All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Foreword / 7
Preface / 10
1 Prospects / 13
3 White / 103
4 Red / 171
5 Sweet / 305
6 Digestif / 341
Thanks / 352 Index / 353
life? All three, in fact, come into my calculations. So do vintages, value (there is an inner sanctum), and plain old sentiment.
However good wine is, sentiment makes it better. If it can’t make a lame wine walk, at least it can make it worth talking about. Above all, incidental connections give people who are wary of wine talk an entry into the conversation. Wine talk rapidly becomes rudely exclusive. I have a perpetual horror of being buttonholed to discuss technicalities by a nerdy wine buff in the company of people who are not. My answers get shorter and shorter as I manoeuvre to change the subject. (On the other hand I am equally vexed by people who do know one wine from another and who chatter on regardless when I think they should be paying attention to the wine in their glasses.) I have the same feeling in gardens when companions ignore the plants in front of them to talk about their own successes and failures.
Half the secret of enjoying wine is to know when to put your critical faculties on hold. Professionals can rarely afford to do this. Pity them. I have little caches of all sorts of wines and vintages that won’t show on anyone else’s radar but have meaning for me. The obvious one is a vintage memorable for a birth or a wedding. The rewards for remembering and bringing out the bottle at the right moment can make up for any deficiency in the wine. But I am soft enough to hoard a bottle from a grower I liked or an obscure region I visited, or even just from a happy holiday, if I see a prospect of a warm reminiscence at some time to come.
My first sight of France was with school friends in Brittany in the early 1950s. I am wearing the white cap.
The painter Paul Hogarth illustrated my Wine Companion. He painted this portrait of Saling Hall as a surprise present in 1984. The ‘Dutch’ gables were added to an Elizabethan house in 1699.
What am I looking for?
A little inner wine cellar was excavated under the house in the early 1700s.
The University Wine & Food Society celebrated its 50th anniversary at a June dinner in
Wren’s Court at Trinity College in 2002 – seemingly without any wine.
Editorial duties included instructing ladies who lunch (in Chanel suits) on the mysteries of tasting. My boss, Harry Yoxall, is on the left.
Was it this lesson in French geography from André Simon that made me dream of a wine atlas?
James Mitchell (centre) and John Beazley founded their publishing house in 1969 with atlases as their speciality. James was a noisy but irresistible leader.
A cobbler should stick to his last. My career as a purveyor of glass and silver for wine drinkers in St James’s Street lasted for 10 years. The memories are more positive than the balance sheet.
A scientific approach –or so it appears. A tasting of Australian wines in the Aldwych in central London with the writer Oz Clarke and a Master of Wine, Angela Muir.
The notebook I keep in the kitchen to record every wine I taste at home. No one reads it except me. After many volumes I decided to spice it up with doodles.
New World Bubbles
Champagne is inherently a vulgar – at least in the sense of popular – taste. Everyone understands its attractions. It is less intimidating as a result than its equivalents in value and prestige. The owner of a bottle of Château Lafite can easily be selfconscious about it. He or she thinks long and hard about which friends should share it. Ostentation, flattery, many various motives might, he thinks, cross their minds; because it is expensive, yes, but also because it is seen as a sophisticated taste, almost inaccessible to those not in the know. And the vintage: is it a good one? One of the best? A bin-end? Of course a good host can give his great bottle a modest introduction, just enough explanation to make it seem appropriate, inevitable almost. Champagne produces no such qualms. To joke about the label is easy – whether it is Roederer Cristal (the automatic choice, apparently, of footballers) or the local supermarket brand. People like me who analyse and memorize the tastes of different champagnes are very much the exception.
