Through a Glass Lightly

Port

PORT

“Claret for Boys” (methinks I hear the Great Doctor with superb finality), “Port for Men, and Brandy for Heroes.” Probably he was right—he so often was right. But a change has come: at this present he would scarce endorse his judgment. Not with unquenchable thirst, and head and nerves immovable, do we drain off those brandies and waters on which our Benbows suffered and were strong. Men have been since Agamemnon, and men will be. The heroic is still attainable; but it has changed its environment, and to seek it in the petit verre, sipped as a digestive after the banquet’s close, were a vain and idle thing. But Johnson speaks truth in the main; for to hack our retracing way through the impenetrable thicket of the years into that sweet and flowering meadowland of adolescence, where the wine was but an attribute of dessert, and it was among the dried cherries and the Elva plums that you looked for its essentials; to transport our big hulking bodies into that ineffable backward, when power was potentiality at best, and ignorance at worst was bliss; to do this, I say, is merely impossible. If be for Boys, and I neither admit it nor deny, then is that cellar closed. But to be Men is for all of us; so for Men is Port. I had said it is the sole and only drink; though many excellent—comparatively excellent—folk there be that give the palm to ginger beer. And yet, on maturer reflection, the earlier thought, quick-leaping and unpremeditated, was best. Yes; Port is the only drink. Drink, mind you: not nectar, as some would have you believe! Nectar is but a vague and shilly-shallying poetasterism, which can by no stretch of language be applied to the nobler stuff. For the gods, and Primitive Man in their image, drank only when they were athirst. They never sipped their liquor. Not theirs (poor devils!) to roll it round the tongue, to toss it playfully against the palate, to let it trickle exquisitely down a gullet of educated sensibility. They quaffed it, they swilled it, they sluiced the drouth out of their systems with it. Nectar was mere stuff with a flow in it; a bulky flux which they drank from great bowls and tankards. They knew nought of palate; only that Nature abhors a vacuum. The state they ambitioned was at best a kind of convivial repletion. In the matter of liquor, the Olympians were co-mates and brothers in ignorance with the Teutons of the Dark Ages. These called their “bene bowse” Nectar, those others, Mead. And Mead, in truth, it was: sweet, clammy, cloying, over-rated Mead.

It is otherwise with Port. Only when the grosser cravings are appeased; when a ruined continent of beef has been toppled down the kitchen stairs; when the jellies and kickshaws are laid waste; when the crumbs are brushed away; when the fair stretch of napery has been whisked into space, and your glowing face beams back at you from the warm, rich, hospitable lustre of the mahogany; when silver reflects its reverted image, and the whole table is alive with light and gladness—only then does the Chief Priest bring on, in that splendid shrine, agleam with an hundred facets, the drink for which Boys are inapt and Heroes unsuitable. In his baize-keeled cradle the giant magnum moves slowly with all the solemnity pertaining to a religious rite around the brilliant woodway; then tongues are loosened, and the joy of life runs high. It is great and good, this antique use of drinking after dinner. What boots it that gourmets like Sir Henry Thompson declare against it? ’Tis dying, if you will; but it dies hard as things British are wont. It has its enemies. The cigarette—a poor thing and anybody's own—makes advance all but impossible: also a fatal fashion would seek to cast the great liquor from us, and, ignor , would have us eschew our Port as a fiery and a heady creature, the sure and faithful ally of the Old Campaigner, Gout. Yet these same weaklings, still constrained by a custom they abhor, are found offering at the dinner’s end the three fallen Graces—Port, , and Claret. Still the Triumvirate (for with wine there is no sex, only age and origin) goes its unhonoured round. For who greatly lusts after the cellars of moderate drinkers, men who too often buy at a venture? And especially is this the case with Port: in whose quest they betake them to their wine—merchant as one should go to his doctor, with medicinal rather than purely hospitable motives. Thus cometh in our midst the Old Tawny, long in the wood, a renegade and traitor, which hath imparted to dead timber that rare and fragrant quality which should have exalted a living palate. Of a brave look, but sans character, sans style, sans everything but liquidity, who does not know the wretch, and, knowing him, long for the days that were? In truth, the modern tipple (it deserves no better word) is miserably wanting in the great bulk and body and splendour of the vintage wines. Ah, those wines! Whence cometh the wonder of them? The pure grape they are not: for they are garrisoned with the mercenaries of other lands, they are stored with the heroic afflatus, they are watered with the Water of Life. Yes; the great Englishman was right when he pronounced them the drink of Men; and had he but laid down his liquor as he laid down his law, there had been some mighty drinking in Gough Square. Yet it is recorded of him that he would drink twelve cups of tea at a sitting, and barter the wealth of Oporto for the tailings of Bohea! Of such differences are our best and worthiest compact.

