Tag: wine

Our century has been remarkably efficient in the manufacture of wastelands. In Uptown you can still experience the sort of passageways down which Mr. Eliot smelt steaks, but nowadays they seem to have almost a period charm. It is the same reading about the Algiers described by Albert Camus; the delicious colonial loucheness of the setting tends to put a pastel patina on the jolly old alienation. It won’t be long before someone turns L’Étranger into a colorful Hollywood costume drama—what price the inner life when Passage to India can become a parade of parasols and solar topees?

To be truly bleak, a landscape must be both familiar and fairly freshly created. The connoisseur might try standing at the entrance of Edinborough Park in midwinter and looking across the glass and concrete tundra of South Edina, all abandoned motorcars and dirty snow and the now-defunct cinderblock multiplex where you once saw flickering pictures of more colorful climes, some of them unspoilt (“Far Away is Close at Hand in Images of Elsewhere,” as the writing on the wall used to say as your train pulled out of Paddington Station, taking you from London to the good green meadows of the West Country).

But for sustained depression, try one of those self-storage places. Concealed in a dip, to avoid blotting the landscape too obviously, ranks of abandoned garages provide the perfect setting for the unsolvable crime at the center of a detective novel. In the alleys between them rattle the skeletons of last year’s leaves. Cryogenics comes to mind. The only people around are keeping warm in the office, and perhaps a bloke working on his vintage Chevy. As you leave, the automated voice that thanks you at the barrier appears to be that of the late Count Dracula.

It is warmer inside these small storage rooms than out in the alleys. One imagines them (for one has seen only one’s own) strewn with the remains of lives, things ugly in themselves (the hideous lampshades, the awful ornaments), which might once have meant something if someone had made them mean it—the gewgaw given as a Christmas joke. Here lies the Nachlass of the maiden aunt whose relations have never got round to sorting out her things; here men (it must surely be mostly men, because the women have the houses) hoard the keepsakes from failed marriages, furniture which no longer lends help or comfort because the couples who owned it are unable to forgive. And the cardboard boxes in which all this is kept give off the sweet but unmistakable smell of decay, as if the things inside were slowly losing the warmth they once acquired from being associated with human life, and are reverting to a mere mineral existence.

Such gloomy ruminations suggest the need for some concentrated sweetness to share with those you love this Christmas. Try liqueur glasses of a 2003 Muscat from Bonny Doon Vineyards in California; it is called Vin de Glaciere, and a small flask will cost you about eighteen dollars. There is a pleasant goldenness and a sweet nose, then, as you sip, a smooth velvety sensation of dried apricots and slight oiliness.

This is not sticky sweet wine; the taste reminds me of nothing so much as Setubal, a fortified wine from Portugal made from a different combination of Muscat grapes, which I favored as a dessert wine in my misspent youth. The Bonny Doon would make good dessert wine in the American sense of dessert—not fruit and nuts nibbled after the ladies have withdrawn to the drawing room in the eighteenth-century manner that so annoyed Virginia Woolf, but “afters”: mince pies, plum pudding, even something creamy like bread-and-butter pudding (with many plump golden raisins, known in England as sultanas from their resemblance to sultans’ wives) or a crème brulée.

Here is no false promise of spring, simply a level winter sweetness. Rabbie Burns walked by the original Bonnie Doon river near Ayr in Scotland and wondered why the birds could sing so sweetly when he was so weary, full of care, having lost his girl (though he seldom seemed to have any trouble finding another). If the bleakness is inside and not simply in the landscape, this Muscat taken as a cup of kindness might cheer things up. What sweeter music can we bring?

The Orient, said Metternich, begins at the Ring. It is hardly surprising an Austrian statesman of the early nineteenth century should think the Near East was as close as the suburbs of Vienna. The Ottoman Turks besieged the Austrian capital at least twice and the favor was returned each time an Austrian army, arrayed boldly by batteries, besieged Belgrade.

Not that the symbiosis of the Ottoman and Hapsburg empires was all horror and confrontation. Even their hostilities had some cheerful consequences. After the second Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 (the year before Bach was born), the retreating armies left behind sacks of black beans the size and shape of rabbit droppings, though a good deal scrunchier. A Viennese entrepreneur ground them into a powder and opened Europe’s first coffeehouse. Can you imagine Vienna without Kaffee und Kuchen? Would you not think J.S. Bach just a polyphiloprogenitive sobersides (like Organ Morgan of Llareggub–it’s organ, organ all the time with him) if there were not those bubbly bits in his Coffee Cantata?

