Wine

In June last year, King’s College Cambridge made more than £1 million from an auction of just 41 lots from its wine cellar. Not bad for a college that until just a few years ago had a hammer and sickle flag hanging in its student bar. But the Marxist sympathies of some of its legendary fellows and students stand little chance against the viticultural genius of the cellar’s buyer: Peter de Bolla, a scholar of 18th century literature and aesthetics. Included in the bonanza sale were 12 bottles of 1999 Echezeaux, an apparently legendary grand cru from Henri Jayer, for which someone bid £100,000. De Bolla had bought them on release and, to give some indication of the return on his investment, when he bought the 1996 vintage he had paid £31.11 per bottle.

The first thing you should know about Montenegro is that it is wildly more dramatic than you might imagine. It would be frankly rude not to pull up on its precarious mountain roads and gawp. In summer the Adriatic shines; in autumn the mountains compete with New England for glorious, rich colours. The second thing you should know is that there is a relaxing lack of big-hitting sights. And anything you do want to do won’t take long. Even the most beautiful and Venetian of the tiny Balkan state’s towns take an afternoon at most to peruse, leaving plenty of time for lingering coffee stops and long fish lunches in the family konobas strung along the coast (which, if you were pushing it, you could drive end to end in around three hours).

Anna, the daughter of friends of mine, is in her final year at university and keen to enter the wine trade. Clearly, she is wise beyond her years because it’s a hugely engaging career. She will never get rich but will always be happy. Oh, and a glass of something tasty will never be far away, and nor will someone congenial with whom to share it.  Wine is made in beautiful places – just think of Bordeaux, the Douro Valley, Western Cape, Yarra Valley, Napa, Piedmont, Mendoza, Central Otago and even the rolling South Downs of Sussex – by delightful people (well, with just the one exception). It’s a warm, friendly and collaborative world to be in.

The Ottomans were evicted from Budapest in 1686, but you can still find reminders of Turkish rule if you look in the right places. All these relics are on the western, or Buda, side of the river, for Pest did not really exist in the 17th century. The original Turkish dome crowns the Rudas Baths, which are still in operation, public baths being one of the more salutary legacies of 145 years of Turkish occupation. Just north of the baths, on a slope leading up to the Buda Castle, an out-of-the-way cluster of graves is all that’s left of an old Muslim cemetery. From a distance, the weathered turban headstones look like pineapples. Other legacies of the Turkish era remain outside of Budapest.

I’m hungry, so I know it has begun. December. The month when the kitchen transforms into a battleground, no soldier safe from its vigilant sniper’s gaze. Seemingly innocuous snacking is off-limits: one must assume that everything edible — everything — has been squirreled away for festive drop-ins, cocktail parties and The Big Day. “Wait! Don’t open that. It’s the Christmas wine.” “Hey. Don’t even think about it. That’s a gift for Auntie Jo.” “Put those back! They’re the Christmas Eve cashews.” We must struggle with bizarre concepts like “having a banana” or “waiting until dinner.” Or, do as I do. Continue in vain, scribbling an IOU list that grows as long as my belly grows round. I’ll buy it back tomorrow. Of course I will.

As we all know, the Swiss love their clocks, their cheese and their chocolate. They also adore their railway. The trains are clean, comfortable, convenient and you can set your (Swiss) watch by them.  The system is 175 years old this year, a fact recently celebrated by the running of the world’s longest train through the Swiss Alps. It was quite a feat and took years to plan. The 1.2 mile-long train comprised 100 carriages and passed over 48 bridges and through 22 tunnels during its 15-mile journey, setting a new Guinness World Record as it did so. If you’re exasperated by British trains with the constant strikes, delays, cancellations, melted rails, frozen points, leaves on the line or the ‘wrong type of sunlight’ (do you remember that one?

The philosopher Roger Scruton died in January 2020 just a few weeks shy of his 76th birthday. He left behind a large circle of admirers and a correspondingly large shelf of books in a variety of genres – novels, opera libretti, volumes of occasional journalism, cultural and architectural criticism, and various philosophical works, popular as well as technical. He wrote and wrote about music, hunting to hounds and politics. He also wrote about the subject that brings us together: wine. Roger was a gifted teacher, always on the lookout for opportunities to educate the ignorant, enlighten the benighted and expand the horizons of those cramped by bigotry and parti pris. His missionary work extended to the pages of the New Statesman, in whose pages his wine columns appeared.

There have been few more momentous weeks in British history, or indeed in world history. This commentator must plead guilty. To draw on George Bush Jr, I mis-underestimated Liz Truss and appear to have made the same mistake about Ukraine. That said, we should all be relieved when the war is over on favourable terms, and tactical nukes have remained an item in Russian military doctrine, without becoming part of military practice. Another mis-underestimation has now been corrected, one hopes permanently. Though I was never guilty, the former Prince of Wales had not received the respect that was his due. That is not true of King Charles III. Throughout the United Kingdom, his first coronation has already taken place, in his loyal subjects’ hearts. The Queen is dead.

August may not be the cruellest month but it is often the most dangerous one. Now that it is over, and rosé is giving way to grouse, we can console ourselves. There has not been a world war. We merely face a number of middle--ranking crises. Over fortifying bottles, I was chatting about such matters with friends who had known the late Peter Inge, a dominating figure even by field marshal standards. It was said that in his company, brigadiers’ coffee cups would rattle with tension. I once taxed him with the contrast between his reputation as a martinet’s martinet and his geniality in private life.