Chapter I: 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.

That large tracts of the earth’s surface are eminently suitable for viticulture, though still virginal of the vine, such as—excluding the British Empire for the moment—parts of central China and Morocco, and possibly Abyssinia and Arabia as well, to say nothing of those considerable regions of Asia Minor and the United States where it was formerly cultivated, there can be little doubt. Moreover, such countries as Southern Russia, the Balkan States, Greece, Persia, Japan and many of the South American republics are undoubtedly capable of a much larger production of wine than they actually grow. The trouble is that the vine, once planted in a strange land, takes many decades, if not centuries, before it begins to yield wine that has any real quality. A successful wine-growing industry cannot be created in much less than half a century. True, we are told by a certain Brother Benedictus in his “_Chronicques Vivaroises_,” as Mrs G. B. Stern reminds us, that the “_belle ordonnance de seps, pères de gros savoureux raisins_” on the famed Hill of Hermitage, the juice of which is “_une rosée paradisiaque_” rather than mere man-made wine, was planted, pruned and tended ready for the vintage in a single night by a host of ex-vigneron angels (for all vignerons, the worthy monk assures us, go straight to heaven, just as no single miscreant of the ungodly company of water-drinkers has ever passed St Peter’s scrutiny at the Golden Gate), so that the grapes were hanging ripe to bursting from these “_vignes séraphiques_” on the morrow, waiting only on the poor, Saracen-hunted hermit, perishing of thirst, to pluck and press them. What an impious irony of fate that Hermitage should be one of the slowest wines to mature! But this is, perhaps, rather an exceptional case even among legends concerning the origins of famous vineyards, most of which claim, with wearisome monotony, to have been planted by the pious legionaries of the benign Emperor Probus, by Charlemagne himself, or various unfamiliar though duly authenticated saints; and raised to fame in the inexhaustible goblets of the _Vert Galant_ or the immortal Rabelais. The vine thrives best and most luxuriantly and yields the largest, coarsest and most regular harvests in very hot, sub-tropical climates to which it is not indigenous and where it is often necessary to irrigate the vineyards. Only in comparatively cold regions, within measurable distance of the northern limit of the vine (an imaginary line passing approximately from Nantes, through Paris, Compiègne, Coblentz, Dresden, a little east of Prague, along the southern slopes of the Carpathians and to the north of the Crimea and Caucasia in Europe; bisecting Turkestan, Cashmere, the Chinese Province of Shantung and Central Japan in Asia; and running from south of Puget Sound, north of the Great Lakes and across part of Canada, to the Atlantic seaboard in the State of New York, on the American continent), and from soil long familiar with its roots, will the Vitis Vinifera yield a vintage of fine and delicate wine; and then only in very small quantities, with an infinity of painful labour, at great expense and seldom more than two or three times in a decade, if, indeed, so often. The world’s most classic vineyards are planted on poor, stoney soil, often on rugged slopes, little suitable for other forms of cultivation.

The world, then, is threatened with the extinction of the few hallowed acres of its very finest and most renowned vineyards within a measurable space of time by the ever-growing threat of over-production—the inclusion not only of just those additional adjacent rods, poles and perches which past generations in their probity and wisdom resolutely refused to annex to them; but also of whole square miles of outlying meadowlands, arable plain or bleak and insufficiently sheltered hill-tops beyond their immediate limits—no less than by a menacing invasion of baser and insufficiently acclimatised sub-species of the parent vine.

Other perils besetting the continuity of the finer wines are the spread of the so-called Type-Wines, in the form of standardised qualities for certain districts (a development that originated in California where wine used to be grown, as long as it could be grown at all, from vineyards vast as cattle-ranches, equipped with all the typically American resources of plant and capital for dealing with vintages on a Ford scale of output), which is being steadily fostered by wine-growers’ co-operatives in many parts of France, Italy and other wine-lands; and the wholesale manufacture by the large French wine-shippers of those vinous mixtures known as “_Monopoles_” and “_Marques Personnelles_.”

