CLARET--AND THE CLARET COUNTRY.
That our worthy forefathers in Guienne loved good wine, is a thing not
to be doubted--even by a teetotaller. When the Earl of Derby halted his
detachments, he always had a pipe set on broach for the good of the
company; and it is to be presumed that he knew their tastes. The wines
of the Garonne were also, as might be expected, freely imported into
England:
"Whit wyn of Oseye, and of Gascoyne,
Of the Ruele, and of the Rochel wyn."
As far down, indeed, as Henry VIII.'s time you might get Gascony and
Guienne wine for eightpence a gallon, and the comfortable word "claret"
was well known early in the seventeenth century. One of its admirers,
however, about that time gave odd reasons for liking it, to wit--"Claret
is a noble wine, for it is the same complexion that noblemen's coats be
of." This gentleman must have been a strenuous admirer of the
aristocracy. The old Gascon growth was, however, in all probability,
what we should now call coarse, rough wine. The district which is
blessed by the growth of Chateau Margaux and Chateau Lafitte, was a
stony desert. An old French local book gives an account of the "savage
and solitary country of Medoc;" and the wines of the Bordelais, there
is every reason to believe, were grown in the strong, loamy soil
bordering the river. By the time that the magic spots had been
discovered, blessed with the mystic properties which produce the Queen
of Wine we had been saddled with--our tastes perverted, and our stomachs
destroyed--by the woful Methuen treaty--heavy may it sit on the souls of
Queen Anne, and all her wigged and powdered ministers--if, indeed, men
who preferred port wine to claret can be conceived to have had any souls
at all, worth speaking about--and thenceforth John Bull burnt the coat
of his stomach, muddled the working of his brain, made himself bilious,
dyspeptic, headachy, and nationally stupid, by imbibing a mixture of
strong, coarse, wines, with a taste but no flavour, and bedevilled with
every alcoholic and chemical adulteration, which could make its natural
qualities worse than they were. See how our literature fell off. The
Elizabethans quaffed sack, or "Gascoyne, or Rochel wyn;" and we had the
giants of those days. The Charles II. comedy writers worked on claret.
Port came into fashion--port sapped our brains--and, instead of
Wycherly's _Country Wife_, and Vanbrugh's _Relapse_, we had Mr. Morton's
_Wild Oats_, and Mr. Cherry's _Soldier's Daughter_. It is really much to
the credit of Scotland, that she stood staunchly by her old ally,
France, and would have nothing to do with that dirty little slice of the
worst part of Spain--Portugal, or her brandified potations. In the old
Scotch houses a cask of claret stood in the hall, nobly on the tap. In
the humblest Scotch country tavern, the pewter _tappit hen_, holding
some three quarts--think of that, Master Slender,--"reamed," _Anglice_
mantled, with claret just drawn from the cask, and you quaffed it,
snapping your fingers at custom-houses. At length, in an evil hour
Scotland fell:
"Bold and erect the Caledonian stood,
Firm was his mutton, and his claret good;
'Let him drink port!' the English statesman cried.
He drank the poison, and his spirit died!"
But enough of this painful subject. As Quin used to say, "Anybody drink
port? No! I thought so: Waiter, take away the black strap, and throw it
out."
Upon the principle, I suppose, of the nearer the church, the further
from God, Bordeaux is by no means a good place for good ordinary wine;
on the contrary, the stuff they give you for every-day tipple is
positively poor, and very flavourless. In southern Burgundy, the most
ordinary of the wines is capital. At Macon, for a quarter of a handful
of sous they give you nectar; at the little town of Tain, where the
Rhone sweeps gloriously round the great Hermitage rock, they give you
something better than nectar for less. But the ordinary Bordeaux wine is
very ordinary indeed; not quite so red-inky, perhaps, as the _Vin de
Surenne_, which, Brillat Savarin says, requires three men to swallow a
glassful--the man who drinks, and the friends who uphold
him on either side, and coax, and encourage him; but still meagre and
starveling, as if it had been strained through something which took the
virtue out of it. Of course, the best of wine can be had by the simple
process of paying for it, but I am talking of the ordinary work-a-day
tipple of the place.