In any case, distinctions between west and east are always arbitrary–they vary as you go round the globe, whereas those between north and south are absolute. And this part of MittelEuropa, whether ruled by the Hapsburgs or the Turks, is a magnificent macedoine of ethnic eccentricity.

Read all about it in the trilogy of travel books by Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor: A Time of Gifts, Between Woods and Water, and a third volume eagerly awaited by admirers. This is the record of a young man who set out, in 1933, to walk from Canterbury to Constantinople. He meets all sorts of men, from barons and rabbis to gypsies and the country gentry of the Pannonian Plain, who are said to enjoy the best partridge shooting in the world. The more spirit one has oneself, the more one finds other people original. The author is the same P. Leigh Fermor who kidnapped a German general on Crete during the Second World War and solemnly exchanged with him lines from the Odes of Horace as they passed by the snow-capped summit of Mount Ida on their way to a British submarine and safety. In Austria and points east, the Leigh Fermor liveliness matches that of the people whose land he was passing through.

For the Romans, it was certainly the north-south distinction that mattered. The beautiful Blue Danube was their frontier facing north toward Central Europe and its ferocious Iron Age warrior aristocracies. Romans, naturally, drank wine; the folk beyond the Roman border liked beer or mead (though they would do as Romans whenever they could get wine). Emperors and armies campaigned along the Danube to keep the empire safe. Marcus Aurelius, after a hard day’s soldiering, would come back to the stronghold of Carnuntum, withdraw into himself, and stoically compose his Meditations. (The opening scenes of Gladiator are as good an evocation as I know of the hard business of campaigning in these dank northern forests.)

Carnuntum today is the center of a thriving wine region, making both red and white wine from French varieties as well as from grapes that have grown in the long hot summers here since the Middle Ages. Production is protected by particularly strict purity laws, introduced twenty years ago, after it was discovered that some Austrian wines contained a chemical called diethylene glycol, added to increase body and sweetness (not to be confused with ethylene glycol, a substance that belongs in the radiator of your motorcar). I cannot imagine why anyone ever thought such adulteration desirable, given the excellence of what they make here naturally.

Try, for instance, a 2003 red from Weingut Glatzer made from the Blaufrankisch grape, available locally for about twelve dollars. Blaufrankisch is the grape Germans call the Limberger; its name comes from the blue of the berries and frankisch, a term used since the Middle Ages to indicate superior quality. The wine is lively, clear and bright with an initial bite like mild black coffee and a fine fruity flavor, concealing hints of that pleasing wateriness that comes from really ripe blackberries. One can imagine it in the company of anything you might eat with a rather alcoholic Pinot Noir–even a Thanksgiving turkey. Though perhaps it might feel more at home with a Pannonian partridge. Prost.

What is it about Americans and guilt? Mr. Bush, it seems, may now be willing to admit that the world is warming up. But he would not have us think that the human race (let alone its industries and motorcars) is in any way responsible. Mustn’t feel bad about it, must we?

This is strange because the sort of Christianity favored by President Frutex (Latin for Bush, don’t you know) used to be particularly keen to impress on people that all have sinned and all have fallen short of the glory of God. Augustine developed the notion of original sin partly from a conviction that the world was actually by nature good (adjust your set, there is no fault in reality). Oliver Cromwell struck a chord with the Puritans of the Rump Parliament when he beseeched them “in the bowels of Christ, that ye may be mistaken.” John Wesley famously felt himself to be a brand plucked from the burning, and generations of evangelical preachers have striven to convince people they are sinners, so that they can then pull the redemption rabbit out of the hat.

Cromwell’s political successors seem to feel that it is other people who make the mistakes. The axis of evil has moved elsewhere (though the only thing I can see that Iran, Iraq and North Korea have in common is that all three irritate the United States). Of course, politicians are hardly the only ones to deny guilt. We the People do so often, and avidly. I had pupils when I taught in California who seemed simply impervious to the mildest suggestion that a mistake might have been made (which is easy enough when writing Latin sentences); correction, as the Frenchman said, ran off their backs like a duck’s water. The word has even been verbed—as in the accusation, “You are trying to guilt me!”

Such shunning of a sense of personal error does not ensure universal happiness. The whole horror of modern no-fault divorce is designed to ignore the possibility that sometimes fault is involved. The masterpiece of those who advocate the avoidance of guilt must be the doctrine of passive aggression. This holds that you may employ the patience of Griselda or of Job putting up with my nonsense, but mysteriously it all remains your fault; I am not responsible for the fact that I behave like a bastard.

