David Dickinson - Death of a wine merchant

‘Can we prove it? That it’s not proper claret, I mean?’ asked Powerscourt, thinking of Charles Augustus Pugh grilling some unfortunate wine merchant in the Old Bailey.

‘Very difficult. Almost impossible,’ said Sir Pericles, rubbing his hands together cheerfully. ‘For every witness the defence calls to pronounce it a fake, the prosecution will counter with one who says that it is the real thing, maybe the real thing in a bad year, but still the real thing.’

‘What about the money?’ said Powerscourt as another train of thought struck him.

‘What do you mean about the money?’

‘Sorry, I was thinking. If we could show that Colvilles bought their supplies for a lot less than everybody else in the same year, mightn’t that show that they weren’t buying genuine claret?’

Sir Pericles stared at the three open bottles on the table. ‘On the face of it, it would. But they would come back then with a different sort of argument. They buy in great bulk so they usually get a discount. Or they have just begun trading with a new firm in Bordeaux who offered an enormous discount on the first year’s supply to win the contract. Or their suppliers were able to buy a lot of wine cheaply by waiting for the end of the season when prices always go down if it’s not a good year. Always remember, most years are not good years. And,’ Sir Pericles rummaged about in his bag once more, ‘if you can persuade any of the money men who work for the wine merchants like the Colvilles, or even Berry Bros. amp; Rudd, to let you inspect their account books, I’ll buy you your very own vineyard in the Medoc.’

‘We don’t seem to have made much progress, Sir Pericles,’ said Powerscourt sadly. ‘Nothing that would help us in court at any rate.’

‘I wouldn’t say that,’ said Freme. ‘You asked me to find out if there was anything suspicious about the Colville wines. I am happy to say there is, certainly about the claret. I shall continue my researches with various other Colville offerings. I shall ask around in the wine trade generally. Discreetly, of course. And now, before I take my leave, I promised you another recipe. This one,’ he pulled a slim volume out of the side pocket of his bag, ‘is the one with the lemon peel. It comes from The Art and Mystery of Vintners and Wine Coopers , 1692. “How to make Rhenish Wine: Take one handful of dried limon peels and put them into ten or twelve gallons of white wine, and put in one pint of damask rose water; then rowl it up and down, and lay it upright, and open the bung of it, and take a little branch of clary and let it steep twenty-four hours; and take it out and it will taste very well.”’

‘I cannot imagine what that would have tasted like, Sir Pericles, I shudder to think.’

‘Let me leave you with something better, Lord Powerscourt. We were travelling earlier on the lower slopes of the claret mountain. This comes from the very summit and I commend it to you and your wife.’ One last dip into the bag and Sir Pericles pulled out another bottle. ‘Some people think that Lafite here is supreme among clarets, the creme de la creme.’

Powerscourt told Lady Lucy after Sir Pericles had left that he expected Johnny Fitzgerald to materialize in a couple of hours at most. He had always possessed an uncanny knack of knowing when his friend had some special sort of liquid in the house, as if he could smell it from the other side of London. Shortly before six o’clock there he was in the Powerscourt drawing room, his eye drawn like a magnet to the Lafite, recently promoted from the dining room downstairs to a small table by the window in the drawing room on the first floor.

‘I’m delighted to see, Francis, that you’re moving up in the wine world at last. Your stuff has never been bad in the past, I grant you that, but now you’re up there on Mount Olympus.’

He inspected the label with great reverence, as if he were looking at a Shakespeare First Folio. ‘Did you know there’s been a great increase in burglary in these parts in the last few weeks, Francis? Fortnum and Mason burglaries the police are calling them, only the luxury items get taken. The other thing they say about this Lafite stuff is that the bottles have a habit of falling over and breaking of their own accord. They’re famous for it. Happens more often than you might think.’

‘Perhaps you’d better open it, Johnny,’ said his friend with a smile. ‘It would be such a shame if the burglars got it first.’

Johnny Fitzgerald held the bottle up to the light. It glowed a deep red. He inspected the label closely. He ran his hand very slowly down the side of the bottle. ‘I haven’t tasted this Chateau Lafite since my uncle introduced me to it on my sixteenth birthday, Francis. He said it would tell me what real wine should taste like. I was only allowed two glasses of the stuff. Bloody uncle knocked off the rest of the bottle on his own.’

Johnny inserted the corkscrew very slowly. He peered into the depths of the bottle when it was open. ‘We’d better have three glasses, Francis. We couldn’t leave Lady Lucy out of this.’

Shortly the three all had a glass in their hand, Johnny sniffing delicately at the liquid like a bloodhound that might have just found a new scent, a new trail for the elusive fox.

‘By God,’ said Johnny, ‘I don’t think they have much of this stuff down there in the Colville warehouses, it’s superb. Now then, Francis, let me tell you what little I have discovered so far.’

Johnny Fitzgerald cast a quick glance over his shoulder to check the bottle was still present and correct. ‘There are two very different sorts of people who work for the Colvilles at the lower end of the trade. You could call them the workers by hand and the workers by brain as that bearded old man up in Highgate Cemetery put in one of his pamphlets long ago. The workers by hand are essentially moving the stuff around in one way or another. The wine arrives at the docks in barrels or tonneaux or barriques or feuillettes or pipes. The Colville men unload it, take it to the warehouses, store it or bottle it in their own bottling plant with their own label production and finally it’s despatched to the Colville shops or their regional headquarters in Edinburgh or Dublin. The same thing happens with the gin over in Hammersmith. That’s a very crude description. It’s an enormous operation and the men are, on the whole, satisfied with what they do, though there were the usual undercurrents about low wages and the need for strike action. Are you with me so far, Francis, Lady Lucy?’

The Powerscourts nodded. Johnny paused to take another draught of his wine, his face breaking into a smile as the taste sank in. ‘You learn some funny things in this line of work,’ he went on. ‘Did you ever realize what the most important factor is in what a country drinks? You didn’t? Well, let me tell you, it’s politics and it’s taxes. During the Napoleonic Wars precious little French wine ever made it here. They say the Garrick Club was down to its last couple of cases of Chateau Latour when peace broke out. Even if it had managed to get here, the wine, that is, the government would have slapped a great bolt of duty on it. So what were Englishmen drinking for most of last century? Port, that’s what went down, port from those English merchants and growers in the Douro Valley. Portugal, as the Portugese reminded the English every time they even thought of increasing the duty, was England’s oldest ally. All the way back to Henry the bloody Navigator, whoever he was.’

There was a sudden outbreak of motor horns hooting outside, coming from the King’s Road a couple of hundred yards away. Voices could be heard, most of them raised in anger.

‘Later on,’ Johnny continued after a glance out into the square, ‘South African wines began to get a look in as the politicians wanted to encourage the wine industry in the colonies. Now here’s a strange thing, Francis. Even those porters and warehousemen who work for the Colvilles can sing Gladstone’s praises. You might think that he was somewhat odd, an austere old bugger, if you ask me, forever trying to save Ireland by day and the prostitutes of London by night, but he did one thing they’ve never forgotten. Somewhere in the 1860s, I think, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer and taking five hours to deliver his Budget, he cut the duty on French wine. He wanted to encourage trade with the French, you see. That was the making of the Colvilles. Unlike the rest of the industry they cut their prices by almost the same as the cut in duty and prospered mightily. The other wine merchants hung on to most of the cut for themselves.’