Drink

A stint in dry dock — the ‘dry’ literally — has one advantage. There is time for lots of long reading. After many decades since the last opening of Middlemarch, I had forgotten how good it is. I had completely forgotten a delicious minor character, Mrs Cadwallader, who is a blend of Aunt Dahlia and Lady Circumference. A Marxist heedless of his safety might describe her as declining gentry. She would have rejected both words with scorn. In those days, many Church of England livings were bestowed on parsons such as Mr Cadwallader, who needed the money to preserve their social status. ‘The C of E was always better at ministering to the deserving ex-rich than to the indifferent poor’: discuss.

There have been some splendid rumours about my health. According to the most exotic, I was cas-evacked from a hill in Scotland, flown to St Thomas’s by private plane and then tested positive for Chateau Lafite. The truth is more banal — and much more reprehensible. I had neglected an infected foot: what an idiot. Finally, it came out in revolt. By the time I did turn myself in to Tommy’s, I was not far from being seriously ill. That has had one advantage. I think that it put me off the booze. The medics were pumping me full of antibiotics and I was determined to co-operate. One or two rakes have offered to smuggle in a bottle of hooch; I adamantly declined. Nothing would come between me and the cure. More-over, I did not feel like a drink.

‘Don’t you think you’re drinking too much?’ said the nurse, contemplating the array of bottles. ‘But I feel so thirsty,’ I replied. A doctor arrived and concluded that powerful intravenous antibiotics did require a lot of liquid, so that the orange juice was acceptable as well as the water. The trouble had started at Boisdale. We were having a modest lunch, to taste some new Spanish wines while working out which sherries would accompany haggis. A Palo Cortado from Gonzalez Byass won that prize. We then moved to Ranald’s cigar terrace to reaffirm the partnership between Speyside and Havana. Only problem: I was feeling increasingly wretched and it was showing. For weeks, my leg had been growing sorer.

Where two or three British males are gathered together, the agenda often includes a glass or two. One thing can lead on to another. To facilitate the supply of glasses, clubs are sometimes formed. These can vary in size and splendour, from the palaces of Pall Mall to the working men’s clubs where the young William Hague delivered beer and sampled the deliveries. (He was unwise to quantify his efforts. It would have been better if he had merely said that from time to time, it was not just the barrels which were rolling.) There are also clubs within clubs. A couple of us have stumbled into irregular sessions which we have called ‘the odd bottles’.

Glenmorangie is the most accessible of malt whiskies. It is a gentle, almost feminine creature, with hints of spring flowers, chardonnay, eine kleine nachtmusik, wholly different from the lowering malts of the Outer Isles. With them, there is no question of hints, let alone Mozart. A blast of peat and iodine arrives to the skirl of the pipes: a mighty dram worthy of the sea-girt rocks among which it was cradled. Both have their place. I recently helped a friend polish off his last bottle of ’63 Glenmorangie. It had gained in depth, strength and subtlety. Should you possess any, our bottle was showing no scintilla of senescence. Its owner is a Scotsman who has grown rich in the colonies and was resolutely uninterested in his treasure’s value (no doubt eye-watering).

A county, a house, a dog — and a bottle. Somerset: men have delved and farmed and built here for millennia, reshaping the landscape but never losing harmony with nature. There lies the dearest freshness pretty near the surface of things. My friends live in the Vale of Blackmore, good hunting country, in a prosperous farmhouse. Over the centuries, it has been added to and bashed about. The exterior isVictorian-esque, but I bet that there is medieval masonry at the core of the stouter walls. In the kitchen, there are oak beams, perfect for hanging hams and flitches of bacon. Indeed, they could be needed for a similar purpose now, because of the dog. El Awrence, a lurcher, is a splendid example of the breed, in his charm, character and relentless criminality.

Port, or Hermitage? This does not refer to personal consumption. I was trying to remember Meredith’s Egoist, in which one of the principal characters seeks to coerce his daughter into marriage, in order to have unlimited access to his putative son-in-law’s ancient wines. That could give rise to an interesting moral speculation. I raised the question in a club, one of the few surviving places in Britain where free speech is possible. There was a desire for further and better particulars: which wine were we talking about, and what about the daughter? Was she an easy-on-the-eye, generally obedient creature, a pleasure to have about the place, or.... Someone quoted Lord Tottering, from one of those splendid cartoons in Country Life.

Alas, the ’63 ports are beginning to fade. I came to that conclusion the last time I tasted a Warre’s, and the other night I was at the drinking of a Graham’s, an exemplar of that magnificent year. It was still delicious, and from the summit of a mountain there is a long descent. But the journey had begun. The passing of a great vintage deserves a grand obsequy: tolling bells, slow marches, a gun-carriage. How appropriate, therefore, that our host was not only a Grenadier but perhaps the most famous member of that illustrious regiment in recent decades. There are so many stories about Valentine Cecil, and most of them are true.

There ought to be a new literary award: the antisocial book of the year. A dozen years ago, Claire Tomalin’s Pepys would have won the laurels by a country mile. That Christmas, everyone seemed to have been given a copy, and normally healthy eaters would arise from the lunch table after only three hours, desperate to return to Pepys. It was impossible to raise a four for bridge. Although John Campbell’s biography of Roy Jenkins is not quite so compulsive, it would take this year’s prize. Inter alia, Mr Campbell solves one of the small historical mysteries of our time. Denis Healey has always insisted that Roy was a closet homosexual. Despite his record as Chancellor, Denis has some grasp on reality. So what is going on?

