Gratification for the Patient

I like starting novels in the middle. By skipping all those establishing shots, which exclude as much as they reveal, you’re able to catch the author and the characters off their guard. Also, once you have finished, you can start again at the beginning and have the paradoxical pleasure of reading the book for the first time twice.

My father did the same. When I was about ten years old, he left on the chair next to the bath the ideal book for those who read like we do. It has color, and some of the most memorable comic characters in English fiction, but, as the author proudly proclaims, nothing much by way of a plot.

Like many Victorian novels, Robert Smith Surtees’s Handley Cross was issued originally as a serial in separate monthly parts. The hero is a relatively rough diamond, a prosperous London grocer called John Jorrocks. Oddly for a Londoner, his principal passion is foxhunting, though he is not above mixing business with pleasure. He was known to have cantered after a fresh acquaintance in the hunting field, calling out, “Did you say two chests of black tea and one of green?” The man leapt a fence to get away from him.

Second only to Jorrocks’s passion for foxhunting was his passion for port. Claret he despised—“I can make you some, if you like,” he told a guest, “with water, vinegar, a lemon and a little drop of port.” Brandy and water was less a pleasure than a form of central heating. But port “wot leaves a mark on the side of the glass” gave ample opportunity to mull over (and magnify) the triumphs of a day’s sport.

By Jorrocks’s time, port had been the favorite wine of Englishmen for over a hundred years. Jorrocks’s racier contemporary Jack Mytton drank eight bottles a day, the first while he was shaving in the morning. He died young—of trying to cure his hiccups by setting fire to his nightshirt.

Port is in fact a by-product of the wars fought by Britain all through the eighteenth century—wars that prevented the France of Louis XIV and Napo-leon from dominating Europe. Fighting France meant less claret coming across the English Channel from Bordeaux and led to closer links between England and Portugal.

The alliance encouraged the wine trade. Soon after the Methuen Treaty of 1703, merchants discovered that vintages from Portugal crossed the stormy Bay of Biscay better if they had first been spiked with brandy. The same methods they developed are used to make the wine we enjoy today. Early during fermentation, the process by which natural sugars would normally become alcohol is arrested by the addition of brandy. The result is both sweet and intoxicating, ideal for drinking slowly after dinner with apples, nuts, Stilton cheese, or a biscuit.

Port comes in various styles: Ruby port is drunk young, having spent most of its life in cask; tawny port is generally older and sometimes has a dryish tinge to the taste. The greatest of all, vintage port, is the wine of a season considered sufficiently remarkable by an individual maker for him to risk his reputation by declaring it a vintage year. In some years only a few houses will declare a vintage. Vintage port spends only a couple of years in cask, so it grows old in bottle. This can be a lengthy process—the wines of 1963 and 1977 still have time on their side, and 1997 won’t be at its best for years yet. And maturing in bottle means that crud accumulates; if vintage port isn’t stored carefully the wine becomes clouded with sediment.

Vintage port is the enemy of instant gratification (which might be why California has so far failed to produce a convincing port, though there is a pleasing drink made there, wittily called Starboard). Long years in bottle must end with sensitive decanting. But it is absolutely worth the effort. There is nothing like the slow, deep sweetness of vintage port. This is a pleasure for people with patience.