He is a true aristocrat, this Port of ours. He disappears into the mists of antiquity, but even thus you see the round and top of his royalty dim shining through the haze which is years. The living generation—republican in fibre, revolutionary in spirit, redolent of fusel and of fizz—recalls not the vintages coeval with Nelson, contemporary with the Duke. Waterloo Port is a tradition, indeed; for itself we know it not, nor are worthy to know. The “crowning mercy” of ’32 (the Reform Bill) was followed by the blessed vintage of '34—post hoc sed non propter hoc; and it has been said with truth that the chief, if not the sole, effect for good of that middle-class Magna Charta was the building of the Reform Club; for here at least are cellars stored with the wine of wines, and thereof some of Mr Gladstone’s starkest opposites counted it their especial privilege to drink. And thereafter Time hath marked his line of advance with halt after halt of noble vintages: even as our Royal Edward planted a cross at every resting-place of his Queen on her solemn march to Westminster. There is ’47, matchless, incomparable, rare and precious, as the sea-otter; there is ’51, honoured, as they say, though not drunk by the austere editor of Truth, which shows that in the radicalest of us lie the germs of nobility; there is ’58, whose dry humour is appreciated of all them that love their Burton and their Lamb. And, there is ’63; and thereby hangs a tale: for a reserve cuvée of him lay long unknown in the Reform Club cellars; and it had been there unto this day, had not a misguided Committee invited the Devonshire to sojourn for a while. There was a second Exodus of the Chosen People, as erst of their fathers under Pharaoh. And centuries of persecution were avenged in six weeks; and the face of ’63 has vanished from the R.C. list.

Of ’65,’70,’75, and ’78 you shall easily judge for yourselves. Last, but not least, is the Port of Victoria’s first Jubilee. That our Sovereign should rule an Empire over which the sun sets not is a trifle, an astronomical juggle, a common jingo yawp. The true secret of her strength lies here: that at least nine times in this glorious reign of hers, she could have filled the dungeoned cellars of Windsor with more illustrious prisoners than the Tudors; just as the secret of her weakness—if she have any—consists in that she didn't do it. Oh, the pity of it! If you may believe your society prints, she drinks nothing but whisky-and-water and a little dry champagne. Yet, at the last, her subjects and their descendants shall softly close their eyes, and drink in Jubilee Port the memory of her in whose honour it is named. So shall their loyalty stay unimpeached and unimpeachable. And yet it is hard to think of what might have been—and is not. One statue less, and—well, well! The Doctor was right; and Port is, after all, the drink of—not Boys, not Heroes, not even Empresses and Queens, but—Men.

