As the Guardian noted last month, Hugh Johnson is the best-selling wine author in the world, but even he has to cope with time and space restrictions:
Monday’s sale at Sworder’s auctioneers of over £100,000 worth of wines, gathered over a career in which Johnson has overseen a revolution in British attitudes to wine, includes rare vintages dating back to 1830, a £2,000 1945 Chateau Latour made in the balmy summer after VE Day and his own desert island bottle, a single 1971 German riesling for £6,000.
The 74-year-old is trying to be philosophical about letting it all go as he moves with his wife Judy from a house with a five-room cellar to one with a coal hole to be closer to children and grandchildren.
“Everyone with a big cellar realises in the end they don’t have enough friends to drink it all with,” he says. “To start with I felt it was a catastrophe but in the end I felt: ‘Just take it.'”
Some of the bottles are thick with dust and their capsules chipped. Perished labels reveal dates that scroll back through time: 2006, 1996, 1945, 1830. There’s even an amphora dredged from the Mediterranean dated AD100. For many in the wine world the sale marks the end of an era that began in the 1960s when wine was the preserve of the elite and Britons drank on average just a third of a glass a week. Between then and now, Johnson’s annual pocket wine guide, featuring hundred of bite-sized verdicts, has sold 12m copies, his World Atlas of Wine, first published in 1971, has sold close to 4m and wine consumption in the UK has increased twelvefold.
[. . .]
Sitting among his bottles for one last time he reflects on how the wine world has changed. In 2006 he spoke out against rising alcohol levels reaching 15%, which he described as thick “steroid-driven muscle” and “boring”. It was part of a long-running battle with his US rival, the critic Robert Parker, whose highly influential scores out of 100 based in part on his love of powerful, fruit-driven wines, reshaped the wine market. Now with more lower alcohol wines on the shelves, Johnson feels the fight is swinging his way.
H/T to Michael Pinkus for the link.
