Author: Oliver Nicholson

When I first came to Minnesota twenty years ago, I had never taught a class larger than ten students—mostly I had conducted the one-to-one tutorials that are at the heart of the Oxford system. My first term here I was given a class on the Roman Republic that numbered some seventy souls. The learning curve for me was as steep as it was for them.

After a few weeks I said to my teaching assistant, a clever young lady who had recently graduated from a cut-glass establishment on the East Coast, that I had really no idea whether I was making an impression. After all, though we speak a similar language, I am a foreigner. A few students kindly asked questions in class, but it was all quite different from the va-et-vien of individual tutorials. “What,” I asked, “do I do?” “That’s easy,” she replied. “You set a pop quiz.”

The following Friday she and I marched into class with seventy sheets of paper, each roneoed with a dozen quick questions, and announced the pop quiz. Roneo, Roneo, wherefore art thou Roneo? I have never felt the temperature in a room drop so quickly—I might as well have walked into a convention of Southern Baptists wearing a false beard and announced that I was the Ayatollah Khomeini.

One of the questions was concerned with divination, the Roman practice, learnt from their sophisticated neighbors the Etruscans, of examining the innards of the animals they had sacrificed to discover from their shape and size and knobbly bits what combination of divine forces was floating around in the atmosphere at the moment of the animal’s sacred demise. There is even a bronze model of a sheep’s liver dug up at Piacenza in northern Italy in 1877, which has mapped onto it the different divine forces associated with each area of the organ. This should explain that “the Etruscans” was the answer I expected when I asked my class: “Who taught the Romans to foretell the future from the entrails of birds?” The best answer I got was “Colonel Sanders.” Minnesotans are good souls, and I think they forgave me—I have certainly never repeated the experiment. And three years later, the teaching assistant and one of the men from the class kindly invited me to their wedding.

Romans thought that birds furnished information about the world not immediately apparent to mankind. The trajectory of events and the pattern of ambient forces could be made out not only from the entrails of the dead but also from the flight of the living. No city could be founded ’til the woodpeckers were wheeling in a favorable configuration. A Roman admiral, told he could not go into battle because the sacred chickens were off their feed, exclaimed, “Let’s see if they will drink,” kicked the peccant poultry over the side of his ship and gave the signal for hostilities to begin. Naturally he was defeated.

It is not only Romans who found birds made them think. A wild duck passes through the halls of memory, a duck roasted by my cousin, a talented cook fortunate in having friends who shoot more game than they can consume themselves. It came from the kitchen, warm, reeking, rich; from its crisp skin rose a fragrance that would have satisfied the most exacting classical god. The charger came to rest in front of my cousin’s husband, a noted wild-animal veterinarian. He raised the carving knife: “These mate for life,” he said. “Anybody want some?”

Well, why not? At least it died flying, not flapping in panic on the conveyor belt of a crowded slaughterhouse. Honest men, says the poet Peter Levi, “dive after truth, know nature, fight pretence / admit we live at one another’s expense.”

This was a memorable bird. And now, years later, I have found just the wine to go with it, a plummy 2004 Pinot Noir from the Hahn Estates in the Santa Lucia highlands of Monterey, south of San Francisco. This wine may be had hereabouts for around thirteen dollars. It has that clear red color characteristic of Pinot Noir, a fine, ripe, fruity taste with soft tannins at the center, only a little acidity, and plenty of alcohol—14.7 percent, according to the bottle, but you do not need to be told—you can taste it. This wine would go with grilled chicken (Hahn is German for cockerel) or summer barbeque, as well as with duck or grouse. Just be sure someone else drives home afterward, unless you wish to face a pop quiz beginning, “Would you mind blowing into this little bag?”

When you buy a farm, said the Roman agricultural writer Palladius, you need to look at the people who live in the area. If they seem a sturdy lot, you can invest with confidence, but if they are podgy and pasty faced (that is a free translation of the Latin), then keep away. The local people, no less than the cheese and wine they produce, are autochthonous, sprung from the local soil.

Until last week, I thought that the origin of the expression “as different as chalk and cheese” also lay in the soil—that the distinction was not between the substances themselves but between the chalk uplands of southern England, traditionally good for grazing sheep, and the region’s lush, damp valleys, where cows produce milk creamy enough to make Stilton and Cheshire. Now I find, from a quick blink at John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, that there were people as far back as the fourteenth century dim enough to confuse actual pieces of cheese with lumps of calcareous limestone. But I still prefer my own theory. The school I went to in my teens was surrounded by chalk downs, no longer sheep-runs but acres of open arable, thickly coated in nitrate of potash. Not only did that land look quite different from the little meadows in the vale a few miles to the south, but the folk who farmed it were different as well. Terroir tells.