TYPE-WINES

The impulse that has called the Type-Wines into being was the necessity of finding some expedient that would enable the proprietors of the less famous growths of well-known regions to sell their wines remuneratively, which was becoming more and more difficult. There was also a strong desire on their part to profit by the recently established _appellations d’origine_ for even the most lowly and inferior wines grown within these areas, and the ambition to compete in foreign markets with the cheap wines of countries such as Algeria and Australia, that are all of them inevitably Type-Wines, sold as often as not under the titles of one or other of the most famous viticultural regions of France (_e.g._, Algerian “Chablis” and South Australian “Hermitage”). True, these descriptions would be illegal in France and those countries which, under recent commercial treaties, now admit yearly quotas of French wines and thereby assure the authenticity of their appellations; but in England the International Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, which nominally secures respect for these same appellations in all signatory states, seems to be a dead letter, if indeed it was not stillborn.

These Type-Wines, already familiar in France, are not easily explained without giving a concrete and somewhat detailed example. For many decades wines have been available in commerce which bore the names of one or other of the great sub-divisions of the Bordelais, such as St Estèphe, Pauillac or Margaux in the Médoc, and Graves, St Emilion and Pomerol as representatives of the other districts entitled to be sold as “Bordeaux.” It was notorious that these wines, which were not always genuine, differed enormously in quality according to the standing of the firms which selected them and the vintages to which they belonged: vintages that were often passed over in silence because the wines in question were a blend of two or more. Nevertheless, wines sold under these labels, that made no claim to have been grown on any territorially defined plot of ground within the borders of their several districts—a particular Château or Cru—represented the cheapest authentic, or putatively authentic, kinds of Bordeaux with which the general public was familiar. The Co-operative Movement among French wine-growers, which had started in the Midi, a region devoted to the production of cheap wines on a vast scale, without much pretension to quality, where it was decidedly beneficial to the interests of the growers and the public alike, eventually spread to certain of the less-known districts of the Bordelais. One of the latest recruits is the Commune of Margaux.

The Commune of Margaux, one of the two most famous in the Médoc, has for centuries been reputed for producing some of the very finest Bordeaux wines there are; its supreme glory being the First Growth of Château Margaux itself. In addition, the Commune boasts four Second Growths, four Third Growths, one Fourth Growth, about a dozen recognised superior Bourgeois and ordinary Bourgeois Growths and something like thirty _Crus Artisans_ and _Crus Paysans_, which represent the tail of the Bordelais hierarchy in point of reputation. There are besides some half-a-dozen large growths planted in _Palu_ soil (rich, alluvial clay) on the foreshore of the Gironde and on certain low-lying islands in the stream. Palus vineyards give a very much larger yield of appreciably coarser wines than those planted on the gravel soil further inland, which is geologically typical of the Médoc proper. In point of production the ten _Crus Classés_ of Margaux yield about 650 _tonneaux_[5] of wine a year, which is easily sold at high prices; the Superior Bourgeois, Bourgeois, Artisan and Peasant Growths account for another 550 between them, the best of which finds a fairly ready market in good years, but much of which has nearly always to be sold at unsatisfactory prices; while the Palus growths produce some 1,100, the sale of which, though prices are relatively low, is on the whole more remunerative because the vintage is much heavier and the cost of cultivation much less. Yet each of these growths, high as humble, every litre of the total average yield of 20,700 hectolitres, has an identical right to the common appellation of “Margaux.” Anyone who lives in the Commune of Margaux and has a strip of garden in which there is room to grow a row of a dozen vines of sorts, tended, perhaps, little and carelessly, can sell his wine as “Margaux” with the same legality as his neighbour who may cultivate a considerable and reputed vineyard in the most approved scientific manner.

