Portraits and Miniatures(82)

So you must expect a certain amount of bias in the following bits of wine gossip, anecdotes or old wives’ tales that I have randomly put together in no particular framework or order except for making them add up to ten.



(1) Why is it that the greatest wines come from the very limits at which you can effectively produce wine of any sort. If you draw an arc from the mouth of the Gironde, looping around the Loire (not much great wine there) to, say Autun at the eastern end of Burgundy, then turning north to skirt Epernay and Reims in Champagne before turning east to take in the Mosel and the Rheingau, you will find with a minor exception to which I will come in a moment that there is nothing produced to the north or the west of it. It is the frontier of the European empire of Bacchus. The exception is southern England. As yet that produces no red wine, so I am essentially unqualified to judge, although remaining in this respect a little sceptical about the glories or the value for money of Hampshire. But does this pattern of Ultima Thule being the best suggest that if there were a climatic change, as was strongly prophesied a few years ago, the frontier would move north? Would the Bordelais become a more robust and less delicate region like the slopes of the Ebro, and the Weald and the Thames Valley become the difficult but fine new frontier region? Not, I think, in under a hundred years or so. I cannot see Château Moulsford replacing Château Mouton in less time than that.



(2) How does New World wine compare with Old? I recently had to make two Australian bicentenary speeches and have aroused marked lack of enthusiasm by giving them what I thought was the relative accolade of being the third-best producer of red wine in the world. (My unspoken premise was that the second place should go to California, although maybe Spain ought to have been next, giving Australia only the fourth plinth.) More important than this, however, is how the ‘steady climate’ New World wines come out compared with the meteorological vagaries of Bordeaux and Burgundy. They always do very well on blindfold tastings. But that is a doubtful concours. It is, in my view, always better to know what you are tasting. It gives much more authority to your pronouncements. I also think that removing the variation of years from the equation (which the Californian or Australian climate effectively does) takes about a third of the fun out of wine. In addition, for my money, Bordeaux gives if not a bigger bang as least a subtler taste for a buck than California does. I therefore remain a strong and prejudiced Old World partisan.



(3) What is the best rule for dealing with an unfamiliar restaurant wine list of moderate quality when parsimony makes one loath to go above the châteaux that are as unknown as is the list itself? The answer in my view is in such circumstances always go for the Graves. There is hardly such a thing as a bad red Graves. In any event it is of course very foolish ever to order wine of more than a modest quality in a restaurant. To pay 100 per cent (at least) mark-up on expensive wine is more akin to lunacy than to generosity. The sommelier of a distinguished Oxfordshire hotel/restaurant once won my heart by flatteringly rejecting my tentative order of about the fourth cheapest claret and saying, ‘Oh, Mr Jenkins, don’t waste your money. You’ll have much better wine than that at home. I’d have the house red if I were you.’



(4) I once amused myself when I was President of the European Commission by arranging the main countries of the Community according to different categories of quality in their governments’ attributes, some of them frivolous as well as specialized to an official visitor. Thus for the ruthless brio of their motor-cycle escorts I put the French easily first, with the Italians second and the British and the Germans third and fourth. (It should be added that had the test been the performance of the economy the Germans, although not the British, would have moved markedly up.) On the quality of government entertaining, however, I without hesitation give the accolade to the British, with the Italians second, the French only third and the Germans again fourth. This was based entirely on the quality of the wine. The Elysée could not begin to rival the 1945 and 1961 first growths which, when I was last a minister, still lurked in the cellars of the Whitehall Hospitality Department.



(5) Do I believe that I can perform precise feats of wine recognition? Alas, no, except purely by accident or by lucky cheating. I think it is a gift like ‘perfect pitch’ and I do not have it. My best recipe for recognizing is to get a quick look at the label. The second best is to know approximately what your host has in his cellar, and then decide at what grade in his stock he is most likely to rate you and his other guests.