Category: Columns

Of all the places I have ever lived, Minneapolis is the most confusing. One might have thought it would be otherwise. It was meant to be laid out, after all, on a Jeffersonian grid. Yet one cycles down the street, blithely confident that the 3800 block of Sheridan Avenue South will lead ineluctably into the 3700 block, only to find that an unkind providence has interposed a lake, a railroad, or a freeway. Reason, one feels, has been defeated by Nature, or at least by Life.
Occasionally, it is true, Minneapolis gives inklings of the organic process of its growth to the hard-pressed cyclist trying to find the house where he has been invited to dinner. If he bumps and rattles his way over the monstrous potholes in the southeast quadrant of Lake Calhoun Parkway, he will come to Richfield Road, originally the wagon route from the infant Minneapolis to the neighboring township of Richfield (which originally included modern Edina). On a good day, the remains of the streetcar rails can be made out beneath the asphalt of broad old thoroughfares such as Portland Avenue. But in Edina the farms that defined the landscape in the late nineteenth century are gone. Only their names survive in Grimes and Browndale avenues.

After trying to get the Minnesota landscape into larger perspective, I went to see the Jeffers Petroglyphs down beyond Mankato. These lively scribings are etched (by who knows what anonymous hand) onto rocks that slope and tilt like the bed of a prehistoric ocean. The wind passes through the prairie grass like cat’s-paws at sea. Here at last I found a sense of the size of the state.

If these waves of prairie have the breadth of an ocean, Mont Ventoux in the South of France has the height of a tsunami. From its summit you can see for miles (all right, kilometers). The fourteenth-century poet Petrarch discovered this when he climbed it—possibly the earliest example of mountaineering, or at least hill walking, done for no other reason than the fun of it. Not that Petrarch was capable of anything so innocent as fun. He took with him a copy of Saint Augustine’s Confessions, which he duly opened on the summit (at random, he claims), and conveniently found a passage that assured him that landscape is less important than the soul: “Men go to admire the high mountains, the vast floods of the sea, the huge streams of the rivers, the circumference of the ocean, and the revolutions of the stars—and desert themselves.”
The modern climber will descry on the southern slopes of Mont Ventoux gravel terraces planted with vineyards sheltered from northerly winds by the mountainous bulk behind them. One of the Côtes de Ventoux wineries that has had a remarkable run of good years recently is Château Pesquié. The red wine made here by the Chaudière family called Ch. Pesquié les Terrasses is a round fruity Rhône. It is composed of slightly less syrah, the grape variety most often associated with Rhône reds, and slightly more grenache, the variety familiar from the wines of Châteauneuf du Pape, about twenty miles to the west. One can confidently commend it for consumption with cheese and meat (including turkey).

Claret, they say, is wine for the head; Burgundy and Rhône, wine for the heart. Even a poet as sententious and self-absorbed as Petrarch would, one feels, have been able to allow a wine as appealing as this one to penetrate the formidable defenses of his self-consciousness. Perhaps, too, it could have inspired him to appreciate the pleasures of landscape without his having to decide in advance what he was going to think about it.

One would have thought it was impossible to pay too much for food. Life, after all, is not the same without it. Yet all over the developed world, farmers are hard up. The English newspapers made hay some weeks ago with a story about farmers’ wives in the Hardy Country, one of the most picture-postcard parts of Britain, who are obliged to advertise their charms on the Internet for the enjoyment of foreign tourists (“Come and Pluck an English Rose”) in order—if you will permit the expression—to make ends meet.

Government subsidies, meant to solve the conundrum of keeping food cheap without making farmers impossibly poorer than their fellow countrymen, do nothing for Third World farmers, who are thus excluded from markets. Farm subsidies are not, in the final analysis, for the long-suffering farmer; they are for eaters who would rather spend money on something else. God alone knows the solution to this—how many economists does it take to change a lightbulb?

But one can hardly hold up for admiration the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union (or whatever the Common Market is being called this week), even though more than forty-six percent of the official expenditure of the European Union goes toward agriculture. The Common Market started as a deal by which German industry paid for the picturesque traditions of French farming. They put the European Parliament at Strasbourg in Alsace to symbolize this concord. Whatever the symbolism, the practicalities are truly remarkable. For one week each month, the 626 members, their staff (who otherwise work in Brussels), their secretariat (based in Luxembourg), and their translators (into and out of eleven official languages) decamp to Alsace. Imagine moving the Minnesota Legislature up to Duluth one week in four, all the year round.

