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more than an hour. I was wasting time. Colin might be here in a couple of hours: barely time for me to finish my lunch-time wine and start to think about what I would drink before dinner.
    I went upstairs and opened the Palmer, decanted it, then poured myself a glass. It was still slightly chilled, but by the second sip was almost at room temperature and quite delicious.
     
Francis used to say to me, ‘The first sip is always the best,’ and sometimes he would take no more than half a glass from a bottle before pouring the rest away, having extracted a knowledge of the wine from that brief encounter that was sufficient for his needs. My needs were different. I wanted to inhale the wine, to sip it, to drink it. I would have swum in it if I could have. I know that for Francis one of his greatest pleasures was simply to sit and look at it. His cellars and his shop are different now. The shop, of course, is closed. The till no longer rings its antique ring; customers no longer gather there in the hope of a free tasting, or catching up on the gossip about the shooting and the fishing, or the racing; the candles that were always lit within it have long since guttered and gone out. That was where I first met Ed Simmonds, as he then was, who became my friend for a while. Now he is the Marquess of Hartlepool, and we no longer speak, but not because of his accession to the family title.
    That was where, in the days of my apprenticeship in wine, I sat beside Francis as his gaze wandered over the thousands upon thousands of bottles in the racks that lined the walls, the piles of wooden cases of wine that formed islands and towers around the enormous room. He would softly murmur a comment here about some château with a name out of Arthurian legend, and he would speak about the great vintages of his parents’ and his grandparents’ day. The reflected candlelight would glint on the bottles and occasionally he would get up and pull a bottle from a rack and say, ‘Look at that. Cocteau painted the original design for that label,’ or ‘That château no longer exists. The Germans blew it up in the Second World War. This is probably one of the last bottles of this wine in existence and when you, or I, or some ignorant customer drinks it, its whole history will be snuffed out for ever, as if it had never existed.’
    His knowledge was more than encyclopaedic. It was like the knowledge that is acquired by a saint or hermit who has spent all of his life studying the gospels. He knew everything: every grower, every shipper, every vintage, every terroir, every clos. Even now, after those evenings of listening to him, after devotedly reading all the classic works on wine, even going at one point to evening classes, my knowledge is not to be compared to Francis’s. His knowledge of wine was like a great panorama of enormous, snow-capped mountains. My knowledge in comparison was like a molehill at the feet of the foothills of those mountains. When Francis died, the world little knew or cared what knowledge died with him. His wine lives on: the bottles sit in their racks, and the timeless vintages age more slowly than men do. Even so I know that now some of them are dying, leaving the long plateau of their mature years and descending slowly towards a vinegary graveyard. Some bottles are already dead, turned from rich dark red to a thin brown, acetic liquid. When Francis himself lay dying, he warned me that one day the wine would start to die as well.
    I can’t drink it all, try as I might. It would be a breach of a sacred trust to sell any. In any case, I could not bear to part with a single bottle. I will drink what I can while life remains in me.
     
‘You were a little tough on poor Nurse Susan,’ said Colin, sipping his cup of tea. Nurse Susan was at the sink, washing up the plates I had used for lunch. She could have used the dishwasher but she explained she didn’t want to waste all that electricity for a few plates.
    ‘Oh, don’t