I have been brooding on the question of wine and national character. One must reflect the other, but how, exactly? This seems impossible to nail down. For example, Americans like powerful wines with concentrated fruit flavours. They also like baseball, SUVs and hot dogs. Is there a common factor? I really cannot see one. Yet all these things are expressions of the same national taste.

The problem is even worse with Spain. As everyone knows, this country has lately been transformed. Once it was a nation of sleepy, backward, blatantly corrupt, Roman Catholic bigots. Now it is a nation of hyperactive, ultra-modern, discreetly corrupt, left-wing neurotics. We would expect this transformation to be somehow reflected in the country’s wine, would we not?

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The story of Oregon Pinot Noir would make an amusing though implausible novel.

Wine has been grown in the northwestern state of Oregon since the nineteenth century. Until the 1960s most of it was rubbish. Then, against the advice of experts, a young winemaker named David Lett planted Pinot Noir in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. He guessed that the cooler, damper conditions would suit the great Burgundian grape better than those of California. He guessed correctly.

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Quite a few of my relatives are tight-fisted. This is a common disease throughout Britain, but it reaches epidemic levels in the North. My Lancastrian relations sweat with terror at the thought of parting with money, and will go to astonishing lengths to avoid doing so.

The worst of these – I must be careful not to identify him, as he would be happy to make a few extra pounds through a libel action – is a byword for stinginess throughout our family. Many years ago he took a brief holiday in the south of France. Before leaving he asked if there was anything I would like him to bring me back. I mentioned a wine I had been reading about, an interesting-sounding red called Bandol. He promised he would do his best.

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