Category: Columns

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.