Wine Club 16 July

We at The Spectator drink a lot of Pol Roger Champagne. It’s more or less the house pour. Not every day you understand, just on high days and holidays such as the Spectator summer party, from which more than a few of us are still recovering.

And I must say that when standing like a vertical sardine in the crush of said party, stuck fast between a resolute Remainer and a wild-eyed Brexiteer, both about to kick off, there is nothing more heartening than the sight of the familiar white-foil bottle. A tap on the waiter’s shoulder, a pirouette-like turn, a swift gulp and I was away, free to muscle in on the gossip behind me about what happened at that Boris barbecue.

The Spectator and Pol Roger were founded a mere 21 years apart — the Speccie in 1828 and Pol in 1849 — and both continue to go from strength to strength. Pol Roger remains one of the few family-owned houses in Champagne and enjoys the rare-distinction of having had royal warrants under both Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II.

Pol’s most famous customer of all, though, was Sir Winston Churchill, after whom the company’s prestige cuvée is named. Pol Roger was his firm favourite and he developed quite a taste for Odette Pol-Roger too, the striking wife of Jacques Pol-Roger, eldest grandson of Pol Roger himself. Indeed, so smitten with her was Churchill that he named his racehorse ‘Pol Roger’ and promised to visit Odette in Épernay. ‘Invite me during the vintage, and I’ll press the grapes with my bare feet,’ he declared.

It’s said that Churchill got through more than 500 cases of Pol Roger in the last ten years of his life, leading his daughter, Lady Soames, to remark, ‘I saw him many times the better for it, but never the worse.’