A few days' lounging in Bordeaux over, and hearing that the vintage was
in full operation, I put myself into a respectable little omnibus, and
started for the true claret country. In a couple of hours I was put down
at the door of the only auberge in the tiny village of Margaux, and to
any traveller who may hereafter wish to visit the famous wine district,
I cordially commend "The Rising Sun," kept by the worthy "Mere
Cadillac." There you will have a bedroom clean and bright as a Dutch
parlour; a grand old four-poster of the ancient regime, something
between a bed and a cathedral; a profusion of linen deliciously white
and sweet smelling; and _la Mere_ will toss you up a nice little potage,
and a cotelette done to a turn, and an omelette which is perfection; and
she will ask you, in the matter of wine, whether you prefer _ordinaire_
or _vieux_? and when you reply, _Vieux et du meilleur_, she will
presently bustle in with a glorious long-necked, cobwebby flask, the
first glass of which will induce you to lean back in a tranquil state of
general happiness, and contemplate with satisfaction even the naughty
doings of the wicked Marguerite of Burgundy, and her sisters Blanche and
Henriette, with Buridan and Gaulnay, in the _Tour de
Nesle_--illustrations of which popular tragedy deck the walls on every
side.
While thus agreeably employed, then, I may enlighten you with a few
topographical words about the claret district. Look at the map, and you
will observe a long tract of country, dotted with very few towns or
villages, called the Landes, stretching along the sea coast from the
Pyrenees to the mouth of the Gironde. At one place the Landes are almost
sixty miles broad, but to the north they fine gradually away, the great
river Garonne shouldering them, as it were, into the sea. Now these
Landes (into which we will travel presently) are, for the most part, a
weary wilderness of pine-wood, morasses, sand-deserts, and barren
shingle. On the other hand, the low banks of the Garonne are generally
of a fat, loamy, and black soil, called, locally, _Palus_. Well, between
the Palus and the Landes, there is a longish strip of country from two
to five miles broad, a low ridge or backbone, which may be said to be
the neutral and blending point of the sterile Landes and the fat and
fertile Palus. And truth to tell, the earth seems as if the influence of
the latter had much to do to bear up against the former. A Norfolk
farmer would turn with a contemptuous laugh from the poor-looking stony
soil. "Why," says he, "it's all sand, and gravel, and shingle, and
scorched with the sun. You would not get a blade of chickweed to grow
there." The proprietors of Medoc would be very glad if this latter
assertion were correct, for the weeding of the vineyards form no
inconsiderable item in the expense of cultivation; but this much may be
safely predicted of this strange soil, that it would not afford the
nourishment to a patch of oats, which that modest grain manages to
extract from the bare hill-side of some cold, bleak, Highland croft, and
yet that it furnishes the influence which produces grapes yielding the
most truly generous and consummately flavoured wine ever drank by man
since Noah planted the first vine slip.
You have now finished the bottle of Vieux. Up, and let us out among the
vineyards. A few paces clears us of the little hamlet of Margaux, with
its constant rattle of busy coopers, and we are fairly in the country.
Try to catch the general _coup d'oeil_. We are in an unpretending
pleasant-looking region, neither flat nor hilly--the vines stretching
away around in gentle undulations, broken here and there by intervening
jungles of coppice-wood, by strips of black firs, or by the stately
avenues and ornamental woods of a first-class chateau. Gazing from the
bottoms of the shallow valleys, you seem standing amid a perfect sea of
vines, which form a monotonous horizon of unvaried green. Attaining the
height beyond, distant village spires rise into the air--the flattened
roofs and white walls of scattered hamlets gleam cheerfully forth from
embowering woods of walnut trees--and the expanse of the vineyards is
broken by hedged patches of meadow land, affording the crops of coarse
natural hay, upon which are fed the slowly-moving, raw-boned oxen which
you see dragging lumbering wains along the winding dusty way.
And now look particularly at the vines. Nothing romantic in their
appearance, no trellis work, none of the embowering, or the clustering,
which the poets are so fond of. Here, in two words, is the aspect of
some of the most famous vineyards in the world.
