Sybille Bedford's Thoughts on wine

I like this extract from Sybille's Obit, published in The Independent and written by Shusha Guppy

Her joie de vivre expressed itself in an abiding curiosity about human beings, a deep love of nature, and a lifelong interest in wine. One of England's best-known connoisseurs, she travelled widely all over this country and abroad, especially in France, to "tasting" and "judging" ceremonies. She described the charm and power of wine, and her own love for it, in a memorable passage in A Compass Error:

[She] loved wine from childhood on. She loved the shapes of bottles, and of course the romantic names and the pictures of the pretty manor houses on the labels, and she loved the link with rivers and hillsides and climates and hot years, and the range of learning and experiment afforded by wine's infinite variety; but what she loved more than these was the taste - of peach and earth and honeysuckle and raspberries and spice and cedarwood and pebbles and truffles and tobacco leaf; and the happiness, the quiet ecstasy that spread through heart and limbs and mind.

Sybille was a brilliant writer though nothing she wrote subsequent to her first travel book (A Sudden View) or her first novel (A Legacy) lived up to her early promise (though her biography of Aldous Huxley was v good though failed to mention she had an affair with his wife). Like many marginally titled "nouveau pauvre", she was a Black Belt in scrounging. Shusha Guppy again, on her mean-spirited approach to wine appreciation:

When Bedford read an article I had written on Persian cuisine, she invited herself to dinner. She arrived with a little basket containing two bottles of wine, red and white, already opened and half consumed: "I'm fastidious about my wine," she explained, refusing what I had provided. She poured herself a glass from her white wine to drink with the hors d'oeuvre, and another from the red for the main course; then she fastened the corks expertly and put the depleted bottles back in her basket - she seemed relieved when I told her I was a teetotaller. She made up for spurning my wine with lavish praise of the Persian dishes: "I love food, good food, simple, authentic. Taking food with friends has a sacramental dimension for me. It is part of my love of life."

She never tried this trick when she came to dinner with me in the early Eighties though she later complained to all and sundry that "the Petrus was far too warm".