Magic Potion

No one ever added more acreage to the Roman Empire than Julius Caesar (the Roman geezer). Until his time, Roman territory in what is now France was the relatively narrow sliver along the Mediterranean coast that is still called Provence, precisely because it was the original Roman province. In ten years Caesar took over all Gaul, and had even paid a couple of visits to the closest of the islands in Ocean, where he found a lot of hairy warriors wearing nothing but woad (blue dye made from a plant like the indigo): “Woad’s the stuff to show men / Woad to scare your foemen / Boil it to a brilliant hue/ Then rub it on your back and your abdomen.”

Of course there was one village in Brittany which even Caesar could not subdue, the one inhabited by the tough little cartoon warrior Astérix and his oversized friend Obélix, who can eat a whole wild boar at a sitting and makes his living (when he is not beating up Romans) delivering the massive stone obelisks used in Gallic religion. The secret weapon of mass destruction the villagers use against the Roman invader is a magic potion brewed by the local druid Panoramix (yes, they all have silly names). Drinking it makes Astérix mightier than Popeye; Obélix was dropped in a vat of it when he was a baby. Apparently there is to be an Astérix film in time for the next Olympics, in which nos héros will compete against a legionary called Gluteus Maximus (very humerus) and there will be a lot of earnest stuff about the morality of magic potions. Odd how morality can spoil a joke.

Perhaps one can forgive Caesar for not referring to this determined center of resistance in the rather po-faced narrative he composed concerning his conquests. What is harder to credit is the account he provides of Gallic wildlife. There are, he says, three sorts of deer in Gaul. One sounds like the unicorn, except that its horn has a branchy tip, like an antler (all right, maybe he had seen a stag in summer after only one of its antlers had fallen off). One is the auroch, a mighty ox which the Gauls were accustomed to catch by the same unsporting method Winnie ille Pu used to capture heffalumps—the auroch is extinct but is known from archaeology. But it is the elks which make one wonder. Elks, according to Caesar, have no knees, so they sleep standing up and leaning against trees, and when they fall over they land on their backs with their little legs wiggling in the air. If you want to catch one, you find a tree that an elk is likely to lean against and you cut halfway through it; you then lie in wait ’til an elk sidles up and goes to sleep, at which point Pif, Paf, Boom (as Astérix says when he biffs a Roman legionary). If you believe this, I have a magic potion that might interest you.

Well, actually I have. It is white and comes from the broad land south of Bordeaux called Entre-deux-Mers. The name is Verdillac—all those French names ending in -ac (Cognac, Cadillac, Carnac) are pre-Roman—and the 2004 vintage, made by the old established firm of Armand Roux, may be had locally for around ten dollars.

A skillful blend of (mostly) Semillon with Sauvignon Blanc, this is very easy to drink. Semillon is the grape variety used to make the great golden dessert wines of Sauternes (I think of dreamy glasses of Chateau Rieussec 1976 sipped in my misspent youth). What the Semillon imparts here is not sweetness, but a pleasing douceur, an almost oily mildness which kicks in just before the aftertaste; some people would call this the taste of melon, but it is more interesting than that. The Sauvignon gives the wine its central grit—the taste you get from the red frilly bits next to a peach stone—and there is an aftertaste which recalls the scent of elderflowers in high summer.

Chilling this wine too much would kill some of the cleverly constructed taste. Roast elk or braised auroch would overpower it. But drinking it with grilled chicken should make you grateful that the Romans brought to Gaul the cultivation of the grape. Astérix and his friends did not know what they were missing; “Ô vive lui, chaque fois / Que chante son coq gaulois.”