My First Wine Epiphany

My early wine experience was minuscule and fragmentary. When I was young my dad used to haunt Oddbins, Peter Dominic and Augustus Barnett and, after furrowed browsing and diligent cross-examination of staff, he would come back armed with liquid bounty.  To this day I haven’t a clue what he bought: Rioja sticks in the memory and the graceful military bearing of the claret bottles comes to mind. At dinner as a special treat I was given a mouthful at the end of the bottle (as often as not a chug of sediment). I do recall the warming wood-burnished Spanish wines, all sweet and tawny and comforting as a bonfire of autumn leaves, and the dusty tannins of Bordeaux…

I had this vague idea that wine was “a good thing” and associated with maturity, and that one needed to be inducted into its wise mysteries much as a mason would have to undergo an arcane initiation process.  At university my college was renowned for the length and breadth of its port and madeira collection which was housed in cellars that were located beneath the main quad ("To which University,’ said a lady, some time since, to the late sagacious Dr. Warren, ‘shall I send my son?’ ‘Madam,’ replied he, ‘they drink, I believe, near the same quantity of Port in each of them.’’) Each new student was invited by the dean, junior dean and master of the college to a succession of lavish repasts and plied with all manner of vinous delights. Not that any of us cared, quantity was preferable to quality and our objective was to attain a state of stark insensibility as rapidly as possible.

My first wine decision arose when I was a member of the Dr Johnson literary society named after the eponymous 18th century man of letters. The committee of said society invited one Melvyn Bragg to speak and prior to his singing retrospectively for his supper we took him out to a cheapo Italian restaurant on the Cornmarket. In a display of largesse I grabbed the wine list (a laminated card of 6 whites and 6 reds) and uttered with monumental authority the immortal words Frascati, por favor. The waiter gorgonised me from head to toe and scornfully poured this collegiate ignoramus a taster of coruscating acidity and stood well back while my nose dropped off.  Excellent, I gasped, tears of pain running down my face.

My next memory was taking my mum out for her birthday to a Michelin starred restaurant in Charlotte Street. The sommelier, for it was he, proffered a leathered bound tome in an appropriately sepulchral manner, appropriate because the restaurant felt as if it has been decked out like the inside of a funeral casket. I was briefly reminded of my favourite literary vignette of wine one-upmanship. “The butler returned with a huge album bound in crocodile leather. “ ‘You are looking at the binding, I notice’, said the host. It is the skin of a crocodile I shot myself in the Nile’ ”. (Jazz and Jasper by William Gerhardie - 1927). I opened the volume and flicked through the vellum. It was written in Linear B or at least couched in a language with which I was entirely unfamiliar and next to the hieroglyphic digest was a list of telephone numbers. I knew the score (or the four score and ten).  You close your eyes, point to a wine three or four from the top (not house, not second wine down – too obvious), because you’ve seemingly cunningly spotted an elusive bargain nestling in the under £40s. The sommelier looked at where my finger was pointing and murmured: Excellent choice, monsieur. I could have kissed him; it was a heroic, ego-inflating white lie, it was politeness sculpted out of heady Michelin miasma of our surroundings. And do you know… the wine tasted jolly good, un vrai vin de complicité, as if I had made the bloody thing myself or had hit the jackpot by placing all my money on one spin of the roulette wheel.

Surviving such ordeals may have given a temporary boost to my armour-propre, but I had still not really tasted wine, only dealt with the nuances of social embarrassment.

This is the moment which I call epiphany. First we recognise that the object is one integral thing, then we recognise that it is an organised composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany.

