Category: Wine

There is a Gresham’s Law in music; bad tunes drive out good. On Sunday you hear a competent choir render a subtle and melodious anthem by Herbert Howells. You are then obliged to join in a repetitive praise chorus of the sort whose words and tune suggest that the righteous are those who have enjoyed a double lobotomy. Guess which piece you are still humming come Wednesday.

Of all the world’s annoying tunes, even worse than the song that never ends (it goes on and on, my friend), the ditty that annoys this noisy oyster most is the one about this land being my land. It’s not just the uninventive tune and bumpy rhythm, it is also the grotesquely all-embracing claim made by the words. They are as vapid as the line of Schiller made famous by being belted out at every performance of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony, Diesen Küss der ganzen Welt—This Kiss to the Whole World. How could anyone, even a tenor going all out and backed by the full faith and credit of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, possibly offer osculatory satisfaction to the entire population of the planet at a single instant? I ask you.

Love of land, like kissing, has to be specific. “Breathes there the man with soul so dead/Who never to himself hath said/This is my own, my native land!” Not that it has to be one’s native land. Generations of northern Europeans have loved the Mediterranean; for every Browning that prefers British buttercups (“the little children’s dower”) to the gaudy melon-flower, there is a Goethe with an ache for the land where bloom the lemon trees (though not all anatomize their Sehnsucht with the same cloying attentiveness).

Love of specific places, like all love, can lead to anguish. Think of Derry’s walls. Or consider the pain (for all concerned) of Serbian attachment to Kosovo, scene of their tragic defeat by the Turks in 1389. You have only to see Behind Enemy Lines (or read a decent newspaper) to know about the horrors of Srbrenica; there are websites maintained by professional Byzantine scholars that catalog the devastation recently wrought upon medieval Serbian art and architecture.

Any human love can be distorted. But in a pure form, the essence of a place appreciated for itself, without emulation or rancor, is a thing of beauty. Wine folk have a word (French, naturally) for the unique quality of a particular place that alone can produce a specific complexity of flavor. It is terroir, the character of a particular piece of terrain, its soil and geology, its climate and micro-climates, the entire physical condition of the place.

Nowhere is terroir more celebrated than in Burgundy, that celebrated swath of eastern France, which produces some of the most expensive wines in the world. The geology here is Jurassic limestone (the Jurassic Era was not invented by Mr. Spielberg but is named after the nearby Jura Mountains), but there are fine gradations of soil chemistry and chalkiness, not only from north to south but also up and down the broad, vine-clad hillsides.

Generations of agricultural ingenuity, beginning with the monks of medieval Cluny and Citeaux, have married the Pinot Noir grape to this complex landscape. In more recent times the vineyards have belonged to a maze of small proprietors, a complexity reflected in the system by which their wines are named, each “grand cru” having its own characteristic terroir and taste. I shall never forget the concatenation of complexity and power issuing from a glass of Corton Les Marechauudes 1964.

Alas, such experiences, at least for the likes of you and me, are rare. If you have not heard of a grand cru Burgundy, you cannot afford it. But there is red Burgundy of a more generic character that can also give great pleasure, especially with cheese or meat. The good and the best are not enemies. It is quite possible to enjoy a Burgundy Passetoutgrains, like the excellent example from Robert Chevillon available locally for less than $15, without insisting that place does not matter and thereby declaring war on terroir.

Nor does it involve assenting to the old saw that “good wine needs no bush.” Burgundy Passe-toutgrains is made mostly of the Pinot Noir grape, though it is permitted to add some Gamay, the lighter-flavored grape characteristic of the Beaujolais region. Buy some, you’ll like it. Well-made wines, unlike cheap music (“extraordinary how potent cheap music is”) and bumptious politicians, do permit variety.

The late summer evenings take my mind back thirty years to a leafy lane on the Devon-Dorset border, the western edge of the countryside familiar to readers of Thomas Hardy’s novels. We had spent the day otter-hunting, the finest of all forms of venery, requiring intimate understanding of the habits of the otter, but offering little threat to the animal’s life. The sport, alas, was on its last legs. A combination of the pesticide DDT (causing sterility all the way up the food chain) and the escape of American mink from fur farms (causing loss of habitat) had reduced English otter numbers to a condition from which they have taken a whole generation to recover. Nevertheless, we had enjoyed a grand day not merely looking at nature but being part of it.

