Wine - Roger Scruton sips the last summer wine sales
Published 19 September 2005
Merchants' summer sales hold delicious bargains, if you're quick enough
Each year the merchants send round their catalogues of fine French wines en primeur - wines usually lying "in bond" in France and just released for sale. Many people buy to "lay down", in the expectation that the wine will, by the time of maturity, be unobtainable at the opening price. This may be true for wines at the top of their price range, but it is emphatically not true of the wines that you and I normally drink. Wines in the middle range, which mature after five or six years, will suddenly give signs that they are "at their best" and may soon be entering their twilight period. At this moment, respectable merchants add them to their summer sales, often selling them off at half the original price. Your choice is simple: buy the wine at £12, and keep it for six years. Or buy it six years later for £6, without the trouble of keeping it, and knowing that it has been properly cellared meanwhile.
However, you must move fast. Make sure you are on the summer sale list, and when the brochure comes try to guess, from the wine, the grower, the year and the price, which are the bargains. It pays to order by telephone. The three merchants that I patronise - Berry Brothers, Corney & Barrow and Justerini & Brooks - are represented on the telephone by well-spoken young men who are a tribute to the public-school system, being able to drink their way through an entire catalogue and still retain an accurate memory of its contents. They have the well-known public-school virtue of fair play, and will respond to a direct question with a direct answer, such as "Quite frankly, it's crap", or "It took me a week to recover from that one".
As an example of what you can achieve, here are some of the bottles I have acquired this summer, all for between £5 and £8 a bottle: Olivier Leflaive's delicious white Pernand-Vergelesses from 2000; a fruity red Pernand-Vergelesses from 1996; a properly mature (2000) Bourgueil; a first-growth Chablis from 2002; Clos de l'Eglise, Lalande de Pomerol 1998; and some restorative half-bottles of 1998 claret at £2 a shot. I know I shouldn't be revealing this - but the sales are now over, and with any luck you will have forgotten my advice by next summer.
There is a beauty in laying down wine: a kind of faith in the future and in the perpetuity of manners and domestic life, which adds to the serene good humour with which the wine will eventually be poured from the bottle. But I don't need to remind you that such faith in the future finds precious little confirmation in the world today. With al-Qaeda undefeated, social mores crumbling and the madmen still in charge, what is there to say, save carpe diem?
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