The Life and Wines of Hugh Johnson

By Hugh Johnson

World’s best-loved wine author, weaves the story of his own epic wine journey with an embracing view of everything he has discovered along the way. Almost without realising it, the reader is drawn into a fascinating world; with each page turned, knowledge is gained and wine wisdom absorbed. Hugh takes us from the teetering ledges of the Mosel and majestic châteaux of the Médoc to the sylvan slopes of Windsor Great Park with a spring in his step and a tasting glass at the ready.
No one writes so infectiously on every aspect of wine, whether human or cultural, technical or historical. This book is peppered with anecdotes and personal recollections, infused with the sheer delight Hugh finds in his subject. It is a book with a story to tell and a mastery of wine to impart.
• First published in 2005 as Wine, A Life Uncorked, this new edition has been updated by Hugh to take in two decades of change in the wine world
• The First Duty of wine: getting to know the luxury red wine icons Bordeaux and Burgundy (which has the lion’s share in Hugh’s cellar)
• Technical Stuff: Hugh learns about winemaking the hard way: by growing and making it his own French Sauvignon Gris
• The Wilder Shores of Wine: tracking wine’s origins in Georgia, the cradle of viticulture
• The Bordeaux Persuasion: from the Médoc to Martha’s Vineyard – Hugh seeks out the world’s great Cabernet Sauvignon-based reds
• NEW Foreword by Eric Asimov, wine critic for the New York Times on what Hugh means to him as an inspirational wine writer
• NEW Digestif! In this new chapter, Hugh reveals the wines that give him the most pleasure – the bottles he keeps in his cellar today
• NEW On ‘Bubbly’: Hugh finds sparkling wine perfection among the grandes marques of Champagne and the fashionable new fizz of our own English vineyards

• Language: English
• Publisher: Académie du Vin Library
• Release date: Jul 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781913141318

Book preview

Preface

Hugh Johnson

There is much to be said, from an author’s point of view and certainly from a publisher’s, for a subject that has obsolescence built into it. One that renews itself regularly once a year, as the world of wine does with each new vintage, is an especially desirable prize. When I started on my first wine book, now 60 years ago, I was making no such calculation; I just saw a gap in the market for a simple text relating the glorious variety of the world’s wines and the different pleasures they have to offer. It was far from my mind that an atlas, an encyclopaedia and a history would follow from it, and even further that a little crib for the forgetful wine lover would become an annual as my Pocket Wine Book. But I made my bed as an encyclopaedist, and lying in it has been absorbing, entertaining, rewarding – everything I could have hoped.

It has also left me with notes and memories that mean much more to me than just keeping up (or trying to keep up) the record.

Proust had his madeleine, and I have my claret. And burgundy and champagne and Moselle and Chianti and Coonawarra. Every bottle, every glass of wine connects with bottles and glasses that went before, leads back in memory, forwards in anticipation and sideways in reverie. The wines that really speak to me are those that reverberate on more than just my tongue. Some wines simply have more to say than others. Hearing what they say, following up and linking their stories, is a pursuit with no end in sight – which means, to me, that it is high time to make a start.

Wine is first and foremost a social game; only secondarily an interest like music or collecting. It is about human relations, hospitality, bonding, ritual … all the manoeuvres of social life – and all under the influence, however mild and benign, of alcohol. No wonder its literature grows and grows. So here is a memoir written with a corkscrew; a book of tastes and opinions, a few assertions, a few conclusions. Reader, I picture you as having your own tastes and opinions, as having as much information to hand as you can handle (and with the Internet beside you, far more), and as being eager to understand. We are in the same boat, you and I. I will tell you what I have understood so far. Some of it could be familiar to you; my tastes have not changed radically with age and experience. I have even repeated a few passages you might have read in articles or other books where they suit my purpose. And while I have updated the top and tail of this book for the 2022 edition, the chapters on bubbly, white, red and sweet wines are just as I wrote them in 2005, when this book was first published. They are a panorama made possible by telescoping 50 notebooks’ worth of travelling, tasting and scribbling, shaped and inspired by the wines lying in my cellar, and they capture the wine world as I experienced it. In this edition I have the luxury of being able to add a hindsight chapter, Digestif, in which I address the wines and wine issues that resonate with me today. For the illustrations I have ransacked the family albums – a hit-and-miss affair, it must be said.

Sixty years of sharing wines and opinions about them has left me in debt to countless people; sometimes for the wine, sometimes the opinions, and always the fellowship. To prevent these pages becoming a list of wines, occasions and companions I have mentioned only a few to illustrate my story. These I thank for their participation, conscious or not, but no less the hundreds, indeed thousands, of wine lovers, wine growers, wine merchants, wine writers and others who have, as the French would say, ‘formed’ me over the years. No part of my formation has been formal; there has been plenty of room for heterodox ideas and eccentricities to take root. But in matters of taste, conformity can easily go too far. Tante teste, tante idee, as the Romans say, or as Rabelais: Fay ce que vouldras. It’s your opinion that counts, not mine.

