The undying snob in man reveals himself as much in the choice of the
wines he drinks as in the clothes he wears or the conversation he
affects. Waves of fashion that depend on the praise or blame of someone
in authority—a king, a beau, a singer, a sportsman, a politician or an
actor—sweep in a wine and sweep it out again. Some have their brief spell
and are no more seen; others return at almost fixed intervals like solar
eclipses. Port we owe to anti-French bias and a long-forgotten political
treaty concluded in the heat of this same rancour; but heavily reinforced
Port will be with us till the threat of Prohibition assumes proportions
menacing enough to make us confine ourselves to natural wines as the
most logical defence against the misrepresentations of the teetotalers.
Sherry, on the other hand, has been coming in and going out ever since
its name was Sack. Madeira’s eclipse has a more rational explanation,
for the quality of that wine has never recovered from the scourge of the
Oidium, which all but exterminated its vineyards in the Fifties. The fate
of Madeira was the ordinary fate of things that are out of sight. The
vines of the island were not in normal bearing again till some decades
afterwards, when the old John Company, the largest buyer of Madeira
wines, had already ceased to exist. Claret and Burgundy, long eschewed
as French growths and penalised by prohibitive duties to the profit
of an ever more alcoholic Port, blossomed for us anew when Gladstone
accomplished the revolutionary step of lowering the duties on light wines
to a shilling the gallon in 1861. Hermitage has disappeared in England,
as Arbois has in France. Hock and Moselle were patriotically, even,
considering the absence of supply, a little ostentatiously, renounced
during the War as Hunnish and unhallowed things—so much so, indeed, that
our greatest living authority on wines passed them over in silence in
a book, which is a classic, written during that period of passionate
professorial denunciation of everything German. Yet long before Locarno
they had returned in triumph to their old popularity in the Houses of
Parliament, as advertising circulars were careful to inform us. Greek
wines, like Byron’s verse, have had their day. Tokay, now a memory and
almost no more made, was hallowed by the prefix “Imperial” and the
knowledge that it was the gift, more precious than jewelled orders or
honorary colonelcies, which kings exchanged in the family circle. Italian
wines have lately enjoyed a good deal of popularity among artistic
persons, explicable by the charm of a Chianti flask rather than by the
average quality of its contents. Marsala, now usually despised as a cheap
and common wine, should be dear to us always as a memory of Nelson. It is
still piously esteemed in the Navy, where Rum has long since passed out
of fashion. Balkan wines may yet enjoy a vogue if Ruritanian princesses
prove as good business women as they are beautiful. Algerian and
Tunisian wines we know well, but more often under Europeanised titles.
The Anglo-Catholic and Jewish communities make much of Palestine wines,
which have little but scriptural geography in their favour. Champagne,
costliest of all wines in the popular imagination, has always held its
own for this very reason. Just as Sherry, decade by decade, had to be
paler or darker in colour and lighter or heavier in body, so Champagne,
which began by being very sweet, has now become dry as a bone. Yet “dry”
Champagne only dates from the Sixties. Sweet it may yet become again,
as sweet as the Russians liked it, when women become sovereign arbiters
of food and drink. A decade or two ago _Carte Anglaise_ was the most
expensive and fashionable degree of “liqueuring” in Champagne. To-day
it is _Drapeau Américain_ (why not “Volstead Bone-Dry Monopole”?) for
the Dollar is at a premium over the Sovereign. Whisky, formerly an
ostler’s dram in the Scottish Highlands, was introduced by golfers,
with the hearty support of the medical profession, and became popular
simultaneously with that now universal game. Irish Whisky, though
extensively drunk, has, for some curious reason, never been fashionable.
There are few brandy-drunkards to-day. Cognac seems to enjoy most esteem
in England as a medicinal restorative. Gin was rescued from Mrs Gamp’s
tea-pot by the sudden popularity during the War of those American
barbarisms, cocktails: a popularity largely due to their requiring
elaborate paraphernalia and the fact that they were illegal in their
native land. Every millionairess who could boast a Diamond Sunburst, we
were given to understand, had her own portable illicit still and a marble
gin-fountain in her platinum-tapped bathroom. Liqueurs, chiefly because
they are sweet and many-hued, have been steadily growing in favour with
ladies ever since dining out in restaurants became an integral part of
our national habits.
Let no man lull himself into a sense of false security by imagining that
the day is still far distant when women will rule the cellar as well as
rocking Baby—and the bottle—in the cradle. A book on wine which appeared
last year addressed all its advice, as though this was the most natural
thing in the world, to “the good hostess,” “the mistress of the house,”
who in these days “can afford to smile” at Dr Middleton’s “ungracious
behaviour” in defining her sex as “Creation’s glory, but anticlimax
following a wine of a century old.” Another male supremacy lies low!
Man is lord of the cobwebbed bins no more; the cellar-key, even as the
ballot-paper, has been snatched from him by a stronger hand.
Now women’s real taste in wine is notoriously for such as are sweet.
