Wine

Q. My dear English husband has never mastered the knack of timing his interventions in conversation. He hesitates politely, and by the time somebody pauses, his comments are no longer to the point so he shuts up. After 45 years I always know when there’s something he wants to say, and it’s become a sort of party turn that I butt in and call for order for the next speaker — which doesn’t reflect well on either of us. Any ideas, Mary? Should he signal, for example by raising his right forefinger, the hand resting on the dinner table? — B.D., Frankfurt A. This gesture is too puny to halt the egotists holding forth.

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.

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.

There ought to be a wise adage: ‘If invited to do good works, always procrastinate. A better offer is bound to turn up.’ About a month ago, the phone rang. Would I attend the Oxford vs Cambridge wine tasting, sponsored by Pol Roger, which would also include a wine hacks vs wine trade contest? Festivities were to continue over lunch. The likelihood of a wooden spoon did not deter me. I was joyously accepting, when a horrible thought occurred. I checked the diary. My forebodings were justified. I was already engaged, to speak at the King’s School, Bruton. There was one possible solution: do both. Get thee behind me, Satan. There could be worse embarrassments than finishing last in a tasting.

Another great Bordeaux vintage on the cards? Peter Grogan examines the unexpected problems created by never-ending success The art of assessing the likely future quality of very young red wines by sniffing away at what are known as ‘barrel samples’ is a decidedly arcane one. I’m no good at it and I haven’t even been within spitting distance of Bordeaux during the current en primeur campaign for the 2010 vintage. This is where the leading châteaux effectively sell their wines as ‘futures’, long before they’re bottled, let alone ready to be shipped to customers. Nonetheless, even from here, I detect among the positive early reports something ineffable playing around the edges that seems suspiciously like the smell of fear.