Admitting mistakes gives people the chance to put them right. Of course, eating humble pie is not a particularly pleasant pastime. The word “humble” as applied to “pie” does not actually derive from anything to do with humility; it comes from the same root as lumbar (as in lumbar pain), and the humbles (or numbles) of a deer are its innards. All the same, humble pie is the opposite of a delicacy, even if it was a dinner as familiar in the Middle Ages as haggis and chips in modern Scotland.

Innards are something else Americans have difficulty with. All right, not everyone savors the scrunch of prairie oysters or the sliminess of cervelle. Cockneys can keep my share of tripe and onions. But heart cooked long enough (it is, after all, quite a tough muscle) is, well, heartening, and grilled kidneys on fried bread is one of the most toothsome breakfasts I know. Perhaps the best bargain at the butchers round here is liver. (Is life worth living? That depends on the liver.) Cut thin, dust with flour, salt and mustard powder, then fry fast with bacon and onions—it is one of the few cuts of meat that gets tougher the longer you cook it—and anoint with the pan scrapings transformed into sauce. The gritty flavor of liver is the perfect accompaniment for spinach cooked quickly in butter.

And a good wine for both liver and spinach together is a red from California that is tough enough to take on any taste (even haggis). Better still, it sells for only about eighteen dollars locally. The 2003 DeLoach California Pinot Noir, from the Russian River valley north of San Francisco, is bright and honest. There is at first a sweetness and flowery charm, but then a delightful roar, as determined as a motorcycle engine, develops in the back of the throat. The sweetness turns into fine strong tannins and, as the wine goes down, aroma rises through the nose. This is wine that engages the attention on every level, like a really worthwhile woman; it has both immediate appeal and depth. But the real beauty of combining it with liver and spinach is the resulting symphony of bitternesses. Who knows, a patient appreciation of these may even make you sorry for your sins.

Every time I take the boat down Stranraer Sound, I think of Saint Brendan. A Celtic monk, Brendan set sail toward the setting sun with fourteen of his confreres in a whimsical endeavor to find the Island of the Promise of the Saints. Spoilsports (i.e., my academic colleagues) tell you his charming tale is an allegory for the development of the soul, like Pilgrim’s Progress. If so, then what, one wonders, is symbolized by the whale called Iasconius, whose back the monks mistake for an island where they can light a bonfire and cook up fish stew? Silly sooth, I would say.

Saint Brendan was sailing away from Ireland into what we call the Atlantic, whereas Stranraer is the dour wee burgh on the bottom left-hand corner of Scotland, from which you get the car ferry across the Irish Sea to Northern Ireland. The town is emphatically unromantic, though the corrugated countryside behind it, the land of Sir Walter Scott’s “Old Mortality,” is appealingly wet and green, and the inlet down which you sail after leaving the harbor is lined with long, low hills that feel they might well be the last of land before you pass, like Turner’s Fighting Témeraire, over the edge of the world.

In Saint Brendan’s time there were, of course, other, more deadly sailors trekking westward. The Vikings got to Minnesota a bit later (1961, according to the team history), but they were certainly in Newfoundland a thousand years ago, where they lived in a seaside settlement now called L’Anse aux Meadows. If you fly Icelandair back from Europe, not only will you find that Iceland (at the right time of year) is green and Greenland is covered with snow, but you will see the rippling gray whaleroad in between them that they rowed over, laid out like a gelatin print.

Less adventurous Vikings got no further than the hills of the Scotch-English border, where they started families with names like Nicholson and became noted for sheep stealing and cattle theft. They still sing ballads in the border country about the most vicious of these “reivers”: “My name is wee Jock Elliot and wha’ daur meddle wi’ me’” (in English, “who dares meddle with me”; and in straight Latin, “nemo me impune lacessit”).

When James VI of Scots became James I of England in 1603, he started to dream up schemes to make his kingdoms a touch more prosperous—Jamestown in Virginia was one of the less lucrative enterprises he chartered. Introducing a market economy to Northern Ireland was one that paid better (though, of course, at the expense of the Gaelic population). Among those transplanted from southern Scotland across the narrow sea to northern Ireland were quite a number of the vigorous folk who had made life on the Scotch-English border so exciting in earlier days, when men were men and sheep were afraid.

Some of the settlers moved on further during the next few generations, especially to the more southerly of the Thirteen Colonies of North America. But plenty stayed. Like their Scottish ancestors, the Protestant settlers in Ulster had a talent for distillation. No surprise, then, that they soon got into the whiskey business (whiskey with an ”e” because it’s Irish). The first license to distill in the northern tip of Ireland, in the area around Bushmills in County Antrim, was granted in 1608. The present Bushmills business, which claims to be the oldest distillery in the world, is first mentioned in 1783. Nowadays it produces several different whiskies: a standard blend of malt and grain (Bushmills Original, with a white label); various single malts; and a superior blend called Black Bush.

