Drink

There was a wonderful old girl called Alice Roosevelt Longworth. The daughter of the good Roosevelt president, Theodore, she was a formidable Washington political hostess until her nineties. The older she grew, the more fearless she became. By the end, she combined the plain speaking of her Dutch forebears with a wit and sharpness which would have delighted, and intimidated, any salon, anywhere, ever. She also solved one of the greater minor mysteries of the 20th century. If any two human beings were fated to become staunch friends, it ought to have been Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. To win the second world war, Churchill had to get on with the lesser Roosevelt, FDR.

A fanatical fisherman died. On arrival in the next world, he found himself on a river. A ghillie was proffering him a 16ft Hardy. ‘This is the life,’ thought the fisherman. ‘Or, rather, the afterlife.’ Within seconds, he made a perfect cast into enticing water: just the sort of pool which would seduce big fish into lingering. Within a few more seconds, his line was racing, the reel screeching, the rod dipping. Five minutes later, a fresh gleaming 30-pounder was on the bank. With arrogant jaws and an angry, imperious eye, this was no mere salmon. He had caught a lord of the river. ‘O death, where is thy sting?’ A second textbook cast, and a similar outcome. He had landed another fish, worthy to lie beside its confrere.

Back in the Sixties, there was a more than usually sanguinary murder in Glasgow. While the killer was awaiting trial, the Scottish Daily Express decided to buy up his family. This must have been after the days when such a case would end with a good hanging; Alan Cochrane insists that he is not that old. But the newspaper thought that the low-lifers’ tales of the dark and bloody alleyways of the Gorbals would titillate its readers. Alan, then a young reporter, was told to hide the family from rival bidders until judgment day, in some discreet hotel up on Lomond-side. That did not sound a hard posting, until he met the MacTumshies. At the first meal, they sat awkwardly on their chairs and gazed suspiciously at the menus — even the ones who were holding them the right way up.

Not all change is for the worse. Go into any supermarket in search of an urgent bottle of wine, and you will find a range of respectable bottles at reasonable prices. The buyers are experts and they drive hard deals with the suppliers: large orders for low profit margins. A club wine committee on which I serve was once looking for a house chablis. Our stoutly old-fashioned members have not caught up with the current market and still expect to pay very little for an acceptable drop of petit chablis. After tasting some cheap but lamentable bottles, composing fierce missives to the wine merchants who were to blame, and wishing that the cat or horse which they employed in their chablis plant would have an early and final trip to the vet, we ended up buying some from Tesco.

I sniffed and sipped and concentrated. It was a wine to savour, drop by drop. A Grands Echézeaux ’98 from the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, this was not a mere bottle. It was an epiphany. ‘Great hatred, little room’: so Yeats summarised Irish history. We could paraphrase him for the DRC: great prices, little room. The clan chief, Romanée-Conti itself, is only four acres; one wonders what every grape is worth. For a chance to buy the wine, at more than £1,000 a bottle en primeur, you virtually have to be entered on a waiting list at birth. I have only drunk it once. It was in the early Eighties at the Plough in Clanfield, Oxfordshire, where the wine list included a 1965 Romanée-Conti for £30.

Claret and cricket go together. Not, admittedly, while watching live cricket; then, the drink should be beer. But what about those of us who believe that the second worst affliction in modern cricket — after Twenty20 — is the barmy army? The batsman has played at and missed each of the last three deliveries. The fielders have all closed in, crouching at short piranha. Exuding destruction, the bowler is returning to his mark. The entire ground is silent, and not just in the sense of making no noise. There is an intensity of silence, all of it piled on the batsman’s shoulders. That was one of life’s great experiences. Now — Lord’s largely excepted — it has been replaced by constant football chanting. This also stifles the brilliant heckle.

It started with a ’99 Margaux, which commanded general agreement from the Brits around the table. Nose, length, balance, harmony: all delectable. It was a velvety, feminine wine, full of promise. Even so, the home team concluded, it was not really ready. The Frenchman in our company could not have disagreed more. ‘You English — you are a nation of necrophiliacs. This wine is excellent; how could you say that it isn’t ready?’ I gave battle. As the fruit and the tannins had not fully come together, we were only drinking 70 per cent of the wine. Give it another three or five years, and they would make love in an ecstatic consummation. The Grenouille shook his head. ‘Pauvres Rosbifs; you come from the cold North and you can never escape it.

