Jonathan Ray
There have been some poorly looking folk wandering about Spectator Towers recently. I’ve lost count of the number of ashen faces I’ve clocked, their owners clinging feebly to the banisters for support or hiding whimpering in dark corners. One or two looked far, far from well. If I were their mother – or their doctor – I would have told them to stay in bed.
In fairness, it has been a deliciously drink-soaked couple of weeks. Our free-flowing, inaugural Spectator English Wine Festival in the garden was followed by a very fine rosé-fuelled Provençal soirée with Catriona Olding and Martin Vander Weyer and that by the notoriously bibulous Spectator Summer Party, about which ’nuff said.
Then came our annual Readers’ ‘Tea’ Party (hmm, Pimm’s party more like) and the joint Spectator/Boisdale Cigar Garden Party, where neither wine nor whisky was found wanting. Indeed, so pleasantly soused was I that I didn’t even manage to finish my bottle of M&S Mâcon on the midnight train home.
But this is The Spectator, not the New Statesman, and we just regroup and push on. And so, with the hols upon us, I hope you’ll join me in getting stuck into these six summery whites (and one rosé). It’s vital to keep one’s liquid intake up.
