Tag: wine

Odd how few poets emerged from the Second World War. The First World War produced plenty. Some, like Rupert Brooke, thought they were going to be Homeric heroes––he died without hearing a shot fired in anger, and is buried on the island of Scyrus, where Achilles hid among the women. Others—Charles Sorley, Wilfrid Owen, Siegfried Sassoon—tried to express the horror of the Western Front.

But the only poet I know of from the Second War is Keith Douglas. He served in a cavalry regiment that had only recently exchanged its horses for tanks. He wondered at the unconcern of his brother-officers fighting in North Africa. It seemed that their hearts were not in the Libyan Desert, but galloping behind foxhounds in the Shires: “It is not gunfire I hear, but a hunting horn.” Foxhunting with hounds, the sport of “this gentle, obsolescent breed of heroes, unicorns almost,” is this month being banned by a new and ill-informed law rammed through a spiteful British Parliament by dubiously constitutional means. English country folk are furious—all sorts of people, not just Keith Douglas’s unicorns. The ban has nothing to do with guns; in fact, shooting will be the crueler, less effective alternative to hunting with hounds. Nor is it a matter of animal welfare; everyone agrees that foxes must be controlled by man in order to maintain the balance of nature. It has everything to do with urban disdain for the countryside and the realities of the natural world. How can you legislate against terriers digging or dogs chasing rabbits?

The realities of nature are like tannin in red wine; too much is tiresome, but without them life is bland. Tannins are what give you the astringent taste in the middle of the mouthful. Until the early nineteenth century, there was thought to be only one type of tannin, the kind that can be extracted from the oak-apple, an unpalatable parasite of the oak tree, the size of a small brown Brussels sprout. In the Middle Ages, oak apples were used as an ingredient in the ink monks used to write manuscripts on parchment. Small boys would be sent round the hedgerows to gather the year’s supply in their frozen fingers. If you have ever sucked a fountain-pen nib (try anything once except adultery and Morris dancing!), you can imagine how bitter this tannin might be.

In fact, different types of tannin are present in all sorts of emulsions of foliage. You can taste it in tea. No doubt there are tannins in the frothy tisane of autumn leaves that drifts on the surface of the Mississippi downstream from St. Anthony Falls after the snowmelt each year.

There are pleasing tannins at the center of a very palatable red wine from the Rhone that I came across recently––I say palatable deliberately, because the tannins are most apparent when the tongue is rubbed against the roof of the mouth. This wine is the 2003 red Beaumes-de-Venise from Paul Jaboulet ainé (available locally for around fifteen dollars).

Beaumes-de-Venise is a pretty, Provençal town famous mainly for its sweet white wine, made from the Muscat grape, Muscat de Beaumes-de-Venise. Red Beaumes-de-Venise is made from Grenache and Syrah, the most popular grapes for red wine in the Rhône valley, and would go well with duck or goose or any red meat or powerful cheese. Indeed, I have seen it take on a haggis and win. (Wonderful thing, haggis––why do Americans not eat heart or liver or kidneys, especially kidneys?)

Two-thousand-three was a hot summer in the south of France. While hordes of Parisians roared along narrow roads during les grandes vacances and English visitors went to view the place where Peter Mayle lived before his books made it too popular for him to continue to live there, while no doubt some wistful souls went to see the ruins they read of in the charming tales of Alphonse Daudet, the country’s grapes ripened rapidly. Sugars developed in the skins; the sharper acids were muted. The wine that resulted is intense and ripely redolent of soft fruit and alcohol, as well as having the aforementioned tannins at its center.

Tannins ensure longevity. Drink a bottle now, and keep another for later, to see how the tannins mellow. This is intense enough to be wine for poets. One of the more eloquent Parliamentary defenders of foxhunting called her sport “our music, our poetry, our art.” There is certainly plenty of good hunting verse. God alone knows if any poet can make sense of the chaos that has been created in Mesopotamia by the politicians of our two great nations.

Wagner’s music, so they say, is not as bad as it sounds. I suppose the tunes aren’t too awful if you don’t mind being shouted at. But what makes me queasy is the overwhelming moral effect, the way it makes you limp and inert like a rabbit trapped in headlights.

Other composers in the light and tuneful category make you want to do something. Gilbert and Sullivan tickle you into singing along; the Strauss waltzes (Johann’s, not Richard’s) offer an invitation to trip the light fantastic toe; a Sousa march is meant to make you, well, march. Even the deafening stuff enjoyed by my teenage daughter (somewhere between a Hard Rock and a hard place) makes one apparently want to crowd-surf—which sounds like a lot of fun.

But hearing Wagner (one can hardly call it listening) merely makes you swoon. It is a passive activity, as squared-eyed as goggling at a television. Slot the CD into the brain, switch off the critical faculty, and let the waves of emotion submerge the pleasure centers, no matter if the torrid tide carries you ineluctably toward a Liebestod. This is consumer music.

