Tag: wine

Freud and Strauss offer contrasting impressions of the nightlife of old Vienna. Hitler painted a verbal picture of the same city as it was seen by those who could not afford Sacher Torte and waltzes, let alone dream therapy with the good doctor, those for whom the opera (the solemnities of Wagner, one gathers, rather than the gaiety of the Gipsy Baron) could be only a very occasional indulgence. Mein Kampf is a book more reviled than read. It certainly earns the revulsion. Like most emetics that really deliver, the effect is gradual. The reader is invited to pity the poor painter, scraping a living as a builder’s laborer, excluded from art school by the shortcomings of the education system. Slowly it emerges that it is all someone else’s fault, the Jews, the unions, the Hapsburg monarchy, parliamentary procedure, you name it. Cringing self-pity metamorphoses effortlessly into snarling resentment and contempt. This is as unhappy a study in the mental genesis of tyranny as you are likely to find. One doubts if Hitler could ever have painted bold bright landscapes like those of Churchill.

Hitler, as is well known, was not keen on wine (though his ambassador to London, von Ribbentrop, had an earlier career as a champagne salesman). Other tyrants have been less teetotal. Saddam Hussein, despite being a Muslim, had a favorite wine. It is a liquid which many of us remember from those anxious years between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP, when bepimpled youth wished to do the right thing by the lady they were entertaining, but did not know if the right thing was red or white. Yes, Mateus Rosé, sweetish, pink, faintly fizzy, to look at not unlike the colored carbonated water some dentists give you to disguise the blood when you “wash out now please.” Maybe you still have one of the dumpy bottles, stoppered with a light bulb, caked in oodles of candle grease.

One ought not to suggest guilt by association. Some of my best friends have moustaches. The taste of Mateus Rosé is at least consistent, even if I am not an admirer. But it is a pity that it is by far the best known table wine from Portugal, a land of many interesting grape varieties and vintages. There is Vinho Verde, a white wine which is indeed green and fresh in taste and color, as the name suggests. And recently I enjoyed a really heartening bottle of Portugese red, Quinta do Crasto 2000, named after the vineyard which clings to the vertiginous slopes of the valley of the River Douro in the north of the country and conveniently available in the valley of the upper Mississippi for substantially less than $20.

The Douro valley is, of course, the area from which port comes, and this red table wine is made from some of the same grapes as port, Tinta Roriz, Tinta Barocca, Touriga Francesa, and Touriga Nacional (the names are as evocative as those of old English apple varieties—listen to Bramley Seedling and Worcester Pearmain, James Greave and Ribstone Pippin). Port, though, stays sweet because its fermentation is arrested. The yeasts get busy in the barrel turning the sugars into alcohol only to have their activities curtailed by the fortifying addition of substantial quantities of brandy. The sugars sit back and let the resulting blend mature into the noblest of all dessert wines.

Quinta do Crasto table wine lacks the sweetness of port, but has much of its nobility. The wonderful dark color is matched by a magnificent dark taste, which not only fills the mouth but swells up into the soft palate and the sinus, making you puff out your moustache (if any) like a walrus. There is soft tannin, enough to give good road-holding qualities, and a slight tang of fresh apples, enough to induce salivation but no sharpness. This is well-balanced wine.

Take it this summer if you are asked to the better sort of barbecue. With the help of a small steak, a baked potato and Savoy cabbage (you know, the crinkly kind) lightly steamed with a knob of butter, it lifted me out of the miry slough of Hitler’s prose. “Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear, gallantry and gaiety and grace.” The answer to tyranny must, I suppose, be hope.

Our first spring in Minnesota came late. It had not been much of a winter, in fact we felt fairly blasé about our capacity to survive Minnesota’s fabled frigidity. (But oh, how we have learned since!) The torrents pouring over St. Antony Falls inspired no particular shock nor awe, unlike the ceaseless roar of Spring 2001. There was road-grit, weak sunshine, and windblown tulips. Surprising then to hear accordion music outside, and the clash of small bells. But it was true—this music came by me on the waters. Rounding a corner we saw a white sleeve rhythmically waving a handkerchief, and were promptly transported from the shore of the Mississippi to the banks of the Thames at Oxford.