Gentlemen’s clubs attract far more interest than they deserve, and an equally unmerited degree of mistrust. If they are not the establishment in secret conclave, they must surely be a potent means of networking — and they exclude women. As for the establishment charge: if only. The country would be better run. The networking allegation, popular with female journalists, is easy to dismiss. Chaps go to their clubs to get away from business, not to be reminded of it. Two editorial types who are old friends have managed to organise a drop of luncheon at the Garrick, which is increasingly difficult these days. There is always someone with a clipboard wanting a two o’clock meeting to discuss photocopying requirements for the third quarter of 2013.

Eheu fugaces. It is 1989 and I am off to Paris for the Sunday Telegraph, to cover the Sommet de l’Arche. Intended to commemorate the French Revolution’s bicentenary, it was a characteristic Gallic blend of grand projet, grandiloquence and frippery. The late Frank Johnson makes a suggestion. I ought to talk to Serge July, the editor of Libération, who is very close to Mitterrand; and here is a number for someone who will have M. July’s coordinates. Already halfway out of the door, not fully concentrating, I thought I was writing down July’s number. I phoned it on landing, and asked for Serge July. ‘Do you mean Georges Joly?’ Perhaps I did. Put through, I told him that I was a colleague of Frank Johnson’s.

I have discovered a powerful argument in favour of ever-closer union with Europe and cannot think why the federasts have not used it. A girl I know who is a professional cook had been using Selfridges as a speakeasy. Although the shop had banned the sale of foie gras, a good butcher with a franchise on the premises would act as a bootlegger. If you asked him for French fillet, he would provide foie gras. Alas, the Selfridges food police found out and closed him down. We should all boycott the House of Selfridge until it comes to its senses. So where was the EU? What is wrong with a common European foie gras policy? It should be illegal for Selfridges to refuse to sell the stuff. Equally, British laws which ban its production should be struck down.

Nineteen-eighty was a great vintage, at least for American politics. I was fortunate enough to spend many months of that year in Washington, anticipating the election of President Reagan. The outgoing Jimmy Carter was a misery-gutted mediocrity: the man who put the mean into mean-spirited. I am prejudiced, in that I have never finished one chapter of a William Faulkner novel. Once — I think it was The Sound and the Fury — I was floundering and about to despair. Someone said: ‘The principal character is mentally defective.’ I replied: ‘Thank you. How does that differentiate him from all the others?’ Carter was Faulkner on a bad day.

In St-Julien, amid the gentle landscape and the gravelly soil, there is a vineyard that had gone to sleep. According to the 1855 classification, Branaire-Ducru was a fourth growth. Back in the 1980s, however, it was neither rated nor priced accordingly.  People bought it because it was relatively cheap, but it had slipped a long way behind its neighbour, Beychevelle. Though that was also a fourth growth, it often delivered second-growth quality. No one was saying that about Branaire-Ducru. Then came new owners, the Maroteaux family, who brought investment, energy and an almost sacramental commitment to producing serious wine. Bacchus, libations, the First Miracle, the Last Supper, the Communion Service: blessed are the wine-makers, for they are the cup-bearers of the Gods.

Although the sample may seem unscientific, I have established a link between dry martinis and longevity. There was a wonderful old fellow called Roland Shaw, who lived to be nearer 90 than 80, and lived is the word. Even given the age of the vehicle, the mileage was prodigious. More than six-and-a-half feet tall, like a piece of Stonehenge with legs, Roland had lapidary features and a basso profundo voice. He would have made an excellent Commendatore, except that he would have won the sword fight. Roland was not only an oil man; he was the Nestor of the oil business, there when the first donkey nodded. He had a damn good war as a US Navy pilot — and he mixed a damn good martini. ‘Dry martinis are like women’s breasts,’ he would say. ‘One is too few.

