PK is away...

Untold Wealth: Romanée-Conti

So last week PK was giving a shout-out to Auberon Waugh who, in turn, was giving a dismissive  shrug to Romanée-Conti, a wine too expensive to drink - and what do you know, but our pals with the superstylish house in southern France are coming over for some nosh and the husband sends me a cheeky email announcing that he's got a Jeroboam of Romanée-Conti 2001 Grand Cru and should he bring it over? Kismet, I think to myself. He also appends a flyer from one of his posh wine merchants to explain just what a startling beverage this is, plus pictures, just in case I was in the dark.

Well, even I have heard of Romanée-Conti, so naturally I tell him to bring it without a shadow of a doubt and actually spend five minutes wondering if my crap Paris goblet wine glasses are really going to do justice to the wine or whether I should nip out and get some proper ones. I then re-read the email, this time adding on all the noughts to the Romanée-Conti asking price which I overlooked the first time round. The bottle in question seems to come in at £130,000 in bond, so I at last work out that this is just a tease rather than a serious offer; although, that said, the pals are quixotic/generous/bonkers enough to do something like bring round a bottle of Romanée-Conti, just for fun, and if anyone was going to gift me a six-figure bottle of wine, it would be them rather than, say, PK.

Only now I am bugged by the idea of a single bottle of wine, even a really big one, costing as much as a Bentley. Hugh Johnson, in my ancient edition of the World Atlas of Wine, notes of the Romanée-Conti family of wines, 'For the finesse, the velvety warmth combined with a suggestion of spice and the almost oriental opulence of their wines the market will seemingly stand any price', which sounds about right. But even allowing for the magnificence of a bottle of Romanée-Conti in any size, what's the point of pricing it so that the price becomes an end in itself? Yes, lots of things are bought for their investment potential, not excluding property, paintings, Warner Bros., Hermann Goering's memorabilia, champion livestock; but in the main you can do something with these things while they appreciate. But a bottle of wine? 'An investment bond,' as Waugh put it? If you'e not drinking it or at least planning to drink it, where's the fun? Do you just stare at the label and that's enough?

Or is the point to be so inhumanly rich that the fun lies in the obscenity of knocking back something which would keep scores of families out of poverty then non-figuratively pissing it away a couple of hours later? Or, rather, to identify it as an obscenity but at the same time detach oneself affectlessly from the demands of the real world and float above it? I could sort of just about imagine the kind of moral putrefaction which might interpret that as an okay way to spend your time; and, if nothing else, it would sit nicely with a comparably value-garbling Jeff Koons, the wine and the artwork, there in your Knightsbridge condominium. I could see that. But would the drink taste better, the same, or worse than any other drink you might consume that day? Or are you so rich that there is no better or worse, only a kind of null perfection? This is doing my crust in.

Actually, all my brush with Romanée-Conti points to is the fact that I still don't understand the relationship between price and market value, believing, at heart, that the price of things reflects the value of things.This is at least one reason why I am not rich. On the other hand, our pals, who are a lot richer than me, turned up, not with a Romanée-Conti but with a bottle of cold pink Crémant de Bourgogne. And it was delicious.

CJ

In times of Waugh

Why on earth would someone republish an old book about wine? What use are pages describing wines which have either expired or become impossibly expensive; regions whose products have changed beyond all recognition; or prices which now look more like those in a sweetshop than a wine merchant?

The thought was raised by the news that, rather like bringing an elderly vintage up from the cellar, Auberon Waugh’s 1986 book, Waugh on Wine, is being republished.

Stifle the realisation that a treasured charity shop find of the original paperback has suddenly plummeted in value; copies have been on sale for upwards of three figures. For some years Waugh on Wine has been in the Sediment library, alongside Kingsley Amis and those few other wine books which, hopefully like our own, are predominantly entertainment rather than reference.

Bron, as some were privileged to call him, died in 2001, and is remembered by our generation as a journalist who was sometimes outrageously entertaining. Or, sometimes, simply outrageous. If someone could cause such offence in writing about wine that they were hauled before the old Press Council, clearly Sediment had something to learn.

Like Sediment, Waugh was open about his relative ignorance on the subject of wine, relying instead (again like Sediment) largely upon the experience of consumption. “I assumed that as a life-long wine drinker I knew all that anyone really needed to know about the subject,” he writes in his Introduction. “Those who knew more, and could talk about such things as grape varieties, were prigs and pedants.”

Still, he succeeded in writing about wine, in that brusque, brook-no-arguments tone of the English upper class. “I think I drank a good Chinon about twelve years ago…but my last five attempts have been failures, so now I have given up. People say it reminds them of violets and wild strawberries, but I feel they must be mad.”

He wrote for Tatler and later the Spectator, propelled largely by his pursuit of good Burgundy and his complaints about the price thereof. He constantly found reasons to grumble and moan, a condition which some us share but believe might be alleviated in themselves if they, like Waugh, had no less than five cellars full of fine wine.

