Author: Oliver Nicholson

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.

How I hate modern motor roads. Come let me count the ways. First there is the intimate shame of personal inadequateness. I know my reactions while driving are not swift enough to be safe at fifty-five miles per hour—in fact, they are unsafe at any speed, as my family says. All too often I will barrel up Highway 100 (Highway 100 is the worst), having missed my turn, heading unwillingly for Manitoba, and knowing that the only solution to my plight is to barrel right on down it again. Heraclitus knew a thing or two; the way up and the way down are one and the same, and they are equally terrifying.

Then there are the other idiots, whose reactions are surely no swifter, but who lack the self-knowledge to admit it. These are the ones who drive as though the rapture has already occurred, or at least as though they have lost all fear of death. (In case of rapture, can I have your car?) Other folk suffer from what the amiable Augustine termed superbia and the late and somewhat less amiable Andrea Dworkin called phallocentricity (sed de mortuis nil nisi binkum).

These include the sort of tow-truck operator, from what is so aptly named a wrecker service, who can blithely remove your car from its appointed parking space without cause in the middle of the night (and in serious contravention of the Fourth Amendment protection against search and seizure), and heave it down the highway to a fastness on the far side of Lyndale, whence it is released after a whole day spent on the telephone, with the barest minimum of apology.

I suppose I should be thankful that American drivers are at least predictable. If the other idiots are British, things are twice as bad; the way that my fellow countrymen demonstrate their wit and originality by tailgating on the M4 at seventy-plus miles per hour is enough (in the expression of my father, a medical man) to cause a rush of cold faeces to the left ventricle.

But worse than the horrors of driving on them are the effects of freeways on the countryside that they carve up, the way they turn the ups and downs of a real journey into a blind swoosh of naked concrete. Imagine, then, my joy to find recently, returning from delivering a lecture in the deep south (that is, halfway to Iowa), that it is possible to pick one’s way across the landscape on one of the original roads of Minnesota. This particular road has its origins in an Indian trail stabilized in 1853 by navigators under a militia officer called Dodd. Little is known about Captain Dodd, but he liked a drink and lies buried in the churchyard of the Episcopal Church in St. Peter (where three or four are gathered together, so Episcopalians say, you will always find a fifth).

It took the gallant captain and his crew a whole Minnesota road-building season (the time of year elsewhere known as summer) to build the Dodd Road. In some places, alas, the fruit of their labors has been turned into six-lane highway; elsewhere, in some southern suburbs, it is pleasingly bordered by McMansions and the sort of lawns that seem to imitate Astroturf. (When will this happy landscape find its Betjeman?) Yet there are stretches where Dodd Road is a real country lane with grit, ditches, and dandelions. I look forward to teasing further reaches of this thoroughfare out of the Minnesota terrain—it will be quite like looking for Roman roads at home.

Not least among the joys of the jolly film Sideways were its roadside vistas, particularly those with vines marching up and down the California hills. More so than any of its human characters, this film’s truly Big Star, as far as the wine trade is concerned, is the Pinot Noir grape. All of the ambient publicity ensured that this variety, the grape from which the famous red wines of burgundy have been made since the Middle Ages, became the next grape that everyone wants to drink, following in the wake of White Zinfandel, Chardonnay, and Merlot.

There is a snag. Pinot Noir is hard to grow; not all of it turns into wine as grand as the great vintages of Burgundy. It may well be as mellow as Merlot (and a lot mellower than Cabernet Sauvignon), but it can sometimes lack body. Allow me, then, to recommend a real pleasure, Mark West Central Coast Pinot Noir 2003, a pellucid red made by people who have long specialized in this variety. Costing just around ten dollars locally, it has a fruity flavor leading to a taste of black pepper and then to a rising aroma of elderflowers (the fresh ones you smell by the roadside, not the more sugary sensations of elderflower cordial). It gave tomato and basil soup an added mileage ingredient. And the following morning, the little that was left over had a noble structure, even after the more evanescent scents had evaporated. Take some along on a summer picnic.

