At the Velodrome

The British - and especially Londoners  - have taken the Olympic Velodrome to their hearts. It’s been given a nickname, the Pringle, which hardly describes the excellence of the building but shows how affectionately we feel towards it. Approaching in the half dark of a winter’s evening everyone gets their camera out as the handsome wooden curve of the roof looms out of the dusk, with the deep blue-black sky behind it. It’s much bigger than you expect; the roof, formed of thin slats of maple, looks like the hull of a boat, like an artist’s impression of the ark.

In the distance behind us (we’ve just been bussed across the Olympic park), is the square bulk of the Westfield shopping centre with its 320 retail units. Each one’s size and shape and orientation is calculated to receive the optimum footfall, to make the most money most efficiently. Westfield is all about profit – the idea that any imagination should come into the design of it is laughable. It’s garish, crowded and noisy, and even though it’s huge, it feels claustrophobic.

The escalators, which could have been soaring aerial stairways from the top of which you could survey the whole domain (Westminster underground station, designed by Hopkins Architects, builders of the Velodrome, incidentally, is criss-crossed with escalators which give views of the cavernous underground halls they traverse) are mean utilitarian affairs, designed to deliver shoppers efficiently to their destination. Shoppers gawping at the view aren’t opening their wallets, after all.

Westfield is about making money, the Park is about spending it, they say, but that doesn’t make it any more awful, full of pointless noise and discord; even though you’re constantly moving and constantly jostled, all this activity seems quite aimlesss.

I think that’s why everyone loves the Velodrome. While Westfield shows the ugly side of 21^st century mega-projects like the Olympics, the Velodrome embodies what everyone wants to believe, that behind all the bombast there’s still a type of nobility behind the idea of the greatest show on earth.

Westfield is boxy and disproportionate, the Velodrome is all satisfying curves, from that great hulled crisp-shaped top and its mirror image, the asymmetic wooden track with its vertiginous looping ends.  The banked rows of spectators mimic the swoop of the track, and above it all there’s the undulating line of that famous roof. It’s like sitting inside a Mobius strip.

Movement too is the defining feature of the Velodrome. The whole place is fluid – you step through the door and whoosh, there’s the track with a dozen cyclists on a warm-up round (if you lean on the rail you feel the vibration of tyre on sprung wood as they pass). Wherever  you stand your eye is drawn to that exhilarating noiseless motion.

The bikes may be soundless but  but if I’ve given the impression the Velodrome  on World Cup night is a quiet place, not at all. The 5000 spectators are vocal and partisan. Next to me is an entire family draped in a union jack. When Chris Hoy takes gold on the Keirin the roar is shattering, everyone on their feet shouting their heads off. Mike Taylor, the Hopkins senior partner who designed the Velodrome – my brother-in-law as it happens – is hoarse after three days of the World Cup.

Even the normal annoyances of any big British sporting event seem to be neutralised here. There are cordoned-off areas and officious types in high-viz vests telling you you can’t go here, or must go there, but they do it in good humour. Outside we’re herded into queues for the buses to take us back to Stratford, and we stand around in the cold drizzle for half an hour. In the distance you can see the huge green neon ‘Casino’ sign on the side of the Stratford complex, and the lights of the 5000-space car park, and the truly hideous 120m Anish Kapoor sculpture, charmingly named  the ArcelorMittal Orbit, whose only purpose was apparently to use up lots and lots of Mittal steel, which indeed it does.

But everyone’s looking back and up, where the Velodrome roof looms benignly over us.

A visit to Opus One

Along with the Bordeaux first growths, Grange, Petrus, Sassicaia, and a handful of others, Opus One is part of that select club of wines that have true global cachet. This classic Bordeaux blend, produced from 139 acres (56.2ha) of some of the finest vineland in the Napa Valley, is only just over 30 years old, yet it is sought after from Hamburg to Hong Kong.

Halloween at Opus: Michael Silacci, me, Roger Asleson. The pumpkin is real

Opus, as everyone knows, is the brainchild of Robert Mondavi and Baron Philippe de Rothschild. As it was for the first vintage in 1979, it is still very much a California-Bordeaux joint venture: it is the only California wine, for example, whose exports are handled entirely by the Bordeaux Place.

But, public relations chief Roger Asleson makes clear, while Mouton’s winemaker Philippe Dhalluin and technical director Eric Tourbier have a consulting role and visit Opus at least three times a year, ‘we have only one winemaker, and that of course is Michael Silacci, whose decisions are final.’

