Category: Columns

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.