England, God knows, is full of odd customs. The unwise think they are vestiges of primeval paganism, but most of them seem to have started in the High Middle Ages, the most Christian era of English history. If you don’t believe me, read a book called The Stations of the Sun by a learned bloke called Hutton. These calendar customs began not as gnarled substitutes for child sacrifice but as the secular entertainments of Christian civilization.

Whatever the history, every May 1, thousands of Oxford people creep out of bed in the wee small hours of the morning. The crowds converge on Magdalen Bridge, where the main London road crosses the river. There they hear, generally in silence, the choir of Magdalen College, grouped on top of the college tower, sing a Latin hymn and a few madrigals, no louder at ground level than birdsong. Then the crowds head back into the city where the purveyors of greasy breakfasts do land-office business and “sides” of Morris dancers, dressed in white shirts and trousers, with colored cross-belts, bells strapped to their legs, and substantial boots perform with a vigor remarkable for the earliness of the hour.

It was Morris dancers we ran into that evening in Minneapolis, one of four sides in the city (two men’s, one women’s, one—from the village of Uptown-on-Calhoun—mixed). They say they are often asked if their art is Irish, but no, it is firmly in the tradition of Thames Valley Morris dancing. This art form was “discovered” in 1899 just in time to prevent its disappearance by a remarkable musicologist named Cecil Sharp (did anyone dare to call him D Flat, one wonders), and it’s now more popular than ever before. Like their Oxford fellows, the Minneapolis dancers also take May Morning exercise early, clashing batons, fiddling, leaping, whirling hankies, but they also meet at a more sociable hour in the evening and come together from the four points of the compass to dance in front of the IDS Tower. (Isn’t there something a bit Freudian about that name?)

So much leaping and clashing (even watching it) naturally works up a thirst, and it is indeed as much with Saturday evenings at Cotswold country pubs as with May Morning in the city that one associates the Morris. How good those white outfits look seen through a pint of Hook Norton Best Bitter, pulled by a shapely forearm from a proper draught-beer engine. Hook Norton promise an on-line shop for their bottled products, but who knows if they will be able to ship to the United States.

Until they do, I recommend a refreshing summer beverage called “ginger beer shandy,” described as “new-fangled” in 1888. One simply adds one of the ordinary bitters (Bass, say, or McEwans Export) to an equal quantity of ginger beer. Not ginger ale, a clear brown cisatlantic drink, but ginger beer as my mother used to make it—with live yeast in the family’s heated linen cupboard (until it exploded), a sweet cloudy non-alcoholic drink now conveniently available from superior Minnesota grocers. The mixture brings out a healthy sweat. Let’s hope the summer is hot enough to warrant drinking plenty of it.

The early monks of the Egyptian desert often faced their demons head on. Abba Antony in the hot sandy silence of the wilderness found himself attacked by several wild beasts at once. They roared and hissed, they buffeted his makeshift cell until it shook. He stared them down. They gnashed their teeth and left.

Often, though, subtle means were needed. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers is full of stories which show how simplicity and discernment (and often humor) learnt from long consideration of the human condition can outwit violence, distraction, and despair. There are plenty of later analogs: Sherlock Holmes caught his murderers by identifying myriad varieties of tobacco ash. Miss Marple and Father Brown recognized killers by applying to the motives of their fellow men the results of a lengthy and patient observation.

Maybe it was something like this that the French Foreign Minister meant when he said France is an old country. He could scarcely have meant it literally. The present French constitution, that of the Fifth Republic, is substantially younger than the present President. Its ultimate ancestor, the constitution of the First Republic, emerged more than a century after the first constitution of Connecticut (supposedly the world’s oldest written constitution).

In fact, France was drawn together as a single state only after the 16th century Wars of Religion. In the Middle Ages what is now French territory was home to two distinct Romance languages, the langue d’oc and the langue d’oui, named from their words for “yes,” the former derived from Latin hoc (“this thing”), the latter from hic ille (“this is it”). Large parts of it were ruled for centuries by the Kings of England.

