A Glass to Remember

In 2014, Tim Atkin arrived at one of our meetings with a bottle of Calon-Ségur 1995.

Tim almost never travels with wines. He is the kind of person who prefers to travel light and taste what the place has to offer. So when he appeared with that bottle, the gesture was already a message before anyone opened it: I brought this for you — chosen, not bought at duty-free.

Calon-Ségur 1995. A great-year Saint-Estèphe, from a estate that carries a heart on its label — because the Marquis de Ségur said his heart was at Calon even though his glory was at Lafite. A wine that already carried nearly twenty years of history when it reached my hands.

I opened it at a blind tasting of national and imported wines, when it turned twenty. Not to impress. To honour the gesture with the moment it deserved.

Since then, on every trip to France, I have visited Calon-Ségur. I have tasted it year after year en primeur in London, alongside the Institute of Masters of Wine. Every time I taste it, I remember that bottle. And I remember what it means when someone who almost never travels with wines decides to make an exception.

Gerard Basset and the last 300 bottles

At a dinner among colleagues, the guest of honour was Gerard Basset — MW, MS, World's Best Sommelier, friend and mentor. I chose to bring a Saltimbanco Pinot Noir. Fewer than 300 bottles produced. A wine that was not easily found and that for me represented exactly what I wanted that evening to say: something unique, something chosen with intention, something that reflected the relationship.

When Gerard tasted it, he stopped. He asked how many bottles there were. When I told him fewer than 300, he wanted to know how he could take them all home.

At the table, other winemakers wanted to move on to another wine. Gerard stopped them: "Wait. This needs time."

It was one of the last intimate dinners we shared before his illness and passing. We did not know that then. But that moment — him pausing the conversation to give the wine the time it deserved — remained with a clarity that words can barely reach.

That Pinot Noir was not only a gesture of gratitude towards Gerard. It became the memory of what he was: someone capable of recognising something genuine, of stopping the world to pay attention to it, and of teaching through gesture what no sommelier manual could teach through words.

The last email we exchanged was shortly before his passing. Knowing time was short, I offered — help, support, whatever he needed. He told me the news.

And he replied: "Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy."

There is no way to be grateful for that with words. There is only one way to honour it: to do it.

The Stellenbosch ritual

Every year, during the Michelangelo competition in South Africa, the judges do something that appears in no official programme: each of us brings one or two bottles of wine with personal history and connection. We open them at the Institute of Masters of Wine in Stellenbosch. And each judge has time and space to explain why they chose that wine.

There is no protocol. No hierarchy in that moment. There are people who work with wine at an international level, gathered around a table, offering something of what they have — not in commercial terms but in symbolic ones. A bottle that represents a place, a person, a moment, a conviction.

That ritual was not designed by anyone. It built itself, year after year, because it responded to a real need: to be grateful for the company, the shared knowledge, and the opportunity to be in that place with those people.

It is the gesture of gratitude in its purest form. Given in exchange for nothing. Marking no hierarchy. Without a price, because its value is not economic. It has history.

The difference between protocol and gesture

I have received wines as gifts many times. Some arrived in perfectly packaged boxes, with institutional cards, as a result of commercial relationships. I remember them vaguely.

Tim's Calon-Ségur I remember with precision. The Saltimbanco that Gerard did not want to end I remember with emotion. The bottles from Stellenbosch I remember with gratitude.

The difference is not in the price of the wine. It is in whether someone thought of you when they chose it. It is in whether the choice says something about the relationship — about who you are, what you value, what you share. It is in whether the giver understands that giving well is a form of listening.

A wine given without intention is an object. A wine given with intention is a declaration.

What remains when the glass is empty

The Calon-Ségur 1995 no longer exists. The Saltimbanco that Gerard made the winemakers wait for is gone too. The bottles from Stellenbosch are opened and emptied every year.

But the gestures that surrounded them did not empty with them.

Because in wine, as in any genuine language of gratitude, what remains is not the object. It is what the object said in the moment it was offered — with time, with intention, with the awareness that that moment was worth marking in that way and no other.

There are glasses that are not forgotten. Not because the wine was extraordinary — though sometimes it is. But because someone, at some moment, chose that wine thinking of you.

And there are replies that are not forgotten either. Those that arrive when someone who is leaving decides to use their last words to remind you that life is worth living fully.

That, in any language, is the most elegant way of saying thank you.

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