Watching people in museums is often as absorbing as studying the displays. Some years ago, my old tutor was standing under the great sixth-century dome of the Holy Wisdom in Istanbul, lecturing to a rather tweedy group of English country gentry. His audience was starting to suffer from museum leg, when a pigeon detached itself from the marble cornice and flapped in a leisurely way across to the gallery where once Byzantine empresses worshipped, encased in pearls and purple. Instinctively, one of the tweeds lifted his umbrella to his right shoulder and sighted along its shaft. He nearly dropped it in surprise: “Good God,” he said, “bloody thing’s out of shot.” After that, the party had a healthier respect for the grandeur of this great fane.

Other museum-goers are moved by a hunger for information rather than an atavistic instinct for field sports. See how some people spend substantially more time reading the didactic label on the wall than they do confronting the complexity of the work it interprets. Such folk should find joy if they go to see the St. John’s Bible, numerous sheets of which are on display at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (until July 3), together with plenty of explanatory props: quill pens, penknives, even photographs of the sheep-surrounded scriptorium in Wales where the scribes commissioned by St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, penned this, the first handwritten Bible in half a millennium.

For at this exhibition, the urge to read rather than to look leads the eye not to the (excellent) supporting information but to the texts of the Bible pages themselves, written in real time to be read in real time. The pleasure of contemplating these great creamy white sheets (about two feet high and two and a half feet wide when spread out) is like the pleasure of watching an artist sketching in the open air; you are drawn to take part in his art, though in this case you fall into the rhythm of his work not by actually seeing him marking the regular black text with his goose quill, but by following with the eye the dance of the text across the page. Such watching induces a passion of patience.

Of course, too, there is looking in addition to reading, for it is the illuminations that catch the eye. They light up the text with multiple colors and associations. Alongside the Parable of the Sower is a figure who might have walked straight out of a Byzantine Gospel-book with his round halo and imperial purple tunic, except that this nether man is clad in something that looks mighty like the blue jeans of a Stearns County bachelor farmer. The butterflies are delightful (as butterflies always are), and gold leaf makes Christ at the Transfiguration appear to be entirely made of light.

But for all their glory, it is to the text that the pictures bring you back. One visitor was overheard to say she had found the exhibition so interesting that when she got home she was going to find a Bible and read it. If the manuscript has this effect on many people, the monks of St. John’s will surely feel they were right to commission it.

Scripture, said Gregory the Great, is a stream where lambs may wade and elephants may swim. A friend was telling me the other day about the meetings of the Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars whose assumptions I do not entirely share (why assume that miracles do not happen?), but who had the admirable aim of analyzing the Gospels to work out what Jesus actually said and did. They also had the good sense to set up their headquarters in the Sonoma Valley north of San Francisco, so that after a hard day’s analyzing they could visit the venerable vineyard of Gundlach-Bundschau, in existence since 1857 (though it grew pears during Prohibition).

You can enjoy a vicarious visit by drinking their Bearitage, Lot no. 11, a red wine available locally for about $12. They call this “California claret,” because like the great reds of Bordeaux it is a blend of several grapes. The analytical palate will detect the round sweetness of Zinfandel, the blandness of Merlot, the long slow tannins of Cabernet Sauvignon (which will give this wine the capacity to keep, though it is also nice now). Analysis is enlightening but not necessary. This wine is more than the sum of its parts; with a steak it told a coherent and convincing story, one which I think would please anyone who has red wine running in his veins.

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!

Home is where we start from. That’s why different things appear perfectly natural to different folk. For much of the Near East it is not democracy that is natural but the milet system of the old Ottoman Empire, where no one had votes, but each minority was responsible for itself under an Islamic umbrella. For me it is the English countryside before the Great War, the Old England of Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill.

For most middle-aged Americans I suppose it is, for better or worse, the Eisenhower era: the wonders of modern science, Detroit dragons, and America as Top Nation forever more. No one now (apart, apparently, from Mr. Rumsfeld) thinks the world is, or ought to be, as simple as it seemed then in the black-and-white pages of Time magazine. Many of us never thought it was.

Ask your pets what their world looks like. Your cat knows your neighborhood quite as well as you do, but what he has marked on his mental map is entirely different. Poor Kit Smart wondered at the wisdom of cats and they put him in Bedlam. You see a crack in the neighbor’s siding. Your cat sees the Gate of Mouse and watches with the full-bore attention of Ernest Hemingway gazing at the gate through which the bull will enter the arena to meet its matador.

