Category: Columns

Being brought up in a family with three doctors gives one an odd outlook on life. It was not just the anatomy textbooks, with their foggy monochrome photographs, that rubbed shoulders with the wildflower guides and J.B. Priestley novels in the family library. Nor was it only the medical advertisements that came in triplicate by each post, some embellished with color photographs of lurid lesions, others appealing to the more cultural proclivities of the medical profession. I recall a whole series of advertisements for a preparation called Cetiprin, each adorned with a frameable brass-rubbing of a medieval man-at-arms encased in chain mail and plate armor and labeled, “Pity the Plight of the Ancient Knight without Cetiprin.” Cetiprin was meant to cure incontinence.

The most lasting impression was made by Father’s stories of medical school at Edinburgh before the First World War. There was the one about him and his dissecting partner taking a small packet of rare roast beef into the dissecting room. (“George, stop eating the corpse.”) But the most memorable was the tale of the fracture by contrecoup.

One day the body of a sailor was fished out of the Firth of Forth, just north of Edinburgh. It was duly brought to the Royal Infirmary, but no next of kin came forward to claim it. This left the professor of anatomy feeling conflicted (or maybe it was morbid pathology, the medical specialty where no patient ever answers back). The cause of the seaman’s demise was a textbook example of a certain sort of head injury, what is called (as was explained with the sort of professional detail enjoyed by small boys) a fracture by contrecoup: The contusions are on one side of the head, but the break in the bone of the skull is on the other.

The professor wanted this head for his teaching collection. After some weeks, he could wait no longer and had it severed and pickled, consigning the rest of the body to a respectful burial. As luck would have it, the following week the next of kin made contact—auld Jock had been lost at sea, they wondered maybe if … The professor thought fast. He would not want to deprive the bereaved of the chance to see their relative; on the other hand, he did not want to get into trouble. He had the head laid out under a sheet with a decapitated tailor’s dummy extended below it. The next of kin were led in. Gingerly, the professor drew back the sheet to show the face: “Aye, indeed, that’s auld Jock, he was a guid man … ” They turned and began to leave. The professor started a sigh of relief. They turned: “Professor, may we see the little finger of the left hand.” Well-concealed consternation. The professor drew himself up to his full height (was he not the heir of Lord Lister, pioneer of antiseptic surgery, of Sir James Young Simpson, promoter of chloroform anesthesia): “No,” he said in oracular tones and a mild court-Scots accent, “you may not see the little finger of the left hand.”

What stuck in my mind was less the immense dignity of professors (not easy to sustain when what you profess is Latin), but the notion of contrecoup. This sense of unintended consequences became a word to live by. Sometimes, says Charles Williams, it is necessary to build the pyre in one place so that the fire from heaven may descend in another. If you teach people about the history of the Near East in the sixth and seventh centuries, they will be less likely to foul up the modern politics of that fouled-up region.

Sancerre is a white wine that works by contrecoup. It is made from the Sauvignon Blanc grape in the Loire region of western France. Take the 2004 vintage of Justin Monmousseau (available around here for less than twenty dollars). The nose is sweet, not sugary, and yeasty like spring flowers. The taste is overpoweringly—but not unpleasantly—acidic, with acrid overtones like the smell made by Boy Scouts when they strike fire from flints. It is the acid that deals the contrecoup. It promotes salivation (sorry to be so anatomical), but what you taste is not just sourness, it is the fresh sense of flowers that you met first in the smell. This Sancerre is as much an idea as a wine. Drink it with simple things, like salad or good goat’s cheese, but perhaps not with rare roast beef.

