The wines of these glorious days having, it is but too apparent, followed the fate of the poetry, rhetoric, sculpture, and architecture of those who consumed them in commendable quantity, and with blameless gusto-the semi-barbarous possessors of the European soil were constrained to make the best of it they could. They gradually, as the Scotch philosophers say, would improve in the manufacture; and, by the time of Charlemagne, and our own immortal Alfred, it appears not unlikely that a consideraable portion of really excellent wines existed in the Western hemisphere. The monks were the great promoters of the science:- Successively spreading themselves from Italy to the remotest regions of Europe, these sacred swarms carried with them, wherever they went, the relish which their juvenile lips had imbibed for something stronger than mead, and more tasty than beer. Wherever the plant would grow, it was reared beneath their fatherly hands, and to them, as Dr. Henderson has most convincingly manifested, the primest vineyards of the Bordelais, the Lyonnais, and the Rhinegau, owe their origin. Unsanctified fingers, it is, alas! true, now gather the roseate clusters of the hermitaGE, yet the name still speaks-stat nominis umbra-and the memory of the Sçavants of the Cloister lingers in like manner in Clos-Vogeot, Clos-du-Tart, Clos St. Jean, Clos Morjot, and all the other compounds of that interesting family. -The Bacchus of modern mythology ought uniformly to sport the cucullus, "And I do think that I could drink With him that wears a hood." I have already hinted, that the taste of our own ancestors, in regard to wine, underwent many and very remarkable mutations: and this is precisely one of the subjects which my jolly little Aberdonian M.D. has treated in a most felicitous manner. Claret became the standing liquor at the Restoration, and continued so until the abominable Methuen treaty gave those shameful advantages to the Portuguese growers, by which their pockets are to this hour enriched, and our stomachs crucified. Since the peace, however, a visible increase in the consumption of French wine has taken place; and it may at this day be safely stated, that the man, generally speaking, who sported good port in 1812, sports good claret in 1824. Still a fine field remains for the patriotic exertions of Canning, Huskisson, and Robinson. And if any body, out of a shovel-hat, drinks port habitually in 1834, these statesmen will have done less for their native land than I at present auspicate, from the known liberality, good taste, &c. &c. &c. by which they are, one and all of them, so egregiously distinguished. Let no filthy, dirty notions of conciliation condemn much longer the guts of the middle orders—the real strength of the nation-to be deluged diurnally with the hot and corrosive liquor of Portugal-the produce of grapes grown by slaves and corrupted by knaves-while, by a slight alteration of the British code, every rector, vicar, and smallish-landed proprietor in England, might easily be enabled to paint his nose of a more delicate ruby, by cultivating an affectionate and familiar intimacy with the blood of the Bordelais. But enough of all this. It is a truly distressing thing to me, and I am sure every right-feeling mind will go along with me in what I say, to observe the awful ignorance which most men make manifest whenever the different branches of oinological science happen to be tabled in the common course of Christian conversation. I speak of men in other respects estimable. I allow the full meed of applause to their virtues, personal, domestic, civic, and political;-but is it, or is it not, the fact, that they scarcely seem to be aware of the difference between Lafitte and Latour?-while, as for being in a condition to distinguish Johannisberg from Steinwein, or Hockheimer from Rudesheimer-the very idea of it is ridiculous. I earnestly recommend to those who are sensible of their own culpable deficiencies in these branches of information, or rather indeed I should say, of common education, to remain no longer in their present Cimmerianism; and the plan I would humbly propose for their adoption is a very simple one. Buy this work of Dr. Henderson's, and do not read through, but drink through it. Make it your business, after coming to the page at which he commences his discussion of the wines now in daily use among the well-bred classes of the community,-make it your business to taste, deliberately and carefully, at least one genuine sample of each wine the doctor mentions. Go through a regular course of claret and burgundy in particular. Lay the foundations of a real thorough-knowledge of the Rhine-wines. Make yourself intimately acquainted with the different flavours of the dry wines of Dauphiny and the sweet wines of Languedoc. Get home some genuine unadulterated Alto Douro, and compare that diligently and closely with the stuff which they sell you under the name of port. Compare the real Sercial which has been at China, with the ordinary truck or barter Madeira, and let the everyday Sherry be