By WALTER JAMES
Wine, properly regarded, is a song without words. It is a gift of nature that wise men through long ages have loved by instinct without the needless prompting of speech and books. But for all that most of us like to talk (and a few to write) about it because we want others to share our joy. No man likes to keep good wine to himself.
Why do we so love wine? Is there a reason for it? Few people get through life without a good many rough passages; fewer get through many days without some petty and pin-pricking irritation or annoyance. For these troubles wine is the great consoler, bestowing a soothing caress which never palls. This is due largely — let us disdain hypocrisy — to its alcohol, that precious emollient wholly beneficent in its use, malevolent only in its abuse, which helps us over the rubs of life and keeps us happily indifferent to the false allure of less innocuous consolations. True winelovers do not smoke reefers or dabble clean fingers in cocaine.
Alcohol is not an evil and never has been; only in excess (as with bread, potatoes, fat, sugar, salt and as dozen other things) does it invite trouble, but wine announces its own satiety and confirmed winelovers are seldom tempted to exceed overmuch. Men who love wine respect it, and what we respect we do not abuse.
Alcohol is integral to wine though few people, I am told, find a strange pleasure in unfermented grape juice, which I myself once tasted. But alcohol, though important, by no means embraces the whole charm of wine. Alcohol is rather a catalyst — something that holds other factors together and acts as a stabiliser, for without the supporting arm of alcohol wine would soon fall by the wayside and decline into ditchwater.
The attraction of bouquet, of flavour and of aftertaste reveal themselves in succession but only when we drink slowly; wine, if we are to receive its full benison, may on no account be rushed. If worth drinking it should be sipped and relished, not just swallowed down with a distant mind while we bandy social fripperies. Wine took a lot of trouble in the winery; surely it is worthy of just a little trouble at the table.
But to drink fine wine every day is in my view a great mistake, altogether apart from the cost. Let wine be a daily companion but fine wine a less frequent visitor, for whole choice vintages may not cloy they can soon be taken for granted and so the impact of contrast will be lost. After savouring common weekday wines, how good that special weekend bottle will taste!
Contrast and change are what adorn the pathway to pleasure, as they do indeed spice certain of life’s joys other than wine. One is reminded of the young French chatelaine who, sad at the waning affection of her husband, thought it would be a good idea to enrol the help of the village priest. He had a most persuasive voice. One never knew.
“He is such a nice old man,” she told her errant husband, “but so poor. It would be a kindness to have him at the chateau for a week or two to let him enjoy a spell of the larger life.”
The lord of the manor, who sensed what was in the wind, agreed at once and the abbé was installed.
“Tell me, my dead abbé,” asked the welcoming nobleman, “what is your favourite dish and I shall see that you have it in plenty?”
“Ah, monsieur,” the old man replied, “of all of the worldly things permitted to my order I think partridge is the most delectable.”
The gamekeeper was instructed to provide partridges every day.
At their first dinner, with hot roast partridge, the abbé was suffused in ecstasy. Never had he tasted such a bird. The next day cold partridge at luncheon was delightful too. At dinner that night the partridge was still good, but had slightly less flavour than before. The same strange fault seemed to show itself in the cold bird at luncheon. After a week the abbé plucked up courage enough to beg his host for a change of diet.
“But, Monsieur le Abbé, you astonish me. You said partridge was your favourite dish and I have been at pains to provide it for you.”
“Ah, Monsieur, I am not ungrateful, but here it is perdrix, perdrix, toujours perdrix. Could I not tonight have just a simple mutton chop for a change?”
The count looked at the old man with the faintest hint of a smile. “I think, Monsieur l’Abbé, we understand one another.” The abbé blushed.
Whether the Count developed a tolerance of mutton chops the story does not tell but its moral is plain. Do not yearn for partridge — or for Mouton — every night.
In Australia today there are any number of good sound wines (dare one call them mutton chop wines?) which are available for a modest outlay if you take the trouble to shop around. From observation, though not from experience, I know that there are lots of wines even more moderately priced and put up in what appears to be discarded shoe boxes. These I have not tried, for there is a limit to those modern customs to which an old man can adjust himself.
This brings to mind a strange feature of drinking habits in Australia today. Putting wine into bottles and properly corking it is not a cheap process. Its purpose is to hold the wine until it has been given the chance to display itself adorned in the garments of maturity in place of the pinafore of childhood — let us say, just as a rule of thumb, three years for white wine and seven for red. Only then does well made wine have a chance of showing its worth.
Wine must be given the opportunity to grow up; in spite of modern methods and inventions it cannot be made on Monday to be consumed on Tuesday; its inevitable rough edges and childish crudities may be smoothed over only with time. The time increases with the weight of the wine — little for a light dry white; more, much more for a full bodied red. So when you draw the cork after it has had hardly time to moisten you throw away all of the benefits of bottling. So called ‘freshness’, lauded by winemakers who want to quit their vintages quickly, is a virtue in unfermented fruit juices but it is no virtue in wine, whose caress most be matronly rather than virginal …
Wine and civilisation have ever walked hand in hand. Which is the elder of the two I have no means of knowing but it is certain that practically all the worthwhile values in life have been developed in the great winegrowing lands. Palestine and Greece, Italy and Spain, France and the Rhineland — what a breed of world-weary morons we would be without them! What have the wineless lands bequeathed to us? The wandering nomads of the untilled steppes were reduced to fermenting their mares’ milk into what they called koumiss (though I may not disparage a delight I have never known).
The savage British Druid-ruled islanders could do no better than rob beehives to make mead, emerging fearfully a step or two from their smoky caves only when they gained the wit to grow barley and make beer, but sadly they lacked the skill to plant vines. They left us nothing. The Sandinavians scratched frost bitten fields for anything that might serve to make a coarse acqua vitae which after long centuries managed to inspire a few tormented playwrights and tremulous pianists. The desert-bred Saracens, perforce content with water, have left us only a few hints in architecture and the seductive charm of algebra. The Russians, when potatoes came over from Peru, could do no better than to turn them into soul-destroying vodka to provoke novels of harrowing gloom. What a sad, arid record have these vineless people to boast! How little they bequeathed to us to make the sentence of life more tolerable, let alone contributing to its fragile joy. What a pitiful contrast to the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome!
Wine is an intensely subjective, personal experience and one must curb any temptation to be opinionated and lay down laws about it. Having drunk wine, with nothing but good and gratitude, every day for sixty years I can feel only pity for those who have deprived themselves of one of the great consolations of life. But I repress any wish to rebuke, or instruct, their folly. (Where I have failed please judge with charity.)
Wine, either heavy or light, makes the most constant of good companions. It eases the loneliness which, whether we hear it clearly or not, is the background music to most people’s lives. Wine shapes and fits into our moods and talks with us, or at least whispers, but never quarrels, never rebukes our faults and errors. He was a wise man who once said that there are four things really worth cherishing in life — old friends to talk with, old books to read, old wood to burn and old wine to drink. The rest, he said, were not worth the pursuit.