Author: Oliver Nicholson

It is a pity there’s no reason to believe King Arthur actually existed. True, there was a sixth-century monk called Gildas The Wise who penned a wordy jeremiad that mentions a battle at a place called Mount Badon where the Celtic remnant of Roman Britain stemmed the tsunami of Anglo-Saxon invasion. It is also true that, long afterwards, Welsh monks with well-developed imaginations placed at Mount Badon one of the twelve victories they ascribed to Arthur. If you think that adds up to evidence for a historical Arthur, you probably also think that Saddam Hussein supported Al Qaeda.

Of course, not necessarily existing is no barrier to being influential, as critics of the Ontological Argument sometimes discover. Imaginative folk of every era since Late Antiquity have peered back into the Age of Arthur and summoned the mythical monarch from the fifth-century mists, calling into the old world to redress the balance of the new. The monks of medieval Glastonbury felt they had solid evidence that Arthur would one day return and put old England to rights when, in 1184, they discovered a lead coffin allegedly containing the king’s bones. It was inscribed with his name and the motto “rex quondam rexque futurus.” Some 300 years later a Warwickshire country gentleman called Malory, in jail awaiting trial on a long list of charges including affray, deer-stealing, and carrying off a neighbor’s wife, wrote a long and eloquent account of King Arthur and the Round Table, lamenting in marginal notes to his manuscript that the age of chivalry was dead and that knights no longer had the noble souls they had of old.

Later poets, too, have found ideals to feed their fancies at the court of the once and future king. The opera of Purcell and Dryden, King Arthur: The British Worthy, is as insubstantial as spun sugar, but no less pleasingly sweet. Alfred Lord Tennyson, gentleman-poet, sought high moral rectitude at the Round Table and found it in Sir Galahad, whose strength was as the strength of ten, because his heart was pure. (Did anyone less pure-hearted, one wonders, try to warn the old boy about his earlier line, “‘The curse has come upon me,’ cried the Lady of Shalott”?) In living memory, Charles Williams found in the Arthur stories a mystical means to understanding the coinherence of human and divine life.

And then there is Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. I loathe this book. Instead of parting the curtains of time to catch sight of Merlin’s Isle of Gramarye, Mr. Twain sends there a cocksure moron of his own era, a nineteenth-century firearms manufacturer yclept Hank Morgan, who turns the armored knights into sandwich-board men advertising soap and, as a final gesture, mows down rank on rank of mounted men-at-arms using an electric fence and a nest of machine guns. The message is: Whatever happens, we have got the Gatling gun and they have not. Mr. Twain (yes, I know it is a nom de plume) is no more imaginative in this book than the creators of the Flintstones, who assimilated even the Neolithic to the contemporary suburb, a habitat as specialized in its own way as that of any dinosaur, and therefore ultimately just as fragile.

What is more, Hank Morgan’s is the sort of mechanical machismo which gives masculinity a bad name. Until his time, men in love with speed needed to develop “good hands” and a lasting relationship with a horse, an animal with more mind of its own than a supermarket trolley, willing when treated well but tricky if bullied. They could not simply pull a metal throttle and blast off into the sunset. Chivalry, as the etymology of the word suggests, involves not only strength but also the gentleness necessary for equestrian manipulation. For Arthur and his knights, manliness was more than force.

Which is why, when I describe the 2007 Sauvignon Blanc from Mount Riley in New Zealand as a masculine wine, I do not mean merely that it knocks your socks off. It is a constant surprise that New Zealanders can make from this variety of grape, so evanescent when the French turn it into Pouilly-Fumé, a wine so muscular in character. The Mount Riley Sauvignon Blanc is bright and clear, the color of pale straw. It is strong and fresh; it is not sweet, but it is not unsubtle. It made me think of the taste of peaches with the sugars taken out. I detected also hints of pepper, such as you sometimes encounter in kiwifruit. A glass or two with a hot fish stew could help redress the balance of your world.

On any list of the smaller enormities of modern life, other people’s Christmas circular letters ought to loom large. It is not the information itself that is so rebarbative. In the great scheme of things, knowing about the family’s new job/house/car/place at the lake is no more or less annoying than reading that Junior has scooped the Miss Joyful Prize for Raffia Work.

