Important Wine Musings

By A. T. Mann

I lived in England for almost twenty years throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and during that time observed and participated in many rituals involving the drinking of fantastic wines of various types. Although the English are not usually thought of as being “into” fine wine, they most definitely are, especially in recent decades, and particularly amongst the upper classes.

An early experience with the wine-drinking habits of these toffs is a tale to which there undoubtedly is a moral, although I cannot be sure exactly what that moral is. Anyway, one of my slightly corrupt publishers in those days was highly born, and as was the custom for such sons of the aristocracy, he was given a christening present by well-meaning relatives and family friends of a “pipe of port.” You may be familiar with fine port wine, which is properly an after-dinner wine rather than a desert wine; but it is an integral part of English drinking habits. During the winter holidays and at Christmas particularly, it is very delicious indeed. Apart from the very great pleasure of drinking port, it is also customary a month or so before the Christmas holidays to buy a whole cylinder of Stilton cheese (a bit like a mild blue cheese), to carve a shallow conical depression out of the top, and fill it up with port. It is then topped up periodically throughout the season until it is, in proper English, soused. This aphrodisiacal mixture is then spooned onto biscuits and accompanied by port wine served from beautiful crystal decanters.

The commerce in wines from Portugal started at a time when the English were fighting both France and Spain, as they constantly were, and needed a new source of wine from the continent (as we know, English wine was and is too horrible even to mention). The Portuguese produced this originally rough wine and in due course learned to fortify it with very potent brandy at a later stage of its fermentation so that it wouldn’t deteriorate on its sea journey to England. To this day the Portuguese government controls the potency of the brandy they supply exclusively to be used in port to keep the playing field level, as the English would say, among the various manufacturers. Well, the English rapidly developed a taste for port (of course, collected from Porto), and built large aging cellars along the Thames in London, which remain to this day.

Port wine was aged in barrels called “pipes” (a vertical container that holds about 700 bottles of wine). It subsequently became traditional for certain English families to "lay down a pipe of port" when a son was born. This meant that said amount would be held somewhere along the Thames; and when the young lad reached the age of consent, he would celebrate by opening and drinking the first bottle of 21 year old port wine. Of course it also meant that for the remainder of his life, he would be able to celebrate birthdays and other festivals with a wine that was of exactly the same vintage as he.

Toward the end of the seventies my publisher friend (and later legal protagonist) inherited quite a grand house along a picturesque river (maybe the Avon) in the Cotswolds, west of London. He had the great good fortune to also inherit a vast wine cellar beneath the house, about which he bragged in an unseemly and constant way. Despite his bad habits and tendencies to flaunt his position, I must admit that visiting him was a great and unexpected pleasure because we would rove his cellars and bring up vintage Champagnes from the 40s, Margaux from the 50s, and of course bottles of his own vintage port, just for fun, and spend splendid evenings drinking them. But I always got the impression that he was somehow abusing his amazing heritage. He had also apparently accumulated quite a large amount of bad karma in this and previous lifetimes, because one week, while he was in London doing business, the cellars of his house were flooded by the river. When he returned, he discovered to his great dismay that the labels had washed off of all the bottles stored there. Apart from vague memories of which racks certain wines were kept in, he now possessed literally thousands of bottles of unmarked and undoubtedly priceless wines. Among the few wines he could readily identify was his pipe of port, kept in its customary place. Some small consolation, indeed!

While I wouldn’t like to draw any conclusions about this tale of publishers, authors and wines, one thing I would say is that it took something off of and yet added to the enjoyment, never being quite sure of the name or age of the magnificent wine one was drinking . . .