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Foreword – HUGH JOHNSON OBE
from The Bordeaux Club
to attain legendary status, which is why this book concentrates on the members as much as it concentrates on their wines.
My overall justification for the structure of this book is, therefore, that if great wines provided the raison d’être for the creation of the Bordeaux Club in 1949, great members provided the reasons for its survival and its growing distinction over 70 years until 2019.
So, in this history of the club, I have taken the view that the wine lovers were quite as important, and just as interesting, as the wine they loved. Indeed, as many members have stressed: ‘Wine, however fine, is nothing without interested and informed drinkers to discuss, judge, compare and reminisce about its virtues and to judge its development and sometimes its decline.’ The great merit of the Bordeaux Club was that it kept detailed minutes, for the whole of its 70-year history, in which those judgements and comparisons were recorded.
If the combination of fine wine and fascinating members dictated the structure of this book, it is ultimately the wine itself that underpins the whole history. It is for this reason that I have included a separate chapter devoted to the best and most memorable wine that we drank over the 70-year span.
Being a wine lover with a significant cellar may have been a defining characteristic for membership of the Bordeaux Club, but it was not sufficient to provide a supply of interesting members who would keep the club alive and thriving for 70 years.
What is striking about the club is the number of life-enhancing members who arrived replete with rich experience drawn from many different careers and many different backgrounds.
It is revealing that the major national honours with which club members were rewarded often had nothing to do with wine. Harry Walston received his peerage and his CVO for services to politics, Jack Plumb received his knighthood for services to history, John Jenkins received his CBE for services to agriculture and trade unions, Hugh Johnson received half of his OBE for services to horticulture. Admittedly Hugh got the other half of his OBE for services to winemaking, and Simon Berry got his CVO and Harry Waugh his MBE for services to wine.
It is also revealing that the enthusiastic amateur members were known primarily for activities very different from selling or writing
about wine. Among the early members, Carl Winter was director of the Fitzwilliam Museum and Dick Ladborough was Pepys Librarian at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Among the other early academic members, the historians were then known mainly for the subjects they wrote about – namely Sir Robert Walpole (Sir John Plumb), Napoleon (Felix Markham), Garibaldi (Denis Mack Smith) and Josiah Wedgwood (Neil McKendrick). By the end of their careers the academics were mainly known for the Oxbridge colleges they were masters of – Brasenose College, Oxford (Maurice Platnauer), Christ’s College, Cambridge (Jack Plumb) and Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge (Neil McKendrick).
Among the non-academic members, Michael Behrens was primarily known as a banker, a gallery owner and a restaurateur. Harry Walston was mainly known as a politician, a landowner and a farmer. John Jenkins was best known as a farmer, a provincial politician and a television presenter. Louis Hughes was best known as a Harley Street consultant with special expertise in human fertility. In the early years of the club’s history, of the 10 first members seven were full-time academics. Admittedly in its final years there was only a single academic, and famous wine men had come to predominate.
Even the wine professionals, however, were far from one-dimensional in their interests and achievements. They often had other strings to their bows – Hugh Johnson was a famous garden writer; John Avery was a theatre angel who helped to finance Lloyd Webber’s Cats; and Simon Berry was an enthusiastic amateur actor who marked his retirement from running Berry Brothers with a successful theatrical production of his own, The Dame and the Showgirl.
Many members were also sufficiently intriguing individuals to catch the attention of novelists in search of arresting characters. Some – such as Lord Walston, Sir John Plumb and Michael Behrens – were so compelling that they proved quite irresistible to major literary figures.
What drew all these colourful and very different characters together was their love of the wines of Bordeaux. Many of them often had very little else in common.
How the mutual attraction worked was vividly explained by Hugh Johnson in his wine-loving autobiography, The Life and Wines of Hugh Johnson (2022). In the chapter ‘Bordeaux with Friends’, he spells out the process by which such a club comes into existence.