Claret

CLARET

Those there are to whom it has ever seemed the gravest of misconceptions that a man cannot love two at once: that (so to speak) he cannot carry a change of raiment in his knapsack, when no climate in the world is so captious or so variable as that of the Land of Love. But I have never shirked the confession that, though full-blooded Lydia may sway my grosser affections, gentle Dorinda hath ever the softer place in my heart. Therefore, it is with no dread of a charge of inconsistency, “the foolish hobgoblin of little minds,” that, while firmly avowing myself the leal bondman of Port, the master-wine, I would still go far out of my way to take the wages of that gentler sovereign of the senses, Claret. Between comparison and contrast is a great gulf, the one being odious and futile, the other obvious and of purpose. So in men’s minds shall these two wines be still at strife for mastery, and none can dogmatically declare who is premier, and it shall remain a question of individual palate till the end. Also a man's mood shall set now this and now that in the foremost place. For if he would go down in a fiery-heated flood, oblivious of all save the glory of his submerging, by all means let him plunge into a sea of Port. He shall the quicker reach the shade, and once there, whether it be grape or gooseberry is all one. But there be times and times, and there lurks in all of us the longing to scale Olympus, and be lifted into the Muses’ battle; and at such a pass, it is the hour of Hautbrion, the moment of Margaux, the instant of Latour and Larose. Pactolus himself flowed with no richer burden; better than grains of gold are borne in Larose’s smooth-tongued flood, and whoso drinks of his ts “purple tide” from him the cares of the world go vanishing, vanishing, with a voluptuous and entrancing effect of delay. With Port we go down gloriously, but precipitately, into the couch of kings; we nestle into Luxury’s lap; but we sleep on the instant. To a splendour of light succeeds an abysm of dark; there is no moment of twilight, no tutelary crepusculum, wherethrough to watch the fading glow we leave, and discern the gradations of the nearing dark. But Claret bears us ever up and up toward the light. Liquid rejects its inherent properties: the stream mounts high and higher to the fount and source of things, even Aganippe’s self. Skyward soar the fancies, airier grow the wits, the summit is in view, and man is worthy his privilege. With we lose the senses, with Claret we exchange them. The commonplace becomes romantic, the accountant precedes a poet. He has spurned the brute earth, and his hand has touched the shoulder of Pegasus himself. That he cannot mount is no fault of the charger that is ready to bear him heavenwards. Not even Claret is omnipotent.

It seems out of the nature of things that man should be drunken, as we use the term, on so admirable a liquor, and so it has ever appeared to me a mistake that Ripton Thompson should have been permitted to drown his five wits in Claret. Surely champagne had been meeter. But this Claret is ever being diluted with abuses, and it scarce surprises that a great man’s name should be evermore associated with a coloured concoction which the unthinking persist in calling Gladstone Claret even unto this day. So is a lordly title dishonoured in the application. Yet that one, of whom it has sometimes been asserted that his promises are writ in water, should find his immortality traced in the nobler fluid affords matter for thought.

But to the name itself there clings a romance no politician nor any touting advertiser can whollydegrade or dispel. His father-grape is himself a true patrician, abiding in fair Châteaux, with ancient honey-sounding names and yet so poor withal that, if truth were told, the most of these holds are unfurnished and dismantled, and many are not in France at all, but (alas!) in Spain. The soil of his garden is of such magnificent sterility that any of less lineage would starve. Yet has he such a grace as, search God’s most fruitful valleys as you may, you shall never find again; for it is the grace of gentle blood that is unadulterated with the prosperity of richness. What boots it that, flushed with the fat of Californian uplands, or bloated with the middle-class pride of Australian vineyards, these Colonial braggarts would seek to disinherit their brother of Bordeaux? They cannot do it; his title is indefeasible. So they come and go to the tune of “Tin-tara-boom-de ay” on a very brazen band: which is, perhaps, as it should be. And while ever trying to persuade the world they are as good as he of Bordeaux, they do not call themselves by names that enthral the ear and capture the purse, but are grossly ticketed Port type, or Sherry type, or Claret type, as the case may be. Where, then, the wonder if men turn to hear of Château Pichon de Longueville, Château de Beycheville, Château Leoville? What flood but would seem glorious from illustrious founts like these? Yet is the method, open to abuses. Such names are weavers of spells, and send you floating back to those happier ages when Scotland and France were more to each other than Scotland and England, and the link was this Claret; so that, as the years broadened into the later and bigger-drinking centuries, it came about that in Scotland there was good Claret and better Claret, but no bad Claret. They tell the same tale of Whiskey now: of Claret—not. Yet, though we may still find “Gladstone” flooding the cellars of Scots who should know better, there is a feeling in the air that traditions are not quickly broken, and that such Claret is still landed at the Port of Leith as the Port of London can never hope to acquire.

