Deer Wine

A few weeks ago, central London saw the largest demonstration it has ever witnessed. A good-humored crowd of 407,791 people marched through the streets. These were not folk normally given to protest. For the most part, they were quiet country people, though to be sure they enjoyed their day out in the capital, cheering, singing, and blowing hunting horns.

They had come to remind Her Majesty’s Government of a few home truths, in particular that one cannot pay too much for food, that it is rude to criticize a farmer with your mouth full, and that agricultural subsidies are not handouts for farmers but a way of ensuring a supply of cheap bread (circuses come separately) for the urban masses. But at the heart of their protest was not the plight of farmers so much as anguish at the government’s interference with certain immemorial pleasures of the rustics.

The oldest of these pursuits is the hunting (with hounds, not guns) of the wild red deer, once the sport of kings, but now carried out only on one remote moor in the southwest of England. Deer run faster and straighter than foxes. Following stag-hounds across the springy heather under an open Exmoor sky must be one of the most exhilarating pleasures a human being can have. Hunting deer involves knowing about their natural history. The locals seem to know the deer individually—“the big stag with the crooked antler as lives above Badgworthy”; “the pale-colored hind you see at the bottom end of Horner Wood.” They can tell from their footprints (“slots”) the age, size, sex, and condition of the deer who made them. It is probably true that despite the damage they do, the wild red deer are tolerated by the Exmoor farming community principally because of their complex relationship as hunter and hunted. If and when the hounds do bring their beast to bay, it is dispatched from close range by the huntsman; the hounds get the paunch, the followers divide up the venison, and the heart goes to the farmer on whose land the deer was killed.

This sport involves a good deal more exercise than the shooting of white-tailed deer, a popular sport in Minnesota in the autumn. But both present one common problem: How do you cook wild meat of indeterminate age which is going to need to be hung quite some time before you can be sure it is at all tender? The sensible solution is, of course, to eat farmed venison, a delicious meat, always reliably tender and amazingly low in cholesterol-inducing fat. It may be the lean meat of the future, but that’s another story.

I cannot help the hunter much with recipes. For these you must look to the wonderful cookbooks of Nichola Fletcher, Game for All and Monarch of the Table (I specially like her “Venison in Chocolate Sauce”). But I can recommend a wine which I think will stand up to the strongest of “gamey” tastes. It is the 2000 Napa Valley Zinfandel from Beaulieu Vineyards, a winery with more than 100 years of continuous history behind it (they made altar wine during Prohibition).

This Zinfandel is a fine red color, like a pan of berry juice ready for making bramble jelly. (Deer like berries. You should see what a stag can do to a blackcurrant bush. So there is some justice in the world!) The soft tannin at the center of the taste will stand up well to the meat, the smell of fresh oil which comes from the wine being matured in oak barrels is appetizing, and the pleasant fruity sensation as you swallow, which is reminiscent of a fresh Granny Smith apple, gives the palate wings. Less mist, more mellow fruitfulness.

This is a wine with a good heart— and at less than $20, a decent price. It should go nicely with whatever Florian Krebsbach and Clarence Bunsen may shoot (or run over) in the woods near Lake Wobegon this autumn. For me, it brings to mind the Scotch poet who wrote, “My heart is on Exmoor / My heart is not here. My heart is on Exmoor / A-chasing the deer.”

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