Tag: wine

Of all the depressing novels I know, Jude the Obscure takes the prize for sustained doom and gloom. Don’t let the film mislead you; it is far too pretty. All those authentic Victorian sets (not to mention the delightfully authentic Kate Winslet) undermine the exposition of Jude’s law, that Sod and Murphy were incurable optimists, because if anything can go wrong it will, particularly when something might seem just for once to be going almost right. It is not Jude one loses patience with; it is his creator, for being so beastly to him. No wonder the nineteenth-century public hated it.

Jude is a country lad with an ambition to study at the University of Christminster, so he starts to teach himself Latin. He swiftly discovers that there is no one-to-one correspondence between English and Latin words, that a foreign language is not simply an alternative set of vocabulary but a wholly different way of putting thoughts together (something that the users of Internet translation services have not always understood). With characteristic determination (doomed, of course), Jude sets about the systematic exploration of Latin grammar and syntax.

I was thinking of Jude’s experience the other day while being lectured by one of those well-fed wiseacres who like to tell us there is no point learning foreign languages because soon everyone will know English. “What can he know of English who only English knows?” I muttered to myself, sotto voce. Those who do not take the trouble to study languages end up like the Monsieur Jourdan in Molière’s Le Bourgeoise Gentilhomme, who is amazed to learn that what he has been speaking all his life is prose.

More to the point, foreigners who learn English do not ipso facto stop talking Foreign. They may know English, and so understand what we tell them. They can say in English what they would like us to hear. But heaven knows what they are muttering about us in the privacy of their own tongues. I wonder how many people in Washington speak Farsi or read Shi’ite theology (though I have it on good authority that at the time of the Tehran Embassy hostage crisis in 1979, the State Department had a computer programmed to simulate the presumed mental processes of the Ayatollah Khomeini). The trouble with my well-fed wiseacre was that the voice he most liked the sound of was his own.

The swiftest method of learning Foreign is, they say, the Horizontal. It usually involves one-to-one tuition and is, in general, employed only in those colleges and universities that have a hearty appetite for protracted and expensive litigation. That said, I know someone who learned French in six weeks by adopting a suitably unclothed and recumbent posture, though the fact that he had come straight from twelve months learning Coptic in an Egyptian monastery may have whetted his whistle. I must say I have not tried it myself, and if I had, I would not be saying.

Wines, too, have their characteristic syntax. Let me introduce you to a red wine that certainly speaks French. It is the 2004 Côtes du Rhône from the well-known Burgundy shipper Charles Thomas (pronounced, of course, Sharl Tomah in the manner of Peter Sellers asking for a rhoom). It is available hereabouts for not much more than ten dollars.

This wine is constructed not in the languorous language of Proust, pursuing evanescent flavors of madeleine and fancy tea down long, convoluted corridors of memory. Rather, like Edith Piaf, it combines sweetness and husky pungency: “No, nothing of nothing. No, I not regret nothing, neither the well which one has done me, nor the bad, all this is for me well equal” (perhaps something does get lost in translation). The initial fruit leads to the tannins at the center of the taste with the inevitability of a well-made sentence. The weather has a lot to do with it; 2004 was not as spectacularly hot and dry as 2003, which produced astonishingly concentrated wines all across France. In 2004, it rained in August. The result is a wine that has both charm and a mind of its own—and plenty of alcohol. Taken with steak frites, it might even put you back on your feet (even if Hardy and his President of the Immortals knock you back down in the very next chapter). Santé!

One of the unsung pleasures of a summer weekend in an English country house is the short shelf of books left in the spare bedroom for the entertainment of guests. If you are out of luck, the row of volumes on the bedside table consists of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, Regency bodice-rippers by the likes of Georgette Heyer or, worst of all, copies of the Watchtower.

A few years ago, every spare bedroom I slept in seemed to boast a copy of Jessica Mitford’s American Way of Death. One could see why one’s kind hosts might not want this gripping volume in a room that they used regularly themselves. It is an entertaining but distinctly macabre exposé of the trade practices of undertakers in the Eisenhower era. Once one has read it, one never forgets the T-shaped layout of the ideal coffin showroom and the methods used to steer mourning relatives toward the most expensive coffins. These, one is told, should be placed in the right-hand arm of the T (because research has shown that wanderers lost in the Antarctic are likely to go round in right-handed circles, like waste water in an antipodean plughole). Some of Miss Mitford’s revelations about embalming are unlikely to induce slumber. I am sure it is all very out of date nowadays. And anyway, she was a Communist.

