Author: Oliver Nicholson

It always seems to happen on a Friday. The phone rings and someone says, “Do you speak Latin?” and I reply “Well, I teach it,” or something equally noncommittal. Then comes the question. “What is the Latin word for ‘color’?” Phew, that’s easy. “Color, spelt the way Americans spell it.” “Well what’s the Latin for enhanced?” “It depends what you mean.” “Okay, then, what’s the Latin for shampoo?”

That one was a local soap company brainstorming the name of an enhanced product. Over the years, I have furnished love-legends for engraving on wedding rings, an inscription for a cake for the Tennessee Valley Authority, and translations of choice phrases in a doctor’s letter to his patient’s lawyer (sui generis perversus, that sort of thing), which had clearly been left in the chaste obscurity of a learned language for a good reason.

The most engaging inquiry was also the most serious. Someone rang from the Medical School (again, a Friday afternoon) wanting to know the origin of a word meaning “pain during intercourse.” He was doing research and wanted to coin a similar word for pain during anal intercourse, and please could I oblige. The term we came up with was proctalgia, derived from Greek “alge,” meaning pain (as in analgesic) and Greek “proktos,” denoting the posterior passage (as in proctophone, one who speaks through that part of his body). Proctalgia is surely a word which deserves a broader usage, for instance, in reference to a tiresome acquaintance, “the fellow gives me acute proctalgia.” I leave it with you.

One hopes that local government appreciates such pleasing contributions to our land grant mission, but it certainly does not discharge a fraction of the service to the state which is rendered by the University’s Classics Department. The hard humanities are as necessary as the hard sciences.

But such telephonic repartee does inspire me to go straight from the office to the new sushi shop to sample the exact pleasures of contrasting fish. (It is, after all, still Friday). Seafood supposedly inspires a kind of cognitive precision, especially sushi. A molecule of mackerel follows a soupcon of salmon. I am reminded of the Latinate epicure newly arrived at Boston’s Logan Airport anxious to sample the local New England delicacies without delay. “Take me,” he said to the cabbie, “to where I can get scrod.” “That’s the first time I’ve heard that in the pluperfect,” came the reply.

A sushi-enhanced sharpness of mind should lead you, too, to the 2002 Sauvignon Blanc from an Argentine winery called Bodegas Norton. This is a light and pleasing wine, a fine complement to raw fish (it would be overpowered by anything smoked or canned). The color is pale, the taste is clean, with a faint fizz, and a hint of the blackcurrant flavor which is more pronounced in, say, Pouilly-Fumé, a wine from the Loire valley in western France, made from the same grape. Above all, it is young and refreshing, serious without being intense.

For all its youth, this is a wine with an interesting history. Sir Edmund Norton was one of those bold Victorian engineers not afraid to take his art to the undiscovered ends. In the late 19th century, Argentine agriculture was transformed by being able to transport its produce to distant markets, not least to Britain and the United States. Immigrants arrived to work the land—readers of Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia will recall the communities of Welsh cattlemen with names like Pedro Evans and Sancho Jones. The secret of this success lay in the railways, largely British-built, and Sir Edmund Norton designed and constructed railway bridges. He married a local woman and settled in the wine country; Bodegas Norton is in the upper Mendoza valley, three and a half thousand feet above sea level, in the eastern foothills of the Andes Mountains.

Those who want the Sauvignon without the sushi can find it for less than $8 all around town. You do not need to be a Latin lover to like this wine. (Remember how Dan Quayle was going to find his Latin handy in Latin America?) But it certainly will put a spring in your step. This wine says “Thank God it’s Friday.”

I recently spent a sad evening in a basement in South Minneapolis. An acquaintance was seeking subsidised legal advice about the custody of his children. He had found it pretty difficult uncovering a voluntary agency able to offer advice to men on such matters. But now here he was with six other unfortunates waiting his turn and talking about his experiences.