What offends is not the list of facts; it is the impersonal braggadocio which implicitly animates their recital. Other documents in life that puff one’s importance at least do so to secure some good purpose: To get a pay raise or obtain a job. But the Christmas circular is bombast in its pure form, intended to impress merely for the purpose of impressing—vanitas vanitatum.

How much more welcome than such cyclo-styled self-advertisement are a few words of personal greeting scrawled on a conventional card. One might even be happier to receive one of the un-Christmas cards sent out annually by an irascible colleague who experiences difficulty forgiving his enemies, even though he knows he really ought to. His concession to the Season of Goodwill consists of posting to the offenders plain black cards signed and inscribed in simple silver script: “I await your apology.”

At least his cards are plain. The nadir of the Christmas circular phenomenon is reached when the puff sheet is accompanied by a card showing not the Holy Family heaped onto a single donkey fleeing into Egypt, but the Nuclear Family disporting itself somewhere warm. Such an exhibition can only be intended to promote envy and uncharitableness when sent to people spending December in Minnesota.

The only one of these family snaps I have ever kept beyond Twelfth Night came from a sprightly minded graduate student the Christmas before the invasion of Iraq. The photograph showed her husband in combat fatigues standing next to his tank. Her bikini-clad form was draped deliciously across the front of the vehicle. The caption read simply “Peace on Earth.”

It is good to know the U.S. Marines do irony.

It is actually the Christians of Iraq I shall be thinking of this Christmas. These are not the converts of intrusive Victorian missionaries; they are communities as old as Christianity itself, long predating the emergence in the Western Middle Ages of Christmas as an important holiday. (In the early Church the great festivals were Easter and to a lesser extent Epiphany.) Their liturgical language is Syriac, a literary form of Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke.

During the first three centuries of Islam, Syriac Christians were a vital link in the transmission of Greek science to the scholars of the Arab world. In the three centuries before Islam, their monasteries were places of poetry and of a spiritual endeavor characterized by considerable psychological acuity. Standing outside a monastery gate on the escarpment of Mount Izla, looking south over the little Turkish border town of Nusaybin, once a great center of Syriac learning, one can sense centuries of intellectual effort wafting up on the thermals from the Mesopotamian plain.

Today the subtle symbiosis that has for centuries sustained these Christian communities is being brushed violently aside. Syriac Christians are leaving their ancestral land to live precariously as refugees in Syria and Jordan. And it’s not just Christians; the Yezidis, a small community whose principal shrine is in the mountains of northern Iraq, also live in justifiable fear. This tragedy seems to be little reported, though the Archbishop of Canterbury’s distress at what he saw when visiting refugees in Syria got some coverage on the internet.

The sober consideration of this cultural catastrophe may be lubricated by a wine that, like the landscape of northern Mesopotamia, is strong and rugged and somewhat sweet. The people of Mount Izla were making their own wines in the time of Ezekiel, but I fear that today the grapes there get turned into raki (the Turkish equivalent of ouzo) or pekmez (a sort of jam). One may substitute a Parducci Pinot Noir grown in the precipitous hills of Mendocino County in northern California, which may be had in Minnesota for about twelve dollars. The color is a good deep red; an aroma rises with the alcohol as the hand warms the glass; the taste is robust and lingering.

This wine would be good company for bread and cheese and hard thinking. Its mellowing influence might well evaporate the vanity of one’s friends. One might even start to wonder what can be done to stop the modern world from destroying all the good we inherited from the past.

Last spring brought a nasty shock. I was walking down a leafy side street off Como Avenue, hoping to admire in passing the jolly gingerbread woodwork around the eaves of the tumbledown duplex where my POSSLQ and I shared our first Minnesota home. The place was in pretty poor nick when we rented it twenty years ago; the waste pipe for the kitchen sink (located for some reason on the landing) was held together by duct tape, squirrels nested noisily in the roofing felt. But in happier times it had been a boyhood home of Governor Floyd B. Olson. Indeed, a previous tenant had tried to have it listed on the National Register of Historic Places, but apparently there was no enthusiasm in official circles for starting a Floyd B. Olson Boyhood Home Tour—the future governor’s family had moved house rather often. No doubt the authorities thought he was better remembered by half of Highway 55 and one of the world’s biggest bronze double-breasted suits.

