HOW I DIS COVE R ED WI N E
But that doesn’t mean I gave up on flavours, perfumes, scents, sights, emotions and sound. I had a childhood completely packed with all of those. I grew up in the Kent countryside during the 1950s and ’60s. I didn’t go to school until I was, what, five? I hung around my mum. I ranged through the fields and marshes and woods that surrounded our house. And I loved my dog Chunky. I then became a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral and all the time I was picking up the aromas and enthusiasms of childhood and adolescence. Going off to school so late meant that I was always in the kitchen, cooking with my mother, tasting stuff – stews, roasts, gravies, soups, jams, chutneys, pickles, cakes, buns and bread. We had a sort of market garden and I quickly learnt how to pick the ripest strawberries and cherries, blackcurrants, redcurrants, apples, plums and pears. The smell of vegetables mingling with fresh earth as you pull up carrots or potatoes from the soil, the pungency of fresh-cropped parsley or mint or sage, the sultry heavy-lidded odour of Black Hamburg grapes in the greenhouse thickening the air with promise – I revelled in all of these, and I can recall all of them with perfect clarity...
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Discovering my unquenchable thirst for wine And it wasn’t just food and drink. As I grew older, it was the smell of linseed oil and my cricket bat; my wellington boots by the back door; the dust in the lane at high summer; the pile of grass cuttings after spring rain had drenched them; my mother’s Calèche perfume when she was going out; my father’s study and his workshop – old books, ink, lathes, lubricating oil and wood shavings. Canterbury Cathedral, cold and pallid on a winter morning, the flagstones smelling of a thousand sunless years, or triumphant and exotic as the incense-swathed clerics swept into the vestry after Eucharist. The crisp, chalky smell of freshly starched sheets – and of matron, fresh, crisp and starched. Flavours, scents, emotions, people, places. But no wine. Quite simply, my parents didn’t really drink. This was the 1950s and ’60s, and by one reckoning only five percent of Britons drank wine at the beginning of the 1960s. You could just about classify my parents as among them, because about twice a year a bottle of wine did come out at table. The white was Lutomer Riesling from Yugoslavia – and I can easily recall its vaguely sweet-sour, fruity fatness from the tiny sips I took. The red was Bull’s Blood from Hungary, a furious mighty red in those days; one sip and I puckered up my face with disgust. But then I can also remember the roasted Irish turkey, the sage and onion stuffing, the chipolata sausages, the honey and mustard-glazed ham and the slightly burnt roast potatoes that accompanied it – much more fun than the wine. Why did adults drink it? The only wine I did enjoy – if you can call it wine – was with the Archbishop of Canterbury. As choristers we would go carol-singing around the cathedral precincts each Christmas, ending up at the
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