Drink

Orange wine is on my mind. On a recent stroll down Westbourne Grove, and with a bit of time on my hands, I stopped into Franklin’s – a sea of tranquillity in the bustle of nearby Portobello market. This local wine bar is run by two wonderful chaps, Luigi and Lucio. The former is from Naples and the latter from Valencia, so they know their wines. And when I asked to try something unusual, I was presented with a glass of orange wine. Their choice was the Bodegas Verum Ulterior Naranja 2024 – as is evident from its name, an orange wine produced in Spain.

Nostalgia grows with age. Inevitably so: years lengthen and with them memories, sometimes, alas, involving departed friends. In my case, this is often interlinked with memorable departed bottles. I had the good fortune to spend a lot of 1980 in Washington where everything seemed to be going right. London was more problematic. The Thatcher government was enmeshed in travails and it was not clear that she would find a way through. Oh me of little faith: she did, thank God. I sometimes thought Thomas Jefferson had been the last American to know anything about wine In those years, Britain was used to travails and habituated to pessimism. Things could always get worse. Not in the States.

Over the weekend, although I hope that I was not committing blasphemy, it occurred to me that two splendid festivals virtually coincide. The first is the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin: the second, slightly earlier, the feast of the ascension of the red grouse. I used to think a grouse needed a two-week hang. I was wrong. A couple of seasons ago, a blind tasting was held One of life’s great pleasures is introducing a girl to Venice. Obviously, this will include the Church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. The architecture is not that magnificent, but is there a more glorious name anywhere? And as for the interior… We enter and as we process down the nave, I tell the neophyte to imagine that this is indeed the Feast of the Assumption.

Walking through Gatwick airport recently, it was heartening to see so many bleary-eyed travellers enjoying a pre-flight drink in the terminal’s Wetherspoons. Few organisations can be said to have done more for the nation’s morale, or more specifically to ease the pain of those with a long journey ahead, than Spoons. That jolly scene, played out in airports across the country, is now under threat from Michael O’Leary. Due to the increase in disruptive passengers, the Ryanair chief executive, who loves to play the stage baddie, wants to ban airport pubs and bars serving drinks in the early morning and to restrict all sales to a two-drink maximum. ‘I fail to understand why anybody in airport bars is serving people at five or six o’clock in the morning.

Rachel Johnson’s raillery is reminiscent of Beatrice and Benedick, in the early phase, but with no danger of a predestinate scratched face. The Johnson family are not egalitarians. When it comes to morals, there is no equal distribution. But to be fair to Rachel, she has never tried to become prime minister. That charming fellow William Sitwell would be a good Benedick. He is always worth reading, but it appears he has recently been unlucky with some customers in his restaurant. They insisted on sauvignon blanc to the exclusion of all other grapes. Yet, and especially in this weather, there’s plenty of good sauvignon blanc, from the Loire, New Zealand – though one can have too much Cloudy Bay – and Bordeaux, where, alas, the best growers charge accordingly.

Last week the great and some not-so-good crammed into the gardens in Old Queen Street to gossip and carouse, sipping on seemingly endless reserves of Pol Roger and Whispering Angel. As I surveyed this magnificent scene, it occurred to me just one thing was missing from The Spectator’s summer party: a glass of chilled red wine. For that is the drink of the moment – at least according to Ocado, which has reported a 1,020 per cent year-on-year increase in searches for ‘chilled red wine’. What’s even more encouraging for those of us who have concern to spare for the puritanism of the young is that this interest comes predominantly from young drinkers. Ocado’s research suggests that 56 per cent of Gen Z and younger millennials have enjoyed chilled red recently.

Heat and dust, plus nonsense. If the high temperatures had arrived earlier, the England cricket authorities could claim that their brains had been cooked. But the dégringolade over Messrs Atkinson and Stokes had already occurred. Curfews: what nonsense is this? We are dealing with Test cricketers, not schoolboys. If a batsman can decide when to leave a ball outside the off stump or a bowler whether to go round the wicket or over it, the chaps can also decide when to draw stumps on their celebrations after a match. I have a rule for walking in boiling foreign cities. Move at funeral pace and never pass a bar These are the same authorities who want us to refer to batsmen as batters. Some battering may indeed be in order, though only verbal.

In the vermuterias of downtown Palma, locals talk of little other than ‘totality’. That is, the moment on 12 August, just after 8.30 in the evening, when the sun will almost be touching the horizon and there will be a total eclipse. It will be the first time since 1905 that Mallorcans have been able to witness a total eclipse at home, and they won’t get the chance again until 2180. You can see why it is dominating discussion in la hora del vermut. It would certainly elevate a negroni, but you fear wasting its potential ina cocktail  The vermouth hour was once a custom in most Spanish towns. It’s the moment after midday but before lunch, when one can enjoy a break from the heat of the day with a glass of the fortified wine.

The heatwave no sooner ended than it was replaced by the Mandywave. Over the next few days, it may be hard to remember that there are other issues in British politics, including interventions by Tony Blair and Alan Milburn, plus a couple of important by-elections. When Lord Mandelson was forced out, Keir Starmer seemed to relish the defenestration. Mandy has now had an unexpected revenge. His comments on Sir Stumbler’s methods of running a government were meant to be sealed in the archives, and it will be amusing to watch Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting squirm when they are asked whether they agree with his comments on their leader.