A Life Uncorked

Everyone has a Most Frequently Asked Question. I have two. The first is ‘How did you get into wine to begin with?’ often with a hint of ‘Is it too late for me to join in?’ The second is ‘What is your favourite wine?’ I’ll come back to the second: the answer is long and equivocal; you may still be wondering at the end of the book.

But the first question has a simple answer, even a road-to-Damascus moment of revelation. It was late at night in my student digs in the Palladian Gibbs Building in King’s College, Cambridge, on one of those rare evenings when I was deep in books and papers. My roommate was out at what I knew was a dinner with many wines. The door swung open and there he was in his dinner jacket, his face I fancy a trifle flushed. ‘Taste these,’ he said, presenting me with two glasses of red wine.

‘What are they?’ said I.

‘Just taste them. Now, what do you think?’

‘Very nice,’ I said, ‘but this one seems to have more flavour.’

‘Exactly. And they came from the same place, the same year – just different sides of the road.’ This was not all he said. Then began a speech about Burgundy, and Vosne-Romanée, and Grands Crus and Premiers Crus, which I thought was a bit over the top for nearly midnight. He eventually went to bed, and I back to my desk. But the seed had been sown, and next time he went out to dinner, I went with him. I paid my first visit to wine country.

It was curiosity that made me first pay attention to wine, and it is curiosity that still makes me impatient to see what lies under every cork. There are disappointments, of course, but you learn to pick likely candidates, at least. Each one adds to the fascination of a subject with an infinity of variables.

Yes, it would be simpler and tidier to live in a world where wine was a commodity like milk. But let me quote the first sentence of my first book, as valid now as when I wrote it: ‘Think, for a moment, of an almost paper-white glass of liquid, just shot with greeny gold, just tart on your tongue, full of wildflower scents and spring-water freshness. And think of a burnt-umber fluid, as smooth as syrup in the glass, as fat as butter to smell and sea-deep with strange flavours. Both are wine.’ And so are glasses of perfumed ruby; of astringent garnet; of carnelian smelling of strawberries; of deep-gold, nut-scented or sweet as honey; of purple giving off fumes of brambles and rum.

‘WINE IS AT the same time simpler than people say and more complex than they think.’ It was French wine philosopher Pierre Boisset who said it; making one of those remarks that catch you off-balance. Yes, it makes you think; that’s the point. But there is another point, and perhaps this is really what he means. Any fool can make a subject complex and any fool can say it is simple. But how much do you have to understand to grasp the essentials?

If I can risk another riddle I would say that most people try either too hard at wine or not hard enough. Wine tends to be an all-or-nothing passion. For some it becomes a matter of moment to remember the proportions of Sauvignon to Sémillon in a vineyard in Sauternes, or the career changes of a fashionable winemaker. They know the Bordeaux Classification by heart and every vintage declared by every port shipper. For others any suggestion of real appreciation – a short pause to look at a wine, inhale its scent or think it through, as it were, in your mouth, let alone try to describe it – is an incomprehensible affectation. ‘I don’t know anything about wine but I know what I like,’ is the motto of this category. For ‘wine’ you could substitute art, music, gardens ….

So what does the reasonable, perfectly balanced person need to know? That wine is not one thing, but many. To appreciate it you don’t have to swallow an encyclopaedia, but you do have to pay attention. A good memory helps, but a clear focus on what you are drinking is indispensable. If it turns a drink into a recreation, who can complain?

FEW PEOPLE HAVE ever had cellars like the ones we found under the country house we bought in 1970. By any standards they were capacious – and frankly mysterious. What were they built for? They date from late Tudor times, the end of the 16th century – long before anyone in England kept, or even owned, many bottles of wine. They must have been for something else, but what? There are four rooms down there, and one of them we know was excavated later than the others, in the 1760s, specifically as a wine cellar, and equipped with round-arched brick bins. We even have the inventory of what it contained in 1769: not a great deal, and mainly Portuguese. ‘1769, the contents of the cellar at Saling Hall belonging to Mr Raymond: Item, 20 bottles of port. Item, 17 bottles of Lisbon and one pint of Surfet water.’ Was Surfet water the Perrier of the time?

I am in reverie. I stand at the top of my cellar steps and the faintest scent greets me: more an atmosphere than a smell. Moist, organic, old. A congregation of bottles, some of which have lain side by side for decades, is too powerful a presence to send off no signals.

