Vintage

Thanks are due to

M Anthony Barton (Château Langoa-Barton), M et Mme Daniel Cathiard (Château-Smith-Haut-Lafitte), Mme Sylvie Cazes-Régimbeau (Château Lynch-Bages), M Charles Eve and Mme Pamela Prior (Château Loudenne), M Pierre Gilles Gromand d’Every (Château de Lamarque), Mme de Lancquesain (Château
Pichon-Longueville
Comtesse de Lalande), M et Mme Sacha Lichine (Château Prieuré-Lichine), M Peter A Sichel (Château d’Angludet), Mme Christine Valette (Château Troplong-Mondot), for their help and hospitality.

I would also like to thank: Mr Matthew Breslin, Mr Nicholas Faith, Mme Deborah Geffré, Mr Adrian George, Mr Daniel Green, Ms Emily Grossman, Mr Robert Joseph, Ms Stephanie Lloyd, Mr Peter Taussig, Mme Christiane Schulyer, Mme Renée Tata, Ms Nicole Tinero, Dr Jonathan Waxman, Mr Victor Woolf, and Ms Ilsa Yardley, and Dr Dennis Friedman for his invaluable help and advice.

The sole remaining testimony to the fact that
twenty-eight
-year-old Clare de Cluzac had spent the impressionable years of her life on the banks of the Gironde, in the midst of one of the finest vineyards in the Médoc, was a photographic palate which enabled her to tell a Pichon-Longueville Comtesse de Lalande from a Château Gloria at a distance of twelve paces and a tendency, when under pressure, to employ the French expletive.

Clare’s birth, at Château de Cluzac, a medieval fortress, which, together with Lesparre to the north and Blanquefort to the south, stood firm against the invading Vikings (many of whom were later to be seduced by the liquid delights of the area), was greeted with only muted joy. Baron Charles-Louis Eugène Bertrand de Cluzac, and to a lesser extent his Irish wife, Viola (née Fitzpatrick), had been hoping for a son to carry on the ancient line of Barons de Cluzac, whose members included an ambassador sent to Turkey by François-er, a celebrated adviser of Henry III, a Major General of the French Army in India, the General Military Commander of the Médoc, and one of the first elected mayors of Bordeaux.

This last was Clare’s great-great-great-
great-grandfather
and the great-great-great-grandfather of
Charles-Louis Eugène Bertrand, who was today solely responsible for the wine production of Château de Cluzac, once the jewel of the Médoc and now crumbling like a damp sugar-lump in the vagaries of a climate as unpredictable as that of England.

That Clare had lost touch with her father (apart from having dinner with him at Claridge’s on the rare occasions when he came to London), a handsome but autocratic playboy, was due both to the fact that her mother had left him when Clare was eight, taking her daughter back to Ireland with her, and that they had never seen eye to eye. From the moment of her birth, Clare had not been able to do a thing right.

Hopeless at sport, which she was never able to take seriously, and frequently lost in a world of her own peopled by imaginary friends, whatever she did was a terrible disappointment to Charles-Louis. He could not accept that any factor other than laziness contributed to her poor level of scholastic attainment. She became so nervous in his company that she reached the point when she was afraid to say anything at all. Even her sense of humour seemed to annoy him. Sometimes the Baron would test her on what she had learned that day at Cours Albert le Grand, the exclusive private school to which, a small and lonely figure, she was taken each day by the chauffeur. He interrogated her in such a hectoring tone that, even if she knew the answers to his questions, she found herself unable to reply. Dogged by a constant sense of inadequacy, and busting her gut to be good enough for her papa, she was unaware that Baron de Cluzac was unprepared to accept from her the mediocrity he unconsciously recognised in himself, and that what he was looking for was perfection.

Clare had not been back to the Médoc since she was eighteen, when she had decided that she was ras le bol both with her father’s cavalcade of women and his overbearing treatment of her. Digging her heels in, she had declared that enough was enough. She still owned twenty-four per cent of Cluzac – willed to her by her grandfather, the late Baron Thibault – which yielded half a dozen yearly cases of Château de Cluzac, with its deep loganberry colour and perfume of acacia, by way of dividends. When she was caught off guard, her vinous origins overrode the veneer of Notting Hill and St Mary’s Ascot and made their way to the surface.

Dressed in black leggings, voluminous black tee-shirt and ubiquitous sneakers, her black bob framing her oval face, she was pushing her trolley round Catesbury’s. As she circumvented the Wines and Spirits, a dull voice, tense with the agony of indecision – a state of mind endemic in superstores in which there was so much on offer – stopped her in her tracks.