Your dog, too, he has a consciousness that makes intelligent distinctions mostly on the basis of smell—a sense most humans (except, of course, connoisseurs of wine) are well on the way to losing. I have seen a pack of beagles follow the trail of a hare through a mink farm without faltering. This is a serious feat of discrimination, since aroma algebra teaches us that mink equals skunk squared. How much we must be missing. One wonders what gave the animals in that Sinhalese nature reserve early warning of last December’s tsunami, so that they made their way inland and escaped the deadly waves.
In the ancient world, it was the Stoic philosophers who were the great exponents of the notion that there is a hidden sympathy that links all physical phenomena. If the Stoics had known about Tokyo and Texas, they would certainly have asserted that a butterfly clapping its wings in the air over the Japanese capital could cause a tornado over Austin. Even spiritual things were exquisitely refined matter, and so were subtly and physically linked. The soul was like gold to airy thinness beat; the whole round earth was every way bound with golden chains too fine for human sight.

It was these connections that made things beautiful. If each person and thing lived in accordance with its own nature, it would become perfectly adapted to its environment, indeed, to the entire universe of which it was a part. Beauty could be discerned wherever things were well-proportioned to one another, above all when they displayed a mathematical symmetry, like the colonnaded frontage of a Greek temple.

Just such a Stoic combination came my way the other evening. It involved a crumbly English cheese called Blue Shropshire (like Stilton, but golden instead of white) and a 2002 Vouvray (costing little more than $12) called Masbon, which is French for “good estate,” though I guess it is simply the name of the shipper. (The experience would probably have been as good, just different, with many another cheese, perhaps best with Wensleydale, that crumbly white poetry from the Yorkshire Dales, home of James Herriot, the horsedoctor and raconteur.) For a vehicle there was good crusty bread; ideal would have been Bath Oliver Biscuits, as eaten with hard-boiled eggs by Dan and Una in Kipling’s Puck.

Vouvray is a white wine from the Loire Valley, southwest of Paris. It is made from the Chenin Blanc grape, which means that it is somewhat sweet; (“off-dry” is the pundit’s word). 2002 was a fine hot year but this wine is not oversweet; it has the characteristic Vouvray edge. One bottle had an aftertaste I was personally not keen on (a little like a McIntosh apple), but this was well-masked by the Blue Shropshire cheese.

Looking for the link that made this wine and cheese such a successful combination required serious research—that is to say, repeated, careful consumption. In the end I decided the connection consisted in a concatenation of creaminess. Nothing excessive, you understand—nothing in excess was a common Stoic motto—but a gentle connection catalyzed by the consumer. As Charles Williams wrote—it is National Poetry Month—“How good the universe can be, what now?”

The other day I had lunch with a lawyer. “Do you like Tony Blair?” he asked, with the courtesy characteristic of his profession. I could give no sensible answer, as I have never had the honor of the prime minister’s acquaintance.

My learned friend went on to wonder how an apparently intelligent and sensitive man could get Britain involved in America’s current adventure in Iraq. It’s not as if the British public was spoiling for the fight. Perhaps Mr. Blair was genuinely frightened of the elusive weapons of mass destruction. There is certainly no shortage of members of Parliament who say they voted for the war because they were told Saddam Hussein could wipe us all out in forty-five minutes flat. Or could it simply be that Mr. Blair was afraid of compromising the special relationship between our two great countries?

One key to understanding Tony Blair is religion—not the battling certainties that animate many evangelical supporters of President Bush, but an altogether more modern, more flexible faith. The Christianity to which his (and my) generation of literate Englishmen did (or did not) subscribe was characterized by a 1963 book called Honest to God. In it, a bishop explained that God is the Ground of All Being, not an old man with a beard in the sky, a truth which some of his readers had tumbled to already (surely the old man with the beard is Santa Claus). This up-to-date faith had much to say about society: “though we are many we are one bread, one body” ran the mantra in the Church of England’s grim modern-language liturgy. It warmed to personal intensity, while soft-pedaling private prayer. The hard work of metaphysics and theology took a back seat to building communities. Diplomacy, someone once said, is the art of letting other people have your way; Christian charity, as it was promoted to us in sixties England, often seemed to mean letting everyone else have their way.
Of course it is good to encourage people to be kind, and one has to acknowledge the sincerity of a public school (i.e. private school) product like Tony Blair, who joins the British Labour party, the party of workers, with hand and brain, under the impression that he may help folk who lack the advantages he was born into.

