Category: Food and Drink

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.

Strong drink has a long association with immorality. There is an engraving of “Gin Lane” in 18th century London by William Hogarth (the artist also responsible for “The Rake’s Progress”) showing a sign: “Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence, clean straw for nothing.” From the same period is “The Beggar’s Opera,” in which assorted villains, cutthroats, footpads, highwaymen, and desperadoes (not to mention pimps and trollops) gather at a pub in one of the British capital’s less fashionable quarters to sing crude drinking songs. You can tell a man who boozes by the company he chooses. I suppose it’s obvious why so many people have made gin rhyme with sin. But intelligent wine-bibbing, it can be argued, actually increases moral refinement. It promotes honest introspection, accuracy and rationality; it promotes moderation.

Think about it. Of all the five senses, taste is the most intimate. Taste is also the sense with the smallest vocabulary. No wonder wine writers are so often driven to peculiar metaphor and periphrasm. My favorite is the observation of Thurber on serving the cooking wine to guests. “A naïve little domestic burgundy; I think you will be surprised at its presumption.” But it is desperation with the inadequacy of the English language that drives us to say that a white wine “smells like wet dog,” or has “a hint of burnt matches in the nose.”

This means that the first quality a serious drinker needs to have is honesty. If he does not note with care what is happening to his palate during the ingestion process, he has not got an earthly chance of describing it accurately. What is more, a mouthful of wine changes its taste all the time from first sip to final swallow (and aftertaste). So a second moral benefit induced by good wine is introspection. The unexamined life is not worth living and the unexamined wine is not worth drinking.

Finally, these other fine qualities will not develop in the mouth or the mind of someone who has had more to drink than is good for them. Shakespeare’s Porter may be right in saying that drink is an equivocator with lechery (“it taketh a man up and it putteth a man down”). In excess, it is an outright enemy of intelligent discrimination, and if we do not discriminate we might as well be swilling White Lightning from a paper bag.

These rather portentous thoughts sprouted on the first decent day of sunshine this extraordinary Spring. Sunshine seemed to indicate Chardonnay, so I fetched out a bottle of Chateau St. Jean Sonoma County Chardonnay (easily available locally for less than $15) and found immediate joy. Let me just say this: The promise of the nose was confirmed by the first bite into the wine, reminiscent of sinking the teeth into a crisp apple, fresh from the tree. I was inspired to open one of those bags of instant salad and grill a small steak. The wine made a pleasing counterpoint to the spinach and rocket, and masked the deadly dullness of iceberg lettuce. The common argot of wine-drinking says you should pair red wines with red meats, but that’s for the simpleminded. This chardonnay’s fruity flavor stood up really well to the meat. If we get any more sensible sunshine this summer (as opposed to burning heat followed by thunderstorms and snow) I will be opening additional bottles. You should too.

Oliver Nicholson is a classicist at the University of Minnesota, and former Secretary of the Wine Committee at Wolfson College, Oxford.

Imagine yourself loaded into a watertight cask and rolled down into the deepest hold of an 18th century sailing ship. You are buffeted about in a sea-voyage of many months. The warmth is oppressive, even in the belly of the ship, and the humidity is worse. From time to time, you hear the scrabbling of ship rats—black rats, the sort that carry the bubonic plague, but in your barrel they can’t get at you.

Sounds foul, doesn’t it? But this rough treatment is how Madeira wine was first made. And the process (well, maybe not the rats) is still simulated in the estufas of that beautiful island, 400 miles from the nearest mainland, out in the broad Atlantic. It’s no wonder that all four sorts of Madeira, from the driest (Sercial) to the sweetest (Malmsey), are a fine nutty brown color. Madeira in its raw state is a white wine, but by the time it’s ready to drink it’s been cooked—“maderized”—in fact and it’s this cooking that produces its distinctive flavor. There are four varieties of Madeira, named for the four grapes involved: there’s the unctuous sweetness of Malmsey, the less sugary savor of Bual, or the more austere Verdelho and Sercial.

Verdelho is often known in America as Rainwater, although it would have to be rainwater off a pretty rusty tin roof to match the color. Rainwater is wonderful when you drink it with a plain cracker (try the English biscuit known as the Bath Oliver) or perhaps a piece of Madeira cake on a cool spring afternoon. Rainwater also makes a pleasant substitute for sherry as a drink before dinner, since it doesn’t disturb the stomach the way a dry sherry can.
Malmsey is good after dinner. If you go to Mount Vernon in Virginia, by all means admire George Washington’s wooden false teeth. Then go downstairs to see his dining room, which is set up for an 18th century after-dinner dessert. This would consist not of cake or pie, but of fruit, nuts, and sweet wines. You can imagine the Father of the Nation talking treason against the British and sipping Malmsey from the small glasses set on the table. Good Malmsey is not just sickly-sweet, it sets a Haydn symphony of sweet and sour playing in your brain.