Am I being unfair? I expect so. But being on the receiving end of Wagner reminds me of a bean-counter university official I met years ago who wanted the professors to refer to their students as “customers.” Apparently, in the retail chain where he had been previously employed, there was no term of greater respect.

But there is a difference between teaching and hawking burgers (yes, I have done both). In retail, the customer gets what you sell him. In education you can never be sure that those who are listening are hearing the same things that the professor says. Nor should they be. A lecturer looking out at ten dozen eyes sees at least ten dozen things going on dialectically behind them—“one deep calling to another,” Augustine thought as he gazed out at his congregation. It may be necessary for the pyre to be built in one place so that the fire from heaven can come down on another. Possibly, virtue can be taught, but it is an oblique business, requiring contributions from all those sitting on the log.

Wine works the same way. Of course one can drink to induce oblivion. But aside from the legendary potion opened in error by Tristan and Isolde, which allegedly smote them with their inescapable love (infatuation, more like it), I can think of no beverage that automatically induces any interesting or enduring state of mind. Enjoying wine involves an active response on the part of the drinker. The counterpoint of great claret may not require as much digital dexterity as a Bach fugue, but it calls for every bit as much sensual attention.

The wine I have found for this month lacks the complexity of the great reds of Bordeaux, but it certainly bears the message répondez s’il vous plaît, even if the response is only copious salivation. It is the 2003 vintage of a white wine called Txakoli, made at a bodega called Txomin Etxaniz, which is near the town of Guetaria on the south shore of the Bay of Biscay in northern Spain’s Basque country.

You can get it locally for around $18, and once you know the “tx” is pronounced approximately like the English “ch,” you will have no problem asking for it. The name is, naturally, Basque, and Basque is the oldest living language in Europe, quite distinct in structure from the Indo-European languages of the rest of the continent, and dating back to the millennia before hordes made their way west from the steppes of Central Asia, speaking the languages that were the ancestors of Hittite, Persian, Greek, Latin, Old Church Slavonic, Welsh, Old Uncle Tom Cobleigh, and all. The grapes are also peculiar to the Basque country, mostly Hondarribi zuri (white) with some Hondarribi beltza (black).

Pull the cork from the tall green bottle, pour out the clear pale contents, and taste. There is a tiny tingle on the tongue, as if you had sand in your sandwich, though without the annoyance that would arouse. Then a refreshing flavor and a slight smokiness, followed by a taste, accumulating on the palate the more one sips, of Granny Smith apples. This is pleasantly sharp. Plenty of the natural malic acid (from “malum,” Latin for apple) remains, as it has not all been transformed into the blander, buttery-tasting lactic acid.

Should you wish to orchestrate Txakoli with food, you might try the things that go with apples—pork, for instance, and cheese (in Yorkshire they eat cheddar cheese with apple pie, most un-American). For music, try Messiaen: bright dissonance, energy, and acid. May it give you joie et clarté.

There are three golden things that never perish: gold, honey, and the sun. An archaeologist friend of mine once put this to the test. She was excavating at the Bronze Age citadel built at Mycenae during the Greek Civil War when her team came across a large jar full of honey. They agreed it would be a pity to let the honey go to the museum, so each morning they had some for breakfast. It was delicious, but it took them most of the season to get to the bottom of the pithos. When they did, they rather regretted their self-indulgence. For what they found at the bottom was an offering to the chthonic gods: the well-preserved bones of a small child. It was quite some time before my friend could be induced to eat honey again.

For Greeks and Romans, bees and honey were special. Honey, they thought, came from heaven, like dew. (“Pour upon us the continual dew of thy blessing,” says The Prayer Book of 1662.) And bees had a perfect polity, everyone with a place and everyone in her proper place (even the gentlemen of the Drones Club), all ruled equitably by their king. No one tumbled to the sex of the queen bee till the 1670s, when a Dutchman, rejoicing in the name of Jan Swammerdam, peered down an early microscope to dissect and draw a queen bee’s ovary, which, so he calculated, contained more than five thousand eggs.

I learned early to respect the political judgment of bees. The tyrannical headmaster of the boarding school where I spent the years seven to thirteen kept several hives, and one afternoon as he was pumping smoke into them the bees turned on him in their thousands. He became an apian pin-cushion and had to be whisked off to the hospital and dosed with antihistamines. In the long run it did nothing to improve his temper, or temper his countenance, which was the color of port wine (yohoho, his nose doth show how oft the black jack to his lips doth go). But it put the old brute out of circulation for an appreciable stretch, so preventing him from caning us.

The sweetness and light our ancestors had from bees was, of course, not all metaphorical. Beeswax made candles and much else, and honey was the principal sweetener of food until the eighteenth century, when imports of cane sugar from the West Indies began arriving in bulk. It is amazing how thoroughly sugar corrupted eighteenth-century taste. The sugar basin of a Georgian tea set is huge, out of all proportion to the teapot or the fat-lipped cream jug; the tea Jane Austen sipped was a syrup. After dinner, eighteenth-century men drank Madeira and port, but they also drank mountain, a super-sticky dessert wine from Málaga in southern Spain, and Marsala, a ditto from Sicily. The Royal Navy ran on rum.

