Jasper's retirement lunch

I’ve known Jasper Morris MW since before he had those letters after his name. Both Oxford graduates, him three or four years after me, we were Master of Wine students together in the mid 1980s. With his shock of red hair, exceptional confidence, loud voice and notable height, he was unignorable. He was always the one in class who’d tell us all that the wine we were tasting blind ‘positively screams Pinot Noir’. His sister Arabella Woodrow qualified as an MW the year after him, in 1986. 

He ran an exceptionally fine import company Morris & Verdin (his brother-in-law Tony...