Wine is of such divinity that it refuses to change its name. It has kept the same name since it was first pupped, and though it is spelt differently in all sorts of languages (Greek which started it, Latin which carried it on and English where it still hangs on by the skin of its teeth, French where it has been terribly shortened and nasalized, Belgian where it carries a nice little "g" subdued at the end of its name, and the German dialects in which it goes on being itself more or less--though the vowel has gone wrong, as vowels will), wine goes on being wine still. Mark my words, you my readers who are destined to live for ever, it will not change. What it was in the beginning that it will be. It is the steadfast thing of this world.
Wine, let me tell you, is unique, simple, not to be modified. It is wholly itself and of its own nature. When you play tricks with it, you change it not slightly but altogether. hence also there is this about it: that being a chief Person in this world, it will be recognized for what it is or will not deal with you at all. It holds a regal state and is at once absolute and alone, yet perfectly satisfied with its won essence; for indeed wine is a god.
Those who are wise will remark that wine will only appear on blessed land, and there is not much of such land. Here in the Old World there is a belt, rather narrow, wherein the grape, which is the parent of wine, ripens to the glory of God and to the infinite benefit of mankind. But that belt will not run as far north as the Baltic or the Channal; beyond the Mediterranean it will not run far south of the Atlas. Just as the great vineyards are confined to a very small acreage of their own country, so is the soil and climate proper to wine confined to a small part of the habitable world. There is no wine in the Tropics; there is not wine in the Arctic. There was, indeed, some sort of wine in England hundreds of years ago, but it died out after fighting hard for its life. I never heard of wine grown in Ireland, though the soul of the Irish is well suited to wine. When I wandered about in Poland some years ago, I found that wine was a foreign thing.
So wine is of its own territory, and that territory is select out of all the territories of the world. I have read that the Persians know wine and were the only Mohammedans who did; also there are famous Persian poems, one of them famously translated into English, which give the right glory to wine. But for the rest it is almost wholly of Europe and of civilized Europe. There is no wine in the Baltic plain, nor do the Prussians crush the grape. There is no wine in the vast spaces of Muscovy unless you include therein the happy corner of the Euxine Chersonese. There is no wine, I am told, in China nor among the Hindoos; nor any among the peoples of the Pacific, unless you count the Australians, who have, as we all know, planted vineyards and rigorously taken to winemaking. Wine is a part of the soul of Europe and proper to ourselves. When we find it in far-off places, the Cape or California, it is but a colony of ourselves.
Wine seems to me to be the test of things European. Were Europe--essential Europe--to perish, why, then, wine would perish too. But when wine disappears, it will be for us to cover our faces and die; for without wine we shall not be ourselves anymore. By wine came the column and the temple, the marble figures and the right colours, all that is permanent in the beauty man has created; and without wine that beauty would sink away.
Here in England the double fate which has for so many centuries disputed the English soul is discovered in the matter of wine. Wine was necessity for whatever was cultivated in England; for the writers and the singers of England, the painters and builders of England, century after century; but it was not the familiar necessity of Englishmen at large. They preferred, when they were most themselves, a barley brew which the first writers on England, almost two thousand years ago, remarked in Kent and which you may (thank God) drink in Kent to this day. Quite lately they have taken, have the English, to many other things; and largely to alien strong waters, particularly to whisky, which came in from the outer lands. But wine still after a fashion survives among such Englishmen who are in tune with the ancient traditions of the island, and of its culture. They no longer drink it our of gold as was the royal custom of the Celtic chieftians, crying "Vin ap or" (or some such horrible noise); they drink it out of glass, a fragile thing; though the wisest of them drink it out of silver, or silver-gilt which is better still; for I will ever maintain that the mere contact with gold provokes a response in wine, which, whenever it meets gold in any form, salutes a brother and a twin. On this account, in the days when we were allowed to have gold coins in England, it was the custom of some very few to cast a sovereign into any cup of wine before they took it to their lips, much as the baser sort will put sugar into tea.
It is pathetic but illuminating indeed to discover how strongly the barbarian has sought and desired wine. He would come hundreds of miles over the angry seas to get it and it was one of the chief objects of his piracies. He was proud to acclimatize it, as much as could be, in his own lands; and sometimes it rewarded him by giving him a very special sort of revelation, producing certain wines which, though from far beyond the boundaries of the Empire, were still worthy of Christian men.
It has been said that 'Man Without Wine is an Ox." Would that he were as much as that! He is something much worse than an ox when he lacks wine. He is a thief, a murderer, a fool and a raving despairing fellow; or, what is much lower, a washed-out nothing; an emptiness. For wine makes man much more surely than man makes wine. Put down a colony of men where you will and you cannot be sure that they will make wine. Indeed, the greater part of them fail hopelessly in the attempt, even when they desire to reach the glory of wine-makers. but though men do not always make wine, wine always makes men everywhere. Introduce it to half men, quarter men, and the great masses of No men, and it turns them into something newer, better, stronger, more permanent, more multiple, deeper rooted, of firmer fibre, better balanced and, in a word,
nourished.
