‘I don’t know about that,’ I said, ‘but I do collect wine. I have quite a few bottles in my cellar now.’
‘A large collection, I imagine, as Jacques says you are already familiar with several vintages of the Pétrus.’
‘I don’t know what you would call large,’ I said. ‘Perhaps one hundred thousand bottles of one sort or another.’
When I tell people this - and I don’t go out of my way to mention the fact - I find they often think I am joking, or that I might be mad. If it is mad to own one hundred thousand bottles of wine, then I am mad. But I look on it as an investment: not so much a financial investment as an assurance that I will spend the rest of my life drinking delicious wine whenever I want to. I inherited most of it from Francis Black.
The head waiter certainly thought I was mad. He straightened up and the smile left his face. ‘Indeed, sir,’ he said. ‘That is certainly what I would call a large collection. Enjoy the rest of your evening with us, sir.’
He left, which was a relief. I find on evenings like this it takes all my concentration to get the most from the experience of drinking the wine. Conversation can be a tremendous distraction, and anyway I have got out of the way of small talk these days. But then the head waiter came back, with a little silver tray.
‘If I could just take an impression of your credit card, sir,’ he said apologetically. ‘I wouldn’t normally trouble you, but as the sum of money is so very large . . .’ and his voice trailed away into a deferential whisper.
‘I don’t use credit cards,’ I said, and I pulled out my roll of banknotes. I knew I usually had between five and ten thousand pounds in cash when I went out. The bank always had an envelope full for me when I called on them once a week for my walking-around money, and I would make sure I had a bit extra if I thought I might come across an interesting wine. I put the roll on the plate. ‘Take what I spend out of that and give whatever’s left back to me when I go,’ I told him.
The head waiter looked appalled and handed me back the roll of notes. ‘That won’t be necessary, sir,’ he said. ‘I did not appreciate you would be paying in cash . . . Sorry to have disturbed . . . Quite unusual . . .’ and again he faded away.
I put the roll of notes back in my pocket. I hadn’t realised it, but they were all fifties. I must have given the taxi driver a hundred pounds for a fifteen-pound fare. I had thought they were tens or twenties, but then of course the bundle would have been inconveniently large. No wonder the taxi driver had blessed me.
I sat undisturbed and watched the restaurant come to life around me. One or two couples had come in and been seated. Two well-dressed women were sitting at the bar drinking champagne. It seemed like a nice place. I liked the sommelier.
A waiter came up and offered me a small plate and said, ‘Compliments of the chef, sir; a morsel of eel pâté on a gooseberry brioche.’
I waved it away. ‘Nothing before the foie gras, thank you.’
Then the sommelier came back and together we looked at the bottle, which he reverentially cradled in his hands, turning it so that I could see the ornate red letters declaring the name of the château, and the appellation Pomerol, and the year. Then there was a considerable amount of business with decanters and corkscrews, and the extracting of the cork, which was conducted with a surgeon’s care, and the decanting of the wine, which was poured as gently as if it were nitroglycerine. Then the decanter was turned gently in front of the flame of my candle, so that I could admire its lustrous colour. The sommelier’s face was lined with care as he carried out these tasks and it was only when the cork had been duly sniffed, and presented for my inspection, and the wine was safely in the decanter, that he relaxed and looked towards me for my approval.
I looked longingly at it. I almost wished I had not complicated matters by ordering another wine to start with. Then I reflected that the anticipation could only heighten the pleasure I knew I would feel at the first sip.
The foie gras arrived and with it the sommelier came again, with the Château Rieussec. He treated it, not with contempt, but with something less than awe. Although this, too, was a great wine, it was a minor princeling in the hierarchy of Bordeaux compared with the imperial pedigree of the Pétrus.
I ate a few morsels of the foie gras, and sipped at the sweet white wine.
Because I knew or, at any rate, had hoped that I might be drinking Pétrus that evening, I had prepared myself as best I knew how for the event. I had read my wine gazetteer to remind myself of the provenance of the wine. Pomerol lies east of Bordeaux, on the northern side of St Emilion. Its wines are described by Robert Parker, the great wine writer, as ‘the burgundies of Bordeaux’ because of their ‘power and opulence’. I therefore felt it was appropriate to saturate myself in the wines of Pomerol that day, while I read about them and thought about the evening that lay ahead.