‘I don’t know whether to get a Bordeaux or a claret, Arthur.’

The speaker, a woman well-honed by existence, whose comfortable figure and neat grey hair bespoke a life of accommodating others, held a bottle of Catesbury’s red (£2.99) at label-reading distance of her bi-focals.

Arthur, who was pushing the trolley and had stopped docilely in his tracks while his wife made up her mind, was able to be of little help. Had he ventured an opinion it was likely it would not have been heeded.

It was strange, Clare thought, how people of precisely the same degree of attractiveness seemed always to be drawn to one another. Richard Gere and Cindy Crawford. John and Norma Major. Torville and Dean. Arthur’s trousers enveloped a waist whose girth suggested an affinity to bitter rather than Bordeaux. They were held
up by braces visible beneath an open anorak as colourless as himself. The little hair that remained to him, some of which sprouted from his ears, might have been cut from the same swatch as his wife’s. Even their spectacles, pale and plastic, appeared interchangeable and probably, in moments of need, were.

‘A Bordeaux is a claret,’ Clare remarked kindly. She looked at the distinctive straight-necked bottles (ideal for holding the long hard corks) for which her native Bordeaux was justly famous. Lined up like skittles, they stood between the sylph-like Alsacians and the sturdy Côtes-du-Rhône. They were, she suspected, purchased by the supermarket more for the keenness of their price than the quality of their contents.

Two pairs of once-blue eyes swung round to meet her own. The couple were struck, as people always were, by the almost indecent animal vitality of Clare’s appearance, by the luminosity of her skin and the spirit that leaped from eyes the colour of the Liffey. It took a moment for Arthur and his wife, no longer as quick off the mark as they had once been, to respond to the gratuitous counsel, by which time both the moment and Clare had passed.

Filling her trolley with vegetables – she and Nicola were having friends to dinner – and making unfavourable comparisons, Clare saw in her mind’s eye the abundant early-morning markets of her native France: geometrically piled stalls of polished purple aubergines, emerald-green peppers, feathered bunches of golden carrots, misshappen tomatoes and bug-ridden lettuces.

Sidonie had taught her to cook when she was a child. Not taught. Sidonie was too parsimonious with words for that. For want of anything better to do, Clare had merely hung around the château kitchens with their dented copper pans, iron stove and open wood fire filled with
vine-clippings. She had learned to gauge the seasons (no hothouse tomatoes or melons in December at Cluzac) at the elbow of the château cook, her long-suffering face chiselled from granite. Pot-au-feu with marrow bones flavoured with juniper and fistsful of herbs meant that it was winter. Soup made from tender nettle tops and sorrel simmered in beef stock heralded the spring. Fish terrines and tartes of figs from the gardens marked the arrival of summer, while in the autumn, in the expectant lull before the vendange, Sidonie bottled scented pears in syrup, put up plums the colour of green chartreuse, preserved tomatoes, and made apple and rose-petal jelly, and confiture de citrons for winter use.

Clare watched attentively as she snapped off the outer leaves of baby mauve artichokes, no bigger than a child’s hand, before simmering them in olive oil and wine. She stared with fascinated horror as she massaged partridges with butter, bound defenceless woodcocks with string or, wielding a heavy cleaver, skilfully jointed rabbits, disdainfully discarding flaps of skin and tips of forelegs, and cutting the back into three or four pieces. Mesmerised by the sound of the balloon whisk, rhythmically striking the sides of the copper bowl held beneath Sidonie’s arm, by the pounding of veal and the pummelling of garlic cloves for aïoli or garlic soup (to assuage colds and reduce high blood pressure), she learned how to chop vegetables in the palm of her hand, to put a thick crust of bread in her mouth before peeling onions, and to clean a frying-pan with salt and a ball of crumpled paper.

It was Sidonie who had brought her up. There had been several nannies, most of them English (as was the custom among the château owners) – including a Miss McKay and a Miss Forbes – but they left, many of them in tears, a phenomenon that at the time Clare did not
understand but which she was vaguely aware had something to do with her father. While the Baron was riding to hounds, shooting duck and teal, playing Real Tennis (which made good use of both his stamina and guile), or indulging his passion for vintage cars, and her mother was busy in the stables with her beloved horses, Clare was left to her own devices. She wandered like the dogs round the vineyards, played beneath the canopies of ancient cedars in the park or in the huge lofts of the château, or, like a dark shadow, attached herself to the heels of Sidonie.