But the greatest find I ever had was a thriller by John Buchan called The Courts of the Morning. John Buchan was a prolific producer of literate light literature in the decades before and after the First World War (he died as governor general of Canada in 1941). Critics have considered his heroes literary ancestors of James Bond, but actually the contrasts are more instructive. There’s precious little technology (though it is occasionally handy that Sir Archie Roylance is an early aviator).

Unlike the sybaritic Bond, Buchan’s Richard Hannay and Sandy Arbuthnot are quietly public-spirited. Though True Love sometimes comes to the surface, there is no sign of Miss Pussy Galore and her bathykolpian avatars; Buchan is the only thriller writer I know to have been an enthusiast for John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

Perhaps Bunyan also affected Buchan’s genius for evoking landscape. The grand, green hills around Erzerum in Eastern Turkey provide spectacular scenery for the dénouement of Greenmantle, a yarn about Hannay and Sandy Arbuthnot using charm and intelligence to foil an Islamic uprising in the darkest days of the First World War. What stuck in the mind from the weekend I spent with The Courts of the Morning was certainly the landscape where the tale unfolds. The core of the story is a miners’ conspiracy in the province of Gran Secco (Big Thirst).
Quite how Sandy Arbuthnot got embroiled in it has long evaporated from memory, but the sense of him speeding up and down the west coast of South America, plunging into deep valleys in sight of snow-topped mountains to deploy his diplomatic skills lingers in the mind like a sweet smell.

I cannot recall what he drank while he was achieving all this. After all, I had to read fast; it would have been tacky to miss meals and tackier still to let the volume find its way into my suitcase (not a temptation for a reader contemplating the grim revelations of Miss Mitford). But there was surely wine to be had. Already in 1933, Viu Manet, nowadays one of the largest wine concerns in South America, was taking advantage of the alternating sea breezes and dry air from the Andes to grow grapes in the temperate vales of Chile.

Since I first met them in England some thirty years ago, Chilean wines have improved massively. Let me commend to you the Semillon made by Viu Manet, a sweet white wine which can be had in half-bottles hereabouts for around twelve dollars. Sweet, but not too sweet, not Bourbon or embalming fluid, lighter than the great French dessert wines of Sauternes that are made from the same sort of grape. Think of it as last-of-the-summer wine, sipped solitarily on the front porch in early evening sunshine, surrounded by the scent of cut grass (so much more pleasing than the sound of grass being cut). Take it with a plain biscuit (OK, cracker) and the kind of light reading whose heroes impart a vicarious sense of mighty deeds achieved. This Semillon might even soothe you into the unjustified conviction that your summer was not entirely wasted. In Chile it is spring.

It is a drear thought that if you can remember the Pudding Shop on the north side of Divan Yolu in Istanbul you must be well into middle age. “Those were the days, my friend,” the Seekers sang, “We thought they’d never end, we would be young for ever and a day.” As the Roman poet Horace said, eheu fugaces, alas, the fleeting years.

Divan Yolu had been one of the grand-processional avenues of Byzantine and Ottoman Constantinople. Between its marble colonnades, purple-robed emperors and their retinues passed ceremoniously from the circular Forum of Constantine to the great Church of the Holy Wisdom.

By the 1970s, it was distinctly dingy. A small Ottoman mosque still broadcast the call to prayer over a crackly public address system, just about audible above the geriatric gearboxes of nose-to-tail Turkish taxicabs. Across the road there were inexpensive kebab shops, the sort of places where you might spot the management replenishing the mineral water bottles from the tap. The upper stories of these eateries were crumbling hotels whose small-bore plumbing pipes had not been designed with western lavatory paper in mind—the blockages and bursts caused by inconsiderate guests smelt awful. So much for the Romantic East.

The Pudding Shop stood in the center of this heterogeneous parade. The puddings were puddings in the American sense, little bowls of dairy glup, with or without rice. The clientele was long-haired youth from all over the western world—what the Turks called hipi (Turkish spelling is relentlessly rational). On one wall there was a notice board on which people advertised for traveling companions to go with them eastward: Persia-Afghanistan-India-Kathmandu.

The Hipi Route to the Mystic East (farther east than the Romantic East) would be impassable today. It finally died at Christmas 1978 with the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. But thirty years ago, it was a long, thin line stretching across Asia, drawn by folk inspired by a lust to know what cannot be known. You saw them, always in groups, hanging around the bus stations at Erzurum and Tabriz, wild-eyed, thin from inanition, sometimes begging, often clutching paperback selections from the Buddhist Scriptures.

