![]() ![]() On his wedding day, he tracked down ‘punnets of fraises des bois from Morocco that were destined for Annabel’s’.Īnd it’s not only wine and strawberries and Georgian silver. The wines, of course, form a kind of chorus – here he is at Coates’s Wine Bar in Old Broad Street: ‘I have pleasant recollections of Château MacCarthy St-Estèphe and Langoa-Barton 1953, both at 13/6- (65p) a bottle Pichon-Comtesse just two shillings (10p) more, and a whole raft of 1955 classed growths at the same sort of price.’ He scours the Portobello Road for antiques (a pair of Georgian candlesticks here, a Stubbs there) meals are recounted as if he can still taste them. Spurrier’s memoir, Wine – A Way of Life (soon to be reissued as A Life in Wine), is packed with such minutiae. Photographs from the period show Spurrier often embraced the sartorial spirit of the age: Sgt Pepper moustache, leather trousers, psychedelic shirts… Hendrix might have recognised a fellow hepcat when the young wine merchant made his all-too-brief appearance. Who else can remember the exact spelling of a lodger’s name, complete with umlaut, from half a century ago? Spurrier, who is 80 next year, can remember episodes from 50 years earlier with a granularity of recall most of us couldn’t summon from last week. ![]() The next morning the au pair – whose name was Susi Spörri, from Zurich, he recalls – asked him if he’d enjoyed meeting Jimi Hendrix. When Spurrier put his head round the door, ‘a young black guy clutching a guitar got up and said, “Hi, I’m Jimi.”’ Spurrier politely returned the greeting, wished everyone good night and went off to bed. His lodger, a Swiss au pair who was trying to get into the music business, had invited a few friends home. Late one night, sometime in the mid-1960s, Steven Spurrier came back to his house in Fulham to find his sitting room full of people. ![]()
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