The stories we heard seemed to suggest that there are areas of Minnesota life where inequality of the sexes has been turned on its head. One wife’s lawyer had apparently suggested a baseless accusation of domestic abuse simply to get the husband out of the house. Other men’s accounts left a similar impression of helplessness, which the legal clinic was striving, with limited resources, to redress. Perhaps it was useful to just get together and commiserate with the boys.

Male friendship is a sensitive plant, growing most strongly when supported by the trelliswork of such institutions as the bowling league, the English pub, or the backstreet tea-house of a Near Eastern town, where mustachioed men sit low to the ground on stools made of old tires and play tric-trac by the hour. I remember a Persian friend once asking me why Americans, such effusive folk when you meet them, spend their evenings shut away each in his home. There certainly do seem to be a lot of lonely men around, and those in this basement, separated from their families, seemed especially bereft.

According to popular belief, the frail flower of American male friendship is often watered by beer—and in the case of most American beer, watered is certainly the word. Thanks to advertising, Budweiser is not only the most popular brew in America, it is increasingly chic abroad. To each his own. But for me, Bud brings to mind the old pub adage that “you only rent your beer.” It is therefore a pleasure to recommend a good solid brew that has a taste.
The August Schell company of New Ulm is one of the oldest breweries in the country and one of the oldest businesses in the state. It was established even before the U.S.–Dakota War of 1862, by immigrants from the Black Forest. The German tradition at New Ulm is obvious. The city boasts a statue of Hermann the German (Arminius to you, me, and Tacitus), whose destruction of three Roman legions at the Battle of the Teutoburger Forest in 9 A.D. prevented the expansion of the Roman Empire into Germanic lands. (Professor Peter Wells of the U of M will soon be publishing a splendid new book on this battle.)

The German pedigree is a fine omen (though I suppose Schlitz, Schmidt, and Blatz are respectable German names, too). Of the numerous admirable brews produced by Schell’s, the one which pleases me most bears not the name of the company but the city. Ulmer Braun has a gold label with a rutting buck who is either ecstatic or angry—has he just consumed the contents? Or trodden on a broken bottle, inconsiderately disposed of? The beer is a pleasing dark brown, the color of old mahogany, and at less than a dollar a bottle for the six-pack, is extremely affordable. You can taste the hops and malt. If you prefer not to taste your beer, you can chill it in the American style, I suppose.

Ulmer Braun is not so stout as Guinness. Nor is it so muscular as Porter, a beer originally made for the men who carted around the crates of fruit and vegetables at Covent Garden Market in London. (Summit Brewing Company makes a fine Porter for those who really like to get their teeth into their beer.) Ulmer Braun has more heart than most lagers. It is a comforting beverage to have with a pork chop and potatoes on a bitter January evening.

“Courage, friends,” said George Bernard Shaw. “We all hate Christmas.” These days there is a good deal more to hate about the festive season than there was in Edwardian England, particularly the annual crash-course in consumerism given to all our children by the manufacturers of worthless plastic gewgaws. No doubt the hairy Hibernian sophisticate disdained competitive consumption. But I fear the things he probably hated most about Christmas were precisely those which decent people most treasure, what John Betjeman, the elegist of the everyday, called “the sweet and silly Christmas things.” In the Twin Cities, the sweetest, silliest Christmas thing is the seasonal willingness of comparative strangers to invite each other into their homes. Newcomers here, even those like me who are accustomed to British levels of reserve, find formidable the willingness, during the rest of the year, Minnesotans exercise to respect one another’s privacy. This is the state whose largest university has for several years been without a faculty club, and no one has even noticed. But across the cities, Christmas seems to free up the flow of the soul, rather like Tom Lehrer’s National Brotherhood Week.

Of course, the midwinter social thaw does not occur on the scale it did in the Roman Empire. In the ancient world, the Saturnalia—the festival of Saturn, coldest, oldest, and most coagulative of the Gods—filled the last days of December with a free-and-easy spirit. (There is, incidentally, no need to believe in any continuity between Saturnalia and Christmas. The first mention of the Nativity of Christ on the 8th day before the Kalends of January comes as late the year 354. The Feast of the Epiphany, January 6, was more important to early Christians, and neither was half as important as Easter. Besides, the Early Church was keener on conversion than continuity.) The Saturnalia was quite a party. It was meant to recall the long-past Golden Age of prosperity and peace when Saturn himself ruled on Earth.