I meet Silacci and Asleson on a superb early autumn day, just as the Cabernet is coming in and being fed into the mighty Bucher-Vaslin optic sorter. Silacci is bounding around the spacious winery like a teenager, studying the grapes rejected by the US$100,000 machine, which can sort grapes at a rate of ten tonnes an hour, introducing me to staff, demanding I climb a rickety gantry to see how the destalker works. Asleson the indulgent elder. You won't catch him clambering on the scaffolding but he's certainly amused by life in general.

Opus is in a constant state of self-discovery. Every aspect of the operation, from the barrel racks to cork research, is tirelessly examined. They have recently spent US$300,000 on a new Oxo-Line barrel rack system, in which each barrel can be racked, filled, cleaned and rotated independently of its fellows. ‘We produce 300,000 bottles so it works out at a dollar a bottle,’ Silacci says.

In his phrase, this fine-tuning of operations is ‘polishing the sphere’. In the realm of corks, for example, he is ‘obsessed with’ achieving nothing short of ‘99.999%’ success rate. What is his failure rate for corks at the moment? ‘One tenth of a percent. How do I know this?’

Because, he says, they open more bottles of Opus at the winery than anywhere else in the world, and every cork pulled is monitored. They even have a machine to measure the force used in the extraction: they had discovered that corks ‘whose integrity was compromised’ were more difficult to pull.

When it comes to selling the wine, prices and markets are monitored in as much detail. Around 20,000 cases are produced (the 2010 vintage was one of the biggest at 24,000, and there is no other wine apart from a tiny cuvee called Overture, of which about 3000 cases are made to be sold only at the winery). With markets to service from London to Jakarta and points in between, allocations can become stretched, and prices fluctuate wildly.

They don’t want Opus to be a trophy wine that never gets opened. ‘One of our projects is to try to equalise or stabilise price discrepancy between international and domestic wines,’ Asleson says, noting that the US$210 suggested retail price can reach US$8-900 in Brazil or in top Chinese hotels.

So prices have to be monitored and allocations juggled. They are selling less wine in the US than they did a few years ago, Asleson says – ‘but comfortably so’ – although one of the biggest markets, Las Vegas, only gets ‘perhaps 20% of what they really want’.

China is important – Opus opened a Hong Kong office in April last year – but they are aware of the danger not only of missing emerging markets like Korea, Vietnam or Singapore, but also forgetting traditional markets. Asleson reels off a list of European centres he will be visiting this year: London, Hamburg, Berlin, the Rheingau, Austria, Switzerland. ‘It is truly important to get back to Europe and the people who brought us to the dance, so to speak’.

The best way of controlling prices and servicing these markets is through good relations with the negociants, Asleson says. He believes negociants are more  transparent with Opus than with their own long-term French producers, with whom they have a more ‘inimical, more contentious relationship.’

Is that true, I asked Mathieu Chadronnier, the head of major negociant CVBG Grands Crus. It’s not a better relationship but a different one, he said, mainly because of the crucial fact that ‘Opus chose to go to Bordeaux, whereas most chateaux have no choice.’ So there is ‘mutual transparency. We sit down a few times a year to assign objectives to our partnership. We have never had a disagreement.’

Chadronnier said he looks forward every year to the release of Opus. ‘It’s a great story and a great success.’ But he can’t be making much money out of it. We’ve been discussing the importance of the Chinese market for instance, one that only amounts to a few hundred cases a year.

It is almost a study in miniature. In the last 30 years, little has changed, and improvements amount to no more than fine-tuning – an tweak in cork technology here, an adjustment to the sorting process there. As Silacci says, it’s a question of giving a further polish to the sphere.

This article first appeared in Meiningers

Francis Ford Coppola at Inglenook: 'The saviour of an American Icon'

Unlike some of his more memorable movie characters, Francis Ford Coppola hasn’t made many enemies. Quite the opposite, it seems. I pondered this as I sat waiting for him at Inglenook on a beautiful October morning. It was early but there were already a few tourists about, and as the rumpled, stately figure – wearing odd socks, I noted, one bright red and one bright blue – hove into view he was accosted by two pretty young women for a photograph. Coppola embraced them both in a big hug and they tripped off happy as can be.

Why shouldn’t he be popular? He is engaging company, peppering his conversation with asides along the lines of, ‘I don’t know anything about making wine, but then I don’t know anything about making movies either. It can be an advantage.’ Women adore him (he’s a terrific flirt), and he’s surrounded by loyal and affecionate staff.