With corruption of taste went corruption of language. Sweetness came to mean simply the presence of sucrose. An earlier age was subtler. When Horatio says, “Good night, sweet prince,” to Hamlet’s corpse, he is not inferring that his royal friend had a high concentration of C12 H22 011; it was more a matter of the air that breathes upon a bank of violets, stealing and giving odor.

All of this came to mind as I was trying to describe the nose and initial taste of an excellent 2001 Chardonnay, Broquel from Argentina (around $15 locally). Others I consulted named fruits. The word that came to my mind was “honeyed.” Not sweet like the sugar-water that oozes from the nozzles protruding from the trepanned plastic bears you buy in supermarkets. But fragrant like lime flowers or thyme—the stuff, in fact, which bees collect and pack so neatly in the pouches on their little thighs. (Even Virgil knew about those, but for the full story, try A Hive of Bees by an apiarist called John Crompton.)

There is nothing flimsy about this wine, which makes it quite unlike the penny-plain Chardonnays you often meet at dull parties. The color is that of wheat straw. There is a faintly smoky aroma and a firm grip on your tonsils as you swallow; then suddenly you are left with freshness. I found it strong enough to stand up to chicken thighs roasted with salt and fresh limes. It would be equally fine with green salad or sharp cheese. In Mendoza, where it originates, it is now late in the southern spring; no doubt there are flowers on the foothills of the Andes. This is a wine which will clear the indoor indulgences of a cold and cloying yuletide. Look on to April and his showers sweet.

Other countries’ politics are always a mystery. Of course, it helps to know some history. Then you can at least ask how they got here from there, rather than merely measure how different they are from us, how they fail to meet our highest standards of democracy, feminism, etc.

But even disinterested interest is sometimes thrown for a loop. Take the recent debate in the Turkish Parliament about making adultery a criminal offense. Most English-language coverage of this unlikely proposal considered its impact on Turkey’s application to join the European Union. A rationale was suggested by a brisk reflection on honor in the villages as described in the novels of Yashar Kemal–and yet there was clearly still more to the politics of this proposal.

American politics can be just as mystifying for foreigners–even for helots who have lived here for decades. Some years ago the London Times published a piece explaining President Carter’s reasons for not attending the funeral of President Tito of Yugoslavia: “Mr. Carter believes in the sanctity of motherhood and therefore sent his mother to the funeral. The affection he feels for her is not universally shared in the United States and is not widely understood abroad.” Quite so.

Maybe it is incomprehension on this level that is behind poll results recently released by the BBC World Service. The BBC reasoned that the Rest of the World were the consumers of American foreign policy and so asked its listeners whom they would vote for as president of the U.S. If the Rest of the World had votes, the result would not be encouraging for Current Resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. N.W.

My guess is that the Rest of the World simply does not see the point of recent U.S. foreign policy. It’s decisive, of course; in Iraq it has decided the fates of between ten thousand and twenty thousand people of several nationalities. But its apologists explain it in circular terms, with a persistent resistance to facts that might only serve to “confuse” the issue. It’s as if history was, or ought to be, a series of self-fulfilling prophecies.

Some of us in the Rest of the World actually feel as if we have been here before. There was just this sort of circularity about the Domino Theory. You remember–nothing to do with pizza, but the Cold War notion that the Reds would pick off adjacent countries one by one and that the West was fated to try to stop them. The trouble is, Russians play chess, not dominoes.

Wine talk, too, can often seem circular when it gets separated from confusing facts like what the liquid in your glass actually tastes and smells of. It is easy for those not paying attention to what they are drinking to think that they are tasting what they have been told they ought to be tasting. Which is why I mention a pleasant surprise I had the other night: a single-variety cabernet sauvignon I really liked. Often, the pure cabernets of California seem overpowering, like a new friend from the West Coast who is trying to tell you too much all at once. The great winemakers of Bordeaux don’t use pure cabernet; they blend it with the blander merlot, so tempering the angular character of the cabernet.

What I was expecting, then, after reading the label, was something with an edge. Instead, I encountered Taft Street Cabernet Sauvignon, a rich, round red (well, almost purple, actually) from the Russian River Valley–the limit of Russian expansion down the California coast from Alaska in the nineteenth century. The soft edges of the taste have a charm that does not weaken the central strength of flavor characteristic of cabernet. If one were not operating a motor vehicle (or a foreign policy), one could drink quite a lot of this, with pork or beef or cheese, even with turkey (no, Jessica, the Rest of the World does not have Thanksgiving). And it’s priced so that many can afford to do so.

The name Taft Street comes from the road in Oakland where the company was founded. President Taft was a Republican; he was also the incumbent president who received the fewest electoral college votes when he stood for reelection (eight to be precise–Utah and Vermont). What the Rest of the World does not understand about the electoral college could be measured by the imperial gallon. One might be happier not thinking too hard about it, but rather getting into bed gratefully with a bottle of this pleasant red. Oblomov rules, OK?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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