Interconnect

Fortnum & Mason has its own range of wines, and as you would expect, they are very good indeed. These are not simple house wines, trading under an anonymous label; they are selected by Fortnum’s chief buyer, Tim French, as the best example he can find of each type of wine. As well as the F&M imprimateur on the label, you’ll find details of who made the wine, how they made it, and where. They are not cheap, but they range from very good indeed to stunning. And, as an introduction to Spectator readers, Tim has discounted them all. Two are somewhat pricier than usual, so there is a pair of sample cases, regular and luxury. First is a Muscadet sur Lie from Luneau 2005 (1). Muscadet can be somewhat flavour-free, but leaving it on its lees adds much to the body and depth.

We’ve all been there: the brain stuck in first gear during an interview; an inappropriate remark to a senior colleague or client; uncontrollable shaking before a speech in public. For most of us these are relatively isolated incidents. There are, however, serial offenders whose failure to control their manners and nerves ultimately proves fatal in today’s cut-throat business world. Two recent surveys highlight the problem. The first reveals that demand for senior executives is booming, thanks to private equity investors’ appetite for hired-in, new-broom management — good news for job-hunters, provided they’re up to the job. But the second suggests they might not be, revealing that 71 per cent of business leaders are frightened of speaking in public.

Q. Everyone over 40 in my office has been let go. I assume I have been spared the axe because Human Resources has never had a record of my date of birth. Now a mountain of paperwork has arrived from the school at which my son will take up a place in September. We, his parents, are asked to supply all manner of personal detail about ourselves including our ages. My husband is happy to give his age. I do not wish to lie about mine but if I failed to fill in the box at all, or wrote ‘N/A’, it might draw more attention because we have moved into a rather small and gossipy community. If I were to give my true age and anyone from the school office were to talk, I truly believe I could lose my job. What should I do? Name and address withheld A.

Our article entitled ‘Shall we tell the Prime Minister? His gang has scattered like rats’ (10 March) was not intended to suggest that Sir Ken Macdonald, QC, the Director of Public Prosecutions, had leaked information to officials at No. 10 or that he was pressurised by the Police to withdraw from making the decision about prosecutions in the cash-for-honours case for that reason. We accept that there would be no truth whatsoever in any such assertions. We further accept that Sir Ken has behaved properly and appropriately and we apologise to him for any embarrassment caused to him by our article.

After drinking over 1,000 Riojas in a year while researching a book, John Radford explains how Spain's best-known red wine continues to reinvent itself with such success If not actually reinventing the wheel, Rioja is certainly reinventing its wines on a rolling basis, as, astonishingly, it always has done. Since the pioneering Marqués de Murrieta and Marqués de Riscal (as they became) changed the face of the wine in the 1850s, everybody involved in the industry has brought new thinking with every passing generation.

The author salutes the 1847 vintage of the legendary sweet wine from the Gironde, Château d’Yquem, a bottle of which recently became the most expensive wine ever sold in the United States and is now the most expensive white wine in the world The author salutes the 1847 vintage of the legendary sweet wine from the Gironde, Chateau d'Yquem, a bottle of which recently became the most expensive wine ever sold in the United States and is now the most expensive white wine in the world Yquem 1847.

As part of a six-month tour of the main wine-producing countries of the world, the author stopped long enough in South Africa to discover the hidden treasures of Hamilton Russell Standing on Cap Agulhas gazing at the ocean, aware of the fact that we were on the very tip of Africa, it seemed unlikely that we would find anywhere quite as beautiful again. We had driven to this remote spot and walked through budding fynbos, the gorgeous display of nature's wild flowers unique to the Cape. And yet the drive from that windswept corner of South Africa towards Hermanus on minor roads proved to be equally spectacular. Hermanus is synonymous with whale-watching and a high standard of living.

Possibly the finest white wine of all France, Chevalier Blanc is remarkable for having a little known cousin, a red Chevalier that stands up to many of the fine wines of the Médoc Possibly the finest white wine of all France, Chevalier Blanc is remarkable for having a little known cousin, a red Chevalier that stands up to many of the fine wines of the Médoc Claude Ricard inherited the celebrated Graves estate Domaine de Chevalier in 1948, at the age of 21, and abandoned a potential career as a classical pianist to take over the reins. But music still pervaded the domaine when Ricard was in charge. On my first visit to Chevalier in the 1980s, the other guests were two flamenco guitarists. There was music – and there was astonishing wine.

Apart from libraries and other centrally administered faculties, the University of Oxford is made up of 45 colleges and halls, all possessing a wine cellar. As a result, the wine culture of the place is immense and indelible, and a sizeable minority of dons – the term describes any fellow of a college – have built highly respectable private cellars of their own. Frequently a case of misunderstanding when a tourist asks ‘Where is the University?’, the colleges collectively comprise the university despite being self-governing, quasi-autonomous legal entities.

When La Baronne Philippine de Rothschild served 1945 Mouton-Rothschild to more than 200 guests at the Syndicat des Crus Classés Dinner on 21 June 1993, the idea was to pour magnums.

Wine has been collected since the late 17th century by everyone from Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Lloyd Webber.  Not much has changed either, except the idea of wine as an investment  -  any suggestion that wine might be sold on for a profit, effectively creating a wine stock market, would in days gone by have made any gentleman choke on his venison.  But the most important considerations for buying wine are the same as ever, namely to know what to buy, who to buy it from, when to buy it, and how much to pay for it. The advantages of investing in wine are fairly straightforward.  Wine is an easily transferable asset with an established and thriving broking and auction market.  There are no limits to investing; you can put in £250 or £250,000.

When I was seven my father gave me a duty-free Timex, my first watch. I loved it, wore for it years, and haven’t had another one since it stopped ticking a decade ago. Why? Because I don’t need one. I have a mobile phone and a laptop and I’m always near someone with an iPod or a Blackberry. All these devices display the time — which is why, if you look around, you’ll see loads of empty wrists: sales of watches to young adults fell 10 per cent in 2005. But while the sensible have realised that they don’t need them, others — apparently including distinguished Spectator contributors — are spending absolute fortunes on them. The luxury watch sector is booming.

In Competition No. 2446 you were invited to provide a poem with the title of ‘The Danger of Queer Hats’. There are one or two queer hats in literature, like the one worn by Lear’s Old Man in the Kingdom of Tess, which was ‘a loaf of brown bread, in the middle of which he inserted his head’; or the one shared by Chesterton’s two friends who companionably smoked the same cigar underneath it. Dangerous hats are a different matter. Apart from some desperate puns — ‘bodyline bowlers’ and ‘poisonous berets’ — your hats were odd rather than lethal except for Shirley Curran’s judge’s black cap, ‘the real one to dread,/ For the day that he dons it he tells you, “You’re dead.