[Illustration]
Fancy open and unfenced expanses of stunted-looking, scrubby bushes,
seldom rising two feet above the surface, planted in rows upon the
summit of deep furrow ridges, and fastened with great care to low,
fence-like lines of espaliers, which run in unbroken ranks from one end
of the huge fields to the other. These espaliers or lathes are cuttings
of the walnut-trees around, and the tendrils of the vine are attached to
the horizontally running stakes with withes, or thongs of bark. It is
curious to observe the vigilant pains and attention with which every
twig has been supported without being strained, and how things are
arranged so as to give every cluster as fair a chance as possible of a
goodly allowance of sun. Such, then, is the general appearance of
matters; but it is by no means perfectly uniform. Now and then you find
a patch of vines unsupported, drooping, and straggling, and sprawling,
and intertwisting their branches like beds of snakes; and again, you
come into the district of a new species of bush, a thicker, stouter
affair, a grenadier vine, growing to at least six feet, and supported
by a corresponding stake. But the low, two-feet dwarfs are invariably
the great wine givers. If ever you want to see a homily, not read, but
grown by nature, against trusting to appearances, go to Medoc and study
the vines. Walk and gaze, until you come to the most shabby, stunted,
weazened, scrubby, dwarfish, expanse of snobbish bushes, ignominiously
bound neck and crop to the espaliers like a man on the rack--these
utterly poor, starved, and meagre-looking growths, allowing, as they do,
the gravelly soil to show in bald patches of grey shingle through the
straggling branches--these contemptible-looking shrubs, like paralysed
and withered raspberries, it is which produce the most priceless, and
the most inimitably flavoured wines. Such are the vines which grow
Chateau Margaux at half a sovereign the bottle. The grapes themselves
are equally unpromising. If you saw a bunch in Covent Garden you would
turn from them with the notion that the fruiterer was trying to do his
customer, with over-ripe black currants. Lance's soul would take no joy
in them, and no sculptor in his senses would place such meagre bunches
in the hands and over the open mouths of his Nymphs, his Bacchantes, or
his Fauns. Take heed, then, by the lesson, and beware of judging of the
nature of either men or grapes by their looks. Meantime, let us continue
our survey of the country. No fences or ditches you see--the ground is
too precious to be lost in such vanities--only, you observe from time to
time a rudely carved stake stuck in the ground, and indicating the
limits of properties. Along either side of the road the vines extend,
utterly unprotected. No raspers, no ha-ha's, no fierce denunciations of
trespassers, no polite notices of spring guns and steel traps constantly
in a state of high go-offism--only, when the grapes are ripening, the
people lay prickly branches along the way-side to keep the dogs,
foraging for partridges among the espaliers, from taking a refreshing
mouthful from the clusters as they pass; for it seems to be a fact that
everybody, every beast, and every bird, whatever may be his, her, or its
nature in other parts of the world, when brought among grapes, eats
grapes. As for the peasants, their appetite for grapes is perfectly
preposterous. Unlike the surfeit-sickened grocer's boys, who, after the
first week loathe figs, and turn poorly when sugar-candy is hinted at,
the love of grapes appears literally to grow by what it feeds on. Every
garden is full of table vines. The people eat grapes with breakfast,
lunch, dinner, and supper, and between breakfast, lunch, dinner, and
supper. The labourer plods along the road munching a cluster. The child
in its mother's arms is tugging away with its toothless gums at a
bleeding bunch; while as for the vintagers, male and female, in the less
important plantations, Heaven only knows where the masses of grapes go
to, which they devour, labouring incessantly at the _metier_, as they
do, from dawn till sunset.
A strange feature in the wine country is the wondrously capricious and
fitful nature of the soil. A forenoon's walk will show you the earth
altering in its surface qualities almost like the shifting hues of shot
silk--gravel of a light colour fading into gravel of a dark--sand
blending with the mould, and bringing it now to a dusky yellow, now to
an ashen grey--strata of chalky clay every now and then struggling into
light only to melt away into beds of mere shingle--or bright
semi-transparent pebbles, indebted to the action of water for shape and
hue. At two principal points these blending and shifting qualities of
soil put forth their utmost powers--in the favoured grounds of Margaux,
and again, at a distance of about fifteen miles further to the north, in
the vineyards of Lafitte, Latour, and between these latter, in the sunny
slopes of St. Jullien. And the strangest thing of all is, that the
quality--the magic--of the ground changes, without, in all cases, a
corresponding change in the surface strata. If a fanciful and wilful
fairy had flown over Medoc, flinging down here a blessing and there a
curse upon the shifting shingle, the effect could not have been more
oddly various. You can almost jump from a spot unknown to fame to
another clustered with the most precious vintage of Europe. Half-a-dozen
furrows often make all the difference between vines producing a beverage
which will be drunk in the halls and palaces of England and Russia, and
vines yielding a harvest which will be consumed in the cabarets and
estaminets of the neighbourhood. It is to be observed, however, that the
first-class wines belong almost entirely to the large proprietors. Amid
a labyrinth of little patches, the property of the labouring peasants
around, will be a spot appertaining to, and bearing the name of, some of
the famous growths; while, conversely, inserted, as if by an accident,
in the centre of a district of great name, and producing wine of great
price, will be a perverse patch, yielding the most commonplace tipple,
and worth not so many sous per yard as the surrounding earth is worth
crowns.
How comes this? The peasants will tell you that it doesn't come at all.
That it is all cant and _blague_ and puff on the part of the big
proprietors, and that their wine is only more thought of because they
have more capital to get it bragged about. Near Chateau Lafitte, on a
burning afternoon, I took refuge beneath the emblematic bush; for the
emblem which good wine is said not to require, is still, in the mid and
southern districts of France, in universal use; in other words, I
entered a village public-house.