Festivities in both ancient Rome and modern Minnesota have in common a need for wine. Bernard Shaw didn’t of course. He was a teetotaler as well as a Noelophobe, so the whole of this column would have passed him by. But the rest of us like to be well lubricated (though not, of course, our designated drivers), and large parties require good bulk wine.

There are few things nastier than the carpet cleaner some people serve their guests—and it is the impurities, they say, which produce the hangover. So let me recommend some decent big bottles: a brand of wine called Vendange, made in the central valley of California, but with a rather French character to it (the name is French for “grape harvest”). At less than $8 locally for a double bottle (1.5 litres), it is certainly affordable and the reds have the added merit of making hearty mulled wine. Vendange wines can be provided in quantity when that’s what’s needed. They also have quality. (Loyal readers of this column may recall my contention that, when it comes to wine, excess is the enemy of appreciation. Let the boozers chunder on the wall-to-wall, or “talk on the big white telephone.”)

Vendange produces wine from a wide range of grape varieties. A host who selects several contrasting bottles can find amusement educating himself about the tastes of different types of grape, knowledge which is basic to intelligent imbibing. The Cabernet, it must be admitted, reminds me why the French mix this variety with the milder-tasting Merlot when they make Claret. But the Pinot Noir slips down pleasantly. My particular favorite, the Malbec, is a dark red wine with a distinctive, refreshing character. There is a good range of whites as well, Chardonnay, Semillon, and so on.

These are wines which will please at parties. Or they can be sipped, while you perform your own sweet and silly seasonal rite. Mine is to read with the children a short story of Alphonse Daudet set one Christmas Eve in 17th century Provence. Whatever yours may be, I wish you every joy at the dark time of the year. Shaw was a bore.

A few weeks ago, central London saw the largest demonstration it has ever witnessed. A good-humored crowd of 407,791 people marched through the streets. These were not folk normally given to protest. For the most part, they were quiet country people, though to be sure they enjoyed their day out in the capital, cheering, singing, and blowing hunting horns.

They had come to remind Her Majesty’s Government of a few home truths, in particular that one cannot pay too much for food, that it is rude to criticize a farmer with your mouth full, and that agricultural subsidies are not handouts for farmers but a way of ensuring a supply of cheap bread (circuses come separately) for the urban masses. But at the heart of their protest was not the plight of farmers so much as anguish at the government’s interference with certain immemorial pleasures of the rustics.

The oldest of these pursuits is the hunting (with hounds, not guns) of the wild red deer, once the sport of kings, but now carried out only on one remote moor in the southwest of England. Deer run faster and straighter than foxes. Following stag-hounds across the springy heather under an open Exmoor sky must be one of the most exhilarating pleasures a human being can have. Hunting deer involves knowing about their natural history. The locals seem to know the deer individually—“the big stag with the crooked antler as lives above Badgworthy”; “the pale-colored hind you see at the bottom end of Horner Wood.” They can tell from their footprints (“slots”) the age, size, sex, and condition of the deer who made them. It is probably true that despite the damage they do, the wild red deer are tolerated by the Exmoor farming community principally because of their complex relationship as hunter and hunted. If and when the hounds do bring their beast to bay, it is dispatched from close range by the huntsman; the hounds get the paunch, the followers divide up the venison, and the heart goes to the farmer on whose land the deer was killed.

This sport involves a good deal more exercise than the shooting of white-tailed deer, a popular sport in Minnesota in the autumn. But both present one common problem: How do you cook wild meat of indeterminate age which is going to need to be hung quite some time before you can be sure it is at all tender? The sensible solution is, of course, to eat farmed venison, a delicious meat, always reliably tender and amazingly low in cholesterol-inducing fat. It may be the lean meat of the future, but that’s another story.

