Wine for Graduates

I have a colleague at the University of Minnesota who hates commencement. Marching in gowns and hoods to the boom of Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” puts her in mind, she says, of the army. I hardly like to point out that most faculty marching would have its practitioners instantaneously in the guardroom were it ever perpetrated on a military parade ground.

Besides, I cannot see students at a degree ceremony without thinking of the swink and toil that brought them there: the freezing evenings bicycling home to Uptown after three hours of night class; the utter frustration some encounter in trying to satisfy mathematical language requirements; and above all, the hours spent doing dull jobs like parking cars and turning hamburgers, hours that impress on students the repetitive and broadly approved message that it is more important to be on time for banausic employments than it is to live the life of the mind. There is an inscape to graduation that merits a certain amount of outward pomp and circumstance.

Elgar, too, had an inscape. There are those who write him off as simply an English Sousa: “Delius is for the superselius, who think Elgar is velgar.” I disagree. The tuneful confidence of “Pomp and Circumstance” is only the surface of a composer who is altogether more enigmatic. You have only to listen to his Cello Concerto to find grand musical language being employed to express a distinctly abstract passion.

No less complex, yet also more accessible, is his big choral piece The Dream of Gerontius. Elgar shared with Purcell a capacity for giving remarkable resonance to words that might otherwise not attract admiration. (Verdi, too—his best opera is the Requiem, because it is the one with the best book.) The Dream of Gerontius is a long poem by John Henry, Cardinal Newman describing the death of an early Christian, not a particular hero or a martyr, just geron tis—Greek for “a certain old man.” The first half happens at the deathbed; the second describes the old man’s onward progress after his passing. No doubt gentle readers will put me right (as several kindly did in the matter of World War II poets), but the only other piece of literature I can think of that has the hero die so early in the action is Charles Williams’s All Hallows Eve, a novel in which the protagonist perishes on the first page. Neither work, however, is in the least bit gloomy. Gerontius’s hopes and fears and acts of faith can indeed induce a certain vertigo. They show, if nothing else, that Elgar was no pompous extrovert; like the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, he knew the “mind has mountains … hold them cheap may who ne’er hung there.”

The idea of inscape was actually invented by Hopkins, an older contemporary of Elgar. Hopkins used it to indicate quintessence, what you see of something from the inside once you have made an act of commitment to it. One somehow doubts he applied the idea much to appreciation of the winemaker’s art—he was an ascetic soul who even, as an undergraduate, denied himself the use of the armchair during Lent—but there are few sensual experiences to which it is more applicable; once one has surveyed, sniffed, sipped, and swallowed one’s wine, commitment to it is complete!

A claret came by me the other day that illustrates the point perfectly. The label on the characteristic Bordeaux bottle (with shoulders) said “Chateau des Agates 2003” and the fluid within, a clever blend of Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Merlot, was a good deep red (and only about ten dollars a go). Drinking it made one aware not only of the inscape of the wine, but also of the architecture of one’s own senses. The smell and taste not only have structure in themselves, but they also raise awareness in the consumer of his own capacity to taste.

Think of your mouth as some great pagan temple, say, the Pantheon at Rome, where they pour libations to the Gods. Take a sip of this claret and a good dry flavor swirls through the hall, followed by pleasant tannins against the teeth. Finally, an aromatic whiff rises into the vault of the palate, up and out through the nose, like smoke through the hole in the middle of the dome. The Gods breathe in and smile.

This is very heartening wine. It would go well with roasted chestnuts or simple barbecue (not one which has been slathered with sweet sauces), the sort of celebration that should await any fresh graduate emerging from commencement. Prosit!