Now we stood in a grassy, gritty lane as the last of the sunlight filtered sideways through the elms (there were still elms then), waiting for the rickety old red van, filled with straw, which would take the hounds home. The pure-bred otterhounds, large, lop-eared friendly beasts with Afro-curly coats, nuzzled our thighs, hoping we still had some of our lunchtime sandwiches left. The Master of the Hounds, a genial man with an outdoor face and the finest note on a hunting horn I have ever heard, had fallen into conversation with an older man who had come upon us in the lane.

It was the older man who caught and held my eye. He was tall and dignified, dressed in the English country manner: cloth cap, good tweed coat, corduroy or cavalry twill trousers (I can’t remember which). They talked of the usual country things—the harvest, the weather, the local fox hounds—though not, I noticed, of their families. A cloud of reserve seemed to hang over their kindly courtesies, as each spoke with studied care. Eventually the older man resumed his walk and the Master turned to us. “That was Colonel Dugdale,” he said softly. “He did everything for those girls.”

Everything promptly fell into place. The newspapers had been full of one Bridget Rose Dugdale, who in the course of getting a degree from Oxford and a doctorate from London University, had got the idea that her life should be spent supporting the cause of the Irish Republican Army. At the time the IRA was short of cash; no doubt the Irish bars in certain American cities were not taking enough in and Colonel Qadhafi of Libya was feeling parsimonious. Anyway, Dr. Dugdale burgled her father’s country house and stole the family treasures. Later she was one of a gang that broke into a big house near Dublin and made off with some really good pictures, including a Vermeer. The thing about Vermeers is that there are not very many of them—perhaps thirty-six. The old Dutchman painted them to give mankind joy, not to provide collateral for the purchase of armaments.

I am not clever enough to debate the ins and outs of the Irish Question. What lingers in the mind is the immense sadness which surrounded the father. No wonder he was reticent, even by English standards. More than anything it was his hopes, it seemed to me, that had been stolen from him.

To have your hope taken away is not natural. It is not an everyday tragedy, the sort of sadness that Hardy, more than most poets, perceived beneath the decencies of country life. Losing hope is like losing the companionship of your shadow. This seemed to me a tragedy caused by an idea. The Turks have a saying, balik bashdan koka— “the fish begins stinking from the head.” There’s nothing harmless about ideas.

Good then to commend to you a wine that goes straight to the heart. It is a Pinot Noir from California, but drunk blind you would think you were in the presence of a burgundy as elegant as Proust’s Madame de Guermantes. The pellucid red, pale around the edges, is the color of good burgundy; it makes the polish on your glass shine brighter, not like the oily integument of port, still less the limpid trout-stream blue of gin. There is a whiff of oak, a slight and pleasing sweetness, and a lingering wininess which rises right through the sinuses as though you were Caruso or Gigli projecting a top “D” from between your eyebrows (any tenor will tell you what I mean). This nectar is the 1998 vintage from Seven Peaks (no, not Twin Peaks), a winery in the Central Coast region of California. It would go well with any mellow cheese, say Stilton, Gorgonzola, or Brie. May you mellow well with it into autumn.

You can find the best-looking man in Minnesota, my female colleagues tell me, at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. He is well over six feet tall, poses naked, and has a relaxed, arrogant look about him—there’s that jutty chin that women find irresistible. I am led to believe (by the same authorities) that the view from the rear is particularly gratifying—this baby got back, as my daughter’s favorite rapster once said.

And perfect proportions. In fact, mathematically exact proportions; every one of his measurements is a planned and precise multiple of one of his knuckles (or digital phalanges, as they call them in the trade). Man is the measure of all things, as Protagoras said. Nothing illustrates more elegantly than this muscular specimen the ancient Greek conviction that the basis of beauty, indeed of all reality, is actually mathematical.

Before you ask, we will never know how many digital phalanges were allotted to the part of him which was most masculine; it must have broken off some time in the last couple of thousand years. The plow-gash on his left thigh looks pretty painful as well.

