Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is Paul Torday’s first novel and his best. It is significantly better than the 2011 film of the same name. The story is as old as the world: hope trumping reality and money over-ruling common sense. Wine production in Wales shares the same themes.
In the late 19th century the third Marquess of Bute was fabulously rich on the proceeds of his family’s coal mines. He built a faux castle in Cardiff and, to round it off, an eye-catcher about five miles away on a hill above the river Taff. To digress, I was invited to Cardiff to see a couple of operas and enjoyed walking round the castle grounds, now a big park in the centre of the city, from where the turrets of Castell Coch may still be seen.
Anyway, when he saw what he had created it reminded him of views of the slopes of the Mosel and so he thought he’d complete the view by planting vines on the hillside.
If anyone thought that the Welsh climate might have been too hostile for viticulture they didn’t draw it to His Lordship’s attention. He was not a man to admit defeat and early failure simply encouraged him to persevere. He planted the first vines in 1875 but it was not until 1897 that he ventured to sell some of his wine through a London wine merchant. They were tactfully but not encouragingly described thus: “although these wines cannot yet be said to possess the delicate aroma and flavour of the best foreign wines, they are eminently wholesome and honest”. There may have been reticence about the quality of the wines, no doubt out of respect for the Marquess but all were in agreement on one point: the labels were splendid.
The last vintage was harvested in 1914 and by 1920 the vines were gone and a venture as quixotic as salmon fishing in the Yemen was over.
(I read about this in an article by Wynford Vaughan Thomas in The Compleat Imbiber 4.)