I steeled myself for January the fourth. La Vendange. Harvest Day.
***
I hadn’t set my alarm for the morning of the fourth. Given the heavy night ahead, I reasoned a little lie-in would keep me refreshed for longer, but still I woke early. I ate a hearty brunch of plain porridge and sliced banana. Marathon food. I studied my tasting notes one last time and practised stretching. I needed to be strong and supple for the task ahead. Lunch was a huge bowl of plain pasta – a reservoir of starch to line my stomach, with no strong flavours to strain my palate or bruise my sense of smell.
I changed into my dinner jacket and black bow tie, as specified in the invitation, and set out for Minstrel Hall, catching the tube from Little Chalfont. My only luggage, also as instructed, was a transparent folder containing some sheet music. But I tell a lie – I had also secreted two tightly wrapped sachets of Madame Joubert’s Lekker Medisyne Trommel in a secret pocket inside my dinner jacket, fresh from my brand-new stash. I’ve always been a fan of performance-enhancing drugs, and for the ordeal ahead I needed all the help I could get.
I arrived a few minutes before four. Which entrance to the Institute should I use? I approached the colossal main doorway on Long Acre, flanked by its muscular cherubs, forbidden to all but fully fledged Minstrels. A large, unsmiling, bearded man wearing full morning dress and holding a staff topped with a carved pine cone, stood in my way.
“I am here for La Vendange. Should I use the side entrance?”
“For La Vendange, you may use this entrance, Mr Hart. If you fail the test, this will be the last time you ever use this doorway.”
How cheerful, I thought. I wondered how he knew my name. He didn’t move.
“May I come in then?”
“Only wine may be consumed in Minstrel Hall.” He looked down at the small bottle of water I had purchased from the shop at the station.
“I see. I’ll finish this off then.”
I wandered down the road, retrieved one of the wraps of Madame Joubert’s, tore it open and poured the contents into the water bottle. The water fizzed and turned the familiar pale pink. I drank it slowly, not wanting to get hiccups, and sauntered back to the entrance, dropping the empty bottle in a bin. The bearded man stood aside and I pushed on the heavy wooden door. It yielded slowly and I entered the Worshipful Institute of the Minstrels of Wine.
I found myself in an atrium decorated rather like the lobby of a stately home. There were polished floorboards underfoot and a chandelier overhead. The walls were decorated with wooden reliefs showing cavorting animals – bulls, tigers and snakes intertwined with ivy and grape vines. Two more bearded men with pine-cone-topped staffs stood to attention by one of the internal doors.
“Mr Hart. If you would come with me, please?” I followed one of them into a small, wood-panelled security office. There were three CCTV monitors on a shelf, showing various angles of the street outside, and a neatly arranged desk with a large metal safe below.
The man leant his staff against the wall, examined my sheet music folder then picked up a security wand and proceeded to stroke it along my arms and legs. It gave a little squawk as it touched my watch and twice more as it skimmed the wallet and phone in my jacket pocket. “You’ll have to leave those with me,” he stated, flatly.
“I promise I won’t phone a friend.”
“No recording devices or anything that could conceal a recording device are permitted in the Great Hall.”
“Right.” I removed my watch and handed over the wallet and phone. The man removed a key from his pocket and crouched down, unlocking the safe. Over his shoulder I saw the safe was divided into shelves on which sat shallow trays, each displaying a neat little name sticker. My possessions were deposited on the empty tray marked ‘Hart’. He locked the safe and rose to his feet.
“I’ll show you to the Great Hall.” We left the office just as another apprentice Minstrel entered through the main door. It was Hervé, a studious Frenchman from Bordeaux. He smiled in recognition.
“Ah, bonjour Felix! ’Appy New Year!” He extended his arm as he approached and I did the same. The steward quickly placed himself between us.
“No touching after the security clearance,” he growled. “Monsieur, please wait here while I show Mr Hart to the hall.”
Hervé did as he was told. “Bonne chance, Felix!” he called as I was led away.
“Same to you Hervé, best of luck.”