I cannot help the hunter much with recipes. For these you must look to the wonderful cookbooks of Nichola Fletcher, Game for All and Monarch of the Table (I specially like her “Venison in Chocolate Sauce”). But I can recommend a wine which I think will stand up to the strongest of “gamey” tastes. It is the 2000 Napa Valley Zinfandel from Beaulieu Vineyards, a winery with more than 100 years of continuous history behind it (they made altar wine during Prohibition).

This Zinfandel is a fine red color, like a pan of berry juice ready for making bramble jelly. (Deer like berries. You should see what a stag can do to a blackcurrant bush. So there is some justice in the world!) The soft tannin at the center of the taste will stand up well to the meat, the smell of fresh oil which comes from the wine being matured in oak barrels is appetizing, and the pleasant fruity sensation as you swallow, which is reminiscent of a fresh Granny Smith apple, gives the palate wings. Less mist, more mellow fruitfulness.

This is a wine with a good heart— and at less than $20, a decent price. It should go nicely with whatever Florian Krebsbach and Clarence Bunsen may shoot (or run over) in the woods near Lake Wobegon this autumn. For me, it brings to mind the Scotch poet who wrote, “My heart is on Exmoor / My heart is not here. My heart is on Exmoor / A-chasing the deer.”

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

My grandfather’s grandfather invented kippers. The family tradition is that if he had not sold the patent for his method of making smoked herrings to Woodgers of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in northeastern England for 200 pounds, we might all have been rich beyond the dreams of creosote. Imagine a penny-a-fish royalty on every kipper consumed on the Flying Scotsman by an Agatha Christie hero fleeing northwards, and the ching soon starts to add up.

Great-great grandfather cut a swathe through the 19th century. There is a daguereotype photo showing him with full set of Victorian whiskers and a long-stemmed “churchwarden” clay pipe. He served on the ship on which Napoleon was carried off to his final exile on the island of Saint Helena, he had a son called Elijah, and his wife is said to have been the first person ever to own a steam trawler.

All of which probably explains my lifelong predilection for smoked fish. Proper kippers are not easy to get in the Twin Cities, but it is a truth which deserves a wider currency that a certain well-known chain of bagel shops will sell you a side or packet of pretty good smoked salmon for a pretty good price, and they sometimes have specials around Christmas.

A lifelong taste for smoked fish naturally precipitates a lifelong search for good wine to go with it. The wine must, of course, be white, light enough to allow the taste of the fish to come through, strong enough in the nose to blend with the smoke, and sufficiently acid to cut into the oils which are meant to be so good for you and some say were the secret of the braininess of Jeeves, the perfect gentleman’s personal gentleman.

Much of the pleasure of such a search comes from trying. When you set out for Ithaca, pray that the way be long, as the Greek poet puts it. But there is one spot on this quest, inexpensive and consistently pleasing, to which I find myself returning regularly. It is Rosemount Chardonnay, all the way from Australia, a fine masculine wine with a powerful flavor, consistent enough to suggest to one lady drinker the persistent charm of honeysuckle. Certainly it has nose enough for the smoky taste of kippers, and strong road-holding qualities on the palate. It is generally available for less than $10 a bottle, and there is not a headache in a hogshead of it.

Australian wine has come a long way in the last generation. The crimes formerly committed under the label “Australian Burgundy”—once satirized as Chateau Downunder—are a thing of the distant past. Wines like Rosemount Chardonnay taste good. They have to; it is a fact that Australians drink twice as much wine per head as inhabitants of the United States. They also sell well; Rosemount is the largest selling brand of white wine in Australia.

In England, where it has been popular for nearly 20 years, “strine wine” has a reputation for reliability. California wine-makers penetrated the British market a few years earlier than the Australians, but got off to a poor start by selling there the lesser products of that great state, notable mostly for their fancy carafes and strong aroma of burnt matches. The Aussies must have guessed they would lose money underestimating the taste of the Great British Public; theirs is wine which no one could dislike. I will back Rosemount Chardonnay against kippers and smoked salmon any time. Only those who spend Christmas Eve at Ingebretsen’s on Lake Street will be able to say if it can stand up to lutefisk.

