'Wine and Walnuts' was a good title for a gossipping book; 'Claret and
Olives' is a better. It has a more decided flavour, a more elegant
bouquet, a more gem-like colour. The other might refer to any
denomination of that multitudinous stuff the English drink under the
name of wine; or, if it has individuality at all, it relishes
curiously of the coarse and heavy produce of Portugal, so beloved of
Dr Johnson, and many other grave doctors, down to the last generation.
This breathes all over of the sweet South; it babbles of green fields;
it is full of gaiety and frolic, of song and laughter, and the sparkle
of wit and crystal. The title, we say, is a good title; and the book
has an unmistakable claret flavour--the best English claret, that is
to say--which unites the strength of Burgundy with the bouquet of
Château Margaux. Mr Reach despises a weak thin wine, and, by an
idiosyncratical necessity, he has produced a sparkling, racy book. He
traces the falling-off in our literature to a change in wine. 'The
Elizabethans quaffed sack, or "Gascoyne, or Rochel wyn,"' quoth he;
'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 stanchly 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
cellar, on the tap. In the humblest Scotch country tavern, the pewter
_tappit hen_, holding some three quarts, "reamed," _Anglicé_, mantled,
with claret just drawn from the cask. 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!"
This will look like treason to a good many of our readers; but we beg
them to reflect, that in preferring claret to port, Mr Reach is, after
all, an advocate of temperance; and they may therefore hope, that by
degrees his potations will become thinner and thinner, till they at
last come down--like Mike Lambourne's intentions--to water, 'nothing
save fair water.' Our belief, indeed, is, that the excessive duty
placed on French wines is a main cause of intemperance in its modern
forms; for the dearth of the article drives people to spirits, and
other intoxicating agents. Let the light claret (_vin ordinaire_) of
France become a cheap and accessible drink, and we say advisedly that
there would soon be a marked improvement in the matter of general
sobriety.
As our author proceeds towards the claret district--for the book is in
the form of a tour--he chats away very agreeably about everything he
sees on the road. We shall not meddle, however, with this part of the
volume, otherwise than to notice a peculiarity we have ourselves been
frequently struck with--the countryness of small towns in France.
There is no aristocracy to be met with there, no higher classes to set
the fashion, no professional functionaries to look up to. 'You hardly
see an individual who does not appear to have been born and bred upon
the spot, and to have no ideas and no desires beyond it. Left
entirely to themselves, the people have vegetated in these dull
streets from generation to generation, and, though clustered together
in a quasi town--perhaps with octroi and mairie, a withered tree of
liberty, and billiard-tables by the half-dozen--the population is as
essentially rural as though scattered in lone farms, unvisited, except
on rent-day, by either landlord or agent.'
After reaching Bordeaux, the tourist proceeded to the village of
Margaux, in the true claret country--a general idea of which he gives
by describing it as a debatable ground, stretching between the sterile
Landes and the fat, black loam of the banks of the Garonne. The soil
is sand, gravel, and shingle, scorched by the sun, and would be
incapable of yielding as much nourishment to a patch of oats as is
found on 'the bare hillside of some cold, bleak, Highland croft.' On
this unpromising ground, grow those grapes which produce the finest
wine in the world. As for the vines themselves, they have about as
much of the picturesque as our drills of potatoes at home. '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.' There are some exceptions to this; but the
low regular dwarfs are the great wine-givers. '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 shew
in bald patches of gray 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.' The grapes are such mean and pitiful grapes as you
would look at with contempt in Covent-Garden Market; and the very
value of the soil contributes to its appearance of destitution--a
rudely-carved stake marking the division of properties where a hedge
or ditch would take up too much of the precious ground. The vineyards
extend to the roadside, without any protection; and yet every living
creature, whether man or animal, eats grapes habitually, morning,
noon, and night, and to an excess that is perfectly wonderful.