For the same reason champagne is considered fair game by imitators, and its imitations are serious currency worldwide. Which New World country was first to do it I’m not sure. Australia and California are both in the running. What happened in California before Prohibition is now largely forgotten, but neither country was shy about using the name Champagne, or indeed Chablis or Burgundy, despite the protests of the French that Champagne is a place, not a synonym for fizzy wine. The difference was that Champagne’s objections were heard because it had the money. In California, Korbell was the first brand I encountered that appealed to me. I went to see their vineyards in the 1960s, out toward the coast in Sonoma. An
extraordinary sight, I remember, because they ran through what had in the not-toodistant past been redwood forest. The butts of giant trees stood out among the vines, the size of small cottages, black (perhaps they had tried to burn them) among the sparkling fresh green of vine rows coming into leaf. The cellars, like most in California in those days, had a log-cabin feel. The vats were smooth towers of warm brown redwood. A number of the wines, all I think sparkling, were rather sweet and had various off-putting strong flavours. But the white-labelled Natural had enough acidity and not too much sugar: Wild West Champagne was a fair name for it. There was another German-founded house with the confusingly similar name of Kornell that used Riesling to make what I always thought were unrefreshing wines.
The German heritage was not as strong as the Italian among those pioneer wineries, but one German name had been exalted to the level of myth, despite having died as a fact with Prohibition. Robert Louis Stevenson, who crossed the continent by train and fell in love with the Napa Valley, made the acquaintance of Jacob Schram, climbed the hill through the redwoods and red-barked madrones to his whiteboarded, verandahed, turreted house in a clearing to drink his wine, and called it ‘bottled poetry.’
Schramsberg was reborn in the 1960s and taken in hand by a young professional couple who were discovering wine and northern California at the same time: Jack and Jamie Davies. Schram had made Cabernet, and no doubt some white wines, but the Davies’ dream was champagne. My first visit there was particularly memorable. I had borrowed a little dark-green MG two-seater from friends in San Anselmo. I swept up the steep curves of the drive through the woods in fine style. I was ravished, as Stevenson had been, by the white house in the clearing and deeply impressed with the rock-cut cellar tunnels behind, which Schram’s labourers had hacked and blasted in the 1860s.
In 1998 these cellars were the scene of a surprise birthday party when I was lured there on another pretext. They are, in the manner of all caves, dark until someone switches on a light. When they did, deep in the ground, I was confronted with a garden. Grass, box hedges, lemon trees, a rose arbour – and in the garden what was apparently my own writing desk. Molly Chappellet is a long-time friend, an epic gardener and the designer of San Francisco’s most stylish parties. She had plotted with my wife Judy, who had abstracted papers, books and family photographs from my study and smuggled them over. She had cultivated grass in trays for the lawn, rushed the roses in at the last minute before their flowers had had time to fade. As I stood, astonished, my family and old friends started appearing from dark places in the rock and guitarists burst into twang. And that was only the apéritif. In another cave, a long
for longer than the life of any creature (or do tortoises keep going this long?). After that there is a 255-year gap in my grasp of old vintages.
Does this make you eager to try the latest batch? Bavaria has only one wine region, where the River Main wanders through the far north, a long way from Munich. This is Franconia; its capital is the Baroque city of Würzburg, and Frankenwein can still be something else. The outward sign is its bottle: squat, pot-bellied and unblushingly known as a goat’s scrotum, Bocksbeutel. The wine-growing soil here is chalky clay, the same formation, or nearly, as in Chablis and Sancerre 500 kilometres to the west. The grape that likes it best is the Sylvaner, looked down on elsewhere as a commoner. Riesling ripens reluctantly in clay and in a continental climate. But in Franconia Sylvaner can make wine as clean, strong and appetizing as Chablis of a high order. At home I have kept bottles long enough for them to become the white-wine equivalent of gamey: 15 years or more. The capacious Weinstuben of Würzburg (wine bars, the biggest are ancient charitable institutions) rarely offer, with their various sausages, anything more than two years old.