Strasbourg is certainly central to Old Europe. Caught between the river Rhine in Germany and the Vosges Mountains in France, it enjoys a relatively dry and continental climate. It has been fought over by armies from East and West at least since the neo-pagan Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate defeated a Germanic confederation there in 357. After the war of 1870, Alsace became German (Elsass); in 1918 it became French once again. Hence the old joke about Alsace wine being made of German grapes using French methods—which means they do, or do not, wash their feet (adjust joke according to prejudice).

It is true that many of the Alsace grape varieties, such as riesling and sylvaner, are also widely grown in Germany. Alsace is in fact the only part of France producing first-rate wine where the grape variety rather than the region is the most prominent item on a wine label. The grape most readily associated with Alsace is the gewürztraminer, a variety actually related to muscat grapes and made into wine with a strong smell of elderflowers, melons, or lychees (pick your own comparison), tasting remarkably like its own fresh grapes.

As in Germany, some growers leave the best grapes on the vines until they grow the “noble rot” and are made into sweeter wines labeled “Vendange Tardive” (German Spätlese). But most Alsace gewürztraminer is made into table wine, clean, dry and spicy, fermented in steel rather than in oak, until all the residual sugar has been absorbed and the wine has a fresh bright finish. This is perhaps the only wine that can stand up to curry.

It is certainly good with turkey. As it costs a fraction of what you would pay for the fine wines of Burgundy, the wine region closest to the southwest of Alsace, you might want to stock up on it in anticipation of Thanksgiving. I would not answer for its compatibility with marshmallow dip or lime jelly. So buy a bottle now and practice.

I hope you are enjoying the new Harry Potter. Such a wealth of invention. And so witty. No profound psychological penetration, I suppose, but who ever expected that in a school story or a murder mystery? J.K. Rowling may not be Jane Austen, but then neither is Dorothy Sayers (who made the error of falling in love with her detective) or P.D. James (so much blood, such clever use of the Book of Common Prayer), Edmund Crispin (the thinking man’s Dorothy Sayers), or Agatha Christie (of whom to say that she has cardboard characters is to attribute to cardboard an excess of sensation).

Even without psychological subtlety, Rowling has conjured up wonderful characters. Anyone employed in education will recognize Professor Umbridge, an administrator from the Ministry of Magic who cannot herself teach her way out of a paper bag but is sent in to reform Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. “She drafted a bit of anti-werewolf legislation two years ago that makes it almost impossible for him to get a job,” says one professor about a brilliant colleague. The enemy of the Umbridges of this world is imagination.

And that is what Rowling has in superabundance. This is not teenybopper novelty-shop witchcraft. Still less is it the nasty world of black masses and witches’ sabbaths. I have never heard anyone miss a point so comprehensively as the earnest, amiable, and literal-minded evangelist on NPR who objected to the Harry Potter tales as promoters of the black arts by quoting sentences out of context, treating the novels in fact in the way that some people treat their Bibles—as if they were instruction manuals for lawn mowers. The bishop of London caught the spirit of the thing when he said he would happily appoint a chaplain for Hogwarts any day Professor Dumbledore requested one.

Of course, not every exercise of the imagination is good. Films like The Patriot propagate a view of the American Revolution that fails to acknowledge it as a civil war between two sets of American colonists, and so perpetuates hostility toward foreigners (and lobsters) that the world might be better off without. Braveheart irresponsibly fomented political hatred within the United Kingdom (think how well it did at the box office).

Yet Harry Potter generates sheer eutrapelia (handy word, that). It recalls the playful Roman poet Ovid. Scarcely surprising, seeing that Rowling (like The Rake himself) was a Latin major in college. Now she is the richest woman in England, richer than the Queen, God bless her (both of them).

Which just shows that imagination has practical consequences. In dreams begin responsibilities. Byron dreamed that Greece might yet be free. His dream formed part of the Grand Design or Big Idea that made Greece, in 1829, the first independent nation to be carved out of the old Ottoman Empire. The consequences of the long, slow disintegration of that Empire we are still living with, not least in Iraq.

