Spectator Life

‘Autonomous machine operating here,’ says the sign. ‘Stay away.’ And instead of the chatter of the vendangeuses, there’s the hum of a robot. Welcome to southern France, 2024, just down the lane from my house, where, walking the dogs among the vines, I stumble upon Ted, a compact, green and white, battery-powered cultivator, guided by GPS satellites. Ted is not dissimilar in principle to a robot lawnmower or vacuum, but is the size of a family car. The French ban on chemicals has created a vast amount of work for growers He is toiling away, straddling the vines and chopping up the mauvaise herbes. He is neither cute nor friendly or even that smart, though he will stop dead in his tracks if he encounters a human obstacle.

Every Thursday morning at Washington Dulles Airport, a French government Airbus disgorges a metal freight container under diplomatic seal. Bypassing US customs inspection, it is transported directly to the French Embassy compound in Georgetown. At midday, elite French diplomats gather to watch as the precious content is unsealed. Spain thrashed France at the 2023 World Cheese Awards Along with the diplomatic papers, direct from the Quai d’Orsay, cheese is delivered weekly for French officials in the United States capital, a country where unpasteurised cheese is cruelly banned. Embassy staff put in their orders a week in advance and get delivered individual baskets of Comte, Reblochon and the soft, smoky goat’s cheese of Sainte-Maure de Touraine.

You are in an Italian restaurant when a waiter appears brandishing a giant pepper grinder. The spaghetti carbonara is made with cream and garnished with a sprig of parsley. You suddenly realise that you are not, after all, in the Tuscan hills, but somewhere in the UK. An Italian restaurant in London will serve you a cappuccino after dinner Is it possible for Italian restaurants in the UK to be authentic? Some of the Greek restaurants in London I’ve eaten in are so much the real deal that I have managed to forget I’m not in Athens. Similarly, some of the Spanish restaurants – such as those on Portobello Road – are indistinguishable from those in Spain, except for the weather and the smoking.

‘Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,’ was an offhand comment made by Kate Moss 15 years ago, one that she is yet to live down and has had to repeatedly apologise for since. Ms Moss might not be Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s obvious role model, but the recent proclamation that he fasts for 36 consecutive hours is certainly more Vogue than Downing Street. Fasting is good for the waist line but it also makes people irritable, erratic, and error prone The Prime Minister has revealed that he doesn’t eat from Sunday afternoon until Tuesday morning. He is an intermittent faster, in other words, and intermittent fasting is a fad that has risen in popularity in recent years.

The haggis: Scotland’s most elusive wild animal, one that can jump six feet in the air and goes straight for the throat, according to the hunters that track the bat-faced, Peter Stringfellow-haired beasts ahead of Burns night. ‘Is that a haggis!?’ I screech at my guide. ‘No, that’s a dog,’ he says, adding that this is going to be a long walk. A year into my Scottish residency and having had an extremely unsuccessful Burns night in Glasgow during my first month here (a date with a Scot more interested in watching himself on YouTube than finding me any kind of haggis supper) I’ve decided to come straight to the source this year and catch my own. Or try to – because it’s no mean feat.   ‘Is that a haggis!?’ I shout, seeing a black animal in the distance.

What Victoria is to a jam sponge, so is Sacher to chocolate cake. It’s a man, a hotel and a cake and, indeed, shorthand for a city. The lines of people outside the Sacher Hotel café in Vienna for chocolate cake with whipped cream on the side are looking for a Viennese experience, like schnitzel, Strauss waltzes or pictures by Klimt. Sacher cake is something you find everywhere, but this one is grounded in a particular place, the Café Sacher. The 360,000 Sacher tortes of varying sizes that are made yearly in its manufactory and dispatched in classy wooden boxes are the exemplars of a formula that has taken over the world. It’s not every hotel where you get chocolate cake for breakfast The cake predates the hotel.