When the fruit is ripe, the fact is announced to the community 'by
authority;' and until the proclamation appears, no man must gather his
grapes if they should be dropping from the bushes. The signal,
however, is at length given, and the work begins. 'The scene is at
once full of beauty, and of tender and even sacred associations. The
songs of the vintagers, frequently chorussed from one part of the
field to the other, ring blithely into the bright summer air, pealing
out above the rough jokes and hearty peals of laughter shouted hither
and thither. All the green jungle is alive with the moving figures of
men and women, stooping among the vines, or bearing pails and
basketfuls of grapes out to the grass-grown cross-roads, along which
the labouring oxen drag the rough vintage-carts, groaning and cracking
as they stagger along beneath their weight of purple tubs, heaped high
with the tumbling masses of luscious fruit. The congregation of every
age and both sexes, and the careless variety of costume, add
additional features of picturesqueness to the scene. The white-haired
old man labours with shaking hands to fill the basket which his
black-eyed imp of a grandchild carries rejoicingly away. Quaint,
broad-brimmed straw and felt hats; handkerchiefs twisted like turbans
over straggling elf-locks; swarthy skins tanned to an olive-brown;
black flashing eyes; and hands and feet stained in the abounding
juices of the precious fruit--all these southern peculiarities of
costume and appearance supply the vintage with its pleasant
characteristics. The clatter of tongues is incessant. A fire of jokes
and jeers, of saucy questions and more saucy retorts--of what, in
fact, in the humble and unpoetic, but expressive vernacular, is called
"chaff"--is kept up with a vigour which seldom flags, except now and
then, when the but-end of a song, or the twanging close of a chorus,
strikes the general fancy, and procures for the _morceau_ a lusty
_encore_. Meantime, the master wine-grower moves observingly from rank
to rank. No neglected bunch of fruit escapes his watchful eye; no
careless vintager shakes the precious berries rudely upon the soil,
but he is promptly reminded of his slovenly work. Sometimes the tubs
attract the careful superintendent: he turns up the clusters, to
ascertain that no leaves nor useless length of tendril are entombed in
the juicy masses, and anon directs his steps to the pressing-trough,
anxious to find that the lusty treaders are persevering manfully in
their long-continued dance.'
The pressure of the grapes is a curious part of the process in an age
of mechanical improvement like the present. It is performed by men
treading among the fruit with their naked feet. 'The wine-press, or
_cuvier de pressoir_, consists, in the majority of cases, of a massive
shallow tub, varying in size from four square feet to as many square
yards. It is placed either upon wooden trestles, or on a regularly
built platform of mason-work, under the huge rafters of a substantial
outhouse. Close to it stands a range of great butts, their number more
or less, according to the size of the vineyard. The grapes are flung
by tub and caskfuls into the cuvier. The treaders stamp diligently
amid the masses, and the expressed juice pours plentifully out of a
hole level with the bottom of the trough into a sieve of iron or
wicker-work, which stops the passage of the skins, and from thence
drains into tubs below. Suppose, at the moment of our arrival, the
cuvier for a brief space empty. The treaders--big, perspiring men, in
shirts and tucked-up trousers--spattered to the eyes with splatches of
purple juice, lean upon their wooden spades, and wipe their foreheads.
But their respite is short. The creak of another cart-load of tubs is
heard, and immediately the wagon is backed up to the broad open
window, or rather hole in the wall, above the trough. A minute
suffices to wrench out tub after tub, and to tilt their already
half-mashed clusters splash into the reeking _pressoir_. Then to work
again. Jumping with a sort of spiteful eagerness into the mountain of
yielding, quivering fruit, the treaders sink almost to the knees,
stamping, and jumping, and rioting in the masses of grapes, as
fountains of juice spurt about their feet, and rush bubbling and
gurgling away. Presently, having, as it were, drawn the first sweet
blood of the new cargo, the eager trampling subsides into a sort of
quiet, measured dance, which the treaders continue, while, with their
wooden spades, they turn the pulpy remnants of the fruit hither and
thither, so as to expose the half-squeezed berries in every possible
way to the muscular action of the incessantly moving feet. All this
time, the juice is flowing in a continuous stream into the tubs
beneath. When the jet begins to slacken, the heap is well tumbled with
the wooden spades, and, as though a new force had been applied, the
juice-jet immediately breaks out afresh. It takes, perhaps, half or
three quarters of an hour thoroughly to squeeze the contents of a
good-sized cuvier, sufficiently manned.' In defence of this primitive
process, it is alleged that no mechanical wine-press could perform the
work with the same perfection as the human foot; and as for the
impurities the juice may acquire from any want of cleanliness in the
operations, these, and every other atom of foreign matter, are thrown
to the surface in the act of fermentation.