He’s also one of the world’s most celebrated film directors. He is personable, warm, amusing, accessible. He’s very, very rich. But none of that really accounts for the respect – even reverence – in which he’s held.

I was in Napa for a week and I spoke to dozens of people, winemakers, winery owners, guys in baseball caps lining the bar at Ana’s Cantina. No-one has a bad word to say of him. Why? Because he’s rescued an American icon. He’s the saviour of Inglenook.

Here is Warren Winiarski, for example, who rang me one evening to underscore comments he had made at lunch. ‘The more I thought about it, the more excited I became. It is such a high-minded, noble enterprise, to restore Inglenook to the role it once occupied.’

Then there’s Chris Howell, winemaker at Cain Vineyards: ‘He’s a hero’. And here’s Marshal Walker, a winery designer, who emailed me to say he remembered the Coppolas throwing ‘some majorly kick-butt parties. I was always impressed with the fact that he and his wife were there dancing, smoking cigars and having fun with us working class folks.’

I called Robin Lail, the dispossessed daughter of former Inglenook owner John Daniel. The sale of the estate in 1964, it is well-documented, was devastating for her. She runs her own winery now, but when a portion of the Inglenook estate, and the chateau, came onto the market in 1992 she was unable to buy. How did she feel about Coppola’s tenure there? ‘It is fascinating, and exhilarating. He reminds me of Niebaum and the way he pursued his dream.’

The dream began in the mid-19^th century with the arrival of a Finnish fur-trader and sea captain of immense wealth and a yearning to make American wines to rival Bordeaux. Gustave Niebaum – ‘the Captain’, as he is always known -  bought a 1,650 acre estate near Rutherford, a spot described by the San Francisco Examiner in 1890 as one of ‘indescribable loveliness’, and built the splendid chateau that forms the centrepiece of the estate today.

Contemporary accounts show the Captain to have had an uncannily modern grasp of fine winemaking. By 1890 he was close-spacing rows to reduce yields. He introduced the first gravity-flow system in California, the first bottling line, the first sorting tables, and obsessed about cleanliness in the winery. He believed utterly in terroir.

The estate survived Prohibition, and Niebaum’s successor JohnDaniel, a great-nephew of his wife’s, carried on the tradition of innovation (he had the first bulldozer in Napa). Inglenook’s reputation grew. Vintages like the 1941 are still considered among the world’s finest wines.

But Daniel had to sell. He had two daughters – Robin Lail is one of them – to whom, for complex social and religious reasons he felt he couldn’t leave the estate. In 1964 Inglenook was bought by a joint venture of Allied Grape Growers and United Vintners. The Gallos had also been interested.

Now started Inglenook’s wilderness years. By 1969 Inglenook had been acquired by Heublein, a Connecticut-based company, the owner of Smirnoff Vodka. Heublein began to produce a wine called Inglenook Navalle, and started the process which today means most Americans know Inglenook as the cheapest of jug wines. A three-litre box of its Burgundy Premium costs $9.

This is where Coppola, flush from the success of 1971’s The Godfather, joins the story, nipping up to Napa from San Francisco to look for ‘a cottage, three of four acres, somewhere we could grow grapes and make wine like the Italians do.’

Coppola and his wife Eleanor bought the first tranche of Inglenook in 1975 and steadily bought up the rest of the estate over the better part of three decades, through rollercoaster years of bankruptcy and riches, and finally – in April 2011 – securing the rights to the Inglenook name for the reported sum of $14m. ‘My contract doesn’t allow me to say how much,’ he said. ‘But it’s in that region.’

From the start they knew they had good land. The part of Inglenook they had bought included the ‘back property’ as they call it, a swathe of the Rutherford Bench, that narrow strip of alluvial sand and silt  that is home to the To-Kalon vineyards and the best Cabernet Sauvignon land in California.

‘Everyone wanted an option on the grapes’, Coppola said, and although for one or two years they sold the fruit they soon decided, if it as was so good, why didn’t they try and make some wine themselves? ‘So I borrowed $20,000 from my mother to buy some fermenting tanks and worked with an amateur winemaker up the street. And we made the first Rubicons - 1978 and 1979.’

It wasn’t an auspicious beginning. He was broke, for a start. After The Godfather he wanted to make a Vietnam epic, but the studios just wanted more gangster films - ‘no-one would give me the money to make Apocalypse Now.’ So he paid for it himself. ‘I ended up owing US$21m - and at that stage it looked like I would lose it all because it seemed like no-one liked [the film]. I was on the verge. I was in bankruptcy.’

