Drink

Claret has a commercial advantage over Burgundy. Thanks to the grandes lignes of châteaux and vintages, you know where you are. A mature and well-kept claret from a good year is unlikely to disappoint. That is why new wine drinkers, seeking certainty, are drawn to Bordeaux. Burgundy is much more complicated. Like the railway lines of the southern region, it is a cat’s cradle of cuvées, domaines and growers. For the natives, there can be advantages. Old Alphonse has half an acre next to Vosne-Romanée. Instead of putting the grapes in with his Bourgogne rouge, he bottles them separately for family and friends. Lucky them.

St James’s Street is a repository of urban comfort. It contains majestic clubs, a gunsmith, a boot-maker, a barber, a cigar shop and a hatter. There are also restaurants, although the doyen is just round a corner in Jermyn Street: Wilton’s. Few if any establishments can match the quality of its seafood. It is as if the ghost of old Marks, its founder, was still on duty, to ensure no backsliding. In his day, a young aristocrat once enquired whether the smoked salmon was up to snuff. Marks looked pained. ‘I don’t know ’ow you can ask that question, my Lord. The smoked salmon ’ere is always the best that money can buy. So it should be. It’s caught by dukes and smoked by Jews.

It is impossible to think about any Italian region without wondering ‘What if?’ Sardinia lacks the glamour, grandeur and menace of Sicily, but it is still a fascinating exemplar of Mediterranean culture: the different historical strata stretching back to pre-history. So: what if the mediaeval rulers of Aragon had been more enduring? What if the Catholic kings had never married? There is no reason why Barcelona should have been ruled from Madrid: still less for the Sardinians to be governed by Turin. A sea-girt Aragonese kingdom, including the Languedoc, Sardinia and Sicily — that would have been a glorious flowering of civilisation and romance: Venus emerging from a scallop shell.

One aspect of the old South Africa’s racial policies cannot be faulted. After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Huguenot refugees arrived at the Cape. Within a few decades, they had been culturally cleansed, abandoning the French language and becoming decent Afrikaners. If only we had possessed the foresight to do something similar in Quebec. But the immigrants were allowed to retain a legacy of their grenouille past: wine-making skills. They planted vineyards around Franschhoek and Stellenbosch, creating a great oeno-phile tradition which still flourishes. The terroirs are in achingly beautiful terrain.

Glyndebourne. There is no single quintessential example of English scenery, but this is one of the finest. The landscape is  old, and verdant. There has been tillage and pasturage here for millennia, and the outcome is harmony, as if tamed nature has embraced man’s gentle mastery. On a sunny summer evening, earth has not anything to show more fair Figaro. Anyone reading the libretto might conclude that earth had not anything to show more absurd. What is this nonsense: a Feydeau farce mitigated by a bit of carpentry? There is a simple answer: the best of all comedies, apart from Shakespeare — and more easily, more continually laughter-worthy than even Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Twelfth Night.

Which is the greatest novel in the English language? Let us review the candidates: Clarissa, Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch, The Bostonians. The other night, someone tried to make a case for Moby-Dick. Along with Tristam Shandy and Daniel Deronda, it is one of my great unreadables. I have tried, but always jumped ship before leaving Nantucket. Clarissa: immense power — if not as much fun as Pamela — yet I have no enthusiasm for rereading it. The Bostonians: again, great power — but what about more matter with less art, and was James really writing in English? Pride and Prejudice: with Portia and Rosalind, Lizzie Bennet is one of the Three Graces, the most delicious girls in fiction (poor Portia, to think of the long slow tragedy of marriage to Bassanio).

My Australian friend was in mourning over the removal of Julia Gillard, the country’s first female prime minister. She had been everything a leftist politician ought to be: ineffectual and un-electable. I concurred; sacking Labour leaders just because they could not win an election sets a very bad example to the rest of the world. For solace, he had decanted a bottle. Something in the nonchalance with which the glass was poured aroused my suspicions, which were strengthened when the nose reached halfway across the room (he is, shall we say, well off). I sipped, savoured splendour, and speculated. ‘I think I’ve had this before, to celebrate when a girl called Mary Wakefield joined The Spectator. It wasn’t quite ready then. It is now.

My friend Mitch Feierstein is a jolly, cheerful, life-enhancing fellow. He is emphatically not one of those economists whose purse-lipped response to any new phenomenon is ‘no good will come of this’ and who have predicted six of the past two recessions. But he is a profound pessimist. In a book he published last year, Planet Ponzi, he devotes page after relentless page to the troubles of the world economy. He depicts the West as a ship without engine or rudder, adrift on a sea of bad debt, worse paper and wholly unrealistic expectations. It is even gloomier than the voyage of the Ancient Mariner. He at least found redemption. There may be only one way out.

Although I promise to move on to drink, forgive me for beginning with a less interesting but even more complex subject: government. It is easy to patronise the Italians. The Risorgimento was a failure (See David Gilmour’s superb The Pursuit of Italy). Since the days of Cavour’s Machiavellianism and Garibaldi’s Cav and Pag bravura, the Italian political system has suffered a steady haemorrhage of authority and prestige, with the partial exception of the Mussolini era. By the 1950s, the serious people in Italy had come to one of three conclusions. The first lot decided that the Italians were not fit to govern themselves.

Spain: an easy country to enjoy; very hard, even for Spaniards, to understand. I remember a dinner party, sitting next to a girl who seemed to want to talk about what had been on television the previous night. She was pretty enough, but I feared that I was in for a long evening and a complete unmeeting of minds. Spanish, she was also dark-complexioned, so in desperation I asked for further and better particulars. She was from Andalusia, which helped to explain the duskiness, and she was the cousin of a duke, who bred fighting bulls. Oh good: something to discuss, a long way from trash TV. In 1936, the reigning Duque was only 14, but had reached manhood in courage. He set off on a horse, at the head of his tenantry, carrying an ancestral war banner, to fight for Franco and Spain and God.

My last column discussed Lady Thatcher and drink. It is now time to move on to sex. But there is little to say. Hard as it may be for moderns to contemplate, she was uxorious. A million years ago, in her days in opposition, I was in the House having  a drink with an elderly Tory MP when she swept past. His already rheumy voice thickened with sentiment. ‘Ishn’t she a lovely little thing,’ he mused (not quite how I would have described the leader of our party). ‘But you should have sheen her when she first arrived. Oh, she was sho beautiful. We all tried to [have our wicked way with] her. None of us got anywhere.’ Back in 1959, when the competition was Bessie Braddock and Dame Irene Ward, she must indeed have looked like a film star.

We should all perform good works. A friend of mine helps to run a soup kitchen in Soho. She summons the wives of the mighty from their seats, in order to fill the lowly with good things. There is a degree of competitiveness. Soignée ladies arrive from Belgravia and Knightsbridge, keeping narrowed eyes on one another’s provender. The rough sleepers are comforted with ris de veau comme chez Troisgros or gnocchi alla Milanese, even if they would prefer a bag of chips and a bottle of meths. Ad maiorem Dei gloriam. My duties are more demanding. I serve on the wine committee of a London club. That is much harder than it sounds. It would be equally simple to satisfy the easy sleepers of Pall Mall and St James’s.