Shimmering Surfaces

The three best reasons for being an academic, as is well known, are June, July, and August. Especially on the occasions when the University of Minnesota conspires with the McKnight Foundation to allow one to spend those months reading and writing about a really genial poet for instance, a character from the Later Roman Empire called Ausonius.

There is a serious side to this enterprise, of course. Ausonius is a wonderful case study of an intelligent Roman who went Christian at around the time most Romans were going Christian, during the fourth century A.D. Watching him integrate ancient science (astrology, for instance) into Christian cosmology is as interesting as considering the relationships between religion and Darwinism. (Am I alone in wanting one of each kind of fish symbol to stick on the back of my car?)
But there is also a fun side to old Ausonius, something agreeably fin de sircle. Sometimes I fancy I can hear him calling to posterity in the way that James Elroy Flecker appealed to a poet a thousand years hence:

But have you wine and music still,
And statues and a bright-eyed love,
And foolish thoughts of good and ill
And prayers to them that sit above?

On one level, then, a poet who promises a summer of roses and wine. Which is as it should be. Roman emperors in those late days lived not at Rome, but on the frontiers of Empire, where they could face down their Germanic neighbors, folk who spoke limited amounts of Latin and smeared butter in their hair instead of scented olive oil (a little dab will do ya). Ausonius was tutor to the son of one such emperor and so spent much of his adult life at Trier on the Moselle, then as now famous for its vineyards. His roots, however, were in Bordeaux, and to this day a well-known wine chateau in Saint-Emilion on the right bank of the Gironde is named Chateau Ausone in his honor (but you know what they say about the wines of Bordeaux—if you have heard of a claret, you can’t afford it).

For a poet so associated with wine, Ausonius was singularly fascinated with water. Icarus falls into it and Christ walks on it. Ausonius enjoyed looking through and across its shifting, shimmering surfaces since, like many a poet, he was interested in fishing; he was amazed, too, at the speed and ease with which a boat could carry him back and forth between his country villa and the city of Bordeaux. In fact, his longest poem is a dreamy description of the Moselle: The river cuts a canyon through the landscape, barges pass up and down, the bargees exchange badinage with men cultivating the hillsides. And in a contemplative passage, the poet wonders at the way fish cannot breathe out of water, while fishermen cannot breathe in it. I have a theory that Ausonius’ interest in water has to do with his shifting sense of himself, and so with the sort of Christian prayer that formed in his heart as he stood before the Most High God of the philosophers.

But that is another story. More immediate is the fact that he would certainly recognize the modern Moselle, its vertiginous hillsides still planted with lines of vines and crowned with country mansions. And I feel sure he would enjoy, as I did the other night, a white wine made from the Riesling grape, available locally in the characteristic slim green Moselle bottles at around twelve dollars. (I do not know the exchange rate for denarii, but I do know a good story about a long-haired barbarian chieftain exchanging his daughter for an amphora of Roman wine.)

This Riesling is the 2001 vintage of Robert Eymael’s Mönchhof estate. The name Mönchhof (monk court) comes from the Cistercians who owned this vineyard from the twelfth till the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Napoleon annexed all of this border region for France and the Eymael family acquired the vineyard. The result of this long history of cultivation is a wine that is on the sweet side, but would be pleasant with many sorts of cheese, fish, or poultry. The color is a consistent pale yellow, but each sip recalled a fresh sort of fruit. I thought I had it down as reminding me of pineapple juice when the next mouthful recalled apples.

Plus ça change, shimmering surfaces indeed. There is also a clear, uncloying aftertaste. What is it about this grape that makes it so infinitely various in its flavors? There’s a question to talk over with Ausonius on an August afternoon.