Bruce Anderson

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.

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.

About ten thousand years ago, man learned to control fire. That was one of the most important events in pre-history: a crucial part of the transition from a humanoid past to a human future. But the flames were domesticated, not tamed. Ten millennia later, fire is still a killer and a destroyer. In our cities, the sirens of the fire engine are part of the symphony of daily life. For fire, read credit, a more recent development, but one which is the economic equivalent of fire. Without it and its handmaiden, paper money, humanity would be much less prosperous: governments, less powerful. So which is more destructive — fire which has leapt free from the fireplace, or credit which has leapt free from reality?

In Rome, there is a palace which is the capital of the world’s smallest state. In Rome, there is a palace which is the capital of the world’s smallest state. The medieval Church had many mansions. As well as orders devoted to prayer and contemplation, there were other bodies, for whom the way of the cross was also the way of the sword. In the 11th century, the Papacy established the Knights Hospitallers, or Knights of St John, whose headquarters were in Jerusalem. The Knights protected pilgrims and fought to preserve the crusaders’ conquests. But as the power of Islam grew, they were thrown on the defensive. Driven from Palestine, they made a stand in Rhodes, where their great castle still dominates. In 1522, Suleiman the Magnificent invaded Rhodes.

A limestone escarpment meanders south from Dijon. The product of prehistoric geological conflicts, it is now an arcadian idyll: the Côte-d’Or. Ducal Burgundy was one of the hauts-lieux of civilisation, and its resonances are all around you. But even before there was a duchy, Charlemagne enjoyed the wines of Burgundy, as had the Romans. That heritage is equally ubiquitous. In Gevrey-Chambertin, there is an unpretentious building, containing offices and a cellar: the headquarters of Pierre Bourée Fils, winemakers. When the cellars were excavated, Roman artefacts were found. The firm has only been in business for 150 years, but as its owners are well aware, they are part of a history almost as old as Europe. The creation of great wine is a consecration of past and present.

I had an old friend — now, sadly, dead — who spent his final years in terror of his wife. I had an old friend — now, sadly, dead — who spent his final years in terror of his wife. By the time he reached man’s estate, he had developed a taste for good claret. As he became a good lawyer, he was able to indulge it. Jolly expeditions to Bordeaux, long sessions with old-fashioned wine-merchants, his own estimable palate: the outcome was an enviable cellar. And an increasingly valuable one. My late friend refused to let counting-house considerations deter him from drinking his treasures; that attitude of mind was for billing clients, not opening bottles. Even so, he was astonished by the constant upward pressure on wine prices.