Part 1

BACCHUS

OR

WINE TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW

TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW

_A List of the Contents of this Series will be found at the end of this volume_

Transcriber’s Note: in fact, this was omitted.

BACCHUS OR WINE TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW

BY P. MORTON SHAND Author of _A Book of Wine_, _A Book of French Wines_, etc.

LONDON KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., LTD. NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.

_Printed in Great Britain by_ MACKAYS LTD., CHATHAM

BACCHUS

OR

WINE TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW

“Put a cup of wine into my hand that I may cast off from me the cloak of hypocrisy.”—HAFIZ.

The bush which none but the poorest wine ever needed has been hung out alluringly as a tavern’s thirst-provoking sign-board to entice the pleasure-seekers of those lands where the grape will not, or may not, ripen for the wine-press, over all wines good and bad, true and false, provided only they be duly intoxicating, by that hysterical piece of amateur legislation known as the Volstead Act. Every people, we know, has the government and laws it deserves. It is only when the citizens of a state are so overcome by enthusiasm for the perfection of their own institutions as to organise propaganda for the conversion of other countries to conformity with the sovereign panaceas they have invented, as in the case of Soviet Russia or the republic which recently substituted a camel rampant and three golden orbs for an eagle as its national emblem, that the domestic policy of such a state ceases to be exclusively its own concern. Not that respect for its privacy is desired by either nation: the one broadcasts its sanguinary social reforms, the other its strident social vulgarities. The war that was to end war was also to end wine. The crusaders of the United States, too proud to fight for any other cause, were to make the world as safe for teetotalism as for democracy, so that for the Utopian future the latter shibboleth should imply the former. The Latin nations, however, were deaf to all material inducements, such as increased industrial efficiency, and obstinately refused to have the “running sore” of viticulture cauterised by the same Fiery Cross as had desiccated California’s wine-grapes into seedless raisins. Ultimately, America, still inspired by the loftiest moral motives, consented to forgo the forcible conversion of Europe to the one generally known commandment of the Koran in exchange for an enormous monetary tribute to indemnify its bankers and munition-manufacturers for the grievous losses in ethical prestige which they had sustained by this unparalleled act of renunciation.

Thanks to the magnificent advertisement given to the inimitable properties of wine by the School-Marms Government which imposed Prohibition on a nation ever whoring after righteousness, its future existence may be deemed assured until the next Puritan revival, or the advent of the New Matriarchy. In spite of the fact that their aims are championed by a titled lady, who, though British neither by birth nor blood, was, appropriately enough, the first woman Member of Parliament to take her seat at Westminster, our “Temperance Reformers” are no more likely to catch us unawares in the course of the next few decades than those other eugenic despots, the vegetarians and the anti-tobacco fanatics. Humanity reacts swiftly and brutally against Puritanism in any form. Every lenten cycle of Praise-God-Bare-Bones theocracy is invariably followed by the reign of a Merry Monarch, if not of a Heliogabalus. In few ages of the past has the will to deny itself no single pleasure of the flesh been more manifest in mankind than in the vandal and hedonist era of transition in which we crudely live.

For a moment it seemed that the “to be, or not to be” of wine-drinking might threaten to become a permanent and burning political question among non-viticultural nations, just as certain practical problems of wine-growing have for long been the paramount agricultural-political issues in viticultural countries. Already, however, the tide of an inevitable revolt against tyrannically “uplifting,” but quite unworkable, enactments has swept over Scandinavia, the nursery of all “progressive” movements. Soviet Russia, which began by abolishing Vodka in favour of a tolerance of light wines and beer, has been constrained to add distillation to other nationalised industries on the cynical pretext that the state needs additional revenue only to be found in exploiting drunkenness. Forewarned, as much by the gruesome Bacchanalia of Prohibition in operation as by the quality of Bootleggers’ “Hootch,” British wine-drinkers are determined to fight to the last in defence of their liberties as their forefathers fought the Excisemen and the Revenue-Cutters before them. The Labour Party, theoretically committed to “an ambitious programme of temperance legislation” (including the back-door policy of Prohibition known as Local Option), dares not lift a finger to put its academic articles of faith into practice on pain of seeing the working class vote against it to a man. The only sign of alarm is in the trade, and can be discounted as a not altogether disinterested manœuvre. Nonconformity, the standard-bearer of Teetotalism, is as defunct as Liberalism, which has now won the right to replace “Brandy Nan” as the alternative proverbial metaphor for something as dead beyond recall as that extinct and fabulous bird the dodo.

