Part 4

Thus it is all the more discouraging and humiliating to find that, according to the “_Times_ Trade Supplement,” the British Empire Producers’ Organisation counsels Empire wine-growers “to give more study to questions of bottles and labels, using accepted shapes and designs _and leaving alone certificates of purity_.” The circular which recommends the expedient of putting new wine into old bottles, a practice recognised as disastrous even in biblical days, closes with the extraordinary statement that “Empire wines are sounder than most foreign wines at similar price, and are only prejudiced by devices (perhaps just the absence of these superfluous certificates of purity?) not usually associated with good wines.” This advice does scant justice to the commercial probity and intelligence of a nation of shopkeepers. It is clear that the very reverse is desirable. Empire Wines should evolve their own shapes of bottles and designs for their labels, just as much as they ought to develop their own individual flavours and other inherent characteristics, to say nothing of discovering their own names. Several of the smaller French growths (notably Anjou and Frontignan), which have recently experienced some difficulty in disposing of their wines remuneratively, have adopted individual types of bottle, and find this policy promotes interest on the part of the public and undoubtedly helps to increase their sales.

If Britons do not have a little more proper pride in their own husbandry, “Empire Produce” will soon come to have something of the purely imitative significance formerly associated with that familiar hall-mark for cheapness and shoddiness: “Made in Germany.” German wines, however, are neither of these _péjoratif_ things, for in German vineyards, which are far from extensive, quantity has always been subordinated to quality. The result is that the yield is very small indeed, while growths like Steinberger and Schloss Johannisberger fetch prices more than double those of the finest French wines, white as red, which are in no wise inferior to them. The reason once again is that German wines do not imitate any others and are content to be unique of their kind. The very considerable difference in price, fine vintage for fine vintage, prevailing between them and the choicest French growths is in ratio to the much larger production of the latter. The royal road to an enhanced quality in Empire Wines is in imitating the painstaking methods and local pride of French and German wine-growers instead of aping the names of their inimitable wines. Empire Wines, even if they are only ordinary beverage wines, must dare to be themselves and brave the risk of standing on their own merits and being sold under their own, and nothing but their own, names. The industry of no nation can take the same pride in slavishly copying the wares of another country as in developing the particular indigenous excellencies of its own. Less than a century ago the Cape produced one wine which became world-famous. That Constantia has disappeared from the tables of European epicures need occasion no surprise. The reason was a simple one. The demand for this wine, which became as fashionable as Madeira, soon exceeded the supply. Constantia was grown in a single vineyard. Increasing popularity led to over-production of its vines, and the growing of much spurious “Constantia,” that was really bad imitation Port, from hastily planted and badly tended vineyards in the surrounding countryside. To-day Constantia, like the Maronean and Pramnian of the Classics, is no more than a memory, though the vineyard still survives and produces, I believe, a “Constantia Claret” (it might have been yet another “Burgundy” but for the irresistible appeal of alliteration) in its stead. The moral is a clear one. Constantia, a fortified red wine, was sold as Constantia and not as Cape “Port,” or Cape “Alicant.” True, it was often referred to as “Cape Constantia,” but this was evidence not of a specious fraud but of a certain local pride in its unusual origin, since no European wine existed of the same name.

The vine has now been acclimatised in South Africa for nearly three hundred years, thus giving the older vineyards time to work out some of that virgin rankness of soil which is a serious handicap to the attainment of fine quality. What South African and Australian viticulture most needs are poorer and more worn soils, more carefully chosen exposures and altitudes for vineyards; and sterner pruning of the vines so as to ensure a far smaller yield per acre.

