Drink

Why soldiers are the funniest people

We were discussing wit. I uttered a self-evident truth which proved gratifyingly controversial. Of all the people I encounter, the soldiers are much the funniest. I took no prisoners among those who tried to disagree, merely telling them to get out more and find themselves in decent company. Military humour is an abiding delight. It

The spirit of Prohibition lives (if you’re a haggis)

It is an old adage, but still pertinent. ‘Every generalisation about India is true, and so is the opposite.’ The other night, some of us were discussing the US and wondering if the same applied. Certainly, there are lots of paradoxes. Although Americans passionately believe that they live in the land of the free, there

The battling brilliance of Burgundy

There is only one answer to the question ‘Burgundy or claret?’ ‘Yes, but never in the same glass.’ Yet I am about to make an observation which cannot be true. I think that good Burgundy sets the conversation ranging widely in a way that claret does not equal. If one was a mystic, there would

When a forgotten bottle turns out to be a treasure

I had not drunk the wine for 20 years, and nearly all the information which I thought that I had remembered turned out to be wrong. It was a Californian pinot noir. I had given friends a case in the late 1980s as a wedding present and one bottle had survived by oversight, like a

Cognac and the Viking connection in la France profonde

The chestnut trees were still resplendent in yellow leaf along the banks of a misty autumn river on its glide through woodlands, pasture, comfortable towns — and vineyards. This was the Charente. Eighty years ago, before the lorry became dominant, it would not have been so peaceful. In those days, barges laden with barrels of

The great lunchtime wine showdown

This is a tale of two lunches, sort of. The first was a classically English affair. We started with native oysters, my first of the season: everything that they should be. Then there was succulent roast pork, its crackling done to perfection. It was accompanied by the Platonic idea of Brussels sprouts. Straight from the

The real French embassy is a restaurant

Semper eadem. There is some basement in a Mayfair street that is forever France. It is not far from the American embassy, a strong candidate for the all-time monstrous carbuncle award. Bad enough that it should ever have been built: worse still, some ‘architects’ want to preserve it. Its menacing hideousness has made a significant

The secret kinship of good wine and good cricket

A high proportion of wine-lovers also enjoy cricket, and vice versa. This might seem natural. Anyone with an aesthetic temperament will surely find his way to two of life’s greatest pleasures. But there may also be a parallel. Wine is made of decomposed grapes. Vignerons conjure sublime flavours out of long-decayed fruit. As you sniff

Proof that the Japanese know how to make great Bordeaux

Château Lagrange, a St Julien third growth, has the largest acreage of any Bordeaux classed growth. For much of the 20th century, this was its sole claim to distinction. Under family management, it consistently failed to justify its ranking. Then the Japanese arrived. In 1983, Suntory bought Lagrange for £4 million. There were resentments. In

Horse racing, Sancerre and escaped lobsters

A stint in dry dock — the ‘dry’ literally — has one advantage. There is time for lots of long reading. After many decades since the last opening of Middlemarch, I had forgotten how good it is. I had completely forgotten a delicious minor character, Mrs Cadwallader, who is a blend of Aunt Dahlia and

Visiting Burgundy from my hospital bed

There have been some splendid rumours about my health. According to the most exotic, I was cas-evacked from a hill in Scotland, flown to St Thomas’s by private plane and then tested positive for Chateau Lafite. The truth is more banal — and much more reprehensible. I had neglected an infected foot: what an idiot.

From Glyndebourne to St Thomas’s Hospital

‘Don’t you think you’re drinking too much?’ said the nurse, contemplating the array of bottles. ‘But I feel so thirsty,’ I replied. A doctor arrived and concluded that powerful intravenous antibiotics did require a lot of liquid, so that the orange juice was acceptable as well as the water. The trouble had started at Boisdale.

A toast to all bottles

Where two or three British males are gathered together, the agenda often includes a glass or two. One thing can lead on to another. To facilitate the supply of glasses, clubs are sometimes formed. These can vary in size and splendour, from the palaces of Pall Mall to the working men’s clubs where the young

Measuring out an elegy in Burgundy

It was a sort of wake. An old friend’s father had died, and some of us were helping him and his wife deal with oddments from the paternal cellar. As he had made 91, enjoyed cantankerous good health until earlier this year, and had always taken a thoroughly unsentimental view of the human condition, there

The joy of Glenmorangie

Glenmorangie is the most accessible of malt whiskies. It is a gentle, almost feminine creature, with hints of spring flowers, chardonnay, eine kleine nachtmusik, wholly different from the lowering malts of the Outer Isles. With them, there is no question of hints, let alone Mozart. A blast of peat and iodine arrives to the skirl

The soul of a lurcher and the secret of a capon

A county, a house, a dog — and a bottle. Somerset: men have delved and farmed and built here for millennia, reshaping the landscape but never losing harmony with nature. There lies the dearest freshness pretty near the surface of things. My friends live in the Vale of Blackmore, good hunting country, in a prosperous