Part 3

The increasing resources of sophistication in their various legal and illegal aspects keep pace with the progress of chemical research. Attempts to level up the irregular work of the sun by artificial means, so as to overcome the lack of any uniform degree of maturity in the grape, caused by the alternating clemency and inclemency of the vintage season, is becoming more and more common. The commonest form of adulteration is blending, whether of separate growths or vintages. To-day an unnamed, or vaguely named, wine, gives rise to the suspicion of being the former, just as an undated wine carries a strong presumption of being the latter. Happily the practice of indicating the vintages of wines has now become much more general, and is being adopted by countries, such as Italy, where the custom was formerly unknown. The consumer’s best safeguard against blended wine is an estate-bottled growth.[7] The use of chemical aids in wine-making is to some extent sanctioned by the law. In France wine may now be sugared (_chaptalisation_), sterilised (_pasteurisation_), fortified (_vinage_), watered (_mouillage_), plastered (_plâtrage_), muted (_mutage_) and, in the case of white wines, sulphured (_sulfitage_), within certain defined limits and subject of formal declaration. The illegal adulterants of wine have been too frequently catalogued to need any recapitulation. Synthetic scents and flavourings are always adding to their number, but it is doubtful whether any synthetic bouquet or taste will ever be able to deceive an experienced palate.

_Chaptalisation_ means supplying the percentage of natural grape-sugar which the most of wet or cold vintage years is deficient in by the same amount of cane or beet sugar. This added sugar is converted into alcohol at the same time, and in precisely the same way, as the natural sugar of the fruit; thanks to this addition the wine is assured of sufficient alcoholic body to keep, which might not otherwise be possible. Only experts can detect a _vin chaptalisé_ from an unsugared wine. This practice is fairly common in the northernmost vineyards, such as Champagne, the Côte d’Or and the Moselle. The German law permits sugaring in certain cases, but no sugared wine may be labelled “_Natur_,” or “_Naturrein_.” Chaptalisation saved the 1925 vintage in the Bordelais, where this expedient had hitherto been held up to execration as a typically Burgundian falsification. _Pasteurisation_ is resorted to so as to preserve young wines of poor vintages against attacks of wine-maladies after they have been bottled. It allows wine to be bottled almost as soon as made, and though it brings the wine well forward in the process, it arrests most of its subsequent natural development. _Vinage_ is simply, as in the case of Port, the brandying of sweet wines with extraneous spirit. _Mouillage_ is resorted to for reducing the alcoholic strength of common wines, which are taxed and priced at so much the alcoholic degree. _Plâtrage_ is the sprinkling of the grapes with plaster of paris while they are being pressed. It is supposed to be a safeguard against the danger of secondary, or acetous, fermentation in hot climates during the first summer following the vintage. _Mutage_ is a means of arresting fermentation chemically, so as to permit of one wine being blended with another before allowing a joint fermentation of the two to proceed to completion. _Sulfitage_ is used to preserve the bright golden colour of white wines, that are apt to turn brown when exposed to the air, and to prevent _vins liquoreux_, like Sauternes, alcoholising a certain degree of unconverted grape-sugar, or _liqueur_, which they are intended to retain. The old method of sulphuring was to smoke the empty casks with sulphur matches before filling them, which resulted in the fumes becoming amalgamated with the wine. The newer, and more dangerous, practice is to add a small percentage of suitably diluted Sulphur Dioxide. The French tolerance of this chemical is 450 parts per million: a proportion identical with that adopted under the new British regulations, which define this “improver” as the only extraneous substance that wine imported into the United Kingdom may contain.

