There are lifts named after Diana Ross (who used to be married to a Verbier local) and James Blunt. Posh and Becks ski here. So do Jamie Oliver, Jemima Khan and Michael Schumacher. It's what your mum and dad would call call "upmarket".

But Verbier will always be most famous as the favoured ski destination of Prince Andrew, former chalet girl Fergie (now the former Duchess of York), motor racing playboy Paddy McNally, ne'er do well Marquess Jamie Blandford etc. This gruesome, braying bunch used to spend their winters in Verbier back in the 1980s, raising hell at the Farm Club, where rows of vodka bottles, outrageously priced (at around £90 a go) and marker-penned with the owners' names, lined the rear of the bar. Where unfunny ice cube fights were frequent and the ghastly euro pop carried on fizzing and pumping until the last sozzled Henry left.

I went to The Farm a few times, once with the writer Toby Young who insisted upon a late night visit. It was one of those places that was hard to get into and disappointing (small, expensive, bad music) once you were in. Shabby and stuck in some sort of Cinzano Bianco/Swisskit choccy bar ad timewarp, the brassy looking girls wore fur waistcoats and the men were dressed in City-boy, candy striped shirts.

So, why did I bother? Well, I was in Verbier for the skiing - which is superb, by the way - and this was the only place in town. Was it fun? I don't remember. I left at 4am, with a banging head and an empty wallet, skiing off my hangover on a perfect blue ski day a few ugly hours later.

Back in Verbier again just before Christmas for the first time in five years, I noticed that there was little talk of the Farm Club this time around. The resort had moved on, revved up and cashed in. I got the impression that the poor old Sloanes couldn't afford it any more.

There's now a sushi restaurant on the high street, two boutique hotels (Le Farinet and the recently opened Nevai), a super luxe chalet, The Lodge, owned by Richard Branson's Virgin Limted Edition brand (yours for around £40,000 a week), a ski shop selling Prada ski jackets at £900, an art gallery selling Warhol originals at £500,000 a pop, and a brand new private member's club night spot: Coco.

Coco is the new face of Verbier nightlife and judging by the décor and cocktail menu, this chi-chi subterranean boîte harbours ambitions of an oligarchic, private jet-chartering clientele. One of the walls is real gold leaf and cost the lion's share of the club's multi-million pound refit.

Thirsty? Get your quaffing gear around L'Avalanche, a giant "volcano" decked in Swarovski crystals or a Coco Chalet (Krug champagne, Hennessy cognac, "elixirs of love" and a solid-silver key fob, which entitles the drinker to a lifetime's membership of the club) which is served in a ice vessel carved to look like a (rather poor person's) mountain chalet. Jodie Kidd and Patrick Kielty necked one on the opening night. They cost £4,300 a pop.

With this sort of pricing Coco's owners (London banker-turned entrepreneur Harvey Sinclair and the ex-Spurs and Switzerland footballer Ramon Vega) seem intent on creating the kind of high rolling, free splurging, "them and us" ambiance that you get at places like Movida in London's West End and Les Caves du Roy in St Tropez. There are private rooms, roped-off areas and "minimum spend" banquettes.

And all that can only mean one thing: the Russians are coming.

Actually, they've already arrived. Apparently, in the very first week of trading, a group of Muscovites booked into the club for seven consecutive nights ordering 20 bottles of Cristal champagne to be laid aside for them each evening. They paid the £78,000 bill in advance.

So is Verbier ready to become a fur coat and Gucci goggles sort of place, a grand luxe, winter retreat in the style of similarly expensive Courchevel and that non-skiers' ski mecca St Moritz? You get the feeling it will only do so with a degree of curmudgeonly Swiss-style aloofness.

This is a town that would prefer not to alienate its old, patrician customers in order to attract a slew of flashy high rolling new ones (wandering around, I actually felt a little bit nostalgic for the old days of the now out-priced Sloanes, a basic and harmless bunch on the whole). It's a town that wants to modernise gracefully, preserving its heritage as, primarily, a youthful, tastefully upscale winter sports resort. The kind of place where the smoking hot Armada ski team (who come here every season for a two week blast) and DJs Groove Armada (they played the Nevai a couple of weeks back) can hang with the hedgefunders, glamourpusses, package deal families and craggy faced ski instructors. Verbier likes its visitors to be well mannered and ski mad. Even the club investors are ambivalent about the famously blunt and unsmiling Russians. "They spend a lot but they are a hatchet-faced lot," one told me. "They never look like they are having a good time." And that can be bad for business… and the all important vibe of the town. Come back Henry and Caroline. All is forgiven.

Getting there:

EasyJet flies to Geneva from 11 UK airports from £58rtn inc tax. Brambleski runs 10 chalets in Verbier, from £600pp per week, full board. Nevai hotel; +41 27 771 6121), doubles from £162, room only.