But this sort of well-meaning Christian pragmatism is dangerously eager to please. Hence the persistent efforts of the Blair press office to fool all of the people all of the time. Hence, too, a willingness to give in to whomever has shouted most loudly most recently (they call it inclusiveness). A fellow supporter of foxhunting said to me over Christmas that the only sure way to save our sport is to have George Bush come out in favor of it, because he is the only person who can shout louder than the left-wing tyrants of the Labour Party.

For Mr. Blair and those like him are not Champagne socialists, eccentric noblemen with demotic principles, like Philippe Duc d’Orléans, who changed his name to Citoyen Égalité during the French Revolution (but was guillotined just the same). Such Bollinger Bolsheviks savor the sharp irony of their position; their taste for aristocratic pleasures is undimmed by their embracing the cause of the People.

Such inconsistency is alien to the Blair Project. The characteristic drink of the contemporary British Christian Socialist is blander, more middle-class. It lacks fizz, and so would never lead to an amusing indiscretion like the nose trick (in which the victim unintentionally gargles champagne through the nose). It is also cheaper than bubbly and, in the spirit of inclusiveness, well within the financial reach of all. It is Chardonnay.

The wine drunk at the celebration dinner after Mr. Blair’s general election victory was a Chardonnay from the village of Lugny near Macon in southern Burgundy, Macon-Lugny les Genièvres, shipped by Louis Latour and available for about $15. There is absolutely nothing nasty about this wine. The 2002 vintage that I enjoyed recently with an omelette lacked sharpness (unlike the same shipper’s Pouilly-Vinzelles, from the same part of Burgundy, available locally for about the same price). A thoroughly pleasant fruitiness gave way to firm, mild bitterness (a bit like the taste of orange pith), until, on swallowing, the fruit reasserted itself, lasting lingeringly. It was good. Decide for yourself if what is amiable in a wine is admirable in a politician.

Odd how few poets emerged from the Second World War. The First World War produced plenty. Some, like Rupert Brooke, thought they were going to be Homeric heroes––he died without hearing a shot fired in anger, and is buried on the island of Scyrus, where Achilles hid among the women. Others—Charles Sorley, Wilfrid Owen, Siegfried Sassoon—tried to express the horror of the Western Front.

But the only poet I know of from the Second War is Keith Douglas. He served in a cavalry regiment that had only recently exchanged its horses for tanks. He wondered at the unconcern of his brother-officers fighting in North Africa. It seemed that their hearts were not in the Libyan Desert, but galloping behind foxhounds in the Shires: “It is not gunfire I hear, but a hunting horn.” Foxhunting with hounds, the sport of “this gentle, obsolescent breed of heroes, unicorns almost,” is this month being banned by a new and ill-informed law rammed through a spiteful British Parliament by dubiously constitutional means. English country folk are furious—all sorts of people, not just Keith Douglas’s unicorns. The ban has nothing to do with guns; in fact, shooting will be the crueler, less effective alternative to hunting with hounds. Nor is it a matter of animal welfare; everyone agrees that foxes must be controlled by man in order to maintain the balance of nature. It has everything to do with urban disdain for the countryside and the realities of the natural world. How can you legislate against terriers digging or dogs chasing rabbits?

The realities of nature are like tannin in red wine; too much is tiresome, but without them life is bland. Tannins are what give you the astringent taste in the middle of the mouthful. Until the early nineteenth century, there was thought to be only one type of tannin, the kind that can be extracted from the oak-apple, an unpalatable parasite of the oak tree, the size of a small brown Brussels sprout. In the Middle Ages, oak apples were used as an ingredient in the ink monks used to write manuscripts on parchment. Small boys would be sent round the hedgerows to gather the year’s supply in their frozen fingers. If you have ever sucked a fountain-pen nib (try anything once except adultery and Morris dancing!), you can imagine how bitter this tannin might be.

In fact, different types of tannin are present in all sorts of emulsions of foliage. You can taste it in tea. No doubt there are tannins in the frothy tisane of autumn leaves that drifts on the surface of the Mississippi downstream from St. Anthony Falls after the snowmelt each year.

