Is it a Zinfandel or a Primitivo?

The dispute between Zinfandel and Primitivo - if it can be called a dispute - is not so  baroque as the battle between Tancredi and Clorinda, but it sounds as old as the hills and is proving no less challenging to handle.  Zinfandel is said to be California’s native grape, capable of producing its most seductive red wine. Primitivo, despite its name, is  Puglia’s (i.e.  Southern Italy’s) potentially finest red. but is it the product of one and the same grape variety?   If so, how and when did it get from Italy’s heel to the western United States?

Though I’m not up to speed on the latest stage of the debate. it’s certainly a running story and has been capable of growing quite heated. There is no doubt that Zinfandel is the better, more enticing name, compared with which Primitivo does Italy no favours. Would you give such a wine to someone as a present?

Yet the answer is that they would be lucky to receive it, at least if it were a good example of its kind. like the one I have just been drinking from Waitrose, a Paolo Leo Primitivo of Manduria. currently reduced from £10.99 to £7.99, perhaps because nobody has been buying it.  But it’s a delicious wine, especially if you decant it. which mellows its flavour and makes it taste like a great Italian red - and, to be ftank, better than some great Italian reds sometimes taste.

At its current price it is a bargain, and I shall be buying more when I return from holiday, if there is any left - failing which the Ristorante Contini in George Street serves a good specimen. Otherwise.  a well-chosen Zinfandel will do very nicely, and Waitrose is again, by the look of things, able to oblige with its Apothic Red  - how’s that for a name? - which at £9.99 may be worth a try. I’ll give you my thoughts on it when I return from Galloway. where neither Zinfandel nor Primitivo may prove easy to find.

Writing resumes on August 4.
17 July 2014

How green was my Gruner Veltliner?

While the white wines of Alsace, for all their elegance. continue to wobble on the edge of popularity, just as they seem always to have done, Austrian Gruner Veltliner is going from strength to strength.  Though there are similarities between them,  it seems plain to me that the banks of the Danube are proving increasingly  successful - more so perhaps than those of the Rhine - in enabling wine producers to strike a balance between the greenish sweetness and dryness that rewards the palate. The result may be less mellow than we would expect of an Alsace wine, but it can be, in the words of the English wine authority Hugh Johnson, “really snappy” - which is not a description you would often use of something from Alsace.

Perhaps it’s the flintiness of the polished Austrian wine at its best which makes the difference, and which makes it so good to drink. It’s not what you might associate with the rough young wines quaffed in the open air at the local  inns in what is now the Viennese suburb (in Beethoven’s time the village) of Grinzing, celebrated  in old Viennese songs by that gemutlich baritone Erich Kunz, where you eat  chicken on the spit or wiener schnitzel  beneath the trees. That was something - perhaps still is - often quite raw in taste, not that it seemed to matter,  since you tended to ignore the rawness for the sake of of the spirit of romance created by where you were drinking it. With a good modern Gruner Veltliner, however, you get a quality wine without losing  the romanticism.

Yet in Britain our supermarkets are still holding back a little on the appeal of these bottles. Though it’s possible to find at least one type of Gruner Veltliner on their shelves, it’s harder to find two. But the small Waitrose stable of these wines has now grown to three -  two of them established (and, priced at more than £10,  not inexpensive) examples of the breed, plus what is presumably intended to be an enticing new cheaper model at £7.99.

The trouble with this bargain, however, is that, despite its sophistication, it does taste undeniably edgier. So my recommendation, for the moment,  is that if you want to try Gruner Veltliner, it’s worth spending  a little more on one of the pricier bottles, with their finely-chiselled minerality, or else wait for Waitrose to bring them briefly down in price, as they sometimes do.
16 July 2014

Charwood connections

Though the rumour that the Tusitala restaurant at Fairemilehead was to become Edinburgh’s latest branch of Sainsbury proved unfounded - it was denied in a printed statement by the owners - the place nevertheless changed hands last month.  It’s now more prosaically  called Charwood, serving fairly similar food to what appear to be its numerous customers,  but placing a heavier emphasis on pizzas, steaks, and burgers.  The loss of the old Samoan name - chosen in tribute to Robert Louis Stevenson’s final  residence in the Pacific - strikes me as a pity, especially as the explanatory Stevenson pictures which used to adorn the entrance to the restaurant have also gone.

But at least the place still looks southwards towards the Pentland village of Swanston and the famous T plantation, with their old Stevenson associations. In fact, at first glance, it would seem that little has changed. The furnishings and colour scheme are just as they were, the big wood-burning stainless steel oven is still in place, and the menu is broadly similar. The differences lie mainly in aspects of the cooking.

The Shetland mussels, formerly a house speciality, tasted what could only be described as tired when I ate them at lunchtime today. It was a word, I fear, that could also be applied to the rest of the meal, including the panna cotta dessert, with its drab strawberries and broken honeycomb biscuit.  Nothing, including the macaroni cheese chosen by one of us, looked very appetising. Moreover the bright Chilean sauvignon, which used to steer the menu in the direction of Stevenson’s Pacific,  has gone, though the replacements by chance  include a Picpoul de Pinet from the French Languedoc, not far from where Stevenson travelled with donkey. The coffee looked too uninviting to sample.