For all their preoccupation with spiritual traditions, the hipi seemed quite uninterested in the Christian and Islamic heritage of Turkey and Persia as they passed through. The poet Peter Levi, who recounted his own adventures in Afghanistan in The Light Garden of the Angel King, found them remarkably unenterprising people. You seldom saw the hipi anywhere except in the places where they all congregated—the Pudding Shop in Istanbul, Nasr-i Khosrow in Teheran.

It is odd too that a movement of free spirits with lofty spiritual aims has left so little in the way of literature. I can think of no bahnbrechend, or groundbreaking, spiritual odyssey recording the hipi Drang nach Osten. That is not to say that their travels had no consequences. Many decent people in the Near East had never seen westerners in the flesh before the hipi passed through. Heaven knows what effect they had on the lands they traversed.

True, they were not guilty of building vulgar concrete tourist hotels, but their practices and appearance were scarcely such as to commend the West to those who in the next decade were to animate the Muslim moral re-armament of Persia and Afghanistan.

There were other folk who frequented the Pudding Shop. They were going in the opposite direction. These were not etiolated seekers after truth; they were beefy blond Australians, big men for whom the shish kebabs of Divan Yolu, one felt, were slim pickings. The destination to which they were working westward was the area of London around the Earls Court tube station, then known as Kangaroo Gulch. Their idea was to see the world before they went home to settle down. They were no better informed than the hipi (“Who were these Byzantine guys?”), but their bluffness was refreshing.

You might find similar genial refreshment in a bottle of Lindemann’s Reserve Merlot, a warm-hearted red wine from the southeast of Australia, available around here for less than twelve dollars a go. This is a rich round wine, compounded of equal parts of Merlot and sunshine, with spicy touches derived from the oak barrels it matured in and fine plummy flavors that will, if you are not careful, have you uttering the broad, relaxed vowels of the Antipodes. It would go well with kebabs. And you do not need to traverse all Asia to get it.

No one ever added more acreage to the Roman Empire than Julius Caesar (the Roman geezer). Until his time, Roman territory in what is now France was the relatively narrow sliver along the Mediterranean coast that is still called Provence, precisely because it was the original Roman province. In ten years Caesar took over all Gaul, and had even paid a couple of visits to the closest of the islands in Ocean, where he found a lot of hairy warriors wearing nothing but woad (blue dye made from a plant like the indigo): “Woad’s the stuff to show men / Woad to scare your foemen / Boil it to a brilliant hue/ Then rub it on your back and your abdomen.”

Of course there was one village in Brittany which even Caesar could not subdue, the one inhabited by the tough little cartoon warrior Astérix and his oversized friend Obélix, who can eat a whole wild boar at a sitting and makes his living (when he is not beating up Romans) delivering the massive stone obelisks used in Gallic religion. The secret weapon of mass destruction the villagers use against the Roman invader is a magic potion brewed by the local druid Panoramix (yes, they all have silly names). Drinking it makes Astérix mightier than Popeye; Obélix was dropped in a vat of it when he was a baby. Apparently there is to be an Astérix film in time for the next Olympics, in which nos héros will compete against a legionary called Gluteus Maximus (very humerus) and there will be a lot of earnest stuff about the morality of magic potions. Odd how morality can spoil a joke.

Perhaps one can forgive Caesar for not referring to this determined center of resistance in the rather po-faced narrative he composed concerning his conquests. What is harder to credit is the account he provides of Gallic wildlife. There are, he says, three sorts of deer in Gaul. One sounds like the unicorn, except that its horn has a branchy tip, like an antler (all right, maybe he had seen a stag in summer after only one of its antlers had fallen off). One is the auroch, a mighty ox which the Gauls were accustomed to catch by the same unsporting method Winnie ille Pu used to capture heffalumps—the auroch is extinct but is known from archaeology. But it is the elks which make one wonder. Elks, according to Caesar, have no knees, so they sleep standing up and leaning against trees, and when they fall over they land on their backs with their little legs wiggling in the air. If you want to catch one, you find a tree that an elk is likely to lean against and you cut halfway through it; you then lie in wait ’til an elk sidles up and goes to sleep, at which point Pif, Paf, Boom (as Astérix says when he biffs a Roman legionary). If you believe this, I have a magic potion that might interest you.

Well, actually I have. It is white and comes from the broad land south of Bordeaux called Entre-deux-Mers. The name is Verdillac—all those French names ending in -ac (Cognac, Cadillac, Carnac) are pre-Roman—and the 2004 vintage, made by the old established firm of Armand Roux, may be had locally for around ten dollars.