PROSTITUTION

The outstanding example of the menace to the survival of wine in its natural form is the wholesale demand for what the French call the “_champagnisation_” of all kinds of wine, great and humble, good, bad and indifferent, red, white and _rosé_, quite irrespective of their suitability for gaseous treatment, which tends more and more to absorb choicer and rarer, rather than poorer and more abundant, qualities. This insatiable public appetite for effervescence ignores the amount of those surplus qualities that are available and, in certain cases, readily adaptable, for the purpose and so degrades fine still wines from their lawful sphere by constraining them to pop, froth and bubble in indignant and impotent protest instead of gurgling majestically into the glass of honour in a tranquil and limpid stream. Our spendthrift generation is convinced that the sparkling variety of any given wine must needs be its highest, because its costliest, expression. Even to-day, few growths have remained wholly immune to this vandalism, while the commercial pressure brought to bear on the few conscientious recalcitrants is increasing yearly. It would seem that in the United States, where the real meaning of simple words is even more often misunderstood than in England, wine, in common parlance, always implies a sparkling wine of sorts, whether genuine or spurious Champagne. The youth of Europe, hypnotised by jazz strains, convulsions and idioms, is doing its best to make the word have the same ignorantly exclusive and inglorious significance in lands that have spontaneously evolved their own languages and ancestral wassailing traditions. It is arguable whether sparkling wine is really wine at all. What admits of no sort of cavil is that its name needs qualifying by some such admonitory adjective so as to distinguish it from the natural wine from which it is, or purports to be, manufactured.

Happily there is yet no sign of a vogue in fortified “qualities” of famous natural wines, but with Port dearer and stronger than ever owing to the new schedule of wine-duties, there is no reason to be over-sanguine. Thanks to the spirited competition of Australian sweet wines, made possible by the considerable preference accorded to Empire wines in this country and an export bounty of 3s. to 4s. the gallon granted by the Commonwealth Government, Portugal and Spain are not likely to have a monopoly of this market for the future. Already, too, a home industry has sprung up for the manufacture of fortified “British Wines”—the unfermented must being imported from abroad in a muted state and “worked up” in this country into a liquid on which the courtesy title of “wine” has been bestowed. Mr Churchill, in the course of his speech on the Budget for 1927, tempered the unwelcome compliment of rendering these concoctions liable to duty by promising to taste them before that measure had the force of law. A less fearless man in his position might well have preferred to renounce the project of raising revenue from such an unpalatable source.

The transformation of various wines (Chablis, Vouvray, Anjou, Mercurey, Cap Corse, etc.) into “tonic wines” or _apéritifs_ (the different proprietary brands of Vermouth, French and Italian, together with the numerous “Quinas,” “Quinquinas,” “Kinas,” and the like, to say nothing of those combined with meat-extract sold by English apothecaries) by an admixture of quinine and other “appetising” herbs and “restorative” drugs, is another barbarism that is now assuming considerable proportions. This heinous practice is at all events of more respectable antiquity than “_champagnisation_,” having been familiar in classical times, with rather different but no more inviting ingredients, in the guise of “wine tempered by the nymphs.” As it is, Great Britain imports more Italian Vermouth than Italian wine. Non-alcoholic wine, or sterilised grape-juice, which is now prepared in France, Germany, Switzerland and the United States, is the most recent fad in the way of _Weinersatz_. It has been claimed that this emasculated beverage has considerable medicinal value. Doubtless it will soon be advertised in this country under some such slogan as “Take the Modish Grape-Cure of Meran at Merriest Margate (or in your own home) with Vincent’s Vitamined Verjuice.” These parodies of wine, it is hardly necessary to add, belong to the same school of “refreshing pick-me-ups” as Cydrax, Kop’s Ale, Herb-Beer, Kola Champagne, Raspberry Sherbet and other mineral-water and Soda-Fountain eruptions. The survival of these dismal and sickly tipples depends on the survival of the Teetotal Dogma which ordains the purging of the pride of the palate with one or other of these potable Puritan penitences.