Take a piece of paper and write on one side: “The statement on the other side of this page is untrue.” Then turn the piece of paper over and write the same thing on the other side. Then apply for a tenure-track position in a university philosophy department, where they will tell you that this is called the Cretan Paradox and has been puzzling people ever since the sixth century B.C., when a Cretan called Epimenides said “Cretans, always liars.”
What underlay this reputation for mendacity were the tall tales the people of Crete used to tell in antiquity about the immortal gods. Zeus, Greatest and Best, they claimed, had been born on their island and they had concealed him from his divine father Kronos (who wanted to eat him) by doing war –dances ’round his cradle whenever his infant wailing threatened to betray his whereabouts. As Greek myths go, that was unremarkable. What bothered people was the Cretans’ further claim that Zeus had also died on the island and was buried on snow-capped Mount Ida, in a tomb marked by the inscription ZAN KRONOU—Zeus the son of Kronos. So much for immortality.
Even in more recent times Crete seems an island larger than life. Take the tales about Cretan resistance to the German occupation during World War II told by an older generation of classical scholars, some of whom shared the tough life of the Cretan andartes, sleeping in caves and shepherds’ huts, scragging German soldiers, and breakfasting on ouzo. A fine film from the 1950s tells one such tale. Ill Met by Moonlight relates in atmospheric monochrome how a posse of Cretan partisans and a pair of young British officers kidnapped a German general as he drove home to his headquarters one spring evening in 1944, then led him through the mountains to a motorboat that carried him to Cairo and a lengthy stay as a guest of His Britannic Majesty. (It is good sometimes to see a film that does not suggest that the war was won by the unaided efforts of John Wayne.)
Both of the British officers involved wrote accounts of this operation. One of them, Patrick Leigh Fermor, described how, in a pause on the trek across the island, the general looked up at the peak of Mount Ida and spoke sotto voce lines the Roman poet Horace had written about the distant view of mountains seen from Rome in the days before pollution: “Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte.” (You see how Mount Soracte stands, bright white with deep snow.) One of his captors completed the quotation. “Ach so, Herr Major,” said the general. “For a long moment,” wrote Leigh Fermor, “the war had ceased to exist.”
What put me in mind of all this was a good-hearted red wine from Crete called Kretikos. It is bottled by the well-known Greek firm of Boutari and the 2005 vintage may be had around here for as little as ten dollars. This is one of those pellucid wines that make glass shine from the inside out; its crimson color is not unlike that of Pinot Noir. At first, the center of the taste also recalls the sweetness of Pinot Noir, bracketed here between a fine initial bite and a pleasantly tannic aftertaste. Revisited after a day or two, the sugars have been absorbed, but the wine retains fine muscular strength.
Whatever philosophers say, truth is seldom pure and never simple. The essential truth about this wine is that, like the great red wines of Bordeaux, it is a blend of two varieties of grape. The Mantilaria, widely planted in the isles of Greece (where burning Sappho had her fun) is relatively low in alcohol, high in tannin and a pleasing ruby hue. The Kotsifali grape is more characteristically Cretan; the wine it makes has more sugar and alcohol, and can go a little brown ’round the edges, like aged claret. They make a happy marriage.
This Cretan wine would taste good with all sorts of meat. It happened to be Easter time when the party that kidnapped the general arrived on Crete to make their preparations. The shepherd they were with selected a lamb, and it was expertly roasted on a spit. They drank quantities of wine—drawn from the barrel, not bottled by Boutari—then lined up colored eggs and used them for target practice: “Christ is risen!” Bang … “He is truly risen!”… Bang. Good wine tells no lies.

I have often thought that the Forty Martyrs of Sebasteia should be the patron saints of Minnesota. Never mind that they are most likely mythical; they can stand for all the other martyrs the Romans executed in the first three centuries A.D. And the myth is certainly appropriate to our chilly state.
The Forty, it is said, were Roman legionaries serving on the Empire’s Euphrates frontier in what is now eastern Turkey when they were given the command to offer sacrifice to the Roman gods. When they refused, they were ordered to stand out in the middle of a frozen lake ’til they changed their minds. One of them did actually give way, legging it to the shore and then to a nearby bathhouse, which had been fired up by the detachment’s commanding officer in order to provide an allurement to apostasy. He promptly exploded. And the bathhouse keeper no less promptly ran out onto the ice to make the number of martyrs back up to forty. What then? Crowns, of course, descended from heaven onto the martyrs’ frozen heads, to the accompaniment of unearthly music and the crashing applause of the first-night audience. Martyrdom on Ice: If Minnesota doesn’t like the title, you could try it on Broadway.
An appropriate saintly patron is also apparently being sought for the Internet. The heavenly protector of Al Gore’s invention will probably be Saint Isidore, bishop of Seville in southern Spain in the early seventh century, and compiler of a work that swiftly became the medieval equivalent of Wikipedia. The Internet and Isidore surely deserve each other; Isidore’s Etymologies are replete with secondhand information, difficult to navigate, and often inaccurate. While the Internet …
What Isidore says about wine, for instance, is a characteristic blend of the derivative, the unpalatable, and the obvious. He alludes to Falernian, the famous sweet white wine from ancient Campania, which he had read about in Roman authors like Horace but is hardly likely to have savored himself. Beverages he is more likely to have actually sampled sound rather less pleasant—for instance, Oenomelum, a sickly syrup compounded of wine and honey.
But then, just as you give up on him, Isidore displays a gem of genuine interest. He mentions the wines of Gaza, carried from the Holy Land as ballast in the ships bringing pilgrims home from Jerusalem. This is interesting because archaeologists find the distinctive, dumpy flasks that held Gaza wine at excavations of post-Roman sites all over Western Europe. In fact, they find them as far away as the southern coast of England, where grand beach barbecues seem to have greeted the arrival of merchant ships coming from the eastern Mediterranean. It is good when the written story fits the physical facts. In fact, Gaza wine is important as evidence that Mediterranean trade long survived the end of the Roman Empire, until the Arab invasions swept through the lands east and south of the Mediterranean, reaching, within a century of his death, southern Spain where Isidore had lived and written.
Funnily enough, Isidore has nothing to say about the wines of his native Spain. It seems that they were no better publicized in the seventh century than they are now. That may be why they are such an excellent value when you do find them.
Try, for instance, the 2004 vintage of Protocolo, which costs less than seven dollars hereabouts. This wine comes from the high plains of La Manchuela in the bottom right-hand corner of Spain, an area with extremes of climate that the Forty Martyrs would have found familiar. The color is a deepest red, like the workers’ flag (which shrouded oft our martyred dead)—this area was a stronghold of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. The grape is the Tempranillo, the variety made famous by Rioja, but Protocolo is innocent of the turpsy oak associated with those famous wines. This is a well-balanced and fruity wine with a firm scrunch in the center of the taste. This was pleasing with a piece of steak and tasted just as good with pasta. One can imagine it accompanying paella. At that price one could even mull it with suitable spices. If you do, be careful not to boil off the alcohol (there’s plenty). Anything to keep winter at a distance.