A skillful blend of (mostly) Semillon with Sauvignon Blanc, this is very easy to drink. Semillon is the grape variety used to make the great golden dessert wines of Sauternes (I think of dreamy glasses of Chateau Rieussec 1976 sipped in my misspent youth). What the Semillon imparts here is not sweetness, but a pleasing douceur, an almost oily mildness which kicks in just before the aftertaste; some people would call this the taste of melon, but it is more interesting than that. The Sauvignon gives the wine its central grit—the taste you get from the red frilly bits next to a peach stone—and there is an aftertaste which recalls the scent of elderflowers in high summer.

Chilling this wine too much would kill some of the cleverly constructed taste. Roast elk or braised auroch would overpower it. But drinking it with grilled chicken should make you grateful that the Romans brought to Gaul the cultivation of the grape. Astérix and his friends did not know what they were missing; “Ô vive lui, chaque fois / Que chante son coq gaulois.”

When I first came to Minnesota twenty years ago, I had never taught a class larger than ten students—mostly I had conducted the one-to-one tutorials that are at the heart of the Oxford system. My first term here I was given a class on the Roman Republic that numbered some seventy souls. The learning curve for me was as steep as it was for them.

After a few weeks I said to my teaching assistant, a clever young lady who had recently graduated from a cut-glass establishment on the East Coast, that I had really no idea whether I was making an impression. After all, though we speak a similar language, I am a foreigner. A few students kindly asked questions in class, but it was all quite different from the va-et-vien of individual tutorials. “What,” I asked, “do I do?” “That’s easy,” she replied. “You set a pop quiz.”

The following Friday she and I marched into class with seventy sheets of paper, each roneoed with a dozen quick questions, and announced the pop quiz. Roneo, Roneo, wherefore art thou Roneo? I have never felt the temperature in a room drop so quickly—I might as well have walked into a convention of Southern Baptists wearing a false beard and announced that I was the Ayatollah Khomeini.

One of the questions was concerned with divination, the Roman practice, learnt from their sophisticated neighbors the Etruscans, of examining the innards of the animals they had sacrificed to discover from their shape and size and knobbly bits what combination of divine forces was floating around in the atmosphere at the moment of the animal’s sacred demise. There is even a bronze model of a sheep’s liver dug up at Piacenza in northern Italy in 1877, which has mapped onto it the different divine forces associated with each area of the organ. This should explain that “the Etruscans” was the answer I expected when I asked my class: “Who taught the Romans to foretell the future from the entrails of birds?” The best answer I got was “Colonel Sanders.” Minnesotans are good souls, and I think they forgave me—I have certainly never repeated the experiment. And three years later, the teaching assistant and one of the men from the class kindly invited me to their wedding.

Romans thought that birds furnished information about the world not immediately apparent to mankind. The trajectory of events and the pattern of ambient forces could be made out not only from the entrails of the dead but also from the flight of the living. No city could be founded ’til the woodpeckers were wheeling in a favorable configuration. A Roman admiral, told he could not go into battle because the sacred chickens were off their feed, exclaimed, “Let’s see if they will drink,” kicked the peccant poultry over the side of his ship and gave the signal for hostilities to begin. Naturally he was defeated.

It is not only Romans who found birds made them think. A wild duck passes through the halls of memory, a duck roasted by my cousin, a talented cook fortunate in having friends who shoot more game than they can consume themselves. It came from the kitchen, warm, reeking, rich; from its crisp skin rose a fragrance that would have satisfied the most exacting classical god. The charger came to rest in front of my cousin’s husband, a noted wild-animal veterinarian. He raised the carving knife: “These mate for life,” he said. “Anybody want some?”

Well, why not? At least it died flying, not flapping in panic on the conveyor belt of a crowded slaughterhouse. Honest men, says the poet Peter Levi, “dive after truth, know nature, fight pretence / admit we live at one another’s expense.”

This was a memorable bird. And now, years later, I have found just the wine to go with it, a plummy 2004 Pinot Noir from the Hahn Estates in the Santa Lucia highlands of Monterey, south of San Francisco. This wine may be had hereabouts for around thirteen dollars. It has that clear red color characteristic of Pinot Noir, a fine, ripe, fruity taste with soft tannins at the center, only a little acidity, and plenty of alcohol—14.7 percent, according to the bottle, but you do not need to be told—you can taste it. This wine would go with grilled chicken (Hahn is German for cockerel) or summer barbeque, as well as with duck or grouse. Just be sure someone else drives home afterward, unless you wish to face a pop quiz beginning, “Would you mind blowing into this little bag?”

When you buy a farm, said the Roman agricultural writer Palladius, you need to look at the people who live in the area. If they seem a sturdy lot, you can invest with confidence, but if they are podgy and pasty faced (that is a free translation of the Latin), then keep away. The local people, no less than the cheese and wine they produce, are autochthonous, sprung from the local soil.