Half a century after Greek independence, in Thessaloniki, then an Ottoman city, Yiannis Boutari founded the wine concern that still bears his name. Of course, Greeks have been making wine ever since Homer’s heroes sailed the wine-dark sea. But only recently did it become commercially available in glass bottles like Boutari’s.

There is something of the smell of a wooded Greek hillside about the red wine they make in the Naoussa in northern Greece, fifty miles from Thessaloniki. The grape is called xinomauro, which is Greek for acid black. Ancient and modern Greeks alike call red wine black—after all, it only looks red in a glass. Sure enough Boutari Naoussa is a good dark-ruby color. The taste is robust, not unlike cabernet, and the price, about $12, is a good value.

No need to clutter your appreciation by recalling that this comes from the same area as Alexander the Great—the man with the grandest designs in all the ancient world. Taste is its own idea. The taste buds are, after all, the swiftest messengers on the royal road from reality to the imagination.

Though it is nearly 20 years ago now, some of us are old enough to remember the Official Preppy Handbook. It told girls called Muffy how to adjust their pearls, push pennies into their penny loafers and pursue men in tartan trousers (which they called plaid pants).

The other day I came across the British equivalent, the Sloane Ranger Handbook (Sloane Square is a smart part of London, near Harrod’s grand emporium). From it, Caroline and Henry Sloane discover how to get green Wellington boots, where to study Cordon Bleu cookery, and which pack of hounds to hunt foxes with. For Americans, it offers a rare chance to consider whether our two great nations are divided by more than a common language.

They are. What the great Augustine would call the “loves” of Sloanes and Preppies are quite distinct. Consider attitudes to the land; in England rural is smart, in America it means hick. Or think of smell. Caroline and Henry think it sad that Americans do not smell of anything. All those showers kill smell dead; far better to wallow in a steamy bath. Caroline married Henry largely on account of his smell, a delicious amalgam of pipe smoke, Labradors, and old leather.

The English simmer (where I write) is ripe with aromas. I do not refer to the overpowering stench of prevarication emerging from a government that persuaded many Members of Parliament to vote for its war in Iraq by announcing we could all be blown up at 45 minutes notice by Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction. The public has a strong sense that if Her Majesty’s ministers were so sure these large but elusive weapons existed, they ought at least to be able to say where they are. This is a smell that will not go away anytime soon.

Thank God there are pleasanter airs abroad. Freshness rises from the pale green grass of the aftermath, where the crows are pecking among the bales of new-mown hay. The sweet peas are flowering, as powerful as brandy, as honeyed as Sauternes. But perhaps the most characteristic smell comes from the black currants—not blackberries, the autumn fruit that looks like raspberries dipped in ink, but black currants, Ribes nigrum, like small cranberries, growing on thornless bushes with leaves like vines.

In the sunshine, they are as pungent as skunks but a whole pile pleasanter, slightly oily (reminiscent, in fact, of the oil boys used to drip onto their electric trains), sweet, sour, and fruity all at the same time. Wine made from the sauvignon blanc grape, especially Pouilly-Fumé from the Loire in western France, is often said to smell of black currants.

The black currant is the most widely grown fruit in Europe. John Tradescant the Elder brought it to England from Central Europe in the early 17th century, in time for it to be transported to the American colonies. It has never been widely grown in America.

Forestedge Winery in Laporte, Minnesota, however, is said to be adding black currant to its range of wines made from local soft fruit and berries. Look out for it.

In the meantime, try a summer aperitif called Kir. Quarter-fill a wine glass with crème de cassis, the liqueur made in Burgundy from black currants and far too sticky to drink on its own. Top it with dry white wine. In Burgundy, they use aligoti (the name of a grape), but you could try anything white, dry, and light. With champagne it becomes Kir Royale. Watch the pretty pink swirls, like marble in motion, then sip judiciously as the sun sinks, the loon calls, and the dog falls into the lake for the nth time (where n is a large whole number).

Kir is named after a priest from Burgundy, Canon Kir, a hero of the resistance and then for many years, in the Fourth Republic, mayor of Dijon. The good canon’s name may be seen on the bottles of the premixed version of Kir, but if you cannot find them, it is easy to mix your own. There are few fruitier ways of keeping down the bill for preprandial libation. Besides, it stretches a hand of friendship across the Atlantic, and that cannot be bad.