Beneath every spire a cellar

A former Oxford college cellar master explains the abiding importance of wine to fellows and students and shares his memories of some remarkable wines

Apart from libraries and other centrally administered faculties, the University of Oxford is made up of 45 colleges and halls, all possessing a wine cellar. As a result, the wine culture of the place is immense and indelible, and a sizeable minority of dons – the term describes any fellow of a college – have built highly respectable private cellars of their own.

Frequently a case of misunderstanding when a tourist asks ‘Where is the University?’, the colleges collectively comprise the university despite being self-governing, quasi-autonomous legal entities. Their wine cellars are correspondingly as diverse and different as they are, and they might be compared to a large extended family, exhibiting a sibling likeness when viewed from afar but proving utterly unique when encountered in person.

It is therefore impossible to generalise about size and content, except to say that large colleges have necessarily large cellars on account of their catering needs, but not all large colleges are equally wealthy. St John’s College has a capacious private endowment of more than £300 million for approximately 500 students, meaning that it can easily stretch to cru classé and grand cru wines even for ordinary guest nights, which are held regularly throughout the academic year. At the other end of the scale, less wealthy colleges have frequently been more experimental with New World wines – perhaps through necessity but often with genuinely meritorious results.

In general, college cellars have a heavy French bias where wine is concerned and a tremendously expansive Port heritage stretching back into the 17th century, when the great Port shippers were first established. Other fortified wines such as Sherry and Madeira have a special place in Oxford’s affections, whereas conventional or – God forbid – fashionable spirits get short shrift.

Before delving into the contents of the cellars of the two Oxford colleges with which I am well acquainted, two memories may begin to describe the extraordinary wine culture within the ‘city of the dreaming spires’. The first concerns a tasting I attended a few years ago, when newly installed as a history fellow at Corpus Christi College. One of the dons noted that the wines he had selected that day would be opened by the other fellows, with happiness, over his grave. Close to retirement, he was well aware that the wine would outlive him and that a sense of institutional longevity and corporate purpose would supersede the selfish and limited horizons of the individual.

In this sense no one owns Oxford, and even the longest-lived fellow is nothing more than a steward. The cellar is there to serve the community within the college, and although it nurtures pleasure as an adjunct of learning, it does not function like a private cellar, whose composition reflects the ego of its creator.

The second memory is purely indulgent but illustrates the sort of unassuming eccentricity for which Oxford is famous. SH Jones & Co of Banbury – one of maybe 50 wine merchants that regularly ply their wares to the colleges – had organised a regular portfolio tasting in the wonderfully Jacobean setting of Wadham College dining hall on a particularly raw day in February, when the rain was being driven across Oxford by a sharp north-easterly wind. Apart from savouring an extraordinarily well-chosen range of young Burgundies, I can still recollect with utter clarity the sustaining warmth of the red embers of a traditional wood fire radiating from the giant 17th-century grate of the fireplace and the lunchtime fare that consisted of only two items: Champagne and game pie, the latter served as a formidable, unadorned slice on a napkin. If I had to summarise the Oxford cellar, it would be in terms of this fusion of the solidly elegant English game pie and the distinctly French Champagne – not perhaps the most appetising or sophisticated combination, yet deliciously memorable and not a little eccentric.

The modus operandi

Corpus Christi College (founded 1517) will serve as my model, and is broadly similar to the wine operation of other colleges. The Keeper of the Wine is the honorific title of the don whose job it is to attend tastings, select wines for the college cellar and select wines to accompany dinners throughout the year, including special events like feasts and so-called ‘gaudies’, when old members return to their alma mater. Like so many other academic offices, this one pays almost nothing (£25 a month), and although it is an enormous privilege, it is also a considerable responsibility. The butler is responsible for the day-to-day management of the stock list, for cellaring and bringing up the wines, yet it is the keeper who has to ensure adequate stocks.

The tasting culture of Oxford is a phenomenon in itself, and the rise of the competitive independent merchant has allowed a great expansion of tastings to the point where it is nearly impossible to attend them all. Typically taking place in a lunch hour, a tasting can be anything from a selection of wholesale cheap reds and whites to an extensive en primeur sampling limited to Bordeaux or Burgundy or specialising in Sauternes. Even highly focused tastings will usually be book-ended by Champagne at one end and dessert wine and Port at the other.

