Drink

There is only one answer to the question ‘Burgundy or claret?’ ‘Yes, but never in the same glass.’ Yet I am about to make an observation which cannot be true. I think that good Burgundy sets the conversation ranging widely in a way that claret does not equal. If one was a mystic, there would be an easy explanation. Bordeaux is a fine culture; Burgundy, a transcendent civilisation, whose glories express the paradoxes of the human condition. Over the centuries, Burgundy often revelled in grandeur: equally often, relapsed into misery (consider the career of Charles le Temeraire, who came close to becoming a Burgundian Charles XII). The highest expressions of its genius nourish the illusion that man can transcend his limitations. That is indeed an illusion.

I had not drunk the wine for 20 years, and nearly all the information which I thought that I had remembered turned out to be wrong. It was a Californian pinot noir. I had given friends a case in the late 1980s as a wedding present and one bottle had survived by oversight, like a Japanese warrior in the jungles of Borneo. So was it a happy oversight? The wine’s history was very Californian. In the late 1970s, two friends called Williams and Selyem started buying pinot noir grapes and making wine in a garage. To begin with, this weekend hobby may not have been an entirely legal operation: cuvée bootlegger, perhaps. But the wine’s fame grew as the friends took over vineyards in the Russian River Valley, Sonoma County.

The chestnut trees were still resplendent in yellow leaf along the banks of a misty autumn river on its glide through woodlands, pasture, comfortable towns — and vineyards. This was the Charente. Eighty years ago, before the lorry became dominant, it would not have been so peaceful. In those days, barges laden with barrels of Cognac made their way along this river to the coast to be shipped all over the world. Wine has been grown in Cognac for centuries and exported since the Middle Ages. But it was always inferior to the products of Bordeaux, to the south-west. Even so, its acidity and low alcohol content made it ideal for distillation once the Dutch discovered the technique. They called the result brandwejn: burnt wine, hence brandy.

This is a tale of two lunches, sort of. The first was a classically English affair. We started with native oysters, my first of the season: everything that they should be. Then there was succulent roast pork, its crackling done to perfection. It was accompanied by the Platonic idea of Brussels sprouts. Straight from the garden, lime-green in colour, perfectly al dente: what a magnificent vegetable. There were also excellent carrots that would have shone in lesser company, and roast potatoes which I should not have eaten, plus Yorkshire pud, ditto: delicious. Eccentric with pork perhaps, but it worked. With the pig we had a Gigondas ’07 from St Cosme, a house which never fails. Having drunk it before, I opened it at breakfast. It needed every hour of breathing.

A delightful girl came to see me this morning. She is helping with the research for a biography of David Cameron. Someone had told her that he was not comfortable in his own skin. There was only one reply to that: balls. I have never known anyone so much at ease with himself. That discussion made me consider the concept of bien dans sa peau. There was Cardus’s marvellous description of Emmott Robinson: ‘It was as if God had taken a piece of strong Yorkshire clay, moulded it into human form, breathed life into it and said: “Thy name is Emmott Robinson and tha shall open t’ bowling from Pavilion End’’.’ That was clearly a happy man, as long as Yorkshire were winning.

A high proportion of wine-lovers also enjoy cricket, and vice versa. This might seem natural. Anyone with an aesthetic temperament will surely find his way to two of life’s greatest pleasures. But there may also be a parallel. Wine is made of decomposed grapes. Vignerons conjure sublime flavours out of long-decayed fruit. As you sniff a good red Burgundy, there will always be a scent of the farmyard. Those who make the great pudding wines extract transcendent sweetness from grapes which are already rotting before they are picked. Cricket is a beautiful and gracious game. I still have a mental picture of a cover drive by Barry Richards. He hardly appeared to move. A gentle half pace forward, a mere flick of the wrists, and the ball was rocketing to the boundary.

Rivers are the cradles of civilisation and the Loire is an outstanding example. It is one of the head-waters of modern France. By the 7th century, the region had emerged from the Dark Ages and was building on Roman traditions to lay foundations that would endure. St Martin, Clovis: we are at the beginning of a recognisably French history. War is both an expression of civilisation and its curse — but also, occasionally, its saviour. In 732, that nascent French history was in danger of eradication until one of the most important battles in European history took place at Tours, near the Loire. Charles Martel defeated a powerful invading force from Muslim Spain. If he had lost, there would have been little else to impede a Muslim advance.

The Honourable Society of Odd Bottles has been mentioned in this column before. I can report that the membership is growing. We are now comfortably into low single figures. The other night, the Bottles assembled. At present, we have no lady members, although there is no rule to prevent it. That is hardly surprising. At present, there are no rules. Nor do we usually have a Toast to the Lassies. But despite their absence, we began by discussing women. We decided that for certain purposes, females could be divided into two groups. There is the voice of duty, and of diet, constantly monitoring their menfolk’s intake. Many years ago, when I was a skinny research student, one of my chums had a wife who was a seriously good cook. She also believed in watching his weight.

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?