Wisdom, however, does not arise simply from the passage of time. It can grow out of reflection on shared suffering. As boys we were taught that French cooking might be good but it had evolved as an act of self-defense; the sauces and sausages had to be tasty because they needed to disguise dodgy meat cooked while French cities were being besieged by the armies of Henry V, the Duke of Marlborough, and other heroes. Our teacher had a point. As recently as the Prussian siege of 1870, the inhabitants of Paris were obliged to consume the inhabitants of their zoo, including the baby elephants Castor and Pollux.

But French country cooking, like that which Elizabeth David taught us to love, grows from the judicious use of hard-won ingredients by sapient peasants making the best of a hard-scrabble life. Cassoulet is one of the splendid achievements of the southern region named (after its old language) the Languedoc. It consists of pork and duck, goose and beans (good for your heart) cooked together over several days. It is the foster-child of silence and leisure. An invitation from my friend the Philolog to her annual Cassoulet Dinner was therefore an act of kindness and one which deserved the offering of an appropriate libation.

The wine would clearly need to come from the Languedoc, the hot Mediterranean coastal area across which Hannibal and his pachyderms passed on their way from Spain to the Alps. Languedoc produces lots of wine, but not all of it slips down easily. I recall a Corbières some years ago which was the color of red ink and tasted a lot like sucking the nib of a fountain pen. (No, I don’t. Not often anyway.)

This time, though, Fortune smiled. The 2001 vintage of Domaine de la Brune, a property in the Coteaux de Languedoc, is a heartening dark red (and about $10 a bottle). Only a tenth of it comes from the Carignan grape, until recently the most commonly grown grape in the Languedoc. But that’s enough to give it an edge. It is mostly Syrah, the grape of great Rhones such as Hermitage, sweetened and softened by some Grenache. The whole is pleasantly rounded, redolent of sunshine and alcohol.

Redolent too of craft and patience on the part of the winemaker who produced this pleasing balance. One should be suspicious of a wine that seems to make one wise (or, for that matter, a superior driver). This one encourages the drinker to recognize something better: the wisdom of the man who made it. Soyez sage.

Those few of us who spend our working lives in the Roman Empire find current events depressingly familiar. The superpowers of Late Antiquity, Rome and Persia, spent much of the half-millennium before the rise of Islam at war. The Persian Empire incorporated not only modern Iran, but also Iraq. The cockpit of imperial confrontation was precisely where modern Turkey, Iraq, and Syria come together.

The Persians were generally the aggressors. During the invasion of 359 AD, a Roman staff officer was taken by a friendly highland chieftain into the foothills of the Kurdish Alps to look down into the Mesopotamian plain. This is one of the great vistas of the world. Through the heat haze, you can sense the curvature of the earth as you look out from the escarpment across the plain below (even if you have drunk nothing stronger than Turkish beer—a refreshing beverage called Efes Pilsen). The staff officer counted the Persian troops, their knights, their archers, their siege engines, and other weapons of mass destruction as they crossed the Great Zab River. The traverse took over three days.

Romans never enjoyed any success following the Persian invasion route in reverse, i.e. south through modern Iraq along the valley of the Tigris. Once or twice they invaded successfully down the Euphrates (a route which cuts off a substantial corner of what is now Syria) and were able to besiege and burn the Persian capital, near where Baghdad is now. But such expeditions often ended in tears or worse; one emperor died from a thunderbolt during a desert storm.

Despite being the aggressors, the Persians seem more sympathetic than the stuffy Romans. Persian courtiers hunted and played chess, which they called euphonically chatrang. Their silver drinking vessels display reliefs of dancing girls with bellies beautiful to behold. The genial king Khusro II liked to have his financial statements submitted on sheets scented with rosewater. Wine was certainly one of the pleasures of his court, as it was of the Persian poets who told stories about him and his wife Shirin (“Sweety”) well into the Islamic period. What the wine was like is anybody’s guess. Attempts to associate ancient or medieval Persia with the excellent modern grape called Shiraz seem pretty tenuous.

The drink I associate with Persia is, oddly enough, Cointreau. It’s purely a matter of atmosphere. Cointreau is an after-dinner drink made out of oranges, and the orange is not recorded in Persia until later. Cointreau is distilled at Angers, in northwest France, from fruit grown in the West Indies, Brazil, and Spain. In its early days, in the mid-19th century, it had rather anti-clerical, rationalist overtones, in contrast to the sticky liquids made by monks—Benedictine, Chartreuse, and the elixir of Père Gaucher.

