27

A PARISIAN PAVEMENT

Paris, France
August, 2003

When the alarm sounded at 5.45 am, I felt every single glass of the night before pounding through my head, and even a shower alternated hot and cold a few times could only wake my body up enough to get moving. Jane and I blearily finished our packing and I realised that I had already collected too many bottles to try and put them all in my checked baggage.

I looked at the four bottles on the desk in our hotel room, including the Daumas Gassac from Linden, a Loire red I’d collected but hadn’t tried yet, Jean-François’s bottle of Cobram Estate olive oil and the Yquem, still swaddled in bubble wrap and housed in a rubber wine sleeve made out of wetsuit material. I had already closed my suitcase and I knew sealed bottles were allowed as hand luggage at that time between London and Paris. So I put all the bottles in a sturdy padded wine bag that we had brought along, knowing it could come in useful somewhere.

‘Are you sure about this for the Yquem?’ Jane asked.

‘Jane, you know my theory,’ I said. ‘The more you worry about a bottle, the more you’re inviting some kind of disaster. Pack it well but treat it like the others and it will be fine. The bottle has two layers of padding as well as the other bottles to keep the bag firm.’

We headed to the airport, drank enough coffee in the departure lounge to survive the short flight, made it out of Charles de Gaulle airport in one piece and took a taxi to our hotel in the centre of Paris. Jane had booked the hotel, having stayed there before, and it was in a brilliant location, right near the Marais and a short walk to the Centre Pompidou. It’s my favourite part of the French capital, with the arty bohemian air of SoHo in New York but everything that’s great about Paris, and within easy reach of all the main attractions as well as a lot of good restaurants and bars.

Arriving at our hotel and still feeling pretty ordinary from the previous night’s indulgences, we clambered out of the taxi, with shopping bags, luggage and the bag of wine all carted onto the slightly uneven, ancient Parisian footpath. As I leaned back in to pay the driver, I thought Jane had the wine bag on her shoulder or in her hands as we had discussed so that we knew it was safe. But in the confusion of the busy pavement, and with the hotel staff taking suitcases from the taxi, the wine bag somehow ended up with our other bags and that’s when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a bag tip.

It was one of those fractions of a second where you just know, deep in your soul, that the bag that just toppled wasn’t one of the many that could have fallen over without incident.

‘Ooh’ is all I remember thinking as my brain registered the horizontal wine bag, but even as I picked it up and reached for the wetsuit polyurethane of the protective sleeve, I was telling myself that the Yquem should be fine; it was well protected.

Right up until I realised the bag was slightly damp and a bottle must have broken.

And right up until I realised that the wetsuit sleeve in my hand was where the seeping wine was coming from.

‘Oh shit,’ I said. ‘It’s the Yquem.’

Jane was truly horrified, her face a white mask of shock.

Me? I felt numb, but I went to work. I prised open the wetsuit sleeve and the bubble wrap and felt where the hundred-year-old bottle had cracked across its bottom seal. The sleeve and wrapping had actually done their job and held the package together tightly, so not much of the wine had escaped. Now I knew where the break was, I turned the bottle upside down, managing to retain most of the liquid.

But now I was standing on a French pavement with an inverted, cracked bottle of probably genuine 1870-something Château d’Yquem and no idea what to do.

‘John . . .’ said Jane. ‘I . . .’

‘Jane, it’s okay,’ I said, looking her in the eye as she tried hard not to cry. ‘Look, bottles break. It happens. Once they break, they’re broken. We’ve still got most of the liquid. It was nobody’s fault but mine for not packing it properly in my luggage, as I did from Australia.’

She didn’t look convinced. In our travels, we’d fallen into the habit of me lugging suitcases and shouldering heavier bags, while Jane was in charge of the variety of smaller bags. But under the circumstances of our not feeling great, the uneven pavement, the bellboys taking bags without asking us which ones, it was simply a moment for Murphy’s Law to play out. It certainly wasn’t Jane’s fault and I didn’t want her to think so. I should have put the bottle in my luggage. I shouldn’t have been lazy with a hangover that morning. I should have carried it at all times.

