Wine-drinkers are nearly always temperate in their opinions. That is why
they are not “Temperance” advocates, the word having become debased into
meaning the most intolerant teetotalism and the vilification of that
essentially temperate beverage wine. Wine-drinkers, as temperate persons,
are as much opposed to alcoholism as to teetotalism. Teetotalers, as
intemperate fanatics, are opposed not so much to alcoholism as to
alcohol itself—and their dour Puritan hearts are virtuously indignant
that those who like it should continue to enjoy the liberty of drinking
it. Wine-drinkers do not drink between meals, which is one of the first
rules of health. They drink at their meals, just as teetotalers, who are
every whit as thirsty as inveterate beer-drinkers, quaff their gaseous
dill-waters at all sorts of times and in all sorts of places—preferably
opposite ancient ruins: perhaps because they suggest to them the
inexorable decline and fall of the brewing barons and the imminent decay
of the fortunes of distillery magnates. To own a cellar of one’s own is
to be independent of vexatious curtailments of drinking hours. Just and
proper as these restrictions are in theory, at all events until human
nature can be relied upon to resist obviously harmful temptations more
stoically than hitherto, they inevitably penalise those whose time is
not their own. A poor man, however, cannot afford a cellar, which is
supposed to imply a degree of affluence that is far from being borne
out by the actual cost of laying down a few moderately good and varied
bins. It is the wine-merchant who keeps up the idea that a cellar is an
expensive luxury, because it is far more profitable for him to sell his
customers fully matured wine than to encourage them to buy the same wine
from him as soon as bottled and let it mature for nothing in their own
cellars. When the interests of true temperance prevail in Parliament,
light natural wines will be taxed so lightly that anyone who could afford
to order a dozen bottles of Bass or Guinness at a time from the grocer’s
could afford to stock a modest cellar. Spirits, on the other hand, will
be taxed still more highly, and fortified wines proportionately to the
added spirit they contain. The heavier incidence of duty on sparkling
wines is not likely to be removed, because there is no valid reason why
it should be. The consumption of sparkling wines, as we have already
seen, needs to be discouraged in the higher interests of natural wines.
A proper purity standard for beer is not likely to be enforced as long
as the public remains apathetic on the subject: that is to say until the
time comes for the whole attitude of the state to the liquor question to
be reviewed, not at the behest of a handful of teetotal fanatics, or the
trade, but in response to the insistent demand of the consumer himself.
The question may be asked, “Should the sale of wines and spirits be
a state monopoly, and is this likely to become general in the near
future?” Leaving aside all academic arguments for and against socialism,
the answer would seem to be, as in the case of railway ownership and
operation, “It depends on the country concerned and the particular genius
of that nation; its administrative efficiency and its attitude towards
the state and state institutions.” It is, however, unthinkable that in
the future any state will consent to abdicate that degree of control
of the liquor trade and public health and order afforded by levying
discriminatory duties on the consumption of spirits. Even in France
Absinthe has had to be made illegal. In Sweden a compromise between
state and commercial exploitation has been adopted. A single company,
the _Aktiebolaget Vin och Spritcentralen_, farms the Government’s
monopoly and hands over all surplus profits to the state after paying
a small fixed dividend to its shareholders. This company also owns all
the distilleries and wine-merchants’ shops in the country. It issues
a sort of pass-book to consumers, showing the holder’s name, address,
profession and taxation assessment and the number of bottles of wine and
spirits he is entitled to monthly on this basis. This is certainly not
socialism, for it substitutes the ratio of taxation for the doctrine
of equality of opportunity; but if it denies the poor man the right
to buy as much as the rich, it prevents the rich man buying as much
as he likes, or devoting more than a certain percentage of his income
to laying down a fine cellar of wine. Reminiscent of Food Control and
Food Cards as these regulations sound, they seem to work well enough in
practice. If a man may not himself import the sort of wines with which
he would prefer to fill his cellar, the company, according to Mr Hedges
Butler, gives him at very reasonable prices a choice of 862 varieties
of wines and 263 of spirits and liqueurs: a much wider selection than
the score of most prominent London wine-merchants stock between them.
