Wine stimulates the wits, emboldens debate, and inspires the mind. Judicious quantities, abetted by judicious quality, encourage the participants to attack the important questions. Thus it has been over the past few days, discussing God and the Universe.

I was talking to an astronomer, whose day is spent contemplating the vastness of interstellar space. Consider one single light year, and how far that would take us from our own celestial neighbourhood. Then let your mind give way before the unimaginable distances. Already daunted, move onwards to the queen of the sciences, theology, and the question posed by that outstanding 20th-century theologian, Mr Prendergast in Decline and Fall. He could not explain why God had bothered to make the world. He might have found answers from Doctors of the Church who drew on the certainties of pre-Copernican cosmology. But once those were destroyed, surely the tides of the sea of faith were doomed to ebb, never to return.

My chum said he had discovered a couple of bottles in the depths of a family cellar

Christianity depends on a meaning to life and a fear of death. Yet if we are forced to the conclusion that we are condemned to an incomprehensible infinity in which some accident of biophysics has created a thinking animal destined for death like any other animal, how can faith survive?

I have known at least one man bold enough to tackle those questions: formidable enough to confront and rebut diabolic doubts. He was an Australian cardinal, George Pell, conservative in politics as in theology, a leader who demanded a great deal from those who worked for him, but who also radiated pastoral care and was altogether a delightful companion.

In Australia, alas, convict criminality is not extinct, even in the highest ranks of the legal profession. Lefties in the state of Victoria were out to get Cardinal George and he was originally convicted of sexual offences. Never has the term ‘kangaroo court’ been more justified. The proceedings were absurd and the whole thing was eventually quashed. In prison, His Eminence had one acute deprivation. Denied wine, he was unable to say Mass. One suspects a corrupt prelate under house arrest in the Vatican would be treated with more respect. George, who had a heroic faith, said it would mean time off in Purgatory.

We toasted his memory in competent champagne and decent claret. But an appropriate tribute was ready and waiting. I was chatting to an old friend, a cradle RC who is more of an Anglican by temperament, except that his strongest religious impulse is to despair of the C of E. Anyway, this chum said he had discovered a couple of bottles in the depths of a family cellar. The labels were barely legible, but he thought that they might be Haut-Brion. As they probably needed drinking, would I assist in that work of mercy? What are old friends for? I assured him that he could rely on me.

They were indeed Ho Bryan, as Pepys called the wine, and both from 1982. I last drank that magnificent vintage in the happiest of circumstances. It was in 10 Downing Street in 2010. David Cameron had just become PM and that bonnest of bon oeufs Michael Spencer had sent over a case. It was superb then, though I remember feeling that it would not have suffered from more time in the bottle. More than a dozen years later – eheu fugaces – it had blossomed into a glorious maturity. It is one of the finest wines I have ever drunk: in claret terms, up there with a ’45 Latour.

I told my friend about George Pell, and we raised a glass to his immortal memory. We went on to raise a further glass in a more embattled cause: the Tory party’s highly mortal future. Magnificent claret inspires optimism. Optimism is certainly needed.