T. T. Greg

“ We confess not to the pecks and bushels of fruits both fresh and preserved—no, we admit no impeachments soft or otherwise; we seek for scapegoats and a herd is at hand. Our fathers have eaten sour grapes and the teeth of the children are set on edge. The blame lies there, in parents and grandparents in whose veins coursed the nefarious sherry, the treacherous Madeira, the malignant port, the malicious hock, and the deceptive champagne. This is the one blessing with which Podagra tempers his many curses. He justifies our senses in blaming our thirsty progenitors for our own sufferings. ”

“ For it must ever be borne in mind that wine is no mere fluid, but is informed with sensitiveness and has a most incomparable soul. There should not be so much as a keyhole for the random gust of sewer gas; no squalid waft of cabbage water should ever whiff it to these secret shrines. In well-regulated houses, even the beer cellar is kept distinct from the palace of the grape ”

“ Happily our own habit is different; and herein shines forth the ancient insular superiority. Scarce has the fish, bull-headed cod or blushing mullet, swum into our ken, ere the cork leaps forth with a cloop of joy, and straightway, as on the approach of spring, the sap stirs and the buds of speech burst into life, and talk, reluctant and hidebound no more, bursts into many-coloured bloom. No longer in middle-class houses is the wine doled out like drops of blood, as in those ugly parties which Original Walker satirised. ”

“ And so it comes about that Spring has no joys for me as it has for others, and I hear the throstle’s liquid warble and the blackbird’s piping with a mute indifference, for throstle and blackbird, thanks to God, reproduce themselves each year, but this Madeira is the last of his race, splendidly sterile and icily null, and already we seem to detect in the blood of him the faint suspicion of tartness, which tells us that the end is nigh. The bloom of age is passing away ”

“ The great wine merchants whose enthusiasm is Burgundy are the Princes of the trade. Their dynasty is hereditary, and at Namur the grandson of Evrad, who supplied our grandsires, is still ready to take our own orders. At Brussels the name of Van Cutsem carries us still a step farther back. There for generations lies the wine in the great cellars of these greater men, each vintage awaiting its joyful resurrection. The cellars are deeply excavated as cellars should be, in the clay, or hollowed out of limestone rock. ”

“ To a splendour of light succeeds an abysm of dark; there is no moment of twilight, no tutelary crepusculum, wherethrough to watch the fading glow we leave, and discern the gradations of the nearing dark. But Claret bears us ever up and up toward the light. ”

“ The trim cap and dainty apron of suburban Phyllis may please and delight some, but, for solid grandeur and substantial splendour, and, it may be added, potential enjoyment, we look solely to those houses whose threshold is guarded and whose portals are opened, by that great emblem of British respectability, the British Butler. Fair Phyllis may crown our brows with myrtle or with laurel, and there is always a plenty of laurel bushes where Phyllis lives, but it takes a man to crown our wine. ”

“ No longer, charm he never so wisely with his choice selection of adjectives, those wondrously suggestive epithets of qualification and allurement, no longer dare we let his oily deliciousness gladden the palate of us upon whom Podagra has laid his dolorous finger. Henceforth life must be for us a stern fact, not to be laughed or quaffed away, but to be lived through and down and out. ”

“ It is the habit of man to curse his wine merchant for sending another wine than that he sampled: yet it is very often not his wine merchant but his cellarage that has played the knave, and has given him the worse end of a bargain. It is not less than marvellous that a good glass of wine is ever ours in town, for the urban cellar is not often ventilated, so that foul air and rank mists still penetrate through cracks and fissures in the brickwork. We can keep our neighbour out of our dining-room, but we cannot barricade our cellars against his atmosphere. ”

“ For who greatly lusts after the cellars of moderate drinkers, men who too often buy at a venture? And especially is this the case with Port: in whose quest they betake them to their wine—merchant as one should go to his doctor, with medicinal rather than purely hospitable motives. Thus cometh in our midst the Old Tawny, long in the wood, a renegade and traitor, which hath imparted to dead timber that rare and fragrant quality which should have exalted a living palate. ”

“ If we would judge aright of the first red wine of France we must go to Brussels, to Dinant, to Charleroi, to Namur. Not on the banks of the Loire but of the Meuse dwell the folk who know what Burgundy is, what Burgundy means. Indeed, the inhabitants of the Ardennes care little enough for the choicer arts. It is not for them to collect enamels. Neither pottery nor pictures seduce them to extravagance. But religiously do they select and treasure their Burgundy, hiving it in cellars, the building and furnishing whereof have been the work of generations. ”

“ Only at funerals shall be missed the captive bubbles struggling, and rightly, to be free: though here the need of them is sorest, and you must perforce put up with Marsala, or, if a first class interment, with brown Sherry.
Truly it is a beverage of romance and laughter, this Champagne. In the lush green by Upper Thames, when summer shines on the glancing hair, the corks have broken forth and shot skywardly, singing the song of prodigality and abandonment. ”

“ He comes on the wings of the circular, and clad in the raiment of hyperbole, flagrantly disregarding the adage that good wine needs no bush, and the pages of his catalogues are strewn with false and perjured epithets. So great are his eulogies of what he is pleased to call his “light Clarets” that for the real thing, if he have it, language falls too short for adoration. ”

