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.

You don’t go to a strip club expecting to put something in your mouth unless you’re an incorrigible roué. So it came as something of a surprise to find myself doing just that in the new Spearmint Rhino club. The club recently launched in Soho’s old Windmill Theatre, famous for staying open throughout the Blitz, when girls appeared naked in static tableaux to get around the era’s indecency laws. Now the venue offers both flesh and – more shockingly – food. A restaurant in a strip club has both bacchanalian promise and the risk of comic disaster. Degustation sounds so like a combination of delicious and disgusting, it suggests there is a fine line between food and sex.

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.

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.

‘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.

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.