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Clubs are not serious places. They are about fun, laughter and talk. On the average members’ table, the conversation can switch in an instant from bawdry to books: from scandal to scholarship. There is also food and drink. Over the past 20 years, the quality of club cuisine has been transformed; most clubs now routinely produce good food. On occasions, especially during the game season, for ‘good’ read ‘superb’. But alas, there has been one backsliding. In the Eighties, many clubs bought first growths. There has been a melancholy, slow withdrawal, which is increasingly affecting the super-seconds as well. The same is true of Oxbridge colleges. It is sad to think that within a few years, the wine lists in the new gentlemen’s clubs of Peking and Shanghai will be better than anything in Pall Mall or St James’s.
So: carpe diem. Club members and their guests can still benefit from the wisdom of wine committees in earlier days, before the balance of power moved in favour of the Far East. One of my clubs has always specialised in Calon-Ségur, a wine that has often been underrated because it is a proper old-fashioned Left-Banker with none of the jammy flamboyance which excites Robert Parker. It was a bottle of ’88 Calon-Ségur which introduced the deputy editor of this magazine to the pleasure of serious claret. We are now drinking the 1996. It is everything that mature claret ought to be.
Or rather, almost everything. About five years ago, waiting for a friend in Brooks’s, I had a glance at their wine list. ’86 Lafite, at £125 a bottle: even then, that was a bargain. Today, Decanter quotes it at over £15,000 a case. I thought that through another club, I could dine in Brooks’s on Fridays. So I decided to taunt and tempt a girl who had always taken a stern line on institutions which debarred her sex from membership. I had tried unavailingly to reason with her: ‘A hundred years ago, you wouldn’t even have had a vote. Don’t make the Africans’ mistake: grab everything at once and end up in chaos.’
Claret succeeded where reason failed. ‘Would you like to drink some ’86 Lafite?’ Sharp indrawal of breath. ‘In Brooks’s.’ Confused breathing noises. ‘Remember: if you don’t, it’ll all be drunk by men.’ Pause. ‘All right.’ I am not going to try to describe that wine, so please take the superlatives as read. There was only one little local difficulty. A couple of days later, I ran into the Secretary of Brooks’s, who gave me a rueful look. Although his front desk had accepted my booking, we were both in error. That other club did not have dining rights on Fridays. Even if it had done, the Lafite was not available to reciprocals: members only, strictly rationed. I apologised and commiserated. But I have never felt more hypocritical.
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