Tag: wine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I like starting novels in the middle. By skipping all those establishing shots, which exclude as much as they reveal, you’re able to catch the author and the characters off their guard. Also, once you have finished, you can start again at the beginning and have the paradoxical pleasure of reading the book for the first time twice.

My father did the same. When I was about ten years old, he left on the chair next to the bath the ideal book for those who read like we do. It has color, and some of the most memorable comic characters in English fiction, but, as the author proudly proclaims, nothing much by way of a plot.

Like many Victorian novels, Robert Smith Surtees’s Handley Cross was issued originally as a serial in separate monthly parts. The hero is a relatively rough diamond, a prosperous London grocer called John Jorrocks. Oddly for a Londoner, his principal passion is foxhunting, though he is not above mixing business with pleasure. He was known to have cantered after a fresh acquaintance in the hunting field, calling out, “Did you say two chests of black tea and one of green?” The man leapt a fence to get away from him.

Second only to Jorrocks’s passion for foxhunting was his passion for port. Claret he despised—“I can make you some, if you like,” he told a guest, “with water, vinegar, a lemon and a little drop of port.” Brandy and water was less a pleasure than a form of central heating. But port “wot leaves a mark on the side of the glass” gave ample opportunity to mull over (and magnify) the triumphs of a day’s sport.

By Jorrocks’s time, port had been the favorite wine of Englishmen for over a hundred years. Jorrocks’s racier contemporary Jack Mytton drank eight bottles a day, the first while he was shaving in the morning. He died young—of trying to cure his hiccups by setting fire to his nightshirt.

Port is in fact a by-product of the wars fought by Britain all through the eighteenth century—wars that prevented the France of Louis XIV and Napo-leon from dominating Europe. Fighting France meant less claret coming across the English Channel from Bordeaux and led to closer links between England and Portugal.

The alliance encouraged the wine trade. Soon after the Methuen Treaty of 1703, merchants discovered that vintages from Portugal crossed the stormy Bay of Biscay better if they had first been spiked with brandy. The same methods they developed are used to make the wine we enjoy today. Early during fermentation, the process by which natural sugars would normally become alcohol is arrested by the addition of brandy. The result is both sweet and intoxicating, ideal for drinking slowly after dinner with apples, nuts, Stilton cheese, or a biscuit.

Port comes in various styles: Ruby port is drunk young, having spent most of its life in cask; tawny port is generally older and sometimes has a dryish tinge to the taste. The greatest of all, vintage port, is the wine of a season considered sufficiently remarkable by an individual maker for him to risk his reputation by declaring it a vintage year. In some years only a few houses will declare a vintage. Vintage port spends only a couple of years in cask, so it grows old in bottle. This can be a lengthy process—the wines of 1963 and 1977 still have time on their side, and 1997 won’t be at its best for years yet. And maturing in bottle means that crud accumulates; if vintage port isn’t stored carefully the wine becomes clouded with sediment.

Vintage port is the enemy of instant gratification (which might be why California has so far failed to produce a convincing port, though there is a pleasing drink made there, wittily called Starboard). Long years in bottle must end with sensitive decanting. But it is absolutely worth the effort. There is nothing like the slow, deep sweetness of vintage port. This is a pleasure for people with patience.

Of all the places I have ever lived, Minneapolis is the most confusing. One might have thought it would be otherwise. It was meant to be laid out, after all, on a Jeffersonian grid. Yet one cycles down the street, blithely confident that the 3800 block of Sheridan Avenue South will lead ineluctably into the 3700 block, only to find that an unkind providence has interposed a lake, a railroad, or a freeway. Reason, one feels, has been defeated by Nature, or at least by Life.
Occasionally, it is true, Minneapolis gives inklings of the organic process of its growth to the hard-pressed cyclist trying to find the house where he has been invited to dinner. If he bumps and rattles his way over the monstrous potholes in the southeast quadrant of Lake Calhoun Parkway, he will come to Richfield Road, originally the wagon route from the infant Minneapolis to the neighboring township of Richfield (which originally included modern Edina). On a good day, the remains of the streetcar rails can be made out beneath the asphalt of broad old thoroughfares such as Portland Avenue. But in Edina the farms that defined the landscape in the late nineteenth century are gone. Only their names survive in Grimes and Browndale avenues.