Anyway, as I rounded the corner I saw not crumbling timber but a large brown hole. This dust inbreathèd was the house, the wall, the wainscot, and the mouse (no shortage of mice). Above the hole, memories swam suspended in a patch of sky: Roses are red/ Violets are blue/ Please will you be/ My POSSLQ. This empty air was where we opened the sherry which had been a parting gift from my previous employer; it was where we survived on short commons till the first paycheck came in, a month after our arrival.

I recall tearing into the envelope and announcing—as any Englishman might—that we should celebrate by going out for curry. Except, of course, in those days there were no curry houses in the Twin Cities. We compromised on an Afghan place, where we chose to sit on the floor cushions, feeling full of Eastern promise—the POSSLQ, fortunately, is better upholstered than I am.

Today we would have plenty of choice. The proliferation of curry houses is one of the best things to happen in the Twin Cities during the past ten years. Not that they form an oenological opportunity. I have met wines that will stand up to curry but none yet that forms as happy a marriage with it as IPA, the India Pale Ale brewed by Victorian box-wallahs for precisely that purpose.

This happy marriage is no more than you might expect. The standard curry-house menu derives, like IPA, from the long symbiosis between the peoples of the British Isles and those of the Indian subcontinent; it is not “authentically” Indian. Chicken tikka masala, now (“studies have shown”) England’s favorite national dish, was probably invented in Birmingham, not in Bombay; the balti certainly was.

The Indian restaurant menu, in fact, is the latest stage in a long relationship that is at least as much cultural as culinary. In the University Church in Oxford is a marble memorial engraved in Latin. On one side of the plaque stands a conventional Roman-style Mourning Victory, but on the other is a gent with a Yul Brynner haircut holding a writing tablet inscribed in Sanskrit. In the pediment is a Brahminic bull. The Latin commemorates Sir William Jones, an English judge in Calcutta in the eighteenth century, who, without losing his own, absorbed so much of the local civilization that he discovered the links between the Indo-European languages.

And there are older culinary links as well. You might not take to mulligatawny soup, but kedgeree is a pleasure; originally khitchri, an Indian confection of rice and beans, it became in the hands of Anglo-Indian cooks a mixture of rice, flaky fish (usually smoked haddock), sliced hard-boiled eggs, and cayenne pepper (with parsley to taste). Try it at home.

And with it try Kendall-Jackson’s Vintner’s Reserve Chardonnay, a bright, refreshing white wine with a smoky center, from the Sonoma Valley of California, available in Minnesota at around fifteen dollars. Kendall-Jackson are the New Critics of the wine world. They seem to think their product should speak for itself, and so tell you little about its history or terroir, for that is what I gather advertising folk call “backstory” and the rest of us information that might lead to a rounded appreciation (those who are ignorant of history, after all, are condemned to repeat it). Though, come to think, it is perhaps this deliberate, fresh-eyed innocence that is itself the backstory of California. Anyway, if this wine speaks for itself, what it says is “Hi.” And the kedgeree has enough history for both. They make a marriage a good deal more pleasing than the concrete confection I fear is about to rise on the site of Château Floyd B. Olson. Eheu fugaces …

A prophet is not without honor, save in her own country and among her own people. One of life’s perennial puzzles is why people in the United States do not seem to read the wonderful novels of Alison Lurie, the sharp-eyed rhapsode of Ithaca, New York.

Every good paperback emporium in England stocks Alison Lurie; you will find her even among the horrid throng and press of Gatwick Aerodrome. But in Minnesota I find her slim volumes elusive. We are divided, as is so often the case, by a common language. Perhaps Americans find Alison Lurie too cruel to be entertaining.

Or maybe it is simply a matter of size. English readers are content to fill up for the weekend with the concentrated spirit of a Penelope Lively or the Welsh wit of Alice Thomas Ellis, whereas the American has greater staying power and prefers to imbibe great Proustian draughts, like a Detroit dragon at a petrol pump. Whenever I hear the word blockbuster, it is of the engine blocks of such mighty motors that I think.

Let me, en tout cas, commend to you Professor Lurie’s Imaginary Friends, a tale of a millenarian cult in upstate New York the denouement of which (it would be deeply unkind to reveal in advance) does little for the reputation of the social science known as religious studies (as distinct from theology, Queen of the Sciences, with its lofty truths and profound heffalump traps).

