Transvestites and Tavel: Drilling for Wine by Robin Yapp

There’s a telling bit about halfway through Drilling for Wine, Robin Yapp’s offbeat account of how he, seemingly by accident, founded England’s best Rhône and Loire specialist while also practising as a dentist. He has been invited along to taste some of the greatest wines from Bordeaux at the house of Financial Times columnist and enthusiastic socialist Edmund Penning-Rowsell — a sign that Yapp had been accepted into the British wine establishment. As the newbie, he is put on the spot when he is asked to give his thoughts about an anonymous wine from a decanter. A nerve-wracking experience. After some deduction he works out that the wine must be a Saint-Émilion from the 1950s and eventually plumps for a ‘55 Figeac. Bullseye!

“Naturally enough, after a virtuoso performance like that, Edmund Penning-Rowsell never again asked for my opinion, erroneously assuming that I would always be correct.”

It’s an impressive bit of blind tasting but Yapp knew his claret. Even before becoming a part-time wine merchant, he’d been drinking a lot of good Bordeaux. To celebrate his daughter’s birth in 1963, he opened a bottle of Cheval Blanc 1953 which cost him 37s 6d — about £42 in modern terms. When Yapp was starting out, a young dentist could afford to drink such wines regularly. Today a 10-year-old Cheval Blanc, the 2016, will now cost you £1,000. There’s no way anyone today could achieve Yapp’s level of knowledge without either a lot of money or years in the trade.

Drilling for Wine begins with Yapp working as a waiter in the faded grandeur of the Royal Hotel in Scarborough. Here, as well as getting to know some extraordinary wines such as Pétrus 1953 (50 shillings/£75 in modern terms), he also had to fend off the attention of amorous older men. There’s an amusing encounter with a transvestite one drunken night:

“Another anatomical oddity began to make itself apparent as this amazon clutched me ever more tightly to her chest; with sickening embarrassment it dawned upon me that our closeness had aroused my partner in a most unaccountable fashion.”

From here he goes to dental school in Leeds where he meets his wife before eventually opening up a practice at Gillingham in Dorset. To begin with he buys wine, Bordeaux mainly, for his own consumption, but slowly and then all at once it begins to take over his life. According to the Yapp website:

“Over-enthusiastic ordering after a long lunch in France results in Robin taking delivery of a pallet of wine at the garage of his house just outside Mere, Wiltshire. He places a small advert in The Sunday Times offering case sales and a mailorder wine business is born.”

Yapp Brothers wine merchants is officially launched in 1969, though the name is a bit of a misnomer as his brother, a doctor who spends much of his time in North Africa, has nothing to do with the business. His speciality was not Bordeaux, however, but the Loire and the Rhône, despite, as he cheerfully admits, only having spent “one day in the Loire Valley the previous year, and not so much as a single minute anywhere in the Rhône.” There’s a particularly amusing bit where, trying to juggle dentistry and selling wine, he invents an imaginary secretary called Felicity Maw-Forbes to make the business seem more legitimate. But in the end he has to let her go as the clients keep flirting with her in their correspondence. One even goes as far as to invite her to “weekend assignations at remotely situated country hotels.” Later he gets a real secretary, the wonderfully named Miss Cerise Lawson-Tancred.

Yapp too clearly has an eye for the ladies.