Elizabeth David was a cookery writer who led the British palate away from the grim days of stodgy, post-war rationing towards the adoption of a fresher, more Mediterranean diet. But she saved the most resonant advice of her six decade writing career for an observation on how to survive a typical British Christmas. Describing the festive period here as The Great Too Much that has also become The Great Too Long, David wrote: A ten-day shut-down, no less, is now normal at Christmas. On at least one day during The Great Too Long stretch, I stay in bed, making myself lunch on a tray. Smoked salmon, home-made bread, butter, lovely cold white Alsace Wine. A glorious way to celebrate Christmas.

It’s the most beautiful restaurant in London – and the oldest. Built in 1573, Middle Temple Hall is celebrating its 450th anniversary. It’s also where Shakespeare held the premiere of his Christmas play, Twelfth Night, in 1602. How strange that hardly anyone knows about the best Elizabethan hall in London. It’s mostly used by barristers but the public can eat there too, as long as you book ahead.  I looked up to high table to see a purple-faced bencher, glaring down at me The food is lovely, substantial, marvellously unponcey fare and fantastically good value for such a staggering spot – on the western edge of the City, on the banks of the Thames. When I was there this month, I had cream of mushroom and tarragon soup (£4.

When Christmas comes, there are few guilt-free pleasures that match the sheer wonder of port (aside from re-watching Dr Strangelove in the wee hours on BBC2). Sweeter than a mince pie and more intoxicating than a pre-Christmas visit to your GP’s waiting room, a glass of port is guaranteed to lift your spirits. And by the time you’re onto your third, if you’re lucky, you should feel so elevated that either you’re on cloud nine or fast approaching it. It’s like the 18th century in a bottle – but the good parts of it, not the pox, the rotting teeth or gangrene That’s the joy of port. For more than 300 years, Britons have been devotees of this very special outpouring of Portugal’s Douro Valley.

Remember the lockdowns? I wish I didn’t, but I do. Especially that insanely grim third lockdown, the winter one, which went on and on and on and which bottomed out, for me, as I did my one allotted weekly walk along the Richmond riverside, in freezing horizontal drizzle. I made sure I had a thermos cup of mulled wine in my hand as I debated with my one permitted friend whether we were legally allowed to sit on a bench together. In the end, we decided best not and trudged further into the sleet. They may give you an extra chance of thyroid cancer – or not (though for me the much more proximate likelihood of liver failure makes that fairly irrelevant) I’ve learned many things from lockdowns, one of them is: that I am never locking down again.

Is champagne a wine region or a state of mind? The small bubbles have a way of getting into the bloodstream and the imagination, creating a slightly euphoric sensation which encourages pleasant chatter. But who put the sparkling genie in the bottle? Who pioneered the intricate process of secondary fermentation in a bottle strong enough to withstand six atmospheres of pressure and contains all those wonderful bubbles of CO2, about 20 million per bottle?  In France, it is claimed that it was Dom Perignon (1638-1715), ‘Come quickly. I am tasting the stars,’ he is supposed to have said. Very romantic, a convenient sales pitch. The only problem is that the story is cobblers. Even eminent French wine historians now agree that there is no written evidence for it.

Before I started researching my book Vines in a Cold Climate, I had a particular image of English sparkling wine as consistent but rarely that exciting. It was all a bit formulaic, like big brand champagne but leaner. I am pleased to say that I could not have been more wrong as the wines now made all over southern England are incredibly diverse, offering a wide array of styles for every palate. If you’re spending between £25 and £50 then England actually offers, on the whole, much more interesting wines than Champagne. Here are six wines that show how different English sparkling wines can be. Westwell Wicken Foy NV (Westwell £27.50) I’m a big fan of Westwell not least because it’s one of the nearest vineyards to me.

This year A Christmas Carol is 180 years old, first published in December 1843. It had sold out by Christmas Eve. And it has a lot to answer for, not simply ­­because it ultimately spawned Kelsey Grammer’s Christmas Carol musical, but because it is credited with having popularised the idea of turkey as a festive staple. As you’ll recall, turkey is what Scrooge has sent to his clerk Bob Cratchit once he’s had his Damascene moment – and the idea took off. Within a few short years (1861 in fact), Mrs Beeton had declared that ‘a Christmas dinner, with the middle classes of this empire, would scarcely be a Christmas dinner without its turkey.