Or my own particular favorite, Foreign Affairs, a novel about an American spinster professor who spends her summers reading in the British Library and has a positively Janeite capacity for observing the rest of the human race. She needs all her powers of penetration. The American characters are straightforward enough; they have one personality each. But the English all have at least two: The posh lady turns out to have a second life as a cleaning woman; even the dogs have multiple personalities. Nothing is what it seems to be. Honest folk who tell the truth are at a disadvantage.

Art reflects life. There are, after all, precious few straight lines in nature. The Monarch butterfly takes a distinctly wobbly course through life but manages to migrate successfully over many thousands of miles. To be sure, the Romans, straightforward folk, laid out their cities as tidy-minded oblongs, making their outlines instantly recognizable from the air, even when (jam seges est ubi Troia fuit) they lie now under farmers’ fields. But the Greeks knew how to marry the apparent irregularity of nature to the elegance of mathematics. Bicycle down Bryant Avenue South between Franklin and Lake and enjoy the Ionic columns that support the porches of many of the older houses. The spiral volutes at the top of each column are an ancient Greek design derived originally from rams’ horns and deliberately patterned in the pleasing ratio of 1:1.618, what they call the “golden section.” There is more in nature than meets the eye.

Which is why it is a substantial pleasure to recommend a straightforward wine that tells the truth. St. Francis “Old Vines” zinfandel from Sonoma County provides (for around twenty dollars a bottle) considerable delight but no surprises. The color is a good dark red, the nose strong and as fruity as black currants. The flavor carries through precisely the promise of the smell; an initial sweetness recalls the clarets of Pomerol. There is a good gravelly center to the taste and afterward there lingers a strong redolence of alcohol (15.8% by volume, according to the label). As the wine sits, the sweetness gives way to simple strength, but it still pleases; it does not bully. It would make pleasant company equally for roast beef or an omelet, even for Welsh Dragon Sausages (recently withdrawn from sale on the orders of the Common Market on the grounds that they contain no dragon meat. Yes, really).

Of course, there are complexities here if you want to look for them. St. Francis was not the pantheistic bunny-hugger of common supposition. Nor is the Sonoma Valley a flat Jeffersonian chessboard. More interesting, the zinfandel old vines have a history. The variety came to California from New England in the slipstream of the Gold Rush, and, in the past few years, DNA analysis has shown that it is actually the Primitivo, a grape that grows prolifically on the coastal plain running up the stocking seam of the leg of Italy; its ultimate origin seems to be a Croatian variety called crljenak kastelanski. Yes, I have spelled it right. But why worry? Pour yourself a glass and settle into a soft chair with Alison Lurie. Together they should see you through a long weekend.

A colleague likes to talk about the Ivy League football games he went to as a graduate student at Harvard. Apparently they did not sing the Tom Lehrer Harvard fight song (“Wouldn’t it be peachy if we won the game …”); in fact, the crowd’s invective sounds as though it was scarcely more subtle than that practiced by supporters of Personchester United (as we must learn to call the English-speaking world’s best-known soccer club). The Harvard crowd, it seems, hit a nadir as it chanted at opponents “You may be winning but you still go to Brown,” with substantial emphasis on the final syllable.

These thoughts often stream through what passes for my mind as I spend time in an England governed no longer by the gleaming grin of Tony Blair but by the altogether grimmer visage of Gordon Brown. One could say that the new British prime minister is the gray man of British politics, except that there has already been a Grey administration—the one headed by the Earl Grey, who gave us the 1832 Reform Act and that filthy tea adulterated with oil of bergamot, the English ancestor of Constant Comment.

True, Mr. Brown has gingered things up by allowing eight ministerial colleagues to announce that they smoked cannabis in their youth, and also by appointing as a minister in the Foreign Office a former United Nations eminence who has dared to tell the United States that might may not always be right.