From a variety of causes, of which inertia and chronic conservatism are
the principal, British wine-merchants, still nominally competitive with
one another, are coming more and more to resemble a number of branches
of one and the same company, offering their customers an ever smaller
selection of stereotyped growths. The invariable answer to this criticism
is “Few but choice,” which is liable to provoke a slightly incredulous
smile. “Few but choice,” faithfully echo the licensed grocers and the
restaurants. The most prominent wine-merchant in Regent Street displays a
wine-list so brief that it could be put to shame by any French provincial
_épicerie_. Indeed British vintners of the present day seem to have
taken as their device Sancho Panza’s words, “I come from my vineyard and
know nothing”—except that very few of them have ever seen a vineyard
or a wine-press. The public must be educated in wine, if its sale is
to increase; a greater sale implies greater variety and cheapness and
better average quality. Our prosperous wine-merchants, supinely content
in the main to make quick and easy profits by the sale of proprietary
brands of Port and Champagne, are much too easy-going to give themselves
the trouble of undertaking any more intelligent propaganda than editing
crude circulars extolling those “very nice wines—not _too_ dry” at
bankrupt stock prices (“cost double”), the curious style of which is
so unchanging as to seem traditional. In fact in nine cases out of ten
they no longer know enough about the commodity they deal in to be able
to do more than sell bottles containing it, much as a barman replenishes
beer-mugs at the tap. There is an urgent need of a better-educated and
more enterprising generation of wine-merchants, knowing their honourable
profession at least as well as their grandfathers did. True, the last
word in advertising wine was said many centuries ago. “Good wine (unlike
the Monopoles and the sham “Hocks” and “Burgundies”) needs no bush”; but
this presupposes that good wine should not be conspicuous by its absence.
Prohibition in Norway, which I believe actually antedates the celebrated
Volstead Act, was expounded to me on the bridge of a collier hove to in
a thick sea-fog off Copenhagen by one of the finest navigators, drunk or
sober, but particularly drunk, that it has ever been my good fortune to
encounter.
This Danish skipper gave me to understand (I cannot, of course, vouch for
the accuracy of his information) that in the long night of the Norwegian
winter there was absolutely nothing else to do but to take to theology
or get drunk. When drunk, the Norwegian crofter or fisherman, however
theological his bent, readily finds a second source of distraction in
beating his wife. The women of Norway seem to have got tired of being
beaten even before the outbreak of the War. When the War restricted
fishing, they began to take counsel together. Reflecting that the Fiend
Alcohol was at the root of all their troubles and the immediate cause
of all their bruises, they decided that he must be exorcised in due
legal form. To bring this about all that was necessary was the power and
exercise of the vote. The granting of the suffrage to women does not
appear to have aroused any sort of opposition in a “progressive” country
like Norway, and the right seems no sooner to have been demanded than
accorded. Once Norwegian womanhood was armed with the franchise, the
first measure insisted on was that imposing Prohibition on Norwegian
manhood. Their husbands do not seem to have been aware of the danger,
or perhaps they were encouraged to get rather exceptionally drunk during
the week devoted to a plebiscite on this purely feminine issue. Alas,
the plight of these energetic and resourceful Viking ladies, once their
husbands were deprived of Aqavit, was in no wise ameliorated; their
last state was decidedly worse than their first! Having now no earthly
distraction whatever, their husbands beat them from morning to night,
and, being involuntarily sober, very much more efficiently than they
had ever done before. Thereupon the united voice of the Norse women
clamoured for the abrogation of Prohibition even as they had but recently
clamoured for its ratification. Once again they had their way, and the
country returned peaceably to the _status quo ante_ of a moderate degree
of drunkenness and a moderate, because quasi-inebriated, prevalence of
wife-beating.
At this point the skipper’s account left off, and we may perhaps
supplement his graphic statement by some rather colder data. However
much bruised Norwegian women may have expressed the desire to see
Prohibition abolished, the chief motive force in securing it was the
economic pressure exercised by foreign countries. Norway is neither
an agricultural nor an industrial country. The nation lives on what
statisticians are fond of calling “invisible exports”—in this case
carrying other nations’ goods in its bottoms—and in exporting the
produce of its fisheries, mostly in the form of dried split-cod, known
variously as _Stokfisk_, _Morue_ and _Bacalão_. This is shipped in
enormous quantities to Roman Catholic countries for Fridays’ dinners.
Now, split-cod, though a foodstuff, is not a prime necessity of life,
like corn and meat, and the countries that buy it find no difficulty in
putting an embargo on it at need. Also Norway is a small and pacific,
and therefore impotent, nation, which can be defied or penalised with
impunity, not a great power backed by a large fleet and the power
of manipulating higher finance. For the sake of its shipping and
the export of its _Stokfisk_, Norway was forced in 1921 to accept
an annual contingent of 4,000 hectolitres of French wine, 5,000 of
Spanish and 8,500 of Portuguese: or a total of some 385,000 gallons,
a very considerable amount for a poor country of well under three
million inhabitants. Thus Norway is now wetter than ever. A state _Vin
Monopolet_ conducts the liquor trade and distils corn-brandy. Wine may
be freely bought, but spirits can only be obtained at a chemist’s shop
on a doctor’s prescription: a regulation the enforcement of which used
in former days to coincide with an alarming increase in such maladies
as snake-bite, anæmia, vertigo, melancholia, personal bereavement,
bankruptcy, religious mania, debility and old age in certain “dry” states
of the American Union.