The expressed juice is now carried away in tubs, and flung into the
fermenting vats. Our author saw the vats in the Château Margaux
cellars the day after they had been filled, and heard, deep down,
'perhaps eight feet down in the juice, a seething, gushing sound, as
if currents and eddies were beginning to flow, in obedience to the
influence of the working spirit; and now and then a hiss and a low
bubbling throb, as though of a pot about to boil.' In a little while,
it would have been impossible to breathe an atmosphere thus saturated
with carbonic acid gas; and the superintendents can only watch the
process of nature by listening outside the door to 'the inarticulate
accents and indistinct rumblings' which proclaim a great
metempsychosis. 'Is there not something fanciful and poetic in the
notion of this change taking place mysteriously in the darkness, when
all the doors are locked and barred--for the atmosphere about the vats
is death--as if nature would suffer no idle prying into her mystic
operations, and as if the grand transmutation and projection from
juice to wine had in it something of a secret and solemn and awful
nature--fenced round, as it were, and protected from vulgar curiosity
by the invisible halo of stifling gas?'
The vintagers naturally claim our attention next. A portion of them
are, of course, the peasantry of the village and neighbourhood; but a
country like France, swarming with poor who are not mendicants, has of
course a floating population, that surges almost instinctively upon
every spot where there is pleasant work to do. The vintage not merely
affords this work, but being attended with all sorts of jollity, the
crowds it collects have a peculiarly vagabond character. You see at a
glance that they are there upon a spree, and submit to the labour, not
as anything they like, or are accustomed to, but as a mere passport to
the fun. They are in France what the Irish harvesters and the Kent
hop-pickers are in England, although always preserving the
peculiarities, that distinguish the former country, giving even her
vagabondage a melodramatic look, just as if they were 'made up' for
the occasion. 'The gendarmerie,' says our author, 'have a busy time of
it when these gentry are collected in numbers in the district. Poultry
disappear with the most miraculous promptitude; small linen articles
hung out to dry have no more chance than if Falstaff's regiment were
marching by; and garden fruit and vegetables, of course, share the
results produced by a rigid application of the maxim, that _la
propriété c'est la vol_. Where these people come from is a puzzle.
There will be vagrants and strollers among them from all parts of
France--from the Pyrenees and the Alps--from the pine-woods of the
Landes and the moors of Brittany. They unite in bands of a dozen or a
score men and women, appointing a chief, who bargains with the
vine-proprietor for the services of the company, and keeps up some
degree of order and subordination, principally by means of the
unconstitutional application of a good thick stick. I frequently
encountered these bands, making their way from one district to
another; and better samples of 'the dangerous classes' were never
collected. They looked vicious and abandoned, as well as miserably
poor. The women, in particular, were as brazen-faced a set of
slatterns as could be conceived; and the majority of the
men--tattered, strapping-looking fellows, with torn slouched hats and
tremendous cudgels--were exactly the sort of persons a nervous
gentleman would have scruples about meeting at dusk in a long lane. It
is when thus on the tramp that the petty pilfering, and picking and
stealing, to which I have alluded to, goes on. When actually at work,
they have no time for picking up unconsidered trifles. Sometimes these
people pass the night--all together, of course--in outhouses or barns,
when the _chef_ can strike a good bargain; at other times, they
bivouac on the lee-side of a wood or wall, in genuine gipsy fashion.