Two old men, very much of the general type of the people of the
country--that is, tall and spare, with intelligent and mildly-expressive
faces and fine black eyes, were discussing together a sober bottle. One
of them had lost an arm, and the other a leg. As I glanced at this
peculiarity, the one-legged man caught my eye.
"Ah!" he said, "looking at our misfortunes; I left my leg on Waterloo."
"And I," chimed in his companion, "left my arm at Trafalgar."
"_Sacré!_" said the veteran of the land. "One of the cursed English
bullets took me in the knee, and spoiled as tight a lancer as they had
in the gallant 10th."
"And I," rejoined the other, "was at the fourth main-deck gun of the
Pluton when I was struck with the splinter while we were engaging the
Mars. But we had our revenge. The Pluton shot the Mars' captain's head
off!"--a fact which I afterwards verified. Captain Duff, the officer
alluded to, was thus killed upon his quarter-deck, and the same ball
shattered two seamen almost to pieces.
"_Sacré!_" said the _ci-devant_ lancer, "I'd like to have a rap at the
English again--I would--the English--_nom de tonnerre_--tell me--didn't
they murder the emperor?"
A rising smile, which I could not help, stopped him. I had spoken so few
words, that the fact that a son of _perfide Albion_ was before them was
only manifested by the expression of my face.
"_Tiens!_" continued the Waterloo man, "_You_ are an Englishman."
The old sailor, who was evidently by no means so keen a hand as his
comrade, nudged him; a hint, I suppose, in common phrase, to draw it
mild; but the ex-lancer of the 10th was not to be put down.
"Well, and if you are, what then, eh? I say I would like to have another
brush with you."
"No, no! We have had enough of brushes!" said the far more pacific man
of the sea. "I think--_mon voisin_--that you and I have had quite enough
of fighting."
"But they killed the emperor. _Sacré nom de tous les diables_--they
killed the emperor."
My modest exculpation on behalf of Great Britain and Ireland was
listened to with great impatience by the maimed lancer, and great
attention by the maimed sailor, who kept up a running commentary:
"_Eh! eh! entendez cela._ Now, that's quite different (to his friend)
from what you tell us. Come--that's another story altogether; and what I
say is, that's reasonable."
But the lancer was not to be convinced--"_Sacré bleu!_--they killed the
emperor."
All this, it is to be observed, passed without the slightest feeling of
personal animosity. The lancer, who, I suspect, had passed the forenoon
in the cabaret, every now and then shook hands with me magnanimously, as
to show that his wrath was national--not individual; and when I proposed
a bottle of rather better wine than they had been drinking, neither
soldier nor sailor had a word to say in objection. The wine was brought,
and very good it was, though not, of course, first-class claret.
"What do you think of that?" said the sailor.
"I wish I had as good every day in England," I replied.
"And why haven't you?" said the fierce lancer. "You might, if you chose.
But you drink none of our wines."
I demurred to this proposition; but the Waterloo man was down on me in
no time. "Yes, yes; the wines of the great houses--the great
proprietors. _Sacré!_--the _farceurs_--the _blageurs_--who puff their
wines, and get them puffed, and great prices for them, when they're not
better than ours--the peasant's wines--when they're grown in the same
ground--ripened by the same sun! _Mille diables!_ Look at that
bottle!--taste it! My son-in-law grew it. My son-in-law sells it; I know
all about it. You shall have that bottle for ten sous, and the Lafitte
people and the Larose people would charge you ten francs for it; and it
is as good for ten sous as theirs for ten francs. I tell you it grew
side by side with their vines; but they have capital--they have power.
They crack off their wines, and we--the poor people!--we, who trim and
dig and work our little patches--no one knows anything about us. Our
wine--bah!--what is it? It has no name--no fame! Who will give us
francs? No, no; sous for the poor man--francs for the rich. Copper for
the little landlord; silver--silver and gold for the big landlord! As
our curé said last Sunday: 'Unto him who has much, more shall be given.'
_Sacré Dieu de dieux!_--Even the Bible goes against the poor!"
All this time, the old sailor was tugging his comrade's jacket, and
uttering sundry deprecatory ejaculations against such unnecessary
vehemence. The Trafalgar man was clearly a take-it-easy personage; not
troubled by too much thinking, and by no means a professional
grievance-monger. So he interposed to bring back the topic to a more
soothing subject, and said that what he would like, would be to see lots
of English ships coming up the Gironde with the good cottons and
woollens and hardwares we made in England, and taking back in exchange
their cheap and wholesome wines--not only the great vintages (_crus_)
for the great folk, but the common vintages for the common folk.