But he wouldn’t declare himself bankrupt. He was despondent, Eleanor was refused credit at the local stores. ‘I had arrived at a kind of paradise and I was only there in order to lose it.’ He spent the 1980s ‘doing one film a year just to pay off the debt.’

It was not until the success of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, in 1992, that he became properly solvent, and in 1995 was able to buy the next piece of the estate that came on the market, the front vineyards and the Inglenook chateau itself. He didn’t have the Inglenook name, of course, so he called it Niebaum-Coppola, filled it with memorabilia from his films and watched the visitors pour in.

‘It was unbelievable. The first year we made $9m, the second year $18m, the third year we made $40m.’

But he began to be appalled by his commercialisation of the venerable estate. He still cherished his dream of making a great wine, ‘in the spirit of Inglenook’, as he put it, and he couldn’t square that with the hordes that came to gawp at Dracula’s cape and Don Corleone’s desk. ‘I said to my wife, I’m worse than Heublein. I’ve taken this historic place, that made great wines, and I’ve turned it into a mall.’

So eight years ago, he opened the unashamedly commercial Francis Ford Coppola Winery in Sonoma, and cleared Inglenook of the film glitz. Soon, the Inglenook retail space will be closed, the better to concentrate on restoring the estate to its past glory.

And what glory. Coppola said that when he first bought the house in 1975, he and his neighbour Robert Mondavi opened a bottle of the 1890. ‘The aroma of this wine permeated the room.’

I haven’t tasted the 1890, but I have had three old Inglenooks whose aromas were as seductive. The finest, by a hair, was a 1958 Cabernet that I had over lunch with Coppola in London. Then, at dinner in Napa we had a 1951 Pinot Noir and a 1961 Cabernet, which have the brightest, freshest, most charming palates you can imagine. All who taste the wines agree. Jancis Robinson said the 1958 was ‘ethereal’, the best of that vintage she had ever had.

That tasting with Mondavi was the birth of Coppola’s ambition to make Inglenook a wine that can take its place among the greats. ‘What we want to achieve is to make a premier cru wine that is known around the world. We know that Inglenook made great wine 50 years ago, and we know it made great wine 100 years ago. So the question is to make sure we follow in that tradition.’

Now that he owns the Inglenook name, the project has shifted a gear. He has hired Philippe Bascaules, winemaker at Chateau Margaux for 21 years, as his managing director. Another Frenchman, Stephane Derenoncourt, has been consulting for some years and will continue to advise, while on the board Coppola has Craig Williams, veteran Phelps winemaker, ‘to give them some feeling of Napa’.

The first vintage of the newly-named wine will be the 2009, in an elegant Bordeaux bottle which will replace the heavy, embossed Rubicon bottle, and a label inspired by an original from the 1940s. As to style, Coppola says he wants ‘to go more in the direction of the 2010 because it has this combination of femininity and and power, freshness and elegance.’

As we taste the wines I ask how he deals with jibes that he wants to produce what one critic called ‘a frenchified California first growth’ – especially now that he’s got a brace of Frenchmen on board?

Coppola points he wasn’t specifically looking for a Frenchman: Philippe was simply the best man for the job.

Bascaules chips in. ‘I’m not here to make a mini-Margaux’, he says. ‘It’s important that I make these wines from the vineyards, not from a pre-conceived idea in my head. My job is to understand the terroir and then use meticulous selection and careful vinification to extract the best possible wines from the estate.’

Inglenook seems to be in good hands. Coppola says his role as owner is ‘to make sure the property can realise its full potential. My goal is to understand the vineyard, and to ultimately provide the ability for Philippe to create a new winery, supplementing the antique chateau winery, where we can bring in 260 acres of fruit, and put it in individual fermenters. I want to learn about not just the parcels that are vinified, but the areas within those parcels.’

Bascaules mentions  the geological survey they have underway, ‘to study the parcel limitations, as some of them may be sub-divided in the future. This parcel-by-parcel analysis will give me the lexicon I need for the future, to truly understand the Inglenook terroir. But I’m already starting to appreciate the enormous potential of the estate.’

What comes across is Coppola’s utter confidence. He knew the ‘absolute rightness’ of the decision to spend $14m (or thereabouts) on the name. He’s quite sure that he can restore the devalued brand to its rightful position. ‘Those who appreciate Inglenook’s greatness have no knowledge of the cheap spinoff wines.’ If you build it, they will come.

