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.
And then Vienna the next day, when I had a little time to see old haunts and talk to old friends. I am only sorry to say it was all so quick; still it was nice to get home for a birthday dinner on the eighth when we assembled at Boisdale’s new branch in Mayfair. I waited at a table on the pavement for my family to turn up, nursing a flute of champagne in the sunlight.
The following week I had a chance to visit my good friend Salvatore Calabrese’s new premises near Liverpool Street station. I was expecting a basement, but I should have known Salvatore better. The Holy Birds, with its Mule Bar is a restaurant with bars on two levels and the whole thing has been designed in a retro style to look like 1960s chic. There is sixties clobber everywhere and wallpaper and carpets made to designs furnished by his children and based on sixties originals. Salvatore took us through a few of his favourite cocktails including that dry martini I first experienced some time in the eighties when he was head barman at Duke’s in St James’s. He told the story about how he hit on the idea of adding the vermouth with a vinegar dropper. We had a Negroni made from a bottle of Sarti gin produced in the forties, Campari from the sixties and a red vermouth dating from the seventies or eighties. We were later allowed to taste the individual ingredients: the gin seemed have no botanical character but the vermouth had aged well and had a pronounced nutty flavour. The Campari appeared to have altered but little. I resolved to buy the ingredients for Negronis for home. I’ll teach my son to make them. It will be my Friday night treat.
The following weekend was Easter. As my family was in Devon during Holy Week I did not have to make Hot Cross buns this year, but they returned on Saturday in time for the Paschal feast. New season’s lamb was terribly rare in London, but I procured a shoulder from one of the two beasts allocated to our local butcher. Two special wines were served with it. I had long been wondering when to open a bottle of 1989 Clos de la Chainette. As the bottle proclaims, this is the former Clos de l’Abbaye de Saint Germain in Auxerre, one of the most ancient vineyards in France – possibly dating back to the 7th Century and a favourite of Thomas Jefferson’s. By some bizarre twist of fate the estate fell into the hands of the local asylum after the revolution, and the small print at the bottom of the label tells you that the owner is still the departmental ‘hôpital psychiatrique.’ I think I was hanging on, hoping to find a suitably crazy guest to help me consume a bottle clearly given to me by the winemaker on one of my many visits to Auxerre.
Old white wine like this is obviously risky, but in fact it was in fine condition, even if the colour was pale amber. It was redolent of honey and apricots. It was quite a surprise, a great treat and not in the slightest bit mad! I don’t suppose there are many more bottles where that one came from – it might have been the very last. With our lamb we had a 1994 Beaune Avaux from Bruno Colin. I had no idea this was going to be so good: fairly throbbing with power still, and biting cherry fruit.
This month I received some interesting wines from Domaine Gayda near Carcassonne. There was a Syrah in a screw-capped bottle that was sadly out of condition and another red that made only a small impression. What really struck me were the whites, in particular a wonderfully bracing 2015 Chenin Blanc wearing the Figure Libre label. Chenin is an unusual grape variety in these parts, but the Gayda team came together in South Africa, where Chenin is the most popular green grape. Another 2015 Figure Libre white called ‘Freestyle’ is made from southern grapes – Grenache Blanc, Maccabeu, Marsanne and Roussanne. I thought this was tremendous as well.
From Tesco I had a box of summer reds: a 2014 La Cometas Carmenère Reserva from Chile’s Central Valley had nice, creamy upfront fruit but was quick to fade. I preferred the 2015 Most Wanted Malbec from Argentina’s San Juan district that put someone in mind of cranberries, but I found it more redolent of incense and in the end recognised a Christmas pudding character. I expected a bit of thunder from the 2009 Valtier Utiel Requena Reserva from Spain, but it proved rather more elegant and mild-mannered, altogether claret-like – which was, of course, also true of the 2010 Château Destau Bordeaux Supérieur which turned out to be a first-class everyday Bordeaux with plenty of raspberry/strawberry Merlot fruit and an excellent structure. The 2013 Higgovale Heights Western Cape Shiraz from South Africa lacked varietal typicity. In comparison The Regions Cabernet Sauvignon from Coonawarra in Australia from the same vintage had much more to offer with its tangy fruit.
Finally, towards the end of the month when the weather turned bitter cold once again, I went to give a lecture in Kempten in the Allgäu in Bavarian Swabia. After a long day’s travel from London and Munich I arrived famished and plodded in under the rain keeping an eye open for somewhere to eat. I took advice from the receptionist at the Fürstenhof, my seventeenth century hotel and I went to Schalander for dinner, which had the advantage of being less than 100 metres away. I had been fantasising about white asparagus, and here it was on the menu. A waitress breezing self-confidence took my order in a gently mocking way and I added a small steak to the dish which was offered as a ‘supplement’. Having dealt with me, she moved over to a table populated by Chinese men and prodded them in an English of prodigious fluency.
When my asparagus arrived it was atypically paltry for Germany: just a few spears, hollandaise sauce and some potatoes in a little bowl. I was pleased I had ordered the tiny steak (which cost almost as much as the asparagus). I resolved that should I come to Kempten again I’d try to locate a place that was more typically Bavarian! The next day I had a lovely Fürstab Hefeweizen beer at Zum Stift on the Stiftsplatz in the shadow of the great basilica, and seeing the enormous plates go past my nose on their way into the dining room I think I found the answer.
I couldn’t go to the Allgäu without going to a dairy to see the famous Bergkäse and I was very kindly driven up to the Sennerei Diepolz. The idea was that I should get a good view of the Alps as well, but the cloud was so low that I could see very little; still the 24-month cheese made up for it. Needless to say the cows go up the mountains here in the summer months and return to the plains for the winter. I don’t know where they were on that late-April day, but it was no time to be up a mountain. I bought a big slab to take home, and about the same weight of serious Swabian bread from the Hofpfisterei in town. When I reached the airport at Memmingen the next morning, the runway was thick with snow and while they de-iced the aircraft the local papers informed me that the cruel return of winter had blighted the fruit crop.
