Ryman de Bergerac

Nick Ryman, who has died at 83, was one of the first small British wine producers to buy his way successfully into the French wine trade and the first I interviewed as newly-appointed wine critic of The Scotsman almost half a century ago.

Though not the friendliest of people, he welcomed me to Chateau la Jaubertie, his property in the Bergerac region of central France, treating me to the delicious blend of Sauvignon and Semillon. He had been struggling to develop as a novice winemaker who had previously helped to run Ryman’s, the family stationery firm but had grown fed up with it.

Having dreamed for years of owning his own French vineyard, he spent his share of the family profits on doing exactly that. Though he had no wine experience with which to bring this about, his purchase of a beautiful small chateau fired his enthusiasm and he gained his learning the hard way, battling with foul weather  and other setbacks until reaching eventual triumph.

When I visited him with a handful of other wine scribes he had begun winning his first awards and had produced a  successful sweet Monbazillac.  Drinking the drier Chateau la Jaubertie with him in his garden, and eating lunch cooked by his wife, made all of us wish to take the same risk and settle in the same lovely but neglected part of France where Nick had been developing new methods of wine production that made many local growers seem outmoded.

Nick’s Bergerac whites struck me as the best I had tasted, yet for a time he had trouble marketing them in Britain. In Scotland, Judith Paris - who had set up her small Wines from Paris company after a career in the Scottish Arts Council - did a deal with him and made Chateau la Jaubertie famously available in Edinburgh, but before long they fell out, which was something that Nick appeared to have a talent for doing - his career was tarnished by recurring family disputes and break-ups making him come to seem one of those people who are called their own worst enemy (a description to which Judith could surely have added the words “Not while I am alive”).

Yet his wine was undoubtedly good and I have vivid memories of sipping it in the Bergerac sunshine - no bad weather on that occasion. His tie-up with Majestic Wines appeared to be a success and my first taste of  Chateau la Jaubertie continues to haunt my memory.

31 July 2015
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This Week's Wine: Italian Verdicchio

Verdicchio - especially when its name is enhanced with the words “classico” and “superiore” - is one of Italy’s most reliable white wines, dry and firmly structured, with enough flavour to make it interesting.

Most supermarkets stock it in one form or another, in good enough versions to make this product of the Adriatic coast seem a safe buy.

Sipped in a Pesaro restaurant, sometimes under a posher name, it seems the nicest of drinks, the perfect representative of the seaside university town where the composer Rossini was born.

Though now sold mostly in conventionally shaped bottles, it used to be visually identified by the tall, curvaceous amphora bottles in which it was traditionally supplied. Today this is something people have come to associate with poorer-quality Verdicchio, but Sainsbury’s current version, a 2014 “Taste the Difference”  classico, though not a superiore, costing £8, is unapologetically in an amphora bottle and is not to be despised because of that.

Although not markedly better than Waitrose’s 2014 Verdicchio Classico (in an ordinary bottle) at £5.99, it is fresh, thoroughly quaffable and certainly preferable to an average supermarket Pinot Grigio.

A more uncommon Italian white is a Grillo from Sicily, a happy specimen of which is being supplied online by Naked Wines of Norfolk at a not excessive £7.99 per bottle. Slightly stronger than the Sainsbury Verdicchio, this vivacious wine has a bit of bite and can be served as an admirable aperitif.
28 July 2015

Pineau of Memory

The gift of a bottle of Pineau des Charentes  recently given to me by a  friend from Manchester came as a jolt of nostalgia akin to the effect of a madeleine on Marcel Proust.

During my two RAF years at SHAPE in Paris it was my favourite French aperitif, superior in my opinion to the then fashionable Dubonnet. Sipped ice cold, it was one of my little pleasures, its nutty, raisiny taste the equivalent of a good sherry of similar strength. As a product of rustic France, it struck me as delightfully mysterious, surpassed only by the more urbane Italian Punt  e Mes, which I came to enjoy - and still do - a little later.

But Pineau, or the slightly stronger Vieux Pineau which I preferred, disappeared from my sphere of bibulous activities when I returned to Britain, its aroma a distant memory.  It had been introduced to me by a French conscript called Michel Gilbert, whom I got to know at SHAPE and who was deprived of Pineau for a week when he was put on a charge while lugging two heavy boxes of documents from one part of the premises to another. A French colonel, passing him en route, asked him why he had failed to salute, and Michel replied that he thought it would have been ridiculous. He was promptly charged and sentenced to jankers. Later he invited me to his wedding at a charming auberge on the Seine outside Paris, though I have not seen him since.

What happened to him - and to Pineau des Charentes - I do not know. Somehow I never drank it again,  not even  when visiting  France and had the opportunity to do  so. My tastes, I suppose, had moved on. Yet clearly it still exists, and the bottle I unexpectedly received, and quickly drank among friends, bore the mellow old enticing label. But British supermarkets seem not to stock  it, nor does my local wine merchant, though it is available, as most things are, through Amazon.