Throughout the day, Coppola has returned again and again to the theme of preservation and legacy. All three of his children - Roman, the Oscar-winning Sofia and the youngest, Gia (actually Coppola's grand-daughter, the daughter of his son Gian-Carlo, who died tragically during the filming of Dracula) - will take over the winery when he is gone, he says. Roman, ‘whose tendency is to hang on to the things he loved and value them’ will be nominally in charge. Coppola says there are no debts on the property.

And so the future of Inglenook is assured. Coppola has atoned for the sins of the corporations that desecrated its name, and for his own sin of commercialisation. He’s doing it for the unsentimental idea that it’s something worth preserving. And the most touching thing about the whole business is that he – the great director – still can’t quite believe it. ‘How could a guy like me, from a lower-middle-class family from Queens, end up owning America’s greatest wine estate?’

This article first appeared in Decanter magazine

Beijing, Bordeaux and the cancelled €30m contract

The Bordeaux negociant community has closed ranks and is refusing to comment, on or off record, about the alleged US$30m cancellation of a Bordeaux 2010 order.

No one, it seems, knows anything. ‘There are rumours but I don’t know any more than that,’ negoce after negoce tells me, which is pretty much the story from most of Bordeaux.

The bare facts, my spies in China tell me, are this: a single Chinese buyer committed around €30m in both back vintages and 2010s through an agent, and then cancelled the lot for reasons unknown.

I gather it was a Hong Kong company, a start up, with considerable resources and backing, servicing En Primeur demand what was described to me as ‘a bunch of rich guys in Beijing with government connections.’

My contact went on, ‘As often occurs, the Hong Kong guys seemingly did not do their research and the mainland money and connections did not deliver.’

There the speculation begins.  The negociants involved are keeping mum about what must have been a massive hit.

One, an ever-courteous – and highly experienced – Bordeaux veteran was more forthcoming. He confirmed he’d heard the rumours, that a ‘significant sum’ and ‘six or seven negociants’ were involved in the deal with ‘one client’.

Orders of that magnitude are very uncommon, he said, and cancellations unheard of. ‘I’ve been many years in the business and I’ve never heard of one.’

Would they have recourse to law? He wasn’t sure – it depends on the contract, and there must have been a contract for a deal that big.

He also stressed that it wasn’t the end of the world. ‘Everyone’s getting very excited because it’s such a big sum of money, and because it’s China. But it’s a one-off – it’s not a trend. It could have happened anywhere. And remember – no one has actually lost any money. No wine left Bordeaux. It’s a non-event.’

Indeed. And who were the rich guys in Beijing with government connections?

China-watchers are speculating one of the downstream buyers might have been the giant Aussino Cellars, which has 200 stores across China.

You’ll remember they had an attack of the vapours back in the summer when a hapless employee told Jane Anson for Decanter that they were ditching the left bank and concentrating on St Emilion and Pomerol in outrage at the prices of the 2010s.

Here's that story, and Aussino’s rather weaselly retraction.

The €30m contract was cancelled just about that time.

A visit to Screaming Eagle

Napa, seven-thirty on a Monday morning in late October and the mist hangs in the valley, a soft white fleece over the vineyards. It sits in pockets over the deep red soil of the tiny Screaming Eagle acreage off the Silverado Trail in Oakville (there’s no ‘winery’ sign, just the number post on the edge of the highway). A little knot of pickers hangs about, an intern or two. They have been picking for some days now, estate manager Armand de Maigret tells me, and the Cabernet is sitting in its bins waiting for the crush. The grapes are small, thick-skinned and sweet, and sparse on the bunches due to the coulure – poor fruit set – that has bedevilled reds and whites alike this year after the heavy rain in June spoilt the flowers. Still, the grapes are delicious. ‘2011 is going to be plumper than Bordeaux,’ de Maigret says. A phenomenal vintage, he adds, but there’s going to be ‘massive selectivity – we’re not taking any chances.’ Of course, as he says later, it doesn’t matter if they have a small vintage. ‘We’re under no financial pressure to increase production’.

Screaming Eagle, after founder Jean Phillips sold her ‘beautiful ranch with my precious little winery’ in 2006, is now wholly owned by Stan Kroenke, who has Arsenal FC in his portfolio, as well as basketball, hockey and American football teams. The vineyards, an almost perfect 50-acre square of Cabernet, Merlot and Cabernet Franc plantings yield between 500 and 800 cases. The smallest recent vintage was the 2005, at 500 cases, the biggest 07 with 800. The first vintage in 1992 was 200. 2011 is going to be small.