Did we simply choose badly? Were the steaks, priced from £15 to £48 (for a classic chateaubriand), the things to go for?  Presumably yes, but here we come to a small enigma, since Charwood, in restaurant terms, is a fashionable name in other parts of the world. Call it up on your computer and you will find that there is a much-vaunted Cairo Charwood’s specialising in - what else? - steaks and pizzas, the best, it seems, in Egypt.   If there is a connection between the Cairo one and the Edinburgh one - there’s evidently another in Southampton  -  who knows?  But if the Edinburgh one is that good, I’d better order a steak next time I go.
15 July 2014

The interview that wasn't

 I saw Lorin Maazel conduct many times but I met him only once, when he was in Edinburgh with the concert pianist Israela Margalit, who had recently become his second wife. They  were staying at the Caledonian Hotel near the Usher Hall. She was in Scotland to play, if I remember rightly, a Rachmaninov or Saint-Saens concerto with Sir Alexander Gibson and the Scottish National Orchestra, and he was there to listen to her.

Sensing a story, I made an appointment to have afternoon tea with them in the hotel’s relaxing lounge.  Though I was happy to interview her - she’d never been in Edinburgh before - I was even happier to do so in the presence of Maazel who, to be truthful, was the person I really wanted to meet.

Maazel’s death in America  the other day  at the age of 84 brought it all back to me. The interview had started with Margalit, alone, joining me at the tea-table.  We chatted about the standard things -  her career and  what she would be playing - and conversation was flowing.  But where was Maazel?  I glanced around the room. Not a sign.  I was beginning to fear that he had guessed my objective when suddenly I spotted him bounding down the staircase, then sauntering across to join us. I brought him into the conversation and he immediately made his position clear. Though perfectly friendly, he said he was not there to be interviewed, or even to take part in a joint interview with his wife. He did not want it known that he was in Edinburgh. He did not want anything  he said to be quoted in The Scotsman.

My plan was not only scuppered but I realised that he was perhaps  not quite the musical show-off I thought he was. His stick technique may have been famously flashy,  his platform manner brimming with self-esteem, but he had rightly guessed that his presence would detract from my interview with his new wife.  Having made his point, he sat back and beamed, saying next to nothing that could not have gleaned from any publicity sheet. But the edge, I regretted, had been removed from  the interview.

Knowing that as a journalist I could have made the whole thing work, I felt disappointed when it didn’t. After our exchange of pleasantries, he and his wife went back upstairs to prepare for the concert. Attending it as a critic,  I thought the performance unimpressive.  Maazel, I was told, was in the audience, though I failed to spot him.  An opportunity to interview him, alas, never came again.The next time I heard Maazel conduct, he had a different wife and Israela Margalit had started a different career as a writer and playwright.But did he already know, that afternoon in Edinburgh, that her days as a concert pianist were numbered?
14 July 2014

The editors in my life (8)

At the start of the nineteen-sixties, I decided I was getting older - I was almost thirty - and was beginning to experience the first pangs of home thoughts from abroad.   Living in Amsterdam was lovely, but where was it getting me?  Into the most comfortable of musical ruts, it seemed.  Yet the more I thought about it, the less I did to change it.  Philips was a congenial organisation to work for. I wrote freelance articles for a variety of publications. Prudently, however, I set aside a month in which to return to Britain and discuss my future. But instead of doing so,  I set off in the other direction to travel by train through Germany, Austria,and Switzerland and see what I saw. It was a delightfully painless journey, a solitary tour of places most of which were  new to someone who had been primarily a francophile.

So I offered to write about it for The Scotsman, and my idea was accepted. I’d already taken one previous peep at Germany, which was still rebuilding itself after the war. I’d visited Cologne but thought the cathedral  less impressive than Schumann had done. I’d boated up the Rhine, stopping at Koblenz in a thunderstorm, but finding it a disappointingly drab place to hold such a key position on three major rivers.

While the rain continued to pour, I made a spur-of-the-moment change of direction.  Jumping on the first train out of Koblenz, I headed up the River  Mosel and got off at the first place it came to.  It was the small riverside village of Cochem. The rain was still pouring. The night was dark.  I found a hotel, the Germania, on the riverside, and booked in. Dinner  was being served and a rustic dinner dance was in progress. I was given a window table with a view of the rain. But thus began my affection for good German wines which, until then, I had known nothing about. With growing  feelings of contentment, I ate a trout and watched the dancing.

Next morning, when I drew back my curtains, the sun was shining on the river and I continued my journey as far as the ancient town of Trier on the Luxemburg border before returning gradually to Amsterdam. My next trip, I vowed, would be more comprehensive, which was how I came to spend a month en route between Wiesbaden,  Heidelberg, Munich, Salzburg, Vienna, Graz, Innsbruck, and Zurich, when I should have been job-hunting (as per my original plan) in London.

Britain, by then, was a different country from the one I had left. It was the time of mods, rockers, Carnaby Street and winkle-picker shoes, which were nowhere to be seen in Amsterdam.  To me it looked trivial. Could I bear to go back to it? Against the odds, I found what I hoped would be no more than a temporary London  job as a sub-editor on The Star, rival of the Evening Standard, but before I could leave Holland the paper abruptly announced its closure. “God be doomed,”  thundered Wim Zalsman, my boss, adding that it was a blessing I could stay on in Holland a little longer, because a replacement for me had not yet been chosen.
13 July 2014

The long lunch

I was lucky enough to be a staff journalist in the last days of British journalism as it once was.  That was the period of what we liked to call the long lunch, when interviews took place and business was done in a good restaurant with a bottle of wine on the table. Life was interesting, productive, and convivial, because lunch had not yet degenerated to the munching of an apple in front of a computer screen.

