T. T. Greg

“ 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. ”

“ To look at life through this clear and golden medium was to cast seriousness to the winds. Clouds would fleet past the midday sun and darken for a brief spell the moon of night: but in these clear depths there was nothing of cloud, nothing of shadow; only, as should be, a heyday of laughter and romance. For, of all the transparencies this world can offer, none is so beautiful; none is so precious as that through which you behold the shining soul of a jest. And where else shall you look for, and more inevitably find it, than in this Dom Pérignon? God rest the good monk’s soul ! ”

“ 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 ”