There is only one wine. Anything that doesn’t make the grade is poured down the drain, which at first seems rather arrogant, but then you realise that production is so tiny, the rejected wine is only going to be a barrel’s worth.

The release price of Screaming Eagle is $750 a bottle, with allocations strictly three bottles at a time. People tend to drink one, cellar one and sell the third, de Maigret says. The wine quickly finds its level in the secondary market, around £2000 a bottle, with the great 97 fetching anything north of £3000.

It’s the ultimate and first cult wine, but the term’s become a bit old hat. ‘No one calls us a cult any more,’ de Maigret says. ‘We’re a grand cru – a Napa first growth, and that’s it.’

He reckons that a cult wine is one that shows the winemaker’s hand, ‘but here it’s not the winemaker making the wine, it’s the place.’

The soil is rich, deep red volcanic, dotted with sizeable rocks (they call them corestones) that on the top of the hill are pulled out of the ground as big as truck wheels, but down here are more manageable. The vines all have irrigation lines (you very seldom see a pure dry-farmed vineyard in Napa). ‘It’s a kind of insurance,’de Maigret says. ‘Young vines have to be helped, and otherwise we only irrigate in a heatwave.’ Yes, of course there are regions of the world with superb dry-farmed vines, like the Douro, or Lebanon, or the south of France, but they have been there for many years more than these vines, and they are planted less tightly, and they yield far less, de Maigret says. At Jonata, Screaming Eagle’s sister vineyard in the Santa Ynez valley (Pinot, Petit Verdot, Sauvignon Blanc, Sangiovese, from $75-$150 a bottle), they are preparing to dry grow by dripping water in a way that trains the roots to go down in steps, as deep as possible.

Screaming Eagle is the result of forensic attention to detail. They’re not alone in this – plenty of producers will pick in half rows only – but here they take it very, very seriously. ‘The blocks are so small, and variation within them is key,’ de Maigret says. The blocks are picked in up to five different slices. They pick on taste, ‘and we use the refractometer afterward to confirm what we’re tasting.’

Winemaker Nick Gislason comes in. He was at Craggy Range in Marlborough and then Harlan, and looks like a successful indie musician (actually, most winemakers in Napa look like musicians - or Grateful Dead roadies).

The winemaking team consists of Gislason, globetrotting Bordeaux consultant Michel Rolland, who's there twice a year, and Napa veteran David Abreu.

We go into the cellar to taste the 2010s in barrel.

First the Merlot, from a block of riverbed gravel under shallow topsoil. It’s dense, with a lovely blackberry palate, licorice and very fine tannins. Then onto Cabernet. This is the Old B Upper Block. Three and a half acres, three to four different parcels, picked in partial rows. Dense and powerful. ‘This is the top third of 70% of the rows.’

Onto D1 North, Cabernet again, this time less dense with a palpable perfume of sandalwood. Gislason: ‘And people don’t believe in terroir in Napa?’

Then Old H Block Cabernet Franc. There’s only one barrel of this. Beautiful, tannic, rounded, mouthfilling and perfumed with violets.

The three to four acres of Cabernet Franc, which often in Napa can be astringent, is a ‘key component, for its density of tannin and floral aromas.’ There’s about 7% in the blend, and about 4% Merlot. (Later that day I meet Phil Coturri at Oakville Ranch Vineyards, a few hundred meters above where we’re standing now. His Cabernet Franc is lovely as well. ‘We’re on the same soil as Screaming Eagle,’ he says, looking down over the ridge.)

The rest is Cabernet. And what Cabernet. Moving onto the bottled wines: the 2008 has a lovely spearmint-fresh nose, and a deep, fresh blackcurrant palate, with exotic notes of chocolate and licorice. It’s bright, lifted, with earthy, spicy – almost hot –  tannins and a tantalising hint of truffle. It’s very long, with wonderful harmony of fruit, acid and tannin. What more can you say about one of the world’s most renowned and expensive wines? It is delicious, and obviously beautifully made. The 2009 is a dense, very deep colour with a nose of mint and some green, peppery, capsicum aromas. Tannins are more insistent than on the 2008, they are more precise, stronger, and give edge to the fruit. Again, delicious, compelling, with huge charm. It is a very, very good wine, with the exotic, perfumed, herbiness of Napa and the precision and linearity of cooler climate Cabernet.