It is a library down there; a library of different takes on the same plot. The plot starts with vines insinuating their roots into the soils of a thousand different fields, feeding on what they encounter in the ground, rock or sand, wet or dry, lean and hungry or fat enough to grow marrows. It ends with the air in a glass rising through your nostrils and your mouth to leave an impression on your mind. The two are intimately, directly, inevitably linked – via a chain of events that can go this way or that in numberless and ceaseless variations. On some nanoscale of infinite variety, everything is recorded. Like the wings of a butterfly in the rainforest, a passing shower or a spore of fungus can tip a balance that eventually makes you decide to order another bottle – or not. Much more, of course, can all the decisions of the farmers, engineers, chemists, lawyers, bankers … the army of operatives who intervene along the way.

There are generous decisions and mean ones, intelligent ones and stupid ones, good ones and bad ones. Cumulatively they make not just a bottle or a vintage but an identity, and a reputation. The differences between wines are genetically inherited: the vines and the vineyard are the bloodline. They are also acquired: when the vine is pruned, as the grapes ripen, when they are picked, as they are fermented and matured and bottled and stored again. The wine has its memories: of the stony soil where the vine’s roots probed deep, of the stone wall that gave it shelter, of the frost in May that reduced half its shoots and the potential crop to brown rags, of the sun that crept up the rows in the morning and left the grapes glowing as it went down, of the sudden cold showers. When a depression made its way from the Atlantic in September, drenching the dark firs on the hills, families setting out for long days in the vineyard went back indoors and waited. For three days grey flurries of rain made puddles under the vines. They waited one warm day after the sky cleared, then took their baskets down and picked from dawn to dusk. The wine remembers it: the dry days of August in the sweet jam-like concentration of its flavour, and the downpour before harvest in a flicker of weakness as you swallow.

At one extreme a wine’s identity is as broad as red or white; at the other it varies between different barrels raised from the same harvest in the same cellar – and eventually, years later, between different bottles from the same barrel.

It is a cliché of the wine trade but nonetheless true that there are no great wines, only great bottles of wine. The eventual unit that is enjoyed or not, judged better or worse, is a bottle. If there is something wrong with it, whatever it’s called or whatever it cost, it is good for nothing. The risk is always there because wine is a living substance, and anything that is alive goes on changing until it dies.

Wine in Ferment

THE TABLOID WAY of putting it would be ‘Wine in ferment’. Rapid and radical change is not peculiar to the world of wine, but in the conservative world of bottles and barrels an adjustment feels like a swerve, and recent adjustments constitute a revolution. Wine today is speaking in new idioms – livelier, in many cases, and more persuasive than its old language (which was full of clichés, to be sure, and near-meaningless repetition).

There is no reason why new generations of drinkers should want to hear the same old story. The experience of coach building was invaluable for the first motorcars, but it has little bearing on the cars of the electronic age, and almost none on aeronautics. Could this be what will happen, and is already happening, to wine?

Yes, it is still an intoxicating drink. You can make it only by fermenting grapes. These are the constants. The best varieties of grapes were found long ago and matched to the best-run vineyards. Centuries of patient assiduity discovered what manoeuvres worked best in what cellars. And the most successful wines were given precise profiles, idealized, imitated.

But what defined these model wines were constraints, natural or adopted. Constraints of fertility and maturity, of ignorance, of disease, of weather; constraints of the market, of legal restrictions, of social norms, of shortage of cash.

What is progress but overcoming restraints? Why should a new world accept rules and disciplines and shortages not indigenous to itself? Warmer weather (or indeed global warming) will give you riper grapes; irrigation, more of them. The resulting flavours may not be the same – but neither will the people, the circumstances, the way of life or the food. Absurd, then, to hanker after a model made for a purpose that has passed. Admire it, yes, for its elegance, its durability, its ability still to attract attention when fitter, more functional alternatives come along. But did Chippendale say the last word on what makes a perfect chair?

I am a Chippendale man myself. I lived for 42 years, by choice, in a house built (probably of recycled materials) in Queen Elizabeth’s reign and remodelled, though not drastically, in that of William III. The outer walls are brick, its panelling oak, its floors oak or tiles. Its furniture aspired to be of the same age, or at least in the same spirit. Our dining chairs, around a walnut table, were in the reassuring broad-bottomed country Baroque style Chippendale would recognize, if not vouch for. Aesthetically, in fact, I inhabited a world fashioned by 17th-century English gentry and updated only piecemeal by the Georgians and Victorians, who seem to have been happy enough with the same snug, perhaps a trifle florid, domesticity.

What is clear is the purpose of a fourth, smaller, room, excavated under the hall floor as, it seems, the only item of 18th-century modernization. This is definitely a wine cellar: brick floored, with six brick bins on one side and four on another, insulated from the outside by the big, older, cellars and, I should judge, unchanged since its contents were minutely listed as part of the inventory of the house.