Until last week, I thought that the origin of the expression “as different as chalk and cheese” also lay in the soil—that the distinction was not between the substances themselves but between the chalk uplands of southern England, traditionally good for grazing sheep, and the region’s lush, damp valleys, where cows produce milk creamy enough to make Stilton and Cheshire. Now I find, from a quick blink at John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, that there were people as far back as the fourteenth century dim enough to confuse actual pieces of cheese with lumps of calcareous limestone. But I still prefer my own theory. The school I went to in my teens was surrounded by chalk downs, no longer sheep-runs but acres of open arable, thickly coated in nitrate of potash. Not only did that land look quite different from the little meadows in the vale a few miles to the south, but the folk who farmed it were different as well. Terroir tells.

The crumbliest, most chalk-like of English cheeses actually come not from the vales of the south but from granite country in Wales and the north, where the last Ice Age scraped the easy surface off the landscape and left what passes in Britain for mountains. Caerphilly, a sharp white cheese from Wales, hails from hills where they quarry granite that people polish and turn into kitchen counters—the sort guaranteed to shatter any wine glass dropped on it. Similarly, Wensleydale cheese is made among the northern Pennines (James Herriot territory). Not long ago, a faceless quango—“quasi-autonomous national governmental organization”—tried to close the creamery and move production to an industrial suburb of Liverpool. A management buyout prevented it and Wensleydale is still made by the strong, silent men of the Yorkshire Dales, as it has been since the twelfth century, when the Cistercian monks first came to tame this wet and gritty land.

The wine that goes best with such sharp, crumbly cheese, however, comes from the sun-dappled valley of the river Loire in western France, distinctly chalk-and-limestone country. Splendid Sauvignon Blanc like Pouilly-Fumé and Sancerre has often lain in cool, dry, limestone caves. Thus cheese and chalk may in a sense bury the hatchet. Crumble some Wensleydale into a green salad, add fresh thyme from the garden, sip one of these dry white wines, and somehow the sharpnesses coalesce.

However, it is not the famous Sauvignon wines from the Loire that we celebrate this month, but rather one whose grapes grow in a land whose spectacular and complex geology defies summary description—though we saw plenty of it masquerading as Middle Earth in the Lord of the Rings films. The House of Nobilo’s 2005 Sauvignon Blanc (available locally for about thirteen dollars) comes from the Marlborough region at the north end of the South Island of New Zealand. This is about as far south as Minnesota or the Rhone valley is north, that is, say, about forty-two degrees of latitude, but the Pacific Ocean makes the climate a good deal milder than ours.

The white Sauvignon grape has been grown here for a century, but it has only become big business in the last thirty years, particularly since England joined the Common Market and New Zealand had to find new markets (and sometimes new products) to replace agricultural exports, like lamb, that had previously gone to Britain. These days the price of land is rising in the Marlborough area as erstwhile pastures are turned over to grapes.

The results of all this industry are fresh, delightful, and now famous. The 2005 Nobilo has a good bright color and a good bright taste, crisp with a hint of a fizz on first acquaintance. It is not as dry as, say, Sancerre (but then the Loire is a good deal farther from the Equator); there is a roundness more reminiscent perhaps of kiwi fruit than of anything citrus. Drink it at lunchtime with a summer salad (don’t forget the cheese) and it will put a spring into your afternoon.

What, a student asked the other day, was the last place to be ruled by the Romans? Nowhere in Italy, that’s for certain; the last Roman emperor I know to have set foot on mainland Italy with the purpose of exercising political power was Constans II in 662. The Holy Roman Empire, begun by Charlemagne and destroyed by Napoleon, we agreed did not count, being notoriously neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. “How about Constantinople, New Rome on the Bosporus, not captured by the Ottoman Turks ‘til May 29, 1453?” the young man suggested. I was able to raise him eight years. At the southeast corner of the Black Sea is the port city of Trebizond, modern Turkish Trabzon, and this pleasant place was ruled by its own local Christian Roman emperors until 1461.

Those who have heard of Trebizond at all probably know it from Rose MacAulay’s The Towers of Trebizond, an endearing novel published in 1956 that stars a spiky Anglican parson, a suffragette, a camel, and a lady whose behavior was, shall we say, no better than it ought to be. It is a witty tale evoking a more generous, less litigious world. Not long after MacAulay’s visit to Trebizond, the local Muslim congregation, which had been worshipping for centuries in the former coronation church of the Roman emperors, magnanimously allowed their mosque to be turned into a museum so that its Christian paintings could be uncovered, studied, and restored. (You have never seen such a flutter of angels’ wings as under that dome.) Until the international treaties of 1922, in fact, a substantial Orthodox Christian minority lived alongside the Trebizond Muslims, but the Orthodox were then sent to Greece as part of an exchange of populations—ethnicity in that part of the world then being defined by religion. A tiny Roman Catholic congregation survived, served by Capuchin friars. Trebizond has always had a reputation for kindness and a mild maritime climate.

