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Title: Bacchus; or, wine to-day and to-morrow
Author: P. Morton Shand
Release date: November 26, 2025 [eBook #77340]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co, 1927
Credits: Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BACCHUS; OR, WINE TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW ***
BACCHUS
OR
WINE TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
_A List of the Contents of this Series will be found at the end of this
volume_
Transcriber’s Note: in fact, this was omitted.
BACCHUS
OR
WINE TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
BY
P. MORTON SHAND
Author of _A Book of Wine_, _A Book of French Wines_,
etc.
LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., LTD.
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.
_Printed in Great Britain by_
MACKAYS LTD., CHATHAM
BACCHUS
OR
WINE TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
“Put a cup of wine into my hand that I may cast off from me the
cloak of hypocrisy.”—HAFIZ.
The bush which none but the poorest wine ever needed has been hung
out alluringly as a tavern’s thirst-provoking sign-board to entice
the pleasure-seekers of those lands where the grape will not, or may
not, ripen for the wine-press, over all wines good and bad, true and
false, provided only they be duly intoxicating, by that hysterical
piece of amateur legislation known as the Volstead Act. Every people,
we know, has the government and laws it deserves. It is only when the
citizens of a state are so overcome by enthusiasm for the perfection
of their own institutions as to organise propaganda for the conversion
of other countries to conformity with the sovereign panaceas they have
invented, as in the case of Soviet Russia or the republic which recently
substituted a camel rampant and three golden orbs for an eagle as its
national emblem, that the domestic policy of such a state ceases to be
exclusively its own concern. Not that respect for its privacy is desired
by either nation: the one broadcasts its sanguinary social reforms, the
other its strident social vulgarities. The war that was to end war was
also to end wine. The crusaders of the United States, too proud to fight
for any other cause, were to make the world as safe for teetotalism as
for democracy, so that for the Utopian future the latter shibboleth
should imply the former. The Latin nations, however, were deaf to all
material inducements, such as increased industrial efficiency, and
obstinately refused to have the “running sore” of viticulture cauterised
by the same Fiery Cross as had desiccated California’s wine-grapes
into seedless raisins. Ultimately, America, still inspired by the
loftiest moral motives, consented to forgo the forcible conversion
of Europe to the one generally known commandment of the Koran in
exchange for an enormous monetary tribute to indemnify its bankers and
munition-manufacturers for the grievous losses in ethical prestige which
they had sustained by this unparalleled act of renunciation.
Thanks to the magnificent advertisement given to the inimitable
properties of wine by the School-Marms Government which imposed
Prohibition on a nation ever whoring after righteousness, its future
existence may be deemed assured until the next Puritan revival, or the
advent of the New Matriarchy. In spite of the fact that their aims are
championed by a titled lady, who, though British neither by birth nor
blood, was, appropriately enough, the first woman Member of Parliament
to take her seat at Westminster, our “Temperance Reformers” are no
more likely to catch us unawares in the course of the next few decades
than those other eugenic despots, the vegetarians and the anti-tobacco
fanatics. Humanity reacts swiftly and brutally against Puritanism in any
form. Every lenten cycle of Praise-God-Bare-Bones theocracy is invariably
followed by the reign of a Merry Monarch, if not of a Heliogabalus. In
few ages of the past has the will to deny itself no single pleasure of
the flesh been more manifest in mankind than in the vandal and hedonist
era of transition in which we crudely live.
For a moment it seemed that the “to be, or not to be” of wine-drinking
might threaten to become a permanent and burning political question
among non-viticultural nations, just as certain practical problems of
wine-growing have for long been the paramount agricultural-political
issues in viticultural countries. Already, however, the tide of an
inevitable revolt against tyrannically “uplifting,” but quite unworkable,
enactments has swept over Scandinavia, the nursery of all “progressive”
movements. Soviet Russia, which began by abolishing Vodka in favour
of a tolerance of light wines and beer, has been constrained to add
distillation to other nationalised industries on the cynical pretext
that the state needs additional revenue only to be found in exploiting
drunkenness. Forewarned, as much by the gruesome Bacchanalia of
Prohibition in operation as by the quality of Bootleggers’ “Hootch,”
British wine-drinkers are determined to fight to the last in defence
of their liberties as their forefathers fought the Excisemen and the
Revenue-Cutters before them. The Labour Party, theoretically committed
to “an ambitious programme of temperance legislation” (including the
back-door policy of Prohibition known as Local Option), dares not lift a
finger to put its academic articles of faith into practice on pain of
seeing the working class vote against it to a man. The only sign of alarm
is in the trade, and can be discounted as a not altogether disinterested
manœuvre. Nonconformity, the standard-bearer of Teetotalism, is as
defunct as Liberalism, which has now won the right to replace “Brandy
Nan” as the alternative proverbial metaphor for something as dead beyond
recall as that extinct and fabulous bird the dodo.
Thus wine has now begun to acquire an added, and most unenviable, lustre
for no better reason than that it used to be denounced by the zealots in
their wrath as “a wile of Satan.” By a biased application of the doctrine
of Justification by Works, the Calvinists were able to find in wine,
rather than in the unchanging heart of man, the source of that insidious
“temptation” inseparable from every gradation of its use that lies
between the equally “sinful” extremes of moderate digestive enjoyment at
meals and the abuse provocative of delirium tremens. Indeed, no honest
discrimination between natural wine or beer and fortified wine or spirits
was ever made by these impassioned casuists. The drinkers of claret,
stout, cider, port or proof gin, the men who would have felt themselves
for ever dishonoured had they once exceeded the strictest sobriety,
as the habitual drunkards, were one and all outlawed impartially as
profligate “wine-bibbers.” In parts of New England to say of a man
that he “drank wine” constituted an inexpugnable gravamen against his
character only comparable with accusing him of living in open adultery.
It is worth noticing how it was only after mankind had refused to be
any longer very much interested in dogmas one way or the other, and
had ceased to damn or bless a neighbour off-hand for holding a certain
selection of them, that the Puritan conscience began to envisage the
possibility of preaching less purely doctrinal abnegations, such as
“Taking the Pledge,” to a considerably greater extent than had hitherto
seemed consonant with the furtherance of “the Lord’s Work.” From that
moment all biblical precepts endorsing the sanction of wine were as
resolutely put aside as the love, pity and forgiveness of Christ’s
teachings had been by the original wine-drinking founder of these austere
sects some three centuries before. Nor was their awakened interest in
“Total Abstinence” due to any weak human compassion for the appalling
effects of alcoholism in heredity, such as those infant maladies which
are the direct results of “the sins of the fathers”—the hideous tenet
of Predestination could be relied upon to eliminate any such motive—but
simply and solely to the cold zest of robbing life of one more pleasant
thing, one more “snare of the flesh.”
The proper place for a man to drink wine, or even spirits, is in his
own, or someone else’s, home, among his family or friends, not in the
nauseating atmosphere of a night-club, the squalor of a saloon-bar, or
ensconced in a high-backed church pew, his eyes riveted on the text
“Lord, give me strength,” furtively draining it from a flask, so as
to sustain the onslaught of those serried battalions of theological
syllogisms which reinforce the “prayerfulness” of the average Scottish
sermon. Indeed, it is probable that the peculiarly sordid type of our
taverns is a direct result, even to some extent the expression, of
that harsh Puritan condemnation of all “strong liquors.” For long the
Righteous consistently refused to co-operate in any movement designed
to ameliorate the conditions, or curtail the licensing hours, of public
houses on the pharisaical pretext that what was needed was their
abolition pure and simple, the felling of the whole tree, not the
lopping off of a rotten branch. No alliance, they declared, could be
contemplated with those “Sons of Belial” and “workers of iniquity” who
were striving in and out of Parliament, usually amidst general obloquy,
to bring about sane temperance and render the inn a place which a
self-respecting working-man might no longer be ashamed to frequent in
company with his wife or sweetheart. Towards the end of the last century
the intransigeance of this attitude became sensibly modified. Many
prominent Nonconformists quietly abandoned the practice, and even the
profession, of teetotalism after reaching that degree of affluence which
impelled them to forsake the “true word” of the little Bethels for the
flesh-pots of the parish church. None the less the outbreak of the War
found many of the more uncompromising Puritans exulting in their Bands
of Hope, because a golden opportunity was now presented of forcing total
abstinence on the nation under cover of the specious argument that a
sober man is able to make shells faster than a drunken, and a Blue-Ribbon
soldier can kill far more of his foes in the Lord’s name than one whose
physique has been undermined by dalliance with the flower of the hop
or the fruits of the vine and the juniper-bush. Now that the voice of
the Unco’ Guid no longer carries much weight in the nation’s counsels,
it is reasonably certain that the public-house, as we know it, will be
profoundly changed for the better, both structurally and as regards its
general ambiance. The lessons of direct state control at Carlisle, and
the experiments with restricted licences and indirect regulation of the
management so wisely instituted in some of garden suburbs and municipal
housing-estates, have proved a valuable stimulus to the enlightenment of
public opinion. Sooner or later, too, we shall learn that in spite of
the grandmotherly assurances of County Councillors to the contrary, the
drinking of a glass of beer in the open air at a table adjacent to the
street pavement is no more bound to encourage immorality than when the
same beverage is consumed between four walls.
Wine, then, if less of a necessity of life than it was for our
forefathers, or even our immediate fathers, is strangely enough regarded
to-day more as something of a luxury, or a minor depravity, than as a
natural taste inherent in the human race. We have grown so accustomed to
quoting the hackneyed and hypocritical “Wine and Women” in explanation
of our neighbours’ failings, that our smug and sniggering satisfaction
makes us apt to forget “Song,” or merriment, the third person of this
ageless trinity, which ennobles the abdiction to both. The three together
can transmute the foul fumes of the gin-palace and the defiling ignominy
of the brothel into the genial fireside haven of a man’s own home,
offering the licit enjoyment of the wife of his bosom and the wine of
his cellar. The abiding verity of Martin Luther’s familiar couplet of
_Gay Sçavoir_, “_Wer nicht liebt Wein, Weib, und Gesang, der bleibt ein
Narr sein Leben lang_” has outlived all the rancorous interdictions
of the misanthropic Calvin. Teetotalism and castration are analogous
abnegations, just as drunkenness and vicarious venery are analogous
abuses, of the purest carnal joys that are our earthly inheritance by the
exercise of our own Free Will and God’s good Grace of Election.
But if the more immediate future of wine, as that of meat and tobacco,
may be considered assured, the same degree of confidence cannot be
expressed in its permanent quality. Prohibition being temporarily
eliminated as a potential menace, there remain three serious and growing
dangers to the survival of wine in that state of purity and excellence
in which it is now obtainable, though by no means necessarily always
obtained. These are its mass-production; its adulteration; and its
prostitution so as to flatter vulgar but expensive palates, or the
exactions of clamant and rapidly expanding congeries of faddists—typified
by the mania for rendering all wines sparkling on the one hand, and that
contradiction in terms, dealcoholised wine, or pasteurised, non-alcoholic
grape-juice, on the other. To these must be added the devastating
epidemics to which the vine is peculiarly subject, such as the Oidium and
the Phylloxera.
The first of these dangers, that of mass-production, is by far the
gravest. The world’s output of wine is steadily increasing, particularly
in Australia, North and South Africa and South America, and to a less,
but still perceptible, extent in Europe itself. Indeed, there might
soon be enough to meet all potential demands of viticultural and
non-viticultural countries alike, but for such factors as continually
rising costs of production and freight, the increase of customs’
barriers, the world’s diminished purchasing power and the growing greed
of middlemen. None the less, France, still the largest producer and
consumer, though followed ever more closely by Italy, is forced to buy
some millions of hectolitres annually from Algeria, Tunis, Spain, Italy
and Greece in order to meet her domestic needs. Nor does she export in
_vins fins_ a quarter of what she imports in the form of common blending
wines. The proportion of fine wines to ordinary wines grown in France is
very small.
