Drink Bill Knott
I have been drinking the good stuff, ransacking what passes for a cellar in our Shepherd’s Bush flat. The pillage started in mid-march, when our usual supplies of vins de soif had been severely depleted, nobody was delivering anything, the supermarket shelves were bare and I wanted something to drink with a nice piece of trout.
The small hatch above the cellar is easy for the sylph-like Mrs K to negotiate (I fear becoming wedged in like a post-prandial Winnie the Pooh), so it was she who emerged with a bottle for our supper, a pleasingly dry, aromatic white from halfway up Mount Etna.
Very good it was, too, but the real treat was that it brought back the sights and smells of Sicily: the carpet of wild fennel in spring, the olive groves bulging with fruit in late summer, the pungent aroma of grappa-spiked espresso … airports may be deserted, but the memory can fly wherever it likes.
A case of Macon and another of Chinon arrived the next day, but I carried on plundering the cellar. A bottle of Assyrtiko brought back fond memories of wine-barhopping in Athens; a Barolo conjured up a misty autumn morning in Piemonte, as we tramped through tangled undergrowth in search of white truffles; a sip of Grüner Veltliner whisked me up an Austrian Alp more serenely than any ski lift.
This temporary stillness – even in the middle of a city, there is no traffic noise, no jets overhead, and the air seems almost bucolically pure – offers the chance to concentrate on the unalloyed, distraction-free pleasure of something unique and uplifting: a piece of music, perhaps, or a painting, or a poem. Or, indeed, a glass of great wine: the vinous version of Wordsworth’s ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’.
Too many bottles spend their lives in musty mausoleums, yearning, Miss Havisham-like, for the ‘special occasion’ that they were promised decades before, while age saps their vigour and dims their beauty. Recent experience has taught me that a bottle of really good wine at the peak of its powers is a special occasion in itself: a wallow in nostalgia, perhaps, but a delightful one.
Build an evening around it: choose the food to suit the wine, rather than the other way round, and keep it simple. Pick a few flowers for the table; put on some music, if you like, or just savour the silence. Then pour a glass from your newly liberated bottle and let it transport you to a happier time and place. You can catch up on the news tomorrow.
My cellar is now catastrophically depleted, but I do not regret a single drop. I will start the onerous task of building another cellarful of memories when this crisis has finally passed, at which point I will politely ask Mrs K to retrieve one of the few surviving inhabitants from beneath the floorboards: a bottle of Louis Roederer Cristal 2009. Now that really will be a special occasion.