Peter May - The Critic

‘What is?’ Sophie took the review from him and looked at it.

‘The code.’

‘You broke it? In your sleep?’

‘Maybe I was asleep, maybe I wasn’t.’ He turned towards the whiteboard and lifted his marker pen. The others watched, filled with sudden curiosity, as he wrote up l, b and j, then turned back to them. A smile split his face. ‘What do these letters mean to anyone.’ They all looked blankly at the board. ‘Okay. Let’s capitalise them. It makes a big difference.’ He wrote up LBJ. ‘Come on. You’ve got to see it.’ Still nothing. ‘Okay, maybe you were too young. But in the sixties, during the Vietnam war, these were initials on everybody’s lips.’ He said them out loud. ‘LBJ.’

Which was when the penny dropped for Michelle. ‘Lyndon B. Johnston. He was sworn in as President after the assassination of Kennedy.’

‘Good girl.’ He turned back to the board and wrote up WJC.

Now Michelle couldn’t keep the smile off her face. ‘William Jefferson Clinton. They’re all Presidents of the United States!’

But Enzo waved a finger of admonishment. ‘Not all of them. There haven’t been ninety-two Presidents.’ He held open palms out towards her. ‘You told me yourself the other night, Michelle. Your dad’s party-piece when he was a kid.’

Realisation dawned on her like sunlight breaking through dark cloud. ‘States!’ she said. ‘Presidents and States.’

Enzo wrote up KY.

‘Kentucky.’

Then NJ.

‘New Jersey.’

He beamed at them. ‘The most common of all codes. Ones that get used by millions of people every day. Post codes. It’s so simple. His parents made him commit to memory all the States and all the Presidents when he was just a kid. He wasn’t ever going to forget them. So every flavour on the wheel got assigned to one of them.’

‘In what order?’ Sophie said.

Enzo shrugged. ‘The States would be alphabetical, the Presidents chronological. All we have to do is figure out where on the taste wheel he started.’

Sophie said, ‘We need a list of States and Presidents.’ And she rounded the table to the computer and tapped a quick search into Google. A smile spread across her face. ‘Fifty States, and forty-three Presidents. Actually, forty-two, because one of them served twice. Isn’t the internet a wonderful thing?’ She clicked a couple of times with her mouse, then hit the print button, and the printer started spewing out a list of US States and American Presidents.

Michelle was looking at the coded scores given to the three wines they had tasted, then glanced up at Enzo’s whiteboard. ‘This doesn’t match, Enzo.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, if the A to F and the 1 to 5, were the last things to be coded, then you would expect them all to be recent Presidents. But they’re not. Look.’ She pointed to the score her father had awarded the Chateau Lastours 2001 Cuvee Special. ‘ALI and CA. That’s got to be Abraham Lincoln and Chester Arthur.’

‘We’ve got them the wrong way round, that’s why.’ Everyone turned to look at Bertrand. ‘Look at the sensory descriptions of the wine in the mouth. WJC. LBJ. GF.’

‘Bill Clinton, Lyndon Johnston, Gerald Ford,’ Michelle said. ‘All right down at the most recent end of the list.’

‘So we work backwards through the sensory descriptions,’ Enzo said. ‘Starting with George W. Bush.’ He wrote up GWB against Thin.

Sophie said, ‘How did Gil Petty describe Thin again?’ She pulled up the page of Petty’s flavour and sensory listings, then burst out laughing. ‘Lacking flavour and body.’ She scrolled up the list. ‘And his father? GHWB? Simple. A sound, drinkable wine of no great distinction. Two Bush presidencies summed up to perfection.’ She looked at Michelle, grinning. ‘Do you think you’re father matched these on purpose?’

‘I doubt it somehow. More like happy coincidence.’

‘What about Clinton?’ Bertrand said. ‘What’s his sensory adjective.’

Sophie put the two together from the separate lists and could hardly speak for laughing. When, finally, she managed to control herself, she said, ‘William Jefferson Clinton comes under the category of Smooth.’ Which brought a spontaneous eruption of laughter from around the room. Braucol woke up and started barking.

‘Maybe your father had a secret sense of humour after all,’ Enzo said. He took the printout of Presidents and States and, starting from the bottom of the board, worked his way back through the list of sensory descriptions, ratings and flavours, putting initials against each. ‘Some of these Presidents had the same initials as States, or each other, so it looks like he’s added the second letter of the surname to distinguish them.’

As he reached the tastes that he had copied down from the flavour wheel, Sophie said, ‘How do you know where he started listing the flavours?’

‘I don’t. But let’s assume that, like me, he started with the biggest grouping, Fruit. We’ll assign the initials to the order in which I’ve written them down, then see how they match up with our own tastings.’

It took several more minutes for him to finish writing State postal codes against flavours, finishing with AL against Apple. He riffled through a confusion of papers to retrieve his notes from the Domenech tastings.

‘Okay, so oak would be NM. We tasted that in the Lastours and the Sarrabelle.’ He checked the two coded reviews and found NM in the taste lines of both. ‘So far so good. We also found vanilla in both the Cuvee Lea and the Sarrabelle Syrah. Which means we should find NJ in their taste lines.’ He checked. ‘And there they are.’

‘And liquorice?’ Bertrand said. ‘We found that in the Syrah, too.’

Enzo looked at the board. ‘ Liquorice is OH.’ He checked it against the review. ‘And there it is.’ He looked up, beaming his satisfaction. ‘By George, I think we’ve got it!’ He pulled the review of the Chateau Lastours Cuvee Special 2001 off the wall and held it up in front of him, so that he could switch focus between the whiteboard and the paper. His cellphone began to ring. ‘Get that will, you Sophie? I want to translate this.’

Sophie took his phone out on to the terrasse, and Enzo began to translate the coded review in front of him.

‘Colour-dark red with brick tones. Nose-smoky oak with wild fruit, following up with strong crushed strawberries. Mouth-soft tannins, velvety and round. Long finish. Longevity-five to eight years. Score-B1.’ He looked at Michelle. ‘No doubt he made it a little more colourful when he wrote it up for the newsletter, but that’s his basic description of the wine.’ He picked up the review of the Sarrabelle Syrah. ‘And it looks like he found his Holy Grail here in Gaillac. He’s given the Syrah an A1.’

Sophie came back in and shut the door gently behind her. Enzo saw immediately that she had paled.

‘What’s wrong?’

She took a tremulous breath, trying to hold back her emotion. ‘Oh, just, you know…We’re here, having a laugh, drinking wine cracking codes…’ She shook her head. ‘That was Nicole. Her mother’s funeral’s the day after tomorrow.’

Rain wept from a dark sky, steady and slow. Black umbrellas jostled for space above the heads of mourners. Grass turned to mud underfoot, splashing black shoes which had been polished to a shine just that morning. The marble slab that covered the family tomb had been slid to one side by red-faced professionals with ropes. Fetid air rose from the concrete hole below. There were other coffins down there. Nicole’s grandparents. Nicole watched as coffinbearers, straining arms and faces, lowered her mother into blackness. One day her father would join his wife. And Nicole would join them both when her turn came. It was salutary for a young girl, looking down into the gaping darkness of eternity, to know that this was where her future lay.