Not the least gray feature of Mr. Brown is the granite town in the east of Scotland where he grew up. I once spent a whole morning behind a stall in Kirkcaldy marketplace (it’s a long story) and had ample opportunity to study the leaden clouds that lurched across the dreich wastes of the Firth of Forth before they unburdened themselves onto to the streaky concrete and dour stone of this dull burgh. The most famous son of Kirkcaldy is Adam Smith, promoter of the dismal science of economics and author of that famous page-turner The Wealth of Nations, which he actually wrote while living at home with his mother. (One wonders how many bawbees a week he gave her towards the housekeeping.)

Mr. Brown is an apt epigonus of the dismal Smith. He has the tidy mind of an economist and, having applied it during the Blair decade to the nation’s finances, he proposes now to redesign that elegant organism, the British Constitution (it does exist, you know, even if it is not written down).

To redesign it, that is, in all but the one particular where it cries out for alteration. When the Blair Administration invented separate national legislatures for Scotland and Wales, it allowed Scots Members of the United Kingdom Parliament to retain the right to vote not only on matters that affect the whole of Britain but also on those that affect only England. An English member now may not vote on the future of foxhunting in Scotland—pas de problème—but a Scots member may still vote on whether it continues in England.

Many English people find this arrangement as quaint as some residents of the District of Columbia find their representation in the U.S. Congress. Mr. Brown thinks it is just fine, and for a very simple reason. The Labour Party, which he leads, has lots of support in Scotland: forty-five seats in the United Kingdom Parliament. His main rivals, the Conservative Party, have very little: only one seat. Does Mr. Brown admit that what worries him is losing all those Labour seats in the United Kingdom Parliament? Of course not; he blathers about sustaining the Union. There are plenty of Englishmen who would be happy to vote for complete independence for Scotland in hopes of resolving this anomaly.

And to show there were no hard feelings, I am sure they would join me in drinking Mr. Brown’s health in a glass of The Famous Grouse. It’s the most popular whiskey in Scotland, available in Minnesota for around twenty dollars a liter. This whiskey is deeper and darker than most of the sweet, pale blends popular in the United States. But for all its firm flavor, the spirit rises through the eyes; there is taste but there is also tingle. It could lift the spirits of folk who dwell below gray skies. Though I suppose it is brown.

Archaeologists have all the fun. Mere historians spend their summers sweating over hot computers while those on expeditions get fresh air and exercise, often in agreeable places. I have just heard from a student who is spending great swaths of his summer making a new map of the Boundary Waters. There are less pleasant ways of spending your days than sitting in a canoe cuddling a GPS. Such canoodling in the Boundary Waters will not reveal any Roman roads (this student’s first love), but he might make his reputation by finally fixing the coordinates of Mist County. No one has ever looked for it that far north.

Of course he would need a time machine. Lake Wobegon, so I have heard its chronicler assert, is really your grandfather’s rural Minnesota. One doubts if many Norwegian bachelor farmers use GPS to direct and regulate their seed drills; there won’t be a lot of agribusiness done in the Chatterbox Café.

All the same, the portrait of this place is at least grounded in realism, which is more than you can say for a lot of pastoral literature. When the Hellenistic wordsmith Theocritus had the wheeze that you could compose clever poetry about country life, he meant it as metaphor; the dysfunctional affections of the nymphs and shepherds who sport in his delightful pleasant groves represent the abstract attachments of urban intellectuals. It is the same with Tudor madrigals. If fair Cloris actually met her swain in a pigsty she would surely have been far too worried about the mud on her multiple petticoats to celebrate their happy, happy loves. Clint Bunsen, by contrast, is not afraid of a little axle-grease.

What is even more remarkable, the good folk of Lake Wobegon are described with optimism and affection; Powdermilk Biscuits are good for you—mostly. Everyday stories of countryfolk are often distressingly cruel. Take Sinclair Lewis. He seems to be the first writer ever to have used the pejorative term “hick” as an adjective; it is a wonder the good people of Gopher Prairie’s real-world counterpart, Sauk Centre, did not chase him all the way down Main Street and into the next county, however many Nobel Prizes he had to his credit. Perhaps their revenge is not to read his novels.

The true masters of metropolitan disdain, though, are the French. M. Eiffel may have been born in Burgundy but he built his tower in Paris. The French intellectual even has an epithet which puts simple countryfolk in their place: They are the petit peuple. Whatever the feminists tell you, Madame Bovary was the victim of the French failure to embrace the simple pleasures of provincial life (though I guess you could say her enthusiastic embrace of a number of other pleasures also contributed to her decline and fall).