Fielding, who knew the sex better than most, and was far from ungallant,
was not the first to remark on it. In one of his now forgotten plays,
as Mr André Simon reminds us, the hero, or some kindly male character,
after making the same observation, sends out for a pint of “Mountain”
(the luscious, honey-sweet Muscat wine now known as Malaga, but no longer
obtainable in an age vowed to a cult of dry wines except in the humbler
public-houses) to comfort a lady’s vapours or soothe her alarums. Of
course, many men also secretly prefer sweet wines to dry. Our national
wine, Port, is decidedly sweet, and could not possibly be called “dry” in
the sense that Sherry often is. But Vintage Port, the feminist authority
declares, “is not a woman’s taste in wine,” though it must surely be a
nearer approach to it than either Vintage Claret or Vintage Burgundy.
Anyhow, Port, as the classic monologue “My fust ’usbing was a Guardsman”
clearly shows, is the most popular wine among women in the saloon-bars
of public-houses. At present all women are exclaiming with a single
voice that they execrate sweet wines and have always preferred dry, the
very driest in fact, even in those dim and distant days when they were
not as yet fashionable. This is only a parrot cry catching up the echo
of the vogue of the moment—“Tell me what is being drunk and I will tell
you that I like it best”—which need deceive nobody. It is like those
terrible headaches, unknown to their grandmothers, which have induced
them one and all to shear off their tresses and shave their napes. M.
Daret, the distinguished _Maître de Chaix_ at Château Yquem, perhaps the
greatest authority on _vins liquoreux_, knows better and is far from
being dismayed. Sauternes was never dearer than it is to-day. It can
only be assumed that drinking it in secret enhances its price. Mrs G.
B. Stern in “Bouquet” furiously denounces Sauternes and claims that it
is as monstrous to suppose that women are incapable of sharing “men’s”
taste for dry wines, or Cognac, as any other hereditary “male” passion,
preference, proclivity or prowess. This delightful, if unconvincing, book
ends on a note of wistful nostalgia for the first properly mixed icy-cold
cocktail waiting to reward her for a strenuous and rather hustled tour
of _dégustation_ through the principal French viticultural districts. I
very much suspect that during the course of this pilgrimage “A Deputy
was King.” The real G. B. Stern was probably in spiritual residence at
that “Palace” in Nice or Monte Carlo all the time. Even Mr, Mrs or Miss
Chaloner owns that on this topic “we are brought up against the very
objection that many women have to Claret, since they find its lack of
sweetness distasteful.... Most women begin with a marked preference
for wines that are frankly sweet (so do boys), or perhaps _demi-sec_,
and there is a touch of austerity about Claret that makes them long
frankly, or privately, to add a little sugar to the glass.” Quite so;
the feminine education up to dry wines is purely a question of following
the prevailing mode and a fresh manifestation of the eternal and servile
imitation of man. This is indirectly confirmed by the authoress herself
(I will plump for authoress and a hundred to one against author) when
she adds: “Though the vine flourished long before mankind, and man is
believed to have enjoyed its produce as a beverage as long ago as the
neolithic period, women are only just beginning to give it their serious
attention.” “The fault of their ignorance” (an ignorance which is not
found in wine-growing countries) is naturally placed “partly at the door
of the opposite sex, who in bygone days were only too well pleased with
it.” Similar reproaches have been levelled against man for his former
tyrannical exclusivity in such domains as higher mathematics, marine
zoology, coal-mining, boiler-stoking, Rugby football and legislative
procedure. It is doubtless theoretically arguable that “women should
possess finer palates than men” and be able to detect and eliminate
corked bottles when decanted—what time their husbands are presumably
peeling potatoes or scolding the cook. But this is by no means the only
preliminary to wining claimed for them. “Where the hostess, or even
women-servants, take over the duties of cork-drawing, it is of real help
to use a mechanical cork-screw.” At first blush one feels inclined to say
“amen” to this, but on second thoughts it seems brutally unfair that,
if men are allowed to draw corks with ordinary corkscrews (which being
far simpler and more satisfactory are usually preferred by them), women
should be debarred from the same male privilege. To provide women with
patent corkscrews is clearly to treat them as inferiors. Sex equality is
no better than a hollow mockery if such unsporting handicaps are to be
allowed to remain, or the hostess’s anxious concentration in studying
the grammar of “the international language” of the wine-list is to be
flurried by idle male gossip.
There is a singular propriety in women arrogating to themselves the
right to choose wines and lay down cellars “like men” in an age in which
so many of them lack the ability to boil an egg. Yet “venturing into
her cellar without a candle” the mistress of the house is told that she
ought to know how to distinguish Bordeaux from Burgundy or Hock bottles
by the exercise of that very tactile sense which now so often fails her
in sewing on a button. “In a well-known women’s club” Miss Chaloner was
recently scandalised to find that the head-waitress, when asked for some
Beaune, had not “even the vaguest notion whether to look for Claret or
Burgundy, or even whether the wine asked for was white or red.” This
pained surprise I am not polite enough to pretend to share. “However, a
discreetly dropped hint that the contour of Burgundy and Bordeaux bottles
was different ... began an interest and education that doubled the value
of the maid to the members of the club.”—From which it might almost be
conjectured that the education in question was imparted to the members
by the maid. When so many prominent judges, divines, scientists, Cabinet
Ministers, university professors and thoughtful clubmen eagerly follow
every passing change in the design of “Camiknicks,” it is melancholy
to be told that “wines ... are seldom appreciated or used to the best
advantage in women’s clubs.”