“ So, like Adam and Eve when they walked no longer in the beautiful nakedness of nescience, but bedecked themselves in the pants and continuations of acquired knowledge, we became ourselves one of the elders and wise-sayers, and gave up happiness with the acquisition of wisdom. Neither does this dread enemy of ours confine himself to joints and knuckles. His old name of Podagra is all too limited for the full scope of his power over the whole body. ”

“ There are men who keep cellar books, ear-marking every bottle of every bin, so that at a glance they can see how much remains of that ’75 Lafitte, and how many bottles of the ’74 Pommery are still for self and friends; but we would put our butler on his honour, and inculcate him with the pride of cellarage, and the artistry of drinking. It may be that we err on the side of credulity, but while we remain in ignorance, we live in bliss. We have endured much at the hands of inexperienced waiters, for the name of butler predicates perfection ”

“ A brave tenant is worth a noble home; see you that he gets it. Let all be in order and in place: as in the heaven above, so in the earth beneath. There is none to dispute that all wines have a body, these Titanic and huge, those of more lissome build. Whatever their physical constitution, yours be it to maintain the existence of the soul and the imagination in them. ”

“ It is not uncommon to hear of a poet that he is a poet’s poet; of a musician, he is for musicians first and laymen after. So it is scarce matter for surprise to learn that a wine there is that is preeminently the wine merchant’s wine. That this should be Sherry is all but inevitable; for he carries not his credentials with him like the rest, but trusteth chiefly to the praise and the recommendation of another, and that other the wine merchant aforesaid. ”

“ Also the First Gentleman in Europe in the early decades of this century, by cultivating and disseminating a preference for sherry, did much to put the nose of our glorious Madeira out of joint; for men are, alas! too apt to forget the glory of this Madeira and wholly to ignore his royal descent. It is a far cry to 1421, when Prince Henry colonised Madeira, the woody island, with grape stocks from Candia, and to this day the romance and joy lingers about these island vineyards. ”

“ It should be so thin that it clings to the lips as a membranous transparency—a bubble divided in twain, and floating on the wings of the wind. It should be wider in the middle than at any other point; should taper thereto from the bottom, or therefrom to the top—so that the soul of the wine comes concentrated into the mouth of its high priest. To be utterly avoided is the narrow hollow stem, which habours dirt or—what is as bad—inclines to the suspicion of dirt. ”

“ For ourselves, we agree with a famous Canon of Reims who observed that “in the wine of Burgundy there is more strength and vigour; if it does not play with its man so much, it overthrows him more suddenly, as did Demosthenes. The wine of Champagne is subtler and more delicate; it amuses more and for a longer time, but in the end it does not produce less effect. ”

“ He will tolerate no sweet to make entrance into a system over which he exercises his tyrannous control, nor permit any acid, however refreshing, to keep harbour therein. What more poetical image in the world than to quaff the juice of the grape from Bordeaux vineyards and sun-bathed slopes of Epernay, and to dream we have clambered along the valleys and up the romantic ravines of snow-topped Helicon and tapped the fountains of Aganippe and Hippocrene, summoning the Muses themselves to play the Hebe for us? ”

“ With Port we lose the senses, with Claret we exchange them. The commonplace becomes romantic, the accountant precedes a poet. He has spurned the brute earth, and his hand has touched the shoulder of Pegasus himself. That he cannot mount is no fault of the charger that is ready to bear him heavenwards. Not even Claret is omnipotent. It seems out of the nature of things that man should be drunken, as we use the term, on so admirable a liquor, and so it has ever appeared to me a mistake that Ripton Thompson should have been permitted to drown his five wits in Claret. ”

“ If Claret be for Boys, and I neither admit it nor deny, then is that cellar closed. But to be Men is for all of us; so for Men is Port. I had said it is the sole and only drink; though many excellent—comparatively excellent—folk there be that give the palm to ginger beer. ”

“ The march of Time can do nothing against him, only to mellow and soften him and make us love him. Indeed, one can hardly be said to be on speaking terms with him unless we have him lurking in the wood these eight or ten years, and afterwards have completed his education and softened the acidities of his young temper in bottle for at least twice that period. ”

“ And the masterful Eighties, the fickle, fleeting, delicate-souled Eighty-Fours, the once speculative, broadly -promising but now fully-realised Eighty-Nines—do we not discuss them, even as the children of our loins? Wine does more than generate talk: it is talk itself ”

“ Above all, you shall flee from the spell of sawdust, the guide, philosopher, and friend of idiot butlers and ’prentice householders. For sawdust, if you only leave it long enough, breeds the creeping thing, and in decay it generates a gas no wine of delicate parts may breathe and live. ”

“ CLARET
CLARET
Those there are to whom it has ever seemed the gravest of misconceptions that a man cannot love two at once: that (so to speak) he cannot carry a change of raiment in his knapsack, when no climate in the world is so captious or so variable as that of the Land of Love. ”