Black Bush is the one I like best, and can be had for less than $30 locally. It is mostly malt whiskey with a certain amount of grain whiskey to lighten the taste (not that it is as light as Cutty Sark and other blends of Scotch popular in the United States). It also has real bite—though, like Irish whiskey in general, it is innocent of the reek of peat that makes connoisseurs of Laphroaig, the Islay malt from the Scotch side of the water, gasp for air. Having been thrice distilled (unusual, though not unique), Bushmills is clean and clear. There are no frills, no superfluous sweetness. It must be something like this they drink in the Island of the Promise of the Saints.

The three best reasons for being an academic, as is well known, are June, July, and August. Especially on the occasions when the University of Minnesota conspires with the McKnight Foundation to allow one to spend those months reading and writing about a really genial poet for instance, a character from the Later Roman Empire called Ausonius.

There is a serious side to this enterprise, of course. Ausonius is a wonderful case study of an intelligent Roman who went Christian at around the time most Romans were going Christian, during the fourth century A.D. Watching him integrate ancient science (astrology, for instance) into Christian cosmology is as interesting as considering the relationships between religion and Darwinism. (Am I alone in wanting one of each kind of fish symbol to stick on the back of my car?)
But there is also a fun side to old Ausonius, something agreeably fin de sircle. Sometimes I fancy I can hear him calling to posterity in the way that James Elroy Flecker appealed to a poet a thousand years hence:

But have you wine and music still,
And statues and a bright-eyed love,
And foolish thoughts of good and ill
And prayers to them that sit above?

On one level, then, a poet who promises a summer of roses and wine. Which is as it should be. Roman emperors in those late days lived not at Rome, but on the frontiers of Empire, where they could face down their Germanic neighbors, folk who spoke limited amounts of Latin and smeared butter in their hair instead of scented olive oil (a little dab will do ya). Ausonius was tutor to the son of one such emperor and so spent much of his adult life at Trier on the Moselle, then as now famous for its vineyards. His roots, however, were in Bordeaux, and to this day a well-known wine chateau in Saint-Emilion on the right bank of the Gironde is named Chateau Ausone in his honor (but you know what they say about the wines of Bordeaux—if you have heard of a claret, you can’t afford it).

For a poet so associated with wine, Ausonius was singularly fascinated with water. Icarus falls into it and Christ walks on it. Ausonius enjoyed looking through and across its shifting, shimmering surfaces since, like many a poet, he was interested in fishing; he was amazed, too, at the speed and ease with which a boat could carry him back and forth between his country villa and the city of Bordeaux. In fact, his longest poem is a dreamy description of the Moselle: The river cuts a canyon through the landscape, barges pass up and down, the bargees exchange badinage with men cultivating the hillsides. And in a contemplative passage, the poet wonders at the way fish cannot breathe out of water, while fishermen cannot breathe in it. I have a theory that Ausonius’ interest in water has to do with his shifting sense of himself, and so with the sort of Christian prayer that formed in his heart as he stood before the Most High God of the philosophers.

But that is another story. More immediate is the fact that he would certainly recognize the modern Moselle, its vertiginous hillsides still planted with lines of vines and crowned with country mansions. And I feel sure he would enjoy, as I did the other night, a white wine made from the Riesling grape, available locally in the characteristic slim green Moselle bottles at around twelve dollars. (I do not know the exchange rate for denarii, but I do know a good story about a long-haired barbarian chieftain exchanging his daughter for an amphora of Roman wine.)

This Riesling is the 2001 vintage of Robert Eymael’s Mönchhof estate. The name Mönchhof (monk court) comes from the Cistercians who owned this vineyard from the twelfth till the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Napoleon annexed all of this border region for France and the Eymael family acquired the vineyard. The result of this long history of cultivation is a wine that is on the sweet side, but would be pleasant with many sorts of cheese, fish, or poultry. The color is a consistent pale yellow, but each sip recalled a fresh sort of fruit. I thought I had it down as reminding me of pineapple juice when the next mouthful recalled apples.

Plus ça change, shimmering surfaces indeed. There is also a clear, uncloying aftertaste. What is it about this grape that makes it so infinitely various in its flavors? There’s a question to talk over with Ausonius on an August afternoon.