LEGISLATIVE RESTRICTIONS ON THE SALE OF WINES AND SPIRITS

Wine-drinkers are nearly always temperate in their opinions. That is why they are not “Temperance” advocates, the word having become debased into meaning the most intolerant teetotalism and the vilification of that essentially temperate beverage wine. Wine-drinkers, as temperate persons, are as much opposed to alcoholism as to teetotalism. Teetotalers, as intemperate fanatics, are opposed not so much to alcoholism as to alcohol itself—and their dour Puritan hearts are virtuously indignant that those who like it should continue to enjoy the liberty of drinking it. Wine-drinkers do not drink between meals, which is one of the first rules of health. They drink at their meals, just as teetotalers, who are every whit as thirsty as inveterate beer-drinkers, quaff their gaseous dill-waters at all sorts of times and in all sorts of places—preferably opposite ancient ruins: perhaps because they suggest to them the inexorable decline and fall of the brewing barons and the imminent decay of the fortunes of distillery magnates. To own a cellar of one’s own is to be independent of vexatious curtailments of drinking hours. Just and proper as these restrictions are in theory, at all events until human nature can be relied upon to resist obviously harmful temptations more stoically than hitherto, they inevitably penalise those whose time is not their own. A poor man, however, cannot afford a cellar, which is supposed to imply a degree of affluence that is far from being borne out by the actual cost of laying down a few moderately good and varied bins. It is the wine-merchant who keeps up the idea that a cellar is an expensive luxury, because it is far more profitable for him to sell his customers fully matured wine than to encourage them to buy the same wine from him as soon as bottled and let it mature for nothing in their own cellars. When the interests of true temperance prevail in Parliament, light natural wines will be taxed so lightly that anyone who could afford to order a dozen bottles of Bass or Guinness at a time from the grocer’s could afford to stock a modest cellar. Spirits, on the other hand, will be taxed still more highly, and fortified wines proportionately to the added spirit they contain. The heavier incidence of duty on sparkling wines is not likely to be removed, because there is no valid reason why it should be. The consumption of sparkling wines, as we have already seen, needs to be discouraged in the higher interests of natural wines. A proper purity standard for beer is not likely to be enforced as long as the public remains apathetic on the subject: that is to say until the time comes for the whole attitude of the state to the liquor question to be reviewed, not at the behest of a handful of teetotal fanatics, or the trade, but in response to the insistent demand of the consumer himself.

The question may be asked, “Should the sale of wines and spirits be a state monopoly, and is this likely to become general in the near future?” Leaving aside all academic arguments for and against socialism, the answer would seem to be, as in the case of railway ownership and operation, “It depends on the country concerned and the particular genius of that nation; its administrative efficiency and its attitude towards the state and state institutions.” It is, however, unthinkable that in the future any state will consent to abdicate that degree of control of the liquor trade and public health and order afforded by levying discriminatory duties on the consumption of spirits. Even in France Absinthe has had to be made illegal. In Sweden a compromise between state and commercial exploitation has been adopted. A single company, the _Aktiebolaget Vin och Spritcentralen_, farms the Government’s monopoly and hands over all surplus profits to the state after paying a small fixed dividend to its shareholders. This company also owns all the distilleries and wine-merchants’ shops in the country. It issues a sort of pass-book to consumers, showing the holder’s name, address, profession and taxation assessment and the number of bottles of wine and spirits he is entitled to monthly on this basis. This is certainly not socialism, for it substitutes the ratio of taxation for the doctrine of equality of opportunity; but if it denies the poor man the right to buy as much as the rich, it prevents the rich man buying as much as he likes, or devoting more than a certain percentage of his income to laying down a fine cellar of wine. Reminiscent of Food Control and Food Cards as these regulations sound, they seem to work well enough in practice. If a man may not himself import the sort of wines with which he would prefer to fill his cellar, the company, according to Mr Hedges Butler, gives him at very reasonable prices a choice of 862 varieties of wines and 263 of spirits and liqueurs: a much wider selection than the score of most prominent London wine-merchants stock between them. From a variety of causes, of which inertia and chronic conservatism are the principal, British wine-merchants, still nominally competitive with one another, are coming more and more to resemble a number of branches of one and the same company, offering their customers an ever smaller selection of stereotyped growths. The invariable answer to this criticism is “Few but choice,” which is liable to provoke a slightly incredulous smile. “Few but choice,” faithfully echo the licensed grocers and the restaurants. The most prominent wine-merchant in Regent Street displays a wine-list so brief that it could be put to shame by any French provincial _épicerie_. Indeed British vintners of the present day seem to have taken as their device Sancho Panza’s words, “I come from my vineyard and know nothing”—except that very few of them have ever seen a vineyard or a wine-press. The public must be educated in wine, if its sale is to increase; a greater sale implies greater variety and cheapness and better average quality. Our prosperous wine-merchants, supinely content in the main to make quick and easy profits by the sale of proprietary brands of Port and Champagne, are much too easy-going to give themselves the trouble of undertaking any more intelligent propaganda than editing crude circulars extolling those “very nice wines—not _too_ dry” at bankrupt stock prices (“cost double”), the curious style of which is so unchanging as to seem traditional. In fact in nine cases out of ten they no longer know enough about the commodity they deal in to be able to do more than sell bottles containing it, much as a barman replenishes beer-mugs at the tap. There is an urgent need of a better-educated and more enterprising generation of wine-merchants, knowing their honourable profession at least as well as their grandfathers did. True, the last word in advertising wine was said many centuries ago. “Good wine (unlike the Monopoles and the sham “Hocks” and “Burgundies”) needs no bush”; but this presupposes that good wine should not be conspicuous by its absence.