Thus wine has now begun to acquire an added, and most unenviable, lustre for no better reason than that it used to be denounced by the zealots in their wrath as “a wile of Satan.” By a biased application of the doctrine of Justification by Works, the Calvinists were able to find in wine, rather than in the unchanging heart of man, the source of that insidious “temptation” inseparable from every gradation of its use that lies between the equally “sinful” extremes of moderate digestive enjoyment at meals and the abuse provocative of delirium tremens. Indeed, no honest discrimination between natural wine or beer and fortified wine or spirits was ever made by these impassioned casuists. The drinkers of claret, stout, cider, port or proof gin, the men who would have felt themselves for ever dishonoured had they once exceeded the strictest sobriety, as the habitual drunkards, were one and all outlawed impartially as profligate “wine-bibbers.” In parts of New England to say of a man that he “drank wine” constituted an inexpugnable gravamen against his character only comparable with accusing him of living in open adultery. It is worth noticing how it was only after mankind had refused to be any longer very much interested in dogmas one way or the other, and had ceased to damn or bless a neighbour off-hand for holding a certain selection of them, that the Puritan conscience began to envisage the possibility of preaching less purely doctrinal abnegations, such as “Taking the Pledge,” to a considerably greater extent than had hitherto seemed consonant with the furtherance of “the Lord’s Work.” From that moment all biblical precepts endorsing the sanction of wine were as resolutely put aside as the love, pity and forgiveness of Christ’s teachings had been by the original wine-drinking founder of these austere sects some three centuries before. Nor was their awakened interest in “Total Abstinence” due to any weak human compassion for the appalling effects of alcoholism in heredity, such as those infant maladies which are the direct results of “the sins of the fathers”—the hideous tenet of Predestination could be relied upon to eliminate any such motive—but simply and solely to the cold zest of robbing life of one more pleasant thing, one more “snare of the flesh.”

The proper place for a man to drink wine, or even spirits, is in his own, or someone else’s, home, among his family or friends, not in the nauseating atmosphere of a night-club, the squalor of a saloon-bar, or ensconced in a high-backed church pew, his eyes riveted on the text “Lord, give me strength,” furtively draining it from a flask, so as to sustain the onslaught of those serried battalions of theological syllogisms which reinforce the “prayerfulness” of the average Scottish sermon. Indeed, it is probable that the peculiarly sordid type of our taverns is a direct result, even to some extent the expression, of that harsh Puritan condemnation of all “strong liquors.” For long the Righteous consistently refused to co-operate in any movement designed to ameliorate the conditions, or curtail the licensing hours, of public houses on the pharisaical pretext that what was needed was their abolition pure and simple, the felling of the whole tree, not the lopping off of a rotten branch. No alliance, they declared, could be contemplated with those “Sons of Belial” and “workers of iniquity” who were striving in and out of Parliament, usually amidst general obloquy, to bring about sane temperance and render the inn a place which a self-respecting working-man might no longer be ashamed to frequent in company with his wife or sweetheart. Towards the end of the last century the intransigeance of this attitude became sensibly modified. Many prominent Nonconformists quietly abandoned the practice, and even the profession, of teetotalism after reaching that degree of affluence which impelled them to forsake the “true word” of the little Bethels for the flesh-pots of the parish church. None the less the outbreak of the War found many of the more uncompromising Puritans exulting in their Bands of Hope, because a golden opportunity was now presented of forcing total abstinence on the nation under cover of the specious argument that a sober man is able to make shells faster than a drunken, and a Blue-Ribbon soldier can kill far more of his foes in the Lord’s name than one whose physique has been undermined by dalliance with the flower of the hop or the fruits of the vine and the juniper-bush. Now that the voice of the Unco’ Guid no longer carries much weight in the nation’s counsels, it is reasonably certain that the public-house, as we know it, will be profoundly changed for the better, both structurally and as regards its general ambiance. The lessons of direct state control at Carlisle, and the experiments with restricted licences and indirect regulation of the management so wisely instituted in some of garden suburbs and municipal housing-estates, have proved a valuable stimulus to the enlightenment of public opinion. Sooner or later, too, we shall learn that in spite of the grandmotherly assurances of County Councillors to the contrary, the drinking of a glass of beer in the open air at a table adjacent to the street pavement is no more bound to encourage immorality than when the same beverage is consumed between four walls.

