For the past 25 years, Bordeaux Index has been relentless in our focus on changing the fine wine market for collectors and investors.

Today, we are the largest seller of fine wine and spirits globally. Bordeaux Index, join us and visit Bordeaux Index.com.

Hello and welcome to Table Talk, the Spectator's Food and Drink podcast. I'm Lara Prendergast.

And I'm Olivia Potts. And today we are delighted to be joined by Alexander Downer.

Alexander is an Australian former politician and diplomat, who was leader of the Liberal Party from 1994 to 1995, Minister for Foreign Affairs from 1996 to 2007, and High Commissioner to the United

Kingdom from 2014 to 2018. He is currently Executive Chair of the International School for Government

at King's College London and chairman of the UK think tank policy exchange. Alexander, welcome to table talk.

Alexander, we're going to start where we always do at the beginning and ask you,

what are your first memories of food? Well, I was breastfed, but I don't have any recollection

of that. My first memories of food are much more breakfast

when I was a child. We lived on a farm and we had dairy cows and so we had fresh milk and,

you know, unpasturized milk. It was just the milk taken from the cows. So that was a bit defining.

And so for breakfast, we would have things with milk. So porridge with milk and sugar. Sounds very

unhealthy now. Or cornflakes with cream milk and sugar, or shredded wheat.

In more recent years, shredded wheat became available the same with the milk,

the cream and the sugar.

I mean, these are terrible things to eat.

But I remember having those kinds of meals, really, as a child.

I mean, in Australia, in South Australia, we would have

had pretty standard then very traditional English meals. So we didn't have much by way of,

you know, continental or Asian food. We had a lot of chops, lamb, roast lamb, roast potatoes, those kinds of things.

Peas, delicious peas, fresh peas. But that kind of very traditional food we had when I was a child.

...