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.