How I hate modern motor roads. Come let me count the ways. First there is the intimate shame of personal inadequateness. I know my reactions while driving are not swift enough to be safe at fifty-five miles per hour—in fact, they are unsafe at any speed, as my family says. All too often I will barrel up Highway 100 (Highway 100 is the worst), having missed my turn, heading unwillingly for Manitoba, and knowing that the only solution to my plight is to barrel right on down it again. Heraclitus knew a thing or two; the way up and the way down are one and the same, and they are equally terrifying.

Then there are the other idiots, whose reactions are surely no swifter, but who lack the self-knowledge to admit it. These are the ones who drive as though the rapture has already occurred, or at least as though they have lost all fear of death. (In case of rapture, can I have your car?) Other folk suffer from what the amiable Augustine termed superbia and the late and somewhat less amiable Andrea Dworkin called phallocentricity (sed de mortuis nil nisi binkum).

These include the sort of tow-truck operator, from what is so aptly named a wrecker service, who can blithely remove your car from its appointed parking space without cause in the middle of the night (and in serious contravention of the Fourth Amendment protection against search and seizure), and heave it down the highway to a fastness on the far side of Lyndale, whence it is released after a whole day spent on the telephone, with the barest minimum of apology.

I suppose I should be thankful that American drivers are at least predictable. If the other idiots are British, things are twice as bad; the way that my fellow countrymen demonstrate their wit and originality by tailgating on the M4 at seventy-plus miles per hour is enough (in the expression of my father, a medical man) to cause a rush of cold faeces to the left ventricle.

But worse than the horrors of driving on them are the effects of freeways on the countryside that they carve up, the way they turn the ups and downs of a real journey into a blind swoosh of naked concrete. Imagine, then, my joy to find recently, returning from delivering a lecture in the deep south (that is, halfway to Iowa), that it is possible to pick one’s way across the landscape on one of the original roads of Minnesota. This particular road has its origins in an Indian trail stabilized in 1853 by navigators under a militia officer called Dodd. Little is known about Captain Dodd, but he liked a drink and lies buried in the churchyard of the Episcopal Church in St. Peter (where three or four are gathered together, so Episcopalians say, you will always find a fifth).

It took the gallant captain and his crew a whole Minnesota road-building season (the time of year elsewhere known as summer) to build the Dodd Road. In some places, alas, the fruit of their labors has been turned into six-lane highway; elsewhere, in some southern suburbs, it is pleasingly bordered by McMansions and the sort of lawns that seem to imitate Astroturf. (When will this happy landscape find its Betjeman?) Yet there are stretches where Dodd Road is a real country lane with grit, ditches, and dandelions. I look forward to teasing further reaches of this thoroughfare out of the Minnesota terrain—it will be quite like looking for Roman roads at home.

Not least among the joys of the jolly film Sideways were its roadside vistas, particularly those with vines marching up and down the California hills. More so than any of its human characters, this film’s truly Big Star, as far as the wine trade is concerned, is the Pinot Noir grape. All of the ambient publicity ensured that this variety, the grape from which the famous red wines of burgundy have been made since the Middle Ages, became the next grape that everyone wants to drink, following in the wake of White Zinfandel, Chardonnay, and Merlot.

There is a snag. Pinot Noir is hard to grow; not all of it turns into wine as grand as the great vintages of Burgundy. It may well be as mellow as Merlot (and a lot mellower than Cabernet Sauvignon), but it can sometimes lack body. Allow me, then, to recommend a real pleasure, Mark West Central Coast Pinot Noir 2003, a pellucid red made by people who have long specialized in this variety. Costing just around ten dollars locally, it has a fruity flavor leading to a taste of black pepper and then to a rising aroma of elderflowers (the fresh ones you smell by the roadside, not the more sugary sensations of elderflower cordial). It gave tomato and basil soup an added mileage ingredient. And the following morning, the little that was left over had a noble structure, even after the more evanescent scents had evaporated. Take some along on a summer picnic.

Watching people in museums is often as absorbing as studying the displays. Some years ago, my old tutor was standing under the great sixth-century dome of the Holy Wisdom in Istanbul, lecturing to a rather tweedy group of English country gentry. His audience was starting to suffer from museum leg, when a pigeon detached itself from the marble cornice and flapped in a leisurely way across to the gallery where once Byzantine empresses worshipped, encased in pearls and purple. Instinctively, one of the tweeds lifted his umbrella to his right shoulder and sighted along its shaft. He nearly dropped it in surprise: “Good God,” he said, “bloody thing’s out of shot.” After that, the party had a healthier respect for the grandeur of this great fane.

