Two crates to Sarajevo
Jeremy Bowen BBC
War correspondents are 'terrible piss artists', according to Jeremy Bowen. You can understand why. If you'd just been robbed at gunpoint by bandits, as he was during the Kosovo crisis, or spent weeks under fire in Baghdad, you'd need a few drinks. 'Boozing is a way of letting off steam as much as anything,' he says. 'It's a way of winding down after incredibly stressful days. But it's also about camaraderie.'
The quality of the stuff the hacks pour down their throats is irrelevant to most of them. But Bowen is something of a wine buff. Reporting from the Balkans in the early 1990s, he used a UN transport plane to ship two cases of Italian wine to former Yugoslavia. 'I heard it was flying down from Ancona, so I went there, bought some decent Italian wine and carried it with me to Sarajevo. It nearly broke my back.'
The feat made Bowen a popular man at the Holiday Inn. 'It was very hard to get hold of good wine, and when you could it cost $50 a bottle.' Most of what the correspondents drank was made from local Slovenian or Croatian grapes, such as Vranac, Dingac and Postup. But when Bowen's Italian wine ran out, the French Foreign Legion played the role of vinous seventh cavalry. 'They got a ration of half a litre of Bordeaux a day, so we bought some wine from them.'
Bowen has reported from the Gulf, El Salvador, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, Somalia and Rwanda, but the area with which he is most commonly associated is the Middle East, where he spent five years as a foreign correspondent. Here, too, he spent his spare time tracking down good wine. 'When I first went there in 1995, there wasn't much imported wine available, so I drank Israeli wines. By the time I left, I was rather fond of them. Either they'd improved, or I just got used to them. The wines from Yarden, Gamla, Margalit and Domaine du Castel are well worth drinking.'
The Lebanon was also part of Bowen's beat. 'Lebanese wine is pretty good and so is the food,' he says. Chèteau Musar, the country's most celebrated wine, was difficult to find, so Bowen used to buy Ksara Kfraya instead. 'There was a very good wine outlet at Beirut airport. I used to raise eyebrows arriving back in Israel with two huge bags full of Lebanese wine. But arriving in the Lebanon with an armful of Israeli wine would have been far, far worse. I never took anything with Hebrew writing on it into the Lebanon, not even a bottle of mineral water.'
It's a world away from Cardiff, where Bowen was born and brought up. In South Wales, his father used to let him drink watered-down Bulls Blood as a kid, but Bowen grew up a beer drinker. A stay in Bologna as an international relations student in 1982 got him interested in wine.
'Drinking in local bars, I started to learn that wine could be made from different grape varieties. The Sangiovese was pretty rough, so if we wanted to splash out we bought a Barbera or a dry Lambrusco. It's funny, but over there no one has heard of the horrible sweet Lambrusco we drink in the UK.'
Bowen is a keen amateur wine collector. He's got some bottles under the stairs at his London home and also keeps wine with two wine merchants in the capital: Handford-Holland Park (020 7221 9614 or www.handford-wine.demon.co.uk) and Berry Brothers & Rudd (0870 900 4300). 'I suppose I've got about four dozen cases in all, mainly Rhúne, Burgundy and Bordeaux. Before I went to the Middle East I was a New World wine drinker, but being there made me miss European wines.' He doesn't mind drinking plonk, but says that 'like a lot of people in their forties, I'd rather have one really good bottle than 20 bottles of bad stuff'.
Bowen's favourite bottles reflect his wine-drinking influences. There's a couple from the Middle East, for a start: the 1999 Ksara Blanc de Blanc from the Bekaa Valley and the 1997 Castel Haute Judèe, Domaine du Castel. 'The Ksara is my last remaining bottle from the Beirut duty free shop. It tastes a bit like a Muscadet, but it reminds me of Lebanese sunshine.' The Castel wine was made just down the road from where Bowen lived in Jerusalem. 'Castel is the sort of place that sells its entire production in a day; this is a really good Bordeaux style red.'
France, if not Bordeaux, accounts for half of Bowen's picks. The 2000 Cútes du Rhúne, Saint Cosme (£6.99 from Hanford-Holland Park) reminds him of his time in Geneva in the mid-1980s, when 'I was on the nursery slopes as a foreign correspondent and realised that the Rhène Valley was on the other side of the lake. The wine has got great colour and it's a really warming red for days when the wind is lashing outside'. The 1999 Cornas, Domaine Courbis (£11.99) is a wine he bought to lay down. 'It's rich and chewy, without being rough,' he says. 'I'm looking forward to drinking it when it's ready.' And the 1999 Savigny Les Beaune, Domaine Jean-Jacques Girard (£12.99) is something he purchased in Burgundy on a recent visit. 'I went to visit Girard on James Handford's recommendation on the way back from a skiing holiday. It was wonderful following Monsieur Girard around the cellar and tasting the wines from the barrel.'
Bowen's sixth wine, the 2000 Il Baciale, Braida (£11.99), has something in common with the Savigny, being an Italian blend of Pinot Noir and Barbera. 'I've chosen an Italian wine because of the Bologna link, even though the wine comes from Piedmont. I wish I'd drunk something like this when I was a student in Italy, rather than all that Sangiovese. It would have saved me a lot of hangovers.' Talking of which, Bowen has recently finished filming a three-part series for the BBC called Booze, to be shown next month. 'It's about why we love booze, why we hate booze and why it hates us. It's mainly a cultural and social programme,' he adds, 'but there is some stuff about wine and health in it. I went to ChÅteau Smith-Haut-Lafitte to take a whirlpool bath in red wine and ended up with grape skins all over my swimming trunks.' He also, he says, had to get drunk on camera. How drunk? 'You'll have to watch the programme.'
source:
The Observer