Even as a trainee I was expected to go out for lunch.  This, even at its shortest, would be a ninety-minute slot in the middle of the day. You set off and, no matter where you ate, you would see what was happening and come back with a story. Sometimes this derived from talks with other journalists or, in my case, musicians, and sometimes from chance encounters which, even in Edinburgh, could turn out to be be valuable sources of information.

 Instilled in me from the start, it was a part of the day to which I invariably looked forward, even if, in my novice period,  I stepped no further than the Adelphi Hotel at the top of the Fleshmarket Close, where for a time, in addition to munching bar lunches and quaffing a beer or the then popular lager and lime,  I ran a  small classical gramophone society - this was the era of the LP record - meeting weekly in a private room. It ended suddenly on the day I was recruited into the RAF, and several of its more dedicated members came to the Waverley Station to bid me farewell on the grim, dark, crowded overnight train to Bedford, where I was to be kitted out.

By the time I was demobbed two years later, the long lunch seemed an even more established way of journalistic life than it did before. There were, as always, the formal lunches, with speeches it was our duty to report. There was the annual Edinburgh Festival lunch, rather a grand affair at the City Chambers when, if a new director was about to be appointed, this was duly announced or at least hinted at. When Lord Harewood resigned, Ernest Bradbury, music critic of the Yorkshire Post in Leeds, was the guest speaker, who expressed the hope that the next director would turn out to be a jewel in theFestival’s crown. His desire was fulfilled. The next director was Peter Diamand from the enterprising Holland Festival.

A good long journalistic lunch was one from which you returned to the office at five o’clock, ready - it was hoped - to start typing. For me as a music critic (eventually of The Scotsman) there were many of these. Sometimes they formed interviews with musicians.  The conductor Sir Charles Mackerras enjoyed lunching with critics but always took care to ask beforehand who was paying. The wild-eyed Russian emigre conductor Jascha Horenstein preferred afternoon tea at the Caledonian Hotel, where he grew impatient if it was not served quickly. On one occasion while I sat quivering - he was a famously scary man - he stormed through to the kitchen and started hammering on a stainless steel counter as if it were an orchestral tamtam, yelling the words "Booma, booma, booma" at the top of his voice.   The service came instantly.

 Best of all was the great Jessye Norman lunch at Raffaelli’s Italian restaurant in the West End. The soprano had been launching the Scotsman Steps exhibition on the North Bridge and the arrangement was that the arts editor Allen Wright and I would take her to lunch at newspaper expense. She sailed into the restaurant like a magnificent galleon  with a flotilla of personal assistants, advisers, admirers and, we thought, a possible lover or two, demanding lunch for everybody.

A special long table was quickly set. The place startlingly began to look like the climax of Act One of Der Rosenkavalier. At a nearby table sat Harry Reid, the Scotsman features editor, lunching with the political writer Michael Fry, but they could not take their eyes off what was happening across the room. I had been put in charge of the wine list and was sitting beside Jessye herself. Marzemino, a red Italian rarity, caught my eye.  “Ah,” I exclaimed, “shall we drink something  operatic? What about Don Giovanni’s wine?”

With a prominent  thumb, Jessye made a meaningful downward gesture. A good Brunello di Montalcino would be preferable, she said. It was indeed good, and it added impressively to the Scotsman bill.
12 July 2014

The trouble with Alsace

Much as I enjoy a summer glass of Alsace wine, I am less puzzled than I once was by the marketing problems it has to face in Britain.  It’s not just that these wines are hybrids, admittedly delicious ones, which are not quite German and not quite French, from vineyards on land famously fought over by opposing German and French armies  Sipped appreciatively in the hilly villages of the Alsace countryside  itself, or in a good restaurant in the fine old town of Colmar,  they are an almost unfailing delight. It’s when you drink them elsewhere that doubts can arise, which is why our supermarkets have such trouble selling them to the British public.

Waitrose’s latest Alsace wine, a not inexpensive Riesling from the Cave de Beblenheim, puts the problem in perspective.  For me it is simply too sweet, with none, or almost none, of the drier, underlying, fascinating secondary flavours which, according to Alsace specialists,  make these wines the subtle experience they are. There was hardly a dish I could think of with which I would have fancied drinking this wine last night, other perhaps than foie gras, for which there are not many customers in Britain.

Rieslings, it’s true, tend towards sweetness, but it is their complexity of taste that makes good ones interesting. Yet here was one, priced like most Alsace wines above the £10 mark, I simply did not like, though it was surely a good one.  What was the matter with it - or with me?

 Waitrose stock a better range of Alsace wines than most supermarkets, and perhaps I would have done better to choose one of the fashionable Gewurztraminers, with their Chinese taste of lychees, which most people seem to prefer these days, and of which Waitrose sell two examples. The difference between a Gewurztraminer made from genuine Alsace grapes, and a cruder one from, say, somewhere in Eastern Europe is significant in my experience, and shows why Alsace wines are rated so highly by those who admire them.

