“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_.”