Mellow Pinot

The late summer evenings take my mind back thirty years to a leafy lane on the Devon-Dorset border, the western edge of the countryside familiar to readers of Thomas Hardy’s novels. We had spent the day otter-hunting, the finest of all forms of venery, requiring intimate understanding of the habits of the otter, but offering little threat to the animal’s life. The sport, alas, was on its last legs. A combination of the pesticide DDT (causing sterility all the way up the food chain) and the escape of American mink from fur farms (causing loss of habitat) had reduced English otter numbers to a condition from which they have taken a whole generation to recover. Nevertheless, we had enjoyed a grand day not merely looking at nature but being part of it.

Now we stood in a grassy, gritty lane as the last of the sunlight filtered sideways through the elms (there were still elms then), waiting for the rickety old red van, filled with straw, which would take the hounds home. The pure-bred otterhounds, large, lop-eared friendly beasts with Afro-curly coats, nuzzled our thighs, hoping we still had some of our lunchtime sandwiches left. The Master of the Hounds, a genial man with an outdoor face and the finest note on a hunting horn I have ever heard, had fallen into conversation with an older man who had come upon us in the lane.

It was the older man who caught and held my eye. He was tall and dignified, dressed in the English country manner: cloth cap, good tweed coat, corduroy or cavalry twill trousers (I can’t remember which). They talked of the usual country things—the harvest, the weather, the local fox hounds—though not, I noticed, of their families. A cloud of reserve seemed to hang over their kindly courtesies, as each spoke with studied care. Eventually the older man resumed his walk and the Master turned to us. “That was Colonel Dugdale,” he said softly. “He did everything for those girls.”

Everything promptly fell into place. The newspapers had been full of one Bridget Rose Dugdale, who in the course of getting a degree from Oxford and a doctorate from London University, had got the idea that her life should be spent supporting the cause of the Irish Republican Army. At the time the IRA was short of cash; no doubt the Irish bars in certain American cities were not taking enough in and Colonel Qadhafi of Libya was feeling parsimonious. Anyway, Dr. Dugdale burgled her father’s country house and stole the family treasures. Later she was one of a gang that broke into a big house near Dublin and made off with some really good pictures, including a Vermeer. The thing about Vermeers is that there are not very many of them—perhaps thirty-six. The old Dutchman painted them to give mankind joy, not to provide collateral for the purchase of armaments.

I am not clever enough to debate the ins and outs of the Irish Question. What lingers in the mind is the immense sadness which surrounded the father. No wonder he was reticent, even by English standards. More than anything it was his hopes, it seemed to me, that had been stolen from him.

To have your hope taken away is not natural. It is not an everyday tragedy, the sort of sadness that Hardy, more than most poets, perceived beneath the decencies of country life. Losing hope is like losing the companionship of your shadow. This seemed to me a tragedy caused by an idea. The Turks have a saying, balik bashdan koka— “the fish begins stinking from the head.” There’s nothing harmless about ideas.

Good then to commend to you a wine that goes straight to the heart. It is a Pinot Noir from California, but drunk blind you would think you were in the presence of a burgundy as elegant as Proust’s Madame de Guermantes. The pellucid red, pale around the edges, is the color of good burgundy; it makes the polish on your glass shine brighter, not like the oily integument of port, still less the limpid trout-stream blue of gin. There is a whiff of oak, a slight and pleasing sweetness, and a lingering wininess which rises right through the sinuses as though you were Caruso or Gigli projecting a top “D” from between your eyebrows (any tenor will tell you what I mean). This nectar is the 1998 vintage from Seven Peaks (no, not Twin Peaks), a winery in the Central Coast region of California. It would go well with any mellow cheese, say Stilton, Gorgonzola, or Brie. May you mellow well with it into autumn.