The Cost of Luxury

General

Labours of Love

Raw materials have remarkable adventures and pass through many skilled hands on their way to becoming precious items. Sophie McBain assesses the cost of luxury

Diamonds

When in 1477 Archduke Maximilian presented his lover, Mary of Burgundy, with a diamond ring to celebrate their engagement, he could have had no idea how many love-struck, cash-strapped men would later curse his romantic legacy. It’s a common misconception that engagement rings can make good investments, but focus on the price and you risk overlooking the value of an object — and even the most meagre of diamonds has undergone an epic journey to get from dark, dingy mine to glittering shop front.

While 50 years ago most of the world’s diamonds were recovered close to the earth’s surface, they are now increasingly mined from further underground. Rough diamonds are sorted by hand into an incredible 16,000 categories and the gem-quality diamonds are sent to one of the main diamond trading centres. Despite the globalisation of the trade, around 80 per cent of rough diamonds are handled in Antwerp.

Rough diamonds need to be cut and polished, a delicate process that has a huge effect on the gem’s final value. ‘At least half the weight will go into powder during cutting, so the challenge for the cutter is to maximise the weight but also cut out as many inclusions as possible, to make the diamond as big as possible and as pure as possible,’ says Alexander Dayekh, owner of Antwerp-based Dayekh Gems. A standard round brilliant cut has 57 facets, but the Dayekh D brilliant cut (pictured) features 105 facets, to add extra sparkle.

It takes 2-3 days for a cutter to finish a traditional hand-cut brilliant, says Dayekh, although cutters work on several gems at a time. Machinery cannot rival hand-cut work, he adds, because cutting diamonds still requires a trained human eye, to see when to polish certain facets.

Despite the scientific precision needed, the connection is emotional, too, says jewellery designer and diamond grader Victoria Tryon. ‘You can have a great-looking certificate but not connect with the stone at all. A stone needs to talk to me. It must have life in it,’ she explains.

Silk

According to Chinese legend, the empress Xi Ling Shi discovered silk around 5,000 years ago, when a silk cocoon fell in her tea and unravelled its spool of fine silken thread. The country still produces around 80 per cent of the world’s silk — but from the Thirties to the Eighties the British royal family eschewed China in favour of English silk. The Queen Mother’s Coronation robes, the Queen’s wedding dress and Princess Diana’s veil were all made with silk produced on England’s only silk farm, which closed in 1981. Lullingstone Silk Farm was founded in the Thirties by Lady Zoe Hart Dyke and expanded from a small pet project in a garage to a complex operation that took up 30 rooms of Lullingstone Castle.

The silkworm’s clumsy appearance belies a delicate constitution. It requires feeding every four hours and dines exclusively on dry mulberry leaves — Lady Hart Dyke planted twenty acres of them to feed her silkworm army. Her son, Guy Hart Dyke, remembers that the sound of their permanent munching penetrated through the whole of Lullingstone Castle, as did their distinctive, and unpleasant, odour.

When they are 30-35 days old, silkworms spin a cocoon. The worms are not allowed to mature into a moth, as this ruins the silk, so after ten days the cocoons meet a brutal end by being baked in an oven. Several strands of the raw silk need to be twisted to make useable thread, so one kilometre of the seven-thread yarn used by top tie-makers contains the silk from 49 cocoons.

England is more famous for its silk-weaving than sericulture. ‘The silk cloth we produce in England is one of the best, if not the best, in the world,’ says Nick Reed, head of buying at Charles Tyrwhitt. One such silk producer is Vanners, which has been processing and weaving silk since the 1740s. Today it employs 40 weavers, who produce around 7,000 metres of cloth a week. Vanners has amassed an archive of 250,000 loom-ready patterns and 25,000 print designs, forming a vast reference library for Savile Row tailors and couturiers.

Sparkling Wine

Years before Dom Pérignon perfected the art of putting the bubbles into wine, English winemakers were producing their own fizzy plonk. While the French made their glass bottles over wood fires, by using hotter coal fires the English were able to make glass thick enough to prevent the bottles exploding before use.

‘Champagne and sparkling wine is one of the most capital-intensive industries in the world, more so than mining,’ says Sam Lindo, winemaker at Camel Valley, an award-winning Cornish winery. With winemakers’ cavernous cellars filled with maturing wines and top vintages, champagne has the biggest stock inventory out of any industry compared to the value of the stock, he says.

Winemaking is labour-intensive work. Camel Valley’s 20,000 vines are hand-pruned once a year in the finger-numbing cold of winter (around 2,000 hours’ work), and in autumn the grapes are harvested by hand. Experienced pickers can pick enough grapes for 330 bottles of wine in one day. The fizziness is achieved when the young wines are fermented for a second time, inside the bottle. A metal cap traps the carbon dioxide inside the bottle, and the pressure rises to six bars, equivalent of three times the pressure of a car tyre. ‘They’re like unexploded bombs,’ says Lindo. Around one in 55 bottles bursts.

The yeast is kept in the bottle for eighteen months, to develop the biscuity flavours in the sparkling wine, but eventually it has to be removed. A process called riddling ensures the yeast sediment gathers at the neck, and this has to then be ‘disgorged’. In February, when the sediment has frozen at the neck of the bottle, the disgorger removes the metal bottle cap and waits for the natural pressure to force the sediment out of the top of the bottle. ‘If you pop the cork off too late, you lose too much wine. Too early, and the yeast goes back inside the wine. Once you get good at it, you’re good at it. The problem is, it’s very expensive to practise,’ Lindo explains. They now have a machine for this, and in one hour a nimble winemaker can disgorge, cork and clean 250 bottles of sparkling wine.

Sophie McBain is a staff writer for Spear's