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

Some countries come up so often in the news that you feel you ought to know more about them. There is a painless way to achieve this. Read travel literature. An intelligent travel book provides more enlightenment than any number of newspaper accounts of the latest atrocities, as well as placing in a longer historical perspective lands which (as was once said of Ireland) produce more history than can be consumed locally.

Imagine, then, the pleasure of finding a book about the Near East that is both easy to read and fresh in its perspective. It is William Dalrymple’s From the Holy Mountain. The author had the fine idea of travelling clockwise around the Eastern Mediterranean (what we used to call the Levant), starting from the monastic community at Mount Athos in northern Greece and ending among the Copts of Egypt, chronicling the scattered remnants of the Christian commonwealth which once covered the whole Mediterranean world in the three centuries leading up to the rise of Islam in the mid-seventh century.

Dalrymple’s visit to a Christian abbey in northern Mesopotamia is particularly poignant. He describes one of the surviving monks, a man whose native tongue is Syriac, a variant of the Aramaic language Jesus spoke, looking out over the monastery’s parched and deserted vineyards. The escarpment of Tur ’Abdin was an area whose wine was well known in Biblical times. Not anymore.

In the Muslim Near East, Christians have traditionally been associated with winemaking. Of course, despite the Koranic prohibitions, they had no monopoly on its consumption. One thinks of the Ottoman Sultan Selim the Sot, and of the poet Omar Khayyam with his book of verses underneath the bough, his loaf of bread and jug of wine, and Thou—even though scholars tell me that the lines would be more accurately translated as a cask of wine, and half a sheep, and Thou. But in common belief, Christianity and wine went together; the Armenian Christians of Ispahan in Persia made rugs with irregularities in the pattern which the dealers called “tipsy carpets.”

Many modern Near Eastern states produce fine wines. The Vieux Thibar of Tunisia is powerful stuff and the multifarious wines of Turkey are a pleasure to the traveller. (My favorite is called Villa Doluca—pronounced do-lud-jah) but they are not frequently found round here. The best known Levantine wine is called Chateau Musar, made for more than 70 years now by a Maronite Christian family in the Bekaa valley in Lebanon. The vines grow on gravel and limestone 3,000 feet above sea level, and they are guaranteed a mild climate by protective mountains on either side. This valley is otherwise famous for the ancient temples at Ba’albek, the largest in the Roman world and known in pre-Christian times for its ritual prostitutes (and known today for its warlords).

There is nothing quite like Chateau Musar. It comes in a claret bottle (with shoulders), its maker studied at the University of Bourdeaux (France was the dominant western power here from the mid-19th century onwards), and the grapes are mostly Cabernet Sauvignon, the variety which gives flavor to most Bourdeaux. Yet the taste and character is more like a Rhone—more sunshine, more alcohol. I recently considered a bottle of the 1996 vintage. It was strong yet subtle.

Chateau Musar takes a long time to make. The different varieties of grape (Cabernet, Cinsault, and various others) are fermented separately for two years before they are blended and then left to age for several more years. It also varies in price; I have seen it on the Internet for less than $12 and for more than $20. This is a wine well worth bringing home in your luggage if you take a trip this fall, to lands where it is more readily available—the Levant, Europe, or England. Whether you think it was Noah who invented wine or Dionysius, Chateau Musar will show you how the ancient art of winemaking can be refined to a high elegance.

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

Bertrand Russell may have looked like God—piercing eyes, white hair, son of the Duke of Bedford, that sort of thing. But he was a philosopher not noted for an enthusiastic belief in the Divine. When asked what he would say when he got to Heaven, he replied in clipped tones, “‘God’, I will say, ‘you are a very mean fellow. You did not give us enough evidence to go on.’” Many restaurant wine lists seem to operate on the same divine principle. I know someone who was driven to ordering “vin rouge” from one particularly pretentious list—not red wine, you understand, but vin rouge.