After breakfast I drank, very slowly, a bottle of Château La Fleur de Gay; and with lunch I drank a bottle of Château Trotanoy 1990, the last bottle of that wine and that year that I had been able to find in the undercroft. I ate, as usual, very little: just enough to bring out the flavour of what I was drinking. I usually get something sent up from the restaurant around the corner. I lingered over the Trotanoy well into the afternoon. I thought about opening another bottle, but decided against it. I came to the restaurant with the tastes of Pomerol still lingering on my palate: two great wines from the district which yet, in the wine drinkers’ map, were as foothills to the great peak of Pétrus on whose summit I soon would tread.
It was inevitable that the wine affected me. My balance, which has been deteriorating these last few months, was not good. I have also developed a distasteful tendency to perspire heavily when I am not drinking wine, and I find my hands tremble. As I am no longer inclined to drive, since the accident, it matters less than it might otherwise have done. I have a Screwpull corkscrew and that opens all but the very oldest bottles without trouble, no matter whether my hands are shaking or not. And when I drink wine I find I become very peaceful, very reflective, sometimes even devotional in my moods. When I am not drinking it, I become restless, prone to unhappy memories of events earlier in my life. I walk around my flat in Half Moon Street, which is on the edge of Mayfair, in the West End of London. I pick up books and put them down unread. I go out into Hyde Park and try to blow the memories away in the fresh air. I walk down Piccadilly and look into the shop windows, or prowl among the bookshelves of Hatchards, or stare at the mountains of crystallised fruit in the windows of Fortnum’s. The memories won’t go away, and so I go back to my flat and bring up a bottle of wine from the small cellar of perhaps a thousand bottles that I keep there, and drink it. My main collection of wine is still in the undercroft at Francis Black’s old house in the North of England, which I acquired when I bought his house from his executors when he died. From time to time I go up there to gaze at my wine and make sure everything is all right, and I check that the temperature controls are working, and the security alarms are correctly set. I ship another few cases back to Half Moon Street to keep me going. The quantity of stock never seems to lessen, though - as if, when I am not there, the wooden cases and the racked bottles are secretly multiplying themselves. But I never linger for more than a few hours there: too many ghosts.
When I have opened the wine, rotated it this way and that in the glass, and savoured its aroma, and when I have sipped the first sip, then peacefulness gradually returns.
I finished the foie gras and sipped at the Rieussec. It was a good wine, with a delicious honey flavour, almost too powerful. I knew I would forget its taste instantly with the first glass of Pétrus. They took the plates away and I was left in peace for a moment, to glance about me. This was a restaurant for the rich and famous. It had taken quite an effort on my part to reserve a table, some weeks ago. Now there was scarcely an empty place in the room. The restaurant had filled up. But it was not noisy. There were perhaps only a dozen tables in quite a large room, well apart from each other so that one could neither overhear nor be overheard. I supposed that if I ever read the newspapers, I would recognise some of the people in here. There were three men ordering their dinner at the next table, and one of them was, I am fairly sure, a government minister. But I felt no real curiosity and I am sure I was invisible to them - not smart enough, sitting on my own, an object worth only a moment’s glance until the eye moved on to something more rewarding to look at elsewhere in the room.
The lamb arrived underneath a huge silver dish cover, and then one or two people did glance my way, their attention caught by the theatre of the waiters removing the dish cover with a flourish, to show the rack of lamb underneath with its little paper crowns on each cutlet.
The sommelier was at my elbow asking if I would like to taste the wine. I dared not speak, but simply nodded my head in assent. A very little was poured into my glass, and the waiter warmed the bowl with his hands and moved it just enough so that the dark, almost purple liquid lost its meniscus for a moment. Then he handed the glass to me. First I inhaled the scent of the wine and then, when its flavour had filled my nose and lungs, I sipped it.
I knew what to expect: flavours of truffles, spices and sweet fruit. Then those tastes receded and it was like entering another country, a place you have always heard of and longed to go to but never visited. It was an experience almost beyond words, not capable of being captured by the normal wine enthusiast’s vocabulary. I sipped the wine and I was so happy, all of a sudden, that a huge smile came over my face. I think I laughed.