DOES THE GERMAN wine tradition travel? The Riesling is a great traveller, but the German style is unique. It is so specific to the valley of the Rhine that its disciplines and distinctions stay at home. No other country or region plays so singularly on the sugar in its grapes. You can argue that none has to grapple with such a cool climate. Alsace is the oldest and biggest non-German proponent of the style, and Alsace has been in and out of Germany time and again in its history. On a clear day its vineyards can see the Rhine.
But Alsace is the sunniest region of France – or so the statistics say. The height of the mountains, the Vosges, on its western flank tucks its east-facing vineyards into a
Riesling in unlabelled magnums, seafood by the bucket.
Len Evans’ appearance as Napoleon, with Trish as his Josephine, surprised no one.
Seafood traditional at Doyle’s on Sydney Harbour.
How tastes change. Each course at the Bathers’ Pavilion, across the harbour, is a
composition. These are Bay Bugs, a reason to visit Sydney in themselves.
My daughter Kitty lives in the South of France and provides timely advice on which rosé to pick.
At Scharzhof you taste at a round table in the hall. The late Egon Müller steered me through many vintages of his sublime Moselle.
Stephanie Toole makes some of Australia’s most persuasive Rieslings in cellars she shares with her husband Jeffrey Grosset in the Clare Valley, South Australia.
There is one bottle left of the 1514 Steinwein – at a secret location in Germany.
The cask it lived in for 200 years is still in the Residenz cellars at Würzburg.
seems impossibly laborious – and, you ask, how on earth did people manage when they had no wine press, no tree trunks and no money?
The stainless steel equivalent is much less fun. The press is a horizontal drum the size of a good-sized engine of the days when trains had boilers. The grapes, precrushed, pour in through a lid. Earlier models work by pushing two pistons together, one from each end, while the whole affair slowly revolves. Intermittently the pistons draw back and a system of steel chains breaks up the caked pulp, releasing more juice through slatted sides into the gulley beneath. Gentler and more efficient, though, is the pneumatic or airbag press, another revolving cylinder, but with a long black bladder inside. The bladder is empty when the grapes go in. As it inflates it squeezes them against the pierced sides of the drum. Nothing abrasive crushes the pips and stalks.
THE
VAST MAJORITY of Chablis ferments in inox, as the French call stainless steel; tall tanks with water-jackets to warm them up or cool them down. Most of it stays in steel until it is bottled, in the summer after the vintage or the summer after that. The old guard use old oak, both for fermentation and for the vital period of élevage; either barrels (the classic Chablis feuillette is the smallest used in France, holding a mere 135 litres; the pièce of the Côte d’Or holds 228) or tubby old foudres holding up to four barrels’-worth. A few challenge convention by using new oak.
Why would you use new oak, with its unmistakable smell, for Chablis, whose character is all about flint and green fruit and hayfields and a whiff of lemon? Oak is what the Montrachets and Meursaults smell of: it is the trademark of the Côte d’Or. Nobody would, is the answer, for the lightweight wines of run-of-the-mill vineyards, Chablis Villages. But concentrated, tightly wound wines, Grands Crus if not Premiers Crus, can not only absorb and dominate the flavour of oak (its users argue), but can also profitably add it to their structure and character.
Oak is the ideal physical container: it allows a slow exchange of wine and oxygen, even through inch-thick planks. The argument is about what flavours it might add, and using old seasoned barrels with no flavour left is the solution. There are small cellars still lined with old foudres, glossy and black with time. Cleaning them perfectly is not easy, there are obvious arguments about their obsolescence. Is it their microflora, their porosity or their neutrality as inert containers that seems to condition their contents at least as well as steel? Or is it perhaps that growers who take such trouble to defend tradition have their hearts in the right place?
