Factorini listicle #4387
"I don't know how you remember such useless stuff" - my brother. [Enjoy this as a beautifully voiced podcast if you'd prefer]
“Brilliant. I don’t know how you remember such useless stuff though”. That’s according to my brother.
Nor do I. Although I suppose partly it’s because I don’t think a brain littered with vaguely-connected factlets is “useless”. Especially if it means you can send insufferably smug pictures like this to your brother…
Astonishingly someone has uploaded that episode to YouTube here. One to watch if you are having an especially dull weekend.
However, if you would rather spend the weekend boring your brother with arcane knowledge, here are five weirdly-connected wine things and a bonus sixth with a wine recommendation. They came to mind because last week I hosted a corporate dinner in The Napoleon Cellar at Berry Bros & Rudd. An excellent event, which led one guest to say to the organising CEO “I knew your company had brains; now I know it has a soul”. My rates and references are excellent.
The Napoleon Cellar appears in the film The Kingsman
It is named after Napoleon III, who hid in the very same cellars during the Chartist Riots, while he was a Special Constable in London.
Charles Dickens was a Special Constable at the same time. Above the barrel cellar at Berry Bros & Rudd is “the Delft Room”, hidden out of the way in a lowering pile of buildings in Pickering Place - the smallest public square in the UK - behind the Berry Bros offices. It’s called The Delft Room because of its original Delft fireplace. Some years after being a Special Constable Dickens was to write “A Christmas Carol” where Scrooge lights a measly fire in his Delft fireplace in a…
suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of buildings up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and forgotten the way out again.
Scrooge is later woken by the ghost of his dead business partner Marley dragging the chains of his torment over the barrels in the wine cellar below.
Who knows, maybe Dickens hid in Berry Bros & Rudd as well? I once told that story at a “Christmas Carol”-themed dinner, where one of the guests was a Marley. She and her sister are the last descendants of Dr Miles Marley - friend and literary inspiration of Charles Dickens - to carry his name.
When Napoleon III became Emperor he requested the 1855 Classification of wines from Bordeaux as part of the 1855 Exposition Universelle de Paris. That is the same 1855 Classification that we use today starting with the First Growths (Premiers Crus) Château Lafite Rothschild, Château Latour, Château Margaux, Château Haut-Brion, and Château Mouton Rothschild (elevated in 1973) through to Fifth Growths (Cinquièmes Crus) including favourites like Château Pontet-Canet, Château du Tertre, Château Pédesclaux, and Château Cantemerle.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were talking about Napoleon III in the famous phrase and now aphorism “first as tragedy, then as farce”.
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”.
The meaning being the revolutionary potential of Napoleon I was squandered by his nephew. “A grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part” as Marx calls him. It is not recorded if Marx knew that Napoleon III had hid in Berry Bros & Rudd’s cellars as a special constable rather than confront the Chartists, but it seems to be in character.
Engels said pretty much the same thing, about the same people. although with a bit more heft:
…it really seems as though old Hegel, in the guise of the World Spirit, were directing history from the grave and, with the greatest conscientiousness, causing everything to be re-enacted twice over, once as grand tragedy, and the second time as rotten farce.
As they still say in France, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Incidentally, that’s a quote from the novelist, Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr from his satirical magazine “Les Guêpes” (The Wasps). In one issue Karr discusses a tour of France by the Duke and Duchess of Orléans. By coincidence, that’s the same Duke Ferdinand who would potentially have become King - rather than Napoleon III becoming Emperor - had his father not been killed in a carriage accident. In the magazine Kerr describes how the Duke and Duchess were were warmly received in Limoux and won praise as they “put the famous blanquette de Limoux above Champagne wine.”
As indeed do I. At least I do when it is as good as the superb Berry Bros. & Rudd Crémant de Limoux by Antech, Brut, Languedoc. Quite possibly the best value wine (£14.95) in the own label range.
A few years ago I was approached by the producers of Love Island UK. They wanted a pallet of unlabelled sparkling wine to be the official wine of the series. But the producer who got in touch was a wine fan and didn’t want to “just do Prosecco like everyone in the office says”. He’d tried this wine with the Antech family in Limoux and thought it was fabulous (it is) and he could surreptitiously introduce a bit of class to the series. And so - astonishingly - Berry Bros & Rudd ended up supplying the official wine of Love Island.
Clearly I love this having just curated a collection of similar nuggets! No such thing as a useless factlet.
How does a factlet compare to a factoid?