Invest in property, instructs my accountant. But I can't afford to buy a flat - let alone a house - in London, so I rent and wait, patiently, for a recession to glide over the horizon, bringing negative equity to millions and, I hope, a place on which I can pay the mortgage. I don't have a pension. I don't have a savings account, apart from the one that will be claimed by the taxman come January. So it makes perfect sense to spend £500 on two cases of en primeur Bordeaux that might, by the time the wine comes of age, have risen in value - but then, again might not.
A trip to Peru aside, this is the most exciting thing I have ever bought. They say you always remember your first case of wine. And by that, they mean not a cheap mixed case of pallid Italian whites and robust Vin de Pays d'Oc from down the road, but a serious set of bottles, each one the same. I feel so ridiculously, stupendously, adolescently intoxicated by my wine (and all the more so because of the romance of it not yet being in bottles, but ageing in oak barrels down in Bordeaux) that I don't think I shall ever be able to draw the corks on the bottles. There is plenty of time for my ardour to cool. And perhaps, by the time it starts being drunk, Bordeaux 2000, one of the most hyped vintages anyone can remember, will have proven itself to be all mouth and no trousers.
It seems unlikely, though. I chose my cases with frenzied diligence. Not being in a position to judge them myself, I bought Wine magazine, in which Robert Joseph, Charles Metcalfe and Margaret Rand had compiled lists of the top wines, rated them out of 100 (in the Parker style) and added a tantalising few words of description. It was like reading a lonely hearts column yet, with all that fevered expectation and the tug-of-loves between merchants selling Bordeaux dry, these hearts weren't very lonely. Then I checked out what the London Evening Standard's Andrew Jefford had to say. He had drawn up a list of the 15 best-value chateaux. With price-raising rampant and first-growth wines such as Chateau Margaux selling at upwards of £130 a bottle, this was very necessary. Lastly, I spent hours cross- referencing with verdicts from Steven Spurrier and the rest of the tasting team at decanter.com, and worried myself silly because I didn't have a list (though I did have titbits, here and there) of scores from Robert Parker, the hugely influential critic whose palate dictates Bordeaux prices.
None the less, my final list - severely trimmed by availability, or rather lack of it - turned out to be sculpted more by impulse than logic. They are saying that Left Bank Bordeaux, with its Cabernet-based wines, is better this year than the Right, so I stuck to those. On the back of my sweaty envelope, toted round for days before I got out the credit card, were the following, all priced in the region of £200 a case: Chateau Cantenac-Brown (Margaux) - given only three out of five stars from Decanter, but commended for its "big, meaty colour, very ripe, slightly animally fruit", and called "impressive" by Wine, which gave it a 90-94 rating; Chateau la Lagune (Haut-Medoc) - "One of the vintage's best buys? 90-95" (Wine), and "charming, even seductive, but lacks concentration" (Decanter); Chateau du Tertre (Margaux) - an Andrew Jefford recommendation, with 90-92 Parker points and four Decanter stars. Don't ask me why, but I bought a case of the Chateau du Tertre for £180 from Berry Brothers & Rudd and immediately began to feel disappointed. "It seems rather plain and rustic," wrote Wine, which gave it a rubbish score. Had I gone ugly early? Panicked and settled for the steady, bespectacled guy who wouldn't let me down, who would please my mother and whom none of my friends would try to steal?
That was when I fell for the second wine of Chateau Margaux, the Pavillon Rouge at £300 a case. It hadn't even been on my list. It was as if I'd got my first clumsy kiss out of the way before getting into the flash car of the flaneur who'd driven up from London to pick me up from the school gates. Wasn't this a foolhardy escapade that could only end unhappily? I hitched up my skirt and typed my credit card details on to an e-mail.