Wine, then, if less of a necessity of life than it was for our forefathers, or even our immediate fathers, is strangely enough regarded to-day more as something of a luxury, or a minor depravity, than as a natural taste inherent in the human race. We have grown so accustomed to quoting the hackneyed and hypocritical “Wine and Women” in explanation of our neighbours’ failings, that our smug and sniggering satisfaction makes us apt to forget “Song,” or merriment, the third person of this ageless trinity, which ennobles the abdiction to both. The three together can transmute the foul fumes of the gin-palace and the defiling ignominy of the brothel into the genial fireside haven of a man’s own home, offering the licit enjoyment of the wife of his bosom and the wine of his cellar. The abiding verity of Martin Luther’s familiar couplet of _Gay Sçavoir_, “_Wer nicht liebt Wein, Weib, und Gesang, der bleibt ein Narr sein Leben lang_” has outlived all the rancorous interdictions of the misanthropic Calvin. Teetotalism and castration are analogous abnegations, just as drunkenness and vicarious venery are analogous abuses, of the purest carnal joys that are our earthly inheritance by the exercise of our own Free Will and God’s good Grace of Election.

But if the more immediate future of wine, as that of meat and tobacco, may be considered assured, the same degree of confidence cannot be expressed in its permanent quality. Prohibition being temporarily eliminated as a potential menace, there remain three serious and growing dangers to the survival of wine in that state of purity and excellence in which it is now obtainable, though by no means necessarily always obtained. These are its mass-production; its adulteration; and its prostitution so as to flatter vulgar but expensive palates, or the exactions of clamant and rapidly expanding congeries of faddists—typified by the mania for rendering all wines sparkling on the one hand, and that contradiction in terms, dealcoholised wine, or pasteurised, non-alcoholic grape-juice, on the other. To these must be added the devastating epidemics to which the vine is peculiarly subject, such as the Oidium and the Phylloxera.

The first of these dangers, that of mass-production, is by far the gravest. The world’s output of wine is steadily increasing, particularly in Australia, North and South Africa and South America, and to a less, but still perceptible, extent in Europe itself. Indeed, there might soon be enough to meet all potential demands of viticultural and non-viticultural countries alike, but for such factors as continually rising costs of production and freight, the increase of customs’ barriers, the world’s diminished purchasing power and the growing greed of middlemen. None the less, France, still the largest producer and consumer, though followed ever more closely by Italy, is forced to buy some millions of hectolitres annually from Algeria, Tunis, Spain, Italy and Greece in order to meet her domestic needs. Nor does she export in _vins fins_ a quarter of what she imports in the form of common blending wines. The proportion of fine wines to ordinary wines grown in France is very small.

The more wine you grow from the same plot of land the poorer will be its quality. There is a strong temptation for the French peasant-proprietors of those regions where the most famous wines are grown to use the “_taille haute_” (the form of pruning which removes less of the young shoots year by year and so produces a larger number of bunches of grapes) instead of the traditional “_taille basse_” (which leaves the minimum amount of new wood on the pollarded vine, thereby entailing many fewer bunches of grapes, but the highest, because the most concentrated, quality in the wine). The incentive to ignore this, perhaps the most sacrosanct of all the honourable traditions of vine-dressing—a tradition which may be compared to the enormity of shooting foxes in England—is particularly strong in the Côte d’Or, where the demand is always out of all proportion to the supply. Another temptation for the _vigneron_, especially in the less-renowned viticultural districts, is to grow an excess of what are called “_plants communs_.” Some, but not all, of these species are hybrid or ungrafted American vines (“_producteurs-directs_”), while others are the commonest but most prolific native vines (“_gros-producteurs_”) grafted on to Phylloxera-resisting “_portes-greffes_” as in the case of the fine vines which produce the finer wines. The _producteurs-directs_ have been planted in response to the insistent demand for more and cheaper wine that has arisen since the War.[1] They give an enormous return per hectare of a coarse, neutral sort of wine of a quality that can only be described as parlous, instead of the small yield of excellent wine furnished by one or other of the delicate “_plants nobles_,” or blue-blooded vines, which are the pride of, and often peculiar to, each particular district. At present the _producteurs-directs_, but not the _gros-producteurs_, are denied all right to a local name, or “_appellation d’origine_,” wherever they may be planted. Notwithstanding, their growers, now a considerable body, are redoubling their efforts to obtain this coveted privilege on the plea that the quality of these wines is rapidly improving; and they may ultimately succeed for political reasons.