For who can be properly nourished, if indeed he be of human stock, without wine? St. Paul said to someone who had consulted him (without remembering that, unlike St. Luke, he was no physician), 'Take a little wine for your stomach's sake.' But I say, take plenty of it for the sake of your soul and all that appertains to the soul: scholarship, verse, social memory and the continuity of all culture. There may be excess in wine; as there certainly is in spirits and champagne, but in wine one rarely comes across it; for it seems to me that true wine rings a bell and tells you when you have had enough. But there is certainly such a thing as a deficiency of wine; and such deficiency is one of the most awful ravenous beasts that can fasten upon a living soul. To drink an insufficient portion of wine, leaving the whole being, body and soul, craving for a full portion, is torture. The felling of loss will pursue a man for hours. On this account our fathers were wont to leave their guests at liberty to call for wine according to their desire; and you may read in any old book, written in the days when England was England, how men called for wine at the table of a host as though that table were their own. Pray heaven this wholesome custom shall return. But like other civilized things it can only come back after great travail and strain; for our vagaries and negligence have already three-quarters ruined us.
I call that man fortunate who, looking back over a long life (such as mine has been), can mark the various stages of his travel by experience in wine. He will say to himself, as he turns over in his soul the memories of youth and of better times, 'Soul, do you remember the wine we drank on the hillside overlooking the Rhine in the better days? Soul, was it not on the Upper Ebro that you and I sat together with a companion wine strong and rough but nobly a friend? Soul, do you remember how, in the midst of Sicily, fainting from fatigue, a goddess came upon you, sent to you for your deliverance, and bearing a pitcher of wine which had been drawn for the gods who were carousing in a neighbouring room? Soul, have you forgotten a certain wine of Touraine which stamped itself upon history for ever, although no record of it has been written down? Soul, are you so ungrateful as to recall no more that wine which had been born in a lonely valley of Jura Hills and made the spot hallowed
in aeternum? Soul, will you not retain the benediction of a certain flask produced for you by a kindly crone in the Lower Apennine, whereby this aged dame earned, and shortly after received, her entry into paradise (for when I passed that way a year later, she was in glory)?' To all these rhetorical questions the soul replies with enthusiastic gratitude, affirming that it never has and never will forget these revelations granted to it during its little passage through the daylight.
Now at the mention of these words,'its little passage through the daylight,' I am reminded of a story which I have told by word of mouth perhaps a thousand times, and even in print too often; but it is better to repeat a good thing than to let it die. The young curate said to the bishop as he lay in his last illness, 'My lord, I have brought you a glass of that wine.' The young curate then kneeling by the be of his venerable patron burst into tears and added, 'Oh, my lord! Soon you will be drinking other and better wine in another and a better world!' To this the hierarch replied, little above a whisper, 'In a better world my faith constrains me to believe, but a better wine than this could never be.' And this, note you, was said of common port. What would he have said had they given him just when it was ripe, just when it was loudest in its praises to the Lord God, the wine of whats-its-name of the year whatever-it-was, which all just men of sufficient experience know to be the greatest wine of the greatest moment in the history of mankind? But the name of that vintage and its date I will not publish until I see my way to earning an adequate reward for the advertisement.
All have heard the true and sufficient story of the younger man who said to the elder man, 'How does one tell good wine?' To whom the elder answered, 'By the taste.' Would that the whole world could learn the lesson of that famous reply. It is not the year, nor the vineyard that distinguishes good wine, exceptional wine. It is the taste. There is no red wine so excellent that you cannot kill it and turn it into vinegar by warming it excessively and too quickly. There is no white wine so remarkable that you cannot destroy it by drinking it after the wrong meats. There is no wine that ever was which remains the same if you leave it open too long. In other words, there is no wine that is itself alone; for all wine, like all human character (of which wine is the reflection and the symbol), is conditioned by circumstance.
Men lay up store of many things, principally of money or the equivalent thereof. Some even lay up store of wisdom; and some, much fewer, of human affection, which is really a most valuable commodity. But few today lay up a store of wine with any knowledge, discretion, choice, intention or continuity. It used to be the common habit with all men who were worthy to consume wine; but in the general decline of the world that habit is dying out. No man can build what is called a cellar and maintain it without constant attention to one home; and most men today have been turned into pauper vagrants. No man can make a cellar who is not prepared to watch unceasingly the going and the outgoing; for this excellence is no more static than any other human excellence. Change and mortality overshadow even wine. There are other dangers and impossibilities about the making of a store of wine. It need the right temperature constantly maintained; it needs protection against violence and vibration; it needs a sort of unending diary or chart of its daily progress. Few would ever be at such pains in the past and today hardly any.
Yet I suppose that the making of a just and adequate wine-treasure will not be wholly abandoned and that somewhere in the ends of the earth, in a dale of Northumberland or perhaps a forgotten village of Cornwall, I shall come again upon a man who has nursed, cherished and preserved an inheritance of wine. There were many such men when I was young, especially here in England. There were many also in Belgium. Such men seem indeed to be proper to territories that have no wine of their own, for what we lack we remember and we prize.
On this account also I trust that the grave peril now hanging over us, lest continual war should destroy the continuity of wine, will make men consider again the imperative duty of saving and handing on to those who shall come after us this greatest of material things, wine.
I am willing to believe that for what is irreplaceable there is a special providence: for good verse that rarest of flowers; for certain landscapes threatened by the greed of men; for certain songs of country people. I willingly believe, therefore, that true wine itself shall not perish either through the degradation of mankind or through oblivion. But, alas, I am none too sure.
Hillaire Belloc,
Places, 1941, the final chapter.
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