just williams
A lifetime of talking sense Few wine writers have had more impact on their chosen field than Michael St-John St John. His career is beautifully remembered in his new book – the first of a trilogy of memoirs – Wine: A Lifetime in The Sense Trade, Volume I 1947-1983. David Williams selects some highlights
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The first time Prep school. 1957. The scent of bleach, Spam, boys’ gym kits and Matron’s enigmatic soapy admixture. Good preparation, in many ways – a remarkably fertile breeding ground – for a career in
the sense trade. Certainly, it was here, at dear St Jeffrey’s, among those beautiful grounds stretching as if forever along the gentle, womanly curve of the Usk Valley, where I learned to be truly
sensitive to the olfactory world and to nature’s merciless scented journey through the seasons from, as it were, blossom to crab apple, mud to mown grass.
Here, too, that I was to have my first experience of the
substance that would fundamentally shape my life. It came
courtesy of a Hungarian schoolmate, Istvan Gábor, a sullen,
prematurely swarthy boy who was inevitably nicknamed Zsa Zsa the moment he’d arrived in school the previous summer, and
who maintained a monkish, faintly menacing silence throughout his brief time among us. The only time I remember him uttering
even a single word was during an unseasonally warm evening in the Michaelmas term.
Now Istvan was a damn fine bridge player – the consequence,
no doubt, of long evenings in hiding with his family from the
Michael St-John St John, The Wine Merchant’s Man of the Year
Hungarian secret police. That night, as with so many others, he
hand to the next, and at one point someone suggested we raise
retrieve, from inside a tatty Soviet-issue pullover, a golden bottle.
hazy memory of crumpled pyjama, underpant and muffled
was helping me defeat a succession of teams of dorm-mates at our improvised card table, when he reached into his trunk to
Raising the bottle high above his head, he uttered a strange word
in his own incomprehensible tongue, a word, that in light of what happened next, could for all the world have been “Abracadabra!” Then he uncorked the bottle with two brutal stabs of my Swiss
the stakes from betting with the usual liquorice shoelaces and humbugs to “strip bridge”! The rest, dear reader, is but a soft
giggles. And the word – the incantation – that started it all and set me on my path in life: Tokaji!
The path to Connoisseur’s Quarterly
Army knife, took a swig and passed it to me.
They say that if one remembers the sixties one wasn’t there. In
the merest sour whiff reminiscent of the St Jeffrey’s chaplain’s
waking up, one charmed, Mediterranean early afternoon in the
Heavenly shafts of light struck my tongue! A golden road to
pleasure opened up, paved in custard and toffee apples and Sunday-evening breath. The bottle passed from one sweaty
which case I must have been a significant contributor to that
decade’s merriment, since so much is a blur until I find myself summer of 1973, in a queen-size bed in my father’s holiday
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