We are, according to Marks & Spencer, in ‘picky bits’ season. I cannot bear the tweeness of it all. M&S is surely mere days away from launching a ‘Paddington Bear picky bits picnic range’. In search for an antidote to such horrors, I go on my annual pilgrimage to Bouchon Racine, which starts on Westbourne Park Road at midday, sipping Beamish Irish stout in The Cow. It is reputed to be David Beckham’s favourite London pub and is one of an increasing number of English pubs piggybacking on the phenomenal appetite for Guinness by serving alternatives to the Black Stuff. Beamish and Murphy’s are popping up on taps across the capital and we are the better for it.

We had gathered to discuss wine, but lesser topics intervened. During the Suez crisis, Clarissa Eden complained that it seemed as if the Suez Canal was running through her drawing room. Today, it is more a matter of the Strait of Hormuz, but that is an undeniably important matter. No one could accuse Mandy of being a stainless character. But what you see is what you get Other subjects which are receiving huge coverage have lesser claims on our attention. An American who had just flown in raised one of them. ‘What has this guy Mandelson actually done?’ Rem acu tetigisti. There is a short answer. He has embarrassed the Prime Minister. But whose fault was that?

As I spent much of January in dry dock in Tommy’s hospital (‘dry’ being doubly appropriate), other avocations were needed. One friend said that it sounded as if I had spent much of the time gazing at the glories of Barry and Pugin, reading poetry or teasing pretty nurses: all pleasant activities. But there was one disappointment. Geoffrey Elton helped to introduce the civilisation of the Rhineland to East Anglia Assuming that hospital wards were good stalking grounds for chaplains, I would have been happy to discuss the Trinity, the meaning of the first verse of St John’s Gospel, or whatever. But only one clergy creature appeared. There is a good old Scots word, ‘mouthless’ (pronounce ‘oo’); that poor fellow fitted the description.

My late grandmother used to say that seeing Pope John Paul II descend by helicopter into Dublin’s Phoenix Park in 1979 felt like seeing God come down to Earth. I daresay I experienced something similar recently when I looked up from my tuna tartare to see Arrigo Cipriani smiling at me. For he sits at the head of what is now a global powerhouse of food and drink, with some two dozen venues worldwide, including London, New York and Hong Kong. But we are back where it all began. In Harry’s Bar, Venice, which Giuseppe Cipriani – Arrigo’s father – established in 1931 with a loan from a wealthy American called Harry Pickering.

‘Earth has not anything to show more fair.’ I have always believed that the notion of a Dry January must have been launched on the world by von Sacher-Masoch: one of his more obscene fantasies. I would no more subject myself to it than to any of the other 11 months. They all deserve better. This year, however, malign fate intervened. On 3 January I was strolling along (as it happens, stone-cold sober) when I suddenly felt rotten. I sat on a fence to work out what was wrong and promptly passed out, falling a few feet while bumping and bashing on the way. A neighbour spotted the fall and dialled 999 virtually before I landed. A few days later, on the phone, he told me: ‘When I first saw you, mate, I thought you was fucking dead.

Many years ago, when entertaining my then girlfriend (now wife) for our first Valentine’s Day, I spent a considerable amount of time and effort preparing an authentic beef bourguignon. With more than one bottle poured in during the slow-cooking process, it did not offer the lightness one might desire on such an occasion. After pushing it around the plate for an hour, she was less than delighted to then be presented with pudding – a sherry trifle. In the years since, not unreasonably, she has insisted on planning the menu. I have been left in charge of drink. For an excellent white wine, I would suggest Bodega del Abad’s San Salvador Godello 2021.

There are two great American bars in London. One is perfect to escape the winter chill, the other to embrace summer sun. In winter, the American Bar at the Savoy – London’s oldest surviving cocktail bar – is ideal. There is a reason why this warm and welcoming spot has courted popularity for so long and is considered the spiritual home of modern mixology, at least in this country. In the summer months, head for the American Bar at the Stafford. There you can enjoy the large terrace just a stone’s throw from St James’s Street, where similarly skilled bar staff are able to mix up pretty much anything one desires. You know you’re in a great American bar when the bartenders are able to sling together on-menu or off-menu mixes while maintaining good conversation.

There are different ways to approach the tyranny of Dry January. One is to drink in secret. Another is to indulge only on feast days. Personally I have always refused to make January a miserable and puritan month, which means finding excellent red wine to transition from Christmas exuberance to the long, drawn-out evenings of the new year. And so the quest to find the perfect January red begins. It should not be too expensive, but nor should it be a false economy. After the excesses of December, value is key. Readers are forgiven for pursuing a bargain in the January sales – we have all done it. But the truth is many discounted offerings represent exactly the kind of wines one should not be drinking. They are the rejects, the failures, the lesser vintages.

Perhaps because of the Flanders and Swann song in which a louche older gentleman tries to lure a younger lady to bed with Madeira wine, the drink has unfairly acquired a fusty image. While port and sherry have experienced a resurgence, Madeira remains underappreciated despite the fact it stands as a proud monument to the grand old Anglo-Portuguese alliance. One man, Jamie Allsopp, is intent on fighting a noble battle to promote the virtues of Madeira. And so to the Blue Stoops, Allsopp Brewery’s newish pub on Kensington Church Street, for their second annual Game and Madeira Dinner, named after the site in Burton-on-Trent where Jamie’s ancestors first brewed Allsopp’s Ale in 1730.