The security man opened another door, its panels painted with twisting vines, heavy with grapes, and waved me through. I entered a short, wood-panelled corridor, bare but for a small chandelier hanging from the high ceiling. A shorter man, clean-shaven, stood at the opposite end.
“Good afternoon, Mr Hart. You are about to enter the Great Hall. You are not a Minstrel so you are forbidden to view anything beyond this point until you are at the examination table. I will be your guide from here. Please put on this blindfold.” He held out a black satin mask with an elastic strap. It looked rather like something a comedy burglar would wear, but without the eye holes.
“Thank you. I don’t believe you said your name.”
“You will refer to me as Frog.”
“Pardon?”
“Frog. You may call me Frog.”
“Is that your real name? Or are you French?”
A pained expression danced, just for a second, across Frog’s face. “Neither. Frogs are the guides for the Initiates in La Vendange. It is a very old tradition.”
“I see. Well, nice to meet you, Frog.”
I pulled the mask over my eyes. It did its job very thoroughly – I was in complete darkness. Frog took hold of my wrist and I heard him turn the door handle. There was a waft of warmer air and the silence of the corridor gave way to the low murmur of hundreds of voices. He led me forward and I was conscious of entering a very large room. When you are blind, your other senses are heightened. I could feel the Madame Joubert’s coursing through my veins, the energy in my tingling muscles, the clear, quick head and an intense feeling of wellbeing, as though I were glowing inside.
As Frog walked me slowly into the room, I turned my head from left to right, taking in the waves of sound washing over me. I perceived there were many people to either side and behind me too. The voices also appeared to come from above, as if I were in the centre of an arena of steeply tiered seating. I counted the steps on the wooden floor as Frog guided me forward. Twenty, thirty, forty paces then we halted, the guide giving my wrist a quick squeeze, as if to say stop.
“You are at your examination table,” he spoke close to my ear. “We will wait for the remainder of the Initiates to assemble before removing your blindfold.”
I strained to try and hear different conversations. There were low, male voices and higher female ones. I could hear the occasional word from the closer members of the audience, a snatch of French here, an American twang there. There were a few coughs and conspiratorial guffaws, and, from the female voices, the occasional tinkle of laughter.
“When your blindfold is removed, the examination will commence,” Frog said, keeping his voice low. “You must identify each of the wines in front of you, stating the region and the principal grape varieties. You will tell me your answer, which you must do quietly, so as not to give clues to your fellow Initiates.”
I heard some shuffling and someone came to a halt a few feet away, presumably in the tender guiding hands of their own Frog.
“If you are correct, or close enough, I will nod. If you are not, I will raise my hand and you will incur a penalty point. You will then proceed to the next wine. If you incur five penalty points, you will be deemed to have failed the examination. If you spit, or spill any wine, you will also be deemed to have failed.”
“And what happens then?”
“You will be removed from the room and you will never set foot in the Worshipful Institute of the Minstrels of Wine again.”
Right. Well, that’s straightforward enough, if rather ruthless. “How many
wines are there?”
“You will see presently.”
I took some deep breaths. I was beginning to feel rather warm in my dinner jacket and my face was sweating under the mask. The Madame Joubert’s was making my muscles shiver with energy. I had to fight the urge to jump up and down like a madman. A tiny drop of sweat rolled down the side of my nose and onto my top lip. I touched it with my tongue and my taste buds exploded into life.
I tasted salt, a yeasty, meaty salt, like a rich piece of serrano ham, just sliced from a leg unhooked from the ceiling of a tapas bar in Seville, at the height of summer. But also an undertone of sea salt, like a beach holiday in Anglesey… no, not Anglesey, Cornwall! Like the taste of your hair when you’ve spent an hour on a trawler off the coast of Cornwall, the southern coast of course, not the north, and…
Christ! What was happening? I wiped my hand across my mouth, smelling supermarket soap, black metallic paint mixed with iron and the tiniest trace of polyethylene from the water bottle… My God! My senses were overwhelming me, my synapses firing wildly. Had I taken too much Madame Joubert’s? Were they pumping something into the air?
“All the Initiates are now in position,” murmured Frog.
