Hugh Johnson
‘Samuel Johnson or Len Evans, take your pick’
We haven’t categorically been drinking more in the various stages of housearrest, but we have certainly been drinking better. Australia’s national wine hero, the inimitable Len Evans, had a formula that applies to situations like this. Knowing Len, he probably had a t-shirt inscribed with it. His equation went: I may have 20,000 drinks left in my life – say, for the sake of argument, five drinks a day x 365 = about 2,000 (certainly an underestimate in his case) over 10 years equals 20,000. Len wasn’t going to waste any of them on plonk. ‘There’s more good wines than that’, said Len. ‘That’s what I’m going to drink.’
So yes, this household has not wasted any of its remaining glasses, however many or few they may be. Samuel Johnson said: ‘When a man knows he’s going to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.’ Hanged, perhaps not, but who knows where the nasty bug is lurking?
Samuel Johnson or Len Evans, take your pick. If you have a cache of wines to look forward to, you start opening them. If your supplies come straight from the high street, you work your way through the more aspirational labels. In this home it’s the bottles below stairs, or more strictly, in the old coal-hole. It was Steven Spurrier who said, or perhaps quoted: ‘One always comes back to claret in the end.’ We need no prompting to drink it to his memory (see ‘A life well lived’, Decanter May issue).
Clarets from before 1990 are getting rarer here. And it’s dawned on me that I’m only keeping most of them for Auld Lang Syne. So the 1970s have all gone, and what would we gain, or learn, by keeping any of the 1980s? Even 1982s? If I looked up their current prices (something easy, and all too tempting, to do) I’d probably sell them. Then the 1990s. Keep one or two ’90s out of curiosity; have some lovely drinking with the ’96s; offer the rest to the highest bidder.
Enjoy 2000s, and everything else up to 2009. Revel in the ’09, but think hard about the 2010s. There’s good future drinking in almost all ranks. Drink up the 2011s, ’12s, ’13s, ’14s (some real fun here) and go easy on the 2016s and onwards: the hard edge of Cabernet strongly suggests waiting longer. 2017 is the one to start with; heavens, it’s four years old already. But remembering the two wise men, Sam and Len, sends me off for my corkscrew, my decanter, and the company (harder to find these days) of convivial companions. D Hugh Johnson OBE is a world-renowned author