More often you look down the list under the appraising eye of someone who thinks you ought to be able to make wise decisions about wine (if about nothing else in life) and you see no more than the name of a grape variety, “Syrah,” and the maker’s name, “Joe.” You shut your eyes, hope for the best and state your choice, humming the while, “Che Syrah Syrah, whatever will be will be.” Which is of course not just the first line of a cheesy pop song. “Che Sara Sara” is the motto of the Duke of Bedford, which is why you see it all over the place in London—especially near the British Museum, long owned by the Duke of Bedford (Bertrand Russell, again).

Sometimes you’re lucky. A pithy line on a wine list the other evening, “Pinot Noir, Kenwood” introduced a really pleasing bottle and prompted a spot of reflection. It would be a pity to have had the experience and missed the meaning. What was there to know about this wine? Let’s try induction.

Kenwood is more likely to be named for a Californian town than the homonymous manufacturer of kitchen appliances or the upmarket mosquito breeding-ground of Minneapolis. Pinot Noir is the grape the French use to make the nectar known as Burgundy. (Did B. Russell feel that nectar was wasted on the Gods?) So this was going to be red and probably stronger, fruitier, and more voluptuous (I nearly said full-bodied, but you know what I mean) than many table wines. The bottle itself provided more information. It announced its year (2000) and the area it came from—the Russian River Valley, a misty wooded cleft in the California coast first settled by Russian fur-trappers in the early 19th century, as they spread south from Alaska (at that time Russian territory). It said that it contained 13.8 percent alcohol by volume, which was cheering but not of course the most important point. And on the back it said it had been aged in French oak barrels for a year (oak imparts its own taste), had a smooth finish, and should not be drunk when I was pregnant (pretty safe there; B. Russell too) or about to drive. Helpful, all of that, but only pointers to the empirical pleasure of pouring a glass and examining it with as many senses as are decent and legal. The eye saw a good deep red, the nose detected the sort of smell you might get if you cross-pollinated a garden rose with a bottle of brandy, the good round taste suggested that after the first glass a second might be an enormously good idea. It was the mind, though, which suggested that this was a drink less analogous to Burgundy than to Port, an Old World wine with few Californian equivalents (though there is an intriguing wine wittily named Starboard).

Only experience will enable you to verify my observations. I thought this a wine delightful in itself, a Ding an Sich. At significantly more than $15 a bottle, this is a bit more expensive than most of the wines which make their way into this column, but I certainly thought it was worth it. Would Bertrand Russell? Can we know what is in Other Minds? It is easier to sample the evidence and make up our own.

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

According to Sir Winston Churchill, the Royal Navy has only three traditions, “Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash.” It’s certainly true that until only a few years ago every enlisted man in Her Britannic Majesty’s fleet had the right to a substantial tot of rum every day at midday. It was powerful stuff. The custom went by the board when it was agreed that perhaps it was not a good idea for sailors in charge of Exocet missiles and other lethal modern ordnance to spend their afternoons in a condition that would make it illegal for them to drive a car.

Things were different in the days of sail. The wooden walls of an 18th-century ship enclosed a community that was often cold and always wet. Sailors needed their comforts. The British warmed their men with rum made from sugar plantations in the West Indies; so did notorious pirates like Captain Henry Morgan (he of the “Old Bold Mate of Henry Morgan” song) and Long John Silver (“Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum”).

But as far back as the early 1600s, the Dutch provided for their sodden sailors by giving them a spirit called brandywine (literally “burnt wine”). To make it they needed to buy substantial quantities of relatively bland wine to distill. Much of this they shipped in from France, particularly from the port of Nantes, at the head of an estuary where the lovely river Loire runs west toward the Atlantic.