There are pleasing tannins at the center of a very palatable red wine from the Rhone that I came across recently––I say palatable deliberately, because the tannins are most apparent when the tongue is rubbed against the roof of the mouth. This wine is the 2003 red Beaumes-de-Venise from Paul Jaboulet ainé (available locally for around fifteen dollars).

Beaumes-de-Venise is a pretty, Provençal town famous mainly for its sweet white wine, made from the Muscat grape, Muscat de Beaumes-de-Venise. Red Beaumes-de-Venise is made from Grenache and Syrah, the most popular grapes for red wine in the Rhône valley, and would go well with duck or goose or any red meat or powerful cheese. Indeed, I have seen it take on a haggis and win. (Wonderful thing, haggis––why do Americans not eat heart or liver or kidneys, especially kidneys?)

Two-thousand-three was a hot summer in the south of France. While hordes of Parisians roared along narrow roads during les grandes vacances and English visitors went to view the place where Peter Mayle lived before his books made it too popular for him to continue to live there, while no doubt some wistful souls went to see the ruins they read of in the charming tales of Alphonse Daudet, the country’s grapes ripened rapidly. Sugars developed in the skins; the sharper acids were muted. The wine that resulted is intense and ripely redolent of soft fruit and alcohol, as well as having the aforementioned tannins at its center.

Tannins ensure longevity. Drink a bottle now, and keep another for later, to see how the tannins mellow. This is intense enough to be wine for poets. One of the more eloquent Parliamentary defenders of foxhunting called her sport “our music, our poetry, our art.” There is certainly plenty of good hunting verse. God alone knows if any poet can make sense of the chaos that has been created in Mesopotamia by the politicians of our two great nations.

Wagner’s music, so they say, is not as bad as it sounds. I suppose the tunes aren’t too awful if you don’t mind being shouted at. But what makes me queasy is the overwhelming moral effect, the way it makes you limp and inert like a rabbit trapped in headlights.

Other composers in the light and tuneful category make you want to do something. Gilbert and Sullivan tickle you into singing along; the Strauss waltzes (Johann’s, not Richard’s) offer an invitation to trip the light fantastic toe; a Sousa march is meant to make you, well, march. Even the deafening stuff enjoyed by my teenage daughter (somewhere between a Hard Rock and a hard place) makes one apparently want to crowd-surf—which sounds like a lot of fun.

But hearing Wagner (one can hardly call it listening) merely makes you swoon. It is a passive activity, as squared-eyed as goggling at a television. Slot the CD into the brain, switch off the critical faculty, and let the waves of emotion submerge the pleasure centers, no matter if the torrid tide carries you ineluctably toward a Liebestod. This is consumer music.

Am I being unfair? I expect so. But being on the receiving end of Wagner reminds me of a bean-counter university official I met years ago who wanted the professors to refer to their students as “customers.” Apparently, in the retail chain where he had been previously employed, there was no term of greater respect.

But there is a difference between teaching and hawking burgers (yes, I have done both). In retail, the customer gets what you sell him. In education you can never be sure that those who are listening are hearing the same things that the professor says. Nor should they be. A lecturer looking out at ten dozen eyes sees at least ten dozen things going on dialectically behind them—“one deep calling to another,” Augustine thought as he gazed out at his congregation. It may be necessary for the pyre to be built in one place so that the fire from heaven can come down on another. Possibly, virtue can be taught, but it is an oblique business, requiring contributions from all those sitting on the log.

Wine works the same way. Of course one can drink to induce oblivion. But aside from the legendary potion opened in error by Tristan and Isolde, which allegedly smote them with their inescapable love (infatuation, more like it), I can think of no beverage that automatically induces any interesting or enduring state of mind. Enjoying wine involves an active response on the part of the drinker. The counterpoint of great claret may not require as much digital dexterity as a Bach fugue, but it calls for every bit as much sensual attention.

The wine I have found for this month lacks the complexity of the great reds of Bordeaux, but it certainly bears the message répondez s’il vous plaît, even if the response is only copious salivation. It is the 2003 vintage of a white wine called Txakoli, made at a bodega called Txomin Etxaniz, which is near the town of Guetaria on the south shore of the Bay of Biscay in northern Spain’s Basque country.