Raeburn Fine Wines in Stockbridge have long been one of Edinburgh’s most comprehensive Alsace stockists, with an impressive list of Rolly-Gassmann bottles. Before I decide that my enthusiasm for Alsace is waning, I must go down there again - or to Peter Green in Marchmont, also notable for its Alsace selection -  and stock up.  My suspicion is that Alsace is not a supermarket wine, even perhaps at Waitrose.
11 July 2014

The wine club lottery

Wine clubs - Laithwaites, the Sunday Times, Virgin - are tempting to join, usually because of their introductory offers, but easy to get tired of.  I’ve been a fickle member of several, initial enticement often dwindling into boredom and, when I decide to drop out, annoyance that they keep pestering me with new proposals that tend to look like old ones in disguise. 

But I like to keep at least one membership running, the latest being Naked Wines from Norfolk,  who make an effort to encourage promising young wine producers in different countries, demonstrating what good value and how interesting their products  are. Some of them, in my experience, are better than others, but the ones I have grown to like and who have proved exciting enough to attract me, have helped to make me a continuing customer. 

The rules applied by Naked Wines are pretty standard. They email  you a frequent, extending wine-list and you tell them what you want. You order by the twelve-bottle case, which can consist of your own choice of wines or, if you prefer, something pre-packaged. Delivery is prompt and, more often than not, free.  Your account balance grows monthly by direct debit and when,  within two or three months, you have accumulated enough cash, you can place your next order in the expectation that it will be both worthwhile and uncommon.

There are various incentives. In your support of the ambitious  young wine producers you can become an “angel,” which enables you to get price  reductions. Every wine gets a listed percentage valuation of how many customers have bought it and been happy with it.  And every so often, if you order at the right moment, you get a free bottle or two. It’s not a bad system, even if you sometimes carelessly miss a bottle you seriously want to try, and for me it has worked well enough up to now.

It’s in identifying  producers you like, and avoiding those you don’t, that the system grows increasingly useful. Benjamin Darnault of the Languedoc is someone I’ve become more and more impressed with.   He produces a lovely fresh, dry Picpoul de Pinet, with a faint hint of prickle, which I’ve ordered several times and of which, this week, I’ve received the 2013 vintage. His pale pink (in some lights almost colourless) grenache is a deliciously dry summer wine, aptly named Pique Nique, and his red Minervois La-Liviniere I would certainly be happy to drink again. 

Rod Easthope’s New Zealand wines, including a fine fruity Pinot Gris, are also worth sampling. Naked Wines, like other wine clubs, may have their lottery aspects, but they have a good policy about returns and for the moment I’m sticking with them.

10 July 2014

Celebratory oils

In celebration of their eightieth birthday, Valvona & Crolla, Edinburgh’s great Italian foodshop and restaurant, are selling La Palombara, which may sound like something from their sumptuous wine list but is in fact an estate bottled extra virgin olive oil from central Italy made by Cesidio di Ciacca, brother of Mary Contini, one of the Edinburgh firm’s proprietors, on his estate in the Val di Comino.  Costing £9.99 for a quarter-litre bottle, this is an oil that cannot conceal that it belongs in Italian olive oil’s highest bracket, but it’s clearly an oil of the highest intensity,  well worth sampling, as is suggested, on salads and charcoal-grilled fish.

Whether it can rival Poggio Lamentano, which has always been my favourite Valvona & Crolla oil, remains to be seen.  Made by the Zyw family, former residents of the Dean Village in Edinburgh, where Aleksander, the father, was a distinguished Polish artist and a close friend of my own father, this distinguished Italian oil has always caught the eye, thanks to the simple but subtle greenness of its label.

But it’s the flavour that counts, of course. Though Aleksander moved to Castagneto Carducci on theTuscan coast for health reasons, and developed his style in new directions, olive oil soon became a family speciality, produced in sloping olive groves above the sea, where I twice had the good fortune to spend a weekend.  The 2013 vintage costs £24.75 for a standard-sized bottle - again not cheap, but a star oil for a star occasion.

Also on Valvona & Crolla’s latest list, and similarly enticing,  is a Frantoio Galantino oil which comes in a half-litre ceramic flask costing £19.95, strikingly designed with an attractive olive motif.

Correction: the opening concert of the Edinburgh Festival takes place this year on Friday, August 8, not on August 7 as stated in a previous blog.
0 July 2014

The editors in my life (7)

I knew I’d got the job when, arriving home one evening, my next door neighbour told me he’d just had a visit from the police asking for information about me. Was I responsible or irresponsible? Did I have criminal tendencies? Was I drunken or drug addicted? What of my family connections?

Though he was not told why he was being quizzed, my neighbour had worked out for himself that a foreign country, possibly Holland, was interested in me. Amsterdam was not yet the drug capital of Europe, and clearly did not yet want to be.  Indeed, during my period there, it still showed a strong streak of Dutch puritanism, not unlike that of the Scotland in which I grew up. At any rate, I passed the test, or whatever it was, and within a month or two I was working for the second time in my life in another country.

But not in Amsterdam.  Philips Phonographische Industrie - known more simply in Britain as Philips Records - had its headquarters in a handsome old country mansion on the outskirts of Baarn, a sleepy town to which it brought a spot - a very  tiny spot - of life.  Few of the great Philips performers, in my experience, ever visited the place. We were the industrial work force, my section of which operated five and a half days a week on the production of record sleeves for which I, as sleeve-note editor, wae expected to supply the copy.

