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. It was not a large restaurant. Sonia would never have compromised her standards by cooking for too many covers. So the senior political trade was good for prestige, but not always for profits (unless it was Willie Whitelaw, whose intake compensated for the detective’s reticence).
Anyway, one day Neville asked if I would help him to finish off a bottle which a customer had barely broached. We quickly concluded that the customer must have been a halfwit. Although I cannot remember the year, it was the Williams & Selyem reserve and exuded finesse. Whether because of meanness or availability — I forget which — my nuptial friends had to make do with the ordinary pinot noir, which was also jolly good. A quarter of a century later, the overlooked bottle was still fine. We opened it. Half an hour later, we decanted it. Two hours after that, the last drops still retained structure. We decided that it was just a little over the hill and would have been better three years earlier. But it had been a very high hill.
I thought that the original begetters had given up and that Williams Selyem was no longer made. Not so; they did sell out, but the new owners have retained the ethos rooted in terroir. The wine has attained cult status. Clubs of devotees have sprung up, and you have to belong in order to visit the vineyards. The wine sells out virtually as soon as it is released. Knowing Californians, a hasty and impatient lot, we can be sure that a lot of it is drunk far too young. It is virtually impossible to get hold of earlier vintages which have had the chance to bank some bottle age. Try it if you come by a bottle; it may not be easy to find.
Bottles, clubs and nuptials lead on to the Society of Odd Bottles. At a recent meeting, we honoured Charlie and Florrie, the betrothed couple, though they do not yet know it. Charlie is already a young Nimrod: Florrie well on the way. It was decided that he should become chief of the imperial junior bottles: she, of the very junior bottles. Readers will be kept informed of their progress.
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