The crumbliest, most chalk-like of English cheeses actually come not from the vales of the south but from granite country in Wales and the north, where the last Ice Age scraped the easy surface off the landscape and left what passes in Britain for mountains. Caerphilly, a sharp white cheese from Wales, hails from hills where they quarry granite that people polish and turn into kitchen counters—the sort guaranteed to shatter any wine glass dropped on it. Similarly, Wensleydale cheese is made among the northern Pennines (James Herriot territory). Not long ago, a faceless quango—“quasi-autonomous national governmental organization”—tried to close the creamery and move production to an industrial suburb of Liverpool. A management buyout prevented it and Wensleydale is still made by the strong, silent men of the Yorkshire Dales, as it has been since the twelfth century, when the Cistercian monks first came to tame this wet and gritty land.

The wine that goes best with such sharp, crumbly cheese, however, comes from the sun-dappled valley of the river Loire in western France, distinctly chalk-and-limestone country. Splendid Sauvignon Blanc like Pouilly-Fumé and Sancerre has often lain in cool, dry, limestone caves. Thus cheese and chalk may in a sense bury the hatchet. Crumble some Wensleydale into a green salad, add fresh thyme from the garden, sip one of these dry white wines, and somehow the sharpnesses coalesce.

However, it is not the famous Sauvignon wines from the Loire that we celebrate this month, but rather one whose grapes grow in a land whose spectacular and complex geology defies summary description—though we saw plenty of it masquerading as Middle Earth in the Lord of the Rings films. The House of Nobilo’s 2005 Sauvignon Blanc (available locally for about thirteen dollars) comes from the Marlborough region at the north end of the South Island of New Zealand. This is about as far south as Minnesota or the Rhone valley is north, that is, say, about forty-two degrees of latitude, but the Pacific Ocean makes the climate a good deal milder than ours.

The white Sauvignon grape has been grown here for a century, but it has only become big business in the last thirty years, particularly since England joined the Common Market and New Zealand had to find new markets (and sometimes new products) to replace agricultural exports, like lamb, that had previously gone to Britain. These days the price of land is rising in the Marlborough area as erstwhile pastures are turned over to grapes.

The results of all this industry are fresh, delightful, and now famous. The 2005 Nobilo has a good bright color and a good bright taste, crisp with a hint of a fizz on first acquaintance. It is not as dry as, say, Sancerre (but then the Loire is a good deal farther from the Equator); there is a roundness more reminiscent perhaps of kiwi fruit than of anything citrus. Drink it at lunchtime with a summer salad (don’t forget the cheese) and it will put a spring into your afternoon.

What, a student asked the other day, was the last place to be ruled by the Romans? Nowhere in Italy, that’s for certain; the last Roman emperor I know to have set foot on mainland Italy with the purpose of exercising political power was Constans II in 662. The Holy Roman Empire, begun by Charlemagne and destroyed by Napoleon, we agreed did not count, being notoriously neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. “How about Constantinople, New Rome on the Bosporus, not captured by the Ottoman Turks ‘til May 29, 1453?” the young man suggested. I was able to raise him eight years. At the southeast corner of the Black Sea is the port city of Trebizond, modern Turkish Trabzon, and this pleasant place was ruled by its own local Christian Roman emperors until 1461.

Those who have heard of Trebizond at all probably know it from Rose MacAulay’s The Towers of Trebizond, an endearing novel published in 1956 that stars a spiky Anglican parson, a suffragette, a camel, and a lady whose behavior was, shall we say, no better than it ought to be. It is a witty tale evoking a more generous, less litigious world. Not long after MacAulay’s visit to Trebizond, the local Muslim congregation, which had been worshipping for centuries in the former coronation church of the Roman emperors, magnanimously allowed their mosque to be turned into a museum so that its Christian paintings could be uncovered, studied, and restored. (You have never seen such a flutter of angels’ wings as under that dome.) Until the international treaties of 1922, in fact, a substantial Orthodox Christian minority lived alongside the Trebizond Muslims, but the Orthodox were then sent to Greece as part of an exchange of populations—ethnicity in that part of the world then being defined by religion. A tiny Roman Catholic congregation survived, served by Capuchin friars. Trebizond has always had a reputation for kindness and a mild maritime climate.