The world is growing bigger and bigger, and though the ranks of the Teetotaller are “swellin wisibly”, the God Dionysos still holds his cult, and the wine merchant looms large on the horizon. He comes on the wings of the circular, and clad in the raiment of hyperbole, flagrantly disregarding the adage that good wine needs no bush, and the pages of his catalogues are strewn with false and perjured epithets. So great are his eulogies of what he is pleased to call his “light Clarets” that for the real thing, if he have it, language falls too short for adoration. To begin with superlatives at the lowest rung of the ladder is to make sure of vertigo and a plunge into anti-climax from the top: so his “grand wines” remain in splendid isolation, whence their three figures alone convey a sense of excellence. Yet even here a man may be undone, and the Claret of his dreams remains an airy phantasm: for though he may find in a day, if his purse be long enough, a Port that is irreproachable, it demands a more arduous pilgrimage ere he come on an incomparable Claret.

Sherry

SHERRY

It is not uncommon to hear of a poet that he is a poet’s poet; of a musician, he is for musicians first and laymen after. So it is scarce matter for surprise to learn that a wine there is that is preeminently the wine merchant’s wine. That this should be Sherry is all but inevitable; for he carries not his credentials with him like the rest, but trusteth chiefly to the praise and the recommendation of another, and that other the wine merchant aforesaid. And though it were too much to say of him that he has inspired a literature, there has grown up around him a copious “derangement of epitaphs,” with no little quaint learning; and let us say at once that, whatever his origin, he has grown manifestly, and flagrantly, bourgeois. As often as not, he is not Sherry, but Sherry-Wine: a most fiery, damnable, and discouraging beverage. In his working suit he tempers the ham sandwich to the shorn stockbroker, and divides the business day into meted periods; and thus far has his uses. His tastes are commercial, and he rarely enters the realm of fancy; for, though he is an emolument of laureates, it is doubtful if he ever inspired a stave of true poetry. The odd part about him is that he is inordinately ours, and is more at home by Thames’ side than on the banks of the Guadalquiver. By travelling hitherward so oft and for so long a time, he has become more British than home brewed October—and not much less than Burton’s Bitter, or Dublin’s Stout. And the chief factor in his adoption, his territorial sponsor, has been the wine merchant, of whom he has ever been the plaything and the wordy sport.

Mark this, and how thin the line that divides literature and commerce! And log-rolling is seen to be essential and evident in the profession of vintner as in the trade of author. In truth, his importance in the world of wines is as much due to the puff adulatory as are the stories of Mr 3, or the poems of Mr 3, in the world of letters. For look you how this wine has been puffed and extolled! On him has been expended that wealth of superlative patter, for him has been invented that special jargon of exaggeration, whereby his vendors have given him a look of virtue, even though he have it not. And so, from being a mere appanage, a kind of spouse lawful of Plum Cake, this Sherry-White-Wine has attained to the dignity of an aboriginal, and upon him has been set the seal of legitimacy. Yet is he the most degenerate of bastards. His veins channel the mixed bloods of a dozen stocks. He is the very mulatto of wines, and art plays well-nigh as many freaks with his complexion as nature with her noblest creation; for he is now the very brownest of browns, and anon is stricken with a pallor that all but fetches him flush with the dominant race. At one time his odour is pervasive and insistent; at another his bouquet is so volatile that only the most curious observer may discern the essence. And if sometimes he should attain to royalty, it is the royalty of Mumbo Jumbo and Theebaw, not that of Victoria or the Hapsburgs. For his blood has gone wofully astray. The founder of his family lies embalmed in some splendid sarcophagus of Spain, same vinous vat of Xeres; and no man living, no, nor his grandfather neither, remembers when he was born—nor so much as when he was crowned. But his has been the royal privilege, that he should be the father of his people, or, at least, of a great many generations. Divide et impera has been the motto of his house, and the virtue and strength of him have been blended in many strains.