This is not one of your modern males, with an intense and sensitive inner life. It is impossible to discern what he is thinking, beyond perhaps that he feels relaxed and confident. A knee and an elbow are bent, the latter to hold a no-longer-extant spear (hence his name, the Doryphoros or Spear-Bearer). Despite the severed tree stump behind him, he does not seem as dim as Paul Bunyan. One imagines him as frozen poetry in motion, like an Olympic athlete: elegant in action but inarticulate when faced with a gabbling journalist.

Beauty here is only skin deep. But what a skin—smooth white Pentelic marble (a Greek marble, though he is a Roman copy of a long-lost Greek original). You may think marble is merely parboiled limestone, of no more interest than potatoes. For Greeks and Romans it was a pleasure to be savored like wine. They looked at the green marble of Thessaly and saw in its white and yellow flecks the flowers and pasture on the spring hillsides from which it was cut. The more decadent emperors enjoyed building baths faced with the creamy stone quarried from the island of Skyros, with its distinctive gold and maroon veins, the colors of the Golden Gophers. (Could that be why Skyrian marble was used for the staircases in the Minnesota State Capitol?)

A plainer creamy marble came from the island of Paros. Its noble simplicity and calm grandeur belies the wild life enjoyed by its ancient inhabitants. Lesbos might be famous for luxury and the poetess Sappho, but for the real strong stuff one turns to Archilochus, the poet of Paros. Too bad his works survive only in fragments. But you will get the idea from the title of a lecture about one of his recently rediscovered poems: “Last Tango on Paros.”

Nowadays Paros is also home to wine marketed by Boutari, the best-known of all Greek wine makers. (Mr. Boutari is known also as a campaigner against dancing bears, but that is another story.) Unusually, this wine is red and robust, not white or resinated (retsina is surely one of those pleasures that are best enjoyed in the land of their origin); it is made from the distinctive Greek grape Xinómavro (“acid black”), with a strong, consistent flavor and a slightly brandified twang at the end.

Its taste, indeed, is monochromatic enough to allow one to mix it with water in the ancient manner, in a krater or mixing bowl. (Just as “crater,” as in volcano, comes from krater because they are the same shape, so “acetabulum”—for the hip-socket —comes from the ancient name for little bowls that Greeks and Romans put vinegar in). Only barbarians drank their wine neat. Do you think the drinkers and thinkers at Plato’s Symposium could have been half so witty if they were in a condition that would have rendered them incapable of operating a motor chariot?

So sit back, add a little water if you wish, and watch the marbly patterns swirl around your glass (or red-figured skyphos). You can do this while you watch the Olympics if you like. For myself, I would rather be among the cypress trees on a Hellenic hillside, balancing the aromas of pine and sunshine, of crushed thyme underfoot, and a whole lamb spitted and roasting succulently to celebrate the Greek festival of the Dormition of the Mother of God.

Why do people admire Napoleon? I don’t mean the French—they have reasons of their own for boosting Bonaparte, such as a dearth of more recent political heroes. But what inspires so many ordinary Anglophones in their cloying fascination for the great dictator? It’s not just the sticky puff-pastries and the Napoleon brandy (but what has that to do with Napoleon?), nor the English eccentrics who put In Memoriam notices for him on appropriate anniversaries in what these days passes for the Personal Column of the London Times.

Something more sinister runs through the websites devoted to Napoleon—dozens of them when last I looked at Google—adulation of a species of power rooted in populism, fed by violence, and dressed in glamour. It would not be fair to condemn Napoleon for his most effusive modern admirer, Bokassa I, former ruler of the Central African Empire. It is said that after he was finally ousted from power, his freezer was found filled with human flesh.

Napoleon was not that bad. But the dapper little French tyrant forms quite a contrast with his most persistent opponent, that amiable old duffer George III. Maybe “Farmer George” should have noticed sooner than he did that his North American subjects were falling out among themselves—though surely it was equally unreasonable of John Hancock to expect His Majesty to read his signature, however big it was written, from the far side of the Atlantic.

Of course there were contemporaries who saw through Napoleon. Beethoven withdrew the dedication of his Third Symphony, the Eroica, when Napoleon crowned himself emperor. Dr. Stephen Maturin’s passion for rescuing his native Catalonia from the Corsican corporal inspired him to serve as a surgeon in the Royal Navy and to star in Master and Commander (wonderful film, all those chaps getting really wet). The Duke of Wellington admitted that Napoleon’s hat on the battlefield was worth forty thousand men, but also said (with his customary damning pithiness—Earl Stanhope’s Conversations with Wellington is one of the finest collections of one-liners in the language) that Napoleon was no gentleman.