Whether I go so far as to buy it that way remains to be seen. My favourite aperitif these days is a good white burgundy, which I shall be content to stick to. But the pleasure of tasting Pineau again was  nice.  If you have come across it in Edinburgh, I would be happy to hear from you.
23 July 2015

The Streaming of the Seraglio

While Edinburgh cinemas declined the opportunity to stream  Sunday’s performance of Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail trom Glyndebourne  - Dorking, Bradford, and Milton Keynes were among the unlikely places that laudably accepted it - I seized my chance to watch the company’s transmission of the event on its own website.

It was by no means perfect. Too many blips on the live screening marred the transmission , particularly during the tension of Act Three, but nevertheless I got an impression of what David McVicar’s fine if controversial new production is like, as well as glimpses of the audience enjoying their picnics in the grounds.

Die Entfugrung - originally better known in Britain in its Italian version entitled Il Seraglio and now anglicised as “The Abduction” - is one of Mozart’s longest operas.  The Glyndebourne  version, largely uncut, started at five and finished more than four hours later, which may have been one reason why Edinburgh cinemas rejected it. But sung by a really good young cast, as this one was, it is a  marvellous, though still slightly underrated work, thanks partly to the Austrian Emperor’s famous comment to the composer after the premiere  that it contained “monstrous many notes.”

Dating from 1782, when Mozart was newly arrived in Vienna, it is a startling precursor in some ways of Cosi fan tutte, with a Fiordiligi-like heroine torn between two men and a story balanced on a knife-edge between the comic and the distraught.

McVicar, I thought, brought out this aspect of the piece more disturbingly than most directors, just as Glyndebourne’s new young music director, Robin Ticciati, admirably conveyed the music’s mixture of drama and exuberance, shot through with the clash of Turkish percussion, which was all the rage in Vienna at the time (it can even be heard in the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony).

Yet there is nothing racist in the approach, as there evidently is in the new production at Aix-en-Provence, which has provoked such fears of terrorist reaction that members of the audience have been searched for weapons as they arrive.

McVicar’s production is impressively truthful and unsensationalist, though undeniably irascible. Everyone, even the usually amicable Pedrillo, is made to seem on the point of exploding with impatience to the extent that Osmin, the Pasha’s threatening overseer, is not the accustomed shaven-headed brute but looks like someone fair-haired  and nasty out of Wagner’s Ring.

Though some of the London critics in their reviews chose to share the Emperor’s complaint about too many notes, the chance to hear a really complete performance  of the work struck me as well worth taking. Whether or not there were too many spoken words, they were part of the character of the piece and the extra music (including the heroic Belmonte’s Act Three aria, almost always omitted) was compensation. It was also a performance enlivened by its passionate and beautifully focused power of observation. When the DVD is issued next year I shall be buying it.
20 July 2015

God's Tenor

The death of Jon Vickers the other day  at the age of 88 prompted me to listen to him again in the DVD of one of his major roles - Don Jose in the Salzburg Festival performance of Bizet’s Carmen with Grace Bumbry in the title role and Herbert von Karajan as conductor.

The lavishly detailed   production by the conductor himself, was very much a spectacular Karajan show, with dozens of extras, a full Spanish corps de ballet, clacking heels,  sumptuous costumes, and a Seville townscape for Act One, complete with sunshine, busy cafe terrace and big stairways - the obverse, in every way,  of the sombre , characteristically “urinary” Beito production streamed on July 1 from the London Coliseum.

Yet the heart of the Karajan performance was where it belonged, not only down in the Salzburg orchestra pit with the Vienna Philharmonic but in the outsize personalities of Vickers (slightly bandy-legged in uniform) and the alluring Bumbry  themselves, along with the expressive, wide-eyed Mirella Freni as Micaela. 

Although, like Beito, Karajan shunned the spoken dialogue which is an essential feature of Bizet’s masterpiece, the strengths - including the melodic sweetness -  of the opera shone through, however grand the scale. God’s Tenor, as Vickers used to be nicknamed, was in eloquent form. Though his Christian zeal - his first wife was a missionary’s daughter and  he pulled out of two major productions of Tannhauser because he deemed Wagner’s opera to be blasphemous - affected much of his career, sometimes to its detriment, his granite-voiced singing was of fierce intensity.

My wife, watching part of Act Two   of Carmen over my shoulder, remarked that he looked just like Billy Graham - an unexpected but apt comment, given his religious background, bringing to mind a profile of him written by Andrew Porter which said that the trouble with Vickers was that there were  moments when he wondered whether he was watching and hearing Jon Vickers as Peter Grimes  or Peter Grimes as Jon Vickers.

