A Really Great Wine, the French say, inhabits you. Hours after you've downed the last drop, it's still meandering round your mouth, lolling on your larynx and teasing your tastebuds to remind you what an exceedingly lucky chap you are to have drunk it.
A few months ago my friend Jacques ventured down to his cellar for the forst time since he and Marie-Ange moved into their neat Bastille flat. The door, oddly, was unlocked, and lying on the floor were three big blue nylon holdalls.
Inside the first holdall Jacques found two dozen bottles of wine labelled Chateau Petrus 1982. Inside the second were 24 bottles of Petrus 1989. Inside the third, 24 petrus 1990. Jacques, who knows a Bordeaux grand cru from a Bulgarian cabernet sauvignon, shot upstairs in a stage approaching delirium and consulted the bible.
The Bordeaux wine guide by Robert Parker, the world's most inflential wine critic, an American who possesses not only a palate sensitive enough to mark wines on a scale of 100 but an authority so immense that even Frenchmen believe him, said the threee Petrus vintages in question all deserved 98 or 99 points.
They were, in short, probably among the top 20 plonks on the planet. Jacques' quick call to the local wine merchant confirmed that a bottle would change hands for anything between $1,400 and $1,800. So Jacques and Marie-Ange had wine worth $140,000.
This left them with something of a dilemma. This wine was not where it should be. Yet it was undeniably occupying their property.
Bugger it, thought Jacques, in French. (On s'en branle, roughly.) We'll nick a couple of bottles in lieu of rent, and take them out to our weekend place. We can then protest innocence if anyone comes knocking.
And thus it was, a few weekends ago, that I and my girlfriend helped to down a 20-year-old bottle of Bordeaux worth $1,700. I had never had a Really Great Wine experience before, and I can tell you now superlatives are superfluous: it was a quasi-religious experience.
Then a small newspaper article told us of a Paris wine merchant's suspicions, flatly denied by the Bordeaux winegrowers' association, that several hundred bottles of fake 1982, 1989 and 1990 Petrus had found their way on to the market.
Was it the most humiliating blow to French self-esteem since Waterloo? "Merde, on s'en branle," said Jacques, caught between toe-curling embarrassment and overwhelming relief. "I felt inhabited by that wine, didn't you? That's enough for me."

Guardian Weekly Feb 28 -Mar 6 2002 (p. 13)

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