It was Wellington’s army’s long campaigns on the Iberian Peninsula (aided by indigenous guerrillas—which is how the word entered English) that slowly wore down Napoleon’s power. The battle that broke the French grip on Spain took place in July 1812 outside the city of Salamanca, halfway between Madrid and Oporto on the coast of Portugal. Skillful use of “dead ground” in the hilly terrain contributed much to Wellington’s victory, but all the same the loss of life was terrible. Seven thousand French and five thousand allies killed and wounded—ten percent of the force.

The hills near Salamanca have recently begun to produce a very pleasing red wine, which can be had around here for about $10. The makers are called Bodegas Valdeaguila and have been in business only since 2000; their wine is called (appropriately enough) Viña Salamanca. Given a little air it is ripe and fruity, with a pleasantly leafy flavor in the aftertaste. At the center there are tannins which tingle somewhat; they would battle effectively with spicy sausage or a paella laced with pepper. These effects are produced by equal quantities of two grape varieties, the Tempranillo, the grape of Ribera del Duero (north of here) and Rioja, and, less familiar, the Rufete, an endemic variety suited to the long sunny days, cool evenings and low rainfall of the hill country (the rain in Spain, you will recall, falls mainly in the plain).

Wine, olives, grain, the perennial staples of Mediterranean life—this will go onward the same, though dynasties pass, as Thomas Hardy said. No bad thing, maybe, that a winemaker’s alliance with nature can furnish distraction from man’s misuse of power.

The other day a student asked me to name my favorite building. I had no hesitation. “Exeter Cathedral,” I said. There is plenty of magnificence: creamy, glowing stone, the longest medieval Gothic vault in England (possibly in the world), a forest of columns branching upward. But this place also has an unintimidating intimacy; while it lacks the astonishing height of French medieval cathedrals, it has a measured, welcoming breadth. If you don’t believe me, try the pictures at www.exeter-cathedral.org.uk.

Don’t miss the details. The carving underneath a seat of a fourteenth-century elephant with cow-like cloven hooves; the corbel carvings of the master mason Roger and his dog. And the owls. My mother, who grew up in the shadow of this great fane, would spend wet afternoons with her sisters in a tiny chantry counting owls. A bishop called Oldham (friend of Erasmus) lies buried there and his coat of arms bears three owls (Oldham/Owldom, geddit?). The sculptor who decorated the walls had taken the pun to an extreme, and the girls were able to find at least forty-three owls—small, wide-eyed, often well concealed in corners. In 1942 someone told my mother that the cathedral had been razed by aerial bombardment. She walked round all day in a daze.

Her informant, thank God, was wrong; only a single chapel had been destroyed. But a mere eighteen months earlier, at Coventry, an entire medieval cathedral had been burnt by incendiary bombs. While the stench of dank charred timber still hung in the air, one of the clergy picked up three medieval nails and put them together to form a cross.

Not long after the end of the war, a group from Coventry went over to Dresden in East Germany, which had been devastated by Allied bombing. They helped rebuild a hospital. This group, the Community of the Cross of Nails, has spread beyond Coventry and is still active in the ghastliest parts of the world, mediating in Iraq, in Gaza, trying to get people to see things whole. When one thinks how thick and deep horror and hatred are spread across the earth, it seems hardly decent to write about the pleasures of wine.

Fear and rancor have never been in short supply, of course. People produced plenty in the Middle Ages as well. For most of the fourteenth century, a dispute as vicious as it is difficult to understand kept half a dozen successive popes in exile at Avignon in the south of France. The palace they erected overlooks the bridge across the river Rhone. The summer residence they built in the hills was slighted in the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion (more horror), and its ruins still loom large above the village.

However, the vines planted at Châteauneuf-du-Pape (new castle of the pope) had their successors, and in the nineteenth century, wine named after the castle became widely available. The reds are better known than the whites, so it was a pleasure recently to meet a bottle of good white Châteauneuf, from the 2002 vintage. Vieux Mas des Papes is a pleasant pale yellow and has a good heart. After an initial impression of the green sweetness of fresh grapes, the wine takes a grip on the palate and promotes substantial salivation and a lingering finish. One imagines there might be incense which tastes like this. It is certainly a wine that would go well with summer greens—endives, asparagus, chives—and like all Châteauneuf-du-Pape, it is not lacking in alcohol (never less than twelve-and-a-half percent).