Formerly the _Crus Bourgeois Supérieurs_ and the _Crus Bourgeois_ commanded a ready sale at prices not utterly disproportionate to those attained by the _Crus Classés_, while the ratio between the two orders of growths was nearly always the same, whatever the prices realised for the First Growths, which always set the tone of the market. Nowadays the public knows far less about wines, and a predominantly _parvenu_ generation wants to buy the best, and nothing but the best, and is guided almost entirely by names and labels and very little by vintages or careful tasting. Moreover there is no longer the same prejudice against consuming comparatively new wines in this hasty age, and, as a consequence, the laying down of wines that are slow to mature is the exception rather than the rule. The result is that it has become so difficult to sell some of the best and most ancient in fame of the _Crus Bourgeois_ at a reasonable profit—to say nothing of the _Crus Artisans et Paysans_—that vines are being grubbed up wholesale. It was to meet this state of affairs that a Co-operative Communal Cellar was founded in Margaux. The avowed object is to utilise all wines made in the territory of the commune, excepting only those that sell readily on their own names and merits, so as to produce year in and year out, irrespective of good or bad vintages because blended from both, a uniform wine with a flavour as typical of the best Margaux growths as the nature of a single composite mixture may allow. It is needless to say that such a Type-Wine “Margaux,” bearing full guarantees of territorial authenticity though it would, must be a hollow parody of a real wine, because it is a synthesis, a standardisation, of many, blended to the taste of the uncritical majority of the public. Should this experiment prove commercially successful, and the example of Margaux prevail, there would soon be an end to all individuality, to all those finer shades of years and growths that are the delight of the true wine-lover; and the ambition of Margaux and its emulators would be to produce an ever-greater quantity, trading on an ancient and no longer justifiable local renown for quality that was only attained in the past by a deliberate and consistent sacrifice of any idea of securing bumper vintages.

It is the rapid rise of the “_Monopoles_,” the very existence of which is an impious challenge to the fair name of wine, that has stimulated the wholesale vatting of these standardised regional growths.

MONOPOLES

The French word “_monopole_,” as applied to wines, really means a firm’s trade-mark, a proprietary brand: in fact very much the same sort of thing as the popular blends of Scotch Whisky advertised by the leading distillers. At present these Monopoles are chiefly confined to the Côte d’Or and the Bordelais, though specimens have already made their appearance in the lists of certain Beaujolais, Côtes du Rhône, Touraine and Anjou wine-merchants who specialise in these particular growths. To explain what these Monopoles really are—an authority of the eminence of M. Raymond Baudouin has not hesitated to stigmatise them as “pharmacy, but not wine”—the French law concerning appellations of origin, which the Monopoles have been devised to circumvent, must first be briefly examined. A wine may now no longer be sold under a territorial designation unless it is territorially entitled to its use: that is to say only when it has been grown exclusively within territory having an identical geographical (but not necessarily administrative) appellation, or within the area of such adjacent communes as may enjoy a recognised and long-established right to the better-known name of their neighbour. For instance, a red wine sold as “Pommard” in France must have been grown within the Commune of Pommard, Département de la Côte d’Or, and none other; a white wine sold as Pouilly (not to be confused with the white wine of Pouilly-sur-Loir from the common border of the Départements of the Cher and the Nièvre), which is the name of a tiny hamlet in the Mâconnais and not of any one commune, must have been grown either in the Commune of Solutré (in which this hamlet actually lies), the Commune of Fuissé, the Commune of Vergisson and a cadastrally delimited part of the Commune of Chaintré, in the Département of Saône-et-Loire, and nowhere else.

In the Côte d’Or there are two kinds of red vines: one the proud “_plant noble_,” called the Pinot of Pineau, which alone has made the wine of Burgundy the nectar that it is, that will grow in few places and then only on the lower slope—a niggardly beggar so delicate as to be prone to practically every malady that the vine is heir to; and the Gamay,[6] a “_plant commun_,” which will thrive anywhere, especially where the Pinot will not—a hardy vine that is a heavy bearer and causes little anxiety or expense to the vigneron.