If I’d just . . .

If we could have . . .

If only . . .

It was done. Such thinking was pointless. The bottle had cracked and that was that.

Now we had to save what we could. Still holding the bottle, I raced into a corner store just down the street and bought two small bottles of Perrier water with screw caps.

I gave the bottles to Jane, who poured the water into the gutter. The doormen from the hotel carried all our bags in and helped us to our room, while I still nursed the broken bottle as steadily and gently as I could.

But I was now in some kind of post-traumatic shock. The wine would now become exposed to air and oxygen would be getting into the liquid, potentially deteriorating the wine. I had to get it into the screw-cap bottles as quickly as I could, and with ideally no oxygen, or certainly as little oxygen as possible in the top of the new bottles to try to preserve the ancient wine in the best possible condition.

We shook the Perrier bottles to get rid of almost every last drop of water and then I delicately lifted the broken Yquem from the wetsuit sleeve at last. Jane helped unwind the bubble wrap and I could finally see the poor bottle as it was. The bottom was broken off, I guess because such old glass was brittle. But by swinging the bottle upside down, I had managed to retain more than half of the liquid.

Now I carefully poured the remaining wine into the Perrier bottles and winced slightly as I deliberately let them overflow, wasting a little of the precious Yquem, to ensure Jane could put the caps on with no room for air.

I looked at the two now full bottles and saw that they were 250 ml bottles. The ancient Yquem bottle still had less than a cup of wine left, so I’d managed to retain more than 500 ml.

With what wine we had now safely screw-topped into the Perrier bottles, there was nothing for it but to strain the remaining wine into a wine glass, poured through a small towel to filter out any glass shards.

I gingerly put the remains of the century-old bottle down on another towel and Jane and I stared at one another, the shock starting to fade.

‘What do we do now?’ she asked.

‘I feel like crying,’ I said.

‘Well, I could do with a drink,’ she said, looking at the half glass of potential 1870 Yquem.

‘Yeah, you’re right,’ I said. ‘Why not?’

Jane tasted first and said nothing, lost in a haze of shock meeting exhilarating aroma and flavour. She handed me the glass and I swirled it, peered at the dark liquid, sniffed it and finally took a sip.

It was superb. Even with all my years of educating myself in wine, I wasn’t really sure exactly what a 130-year-old Château d’Yquem was supposed to taste like, but if you’d asked me, I would have guessed something like this.

Oh my God.

Looking back, I only wished that when I had this once-in-a-lifetime experience of sampling such a wine, I hadn’t been hungover or preoccupied with self-checking to see if I had had or was in the process of having a heart attack when I stood in our Parisian hotel room and tasted it.

What I should have done is an organoleptic analysis of this wine and written detailed tasting notes, then and there. But I just stood there, with my head pounding and slightly spinning.

But, honestly, the memory of that sip is a bit of a blur.

What is not a blur is Jane, having tasted it, looking at me quietly, and then coming over to me and wrapping her arms around me.

We stayed like that for some time until she pulled back to look at my face and said, ‘John, I didn’t miss that in the moments after that bottle broke, you were genuinely more concerned about me and my feelings than you were about your beloved Yquem. That was true love. Right there.’

She gently kissed me.

I didn’t say anything. She was right. I had been more concerned about that look of death on her face than I was about the bottle. We’d managed to save the situation so that I was reasonably sure I’d preserved enough of the wine that the experts at Château d’Yquem would be able to look at it and have a fairly good idea of what it had been like a few days before, when we broke it. We had the original bottle with the cork still in it. We had the capsule and the glass. We had taken photos of it all, and while we were starting to become resigned to where we’d found ourselves, there was a way forward.

This latest setback was just another part of the saga of unearthing Stalin’s wine.

But of course, none of this covered the unmistakable and unavoidable question that hung so heavily in the Parisian air that morning.

How on earth was I going to tell Kevin?