After trying to get the Minnesota landscape into larger perspective, I went to see the Jeffers Petroglyphs down beyond Mankato. These lively scribings are etched (by who knows what anonymous hand) onto rocks that slope and tilt like the bed of a prehistoric ocean. The wind passes through the prairie grass like cat’s-paws at sea. Here at last I found a sense of the size of the state.

If these waves of prairie have the breadth of an ocean, Mont Ventoux in the South of France has the height of a tsunami. From its summit you can see for miles (all right, kilometers). The fourteenth-century poet Petrarch discovered this when he climbed it—possibly the earliest example of mountaineering, or at least hill walking, done for no other reason than the fun of it. Not that Petrarch was capable of anything so innocent as fun. He took with him a copy of Saint Augustine’s Confessions, which he duly opened on the summit (at random, he claims), and conveniently found a passage that assured him that landscape is less important than the soul: “Men go to admire the high mountains, the vast floods of the sea, the huge streams of the rivers, the circumference of the ocean, and the revolutions of the stars—and desert themselves.”
The modern climber will descry on the southern slopes of Mont Ventoux gravel terraces planted with vineyards sheltered from northerly winds by the mountainous bulk behind them. One of the Côtes de Ventoux wineries that has had a remarkable run of good years recently is Château Pesquié. The red wine made here by the Chaudière family called Ch. Pesquié les Terrasses is a round fruity Rhône. It is composed of slightly less syrah, the grape variety most often associated with Rhône reds, and slightly more grenache, the variety familiar from the wines of Châteauneuf du Pape, about twenty miles to the west. One can confidently commend it for consumption with cheese and meat (including turkey).

Claret, they say, is wine for the head; Burgundy and Rhône, wine for the heart. Even a poet as sententious and self-absorbed as Petrarch would, one feels, have been able to allow a wine as appealing as this one to penetrate the formidable defenses of his self-consciousness. Perhaps, too, it could have inspired him to appreciate the pleasures of landscape without his having to decide in advance what he was going to think about it.

One would have thought it was impossible to pay too much for food. Life, after all, is not the same without it. Yet all over the developed world, farmers are hard up. The English newspapers made hay some weeks ago with a story about farmers’ wives in the Hardy Country, one of the most picture-postcard parts of Britain, who are obliged to advertise their charms on the Internet for the enjoyment of foreign tourists (“Come and Pluck an English Rose”) in order—if you will permit the expression—to make ends meet.

Government subsidies, meant to solve the conundrum of keeping food cheap without making farmers impossibly poorer than their fellow countrymen, do nothing for Third World farmers, who are thus excluded from markets. Farm subsidies are not, in the final analysis, for the long-suffering farmer; they are for eaters who would rather spend money on something else. God alone knows the solution to this—how many economists does it take to change a lightbulb?

But one can hardly hold up for admiration the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union (or whatever the Common Market is being called this week), even though more than forty-six percent of the official expenditure of the European Union goes toward agriculture. The Common Market started as a deal by which German industry paid for the picturesque traditions of French farming. They put the European Parliament at Strasbourg in Alsace to symbolize this concord. Whatever the symbolism, the practicalities are truly remarkable. For one week each month, the 626 members, their staff (who otherwise work in Brussels), their secretariat (based in Luxembourg), and their translators (into and out of eleven official languages) decamp to Alsace. Imagine moving the Minnesota Legislature up to Duluth one week in four, all the year round.

Strasbourg is certainly central to Old Europe. Caught between the river Rhine in Germany and the Vosges Mountains in France, it enjoys a relatively dry and continental climate. It has been fought over by armies from East and West at least since the neo-pagan Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate defeated a Germanic confederation there in 357. After the war of 1870, Alsace became German (Elsass); in 1918 it became French once again. Hence the old joke about Alsace wine being made of German grapes using French methods—which means they do, or do not, wash their feet (adjust joke according to prejudice).