As there is very little slope with the right exposure in each commune, it follows that there is a considerable extent of Gamay plantations, since the wine of the Gamay vineyards has just as much right to be sold as “Pommard,” if it is grown in that commune, as wine grown in the most famous of the historic “_climats_” which have been planted exclusively with Pinot vines since time immemorial. (In England, in so far as our “Pommard” ever comes from that Commune, or the Burgundy region at all, it is nearly always Gamay wine, French growers and shippers having long ago discovered that most English wine-drinkers, and many English wine-merchants, cannot distinguish it from a Pinot growth, though these respective flavours, once they become familiar, are as dissimilar as chalk and cheese.) An amendment to the _Loi des Appellations d’Origine_, called the _Amendment Capus_ after the name of the Senator who introduced it, is now before the French Chambers, the object of which, should it, as seems probable, be ratified, is to limit any given “_appellation d’origine_” ampelographically as well as territorially: that is, to confine it to wines grown from those auguster vines that are historically as much an integral part of the wine itself as the traditional area of ground and the geological nature of the soil it has always been grown on. The first important effect of this amendment to the existing state of the law would be that Gamay wines grown in Côte d’Or communes would no longer be entitled to any local appellation of origin (such as “Pommard”), unless it were the generic name “Bourgogne,” the lowest, because the most general, qualification of all for any Burgundy, red or white. A given wine, enjoying the right to a special secondary appellation, can always be made to descend the scale from the particular to the general in bad years, or for any other cause that may have marred its quality; but a wine can never be promoted to a higher category than that in which it was born and bred. A simple instance for exemplifying this point is afforded by the official grouping in the Beaujolais. The local appellations of origin here recognised as “_pouvant revendiquer les usages loyaux, locaux et constants_,” are Moulin-à-Vent, Fleurie, Morgon, Juliénas, Brouilly, Thorins, and Chénas. Now none of these wines can under any circumstances appropriate to itself the name of one of its fellows. Chénas may not style itself Moulin-à-Vent; nor, for that matter, though there is no sort of temptation to do so, may Moulin-à-Vent style itself Chénas. Yet all are Beaujolais and “Beaujolais” is the common name to which every other wine grown in that region has an equal right. Thus any of these seven “named” wines may call itself simply “Beaujolais,” and being a Beaujolais has a clear title to the seemingly magnificent, but in reality exceedingly common and unassuming, patronymic of “Bourgogne.” There is only one Mackintosh of Mackintosh, but Andrew Mackintosh, gillie to THE Mackintosh, is as much a “Mackintosh” as the exalted Chief of the Clan.

None the less any wine-merchant has the right to sell a wine, or blend of wines, French or foreign, called by some fantastic name, or whatever title of his own invention he chooses to employ, provided it is not identical with an existing appellation of origin. More often than not the bottler selects a name nicely calculated to seem a genuine territorial appellation to the unwary, such as Château This or Clos That, Roc d’Or or Monvalloir; or, keeping within the law, slightly adapts the spelling of some classic growth with fraudulent intent: Romani for Romanée, etc. Several of the more important Bordeaux and Beaune firms sell Monopoles purely on the strength of their own names and previous reputations as Chose’s Blue and Green Labels, or Red and Yellow Capsules, much as English grocers sell different qualities of well-known brands of tea. Where Saints’ names are invoked because of their prevalence in Bordelais communes, the wines they consecrate are no more catholic for the doubtful compliment of a spurious, or impersonated, canonisation. Certainly good St Vincent would have none of these imposters either as brother saints or tipplers.

According to M. Raymond Baudouin, a typical recipe adopted by the Côte d’Or alchemists is

25% genuine Côte d’Or Burgundy for flavouring.

30% good Côtes du Rhône wine to eke out this flavouring.

20% ordinary Algerian wine to reduce the cost.

25% natural wine (_i.e._, wine with no special flavour or other
salient characteristic) to drown the taste of the hot Algerian
blending wine and still further reduce the cost of production.

The Bordeaux houses are said to employ

25% genuine Bordeaux.

30% good Midi wine.

20% ordinary Algerian wine.

25% neutral wine.

It is perhaps hardly necessary to add that these formulas are only approximate, and that the actual ingredients of each Monopole vary in nature and ratio with the firm of wine-cooks concerned. Indeed, there are some Côte d’Or houses which claim that their Monopoles are blended exclusively from pure, territorially genuine, Burgundies: a claim which, whether justifiable or not in fact, is best rejected on principle, because there is seldom any inducement to blend a wine good enough to be sold unblended.