My boss, in overall charge of the record sleeves, was WL (short for Wim or, more mysteriously, Pim) Zalsman, a noisy, fast-talking, well-upholstered Dutchman, member of a Rotterdam newspaper family, who was constantly in dispute with the London leg of Philips, as well as with some of his own colleagues. I'd met him, and liked him, at my job interview.  On home ground he was prone to prowl around the small annexe, a former gatehouse, in which we worked, periodically snarling “Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman.”  But, though he shouted  rather a lot, he was not hard-hearted and in his spare time he was a virtuoso player of Sjoelbak, a traditional Dutch form of shove-halfpenny, which he played with terrifying velocity on a polished wooden  table in the basement of his home.

He was also a virtuoso of old Dutch expletives, not just of the basic ”God be doomed” variety, but of more imaginative an startling wordings. Summoning you to his room, he would stare at you through almost closed eyes and ask you - an artful ruse - what you were staring at. “Have I got green snot coming out of my nostrils?” he would exclaim.  “Have I forgotten to get dressed?  Have I wet my trousers?”

He was nothing if not forthright.  When he returned from official travels, the word would go round: “Zalsman is back.” Though some of us feared his temper, he was more of a barker than a biter.

Mostly he spoke to me in English, and only switched to Dutch if he wanted to gain an advantage. If he said “Dag Meneer Wilson” (Good-day Mr Wilson) in greeting, I knew I’d made some editorial blunder.  But on the whole,  as the company’s resident Scot, I was lucky to find myself encouraged.  We were a young team, most of us in our twenties, Zalsman still in his thirties, and the staff proof reader, Jan Huizinga (no to be confused with the great Dutch historian), for whom I had a special affection,  as an erudite fifty-year-old father figure.

Everyone was eager to speak English and came to me with grammatical questions and rules I’d never heard of, such as the positioning of place before time in the running order of a sentence. Every day there would be requests. Can you let me have - I was asked more than once - a sleeve note on Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, by lunchtime if you please?  The work was not yet the popular classic it later became.

Notes on jazz or pop or what Philips  obscurely called Dancers’ Dorado tended already, all those years ago, to take priority over the classics.  I had to remember that photographic transparencies were known as diapositives. The company’s relationship  with Columbia Records in America meant that some sleeve notes were already written over there. German sleeve notes, on the other hand, were written by me in English, then translated into German.

The atmosphere, as I have mentioned in an earlier blog, tended to be convivial, and the sleeve designers with whom I worked were skilled and chatty. Living in Holland was seldom less than fun. For the best part of three years I continued, almost every night being a night out in Amsterdam, 45 minutes away, where I had chosen to reside.

But it was not, as I gradually decided, a job for life (though one of my successors, David Hogarth,  got married there and stayed on).  Sleeve notes and other articles could never be works of criticism. Even the most minor concertos had to be extolled as masterpieces. Philips performers were always  the best, even when they were not. I was already too much of a critic to find this acceptable in the long term.  But my Dutch friends were a joy to spend time with, and  the Amsterdam restaurants, particularly the Chinese and Indonesian ones. were a pleasure also. And even Zalsman’s outsize personality was, I decided, something to savour and certainly remember..
8 July 2014

The darker side of Dyer

Reading, or re-reading, Geoff Dyer’s The Missing of the Somme is as good a way as any, and probably better than most,  of preparing yourself for this year’s Edinburgh Festival, with its emphasis on memories of war that range from the edgy intensity of Britten’s War Requiem at the Usher Hall  to the potential nostalgia of Bal Moderne, a choreographed evocation of the songs and dances of wartime Europe, which will be be presented for three afternoons at the Hub and is described as an “immersive” experience where the audience will be given an opportunity to dress up in period clothes and join the performers in a programme devoted to wartime popular entertainment.

Though the latter seems a long way from the stinking trenches of the Somme,  it perhaps comes closer to the Dyer we know than the beautiful, elegiac, melancholy book he wrote in 1994 about what he prefers to call the Great War rather than (less emotively) the First World War. But the point about Dyer is that he is the sharpest of observers - of anything from Tarkovsky’s gaunt Russian film entitled Stalker, out of which in 2012 he drew his substantial book called Zona, characteristically subtitled A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room, to his superb collection  of essays, dating from 2903, about Thailand, France, Libya, and Italy,  subversively entitled Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It.

Dyer is famed for his polished flippancy, beneath which lies something often darker and, at times, quite disturbing. It’s the darker side of Dyer that emerges, without the flippancy, in The Missing of the Somme, but his keen-eyed watchfulness (which can be serious as well as funny)  and interest in relics - ruins, graves and, in this case, the architecture of cenotaphs - are fully evident.

Twenty years on, the book continues to gleam amid the welter of centenary studies of the Great War that publishers have been battering us with, because it is so elegantly as well as movingly written and, like most of Dyer, is an impeccable model of style. Though the comedy - which, in his latest book, derives from two weeks spent on board an oppressive  American aircraft carrier patrolling the Gulf -  is inevitably missing, it is not missed. And even the new book ends with a night of total emptiness - nothing to see, nothing to do, nothing to enjoy - in Bahrain.Its effect is like that of the finale of Vaughan Williams’s otherwise intimidating Symphony No 6.
7 July 2014

Continental Ways

The west end of George Street and its Castle Street crossover are in a state of gastronomic change.   Librizzi’s has been replaced by Mark Greenaway’s. Cosmo’s, the oldest of Edinburgh’s ambitious Italian restaurants, closed down a while ago but it, too, has been replaced.  And what has happened to Centrotre?  It’s now called Contini, but this is no more than a new name, because it’s said that customers have been having difficulties with the old one - a pronunciation problem perhaps? Or, after more than a decade, a different moniker was simply deemed desirable.

