Apart from libraries and other centrally administered faculties, the University of Oxford is made up of 45 colleges and halls, all possessing a wine cellar. As a result, the wine culture of the place is immense and indelible, and a sizeable minority of dons – the term describes any fellow of a college – have built highly respectable private cellars of their own.
Frequently a case of misunderstanding when a tourist asks ‘Where is the University?’, the colleges collectively comprise the university despite being self-governing, quasi-autonomous legal entities. Their wine cellars are correspondingly as diverse and different as they are, and they might be compared to a large extended family, exhibiting a sibling likeness when viewed from afar but proving utterly unique when encountered in person.
It is therefore impossible to generalise about size and content, except to say that large colleges have necessarily large cellars on account of their catering needs, but not all large colleges are equally wealthy. St John’s College has a capacious private endowment of more than £300 million for approximately 500 students, meaning that it can easily stretch to cru classé and grand cru wines even for ordinary guest nights, which are held regularly throughout the academic year. At the other end of the scale, less wealthy colleges have frequently been more experimental with New World wines – perhaps through necessity but often with genuinely meritorious results.
In general, college cellars have a heavy French bias where wine is concerned and a tremendously expansive Port heritage stretching back into the 17th century, when the great Port shippers were first established. Other fortified wines such as Sherry and Madeira have a special place in Oxford’s affections, whereas conventional or – God forbid – fashionable spirits get short shrift.
Before delving into the contents of the cellars of the two Oxford colleges with which I am well acquainted, two memories may begin to describe the extraordinary wine culture within the ‘city of the dreaming spires’. The first concerns a tasting I attended a few years ago, when newly installed as a history fellow at Corpus Christi College. One of the dons noted that the wines he had selected that day would be opened by the other fellows, with happiness, over his grave. Close to retirement, he was well aware that the wine would outlive him and that a sense of institutional longevity and corporate purpose would supersede the selfish and limited horizons of the individual.
In this sense no one owns Oxford, and even the longest-lived fellow is nothing more than a steward. The cellar is there to serve the community within the college, and although it nurtures pleasure as an adjunct of learning, it does not function like a private cellar, whose composition reflects the ego of its creator.
The second memory is purely indulgent but illustrates the sort of unassuming eccentricity for which Oxford is famous. SH Jones & Co of Banbury – one of maybe 50 wine merchants that regularly ply their wares to the colleges – had organised a regular portfolio tasting in the wonderfully Jacobean setting of Wadham College dining hall on a particularly raw day in February, when the rain was being driven across Oxford by a sharp north-easterly wind. Apart from savouring an extraordinarily well-chosen range of young Burgundies, I can still recollect with utter clarity the sustaining warmth of the red embers of a traditional wood fire radiating from the giant 17th-century grate of the fireplace and the lunchtime fare that consisted of only two items: Champagne and game pie, the latter served as a formidable, unadorned slice on a napkin. If I had to summarise the Oxford cellar, it would be in terms of this fusion of the solidly elegant English game pie and the distinctly French Champagne – not perhaps the most appetising or sophisticated combination, yet deliciously memorable and not a little eccentric.
The modus operandi
Corpus Christi College (founded 1517) will serve as my model, and is broadly similar to the wine operation of other colleges. The Keeper of the Wine is the honorific title of the don whose job it is to attend tastings, select wines for the college cellar and select wines to accompany dinners throughout the year, including special events like feasts and so-called ‘gaudies’, when old members return to their alma mater. Like so many other academic offices, this one pays almost nothing (£25 a month), and although it is an enormous privilege, it is also a considerable responsibility. The butler is responsible for the day-to-day management of the stock list, for cellaring and bringing up the wines, yet it is the keeper who has to ensure adequate stocks.
The tasting culture of Oxford is a phenomenon in itself, and the rise of the competitive independent merchant has allowed a great expansion of tastings to the point where it is nearly impossible to attend them all. Typically taking place in a lunch hour, a tasting can be anything from a selection of wholesale cheap reds and whites to an extensive en primeur sampling limited to Bordeaux or Burgundy or specialising in Sauternes. Even highly focused tastings will usually be book-ended by Champagne at one end and dessert wine and Port at the other.
Wines are rarely bought in quantities of less than six dozen, and it is not uncommon to see shipments of 50 cases arriving at the college – hardly surprising when one considers that a formal dinner for 100 guests consumes in the region of six to eight cases, taking into account a pre-dinner apéritif, claret, dessert wine and Port.
Corpus is the smallest undergraduate college in Oxford, with just 230 undergraduates, so its stock list, valued at just under £100,000 at cost, is probably below the average of the other colleges. Viewed as a pyramid, the vast base comprises two thirds of the 15,000-odd bottles in the collection and consists almost entirely of drinking wines in the £5–10 value range.
The top third begins to get more interesting, although there is still a predominance of cru bourgeois clarets rather than classed growths. At the very top, one breaks into the latter category alongside grand cru classé Sauternes and Vintage Port, but still there are constraints of price owing to the little-known fact that fellows pay for the wine they consume at dinner. The cost of the wine is equally divided between those present, meaning that even the greatest connoisseur must dwell with the fellow who simply isn’t bothered and doesn’t want to pay – and there are plenty of the latter.
Undergraduates, on the other hand, have largely uneducated palates and don’t care what they drink as long as it’s cheap. The central demand for top-class wines is, ironically, from outside – from the conference trade that provides colleges with a valuable additional source of income outside term. In short, running a college cellar has never been more complex. Fifty years ago, the fellowship was less than half the size it is today, and it remained a largely enclosed, elitist and male community. Today, it must cater for many different groups and is dazzled by choice and value reflecting the transformation of wine geography over the past 20 years.
Drinking it
Entrusted with the cellar for a single term in 2001, when the keeper was giving a lecture series in Australia, I brought up six German white wines for an informal tasting in order to establish whether they were still alive. We found that two were miraculously intact, the other four inadequate even for cooking. The former consisted of a Sieger 1982 Kapellaner Rosengarten Sp