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. He could no longer afford to buy his favourites en primeur, but as he said, that hardly mattered, for two reasons. In the first place — and, alas, he was right — he was unlikely to live to salute their maturity in his glass. Second, he was in a position to trade the odd case of Lafite, itself not yet ready, for up to 50 cases of serious wine. That is where the wife was a potential threat. Suppose she discovered that even one little box of that Lafite would pay a grandchild’s school fees for a year…
Life has graver problems, and this column will address one of them. In the 1980s, Alan Clark complained that decent claret was costing £100 a bottle. For the wines he had in mind, try over £1,000 today, and counting. Empty bottles of Lafite are fetching $150 in Beijing. Most of us will rarely be able to afford the wines that dons used to take for granted at high table.
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