MALADIES OF THE VINE

It is too often forgotten that the vinelands of Europe, and the majority of the Australian, North and South African vineyards planted with European vines, came within an ace of total destruction by those terrible scourges the Oidium (first noted in 1845) and the Phylloxera (which appeared in 1868), which devastated the viticultural world only a decade or two apart in the middle of the last century. Both came from America, and pious French vignerons see in Prohibition a divine visitation on a country so hardened in iniquity as to have wantonly disseminated, if not deliberately incubated, these frightful pestilences, in despair of ever equalling the quality of European wines. Of the two, the latter, because it was recurrent and seems to be endemic to the vine, was by far the more catastrophic. Chemical means, such as sulphur-spraying, were eventually devised for coping with the former, so that it could be, if not eradicated, at least held in check. The Phylloxera, on the other hand, for long defied the concerted efforts of the world’s most skilful chemists and agriculturists, traversing Europe from Portugal to the Crimea like a forest fire, and even passing mysteriously beyond the seas to infest the young vineyards of other continents. The havoc wrought was inestimable, particularly in France, where a million hectares of vineyards, which have never since been replanted, were swept out of existence. Indeed, when this murrain was at its zenith, there was for some time grave doubt whether the French peasantry could ever be induced to replant their perished vines. In the magnitude of its destructiveness and the swiftness and universality of its contagion, the Phylloxera can only be compared to the dreaded Pink Bol-Worm parasite of the cotton-plant. Ultimately salvation was found in wholesale replanting with grafted vines. The peculiarity of this pest was that it attacked the roots, but not the foliage, of the European vines, while the roots of the indigenous American species were as inured against its infection as their foliage was susceptible to it. Thus by grafting picked European vine-shoots on to suitable American vine-stocks, a hardy plant could be evolved, both roots and foliage of which were sufficiently resistent to the cryptogam. There are, of course, plenty of other blights and distempers that afflict the vine in greater or less degree according to the species concerned and the nature of the soil and climate it is grown in. The vigneron’s life is one unceasing round of watch and ward, toil and prayer. Not for a single week in the year can the smallest vineyard go untended. A new and more dreadful Phylloxera might appear at any moment, though the viticulturist is now much better equipped to resist fresh parasitic invasions.

A word may be said in connection with the maladies peculiar to the vine on the vexed question of the relative merits of the wines grown from grafted and ungrafted vines. It is usually claimed that the quality of the pre-phylloxera wines, grown from old French ungrafted vines, was infinitely superior to anything that the best grafted vines can ever hope to produce. This contention is not supported by the consensus of opinion among wine-growers and wine-merchants, though some make a reservation in favour of the old _vieilles souches_ Burgundies. The new vines show no “yellow streak.” They have acquired none of the primitive characteristics of native American vines, such as their foxy flavour, except their New-World vigour. The wines they yield mature more rapidly and are certainly, like the grafted vines themselves, shorter-lived, but they give an equal quality with a slightly larger yield per acre. Fifty or a hundred years hence it will be possible to pass a more definite and dispassionate judgment on this controversy. It should, however, be remembered that those who insistently decry all wines grown from grafted vines are generally old gentlemen who have already reached that age when, like the Señor d’Asumar, in “Gil Blas,” the peaches of their youth seem infinitely larger, juicier and more luscious than any that are grown to-day.

THE FUTURE OF EMPIRE WINES

During the South African War we were urged to think imperially. After the World War, the nation, in spite of saturation with American films, was considered to have pondered sufficiently in an imperial sense for the time to be ripe to ask it to eat, drink and clothe itself imperially as well. The dogma of Free Trade was definitely abandoned and several minor Empire preferences were offered us as grist for mental stimulus. To food for the mind we were exhorted to add food for the body, though the reverse process might have made a stronger appeal with a more logical nation, besides simplifying the necessary change in purchasing habits which had survived the outworn doctrines of Bright and Cobden who had been instrumental in moulding them.