The more wine you grow from the same plot of land the poorer will be its
quality. There is a strong temptation for the French peasant-proprietors
of those regions where the most famous wines are grown to use the
“_taille haute_” (the form of pruning which removes less of the young
shoots year by year and so produces a larger number of bunches of grapes)
instead of the traditional “_taille basse_” (which leaves the minimum
amount of new wood on the pollarded vine, thereby entailing many fewer
bunches of grapes, but the highest, because the most concentrated,
quality in the wine). The incentive to ignore this, perhaps the most
sacrosanct of all the honourable traditions of vine-dressing—a tradition
which may be compared to the enormity of shooting foxes in England—is
particularly strong in the Côte d’Or, where the demand is always out
of all proportion to the supply. Another temptation for the _vigneron_,
especially in the less-renowned viticultural districts, is to grow an
excess of what are called “_plants communs_.” Some, but not all, of these
species are hybrid or ungrafted American vines (“_producteurs-directs_”),
while others are the commonest but most prolific native vines
(“_gros-producteurs_”) grafted on to Phylloxera-resisting
“_portes-greffes_” as in the case of the fine vines which produce the
finer wines. The _producteurs-directs_ have been planted in response to
the insistent demand for more and cheaper wine that has arisen since the
War.[1] They give an enormous return per hectare of a coarse, neutral
sort of wine of a quality that can only be described as parlous, instead
of the small yield of excellent wine furnished by one or other of the
delicate “_plants nobles_,” or blue-blooded vines, which are the pride
of, and often peculiar to, each particular district. At present the
_producteurs-directs_, but not the _gros-producteurs_, are denied all
right to a local name, or “_appellation d’origine_,” wherever they may
be planted. Notwithstanding, their growers, now a considerable body,
are redoubling their efforts to obtain this coveted privilege on the
plea that the quality of these wines is rapidly improving; and they may
ultimately succeed for political reasons.
The world wants more and more wine, and always of the kinds it thinks
the best. The vineyards of Bordeaux, Burgundy and the Rhine are already
producing all but their maximum yield. Already, too, many plots of
ground in these famous regions are under vines which, from the nature
of their soil, their altitude or exposure, ought never to have been
planted with them. The temptation to indulge in over-production is
continually increasing. The average wine-drinker persists in asking
for about ten names among wines, and will not look at anything else,
however excellent and reasonable in price, because Mr Everyman has no
longer much individual palate, and will not trust such as he has, but
buys imitatively and gregariously as he buys most other things. There
is not enough of these particular wines to go round; indeed there has
not been enough for some decades past. Unfortunately, the public prefers
to be bamboozled rather than have to exercise its own discrimination in
choosing from amongst the immense variety of other growths, many of them
admirable and a few superb, which the earth has to offer in addition to
Bordeaux, Burgundy, Chablis, Sauternes, White Graves, Hock and Moselle
among natural wines, and Port, Sherry and Madeira among fortified ones.
In England we have grown so accustomed to cynical impertinences with
“appellation of origin” that we are neither shocked nor surprised that
bacon can be sold called “Danish Wiltshire,” or that Canadian soft-soap
should be described in commerce as “Cheddar Cheese.” Thus we have no
idea what indignation and contempt such titles as “Australian Burgundy,”
“Algerian Chablis,” “Spanish Graves,” “South African Hock,” or the
now happily defunct “Californian Moselle,” excite among Frenchmen and
Germans, for whom these preposterous and fraudulent titles are the taking
of sacred names in vain. The following verses, taken from the ballad of
Raoul Ponchon, called “_Bourgogne d’Australie_,” which used to be popular
in purely French cabarets—anyhow until the Australians showed their
magnificent qualities as attacking troops by the side of their French
brothers-in-arms—is a typical example of the burning resentment felt by
the whole French people at what is to them an act of the most cynical
piracy, almost the theft of an historic part of their national patrimony.
“_Vous êtes par trop rigolos,_
_Australiens immenses!_
_Mettez bien dans vos ciboulots_
_Où règnent les démences,_
_Qu’il n’est d’autre vin bourguignon_
_—Croyez-en un ivrogne—_
_Que celui que nous bourgognons_
_Aux coteaux de Bourgogne._
_Et la Bourgogne, elle est ici,_
_Et non en Australie!_
...
_Il faut avoir un fier toupet_
_Pour mettre une étiquette_
_Semblable à votre vin suspect,_
_Véritable piquette!_[2]
_Il n’est, chez nous, maigre pinard,_[3]
_Qui ne soit cent fois brave_
_Comme le vin le plus gaillard_
_De vos meilleures caves._
_Vous planteriez, ô Melbournois!_
_Sur vos coteaux barbares,_
_Les plus fins de nos ceps gaulois,_
_Nos Pinots[4] les plus rares,_
_En vain! Car à ces gaillards-là,_
_A ces vrais gentilshommes,_
_Il faut ce terroir de gala,_
_Dont, Dieu merci! nous sommes._”
The future of the purity and authenticity of wine—for though wine is
far better made to-day than it was fifty years ago, thanks chiefly to
Pasteur, it is also far more skilfully doctored—is wrapped up in the
question of how far it may be possible to afford as adequate legal
protection for recognised territorial appellations of origin outside, as
already exists inside, the frontiers of those states in which they are
found. If an imitation “Burgundy,” say Australian, really resembled true
Burgundy, which it does not because it cannot, there would, perhaps, be
less cause to deny its right to a stolen title. The same excuse might
be proffered, though with an even smaller show of logic, if, apart from
any question of resemblance, it was of an equal, or merely comparable,
quality.
The problem of to what extent the wines of other countries can be
improved, above all in keeping qualities, without sacrificing their own
individual characteristics, so as to make it possible to mention them in
the same breath as the more famous growths of France and Germany, is an
arduous, but, in the long run, not necessarily an insuperable one. Every
year we are learning more about the natural history of the vine and the
chemistry of wine.
It is useless for the wines of other countries to seek to imitate the
essential flavours and other peculiarities of the most famous French
and German wines to which they may most nearly approximate in colour or
alcoholic strength as it would be for these French and German wines to
seek to imitate their imitators. In the case of the commoner fortified
wines of Portugal and Spain imitation of a kind is not altogether
impossible owing to the very nature of their preparation by brandying the
only partially fermented must. The imitation of one wine by another, it
cannot be too strongly emphasised, is impossible by natural means. Though
every red and white natural wine has something in common with all other
natural red and white wines, no two growths ever really resemble each
other, and rarely two vintages of one and the same growth.
That large tracts of the earth’s surface are eminently suitable for
viticulture, though still virginal of the vine, such as—excluding the
British Empire for the moment—parts of central China and Morocco,
and possibly Abyssinia and Arabia as well, to say nothing of those
considerable regions of Asia Minor and the United States where it was
formerly cultivated, there can be little doubt. Moreover, such countries
as Southern Russia, the Balkan States, Greece, Persia, Japan and many
of the South American republics are undoubtedly capable of a much
larger production of wine than they actually grow. The trouble is that
the vine, once planted in a strange land, takes many decades, if not
centuries, before it begins to yield wine that has any real quality. A
successful wine-growing industry cannot be created in much less than
half a century. True, we are told by a certain Brother Benedictus in
his “_Chronicques Vivaroises_,” as Mrs G. B. Stern reminds us, that the
“_belle ordonnance de seps, pères de gros savoureux raisins_” on the
famed Hill of Hermitage, the juice of which is “_une rosée paradisiaque_”
rather than mere man-made wine, was planted, pruned and tended ready
for the vintage in a single night by a host of ex-vigneron angels (for
all vignerons, the worthy monk assures us, go straight to heaven, just
as no single miscreant of the ungodly company of water-drinkers has ever
passed St Peter’s scrutiny at the Golden Gate), so that the grapes were
hanging ripe to bursting from these “_vignes séraphiques_” on the morrow,
waiting only on the poor, Saracen-hunted hermit, perishing of thirst,
to pluck and press them. What an impious irony of fate that Hermitage
should be one of the slowest wines to mature! But this is, perhaps,
rather an exceptional case even among legends concerning the origins of
famous vineyards, most of which claim, with wearisome monotony, to have
been planted by the pious legionaries of the benign Emperor Probus, by
Charlemagne himself, or various unfamiliar though duly authenticated
saints; and raised to fame in the inexhaustible goblets of the _Vert
Galant_ or the immortal Rabelais. The vine thrives best and most
luxuriantly and yields the largest, coarsest and most regular harvests in
very hot, sub-tropical climates to which it is not indigenous and where
it is often necessary to irrigate the vineyards. Only in comparatively
cold regions, within measurable distance of the northern limit of the
vine (an imaginary line passing approximately from Nantes, through Paris,
Compiègne, Coblentz, Dresden, a little east of Prague, along the southern
slopes of the Carpathians and to the north of the Crimea and Caucasia in
Europe; bisecting Turkestan, Cashmere, the Chinese Province of Shantung
and Central Japan in Asia; and running from south of Puget Sound, north
of the Great Lakes and across part of Canada, to the Atlantic seaboard
in the State of New York, on the American continent), and from soil long
familiar with its roots, will the Vitis Vinifera yield a vintage of
fine and delicate wine; and then only in very small quantities, with an
infinity of painful labour, at great expense and seldom more than two or
three times in a decade, if, indeed, so often. The world’s most classic
vineyards are planted on poor, stoney soil, often on rugged slopes,
little suitable for other forms of cultivation.
The world, then, is threatened with the extinction of the few hallowed
acres of its very finest and most renowned vineyards within a measurable
space of time by the ever-growing threat of over-production—the
inclusion not only of just those additional adjacent rods, poles and
perches which past generations in their probity and wisdom resolutely
refused to annex to them; but also of whole square miles of outlying
meadowlands, arable plain or bleak and insufficiently sheltered hill-tops
beyond their immediate limits—no less than by a menacing invasion of
baser and insufficiently acclimatised sub-species of the parent vine.
Other perils besetting the continuity of the finer wines are the spread
of the so-called Type-Wines, in the form of standardised qualities
for certain districts (a development that originated in California
where wine used to be grown, as long as it could be grown at all, from
vineyards vast as cattle-ranches, equipped with all the typically
American resources of plant and capital for dealing with vintages on a
Ford scale of output), which is being steadily fostered by wine-growers’
co-operatives in many parts of France, Italy and other wine-lands; and
the wholesale manufacture by the large French wine-shippers of those
vinous mixtures known as “_Monopoles_” and “_Marques Personnelles_.”
TYPE-WINES
The impulse that has called the Type-Wines into being was the necessity
of finding some expedient that would enable the proprietors of the less
famous growths of well-known regions to sell their wines remuneratively,
which was becoming more and more difficult. There was also a strong
desire on their part to profit by the recently established _appellations
d’origine_ for even the most lowly and inferior wines grown within these
areas, and the ambition to compete in foreign markets with the cheap
wines of countries such as Algeria and Australia, that are all of them
inevitably Type-Wines, sold as often as not under the titles of one or
other of the most famous viticultural regions of France (_e.g._, Algerian
“Chablis” and South Australian “Hermitage”). True, these descriptions
would be illegal in France and those countries which, under recent
commercial treaties, now admit yearly quotas of French wines and thereby
assure the authenticity of their appellations; but in England the
International Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, which
nominally secures respect for these same appellations in all signatory
states, seems to be a dead letter, if indeed it was not stillborn.
