Summer Pleasures

According to Sir Winston Churchill, the Royal Navy has only three traditions, “Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash.” It’s certainly true that until only a few years ago every enlisted man in Her Britannic Majesty’s fleet had the right to a substantial tot of rum every day at midday. It was powerful stuff. The custom went by the board when it was agreed that perhaps it was not a good idea for sailors in charge of Exocet missiles and other lethal modern ordnance to spend their afternoons in a condition that would make it illegal for them to drive a car.

Things were different in the days of sail. The wooden walls of an 18th-century ship enclosed a community that was often cold and always wet. Sailors needed their comforts. The British warmed their men with rum made from sugar plantations in the West Indies; so did notorious pirates like Captain Henry Morgan (he of the “Old Bold Mate of Henry Morgan” song) and Long John Silver (“Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum”).

But as far back as the early 1600s, the Dutch provided for their sodden sailors by giving them a spirit called brandywine (literally “burnt wine”). To make it they needed to buy substantial quantities of relatively bland wine to distill. Much of this they shipped in from France, particularly from the port of Nantes, at the head of an estuary where the lovely river Loire runs west toward the Atlantic.

To provide for the Dutch trade, the area around Nantes was planted with a heavy fruiting grape called the Melon de Bourgogne, which was brought in from Burgundy. People suggest the name of the grape comes from the round leaves on the vines, but it might as well come from the fact that these grapes taste like melons—which is to say, they taste like nothing much at all. When the Dutch export market dried up, the farmers around Nantes found a way to turn the grapes they were growing into a very palatable white wine called Muscadet, ideal for summer drinking, pleasing with a Welsh Rarebit (sharp cheese grilled on buttered toast), wonderful with fish.

I recently considered a bottle of Domaine de la Cognardiere “Bella Verte” Muscadet (substantially less than $15 on the Minneapolis side of the Edina-Minneapolis frontier). It had an initial taste that was pleasingly round, perhaps like the smell of a sun-filled cabin that has not been opened up for some months, slightly sharp, pleasantly musty. But the full benefit came on breathing out. This generated a taste like the fume of two flints clashed together. I can see this taste mingling with the smell of burning sparklers, now apparently legal in Minnesota, on July 4.

The secret of the wine lies in the way it is allowed to ferment on its lees, “sur lie,” as it says on the labels. The liquid derived from the grapes picked each autumn is left over the winter in casks together with the solid dregs, and it is this which gives depth and complexity of flavor to what might otherwise be a rather dull drink. Sometimes the dregs impart a slight but refreshing fizz.

Muscadet is like nothing else. Many other wines are made along the banks of the river Loire. They vary from the delightful vintages of Pouilly-Fume, with their heavenly smell of blackcurrants, redolent of country gardens in midsummer, to beverages which in wet cold years would be better employed as battery acid. But most of these are made from the Sauvignon Blanc grape, none from the Melon de Bourgogne.

This is a wine to sip in a hammock. If you need summer reading to go with it, try Flying Colours by C.S. Forester, a novel in which Captain Horatio Hornblower of the Royal Navy escapes from Napoleon’s France by drifting in a rowboat down the Loire, past the chateaux, past the vineyards. Life could be worse.

Oliver Nicholson is a classicist at the University of Minnesota, and former Secretary of the Wine Committee at Wolfson College, Oxford.