To smoke and drink imperially is rather a different matter to eating and dressing imperially. Most of us would gladly smoke and drink what our fellow-Britons grow if the question of quality did not persist in intruding itself between the cup and the lip. Even when we are prepared to ignore this aspect of practical patriotism, imperial flattery of the palate has a way of forcing itself on our attention at the very first puff or sip. Nor are we always quite honest with ourselves when we make a resolution to eat, drink, smoke or dress imperially for the future, because on these occasions we often refrain from making an inventory of the mental reservations which, consciously or unconsciously, we bring to the list. Not even the most ardent patriot, until at least he loses his palate, can pretend that Borneo Cigars or Burmah Cheroots are superior to Havana Cigars and Manilla Cheroots. So it is with Empire Wines. Australian “Burgundy” and South African “Hock” could not pass muster for the French and German wines they so unblushingly pretend to be with the wine-waiter of the National Liberal Club.

It is an axiom in wine that quality can only be forthcoming in countries where viticulture depends primarily on the home market, and even then it is less often attained than otherwise. For all practical purposes there are only four provenances of Empire wines: South Africa, Australia, Palestine and Cyprus, which already produce more than they can readily dispose of, as only the first and last are in any real sense wine-drinking countries. A little wine is grown in Cashmere, Canada and Malta as well, but the quantity is negligible. From climatic and geological deductions it seems probable that vineyards could be successfully planted in parts of New Zealand, Kenya, Rhodesia and the middle slopes of the Himalayas, Ghats and Nilgherry Hills in India, but there is no potential demand for fresh sources of supply unless their produce is of a vastly superior quality to anything now grown on British soil. The Cyprian Commanderia wine of Paphos is historically one of the world’s most famous growths, but it is doubtful whether its peculiar flavour will ever make any strong appeal to the British palate. Little of the ordinary wine of the island is now exported to England, the bulk of such as is being absorbed by the manufacturers of a well-known brand of “Tonic Wine,” which is very popular with rigid teetotalers and connoisseurs of patent medicines. Quantitatively, there is little hope for Empire wines, even when protected by substantial preferential tariffs. Algerian common wines, to say nothing of the most ordinary French, Spanish and Italian growths, will always be cheaper and more abundant than any similar wines grown in Australia or the Cape, which have to pay far higher freight and are cultivated by vine-dressers that are far more highly paid. Even should the Algerian supply fail for any cause, and at present it is increasing steadily every year, larger and larger quantities of Argentine and Chilian wines are becoming available for export. Algerian wines are not particularly choice—they have only been cultivated for about sixty years—but some of them are superior to anything produced within the Empire. Moreover, except in England, they are sold under their local Algerian name as Médéa, Miliana, Mascara, and Coteaux de l’Harach, etc., and not as Algerian “Claret,” “Burgundy,” “Chablis,” “Graves,” and “Sauternes”; though our own wine-merchants, save when, as is not infrequent, they use them anonymously, do not hesitate to give them these absurd and mendacious titles.

All other Empire wines, with one or two honourable exceptions, such as the South African Riebeeck Kastel and the Australian Highercombe Amber, produce, on their own label avowals, nothing but self-styled imitations of the leading European wines, prefixed by the safeguarding qualification Australian, South African or Palestine, as the case may be, which reduces these fraudulent claims to nonsense. Even where local names are adopted, such as Schoongezicht, Paarl and Drakenstein, they are used to qualify the meaningless title “Hock.” It is a lie. The wines of these three districts—and they are about the best which the Empire has to offer—are, and always will be, nothing but Schoongezicht, Paarl and Drakenstein respectively. They are not, and cannot be, “Hocks,” even though grown from the choicest Rhenish Riesling vines, because Hock is a purely German wine to which the Rhineside town of Hochheim-am-Main has given its name. Hochheim is in the Regierungsbezirk Wiesbaden of Prussia, and not in the Cape Province of the Union of South Africa. Nearly all Australian, and a great many South African, red wines describe themselves as “Burgundies” (there are, to be sure, a few “Clarets” and “Hermitages” as well) and often perpetrate a further, and yet more laughable, contradiction in terms by claiming that they are grown from Cabernet or Malbec vines: classic French vines, it is true, but native to the Bordelais and not Burgundy, where their cultivation is quite unknown. Burgundy is the product of a certain type of vine grown from time immemorial on a particular kind of soil with a particular exposure, at a particular altitude, in a particular climate prevailing between a particular longitude and a particular latitude that coincide in eastern France: a concatenation of elements and circumstances which cannot possibly be reproduced in Australia, South Africa or anywhere else. Nor does “Burgundy,” as is sometimes supposed, denote a certain strength of red wine, a full-bodied growth, in contradistinction to “Claret” (which by the accident of a name, that should rightly be Bordeaux, is not the fraud it sounds, since “Claret” really means no more than a light-red wine) as a term used to imply a lighter-bodied and much less alcoholic type. The alcoholic contents of good Bordeaux and Burgundy, quality for quality, are usually more or less identical. The strength of wines is calculated in alcoholic degrees and not by appropriating names filched from certain representative growths. The essential vinous ethers of these spurious “Hocks” and “Burgundies,” scanty and not very subtle though they are, would, like the rose’s perfume, exhale bouquets just as bland under their own, or any other, names. If a single swallow does not of itself herald an English summer, all the Emus in the Commonwealth cannot transmute a South Australian vintage into the _Grande Année_ of a Côte d’Or _Tête de Cuvée_.

