CONSUMING INTEREST
'Vintage volumes
LESLIE ADRIAN
In 1912 the Wine Trade Club's dranb:, society put on a charity show at the Rol Court in Sloane Square. One of the pl:":1 was a little farce called My French hien- Its plot revolved around the efforts of Frenchman to get an English widow tiddl by giving her more champagne than s ever had before. Since the direction lack professionalism, the actors were prokid not with a dummy bottle filled se lemonade, but with an intact magnum e genuine fizz. When the moment came tackle the cork, it proved a perfect brute its top broke off and the rest remain tightly wedged in the neck. There was ,vorkscrew; so all the sommelier could d was pretend to pour out the wine, while guests pretended to drink from empl glasses and the widow pretended to get I up without a drop of fuel. 'As the hoe was packed with wine trade people uh knew all about broken corks, they laugh and laughed, and cheered, but I didif recalls the dramatist, Andre L. Simon. the the youthful representative of Pomme over here, 'and I never attempted to sui another play'.
Fortunately for us, M Simon's nee tional talents continued to find an owl in almost non-stop descriptive prose. At t age of ninety-two he has written over hundred works, the majority on wine abo which he probably knows more than an. one. A decade ago, in the 'Span, champagne' case, he was led by counsel acknowledge his status as an authori wittily replying, 'Sir, I am full of subject'. Since then we have had from h a superb history of champagne, a vole on the great wines of Germany twilit with S. F. Hallgarten) and another on t wines, vineyards and vignerons of Austral Now we are given his last work—or so says at the moment—entitled, because ftight has failed, In the Twilight (Mich- . Joseph 35s). It is a small gem of a bo sparkling with reminiscence and anecdota reflecting a characteristic, unfaded joie vivre. Supplementing his autobiograPh) Request, it provides in particular a iNet of fascinating detail about the Wine Food Society, which he founded in 191 `to bring together and to serve all ■■ take an intelligent interest in the probl and pleasures of the table' and which a time he ran virtually single-handed. M Simon says he no longer has an th to do with the Society's affairs, but he still its President and it is still going sat Its latest publication, a guide to The III of Bordeaux by Edmund Pennine-Row (Michael Joseph 55s), lacks much of literary quality and elegance with 01' for example, the late Maurice Heal). M Alexis Lichine have graced the sub But it is the most comprehensive. UP'. date and scholarly book on claret available to the amateur or the connoss in this country, and as such is likel) become a standard work of reference. most rewarding chapter, I found, was that devoted to a personal assessment, lacking nothing in taste or discrimination, of clarets of various vintages from the pre- phylloxera days—the author, who is chairman of the IEC Wine Society, has had the privilege of drinking a Lafite I803—to the present decade.
He has brought up from the cellar a vintage tale about a rich mayor of Bordeaux, some hundred years ago, who offered the British consul twelve thousand francs (the equivalent of at least £2,500 in today's money) for his last twelve bottles of Mouton 1828. The consul declined to sell more than six. 'My dear fellow', protested the mayor, 'if I buy wine at a thousand francs a bottle, it is on condition that I am the only man who can give it to his friends to drink.' Whereupon the'consul, presumably with an haussetnent d'epattles, turned to his butler and said, 'Bernard, decant us two more bottles of the 1828 Mouton'.
Mr Penning-Rowsell likes this story so much that he reproduces it for a second time in his valuable contribution, on 'What to buy and what to drink in 1970', to the latest issue of The Coin pleat Imbibe," (Hutchinson 45s). Having noted the recent phenomenal increases in the price of first growths of the Gironde, he adds archly, 'Shall we live to make a similar gesture with the 1945 Mouton—of which a case was auctioned in Chicago in May 1969 for £234? Happily, even non-Americans can still enjoy the full range of fine wines at one remove—that is to say on the printed page, rather as our mothers enjoyed Rudolph Valentino on the silver screen. After all, The Compleat Imbiber, Mr Cyril Ray's annual star-studded drink-and-tuck- in, costs less than one glass of that 1945 Mouton-Chicago.
Previous page
