A couple of stately homes to report. Cliveden on Sunday. I’ve talked about this place before. I did a race here last Christmas. Loved the race, and hope to do it again this year; but Sunday’s trip wasn’t great. We waited ages to be allowed in to see the interior, and once inside, found that they couldn’t wait to shunt us out again, through the back door.
Out on the terrace I grasped my class revenge by loitering threateningly at the large windows of the hotel, staring in at the rich people trying to enjoy their Sunday roasts. I managed to amuse myself for a minute or two this way until I noticed that one of the tables had a bottle of Chateau Palmer on the go. What a chain of thought this detonated. I have a story about Chateau Palmer; a story that, remarkably, also involves staring through a window. Not just any window but one of the windows at the chateau itself.
The story has strands of comedy and tragedy. 
It was the week of the great storm that destroyed half the trees in London. The week of the tremendous stockmarket crash.
I was in Bordeaux, supposedly helping with the grape harvest at Chateau Méaume, near Pomerol. The truth was that the 4 of us who went over from England were there as part of an annual PR jaunt; we sold the wine in London, and the owner of the property was a big pal of the chaps we worked for. Pissing in each other’s pockets, as they say. We didn’t do much work during our fortnight. Getting drunk seemed like a better idea. Each morning a case of wine was left on the doorstep of the cottage we slept in, and whoever delivered the 12 bottles removed the 12 empties from the previous day.
One day we went for a glorious autumnal drive through the Medoc. For a grapehead like I then was, this was one of my life’s more exciting days. You just cannot imagine how happy I was that afternoon. I’d spent years studying these vineyards, these wines, these grapes. And here I was.
Chateau D’Yquem is the very greatest dessert wine on the planet. When we saw the sign, we stopped the car and got out. I just walked down to the end of the vineyard, where I found a big oak tree. How wonderful to sit beneath it on that late autumn afternoon, in the cool, dappled sunshine. Alongside me was a small river. I munched a few grapes, smoked a joint, and told myself that no one on earth was ever happier than this.
When we moved down to Berkshire from Leeds in 2002, I was sorting out some stuff and came across an envelope, upon which was written “CHATEAU D’YQUEM, October 1987”. Inside was an acorn.
I haven’t yet planted that acorn. Or have I? This is the first time I’ve asked myself the question. Perhaps it was a virtual acorn, and perhaps I’ve been sheltering beneath that virtual oak, grinning, ever since.
But wait. Chateau Palmer.
In the early 80s, I went to a Palmer tasting in London. We “looked at” (to use the archaic wine trade terminology) 3 or 4 recent off-vintages of Chateau Palmer. Despite being supposed lesser years, the wines were just beautiful; truly among the greatest clarets I have ever tasted. Apart from the fantastic Penfold’s Grange Hermitage tasting I attended in 1986, the Palmer evening was simply the best ever. From that moment on, I was a Palmer man.
And so.
And so, when our host at Chateau Méaume happened to mention, on the morning of our trip up the Medoc, that he was a buddy of the owner of Palmer, you can understand the electricity of excitement. I was throbbing. “Would there be any chance of arranging a visit ….?”
Alan spent the morning trying to phone the proprietor of Palmer, but to no avail. He wasn’t around that day. These were pre-mobile days, of course. Another time perhaps.
A couple of hours later, we were driving slowly through Margaux, and there was Chateau Palmer. We had to stop. We parked on the road and wandered through the open gates. Such a shame that there was no one in to see us. My workmates stretched out on the lawn in the sunshine, while I went for a wander round the outside of the chateau. I walked around the hedge visible on the right of the picture, alongside the annexed part of the house.
The rooms along the right were mainly offices, and pretty dull. Desks, a few typewriters. I was disappointed. This was the world-famous Chateau Palmer. For all I could see, it might just as well have been the home of a ball-bearing lubricant magnate.
But then I came across the very final window, through which I could see a darkened room with a low ceiling and a line of chunky wooden tables. On the tables were unlit candles and loosely covered plates of dry biscuits. But much more exciting was a row of bottles with that distinctive, black and gold label. Six of them. I couldn’t see the vintages, but they were pukka Palmer. My face was pressed against the window, and the window was steaming up. The Palmer tasting room.
It was a moment of revelation. It reminded me of a day 21 years earlier. 11 July 1966. Eight years old. Wandering the few hundred yards over to Wembley Stadium after school one day. England v Uruguay, the first match of the World Cup. I didn’t have a ticket of course, but I stood outside the stadium listening to the clamour of the crowd inside. That moment has never gone away. The immense roar of 100,00 people on the other side of that wall, enjoying something that I couldn’t see. That sense of missing out on something available to others kept returning. So near, yet so far. I didn’t rationalise it until the day of the Palmer visit.
The story has a terrible twist. When we returned to Méaume, I mentioned that we’d had a wander round Palmer. Alan was aghast. “But you should have knocked on the door”, he said. “I finally managed to get through after you’d left. They said they would love to meet you. They would set up a special tasting for you…..”
Oh God. The tasting room; the bottles. They were for us, but we didn’t know.
I think that afternoon destroyed forever the belief that I wasn’t allowed to have the things that other people have. If I’d been a little bolder, I could have had a personal tutored tasting with the winemaker at Chateau Palmer.
So there I was, at Cliveden, peering through the window at the Palmer bottle, remembering looking through another significant window.
A less profound experience came yesterday at Eltham Palace in SE London. Eltham is a very curious minestrone of English social history. Been around since about the 10th century, and from 1250 or so was the leading royal palace right through the reigns of the Edwards, and nearly all the Henrys up to Henry VIII and a bit beyond. Around 1650 it fell out of favour, and almost unbelievably, the magnificent Great Hall with its vaulted ceilings and glorious stained glass windows became… became a cow barn for about 3 centuries or so. After several attempts at pulling the place down, the late Victorians suddenly woke up to its historical value, and leased it to the Courtauld family, who eventually built a sizeable house next door and turned the rooms into a series of stunning Art Deco set-pieces.
[Voice from the back]Hang on mate, what about the running? I’ve come here to read about the running, not all this crap about Art Deco set-pieces. When’s the running stuff coming along, eh?
Ah yes, the running. Right. Coming right up Sir, coming right up…..