But for me Cointreau means Persia. Thirty years ago, I was over there sorting pottery shards for an archaeologist. I came to drink rather a lot of it, courtesy of a friend who was house-sitting in North Teheran for a British diplomat with (thanks to the diplomatic bag) a well-stocked drinks cupboard. Foreign alcohol was available but was fiercely expensive; polite people in the suburbs seemed caught up in a dust-devil of conspicuous consumption. Western goods, such as good drink, were conspicuously consumed (it all came crashing down when the Shah fell). Anyway, my friend knew she could afford to replace only one bottle. So it was the Cointreau we polished off, looking out over the fruit tree blossoms, the melting snow from the mountain behind us pouring audibly down the nearby streams.

The liqueur is clearer than a trout stream, sweet but not oppressive, a relief from the rosewater omnipresent in Persian sweetmeats. The oranges, in fact, make Cointreau somewhat astringent, like the coarser cuts of Tiptree marmalade (manufactured, of course, from bitter Seville oranges and not the watery things which go into inferior brands). One senses springtime and contentment, but not at the expense of rationality (and at the expense hereabouts of only about $10 for a little “pony” bottle), the Merry Monarch might have approved. I don’t know if the diplomat did, or if he ever knew. But then such folk are sent to lie abroad for their country.

It always seems to happen on a Friday. The phone rings and someone says, “Do you speak Latin?” and I reply “Well, I teach it,” or something equally noncommittal. Then comes the question. “What is the Latin word for ‘color’?” Phew, that’s easy. “Color, spelt the way Americans spell it.” “Well what’s the Latin for enhanced?” “It depends what you mean.” “Okay, then, what’s the Latin for shampoo?”

That one was a local soap company brainstorming the name of an enhanced product. Over the years, I have furnished love-legends for engraving on wedding rings, an inscription for a cake for the Tennessee Valley Authority, and translations of choice phrases in a doctor’s letter to his patient’s lawyer (sui generis perversus, that sort of thing), which had clearly been left in the chaste obscurity of a learned language for a good reason.

The most engaging inquiry was also the most serious. Someone rang from the Medical School (again, a Friday afternoon) wanting to know the origin of a word meaning “pain during intercourse.” He was doing research and wanted to coin a similar word for pain during anal intercourse, and please could I oblige. The term we came up with was proctalgia, derived from Greek “alge,” meaning pain (as in analgesic) and Greek “proktos,” denoting the posterior passage (as in proctophone, one who speaks through that part of his body). Proctalgia is surely a word which deserves a broader usage, for instance, in reference to a tiresome acquaintance, “the fellow gives me acute proctalgia.” I leave it with you.

One hopes that local government appreciates such pleasing contributions to our land grant mission, but it certainly does not discharge a fraction of the service to the state which is rendered by the University’s Classics Department. The hard humanities are as necessary as the hard sciences.

But such telephonic repartee does inspire me to go straight from the office to the new sushi shop to sample the exact pleasures of contrasting fish. (It is, after all, still Friday). Seafood supposedly inspires a kind of cognitive precision, especially sushi. A molecule of mackerel follows a soupcon of salmon. I am reminded of the Latinate epicure newly arrived at Boston’s Logan Airport anxious to sample the local New England delicacies without delay. “Take me,” he said to the cabbie, “to where I can get scrod.” “That’s the first time I’ve heard that in the pluperfect,” came the reply.

A sushi-enhanced sharpness of mind should lead you, too, to the 2002 Sauvignon Blanc from an Argentine winery called Bodegas Norton. This is a light and pleasing wine, a fine complement to raw fish (it would be overpowered by anything smoked or canned). The color is pale, the taste is clean, with a faint fizz, and a hint of the blackcurrant flavor which is more pronounced in, say, Pouilly-Fumé, a wine from the Loire valley in western France, made from the same grape. Above all, it is young and refreshing, serious without being intense.