To provide for the Dutch trade, the area around Nantes was planted with a heavy fruiting grape called the Melon de Bourgogne, which was brought in from Burgundy. People suggest the name of the grape comes from the round leaves on the vines, but it might as well come from the fact that these grapes taste like melons—which is to say, they taste like nothing much at all. When the Dutch export market dried up, the farmers around Nantes found a way to turn the grapes they were growing into a very palatable white wine called Muscadet, ideal for summer drinking, pleasing with a Welsh Rarebit (sharp cheese grilled on buttered toast), wonderful with fish.

I recently considered a bottle of Domaine de la Cognardiere “Bella Verte” Muscadet (substantially less than $15 on the Minneapolis side of the Edina-Minneapolis frontier). It had an initial taste that was pleasingly round, perhaps like the smell of a sun-filled cabin that has not been opened up for some months, slightly sharp, pleasantly musty. But the full benefit came on breathing out. This generated a taste like the fume of two flints clashed together. I can see this taste mingling with the smell of burning sparklers, now apparently legal in Minnesota, on July 4.

The secret of the wine lies in the way it is allowed to ferment on its lees, “sur lie,” as it says on the labels. The liquid derived from the grapes picked each autumn is left over the winter in casks together with the solid dregs, and it is this which gives depth and complexity of flavor to what might otherwise be a rather dull drink. Sometimes the dregs impart a slight but refreshing fizz.

Muscadet is like nothing else. Many other wines are made along the banks of the river Loire. They vary from the delightful vintages of Pouilly-Fume, with their heavenly smell of blackcurrants, redolent of country gardens in midsummer, to beverages which in wet cold years would be better employed as battery acid. But most of these are made from the Sauvignon Blanc grape, none from the Melon de Bourgogne.

This is a wine to sip in a hammock. If you need summer reading to go with it, try Flying Colours by C.S. Forester, a novel in which Captain Horatio Hornblower of the Royal Navy escapes from Napoleon’s France by drifting in a rowboat down the Loire, past the chateaux, past the vineyards. Life could be worse.

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

A lot of godly folk seem to forget that the Lord’s first miracle was turning water into wine. But it was a minister from the Western Isles of Scotland who pointed out that this was hardly remarkable. In his part of the world, he opined, the Good Lord turns water into whiskey every day.

Of course he was right. Whiskey has its origin in the generous quantities of cold water which a benign Providence, aided by the Gulf Stream, pours onto the sodden and stony landscape of the northern United Kingdom. No rain, no whiskey. The English spell it “whisky,” the Scots prefer plain KY (yes, like the jelly), but either way it is an anglicized form of the Gaelic uisgebeatha, which means “water of life.” Few parts of Scotland are more sodden than the island of Islay (pronounced EYE-lah). This is the watery world of Compton MacKenzie’s happy novel Whisky Galore, filmed in 1949 as a rollicking Ealing comedy with the title Tight Little Island. Islay is located at the northern end of the narrow channel that unites Northern Ireland to Southwest Scotland in a Celtic cultural syzygy. The island gets more than its share of the rain brought in by westerly winds off the Atlantic. No surprise then to find a dozen distilleries on Islay, each making a distinctive single malt whiskey on the banks of the island’s peaty streams.

Water is essential. The other necessity is grain to make the malt. Moored alongside the wharves at the distilleries, you will see the ships, dirty British coasters with salt-caked smokestacks, which bring in the barley. The grains are warmed and moistened so that they germinate and generate sugars. Some of the peaty taste of the final liquor comes from the reek of the peat fires which provide the heat. The germinated barley, the malt, is milled and then mashed—brewed in water roughly the temperature of hot coffee. The resulting sweet liquor, full of sugars and all sorts of interesting enzymes, is then made to ferment with living yeast before it is distilled and drawn off into casks to grow old gracefully. As it ages, some of the spirit evaporates and makes the angels happy, but much single malt whiskey also comes to America, where, thanks to lower taxation on alcohol in the United States, it is often cheaper than in its country of origin (about $40 a bottle in these parts).

