What I am about to write might well be cause to send me to the Tower of London. I will explain later.
I have always been interested in wine, about it, and drinking it - ever since consuming the dregs from bottles (recycled then) left out for the wine merchant to collect when I was a child in the country at the turn of the 1920s to 1930s.
A good way to learn about wine is to have a wine book to record wines bought and years drunk, with opinions in explicitly one’s own descriptive words on its quality over time.
The 1960s was the ideal period to start, when all but the great Châteaux in Bordeaux produced fine wine at plonk prices.
The 1960s was a decade when I knew the years but not necessarily the Châteaux.
As most wine then was imported in casks and bottled by wine merchants in the UK, I didn’t see why I shouldn’t do the same. A customs officer, in the wine section of that organisation, who had bought a painting from one of my exhibitions, had done much for a Spanish sea captain and didn’t see why this sailor shouldn’t do something for him in return.
So some pound notes changed hands and back from Valencia came two odd-looking casks strapped to the ship’s railings (94 litres of 16 grados and 90 litres of 15 grados).
Bottles and corks had to be bought. Contractors then had agreements to take away all bottles left outside hotels and restaurants to be recycled. I visited their premisses where only Claret, Burgundy and Port bottles were recyclable, so there was a huge pile of broken glass formed in their East End yard of non recyclable bottles of all colours and shapes. So I decided also to collect my claret-shaped bottles left outside hotels and restaurants for free (at 4am), whereas I would have had to pay a shilling a bottle to those with contracts.
Because of my unique position, the managing director of a famous cork company personally selected with me short-long Bordeaux length corks for my bottling. He was also rather fond of drinking Sherry, so we consumed quite a bit.
Another wonderful importation was a hogshead (58 gallons) of Crianza Rioja Bilbainas, Haro and more from Prignac in Bas-Médoc, and so on it went.
Not all was straightforward. In 1969 a small cask (a quart de Barrique) of Châteaux Gallais Bellevue got crushed aboard a coaster on its way to a wharf on the Isle of Dogs in London, where it was found to have lost about half its contents. I would have had to pay duty as though it was full. But I had friends in the system and on the following day of its arrival my cask miraculously had a tin patch nailed to the wound and the barrel was now full to the shrive (bung). The wine that was used to top up my barrel must have been of the highest quality because the blend was absolutely delicious.
For all my bottles, bottled and shared among friends, were labelled with my own designed label, and capped with a red tin/lead capsule, (whereas a firm, Corfe & Seccombe, could have provided me with a choice of many fancy labels of their design).
In those days, importers of wine could call the contents of their bottles anything they chose. So it was a period where knowledge and discernment came to the fore.
It was about this time that I came across wonderful J Lyons at the Hop Exchange Wine Cellars in Southwark where most client’s bottles were washed and recycled on site.
It was here in January1968 that I chanced upon Châteaux Cantanac-Brown 1959 which was the best wine I had ever, or since, drunk. So I bought a lot and had most kept in their paid reserve as I lacked space for it. The last bottle consumed was on the 4th of December 1993 and in my wine book I wrote: “Farewell dear old friend”.
In those splendid Hop Exchange Cellars worked a wonderful lady. Her job was to stick the
J Lyons house labels on their bottles.
Beyond her gluing apparatus (two hands) was a large round bath in which was placed any wine the labels from which had to be soaked off and replaced by a wine in demand.
Perhaps I should not have been witness to it, but at that time J Lyons were supplying Buckingham Palace with white wine (ordinarily just “Hock”) with rather grand royal labels, now stuck to the bottles by this lady.
Is revealing such Palace secrets justification for a beheading? I hope not.