 But happily it’s still Victor and Carina who are in charge. The spruce decor inside this former George Street bank, with all its imposing pillars,  remains the same. The wine list looks as good as ever. The menu,  it's true,  has been revamped, but not hugely.  It’s still - perhaps even more so - the place we had grown to love.

Carina has celebrated its relaunch - if that’s the word - by writing a sumptuous seasonal cookbook, beautifully designed and greatly enticing. It’s all in the family, because she is the sister of Mary Contini, of Valvona & Crolla, already an established writer.  But the two sides of the family go separate ways, with separate aims - Victor and Carina having recently taken over the National Gallery of Scotland’s restaurant and cafe in Princes Street Gardens, while Valvona & Crolla continue to run a cafe and shop on the third floor of Jenners, as well as their Vincaffe near Harvey Nichols.

In George Street yesterday afternoon, the newly-named Contini was bridging the gap between lunch and dinner by, as usual, serving coffee and drinks indoors and out on the pavement. That stretch of the street is at present  in a state of interesting upheaval with wooden platforms being built from the kerbside into the roadway. These, as part of what looks like a policy of increasing pedestrianisation, will form cafe terraces in time for the Edinburgh Festival, helping to push George Street in the continental direction in which it has recently been going.

But with yesterday’s weather a little unsettled, we chose to sit inside at one of Contini’s window tables, drinking their excellent coffee and thick hot  Italian  chocolate, augmented with glistening slices of pure gluten-free chocolate cake, a golden honeycomb crunch, and a dollop of creme fraiche. One of Contini’s pleasures is that it’s open all day, serving coffee or breakfast from 7.30.  We did not wait on for dinner, which as before  includes an assortment of fresh, not inexpensive seafood dishes, well-composed pastas.  and some classy pizzas, eked out with irresistible desserts.
6 July 2014

Festival openings

The Edinburgh Festival’s annual opening concert in the traditionally teetotal surroundings of the Usher Hall - consisting so often of a large-scale, mind-cleansing, ecumenically inoffensive choral masterpiece - only once in my experience caused preliminary uproar of a sort which today would  inspire disbelief.   That was when Sir Thomas Beecham announced that he would conduct Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis and found his performance banned by the Scottish Kirk as a piece of mischievous popery. Though Beecham was never a man to back down when faced with opposition, he conducted, if I remember rightly, the Ninth Symphony instead.

Today such problems no longer arise. The Usher Hall has for some years served alcohol and the Festival does not need to be unveiled with a religiously impeccable opening Sunday concert  - though I must admit that the only time I myself strongly objected to the content of the opening programme was when Frank Dunlop launched the Festival with the Nazi vulgarity of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana.  “What’s wrong with a spot of vulgarity,” were the words with which Frank countered my opposition.  It wasn’t the vulgarity that was objectionable, I replied. It was the politics of the composer.

Under Sir Jonathan Mills’s aegis, the problem - even if it still existed - has been sidestepped with ease. The Sunday night opening concert is a thing of the past. This year the opening concert will be on Friday, August 7. Though still a vocal event, featuring the Festival Chorus and Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the composers who have been chosen are an arresting mixture of Schoenberg, Scriabin, and Debussy, with the invigorating and amiably subversive Oliver Knussen as conductor.

Schoenberg was a composer chased from Europe by his Nazi foes. The inclusion of  Debussy’s Martyrdom of St Sebastien is clearly a tribute to the Festival’s theme this year, inspired by Albert Camus’s declaration that “it is the destiny of the artist not to serve those who make history, but to serve those who are its victims.”

The point will be underlined the following night when Donald Runnicles and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra perform the young Benjamin Britten’s pacifist Sinfonia da Requiem, commissioned by the Japanese and banned by them before it could be performed.
5 July 2014

Not just another rustic red

I’d been told I should try a red wine with the simple, unpretentious name of Domaine Marie, from the area of Faugeres in the Languedoc, available from Waitrose, my favourite supermarket (and Which? Magazine’s also I note with interest). It was good advice. Though there’s no shortage of southern French Languedoc wines on British shelves these days, here was one which, through the modesty of its label, could be in danger of being overlooked.

From a small estate run by Marie and her husband in the Cevennes, where Stevenson travelled with his donkey, it’s not just another rustic red. Indeed I’d be happy to find it on a restaurant wine list at a price in keeping with  - i.e. not more than twice as much as - the £8.49 Waitrose is asking for the 2011 vintage.  Such a shop price is a bargain for something as silky as this, dark enough to look like one of the black red wines of Cahors, big enough in flavour to confirm its 14 per cent alcohol level, yet not at all overbearing or excessively fruitified, based on a combination of Grenache, Syrah, and Carignan grapes, such as would be favoured in the Rhone. 

Once poured or decanted, it quickly softens in taste. We drank it last night with sirloin steaks and roasted parsnips, to which it seemed admirably suited. Faugeres wines, when you find them, can come at prices much higher than Waitroses’s, but this one, even if it is an introductory offer, is certainly no disappointment. 