I SHALL TELL you in due course about the contents of this cellar and the other, much humbler, one that holds my wine today. First, though, I must justify, if only for myself, the large part that wine has played a part in my life since it first caught my attention all those years ago. How come I still pull corks with alacrity, full of curiosity; still get a buzz from each first sip, rolling it round my tongue, sucking it to test its mettle? What sort of test am I putting it to? What do I expect or want it to be? Clearly something more than a mere thirst-quencher. Or a rather long way round to oblivion. Indeed I find myself straight away facing the principal drawback of this great companion. If you drink too much, or even if you drink what feels like enough, your legs become as tangled as your thoughts seem lucid. You may not fall over, but you must certainly not drive home.

Paradox: there is no wine without alcohol. None of its properties is available without the fermentation of the fruit that turns it into a drug. Smell, taste, texture, the kernel of satisfaction in each sip, the complexity of your body’s response – none of these belongs to grape juice. How much alcohol wine needs, why some are completely satisfying with very little and others seem lean and limp without a hefty dose, is a subject I will come back to later, but all efforts to remove the alcohol and keep the essential flavours fail. It becomes like a bird without wings.

Not a knockout drop, then, and more than a glass of water. What am I asking wine to be? There is some quality the most commonplace wine and the most rarefied both need to pass muster. Call it balance; call it harmony. What it feels like to me is energy, almost as though the wine were a living organism interacting with my tongue and palate. Good wine manages to communicate undeployed reserves of energy, at least to tasters who look beneath the surface to gauge what it will become as it matures. Great wine in its youth (and to the initiated) conveys the feeling of an unexploded bomb.

How does such energy communicate itself to your brain? It seems to consist of contrasting properties in opposition. Sweetness and sharpness for example, in a Riesling from the Moselle – a good wine to examine for clues since it is so transparent, there is no body or breadth of flavour and very little alcoholic warmth to obscure what seems a simple contrast between sweet and sour. When this opposition becomes balance, you’re in business. How far from simple it is, though, becomes clear when you compare several similar examples. Analytically they might be almost identical: sugar content so much in grams per litre, acidity ditto; but sense of energy, of something happening to your whole mouth: worlds apart. At one extreme you have something no more interesting than lemonade: perfectly swallowable but equally forgettable. At the other a convulsive, electrifying, high-tension display: charisma in a bottle.

There is a school of thought that says voltage is everything: quite simply the more intense the flavour the better. ‘No one can deny,’ says a Californian wine critic, ‘that intensity drives the score.’ (I’ll come to the question of scores later. The word means a numerical rating arrived at by comparative tasting.) Professional wine tasters can easily fall into this trap; intensity is the character that tends to emerge when you are faced with a line-up of 50 or so wines of the same kind. The palate is (or should be) a sensitive organ. Bathe it repeatedly in alcohol, acidity and tannin, and the quieter notes cease to register. Tannin, after all, is the substance that turns skin to leather, acidity forces your sensitivity to retreat in self-defence, and alcohol numbs not only the nerve endings but the nervous system itself.

Perhaps I should have started by asking what wine is for. There may not be such an obvious consensus. I rarely, for example, drink wine, or more than a couple of glasses, without food – and when I do it is almost always white. Wine for me is essentially what I drink while eating, which is not at all the case with my children’s generation. I can only respect their capacity for wine unmixed with solid matter. If they want wine which itself tastes more solid, if that’s the word, I can hardly be surprised.

It depends whether you see wine primarily as a drink or as a recreational substance. In a drink you look for something refreshing and satisfying without too loud a voice, not too intrusive on your food or your thoughts each time you take a sip. How often do you sip? Some people, I notice, revisit their wine glass at long intervals. They seem to forget about it between an initial taste and a first swallow, and the moment when the plates are cleared away. Others (and I am one) are constantly coming back to it, touching it, looking at its colours and following each mouthful of food with a contemplative sip. Rarely, if ever, a full-throttled swallow. You can call it taster’s tic, if you like, or the programmed response of someone who has been to too many wine tastings. When I catch myself swishing the water in my tooth mug and sniffing it before I rinse my mouth, I know I need therapy.

At table I am using the wine as sauce or lubricant for my food. A bite, a sip, the food and the wine together in my mouth; it blends their flavours almost as though the wine had gone into the pot. It works when both have the same intensity of flavour, or nearly. If the food is much more tasty, or spicy, or hot or acid, then the wine falls back into the role of a chaser; just a liquid to clear the passage for another mouthful. If the wine is more intense in flavour, fruitier or sweeter than the food, or with tannins that attack your palate, the artistry of the chef goes for nothing. All that is left is texture, and even that can be blotted out by a too-forceful wine.

What does surprise me is anyone’s indifference to food after a glass or two of wine. When tasting, concentrating on smells and flavours, trying to analyse them and record my ideas, I can stave off thoughts of food for hours on end – if sometimes with difficulty. But once I start to sip and swallow, my guard is down. The message comes back from my stomach, ‘Thanks. That put me right in the mood. Shall we have a look at the menu?’