At present our bejazzed manhood cannot summon to its aid enough of our
old Viking virility to countenance wife-beating in any form, even when
the chastisement is clearly justified. But when our masterful womenkind
seek to impose Prohibition on us, who knows but that the long-suffering
worm may not turn at last? Perhaps the experience of a short term of this
ban might be the cause of curing half our domestic troubles.
Much the same sort of system of placing few or no restrictions on the
sale of wine, and investing the purchase of spirits with considerable
formalities, has been adopted by certain Canadian provinces. In Quebec,
possibly as a legacy of French blood, the sale of wine vastly exceeds
that of spirits, in spite of a continuous invasion of this hospitable
territory by thirst-maddened tourists from the freest of all countries
at its gates. In Belgium, too, there are restrictions on the sale of
spirits, liqueurs and _apéritifs_, but none on that of beer and wine.
The vicissitudes of Norway lead us to the consideration of modern
international commercial treaties in their relation to wine. The old
trade agreements between nations in pre-war days were usually rather
amateur, almost altruistic, affairs. The industrial struggle for
existence had not, as then, become acute, because there were more rich
and fewer poor states in the relatively happy family of the nations.
To-day quotas, contingents and categories of goods are carefully
scheduled and obstinately bargained for, each high contracting party
putting forward its irreducible demands, together with certain other
claims advanced as camouflage, which are quietly abandoned once the
acceptance of the former is conceded. Germany produces fine white
wines and but little red. Her new commercial treaty with France, now
being negotiated, stipulates, within the agreed annual contingent of
French wine which she agrees to accept, for a minimum of white and a
maximum of red. But this is not all. Germany was a pioneer in strict
application of the doctrine of Appellation of Origin as applied to
wine, and Bethmann-Hollweg’s _Reichsweingesetz_ of 1909 preceded similar
legislation in any other country, with the possible exception of Hungary.
Thus it is not surprising to find that Germany should insist on stringent
_appellations d’origine_ for the French wines she pledges herself to buy.
Going further still in this direction, the German Ministry of Commerce
has divided the annual quota into fixed ratios between the several
viticultural regions of France: not so much in proportion to their
importance as in accordance with German domestic needs and tastes. It is
left to the French Government to draw up a list of recognised _local_
appellations within each of these regions (that is to say the names of
separate communes and smaller, but more famous, growths) and submit it
to the approval of the competent German authorities before the treaty
enters into vigour. The Belgian Government was the real precursor in this
direction, for the recently concluded Belgo-French Commercial Treaty
names over two hundred appellations of French wines, the authenticity of
which is guaranteed by the French state, as being alone entitled to be
admitted into Belgian territory. The only appellations of wine which
enjoy protection under any commercial agreement concluded with this
country are Port and Madeira. Wine sold as “Port” or “Madeira” in Great
Britain and Northern Ireland must be the authentic produce of the Alto
Douro or the Island of Madeira, fortified, as required by Portuguese
law, to a given alcoholic strength: that is a “_vinho surdo_” or “_vinho
muito_.” The first of these exclusive appellations is very distasteful to
Australian manufacturers of sweet wines, who are anxious to call their
more spirituous wares “Australian Port.” All other wines in this country
are still very much what their vendors choose to label them. Fortunately
nations are as imitative as persons. It is to be hoped, therefore, that
when the time comes for the existing Anglo-French Commercial Treaty to be
renewed—which is sure to entail long and pertinacious haggling on both
sides on account of the recent French embargo on British coal—this state
of affairs will be remedied in so far as French, or _soi-disant_ French,
wines are concerned. This hope is not so naïve as it may sound. It will
be as much in the interests of our negociators to see that the fixed
minimum quota of French wines, which we shall probably have to agree to
admit annually, shall be the best, instead of among the worst, of their
kinds, as it will be in that of the French to stipulate that henceforward
no wines sold in the United Kingdom as French shall be anything but
French, and that they must correspond in the strictest territorial sense
with the names printed on their labels. Thus, granted a reasonable degree
of skill in our politicians and public officials, the further we deviate
from Free Trade the better should be the quality of the goods we receive
from other countries: an idea altogether too simple to have ruffled the
brains of the Manchester School mandarins.