Friends whose taste buds you trust are a good way of gaining advice on wines you might not otherwise buy.  Waitrose sell it by the case and half-case as well as in single bottles. I’ll be on the lookout for it again.

4 July 2014

The editors in my life (6)

Can you remember - asks AA Gill in this week’s Sunday Times - how grim and threadbare Britain was in the 1950s?  Rationing, as we are still being reminded,  persisted until 1953 - its presence insidiously suggestive of a Philip Larkin poem - though I can’t remember that it lasted quite as long as it did.   I have a clearer recollection of buying pounds of chocolate on my first trip to Belgium as a schoolboy soon after the war, and the exhilaration of being able to do so. My first sight of a neon-lit city - post-war Brussels, of all places - was part of that experience, as was my first taste of veal and, at the Cite Universitaire where we stayed, my first bowl of edible porridge.

Yet returning to Edinburgh as a trainee journalist in 1956 after two years in Paris was not all gloom and despair.  The streets, it’s true, remained largely devoid of restaurants, but the ones that were there included a few worth eating in, particularly the excellent Cafe Royal with its stained glass windows and wonderful waitresses, the St Giles Grill and the smart Aperitif, the cosy Cramond Inn and the resourceful Ricky’s at Tollcross.

True, the National Gallery seemed puny compared with the Louvre, and Calton Hill with the Butte Montmartre, but completing my newspaper  training, as I was  now on the brink of doing,  felt  like graduating from college.  Working for the Evening Dispatch with Alec Bowman as the most benign of editors, and with the bustling old chief reporter Bobby Leishman as my attentive overseer,  I was for a time blissfully happy,  Along with  the leader writer  Alastair Stuart, I started a monthly two-page spread of paperback book reviews, reputedly the first of its kind in Britain.

Leishman, in a state of constant anxiety, was a rubicund perfectionist, a stickler for good syntax who forbade me to write such ineptitudes as “Following the concert, the conductor fell off the platform.”  The word I needed to use, he huffed and puffed, was  “after.”  The conductor was not following the concert.  It’s a crime, I’m sorry to say, which is still committed by most newspapers today.

Bobby also had a thing about pianos, which were never to be described as bad or out of tune. “It causes pointless trouble,” his voice of experience  would splutter. “You never hear the end  it. Every piano tuner and piano owner  in Edinburgh will want you sacked.”    Though the paper’s  theatre critic was permitted to reprove, if necessary, actors at the King’s or Lyceum, humdrum shows at the Gaiety, Leith, or the Palladium, Fountainbridge, were sacrosanct, no matter how embarrassingly unfunny they were. Bobby was a joy and an education  to work for, once you got to know his quirks.

Nevertheless I sensed that the day was coming when I would need to move
on. Edinburgh, for all its virtues, seemed at the time  no substitute for Paris. While I rejoiced in being simultaneously a music critic, film critic, and art critic, and in making a host of new friends, I still yearned for somewhere else.   Within a few years of coming home, when the dull Karl Rankl was succeeded by the even duller Hans Swarowsky as conductor of the Scottish National Orchestra, a possible exit route suddenly materialised for me  in the form of an advert in the New Statesman announcing a job as sleeve-note editor at the headquarters of an international record company in Holland. The company, I suspected, could only be Philips. I instantly applied, was interviewed in London by three sturdy Dutchmen, and found myself appointed.

My enthusiasm for jazz as well as classical music, for Dave Brubeck as well as Leonard Bernstein (both of them Philips artists), did not go unnoticed by my interviewers.  Nor did  the meagreness of my Edinburgh salary which, as it soon turned out,  was about to be doubled.  Yet kissing the Dispatch goodbye was not easy. I had prospered there and enjoyed my work.  But the paper’s days were numbered. Before long its owners, the Thomson Organisation of Canada, would buy out its Edinburgh rival, the Evening News.  Then, instead of closing down the News, they closed their own less prosperous Dispatch instead.

The News offices at the bottom of Cockburn Street were bought by the district council, and eventually became for some years  the headquarters of the Edinburgh Festival. The News was shifted to the lofty Scotsman building in the North Bridge, though it remained, in my view, a less interesting paper than the Dispatch. Today, despite further changes of premises, that is the arrangement which, for better or worse,  still stands,  though the Thomson Organisation itself moved out some time ago.  Such are the vicissitudes of British newspaper life.
3 July 2014

Make mine Beaujolais

An email from Gerald Larner - good friend, fellow wine  drinker, fine programme-note essayist. and former Guardian music critic - pays tribute to the 2009 vintage of Beaujolais-Villages, which I omitted to mention in my recent Beaujolais blog (“Simply so French,” 21 June). Though there may not be a great deal of it left by now, you can still find it on restaurant wine lists, he says, even if what you are in danger of being served, without apology, turns out to be the less good (though in my view by no means despicable) 2010, 

In shops, however, it has become hard to track down, even though  Beaujolais stocks do seem to be increasing. Waitrose has just added a 2011 Chateau de Chenas Moulin a Vent (a major Beaujolais cru, offering deeply serious drinking) to its list, not cheap at £11.99 but surely a bargain in terms of quality.  Next time Gerald comes visiting I’ll have a bottle ready for him.