WHEN YOUR MIND starts to turn towards an evening glass of wine, how does the prospect present itself to you? Is your first concern the odds of a heart attack, and the golden opportunity of lengthening them by a minuscule fraction if you choose red rather than white? Neither is mine.

What do I consider? My companions first of all. The food in prospect. Wines that I want, or need, to taste. My bank balance. Most powerfully, though least palpably, the crystallizing image of thirst, the anticipation of winey pleasure forming in my mind as evening approaches. It is, strange to say, quite specific.

I think sweetness, fruity uplift, gripping tannins, scouring acidity or inspiring bubbles. I think grape varieties, regions, countries, vineyards, growers, vintages. There is a list of wine flavours in my subconscious, just as there is an ingrained food menu. You are just the same: lamb, fruit, an egg, salmon, a jam sandwich are all there in your mental menu. For one reason or another (you may even believe it is your body chemistry issuing instructions), one takes priority and becomes what you want.

Of course there are practical factors. Where am I? I would have a different bottle in mind in a restaurant, a summerhouse, a mountain cabin or a city apartment. There are chalet wines and boardroom wines and wines for South Sea islands. And in wine country it would be perverse not to drink (or at least try) what is being made before your eyes.

And when is it for? Is this a snap decision for today or a considered one for a special occasion? Is it lunch or dinner or a picnic? Is it summer or winter? Are there crystal glasses or plastic beakers? What sort of occasion, in short, with what sort of expectations? Exceed them, it need be only by a whisker, and everyone will smile.

Question one, though, was with whom? I have dear friends, and close family, who are classed as swine in the wine department; I keep my pearls for other people. I have often poured these brutes a wine I particularly like, and would like them to like. I have tried a nudge, as in ‘What do you think of this wine?’ It doesn’t take long to see a glimmer of interest; a moment longer, perhaps, to see whether it is mere politeness. I am absurdly gratified if one of my swine sniffs the pearl and looks up with a question. A second glass is instantaneous – but then I have to suppress my urge to add footnotes. Voltaire never troubled himself, apparently, with such urges and counter-urges. When he lived in exile near Geneva, he is said to have given his stream of visitors Beaujolais while he drank Corton.

Here is a story about two Australian swagmen who used to meet for a chat under the shade of a well-placed tree. By Jacob’s Creek, I shouldn’t wonder. One day Barry turned up with a bottle. He took a long swig, wiped his lips on his sleeve, and passed the bottle to his mate Kevin, who did the same. ‘Whad’ya think of it?’ said Barry.

‘Jes right,’ said Kev.

‘Whad’ya mean, jes right?’

‘Well. If it’d bin any better you wouldn’a giv’n it to me, an’ if it’d bin any wuss, I couldn’a drunk it.’ The art of wine selection in a nutshell.

WITH THE RIGHT companion, a single wine can be a continuing conversation. It is an experience you share, or would like to share. I’m afraid some of us even speculate about the tastes of wines we have never seen – or even wines that have never yet been made. The conversation is the point.

Way back when there were far fewer bottles of wine in the Johnson household, and a smaller variety of labels to be assessed in the world at large, we used to keep a leftovers bottle in the fridge. Think of it. We actually poured the remaining quarter of a bottle into another with a third left in it, maybe added a third wine we had tasted and liked but not quite finished, gave the brew a gentle shake and kept it to drink later. I don’t remember ever actually blending red with white. You have to draw the line somewhere. But nor do I remember any negative side effects. We were ready, in other words, just to drink or offer friends a glass of wine as a commodity that needed no more qualification than a glass of water.

Are you shocked? What a long way we have come. Today I might, if no one were looking, still dilute Perrier with San Pellegrino. But the idea of casually combining wines seems to belong to another age. Tipping a smidgen of a Cabernet into a Shiraz is what a clever-clogs wine buff might do after a bottle of each to show his mastery of judicious blending. Most of us have come to accept that each bottle has a precious identity that must be preserved. It can be criticized, it can even be poured down the sink, but to sully the uniqueness of its being is sacrilege.

Who is right? Why don’t we, why daren’t we, make our own cuvées? Have we just bought a load of expensive winery PR or are we really spellbound by something Eden Valley has that Clare doesn’t, or Russian River offers but Alexander Valley can’t? There are plenty of answers to these questions. Enough, indeed, to fill books.

I would not be so reverential. Most budget wine is as much an industrial product as most beer. There is no one whose pride you would hurt if you did a bit of blending. If there is a taboo, it is in somebody’s interest – and that somebody is not you.

