In Good Taste: Branaire-Ducru 1928-2013 

BY NEAL MARTIN | MARCH 17, 2020

Tales of the Unexpected scarred me for life. This television series, with its unforgettable waltzing fairground theme tune and silhouetted lady dancing pagan-like against a backdrop of burning flames, put the heebie-jeebies up this impressionable 10-year-old. Episodes were not frightening but sinister; something nasty always happened before the credits rolled. I was a victim of author Roald Dahl’s vivid and wonderful yet twisted imagination. Even his children’s classics, such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach, have their dark undertones.

Many episodes of Tales of the Unexpected were adapted from Dahl’s short stories. One of the better known is “Taste,” first published in 1945, which later gained popularity after it was reprinted in The New Yorker magazine in 1951. This particular tale mined Dahl’s expertise in fine wine. I encourage you to read the original; simply search for “Roald Dahl Taste” on the web, where you can find it for free, and revel in Dahl’s impeccable storytelling and pinpoint wine references.

Now, if you don’t want spoilers, skip down to the History section...

The narrator recounts a private family dinner party. The host plans to outwit his guest, a famous and supercilious gourmet aptly named Richard Pratt, by serving an obscure wine and challenging him to identify it blind. (Hmm – that sounds familiar!) Relishing the challenge, the insufferably pompous wine expert goads his host and raises the stakes until the host agrees to wager his 18-year-old daughter’s hand in marriage. The daughter is a bit miffed but reluctantly agrees. In a drawn-out deduction for his audience, the gourmet comments that the wine must be from “one of those small vineyards around Beychevelle,” and then goes on to correctly identify the wine and vintage, to the horror of those watching. Just as Pratt invites his host to discuss nuptials in the kitchen, the maid appears and returns the expert’s spectacles, which he had carelessly left next to the bottle in the study where it had been allowed to breathe. (It’s that old truism of a glance at the label being worth 25 years of experience.) The story is left open-ended, the furious host rising from his chair and his wife begging her husband not to do anything stupid.

And the wine that almost condemned the daughter to a lifetime’s purgatory of betrothal to a wine bore droning on about the injustices of 1855 or ideal serving temperatures for claret?

It was 1934 Branaire-Ducru.

Château Branaire-Ducru lies opposite Beychevelle in the south of the Saint-Julien appellation. The gardens have always been manicured, and I have a soft spot for the pyramid hedges.