One Sunday afternoon in February, modern passions smashed the city’s peace. The priest who cared for the dozen or so Roman Catholics in Trebizond, Father Andrea Santoro, was shot dead while praying in the church. The killer was a teenager, enraged by insults to his faith. The priest was no proselytizer; evangelism, even the wearing of religious dress in public, is illegal in Turkey, a secular state which is ninety-eight percent Muslim. Fr. Andrea lived there as a quiet witness to a force more positive even than tolerance. “Silence, humility, the simple life … clear and defenseless witness and the conscious offering of one’s life can rehabilitate the Middle East,” he told a friend. The bishop who buried him back home in Italy called him a martyr; he reported that the priest’s mother feels great pain for the young man who killed her son. No true Muslim, said a minister of the Turkish government, would kill a man of God in the house of God. “We must,” said the poet W.H. Auden, “love one another or die.”

They drink wine in Trebizond, but they do not grow it. Turkish wine is very good, but the beverage that comes from the wooded valleys of the Black Sea coast is Turkish tea. Grapevines and tea bushes are seldom horticultural bedfellows. It is frothy coffee that one associates with the Capuchin Friars, Fr. Santoro’s order. Cappuccino gets its name from the color of their habits. But he, in fact, came from Rome, and the volcanic hills south and east of the city produce good dry white wine which refreshes countless Romans who drive out from the capital to have dinner in the Castelli Romani on hot summer evenings.

The wine from Frascati, made by Fontana Candida (Italian for “white fountain”), is an old favorite, remarkably consistent over the years and at less than ten dollars very affordable. It is made mostly from the Trebbiano grape, the most widely grown grape in Italy, mixed with two types of Malvasia. The color is so yellow it is almost green; the nose recalls brewer’s yeast more than the wild flowers alluded to on the label, but there is a good bitter acid scrunch at the center of its taste, followed by a long pleasing flavor redolent of watermelons. This Frascati goes (of course) with fish and also with lemon chicken; it would complement a leg of lamb, roasted with lots of rosemary. It is a glass of this that I shall raise at Easter to honor the memory of a martyr, a brave man called home, a witness to the hope made possible by the practice of forgiveness.

When I was home in England over Christmas, I caught a liver specialist from (appropriately enough) Liverpool being interviewed on the wireless. He was talking about cirrhosis, that very nasty condition in which the liver turns into little yellowish granules, and eventually packs up completely. When he began in the liver business years ago, he said, this was the disease of older men, brought on by a lifetime’s application to the bottle. Nowadays, though, he frequently found the beds in his ward filled with young women who had managed to achieve the same effect in an altogether shorter time. The young people of Liverpool, he averred, do drink an awful lot these days.

Archaeological evidence suggests this phenomenon is not confined to Liverpool. As the spring thaw sets in each year along fraternity row in Minneapolis, bottles emerge to view in the snow banks on the boulevard, mostly bearing the names of undistinguished vintages or popular brands of beer. As the melt proceeds, they dribble down into the gutter, where they pose a hazard to cyclists (credite experto … ). The historian Edward Gibbon, writing about Oxford during the eighteenth century, felt that the deep potations of those who were supposed to be teaching him Latin and Greek excused “the brisk intemperance of youth.” I can forgive a good deal of brisk intemperance, but a puncture in my front tire makes me livid (a very nasty condition in which the face goes pale purple with rage).

In Gibbon’s time, the British government tried to use stiff excise duties to control alcoholic intake. Avoiding these penalties became something like the national sport. The stakes were high; you could get hanged for smuggling, but evading the exciseman appealed to a certain spirit of adventure, as those fortunate enough to have had J. Meade Falkner’s novel Moonfleet read to them in their youth can certainly agree.

The most unlikely recruit to the government team must surely have been Rabbie Burns, the Scots national poet. This is a man who wrote lines like “Freedom an’ whisky gang thegither,” as well as one of the world’s great drinking songs, “O Willie Brew’d a Peck o’ Maut” (chorus: “We are na fou, we’re nae that fou, but just a drapee in our e’e … ”). Yet he spent the last half-dozen years of his short life (he died of heart trouble, not of drink) chasing down smugglers and illicit distillers in the deep valleys of Dumfries and Galloway. Not that it seems to have cramped his style. One of his wildest poems is a rant about the party put on in a town where the local exciseman had been carried away to hell by the devil; Burns is said to have composed it while waiting on the beach for reinforcements so he could search a smuggling ship that had gone aground on the treacherous sands of the Solway Firth.