You can get it locally for around $18, and once you know the “tx” is pronounced approximately like the English “ch,” you will have no problem asking for it. The name is, naturally, Basque, and Basque is the oldest living language in Europe, quite distinct in structure from the Indo-European languages of the rest of the continent, and dating back to the millennia before hordes made their way west from the steppes of Central Asia, speaking the languages that were the ancestors of Hittite, Persian, Greek, Latin, Old Church Slavonic, Welsh, Old Uncle Tom Cobleigh, and all. The grapes are also peculiar to the Basque country, mostly Hondarribi zuri (white) with some Hondarribi beltza (black).

Pull the cork from the tall green bottle, pour out the clear pale contents, and taste. There is a tiny tingle on the tongue, as if you had sand in your sandwich, though without the annoyance that would arouse. Then a refreshing flavor and a slight smokiness, followed by a taste, accumulating on the palate the more one sips, of Granny Smith apples. This is pleasantly sharp. Plenty of the natural malic acid (from “malum,” Latin for apple) remains, as it has not all been transformed into the blander, buttery-tasting lactic acid.

Should you wish to orchestrate Txakoli with food, you might try the things that go with apples—pork, for instance, and cheese (in Yorkshire they eat cheddar cheese with apple pie, most un-American). For music, try Messiaen: bright dissonance, energy, and acid. May it give you joie et clarté.

There are three golden things that never perish: gold, honey, and the sun. An archaeologist friend of mine once put this to the test. She was excavating at the Bronze Age citadel built at Mycenae during the Greek Civil War when her team came across a large jar full of honey. They agreed it would be a pity to let the honey go to the museum, so each morning they had some for breakfast. It was delicious, but it took them most of the season to get to the bottom of the pithos. When they did, they rather regretted their self-indulgence. For what they found at the bottom was an offering to the chthonic gods: the well-preserved bones of a small child. It was quite some time before my friend could be induced to eat honey again.

For Greeks and Romans, bees and honey were special. Honey, they thought, came from heaven, like dew. (“Pour upon us the continual dew of thy blessing,” says The Prayer Book of 1662.) And bees had a perfect polity, everyone with a place and everyone in her proper place (even the gentlemen of the Drones Club), all ruled equitably by their king. No one tumbled to the sex of the queen bee till the 1670s, when a Dutchman, rejoicing in the name of Jan Swammerdam, peered down an early microscope to dissect and draw a queen bee’s ovary, which, so he calculated, contained more than five thousand eggs.

I learned early to respect the political judgment of bees. The tyrannical headmaster of the boarding school where I spent the years seven to thirteen kept several hives, and one afternoon as he was pumping smoke into them the bees turned on him in their thousands. He became an apian pin-cushion and had to be whisked off to the hospital and dosed with antihistamines. In the long run it did nothing to improve his temper, or temper his countenance, which was the color of port wine (yohoho, his nose doth show how oft the black jack to his lips doth go). But it put the old brute out of circulation for an appreciable stretch, so preventing him from caning us.

The sweetness and light our ancestors had from bees was, of course, not all metaphorical. Beeswax made candles and much else, and honey was the principal sweetener of food until the eighteenth century, when imports of cane sugar from the West Indies began arriving in bulk. It is amazing how thoroughly sugar corrupted eighteenth-century taste. The sugar basin of a Georgian tea set is huge, out of all proportion to the teapot or the fat-lipped cream jug; the tea Jane Austen sipped was a syrup. After dinner, eighteenth-century men drank Madeira and port, but they also drank mountain, a super-sticky dessert wine from Málaga in southern Spain, and Marsala, a ditto from Sicily. The Royal Navy ran on rum.

With corruption of taste went corruption of language. Sweetness came to mean simply the presence of sucrose. An earlier age was subtler. When Horatio says, “Good night, sweet prince,” to Hamlet’s corpse, he is not inferring that his royal friend had a high concentration of C12 H22 011; it was more a matter of the air that breathes upon a bank of violets, stealing and giving odor.

All of this came to mind as I was trying to describe the nose and initial taste of an excellent 2001 Chardonnay, Broquel from Argentina (around $15 locally). Others I consulted named fruits. The word that came to my mind was “honeyed.” Not sweet like the sugar-water that oozes from the nozzles protruding from the trepanned plastic bears you buy in supermarkets. But fragrant like lime flowers or thyme—the stuff, in fact, which bees collect and pack so neatly in the pouches on their little thighs. (Even Virgil knew about those, but for the full story, try A Hive of Bees by an apiarist called John Crompton.)