I remember one cellar visit years ago in a heatwave, when the tasting glasses in the cellar were beaded with condensation. The tradition here is to use small round
ballons, as it is in the Côte d’Or. I used a photograph of one sitting on the bung of a black barrel in my first Wine Atlas. The light from the cellar door caught its green depths through the dewy beads and made readers, they told me, react as I had done. The cold, plummy, pebbly hay-meadow taste was absorbed by your eyes and appeared miraculously in your mouth. More often, though, I have come on cold winter days when you group round the barrels stamping your feet. In these crystalline conditions every nuance of the cold wine is hard-etched without flattery.
So enthralled was I at one such session (it was with Michel Laroche in 1988) that I ordered a whole barrel – for myself. Not many feuillettes leave Chablis full these days, I fancy, when almost all wine is bottled where it is made. The rationale is presumably authenticity, since bottling wine is not a skill it takes too long to learn. I still have the chubby little cask of pale oak empty in the cellar as a souvenir, not only of a most pleasant wine (not a great vintage, 87, and I paid a modest price) but also of a hilarious evening. We dressed the cellar with vine branches, set up a table with oysters and bread and ham and cheese, and let our friends take turns at the spigot. We bottled half of it in magnums, a better measure than bottles, to my mind, for such a versatile and sociable wine. If there are four people at table and one wine is to last the whole meal, you would need at least two bottles. A magnum is not only more handsome; its wine keeps in good condition for longer and eventually, in my experience, reaches greater perfection.
Tasting convention in Chablis is the same as in the rest of Burgundy. You get your eye in with the new wine either at Villages level (or with the junior appellation, Petit Chablis), then taste wine of the same rank one year older. Then you move on to Chablis Premiers Crus (most good growers have several different plots) to finish with a Grand Cru, if any – and if you are lucky, an older bottle to drink over the parting reminiscences. You soon discover what is on your host’s mind. In spring, frost is never far from it. It can be devastating here. In the 1950s it almost put paid to the whole notion of Chablis. Now every vineyard is littered with little black stoves; on a clear night their flames flicker all around and their smoke hangs like fog between the wires. The high-tech solution is water, sprayed on from pressure nozzles as the temperature falls to zero to form a freezing protective film around the vulnerable new shoots. They can withstand zero, but no lower.
If it is not frost, it is some controversy: new plantings on the wrong soil, machine harvesting, using new barrels and, of course, price. What should Chablis cost? Its name makes it a frequent supermarket loss-leader, which creates expectations that it should be cheap. If it is, it will also be pretty thin in flavour. Yet even thin Chablis is often a good and typical drink. Which makes the wild-beast roar of a Premier or
The Médoc to me has always been tree, as well as wine, country. A bouquet d’arbres exotiques accompanies almost every château – amusing novelties in the garden for the builders; now landmarks visible for miles around. Grand ones like the Beychevelle cedar stick in the mind. There is one tree so prominent and so peculiar that I recognized it when I read the account by a hostage of his three-year captivity by terrorists in Beirut. Jean-Paul Kauffmann was a journalist from Bordeaux when he was captured. He writes of a tall tree, delicate in its pale foliage, standing alone by a stream, surrounded by vineyards. In his prison it says to him: ‘to live is to be alone.’ It is the swamp cypress that marks the boundary of St-Julien and Pauillac, where the vineyards of Château Latour, Château Léoville-Las-Cases and the two Châteaux Pichon-Longueville meet – to Kauffmann the territoires royaux of the Médoc. To me it has always been symbolic, too; an alien from the Caroline swamps declaring that this landscape is the work of man. Nature did not put vines here either. But can man determine what they produce? No, nor can the commune boundary make any difference. It is what the vine roots find deep in the soil that determines the wine and here, regardless of the boundary, are four of Bordeaux’s most famous properties making four quite different styles of wine. Château Latour is stern and majestic, Léoville-Las-Cases ascetically fine, Pichon Comtesse fragrant and feminine, Pichon Baron a Pauillac of the cedar-scented, strongly structured school. The philosophy of each is to make the most of the terroir. How they do that, with what grapes, with oak vats or steel and with 100 nuances, completes the definition of each château.