These Type-Wines, already familiar in France, are not easily explained
without giving a concrete and somewhat detailed example. For many decades
wines have been available in commerce which bore the names of one or
other of the great sub-divisions of the Bordelais, such as St Estèphe,
Pauillac or Margaux in the Médoc, and Graves, St Emilion and Pomerol as
representatives of the other districts entitled to be sold as “Bordeaux.”
It was notorious that these wines, which were not always genuine,
differed enormously in quality according to the standing of the firms
which selected them and the vintages to which they belonged: vintages
that were often passed over in silence because the wines in question were
a blend of two or more. Nevertheless, wines sold under these labels, that
made no claim to have been grown on any territorially defined plot of
ground within the borders of their several districts—a particular Château
or Cru—represented the cheapest authentic, or putatively authentic, kinds
of Bordeaux with which the general public was familiar. The Co-operative
Movement among French wine-growers, which had started in the Midi, a
region devoted to the production of cheap wines on a vast scale, without
much pretension to quality, where it was decidedly beneficial to the
interests of the growers and the public alike, eventually spread to
certain of the less-known districts of the Bordelais. One of the latest
recruits is the Commune of Margaux.
The Commune of Margaux, one of the two most famous in the Médoc, has for
centuries been reputed for producing some of the very finest Bordeaux
wines there are; its supreme glory being the First Growth of Château
Margaux itself. In addition, the Commune boasts four Second Growths,
four Third Growths, one Fourth Growth, about a dozen recognised superior
Bourgeois and ordinary Bourgeois Growths and something like thirty _Crus
Artisans_ and _Crus Paysans_, which represent the tail of the Bordelais
hierarchy in point of reputation. There are besides some half-a-dozen
large growths planted in _Palu_ soil (rich, alluvial clay) on the
foreshore of the Gironde and on certain low-lying islands in the stream.
Palus vineyards give a very much larger yield of appreciably coarser
wines than those planted on the gravel soil further inland, which is
geologically typical of the Médoc proper. In point of production the ten
_Crus Classés_ of Margaux yield about 650 _tonneaux_[5] of wine a year,
which is easily sold at high prices; the Superior Bourgeois, Bourgeois,
Artisan and Peasant Growths account for another 550 between them, the
best of which finds a fairly ready market in good years, but much of
which has nearly always to be sold at unsatisfactory prices; while the
Palus growths produce some 1,100, the sale of which, though prices are
relatively low, is on the whole more remunerative because the vintage is
much heavier and the cost of cultivation much less. Yet each of these
growths, high as humble, every litre of the total average yield of
20,700 hectolitres, has an identical right to the common appellation of
“Margaux.” Anyone who lives in the Commune of Margaux and has a strip of
garden in which there is room to grow a row of a dozen vines of sorts,
tended, perhaps, little and carelessly, can sell his wine as “Margaux”
with the same legality as his neighbour who may cultivate a considerable
and reputed vineyard in the most approved scientific manner.
Formerly the _Crus Bourgeois Supérieurs_ and the _Crus Bourgeois_
commanded a ready sale at prices not utterly disproportionate to those
attained by the _Crus Classés_, while the ratio between the two orders
of growths was nearly always the same, whatever the prices realised for
the First Growths, which always set the tone of the market. Nowadays
the public knows far less about wines, and a predominantly _parvenu_
generation wants to buy the best, and nothing but the best, and is
guided almost entirely by names and labels and very little by vintages
or careful tasting. Moreover there is no longer the same prejudice
against consuming comparatively new wines in this hasty age, and, as a
consequence, the laying down of wines that are slow to mature is the
exception rather than the rule. The result is that it has become so
difficult to sell some of the best and most ancient in fame of the _Crus
Bourgeois_ at a reasonable profit—to say nothing of the _Crus Artisans
et Paysans_—that vines are being grubbed up wholesale. It was to meet
this state of affairs that a Co-operative Communal Cellar was founded in
Margaux. The avowed object is to utilise all wines made in the territory
of the commune, excepting only those that sell readily on their own
names and merits, so as to produce year in and year out, irrespective
of good or bad vintages because blended from both, a uniform wine with a
flavour as typical of the best Margaux growths as the nature of a single
composite mixture may allow. It is needless to say that such a Type-Wine
“Margaux,” bearing full guarantees of territorial authenticity though it
would, must be a hollow parody of a real wine, because it is a synthesis,
a standardisation, of many, blended to the taste of the uncritical
majority of the public. Should this experiment prove commercially
successful, and the example of Margaux prevail, there would soon be an
end to all individuality, to all those finer shades of years and growths
that are the delight of the true wine-lover; and the ambition of Margaux
and its emulators would be to produce an ever-greater quantity, trading
on an ancient and no longer justifiable local renown for quality that was
only attained in the past by a deliberate and consistent sacrifice of any
idea of securing bumper vintages.
It is the rapid rise of the “_Monopoles_,” the very existence of which is
an impious challenge to the fair name of wine, that has stimulated the
wholesale vatting of these standardised regional growths.
MONOPOLES
The French word “_monopole_,” as applied to wines, really means a
firm’s trade-mark, a proprietary brand: in fact very much the same
sort of thing as the popular blends of Scotch Whisky advertised by the
leading distillers. At present these Monopoles are chiefly confined to
the Côte d’Or and the Bordelais, though specimens have already made
their appearance in the lists of certain Beaujolais, Côtes du Rhône,
Touraine and Anjou wine-merchants who specialise in these particular
growths. To explain what these Monopoles really are—an authority of the
eminence of M. Raymond Baudouin has not hesitated to stigmatise them
as “pharmacy, but not wine”—the French law concerning appellations of
origin, which the Monopoles have been devised to circumvent, must first
be briefly examined. A wine may now no longer be sold under a territorial
designation unless it is territorially entitled to its use: that is to
say only when it has been grown exclusively within territory having an
identical geographical (but not necessarily administrative) appellation,
or within the area of such adjacent communes as may enjoy a recognised
and long-established right to the better-known name of their neighbour.
For instance, a red wine sold as “Pommard” in France must have been
grown within the Commune of Pommard, Département de la Côte d’Or, and
none other; a white wine sold as Pouilly (not to be confused with the
white wine of Pouilly-sur-Loir from the common border of the Départements
of the Cher and the Nièvre), which is the name of a tiny hamlet in the
Mâconnais and not of any one commune, must have been grown either in the
Commune of Solutré (in which this hamlet actually lies), the Commune of
Fuissé, the Commune of Vergisson and a cadastrally delimited part of the
Commune of Chaintré, in the Département of Saône-et-Loire, and nowhere
else.
In the Côte d’Or there are two kinds of red vines: one the proud “_plant
noble_,” called the Pinot of Pineau, which alone has made the wine of
Burgundy the nectar that it is, that will grow in few places and then
only on the lower slope—a niggardly beggar so delicate as to be prone to
practically every malady that the vine is heir to; and the Gamay,[6] a
“_plant commun_,” which will thrive anywhere, especially where the Pinot
will not—a hardy vine that is a heavy bearer and causes little anxiety or
expense to the vigneron.
As there is very little slope with the right exposure in each commune,
it follows that there is a considerable extent of Gamay plantations,
since the wine of the Gamay vineyards has just as much right to be sold
as “Pommard,” if it is grown in that commune, as wine grown in the most
famous of the historic “_climats_” which have been planted exclusively
with Pinot vines since time immemorial. (In England, in so far as our
“Pommard” ever comes from that Commune, or the Burgundy region at all,
it is nearly always Gamay wine, French growers and shippers having
long ago discovered that most English wine-drinkers, and many English
wine-merchants, cannot distinguish it from a Pinot growth, though these
respective flavours, once they become familiar, are as dissimilar as
chalk and cheese.) An amendment to the _Loi des Appellations d’Origine_,
called the _Amendment Capus_ after the name of the Senator who introduced
it, is now before the French Chambers, the object of which, should it,
as seems probable, be ratified, is to limit any given “_appellation
d’origine_” ampelographically as well as territorially: that is, to
confine it to wines grown from those auguster vines that are historically
as much an integral part of the wine itself as the traditional area of
ground and the geological nature of the soil it has always been grown on.
The first important effect of this amendment to the existing state of the
law would be that Gamay wines grown in Côte d’Or communes would no longer
be entitled to any local appellation of origin (such as “Pommard”),
unless it were the generic name “Bourgogne,” the lowest, because the most
general, qualification of all for any Burgundy, red or white. A given
wine, enjoying the right to a special secondary appellation, can always
be made to descend the scale from the particular to the general in bad
years, or for any other cause that may have marred its quality; but a
wine can never be promoted to a higher category than that in which it was
born and bred. A simple instance for exemplifying this point is afforded
by the official grouping in the Beaujolais. The local appellations of
origin here recognised as “_pouvant revendiquer les usages loyaux,
locaux et constants_,” are Moulin-à-Vent, Fleurie, Morgon, Juliénas,
Brouilly, Thorins, and Chénas. Now none of these wines can under any
circumstances appropriate to itself the name of one of its fellows.
Chénas may not style itself Moulin-à-Vent; nor, for that matter, though
there is no sort of temptation to do so, may Moulin-à-Vent style itself
Chénas. Yet all are Beaujolais and “Beaujolais” is the common name to
which every other wine grown in that region has an equal right. Thus any
of these seven “named” wines may call itself simply “Beaujolais,” and
being a Beaujolais has a clear title to the seemingly magnificent, but
in reality exceedingly common and unassuming, patronymic of “Bourgogne.”
There is only one Mackintosh of Mackintosh, but Andrew Mackintosh, gillie
to THE Mackintosh, is as much a “Mackintosh” as the exalted Chief of the
Clan.
None the less any wine-merchant has the right to sell a wine, or blend
of wines, French or foreign, called by some fantastic name, or whatever
title of his own invention he chooses to employ, provided it is not
identical with an existing appellation of origin. More often than not the
bottler selects a name nicely calculated to seem a genuine territorial
appellation to the unwary, such as Château This or Clos That, Roc d’Or
or Monvalloir; or, keeping within the law, slightly adapts the spelling
of some classic growth with fraudulent intent: Romani for Romanée, etc.
Several of the more important Bordeaux and Beaune firms sell Monopoles
purely on the strength of their own names and previous reputations as
Chose’s Blue and Green Labels, or Red and Yellow Capsules, much as
English grocers sell different qualities of well-known brands of tea.
Where Saints’ names are invoked because of their prevalence in Bordelais
communes, the wines they consecrate are no more catholic for the doubtful
compliment of a spurious, or impersonated, canonisation. Certainly good
St Vincent would have none of these imposters either as brother saints or
tipplers.
According to M. Raymond Baudouin, a typical recipe adopted by the Côte
d’Or alchemists is
25% genuine Côte d’Or Burgundy for flavouring.
30% good Côtes du Rhône wine to eke out this flavouring.
20% ordinary Algerian wine to reduce the cost.
25% natural wine (_i.e._, wine with no special flavour or other
salient characteristic) to drown the taste of the hot Algerian
blending wine and still further reduce the cost of production.
The Bordeaux houses are said to employ
25% genuine Bordeaux.
30% good Midi wine.
20% ordinary Algerian wine.
25% neutral wine.
