Bruce Anderson

Big two-hearted river

Winemaking is as native to that region as hunting is to Dorset

The Rhône is a strong river. The Loire derives graciousness from its châteaux. The Rhine and the Thames have been sentimentalised: not the Rhône. There are no Rhône-maidens, no suggestion of ‘sweet Rhône run softly till I end my song’. A powerful onrush of water rips past the banks of a river that knows how to drown men.

But it also brings fertility in abundance. This is probably the oldest wine-growing region in France. The romantic version is that Greeks brought the Shiraz grape from Persia; 2,500 years later, Syrah is still the region’s vinous bedrock. As one would expect from a combination of the River God and the Sun God, these are powerful wines, easily hitting 14 degrees. Even Hemingway declared that Châteauneuf is not a lunchtime wine.

Single bottles are always a temptation. All too often, it is one that should be resisted. Great wine needs a lengthy and untroubled maturation. It should be put to sleep like Brünnhilde, until a hero arrives for the awakening. If the bottle has been forgotten about and bundled around in various house-movings before coming to rest next to the central heating boiler, the owners will end up with a somewhat ill-tempered Valkyrie.

My experiment took place in the early 1980s. There were no heroes or dragons: merely a wine merchant who had three bottles of Hermitage from the 1920s. He offered no guarantee about their condition. To adopt booksellers’ idiom, they were for sale ‘with all faults’. I cannot remember the price. It was cheap if the bottles had retained their quality: not so, if they had turned to vinegar. It would be unfair to describe the first two as vinegar: unfair on vinegar. They smelt as if they might be a substitute for Novichok.

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