I have followed the vintage closely enough to see dozens of little differences that could add up to different qualities – or different styles – right through the harvest. The first difference to add to that of soils is the proportion of different grapes: Cabernet
The Marqués was our first sailing freighter from Bordeaux. Here she lies off the little harbour of Château Loudenne.
In the rigging. An experience perhaps better in retrospect.
The Bordeaux Club in рrе-dinner champagne session on our sunburnt lawn. Jack Plumb is the one in the straw hat; Harry Waugh is on the left.
Marvin Shanken (left) and Kevin Zraly flank the performers (David Orr, President of Latour, on the left) at a New York Wine Spectator tasting.
Next stop: Japan. For some reason the Japanese market for wine was even more appealing.
Under new ownership. The new team in the tasting room at Latour in 1994.
François Pinault is at the head of the table, the current gérant, Frédéric Engerer, behind his right shoulder.
The very office, the very desk where it was signed and the very document of the 1855 Classification are still in place in the Chambre de Commerce on the Bordeaux quayside.
Château Haut-Brion, the first First Growth, was bought by Clarence Dillon, an American banker, in 1935. With his daughter Joan, Duchesse de Mouchy, in 1987.
The Bordeaux Persuasion
Achecklist of all the world’s wines of the Bordeaux Persuasion would be longer than it would be useful. Any number can play. Plant Cabernet. Plant Merlot. Plant Cabernet Franc, Petit Verdot, even Malbec, even Tannat – they are all the grapes of Gascony, of the basin of the Gironde, perhaps with common parentage, perhaps with mingling genes. One account traces the family back, via Roman Spain, to Albania on the Adriatic. Two thousand years of cultivation and selection have narrowed down the clones that suit the maritime climate of Bordeaux. In the past 200 years they have been shown almost every wine-susceptible climate on earth, and put on at least a recognizable performance in most of them. For how long will Bordeaux be able to claim leadership over such talent, and such diversity?
The grapes are on the limits of viability in Bordeaux. Climate change for the warmer would be good for business, but at the first sniff of a new Ice Age Bordeaux would be in trouble. A good vintage in Bordeaux is by definition a warm, dry, sunny one. All the great vintages have been years of exceptional heat. The same, though, can be said of any part of France: wine growing was introduced there from further south. Does this mean that more warmth means better wine? Not so fast.
California was the first place on earth to make wine comparable to some of the best Bordeaux. It may have happened in the Napa Valley as far back as the 1850s. The oldest examples I have tasted were from the 1940s. Then came Australia. The first I became aware of were from the remote outpost of Coonawarra in the southerly panhandle of South Australia. Chile had already been making Cabernet for three generations by then, but whether any was comparable to Bordeaux is very doubtful.
Chile
CHILEAN CABERNET FIRST crossed my path in the 1960s as one of the cheapest red wines my friends could be prevailed upon to drink. I must have been convinced because I negotiated with the London importer for a whole barrel to be delivered to the spacious cellars of my new home in the country. Half a dozen friends bought shares. We grew excited as we heard of its progress: by lorry to Valparaíso (not far, it came from the Canepa winery, between Valparaíso and Santiago); by steamer up the long coast of Chile, past Peru and Ecuador and Colombia and across to the Panama Canal; a steamy tropical passage through the Caribbean; five days steaming on the rollers of the Atlantic and a gentle home run up the Channel to Southampton. It rested in a London warehouse while I paid as much as the wine was worth in duty. Then a brewer’s lorry brought it up to Essex. Hurrah. But how to get it down into the cellar?
The driver was a drayman. He rolled beer barrels for a living. They have ways. A noose around the barrel, a turn around the axle of the lorry, aim it end on down the cellar stairs and lower away. Just in case, a lorry tyre at the bottom for a soft landing. What he had failed to notice, and I to remember, was that four steps from the bottom the stairs widen out. Unconfined, the barrel turned sideways and fell, bounced on the tyre and drove its end into the brick floor.