It is perhaps hardly necessary to add that these formulas are only
approximate, and that the actual ingredients of each Monopole vary in
nature and ratio with the firm of wine-cooks concerned. Indeed, there
are some Côte d’Or houses which claim that their Monopoles are blended
exclusively from pure, territorially genuine, Burgundies: a claim which,
whether justifiable or not in fact, is best rejected on principle,
because there is seldom any inducement to blend a wine good enough to be
sold unblended.
A widely organised conspiracy now exists to foist these vinous
compounds, which may conceivably be wine and even French wine, but
are certainly neither Bordeaux nor Burgundy according to any legal or
loyal interpretation of those terms, on purchasers of single bottles
and diners at restaurants because they yield much bigger profits than
ordinary wines. Thanks to our national ignorance of wines, Monopole
brands of White Graves (one boasts that it is supplied to the House
of Lords), and other so-called “Oyster-Wines,” have already gained a
certain footing on the English market because they are supposed to offer
“more regular and uniform quality” than wines bearing straightforward
territorial designations, together with a sustained standard of flavour,
independent of vintage vagaries: a thing which it is simplicity itself
to produce once “_coupage_,” or scientific blending, is resorted to. In
the Côte d’Or, where the demand for authentic Côte de Nuits and Côte
de Beaune Burgundies is anything up to five times as much as can be
genuinely produced, while bad vintages are much more frequent than good,
the evil of the “_Marques Personnelles_” has made such rapid progress
that already more Monopole wines than territorial growths are sold and
the integrity of the sacred name of Burgundy is definitely compromised.
Many of these mixtures are quite agreeable to drink, provided always that
they are taken for what they really are and not for what they pretend
to be, but to offer them to one’s friends is an unpardonable insult,
however merited the insult may sometimes be. The proper sphere for these
beverages—if, indeed, they can be said to have any proper sphere other
than the hoodwinking of the credulous and ignorant for whom they are
lavishly and alluringly labelled in regulation Burgundy and Bordeaux
bottles—is for splashing down a hustled and jolted meal in a dining-car.
A Monopole may be defined as the _Train Bleu_ wine par excellence, since
it can always be relied upon to be none the worse for the most violent
shaking before taking.
A word of caution is, however, necessary because in French commercial
usage this dangerous word “_monopole_” can have two very different
interpretations. The first, which is infinitely the more common, as we
have just seen, applies to blended wines sold as proprietary brands under
the euphemism which the law requires to be printed in the wine-merchant’s
price-list but not on the label of the bottle: “_exclusif de toute
considération d’origine et de cépage_” (_cépage_ means in this context
the types of vine traditionally associated with particular growths of
wine). The second, and entirely respectable sense, which the same term
may have, is in the case where a certain firm may own or lease the
whole of a particular vineyard and can thus claim that it possesses
a “monopoly” of its wine. An outstanding instance is provided by
Romanée-Conti of Vosne, perhaps the most famous vineyard in the whole
world, which is “_Monopole de la Maison De Villaine et Cambon_” for the
very good and sufficient reason that this old and honourable firm owns
the freehold of the hallowed hectare and a half and bottles every drop of
its priceless wine in its own cellars.
Strictly speaking, Champagne (where the term originated and where it is
still extensively used), practically all other sparkling wines and most
Ports, Sherries, Madeiras and Marsalas are likewise Monopoles, because
they are sold under the names of different makers—each separate shipper
representing one or more proprietary brands—instead of under the names of
particular vineyards or communes. In each of these cases, however, the
blending formula, which has made the reputation and constitutes the most
jealously guarded secret of each firm, relies wholly on wines enjoying
co-equal local appellations. Every drop of Première Zone Champagne is
territorially genuine “Champagne,” although as many as six separate
communes, each with its own appellation of origin, may have contributed
to its composition. The only way to avoid pitfalls is to know your Côte
d’Or communes and “_climats_” and your Bordeaux districts, with their
constituent communes and satellite _Crus_, _Clos_ and _Châteaux_ (the
latter is almost the work of a lifetime), more or less by heart, and
to apply the cold test of geography to every bottle you are invited
to buy. Even then you have no real guarantee in England, for English
wine-merchants seem to be able to label wines, or other vinous mixtures,
with more or less any names that suit their fancies, and yet enjoy
virtual immunity from prosecution, so long as they do not describe as
“Port” or “Madeira” wines that were not originally shipped from Oporto
and Funchal with the appropriate Portuguese Certificate of Origin.
ADULTERATION
The increasing resources of sophistication in their various legal and
illegal aspects keep pace with the progress of chemical research.
Attempts to level up the irregular work of the sun by artificial
means, so as to overcome the lack of any uniform degree of maturity
in the grape, caused by the alternating clemency and inclemency of the
vintage season, is becoming more and more common. The commonest form of
adulteration is blending, whether of separate growths or vintages. To-day
an unnamed, or vaguely named, wine, gives rise to the suspicion of being
the former, just as an undated wine carries a strong presumption of being
the latter. Happily the practice of indicating the vintages of wines
has now become much more general, and is being adopted by countries,
such as Italy, where the custom was formerly unknown. The consumer’s
best safeguard against blended wine is an estate-bottled growth.[7] The
use of chemical aids in wine-making is to some extent sanctioned by the
law. In France wine may now be sugared (_chaptalisation_), sterilised
(_pasteurisation_), fortified (_vinage_), watered (_mouillage_),
plastered (_plâtrage_), muted (_mutage_) and, in the case of white
wines, sulphured (_sulfitage_), within certain defined limits and
subject of formal declaration. The illegal adulterants of wine have been
too frequently catalogued to need any recapitulation. Synthetic scents
and flavourings are always adding to their number, but it is doubtful
whether any synthetic bouquet or taste will ever be able to deceive an
experienced palate.
_Chaptalisation_ means supplying the percentage of natural grape-sugar
which the most of wet or cold vintage years is deficient in by the
same amount of cane or beet sugar. This added sugar is converted into
alcohol at the same time, and in precisely the same way, as the natural
sugar of the fruit; thanks to this addition the wine is assured of
sufficient alcoholic body to keep, which might not otherwise be possible.
Only experts can detect a _vin chaptalisé_ from an unsugared wine.
This practice is fairly common in the northernmost vineyards, such as
Champagne, the Côte d’Or and the Moselle. The German law permits sugaring
in certain cases, but no sugared wine may be labelled “_Natur_,” or
“_Naturrein_.” Chaptalisation saved the 1925 vintage in the Bordelais,
where this expedient had hitherto been held up to execration as a
typically Burgundian falsification. _Pasteurisation_ is resorted to
so as to preserve young wines of poor vintages against attacks of
wine-maladies after they have been bottled. It allows wine to be bottled
almost as soon as made, and though it brings the wine well forward in
the process, it arrests most of its subsequent natural development.
_Vinage_ is simply, as in the case of Port, the brandying of sweet wines
with extraneous spirit. _Mouillage_ is resorted to for reducing the
alcoholic strength of common wines, which are taxed and priced at so
much the alcoholic degree. _Plâtrage_ is the sprinkling of the grapes
with plaster of paris while they are being pressed. It is supposed to be
a safeguard against the danger of secondary, or acetous, fermentation
in hot climates during the first summer following the vintage. _Mutage_
is a means of arresting fermentation chemically, so as to permit of one
wine being blended with another before allowing a joint fermentation of
the two to proceed to completion. _Sulfitage_ is used to preserve the
bright golden colour of white wines, that are apt to turn brown when
exposed to the air, and to prevent _vins liquoreux_, like Sauternes,
alcoholising a certain degree of unconverted grape-sugar, or _liqueur_,
which they are intended to retain. The old method of sulphuring was to
smoke the empty casks with sulphur matches before filling them, which
resulted in the fumes becoming amalgamated with the wine. The newer,
and more dangerous, practice is to add a small percentage of suitably
diluted Sulphur Dioxide. The French tolerance of this chemical is 450
parts per million: a proportion identical with that adopted under the new
British regulations, which define this “improver” as the only extraneous
substance that wine imported into the United Kingdom may contain.
PROSTITUTION
The outstanding example of the menace to the survival of wine in its
natural form is the wholesale demand for what the French call the
“_champagnisation_” of all kinds of wine, great and humble, good, bad
and indifferent, red, white and _rosé_, quite irrespective of their
suitability for gaseous treatment, which tends more and more to absorb
choicer and rarer, rather than poorer and more abundant, qualities. This
insatiable public appetite for effervescence ignores the amount of those
surplus qualities that are available and, in certain cases, readily
adaptable, for the purpose and so degrades fine still wines from their
lawful sphere by constraining them to pop, froth and bubble in indignant
and impotent protest instead of gurgling majestically into the glass of
honour in a tranquil and limpid stream. Our spendthrift generation is
convinced that the sparkling variety of any given wine must needs be its
highest, because its costliest, expression. Even to-day, few growths have
remained wholly immune to this vandalism, while the commercial pressure
brought to bear on the few conscientious recalcitrants is increasing
yearly. It would seem that in the United States, where the real meaning
of simple words is even more often misunderstood than in England, wine,
in common parlance, always implies a sparkling wine of sorts, whether
genuine or spurious Champagne. The youth of Europe, hypnotised by jazz
strains, convulsions and idioms, is doing its best to make the word have
the same ignorantly exclusive and inglorious significance in lands that
have spontaneously evolved their own languages and ancestral wassailing
traditions. It is arguable whether sparkling wine is really wine at all.
What admits of no sort of cavil is that its name needs qualifying by some
such admonitory adjective so as to distinguish it from the natural wine
from which it is, or purports to be, manufactured.
Happily there is yet no sign of a vogue in fortified “qualities” of
famous natural wines, but with Port dearer and stronger than ever
owing to the new schedule of wine-duties, there is no reason to be
over-sanguine. Thanks to the spirited competition of Australian sweet
wines, made possible by the considerable preference accorded to Empire
wines in this country and an export bounty of 3s. to 4s. the gallon
granted by the Commonwealth Government, Portugal and Spain are not
likely to have a monopoly of this market for the future. Already, too,
a home industry has sprung up for the manufacture of fortified “British
Wines”—the unfermented must being imported from abroad in a muted state
and “worked up” in this country into a liquid on which the courtesy title
of “wine” has been bestowed. Mr Churchill, in the course of his speech
on the Budget for 1927, tempered the unwelcome compliment of rendering
these concoctions liable to duty by promising to taste them before that
measure had the force of law. A less fearless man in his position might
well have preferred to renounce the project of raising revenue from such
an unpalatable source.
The transformation of various wines (Chablis, Vouvray, Anjou, Mercurey,
Cap Corse, etc.) into “tonic wines” or _apéritifs_ (the different
proprietary brands of Vermouth, French and Italian, together with the
numerous “Quinas,” “Quinquinas,” “Kinas,” and the like, to say nothing
of those combined with meat-extract sold by English apothecaries) by
an admixture of quinine and other “appetising” herbs and “restorative”
drugs, is another barbarism that is now assuming considerable
proportions. This heinous practice is at all events of more respectable
antiquity than “_champagnisation_,” having been familiar in classical
times, with rather different but no more inviting ingredients, in
the guise of “wine tempered by the nymphs.” As it is, Great Britain
imports more Italian Vermouth than Italian wine. Non-alcoholic wine,
or sterilised grape-juice, which is now prepared in France, Germany,
Switzerland and the United States, is the most recent fad in the way of
_Weinersatz_. It has been claimed that this emasculated beverage has
considerable medicinal value. Doubtless it will soon be advertised in
this country under some such slogan as “Take the Modish Grape-Cure of
Meran at Merriest Margate (or in your own home) with Vincent’s Vitamined
Verjuice.” These parodies of wine, it is hardly necessary to add, belong
to the same school of “refreshing pick-me-ups” as Cydrax, Kop’s Ale,
Herb-Beer, Kola Champagne, Raspberry Sherbet and other mineral-water and
Soda-Fountain eruptions. The survival of these dismal and sickly tipples
depends on the survival of the Teetotal Dogma which ordains the purging
of the pride of the palate with one or other of these potable Puritan
penitences.
