Over nine days recently I was ridiculously lucky enough to be treated to no fewer than five very serious wine dinners – serious as in the quality and age of the wine rather than the demeanour of the attendees. Vintages included three from each of the near-mythical 1959 and 1945 and two each from the famously long-lived 1928 and the best wartime vintage of 1943. If the dinners had taken place in the last century, chances are that my hosts would all have been British. But among these modern-day hosts only one of them was from the UK, a neighbour with a particularly enviable cellar. The others were born in Hong Kong, mainland China and, in the case of the last two of these dinners, in Greece.
My Greek host had lured me to Switzerland with the promise of a complete vertical of Pétrus, famously the most expensive red bordeaux of all, from 1970 to 1982, thereby filling in a whole nine gaps in my collection of tasting notes. The irony is that most of these are the weakest vintages of that period and were particularly difficult for my host to track down. He already had vintages such as 1982, 1985, 1990 and 2000 in quantity but it took some real sleuthing to track down lesser years from the early and late 1970s, most examples of which have presumably already been drunk.
Having assembled a group of friends, a couple of Bulgarian musicians to serenade us, and the young Czech chef David Jehlicka whose talents they had spotted on a private cruise, our Greek hosts plunged us straight into this world-famous Pomerol with glasses of the 1972 and 1973 Pétrus on their terrace before dinner. Neither of these years has much of a reputation but I was amazed by how delicious the 1972 was: seductively heady even if pretty lightweight. Clutching my BlackBerry so as to record every nuance, I actually found myself keying in the absurd phrase “an aperitif Pétrus”. The 1973 was looking pretty good too, even if more concentrated and austere, almost more like a Cabernet-dominated left bank wine than the all-Merlot star of the right bank of the Gironde. In fact I thought the 1973 still had quite a way to go, unlike our oxidised bottle of 1974, the light and charming 1976, the light and leafy 1977, the rather undramatic 1978 and, even more evolved, 1979.