Prices and Values

IT IS EASY for someone like me who drinks for a living to become detached from the realities of a budget. It is one thing to work out for yourself whether the colossal price demanded for a cult wine is justified (the answer is probably ‘No’), or to weigh up the relative values of two different châteaux, or two different vintages. Abstract valuation, you could call it. Real priorities are more demanding. The shopper asks ‘Is that fair value for the same price as a chicken?’ If you are a shopper who hunts down the best and freshest chicken in the market you will have the same feeling about the wine to go with it. You want real satisfaction, not a token. Curnonsky, the first French food journalist (his name was a play on ‘Why not?’ with a dash of Polish), formulated the basic requirement: food should taste of what it is. It is no different with wine.

Here, let’s imagine, are two bottles of red wine. You bought one to go with your free-range bird; it is a well-regarded, not exactly ambitious Tuscan wine, a Chianti Classico. It cost, as it happens, the same price as the fowl. The friend you invited to dinner brings a bottle, by chance another Tuscan red, but this one a birthday present. Very special, it must be. You could buy five chickens and a bottle of olive oil for this price. You open both bottles, exclaiming at the shape (very tall), the colour (black) and above all the weight of the expensive one. The bottle empty weighs the same as the other one full. You pour two glasses of each.

The chicken has perfumed the room; a good idea, that sprig of rosemary inside. You sip the Chianti. It blends as perfectly with the bird as its own steaming juices; just seasoning it with fruity acidity, a gentle glow, a brush of roughness as you swallow. You salivate, eat a piece of the thigh, and pick up the second glass, from the overweight bottle. Caramba, the colour! The Chianti was garnet; this is bloody ruby. And Caramba, the nose! A rush of sweet berries and a strong suggestion of coffee. You sip. You forget the chicken. This is Ferrari-powered, Gucci-shod. What is it doing here? What on earth should we be eating with this? Perhaps, at that price, the answer is nothing: you should just sip, and wonder.

There is no stopping a man when money is no object. More, bigger, louder, sooner are not just wishes, they are commands. Once you think you need every chicken truffled, though, you have eliminated 99 percent of the pleasures of the table. And once you need your wine in overweight bottles, you have laid waste most of the world of wine.

Would I not pay five-chickens-and-a-bottle-of-olive-oil’s-worth for a bottle of wine? Indeed I would. A hundred hens, in extreme cases. Such as? Such as an old wine I have heard stories about, whose biography I have read, a wine that triumphantly expresses a specific place and time. I say an old wine because costly wines are not, or are very rarely, made to be drunk young. The costly elements are those that stay submerged under blasts of ripe fruit and wafts of toasted oak. They announce their presence by blocking your tasting apparatus. They may be colossal in the three dimensions of fruit and terroir and the maker’s mark of character. But great wine works in four dimensions, and the essential fourth is time.

Early Days

BUT BACK TO the Frequently Asked Question. Wine: how did I get into it? My Damascus moment at Cambridge had had its inevitable result. Lectures were no longer my only passion. Cambridge colleges in those days had serious cellars, and no one discouraged undergraduates from joining in. No doubt there were some bins reserved for the dons, but they did not include the Lynch-Bages 1953 or the Lafite 1949. I can still recall how delicious these clarets were. It took no training at all to tell they were very special. My modest bursary did not allow me many trial runs up the Bordeaux Classification. I admit I spent more on champagne – and well remember my father’s reaction when I eventually came down from Cambridge with a case ‘for emergencies’. It was not that my father didn’t enjoy wine himself. He was a barrister and a member of the Wine Society; their sherries and everyday clarets were on tap at home, and on Sundays Château Les Ormes de Pez. But in Sunderland, where he came from, champagne sent a message he preferred not to hear.

The University Wine & Food Society was a meeting place for the lighter element at Cambridge, shrewdly viewed by the wine trade in London as a breeding ground for future customers. Under the pretext of our annual tasting match against Oxford, members went on to a punishing training programme, tasting everything on offer – and the offer was spectacular. We had champagne tastings, sherry tastings, port, of course, and Bordeaux and burgundy without end. Of all the wine merchants who made the trip from London with cases of samples, the most engaging and indulgent was Otto Loeb, a don-like figure himself, founder of OW Loeb & Co in London and in his native Trier on the Moselle. He had London’s finest list of German wines, then a major part of our drinking. He also travelled with an open mind, and had recently been to California. (So had I, aged 17, before university.)

No one in Britain knew anything about California wine in those days. There was not a great deal to know: the industry was still just picking itself up after Prohibition. When he came to Cambridge with a tasting of Louis Martini, BV, Inglenook, Almaden, Christian Brothers, Italian Swiss Colony – all the major players of the time – we were impressed. This was cutting-edge stuff.