With a reputation like that, it is scarcely surprising that “Bobbie Burns” should have given his name to a vineyard in the Australian State of Victoria (the bottom right-hand corner) founded by a Scots gold prospector called John Campbell. Campbells Wines produced their first vintage in 1870, and their Bobbie Burns Shiraz 1998 (available hereabouts for less than $17) is a worthy scion. The Shiraz grape, widely grown in Australia, is the same as that which the French call the “Syrah,” the variety from which most of the great red wines of the Rhône Valley are made. It has, alas, no historical connection with the Persian city of the same name, home of the Persian national poet Hafiz, a bard altogether more refined than “owr Rabbie,” and one who wrote about wine, it seems, merely as a metaphor for spiritual experience.

There is nothing immaterial about this good-hearted red. It has little nose, but plenty of fruit and alcohol, as one might expect from grapes which have reached ripeness over a long, warm autumn. The tannins are more spicy than redolent of the oak barrels in which the wine matured. This would make a cheering companion to any red meat, a pork roast say, or even haggis, the great chieftain of the pudding race. Come to that, the tannins suggest it has time still on its side. Buy some now to drink later. But best make sure you like it; sample some now as well, and call to mind Paul’s advice to Timothy: “Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake.” A little wine—no poet (or hepatologist) could have said it better.

These winter mornings, the sunshine shows things as they are. I was recently in Devon, the corner of southwest England where I was brought up, which was covered with a fine coating of frost that imparts sharpness to every detail of the landscape. “Proper rimey,” said my neighbor there, a man who lives in the house where he was born and has been digging the graves in the village churchyard for nigh on forty years. The frost (a.k.a. rime) gives each blade of grass a thin, sharp edge with the patina of brushed steel. A little warmth from the sun strikes the tousled twigs of the willows down by the stream and rows of water drops form orderly queues along the underside of each wooden wisp. All this ambient moisture freezes the fingers and, seemingly, each individual capillary within each finger. Thirty degrees Fahrenheit in Devon feels something like thirty degrees colder than it does in Minnesota.

If the morning sun shows things as they are, it is the pale, slanting light of late afternoon that is the joy of the historian, for it shows things as they were. This narrow valley has become a palimpsest, a surface like a medieval sheepskin manuscript that has been written over by one scribe after another to record successive lives. Oblique light reveals the slightest lump or line in the landscape left behind by an old lane or hedgebank or by the walls of a building long since disappeared. Sunset has an ultraviolet feel.

Nowadays, the stream, one of the little brawling brooks which eventually empties itself into the River Exe, runs straight through pasture into an ornamental garden. But a couple of hundred years ago, trenches and tributaries, long since dry but now apparent in the weak winter sunshine, ran in and out of it. These were excavated in order to irrigate orchards growing apples with names like Kingston Black, Sweet Alford, and Slack My Girdle, the fruit that made the fearsomely alcoholic farmhouse cider for which Devon used to be famous. I have known tough Scotch matelots, well acquainted with the strong waters of their own country, who have come ashore from their ships at Plymouth and found Devon cider to be more than they could handle.

Underneath the vanished sylvan landscape of the apples is another—noisier, malodorous, industrial. Seven hundred years ago, mills here were fulling and bleaching woolen cloth, their wheels driven by the water power of leats laboriously dug out by hand and visible now as the merest shadows in the field-grass. These are not the product of the fey fancies that some folk associate with so-called ley lines. They were dug by hard graft to serve a serious business; like many modern developing nations, medieval Devon made its first efforts at industrialization by manufacturing textiles. One of the fields on the side of this valley is called Long Bolham; the name is that of a weaver, Nicholas de Bolleham, who on the eleventh of September, 1337, took on a lifetime lease of the land and mills from the Lord of the Manor—you can read the document in the Harvard Law Library. His industry has left little enough impression on the sedgy grass of these pastures. In the four centuries that succeeded him, however, the long, slow growth of the West Country cloth trade powered the enterprise of intrepid Devon seafarers such as Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake, not to mention the brave folk who sailed from Plymouth in the Mayflower in 1620 and thus made a mark on a wider world.

Teasing ghosts out of the frosty fields is a fine occupation for the dark time of the year, but it is chilly work. Too much contemplation makes one pale. You could put warmth back into your extremities with the 2001 vintage of a fine red Rhône from Domaine Sainte-Anne (Appellation Côtes-du-Rhône-Villages Contrôlée). True, the wine comes from near Saint-Gervais in the hill country west of the Rhône, so the vines that grow its grapes (principally Grenache and Syrah) are no strangers to cold. But lemon trees and the Mediterranean are within reach.

This is wine with a good red color, strong, toothsome tannins, and fruity flavors reminiscent of cherries, neither flimsy (like bad Beaujolais) nor seriously weighty (like great Châteauneuf du Pape). Nor is it excessively expensive in Minnesota, at around $15 a bottle. And, as a vegetarian friend recently said to me, “Rhône goes with everything.” This would certainly be fine with all sorts of food, from hummus dip to roast pheasant. It is the kind of warming wine that inspires confidence. Maybe it could set 2006 in a somewhat rosier light.