MALADIES OF THE VINE
It is too often forgotten that the vinelands of Europe, and the majority
of the Australian, North and South African vineyards planted with
European vines, came within an ace of total destruction by those terrible
scourges the Oidium (first noted in 1845) and the Phylloxera (which
appeared in 1868), which devastated the viticultural world only a decade
or two apart in the middle of the last century. Both came from America,
and pious French vignerons see in Prohibition a divine visitation on a
country so hardened in iniquity as to have wantonly disseminated, if
not deliberately incubated, these frightful pestilences, in despair of
ever equalling the quality of European wines. Of the two, the latter,
because it was recurrent and seems to be endemic to the vine, was by
far the more catastrophic. Chemical means, such as sulphur-spraying,
were eventually devised for coping with the former, so that it could
be, if not eradicated, at least held in check. The Phylloxera, on the
other hand, for long defied the concerted efforts of the world’s most
skilful chemists and agriculturists, traversing Europe from Portugal
to the Crimea like a forest fire, and even passing mysteriously beyond
the seas to infest the young vineyards of other continents. The havoc
wrought was inestimable, particularly in France, where a million hectares
of vineyards, which have never since been replanted, were swept out of
existence. Indeed, when this murrain was at its zenith, there was for
some time grave doubt whether the French peasantry could ever be induced
to replant their perished vines. In the magnitude of its destructiveness
and the swiftness and universality of its contagion, the Phylloxera
can only be compared to the dreaded Pink Bol-Worm parasite of the
cotton-plant. Ultimately salvation was found in wholesale replanting
with grafted vines. The peculiarity of this pest was that it attacked
the roots, but not the foliage, of the European vines, while the roots
of the indigenous American species were as inured against its infection
as their foliage was susceptible to it. Thus by grafting picked European
vine-shoots on to suitable American vine-stocks, a hardy plant could be
evolved, both roots and foliage of which were sufficiently resistent
to the cryptogam. There are, of course, plenty of other blights and
distempers that afflict the vine in greater or less degree according to
the species concerned and the nature of the soil and climate it is grown
in. The vigneron’s life is one unceasing round of watch and ward, toil
and prayer. Not for a single week in the year can the smallest vineyard
go untended. A new and more dreadful Phylloxera might appear at any
moment, though the viticulturist is now much better equipped to resist
fresh parasitic invasions.
A word may be said in connection with the maladies peculiar to the vine
on the vexed question of the relative merits of the wines grown from
grafted and ungrafted vines. It is usually claimed that the quality
of the pre-phylloxera wines, grown from old French ungrafted vines,
was infinitely superior to anything that the best grafted vines can
ever hope to produce. This contention is not supported by the consensus
of opinion among wine-growers and wine-merchants, though some make a
reservation in favour of the old _vieilles souches_ Burgundies. The new
vines show no “yellow streak.” They have acquired none of the primitive
characteristics of native American vines, such as their foxy flavour,
except their New-World vigour. The wines they yield mature more rapidly
and are certainly, like the grafted vines themselves, shorter-lived, but
they give an equal quality with a slightly larger yield per acre. Fifty
or a hundred years hence it will be possible to pass a more definite
and dispassionate judgment on this controversy. It should, however, be
remembered that those who insistently decry all wines grown from grafted
vines are generally old gentlemen who have already reached that age when,
like the Señor d’Asumar, in “Gil Blas,” the peaches of their youth seem
infinitely larger, juicier and more luscious than any that are grown
to-day.
THE FUTURE OF EMPIRE WINES
During the South African War we were urged to think imperially. After
the World War, the nation, in spite of saturation with American films,
was considered to have pondered sufficiently in an imperial sense for
the time to be ripe to ask it to eat, drink and clothe itself imperially
as well. The dogma of Free Trade was definitely abandoned and several
minor Empire preferences were offered us as grist for mental stimulus.
To food for the mind we were exhorted to add food for the body, though
the reverse process might have made a stronger appeal with a more logical
nation, besides simplifying the necessary change in purchasing habits
which had survived the outworn doctrines of Bright and Cobden who had
been instrumental in moulding them.
To smoke and drink imperially is rather a different matter to eating
and dressing imperially. Most of us would gladly smoke and drink what
our fellow-Britons grow if the question of quality did not persist in
intruding itself between the cup and the lip. Even when we are prepared
to ignore this aspect of practical patriotism, imperial flattery of the
palate has a way of forcing itself on our attention at the very first
puff or sip. Nor are we always quite honest with ourselves when we make
a resolution to eat, drink, smoke or dress imperially for the future,
because on these occasions we often refrain from making an inventory of
the mental reservations which, consciously or unconsciously, we bring to
the list. Not even the most ardent patriot, until at least he loses his
palate, can pretend that Borneo Cigars or Burmah Cheroots are superior
to Havana Cigars and Manilla Cheroots. So it is with Empire Wines.
Australian “Burgundy” and South African “Hock” could not pass muster for
the French and German wines they so unblushingly pretend to be with the
wine-waiter of the National Liberal Club.
It is an axiom in wine that quality can only be forthcoming in
countries where viticulture depends primarily on the home market, and
even then it is less often attained than otherwise. For all practical
purposes there are only four provenances of Empire wines: South Africa,
Australia, Palestine and Cyprus, which already produce more than they
can readily dispose of, as only the first and last are in any real
sense wine-drinking countries. A little wine is grown in Cashmere,
Canada and Malta as well, but the quantity is negligible. From climatic
and geological deductions it seems probable that vineyards could be
successfully planted in parts of New Zealand, Kenya, Rhodesia and the
middle slopes of the Himalayas, Ghats and Nilgherry Hills in India, but
there is no potential demand for fresh sources of supply unless their
produce is of a vastly superior quality to anything now grown on British
soil. The Cyprian Commanderia wine of Paphos is historically one of the
world’s most famous growths, but it is doubtful whether its peculiar
flavour will ever make any strong appeal to the British palate. Little
of the ordinary wine of the island is now exported to England, the
bulk of such as is being absorbed by the manufacturers of a well-known
brand of “Tonic Wine,” which is very popular with rigid teetotalers
and connoisseurs of patent medicines. Quantitatively, there is little
hope for Empire wines, even when protected by substantial preferential
tariffs. Algerian common wines, to say nothing of the most ordinary
French, Spanish and Italian growths, will always be cheaper and more
abundant than any similar wines grown in Australia or the Cape, which
have to pay far higher freight and are cultivated by vine-dressers that
are far more highly paid. Even should the Algerian supply fail for any
cause, and at present it is increasing steadily every year, larger and
larger quantities of Argentine and Chilian wines are becoming available
for export. Algerian wines are not particularly choice—they have only
been cultivated for about sixty years—but some of them are superior to
anything produced within the Empire. Moreover, except in England, they
are sold under their local Algerian name as Médéa, Miliana, Mascara, and
Coteaux de l’Harach, etc., and not as Algerian “Claret,” “Burgundy,”
“Chablis,” “Graves,” and “Sauternes”; though our own wine-merchants, save
when, as is not infrequent, they use them anonymously, do not hesitate to
give them these absurd and mendacious titles.
All other Empire wines, with one or two honourable exceptions, such
as the South African Riebeeck Kastel and the Australian Highercombe
Amber, produce, on their own label avowals, nothing but self-styled
imitations of the leading European wines, prefixed by the safeguarding
qualification Australian, South African or Palestine, as the case may
be, which reduces these fraudulent claims to nonsense. Even where local
names are adopted, such as Schoongezicht, Paarl and Drakenstein, they
are used to qualify the meaningless title “Hock.” It is a lie. The wines
of these three districts—and they are about the best which the Empire
has to offer—are, and always will be, nothing but Schoongezicht, Paarl
and Drakenstein respectively. They are not, and cannot be, “Hocks,” even
though grown from the choicest Rhenish Riesling vines, because Hock is
a purely German wine to which the Rhineside town of Hochheim-am-Main
has given its name. Hochheim is in the Regierungsbezirk Wiesbaden of
Prussia, and not in the Cape Province of the Union of South Africa.
Nearly all Australian, and a great many South African, red wines describe
themselves as “Burgundies” (there are, to be sure, a few “Clarets” and
“Hermitages” as well) and often perpetrate a further, and yet more
laughable, contradiction in terms by claiming that they are grown from
Cabernet or Malbec vines: classic French vines, it is true, but native
to the Bordelais and not Burgundy, where their cultivation is quite
unknown. Burgundy is the product of a certain type of vine grown from
time immemorial on a particular kind of soil with a particular exposure,
at a particular altitude, in a particular climate prevailing between a
particular longitude and a particular latitude that coincide in eastern
France: a concatenation of elements and circumstances which cannot
possibly be reproduced in Australia, South Africa or anywhere else. Nor
does “Burgundy,” as is sometimes supposed, denote a certain strength of
red wine, a full-bodied growth, in contradistinction to “Claret” (which
by the accident of a name, that should rightly be Bordeaux, is not the
fraud it sounds, since “Claret” really means no more than a light-red
wine) as a term used to imply a lighter-bodied and much less alcoholic
type. The alcoholic contents of good Bordeaux and Burgundy, quality for
quality, are usually more or less identical. The strength of wines is
calculated in alcoholic degrees and not by appropriating names filched
from certain representative growths. The essential vinous ethers of these
spurious “Hocks” and “Burgundies,” scanty and not very subtle though
they are, would, like the rose’s perfume, exhale bouquets just as bland
under their own, or any other, names. If a single swallow does not of
itself herald an English summer, all the Emus in the Commonwealth cannot
transmute a South Australian vintage into the _Grande Année_ of a Côte
d’Or _Tête de Cuvée_.
Even if it be true that vigorous and psychologically intelligent
advertising can increase the sales of any article, irrespective of its
worth or utility, this would scarcely seem to apply to that particular
brand, notable among “Burgundies” which are “generous but not spirity,
soft but not sugary” for being sold under the device “Every Meal a
Banquet.” That slogan “Every Meal a Banquet” is nicely calculated to
deter any normal person from buying this particular brand—and that
without even tasting it. Banquets are usually heavy and singularly
depressing functions which people like Lord-Lieutenants, princes of the
blood, mayors, chairmen of companies, politicians, public officials and
diplomats accept with a heavy heart, and only because such occasions
are part of their regular duties. Secretly they dread these orgies
of ceremonious and oratorical eating as a pernicious waste of time,
nefarious to their digestions. Thus we surmise that a wine capable of
transforming every meal, however simple, intimate and unpretentious, into
that portentously aldermanic and dyspeptic thing, a banquet, must be
singularly heavy and soporific in its effects.
If real quality in Empire Wines is to be attained at all, it can only
be by abandoning the existing methods of mass-production of Type-Wines
and deliberately fostering the particularisation of certain small, but
promising, local growths. South Africa, where irrigation of the vineyards
is not as common as in Australia—irrigation more than doubles the yield
and more than halves the quality—has already made some progress in this
direction. As has already been noticed, wines are grown in the Cape at
certain localities called Schoongezicht, Paarl and Drakenstein, which we
assume, just because they are named, are probably of far better quality
than the unnamed South African growths. The Australian Type-Wines, on the
other hand, are apparently not even regional specimens of their kind. The
average consumer of flagon wines knows nothing whatever about them except
that they are grown somewhere in a vast Dominion which is a continent in
itself. Keystone, Tintara, Ophir and Harvest are registered trademarks,
not places on the map.