It was not ever thus. In the fifteenth century, Burgundy in the east of France was a self-governing duchy capable of pursuing its own foreign policy—it was a Duke of Burgundy who captured Joan of Arc. Much of what one thinks of as characteristically medieval is associated with the Burgundian court—the high, pointy hats of the ladies, Books of Hours embellished with luminous blue and gold, the angular elegance of the music of Dufay. The distinctly unhick lives of John the Fearless and Philip the Good were fuelled by good local wine whose terroir had already been nurtured (not least by Cluniac and Cistercian monks) for centuries.

The Pinot Noir grape is the characteristic grape of Burgundy—it first enters the written record (as Noirien) in documents from the reign of Philip the Bold. The good duke resented growers who wanted to make quick profits from the higher-yielding Gamay variety, and ordered them to mend their ways; so much for the magic of the market. You can benefit from this ducal forethought. In Burgundy, 2005 was a particularly good year, warm but not scorching and wet at just the right times. The long-established shippers Bouchard Ainé et Fils have generously made available a very pleasing red burgundy, full of fruit and flavor, labeled simply 2005 Bourgogne Rouge Pinot Noir, at a shockingly affordable price: under $20 a bottle. Local taste (rather than price) might prompt drinkers at the Sidetrack Tap to give it a miss, but I can imagine this burgundy being sipped with pleasure (from glass, not plastic, glasses) once the canoe has been parked, the GPS put to bed for the night, and the sausages (scholars cannot afford steak) have been set to sizzle.

I must say I have never understood what the Playboy bunnies saw in Dr. Kissinger. Perhaps they’re professionally equipped to detect charm and wit where mere men miss it. Who knows, the long fluffy ears may contain hidden sensors programmed to relay subtle messages to secondary brains located in the bunnies’ gluteal powder puffs, which, when they are not using them to the same end as the brontosaurus did its rear brain—to regulate the wagging of its great tail—can then transmit in appropriate code to the State Department in Foggy Bottom.

Certainly one of the most delicious moments I ever heard on the BBC Home Service was an interview with Dr. Kissinger conducted by Jeremy Paxman, the Rottweiler of English political radio. It was a Monday morning, and the return leg of the school run. I had what MPR calls a “driveway moment” so powerful that I had to pull over. Dr. Kissinger clearly thought he had been invited to talk on the wireless so he could puff the sales of his new book. Instead he was asked some rather direct questions about the bombing of Cambodia. The scraping of the chair as the bodacious doctor rose to his feet was punctuated by Mr. Paxman’s running commentary: “Dr. Kissinger appears to be leaving … Bye, Dr. Kissinger.” Gee, those Brits are so polite.

I guess what irks me most about him, though, is the well-known Kissinger dictum on academic politics, namely that infighting in universities is so bitter because what is at stake is so insignificant. Insignificant to whom, one may ask. Intelligent folk give their lives to enterprises like the breeding of fruit-flies or the study of Shi’ite theology because they think them important (and you never know when such pure study may come in handy—Foggy Bottom could perhaps use a spot of Shi’ite theology). More to the point, pure research is an enterprise often lonely and always imaginative. That is why it engages the passions. When someone whose intimate life has been engaged from an early age with understanding the Middle Ages is told that professional mediaevalists do not actually need to know Latin, it is scarcely surprising that he suffers an acute sense of humor failure. Of such differences are academic disputes made. They may seem insignificant to folk like the erstwhile plenipotentiary, but they are bitter for the rather prosaic reason that they often involve principles that the participants care about passionately.

It is the same in churches. You can get good Christian folk to disagree about lots of things, from civil unions to the Doctrine of the Trinity. But in my experience the easiest way to incite a spirit of uncharitableness is incense; I am sure Uncle Screwtape would not disagree. For some folk, incense is insincere show, the reek of Rome, the epitome of vain repetition. For others, holy smoke is the prayer of the faithful rising up before God, swirling, shot through with sunlight, shared; they recall how early Christians witnessing the martyrdom of their comrades remarked on the sweet smell emanating from their seared flesh. Incense matters because it has to do with the way Christians pray, and that, presumably, is something they really care about.

