The wines of a lifetime

In longevity, great wine can march with human life. Creating (better still, maintaining) a fine cellar really is a compact between the dead, the living and those not yet able to appreciate serious claret. There is a sort of comparison with trees and houses, yet in those cases, the time-scales transcend the shortness of our lifespan. I have a number of friends who plant trees in the serene and stoical knowledge that, one day, the offspring of their husbandry will spread a benison over the surrounding countryside, though they themselves will not be here to see it. Nunc dimittis.

Houses are even more germane. One of the glories of England is the number of buildings which have survived in family hands for centuries, preserving a fair proportion of their contents. I was in one such establishment the other day. There was a 1630s portrait attributed to Dobson. I queried this, asking my host whether it might not be a Cornelius Johnson. ‘I see what you mean, but the document-ation is agin you. We have Dobson’s bill in the archives.’ History is now and England.

In comparison, the poor frogs suffer. Some families did manage to recover their châteaux after 1815, but the kit had usually been looted. Since then, the Code Napoleon has enforced subdivision. One suspects that if Bonaparte himself had made peace with the Allies and reigned for a few more stable years, he too would have understood the values of primogeniture. It was not to be.

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By no means all British houses have survived. A visit to the Huntington Hartford collection in Pasadena is a bittersweet experience, for that museum is also a memorial to imperial overstretch. I seem to remember a number of portraits of country houses, whose pediments have mottoes such as Hora et Semper.