Zoe Strimpel

What the Cambridge dons drink

My fine wine masterclass from the Dionysus of King's College

  • From Spectator Life
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In June last year, King’s College Cambridge made more than £1 million from an auction of just 41 lots from its wine cellar. Not bad for a college that until just a few years ago had a hammer and sickle flag hanging in its student bar. But the Marxist sympathies of some of its legendary fellows and students stand little chance against the viticultural genius of the cellar’s buyer: Peter de Bolla, a scholar of 18th century literature and aesthetics. Included in the bonanza sale were 12 bottles of 1999 Echezeaux, an apparently legendary grand cru from Henri Jayer, for which someone bid £100,000. De Bolla had bought them on release and, to give some indication of the return on his investment, when he bought the 1996 vintage he had paid £31.11 per bottle.

De Bolla is the head boffin at the King’s cellar. But Cambridge’s most elite professoriat is dotted with grey-haired men – scholars of texts ancient and modern – whose expertise and knowledge about wine rivals (and at times may even supersede) their academic attainment. Among the select crew whose lord and king is de Bolla there is one that stands out: his old friend and colleague Professor Simon Goldhill, a classicist and something of a Dionysus figure.

My first experience of Professor Goldhill’s bacchanalian approach to conviviality came ten years after I, along with all other undergraduates studying English literature at Cambridge, had read and been examined on his seminal book Reading Greek Tragedy. A decade later I had returned to Cambridge for an MPhil in Gender Studies. My then-boyfriend , a historian of 17th century Englishmen in Syria, had a position at an institute run by Goldhill. My ex could not attend its summer party, but I went along anyway. The memorable evening involved celebrations in Goldhill’s rooms opposite the famous chapel, with fast-depleting and endlessly topped-up decanters and flagons of old Burgundies and Bordeaux sitting among rare-looking bibles and art books.

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