You may often see their watchfires glimmering in the night; and be
sure that where you do, there are twisted necks and vacant nests in
many a neighbouring henroost.' Mr Reach witnessed an altercation,
respecting passage-money, between a party of these wanderers and a
ferryman of the Garonne; and it ended in the vintagers refusing to
cross the river, rather than submit to the overcharge, as they
contended it was, of a sou. 'A bivouac was soon formed. Creeping under
the lee of a row of casks, on the shingle of the bare beach, the women
were placed leaning against the somewhat hard and large pillows in
question; the children were nestled at their feet and in their laps;
and the men formed the outermost ranks. A supply of loaves was sent
for and obtained. The chief tore the bread up into huge hunks, which
he distributed to his dependents; and upon this supper the whole party
went coolly to sleep--more coolly, indeed, than agreeably--for a keen
north wind was whistling along the sedgy banks of the river, and the
red blaze of high-piled fagots was streaming from the houses across
the black, cold, turbid waters.'
If our author's picture of the vine is not _couleur de rose_, he is
still less complimentary to the olive. Languedoc is the country of the
latter luxury; and Languedoc is in the south of France--aptly termed
'the austere south.' 'It _is_ austere, grim, sombre. It never smiles:
it is scathed and parched. There is no freshness or rurality in it. It
does not seem the country, but a vast yard--shadeless, glaring, drear,
and dry. Let us glance from our elevated perch over the district we
are traversing. A vast, rolling wilderness of clodded earth, browned
and baked by the sun; here and there masses of red rock heaving
themselves above the soil like protruding ribs of the earth, and a
vast coating of drowthy dust, lying like snow upon the ground. To the
left, a long ridge of iron-like mountains--on all sides rolling hills,
stern and kneaded, looking as though frozen. On the slopes and in the
plains, endless rows of scrubby, ugly trees, powdered with the
universal dust, and looking exactly like mop-sticks. Sprawling and
straggling over the soil beneath them, jungles of burnt-up, leafless
bushes, tangled, and apparently neglected. The trees are olives and
mulberries--the bushes, vines.' This is a picture that will not
impress an Englishman with the due sensation of dreariness, unless he
recollects that in France there are no enclosures--that the country
lies spread out before him, in some parts and seasons, like a richly
variegated carpet; in others, like an Arabian desert. The romantic,
Eastern, Biblical olive!--what is it? 'The trunk, a weazened,
sapless-looking piece of timber, the branches spreading out from it
like the top of a mushroom; and the colour, when you can see it for
dust, a cold, sombre, grayish green. One olive is as like another as
one mop-stick is like another. The tree has no picturesqueness, no
variety. It is not high enough to be grand, and not irregular enough
to be graceful. Put it beside the birch, the beech, the elm, or the
oak, and you will see the poetry of the forest, and its poorest and
most meagre prose.'
The mop-stick appearance of the olive is an artificial beauty; to make
it look like an umbrella is the _ne plus ultra_ of arboriculture. But
the present race of olives, twist and torment them as we will, are
inferior to those of the times of our grandfather. 'Towards the close
of the last century, there was a winter night of intense frost; and
when the morning broke, the trees were nearly smitten to the core.
That year, there was not an olive gathered in Provence or Languedoc.
The next season, some of the stronger and younger trees partially
revived, and slips were planted from those to which the axe had been
applied; but the entire species of the tree had fallen off--had
dwindled, and pined, and become stunted; and the profits of olive
cultivation had faded with it.' Olive-gathering, it will be felt, is a
slow affair. The getting in this harvest is 'as business-like and
unexciting as weeding onions, or digging potatoes. A set of ragged
peasants--the country people hereabouts are poorly dressed--were
clambering barefoot in the trees, each man with a basket tied before
him, and lazily plucking the dull oily fruit. Occasionally, the
olive-gatherers had spread a white cloth beneath the tree, and were
shaking the very ripe fruit down; but there was neither jollity nor
romance about the process. The olive is a tree of association, but
that is all. Its culture, its manuring and clipping, and trimming and
grafting--the gathering of its fruits, and their squeezing in the
mill, when the ponderous stone goes round and round in the glutinous
trough, crushing the very essence out of the oily pulps, while the fat
oleaginous stream pours lazily into the greasy vessels set to receive
it; all this is as prosaic and uninteresting, as if the whole Royal
Agricultural Society were presiding in spirit over the operations.'
Our readers will now see that this is a racy, vigorous book, full of
new remark and clever painting; and we recommend them to test the
correctness of our opinions, therefore, by having recourse to the
volume itself, which is neither large nor expensive.