He believed that “wine-writing ahould be camped up”, and his own employs the most extraordinary descriptive adjectives: “mushrooms, black treacle, burned pencils, condensed milk, sewage, the smell of French railway stations or ladies’ underwear – anything to get away from the accepted list of fruits and flowers.”

But his writing is marked by a kind of national stereotyping we find uncomfortable today. “This is the sort of heavy oak-vanilla taste which the Spaniards think high-class,” he writes of one white wine, “but I prefer my Horlicks without dust and cobwebs.” We smile at the second half of the sentence while still wincing at the first.

Or how about venturing that some of the flavours we detect in a Burgundy are “…probably because of filthy French habits – not washing their hands before wine-making, working with a dirty, yellow cigarette hanging out of their mouths, breathing garlic over the wine-press, etc.”

And that’s as opposed to the Americans. “Even the best California wine has only one taste," he writes, "Delicious but homogenised, clean but somehow unexciting. One really can’t be more poetic about them than that. I am afraid it may be the result of too much hygiene.”

He was, of course, a deliberate provocateur. And he came from a different time and society; Waugh initially inherited his cellars from his father, the author Evelyn, a man whose social standing, Bron writes, was marked by (and mocked for) his pronunciation of ‘claret’ as ‘clart’. The Press Council let Bron off the hook for describing a wine with a particularly vile analogy, but it’s interesting to consider how his writing escaped greater censure, back in those pre-Twitter days.

Perhaps those observations which do stand the test of time justify rereading Waugh thirty years on. “Champagne is essential before any meal which is intended to impress,” he writes. Indeed.

“White wine is just as alcoholic as red and probably makes one rather drunker, as one tends to drink more of it.”

And “Investors are having as bad an effect on Burgundy as phylloxera ever did, and until one can convince the world that Romanée Conti is a wine rather than an investment bond, the future is very bleak.”

Plus ça change…

PK

The Floating World

So the boat has returned to its home port and the wife and I have left it there, taking with us the remnants of our cruise to the West Country. This includes four weeks' worth of appalling laundry, some serious windburn and the remains of a bol sauce that I confected ten days ago in Portland Harbour. Just about everything else has been consumed (or thrown overboard), including two and a half litres of whisky, some gin & tonics, beer, cider, champagne and something between half a case and a case of mixed red and rosé, most of which was drunk by me. So now I'm wondering, were we completely sober at any point?

Most of this deluge of booze was drunk in the evenings, at a time when we were either hysterical with relief at having got somewhere without crashing; or were in a savage depression on account of not having got somewhere due to gales, downpours, fog, lethargy. The boat intensifies moods in a way you don't experience anywhere else. So, with the full sanction of what we like to think of as one of the Royal Navy's oldest traditions, we got stuck into the drink, either as mood-enhancer or mood-suppressor. Indeed, after getting into an impromptu race with a yacht owned by the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth - crewed by four junior officers and an older bloke with an accent straight out of In Which We Serve - I thought we'd really earned our beverages, even though we came in second.

Fair enough. We were technically on holiday and had to get through it. And we had some good times, especially once we'd found a couple of packets of crinkle-cut crisps in a corner locker. What worries me now, though, is that I might be translating this behaviour into acceptable practice back on land. Four weeks is quite long enough to internalise a routine of a couple of stiff whiskies followed by some cheap red wine once it's gone six and I don't know if my liver can handle it in an ongoing fashion. Okay day? A few small gratifications, some kind of micro-acheivement like mowing the lawn or just getting out of bed without putting my back out? Treat it like a successful forty-five-mile crossing of Lyme Bay, open the Famous Grouse. Crap day? Nothing achieved, constant residual despair at lack of funds, political situation, inability to remember the lyrics to Mr Tambourine Man? Same as for Okay day, but remember to frown into whisky tumbler, shun crisps. A pattern establishes itself, with only the gradual empurpling of my nose and a delta of tiny ruptured blood vessels spreading across my face to mark my decline. It doesn't seem like a good idea, not as long as I want to hang on to the remains of what I like to call my dignity. But it looms, unless I can change the trend.

The alternative, of course, is to stay on the boat for ever, drinking like only those afloat can and not bothering about the consequences. After all, once you get past the high-priced yacht marinas and their fancypants residents, the world of water lends itself quite readily to a fully alternative lifestyle. We knew one bloke who lives in a giant windowless barge up a backwater, only the occasional movement of his tarpaulins and the barking of his dogs to give him away. He's an expert in military electronics as it happens. And on the lovely river Dart this year we saw another bloke sailing a home-made boat, painted pea-green and shaped like Marat's bath, just room enough for him to sit in. He was using a single sail apparently cut from a bedsheet to move him along, with a paddle-cum-tiller, like Venetian gondoliers use, to get him out of difficulties. Upriver it's another world, and I don't think anyone there is going to lose sleep over how many litres of whisky it takes to amuse two people in the privacy of their own hull.

This would, in turn, require me to grow a beard and occasionally wear mittens, in order to go properly off-grid. Hideous? Yes, but the beard would at least cover up my drinker's face including, if it got big enough, part of my nose. I need to think this one through.

CJ