I could smell his sweat and a combination of shampoo, deodorant and musky aftershave – the latter applied some days ago.
“After the Invocator has spoken, the examination will begin.”
“The who?” I asked, my leg jiggling, but my question was drowned by a trumpet fanfare blasting from somewhere just ahead. It was deafeningly loud and sounded live rather than a recording. The trumpets were followed by the pounding of drums. The fanfare ended and there was silence. Then a man’s voice spoke out, loud and clear:
Welcome, Initiates, on this the twelfth day of Dionysus!
The day of Theemeter!
Behold! The clearing of the wine.
And now this pompe arrives
Let the contest begin!
And may all win, in the manner of Dikaiopolis.
What in God’s sweet name are you banging on about, I wondered. Still, at least we were about to get on with it. I felt like a sprinter waiting for the starter’s gun. I could barely stand the tension.
I felt Frog’s hands remove my blindfold. I blinked in the light for a second and then gasped. I was in the centre of a large theatre, surrounded on three sides by the audience. As I had perceived, the rows of seats were tiered. There were a dozen rows, tiered steeply from ground level to way above my head. The theatre was full and I guessed that most of the Institute’s thousand members were present.
There was a sort of VIP box halfway up one side, in which sat an older man on a throne holding a staff – I decided he must be the Invocator. The audience were dressed in their finery, dinner jackets for most of the men, ball gowns for the women. I also spotted many varieties of regional dress, Japanese men in formal striped kimono and African women in brightly printed dresses. I assumed that, somewhere up there, Joan from Gatesave and perhaps Paul and Gillian from the old days at Charlie’s Cellar were watching.
The cream of the world’s wine industry had turned out to see me sink or swim.
At the front, from where the fanfare had come, a full orchestra was seated on a low stage. In front of them stood a bench on which a collection of musical instruments lay, no doubt for the recital part of the examination.
On the floor of the theatre, overlooked by the audience, were fifteen very long tables, running parallel to one another, the kind of thing you might have seen at a large medieval banquet. Each was perhaps twenty yards in length and covered in white linen. We fifteen Initiates were standing at the head of our own tables, accompanied by our Frogs – our personal examiner and potential executioner.
But the most intimidating sight lay on the tables. On each was a perfectly straight line of wine glasses, spaced just a couple of inches apart. They stretched the entire length of the floor and each contained a quarter-glass of wine. My blood ran cold as I tried to estimate how many there were.
The glasses closest to us contained pale white wine, and I could see the colour darkening as the line stretched away. Towards the halfway mark the colour changed to pink, then to red, with presumably the darkest, most intense wines at the end, nearest the orchestra. And we were allowed just five wrong answers before we were kicked out!
I looked at my fellow Initiates. It seemed a long time since we christened ourselves Les Quinze and drank our bodyweight in Patagonian Malbec. Everyone else was facing forward, grimly contemplating their row of wines stretching into the distance. My table was roughly in the middle of the fifteen. To my right was Hugo, a French sommelier from Paris, to my left an Italian woman who worked as a buyer for a chain of upmarket delis. I spotted Valentina, my Argentinian winemaking squeeze, at the far end, frowning defiantly at her table, looking wonderful in a black, figure-hugging dress.
“There are one hundred and eighty wines on the table, Mr Hart,” whispered Frog, removing any doubt. “You have two hours. You may begin.”
A large digital stopwatch, high in the corner of the hall, began its countdown. I don’t know which of my fellow Initiates moved first – I was focused on my table to the exclusion of all else. I took a deep breath and grasped the first glass by the stem.
Before I had even swirled the glass, I spotted the fine bubbles rising in the pale golden wine. A quick sniff confirmed it was Champagne, a good one, probably vintage. I concentrated on the aroma – it jumped with delicious brioche and biscuit aromas, and it was clean and creamy. I took a mouthful – a Chardonnay-dominated blend for sure, maybe a pure Blanc de Blancs. I looked around for the spittoon and with a shock remembered the no spitting rule. I turned to see Frog watching me closely. I swallowed the mouthful. Christ Felix, take smaller sips! Many more gulps like this and you’ll pass out before you’re quarter of the way through.