For those who find incense makes them wheezy, let me suggest a method of appreciating it in liquid form. It comes in slim green bottles containing wine made from Carignan grapes by Cline Cellars of Contra Costa County in California. Carignan is a variety with few friends. It has long been widely planted in southwestern France, where it has generally been blended with other varieties to produce vin very ordinaire, promote hangovers and cirrhosis, and sustain full employment in the French agricultural sector. Carignan vines contributed copiously to the Common Market’s “wine lake,” and in recent times French growers have been encouraged to grub them up.

But where many Frenchmen have failed, Cline Cellars has made a distinctive, strong, dry red wine from Carignan grapes. I sipped it recently at a local hostelry alongside a plate of good oily spaghetti Bolognese. The acids cut right through the oils. But what was most remarkable was the smoky aroma that rose through the roof of the mouth directly from the tannins at the center of the taste. I have seldom met anything like it—the nearest thing I can think of is a nobly nutty, dry Oloroso sherry drunk a quarter-century ago. This is not a wine for everyone—bunnies, I am told, prefer champagne. But those who do like it should find it feeds the imagination. Give it a try.

End-of-term gifts from one’s pupils are a recurrent pleasure of professorial life. Like the boarding-school boy who thanked the aunt for the bottle of cherries pickled in brandy, one enjoys them not only for themselves but also for the spirit in which they are given. Only once have I been given an apple (and then in a spirit of irony). Port, of course, is always welcome.

Some of the offerings that have thus come to ornament my office enjoy an oblique, even recondite significance. There is the plastic McNugget that for nearly twenty years has been ever ready to perform the function kindly envisaged by its thoughtful donor, namely to differentiate between two senses of the present participle neuter of the Greek verb “to be.” Unadorned, the McNugget is mere Being, pure Essence. But accoutered with his little ten-gallon hat and his red-and-yellow McGunbelt, he becomes a Specific Being, That Which Is.

The token of appreciation that most often catches the visitor’s eye is my Plastic Action Figure of Pope Innocent III. His Holiness stands about six inches high in a maroon vestment, pallium, and triple tiara. He holds up a number of fingers in a gesture, perhaps of blessing, and has at hand a scroll reading, “Filii Hohenstaufenin, osculamini asinum meum.” I guess this is meant to allude to Innocent’s political manipulation of the Holy Roman Empire; rendered roughly into the vulgar tongue, the words might mean, “Sons of the Hohenstaufen, you are kissing my donkey.”

Innocent must be one of the least aptly named of all Roman pontiffs. He gave ecclesiastical backing to the unspeakable Fourth Crusade of 1204, which one historian has called the last of the barbarian invasions. Its knights never went near the Holy Land; instead they appropriated Constantinople, the venerable capital of the Christian Emperors of Byzantium, who had formed an intelligent symbiosis with their Muslim neighbors.

Look westward and Innocent’s effect is no brighter. The Cathars are not heroes of mine, a set of dismal dualists who denigrated the flesh and whose promotion as early avatars of modern hedonist (sorry—liberal) theology is (shall we say charitably) difficult to understand. But whatever the Cathars’ faults, there was no need for Pope Innocent to fire up knights from northern France to invade the Cathar region—what is now southwestern France but was then a distinct land with its own language, the langue d’oc (so called because its word for “yes” was oc rather than the French oui). One of the northern aggressors was so ferocious that he exhorted his subordinates, who could not tell Cathar enemy from innocent bystander: “Kill them all; God will recognize which ones are His.”

The city walls of Carcassonne, one of the great Cathar strongholds, no longer echo with the clash of swords. They were extensively rebuilt in the nineteenth century by the Gothic fantasist Viollet-le-Duc, and breathe a heavily romanticized version of the last enchantments of the Middle Ages.

A reassuring reality is to be found a few miles northwest of Carcassonne. The Château de Pennautier is the leading winemaker in the small, relatively new appellation of Cabardès and its 2004 rosé, available for about $12, is a proper summer tonic. It is made from Syrah and Grenache grapes, varieties one most associates with the Rhône valley, but it is much less heavy than most Rhônes.