Wines are rarely bought in quantities of less than six dozen, and it is not uncommon to see shipments of 50 cases arriving at the college – hardly surprising when one considers that a formal dinner for 100 guests consumes in the region of six to eight cases, taking into account a pre-dinner apéritif, claret, dessert wine and Port.

Corpus is the smallest undergraduate college in Oxford, with just 230 undergraduates, so its stock list, valued at just under £100,000 at cost, is probably below the average of the other colleges. Viewed as a pyramid, the vast base comprises two thirds of the 15,000-odd bottles in the collection and consists almost entirely of drinking wines in the £5–10 value range.

The top third begins to get more interesting, although there is still a predominance of cru bourgeois clarets rather than classed growths. At the very top, one breaks into the latter category alongside grand cru classé Sauternes and Vintage Port, but still there are constraints of price owing to the little-known fact that fellows pay for the wine they consume at dinner. The cost of the wine is equally divided between those present, meaning that even the greatest connoisseur must dwell with the fellow who simply isn’t bothered and doesn’t want to pay – and there are plenty of the latter.

Undergraduates, on the other hand, have largely uneducated palates and don’t care what they drink as long as it’s cheap. The central demand for top-class wines is, ironically, from outside – from the conference trade that provides colleges with a valuable additional source of income outside term. In short, running a college cellar has never been more complex. Fifty years ago, the fellowship was less than half the size it is today, and it remained a largely enclosed, elitist and male community. Today, it must cater for many different groups and is dazzled by choice and value reflecting the transformation of wine geography over the past 20 years.

Drinking it

Entrusted with the cellar for a single term in 2001, when the keeper was giving a lecture series in Australia, I brought up six German white wines for an informal tasting in order to establish whether they were still alive. We found that two were miraculously intact, the other four inadequate even for cooking. The former consisted of a Sieger 1982 Kapellaner Rosengarten Spätlese and a Finkenauer 1989 Kreuznacher St M Auslese, both offering that extraordinary combination of kerosene nose and antique furniture-polish palate – an acquired taste yet unique, and underpinned by a racy acidity that had not faded.

My experiment illustrated the controversial status of German wines in Oxford. Most colleges have a small collection of Rieslings, but very few have a great enthusiasm for German wine – and despite the greatest efforts of enthusiast wine merchants such as Iris Ellmann of specialist shipper Winebarn, it remains an uphill struggle. Put it down to 20th-century politics or cultural bias, but German wine has a difficult time in Oxford.

The highlight of the Corpus cellar, apart from Port, lies in Sauternes and claret. Again, the collection is slightly hit and miss, and what was acquired as a bargain many years ago does not always live up to billing, such as the 1985 Château Filhot that I recently tasted: a weak Sauternes vintage and a weak wine. But try 1986 Château Rieussec, originally acquired for the seemingly paltry sum of £11.25 a bottle, and you have a wonderful example of mature and perfectly balanced Sauternes from a great year. Building on this example, the college recently acquired a small quantity of 2001 Rayne-Vigneau, with a view to the quincentennial celebrations due in 2017, as well as a greater quantity of Lamothe-Guignaud from the same vintage – a bargain that will drink very well until around 2012.

The Corpus clarets do not compare to lavish private cellars and, like most colleges, Corpus has been progressively priced out of the top classed growths. Nonetheless, secondary wines of some character are present, such as 1983 Cos d’Estournel, still delicately intact at a recent tasting, and, more fragrantly and powerfully, 1995 Beau-Site, which is drinking wonderfully at the moment. Other mainstays include Batailley, Branaire du Cru, Chasse-Spleen, Cissac, Patache d’Aux, La Lagune and Langoa-Barton, the last showing 23 bottles of the 1989 in stock – undoubtedly a special wine for a special occasion.

Port remains, in my opinion, the highlight, if only because it comprises such a large part of the Corpus cellar. Corpus actually has a deficit of very old Port, the last of the 1977s (Graham’s) having disappeared over the past year. Yet there were once vast stocks of the 1955 and 1963, which live on in the corporate memory and crop up in conversation, and there are currently great stocks of all the vintages declared since 1977, in particular 1983, 1985, 1991 and 1994, the latter shaping up to be one of the truly great years, quite possibly better than the overhyped millennial year.