brought into immediate contact with the genuine vino catholico of Xeres. Study this with unremitting attention and sedulity for a few years, and depend upon it, that, at the end of your apprenticeship, you will look back with feelings, not of contempt merely, but of horror and disgust, upon the state in which you have so long suffered many of your noblest powers and faculties to slumber, or at least to doze. I cannot sufficiently expatiate upon the absolute necessity of this in the course of a periodical paper, such as the present. Let it be impressed upon your minds-let it be instilled into your children—that he who drinks beer, ought to understand beer, and that he who quaffs the generous juice of the grape, ought to be skilled in its various qualities and properties. That man is despicable who, pretending to sport vin de Bourdeaux, gives you, under the absurd denomination of claret, a base mixture of what may be called Medoc smallbeer, and Palus, and Stum wine, and Alicant, and Benicarlo, and perhaps Hermitage, if not brandy-poison, for which he pays, it is probable, three shillings a-bottle more than he would do if he placed upon his board in its stead the genuine uncontaminated liquid ruby of the Bordelais. I want words to express my contempt for him whose highly powdered and white-waistcoated butler puts down vin de Fimes, that is to say, the worst white Champagne, stained with elderberries and cream of tartar, when the call is for Clos St. Thiery, or Ay--wines tinged with the roseate hues of sunset by the direct influence of Phœbus. If you cannot afford claret, give port; if you cannot afford port, give beer-The only indispensable rules are two in number: Give the article you profess to give, genuine, pure, and excellent; and give it freely, liberally, in full overflowing abundance and profusion. Farewell, for the present, to the great historian of Wine. I seriously, and to the exclusion of all puffery and balaam, consider his book as an honour to him—to Aberdeen, which nursed his - youth-to Edinburgh, which gave him his well-merited degree and to London, which has enjoyed the countenance of his manhood-and as a great gift to the public at large, destined, I fondly hope, to profit widely and deeply by the diffusion of his udious labours. Two centuries ago, Lord Bacon declared that a good history of wine was among the grand desiderata of literature: Such it has ever since continued to be; but proud and consolatory is the reflection, that we are the contemporaries of a Henderson, and that such it can never again be esteemed, unless, indeed, some awful world-shaking revolution shall peradventure pass once more over the races of mankind, and bury the bright and buoyant splendours of Champagne, the balmy glutinous mellow glories of Burgundy, the elastic never-cloying luxury of Claret, the pungent blessedness of Hock, and the rich racy smack of the mother of Sherry, beneath the same dark and impenetrable shades which now invest the favourite beverages of the prima virorum. "The Massic, Setine, and renowned Falerne." It will strike every one as odd, that I should have gone through an article of this length without once alluding to the very existence of-PUNCH. Reader, the fault is not Dr. Henderson's no, nor is it mine. The fact is, that punch-drinking and wine-drinking are two entirely different sciences, and that while, in regard to the latter, Dr. Henderson has written a book, and I a review of it in Blackwood, it seems by no manner of means improbable that, as touching the other, we may be destined to exchange these rôles-I to compose the history of that most imperial of all fluids,* and he, if it so pleases him, to comment upon my labours in the pages of * "My Grandmother's review-the British." Maginn's history of Whiskey-punch-"the most imperial of all fluids”never went farther than this announcement.-M. My work will probably be rather a shorter one than the Doctor's. Say what we will about the other arts and sciences, it must at least be admitted that there are three things whereon, and appropriately, the moderns do most illustriously vaunt themselves, and whereof the godlike men of Old were utterly ignorant and inexperienced. I allude to gunpowder, the press, and the punchbowl, the three best and most efficient instruments, in so far as my limited faculties enable me to form an opinion, for the destruction of the three worst and most disgusting of our annoyances in this sublunary sphere-I mean Duns-Whigsand Blue Devils: Wishing to which trio every thing that is their due, and every thing that is stomachic, invigorative, stimulant, and delightful to yourself, I remain, dear Mr. North, your humble and obliged servant, and affectionate friend, Eltrive Lake, July 4th, 1824. M. ODOHERTY. Parody on Wordsworth.* My heart leaps up when I behold A bailiff in the street: 'Twas so since from one first I ran; A trap is hateful to a man! And my whole course in life shall be Bent against them in just antipathy! * This, given as an Extract from "Poems of the Apprehension," appeared in the Literary Gazette.-M. |