One Sunday afternoon in February, modern passions smashed the city’s peace. The priest who cared for the dozen or so Roman Catholics in Trebizond, Father Andrea Santoro, was shot dead while praying in the church. The killer was a teenager, enraged by insults to his faith. The priest was no proselytizer; evangelism, even the wearing of religious dress in public, is illegal in Turkey, a secular state which is ninety-eight percent Muslim. Fr. Andrea lived there as a quiet witness to a force more positive even than tolerance. “Silence, humility, the simple life … clear and defenseless witness and the conscious offering of one’s life can rehabilitate the Middle East,” he told a friend. The bishop who buried him back home in Italy called him a martyr; he reported that the priest’s mother feels great pain for the young man who killed her son. No true Muslim, said a minister of the Turkish government, would kill a man of God in the house of God. “We must,” said the poet W.H. Auden, “love one another or die.”

They drink wine in Trebizond, but they do not grow it. Turkish wine is very good, but the beverage that comes from the wooded valleys of the Black Sea coast is Turkish tea. Grapevines and tea bushes are seldom horticultural bedfellows. It is frothy coffee that one associates with the Capuchin Friars, Fr. Santoro’s order. Cappuccino gets its name from the color of their habits. But he, in fact, came from Rome, and the volcanic hills south and east of the city produce good dry white wine which refreshes countless Romans who drive out from the capital to have dinner in the Castelli Romani on hot summer evenings.

The wine from Frascati, made by Fontana Candida (Italian for “white fountain”), is an old favorite, remarkably consistent over the years and at less than ten dollars very affordable. It is made mostly from the Trebbiano grape, the most widely grown grape in Italy, mixed with two types of Malvasia. The color is so yellow it is almost green; the nose recalls brewer’s yeast more than the wild flowers alluded to on the label, but there is a good bitter acid scrunch at the center of its taste, followed by a long pleasing flavor redolent of watermelons. This Frascati goes (of course) with fish and also with lemon chicken; it would complement a leg of lamb, roasted with lots of rosemary. It is a glass of this that I shall raise at Easter to honor the memory of a martyr, a brave man called home, a witness to the hope made possible by the practice of forgiveness.

When I was home in England over Christmas, I caught a liver specialist from (appropriately enough) Liverpool being interviewed on the wireless. He was talking about cirrhosis, that very nasty condition in which the liver turns into little yellowish granules, and eventually packs up completely. When he began in the liver business years ago, he said, this was the disease of older men, brought on by a lifetime’s application to the bottle. Nowadays, though, he frequently found the beds in his ward filled with young women who had managed to achieve the same effect in an altogether shorter time. The young people of Liverpool, he averred, do drink an awful lot these days.

Archaeological evidence suggests this phenomenon is not confined to Liverpool. As the spring thaw sets in each year along fraternity row in Minneapolis, bottles emerge to view in the snow banks on the boulevard, mostly bearing the names of undistinguished vintages or popular brands of beer. As the melt proceeds, they dribble down into the gutter, where they pose a hazard to cyclists (credite experto … ). The historian Edward Gibbon, writing about Oxford during the eighteenth century, felt that the deep potations of those who were supposed to be teaching him Latin and Greek excused “the brisk intemperance of youth.” I can forgive a good deal of brisk intemperance, but a puncture in my front tire makes me livid (a very nasty condition in which the face goes pale purple with rage).

In Gibbon’s time, the British government tried to use stiff excise duties to control alcoholic intake. Avoiding these penalties became something like the national sport. The stakes were high; you could get hanged for smuggling, but evading the exciseman appealed to a certain spirit of adventure, as those fortunate enough to have had J. Meade Falkner’s novel Moonfleet read to them in their youth can certainly agree.

The most unlikely recruit to the government team must surely have been Rabbie Burns, the Scots national poet. This is a man who wrote lines like “Freedom an’ whisky gang thegither,” as well as one of the world’s great drinking songs, “O Willie Brew’d a Peck o’ Maut” (chorus: “We are na fou, we’re nae that fou, but just a drapee in our e’e … ”). Yet he spent the last half-dozen years of his short life (he died of heart trouble, not of drink) chasing down smugglers and illicit distillers in the deep valleys of Dumfries and Galloway. Not that it seems to have cramped his style. One of his wildest poems is a rant about the party put on in a town where the local exciseman had been carried away to hell by the devil; Burns is said to have composed it while waiting on the beach for reinforcements so he could search a smuggling ship that had gone aground on the treacherous sands of the Solway Firth.