‘What makes it unique? It doesn’t need to be overly ripe – we’re almost the first to pick reds in the valley. It has natural elegance and balance.

‘There’s no average, but the main elements are the lifted fruit, the perfume, brightness, floral aromas, the good acidity, the femininity. They are never over-powerful. Most of all they’re wines that make you think of food.’

Quite so. I hadn’t had breakfast, and the thought of a glass of the 2009 with a rack of lamb with a succulent sweet layer of sizzling fat pierced with sprigs of rosemary, was compelling.

I never lose my first impression of Napa as an enchanted valley. To stand high on a ridge and look down over its wide green floor carpeted with vineyards, and its rocky oak-covered hillsides, is to imagine what the first settlers must have thought, scrambling up the slopes in their fur hats and leggings, and marvelling at the beauty and fecundity of it all. Screaming Eagle’s a part of that enchantment, and it’s a privilege to be here, just as it is to be at any one of the estates all over the valley and the hills. It’s just that this one’s a sight harder to get invited to. ‘When we get a request we let it sit for a bit and then see if it gets followed up,’ de Maigret said as I got into my car. ‘Then we take another look. We tend to say no to most people. Jay-Z was in touch recently. We turned  him down.’

What's going to happen to Calon Segur?

St Estephe is agog following the death last week of the chatelaine of Calon Segur, the formidable and irascible Mme Gasqueton. The 3rd growth estate – second only in renown to its neighbours Cos d’Estournel and Montrose - will be sold.

Or so many think. I spoke to a broker who said it was a certainty. He didn’t know much about the family’s tax affairs but was pretty certain any heirs would have to pay death duties on the 50ha estate. Mme Gasqueton leaves one daughter, not involved in the business.

The land, whose vineyards sit on the wonderful gravel mounds of the high northern Medoc, will fetch more than €2m a hectare, so the tax burden could be crippling.

The obvious thing would be to sell the other family estate in St Estephe, the Cru Bourgeois Chateau Capbern-Gasqueton, and pay off the tax on Calon with the proceeds.

Calon is famous for its old-fashioned elegance and restraint; whoever takes on the ancient estate (it’s said to date back to the Romans) will have the opportunity, as one close observer told me, to transform it into one of this tiny appellation’s wonders.

At Phelan Segur, another estate in the process of transforming itself, they are watching with bated breath.

There’s much speculation about who may have pockets deep enough.

Frederic Rouzaud, whose Roederer empire snapped up Pichon Lalande 5 years ago (under comparable circumstances: May Eliane de Lenquesaing, with grown children in other professions, found herself without an heir), and who already owns de Pez and Haut Beausejour across the way, must be emailing his bank manager.

Other candidates: hungry insurance companies like AXA Millesimes (Christian Seely, boss of Pichon Baron, Petit Village, Suiduiraut… emailing ditto), or the French health insurance group MACSF, which shelled out €200m for Chateau Lascombes in July.

Or Francois Pinault, owner of Latour, to stop anyone else getting their hands on it, especially LVMH’s Bernard Arnault (probably not interested, with Cheval Blanc, and Yquem quite enough to worry about). Or Bernard Magrez (not rich enough).

And what about the Chinese, who have been busy acquiring Bordeaux properties over the last 12 months, and whose purchases Jane Anson has been detailing on Decanter.com?

Nothing on the scale of Calon, certainly, but a company like cereals-to-oils giant Cofco, which employs 80,000 people, owns Great Wall and is listed by Fortune magazine as one of the world’s top 500 companies, must be watching. It bought the 20ha Lalande-de-Pomerol estate Chateau Viaud a few months ago...

Then there’s Richard Shen Dongjun, who recently added Chateau Laulan Ducos, a 2ha cru bourgeois in AOC Medoc to his chain of 400 jewellery shops, Tesiro.

Or the luxury goods company Hongkong A&A International, which bought Chateau Richelieu in AOC Fronsac, one of Bordeaux’s oldest estates, in 2009.

That's quite enough billionaires (Ed.)

It probably won’t be a trophy hunter: Calon Segur is an idiosyncratic property, with huge cachet among the cognoscenti but without the heft of a first or a super second. It will be someone who wants to be known as a sophisticate, not a flash harry.

But for all it’s idiosyncracies it’s a brand as bankable as any. Mme Gasqueton did nothing in the way of marketing or pr – the very opposite, in fact, being openly rude to many who don’t normally expect such treatment. ‘She created a myth,’ as one neighbour told me, ‘and that’s another kind of brand-building.’