That these Australian and South African masqueraders under French and
German colours can be sold in Great Britain has been amply proved. In
1926 the consumption of Australian wines increased by over a million
gallons. That their sale would fall away by nearly as much—drinking
imperially is a habit that, to be abiding, requires some little time to
form—were the preference and bounty removed there can be little doubt.
Palestine, the latest recruit to the wine-lands of the Empire, produces
imitations—very bad imitations, too, though the wines to which these
illustrious and illusory resemblances are attributed by their Zionist
growers are, in their rough and humble way, sometimes quite passable
wines—of all the classical growths of France, Germany, Spain, Portugal,
Hungary and Greece: everything, in fact, except an honest and avowedly
Palestine wine _tel quel_. That some of these vineyards are now being
turned over to the cultivation of table-grapes, or transformed into
orange-groves, for lack of a market for their plagiarising wines, cannot
be regretted as long as the Holy Land, of all regions of the earth, has
not the proper pride to say of its first-fruits, “a poor thing, but
mine own,” rather than “these are extremely fine reproductions, made
purposely to resemble the best-known growths of other countries in all
respects, and sold under their names at a very reasonable price.”
Thus it is all the more discouraging and humiliating to find that,
according to the “_Times_ Trade Supplement,” the British Empire
Producers’ Organisation counsels Empire wine-growers “to give more
study to questions of bottles and labels, using accepted shapes and
designs _and leaving alone certificates of purity_.” The circular
which recommends the expedient of putting new wine into old bottles, a
practice recognised as disastrous even in biblical days, closes with the
extraordinary statement that “Empire wines are sounder than most foreign
wines at similar price, and are only prejudiced by devices (perhaps just
the absence of these superfluous certificates of purity?) not usually
associated with good wines.” This advice does scant justice to the
commercial probity and intelligence of a nation of shopkeepers. It is
clear that the very reverse is desirable. Empire Wines should evolve
their own shapes of bottles and designs for their labels, just as much as
they ought to develop their own individual flavours and other inherent
characteristics, to say nothing of discovering their own names. Several
of the smaller French growths (notably Anjou and Frontignan), which
have recently experienced some difficulty in disposing of their wines
remuneratively, have adopted individual types of bottle, and find this
policy promotes interest on the part of the public and undoubtedly helps
to increase their sales.
If Britons do not have a little more proper pride in their own husbandry,
“Empire Produce” will soon come to have something of the purely imitative
significance formerly associated with that familiar hall-mark for
cheapness and shoddiness: “Made in Germany.” German wines, however,
are neither of these _péjoratif_ things, for in German vineyards,
which are far from extensive, quantity has always been subordinated
to quality. The result is that the yield is very small indeed, while
growths like Steinberger and Schloss Johannisberger fetch prices more
than double those of the finest French wines, white as red, which are
in no wise inferior to them. The reason once again is that German
wines do not imitate any others and are content to be unique of their
kind. The very considerable difference in price, fine vintage for fine
vintage, prevailing between them and the choicest French growths is
in ratio to the much larger production of the latter. The royal road
to an enhanced quality in Empire Wines is in imitating the painstaking
methods and local pride of French and German wine-growers instead of
aping the names of their inimitable wines. Empire Wines, even if they
are only ordinary beverage wines, must dare to be themselves and brave
the risk of standing on their own merits and being sold under their own,
and nothing but their own, names. The industry of no nation can take
the same pride in slavishly copying the wares of another country as in
developing the particular indigenous excellencies of its own. Less than
a century ago the Cape produced one wine which became world-famous.
That Constantia has disappeared from the tables of European epicures
need occasion no surprise. The reason was a simple one. The demand for
this wine, which became as fashionable as Madeira, soon exceeded the
supply. Constantia was grown in a single vineyard. Increasing popularity
led to over-production of its vines, and the growing of much spurious
“Constantia,” that was really bad imitation Port, from hastily planted
and badly tended vineyards in the surrounding countryside. To-day
Constantia, like the Maronean and Pramnian of the Classics, is no more
than a memory, though the vineyard still survives and produces, I
believe, a “Constantia Claret” (it might have been yet another “Burgundy”
but for the irresistible appeal of alliteration) in its stead. The moral
is a clear one. Constantia, a fortified red wine, was sold as Constantia
and not as Cape “Port,” or Cape “Alicant.” True, it was often referred to
as “Cape Constantia,” but this was evidence not of a specious fraud but
of a certain local pride in its unusual origin, since no European wine
existed of the same name.
The vine has now been acclimatised in South Africa for nearly three
hundred years, thus giving the older vineyards time to work out some
of that virgin rankness of soil which is a serious handicap to the
attainment of fine quality. What South African and Australian viticulture
most needs are poorer and more worn soils, more carefully chosen
exposures and altitudes for vineyards; and sterner pruning of the vines
so as to ensure a far smaller yield per acre.
LEGISLATIVE RESTRICTIONS ON THE SALE OF WINES AND SPIRITS
Wine-drinkers are nearly always temperate in their opinions. That is why
they are not “Temperance” advocates, the word having become debased into
meaning the most intolerant teetotalism and the vilification of that
essentially temperate beverage wine. Wine-drinkers, as temperate persons,
are as much opposed to alcoholism as to teetotalism. Teetotalers, as
intemperate fanatics, are opposed not so much to alcoholism as to
alcohol itself—and their dour Puritan hearts are virtuously indignant
that those who like it should continue to enjoy the liberty of drinking
it. Wine-drinkers do not drink between meals, which is one of the first
rules of health. They drink at their meals, just as teetotalers, who are
every whit as thirsty as inveterate beer-drinkers, quaff their gaseous
dill-waters at all sorts of times and in all sorts of places—preferably
opposite ancient ruins: perhaps because they suggest to them the
inexorable decline and fall of the brewing barons and the imminent decay
of the fortunes of distillery magnates. To own a cellar of one’s own is
to be independent of vexatious curtailments of drinking hours. Just and
proper as these restrictions are in theory, at all events until human
nature can be relied upon to resist obviously harmful temptations more
stoically than hitherto, they inevitably penalise those whose time is
not their own. A poor man, however, cannot afford a cellar, which is
supposed to imply a degree of affluence that is far from being borne
out by the actual cost of laying down a few moderately good and varied
bins. It is the wine-merchant who keeps up the idea that a cellar is an
expensive luxury, because it is far more profitable for him to sell his
customers fully matured wine than to encourage them to buy the same wine
from him as soon as bottled and let it mature for nothing in their own
cellars. When the interests of true temperance prevail in Parliament,
light natural wines will be taxed so lightly that anyone who could afford
to order a dozen bottles of Bass or Guinness at a time from the grocer’s
could afford to stock a modest cellar. Spirits, on the other hand, will
be taxed still more highly, and fortified wines proportionately to the
added spirit they contain. The heavier incidence of duty on sparkling
wines is not likely to be removed, because there is no valid reason why
it should be. The consumption of sparkling wines, as we have already
seen, needs to be discouraged in the higher interests of natural wines.
A proper purity standard for beer is not likely to be enforced as long
as the public remains apathetic on the subject: that is to say until the
time comes for the whole attitude of the state to the liquor question to
be reviewed, not at the behest of a handful of teetotal fanatics, or the
trade, but in response to the insistent demand of the consumer himself.
The question may be asked, “Should the sale of wines and spirits be
a state monopoly, and is this likely to become general in the near
future?” Leaving aside all academic arguments for and against socialism,
the answer would seem to be, as in the case of railway ownership and
operation, “It depends on the country concerned and the particular genius
of that nation; its administrative efficiency and its attitude towards
the state and state institutions.” It is, however, unthinkable that in
the future any state will consent to abdicate that degree of control
of the liquor trade and public health and order afforded by levying
discriminatory duties on the consumption of spirits. Even in France
Absinthe has had to be made illegal. In Sweden a compromise between
state and commercial exploitation has been adopted. A single company,
the _Aktiebolaget Vin och Spritcentralen_, farms the Government’s
monopoly and hands over all surplus profits to the state after paying
a small fixed dividend to its shareholders. This company also owns all
the distilleries and wine-merchants’ shops in the country. It issues
a sort of pass-book to consumers, showing the holder’s name, address,
profession and taxation assessment and the number of bottles of wine and
spirits he is entitled to monthly on this basis. This is certainly not
socialism, for it substitutes the ratio of taxation for the doctrine
of equality of opportunity; but if it denies the poor man the right
to buy as much as the rich, it prevents the rich man buying as much
as he likes, or devoting more than a certain percentage of his income
to laying down a fine cellar of wine. Reminiscent of Food Control and
Food Cards as these regulations sound, they seem to work well enough in
practice. If a man may not himself import the sort of wines with which
he would prefer to fill his cellar, the company, according to Mr Hedges
Butler, gives him at very reasonable prices a choice of 862 varieties
of wines and 263 of spirits and liqueurs: a much wider selection than
the score of most prominent London wine-merchants stock between them.
From a variety of causes, of which inertia and chronic conservatism are
the principal, British wine-merchants, still nominally competitive with
one another, are coming more and more to resemble a number of branches
of one and the same company, offering their customers an ever smaller
selection of stereotyped growths. The invariable answer to this criticism
is “Few but choice,” which is liable to provoke a slightly incredulous
smile. “Few but choice,” faithfully echo the licensed grocers and the
restaurants. The most prominent wine-merchant in Regent Street displays a
wine-list so brief that it could be put to shame by any French provincial
_épicerie_. Indeed British vintners of the present day seem to have
taken as their device Sancho Panza’s words, “I come from my vineyard and
know nothing”—except that very few of them have ever seen a vineyard
or a wine-press. The public must be educated in wine, if its sale is
to increase; a greater sale implies greater variety and cheapness and
better average quality. Our prosperous wine-merchants, supinely content
in the main to make quick and easy profits by the sale of proprietary
brands of Port and Champagne, are much too easy-going to give themselves
the trouble of undertaking any more intelligent propaganda than editing
crude circulars extolling those “very nice wines—not _too_ dry” at
bankrupt stock prices (“cost double”), the curious style of which is
so unchanging as to seem traditional. In fact in nine cases out of ten
they no longer know enough about the commodity they deal in to be able
to do more than sell bottles containing it, much as a barman replenishes
beer-mugs at the tap. There is an urgent need of a better-educated and
more enterprising generation of wine-merchants, knowing their honourable
profession at least as well as their grandfathers did. True, the last
word in advertising wine was said many centuries ago. “Good wine (unlike
the Monopoles and the sham “Hocks” and “Burgundies”) needs no bush”; but
this presupposes that good wine should not be conspicuous by its absence.
Prohibition in Norway, which I believe actually antedates the celebrated
Volstead Act, was expounded to me on the bridge of a collier hove to in
a thick sea-fog off Copenhagen by one of the finest navigators, drunk or
sober, but particularly drunk, that it has ever been my good fortune to
encounter.