Not only were the college cellars open to us, but the kitchens, too. The butler, Mr Brownstone, and Mr Tabor, the chef, egged us on to give elaborate dinners in our rooms. When a wine merchant came from London, and especially when he brought one of his suppliers, a shipper or the owner of an estate, we pushed the boat out. The food, the silver and crockery were carried by porters across the college shoulder high on heavy wooden trays covered with green baize.

Conservative, I should say our menus were. Soup, fish, game whenever possible, and a spectacular crème brûlée, which every college kitchen, I gather, claimed to have invented. It came in a great tureen, glazed with an amber layer of burnt sugar so thick that it took several thwacks with a heavy spoon to break it. Then yellow cream oozed up through the cracks.

I never played for Cambridge. I suppose there were simply more talented tasters available. My roommate, my initiator, was the highest scorer and made sure Oxford went home to practise.

In 1960 I graduated with what used to be called a ‘gentleman’s degree’ – indicating that it had not been too strenuous to achieve. I applied for various jobs where an ability to count would have been useful, but the firms wisely turned me down. Then I wrote to magazines. Condé Nast, publishers of Vogue and House & Garden, called me for an interview, and I joined the Features department of Vogue as that rare thing, a male recruit.

My colleagues were terrifying. The regular recruitment route was via the Vogue Talent Contest – open only to women. Four of Britain’s brightest, best-educated and most beautiful women are plenty in one office. But in the 1960 December issue I was allowed to write a piece called ‘Talking Turkey’. Reading it now I can see that I was under the influence of PG Wodehouse – not a bad place for a writer to be. I knew, of course, very little about turkey or what wine to drink with it. But ignorance is the safest starting point for a journalist. I identified authorities. I rang them up. I wrote down their answers, and my name appeared at the bottom of the article. My star guest, if that’s the word, was Mr Nubar Gulbenkian, one of London’s most prominent diners-out, a man who had his own taxi, its body conspicuous in wickerwork to make sure head waiters knew who was coming. ‘It depends on the weather,’ was his answer to my question, ‘and on my guests and on the night before; but it will be either Château Lafite 1949 or Clos de Vougeot 1928.’ It was nice to recognize one old friend at least. The Lafite, I told my readers, could be had from Dolamore & Co for 39 shillings, a Pommard 1928 (but no more Clos de Vougeot) from Hatch Mansfield for 27/6-.

Once a writer has been identified by interested parties, you can imagine what happens. ‘This Hugh Johnson, who is he? Never mind, he writes about wine in Vogue.’ Could I have lunch? Would I like to visit Champagne? It didn’t take long. José Wilson, the features editor of House & Garden, began to send me on travel assignments. The articles began to spread to other publications. First House & Garden, then Condé Nast magazines in New York. I soon discovered that Condé Nast printed much longer articles, paid much more money, and required a visit from their contributors from time to time. And that wine was not their only interest.

Today ‘wine writing’ is a common subset of journalism and often a useful peg for some wine-related advertising. Editors usually expect a summary of this week’s supermarket bargains. Then, there was only a handful of regular wine writers, led by André L Simon, representing the classical tradition, and Raymond Postgate, the consumer advocate, founder of The Good Food Guide. Cyril Ray, one-time Moscow correspondent of The Sunday Times, wrote a splendidly casual column in The Observer. Technical knowledge was evidently not necessary. I somehow learned that The Sunday Times might be susceptible to an approach and went to see the Features Editor. It was the beginning of an association with that paper that still continues. One snag: my employer Condé Nast did not approve of moonlighting. My name must not appear elsewhere. No one at The Sunday Times thought my name mattered in the least, so I took the nom de verre of John Congreve.

Congreve lasted several seasons and confused everyone, himself included, by switching identities like a hero in one of his namesake’s plays. Funnily enough nobody seemed to mind who he was either. You never saw him at wine tastings, or the long lunches in the City that shippers gave in those days – lunches that sometimes lasted until after lights out. The chap you did see, increasingly, was me.

This was when I learned that my strings were being pulled by a man whom I respected but hardly knew, the chairman of Condé Nast and the founder of British Vogue, Harry Yoxall. It was probably he who arranged for me to interview André Simon in the Grosvenor Gardens office of the Wine & Food Society he had founded in 1931. Simon was 85, I was 23. Yoxall had evidently decided to help his friend Simon to retire gracefully from his Society by buying its quarterly magazine, Wine & Food. It seems I was being groomed to be its new editor (and only the second in its history). I found myself invited back, and introduced around, until that winter I was told to gear up for my first issue, in spring 1963. I have my fumbling efforts here. I daringly introduced the first illustrations in the magazine’s history: old woodcuts, which cost nothing to reproduce. But most important for me, I persuaded Elizabeth David to contribute an article, characteristically on an 18th-century recipe for ham.

