How I Discovered Wine

I started drinking at the age of three. We were having a picnic on the banks of the river. My brother was drowning in the weir. My father was trying to rescue him. My mother was having hysterics. And there was this bottle of my mum’s damson wine. No one was looking, so I drank it – delicious.

My brother survived, but I very nearly didn’t. After my father had hauled him out of the water, he took one look at the empty bottle, turned me upside down and whacked most of the liquid out of me from whence it had entered. That put me off drinking till I was 18. Well, not quite. Later that summer my sister was christened. My father had poured out glasses of South African sherry for when the guests got home from church. Too good to miss, with my brother able to reach them from a chair. Another thick head. Another whack. I think. Actually, it all got a bit blurred by the second glass. And this time I really did get put off drink till I was 18. But I’ve always adored wines that taste of damsons, not least because I know they taste just as good on the way back up as on the way down. And I’ve always been partial to a second glass of sherry.

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...