For all its youth, this is a wine with an interesting history. Sir Edmund Norton was one of those bold Victorian engineers not afraid to take his art to the undiscovered ends. In the late 19th century, Argentine agriculture was transformed by being able to transport its produce to distant markets, not least to Britain and the United States. Immigrants arrived to work the land—readers of Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia will recall the communities of Welsh cattlemen with names like Pedro Evans and Sancho Jones. The secret of this success lay in the railways, largely British-built, and Sir Edmund Norton designed and constructed railway bridges. He married a local woman and settled in the wine country; Bodegas Norton is in the upper Mendoza valley, three and a half thousand feet above sea level, in the eastern foothills of the Andes Mountains.

Those who want the Sauvignon without the sushi can find it for less than $8 all around town. You do not need to be a Latin lover to like this wine. (Remember how Dan Quayle was going to find his Latin handy in Latin America?) But it certainly will put a spring in your step. This wine says “Thank God it’s Friday.”

I recently spent a sad evening in a basement in South Minneapolis. An acquaintance was seeking subsidised legal advice about the custody of his children. He had found it pretty difficult uncovering a voluntary agency able to offer advice to men on such matters. But now here he was with six other unfortunates waiting his turn and talking about his experiences.

The stories we heard seemed to suggest that there are areas of Minnesota life where inequality of the sexes has been turned on its head. One wife’s lawyer had apparently suggested a baseless accusation of domestic abuse simply to get the husband out of the house. Other men’s accounts left a similar impression of helplessness, which the legal clinic was striving, with limited resources, to redress. Perhaps it was useful to just get together and commiserate with the boys.

Male friendship is a sensitive plant, growing most strongly when supported by the trelliswork of such institutions as the bowling league, the English pub, or the backstreet tea-house of a Near Eastern town, where mustachioed men sit low to the ground on stools made of old tires and play tric-trac by the hour. I remember a Persian friend once asking me why Americans, such effusive folk when you meet them, spend their evenings shut away each in his home. There certainly do seem to be a lot of lonely men around, and those in this basement, separated from their families, seemed especially bereft.

According to popular belief, the frail flower of American male friendship is often watered by beer—and in the case of most American beer, watered is certainly the word. Thanks to advertising, Budweiser is not only the most popular brew in America, it is increasingly chic abroad. To each his own. But for me, Bud brings to mind the old pub adage that “you only rent your beer.” It is therefore a pleasure to recommend a good solid brew that has a taste.
The August Schell company of New Ulm is one of the oldest breweries in the country and one of the oldest businesses in the state. It was established even before the U.S.–Dakota War of 1862, by immigrants from the Black Forest. The German tradition at New Ulm is obvious. The city boasts a statue of Hermann the German (Arminius to you, me, and Tacitus), whose destruction of three Roman legions at the Battle of the Teutoburger Forest in 9 A.D. prevented the expansion of the Roman Empire into Germanic lands. (Professor Peter Wells of the U of M will soon be publishing a splendid new book on this battle.)

The German pedigree is a fine omen (though I suppose Schlitz, Schmidt, and Blatz are respectable German names, too). Of the numerous admirable brews produced by Schell’s, the one which pleases me most bears not the name of the company but the city. Ulmer Braun has a gold label with a rutting buck who is either ecstatic or angry—has he just consumed the contents? Or trodden on a broken bottle, inconsiderately disposed of? The beer is a pleasing dark brown, the color of old mahogany, and at less than a dollar a bottle for the six-pack, is extremely affordable. You can taste the hops and malt. If you prefer not to taste your beer, you can chill it in the American style, I suppose.

Ulmer Braun is not so stout as Guinness. Nor is it so muscular as Porter, a beer originally made for the men who carted around the crates of fruit and vegetables at Covent Garden Market in London. (Summit Brewing Company makes a fine Porter for those who really like to get their teeth into their beer.) Ulmer Braun has more heart than most lagers. It is a comforting beverage to have with a pork chop and potatoes on a bitter January evening.

