The other day a student asked me to name my favorite building. I had no hesitation. “Exeter Cathedral,” I said. There is plenty of magnificence: creamy, glowing stone, the longest medieval Gothic vault in England (possibly in the world), a forest of columns branching upward. But this place also has an unintimidating intimacy; while it lacks the astonishing height of French medieval cathedrals, it has a measured, welcoming breadth. If you don’t believe me, try the pictures at www.exeter-cathedral.org.uk.
Don’t miss the details. The carving underneath a seat of a fourteenth-century elephant with cow-like cloven hooves; the corbel carvings of the master mason Roger and his dog. And the owls. My mother, who grew up in the shadow of this great fane, would spend wet afternoons with her sisters in a tiny chantry counting owls. A bishop called Oldham (friend of Erasmus) lies buried there and his coat of arms bears three owls (Oldham/Owldom, geddit?). The sculptor who decorated the walls had taken the pun to an extreme, and the girls were able to find at least forty-three owls—small, wide-eyed, often well concealed in corners. In 1942 someone told my mother that the cathedral had been razed by aerial bombardment. She walked round all day in a daze.
Her informant, thank God, was wrong; only a single chapel had been destroyed. But a mere eighteen months earlier, at Coventry, an entire medieval cathedral had been burnt by incendiary bombs. While the stench of dank charred timber still hung in the air, one of the clergy picked up three medieval nails and put them together to form a cross.
Not long after the end of the war, a group from Coventry went over to Dresden in East Germany, which had been devastated by Allied bombing. They helped rebuild a hospital. This group, the Community of the Cross of Nails, has spread beyond Coventry and is still active in the ghastliest parts of the world, mediating in Iraq, in Gaza, trying to get people to see things whole. When one thinks how thick and deep horror and hatred are spread across the earth, it seems hardly decent to write about the pleasures of wine.
Fear and rancor have never been in short supply, of course. People produced plenty in the Middle Ages as well. For most of the fourteenth century, a dispute as vicious as it is difficult to understand kept half a dozen successive popes in exile at Avignon in the south of France. The palace they erected overlooks the bridge across the river Rhone. The summer residence they built in the hills was slighted in the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion (more horror), and its ruins still loom large above the village.
However, the vines planted at Châteauneuf-du-Pape (new castle of the pope) had their successors, and in the nineteenth century, wine named after the castle became widely available. The reds are better known than the whites, so it was a pleasure recently to meet a bottle of good white Châteauneuf, from the 2002 vintage. Vieux Mas des Papes is a pleasant pale yellow and has a good heart. After an initial impression of the green sweetness of fresh grapes, the wine takes a grip on the palate and promotes substantial salivation and a lingering finish. One imagines there might be incense which tastes like this. It is certainly a wine that would go well with summer greens—endives, asparagus, chives—and like all Châteauneuf-du-Pape, it is not lacking in alcohol (never less than twelve-and-a-half percent).
All this for only $19.68, including tax. The figure sticks in the mind because 1968 was one of the worst years in living memory for many French wines. Oddly enough, 2002 was also a poor year in the Rhone valley—it rained. But this wine is made from the young vines of a well-known Châteauneuf domaine, that of Vieux Télegraphe, and the skill of the winemaker has triumphed over adversity. Perhaps it is true that wine does more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to Man. Justifying Man’s ways to God, or even to himself, is quite another matter.