How, then, can we honour him in these innumerable descendants? Birth will out from time to time, but education and environment are potent factors in lineal deterioration. Haply, if we are lucky, we fall in with cadets of the direct line, bearing about them inalienable traces of their sovran origin; and these we lure into our own service at a recognised pay of some fifteen to twenty shillings a head (or bottle). But the great clan itself is so many thousands strong that its value is scarce as many pence per cork. For these needy rapscallions the wine merchant’s office forms, as it were, a Labour Bureau, where they hang about till some one takes them on: or they flow over into the vaults of the Bodega, there to levy blackmail on the stomachs of public citizens, and tweak the noses of the dilettanti. Nevertheless, this Sherry is a force to be reckoned with; he is a monster of our creation, and we must treat him well or he will get the better of us, poor Frankensteins that we are. So, then, we cannot blame the wine merchant for writing the creature up, and allowing his imagination to get the better of his veracity or his professional zeal to top his individual integrity. For our part, when we read of “Magnificent Golden Sherry, thirty years in bottle, full, rich, without sweetness, with superb bottled flavour” we never think of questioning if such things be or no, but are filled with gratitude for so golden an opportunity. It is only five-and- forty shillings; and it were surely cheap at anything under a hundred! A still, small voice (with a strong Scots accent) whispers us to sample; salvation cometh not from the East or from the West, but from the North; and for this “Old Pale Oloroso Pale Sherry”—whatever whiff of romance the re-duplication of the epithet, the reiterated pallor, may have imparted, is now for ever flown. And if it were not, it were utterly dispelled by this further essay in description: “A good, sound, clean wine, with plenty of flavour and free from heat”; for that label, “a good, sound wine,” is even the most damnatory ever conferred. Yet is it meant to please; and would seem to fulfil its destiny—for catalogues are innumerable as leaves in Vallombrosa, and in all lurks the pernicious phrase. Verily, these Balaams of the wine trade set forth to bless, and yet for all their efforts they end by placing a curse upon their wares. The egg merchant is, we presume, the social inferior of the Vintner; yet what a lesson the one may learn from the other! For, consider the magnificent intensity, the superb restraint, of this announcement:

New-laid eggs | 2d. each.

Fresh eggs | 12/ d.each

Eggs. | 1s. a doz.

Cooking eggs | 6d.a doz.

Eggs for electioneering purposes | 2s. 6d. a hundred.

Ever so much is said, and how few the words! It is the padding of a volume in the pith of a paragraph. On such lines should catalogues be built. Four epithets at most, and the whole kingdom is neatly and exhaustively differentiated. To the Man of Eggs, you, Man of Wine, and learn wisdom and the “value of reserve.”

Spain’s chivalry was laughed away these many years agone, but you cannot laugh away Spain’s potent Sherries. They grin at you over the tops of multitudinous vats, and there is never an Englishman but knows the grimace. The wine (the Sherry Wine) is present wherever our language is spoken; its appearance with the soup is as regular as the tureen, and very near as indispensable; a dinner without it were second savagery and mere amorphousness. It is the soul of a cocktail and the body of bitters. You still can drink it in hours when to drink aught else would write you down a “nipper.” No funeral is complete without it, and it is never absent from a wedding, where it affords a pleasant stimulus to the hired waiters. In good old-fashioned houses it is held the only refreshment. It is gifted with a peculiar capacity for penetration; and if we are troubled with livers, and things of that sort, it finds us out quicker than any other potable. However, it retains two privileges, one of which it shares with Madeira, but the other, poor thing though it be, is its own. It claims by prescriptive right the extraordinary epithet of “nutty” and—it serves for a whitewash!

Champagne

CHAMPAGNE

It is in accordance with the eternal Unfitness of Things that Sparkling Champagne—that river on whose foaming stream, to the accompaniment of whose gallant laughter, two centuries of blades and Cyprians have floated bravely down into the gay backward abysm of Time—should have taken its rise in a Benedictine abbey. Yet in 1670, at Haut-Villers, one Dom Pérignon scored history with a thicker line than ever was drawn by William of Orange in 1688 of blessed memory. It took an Act of Settlement effectually and finally to abolish Divine Right; but in 1680 the dynasty of Still Champagne was quietly wiped out of being by a pacific friar. It perished perfect, consummate, unregretted—for the usurper proved himself omnipotent. The invincible Dom Pérignon, some ten years earlier, had lighted on a precious hoard beside which the Abbé Faria’s was a trifle: for it was a case of incalculable milliards. And though the founder of a line is ever its greatest hero, so that Napoleon the Little is the natural complement of Napoleon the Great, this monk contrived to maintain the splendour of his order. He imparted his secret only when, in articulo mortis, he placed the crown on the head of Friar Philippe, his legitimate successor; who in his turn bequeathed it in 1765 to Brother André Lemaire. And this one reigned for thirty years, an enviable despot, and passed it down to his successor Dom Grossart. And he, having the Moets among his subjects, died with his secret big and undivulged, and the line and dynasty of Dom Pérignon was extinct. And none was greater than the Founder, who, arch-celibate though he was, yet made conjunctions happier far than all the rest of the clergy put together; for so consummate was his skill, and so exquisite his palate, that, being blind with years, he would taste you grapes from a score of vineyards, and decree that the wine of this one must be married to the wine of that; and his fame was great in the land, and the people would have his wine or none. And as the greatest mind is that which can adjust itself to the smallest details making for perfection, so this our benefactor, discarding the oil-steeped wisps of tow which till his time did vulgar service as stoppers, invented corks. So, too, he established the long, flute-shaped glass wherefrom to drink the elixir he had found, and wherein, like a true hedonist, he might watch the merry atoms frisk and dance like winter stars in running water.