Heaven knows the European Community (or whatever they are calling it this week) fails to warm the cockles of the English heart. (How would you like life in Minnesota regulated in detail by a bloated bureaucracy, living on expense accounts in a foreign land?) But one of its pleasanter side effects has been a scheme of international town-twinning—“Partnerstädte in Europa,” the bumper stickers call it. Sometimes the partnerships between cities in different countries are rather elegant. Oxford, for instance, is twinned with Leiden, seat of the oldest university in the Netherlands.
Indeed, sometimes these seem to be matches made in heaven rather than in Brussels. The committees responsible have been rather kind in twinning the small town I come from in southwest England, Tiverton in Devon, with Chinon, an even smaller town on a tributary of the Loire River in western France. I am not sure what we did to deserve this good fortune. Although Tiverton is more than twice its size, Chinon has by far the more distinguished history. It was a stomping ground of Joan of Arc, Rabelais, Cardinal Richelieu, and King Henry II of England. Tiverton was a place where the medieval Earls of Devon stayed to hunt stags; it then grew into an industrial center that did very nicely thank you in the early modern cloth trade—solid and lovely—but not the scene of great romantic deeds.
In fact, the only thing I can think of that the two places have in common is that each has a twelfth-century castle that towers high over a river. Tiverton Castle, though, preserves little from the Middle Ages. The Parliamentary armies captured it during the English Civil War (a lucky cannon ball broke the chain holding up the drawbridge) and they did not leave a lot standing.
The remains of Chinon Castle, on the other hand, are massive. And its origins were royal—it was built by Henry II of England (who was also Count of Anjou). Connoisseurs of cinema will know it as the setting for The Lion in Winter, where Peter O’Toole, impersonating Henry II in robes remarkably ragged for a monarch, trades swift Stoppard-like repartee with Katherine Hepburn posing as a rather unregal Eleanor of Aquitaine, “that fertile and fateful female,” as my old tutor used to call her. The only hint that the characters in this film are anything more than spoiled celebrities is a long shot near the beginning showing the castle massive and mysterious from across the water. Shakespeare did royalty better than this. (So did Helen Mirren in The Queen.)
The wines made around the two towns are not really comparable, either. Tiverton lies on the same latitude as the Moselle River. So there is every reason it should produce good wine, but I have never seen our local Yearlstone vintages for sale in the United States. The Loire Valley, on the other hand, produces more different sorts of wine than anywhere in France. They range in flavor from the Granny Smith bite of Muscadet to the dark mysteries of red Saumur. After a hot summer, Rosé d’Anjou comes somewhere in between—light, fruity, and refreshing.
Try a delightful rosé made just upstream from Henry II’s crenellated residence. Charles Joguet’s Chinon Rosé 2005 (just over sixteen dollars hereabouts) is made wholly from Cabernet Franc grapes, the same variety used to make red Saumur, but for the rosé the juice is taken from the must (the crushed grapes) before the skins have had time to color it much. The result looks just like the pink juice of mountain-ash berries as one boils them down to make rowan jelly, the perfect foil for roast lamb or venison. The wine also has the same sequence of tastes that you find in rowan berry juice—fruit followed by delicious, long, waxy bitterness. Think pink grapefruit without the acid, but with a little tingle in the taste. This wine drunk with a venison paste would have revived a royal palate jaded by a difficult day inventing the Assize of Novel Disseisin; with appropriate charcuterie, it might refresh a Brussels apparatchik after hours in committee-making regulations about straight bananas. And for us, in the dark time of the year, it could fuel an entire dinner party, from smoked salmon through rack of lamb to a baveuse wheel of Brie. Vive les Angevins.