All this for only $19.68, including tax. The figure sticks in the mind because 1968 was one of the worst years in living memory for many French wines. Oddly enough, 2002 was also a poor year in the Rhone valley—it rained. But this wine is made from the young vines of a well-known Châteauneuf domaine, that of Vieux Télegraphe, and the skill of the winemaker has triumphed over adversity. Perhaps it is true that wine does more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to Man. Justifying Man’s ways to God, or even to himself, is quite another matter.

I have never been a big fan of Chenin Blanc. If grapes were people, this variety would be your alcoholic uncle, all hail-fellow-well-met as he comes through the door, but a bit bland, short on attention span and interesting conversation, and liable to leave behind him a sensation somewhat different from the initial affable salute.

A memorable 1961 Vouvray comes to mind, the pride of the cellar at a place where I used to work (such was the state of the academic job market in the Reagan-Thatcher years that I was in six establishments in seven years before the U of M snapped me up). Vouvray is always one hundred percent Chenin Blanc. It is a pale yellow wine from near Tours in the Loire valley, south of Paris, and is known for its keeping qualities. 1961 was a year with a fine reputation. Those in the know spoke in subdued tones of this treasure—it amounted to several dozen bottles. Quite enough, thought some, for one to be tested. The experiment was a revelation. Over the two decades these bottles had sat in the cellar, the contents had developed a flavor which combined the vapid nastiness of a Macintosh apple with the heady aroma of dry-cleaning fluid.

The solution adopted to the problem of their disposal was not particularly kind. It followed the gospel principle that “every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine; and when men have well drunk, then that which is worse” (John 2:10). Some people at that particular staff farewell party may have been surprised at the lavish provision of liquids, but there were no complaints, which goes to show that even thinking people do not always think when they drink.

Imagine then the pleasure of finding recently not one but two Vouvrays tasting as good as their mellifluous name (thrill to the delicious labiodental fricatives). Both are from the 2002 vintage, a year with a long sunny autumn—important if grapes are to ripen and become sweet in an area which is both inland and quite far north. Both may be had locally for about $10.

The drier of the two is from the well-known domaine of Sauvion. It is a clear pale yellow. Its initial sweetness is followed by bright acid, but what lingers long after you have swallowed each mouthful is a delicious bitterness, like that of fresh grapefruit. I detected one note in it which would pick up the taste of gouda cheese. This would go down very nicely before dinner on a sunny evening, a pleasant variation from fashionable Sauvignon Blanc. Nor is it any dispraise to say that it would be an ideal wine to drink with potato salad, or one of those cold amalgams people put together for graduation parties that involve multicolored rigatoni, turmeric, and yogurt (or is it cottage cheese or mayonnaise—surely not Miracle Whip). It went well with a pasta sauce I make out of eggplants, browned onions, ricotta, and tinned tomatoes. It is surely no mistake that it comes from the region where the 16th-century French queen Catherine de Medicis had several chateaux, for it is she who is said to have introduced white sauce into French cooking from her native Italy—an Italy whose cuisine had in her day not yet integrated the tomato, a New World vegetable (or fruit—I am not getting into that one).

Our other Vouvray is a similar pleasing pale yellow, but tastes somewhat sweeter. It is from the caves of Jean-Paul Poussin; caves not only in the French sense of “cellars” but also in the English sense, for M. Poussin’s bottles age in grottos cut out of the creamy local tufa limestone, caves which in the Middle Ages were used for disposing of bodies in times of plague. The wine gives the mouth a sense of fullness, in much the same way that champagne does (though this wine is not in the least fizzy).

These are jolly good value, if you ask me, fine and fresh for spring. This is what wine might have tasted like in Eden, before the accumulated misdeeds of mankind made us sad and bland and boring. Drink them young.

