David Dickinson - Death of a wine merchant

The young man ran his hand through a great mop of straw-coloured hair and did a few quick doodles on the pad in front of him. Vicary was the expert in money and accounting, Septimus the master in the acquisition of the wines and spirits. ‘What do you say to nine shillings a dozen, Septimus? A shilling a case cheaper than Colvilles. That should send the customers flocking in to Piccadilly Wine, don’t you think?’

‘Will we still make a profit on that?’

‘I should think so. But if it goes well we may need some more of Burgundy’s finest. Could you rustle up another hundred cases or so, do you think?’

Septimus Parry smiled. ‘I shall see to it now, partner,’ he said and set off at once for a warehouse by the Thames.

Sir Pericles Freme lived in a small but perfect Georgian house not far from the Powerscourts in Chelsea. An immaculately dressed footman showed Powerscourt into a drawing room on the first floor. Sir Pericles still had the bearing of a man who had spent many years in the military. He was in his late fifties with neatly combed white hair and a small white moustache. He read the note from George Berry and ushered Powerscourt into a chair.

‘Can’t say I envy you this job, Powerscourt. Never easy getting a man off a murder charge, still harder if the fellow won’t speak at all. You want to know about the Colville wine business, as I understand it from Berry, you want to know if there was anything going on there that could have led to his death. Am I right?’

‘Absolutely,’ said Powerscourt.

‘How much do you know about wine? Forgive me for asking such an elementary question but it has a bearing on what my response is going to be.’

‘Well,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I buy, on the whole, what the good people at Berry Bros. tell me to buy. And then I drink it. Or rather my close friend Johnny Fitzgerald drinks it. I’ve always thought he consumes more of my wine than I do myself.’

‘I think most people have friends like that,’ said Freme, ‘but you wouldn’t call yourself an expert?’

‘No, I wouldn’t,’ said Powerscourt.

‘I see.’ Sir Pericles paused for a moment, flicking a speck of dust from his trousers. ‘It’s a very strange thing, wine. I often think the business is like diamonds, it has such a fascination for some people. It’s totally irrational. I know some of my distinguished colleagues in the trade who will tell you how elated they become at the prospect of tasting some of those very superior Bordeaux or burgundies. They’re in a state of high excitement for days or even weeks beforehand. And when they come back, if they’ve been lucky, they will tell you about the taste of the stuff with a faraway look in their eyes as if they’ve been to paradise. But there are a number of problems with the trade, always have been.

‘The first is that the wine isn’t the same from year to year. It never is. Some years the weather is good, some years the weather is bad. If you’re growing Chateau Powerscourt it just isn’t going to taste the same in 1908 as it did in 1906. So what do you do? Some people try to mix the bad years up with the good ones, nothing wrong with that, but it doesn’t always work. At the top end of the market the merchants will tell their favoured clients not to buy any of the 1906 at all, to wait for another good year and then buy more than you need for a single year. The problem is more acute at the bottom end of the market. Colvilles and their rivals aren’t going to tell their customers not to buy any of their own-label claret in 1911 because it’s been a bad year. Somehow they have to try to make it taste the same, or nearly the same as in a good year. The people who can tell them how to do that are the blenders, and good blenders earn themselves enormous sums of money. Some of them indeed retire early.’

‘Who decides what is good and what is not so good?’ said Powerscourt.

‘Very good question that,’ replied Sir Pericles. ‘There’s a sort of Stock Exchange of views at work. The word goes out from the merchants and negociants and the shippers that such and such is a good year. It’s a bit like the Stock Exchange deciding that such and such a share is a good investment and everybody piles in. It’s not like a weighing machine where you can say this crate is exactly one ton and a quarter and everybody will agree. It’s more diffuse than that.’

‘Do the experts always agree with each other?’

‘Usually they do. Somebody may take a contrary view but that’s quite rare.’

‘And how easy is it to cheat, to forge wines in the same way people forge banknotes or pictures?’

‘It’s easier than you might think. It’s difficult at the very top end of the scale but not impossible. But in the middle range it’s quite tempting. Suppose you have some land near Montrachet or Chablis. The ground is the same, the grapes are the same, the weather is the same as it is for the great vineyards in those parts. What is to stop you putting Montrachet or Chablis labels on your produce and selling it for two or three times the price you would get for it with the correct label? Labels are changed all the time and the ignorance of the public is the biggest reason the crooks get away with it. Let’s take champagne. Vast amounts of it are consumed at weddings and parties where most of the customers haven’t tasted champagne since the last wedding they went to. How are they to know if it is the real thing or not? The best sparkling Saumur used to get passed off as champagne until some bright fellow – it might even have been a Colville, now I come to think of it – realized that you could sell the Saumur for much less than the champagne and still make a tidy profit because you could sell much more of it.’

‘How easy is it to forge the wine altogether, so that it’s never been near the Douro Valley or the Cote d’Or?’

‘Powerscourt,’ said Freme sadly, ‘I could take you to Sete on the south coast of France or Hamburg or, I suspect, to places in London where you can walk in and order thousands of bottles of selected wines for collection within forty-eight hours. Sete is particularly famous for forgery because it’s so close to Algeria and all that red they produce. This is aimed at what you might call the bottom end of the market, Colvilles’ house claret if you like. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it, but that’s the end where forgery becomes very tempting.’

‘Some years ago,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I carried out an investigation into a death that involved forged paintings. Much of that revolved round the question of attribution, whose voice would be believed when he said that the Titian was a Titian or was not a Titian. Is it the same with the wine business?’

‘In a sense it is. It’s a sort of con trick in a way. At the top end when the posh merchants on the Quai des Chartrons in Bordeaux say this Latour is very good, everybody believes it. At the bottom end people believe they are drinking claret when the label says it is Colvilles’ own. Let me read you something. I’ve been collecting these recipes for years now.’

Sir Pericles Freme rummaged around in his desk and produced a large sheet of paper. He fixed a pair of pince-nez on his face and began:

‘“An admirable wine, very like claret, and even surpassing claret in strength, may be prepared by the following process. Take any quantity of Malaga raisins, chop them very small, put to every pound of them a quart of water, and let them stand in an open vessel having a cloth thrown over it for a week or nine days, stirring them well daily. Then, drawing off as much of the liquid as will run, and straining out the rest from the raisins by pressure, turn up the whole in a seasoned barrel; and, to every gallon of the liquid, add a pint of the cold juice of ripe elder berries, which had previously been boiled or scummed. Let it stand, closely stopped, about six weeks; then draw it off, as far as is tolerably fine, into another vessel; add half a pound of moist sugar to every gallon of liqueur; and when it gets perfectly fine, draw it into bottles.” Less than a century old, that recipe, Powerscourt. Maybe we should try to make it some day.’