Stephen Hero – James Joyce

My mother and I took all our holidays on the (Outer) Hebridean island of Harris where we had a holiday cottage. We shopped for groceries in the local village where you could buy bread, UHT milk, mutton and as many potatoes as you could shake a hoe at. Alcohol was another matter for Harris was a wine free zone (it was a wee free zone), and to buy anything resembling fermented grape juice we had to make a 100 mile round trip to Stornoway in Lewis to shop at the co-op and purchase litre bottles of Hirondelle. The only wheel in town, this swallow made our summer and we guzzled it by bucketload as though it was the tastiest vin de terroir. Harris was also hitherto a gastronomic vacuum, until one day Alison and Andrew Johnson, a young couple from England, bought a ruined Georgian manse on the west side of the island, converted it into a hotel and thus begat Scarista House. News travels particularly fast on a small island and, as avid readers of the Good Book (the Good Food Guide) and since we subsisted for almost two months on a diet of mutton stew, mutton curry and hangtown fry washed down with the beakers of the swallow or Tennent’s lager, my mum and I couldn’t wait to beat a slavering path to its door.

The day we visited Scarista was a night in late August. I can’t remember a single thing about the meal other than my mum being immersed in the wine list and mumbling something about Saint-Estèphes - or was it Saint-Juliens?  These were words I had heard before and I knew they betokened the kind of serious wines that my father used to bring home (ie wines that had a cork and not a screwcap). Having conferred with the owner of the hotel (grown up conversation) she reached a decision and whichever holiest of holies it was, was duly presented. Again, fuzzily naive, I didn’t pay too much attention – to use the words of a former president “I didn’t inhale”. Mindful of the journey back to our side of the island we only assayed a couple of glasses (but we were allowed to cork the bottle and take it back with us) but I gathered from my mum’s cooing (or was it purring) that the wine was à point which alerted me to the fact that I should be trying to appreciate it. To me, however, wine was objective ritual rather than personal romance – I couldn’t make the leap of understanding.

We drove back to our side of the island and emerged from the car under a vivid night sky hotching with stars; the effect was of galaxies carelessly smeared against a grey-black canvas and the more you looked the bigger the universe appeared - almost as if was bulging at the seams.

My mum handed me the wine bottle and I took a pull. The ruby wine cascaded into my mouth and I rolled it around sensing its caress. I didn’t have the language; this is perhaps what makes the experience special, because I was trying to make inchoate sense out of kaleidoscopic shapes and textures. I recall leather, olives, herbs, graphite - and pure warmth, God in velvet trousers. There was a beautiful seasoned woodiness, as if fine-grained wood had assumed liquid form. The deliciousness was exhilarating; I felt different senses being connected for the first time; I was conscious of primary and secondary aromas, of texture and subtlety.

Epiphanies form a perpetual bridge between the past and present. I just have to think of the wine and the sensations come rushing back. It is not that the wine was necessarily stellar (even if the sky was!), it is that experience can be utterly transformed by context and also state of mind. I was young enough to be innocent and therefore entirely receptive, yet old enough to absorb what was going on and take pleasure in the experience. Starstruck, I necked from the bottle, felt the wine on my pulses and apprehended my surroundings. I was at the gate where the path snaked down to our house; the stegosaurus humpback of northern Harris loomed in front of me, the familiar mountains lowering and silent seemed like a giant audience. The bay sparkled under the moon, the sea was as unruffled silk, the air was soft and sweet, perfumed with heather, bracken and salt. I looked up at the firmament of stars, firstly it seemed to be composed of countless pinpoints of light and then constellations took shape and then, as I looked more intently, I seemed to be sucked into an infinity of possibilities. Another swig brought me back to earth… I felt rooted.  It seemed the sky was vibrating, some of the points of light were moving, the wine was coursing into my blood, filling my mind…

Oh bliss! Bliss and heaven! Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh. It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now. As I slooshied, I knew such lovely pictures!

Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess

This was the perfect luminous moment, a kind of peace dropping still, when I felt centred in a beautiful location beneath a jewelled sky and the heavens alive with movement. Past, present and future came together in an instant. I walked along the rough path towards our cottage taking further bee-sips. So this was wine, a liquid that could encode the beauty of nature itself in one’s living memory. And the quality of the wine was its capacity to provoke an intimate personal response. An epiphany occurs when a heightened personal response to an event can be translated into an aesthetic apprehension of said event through art, or poetry or music. The name of the wine is a conduit or a key that unlocks the past and serves to recreate the very flavour of that formative experience.

And the wine? Chateau Talbot 1978.