It is true that many of the Alsace grape varieties, such as riesling and sylvaner, are also widely grown in Germany. Alsace is in fact the only part of France producing first-rate wine where the grape variety rather than the region is the most prominent item on a wine label. The grape most readily associated with Alsace is the gewürztraminer, a variety actually related to muscat grapes and made into wine with a strong smell of elderflowers, melons, or lychees (pick your own comparison), tasting remarkably like its own fresh grapes.

As in Germany, some growers leave the best grapes on the vines until they grow the “noble rot” and are made into sweeter wines labeled “Vendange Tardive” (German Spätlese). But most Alsace gewürztraminer is made into table wine, clean, dry and spicy, fermented in steel rather than in oak, until all the residual sugar has been absorbed and the wine has a fresh bright finish. This is perhaps the only wine that can stand up to curry.

It is certainly good with turkey. As it costs a fraction of what you would pay for the fine wines of Burgundy, the wine region closest to the southwest of Alsace, you might want to stock up on it in anticipation of Thanksgiving. I would not answer for its compatibility with marshmallow dip or lime jelly. So buy a bottle now and practice.

I hope you are enjoying the new Harry Potter. Such a wealth of invention. And so witty. No profound psychological penetration, I suppose, but who ever expected that in a school story or a murder mystery? J.K. Rowling may not be Jane Austen, but then neither is Dorothy Sayers (who made the error of falling in love with her detective) or P.D. James (so much blood, such clever use of the Book of Common Prayer), Edmund Crispin (the thinking man’s Dorothy Sayers), or Agatha Christie (of whom to say that she has cardboard characters is to attribute to cardboard an excess of sensation).

Even without psychological subtlety, Rowling has conjured up wonderful characters. Anyone employed in education will recognize Professor Umbridge, an administrator from the Ministry of Magic who cannot herself teach her way out of a paper bag but is sent in to reform Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. “She drafted a bit of anti-werewolf legislation two years ago that makes it almost impossible for him to get a job,” says one professor about a brilliant colleague. The enemy of the Umbridges of this world is imagination.

And that is what Rowling has in superabundance. This is not teenybopper novelty-shop witchcraft. Still less is it the nasty world of black masses and witches’ sabbaths. I have never heard anyone miss a point so comprehensively as the earnest, amiable, and literal-minded evangelist on NPR who objected to the Harry Potter tales as promoters of the black arts by quoting sentences out of context, treating the novels in fact in the way that some people treat their Bibles—as if they were instruction manuals for lawn mowers. The bishop of London caught the spirit of the thing when he said he would happily appoint a chaplain for Hogwarts any day Professor Dumbledore requested one.

Of course, not every exercise of the imagination is good. Films like The Patriot propagate a view of the American Revolution that fails to acknowledge it as a civil war between two sets of American colonists, and so perpetuates hostility toward foreigners (and lobsters) that the world might be better off without. Braveheart irresponsibly fomented political hatred within the United Kingdom (think how well it did at the box office).

Yet Harry Potter generates sheer eutrapelia (handy word, that). It recalls the playful Roman poet Ovid. Scarcely surprising, seeing that Rowling (like The Rake himself) was a Latin major in college. Now she is the richest woman in England, richer than the Queen, God bless her (both of them).

Which just shows that imagination has practical consequences. In dreams begin responsibilities. Byron dreamed that Greece might yet be free. His dream formed part of the Grand Design or Big Idea that made Greece, in 1829, the first independent nation to be carved out of the old Ottoman Empire. The consequences of the long, slow disintegration of that Empire we are still living with, not least in Iraq.

Half a century after Greek independence, in Thessaloniki, then an Ottoman city, Yiannis Boutari founded the wine concern that still bears his name. Of course, Greeks have been making wine ever since Homer’s heroes sailed the wine-dark sea. But only recently did it become commercially available in glass bottles like Boutari’s.

