A Cruel Month

Posted: 2nd May 2017

I was in Austria at the beginning of the month. Somehow I managed to miss the Prince of Wales in Schwechat. He arrived at much the same time as me. I spent my birthday in Burgenland, at a wine conference talking about awarding points to wine. It was nice to be back. I saw familiar, generally friendly faces that have filled out a bit in the intervening years, in some cases their hair has thinned, or was dusted with wintry grey. Such faces hold a mirror up to your own – if they look much older you can take it for granted you do too!

It is not the prettiest part of the country. The area between the Neusiedlersee and the Hungarian Frontier is flat and uneventful and the weather was wet and cold. At lunch an excitable Christine Saahs told me of her audience with Prince Charles in Vienna the night before, and how he and Camilla had ordered more wine from the excellent Nikolaihof for Highgrove. After my various turns on the stage I went to a big bottle party and met ‘der Metzger’ for the first time, the famous local butcher-cum-winemaker was trailing around with huge bottles of his wine, and I fell to drinking with a Viennese architect, a schoolmaster-cum-winemaker from the Weinviertel and a Mongolian surgeon who was hoping to stage a comparative tasting of fermented mares’ milk. I wisely took myself off to bed at ten.