Other museum-goers are moved by a hunger for information rather than an atavistic instinct for field sports. See how some people spend substantially more time reading the didactic label on the wall than they do confronting the complexity of the work it interprets. Such folk should find joy if they go to see the St. John’s Bible, numerous sheets of which are on display at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (until July 3), together with plenty of explanatory props: quill pens, penknives, even photographs of the sheep-surrounded scriptorium in Wales where the scribes commissioned by St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, penned this, the first handwritten Bible in half a millennium.

For at this exhibition, the urge to read rather than to look leads the eye not to the (excellent) supporting information but to the texts of the Bible pages themselves, written in real time to be read in real time. The pleasure of contemplating these great creamy white sheets (about two feet high and two and a half feet wide when spread out) is like the pleasure of watching an artist sketching in the open air; you are drawn to take part in his art, though in this case you fall into the rhythm of his work not by actually seeing him marking the regular black text with his goose quill, but by following with the eye the dance of the text across the page. Such watching induces a passion of patience.

Of course, too, there is looking in addition to reading, for it is the illuminations that catch the eye. They light up the text with multiple colors and associations. Alongside the Parable of the Sower is a figure who might have walked straight out of a Byzantine Gospel-book with his round halo and imperial purple tunic, except that this nether man is clad in something that looks mighty like the blue jeans of a Stearns County bachelor farmer. The butterflies are delightful (as butterflies always are), and gold leaf makes Christ at the Transfiguration appear to be entirely made of light.

But for all their glory, it is to the text that the pictures bring you back. One visitor was overheard to say she had found the exhibition so interesting that when she got home she was going to find a Bible and read it. If the manuscript has this effect on many people, the monks of St. John’s will surely feel they were right to commission it.

Scripture, said Gregory the Great, is a stream where lambs may wade and elephants may swim. A friend was telling me the other day about the meetings of the Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars whose assumptions I do not entirely share (why assume that miracles do not happen?), but who had the admirable aim of analyzing the Gospels to work out what Jesus actually said and did. They also had the good sense to set up their headquarters in the Sonoma Valley north of San Francisco, so that after a hard day’s analyzing they could visit the venerable vineyard of Gundlach-Bundschau, in existence since 1857 (though it grew pears during Prohibition).

You can enjoy a vicarious visit by drinking their Bearitage, Lot no. 11, a red wine available locally for about $12. They call this “California claret,” because like the great reds of Bordeaux it is a blend of several grapes. The analytical palate will detect the round sweetness of Zinfandel, the blandness of Merlot, the long slow tannins of Cabernet Sauvignon (which will give this wine the capacity to keep, though it is also nice now). Analysis is enlightening but not necessary. This wine is more than the sum of its parts; with a steak it told a coherent and convincing story, one which I think would please anyone who has red wine running in his veins.

I have a colleague at the University of Minnesota who hates commencement. Marching in gowns and hoods to the boom of Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” puts her in mind, she says, of the army. I hardly like to point out that most faculty marching would have its practitioners instantaneously in the guardroom were it ever perpetrated on a military parade ground.

Besides, I cannot see students at a degree ceremony without thinking of the swink and toil that brought them there: the freezing evenings bicycling home to Uptown after three hours of night class; the utter frustration some encounter in trying to satisfy mathematical language requirements; and above all, the hours spent doing dull jobs like parking cars and turning hamburgers, hours that impress on students the repetitive and broadly approved message that it is more important to be on time for banausic employments than it is to live the life of the mind. There is an inscape to graduation that merits a certain amount of outward pomp and circumstance.

Elgar, too, had an inscape. There are those who write him off as simply an English Sousa: “Delius is for the superselius, who think Elgar is velgar.” I disagree. The tuneful confidence of “Pomp and Circumstance” is only the surface of a composer who is altogether more enigmatic. You have only to listen to his Cello Concerto to find grand musical language being employed to express a distinctly abstract passion.

No less complex, yet also more accessible, is his big choral piece The Dream of Gerontius. Elgar shared with Purcell a capacity for giving remarkable resonance to words that might otherwise not attract admiration. (Verdi, too—his best opera is the Requiem, because it is the one with the best book.) The Dream of Gerontius is a long poem by John Henry, Cardinal Newman describing the death of an early Christian, not a particular hero or a martyr, just geron tis—Greek for “a certain old man.” The first half happens at the deathbed; the second describes the old man’s onward progress after his passing. No doubt gentle readers will put me right (as several kindly did in the matter of World War II poets), but the only other piece of literature I can think of that has the hero die so early in the action is Charles Williams’s All Hallows Eve, a novel in which the protagonist perishes on the first page. Neither work, however, is in the least bit gloomy. Gerontius’s hopes and fears and acts of faith can indeed induce a certain vertigo. They show, if nothing else, that Elgar was no pompous extrovert; like the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, he knew the “mind has mountains … hold them cheap may who ne’er hung there.”

