A work of art

Sebastian Morello sings the praises of claret

Wine and education have ever been connected in my mind, long before I was of an age to partake with any seriousness of the former, or indeed the latter for that matter. My parents would sip crisp new world whites in the evening as they read novels, and in turn recreational cultivation of the mind was associated for me – as far back as my memory will take me – with Dionysian consolations.

Education turned out to be hard for me, for I was both slow and lazy, and this double disorder did not inspire in my teachers much affection for me; teachers who did not help the situation by being unfalteringly uninspired in every other way. But the occasional escape from my boarding school to a rural pub for a rough glass of house plonk marked a rare relief from the torments of that institution, and to me the stuff tasted like Elysian nectar.

Wine and education flanked my maturation. Wine carried me through my studies at drama school, oiling my memory as I sought to retain great tracts of Shakespeare’s prose, and it was a solace next to the humiliation of daily wearing tights. Wine then walked with me as I entered the scary world of the wage-earner.

Wine accompanied me into my undergraduate degree in philosophy, undertaken through distance learning while I held down a full-time job. I read the necessary texts and wrote my essays in the evening after work while I sipped Port. At that time, I was renting a room on the top floor of Cardinal Manning’s old London home, and I treated his old cut glasses as my own.

While juggling my studies with my job, I read in times of relaxation Roger Scruton’s I Drink Therefore I Am for the purpose of cleansing my mind of the annoying analytic jargon which often made my chosen discipline unattractive to me. This book motivated me in many ways, one of which was to take more seriously the world of claret, as Bordeaux is known to the English. As in every other aspect of my life, then, I travelled from the new world to the old. Soon, however, I foolishly came to turn up my nose at anything other than claret.

Later, when studying under Scruton for postgraduate research, I found that he would not touch the house claret of Pall Mall’s Reform Club, in a private dining room of which he would conduct his lessons. Instead, our sapiential conversations were lubricated with a delicious Rioja. By this I was liberated from my slavish relationship with claret, and only at that point was I truly able to enjoy it: an important lesson for the spiritual life may be found therein.

Some months ago, I had an encounter with claret which reminded me of its bewitching properties. I was invited to a friend’s home for a dinner. The two other guests were a very close friend of mine – a director of an important publishing house – and an excitable Brazilian gentleman whom I had met once or twice before in passing. The Brazilian spent most of the evening seemingly prophesying an “imminent chastisement” and a “time of great universal suffering.” I nodded and laughed awkwardly at what seemed an odd dinner topic. I am not laughing now.

My friend, our host, served bottles of carefully decanted 1996 Chateau Marquis de Terme. It should have been drunk a few years ago, but it was still exquisite. This particular claret was one of the favourite wines of the treasonous heresiarch Thomas Jefferson; I suppose he had to judge right in something. This wine was really a work of art: full-bodied but not overpowering, sweet but not sickly, subtle tannins, a good long finish embracing each mouthful of the succulent lamb on our plates, each sip a burst of blackberries, dark cherries, and vanilla, all lush and velvety. If you stumble across a bottle, or better, a case, think carefully before you stumble on.

As I write I am confined to my home by the political powers, and like everyone else I am trying to protect family and self from a raging pandemic. I have discovered once again the deep relationship between wine and education, and why these mark two great consolations in this valley of tears. This plague-stricken time, during which we are cut off from the Sacraments, those very sources of the divine life and our true joy here below, requires some consolations so as not to be a cause of sheer despair: I present to you wine and books.