Heaven, said the Regency wit Sydney Smith, is eating paté de foie gras to the sound of trumpets. It sounds pretty piggy if you ask me, all too like the fellow who said that you should decide what to do in life by following your bliss. And rather odd doctrine for S. Smith, who made his name as a book reviewer but had a day job as a canon of S. Paul’s Cathedral in London. I have naturally no grudge against Canon Smith himself, but his apolaustic attitudes are a bit emetic. Were his sermons, one wonders, wholly concerned with the austere and lofty spiritual discipline of feeling good about yourself?

Which was hardly an option for the geese from whom the paté came. I cannot imagine paté de foie gras without also imagining how it is made. The reverend canon was able to fill his face with the noted French delicacy because geese had been filled with grain till their livers reached the bursting point. However much you resent the mess wild geese make around the lakes, such bloating seems a pretty unpleasant fate. Their consumerism was involuntary; that of S. Smith was a matter of choice.

Come to that, unmitigated trumpets might also get a bit trying, even if, like an earlier (and considerably more interesting) cleric from S. Paul’s, you posted the angels blowing them at the round world’s imagined corners. One must, I suppose, give Canon Smith credit for taking the trouble to be a hedonist. Any preference is better than none. But still, one asks, where is he in the heaven which he projects? In the Smithian assertion (or should it be “Smithic”?), “eating” is simply a gerund, or possibly a participle; it has no subject, and the person is absent. He makes it sound as if there is action occurring apart from the existence of the actor. In fact, you could say that the receptacle into which the paté de foie gras goes is less a Blessed Spirit than a Bottomless Pit. (Why does this all remind me of Christmas?)

I guess the first step toward personality, and away from being simply a Black Hole of consumption, could be to discriminate between pleasures. Even a sensualist may refine his appetite; Lucretius, the most materialistic of Roman poets, is notable for the sheer sharpness of his physical observation. I would commend to Canon Smith—and to you, benevolent reader—claret, the red wine of Bordeaux, the thinking man’s wine (though, as a Whig, Sydney Smith probably preferred port).

Specifically, try Château Greysac from the fine vintage of the year 2000, available around here for less than twenty dollars. The process of discrimination starts even before the cork leaves the bottle. This is French wine in a bottle with proper shoulders, so it is going to be from Bordeaux rather than from Burgundy or the Rhone (which have sloping shoulders, like your pin-headed correspondent).

Now note the words Appelation Controlée. These are not an assurance that a wild man from West Virginia has been caught by the sheriff but official notice that the wine is part of a quota permitted to bear a particular name and that it has been made in a particular way from grapes characteristic of the region—in this case mostly Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Cabernet Franc.

The word that comes between Appelation and Controlée tells you which region it is. The lesser wines of Bordeaux will say simply Bordeaux or Bordeaux Supérieur (the latter merely indicates a slightly higher level of alcohol). Château Greysac, however, says “Médoc,” which is the area on the left bank of the river Gironde where many of the most famous Bordeaux wines come from—and yet not all wines made in the Médoc are allowed that appellation. It also says “Cru Bourgeois,” a title of honour Château Greysac acquired in 1978, only a few years after modern winemaking began there.

Having exercised the mind on the wine label (and wished one were striding along the vine-clad gravel ridges of the Médoc), one can then exercise it on the wine itself. One encounters a clear bright red, a pleasing sharpness, and then a concatenation of tannins (the woody hardness) and the taste of oak (the pleasing sweetness redolent of turpentine). You can take mental exercise tasting this wine by racing these two tastes against each other, before swallowing and then maybe sipping a little more. The strength of the tannin shows that it has time on its side. Drink some now and keep some for later. Maybe it will make you a thinking drinker.

Our century has been remarkably efficient in the manufacture of wastelands. In Uptown you can still experience the sort of passageways down which Mr. Eliot smelt steaks, but nowadays they seem to have almost a period charm. It is the same reading about the Algiers described by Albert Camus; the delicious colonial loucheness of the setting tends to put a pastel patina on the jolly old alienation. It won’t be long before someone turns L’Étranger into a colorful Hollywood costume drama—what price the inner life when Passage to India can become a parade of parasols and solar topees?

