WINE, WOMEN AND CHRISTMAS PUDDING

SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT CHAMPAGNE.

            In the last days of the 19th century,  every crowned head and dignitary visiting Paris was accorded an evening at La Chabanais, the city’s finest brothel, an occasion disguised in the official itinerary as “dinner with the chairman of the Senate.” Among the house’s many sophisticated features, one in particular appealed to Edward, Britain’s Prince of Wales,  soon to be Edward VII.

 A large brass bath, elaborately decorated, was filled with champagne and one of the house’s sixty pensionnaires bathed in it while Edward and his cronies sat around, dipping out mugs of fizz and toasting one another’s health. Such a bath was more fun for Edward and his pals than for the girls, who complained that the wine made them sticky, a problem in those pre-bathroom days, although there were probably plenty of customers who would lick them off, and pay for the privilege, just as the city’s most prominent gays competed to loiter in the wings of the Opera and sponge down a sweaty Nijinsky after his performance in Spectre de la Rose.

Nijinsky in Spectre de la Rose. “And don’t forget to scrub my back.”

            Edward and the bath came to mind this week with the announcement that 2022 promises to be a vintage year for all French wine, but particularly champagne;  perhaps equal to the legendary product of 1959 – good news for the fizz business, which already generates an annual US$5.5 billion worldwide.  Even now, the owner of that bath (bought by Salvador Dali after France closed its brothels in 1946), may be dusting it off and calculating how many bottles of Mumm or Veuve Cliquot it would take to fill it.

I was never much of a drinker, another area where I disappointed my parents.  But this did give me a little more disposable income, some of which I invested in a small syndicate that bought up for re-sale the wine cellars of bankrupt restaurants and hotels – reserving, of course, a few bottles for the members. The latest such bonus arrived just as I prepared to leave for England in 1969. With no time to do more than glance in the carton, I said to my father “Look after this for me, will you?” - confident that, before our boat was over the horizon, he’d have opened the first bottle to toast my departure.

I didn’t return for more than a decade, arriving just in time for Christmas. With the rest of the family, we gathered at my parents’ home in the mountains outside Sydney, where I tried to  reconcile the heat, the smell of eucalyptus and the calls of exotic birds with the European Christmas I’d come to know, a time of snow and church bells and In the Bleak Midwinter.   

Part-way through the pleasantries, my father volunteered “I’ve still got that wine you left here.” 

           The next day, we spent the morning looking for it, running it to earth at the back of the garage. The carton had rotted away but an accumulation of camping equipment, garden furniture and assorted junk had protected the bottles from sunlight and extremes of temperature as effectively as any cellar.

            We placed them on the kitchen table. A few were those dessert wines, Auslese and Spatelese Rieslings the Australians call, inelegantly, “stickies”. A respectable Chateauneuf-du-Pape looked promising, though only tasting would tell whether it had weathered the long voyage from Provence.

            ….which left a single bottle. I brushed the dust from the dull, undecorated red label with its block of minuscule text.

            “You’re not going to tell me,” my father said reverently, “that that’s a Grange.”

            Wine-maker Max Schubert bottled the first Grange Hermitage for Penfolds in 1951, after he’d toured Bordeaux to learn French techniques. On his return, he took what grapes he could find, mostly Shiraz, from a number of vineyards, and put his new-learned expertise to the test. Since it was an experiment, he gave most of that small production away, the bottles so anonymous that the labels weren’t printed but typed.

             My bottle dated from 1962, a few years after Penfolds  ordered Schubert to stop wasting time and get back to its more profitable production of sherry and the other fortified wines favoured by unsophisticated Australian palates. But he continued making Grange in secret, and its reputation grew, as did the price, rising to $10 a bottle, when most local wines sold for less than $2. Today, if you could find one, a bottle of that 1951 vintage would cost $50,000.

             Calls to friends more knowledgable about wine suggested that our bottle was worth a few hundred dollars at least, and much more if I held onto it for another decade.

            As for drinking it… Well, maybe some people did eat breakfast off Meissen and dig the garden in Dior, but such luxury was not for us. A bottle of this quality wasn’t for consumption but investment.

            Then my mother opened the oven door and took out the turkey.

Of course a Grange called for foie gras and Chateaubriand and Pommes de terre Dauphinoise.

But it went with Christmas pudding just as well.