I have a friend who brought shame on his family. Rupert Birch was educated at Westminster and the House. Descending from a long line of writers, artists and journalists, he was admirably qualified for a distinguished career of cultivated indigence. Instead, he became a banker. But the fall of man can be followed by redemption. After making what anyone but a fellow banker would regard as a useful little fortune, Rupert did what many bankers talk about but few accomplish. At 40, he chucked his counting house for a sacramental vocation. He became a winemaker. He discovered 25 acres of vines near Aix-en-Provence. The previous owners had sold their grapes to the local coopératif. Rupert turned them into a vineyard, Domaine de la Brillane. Sounds romantic: it was damned hard work.

As one approaches St James’s Street from Pall Mall, there is an enticing window full of whisky bottles. Part of Berry Bros & Rudd’s temple complex, it is devoted to Glenrothes, a Speyside Malt. The bottles do not look as if they were designed by a marketing man and their labels largely consist of tasting notes. I could not recall whether I had sampled Glenrothes (take that as you will) so it was clearly time to concentrate some attention on this rare malt. Scotland has its pastoral symphonies as well as its bleaker grandeur. From Aberdeen airport, the autumnal road to Rothes eases its way across rich farmland into the Spey country. Apart from salmon, Speyside was always notorious for unlicensed distilling.

Puritanism is like sea water. When it meets resistance at one point, it promptly finds another route. I came to that conclusion during the Tory conference in Manchester. If you passed a couple of Tory representatives, they might well be discussing community. Every ‘community’, every diversity, that you could think of was in view, plus the ones which the Cameroons have invented. These days, the Tory tribe looks like the entrance queue to the Coliseum, under a late and decadent emperor. Whether this is a good thing or a bad one, it does not signify the universal prevalence of permissiveness. Over the weekend, a photographer snatched a shot of the Prime Minister holding a wine glass, and the story immediately became a talking point. This is the Tories’ own fault.

At Tory party conferences circa 1980, there would usually be a day when the Daily Telegraph team looked glum. One would enquire why. ‘Dunno why I’m bothering to write this. Word from London is that we won’t have a paper tomorrow. The inkies’ll stop the presses.’ In those days, the print workers’ unions would always use the Tory conference to remind the world who really ran Fleet Street. Then came Rupert Murdoch. His record may not be wholly angelic, but the victor of Wapping is entitled to the nation’s gratitude. Even when I joined the Sunday Telegraph in 1986, a few pre-Wapping vestiges survived. The canteen, a necessary source of breakfast on Saturdays, was run by Inkies’ wives.

We should all eat humbly. There is no sense in foraying to far-flung continents in search of fancy victuals. We should be content with the near-at-hand: the harvests of our fields, hills, rivers, seas and moors. The Chinaman has his bowl of rice, the Irishman his cauldron of potatoes. At this time of year, our equivalent ought to be a grouse. The grouse is a fascinating bird, and not just in the way that it swirls and swerves and, after a final jink, speeds by contemptuously. It can make even fine shots feel foolish, let alone those, such as your correspondent, whose marksmanship qualifies them for membership of the RSPB. But the grouse also raises theological and philosophical questions.

Forty years ago this English summer, Australia was stricken by a cultural catastrophe. The damage to national morale has reverberated down the decades. It has contributed to the implosion of Australian cricket and the loss of the Ashes, now irrevocable. The disaster occurred when the only two intellectuals in the convict settlements both bought one-way tickets to London. Forty years on, Clive James is marginally the better known. But from the outset, Roxy Beaujolais (née Jean Hoffmann: New South Wales meets New Orleans) has been part of the va et vient. For a time, she ran the front of house at Ronnie Scott’s. She then decided that she wanted to be a salonniere and worked out how to make that precarious career a practical possibility.

Ou sont les bouteilles d’antan? With the onset of middle life, a good bottle can take on a melancholy aspect. Ou sont les bouteilles d’antan? With the onset of middle life, a good bottle can take on a melancholy aspect. The other day, I was lucky enough to be at the drinking of a ’67 Yquem, which I had not tasted for nearly 20 years. Magnificent then, it had lost nothing over the previous decades. It was and remains a celestial harmony of sweetness and structure, like a Greek temple melted down in honey. But I had drunk the previous bottle with Alan Clark. So I retold a few of the best Clark stories and raised a glass to his shade. Another bottle brought back a similar memory: another drinking companion who has crossed the Styx.