The irony of Corpus’s Port collection is that so little of it is actually drunk. The college regularly serves LBV at its guest nights and ordinary dinners, and in 2003 just 17 bottles of Vintage Port were drunk, suggesting that the current reserves of 2,416 bottles will carry the college for the next 142 years. Anecdotally, it would seem that other colleges sit on similarly magnificent collections of Port. One large college has 400 bottles of the 1963, while others still have residual stocks of the ’55s and ’45s. As for even older vintages, I cannot say with any certainty: there is an extraordinary and almost impenetrable secrecy on the subject.

Memorable wines

All my memories of wine in Oxford are composites of time, place, people and atmosphere, and they are only secondarily to do with the label being drunk. The most extraordinary nose was on a 1989 Château d’Angludet, brought up from the Corpus cellar in the autumn of 2000. Served alongside partridge, it was in my glass at exactly the right moment and smelt almost purely of Havana cigar. Completely extraordinary, ten minutes later it began to fade, and by the end of the main course it had all but gone. It was my first experience of a fickle, magical wine that surpassed itself only to end enigmatically, and it will therefore remain completely memorable.

The second memory is of a tasting where Brett Turner of Cambridge Fine Wine had chanced upon some bottles of 1943 Montbazillac, apparently hidden during the occupation and only rediscovered some 60 years later. It was fully intact but extremely mellow, a sort of caramelised brandy snap. I think my imagination, which fixated on the meaning of the wine produced in an hour of peril, probably outran the objective quality of the wine, but it was still a special occasion.

The third wine was also a product of strange circumstances. Corpus hosted a special tasting by the Perrin family, producers of the wonderfully full-bodied Châteauneuf-du-Pape Château de Beaucastel. Almost no one came to the tasting because it was held in the evening and it was raining hard, but nonetheless I was presented with two bottles of 1985 Beaucastel, one of its finest vintages. It lived up to the billing, possessing an extremely fine nose underlain by all manner of Grenache-inspired complexity.

Finally, the greatest wine I have tasted was in the company of two great Corpus historians, Brian Harrison and John Watts. With a typically utilitarian absence of ceremony, Harrison uncorked a bottle of 1985 Château Gloria Henri Martin to accompany a prune and beef casserole at his home on top of Hinksey Hill. We drank it on one of those raw spring days when cold showers were followed by radiant sun and monkjack deer ambled through daffodils. It was absolutely superb and immediately registered as a great wine.

Final thoughts

It is almost impossible to scratch the surface of this vast topic, but the wine culture of Oxford is probably more impressive than the actual labels drunk, and this is arguably indicative of robust health at a time when most of the rest of the world lurches towards Parkerisation and label chasing. If the average college cellar has 15,000–20,000 bottles worth £150,000 at cost, then the retail value multiplied by 45 results in a collective cellar that must run to tens of millions of pounds.

But equally impressive is the otherworldly nature of the cellars and those who run them, both caught up in a virtual time warp of their own making. One of the intriguing details to emerge from Jancis Robinson’s 1999 UK TV series Vintners’ Tales, was that Lincoln College then possessed considerable quantities of 1982 Château Pichon-Longueville Lalande, available to fellows at £12.25 per bottle. The man in charge, a classicist called Nigel Wilson, estimated the market value at £40, but Jancis pointed out to him that bottles were selling then for £200 a bottle. An extreme instance, perhaps, but the underlying point should not be that the college was foolishly out of step with the market, but rather that its objective is to foster community ahead of profit.

Despite financial pressures, the colleges maintain an enviable quality of life owing to basic infrastructure rather than massive wealth, including large cellars whose cost was written down hundreds of years ago and an infinitely long-term capital structure that can flex with the rise and fall of successive vintages. At best, an Oxford cellar is well stocked with wines that have been selected by sharp palates – palates that have been sharpened by a specific sort of wine culture: not just knowledge as an adjunct to pleasure rather than mere sensation, but a sense of taste refined over a lifetime.