How to become an old soak

Drink and longevity: there seems to have been a successful counter-attack against the puritans, prohibitionists and other health faddists. Indeed, there is virtually a consensus that red wine has almost medicinal properties. That said, a confusion about so-called units remains. When the measurement was explained to me, I said that it sounded adequate. ‘Really?’ ‘Yes, that ought to be more or less enough.’ Then the cross-purposes were unscrambled. The 98 units or whatever – a figure clearly designed to give a bogus authority to the calculation – was a weekly total, not a daily one.

There was a delightful medic called Patrick Trevor-Roper, the brother of the historian, but an altogether more amiable character. Patrick was a distinguished eye surgeon, spoken of with affection and respect by the many acolytes whom he trained. I once asked him about drink and health. His reply was reassuring. He said that unless one had an unlucky liver – ‘if that were true of you, Bruce, you’d know by now’– and as long as you took most of your refreshment in the form of wine, there should not be a difficulty. But if, like too many of my fellow Scots, you drank whisky in the quantities the French devote to wine, that would be a problem. There was, however, no reason why a normal wine-drinker should not live to be an old soak.

Another aspect of wine and long life occurred to me recently, after a couple of tastings. I have little confidence in my own ability to assess very young wines; nor am I a natural spitter. I once wrote of a yearling Latour that it was awesome and majestic, like a great mountain range dominating the sky, covered in cloud, but with the power shining through.