“Chardonnay, a small component of Pinot Noir, Champagne region,” I whispered.
Frog nodded and I grasped the next glass. Small bloody sips, Felix. I could see this one had bubbles too. A sniff conjured up a drunken evening in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter, crammed into a hot bar, a beautiful Catalan woman with long slim limbs nuzzling my neck…
“Macabeo, Parellada and Xarel-lo. Penedès region.”
Another nod. Another glass. More bubbles. This one less obvious, a creamy lemon bouquet, possibly Chardonnay, but richer than the first wine, with punchier, tropical fruit notes. The tasting room at Charlie’s Cellar appeared in front of me, one of the buying team teaching me the difference between sparkling wines. Who was it? That clipped, precise way of speaking – it was Paul, probably sitting somewhere in this very audience. In my mind’s eye I could see him holding up a lean Tasmanian sparkling wine next to a more generous Hunter Valley fizz…
“Chardonnay again. Hunter Valley, Australia.”
The nod again. Thank God. That’s three down, only one hundred and seventy-seven to go.
At that moment there was a buzz and a quiet chorus of ‘Oooh!’ from the crowd. I looked around and saw one of the Frogs with his hand raised. It was Fernanda, the Chilean winemaker. Poor Fernanda, she was a nice lady – a little intense for my taste – but I felt sorry for her making an error so early on. I wondered what she had misidentified. Maybe the Aussie fizz had fooled her or was there a fiendishly difficult wine a little further down the line? Whatever, I mustn’t be distracted.
I saw that people were looking towards the high, vaulted roof and I followed their gaze. I gasped out loud when I spotted the huge screen suspended from the ceiling. Projected upon it were each of our surnames in alphabetical order. Fernanda Guerra’s name, just above my own, had a big red cross next to it. There was room for five crosses next to each name, after which… goodbye.
Back to the wines. Another swirl and a sniff. A green tinge to this one and only the tiniest hint of bubbles. I tasted the wine and I was sitting at a loud, raucous table in Lisbon, very late at night. The table was piled high with seafood – salted
cod, sardines, little clams and huge tiger prawns. A pretty woman, Carolina, with long curly dark hair rested her arm across my shoulders and laughed as she poured vinho verde from a jug into simple glass beakers…
“Alvarinho dominates, I suspect a little Loureiro. Minho region.”
Frog nodded, I could see he was impressed – though not as impressed as I’d been later that night, as the fabulous Carolina writhed astride me in her tiny apartment overlooking the Cais do Ginjal… Focus, for Christ’s sake Felix!
The next wine was an Albariño from the rain-blessed lands of Galicia. I recalled sheltering from a howling storm in a tiny tapas bar, nestling in the shadow of the moss-covered Catedral de Santiago de Compostela, slipping a blasphemous hand round my partner’s waist and drawing her close as we clinked glasses, enjoying the way her rain-soaked blouse pressed against my chest…
Another buzz and I looked up. A cross next to Hervé, the French friend I’d bumped into at the entrance. Maybe the Albariño had foxed him. Back to work.
A peachy, floral Gavi di Gavi from Piedmont conjured a roaring Courmayeur après-ski session with Clémence, my stunningly athletic ski coach. A Sicilian Fiano, gulped by the carafe in a shaded square one afternoon in Palermo. Then a South African Sauvignon Blanc, spotting whales from a sunny cliff-top café in Hermanus, the wind howling off the Southern Ocean.
I started to hit my stride, a quick twist of my wrist and the wine would swirl in the glass as I brought it to my nose. Then a scene would impose itself, sometimes an eavesdropped conversation between senior buyers in the tasting room, occasionally a moment from a tasting lecture in the Institute’s own Théâtre de la Véraison, but more often a taverna in some pretty European town and a beautiful woman, skin darkened by the Mediterranean sun, winking at me over a table heaving with local food and wine.
Then it would come to me and I’d whisper to Frog, he’d nod, and we’d move onto the next glass.
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