When I first poured this, I found it confusing. The color is a clear carroty pink, the nose subtly sweet. The initial flavor recalled soft fruit, then tannins kicked in, redolent of mild black pepper, and finally came a series of aftertastes, including the slightly numbing sensation that wine folk associate with pear-drops. But for all its lightness, this wine stood up well to a small steak. What I really liked, however, was the way the wine settled into the glass. A day later it was no longer confusing. The wine had achieved the boldness one associates with innocence. It had come together in a combination of sweetness, acidity, and salutary bitterness—as refreshing as a fine, fleshy, pink grapefruit. Now that’s something no student has ever given me.

Oliver Nicholson is a classicist at the University of Minnesota and former secretary of the Wine Committee at Wolfson College, Oxford.

Read more of Oliver Nicholson’s wine selects at www.rakemag.com/restaurants

I shall spend a lot of this summer reading Polybius. The rise and fall of empires is in the air, and Polybius is the most coherent historian of the rise of Rome—not least because he was a Greek and smart. When Polybius describes how the Roman general Titus Flaminius accomplished his mission in the Second Macedonian War of 200-196 B.C. and then promptly promised that the Roman army would withdraw so that Greece might now be free, one cannot avoid a sense of déjà vu all over again.

Such Roman blandishments did not on the whole fool Polybius, but, in general, the old Greek admired Rome; he saw it as the new world called into existence to redress the balance of the old. What other people considered Roman aggressiveness he extolled as efficiency; what others deemed their unthinking arrogance, he thought of as honest confidence. For all Polybius’ praise of Roman discipline, I admire more the Romans’ fierce adversaries, the bright-eyed Celts who threw themselves in waves against the solid wall of Roman shields at the Battle of Telamon in 224 B.C., ululating their wild war cries, wearing nothing but their weapons, their long hair, and the gold collars round their necks.

Of course not all empires are the same, either in the trajectory of their rise and decline, or in the spirit animating them. It would be hard to find in Roman imperial verse such a sense of the fragility of human aspiration as that expressed in the High Victorian ode that Sir Edward Elgar turned into his cantata “The Music Makers.”

One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song’s measure
Can trample an empire down.

More remarkable still for its humility is “Recessional,” the ode written to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897 by Rudyard Kipling, the archpoet of Empire:

Far-called, our navies melt away—
On dune and headland sinks the fire—
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

Try getting a Roman emperor (or American president) to utter the final couplet of “Recessional”:

For frantic boast and foolish word,
Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!

Of course no empire ever entirely dies. The Romans brought the cherry to Italy and the grape to France, and they seem to have survived. Go to Nîmes in Provence and admire the Roman temple known as the Maison Carée, which still has its Roman roof. Then head out on the old pilgrim road to Compostela ’til you come to pebbled slopes facing south across the marshes of the Camargue, famous for its wild gray horses and pink flamingoes (naturally pink, not kept that way by being fed carrots or shrimp shells like the ones in zoos). Here are the vines of Château L’Ermitage, makers of a wonderful white wine that can be had for around eleven dollars hereabouts.

The 2005 vintage of Chateau l’Ermitage has a trajectory like that of an empire. In the beginning, the color is clear and cloudless, the immediate aroma redolent of flowers from the south. I was reminded of a snuff I used to take that was scented with North African carnations. The initial taste is fresh and light, like melons, almost like watery Chenin Blanc, followed by no sharpness but lots of low and dirty tannins, like Melba toast. Wait, though. The wine grows upon your very tongue. Roussanne grapes, a rather rare variety grown mostly along the Rhône, contribute half of the juice in this vintage (the rest is Grenache and a little Viognier) and in a warm year they produce wine of great richness. The flowery first impression and the forceful tannins fuse into a flavor that is full bodied, powerful, and pungent like gunflint. Enjoy it with old-home chicken—potatoes, garlic, onions, and boneless breasts of chicken (never understood that—I thought most breasts were boneless), fried together and mixed with yogurt just before dishing up. (Make sure you use the plain yogurt, not the strawberry flavor.) Eventually, a day or two after the wine has been exposed to the open air, acid will creep in round the edges. Sic transit gloria mundi. Time to open another bottle.

Oliver Nicholson is a classicist at the University of Minnesota and former secretary of the Wine Committee at Wolfson College, Oxford.

Read more of Oliver Nicholson’s wine selects.