It is also of the essence of a great discovery that it should come at the right moment, and this thing sparkled into being when the fortunes of France were on the ebb. So debilitated was the stomach of the Grand Monarque, that Fagon, his good physician, had to forbid him all but the oldest , and that most villainously laced with water. But this Dom Perignon—how bright a herald, how inspiriting a companion for his dull and lonely Maintenon, aweary with his tire wails, his enfeebled autocracy, and soured by the falsehood of her true position! What wonder if she and all the bloods and the grand dames and the lesser ladies drank of it and were glad, while Louis looked another way and sipped attenuated Burgundy? Here was enough, you would think, to console their France under those terrific visitations of Corporal John’s; yet the influence has passed clean from the land of its nativity, the genius of the people it represented has been carried to other shores. It has pierced the fogs of Albion, and made us for the moment the compeers of those brighter spirits across the Channel whose image and superscription it bears.

De ce vin frais l’écume pétillante, De nos Français est l’image brillante, said Voltaire; yet he told but a half truth, after all, for his countrymen for the most part drink it at this present heavy and sweet to an accompaniment of marrons glacés and such-like cloying cates. Happily our own habit is different; and herein shines forth the ancient insular superiority. Scarce has the fish, bull-headed cod or blushing mullet, swum into our ken, ere the cork leaps forth with a cloop of joy, and straightway, as on the approach of spring, the sap stirs and the buds of speech burst into life, and talk, reluctant and hidebound no more, bursts into many-coloured bloom. No longer in middle-class houses is the wine doled out like drops of blood, as in those ugly parties which Original Walker satirised. At this, the tail-end of our century, it pours like melting snow down Soracte’s sides, or spring torrents in the Acroceraunian hills. The dullard stands amazed at his own wit; and the professional talker-out moves not to envy; and the sorriest dog of us barks in rhapsodies and epigrams. No less than Port it carries the vintage glory with it; for do we not speak of that ’74 Perrier-Jouet (now for ever laid to rest in pious gastronomic cells!) as of darling poet or statesman idolised in the Abbey by the stream of Thames? And the masterful Eighties, the fickle, fleeting, delicate-souled Eighty-Fours, the once speculative, broadly -promising but now fully-realised Eighty-Nines—do we not discuss them, even as the children of our loins? Wine does more than generate talk: it is talk itself; and do we not glory somewhat in their prices and value our dinners by those Princes of the Blood with whom we are privileged to fraternise? And our preferences—how exclusively our own, how cherished, how esteemed! How this one will swear by the buff label of that Widow Clicquot, who takes precedence, and the wall of all other widows, save Mrs Wadman alone! Think, too, of the liquid splendour of the Irroy name, the mouthful of majesty in Deutz and Geldermann’s Gold Lack, the aristocratic flavour of Due de Montebello, and the disappointment bred of too great an intimacy with that titled impostor! Then, too, the utter exclusiveness of Heidsieck’s Dry Monopole, the merry lilt of Pommery and Greno, the boom of Bollinger ! Are we not familiar with them all ? They are intimates at the eventful moments of our lives! We have trysted with them at the Continental, and in marbled halls, when