The idea of inscape was actually invented by Hopkins, an older contemporary of Elgar. Hopkins used it to indicate quintessence, what you see of something from the inside once you have made an act of commitment to it. One somehow doubts he applied the idea much to appreciation of the winemaker’s art—he was an ascetic soul who even, as an undergraduate, denied himself the use of the armchair during Lent—but there are few sensual experiences to which it is more applicable; once one has surveyed, sniffed, sipped, and swallowed one’s wine, commitment to it is complete!

A claret came by me the other day that illustrates the point perfectly. The label on the characteristic Bordeaux bottle (with shoulders) said “Chateau des Agates 2003” and the fluid within, a clever blend of Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Merlot, was a good deep red (and only about ten dollars a go). Drinking it made one aware not only of the inscape of the wine, but also of the architecture of one’s own senses. The smell and taste not only have structure in themselves, but they also raise awareness in the consumer of his own capacity to taste.

Think of your mouth as some great pagan temple, say, the Pantheon at Rome, where they pour libations to the Gods. Take a sip of this claret and a good dry flavor swirls through the hall, followed by pleasant tannins against the teeth. Finally, an aromatic whiff rises into the vault of the palate, up and out through the nose, like smoke through the hole in the middle of the dome. The Gods breathe in and smile.

This is very heartening wine. It would go well with roasted chestnuts or simple barbecue (not one which has been slathered with sweet sauces), the sort of celebration that should await any fresh graduate emerging from commencement. Prosit!

Home is where we start from. That’s why different things appear perfectly natural to different folk. For much of the Near East it is not democracy that is natural but the milet system of the old Ottoman Empire, where no one had votes, but each minority was responsible for itself under an Islamic umbrella. For me it is the English countryside before the Great War, the Old England of Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill.

For most middle-aged Americans I suppose it is, for better or worse, the Eisenhower era: the wonders of modern science, Detroit dragons, and America as Top Nation forever more. No one now (apart, apparently, from Mr. Rumsfeld) thinks the world is, or ought to be, as simple as it seemed then in the black-and-white pages of Time magazine. Many of us never thought it was.

Ask your pets what their world looks like. Your cat knows your neighborhood quite as well as you do, but what he has marked on his mental map is entirely different. Poor Kit Smart wondered at the wisdom of cats and they put him in Bedlam. You see a crack in the neighbor’s siding. Your cat sees the Gate of Mouse and watches with the full-bore attention of Ernest Hemingway gazing at the gate through which the bull will enter the arena to meet its matador.

Your dog, too, he has a consciousness that makes intelligent distinctions mostly on the basis of smell—a sense most humans (except, of course, connoisseurs of wine) are well on the way to losing. I have seen a pack of beagles follow the trail of a hare through a mink farm without faltering. This is a serious feat of discrimination, since aroma algebra teaches us that mink equals skunk squared. How much we must be missing. One wonders what gave the animals in that Sinhalese nature reserve early warning of last December’s tsunami, so that they made their way inland and escaped the deadly waves.
In the ancient world, it was the Stoic philosophers who were the great exponents of the notion that there is a hidden sympathy that links all physical phenomena. If the Stoics had known about Tokyo and Texas, they would certainly have asserted that a butterfly clapping its wings in the air over the Japanese capital could cause a tornado over Austin. Even spiritual things were exquisitely refined matter, and so were subtly and physically linked. The soul was like gold to airy thinness beat; the whole round earth was every way bound with golden chains too fine for human sight.

It was these connections that made things beautiful. If each person and thing lived in accordance with its own nature, it would become perfectly adapted to its environment, indeed, to the entire universe of which it was a part. Beauty could be discerned wherever things were well-proportioned to one another, above all when they displayed a mathematical symmetry, like the colonnaded frontage of a Greek temple.

Just such a Stoic combination came my way the other evening. It involved a crumbly English cheese called Blue Shropshire (like Stilton, but golden instead of white) and a 2002 Vouvray (costing little more than $12) called Masbon, which is French for “good estate,” though I guess it is simply the name of the shipper. (The experience would probably have been as good, just different, with many another cheese, perhaps best with Wensleydale, that crumbly white poetry from the Yorkshire Dales, home of James Herriot, the horsedoctor and raconteur.) For a vehicle there was good crusty bread; ideal would have been Bath Oliver Biscuits, as eaten with hard-boiled eggs by Dan and Una in Kipling’s Puck.