Prohibition in Norway, which I believe actually antedates the celebrated Volstead Act, was expounded to me on the bridge of a collier hove to in a thick sea-fog off Copenhagen by one of the finest navigators, drunk or sober, but particularly drunk, that it has ever been my good fortune to encounter.

This Danish skipper gave me to understand (I cannot, of course, vouch for the accuracy of his information) that in the long night of the Norwegian winter there was absolutely nothing else to do but to take to theology or get drunk. When drunk, the Norwegian crofter or fisherman, however theological his bent, readily finds a second source of distraction in beating his wife. The women of Norway seem to have got tired of being beaten even before the outbreak of the War. When the War restricted fishing, they began to take counsel together. Reflecting that the Fiend Alcohol was at the root of all their troubles and the immediate cause of all their bruises, they decided that he must be exorcised in due legal form. To bring this about all that was necessary was the power and exercise of the vote. The granting of the suffrage to women does not appear to have aroused any sort of opposition in a “progressive” country like Norway, and the right seems no sooner to have been demanded than accorded. Once Norwegian womanhood was armed with the franchise, the first measure insisted on was that imposing Prohibition on Norwegian manhood. Their husbands do not seem to have been aware of the danger, or perhaps they were encouraged to get rather exceptionally drunk during the week devoted to a plebiscite on this purely feminine issue. Alas, the plight of these energetic and resourceful Viking ladies, once their husbands were deprived of Aqavit, was in no wise ameliorated; their last state was decidedly worse than their first! Having now no earthly distraction whatever, their husbands beat them from morning to night, and, being involuntarily sober, very much more efficiently than they had ever done before. Thereupon the united voice of the Norse women clamoured for the abrogation of Prohibition even as they had but recently clamoured for its ratification. Once again they had their way, and the country returned peaceably to the _status quo ante_ of a moderate degree of drunkenness and a moderate, because quasi-inebriated, prevalence of wife-beating.

At this point the skipper’s account left off, and we may perhaps supplement his graphic statement by some rather colder data. However much bruised Norwegian women may have expressed the desire to see Prohibition abolished, the chief motive force in securing it was the economic pressure exercised by foreign countries. Norway is neither an agricultural nor an industrial country. The nation lives on what statisticians are fond of calling “invisible exports”—in this case carrying other nations’ goods in its bottoms—and in exporting the produce of its fisheries, mostly in the form of dried split-cod, known variously as _Stokfisk_, _Morue_ and _Bacalão_. This is shipped in enormous quantities to Roman Catholic countries for Fridays’ dinners. Now, split-cod, though a foodstuff, is not a prime necessity of life, like corn and meat, and the countries that buy it find no difficulty in putting an embargo on it at need. Also Norway is a small and pacific, and therefore impotent, nation, which can be defied or penalised with impunity, not a great power backed by a large fleet and the power of manipulating higher finance. For the sake of its shipping and the export of its _Stokfisk_, Norway was forced in 1921 to accept an annual contingent of 4,000 hectolitres of French wine, 5,000 of Spanish and 8,500 of Portuguese: or a total of some 385,000 gallons, a very considerable amount for a poor country of well under three million inhabitants. Thus Norway is now wetter than ever. A state _Vin Monopolet_ conducts the liquor trade and distils corn-brandy. Wine may be freely bought, but spirits can only be obtained at a chemist’s shop on a doctor’s prescription: a regulation the enforcement of which used in former days to coincide with an alarming increase in such maladies as snake-bite, anæmia, vertigo, melancholia, personal bereavement, bankruptcy, religious mania, debility and old age in certain “dry” states of the American Union.

