Society

It has become a commonplace fact, beloved of pub quizzes, that an Englishman, Christopher Merret, invented Champagne. There is even an element of truth to it: Merret gave a paper to the Royal Society in 1672 outlining how to make wine fizzy. But he wasn’t the first to induce bubbles in a bottle. In the West Country, scientifically inclined gentlemen had been doing it for years — only they used cider, not wine. In the 17th century there was a wine crisis in England. Home-grown vines had been killed by prolonged cold weather — something now known as the Little Ice Age — and imports were severely curtailed because of

The cellars at Combe Florey, the house in Somerset in which I grew up, were a place of mystery and fear. You walked down wide, shallow stone steps to a large door on which my father had stuck a postcard which read ‘I know who you are’ when, in a fit of paranoia, he decided that a neighbour was stealing his wine. Once through the door, there were more steps down until you found yourself in a large, cool, faintly musty-smelling room. Bats, furious at the disturbance, swooped around you until they sulkily returned to their lair in some dark corner. Off each wall were more cellars: in one, a

James Bond’s ‘Vodka martini, shaken, not stirred’ will never be a mark of sophistication for me because vodka and I go back too far. Our association began when I was nine or ten in that brief interlude after the second world war when Russia was still ‘our noble ally’. Vodka was simply one more new thing, marketed when pizza was still called ‘pizza pie’ and the strict law pushed for years by the butter interests was dropped, permitting margarine to be sold coloured instead of white. Putting margarine ‘on the table’, once unforgiveable, quickly became common practice, but vodka’s image problems were harder to shake. The USA is a whiskey