The Irresistible Inheritance Of Wilberforce Read Online Free PDF Page A

put the cup of tea down on the bedside table and produced from somewhere a plastic bowl and a damp towel. She had the bowl in position as I threw up into it, the beads of sweat starting from my forehead and running down my cheeks. Then she mopped my face with the towel and took the bowl away, returning in a second with a glass of water.
    ‘There now, petal, just drink this. I’ve put something in it to calm your stomach down.’
    I tried to take the glass but my hands were trembling too violently, so she held it to my lips and I managed to take a few sips. At first I thought I was going to be sick again, but I wasn’t, and after a while my feelings returned to something like normal.
    When I could speak I said, ‘Please take the tea away.’
    ‘It would do you a lot of good, petal, if you drank it.’
    ‘I can’t stand the smell of it.’
    Nurse Susan shook her head doubtfully, but she took the tea away.
    As she was about to leave the room I called, ‘Nurse?’
    She stopped and turned to see what I wanted.
    ‘In the kitchen, in the wine rack, you’ll find a bottle of Château Yon Figeac 1996. I hope it is the 1996. Could you open it and bring me a large glass of that, please?’
    She shook her head. ‘No alcohol. Doctor’s orders, Mr Wilberforce. It’s very naughty of you to even think of such a thing.’ Then she left before I could confront her with the very many compelling arguments as to why Colin had no right to stop me drinking wine in my own flat, why it was my body and I could do as I wanted with it, why I had survived perfectly well on a regime of four or five (or maybe five or six) bottles of wine every day of my life for the last few years, and why she could take herself off and go and be more use elsewhere, if she was not prepared to let me take my preferred medicine in my preferred way.
    I heard her go downstairs and, a moment later, the sound of the television in the kitchen.
     
I love wine. I have not always loved it, but I have made up for the woeful ignorance of the first thirty years of my life by the passion and intensity of my relationship with wine ever since. I need to be more precise: I very much like white burgundy, I am fond of some red burgundies, I have flirted with some excellent and intriguing wines from Tuscany; but I adore Bordeaux. When I say wine, I am speaking of red Bordeaux - or claret, as some of us who drink it still call it. I am speaking of the wine that is made from the grape varieties of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot. I am speaking of vines planted on the light land of Médoc, on the clay levels of St Emilion and Pomerol, on the iron-rich soils of the terroir of Pétrus. I am speaking of wines made from a triage - a selection of the best berries - of grapes, which are destemmed by a fouloir égrappoir and then pumped into the cuvée, where fermentation takes place over many anxious days and nights. Then the grape skins are added back in, and maceration takes place for a further ten or fourteen days, adding colour and body to the wine. Once this process is complete, the wine is removed from the vat to the barrel, where it may reside for a further period of two years or more, before it is finally bottled.
    All this is chemistry, technology and then, finally, wizardry. You and I might do it by the book and produce something undrinkable despite using the same equipment and the same methods as the great winemakers; but a Jacques Thienpoint or a Christian Moueix can add magic to the process and suddenly the base grape juice is transmuted into something wonderful, even celestial.
    Then, as I lay in bed thinking about wine, the familiar restlessness crept upon me once again. I felt a need to keep twitching my arms and legs, as if I had just taken too much exercise, or else not enough. My hands and feet felt chilled. After a while the whole of my body was covered in a light film of perspiration, as if I was weeping through the pores of my skin.
    When I