Is there a last lingering doubt in the heart of the vinously educated
hostess as to the propriety of offering her guests wine—a moral, an
æsthetic, not a social perplexity, of course—it is soon allayed. “In
the hands of the discriminating hostess, wine has the charm, the kindly
welcome of the hearth to which she invites her guests, and if possessing
in careless, or stupid use, some dangers, that is not a reason for
banishing HER cellar. The hostess who ... still hesitates over so grave a
problem as the ethical values of wine”—previously, no doubt, learnedly
and exhaustively debated at her club: perhaps the very one where the
head-waitress did not know Big Tree from Wonga-Wonga—“may yet take much
comfort to heart.” But where does the model hostess’s husband dine on
these occasions, since he has no longer a cellar of his own, or even a
key to his wife’s? There is at least one occasion mentioned on which we
may be quite sure that he would contrive to find a sufficient excuse for
absenting himself to “the tyrant,” or even brave “the brute’s” wrath by
taking French leave—when she “might desire to give her dinner a special
character, reminiscent of a particular occasion, or holiday in Italy”;
in which case, “she would have no difficulty in confining the choice
of her wine-list to Italian wines.” Perhaps, too, the cigars (which in
spite of the practical protests of Madame Hanska and George Sand have
been allowed to remain a male monopoly for far too long) would be those
delicious curling Minghettis? Italian wines are often excellent in Italy,
when served with Italian cooking, but the prevailing quality of “what the
vintners sell” in what ladies call “those funny little continental shops
in Soho” (for Italian wines are not generally obtainable elsewhere),
under the fair names of Chianti, Barolo, Cortese, Orvieto, Asti Spumante,
etc., is enough to make the most chicken-hearted Fabian husband rebel.
In the future wine is likely once more to be considered, even in
non-viticultural countries, as a FOOD essential to physical and moral
well-being, rather than as a dangerous artificial stimulant, or the
sybaritic indulgence of a few eccentric old epicures. In cultured
epochs wine is sure to be held in honour as an integral part of taste,
while spirits are certain to reign supreme in barbarous, philistine and
sanctimonious centuries, whether permitted or proscribed by the law. The
present renaissance of gastronomy in England, hesitant though it still
is, is of happy augury for marking the eclipse of an age likely to be
identified by future social historians with the perpetual swilling of
whisky-and-soda by otherwise refined and self-respecting people; and
as heralding the advent of an era in which wine will be purer, better,
cheaper, more abundant and varied in its kinds, besides being more justly
and intelligently appreciated by the nation at large. With the increasing
shortage of cereals throughout the world, the making of grain-spirits
will soon become indefensible, and the same consideration may ultimately
apply to beer as well.
The survival of wine and male dominance, are, as Scandinavia has shown
us, parallel issues. If wine survives feminism, which, in spite of the
foregoing instances of its latest manifestation, is much more likely
to be œnophobe than œnophil, there will be no place left for teetotal
Puritanism in a wine-loving world.
* * * * *
Bacchus, when yet a child, fared one day along an unfamiliar desert path
strewn with the bleaching bones of all manner of birds and beasts that
had perished there of drought. Wearied, he sat himself down to rest
on a heap of stones amidst a solitary patch of verdure growing by the
wayside. He found the rambling shrub, the tender leaves of which cooled
and caressed his bruised and heated feet, so green and gracious that he
pulled it up by the roots so as to take it home with him and plant it in
his garden. Fearing lest it might wither under the scorching rays of the
sun as he bore it in his hands, he picked up a bird’s skull and put the
roots, with a little earth, into the hollow of the beak. The plant grew
so fast while he wended his way homewards that its roots soon outgrew the
prison of their narrow sheath. Thereupon he imbedded the bird’s skull in
the shoulder-blade of a lion. Nevertheless the roots began once again
to overspread their allotted trough, so that he had recourse to the
expedient of thrusting the lion’s shoulder-blade into the jaw-bone of
an ass. When, at length, he reached home and went to plant the strange
wild shrub in his garden, he found it impossible to extricate the knotted
roots from the three bones incasing them; so he planted it just as it
was, bones and all. The vine, for such was the name he gave this goodly
creeping plant, throve luxuriantly and bore the young god, who tended
and pruned the holy tree lovingly, tressing its branches into a shady
arbour, an abundance of heavy bloom-dusted grape-clusters, both purple
and golden: the juice of which he pressed and gave to the sons of men for
their sustenance and comfort in sickness and adversity and to make glad
their hearts on high festivals and days of family rejoicing. And, behold,
as soon as the sons of men first tasted the blood of the grape—which they
straightway called wine, meaning a sacred water—a prodigy came to pass!
For when they began to drink they sang as do the birds of the forest;
when they drank more they became strong and courageous as lions; but when
they drank yet more, they grew foolish as jackasses.
Thus it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be.