Sweetness and Lime

There are three golden things that never perish: gold, honey, and the sun. An archaeologist friend of mine once put this to the test. She was excavating at the Bronze Age citadel built at Mycenae during the Greek Civil War when her team came across a large jar full of honey. They agreed it would be a pity to let the honey go to the museum, so each morning they had some for breakfast. It was delicious, but it took them most of the season to get to the bottom of the pithos. When they did, they rather regretted their self-indulgence. For what they found at the bottom was an offering to the chthonic gods: the well-preserved bones of a small child. It was quite some time before my friend could be induced to eat honey again.

For Greeks and Romans, bees and honey were special. Honey, they thought, came from heaven, like dew. (“Pour upon us the continual dew of thy blessing,” says The Prayer Book of 1662.) And bees had a perfect polity, everyone with a place and everyone in her proper place (even the gentlemen of the Drones Club), all ruled equitably by their king. No one tumbled to the sex of the queen bee till the 1670s, when a Dutchman, rejoicing in the name of Jan Swammerdam, peered down an early microscope to dissect and draw a queen bee’s ovary, which, so he calculated, contained more than five thousand eggs.

I learned early to respect the political judgment of bees. The tyrannical headmaster of the boarding school where I spent the years seven to thirteen kept several hives, and one afternoon as he was pumping smoke into them the bees turned on him in their thousands. He became an apian pin-cushion and had to be whisked off to the hospital and dosed with antihistamines. In the long run it did nothing to improve his temper, or temper his countenance, which was the color of port wine (yohoho, his nose doth show how oft the black jack to his lips doth go). But it put the old brute out of circulation for an appreciable stretch, so preventing him from caning us.

The sweetness and light our ancestors had from bees was, of course, not all metaphorical. Beeswax made candles and much else, and honey was the principal sweetener of food until the eighteenth century, when imports of cane sugar from the West Indies began arriving in bulk. It is amazing how thoroughly sugar corrupted eighteenth-century taste. The sugar basin of a Georgian tea set is huge, out of all proportion to the teapot or the fat-lipped cream jug; the tea Jane Austen sipped was a syrup. After dinner, eighteenth-century men drank Madeira and port, but they also drank mountain, a super-sticky dessert wine from Málaga in southern Spain, and Marsala, a ditto from Sicily. The Royal Navy ran on rum.

With corruption of taste went corruption of language. Sweetness came to mean simply the presence of sucrose. An earlier age was subtler. When Horatio says, “Good night, sweet prince,” to Hamlet’s corpse, he is not inferring that his royal friend had a high concentration of C12 H22 011; it was more a matter of the air that breathes upon a bank of violets, stealing and giving odor.

All of this came to mind as I was trying to describe the nose and initial taste of an excellent 2001 Chardonnay, Broquel from Argentina (around $15 locally). Others I consulted named fruits. The word that came to my mind was “honeyed.” Not sweet like the sugar-water that oozes from the nozzles protruding from the trepanned plastic bears you buy in supermarkets. But fragrant like lime flowers or thyme—the stuff, in fact, which bees collect and pack so neatly in the pouches on their little thighs. (Even Virgil knew about those, but for the full story, try A Hive of Bees by an apiarist called John Crompton.)

There is nothing flimsy about this wine, which makes it quite unlike the penny-plain Chardonnays you often meet at dull parties. The color is that of wheat straw. There is a faintly smoky aroma and a firm grip on your tonsils as you swallow; then suddenly you are left with freshness. I found it strong enough to stand up to chicken thighs roasted with salt and fresh limes. It would be equally fine with green salad or sharp cheese. In Mendoza, where it originates, it is now late in the southern spring; no doubt there are flowers on the foothills of the Andes. This is a wine which will clear the indoor indulgences of a cold and cloying yuletide. Look on to April and his showers sweet.