Greeks and Romans thought the world looked like a fried egg. There was land in the middle, wholly surrounded by Ocean, with a sea (appropriately called the Mediterranean) bisecting the land. Even in the early Middle Ages, fishermen in what is now Normandy are said to have heard at dead of night the boats putting off from shore, carrying the souls of the newly dead off to the Isles of the Blest, out to seas colder than the Hebrides, “where the fleet of stars is anchored, and the young star-captains glow.”

One of the wildest views of Ocean is to be had from the headland in northwest Spain called Finisterre (the End of the Earth). It was on the beach here that medieval pilgrims, after visiting the shrine of St. James the Apostle at Santiago de Compostela, would gather palmate shells as souvenirs.

The bones of St. James were not discovered at Compostela until around 813 A.D., and the Apostle was quickly enlisted in the struggle of Christian Spain against the Muslims who had controlled much of the peninsula for more than a century. Legend says that St. James was seen mounted on a white horse doing battle in a manner that earned him the sobriquet “Moor-Slayer.” Christians were not alone in having such heavenly help.

The earliest Muslims, the Companions of the Prophet, saw angels riding beside them at the battle of Badr. You can still meet Muslims—mild men, not wild-eyed enthusiasts who commit atrocities like the recent sad outrage in Madrid—who speak with regret about the way that Spain was lost to the Dar ul-Islam.

These were regrets Christians of the Early Middle Ages found themselves unable to share. I guess it is all a matter of what you think is natural. Believing in Ocean or the Dar ul-Islam is no odder than believing in Manifest Destiny or the American Century. The trouble with most contemporary prattle about multiculturalism is that it underestimates the depth, the instinctive naturalness of cultural differences and convictions. These are not just a matter of preferring Pepsi to Coke.

Or preferring neither. A friend recently recalled that when he lived in Spain he felt no need for either cola, indeed found it quite natural to take with his meals a genial red wine called Penascal. He and I proceeded to share a bottle. I liked it so well I bought one for myself—on this shore of Ocean I found the price varies wildly from $5 to $12. This is robust drinking, made mostly from the fruity Tempranillo grape, the variety from which they make the famous wines of Rioja. Tempranillo is known in Portugal as Tinta Roriz and is one of the constituents of port, so the color of Penascal is, as you would expect, a hearty deep red. Our ancestors called such wines Tent, from tinto (“colored”), to distinguish them from the paler, clearer clarets of Bordeaux.

Penascal has a strong, oaky center—from the barrels it is matured in—but stops short of being unbalanced, harsh, or intrusive. It comes from the broad dry upland of Leon and Castile, whose northern steppes were traversed by pilgrims. The river Duero cuts through to the south (becoming the Douro—of port fame—once it has flowed west into Portugal), and it is in this river valley that Penascal has its origin, though it does not actually have the appellation Ribera del Duero.

It stands up well to strong flavors, to garlic or paella or sharp or stinky cheese. I made the mistake of chomping on a red pepper while sipping some Penascal and found that the first half of the taste (the fruity bit before the oaky flavor) was still discernible, before the pepper burst into fresh flames on my tongue. This is an experiment you need not repeat. But Penascal itself—that you could get quite used to.

I have always warmed to authors who thank their spouses for preparing their index. Such marital harmony, such mutual society, help and comfort. You can imagine their kitchen: she sitting at the table rummaging through proofs and index cards, he standing at the stove turning Seville oranges into coarse-cut marmalade.

It is surely gracious also for professors to thank their students, not (heaven forfend) because they have published their students’ research, nor from fake humility or a failure to put in the necessary hours in the library, but rather to acknowledge two important gifts. One is the sense that there are others who care about what one loves and wants to study—the pursuit of truth for its own sake can otherwise be a lonely business. The other is a sense of hope. A lifetime of teaching impresses on those who teach that the end is not yet, that people do become wiser, or at least more knowledgeable, given the opportunity. Some more generous professors, I am told, even take this view of telemarketers who call at dinnertime.

I recently spoke to a friend at an English college where admission depends heavily on personal interviews conducted by the people who will actually teach candidates if they are admitted. Potential students in their very late teens, he said, were like young claret—the name given to the great wines of Bordeaux since the seventeenth century, when wines like Chateau Haut-Brion were already being enjoyed by the likes of Samuel Pepys, the diarist. Clarets do not leap into life fully armed, like Athena from the head of Zeus (or Dionysus from his thigh). Samples taken from the cask before the wine is ready to be sold taste largely of tannin. The initial impact on the tongue and palate and the taste left after swallowing (or spitting—in the cuspidor, that’s what it’s for, toreador) may suggest the pleasures of the finished article. But in between there is a hard, dry taste like leaf mold (no, I don’t, not often, anyhow) or dry tea leaves (politesse once obliged me to eat half a pound of dry tea leaves in a train on the Turkish-Syrian border, but that is another story).