At present our bejazzed manhood cannot summon to its aid enough of our old Viking virility to countenance wife-beating in any form, even when the chastisement is clearly justified. But when our masterful womenkind seek to impose Prohibition on us, who knows but that the long-suffering worm may not turn at last? Perhaps the experience of a short term of this ban might be the cause of curing half our domestic troubles.

Much the same sort of system of placing few or no restrictions on the sale of wine, and investing the purchase of spirits with considerable formalities, has been adopted by certain Canadian provinces. In Quebec, possibly as a legacy of French blood, the sale of wine vastly exceeds that of spirits, in spite of a continuous invasion of this hospitable territory by thirst-maddened tourists from the freest of all countries at its gates. In Belgium, too, there are restrictions on the sale of spirits, liqueurs and _apéritifs_, but none on that of beer and wine.

The vicissitudes of Norway lead us to the consideration of modern international commercial treaties in their relation to wine. The old trade agreements between nations in pre-war days were usually rather amateur, almost altruistic, affairs. The industrial struggle for existence had not, as then, become acute, because there were more rich and fewer poor states in the relatively happy family of the nations. To-day quotas, contingents and categories of goods are carefully scheduled and obstinately bargained for, each high contracting party putting forward its irreducible demands, together with certain other claims advanced as camouflage, which are quietly abandoned once the acceptance of the former is conceded. Germany produces fine white wines and but little red. Her new commercial treaty with France, now being negotiated, stipulates, within the agreed annual contingent of French wine which she agrees to accept, for a minimum of white and a maximum of red. But this is not all. Germany was a pioneer in strict application of the doctrine of Appellation of Origin as applied to wine, and Bethmann-Hollweg’s _Reichsweingesetz_ of 1909 preceded similar legislation in any other country, with the possible exception of Hungary. Thus it is not surprising to find that Germany should insist on stringent _appellations d’origine_ for the French wines she pledges herself to buy. Going further still in this direction, the German Ministry of Commerce has divided the annual quota into fixed ratios between the several viticultural regions of France: not so much in proportion to their importance as in accordance with German domestic needs and tastes. It is left to the French Government to draw up a list of recognised _local_ appellations within each of these regions (that is to say the names of separate communes and smaller, but more famous, growths) and submit it to the approval of the competent German authorities before the treaty enters into vigour. The Belgian Government was the real precursor in this direction, for the recently concluded Belgo-French Commercial Treaty names over two hundred appellations of French wines, the authenticity of which is guaranteed by the French state, as being alone entitled to be admitted into Belgian territory. The only appellations of wine which enjoy protection under any commercial agreement concluded with this country are Port and Madeira. Wine sold as “Port” or “Madeira” in Great Britain and Northern Ireland must be the authentic produce of the Alto Douro or the Island of Madeira, fortified, as required by Portuguese law, to a given alcoholic strength: that is a “_vinho surdo_” or “_vinho muito_.” The first of these exclusive appellations is very distasteful to Australian manufacturers of sweet wines, who are anxious to call their more spirituous wares “Australian Port.” All other wines in this country are still very much what their vendors choose to label them. Fortunately nations are as imitative as persons. It is to be hoped, therefore, that when the time comes for the existing Anglo-French Commercial Treaty to be renewed—which is sure to entail long and pertinacious haggling on both sides on account of the recent French embargo on British coal—this state of affairs will be remedied in so far as French, or _soi-disant_ French, wines are concerned. This hope is not so naïve as it may sound. It will be as much in the interests of our negociators to see that the fixed minimum quota of French wines, which we shall probably have to agree to admit annually, shall be the best, instead of among the worst, of their kinds, as it will be in that of the French to stipulate that henceforward no wines sold in the United Kingdom as French shall be anything but French, and that they must correspond in the strictest territorial sense with the names printed on their labels. Thus, granted a reasonable degree of skill in our politicians and public officials, the further we deviate from Free Trade the better should be the quality of the goods we receive from other countries: an idea altogether too simple to have ruffled the brains of the Manchester School mandarins.

FASHION AND FEMINISM IN WINE