Even if it be true that vigorous and psychologically intelligent advertising can increase the sales of any article, irrespective of its worth or utility, this would scarcely seem to apply to that particular brand, notable among “Burgundies” which are “generous but not spirity, soft but not sugary” for being sold under the device “Every Meal a Banquet.” That slogan “Every Meal a Banquet” is nicely calculated to deter any normal person from buying this particular brand—and that without even tasting it. Banquets are usually heavy and singularly depressing functions which people like Lord-Lieutenants, princes of the blood, mayors, chairmen of companies, politicians, public officials and diplomats accept with a heavy heart, and only because such occasions are part of their regular duties. Secretly they dread these orgies of ceremonious and oratorical eating as a pernicious waste of time, nefarious to their digestions. Thus we surmise that a wine capable of transforming every meal, however simple, intimate and unpretentious, into that portentously aldermanic and dyspeptic thing, a banquet, must be singularly heavy and soporific in its effects.

If real quality in Empire Wines is to be attained at all, it can only be by abandoning the existing methods of mass-production of Type-Wines and deliberately fostering the particularisation of certain small, but promising, local growths. South Africa, where irrigation of the vineyards is not as common as in Australia—irrigation more than doubles the yield and more than halves the quality—has already made some progress in this direction. As has already been noticed, wines are grown in the Cape at certain localities called Schoongezicht, Paarl and Drakenstein, which we assume, just because they are named, are probably of far better quality than the unnamed South African growths. The Australian Type-Wines, on the other hand, are apparently not even regional specimens of their kind. The average consumer of flagon wines knows nothing whatever about them except that they are grown somewhere in a vast Dominion which is a continent in itself. Keystone, Tintara, Ophir and Harvest are registered trademarks, not places on the map.

That these Australian and South African masqueraders under French and German colours can be sold in Great Britain has been amply proved. In 1926 the consumption of Australian wines increased by over a million gallons. That their sale would fall away by nearly as much—drinking imperially is a habit that, to be abiding, requires some little time to form—were the preference and bounty removed there can be little doubt.

Palestine, the latest recruit to the wine-lands of the Empire, produces imitations—very bad imitations, too, though the wines to which these illustrious and illusory resemblances are attributed by their Zionist growers are, in their rough and humble way, sometimes quite passable wines—of all the classical growths of France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Hungary and Greece: everything, in fact, except an honest and avowedly Palestine wine _tel quel_. That some of these vineyards are now being turned over to the cultivation of table-grapes, or transformed into orange-groves, for lack of a market for their plagiarising wines, cannot be regretted as long as the Holy Land, of all regions of the earth, has not the proper pride to say of its first-fruits, “a poor thing, but mine own,” rather than “these are extremely fine reproductions, made purposely to resemble the best-known growths of other countries in all respects, and sold under their names at a very reasonable price.”