These tannins will be absorbed as the wine lies in its bottle, waiting to be drunk. Sometimes, as with a memorable bottle of 1975 Haut-Bages-Monpelou consumed in the late 1980s, they are never absorbed; this was a wine as inky in taste as it was in color. Sometimes one waits too long, the wine lies in the cellar howling “drink me now” through its cork, no one hears, and what is eventually poured is brown around the edges and acid. But more clarets die, I fear, of infanticide than of old age. What my English friend was trying to say was that his interview technique involved assessing the potential for mellowing exhibited by the tannins in his future pupils, while at the same time savoring their possible depth, complexity and fruit. He quoted Mark Twain at me: “When I was 18, I thought my father was an old fool. When I got to be 23, I was amazed how much he had picked up in five years.” Not a scientific method, I guess, but humane and effective.

Not all the wines of Bordeaux are made for the long haul. Indeed, I recently enjoyed a bottle only three years old, which made up in pleasant warmth what it lacked in complexity. Like most red Bordeaux, the 2000 vintage of Chateau Saint Sulpice (Appellation Bordeaux Controlée) is a blend of Merlot (imparting mellowness) and Cabernet (imparting flavor)—in this case rather more Merlot than Cabernet. Upon opening there is little smell to it, but the first impact on the tongue releases a pleasantly “winey” aroma up inside the nose, followed by a light tanniny taste and a lingering flavor of grapes. Left to air for a little while, it mellows further. It would be good with cheese or pork; it made a homemade cauliflower cheese really quite palatable. This is not complicated wine, but it bears thinking about as it goes down. Moreover, at about $10 a bottle locally it does no excess damage to the budget—and that is surely a true foundation for domestic harmony.

The saints of February are a rum lot. The larger their reputation, the less can be said for certain about their lives and activities—and vice versa. The blameless virgin Saint Scholastica, twin sister of Saint Benedict, is relatively well documented—for someone who lived fifteen hundred years ago. But she is remembered only for the name of a distinguished college in Duluth, and for the fact that on her feast day (February 10) in 1355 no fewer than sixty-three Oxford scholars were killed in a riot, which began as a difference of opinion about the beer in the Swindlestock Tavern in the city center.

By contrast, nothing is known for certain about the fourth century’s Saint Blasius (February 3), but in the Middle Ages he had a mighty reputation for curing sore throats and as the patron of workmen who combed raw wool—thanks to legend that the Roman authorities tortured him by scarifying his sides with metal combs. Similarly, Saint Agatha (February 5) is entirely legendary. But she was regularly invoked in medieval Sicily to prevent volcanic eruptions from Mount Etna, no doubt on account of the myth that her martyrdom involved double mastectomy.

In such company it is scarcely surprising that there is not much that is true, or even likely, to tell about the best known of all the February saints, the patron of tacky Hallmark cards, unseasonable single red roses, and the midweek catering trade. We know for certain there was a shrine dedicated to a Saint Valentine just outside Rome as early as 352. The rest is legend—in fact, two legends: one revolving round Valentine of Rome, the other around Valentine of Terni, a hill-city many miles to the north. It was not until the time of Chaucer, a millennium after the construction of the Roman shrine, that we find people pairing off on February 14, and they seem to have been inspired not by the alleged deeds of either Valentine, but by noticing that this was the time when small birds found their mates. Fourteenth-century folk were as good at inventing traditions as the Victorians.

In our gray world (and what is grayer than the slush churned by the buses in Uptown on a February evening?), it is a poor heart that never rejoices. There ought to be something that can warm and lubricate your Valentine’s Day (and, no doubt, your valentine). Everyone I ask about this suggests champagne. I disagree. For one thing, it’s cold, and what sensible person wants to add extra chill to a Minnesota winter? Second, even in small quantities it dries you out, causing particularly grim and enervating hangovers. But most important, the energy it imparts is evanescent; it lifts the spirits only to dump them good and hard afterward. Macbeth’s porter might well have been thinking of champagne when he said that much drink is an equivocator with lechery: “It provokes the desire, but it takes away from the performance.” Those who propose champagne are welcome to my share.