Sometimes she went into the dank and shadowy
semi-underground
chais with their beaten earth floors. Almost overpowered by the dizzying fumes that emanated from the rows of oak barrels, their rotund bellies stained crimson with the lees of the wine, she sought out Jean Boyer, the Baron’s cellarmaster and Sidonie’s husband, and made him tell her stories. As a boy, Jean had helped the resistance fighters during the German occupation. He would show Clare the stumps of his three missing fingers, blown off by the detonator he had laid on the track to stop a Nazi troop train. Although he dared her to touch his maimed hand, she could never bring herself to do so.

Jean and Sidonie, for some reason she had never been able to fathom, had no family of their own. This, she gathered, with the perspicacity of childhood, had something to do with her father, the Baron, whom they both feared and loved. Childless herself, Sidonie occupied herself silently with Clare, allowing her to stalk her like a miniature shade, and holding her wordlessly against the upholstery of her bosom whenever there were tears.

Brought up by peasants, Clare adored peasant food. For tonight’s dinner in the flat she shared with Nicola in
Notting Hill, she was making a vegetable soup (almost a meal in itself). Unlike Sidonie, who with her strong right arm would have passed it lovingly through her battered mouli-légumes, the paint worn from its handle by her capable fingers, Clare would sling the cooked vegetables into the food-processor until they resembled baby-food (Sidonie would have had a fit), which would be mopped up with ‘French’ bread, to half a dozen baguettes of which she helped herself from the bakery shelves.

‘Can I come?’

The young man who addressed her and whose basket contained a healthy packet of Quorn, a few carrots and some spring onions, wore beaten-up jeans and a
done-to-death
sweat-shirt. He was not bad-looking. Men were always coming on strong to her in supermarkets. The long aisles proclaiming Soup and Soap, Preserves and Pet Food, had taken the place of singles bars. Status was indicated at the checkout, with Mr Men Orange Drinks and squashy packs of disposable nappies being the kiss of death.

‘Sorry,’ Clare said amicably, moving on to the cheese counter.

‘No sweat.’

She knew that she was attractive to men. Sexual vibes, over which she had no control, radiated effortlessly from her being and made them, irrespective of age, want to possess her. It was not that her body was anything to write home about. She was underweight, her
collarbones
protruding beneath her long neck like
salt-cellars
, her arms skinny and her breasts unenviably small. The de Cluzac nose dominated her oval face, on which the heavy eyebrows remained unplucked. Her wide and open smile revealed healthy teeth which
complemented the animation of her eyes. It was the sum of the parts, rather than the parts themselves, that laid her open to the advances to which she had become accustomed.

Paradoxically, her father’s cavalier treatment of her as a child had equipped her to deal with men. Put down and criticised by him for as long as she could remember, a less robust personality might have been pulverised into a pale ghost of submission from which the last vestiges of self-esteem had been crushed. The Fitzpatrick gene, inherited through her mother from a line of long-lived Irish pugilists, had merely ensured that the Baron’s treatment of her, her failure, as a mere girl, to receive recognition from him, had equipped her to stand up for herself.

That this assertiveness was sometimes mistaken by the opposite sex for aggression, she attributed to the male tendency to regard as contentious any degree of outspokenness which distinguished women from
doormats
. It was an argument that never failed to silence Jamie.

She had been going out with Jamie Spence-Jones, a Senior Registrar in orthopaedic surgery at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, for over a year. A dedicated rugby player and erstwhile captain of cricket at Cambridge, Jamie, with his powerful shoulders and muscular legs, was as tall and well built as the Baron; but, by virtue of his good nature and equable temperament, he was the antithesis of her father.

They did not actually live together. Jamie had a fifteenth-century cottage near Waterperry which he was modernising in his spare time, and during the week Clare lived in Notting Hill.

From Monday to Friday she and Nicola, an art historian by training, ran a contemporary art gallery,
the Nicola Wade Gallery, in a basement in Neal Street. Nicola was the artistic brains, sniffing out unknown painters with the unerring nose of a Luberon pig for truffles, and Clare the hustler, leaning on the bank for loans, bringing in the punters, taking charge of the marketing and arranging the private views. On Saturdays, by way of extra income, they had a stall in Portobello market, from which they sold second-hand books and ‘antiques’ painstakingly tracked down by them both.

Surprisingly, in the current economic climate – the art market was in the doldrums – the gallery was going from strength to strength, and they were hoping to move to a larger and more up-market basement in Albemarle Street. Clare had her eye on Millington’s, where rumour had it that after thirty-five years selling fine ceramics in London, Michael Millington had had enough of the
rat-race
and was retiring to St Ives to set up a low-key gallery featuring work by local craftsmen. The only problem was that the bank manager had almost died laughing when she had outlined their plan, and there had seemed no way that they could raise the necessary cash.