The wines change, and we change with them. It is 1980, in Washington, and a girl gives me a bottle of 1974 Robert Mondavi Cabernet Sauvignon reserve as a birthday present. It would have been churlish not to drink it together, though I feared it would be too young. It was; much too young: too young, even, for Jimmy Savile. It was like eating green strawberries. Not that I admitted this to my companion. Knowing nothing about wine, she thought six years was old. If it lacked immediate appeal, she blamed her own lack of sophistication. Anyway, it was a pleasant evening.
Last week, an oenophile gathering, and a merchant produces a bottle of the same wine which he had picked up in a cheap mixed-case purchase. 1974 had been an excellent year in California. There was no reason why that wine should not have reached a gracious maturity. Even if a little over the hill, it had been a high hill; there was every hope of pleasure for a long way down. Alas, my expectations were dashed. That bottle had clearly suffered an unhappy childhood. It had turned into Pip’s sister: angry and embittered vinegar.
But it made me think back to 1980, a wonderful political vintage. That was an excellent time to be in Washington. The Reaganites were coming and the dollar was weak, thanks — I suppose he ought to be thanked for something — to Jimmy Carter. Although it would be too complimentary to compare him to vinegar, which has its uses, he sounded as if he drank little else. He had been a peanut farmer, hence the bumper sticker: ‘Roast Jimmy’s nuts.’
I and my friends tried not to drink vinegar. One of our favourite meeting places was Chez Maria, on M Street in Georgetown. The proprietor, Georges, was a blend of characters from Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad. He seemed to have spent most of his career knocking around the fringes of imperial decline, but always glossed over his military record. I suspect that it had been more than creditable. Georges had run a restaurant in Phnom Penh just before the Killing Fields and had begged his Cambodian chef to leave with him, unavailingly. ‘You ever hear what happened to him?’ I asked. ‘No. Only hope it was quick.’
That was a rare lapse into melancholy. Georges served a simple Franco-Vietnamese cuisine, with the seafood of Chesapeake Bay as a substitute for the Mekong, but it was the wine which drew us. With an outstanding palate, he had taken advantage of the ignorance of Washington wine merchants of that era. You could — we sometimes did — run an Yquem against California’s finest. France always won, but the New World was never disgraced.
One night, I was dining with John O’Sullivan. Georges said that he had a hideously early start. We rose to leave, but ‘No, no. Stay as long as you like. There are the keys; just lock up when you go. Help yourself from the fridge if you’d like any more dessert wine. We’ll settle up when you’re next in.’ We did have something else, but when I tried to pay for it, Georges’ American assistant refused to believe me. He produced the bill. Although not quite worthy of Prince Hal’s censure: ‘One halfpenny-worth of bread to this intolerable deal of sack’, there was a similarly Falstaffian contrast.
On another evening, someone approached our table. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I could not help overhearing your conversation and do you mind if I join you? I came to DC in search of good wine, high culture and right-wing politics. I think I have now found them all.’ That turned out to be Tom Harley, an excellent companion, who later became the head of Australian National Heritage. I often expressed scepticism about his duties. What was there to conserve, apart from some convict chains, a couple of boomerangs and one of Bradman’s bats (which would indeed be a treasure)?
Anyway, it was all good company, as the chimes at midnight incited the pulling of corks.
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