Restaurant review: The Fox and Grapes, Wimbledon

The Fox and Grapes at Wimbledon is a strange, oddly old-fashioned gastropub.

It used to be a straightforward boozer, doing classic roast beef and all the trimmings Sunday lunches for the Labrador-and-striped shirt set. Then it was taken over by Claude Bosi, who started at Overton Grange near Ludlow and has two Michelin stars at Hibiscus, and now it’s a gastropub. The clientele is still a particular type of overfed man in bright striped shirt, with that kind of swept-back longish hair only the upper classes have. Rather jowly and solidly satisfied, with a thin harassed-looking wife, probably very nice, if orange. There were also lots of dogs around.

So it’s still self-consciously a pub. There’s a bar with taps, and a bloke behind it polishing glasses, but when you go up to the bar someone comes out from a side door and asks if he can help.

The furniture is higgledy-piggledy pub-like, no table cloths, and our table had the authentic greasy-sticky feel, not nice, but probably deliberate, my friend said.

I digress. This is a restaurant run by a garlanded chef, in a prime, the prime, position in some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Greasy tables and dogs notwithstanding, it had better be bloody good.

The wine list is short, unpretentious, imaginative, full of goodies, with prices so reasonable I thought I was still on the by-the-glass page. We had a very workable Pinot Grigio to start, the Bacaro, and the Domaine Isle St Pierre Rhone white, also very decent. Then a bottle of Musar Jeune 2007, a lovely fresh crunchy summer wine, and at under £30 I call that handsome.

I’m so pleased by wine list that I’m not going to complain about the way it was presented (this is where the pub/Michelin’d chef/Wimbledon stripey shirt thing gets itself all in a tizzy), the waitress showing me the bottle with full ceremony, then a sample, then the thumbs up and then she absolutely sloshes it into the glass, practically to the brim, as if she’s the landlord’s daughter in some zinc-topped bar in rural Aragon.

While the wine list is just unpretentious , the menu is studiedly unpretentious. ‘Ploughman’s Platter’,’Patrick’s burger’, ‘English Brown Ale Battered Scottish Hake and Chips, Mushy Peas.’ This is so carefully, almost arrogantly, a homage to every over-rated gastro-makeover in every corner of the country that again you think (fingering the tactile table), this had better be jolly good.

And actually it is. Apart from one of the starters, the Jersey Royal and Summer Nettle Soup with Rabbit Rilette Baguette, which looked like pondwater, and was over-salted, spuds overcooked, nettles giving nothing at all apart from the sludge-green pondiness, and presented on one of those really annoying faux-rustic wooden "platters" that must be a waiter's nightmare, the food was memorable.

My steak (cooked in the very of the moment super-hot Josper oven, as announced) was almost perfect (perfection being a ribeye my younger brother did for me on a barbecue in about 1998, in his back garden in Bath), perfectly rare, just resistant enough to the knife and teeth, lovely flamed flavour. And it sat on a bed of French beans that were so beautifully a point, so absolutely the right temperature, that there and then I relaxed. Anyone can bung a steak in a Josper oven and twiddle about with garnish, but only a Master can cook beans  like that.

 My friend’s Salad of Crispy Pork Belly and Black Pudding was tender, easily forked off the crackling, which itself was poised between crunchy and succulent, the black pudding pungent, dark and agreeably carnal.

Now hands up all those who have been disappointed by summer pudding? If I had to nominate a dish which sums up the early English summer in all its sharp,  tangy-sweet, juicy pregnant ripeness it would be summer pudding. But how often do you order it and find a soggy oversweet mess, or a criminal pallid dry thing with bits of white bread showing through the juice?

Write this down: if there is one reason for making a pilgrimage to the Fox and Grapes, London, SW, between late May and early August, it’s the summer pudding.

I could tell from the start it was a good one. Firm, the white bread soaked in juice but retaining its integrity, just the right size (about as big as an upturned yoghurt pot), the centre packed with fruit, sugared to just the right side of sharpness, not  running with juice but with a lovely dense moistness. Superb. It was like the scene in Ratatouille when the terrifying critic takes his first mouthful and is transported back to his childhood kitchen. This took me back to 1976, Clarks sandals and Aertex shirts.

And it knocked the Eton Mess into a cocked hat, and that wasn’t bad at all.

The coffee was good and hot. The bill? £127 for two. What do you expect from Wimbledon?

foxandgrapeswimbledon.co.uk