“Courage, friends,” said George Bernard Shaw. “We all hate Christmas.” These days there is a good deal more to hate about the festive season than there was in Edwardian England, particularly the annual crash-course in consumerism given to all our children by the manufacturers of worthless plastic gewgaws. No doubt the hairy Hibernian sophisticate disdained competitive consumption. But I fear the things he probably hated most about Christmas were precisely those which decent people most treasure, what John Betjeman, the elegist of the everyday, called “the sweet and silly Christmas things.” In the Twin Cities, the sweetest, silliest Christmas thing is the seasonal willingness of comparative strangers to invite each other into their homes. Newcomers here, even those like me who are accustomed to British levels of reserve, find formidable the willingness, during the rest of the year, Minnesotans exercise to respect one another’s privacy. This is the state whose largest university has for several years been without a faculty club, and no one has even noticed. But across the cities, Christmas seems to free up the flow of the soul, rather like Tom Lehrer’s National Brotherhood Week.

Of course, the midwinter social thaw does not occur on the scale it did in the Roman Empire. In the ancient world, the Saturnalia—the festival of Saturn, coldest, oldest, and most coagulative of the Gods—filled the last days of December with a free-and-easy spirit. (There is, incidentally, no need to believe in any continuity between Saturnalia and Christmas. The first mention of the Nativity of Christ on the 8th day before the Kalends of January comes as late the year 354. The Feast of the Epiphany, January 6, was more important to early Christians, and neither was half as important as Easter. Besides, the Early Church was keener on conversion than continuity.) The Saturnalia was quite a party. It was meant to recall the long-past Golden Age of prosperity and peace when Saturn himself ruled on Earth.

Festivities in both ancient Rome and modern Minnesota have in common a need for wine. Bernard Shaw didn’t of course. He was a teetotaler as well as a Noelophobe, so the whole of this column would have passed him by. But the rest of us like to be well lubricated (though not, of course, our designated drivers), and large parties require good bulk wine.

There are few things nastier than the carpet cleaner some people serve their guests—and it is the impurities, they say, which produce the hangover. So let me recommend some decent big bottles: a brand of wine called Vendange, made in the central valley of California, but with a rather French character to it (the name is French for “grape harvest”). At less than $8 locally for a double bottle (1.5 litres), it is certainly affordable and the reds have the added merit of making hearty mulled wine. Vendange wines can be provided in quantity when that’s what’s needed. They also have quality. (Loyal readers of this column may recall my contention that, when it comes to wine, excess is the enemy of appreciation. Let the boozers chunder on the wall-to-wall, or “talk on the big white telephone.”)

Vendange produces wine from a wide range of grape varieties. A host who selects several contrasting bottles can find amusement educating himself about the tastes of different types of grape, knowledge which is basic to intelligent imbibing. The Cabernet, it must be admitted, reminds me why the French mix this variety with the milder-tasting Merlot when they make Claret. But the Pinot Noir slips down pleasantly. My particular favorite, the Malbec, is a dark red wine with a distinctive, refreshing character. There is a good range of whites as well, Chardonnay, Semillon, and so on.

These are wines which will please at parties. Or they can be sipped, while you perform your own sweet and silly seasonal rite. Mine is to read with the children a short story of Alphonse Daudet set one Christmas Eve in 17th century Provence. Whatever yours may be, I wish you every joy at the dark time of the year. Shaw was a bore.

A few weeks ago, central London saw the largest demonstration it has ever witnessed. A good-humored crowd of 407,791 people marched through the streets. These were not folk normally given to protest. For the most part, they were quiet country people, though to be sure they enjoyed their day out in the capital, cheering, singing, and blowing hunting horns.

They had come to remind Her Majesty’s Government of a few home truths, in particular that one cannot pay too much for food, that it is rude to criticize a farmer with your mouth full, and that agricultural subsidies are not handouts for farmers but a way of ensuring a supply of cheap bread (circuses come separately) for the urban masses. But at the heart of their protest was not the plight of farmers so much as anguish at the government’s interference with certain immemorial pleasures of the rustics.

The oldest of these pursuits is the hunting (with hounds, not guns) of the wild red deer, once the sport of kings, but now carried out only on one remote moor in the southwest of England. Deer run faster and straighter than foxes. Following stag-hounds across the springy heather under an open Exmoor sky must be one of the most exhilarating pleasures a human being can have. Hunting deer involves knowing about their natural history. The locals seem to know the deer individually—“the big stag with the crooked antler as lives above Badgworthy”; “the pale-colored hind you see at the bottom end of Horner Wood.” They can tell from their footprints (“slots”) the age, size, sex, and condition of the deer who made them. It is probably true that despite the damage they do, the wild red deer are tolerated by the Exmoor farming community principally because of their complex relationship as hunter and hunted. If and when the hounds do bring their beast to bay, it is dispatched from close range by the huntsman; the hounds get the paunch, the followers divide up the venison, and the heart goes to the farmer on whose land the deer was killed.