The world wants more and more wine, and always of the kinds it thinks the best. The vineyards of Bordeaux, Burgundy and the Rhine are already producing all but their maximum yield. Already, too, many plots of ground in these famous regions are under vines which, from the nature of their soil, their altitude or exposure, ought never to have been planted with them. The temptation to indulge in over-production is continually increasing. The average wine-drinker persists in asking for about ten names among wines, and will not look at anything else, however excellent and reasonable in price, because Mr Everyman has no longer much individual palate, and will not trust such as he has, but buys imitatively and gregariously as he buys most other things. There is not enough of these particular wines to go round; indeed there has not been enough for some decades past. Unfortunately, the public prefers to be bamboozled rather than have to exercise its own discrimination in choosing from amongst the immense variety of other growths, many of them admirable and a few superb, which the earth has to offer in addition to Bordeaux, Burgundy, Chablis, Sauternes, White Graves, Hock and Moselle among natural wines, and Port, Sherry and Madeira among fortified ones. In England we have grown so accustomed to cynical impertinences with “appellation of origin” that we are neither shocked nor surprised that bacon can be sold called “Danish Wiltshire,” or that Canadian soft-soap should be described in commerce as “Cheddar Cheese.” Thus we have no idea what indignation and contempt such titles as “Australian Burgundy,” “Algerian Chablis,” “Spanish Graves,” “South African Hock,” or the now happily defunct “Californian Moselle,” excite among Frenchmen and Germans, for whom these preposterous and fraudulent titles are the taking of sacred names in vain. The following verses, taken from the ballad of Raoul Ponchon, called “_Bourgogne d’Australie_,” which used to be popular in purely French cabarets—anyhow until the Australians showed their magnificent qualities as attacking troops by the side of their French brothers-in-arms—is a typical example of the burning resentment felt by the whole French people at what is to them an act of the most cynical piracy, almost the theft of an historic part of their national patrimony.

“_Vous êtes par trop rigolos,_ _Australiens immenses!_ _Mettez bien dans vos ciboulots_ _Où règnent les démences,_

_Qu’il n’est d’autre vin bourguignon_ _—Croyez-en un ivrogne—_ _Que celui que nous bourgognons_ _Aux coteaux de Bourgogne._

_Et la Bourgogne, elle est ici,_ _Et non en Australie!_

...

_Il faut avoir un fier toupet_ _Pour mettre une étiquette_ _Semblable à votre vin suspect,_ _Véritable piquette!_[2]

_Il n’est, chez nous, maigre pinard,_[3] _Qui ne soit cent fois brave_ _Comme le vin le plus gaillard_ _De vos meilleures caves._

_Vous planteriez, ô Melbournois!_ _Sur vos coteaux barbares,_ _Les plus fins de nos ceps gaulois,_ _Nos Pinots[4] les plus rares,_

_En vain! Car à ces gaillards-là,_ _A ces vrais gentilshommes,_ _Il faut ce terroir de gala,_ _Dont, Dieu merci! nous sommes._”

The future of the purity and authenticity of wine—for though wine is far better made to-day than it was fifty years ago, thanks chiefly to Pasteur, it is also far more skilfully doctored—is wrapped up in the question of how far it may be possible to afford as adequate legal protection for recognised territorial appellations of origin outside, as already exists inside, the frontiers of those states in which they are found. If an imitation “Burgundy,” say Australian, really resembled true Burgundy, which it does not because it cannot, there would, perhaps, be less cause to deny its right to a stolen title. The same excuse might be proffered, though with an even smaller show of logic, if, apart from any question of resemblance, it was of an equal, or merely comparable, quality.

The problem of to what extent the wines of other countries can be improved, above all in keeping qualities, without sacrificing their own individual characteristics, so as to make it possible to mention them in the same breath as the more famous growths of France and Germany, is an arduous, but, in the long run, not necessarily an insuperable one. Every year we are learning more about the natural history of the vine and the chemistry of wine.

It is useless for the wines of other countries to seek to imitate the essential flavours and other peculiarities of the most famous French and German wines to which they may most nearly approximate in colour or alcoholic strength as it would be for these French and German wines to seek to imitate their imitators. In the case of the commoner fortified wines of Portugal and Spain imitation of a kind is not altogether impossible owing to the very nature of their preparation by brandying the only partially fermented must. The imitation of one wine by another, it cannot be too strongly emphasised, is impossible by natural means. Though every red and white natural wine has something in common with all other natural red and white wines, no two growths ever really resemble each other, and rarely two vintages of one and the same growth.