Free The Company of Fellows by Dan Holloway

Markova. It was from the proceedings of a
conference that had been held in Sofia in 1987. The article was
about the way icon painters in the Greek Orthodox religion saw
their art as a way of compensating people for Christ’s delay in
returning to collect the blessed. Some of them apparently believed
that their work was the embodiment of the first fruits of the
Spirit that Christ had promised the Church it would enjoy until he
came – a little taste of heaven here on earth, a spiritual amuse
bouche. Some artists, it seemed, conveyed this idea in colour
symbolism. Tommy imagined hundreds of worshippers looking up at the
painted ceilings of their churches and catching a glimpse of
celestial blue, suddenly being transported into the presence of God
and realising how transitory their problems were. How much more
useful than food, he scoffed. Or vaccines. Then he laughed to
himself. How different really were these escape mechanisms from his
own little glimpses of heaven? He looked at some of the pictures
tied to the paper with a treasury tag, appreciating just how
important beauty was in people’s lives, how much more than the
luxury it was often made out to be.
    He proceeded
through more articles, some of which were about the Holy Spirit,
some of which were about religious art, most of which were about
neither. As he reached the beginning of the 1990s, around the time
the art and culture market was going stratospheric, there were
several pages torn out of Christie’s and Sotheby’s auction
catalogues, from London and New York. They were taken from
specialist sales devoted to fine art, furniture, antiques, and
wine. Shaw had attached notes to many of these detailing the prices
the lots actually fetched. Uniformly the auction house figures were
vast underestimates of the voracity of a market fuelled by
stockbroker bonuses, coke-fuelled competitiveness, and a whole new
generation of buyers looking for another bubble to pump for profit.
In a few instances the sales exceeded by a factor of ten the
already-inflated estimates.
    Tommy
inevitably spent longest with the wine. His eyes lingered over the
enlarged photos of old dark bottles and frayed labels as though he
was gazing at erotic art. There were cases of the finest wines ever
made side by side with some of the early garagiste obscurities –
wines so called because they were produced in such small quantities
that they were often literally made in garages. In the 1980s and
1990s, during the financial boom of Margaret Thatcher and Gordon
Gecko, the commodities market in wine had been as frenetic as oil
or sugar or precious metals or any of the other traditional objects
of speculative desire. A killing was there to be made if you bought
right, and to a community that lived by the law of supply and
demand it was obvious that for something to be the best buy it had
to be the rarest. So overnight tiny new producers like Chateau Le
Pin in France and Screaming Eagle in California sold their wines
for more than the oldest, finest producers in the world who
happened to be unlucky enough to produce their exquisite liquors in
larger quantities. No matter that no-one knew what the drink would
taste like after 4 years, let alone 40, when presumably it was
intended to provide for people’s retirement.
    Tommy skipped
past these parvenu curios, and came to rest on the classics. This
wasn’t good wine, the kind you can pick up for £10 from the
supermarket; nor the exceptional wine you can get for £30 or £40
from a wine merchant for a very special anniversary; nor even the
once in a lifetime fine wine you can find at the best stockists in
London for a few hundred pounds. These were the complex, unctuous
nectars that had been adding layer on layer of richness and charm
for decades, like a lacquer worked on for months by a Japanese
master craftsman, and would carry on doing so for decades to
come.
    There was a
bottle of Chateau Margaux, 1928, reckoned by many to be one of the
two best wines