"At Frankfort on the Maine,
And at Würtzburg on the Stein,
At Bacharach on the Rhine,
Grow the three best kinds of wine."
We know but little of the superior red wines of Walporzheimer,
Ahrweiler, and Bodendorfer, which come from the valley of the Ahr. The
Ahr falls into the Rhine near Sinzig, midway between Coblenz and Bonn.
The wines from its beautiful vineyards are a fine deep red. The taste
is astringent, somewhat like port. There is an agreeable red wine
called Kreutzburger which comes from the neighbourhood of
Ehrenbreitstein. Linz on the Rhine sends us a good red wine known as
Dattenberger. These are all pure wines which know no doctoring.
The Liebfrauenmilch is a Riesling wine with a fine bouquet. It owes
its celebrity rather to its name than its merits. It comes from the
vineyards adjoining the Liebfrauen Kirche near Worms, and was named by
some pious churchman.
No wines have as many poetical tributes as the Rhine wines. One of the
English poets sings:--
"O for a kingdom rocky-throned,
Above the brimming Rhine,
With vassals who should pay their toll
In many sorts of wine.
Above me naught but the blue air,
And all below, the vine,
I'd plant my throne, where legends say
In nights of harvest-time
King Charlemagne, in golden robe,--
So runs the rustic rhyme,--
Doth come to bless the mellowing crops
While bells of Heaven chime."
The Steinbergers, the Hochheimers, Marcobrunners, and Rüdesheimers,
sound like so many noble families. Indeed an American senator, hearing
these fine names, remarked: "I have no doubt, sir, they are all very
nice girls."
There is a famous Hochheimer, no less than a hundred and sixty-seven
years old, the vintage of that year when the Duke of Marlborough
gained the Battle of Ramillies. Let us hope that he and Prince Eugene
moistened their clay and labours with some of this famous wine. These
wines do not last, however. The best age is ten years, and those which
have been stored in the antique vaulted cellar of the Bernardine Abbey
of Eberbach, world-renowned as the Grand-ducal Cabinet wine of the
ruler of Nassau, are now completely run out. Even Rudesheimer of 1872
is no longer good.
It must be remembered, however, that these wines are never fortified.
To put extraneous alcohol into their beloved Rhine wine would rouse
Rudolph of Hapsburg and Conrad of Hotstettin from the sleep of
centuries.
The Steinberger Cabinet of 1862 is the most superb. Of Rhine wines for
bouquet, refined flavour, combined richness and delicacy. We do not
except Schloss Johannisberger, because that is not in the market. A
Marcobrunner and a Rüdesheimer are not to be despised.
Prince Metternich sent to Jules Janin for his autograph, and the witty
poet editor sent a receipt for twelve bottles of Imperial Schloss
Johannisberger. The Prince took the hint and had a dozen of the very
best cabinet wine forwarded, every bottle being sealed and every cork
duly branded with the Prince's crest! The Johannisberger wine is
excessively sweet, singularly soft, and gives forth a delicious
perfume, a rich, limpid, amber-coloured wine, with a faint bitter
flavour; it is as beautiful to look at as it is luscious to the taste,
and it possesses a bouquet which the Empress Eugénie compared to that
of heliotrope, violets, and geranium leaves combined.
The refined pungent flavour of a good Hock, its slight racy
sharpness, with an after almond flavour, make it an admirable
appetizer. The staircase vineyards, in which the grapes grow on the
Rhine, seem to catch all the revivifying influences of sunshine. Their
splendid golden colour is caught from those first beams of the sun as
he greets his bride, the Earth, after he has been separated from her
for twelve dark hours.
Some very good wine comes from the Rochusberg, immediately opposite
Rüdesheim. Goethe heard a sermon here once in which the preacher
glorified God in proportion to the number of bottles of good wine it
was daily vouchsafed to him to stow away under his waistband.
It was here that the rascal lived who drank wine out of a boot,
immortalized by Longfellow. We can hardly, however, abuse the man, for
he had an incurable thirst, and no crystal goblet would have held
enough for him,--not indeed the biggest German beer mug.
Longfellow, in the "Golden Legend," has a chapter devoted to wine. In
this poem the old cellarer muses, as he goes to draw the fine wine for
the fathers, who sit above the salt, and he utters this truth of those
brothers who sit below the salt:--
"Who cannot tell bad wine from good,
And are much better off than if they could."
The superior wines of the Rhine, Walporzheimer, Ahrweiler and
Bodendorfer, all deserve notice.
The kind of wine to be served with a dinner must depend on the means
of the host. It is to be feared that, ignorantly or otherwise, many
wines with high-sounding names which are not good are offered to
guests.
Mr. Evarts made a witty remark on this subject. Some one said to him,
"I hear that as a great diner-out you find yourself the worse for
drinking so many different sorts of wine." "Oh no," said Mr. Evarts,
"I do not object to the different wines, it is the indifferent wines
which hurt me!"
Savarin says, sententiously, "Nothing can exceed the treachery of
asking people to dinner under the guise of friendship, and then giving
them to eat or drink of that which may be injurious to health." We
should think so. That was the pleasant hospitality of the Borgias. In
the neighbourhood of Neuwied, the dealers are accused of much
doctoring of wine. During the vintage, at night, when the moon has
gone down, boats glide over the Rhine freighted with a soapy substance
manufactured from potatoes, and called by its owners sugar. This stuff
is thrown into the vats containing the must, water is introduced from
pumps and wells, chemical ferments and artificial heat are applied.