“ My obiter dictum that the old Madeira had sunk into his dotage and had become tart and peevish degraded him instanter into the second-class, so that he became the drink of those who were yet young and uninitiate. And now Death, on the pale horse Insurance, has bid me stand and deliver, and offers me life only on the degrading terms of abject teetotalism. All is over; no longer do I descend—oh! facilis et amabilis descensus—into the cellar and watch with silent joy the removal, for my own immediate delectation, of the “storied urn” ”

“ The true butler, born as well as made, should supplement that scanty intelligence which is the endowment of too many hosts; he should differentiate between the quality and the fibre of his guests; he should divine that a parson’s glass should always be filled to the brim, for that he can take a little more than other people, and yet be ill-satisfied. ”

“ If we would seek for a moment to wander awhile into the shadowy rest-bringing bypaths of fancy and thought, or gallop impetuously into the very jousts of love and romance, into the tourney, as it were, of life, if we would watch the tossing, dancing bubbles in our champagne like stars of dawn luring us onward to a new youth, lo! ”

“ For the gods, and Primitive Man in their image, drank only when they were athirst. They never sipped their liquor. Not theirs (poor devils!) to roll it round the tongue, to toss it playfully against the palate, to let it trickle exquisitely down a gullet of educated sensibility. They quaffed it, they swilled it, they sluiced the drouth out of their systems with it. Nectar was mere stuff with a flow in it; a bulky flux which they drank from great bowls and tankards. They knew nought of palate; only that Nature abhors a vacuum. ”

“ Their bottles are yellow-black in colour, and from a cunning—begotten of long experience—are rough inside, differing herein from the bottles of Champagne which for a different reason are smooth on either surface. For it is well-nigh impossible to carry out the perfect maturing of Burgundy with a smooth-stomached bottle, for the deposit in the wines clings, as it should, to the roughened surface, and only the glory of the wine remains to drink, that which would work its ruin blending not with it. ”

“ So, do what we will, we cannot but doff our hats to this wine of ours, for we stand—in his presence—in the presence of royalty. And he has this endearing quality about him, that he and Time are such good friends and understand one another so well that age becomes him and is his charm, when with us poor men and women only too often youth is the one possession we are born with, which we have squandered ere we knew that it was worth anything. Now Madeira in his youth is harsh and austere, he has a pungent tongue, and speaks with bitterness ”

“ Pactolus himself flowed with no richer burden; better than grains of gold are borne in Larose’s smooth-tongued flood, and whoso drinks of his ts “purple tide” from him the cares of the world go vanishing, vanishing, with a voluptuous and entrancing effect of delay. With Port we go down gloriously, but precipitately, into the couch of kings; we nestle into Luxury’s lap; but we sleep on the instant. ”

“ Actors love thee, and women; but for all that, rise, rise, rise ever; for once the beaded bubbles of ephemeral evanescence have winked their last, there is no deep so plummetless as that encircled by yon vacuous and reproachful glass. ”

“ He should thieve in the grand style, and never condescend to take the heart out of a flask and fill the eviscerated shell with water; he should know that a bottle is of the aristocracy, and should ever treat it like a gentleman. What blow so hard to bear as the knowledge, years after you have sacked your incomparable butler for intemperance, that he had drunk three and a half dozen of your ’47 port, and filled the bottles with the pure lymph in which you condescend to wash, but never debase yourself by drinking? ”

“ Maybe these veteran topers, these fontes et origines mali, themselves grew old in years, and suffered their twinges, and swore their expostulatory swears; but they had drunk their fill; while we, a degenerate progeny, have no drink, and begin our twinges in our cradle, interrupting with our infantine oaths the lullaby of our nurses, and finding, as we grow older, our books in the pinching boots, sermons in chalkstones, and Gout in everything. ”

“ Also remember that “A wine-cellar too hot or cold Murders wine before ’tis old”; and be your own cellarman.
A waitress, being a woman, cares nothing about wine and knows less. A butler either cares about wine, or does not. If he does, he drinks it; if he does not he gives it away. And let your cellar be a pattern of neatness, so that yourself can descend thereunto with pleasure, and conduct your friend with pride. ”

“ The soil of his garden is of such magnificent sterility that any of less lineage would starve. Yet has he such a grace as, search God’s most fruitful valleys as you may, you shall never find again; for it is the grace of gentle blood that is unadulterated with the prosperity of richness. ”

“ Alone and unaccompanied he should disappear slowly and with method down the throats of those who love him, conferring some essence of his own greatness upon them; for, great as he is in all other particulars, he has, above all, the indescribable qualities—style and distinction. ”

“ It is not every one, and least of all a Londoner or town man, who can scoop him a cellar under the living rock, which is the true matrix for the development of good wine; but you will find no finer hold than that which lies deep, some forty to fifty feet, as the soil allows, without excess of moisture, nor with any opening save one to the north alone. In populous cities pent, the least you should insist on is. ”

“ What lovelier labour does gastronomy know than to let its hand roam under the dark green strawberry leaves in English garden, and lure from its hiding-place the queen of fruits, as the rose of flowers, whether we take it cool and refreshing from the chilly shade, or hot and life-giving with the warmth of sun and heaven thick upon it? ”