Single malt whiskey is the characteristic product of a single distillery. Much of it finds its way into the familiar blends of Scotch, where it is mixed with grain whiskey, a spirit produced by a less exacting process. It is the malt element which gives each blend its characteristic taste. Cutty Sark, for instance, a blend which appeals to the American taste for lighter sweeter Scotch, contains a good deal of Islay single malt. It was actually invented during Prohibition and shipped into the States by the redoubtable Captain Bill McCoy, whose name survives in the expression “the real McCoy.”

Blended whiskey is warming in a Minnesota winter, of course, but it is single malts which engage the intelligence as well as the heart. Laphroaig is perhaps the best known of the Islay malts, but it’s definitely an acquired taste—the unkind have compared it to iodine strained through creosote-coated railroad ties. Of them all Bunnahabhain is the most immediately appealing. The name (Gaelic for “mouth of the river”) is easily pronounced: BOON-a-haaven. On the label is an old boy at the wheel of his British coaster. The whiskey is pale gold, sweeter and lighter than most Islay malts perhaps because the spring water reaches this remote and beautiful place through pipes and is therefore not so heavily impregnated with the taste of the surrounding peat. A dram of Bunnahabhain taken before you walk the dog on a summer evening may well lead to a second. It ought to have you, in the words of the old song printed on the bottle, “Westering Home with a song in the air/ Light in the eye and it’s good-bye to cares.”

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

Strong drink has a long association with immorality. There is an engraving of “Gin Lane” in 18th century London by William Hogarth (the artist also responsible for “The Rake’s Progress”) showing a sign: “Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence, clean straw for nothing.” From the same period is “The Beggar’s Opera,” in which assorted villains, cutthroats, footpads, highwaymen, and desperadoes (not to mention pimps and trollops) gather at a pub in one of the British capital’s less fashionable quarters to sing crude drinking songs. You can tell a man who boozes by the company he chooses. I suppose it’s obvious why so many people have made gin rhyme with sin. But intelligent wine-bibbing, it can be argued, actually increases moral refinement. It promotes honest introspection, accuracy and rationality; it promotes moderation.

Think about it. Of all the five senses, taste is the most intimate. Taste is also the sense with the smallest vocabulary. No wonder wine writers are so often driven to peculiar metaphor and periphrasm. My favorite is the observation of Thurber on serving the cooking wine to guests. “A naïve little domestic burgundy; I think you will be surprised at its presumption.” But it is desperation with the inadequacy of the English language that drives us to say that a white wine “smells like wet dog,” or has “a hint of burnt matches in the nose.”

This means that the first quality a serious drinker needs to have is honesty. If he does not note with care what is happening to his palate during the ingestion process, he has not got an earthly chance of describing it accurately. What is more, a mouthful of wine changes its taste all the time from first sip to final swallow (and aftertaste). So a second moral benefit induced by good wine is introspection. The unexamined life is not worth living and the unexamined wine is not worth drinking.

Finally, these other fine qualities will not develop in the mouth or the mind of someone who has had more to drink than is good for them. Shakespeare’s Porter may be right in saying that drink is an equivocator with lechery (“it taketh a man up and it putteth a man down”). In excess, it is an outright enemy of intelligent discrimination, and if we do not discriminate we might as well be swilling White Lightning from a paper bag.

These rather portentous thoughts sprouted on the first decent day of sunshine this extraordinary Spring. Sunshine seemed to indicate Chardonnay, so I fetched out a bottle of Chateau St. Jean Sonoma County Chardonnay (easily available locally for less than $15) and found immediate joy. Let me just say this: The promise of the nose was confirmed by the first bite into the wine, reminiscent of sinking the teeth into a crisp apple, fresh from the tree. I was inspired to open one of those bags of instant salad and grill a small steak. The wine made a pleasing counterpoint to the spinach and rocket, and masked the deadly dullness of iceberg lettuce. The common argot of wine-drinking says you should pair red wines with red meats, but that’s for the simpleminded. This chardonnay’s fruity flavor stood up really well to the meat. If we get any more sensible sunshine this summer (as opposed to burning heat followed by thunderstorms and snow) I will be opening additional bottles. You should too.

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