I will choose something heart-warming, fruity, and red. Pinot noir is the grape from which the French make Burgundy. For a fraction of the cost of a bottle of good Burgundy (in fact, about twenty dollars—but your sweetheart’s worth it!), you can share Wild Horse pinot noir from the Central Coast of California, midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. The winery, founded little more than twenty years ago, gets its name from the local wild mustangs, descended from the horses brought by the Spaniards to the California missions. Wild Horse gathers grapes from vineyards spread widely across the region.

Wild Horse pinot noir would be good on its own, with pâté or cheese, or with a wide variety of food. It is a wine that would look warm by firelight. I can imagine it well with roast wild duck, but you would need to cook a brace—they mate for life, not just for February. Good luck with your own valentine legend.

Who now reads Charles Morgan? Some years ago there was a revival of his novel The Gunroom, which proved to anyone who was interested that the middle one of Churchill’s three Traditions of the Royal Navy (Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash) was a living reality for young officers of the Edwardian Era.

Morgan’s masterpiece is The Fountain, a thoughtful love story set during the First World War. The unkind complain that the characters talk more about doing less than any others in literature (even those of E.M. Forster, his older contemporary), but what could be more absorbing than serious reflection on serious sentiment, especially if it is presented in dignified English prose rather than modish modern psychobabble?

It was not only inner lives Charles Morgan could delineate; he was expert at placing people in a landscape. The Voyage begins in 1883 among the green chalk combes of western France, north of Bordeaux just inland from the Atlantic, the land bisected by the river Charente, the land where Cognac comes from. In the last years of the nineteenth century, the vineyards of Europe were being laid waste by a tiny insect from the East Coast of the United States called Phylloxera vastatrix; the name means literally Dryleaf the Devastator, which sounds like something out of Tolkien. In its own land it lives by sucking sap from the hard roots of the American vine Vitis labrusca so when it came to France and found the soft rootstock of Vitis vinifera the European grapevine, it behaved like a mouse munching through a wheel of Brie. It took years to perfect the science of grafting French vines onto hard American root stock; it was during this hiatus in brandy production that Scotch whiskey really established itself as a popular alternative in the smoking rooms of London clubs. In the meantime Charles Morgan’s hero Barbet was having anxious discussions with the parish priest about the spread into neighboring vales of the vine pest, “the accursed green fly.”

This is a novel full of food and drink. In the first scene, Barbet, an amiable man as unworldly as he is wise, takes a big pot of homemade stew to the six prisoners in the local jail, which he runs in his old farm buildings. Charente is a part of the world where eating and drinking are taken seriously. Even today, in a France where young folk are supposed to be knee-deep in McDonald’s wrappers, one may read in a Jarnac school newsletter that the children are to benefit from a program of éveil sensoriel (sensual awakening—it sounds better in French) based on discovering the pleasures of eating local produce. Lucky old them, I say.

No doubt as part of their awakening they will meet (in suitably moderate quantities) the sweet local wine Pineau des Charentes. This appealing pudding wine is made in both white and rosé, though the white is much more easily found than the pink. It is of varying ages, from twelve months to twelve years—the older the better. And it owes its sweetness not to the grape varieties from which it is made (claret grapes for the pink, a whole range of varieties for the white) but to the local brandy used to arrest its fermentation as soon as the grapes have been pressed. One part spirit to three parts grape juice prevents the grape sugars from turning into alcohol.

Pineau des Charentes was allegedly discovered when someone in the 16th century poured brandy into a barrel of freshly pressed grape juice. The legend seems set a little early for the development of brandewijn by the Dutch in the seventeenth century—though this was indeed one of the areas where canny Dutch merchants of the Rembrandt era got their grapes. Whether or not either legend is true, white Pineau des Charentes goes well with creamy things, custard, or Brie. And the rosé is that rare thing, a wine that goes well with chocolate. Lightly chilled, this is one of life’s simple pleasures. As innocent and as amiable, perhaps, as Charles Morgan’s Barbet.