Gérard Basset

Posted: 1st February 2019

Gérard Basset died from throat cancer this month. It is sad news, not least because he was younger than me and had everything to live for. I had known him from the late eighties, since the first time I stayed at Chewton Glen in the New Forest. He was the sommelier and the hotel was managed by his young friend Robin Hutson. Their partnership survived until Gérard’s death, linked by any number of hotels that had been spawned by the successful Hôtel du vin chain that they launched together. I think it was also at Chewton Glen that Gérard met his wife Nina, the mother of his child. I have a memory of a sunny day, a good lunch and a tour of the cellar. The owner, Martin Skan, was in close attendance, as he always was.

As for Gérard he was shy, attentive and genuinely humble. He struck me as quite different from most other French sommeliers, the ones I had to stomach at so many tastings in France and who worked in restaurants with Michelin rosettes; the more stars the restaurant possessed, the more arrogant they became. They didn’t taste like us, they had a system: first ‘bouche’, second ‘bouche’, and then an interminable list of fruits and flowers that would have flummoxed a nation of gardeners. They looked down on us as amateurs, which I suppose we were.