I have been thinking about the Dark Ages. This has nothing to do with Theresa May or Jeremy Corbyn. A friend of mine, Chase Coffin-Roggeveen, has a doctoral thesis in mind about the increasing use of wine for liturgical purposes during the English Dark Ages. Like all scholars who address that period, he has to wrestle with slender sources. Those who do not leave documents tend to be written out of history: think of the Wends. There are revisionists, such as Sally Harvey, who contrast the surviving beauties of Saxon civilisation — consider the manuscripts — with the Normans’ brutality. There is an obvious three-hour essay question: ‘How dark were the Dark Ages?’
Chase is well qualified to address such topics. As his name might suggest, he has family links with Nantucket. Seagirt, sea-tossed, with none of the Lib-Dem meretriciousness of Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket has a bleak ethos, wrested out of subsistence fishing, whaling and God. (At this point, a confession is called for. I find Moby-Dick unreadable. Per contra, I would claim ‘The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’ is the greatest American poem.)
But today’s Nantucket is not all austerity. Chase has been a sommelier in charge of a serious wine list. At a recent auction in Scotland, he bought some old bottles. He resold one, an 1860 Armagnac, which paid for all the rest, dating from the second European dark age. We started with two bottles of Mouton d’Armailhac 1929: the onset of the Great Depression, and a couple of years before the Rothschilds bought the château. One was hopeless: the other was still fighting against the dying of the light.
The same was true of a Cos d’Estournel ’34. Traditionally, Cos is as long-lived as any Bordeaux, with the exception of Latour.
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