The sommelier smiled too. ‘Is it wonderful, sir?’
I handed him the glass and he too inhaled it. ‘It is wonderful,’ I told him.
He smiled again and said, ‘There is nothing else on earth like it, monsieur.’ Then, with true grace, he poured me a full glass of wine and left me alone to enjoy it. The waiter presented me with two cuts of lamb from the rack, and I ate part of one of them - just enough to allow its taste to complement that of the wine.
I ate morsels of lamb, and sipped from my glass. And in that other country, where the wine took me, was Catherine. Not exactly sitting at the table with me; it was more subtle than that. She was somewhere behind my left shoulder and, although I could not see her, I knew how she looked. Twenty-five years of age, and pretty as a picture, just as she had been for the last two years. I could smell the perfume she wore, and it smelled the same as the wine. Then, above the clatter of the knives and forks and the growing din of conversation from the tables around me, I could hear her humming. She had once been a member of a choir and it was an air from Bach that she was singing. I don’t remember which one but I remembered the tune very well, and the pure sound of her voice. I hummed along with her, as I sometimes used to, even though she said I had no ear for music.
The head waiter appeared at my elbow: ‘Excuse me sir, but would you mind not humming so loudly? It might disturb the other guests.’
The image of Catherine vanished in a moment, and I felt dislocated inside my head. The wine tasted suddenly flat and insipid. ‘Was I humming?’ I said, restraining my annoyance at having my tranquil mood disturbed. ‘I’m terribly sorry.’
I bent my head over my plate and ate another forkful of lamb, in order that the head waiter would go away.
He bowed his head and said, ‘So sorry to disturb you, sir. Most considerate, sir. Thank you so much.’
The sommelier came and poured a little more wine and I noticed I had drunk more than half the bottle. I said to him as he filled my glass, ‘I think you said this was the last bottle but one?’
‘Yes, monsieur, that is correct. One last bottle and then it is gone. I do not know that there are many bottles of that vintage left in the whole of London now.’
‘Then bring it up and decant it, please.’
The sommelier replied, ‘Are you certain, monsieur? Two bottles of a wine like this in one evening, for one man. Is it not too much sensation at one time?’
The thing is, I knew he was right. It was, without a doubt, overdoing it. I could not possibly enjoy the second bottle as much as the first. My palate would become dulled and furred with the wine. Moreover it would be the fourth, possibly the fifth bottle of wine I had drunk today, and that was before I found my way home and drank the bottle of Montagny that I always had as a nightcap.
The fact remained that I could not bear the thought of anyone else having that bottle. It had to be mine. It was as simple as that. ‘Please bring it, anyway,’ I said.
The sommelier bowed but there was doubt in his eyes, and I saw him go and have a conversation with the head waiter. I think they were wondering whether I would make more of a scene if I drank the wine than the scene they knew I would make if they did not bring it up for me.
Then he disappeared and after a few minutes came back with the second bottle of Pétrus, and whilst he went through the same rituals as before, he found time to refill my glass from the first bottle. I noticed some curious glances from around the restaurant. One man, more inquisitive or ill-mannered than the others, arose from the table of three that I had noticed earlier and walked across to me.
‘Forgive me for intruding,’ he said, ‘but I noticed the label on that bottle of wine. Is that Pétrus you’re drinking?’ Without waiting for an answer he bent over and examined the label, which the sommelier instinctively turned so that he could read it.
‘My God. The 1982,’ he exclaimed, and then turned and said to me with some admiration, ‘I say, you really know how to push the boat out. Well done, old boy. Enjoy yourself! ’ He went back to his table and there was a little extra buzz to their conversation. I tried hard to ignore their looks and after a while the wine absorbed me again in its powerful and aromatic embrace. I found that I was drinking wine from the second bottle. It was nearly the same, but not quite: once again the sense of being in a different place, but now seeing the landscape of this unknown country from a new vantage point. And Catherine came back, somewhere nearby, and together we sang a few bars of ‘Jesu, joy of man’s desiring’.