To be truly bleak, a landscape must be both familiar and fairly freshly created. The connoisseur might try standing at the entrance of Edinborough Park in midwinter and looking across the glass and concrete tundra of South Edina, all abandoned motorcars and dirty snow and the now-defunct cinderblock multiplex where you once saw flickering pictures of more colorful climes, some of them unspoilt (“Far Away is Close at Hand in Images of Elsewhere,” as the writing on the wall used to say as your train pulled out of Paddington Station, taking you from London to the good green meadows of the West Country).

But for sustained depression, try one of those self-storage places. Concealed in a dip, to avoid blotting the landscape too obviously, ranks of abandoned garages provide the perfect setting for the unsolvable crime at the center of a detective novel. In the alleys between them rattle the skeletons of last year’s leaves. Cryogenics comes to mind. The only people around are keeping warm in the office, and perhaps a bloke working on his vintage Chevy. As you leave, the automated voice that thanks you at the barrier appears to be that of the late Count Dracula.

It is warmer inside these small storage rooms than out in the alleys. One imagines them (for one has seen only one’s own) strewn with the remains of lives, things ugly in themselves (the hideous lampshades, the awful ornaments), which might once have meant something if someone had made them mean it—the gewgaw given as a Christmas joke. Here lies the Nachlass of the maiden aunt whose relations have never got round to sorting out her things; here men (it must surely be mostly men, because the women have the houses) hoard the keepsakes from failed marriages, furniture which no longer lends help or comfort because the couples who owned it are unable to forgive. And the cardboard boxes in which all this is kept give off the sweet but unmistakable smell of decay, as if the things inside were slowly losing the warmth they once acquired from being associated with human life, and are reverting to a mere mineral existence.

Such gloomy ruminations suggest the need for some concentrated sweetness to share with those you love this Christmas. Try liqueur glasses of a 2003 Muscat from Bonny Doon Vineyards in California; it is called Vin de Glaciere, and a small flask will cost you about eighteen dollars. There is a pleasant goldenness and a sweet nose, then, as you sip, a smooth velvety sensation of dried apricots and slight oiliness.

This is not sticky sweet wine; the taste reminds me of nothing so much as Setubal, a fortified wine from Portugal made from a different combination of Muscat grapes, which I favored as a dessert wine in my misspent youth. The Bonny Doon would make good dessert wine in the American sense of dessert—not fruit and nuts nibbled after the ladies have withdrawn to the drawing room in the eighteenth-century manner that so annoyed Virginia Woolf, but “afters”: mince pies, plum pudding, even something creamy like bread-and-butter pudding (with many plump golden raisins, known in England as sultanas from their resemblance to sultans’ wives) or a crème brulée.

Here is no false promise of spring, simply a level winter sweetness. Rabbie Burns walked by the original Bonnie Doon river near Ayr in Scotland and wondered why the birds could sing so sweetly when he was so weary, full of care, having lost his girl (though he seldom seemed to have any trouble finding another). If the bleakness is inside and not simply in the landscape, this Muscat taken as a cup of kindness might cheer things up. What sweeter music can we bring?

The Orient, said Metternich, begins at the Ring. It is hardly surprising an Austrian statesman of the early nineteenth century should think the Near East was as close as the suburbs of Vienna. The Ottoman Turks besieged the Austrian capital at least twice and the favor was returned each time an Austrian army, arrayed boldly by batteries, besieged Belgrade.

Not that the symbiosis of the Ottoman and Hapsburg empires was all horror and confrontation. Even their hostilities had some cheerful consequences. After the second Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 (the year before Bach was born), the retreating armies left behind sacks of black beans the size and shape of rabbit droppings, though a good deal scrunchier. A Viennese entrepreneur ground them into a powder and opened Europe’s first coffeehouse. Can you imagine Vienna without Kaffee und Kuchen? Would you not think J.S. Bach just a polyphiloprogenitive sobersides (like Organ Morgan of Llareggub–it’s organ, organ all the time with him) if there were not those bubbly bits in his Coffee Cantata?

In any case, distinctions between west and east are always arbitrary–they vary as you go round the globe, whereas those between north and south are absolute. And this part of MittelEuropa, whether ruled by the Hapsburgs or the Turks, is a magnificent macedoine of ethnic eccentricity.

Read all about it in the trilogy of travel books by Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor: A Time of Gifts, Between Woods and Water, and a third volume eagerly awaited by admirers. This is the record of a young man who set out, in 1933, to walk from Canterbury to Constantinople. He meets all sorts of men, from barons and rabbis to gypsies and the country gentry of the Pannonian Plain, who are said to enjoy the best partridge shooting in the world. The more spirit one has oneself, the more one finds other people original. The author is the same P. Leigh Fermor who kidnapped a German general on Crete during the Second World War and solemnly exchanged with him lines from the Odes of Horace as they passed by the snow-capped summit of Mount Ida on their way to a British submarine and safety. In Austria and points east, the Leigh Fermor liveliness matches that of the people whose land he was passing through.