There is something of the smell of a wooded Greek hillside about the red wine they make in the Naoussa in northern Greece, fifty miles from Thessaloniki. The grape is called xinomauro, which is Greek for acid black. Ancient and modern Greeks alike call red wine black—after all, it only looks red in a glass. Sure enough Boutari Naoussa is a good dark-ruby color. The taste is robust, not unlike cabernet, and the price, about $12, is a good value.

No need to clutter your appreciation by recalling that this comes from the same area as Alexander the Great—the man with the grandest designs in all the ancient world. Taste is its own idea. The taste buds are, after all, the swiftest messengers on the royal road from reality to the imagination.

Though it is nearly 20 years ago now, some of us are old enough to remember the Official Preppy Handbook. It told girls called Muffy how to adjust their pearls, push pennies into their penny loafers and pursue men in tartan trousers (which they called plaid pants).

The other day I came across the British equivalent, the Sloane Ranger Handbook (Sloane Square is a smart part of London, near Harrod’s grand emporium). From it, Caroline and Henry Sloane discover how to get green Wellington boots, where to study Cordon Bleu cookery, and which pack of hounds to hunt foxes with. For Americans, it offers a rare chance to consider whether our two great nations are divided by more than a common language.

They are. What the great Augustine would call the “loves” of Sloanes and Preppies are quite distinct. Consider attitudes to the land; in England rural is smart, in America it means hick. Or think of smell. Caroline and Henry think it sad that Americans do not smell of anything. All those showers kill smell dead; far better to wallow in a steamy bath. Caroline married Henry largely on account of his smell, a delicious amalgam of pipe smoke, Labradors, and old leather.

The English simmer (where I write) is ripe with aromas. I do not refer to the overpowering stench of prevarication emerging from a government that persuaded many Members of Parliament to vote for its war in Iraq by announcing we could all be blown up at 45 minutes notice by Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction. The public has a strong sense that if Her Majesty’s ministers were so sure these large but elusive weapons existed, they ought at least to be able to say where they are. This is a smell that will not go away anytime soon.

Thank God there are pleasanter airs abroad. Freshness rises from the pale green grass of the aftermath, where the crows are pecking among the bales of new-mown hay. The sweet peas are flowering, as powerful as brandy, as honeyed as Sauternes. But perhaps the most characteristic smell comes from the black currants—not blackberries, the autumn fruit that looks like raspberries dipped in ink, but black currants, Ribes nigrum, like small cranberries, growing on thornless bushes with leaves like vines.

In the sunshine, they are as pungent as skunks but a whole pile pleasanter, slightly oily (reminiscent, in fact, of the oil boys used to drip onto their electric trains), sweet, sour, and fruity all at the same time. Wine made from the sauvignon blanc grape, especially Pouilly-Fumé from the Loire in western France, is often said to smell of black currants.

The black currant is the most widely grown fruit in Europe. John Tradescant the Elder brought it to England from Central Europe in the early 17th century, in time for it to be transported to the American colonies. It has never been widely grown in America.

Forestedge Winery in Laporte, Minnesota, however, is said to be adding black currant to its range of wines made from local soft fruit and berries. Look out for it.

In the meantime, try a summer aperitif called Kir. Quarter-fill a wine glass with crème de cassis, the liqueur made in Burgundy from black currants and far too sticky to drink on its own. Top it with dry white wine. In Burgundy, they use aligoti (the name of a grape), but you could try anything white, dry, and light. With champagne it becomes Kir Royale. Watch the pretty pink swirls, like marble in motion, then sip judiciously as the sun sinks, the loon calls, and the dog falls into the lake for the nth time (where n is a large whole number).

