Heritage, schmeritage
What should historic brands do when nobody cares about history? Plus a new Critic wine club.
New Critic wine club
There’s a new offer from the Critic wine club which I curate (dread word!) It comes from Private Cellar and features a gloriously bright Spanish pink, none of that wishy washy swimming pool water. Then there are two Riojas from Bodegas de la Marquesa: a white that would make a great white Burgundy substitute and a fine crianza. All bottles have about a pound knocked off and there’s nothing over £17 a bottle. Go to Private Cellar for more information.
The end of history
I have just finished The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe. It’s one of those rare books that deserves all the superlatives attached to it. Something that struck me about the 1980s Park Avenue types that Tom Wolfe satirises so expertly is just how, by today’s standards, cultured they all are. They might be soulless vampires, but they know they are meant to appreciate high culture, so they invite opera singers and eminent English poets to their ghastly parties.
Their tastes are decidedly old money. Sherman McCoy, the main protagonist, who is accused of severely injuring a black teenager in a hit-and-run accident, wears Savile Row suits and shoes from New & Lingwood in Jermyn Street. It’s not just the WASPs1, his boss Lopwitz is Jewish, and his office has original Chippendale furniture and an actual fireplace that cost him $350,000 to install.
This is how it was until recently. The rich aimed to live like the British aristocracy, only with better plumbing and dentistry. Think of the great robber baron Andrew Carnegie, who returned home to Scotland in 1898 and rebuilt Skibo Castle in a Scots baronial style. But no more. Today the look of the global rich is rather different, as I discovered on a recent trip to a boutique hotel in the Cotswolds. The outside was a beautifully preserved yellow stone building, but the vernacular look ended as soon as we got inside. The dining room felt like a bathroom in Dubai, a very nice bathroom in Dubai, I should hasten to add, but a bathroom nonetheless. It probably cost a fortune to do up but looked, to my mind, cheap and incongruous.
You see this again and again on Rightmove, where I spend far too much time looking at houses I can’t afford. Beautiful Georgian or Victorian houses with grey laminate floors and spotlights. Who wants this sort of thing? Well, I’m afraid to say that clearly many people do.
My parents spent their weekends antiquing and filled the house with heavy hardwood furniture, which I imagine is now completely worthless. Rather than the tweed suits of old, the rich dress like the Roy family in Succession, it’s all upmarket gilets and designer baseball caps. Madeleine Grant has written a great piece on the decline of the Wasps in The Spectator. Only the out-of-towners wear a jacket and tie when eating out these days.
This fetish for the new presents a problem for prestige wine, which for years, centuries even, has traded on its venerability.