"Indeed, I think," he concluded, "that sitting here drinking this good
ten sous' wine with this English gentleman--who's going to pay for
it--is far better than fighting him and hacking him up, or his hacking
us up, with swords and balls and so forth."
To this most sensible opinion we had all the pains in the world to get
the doughty lancer to incline. He couldn't see it at all. He would like
to have another brush. He wasn't half done for yet. It was all very
well; but war was grand, and glory was grand. "_Vive la guerre!_" and
"_Vive la gloire!_"
"But," said the sailor, "there is death in glory!"
"_Eh bien!_" shouted the warrior, with as perfect French sentiment as
ever I heard, "_Vive la mort!_"
In the end, however, he was pleased to admit that, if we took the
peasant wines, something might be made of us. The case was not utterly
hopeless; and when I rose to go, he proposed a stirrup-cup--a _coup de
l'étrier_--to the washing down of all unkindness; but, in the very act
of swallowing it, he didn't exactly stop, but made a motion as if he
would, and then slowly letting the last drop run over his lips, he put
down the glass, and said, bitterly and coldly, "_Mais pourtant, vous
avez tué l'Empereur!_"
I have introduced this episode principally for the purpose of showing
the notions entertained by the small proprietary as to the boasted
superiority of the large vineyards; but the plain truth is, that the
great growers are perfectly in the right. I have stated that the quality
of the soil throughout the grape country varies almost magically. Well,
the good spots have been more or less known since Medoc was Medoc; and
the larger and richer residents have got them, by inheritance, by
marriage, and by purchase, almost entirely into their own hands. Next
they greatly improved both the soil and the breed of plants. They
studied and experimentalized until they found the most proper manures
and the most promising cultures. They grafted and crossed the vine
plants till they got the most admirably bearing bushes, and then,
generation after generation, devoting all their attention to the quality
of the wine, without regard to the quantity--scrupulously taking care
that not a grape which is unripe or over-ripe finds its way to the
tub--that the whole process shall be scrupulously clean, and that every
stage of fermentation be assiduously attended to--the results of all
this has been the perfectly-perfumed and high-class clarets, which fetch
an enormous price; while the peasant proprietors, careless in
cultivation, using old vine plants, anxious, at the vintage, only for
quantity, and confined to the worst spots in the district, succeed in
producing wines which, good as they are, have not the slightest pretence
to enter into competition with the liquid harvests of their richer and
more enlightened neighbours.
But it is high time to sketch, and with more elaboration than I have
hitherto attempted, the claret vintage and the claret vintagers. Yet
still, for a moment, I must pause upon the threshold. Will it be
believed--whether it will or not it is, nevertheless, true--that the
commencement of the vintage in France is settled, not by the opinion or
the convenience of the proprietors, but by the _autorités_ of each
_arrondissement_? As September wanes and the grape ripens, the rural
mayor assembles what he calls a jury of _experts_; which jury proceed,
from day to day, through the vineyards, inspecting and tasting the
grapes and cross-questioning the growers; after which, they report to
the mayor a special day on which, having regard to all the vineyards,
they think that the vintage ought to commence. One proprietor, in a very
sunny situation and a hot soil, may have been ready to begin a fortnight
before; another, in a converse locality, may not be ready to commence
for a fortnight afterwards. _N'importe_--the French have a great notion
of uniform symmetry and symmetrical uniformity, and so the whole
district starts together--the mayor issuing, _par autorité_, a
highly-official-looking document, which is duly posted by
yellow-breeched _gens-d'armes_, and, before the appearance of which, not
a vine-grower can gather, for wine purposes, a single grape. Now, what
must be the common sense of a country which permits, for one instant,
the continuance of this wretched little tyrannical humbug? Only think of
a trumpery little mayor and a couple of beadles proclaiming to the
farmers of England that now they might begin to cut their wheat! The
mayor's mace would be forced down the beadle's throat, and the beadle's
staff down the mayor's. But they manage these things--not
exactly--better in France. What would France be without _les autorités_?
Could the sun rise without a prefect? Certainly not. Could it set
without a sub-prefect? Certainly not. Could the planets shine on France
unless they were furnished with passports for the firmament? Clearly
not. Could the rain on France unless each drop came armed with the
_visé_ of some wonderful bureau or other? Decidedly not. Well, then, how
could the vintage begin until the people, who know nothing about the
vintage, command it? It is quite clear, that if you have any doubt
about these particulars, you know very little of the privileges, the
rights, the functions, and the powers, of the "authorities" in France.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: THE VINTAGE.]