A weeping barrel is a sad sight. The iron hoops had slipped enough for the parched staves to open up. The smell was marvellous as the barrel turned red and the puddle grew. We grabbed hammers and ruined chisels bashing the hoops as tight as we could. We threw sacks in the pond and wrapped the barrel in them. Why hadn’t they given it a good soaking to swell the staves before they loaded it? The story, though, has a more than happy ending.
I recommend a bottling party. Quality control is a serious business, and nobody shirks his duty. Nine or 10 of us worked late into the night, taking turns to suck on the siphon and direct the tube into the next bottle. In preparation for the first day I had ordered 25 dozen brand-new bottles, or their equivalent in magnums.
Mystery: I came to the end of the bottles and I still had 20 centimetres of wine to go in the barrel. Alarm: I had to leave them there. No more bottles, and a trip booked to France. I rang round all my neighbours for empties, and stirred what seemed a shocking quantity of sulphur into the remaining wine as it lay exposed to the air in the barrel. I came back. It tasted fine. And we bottled the rest in a medley of old wine bottles, beer bottles, water bottles, even a rather fine blue half-gallon affair from a Victorian pharmacy. It was the cheapest wine I ever bought: the barrel held 300 litres when I expected 225. But more important, it was delicious. It had the ripe dark blackcurrant flavour of good-vintage claret with a dry, earthy tang. Had it been
Did I say Wimbledon? There is no resemblance at all, except perhaps a blazer or two. The game does not take long. There is a decanter in front of the treasurer. He passes it round. The glasses are small; fat rubies in crystal, alone on the polished board. ‘I think I recognize this,’ says a member; ‘it’s one of yours, isn’t it, David?’ It is not worth playing for high stakes: what are the odds when it must be a wine from one of 16 shippers, and there are perhaps 40 vintages in the cellar? It is a matter of professional pride, though, to be able to match the richness of Fonseca’s, the sweetness of Graham’s, the vigour of Dow’s or the authority of Taylor’s with the characteristics, and the maturity, of a ’77, a ’70, a ’66 or a ’63.
The inquisition over, there is plenty to talk about. They are rivals and colleagues at the same time. There are technical developments, new regulations, tricky farmers, the traffic, new wrinkles in the business that can always be improved. Their great purpose is to extract the maximum colour and flavour from the grapes, if possible without the patient crews who used to tread them, and in many cases still do. The port farmer works harder than any other wine grower. The slopes are steep, the soil hard and the weather extreme. The men carry the grape baskets on their shoulders, 60 kilos at a time: there is no other way. Then they form lines, women and children too, and tread the purple soup thigh-deep in the stone lagar until midnight, the foreman calling ‘Um, dois, esquerdo, direita’: ‘One, two, left, right,’ and an accordion going back over a lifetime of songs.
The test is the taste. If a grower can reach the same rich density of extraction with an autofermenter or a robotic lagar he will – except at little farms up rocky tracks when there are not enough grapes to fill one. And the taste decides whether your best wines add up to a vintage worth declaring – a form of arithmetic only longexperienced palates can do. It is a rare year that finds the shippers unanimous. In every year one part of the valley does better than another, one grape than another, one quinta than another. There is no absolute, and each blender has a goal in mind, that he must either reach or abandon. In Champagne, a vintage wine is a selection: you can select for it in most years if the market demands it, and your customers will know what to expect. On the Douro, to declare a vintage is to make a commitment to an idea whose time is still a long way off. Nobody can be sure, when the fierce fluid is first assessed, what it will become after 20 years or so in confinement. Yet you can taste the flicker of clouds over the canyons 50 years later. That, at least, is the legend – and I love legends. This is where Hugh Raymond comes in.
The Noble Rot
The gloom of a great brick vault was lit by iron chandeliers the size of cartwheels.
