I am not sure when I first awoke to how institutions of higher education had been colonised by the apparatchiks, and how scholarship in this country would henceforth have to be conducted outside the academy, if it were to honour truth rather than orthodoxy as its goal. But two episodes certainly had a profound impact on me. The first was a ceremony I happened to witness at the University of Glasgow, on a day when my own invited lecture had been subjected to a semi-official boycott. A crowd of old farts in academic robes was conferring an honorary degree on Robert Mugabe. On the strength of what contribution to the life of the mind, I asked? Nobody could tell me. The second episode was the news of another honorary degree - that conferred on Elena Ceausescu by what was then the Polytechnic of Central London, in acknowledgement of her reputation as a chemist (a reputation denied by no Romanian chemist other than a few oddballs who had been locked up for their own protection).
Not everybody went along with the arse-licking that our establishment lathered on to the Ceausescus. Jessica Douglas-Home led a band of intrepid dissidents, who visited those in need, awakened the world to the facts and, at no little risk to themselves, defended the Romanian villages from Ceausescu's mad design to raze them to the ground, as he had razed Bucharest. If the Romanian countryside still lives, it is in part thanks to Douglas-Home and the trust that she founded - the Mihai Eminescu Trust, named after Romania's national poet.
The Mihai Eminescu Trust is the one example that I know of effective Romanian patriotism - and why should it matter that it was founded by an Englishwoman? Since the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu, the trust has taken on the task of reviving the Saxon villages of the sub-Carpathian region. Visitors will know the region's astonishing beauty, which provoked Ceausescu in the way that Paradise provoked Satan. But they may not have discovered that the area produces a more-than-palatable wine, and that this wine is available in Britain. True, the wine is produced by Germans, from a French grape, and matured in oak imported from Hungary. But if you are to subtract France, Germany and Hungary from Romania, precious little remains: certainly not Eminescu, Enescu or Ionescu, or any other 'escu, except perhaps Ceausescu or the fescue grass with which he hoped to cover the burial mounds of 20,000 villages.
La Cetate (which means "beside the castle") is a fruity Merlot produced in Oprisor by the Carl Reh Winery and available from Waitrose at £4.99. The 2000 has a vanilla finish that you can almost lick off the glass, and is deeper and fruitier than any other wine that you are likely to encounter at that price.