A widely organised conspiracy now exists to foist these vinous compounds, which may conceivably be wine and even French wine, but are certainly neither Bordeaux nor Burgundy according to any legal or loyal interpretation of those terms, on purchasers of single bottles and diners at restaurants because they yield much bigger profits than ordinary wines. Thanks to our national ignorance of wines, Monopole brands of White Graves (one boasts that it is supplied to the House of Lords), and other so-called “Oyster-Wines,” have already gained a certain footing on the English market because they are supposed to offer “more regular and uniform quality” than wines bearing straightforward territorial designations, together with a sustained standard of flavour, independent of vintage vagaries: a thing which it is simplicity itself to produce once “_coupage_,” or scientific blending, is resorted to. In the Côte d’Or, where the demand for authentic Côte de Nuits and Côte de Beaune Burgundies is anything up to five times as much as can be genuinely produced, while bad vintages are much more frequent than good, the evil of the “_Marques Personnelles_” has made such rapid progress that already more Monopole wines than territorial growths are sold and the integrity of the sacred name of Burgundy is definitely compromised. Many of these mixtures are quite agreeable to drink, provided always that they are taken for what they really are and not for what they pretend to be, but to offer them to one’s friends is an unpardonable insult, however merited the insult may sometimes be. The proper sphere for these beverages—if, indeed, they can be said to have any proper sphere other than the hoodwinking of the credulous and ignorant for whom they are lavishly and alluringly labelled in regulation Burgundy and Bordeaux bottles—is for splashing down a hustled and jolted meal in a dining-car. A Monopole may be defined as the _Train Bleu_ wine par excellence, since it can always be relied upon to be none the worse for the most violent shaking before taking.

A word of caution is, however, necessary because in French commercial usage this dangerous word “_monopole_” can have two very different interpretations. The first, which is infinitely the more common, as we have just seen, applies to blended wines sold as proprietary brands under the euphemism which the law requires to be printed in the wine-merchant’s price-list but not on the label of the bottle: “_exclusif de toute considération d’origine et de cépage_” (_cépage_ means in this context the types of vine traditionally associated with particular growths of wine). The second, and entirely respectable sense, which the same term may have, is in the case where a certain firm may own or lease the whole of a particular vineyard and can thus claim that it possesses a “monopoly” of its wine. An outstanding instance is provided by Romanée-Conti of Vosne, perhaps the most famous vineyard in the whole world, which is “_Monopole de la Maison De Villaine et Cambon_” for the very good and sufficient reason that this old and honourable firm owns the freehold of the hallowed hectare and a half and bottles every drop of its priceless wine in its own cellars.

Strictly speaking, Champagne (where the term originated and where it is still extensively used), practically all other sparkling wines and most Ports, Sherries, Madeiras and Marsalas are likewise Monopoles, because they are sold under the names of different makers—each separate shipper representing one or more proprietary brands—instead of under the names of particular vineyards or communes. In each of these cases, however, the blending formula, which has made the reputation and constitutes the most jealously guarded secret of each firm, relies wholly on wines enjoying co-equal local appellations. Every drop of Première Zone Champagne is territorially genuine “Champagne,” although as many as six separate communes, each with its own appellation of origin, may have contributed to its composition. The only way to avoid pitfalls is to know your Côte d’Or communes and “_climats_” and your Bordeaux districts, with their constituent communes and satellite _Crus_, _Clos_ and _Châteaux_ (the latter is almost the work of a lifetime), more or less by heart, and to apply the cold test of geography to every bottle you are invited to buy. Even then you have no real guarantee in England, for English wine-merchants seem to be able to label wines, or other vinous mixtures, with more or less any names that suit their fancies, and yet enjoy virtual immunity from prosecution, so long as they do not describe as “Port” or “Madeira” wines that were not originally shipped from Oporto and Funchal with the appropriate Portuguese Certificate of Origin.

ADULTERATION

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