Vouvray is a white wine from the Loire Valley, southwest of Paris. It is made from the Chenin Blanc grape, which means that it is somewhat sweet; (“off-dry” is the pundit’s word). 2002 was a fine hot year but this wine is not oversweet; it has the characteristic Vouvray edge. One bottle had an aftertaste I was personally not keen on (a little like a McIntosh apple), but this was well-masked by the Blue Shropshire cheese.

Looking for the link that made this wine and cheese such a successful combination required serious research—that is to say, repeated, careful consumption. In the end I decided the connection consisted in a concatenation of creaminess. Nothing excessive, you understand—nothing in excess was a common Stoic motto—but a gentle connection catalyzed by the consumer. As Charles Williams wrote—it is National Poetry Month—“How good the universe can be, what now?”

The other day I had lunch with a lawyer. “Do you like Tony Blair?” he asked, with the courtesy characteristic of his profession. I could give no sensible answer, as I have never had the honor of the prime minister’s acquaintance.

My learned friend went on to wonder how an apparently intelligent and sensitive man could get Britain involved in America’s current adventure in Iraq. It’s not as if the British public was spoiling for the fight. Perhaps Mr. Blair was genuinely frightened of the elusive weapons of mass destruction. There is certainly no shortage of members of Parliament who say they voted for the war because they were told Saddam Hussein could wipe us all out in forty-five minutes flat. Or could it simply be that Mr. Blair was afraid of compromising the special relationship between our two great countries?

One key to understanding Tony Blair is religion—not the battling certainties that animate many evangelical supporters of President Bush, but an altogether more modern, more flexible faith. The Christianity to which his (and my) generation of literate Englishmen did (or did not) subscribe was characterized by a 1963 book called Honest to God. In it, a bishop explained that God is the Ground of All Being, not an old man with a beard in the sky, a truth which some of his readers had tumbled to already (surely the old man with the beard is Santa Claus). This up-to-date faith had much to say about society: “though we are many we are one bread, one body” ran the mantra in the Church of England’s grim modern-language liturgy. It warmed to personal intensity, while soft-pedaling private prayer. The hard work of metaphysics and theology took a back seat to building communities. Diplomacy, someone once said, is the art of letting other people have your way; Christian charity, as it was promoted to us in sixties England, often seemed to mean letting everyone else have their way.
Of course it is good to encourage people to be kind, and one has to acknowledge the sincerity of a public school (i.e. private school) product like Tony Blair, who joins the British Labour party, the party of workers, with hand and brain, under the impression that he may help folk who lack the advantages he was born into.

But this sort of well-meaning Christian pragmatism is dangerously eager to please. Hence the persistent efforts of the Blair press office to fool all of the people all of the time. Hence, too, a willingness to give in to whomever has shouted most loudly most recently (they call it inclusiveness). A fellow supporter of foxhunting said to me over Christmas that the only sure way to save our sport is to have George Bush come out in favor of it, because he is the only person who can shout louder than the left-wing tyrants of the Labour Party.

For Mr. Blair and those like him are not Champagne socialists, eccentric noblemen with demotic principles, like Philippe Duc d’Orléans, who changed his name to Citoyen Égalité during the French Revolution (but was guillotined just the same). Such Bollinger Bolsheviks savor the sharp irony of their position; their taste for aristocratic pleasures is undimmed by their embracing the cause of the People.

Such inconsistency is alien to the Blair Project. The characteristic drink of the contemporary British Christian Socialist is blander, more middle-class. It lacks fizz, and so would never lead to an amusing indiscretion like the nose trick (in which the victim unintentionally gargles champagne through the nose). It is also cheaper than bubbly and, in the spirit of inclusiveness, well within the financial reach of all. It is Chardonnay.

The wine drunk at the celebration dinner after Mr. Blair’s general election victory was a Chardonnay from the village of Lugny near Macon in southern Burgundy, Macon-Lugny les Genièvres, shipped by Louis Latour and available for about $15. There is absolutely nothing nasty about this wine. The 2002 vintage that I enjoyed recently with an omelette lacked sharpness (unlike the same shipper’s Pouilly-Vinzelles, from the same part of Burgundy, available locally for about the same price). A thoroughly pleasant fruitiness gave way to firm, mild bitterness (a bit like the taste of orange pith), until, on swallowing, the fruit reasserted itself, lasting lingeringly. It was good. Decide for yourself if what is amiable in a wine is admirable in a politician.