Never Let Me Go: 2005 Loire at Twenty Years
…memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading. I lost Ruth, then I lost Tommy, but I won’t lose my memories of them.
I suppose I lost Hailsham too. You still hear stories about some ex-Hailsham student trying to find it, or rather the place where it used to be. And the odd rumour will go round sometimes about what Hailsham’s become these days – a hotel, a school, a ruin….
– Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber & Faber, 2005)
Published in 2005 – clearly a good vintage for modern literature as well as wine – Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian novel Never Let Me Go is a tale of innocence lost, the story of a handful of characters and, looming large over them, their inevitable fate. A fate which, as an indicator of the skill of Ishiguro’s writing, is always met off the page.
The novel, rapidly established as a classic of 21st-century literature, deals with several themes, to my mind – acknowledging that I am no literary maven – memory, love and loss. The narrator, Kathy H., a young woman raised and educated at Hailsham, tells us of one of memory’s most curious features: its temperamental fallibility. While some memories seem destined to stay with us forever, images seared on our mind’s eye, in extreme circumstances even becoming intrusive, others slowly fade from view, to be lost forever. Or perhaps one day unexpectedly jolted back to the forefront of our mind, pulled there by some stimulus, a sight or scent, or the sound of someone’s voice.
My memories of 2005 certainly fall into the faded category, but I am fortunate that I have the wines which – in this case – serve to remind me that this was an exceptional vintage in the Loire Valley (rumour has it that it was pretty good in Bordeaux as well).
As more than a handful of years have passed since I last pulled the cork on a wine of this vintage, late in 2025 I decided it was about time I returned to it, in order to refresh my fading memory. Fortunately for me, unlike the rather mysterious Hailsham which evades discovery, a simple hunt through my cellar soon produced positive results. A total of three-dozen wines, all from the Loire Valley, all from the 2005 vintage.