For the Romans, it was certainly the north-south distinction that mattered. The beautiful Blue Danube was their frontier facing north toward Central Europe and its ferocious Iron Age warrior aristocracies. Romans, naturally, drank wine; the folk beyond the Roman border liked beer or mead (though they would do as Romans whenever they could get wine). Emperors and armies campaigned along the Danube to keep the empire safe. Marcus Aurelius, after a hard day’s soldiering, would come back to the stronghold of Carnuntum, withdraw into himself, and stoically compose his Meditations. (The opening scenes of Gladiator are as good an evocation as I know of the hard business of campaigning in these dank northern forests.)

Carnuntum today is the center of a thriving wine region, making both red and white wine from French varieties as well as from grapes that have grown in the long hot summers here since the Middle Ages. Production is protected by particularly strict purity laws, introduced twenty years ago, after it was discovered that some Austrian wines contained a chemical called diethylene glycol, added to increase body and sweetness (not to be confused with ethylene glycol, a substance that belongs in the radiator of your motorcar). I cannot imagine why anyone ever thought such adulteration desirable, given the excellence of what they make here naturally.

Try, for instance, a 2003 red from Weingut Glatzer made from the Blaufrankisch grape, available locally for about twelve dollars. Blaufrankisch is the grape Germans call the Limberger; its name comes from the blue of the berries and frankisch, a term used since the Middle Ages to indicate superior quality. The wine is lively, clear and bright with an initial bite like mild black coffee and a fine fruity flavor, concealing hints of that pleasing wateriness that comes from really ripe blackberries. One can imagine it in the company of anything you might eat with a rather alcoholic Pinot Noir–even a Thanksgiving turkey. Though perhaps it might feel more at home with a Pannonian partridge. Prost.

What is it about Americans and guilt? Mr. Bush, it seems, may now be willing to admit that the world is warming up. But he would not have us think that the human race (let alone its industries and motorcars) is in any way responsible. Mustn’t feel bad about it, must we?

This is strange because the sort of Christianity favored by President Frutex (Latin for Bush, don’t you know) used to be particularly keen to impress on people that all have sinned and all have fallen short of the glory of God. Augustine developed the notion of original sin partly from a conviction that the world was actually by nature good (adjust your set, there is no fault in reality). Oliver Cromwell struck a chord with the Puritans of the Rump Parliament when he beseeched them “in the bowels of Christ, that ye may be mistaken.” John Wesley famously felt himself to be a brand plucked from the burning, and generations of evangelical preachers have striven to convince people they are sinners, so that they can then pull the redemption rabbit out of the hat.

Cromwell’s political successors seem to feel that it is other people who make the mistakes. The axis of evil has moved elsewhere (though the only thing I can see that Iran, Iraq and North Korea have in common is that all three irritate the United States). Of course, politicians are hardly the only ones to deny guilt. We the People do so often, and avidly. I had pupils when I taught in California who seemed simply impervious to the mildest suggestion that a mistake might have been made (which is easy enough when writing Latin sentences); correction, as the Frenchman said, ran off their backs like a duck’s water. The word has even been verbed—as in the accusation, “You are trying to guilt me!”

Such shunning of a sense of personal error does not ensure universal happiness. The whole horror of modern no-fault divorce is designed to ignore the possibility that sometimes fault is involved. The masterpiece of those who advocate the avoidance of guilt must be the doctrine of passive aggression. This holds that you may employ the patience of Griselda or of Job putting up with my nonsense, but mysteriously it all remains your fault; I am not responsible for the fact that I behave like a bastard.

Admitting mistakes gives people the chance to put them right. Of course, eating humble pie is not a particularly pleasant pastime. The word “humble” as applied to “pie” does not actually derive from anything to do with humility; it comes from the same root as lumbar (as in lumbar pain), and the humbles (or numbles) of a deer are its innards. All the same, humble pie is the opposite of a delicacy, even if it was a dinner as familiar in the Middle Ages as haggis and chips in modern Scotland.

Innards are something else Americans have difficulty with. All right, not everyone savors the scrunch of prairie oysters or the sliminess of cervelle. Cockneys can keep my share of tripe and onions. But heart cooked long enough (it is, after all, quite a tough muscle) is, well, heartening, and grilled kidneys on fried bread is one of the most toothsome breakfasts I know. Perhaps the best bargain at the butchers round here is liver. (Is life worth living? That depends on the liver.) Cut thin, dust with flour, salt and mustard powder, then fry fast with bacon and onions—it is one of the few cuts of meat that gets tougher the longer you cook it—and anoint with the pan scrapings transformed into sauce. The gritty flavor of liver is the perfect accompaniment for spinach cooked quickly in butter.

