Strine Wine

When I was home in England over Christmas, I caught a liver specialist from (appropriately enough) Liverpool being interviewed on the wireless. He was talking about cirrhosis, that very nasty condition in which the liver turns into little yellowish granules, and eventually packs up completely. When he began in the liver business years ago, he said, this was the disease of older men, brought on by a lifetime’s application to the bottle. Nowadays, though, he frequently found the beds in his ward filled with young women who had managed to achieve the same effect in an altogether shorter time. The young people of Liverpool, he averred, do drink an awful lot these days.

Archaeological evidence suggests this phenomenon is not confined to Liverpool. As the spring thaw sets in each year along fraternity row in Minneapolis, bottles emerge to view in the snow banks on the boulevard, mostly bearing the names of undistinguished vintages or popular brands of beer. As the melt proceeds, they dribble down into the gutter, where they pose a hazard to cyclists (credite experto … ). The historian Edward Gibbon, writing about Oxford during the eighteenth century, felt that the deep potations of those who were supposed to be teaching him Latin and Greek excused “the brisk intemperance of youth.” I can forgive a good deal of brisk intemperance, but a puncture in my front tire makes me livid (a very nasty condition in which the face goes pale purple with rage).

In Gibbon’s time, the British government tried to use stiff excise duties to control alcoholic intake. Avoiding these penalties became something like the national sport. The stakes were high; you could get hanged for smuggling, but evading the exciseman appealed to a certain spirit of adventure, as those fortunate enough to have had J. Meade Falkner’s novel Moonfleet read to them in their youth can certainly agree.

The most unlikely recruit to the government team must surely have been Rabbie Burns, the Scots national poet. This is a man who wrote lines like “Freedom an’ whisky gang thegither,” as well as one of the world’s great drinking songs, “O Willie Brew’d a Peck o’ Maut” (chorus: “We are na fou, we’re nae that fou, but just a drapee in our e’e … ”). Yet he spent the last half-dozen years of his short life (he died of heart trouble, not of drink) chasing down smugglers and illicit distillers in the deep valleys of Dumfries and Galloway. Not that it seems to have cramped his style. One of his wildest poems is a rant about the party put on in a town where the local exciseman had been carried away to hell by the devil; Burns is said to have composed it while waiting on the beach for reinforcements so he could search a smuggling ship that had gone aground on the treacherous sands of the Solway Firth.

With a reputation like that, it is scarcely surprising that “Bobbie Burns” should have given his name to a vineyard in the Australian State of Victoria (the bottom right-hand corner) founded by a Scots gold prospector called John Campbell. Campbells Wines produced their first vintage in 1870, and their Bobbie Burns Shiraz 1998 (available hereabouts for less than $17) is a worthy scion. The Shiraz grape, widely grown in Australia, is the same as that which the French call the “Syrah,” the variety from which most of the great red wines of the Rhône Valley are made. It has, alas, no historical connection with the Persian city of the same name, home of the Persian national poet Hafiz, a bard altogether more refined than “owr Rabbie,” and one who wrote about wine, it seems, merely as a metaphor for spiritual experience.

There is nothing immaterial about this good-hearted red. It has little nose, but plenty of fruit and alcohol, as one might expect from grapes which have reached ripeness over a long, warm autumn. The tannins are more spicy than redolent of the oak barrels in which the wine matured. This would make a cheering companion to any red meat, a pork roast say, or even haggis, the great chieftain of the pudding race. Come to that, the tannins suggest it has time still on its side. Buy some now to drink later. But best make sure you like it; sample some now as well, and call to mind Paul’s advice to Timothy: “Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake.” A little wine—no poet (or hepatologist) could have said it better.