Kir is named after a priest from Burgundy, Canon Kir, a hero of the resistance and then for many years, in the Fourth Republic, mayor of Dijon. The good canon’s name may be seen on the bottles of the premixed version of Kir, but if you cannot find them, it is easy to mix your own. There are few fruitier ways of keeping down the bill for preprandial libation. Besides, it stretches a hand of friendship across the Atlantic, and that cannot be bad.

Imperialists come in all shapes and sizes. Some claim their god gave them the right to take away other people’s land and market the produce of their orange groves. Others never visit the places or people whose lives they dominate through the sale of brown sticky drinks and their cinematic equivalent.

And then there are the unlikely ones, such as the poet Catullus. In the middle of the first century B.C. Rome was taking on territory at a greater rate than ever before. It was the custom for young men who aspired to a political career (or whose fathers aspired to one for them) to spend a year or more in a province as an honorary attaché on the governor’s staff, picking up tips, both informative and financial. Catullus did not find the wide plains of what is now northwestern Turkey at all to his liking. He was clearly happier in a sleazy pub off the Forum in Rome (“salax taberna,” as in “salacious tavern”), even if he did accuse its regulars of rogering his lady love Lesbia, “than whom no woman will ever be more greatly loved.” He was especially bitter about a Spaniard called Egnatius who favored as a dentifrice (so Catullus claimed) a fluid for the production of which he held, shall we say, an unassailable monopoly. [Uh, his own urine.—Editors]

Perhaps Catullus could have learned to like living abroad for his country. One thinks of that remarkable generation of British Arabists who tried to put the Near East back on its feet after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War. Hamilton, who engineered the Hamilton Road through the Zagros Mountains, the first road to link Persia with northern Iraq, was perhaps a natural for strenuous service. Lawrence, too, of course. But less so Canon Wigram who spent years living in the remote mountain villages of the Assyrian Christians, not proselytizing but providing every kind of help—medical, liturgical, typographical, political.

Still less, one might have thought, Gertrude Bell. When that formidable lady first came to the East it was to fall in love with a young diplomat under the plane trees of the British Legation in Teheran and to translate the wine-and-roses poems of Hafiz, the Persian national poet. Yet she learned to travel rough, to do astounding amounts of pioneer work in Byzantine and early Islamic archaeology (she was the power behind the Baghdad Museum, the one recently looted) and to become the trusted political counselor of the first King of independent Iraq (while remaining resolutely against Votes for Women at home).

The memoirs written by this generation shine with love of the Levant, the land, its languages, its people. Try Sir Arnold Wilson’s S.W. Persia or Hamilton’s Road through Kurdistan (and if it’s you that has my copy of the latter, please could I have it back). Alas, it will have been papers precisely of this period that were lost in the holocaust of the Iraqi National Archives horrifyingly described by Robert Fisk in the last week of the recent war.

Gertrude Bell died in Baghdad. Catullus sailed a yacht back from Asia Minor, down the Bosporus, past Byzantium, through the Greek islands, up the Adriatic. He made his homecoming not to Rome, but to northern Italy, where his family lived. The yacht was allowed a serene retirement on the limpid waters of Lake Garda. No serene retirement for young Catullus. He went on writing, riling other poets, especially Julius Caesar’s Chief Engineer, a multifutuent but incompetent versifier whom Catullus liked to call Mentula, (crudely translated by the late Professor Swanson as Mantool and by the witty James Michie as John Thomas). Catullus’s father invited Caesar to dinner when the great man was in northern Italy and made his son apologize.

One does not know what they drank, but the enterprising firm of Bitari has invented a pleasant red wine grown in the hills near Verona, the poet’s home, and named it after him. Catullo is 60 percent Cabernet (not a grape one associates with this part of the world) and 40 percent Corvino (which one does—it is the main variety in Valpolicella). The blend is mighty successful; my friend the wine merchant, with whom I discussed a bottle of this one sunny evening, thought it tasted rather like Pinot Noir, which is to say that it slipped down all too quickly, promoting pleasure more than thought and pastime with good company. Order it at your salax taberna, or take it to the lake and listen to the water chuckling up against the dock sharing your pleasure at being home.