After twelve happy years in Oxford, the happy year I spent in Cambridge was a far greater culture shock than (several years later) coming to Minnesota. The first thing I learned was that in Cambridge, it is not polite to be rude to people. If you say, “I read your book; what a lot of rot,” they think you mean it, acute sense of humor failure occurs, and you will have offended against the precept that “a gentleman is one who never gives offense unintentionally.”

But there is something about Cambridge books I never entirely understood: It is the emblem that the grandest offerings from Cambridge University Press bear upon their title page. Nobody has ever satisfactorily explained to me why scholars consulting The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire or an edition of Epistulae ad Familiares should encounter—up front, close and personal—an oval embracing an etching of the upper half of a naked woman displaying, for universal cynosure, what the novelist Thackeray refers to as “famous frontal development.”

For the learned, Cambridge University Press provides a cryptic clue. Around the oval run the words “Hinc Lucem Et Pocula Sacra,” which my third-year Latin class would render rightly as “Light and Holy Drinks From Here.” If this is an allusion to the excellence of Cambridge college port, I could not possibly disagree; port is one of the more splendid of the superficial similarities between the two ancient English seats of learning. But I fear it is a reference to the famous frontal development. The literal translation of alma mater is, after all, wet nurse; an alumnus is one who has imbibed in the way that nature intended from a lady not his natural mother. (Thackeray indeed was a Cambridge alumnus.) The holy drinks may be on the university, but they are strictly nonalcoholic. Pity. Who wants learning when there is a possibility of port?

Port rhymes with thought. Unlike the great wines of Bordeaux, port does not absolutely demand that you switch your mind on while drinking it, but, like an intelligent woman, it does furnish substantially more pleasure if you give it your thoughtful attention. Thought requires information. The best place I know to find out painlessly about the finer points of wine is Jancis Robinson’s Oxford Companion to Wine. A magnificent new edition, just out, is a must this Christmas for the oenophile who has everything. From the rosé-tinted pages of front matter to the tables at the end (did you know that Kyrgyzstan produces 951,000 U.S. gallons of wine a year? Rather a lot for a mostly Muslim land), this is a riot of delicious information. You can savor swift pen portraits of famous connoisseurs, such as Robert M. Parker Jr., whose system of scoring wines numerically has been “easily and delightedly grasped by Americans familiar with high school grades,” and Hugh Johnson. You can grieve over phylloxera, wonder at the possible taste of the Roman wine coolers described by Pliny, or come to grips with the difference between Ruby and Tawny, Vintage and Late Bottled Vintage port.

And while you are about it, sip a glass of Fonseca ten-year-old Tawny Port, available hereabouts for a little over $30 (about half the price of The Oxford Companion to Wine). Tawny port lacks the rich, oily glory of vintage port, but it lacks also the rich, oily price. It needs none of the TLC, cellaring, or meticulous decanting without which vintage port—the product of a single outstanding year, long-matured in dusty bottles—is simply wasted. Tawny port has aged in wood but does not taste of it. The color is comparatively light; there is a whiff of grappa in the nose followed by fruity sweetness. On the palate there is warmth, a good grip, and a lingering pleasantness. Go on, have a second glass.

It would be genial to savor this port after dinner. Or, let us be honest, to keep it behind the filing cabinet for those long, cold Minnesota Saturdays when inspiration is frozen, when you stare, snow-blind, at a blank computer screen wondering how best to use the next precious moments of research time, when even the title page of The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire has ceased to please. Put it on a billboard: Fonseca, freeing the ice floes of the scholarly imagination since 1822. Hinc vere lucem et pocula sacra.