This Danish skipper gave me to understand (I cannot, of course, vouch for
the accuracy of his information) that in the long night of the Norwegian
winter there was absolutely nothing else to do but to take to theology
or get drunk. When drunk, the Norwegian crofter or fisherman, however
theological his bent, readily finds a second source of distraction in
beating his wife. The women of Norway seem to have got tired of being
beaten even before the outbreak of the War. When the War restricted
fishing, they began to take counsel together. Reflecting that the Fiend
Alcohol was at the root of all their troubles and the immediate cause
of all their bruises, they decided that he must be exorcised in due
legal form. To bring this about all that was necessary was the power and
exercise of the vote. The granting of the suffrage to women does not
appear to have aroused any sort of opposition in a “progressive” country
like Norway, and the right seems no sooner to have been demanded than
accorded. Once Norwegian womanhood was armed with the franchise, the
first measure insisted on was that imposing Prohibition on Norwegian
manhood. Their husbands do not seem to have been aware of the danger,
or perhaps they were encouraged to get rather exceptionally drunk during
the week devoted to a plebiscite on this purely feminine issue. Alas,
the plight of these energetic and resourceful Viking ladies, once their
husbands were deprived of Aqavit, was in no wise ameliorated; their
last state was decidedly worse than their first! Having now no earthly
distraction whatever, their husbands beat them from morning to night,
and, being involuntarily sober, very much more efficiently than they
had ever done before. Thereupon the united voice of the Norse women
clamoured for the abrogation of Prohibition even as they had but recently
clamoured for its ratification. Once again they had their way, and the
country returned peaceably to the _status quo ante_ of a moderate degree
of drunkenness and a moderate, because quasi-inebriated, prevalence of
wife-beating.
At this point the skipper’s account left off, and we may perhaps
supplement his graphic statement by some rather colder data. However
much bruised Norwegian women may have expressed the desire to see
Prohibition abolished, the chief motive force in securing it was the
economic pressure exercised by foreign countries. Norway is neither
an agricultural nor an industrial country. The nation lives on what
statisticians are fond of calling “invisible exports”—in this case
carrying other nations’ goods in its bottoms—and in exporting the
produce of its fisheries, mostly in the form of dried split-cod, known
variously as _Stokfisk_, _Morue_ and _Bacalão_. This is shipped in
enormous quantities to Roman Catholic countries for Fridays’ dinners.
Now, split-cod, though a foodstuff, is not a prime necessity of life,
like corn and meat, and the countries that buy it find no difficulty in
putting an embargo on it at need. Also Norway is a small and pacific,
and therefore impotent, nation, which can be defied or penalised with
impunity, not a great power backed by a large fleet and the power
of manipulating higher finance. For the sake of its shipping and
the export of its _Stokfisk_, Norway was forced in 1921 to accept
an annual contingent of 4,000 hectolitres of French wine, 5,000 of
Spanish and 8,500 of Portuguese: or a total of some 385,000 gallons,
a very considerable amount for a poor country of well under three
million inhabitants. Thus Norway is now wetter than ever. A state _Vin
Monopolet_ conducts the liquor trade and distils corn-brandy. Wine may
be freely bought, but spirits can only be obtained at a chemist’s shop
on a doctor’s prescription: a regulation the enforcement of which used
in former days to coincide with an alarming increase in such maladies
as snake-bite, anæmia, vertigo, melancholia, personal bereavement,
bankruptcy, religious mania, debility and old age in certain “dry” states
of the American Union.
At present our bejazzed manhood cannot summon to its aid enough of our
old Viking virility to countenance wife-beating in any form, even when
the chastisement is clearly justified. But when our masterful womenkind
seek to impose Prohibition on us, who knows but that the long-suffering
worm may not turn at last? Perhaps the experience of a short term of this
ban might be the cause of curing half our domestic troubles.
Much the same sort of system of placing few or no restrictions on the
sale of wine, and investing the purchase of spirits with considerable
formalities, has been adopted by certain Canadian provinces. In Quebec,
possibly as a legacy of French blood, the sale of wine vastly exceeds
that of spirits, in spite of a continuous invasion of this hospitable
territory by thirst-maddened tourists from the freest of all countries
at its gates. In Belgium, too, there are restrictions on the sale of
spirits, liqueurs and _apéritifs_, but none on that of beer and wine.
The vicissitudes of Norway lead us to the consideration of modern
international commercial treaties in their relation to wine. The old
trade agreements between nations in pre-war days were usually rather
amateur, almost altruistic, affairs. The industrial struggle for
existence had not, as then, become acute, because there were more rich
and fewer poor states in the relatively happy family of the nations.
To-day quotas, contingents and categories of goods are carefully
scheduled and obstinately bargained for, each high contracting party
putting forward its irreducible demands, together with certain other
claims advanced as camouflage, which are quietly abandoned once the
acceptance of the former is conceded. Germany produces fine white
wines and but little red. Her new commercial treaty with France, now
being negotiated, stipulates, within the agreed annual contingent of
French wine which she agrees to accept, for a minimum of white and a
maximum of red. But this is not all. Germany was a pioneer in strict
application of the doctrine of Appellation of Origin as applied to
wine, and Bethmann-Hollweg’s _Reichsweingesetz_ of 1909 preceded similar
legislation in any other country, with the possible exception of Hungary.
Thus it is not surprising to find that Germany should insist on stringent
_appellations d’origine_ for the French wines she pledges herself to buy.
Going further still in this direction, the German Ministry of Commerce
has divided the annual quota into fixed ratios between the several
viticultural regions of France: not so much in proportion to their
importance as in accordance with German domestic needs and tastes. It is
left to the French Government to draw up a list of recognised _local_
appellations within each of these regions (that is to say the names of
separate communes and smaller, but more famous, growths) and submit it
to the approval of the competent German authorities before the treaty
enters into vigour. The Belgian Government was the real precursor in this
direction, for the recently concluded Belgo-French Commercial Treaty
names over two hundred appellations of French wines, the authenticity of
which is guaranteed by the French state, as being alone entitled to be
admitted into Belgian territory. The only appellations of wine which
enjoy protection under any commercial agreement concluded with this
country are Port and Madeira. Wine sold as “Port” or “Madeira” in Great
Britain and Northern Ireland must be the authentic produce of the Alto
Douro or the Island of Madeira, fortified, as required by Portuguese
law, to a given alcoholic strength: that is a “_vinho surdo_” or “_vinho
muito_.” The first of these exclusive appellations is very distasteful to
Australian manufacturers of sweet wines, who are anxious to call their
more spirituous wares “Australian Port.” All other wines in this country
are still very much what their vendors choose to label them. Fortunately
nations are as imitative as persons. It is to be hoped, therefore, that
when the time comes for the existing Anglo-French Commercial Treaty to be
renewed—which is sure to entail long and pertinacious haggling on both
sides on account of the recent French embargo on British coal—this state
of affairs will be remedied in so far as French, or _soi-disant_ French,
wines are concerned. This hope is not so naïve as it may sound. It will
be as much in the interests of our negociators to see that the fixed
minimum quota of French wines, which we shall probably have to agree to
admit annually, shall be the best, instead of among the worst, of their
kinds, as it will be in that of the French to stipulate that henceforward
no wines sold in the United Kingdom as French shall be anything but
French, and that they must correspond in the strictest territorial sense
with the names printed on their labels. Thus, granted a reasonable degree
of skill in our politicians and public officials, the further we deviate
from Free Trade the better should be the quality of the goods we receive
from other countries: an idea altogether too simple to have ruffled the
brains of the Manchester School mandarins.
FASHION AND FEMINISM IN WINE
The undying snob in man reveals himself as much in the choice of the
wines he drinks as in the clothes he wears or the conversation he
affects. Waves of fashion that depend on the praise or blame of someone
in authority—a king, a beau, a singer, a sportsman, a politician or an
actor—sweep in a wine and sweep it out again. Some have their brief spell
and are no more seen; others return at almost fixed intervals like solar
eclipses. Port we owe to anti-French bias and a long-forgotten political
treaty concluded in the heat of this same rancour; but heavily reinforced
Port will be with us till the threat of Prohibition assumes proportions
menacing enough to make us confine ourselves to natural wines as the
most logical defence against the misrepresentations of the teetotalers.
Sherry, on the other hand, has been coming in and going out ever since
its name was Sack. Madeira’s eclipse has a more rational explanation,
for the quality of that wine has never recovered from the scourge of the
Oidium, which all but exterminated its vineyards in the Fifties. The fate
of Madeira was the ordinary fate of things that are out of sight. The
vines of the island were not in normal bearing again till some decades
afterwards, when the old John Company, the largest buyer of Madeira
wines, had already ceased to exist. Claret and Burgundy, long eschewed
as French growths and penalised by prohibitive duties to the profit
of an ever more alcoholic Port, blossomed for us anew when Gladstone
accomplished the revolutionary step of lowering the duties on light wines
to a shilling the gallon in 1861. Hermitage has disappeared in England,
as Arbois has in France. Hock and Moselle were patriotically, even,
considering the absence of supply, a little ostentatiously, renounced
during the War as Hunnish and unhallowed things—so much so, indeed, that
our greatest living authority on wines passed them over in silence in
a book, which is a classic, written during that period of passionate
professorial denunciation of everything German. Yet long before Locarno
they had returned in triumph to their old popularity in the Houses of
Parliament, as advertising circulars were careful to inform us. Greek
wines, like Byron’s verse, have had their day. Tokay, now a memory and
almost no more made, was hallowed by the prefix “Imperial” and the
knowledge that it was the gift, more precious than jewelled orders or
honorary colonelcies, which kings exchanged in the family circle. Italian
wines have lately enjoyed a good deal of popularity among artistic
persons, explicable by the charm of a Chianti flask rather than by the
average quality of its contents. Marsala, now usually despised as a cheap
and common wine, should be dear to us always as a memory of Nelson. It is
still piously esteemed in the Navy, where Rum has long since passed out
of fashion. Balkan wines may yet enjoy a vogue if Ruritanian princesses
prove as good business women as they are beautiful. Algerian and
Tunisian wines we know well, but more often under Europeanised titles.
The Anglo-Catholic and Jewish communities make much of Palestine wines,
which have little but scriptural geography in their favour. Champagne,
costliest of all wines in the popular imagination, has always held its
own for this very reason. Just as Sherry, decade by decade, had to be
paler or darker in colour and lighter or heavier in body, so Champagne,
which began by being very sweet, has now become dry as a bone. Yet “dry”
Champagne only dates from the Sixties. Sweet it may yet become again,
as sweet as the Russians liked it, when women become sovereign arbiters
of food and drink. A decade or two ago _Carte Anglaise_ was the most
expensive and fashionable degree of “liqueuring” in Champagne. To-day
it is _Drapeau Américain_ (why not “Volstead Bone-Dry Monopole”?) for
the Dollar is at a premium over the Sovereign. Whisky, formerly an
ostler’s dram in the Scottish Highlands, was introduced by golfers,
with the hearty support of the medical profession, and became popular
simultaneously with that now universal game. Irish Whisky, though
extensively drunk, has, for some curious reason, never been fashionable.
There are few brandy-drunkards to-day. Cognac seems to enjoy most esteem
in England as a medicinal restorative. Gin was rescued from Mrs Gamp’s
tea-pot by the sudden popularity during the War of those American
barbarisms, cocktails: a popularity largely due to their requiring
elaborate paraphernalia and the fact that they were illegal in their
native land. Every millionairess who could boast a Diamond Sunburst, we
were given to understand, had her own portable illicit still and a marble
gin-fountain in her platinum-tapped bathroom. Liqueurs, chiefly because
they are sweet and many-hued, have been steadily growing in favour with
ladies ever since dining out in restaurants became an integral part of
our national habits.
Let no man lull himself into a sense of false security by imagining that
the day is still far distant when women will rule the cellar as well as
rocking Baby—and the bottle—in the cradle. A book on wine which appeared
last year addressed all its advice, as though this was the most natural
thing in the world, to “the good hostess,” “the mistress of the house,”
who in these days “can afford to smile” at Dr Middleton’s “ungracious
behaviour” in defining her sex as “Creation’s glory, but anticlimax
following a wine of a century old.” Another male supremacy lies low!
