‘The definitive Christmas present for wine lovers’ recreated

H Warner Allen (1951) 

In my last year as an undergraduate, when I was dead broke, as all fourth-year men were in those unregenerate days, I led myself into temptation one afternoon and dropped in at Jones’s, the wine-merchants in the High. A wily salesman with a reverend white beard made a casual remark that there was just one dozen of 1864 Lafite left in the cellar. I was tempted and fell. One hundred and twenty shillings a dozen seemed, in those days, a fantastic price to pay even for the best claret the world has ever seen. This wine was reposing under my window seat in the recess which was the nearest approach to a cellar in my digs, when certain sons of Belial, flown with insolence and wine, paid me a visit as they were wont to do, and, finding me out, hunted round for something to devour. Some of them helped themselves to whisky as was right and proper, but more enterprising members of the gang explored the cavity below my window seat. [ or just this last sentence] To this day I shudder to think of what followed. They laid sacrilegious hands on my best claret, and when I came in I found them drinking Château Lafite 1864 out of tumblers with no better excuse than that it seemed to them quite decent red ink.

Michael Broadbent (1981)

Glamis. What this name evokes! Scenes from Macbeth; the birthplace of Elizabeth the Queen Mother; and the resting place of the most famous collection of magnums ever to find its way to (and occasionally revisit) the saleroom: 1870 Lafite…Clearly Claude Bowes Lyon, the 13th Earl of Strathmore, was a keen wine buff. But the 1870 Lafite must have proved an immense disappointment. It was an enormous wine, black as Egypt’s night, severe, tannic – undoubtedly like red ink when young. The 13th Earl died before the wine had matured enough to drink; indeed it took half a century (as did the 1928 Latour) to come round. We opened one magnum before the sale – absolutely essential, for had it not been up to scratch the whole collection would have been suspect and its value negligible. To make the most of the occasion I invited some of the best English ‘literary palates’ to diner in the Christie’s boardroom, including Hugh Johnson, Cyril Ray, Edmund Penning-Rowsell and Harry Waugh. Naturally, we had some interesting wines, the pièce de resistance being immediately preceded by one of the most exquisite of clarets: the 1900 Léoville-Las-Cases. With bated breath I drew the cork of the magnum of 1870 Lafite: the original cork was perfect, the level of the wine amazingly high. As for the colour, it was so deep and so red that it could almost have been mistaken for a 1959. The nose was equally miraculous: not a hint of old age, of oxidation or over acidity – just gentle rich fruit. It was a lovely drink: full yet soft and velvety, with great subtlety and length of flavour; still tannic, with years of life left. The greatest of great clarets. It just seemed to get better at every sip….