![]() ![]() In the staff quarters of this hotel, you could drink as much wine as you liked for nothing, but if you wanted water that was safe to drink, you had to pay for it. Whereas I had already seen, when working as a chambermaid in Italy, that for Europeans wine was an everyday drink. ![]() Wine was a very elitist drink at that stage, yes. ![]() It took me living in France for a year, a few years later, to throw off that idea.Įxcept presumably, in England, there would have been a class divide? They were seen as being terminally frivolous. I’m going to become a wine writer,’ because back then, in the early 1970s, the subjects of wine and food had no social status at all. Of course I didn’t then immediately say, ‘OK, that’s it. At just one smell of it, I could sense that there was history, geography, psychology, and all sorts of interesting things in this liquid and that it was not only hugely, sensually appealing but probably intellectually satisfying as well. I had one bottle of really great red Burgundy, a Chambolle-Musigny, Les Amoureuses 1959, that was just so clearly many streets ahead of student plonk. I was not brought up with wine, but, as a student at Oxford, I was exposed to really good wine at prices that nowadays seem ludicrously low. Foreign Policy & International Relationsīefore we get to the books, tell us how you first got interested in wine. ![]()
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