Man is lord of the cobwebbed bins no more; the cellar-key, even as the
ballot-paper, has been snatched from him by a stronger hand.
Now women’s real taste in wine is notoriously for such as are sweet.
Fielding, who knew the sex better than most, and was far from ungallant,
was not the first to remark on it. In one of his now forgotten plays,
as Mr André Simon reminds us, the hero, or some kindly male character,
after making the same observation, sends out for a pint of “Mountain”
(the luscious, honey-sweet Muscat wine now known as Malaga, but no longer
obtainable in an age vowed to a cult of dry wines except in the humbler
public-houses) to comfort a lady’s vapours or soothe her alarums. Of
course, many men also secretly prefer sweet wines to dry. Our national
wine, Port, is decidedly sweet, and could not possibly be called “dry” in
the sense that Sherry often is. But Vintage Port, the feminist authority
declares, “is not a woman’s taste in wine,” though it must surely be a
nearer approach to it than either Vintage Claret or Vintage Burgundy.
Anyhow, Port, as the classic monologue “My fust ’usbing was a Guardsman”
clearly shows, is the most popular wine among women in the saloon-bars
of public-houses. At present all women are exclaiming with a single
voice that they execrate sweet wines and have always preferred dry, the
very driest in fact, even in those dim and distant days when they were
not as yet fashionable. This is only a parrot cry catching up the echo
of the vogue of the moment—“Tell me what is being drunk and I will tell
you that I like it best”—which need deceive nobody. It is like those
terrible headaches, unknown to their grandmothers, which have induced
them one and all to shear off their tresses and shave their napes. M.
Daret, the distinguished _Maître de Chaix_ at Château Yquem, perhaps the
greatest authority on _vins liquoreux_, knows better and is far from
being dismayed. Sauternes was never dearer than it is to-day. It can
only be assumed that drinking it in secret enhances its price. Mrs G.
B. Stern in “Bouquet” furiously denounces Sauternes and claims that it
is as monstrous to suppose that women are incapable of sharing “men’s”
taste for dry wines, or Cognac, as any other hereditary “male” passion,
preference, proclivity or prowess. This delightful, if unconvincing, book
ends on a note of wistful nostalgia for the first properly mixed icy-cold
cocktail waiting to reward her for a strenuous and rather hustled tour
of _dégustation_ through the principal French viticultural districts. I
very much suspect that during the course of this pilgrimage “A Deputy
was King.” The real G. B. Stern was probably in spiritual residence at
that “Palace” in Nice or Monte Carlo all the time. Even Mr, Mrs or Miss
Chaloner owns that on this topic “we are brought up against the very
objection that many women have to Claret, since they find its lack of
sweetness distasteful.... Most women begin with a marked preference
for wines that are frankly sweet (so do boys), or perhaps _demi-sec_,
and there is a touch of austerity about Claret that makes them long
frankly, or privately, to add a little sugar to the glass.” Quite so;
the feminine education up to dry wines is purely a question of following
the prevailing mode and a fresh manifestation of the eternal and servile
imitation of man. This is indirectly confirmed by the authoress herself
(I will plump for authoress and a hundred to one against author) when
she adds: “Though the vine flourished long before mankind, and man is
believed to have enjoyed its produce as a beverage as long ago as the
neolithic period, women are only just beginning to give it their serious
attention.” “The fault of their ignorance” (an ignorance which is not
found in wine-growing countries) is naturally placed “partly at the door
of the opposite sex, who in bygone days were only too well pleased with
it.” Similar reproaches have been levelled against man for his former
tyrannical exclusivity in such domains as higher mathematics, marine
zoology, coal-mining, boiler-stoking, Rugby football and legislative
procedure. It is doubtless theoretically arguable that “women should
possess finer palates than men” and be able to detect and eliminate
corked bottles when decanted—what time their husbands are presumably
peeling potatoes or scolding the cook. But this is by no means the only
preliminary to wining claimed for them. “Where the hostess, or even
women-servants, take over the duties of cork-drawing, it is of real help
to use a mechanical cork-screw.” At first blush one feels inclined to say
“amen” to this, but on second thoughts it seems brutally unfair that,
if men are allowed to draw corks with ordinary corkscrews (which being
far simpler and more satisfactory are usually preferred by them), women
should be debarred from the same male privilege. To provide women with
patent corkscrews is clearly to treat them as inferiors. Sex equality is
no better than a hollow mockery if such unsporting handicaps are to be
allowed to remain, or the hostess’s anxious concentration in studying
the grammar of “the international language” of the wine-list is to be
flurried by idle male gossip.
There is a singular propriety in women arrogating to themselves the
right to choose wines and lay down cellars “like men” in an age in which
so many of them lack the ability to boil an egg. Yet “venturing into
her cellar without a candle” the mistress of the house is told that she
ought to know how to distinguish Bordeaux from Burgundy or Hock bottles
by the exercise of that very tactile sense which now so often fails her
in sewing on a button. “In a well-known women’s club” Miss Chaloner was
recently scandalised to find that the head-waitress, when asked for some
Beaune, had not “even the vaguest notion whether to look for Claret or
Burgundy, or even whether the wine asked for was white or red.” This
pained surprise I am not polite enough to pretend to share. “However, a
discreetly dropped hint that the contour of Burgundy and Bordeaux bottles
was different ... began an interest and education that doubled the value
of the maid to the members of the club.”—From which it might almost be
conjectured that the education in question was imparted to the members
by the maid. When so many prominent judges, divines, scientists, Cabinet
Ministers, university professors and thoughtful clubmen eagerly follow
every passing change in the design of “Camiknicks,” it is melancholy
to be told that “wines ... are seldom appreciated or used to the best
advantage in women’s clubs.”
Is there a last lingering doubt in the heart of the vinously educated
hostess as to the propriety of offering her guests wine—a moral, an
æsthetic, not a social perplexity, of course—it is soon allayed. “In
the hands of the discriminating hostess, wine has the charm, the kindly
welcome of the hearth to which she invites her guests, and if possessing
in careless, or stupid use, some dangers, that is not a reason for
banishing HER cellar. The hostess who ... still hesitates over so grave a
problem as the ethical values of wine”—previously, no doubt, learnedly
and exhaustively debated at her club: perhaps the very one where the
head-waitress did not know Big Tree from Wonga-Wonga—“may yet take much
comfort to heart.” But where does the model hostess’s husband dine on
these occasions, since he has no longer a cellar of his own, or even a
key to his wife’s? There is at least one occasion mentioned on which we
may be quite sure that he would contrive to find a sufficient excuse for
absenting himself to “the tyrant,” or even brave “the brute’s” wrath by
taking French leave—when she “might desire to give her dinner a special
character, reminiscent of a particular occasion, or holiday in Italy”;
in which case, “she would have no difficulty in confining the choice
of her wine-list to Italian wines.” Perhaps, too, the cigars (which in
spite of the practical protests of Madame Hanska and George Sand have
been allowed to remain a male monopoly for far too long) would be those
delicious curling Minghettis? Italian wines are often excellent in Italy,
when served with Italian cooking, but the prevailing quality of “what the
vintners sell” in what ladies call “those funny little continental shops
in Soho” (for Italian wines are not generally obtainable elsewhere),
under the fair names of Chianti, Barolo, Cortese, Orvieto, Asti Spumante,
etc., is enough to make the most chicken-hearted Fabian husband rebel.
In the future wine is likely once more to be considered, even in
non-viticultural countries, as a FOOD essential to physical and moral
well-being, rather than as a dangerous artificial stimulant, or the
sybaritic indulgence of a few eccentric old epicures. In cultured
epochs wine is sure to be held in honour as an integral part of taste,
while spirits are certain to reign supreme in barbarous, philistine and
sanctimonious centuries, whether permitted or proscribed by the law. The
present renaissance of gastronomy in England, hesitant though it still
is, is of happy augury for marking the eclipse of an age likely to be
identified by future social historians with the perpetual swilling of
whisky-and-soda by otherwise refined and self-respecting people; and
as heralding the advent of an era in which wine will be purer, better,
cheaper, more abundant and varied in its kinds, besides being more justly
and intelligently appreciated by the nation at large. With the increasing
shortage of cereals throughout the world, the making of grain-spirits
will soon become indefensible, and the same consideration may ultimately
apply to beer as well.
The survival of wine and male dominance, are, as Scandinavia has shown
us, parallel issues. If wine survives feminism, which, in spite of the
foregoing instances of its latest manifestation, is much more likely
to be œnophobe than œnophil, there will be no place left for teetotal
Puritanism in a wine-loving world.
* * * * *
Bacchus, when yet a child, fared one day along an unfamiliar desert path
strewn with the bleaching bones of all manner of birds and beasts that
had perished there of drought. Wearied, he sat himself down to rest
on a heap of stones amidst a solitary patch of verdure growing by the
wayside. He found the rambling shrub, the tender leaves of which cooled
and caressed his bruised and heated feet, so green and gracious that he
pulled it up by the roots so as to take it home with him and plant it in
his garden. Fearing lest it might wither under the scorching rays of the
sun as he bore it in his hands, he picked up a bird’s skull and put the
roots, with a little earth, into the hollow of the beak. The plant grew
so fast while he wended his way homewards that its roots soon outgrew the
prison of their narrow sheath. Thereupon he imbedded the bird’s skull in
the shoulder-blade of a lion. Nevertheless the roots began once again
to overspread their allotted trough, so that he had recourse to the
expedient of thrusting the lion’s shoulder-blade into the jaw-bone of
an ass. When, at length, he reached home and went to plant the strange
wild shrub in his garden, he found it impossible to extricate the knotted
roots from the three bones incasing them; so he planted it just as it
was, bones and all. The vine, for such was the name he gave this goodly
creeping plant, throve luxuriantly and bore the young god, who tended
and pruned the holy tree lovingly, tressing its branches into a shady
arbour, an abundance of heavy bloom-dusted grape-clusters, both purple
and golden: the juice of which he pressed and gave to the sons of men for
their sustenance and comfort in sickness and adversity and to make glad
their hearts on high festivals and days of family rejoicing. And, behold,
as soon as the sons of men first tasted the blood of the grape—which they
straightway called wine, meaning a sacred water—a prodigy came to pass!
For when they began to drink they sang as do the birds of the forest;
when they drank more they became strong and courageous as lions; but when
they drank yet more, they grew foolish as jackasses.
Thus it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be.
FOOTNOTES
[1] The main reason is that predominantly cider- and beer-drinking
Départements of the north and north-east have now become large consumers
of wine: an appetite whetted by the much appreciated Army wine-ration,
nicknamed “Pinard,” during the long years of mobilisation.
[2] _Piquette_ means sour, thin wine; it is to wine what small-beer is to
ale.
[3] See note to page 17.
[4] See page 34. The Pinot was tried in Australia, but did not prove a
success in such a hot and arid climate.
[5] The _Tonneau Bordelais_ has a capacity of four _Barriques_ of 22
litres each, or 900 litres in all.
[6] The coarse and common Gamay of the Côte d’Or must not be identified
with the Petit Gamay, the “_plant noble_” of the Beaujolais from which
all the finest wines of the latter region have always been grown.
[7] It is a significant fact that since the War the only French
viticultural region that has increased its export of bottled wines is the
Bordelais. This is the region in which estate-bottling is most widely
adopted. Exports of Bordeaux wines in the wood have sensibly decreased.
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