There is nothing flimsy about this wine, which makes it quite unlike the penny-plain Chardonnays you often meet at dull parties. The color is that of wheat straw. There is a faintly smoky aroma and a firm grip on your tonsils as you swallow; then suddenly you are left with freshness. I found it strong enough to stand up to chicken thighs roasted with salt and fresh limes. It would be equally fine with green salad or sharp cheese. In Mendoza, where it originates, it is now late in the southern spring; no doubt there are flowers on the foothills of the Andes. This is a wine which will clear the indoor indulgences of a cold and cloying yuletide. Look on to April and his showers sweet.

Other countries’ politics are always a mystery. Of course, it helps to know some history. Then you can at least ask how they got here from there, rather than merely measure how different they are from us, how they fail to meet our highest standards of democracy, feminism, etc.

But even disinterested interest is sometimes thrown for a loop. Take the recent debate in the Turkish Parliament about making adultery a criminal offense. Most English-language coverage of this unlikely proposal considered its impact on Turkey’s application to join the European Union. A rationale was suggested by a brisk reflection on honor in the villages as described in the novels of Yashar Kemal–and yet there was clearly still more to the politics of this proposal.

American politics can be just as mystifying for foreigners–even for helots who have lived here for decades. Some years ago the London Times published a piece explaining President Carter’s reasons for not attending the funeral of President Tito of Yugoslavia: “Mr. Carter believes in the sanctity of motherhood and therefore sent his mother to the funeral. The affection he feels for her is not universally shared in the United States and is not widely understood abroad.” Quite so.

Maybe it is incomprehension on this level that is behind poll results recently released by the BBC World Service. The BBC reasoned that the Rest of the World were the consumers of American foreign policy and so asked its listeners whom they would vote for as president of the U.S. If the Rest of the World had votes, the result would not be encouraging for Current Resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. N.W.

My guess is that the Rest of the World simply does not see the point of recent U.S. foreign policy. It’s decisive, of course; in Iraq it has decided the fates of between ten thousand and twenty thousand people of several nationalities. But its apologists explain it in circular terms, with a persistent resistance to facts that might only serve to “confuse” the issue. It’s as if history was, or ought to be, a series of self-fulfilling prophecies.

Some of us in the Rest of the World actually feel as if we have been here before. There was just this sort of circularity about the Domino Theory. You remember–nothing to do with pizza, but the Cold War notion that the Reds would pick off adjacent countries one by one and that the West was fated to try to stop them. The trouble is, Russians play chess, not dominoes.

Wine talk, too, can often seem circular when it gets separated from confusing facts like what the liquid in your glass actually tastes and smells of. It is easy for those not paying attention to what they are drinking to think that they are tasting what they have been told they ought to be tasting. Which is why I mention a pleasant surprise I had the other night: a single-variety cabernet sauvignon I really liked. Often, the pure cabernets of California seem overpowering, like a new friend from the West Coast who is trying to tell you too much all at once. The great winemakers of Bordeaux don’t use pure cabernet; they blend it with the blander merlot, so tempering the angular character of the cabernet.

What I was expecting, then, after reading the label, was something with an edge. Instead, I encountered Taft Street Cabernet Sauvignon, a rich, round red (well, almost purple, actually) from the Russian River Valley–the limit of Russian expansion down the California coast from Alaska in the nineteenth century. The soft edges of the taste have a charm that does not weaken the central strength of flavor characteristic of cabernet. If one were not operating a motor vehicle (or a foreign policy), one could drink quite a lot of this, with pork or beef or cheese, even with turkey (no, Jessica, the Rest of the World does not have Thanksgiving). And it’s priced so that many can afford to do so.

The name Taft Street comes from the road in Oakland where the company was founded. President Taft was a Republican; he was also the incumbent president who received the fewest electoral college votes when he stood for reelection (eight to be precise–Utah and Vermont). What the Rest of the World does not understand about the electoral college could be measured by the imperial gallon. One might be happier not thinking too hard about it, but rather getting into bed gratefully with a bottle of this pleasant red. Oblomov rules, OK?