With a reputation like that, it is scarcely surprising that “Bobbie Burns” should have given his name to a vineyard in the Australian State of Victoria (the bottom right-hand corner) founded by a Scots gold prospector called John Campbell. Campbells Wines produced their first vintage in 1870, and their Bobbie Burns Shiraz 1998 (available hereabouts for less than $17) is a worthy scion. The Shiraz grape, widely grown in Australia, is the same as that which the French call the “Syrah,” the variety from which most of the great red wines of the Rhône Valley are made. It has, alas, no historical connection with the Persian city of the same name, home of the Persian national poet Hafiz, a bard altogether more refined than “owr Rabbie,” and one who wrote about wine, it seems, merely as a metaphor for spiritual experience.

There is nothing immaterial about this good-hearted red. It has little nose, but plenty of fruit and alcohol, as one might expect from grapes which have reached ripeness over a long, warm autumn. The tannins are more spicy than redolent of the oak barrels in which the wine matured. This would make a cheering companion to any red meat, a pork roast say, or even haggis, the great chieftain of the pudding race. Come to that, the tannins suggest it has time still on its side. Buy some now to drink later. But best make sure you like it; sample some now as well, and call to mind Paul’s advice to Timothy: “Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake.” A little wine—no poet (or hepatologist) could have said it better.

These winter mornings, the sunshine shows things as they are. I was recently in Devon, the corner of southwest England where I was brought up, which was covered with a fine coating of frost that imparts sharpness to every detail of the landscape. “Proper rimey,” said my neighbor there, a man who lives in the house where he was born and has been digging the graves in the village churchyard for nigh on forty years. The frost (a.k.a. rime) gives each blade of grass a thin, sharp edge with the patina of brushed steel. A little warmth from the sun strikes the tousled twigs of the willows down by the stream and rows of water drops form orderly queues along the underside of each wooden wisp. All this ambient moisture freezes the fingers and, seemingly, each individual capillary within each finger. Thirty degrees Fahrenheit in Devon feels something like thirty degrees colder than it does in Minnesota.

If the morning sun shows things as they are, it is the pale, slanting light of late afternoon that is the joy of the historian, for it shows things as they were. This narrow valley has become a palimpsest, a surface like a medieval sheepskin manuscript that has been written over by one scribe after another to record successive lives. Oblique light reveals the slightest lump or line in the landscape left behind by an old lane or hedgebank or by the walls of a building long since disappeared. Sunset has an ultraviolet feel.

Nowadays, the stream, one of the little brawling brooks which eventually empties itself into the River Exe, runs straight through pasture into an ornamental garden. But a couple of hundred years ago, trenches and tributaries, long since dry but now apparent in the weak winter sunshine, ran in and out of it. These were excavated in order to irrigate orchards growing apples with names like Kingston Black, Sweet Alford, and Slack My Girdle, the fruit that made the fearsomely alcoholic farmhouse cider for which Devon used to be famous. I have known tough Scotch matelots, well acquainted with the strong waters of their own country, who have come ashore from their ships at Plymouth and found Devon cider to be more than they could handle.

Underneath the vanished sylvan landscape of the apples is another—noisier, malodorous, industrial. Seven hundred years ago, mills here were fulling and bleaching woolen cloth, their wheels driven by the water power of leats laboriously dug out by hand and visible now as the merest shadows in the field-grass. These are not the product of the fey fancies that some folk associate with so-called ley lines. They were dug by hard graft to serve a serious business; like many modern developing nations, medieval Devon made its first efforts at industrialization by manufacturing textiles. One of the fields on the side of this valley is called Long Bolham; the name is that of a weaver, Nicholas de Bolleham, who on the eleventh of September, 1337, took on a lifetime lease of the land and mills from the Lord of the Manor—you can read the document in the Harvard Law Library. His industry has left little enough impression on the sedgy grass of these pastures. In the four centuries that succeeded him, however, the long, slow growth of the West Country cloth trade powered the enterprise of intrepid Devon seafarers such as Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake, not to mention the brave folk who sailed from Plymouth in the Mayflower in 1620 and thus made a mark on a wider world.