Elizabeth David’s greatest book, French Provincial Cooking, had been published in 1960. I had plucked up courage to call at her house in Chelsea to solicit an article. I can see her kitchen now: its scrubbed wooden table taking up most of the room, half-covered in books and papers; plates and casseroles and a wine bottle and glasses over by the ordinary white cooker; a great armoire at one end, the walls lined with wooden racks of dishes. And there was a wonderful smell of baking.

Nobody was to have a greater influence on me, either as an editor or as a writer, than Elizabeth David. Over the next few years we became friends as well as colleagues. It was challenging: she did not suffer fools gladly, and I must have said and done all sorts of foolish things. I was always on my guard: a laugh could suddenly turn into a frown. But she taught me how to stickle; there was never a more pinpoint stickler for accuracy and honesty. It slowed her writing down to a crawl, all the checking and delving. Her later books became pedantic: no more of the broad poetic brushstrokes that taught England to love the homely dishes of Italy and France and the colours of their markets when her accounts of the single-minded greed of bourgeois French families read like Zola. Her Spectator articles were high comedy.

Wine & Food was engrossing; I grew bolder in my search for contributors, persuading Evelyn Waugh to write about champagne and the playwright Christopher Fry to translate three of the poems of Philippe de Rothschild into English verse. These literary pretensions did not seem to offend anyone. At the same time I found my work for André Simon expanding. At the end of 1963 I was given the portentous title of General Secretary of the Wine & Food Society. As such my main job was organizing lunches and dinners for its members.

It seems preposterous now that at the age of just 24 I was signing bills at The Connaught and Mirabelle, London’s best restaurants of the day. It is not true, as many assert, that there was nothing worth eating in England in those olden days. The Connaught Hotel was only 15 minutes’ walk from the Society’s offices, over-looking the park at 2, Hyde Park Gate. It was well worth the effort, and I made it – as often as possible.

The Saling Hall Cellar

ANYONE LOOKING AROUND my cellar would have no doubt where my heart lies: claret, red Bordeaux, outnumbers all other wines put together. The slim dark cylinders with their white labels are everywhere, tucked away in racks, stacked in bins, standing on the table or the floor looking expectant – opening time must be near. Even more of a presence are the pale pine boxes as yet unopened, a pile here, a pile there, each with a black brand on the end, some quasi-armorial, some outlines of châteaux, some just resounding names.

It was true for a long time, my preference for claret above all red wines. I am more open-minded now, as the slope-shouldered bottles and the cardboard boxes attest. There is a simple reason, though, why Bordeaux will always be in a majority down here. It stays longer. The waiting time can be, and often is, 10 years or more; 30 years in some cases. So it accumulates while other equally loved wines pass through.

Burgundy came more recently into my life, and my cellar. There has been a great change in style, in quality and in availability of good burgundy in my drinking lifetime. And what is true of Burgundy is true of almost every other region and country: it has far more to offer than it did. Does this mean that Bordeaux should change too? It is the debate of our time.

White wines by their nature flow more rapidly. The come-and-go rate is higher, but there are exceptions. Some of the German wines, the sweetest wines of such exceptional vintages as 1971, have been in residence as long as 40 years. It’s time I drank them; the problem has been – who with? For years my friends groaned when I went into my ‘Don’t you like Riesling?’ routine, but things have got better recently.

In reality there is a two-tiered system in operation: the wines I must taste as soon as possible to keep myself up to date, regardless of when they will be at their supposed best, and those I am hoarding out of passion to follow their careers all the way. The first you might call my professional cellar – but could you separate what you drink out of curiosity from what you drink out of conviction? If there is a difference, it is in giving a conviction wine the benefit of the doubt. It may have seen better days, but it revives old memories. A wine lover should be a romantic: romance can plaster over all sorts of cracks. Cold objectivity never comes between me and something I love. And one sip could be enough to register a new conviction wine.

Which raises a tricky topic: objectivity. Critics are obliged to be objective in their assessments. In their public role as judges they should put their preferences and prejudice aside. Which is why ‘critic’ is a term I have never accepted. ‘Commentator’, certainly. A diligent dilettante is how I see myself; a dabbler who dabbles deep, but not so deep that the waters of his subject close over his head.

I love what my French publishers call me: un vulgarisateur. Think of the Vulgate, the name of the Bible translated into the common tongue. If a vulgarisateur needs a justification, I borrow mine from an old friend and philosopher in Burgundy, Pierre Poupon, who wrote: ‘qui, ayant ressenti à certains moments la montée incomparable de la joie intérieure, n’a jamais éprouvé le désir de révéler aux autres que le bonheur existe?’ Who, having felt his spirits soar with joy, has not wanted to show others that such happiness exists?

There is a story of a young subaltern whose commanding officer wrote: ‘This officer’s men will follow him anywhere, if only out of curiosity.’ I will open any bottle in the same spirit. It can lead to a distressing quantity being poured down the drain – there is, after all,