It was this aspect of the great, craggy-faced tenor, son of a Canadian  lay preacher, which my wife seemed to have picked up, and which undoubtedly marred some of his performances, memorable though they were. I heard him seldom - as Verdi’s Otello and Handel’s Samson - and almost always in London. But it was a memorable, if sometimes exhausting and finally exhausted voice. Karajan was said to admire him enormously but Sir Georg Solti - a “bully” according to Vickers, though Vickers seemed to be a bit of a bully himself - fell out with him and refused to work with him. 

And his Don Jose? Undoubtedly impressive,not least in the Flower Song,  though his soft notes, as light as feathers in contrast with what has been called the blunderbuss effect of his loud ones, are what stick in the memory.  It is easy to imagine what his Messiah, conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham, must have been like - the sound of God’s Tenor at full throttle, but at times on the edge of inaudibility,  was something to savour.

17 July 2015 

Please visit my blog:  conradkmwilson.blogspot.co.uk

This Week’s Wines: Summer Whites

If you find Sancerre too lush for your palate as a summer sauvignon, and perhaps also too pricey, an alternative lies in a Touraine Sauvignon, which comes from the same French region but is more mineral in flavour and costs a lot less. Waitrose’s own-label version at £6.99  from Cave de Oisly is a particularly nice example, refreshingly dry but with ample flavour.

Also worth sampling,  from a different part of France is Simpson’s Sauvignon, a product  of the Languedoc. which Naked Wines of Norfolk, now operating  in conjunction with Majestic Wines, sell for £7.99.

Charles Simpson, in partnership with his wife Ruth, is a young Englishman, formerly in pharmaceuticals, now working in southern France under the name of Simpsons of Saint Rose. His Sauvignon is not his only wine - his low-yield Roussanne at £9.99 is a rarity also worth drinking and deemed a fine match for crab.

More readily accessible, however, are a pair of classic  white burgundies, a St Veran and an even better Montagny, both being marketed by Tesco around the same sort of  price. The Montagny can be bought by the half case (six bottles) for under £60. Strongly recommended.
11 July 2015

A Carmen for Today

Gratuitously vicious and violent, Calixto Bieto’s English National Opera  production of Carmen, streamed earlier this month from the London Coliseum to cinemas everywhere, was in some respects less lethal than expected. Though his devotion for opera as sensationalism was emphatically still present, it was not wholly at odds with the Merimee story on which Bizet based his final opera.

The feebleness with which it has been so often characterised - it was the first opera I saw as a boy and I thought it too soft-edged - was ruthlessly swept aside. But what replaced it was musically unconvincing. Carmen is a sublime example of French lyricism, and its beauty needs to be respected. By Beito, alas, it wasn’t.

The heroine’s “goodness”, as opposed to her badness, was famously portrayed by Teresa Bergaza at the 1977 Edinburgh Festival  in a performance where her feminism, not her sluttishness, was what mattered. Some people thought her too puritanical for the part, but with Placido Domingo as her Don Jose the combination worked, and her death was a feminist victory.

Viewed in remorseless close-up, there was no doubt about Carmen’s sluttishness in Justina Gringyte’s brassy ENO portrayal. Even Micaela, in Bieto’s hands, became something of a slut as she wobbled round the stage in high-heeled shoes, in total defiance of the tenderness of her music.Yet Eleanor Dennis in this role gave us the best singing of the evening, even when Beito was intent on making her respond with triumph when she persuaded Don Jose to return to his mother at the end of Act Three.

Beito’s was, in fact, a Carmen without dramatic contrast. Eric Cutler’s big, bullish Don Jose was a long way from Domingo’s, and sounded merely crude in the Flower Song. Leigh Melrose’s apparently world-famous portrayal of Escamillo, thanks to Beito’s updating, seemed no more than an Al Caponish gangster in Act Two.

Nor was the decor helpful. Lilias Pasta’s tavern was non-existent, and the mountain scene was a car park big enough for five cars to be brought on to the Coliseum stage - a triumph of sorts. In Act One, shorn of its lyricism by one of Beito’s scenes of public urination, the Spanish flag was made to symbolise the barracks and cigarette factory. Spoken dialogue, perhaps fortunately in the circumstances, was in short supply. The English translation, for once all too audible, was crude.

Yet the final act was an unexpected success. The excellent ENO Chorus sang vividly from the front of the stage. The chalk circle within which Carmen and Don Jose brought the opera to its climax, was effective. Richard Armstrong, as he did in the days when he was  Scottish Opera’s expert music director, proved himself a real conductor, even if the orchestral reproduction in Castle Douglas’s nice little cinema, where we heard it, sounded far too loud.

Operatic streaming has become one of the success stories of modern times, enabling more and more people to experience famous productions from which - for reasons of distance and high ticket prices - they are customarily excluded. Though this Carmen was not one of the better examples of beaming live opera to the masses, it showed what has become possible. Along with DVD, a more subtle format, opera streaming is one of the musical assets of the day.

10 July 2015