The Romans knew about maderizing wine. But we have 18th century America and England to thank for the nectar we enjoy today. The island of Madeira was a convenient mid-Atlantic harbor in colonial times. (Readers of Patrick O’Brien’s novels about Nelson’s Navy will know Madeira simply as “the Island.”) His Majesty’s Government in England would not permit trade between the American colonies and other European nations, and the 18th century was punctuated by frequent wars between France and England. The absence of French wines made early Americans thirsty.

One could argue that Madeira was not Europe but Africa. Besides, it belonged to Portugal and the alliance between England and Portugal is the oldest diplomatic alliance in the world, dating back to the Middle Ages. So when they found that the unappealing white wines of the island, which had previously been used as ballast in the bottoms of ships, could be made palatable by long sea voyages, vine-growers and merchants hastened to supply the Colonials’ favorite lubricant.

You can sip your way into all this history for as little as $15 a bottle, and you don’t have to drink it all at once when you’ve opened it. After all that abuse in its manufacture, Madeira has the patience to wait for you to enjoy it.

By Oliver Nicholson

Things seem to be getting serious. She’s convinced her parents to ask you to dinner and you’re scared stiff. It’s not that the grub will be bad. Her mother has a great reputation as a cook. But how will you ever convince them you’re good enough for their little girl?

First impressions count, and only a clod would show up empty-handed. So, what will it be? Chocolates? Too impersonal. Flowers? Ditto, unless you grew them yourself. Hot dish? Hardly, when she’s such a good cook. Wine? Her father is one of those meek little men who mows the lawn and does the dishes in rubber gloves. He undoubtedly knows the perfect wines to go with the perfect cook’s perfect grub. He probably has the wine all mapped out: a nifty little Mersault for the truite meuniere, Aloxe-Corton for the Beef Wellington.

Wait, though, what about wine for after dinner? A fine idea. You go to the wine shop and look down the shelves. Port? Too complicated. Besides, the really good ones need to be kept for years, filtered into decanters and left to settle, hardly the sort of thing you can hand over after you’ve hung up your coat with “I thought you might like to try this.” Madeira? Where is Madeira? And then there are all those yellowish wines, said to be sweet. Might do for drinking with the Perfect Pudding or with fruit and nuts afterwards.

OK, which? My advice is to go for the one called Beaumes de Venise. Why? For a start, it tastes good. Not just good but interesting. Odd things happen to the roof of your mouth when you drink it slowly. For another thing, it comes from an interesting place; it may get her father talking about their holiday in the south of France, which will cheer him up, whatever it may do to you. Best of all, it’s not expensive. A half-bottle, which is all you’ll need, costs around $12. Can’t be bad.

All the Beaumes de Venise in the world comes from one pretty village in southern France. Provence was the first area of Gaul to be annexed by the Roman Empire, more than a century before Christ. The small Muscat grapes from which the wine is made grow on sandy terraces laid out along the hot hillsides northeast of Avignon. These grapes probably came to Provence even before the Romans. Ancient writers tell how the people of Iron Age Gaul were so keen on wine imported from the Greek and Roman world that they would sell their own daughters into slavery simply to get their hands on a bottle of it– though of course it might be tactless to relate this at dinner with your future in-laws. Anyway, when the good people of Gaul began to grow grapes for themselves it was likely the Muscat grape they planted.

The Greeks have a saying that you should enjoy your wine with all five senses. I’m not sure how touch or hearing come into it, but Beaumes de Venise held up to the light, even on a grey March evening in Minnesota, has a pleasing smell and a pale gold glint. The tastes are delicate, reminiscent of several sorts of fruit. Maybe that’s why I’ve seen it commended for use in recipes for fruit salad with mangoes, strawberries, and pineapple. But frankly, that’s a waste. The flavors of its own fruit are too complicated to mask with such strong alien tastes.

If you like Beuames de Venise, you’ll be in godly company: The Popes enjoyed it when they lived at Avignon in the 14th century. I’m not sure if this fact will make you seem more virtuous in her parents’ eyes, but it certainly can’t hurt your reputation–nor that of this excellent wine.

Oliver Nicholson is a classicist at the University of Minnesota, and former Secretary of the Wine Committee at Wolfson College, Oxford.