He also suggests in his email that the great disaster of Beaujolais Nouveau, which at one time people used to rush across France to buy, was not entirely bad news. Though much of it was admittedly poor stuff, at least it gave you what he describes as a “mouth feel” - something all wine tasters should treat seriously because it provides a hint of what the vintage might turn out to be like when properly produced.  All of which goes to prove that it’s foolish to treat even the worst Beaujolais without at the very least a touch of respect.

2 July 2014

The editors in my life (5)

Having observed two springtimes in the Bois de Boulogne, experienced two fourteenths of July from the top of the Butte Montmartre, spent two Decembers strolling past the Christmas shop windows of the Rue de Faubourg St Honore on a Saturday afternoon en route to browse amid the polished wood bookcases of Galignani’s splendid shop in the Rue de Rivoli followed by coffee and cakes and a spot of reading in my favourite cafe near the Palais Royale, I suddenly found that my demob from the RAF at SHAPE was almost upon me. 

Could I bear it? The question I thought I would never ask myself now loomed over me. I toyed with the idea of signing on for another year - something else I thought I’d never do - and discussed it with my squadron leader but was given no guarantee that I would remain at SHAPE if I did.  Since the great military headquarters, which I had grown to love and where much of the time I did not even have to wear uniform, was the vital factor in my negotiations, I immediately retracted what was surely my foolhardy plan. 

The many good English friends I had made (though surprisingly few Scottish ones) were also on the brink of demob and only one of them, Jim Fox, planned to settle in Paris, where he already had a room in the house of a White Russian landlady near the Parc Monceau and would eventually become a celebrated photographer.  He’s still living there and we correspond from time to time.   His civilian ambitions struck me as enviable, and I’m glad he fulfilled them. 

Would SHAPE, I wondered, be interested in employing what is nowadays known as a writer-in-residence?  Negotiations reopened, but it turned out that there was already such a person,  who operated privately in this capacity and was referred to as a rock of Gibraltar in his immobility. What he wrote, if anything, I no longer recall.   Besides, I reminded myself, I was a music critic, wasn’t I, with a job awaiting me back home.

All the same, I had got to know various British journalists resident in Paris including the film critic Calais Calvert and a delightful Darby and Joan called Frank and Topsy Tole who lived in a tiny attic and worked for one of the London papers. Better an attic in Paris, I thought, than a penthouse in Kensington. They invited me periodically for supper, and it was through them that I had my first taste of Mont Blanc, a concoction of chestnut puree and sour cream to which I soon became addicted.

But it did not lead to a job and in the end my demob preparations prevailed. I cleaned out my locker, on whose top shelf I kept my French cheeses, and every weekend a bucket of oysters which I shared around the billet.    An invitation to the annual Paris pastrycooks’  ball - like a scene from a Massenet opera -  formed my goodbye to the  city I loved, and still love, above all others. The two pretty French secretaries I sometimes worked with, Annie Lambert and Claude Diraison, waved me goodbye. 

Meanwhile in Edinburgh, where it still seemed too cold to wear an open-necked shirt,  a new editor awaited me at the Evening Dispatch. Theoretically, I was still a trainee, but a more confident one than I had been two years previously.  The Thomson Organisation had by now decided that the brash Londoner, Jack Miller. was not the answer to the paper’s problems and had replaced him with the neat, polite, and affable Alec Bowman, a deft, quietly experienced journalist from The Scotsman. He wasn’t the answer either but I thought him an admirable editor while he lasted, intelligent and easy to get on with. 

If he had a quirk it was that he fancied himself as a music critic.  In my absence abroad he had sometimes deputised for me when an event of special importance occurred.  It was not a pleasure he desired to give up. Would I mind, he asked  with his infinite gentleness, if he continued?  It was not for me as a trainee to object, especially as the terms he offered me in return proved conspicuously generous. Since it was a journalistic tradition, nowadays in London sometimes withheld, to supply critics with two tickets for events, Alec artfully proposed that once in a while he would take one ticket and give me the other,  and we would attend the performance together. 

This, as he doubtless knew, could have seemed offensive. Young though I was,  I was the critic. But the operative word was “occasionally” and he did not abuse it. Indeed it happened so seldom that it never caused an embarrassing  predicament. In return he offered me even better terms than I already had. In addition to being music critic - an appointment now to be rather grandly upgraded to “our music critic” - my job was to be expanded, thanks to my Parisian experience, to being film critic as well, and also, though in a smaller way, an art critic. 

Though I felt concerned that my field of authority hardly stretched that wide, he pointed out that I would be the paper’s official cultural correspondent. Perhaps it was no more than an old Scottish way of getting one person to do several jobs, but who was I to refuse?  It was a great offer. Even if it meant working under more than one name with not much of an increase in salary, it suited my youthful journalistic ambitions very well. 

On the subject of music, Bowman took care not to overplay his hand. Only once did we come close to clashing.   That was over a Rosenkavalier at the Edinburgh Festival which we both wanted to review. Bowman reviewed it. I accompanied him, feeling a bit like a plumber’s mate. But he took good care to check his facts with me before committing them to print. 

He was a good editor to work for, never causing trouble and always coming up with ideas which he knew might attract me, like being a general features writer as well as a critic. When Edinburgh rashly decided to get rid of its double-decker trams, I said adieu to them under the heading “A Farewell to Trams,” supplied by Bowman himself. Now that trams have returned, amid a prolonged, painful, and costly dispute with foreign suppliers, I’m happy to know that I still have, somewhere among my files, a yellowed cutting of my nostalgic 1950s article. 

1 July 2014