Master and Commandaria

Looking for Patrick O’Brian’s own wine in the Roussillon.

It’s hard to watch Master and Commander, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, without thinking what might have been. As Boccherini plays at the end, a little part of me expects “Jack Aubrey will return in Post Captain” to pop up. Thankfully the one film made out of a Patrick O’ Brian’s novel is so rich that it repays repeated viewing. I saw it in the cinema when it was first released and since then must have seen it dozens of times with my wife who thankfully for the sake of our marriage is just as much of a fan. We watched it again this week and she pointed out how the cinematography seems inspired by old masters like Turner, Delacroix and, at one moment near the beginning when the gloom below decks is lit by a solitary lamp, Wright of Derby. That’s the thing about Master and Commander, there’s always something new to see. The deeper that I’ve got into reading the novels, the more I’ve come to fully appreciate the casting of the film. Portly but vigorous and charismatic, Russell Crowe is Jack Aubrey and while Paul Bettany is really too handsome for Stephen Maturin, the relationship between the two is so finely observed. This perceptive article by Niall Gooch notices some things I’d hadn’t see before:

One of the very best scenes in the whole film is when they break into the old naval song Don’t Forget Your Old Shipmate. It lasts less than a minute, but we get several subtle character moments. Stephen’s inherent reserve breaks down in the face of the unfeigned jollification. Blakeney, looking somewhat the worse for drink, also hesitates to join in, before finding his voice, an allusion to his ongoing initiation into the sphere of adult masculinity (something else to which modern boys lack reliable access). Jack, for his part, hands a glass of port to Killick, a sign of his generosity and care for his men. 

Port runs through the veins of Master and Commander the film just as it does the books. By my reckoning, and I haven’t put it through a computer or anything, it’s the most-mentioned wine followed at some distance by madeira. The pursuit of good quality food and wine is of almost as much interest to Aubrey as his pursuit of the French, money and women. As with all these things, there are successes and failures.

Russell Crowe as Aubrey, right, and Paul Bettany as Maturin, left.

A notable triumph occurs in Mauritius Command when Aubrey captures a French vessel with a sensational cellar consisting of Haut Brion, Lafite* and other great Bordeaux wines, and he makes good use of the captured French cook as well. At other times Aubrey isn’t so lucky. In the first book Master and Commander they drink a mixture of “sloe juice, vinegar and sugar of lead that has been sold to Jack as wine.” It would have been very common at the time for indifferent wine to be perked up with sloes or elderberries and even sweetened with highly toxic lead oxide. The port isn’t always much better described in HMS Surprise as a “muddy brew”.

If you want a full breakdown of everything drunk and eaten in the Aubrey/ Maturin novels, it’s worth getting hold of Lobscouse & Spotted Dog by Anne Chotzinnoff Grossman and Lisa Grossman Thomas. Sadly there’s no mention of Commandaria - a sweet Cypriot wine that was popular with the Royal Navy in the 20th century - but I couldn’t resist the pun in the title of this post. But there is another Mediterranean sweet wine, one that Patrick O’ Brian himself would have been very familiar with. It features in The Hundred Days when the French Captain Christian-Palliere’s begins his dinner with: “a glass of Banyuls and some anchovies, a handful of olives...’” Banyuls is a sweet fortified wine named after a town in the Roussillon.

O’ Brian moved to the nearby fishing village of Collioure about eight miles from the Spanish border in 1949. He’d left his own wife and taken up with Mary Tolstoy, the wife of a Russian count. After an unhappy period in Wales, the pair had decided to head to warmer climates. In 1955 they bought a vineyard which was about 45 minutes walk up the steep slope from the town so that they could be self-sufficient in wine. His biographer and stepson, Nikolai Tolstoy told me when I wrote to him: “From the outset they gathered the vendange each autumn, making enough red vin ordinaire for their own use year-round. Patrick and my mother trod the grapes.” The chef Rowley Leigh** describes a photo he saw of the author at harvest time: “here is a photograph of a 70-year-old O’Brian skipping down a steep and rocky hillside with another man half his age: each has a large basket of grapes in one hand and between them they are carrying a much larger one.”

Patrick O’Brian admires a bunch of grapes (photo from Viktor Wynd)

It wasn’t all plain sailing, however, at one time O’ Brian tried to excavate a cellar with dynamite with, according to his biographer and stepson Nikolai Tolstory, “near-disastrous effect.” After nearly killing himself, the couple sensibly decided to enlist local workers to build the cazot - semi-underground worker’s cottage. Here O’ Brian wrote all his most famous books in a tiny study with the scent of wine in his nostrils. No wonder Maturin, who O’ Brian clearly identified with strongly, is half-Catalan, and half-Irish, O’Brian’s other adopted home where he was buried. 

Tolstoy wrote: “in due course they also produced the local (excellent) fortified wine, Banyuls. Eventually, too, they were deservedly proud of being accorded the appellation controlée”. 

Visiting the town of Banyuls a few years back,  I was struck by the similarity with the Douro valley in Portugal in how the grapes are grown on steep terraces sloping down to the water. The wine tastes similar to port too. It’s made from grenache and other local grapes like carignan and mourvedre. As with port, it has alcohol added while it’s still fermenting leaving a sweet wine which usually has a little less sugar and alcohol than the Portuguese equivalent. It’s very much an Iberian wine, rather than a French one, similar wines are still made on the other side of the border. Indeed the Roussillon historically belonged to the crown of Aragon and only became part of France in 1659.

Sometimes Banyuls is bottled a year or so after vintage to produce a vintage port-like wine. But there’s a special local style where the wine is left out in glass demi-johns so it is slowly cooked in the sun and frozen in the winter. This brutal treatment is not dissimilar to how madeira would have been aged in ships sailing around the world, and it creates a style of wine known in Catalan as ‘rancio’ literally rancid, but don’t let that put you off, which tastes of dried fruit and nuts. Like madeira, once it has had this treatment it is pretty much indestructible. I had a 1936 from nearby Rivesaltes that was fresh and vital. 

O’Brian and Mary Tolstoy made wines for home consumption and to give to family and friends. When O’Brian died in 2000, Rowley Leigh admitted “my main response was to wonder if it would be possible to taste the last vintage the 1998.” I have to admit that I had a similar response especially when Tolstoy let me know that he still has some vintages left of O’Brian’s Banyuls left in his cellar. There’s every chance that these wines will still be in good condition. Imagine drinking O’ Brian’s own wine while rewatching Master and Commander! Certainly the next best thing to a sequel. 

Thank you to Nikolai Tolstoy and Patrick O’Brian’s grandson Viktor Wynd for your help with this article.

* It’s interesting to note, or rather quite interesting, that these are the only mentions of wine named by estate rather than just generically like port or madeira.

** In Noble Rot magazine.