The en primeur tastings have been taking place in Bordeaux, and the mood has oscillated from despair to defiance. It is like Boxer’s trip to the knackers’ in Animal Farm: one would need a heart of stone not to laugh. The greediest winemakers in the world had a terrible 2013, and there was a degree of hostility towards the British press, some of whom were accused of gloating. Surely not. The house of Pontet-Canet was said to be especially thin-skinned. Thirty years ago, it was a modest little fifth growth; I remember using it as a table wine in a Washington hotel. Now, it has soared in reputation and in self-esteem. We are used to super seconds. Pontet-Canet regards itself as a super fifth. That is unlikely to be true of its 2013s.

Chefs have a problem. Think of much of the best food you have ever eaten. Caviar, English native oysters, sashimi, foie gras, truffles, jamon iberico, grouse, golden plover, properly hung Scotch beef; Stilton, the great soft cheeses: all have one point in common. They require minimal intervention from the kitchen. With the assistance of one female sous-chef, even I could roast a grouse. The chef would come into his own over pudding, and indeed with Welsh rarebit, but one can understand why this does not provide enough outlet for creativity. There are always the great French bourgeois dishes, which few of us eat often enough. Navarin of lamb, blanquette de veau, suprêmes de volaille, daube de boeuf: all splendid. But they are not a new challenge to a cook.

It is impossible not to sympathise with Armenia. It has spent much of its history between the hammer and the anvil, trying to fend off imperial predators and usually failing. What if the Armenians had inhabited the British Isles? Apart from the savage Irish in their bogs and cabins, the main enemy would have been the French, whose malevolence could be drowned in the English Channel. With such a happy geography, Armenians would be as numerous and prosperous as we are. But neither geography nor history was benign, with one paradoxical exception. Because the Russians rescued them from the Turks, the Armenians were rarely disloyal to the Soviet Union. Even so, their grog-makers suffered. The Soviet system drove more and more people to drink, of worse and worse quality.

Three of us, old friends, were meeting to arrange a marriage. The young couple have never actually met. Indeed, they are still unaware of one other’s existence. But it is so obviously a union endorsed by the heavens. Young Florence King has already been heralded in this column. At least since the infancy — did she have one? — of Diana, Huntress and Goddess, no four-year-old girl has ever shown so much interest in field sports. In Ireland, Florence is a bisexual name. One feels that our Florry must be a kinswoman of the immortal Flurry Knox. The bridegroom will be Charlie. At the age of seven, he climbed a tree and killed a pigeon with his bare hands. When his father regaled a club table with the story, there was general scepticism.

The ostensible subject matter is misleading, as is any conflation with his lesser relatives’ wassailing peasants and roistering village squares. But Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s work is profoundly serious. It has a formidable intellectual content, a Shakespearian emotional range: a sardonic and stoical view of the human condition. There are paintings — ‘The Triumph of Death’, ‘The Blind Leading the Blind’ — which descend from Hieronymus Bosch. There is also the marvellous ‘Fall of Icarus’. According to recent scholarship, the version we have is not a Bruegel, but a later copy. That is plausible; it looks later. Yet the composition is classic Bruegel. He would be drawn to any legend expressing the vanity of human wishes.

Give us this day our daily bread: those are also words of great culinary significance. Even if the ‘bread’ takes different forms — rice, pasta, potatoes — billions of people all over the world are following in that prayer’s footsteps. ‘Staple diet’: throughout history, most people have lived off staples, or died when they ran out. Staples stimulated cookery. Over time, though it would be fun to try, even daily caviar might pall: daily bread, somewhat sooner. So those who prepared the basics tried to spice them up. If meat or fish were available, there would be no problem, but they are expensive ingredients. Most of those at subsistence level had to make do with herbs and vegetables, plus a little meat or fish for special occasions.

As a life, it was a scintillating spectrum of the human condition. There was hardship and suffering, as well as laughter and fun, plus a great deal of sex, mostly extra-canonical. There were large, even universal perspectives, but also a fey and complex personality which did not sit easily with coherence. That may explain why no biographer has come close to doing him justice. This was a great man, always overshadowed by a weakened constitution and by social insecurity. His high talent was recognised as soon as he was published. Had he been a less restless, more accommodating personality, he could have settled down in the library of an aristocratic house, funded by some patron happy to secure his own immortality by serving as a grub in amber.

We agreed that it was the gravest crisis facing mankind. It has led to dashed hopes, widespread grief and a universal loss of confidence in the future. As the scientists seem powerless, the world is thrown back on superstition. If the learned have no answers, one may as well listen to old Jacques, who remembers his great uncle’s advice about coping with phylloxera. I refer, of course, to oxidisation and white Burgundy. The 1996 was supposed to be superb and long-lasting. Friends of mine finally decided that the moment had come to begin enjoying their Chassagnes, Pulignys and Chablis grands crus. Aargh.

Our sweet enemy, France, is not always that sweet. It is tempting to respond to France’s current degringolade with cynicism and indeed schadenfreude. For a start, it should keep down prices: even claret prices. There are reports that £80 million worth of serious claret is on the high seas, returning from China. Ordered, it was never paid for. The négociants of Bordeaux were already coping with two disappointing vintages — 2011 and 2012 — plus one unspeakable one. 2013 is by all accounts the worst year since at least 1973. Various houses will not declare a vintage. Only the boldest or most foolhardy will be buying en primeur. That said, a few years ago I drank a ’73 Latour en magnum.