This sport involves a good deal more exercise than the shooting of white-tailed deer, a popular sport in Minnesota in the autumn. But both present one common problem: How do you cook wild meat of indeterminate age which is going to need to be hung quite some time before you can be sure it is at all tender? The sensible solution is, of course, to eat farmed venison, a delicious meat, always reliably tender and amazingly low in cholesterol-inducing fat. It may be the lean meat of the future, but that’s another story.

I cannot help the hunter much with recipes. For these you must look to the wonderful cookbooks of Nichola Fletcher, Game for All and Monarch of the Table (I specially like her “Venison in Chocolate Sauce”). But I can recommend a wine which I think will stand up to the strongest of “gamey” tastes. It is the 2000 Napa Valley Zinfandel from Beaulieu Vineyards, a winery with more than 100 years of continuous history behind it (they made altar wine during Prohibition).

This Zinfandel is a fine red color, like a pan of berry juice ready for making bramble jelly. (Deer like berries. You should see what a stag can do to a blackcurrant bush. So there is some justice in the world!) The soft tannin at the center of the taste will stand up well to the meat, the smell of fresh oil which comes from the wine being matured in oak barrels is appetizing, and the pleasant fruity sensation as you swallow, which is reminiscent of a fresh Granny Smith apple, gives the palate wings. Less mist, more mellow fruitfulness.

This is a wine with a good heart— and at less than $20, a decent price. It should go nicely with whatever Florian Krebsbach and Clarence Bunsen may shoot (or run over) in the woods near Lake Wobegon this autumn. For me, it brings to mind the Scotch poet who wrote, “My heart is on Exmoor / My heart is not here. My heart is on Exmoor / A-chasing the deer.”

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

My grandfather’s grandfather invented kippers. The family tradition is that if he had not sold the patent for his method of making smoked herrings to Woodgers of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in northeastern England for 200 pounds, we might all have been rich beyond the dreams of creosote. Imagine a penny-a-fish royalty on every kipper consumed on the Flying Scotsman by an Agatha Christie hero fleeing northwards, and the ching soon starts to add up.

Great-great grandfather cut a swathe through the 19th century. There is a daguereotype photo showing him with full set of Victorian whiskers and a long-stemmed “churchwarden” clay pipe. He served on the ship on which Napoleon was carried off to his final exile on the island of Saint Helena, he had a son called Elijah, and his wife is said to have been the first person ever to own a steam trawler.

All of which probably explains my lifelong predilection for smoked fish. Proper kippers are not easy to get in the Twin Cities, but it is a truth which deserves a wider currency that a certain well-known chain of bagel shops will sell you a side or packet of pretty good smoked salmon for a pretty good price, and they sometimes have specials around Christmas.

A lifelong taste for smoked fish naturally precipitates a lifelong search for good wine to go with it. The wine must, of course, be white, light enough to allow the taste of the fish to come through, strong enough in the nose to blend with the smoke, and sufficiently acid to cut into the oils which are meant to be so good for you and some say were the secret of the braininess of Jeeves, the perfect gentleman’s personal gentleman.

Much of the pleasure of such a search comes from trying. When you set out for Ithaca, pray that the way be long, as the Greek poet puts it. But there is one spot on this quest, inexpensive and consistently pleasing, to which I find myself returning regularly. It is Rosemount Chardonnay, all the way from Australia, a fine masculine wine with a powerful flavor, consistent enough to suggest to one lady drinker the persistent charm of honeysuckle. Certainly it has nose enough for the smoky taste of kippers, and strong road-holding qualities on the palate. It is generally available for less than $10 a bottle, and there is not a headache in a hogshead of it.