This noble fluid is sent everywhere by land and water, and labelled as
first-class wine. It is not bad to the taste, but does not bear
transportation. This adulteration chiefly affects the wines sold at
German hotels.
Heinrich Heine has left us this picture of a German dinner: "I dined
at the Crown at Clausthal. My repast consisted of spring greens,
parsley soup, violet blue cabbage, a pile of roast veal, which
resembled Chimborazo in miniature, and a sort of smoked herring called
buckings, from their inventor William Buckings, who died in 1447, and
who on account of that invention was so greatly honoured by Charles V.
that the great monarch in 1556 made a journey from Middelburg to
Bierlied, in Zealand, for the express purpose of visiting the grave of
the great fish-dryer. How exquisitely such dishes taste when we are
familiar with their historical associations."
It is impossible in translation to give Heine's intense ridicule and
scorn. He was a Frenchman out of place in Germany. He revolted at
things German, but endeared himself to his people by his wit,
universality of talent, and sincerity. The world has thanked him for
his "Reisebilder." Heine gives us new ideas of the horrors of German
cookery when he talks of Göttingen sausages, Hamburg smoked beef,
Pomeranian goose-breasts, ox-tongues, calf's brains in pastry, gudgeon
cakes, and "a wretched pig's-head in a wretcheder sauce, which has
neither a Grecian nor a Persian flavour, but which tasted like tea and
soft soap."
He cannot leave Göttingen without this description: "The town of
Göttingen, celebrated for its sausages and its university, belongs to
the King of Hanover, and contains nine hundred and ninety-nine
dwellings, divers chambers, an observatory, a prison, a library, and a
council chamber where the beer is excellent."
German sausages are very good. Even the great Goethe, in dying,
remembered to send a sausage to his æsthetic love of a lifetime, the
Frau Von Stein.
Thackeray, who was keenly alive to the horrors of German cookery, says
that whatever is not sour is greasy, and whatever is not greasy is
sour. The curious bill of fare of a middle-class German table is
something like this: They begin with a pudding. They serve sweet
preserved fruit with the meat, generally stewed cherries. They go on
with dreadful dishes of cabbage and preparations of milk, curdled,
soured, and cheesed.
Dr. Lieber, the learned philologist, was eloquent on the subject of
the coarseness of the German appetite. He had early corrected his by a
visit to Italy, and he remarked, with his usual profundity, that it
was "the more incomprehensible as nature had given Germany the finest
wines with which to wash down the worst cookery."
A favourite dish is potato pancakes. The raw potatoes are scraped
fine, mixed with milk, and then treated like flour cakes, served with
apple or plum sauce.
Sauer-kraut is ridiculed, but it is only cabbage cut fine and pickled.
There are two delicious dishes in which it plays an important part:
one is roast pheasant cut fine and cooked with sauer-kraut and
champagne; the other is sauer-kraut cooked in the _croûte_ of a
Strasbourg _pâté de foie gras_.
Favourite Austro-Hungarian dishes are _bachhendl_, baked
spring-chicken,--the chicken rolled into a paste of egg flour and then
baked. It is rather dry to eat, but just the thing with a bottle of
Hungarian wine. Also a beefsteak with plenty of _paprika_, or
Hungarian red pepper, Brinsa cheese, pot cheese, made in the
Carpathian mountains and baked in a hot oven.
Brook trout is never fried, but boiled in water, and then served
surrounded by parsley in melted butter.
In eastern Russia grows a pea, the gray pea, which is boiled and eaten
like peanuts by peeling off the hard skin, or boiled with some sort of
sour-sweet sauce, which softens the skin. This pea is such a favourite
with the Lithuanians that it is made the subject of poetry.
Venison, and hare soup, are deliciously gamey bouillons, which are
made of the soup bone of the roast. The Polish soup _barscz_ is made
of bouillon with the juice of red beets, little _saucissons_, and
specially made pastry, with highly spiced forced-meat balls swimming
in it.
Lettuce salad is prepared in Germany with sour cream.
A favourite drink is warm beer,--beer heated with the yolk of an egg
in it.
"Fill me once more the foaming pewter up!
Another board of oysters, ladye mine!
To-night Lucullus with himself shall sup.
Those mute inglorious Miltons are divine;
And as I here in slippered ease recline,
Quaffing of Perkins's Entire my fill,
I sigh not for the lymph of Aganippe's rill."
Beer is the amber inspiration of the Germans, and plays its daily,
hourly part in their science of entertaining.
And the pea which can be skinned, which is such a favourite with the
Lithuanians, has also been immortalized by Thackeray:--
"I give thee all! I can no more,
Though poor the offering be;
Stewed duck and peas are all the store
That I can offer thee!--
A duck whose tender breast reveals
Its early youth full well,
And better still, a pea that peels
From fresh transparent shell."
But it must not be supposed that rich German citizens of the United
States do not know how to give a good dinner. Cosmopolitan in
everything else, these, the best colonists whom Europe has sent to us,
make good soldiers, good statesmen, and good entertainers. They do not
insist that we shall eat pig and prune sauce. No, they give us the
most affluent bill of fare which the market affords. They give us a
fine dining-room in which to eat it, and they offer as no other men
can "a tankard of Assmanschausen."
They give us, as a nation, a valuable present in mineral water. The
Apollinaris bubbling up near the Rhine seems sent by Heaven to avert
that gout and rheumatism which are the terrible after-dinner penalties
of those who like too well the noble Rhine wines.