And a good wine for both liver and spinach together is a red from California that is tough enough to take on any taste (even haggis). Better still, it sells for only about eighteen dollars locally. The 2003 DeLoach California Pinot Noir, from the Russian River valley north of San Francisco, is bright and honest. There is at first a sweetness and flowery charm, but then a delightful roar, as determined as a motorcycle engine, develops in the back of the throat. The sweetness turns into fine strong tannins and, as the wine goes down, aroma rises through the nose. This is wine that engages the attention on every level, like a really worthwhile woman; it has both immediate appeal and depth. But the real beauty of combining it with liver and spinach is the resulting symphony of bitternesses. Who knows, a patient appreciation of these may even make you sorry for your sins.

Every time I take the boat down Stranraer Sound, I think of Saint Brendan. A Celtic monk, Brendan set sail toward the setting sun with fourteen of his confreres in a whimsical endeavor to find the Island of the Promise of the Saints. Spoilsports (i.e., my academic colleagues) tell you his charming tale is an allegory for the development of the soul, like Pilgrim’s Progress. If so, then what, one wonders, is symbolized by the whale called Iasconius, whose back the monks mistake for an island where they can light a bonfire and cook up fish stew? Silly sooth, I would say.

Saint Brendan was sailing away from Ireland into what we call the Atlantic, whereas Stranraer is the dour wee burgh on the bottom left-hand corner of Scotland, from which you get the car ferry across the Irish Sea to Northern Ireland. The town is emphatically unromantic, though the corrugated countryside behind it, the land of Sir Walter Scott’s “Old Mortality,” is appealingly wet and green, and the inlet down which you sail after leaving the harbor is lined with long, low hills that feel they might well be the last of land before you pass, like Turner’s Fighting Témeraire, over the edge of the world.

In Saint Brendan’s time there were, of course, other, more deadly sailors trekking westward. The Vikings got to Minnesota a bit later (1961, according to the team history), but they were certainly in Newfoundland a thousand years ago, where they lived in a seaside settlement now called L’Anse aux Meadows. If you fly Icelandair back from Europe, not only will you find that Iceland (at the right time of year) is green and Greenland is covered with snow, but you will see the rippling gray whaleroad in between them that they rowed over, laid out like a gelatin print.

Less adventurous Vikings got no further than the hills of the Scotch-English border, where they started families with names like Nicholson and became noted for sheep stealing and cattle theft. They still sing ballads in the border country about the most vicious of these “reivers”: “My name is wee Jock Elliot and wha’ daur meddle wi’ me’” (in English, “who dares meddle with me”; and in straight Latin, “nemo me impune lacessit”).

When James VI of Scots became James I of England in 1603, he started to dream up schemes to make his kingdoms a touch more prosperous—Jamestown in Virginia was one of the less lucrative enterprises he chartered. Introducing a market economy to Northern Ireland was one that paid better (though, of course, at the expense of the Gaelic population). Among those transplanted from southern Scotland across the narrow sea to northern Ireland were quite a number of the vigorous folk who had made life on the Scotch-English border so exciting in earlier days, when men were men and sheep were afraid.

Some of the settlers moved on further during the next few generations, especially to the more southerly of the Thirteen Colonies of North America. But plenty stayed. Like their Scottish ancestors, the Protestant settlers in Ulster had a talent for distillation. No surprise, then, that they soon got into the whiskey business (whiskey with an ”e” because it’s Irish). The first license to distill in the northern tip of Ireland, in the area around Bushmills in County Antrim, was granted in 1608. The present Bushmills business, which claims to be the oldest distillery in the world, is first mentioned in 1783. Nowadays it produces several different whiskies: a standard blend of malt and grain (Bushmills Original, with a white label); various single malts; and a superior blend called Black Bush.

Black Bush is the one I like best, and can be had for less than $30 locally. It is mostly malt whiskey with a certain amount of grain whiskey to lighten the taste (not that it is as light as Cutty Sark and other blends of Scotch popular in the United States). It also has real bite—though, like Irish whiskey in general, it is innocent of the reek of peat that makes connoisseurs of Laphroaig, the Islay malt from the Scotch side of the water, gasp for air. Having been thrice distilled (unusual, though not unique), Bushmills is clean and clear. There are no frills, no superfluous sweetness. It must be something like this they drink in the Island of the Promise of the Saints.