Mon Jan 28, 2013 6:32 pm
Thanks, Luca--we've enjoyed the Donovan Bar at Browns as well, though the late-night jazz guitarist has sometimes been a bit insistent in volume when the bar was not crowded. They made an interesting variation on the Vesper when the Daniel Craig Casino Royale was released, using Hendricks gin and a cucumber garnish (to pick up the cucumber aromatics in the gin), which I found quite successful--refreshing in summer. I'll look into the other spots you mention. These days we're usually based at 100 Piccadilly (next door to Lord Peter), but range pretty freely around town.
NJS, you take me down memory lane! Back in the late 70s, on one of my first-ever visits to London as a freshly minted American undergraduate who'd never tasted vintage port, I wandered in to the Russell bar (I was staying nearby), dripping, on a perfectly foul autumn day. The bar was wonderfully atmospheric, but completely run down--beyond shabby chic to threadbare and smelling of mold. Nevertheless the worn chesterfields and bald velvet chairs were inviting, so I sat down and picked up the drinks list from one of the little marble-topped tables. One of the entries was an unspecified "vintage port," with a price for a single or a double. My impression of port, at that point formed entirely from literature, was that it was the thing to drink on a dank day. Being impecunious, I asked the barman for a single.
He had sized me up no doubt as a clueless and probably barbaric American yoof who probably smoked pot and traveled with a backpack containing not enough clean clothes. "My god, man," he said, looking pained. "At least get a double." He did not, in General Yamashita's phrase, look happy in his work. Thoroughly browbeaten, I acceded meekly. He stalked off and returned after some time with a smallish glass and a quite fine cut-glass mallet decanter, to the neck of which was attached, via a twisted rubber band, a very long cork stained nearly black. He poured out the wine, waited a moment, turned on his heel, and disappeared.
I took a first, sip, intending to savor. I was just learning about wine in those days, but even I could tell this was no ordinary tipple. I took another sip, and it was if an entire olfactory and gustatory symphony started playing at once, so rich and complex was the juice. I sat motionless for some time, lost in the sensations. Then I realized I had no idea what I was drinking--I didn't want it to be the last time I experienced this pleasure.
So I mentally calculated my remaining funds, thinking how best to approach the barman for information. When I'd finished my glass, I walked over to the bar, where the barman sat on his stool reading a newspaper, and asked for another glass. As nonchalantly as I could manage, I asked him, "By the way, what is this I'm drinking?"
He looked at me the way a middle-aged person will look at you over their reading glasses, though he was not yet middle aged and wore none. "Fonseca 1963," he said. "Is that good enough for you?"
I made a mental note, though neither the name nor the vintage meant anything to me then.
In hindsight, I have much more sympathy with the barman who, at the time, I thought insufferably rude, though I endured it quietly. When later I, as a newlywed, began to lay down the vintages of '80s Pichon Lalande, Margaux, Hermitage LaChapelle, Suduiraut, and the others that I looked forward to sharing with my wife in their maturity, I felt great satisfaction at the prospect of building and investing in our life together. We did have a chance to share a few of those bottles--'82 Pichon Lalande at Le Bec Fin to celebrate publication of her first book--but she didn't live to taste the vast majority. Now, I look for happy occasions to share them, always keeping her secretly in mind--these wines that, even in their contemporary vintages I can probably never afford to replace. But no matter how good the company, there's always a little disappointment, a sense that the wine has missed the audience worthy of it.
So now, when I think of that embittered barman at the Russell, I think of Alexandrian poet C.P. Cavafy's remark to E.M. Forster in 1918: "But there is one unfortunate difference between us [the British and the Greeks], one little difference. We Greeks have lost our capital – and the results are what you see. Pray, my dear Forster, oh pray, that you never lose your capital."
May none of us ever again lose our capital. And, in Churchill's words, never, never, never give in.
ooo000OOO