At last – wine is a force for good

What an interesting week it has been. On Thursday evening I was lucky enough to be one of the few non-Burgundian, and even fewer female, guests at a dinner in London to celebrate Aubert de Villaine winning Decanter magazine’s Man of the Year award. Rather to Decanter’s shame, de Villaine is the first Burgundian to have been awarded this honour. But he is not just any Burgundian. He runs the world-famous Domaine de la Romanée-Conti in a manner as modest, almost ascetic, as the prices of his wines are heart-stopping. As our host, he provided for his 40 or so guests at UK importers Corney & Barrow DRC Montrachet 2003, La Tâche 1991 and the (almost) priceless Romanée-Conti itself, from the superlative 1971 vintage. Were anyone vulgar enough to seek market prices for these wines, they would find that the last wine runs to a five-figure sum per bottle in pounds.

This is the sort of treat of an evening – great wine, delicious food and amusing, relaxed, well-informed company – that outsiders probably think is more commonplace for wine writers than it really is. I had spent the afternoon much more typically, working my way round the tasting tables at the supermarket Sainsbury’s presentation of summer wines to the media, dutifully tasting their new range of “House” wines under £4 a bottle to see whether any were worth drinking. (Only the House Chianti at £3.86, in my view).

 The following evening I was atoning for my sin of conspicuous DRC consumption by tutoring a tasting of some medium-priced wines for our 27-year-old daughter and 18 of her friends. (With careful pouring, a single bottle can provide 20 decent tasting samples.) She wanted to raise funds for Breakthrough Breast Cancer in memory of the glamorous mother of one of her friends and a wine tasting seemed as good a way as any to winkle £750 out of young Londoners. Aware that some studies posit increased risks of various cancers with alcohol consumption, I did provide spittoons. No one but me actually spat but the group were fastidious tasters who sniffily poured away the remains of the Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc that they found unappetisingly sweet and the young red bordeaux they (rightly) decided would be better with food.

Their favourite wines, incidentally, were the haughty but magnificently dry, dense Trimbach Riesling 2008 Alsace (under £10 at the Wine Society, Majestic) and Le Serre Nuove dell’Ornellaia 2006 Bolgheri red Supertuscan, currently available in Europe and the US (but not Britain) for around £20 a bottle. They objected to the carbon dioxide purposely left in the young dry Riesling from the Rheinhessen and were (to me) strangely comforted by the relative innocuousness of the Botham Merrill Willis 2007 Australian Chardonnay sold (£14.99 Christopher Piper Wines) in aid of Ian Botham’s fund for leukaemia research.

Because of its alcohol content and elitist connotations, wine has in its time been cast by some as a social undesirable but nowadays it is a thoroughly democratic drink, part of the fabric of life in so much of the world, including parts that were terra incognita for the fermented juice of the grape only a decade or two ago. Not only that, but I increasingly see this growing love of wine being used as a force for good.

Only a week before the DRC dinner I had been in Singapore at my eighth fundraising wine dinner for Room to Read, chosen as the FT’s pet charity this year for its jaw-dropping efficiency in bringing education to the developing world. Founder John Wood had just been on a Himalayan trek in Nepal, the country where it all began 10 years ago, with his parents and other long-term supporters to open Room to Read’s 10,000th library. This was the first such wine dinner in Singapore and Wood cunningly made much of the stupendous amounts that had previously been raised at three similar dinners in Hong Kong. The result was that the 400 guests donated well over S$2m (nearly £1m) at the dinner alone.

 This feat was mainly due to Wood’s Billy Graham-like evangelistic gift but some credit was undoubtedly due to the wines, all supplied by their producers in South Africa and shipped (with nail-biting timing) across the Indian Ocean by the generic body Wines of South Africa.

. . .

Because South Africa is the only serious wine producer among the nine Asian and southern African countries in which Room to Read builds schools and libraries and funds girls’ scholarships, it was also the obvious choice as wine supplier for our Room to Read dinner at Le Café Anglais in London last November. I like to think that the quality of the wine, some of the finest South Africa produces, played some part in raising nearly £1m that night, too.

In Singapore my favourite wine was Glen Carlou’s exemplary, and quite burgundian, Quartz Stone Chardonnay 2008 Paarl (£14.50 Noel Young). I sat next to the South African high commissioner, who as a boy could surely never have imagined personally witnessing his country’s wines’ being feted by some of Asia’s sharpest brains. Certainly in South Africa, wine exports have been a major vehicle for much-needed social change on the Cape farms that produce them and for providing global consumers with a tangible link to the new South Africa.

We broke our journey home with our first, but I hope not last, experience of the beautiful Maldives, the coral reefs and warm turquoise waters providing surreal interludes between periods spent agape at the political shenanigans back in Britain on Sky News – or perhaps it was the other way round. John Wood had recommended the Four Seasons Landaa Giraavaru, which we enjoyed so much we were happy to accept an invitation to spend an hour talking to the resort’s 20-odd waiting staff about wine service.

 They were virtually all young Maldivian men, most of them Muslims devout enough never to have tried a drop of wine. Yet, thanks to regular influxes of well-heeled Russians, they probably serve more bottles of first growths than most London restaurants. We were most impressed by the flawless wine service we experienced but I was even more impressed by the standard of questions they asked at our training session.

The first concerned the arcane changes under way in European wine law whereby wine regions could choose to substitute PDO (protected designation of origin) for traditional designations such as Appellation Contrôlée or DOC. I think the questioner is ahead of most wine producers on this one. The second questioner wanted to delve into the likely effects of climate change on some of the wine world’s more obscure corners. All the questions were about as demanding as I would expect from a group of Master of Wine students.

Truly wine is today an international force and, I would argue, a force for good.

www.jancisrobinson.com

More columns at www.ft.com/robinson