Teasing ghosts out of the frosty fields is a fine occupation for the dark time of the year, but it is chilly work. Too much contemplation makes one pale. You could put warmth back into your extremities with the 2001 vintage of a fine red Rhône from Domaine Sainte-Anne (Appellation Côtes-du-Rhône-Villages Contrôlée). True, the wine comes from near Saint-Gervais in the hill country west of the Rhône, so the vines that grow its grapes (principally Grenache and Syrah) are no strangers to cold. But lemon trees and the Mediterranean are within reach.

This is wine with a good red color, strong, toothsome tannins, and fruity flavors reminiscent of cherries, neither flimsy (like bad Beaujolais) nor seriously weighty (like great Châteauneuf du Pape). Nor is it excessively expensive in Minnesota, at around $15 a bottle. And, as a vegetarian friend recently said to me, “Rhône goes with everything.” This would certainly be fine with all sorts of food, from hummus dip to roast pheasant. It is the kind of warming wine that inspires confidence. Maybe it could set 2006 in a somewhat rosier light.

Heaven, said the Regency wit Sydney Smith, is eating paté de foie gras to the sound of trumpets. It sounds pretty piggy if you ask me, all too like the fellow who said that you should decide what to do in life by following your bliss. And rather odd doctrine for S. Smith, who made his name as a book reviewer but had a day job as a canon of S. Paul’s Cathedral in London. I have naturally no grudge against Canon Smith himself, but his apolaustic attitudes are a bit emetic. Were his sermons, one wonders, wholly concerned with the austere and lofty spiritual discipline of feeling good about yourself?

Which was hardly an option for the geese from whom the paté came. I cannot imagine paté de foie gras without also imagining how it is made. The reverend canon was able to fill his face with the noted French delicacy because geese had been filled with grain till their livers reached the bursting point. However much you resent the mess wild geese make around the lakes, such bloating seems a pretty unpleasant fate. Their consumerism was involuntary; that of S. Smith was a matter of choice.

Come to that, unmitigated trumpets might also get a bit trying, even if, like an earlier (and considerably more interesting) cleric from S. Paul’s, you posted the angels blowing them at the round world’s imagined corners. One must, I suppose, give Canon Smith credit for taking the trouble to be a hedonist. Any preference is better than none. But still, one asks, where is he in the heaven which he projects? In the Smithian assertion (or should it be “Smithic”?), “eating” is simply a gerund, or possibly a participle; it has no subject, and the person is absent. He makes it sound as if there is action occurring apart from the existence of the actor. In fact, you could say that the receptacle into which the paté de foie gras goes is less a Blessed Spirit than a Bottomless Pit. (Why does this all remind me of Christmas?)

I guess the first step toward personality, and away from being simply a Black Hole of consumption, could be to discriminate between pleasures. Even a sensualist may refine his appetite; Lucretius, the most materialistic of Roman poets, is notable for the sheer sharpness of his physical observation. I would commend to Canon Smith—and to you, benevolent reader—claret, the red wine of Bordeaux, the thinking man’s wine (though, as a Whig, Sydney Smith probably preferred port).

Specifically, try Château Greysac from the fine vintage of the year 2000, available around here for less than twenty dollars. The process of discrimination starts even before the cork leaves the bottle. This is French wine in a bottle with proper shoulders, so it is going to be from Bordeaux rather than from Burgundy or the Rhone (which have sloping shoulders, like your pin-headed correspondent).

Now note the words Appelation Controlée. These are not an assurance that a wild man from West Virginia has been caught by the sheriff but official notice that the wine is part of a quota permitted to bear a particular name and that it has been made in a particular way from grapes characteristic of the region—in this case mostly Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Cabernet Franc.

The word that comes between Appelation and Controlée tells you which region it is. The lesser wines of Bordeaux will say simply Bordeaux or Bordeaux Supérieur (the latter merely indicates a slightly higher level of alcohol). Château Greysac, however, says “Médoc,” which is the area on the left bank of the river Gironde where many of the most famous Bordeaux wines come from—and yet not all wines made in the Médoc are allowed that appellation. It also says “Cru Bourgeois,” a title of honour Château Greysac acquired in 1978, only a few years after modern winemaking began there.

Having exercised the mind on the wine label (and wished one were striding along the vine-clad gravel ridges of the Médoc), one can then exercise it on the wine itself. One encounters a clear bright red, a pleasing sharpness, and then a concatenation of tannins (the woody hardness) and the taste of oak (the pleasing sweetness redolent of turpentine). You can take mental exercise tasting this wine by racing these two tastes against each other, before swallowing and then maybe sipping a little more. The strength of the tannin shows that it has time on its side. Drink some now and keep some for later. Maybe it will make you a thinking drinker.