Along one wall ran a table with three vintages each of Châteaux Lafite, Latour, Margaux, Mouton and Haut-Brion. Opposite the First Growths was another table with the full range of wines from the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. The rare champagnes were in one corner, vintage ports in another, and Château d’Yquem gleamed gold on a table in the middle. Then the fairway was encumbered by barrels, not of wine but of oysters and lobsters, the tables piled with sirloins and saddles, and the press of guests more organized, as we stood in line for a gargantuan buffet.
A lobster, I thought, would be the proper way to start. I was 23, and hungry. The old gentleman beside me in the queue, a telltale ribbon in the buttonhole of his grey suit, smiled at me over his spectacles. When he saw me examining the lobsters he asked, in faintly French English, ‘What will you drink with that, my friend?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I answered.
‘I suggest you take a glass of Château d’Yquem.’
I knew Château d’Yquem from decadent days in Cambridge as the grandest of all pudding wines and the ultimate show-off bottle. We had a silly student name for it: Wickham White. I had even drunk it, with the college’s patent crème brûlée – about the only dish that could compete with, and spoil, its glorious creamy sweetness. With lobster? Who was this eccentric Frenchman?
He introduced himself as Bertrand de Lur Saluces. I knew that name: it is written in gold on the most sublimely simple of all wine labels: Château d’Yquem Lur Saluces, and a vintage date. I was queuing with the most illustrious name in all Bordeaux,
It is not hard to describe the way Hungary’s traditional wines differ from French and German wines. ‘Fire’ is the word the Hungarians traditionally use for the quality they are looking for. Don’t be put off, though, by an image of alcohol and chilli peppers cauterizing your tongue and tastebuds. By ‘fire’, they mean vitality and high-flavoured sweetness.
TRIPS BEHIND THE Iron Curtain were always fascinating in what they revealed of the way Europe used to look. There was a startling simplicity and innocence about the uncluttered streets, the cities standing (if they were standing) just as they had been built and, above all, the absence of words. There is nowhere you can look in a modern town without reading: advertising, instructions, warnings, labels everywhere. Every word alters your perception, distracts you, occupies some tiny part of your attention. Times Square is all words; St Mark’s Square: no words. At one time, if there were not portraits of Lenin defacing the place, the whole of Eastern Europe was like St Mark’s Square. That is how I remember Hungary in those days: big, cold, shabby Budapest and remote, muddy, time-warp Tokaj.
In my first Wine Atlas I used a photograph of the Tokaj market place: a peasant in boots, layers of waistcoats and a stocking cap by a cart jumbled with old barrels on ruts of frozen mud. It would have passed for a scene from Dostoyevsky, at least to me, knowing little of Russia, my head filled with images of chilly gloom. (The Hungarian authorities hated the picture and asked me to change it.) What I remember best about my first visit, in 1970, was the warmth and noise of the little inns, the beauty of hot
It was evidently a wine lover who built the staircase at Saling Hall.
A broken arm lent artistic verisimilitude when I wore my ancestral red coat (Captain John Henry Johnson, North York Militia, circa 1815).
The ancient model of barco rabelo no longer carries the crop down from the high Douro, but its descendants make excursions on the now-placid river.
Accordion and drum lead a file of harvesters, carrying the crop in baskets on their shoulders, along a steep Douro terrace.
The Lebègue tasting under London Bridge where I met the Marquis Bertrand de Lur Saluces, inheritor of Château d’Yquem.
Isztván Szepsy (left) has become an iconic figure in Hungary for his championship of Tokaji. This was outside his cellar in 1990 with Peter Vinding.
‘Johnson Var’, Johnson’s Castle, is the ironic name the locals have given to the little yellow cabin in the vineyard of Mézes Mály, source of deeply honeyed wine.
When shall we start picking? Family and friends on the verandah of the yellow house. You can count on perhaps six good aszù vintages in a decade; 1993 and ’99 were potentially great ones.
