When a forgotten bottle turns out to be a treasure

I had not drunk the wine for 20 years, and nearly all the information which I thought that I had remembered turned out to be wrong. It was a Californian pinot noir. I had given friends a case in the late 1980s as a wedding present and one bottle had survived by oversight, like a Japanese warrior in the jungles of Borneo. So was it a happy oversight?

The wine’s history was very Californian. In the late 1970s, two friends called Williams and Selyem started buying pinot noir grapes and making wine in a garage. To begin with, this weekend hobby may not have been an entirely legal operation: cuvée bootlegger, perhaps. But the wine’s fame grew as the friends took over vineyards in the Russian River Valley, Sonoma County. Until then, Sonoma had been regarded as a hillbilly relation of Napa, producing wines that often ended up in cardboard boxes and deserved no gentler fate. Messrs Williams and Selyem changed all that. Within a very few years, they achieved world-class status, with pinot noir at least as good as any produced outside Burgundy.

I was introduced to it by Neville Blech when he ran the Mijanou restaurant, much admired by Tory cabinet ministers and by Roy Jenkins; some would say that was a distinction without a difference. Neville had a superb wine list, which may explain Roy’s enthusiasm, and his wife Sonia was an outstanding chef. I can still taste her ravioli aux truffes, and never understood why Mijanou was not deluged with rosettes. It fed almost every member of Mrs Thatcher’s cabinets, though not the Lady herself. There was only one drawback. If the minister — Northern Ireland Secretary or Home Secretary, say — had a detective, he had to come too and would have a table to himself, drinking water to accompany the house menu.