Andrew Jefford

‘Bottles symbolise a sort of plenty: the apogee of the harvest home’

Another house move – the eighth in 10 years. this is too often for a peaceful life, and too often to retain much wine. each successive move shakes away a few more bottles.

We haven’t, this time, moved to somebody else’s former house for an agreed price, but set about building our own. (or, to be more accurate, getting it built.) As anyone who has ever undertaken this will confirm, what you naively assume is ‘the budget’ quickly casts adrift of its moorings. After that, it’s a question of scraping together whatever you can in order to complete the house in a utilitarian rather than an aesthetic sense. my surviving wine collection became part of the scrapings: c’est la vie. Last saturday we stumbled over the rubble that passes for a front garden, and collapsed inside. (my wife was already on piratical crutches after a window-cleaning accident.) since then, chaos.

With one exception. It’s not a cellar as such, but the house is built on a hill, meaning the crawlspace under the northwest corner is big enough to stand up in. that is, de facto, the cellar – and our lovely builders Amaury and Abdel lashed out with a bit of extra concrete to make it look the part.

I still have a few wine racks and a flotsam of leftovers, including most of a case of my first ever truly successful red Burgundy purchase, Pierre Labet’s Beaune 1er Cru, Coucherias 2012 (a lovely wine, graceful and grave, thanks not least to its whole-bunch fermentation); the last remaining half-bottles of the toothsome Château Patache d’Aux, médoc Cru Bourgeois 2009 (a total bargain at just over €7 each when purchased); a bit of the big-boned napanook 2009; some stern but rewarding Cornas, La Geynale 2012 from vincent Paris; a few bottles of unpredictable, but unfailingly intriguing Barolo from 2008, 2009 and 2010; and some local Languedoc favourites, including Pic st Loup from Domaine de mortiès and Domaine de l’hortus. oh yes, and some top grower Champagnes (see Panel Tasting, p95), which a generous friend sent me, wildly eclipsing the kindness of the simple favour it recompensed.

In storage terms, I’ve been winging it for the last seven years with a north-facing room – ideally icy in winter, but unnervingly warm in summer; you could almost hear the bottles sigh with relief as I positioned them on the racks in their new home. my brain, boiling with work, admin, childcare and housemoving mayhem, had somehow decided it was a priority to sort out the little cellar. As I was down there, I remembered a scene from edgar reitz’s film Heimat, in which one of the characters goes down to a cellar to retrieve some wine and lingers there, in the shadowy semi-darkness, looking about in contented, almost blissful gratitude. noticing some apples on a shelf, he reaches up and eats one, prolonging the moment’s quietness and peace, and intensifying its sense of plenty. War’s opposite, in other words. ( Heimat traces life in the rural hunsrück, which lies between the German mosel and the nahe regions, between 1919 and 2000.)

If wine cellars can be said to have a meaning, that’s it. Personal catastrophe (of which war is a vast accumulation) is a smashing of all the bottles in the cellar. the bottles themselves are not wealth, exactly – that would be the silverware upstairs. Bottles are the symbol of a different sort of plenty: the apogee of the harvest home, the season’s generosity shored against ruin, and shored in a form perfectly calibrated to the human lifetime: chaotically young, with everything to learn; beautiful in early maturity; understated but wise, harmonious and resolved in late maturity, before the inevitable decline sets in.

But they’re not just a liquid sheaf of wheat or basket of quinces, since they also intoxicate in a gently familiar manner: they promise to bring emotion upstairs at the same time as they bring rare and beautiful aromas and flavours. It’s that emotional lure which accounts for our almost irrational reverence for the bottles – and for the cave below the hearth in which they will see out the years.

now, back to the boxes…