How to infuriate the French

Fine wine rarely makes it into the public consciousness, but one event in 1976 has proved of perennial interest: the so-called Judgment of Paris. It heralded the arrival of wine from the New World, but also tapped into popular prejudice. Who can resist French wine snobs being made to look foolish? So these memoirs by Steven Spurrier, the man behind that notorious tasting, have been keenly anticipated.

It was a glass of 1908 Cockburns port that Spurrier tried at the age of 13 that sparked a lifelong interest in wine. Rather than go to university, as expected, he worked in the cellars of a wine merchant, Christopher’s, in Soho. In his early twenties he inherited £250,000 (the equivalent of £5 million today) when the family gravel business was sold. This financial security enabled Spurrier to spend a year working without pay in the great merchant houses of Europe, including Joseph Drouhin in Burgundy, Hugel in Alsace and Yeatman’s in Oporto. This portrait of an aristocratic trade on the verge of transformation is fascinating, and much the best part of the book.

Nowadays, Spurrier cuts a very establishment figure, but in the 1960s he found the London wine trade ‘too ‘‘old boy’’ for me’, as he puts it. The old boys looked askance at such modern ideas as having a fridge in the car. His inheritance enabled Spurrier to lead a swinging life, hosting parties, going to Annabel’s and even meeting Jimi Hendrix. There’s a splendid photo of Spurrier decked out in full Austin Powers finery on his wedding day. But for all his modern ideas, there’s more than a touch of Wallace Arnold (Craig Brown’s spoof clubbable Tory) about Spurrier’s prose. He puts the words ‘gentrification’, ‘trim’ and ‘soap opera’ in inverted commas, as though they are dreadful neologisms and naturally ‘’phone’ is always written with an apostrophe in front.