Australian wine has come a long way in the last generation. The crimes formerly committed under the label “Australian Burgundy”—once satirized as Chateau Downunder—are a thing of the distant past. Wines like Rosemount Chardonnay taste good. They have to; it is a fact that Australians drink twice as much wine per head as inhabitants of the United States. They also sell well; Rosemount is the largest selling brand of white wine in Australia.

In England, where it has been popular for nearly 20 years, “strine wine” has a reputation for reliability. California wine-makers penetrated the British market a few years earlier than the Australians, but got off to a poor start by selling there the lesser products of that great state, notable mostly for their fancy carafes and strong aroma of burnt matches. The Aussies must have guessed they would lose money underestimating the taste of the Great British Public; theirs is wine which no one could dislike. I will back Rosemount Chardonnay against kippers and smoked salmon any time. Only those who spend Christmas Eve at Ingebretsen’s on Lake Street will be able to say if it can stand up to lutefisk.

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

Some countries come up so often in the news that you feel you ought to know more about them. There is a painless way to achieve this. Read travel literature. An intelligent travel book provides more enlightenment than any number of newspaper accounts of the latest atrocities, as well as placing in a longer historical perspective lands which (as was once said of Ireland) produce more history than can be consumed locally.

Imagine, then, the pleasure of finding a book about the Near East that is both easy to read and fresh in its perspective. It is William Dalrymple’s From the Holy Mountain. The author had the fine idea of travelling clockwise around the Eastern Mediterranean (what we used to call the Levant), starting from the monastic community at Mount Athos in northern Greece and ending among the Copts of Egypt, chronicling the scattered remnants of the Christian commonwealth which once covered the whole Mediterranean world in the three centuries leading up to the rise of Islam in the mid-seventh century.

Dalrymple’s visit to a Christian abbey in northern Mesopotamia is particularly poignant. He describes one of the surviving monks, a man whose native tongue is Syriac, a variant of the Aramaic language Jesus spoke, looking out over the monastery’s parched and deserted vineyards. The escarpment of Tur ’Abdin was an area whose wine was well known in Biblical times. Not anymore.

In the Muslim Near East, Christians have traditionally been associated with winemaking. Of course, despite the Koranic prohibitions, they had no monopoly on its consumption. One thinks of the Ottoman Sultan Selim the Sot, and of the poet Omar Khayyam with his book of verses underneath the bough, his loaf of bread and jug of wine, and Thou—even though scholars tell me that the lines would be more accurately translated as a cask of wine, and half a sheep, and Thou. But in common belief, Christianity and wine went together; the Armenian Christians of Ispahan in Persia made rugs with irregularities in the pattern which the dealers called “tipsy carpets.”

Many modern Near Eastern states produce fine wines. The Vieux Thibar of Tunisia is powerful stuff and the multifarious wines of Turkey are a pleasure to the traveller. (My favorite is called Villa Doluca—pronounced do-lud-jah) but they are not frequently found round here. The best known Levantine wine is called Chateau Musar, made for more than 70 years now by a Maronite Christian family in the Bekaa valley in Lebanon. The vines grow on gravel and limestone 3,000 feet above sea level, and they are guaranteed a mild climate by protective mountains on either side. This valley is otherwise famous for the ancient temples at Ba’albek, the largest in the Roman world and known in pre-Christian times for its ritual prostitutes (and known today for its warlords).

There is nothing quite like Chateau Musar. It comes in a claret bottle (with shoulders), its maker studied at the University of Bourdeaux (France was the dominant western power here from the mid-19th century onwards), and the grapes are mostly Cabernet Sauvignon, the variety which gives flavor to most Bourdeaux. Yet the taste and character is more like a Rhone—more sunshine, more alcohol. I recently considered a bottle of the 1996 vintage. It was strong yet subtle.

Chateau Musar takes a long time to make. The different varieties of grape (Cabernet, Cinsault, and various others) are fermented separately for two years before they are blended and then left to age for several more years. It also varies in price; I have seen it on the Internet for less than $12 and for more than $20. This is a wine well worth bringing home in your luggage if you take a trip this fall, to lands where it is more readily available—the Levant, Europe, or England. Whether you think it was Noah who invented wine or Dionysius, Chateau Musar will show you how the ancient art of winemaking can be refined to a high elegance.

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