Chapter II: Part 2

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.”

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

The undying snob in man reveals himself as much in the choice of the wines he drinks as in the clothes he wears or the conversation he affects. Waves of fashion that depend on the praise or blame of someone in authority—a king, a beau, a singer, a sportsman, a politician or an actor—sweep in a wine and sweep it out again. Some have their brief spell and are no more seen; others return at almost fixed intervals like solar eclipses. Port we owe to anti-French bias and a long-forgotten political treaty concluded in the heat of this same rancour; but heavily reinforced Port will be with us till the threat of Prohibition assumes proportions menacing enough to make us confine ourselves to natural wines as the most logical defence against the misrepresentations of the teetotalers. Sherry, on the other hand, has been coming in and going out ever since its name was Sack. Madeira’s eclipse has a more rational explanation, for the quality of that wine has never recovered from the scourge of the Oidium, which all but exterminated its vineyards in the Fifties. The fate of Madeira was the ordinary fate of things that are out of sight. The vines of the island were not in normal bearing again till some decades afterwards, when the old John Company, the largest buyer of Madeira wines, had already ceased to exist. Claret and Burgundy, long eschewed as French growths and penalised by prohibitive duties to the profit of an ever more alcoholic Port, blossomed for us anew when Gladstone accomplished the revolutionary step of lowering the duties on light wines to a shilling the gallon in 1861. Hermitage has disappeared in England, as Arbois has in France. Hock and Moselle were patriotically, even, considering the absence of supply, a little ostentatiously, renounced during the War as Hunnish and unhallowed things—so much so, indeed, that our greatest living authority on wines passed them over in silence in a book, which is a classic, written during that period of passionate professorial denunciation of everything German. Yet long before Locarno they had returned in triumph to their old popularity in the Houses of Parliament, as advertising circulars were careful to inform us. Greek wines, like Byron’s verse, have had their day. Tokay, now a memory and almost no more made, was hallowed by the prefix “Imperial” and the knowledge that it was the gift, more precious than jewelled orders or honorary colonelcies, which kings exchanged in the family circle. Italian wines have lately enjoyed a good deal of popularity among artistic persons, explicable by the charm of a Chianti flask rather than by the average quality of its contents. Marsala, now usually despised as a cheap and common wine, should be dear to us always as a memory of Nelson. It is still piously esteemed in the Navy, where Rum has long since passed out of fashion. Balkan wines may yet enjoy a vogue if Ruritanian princesses prove as good business women as they are beautiful. Algerian and Tunisian wines we know well, but more often under Europeanised titles. The Anglo-Catholic and Jewish communities make much of Palestine wines, which have little but scriptural geography in their favour. Champagne, costliest of all wines in the popular imagination, has always held its own for this very reason. Just as Sherry, decade by decade, had to be paler or darker in colour and lighter or heavier in body, so Champagne, which began by being very sweet, has now become dry as a bone. Yet “dry” Champagne only dates from the Sixties. Sweet it may yet become again, as sweet as the Russians liked it, when women become sovereign arbiters of food and drink. A decade or two ago _Carte Anglaise_ was the most expensive and fashionable degree of “liqueuring” in Champagne. To-day it is _Drapeau Américain_ (why not “Volstead Bone-Dry Monopole”?) for the Dollar is at a premium over the Sovereign. Whisky, formerly an ostler’s dram in the Scottish Highlands, was introduced by golfers, with the hearty support of the medical profession, and became popular simultaneously with that now universal game. Irish Whisky, though extensively drunk, has, for some curious reason, never been fashionable. There are few brandy-drunkards to-day. Cognac seems to enjoy most esteem in England as a medicinal restorative. Gin was rescued from Mrs Gamp’s tea-pot by the sudden popularity during the War of those American barbarisms, cocktails: a popularity largely due to their requiring elaborate paraphernalia and the fact that they were illegal in their native land. Every millionairess who could boast a Diamond Sunburst, we were given to understand, had her own portable illicit still and a marble gin-fountain in her platinum-tapped bathroom. Liqueurs, chiefly because they are sweet and many-hued, have been steadily growing in favour with ladies ever since dining out in restaurants became an integral part of our national habits.

Let no man lull himself into a sense of false security by imagining that the day is still far distant when women will rule the cellar as well as rocking Baby—and the bottle—in the cradle. A book on wine which appeared last year addressed all its advice, as though this was the most natural thing in the world, to “the good hostess,” “the mistress of the house,” who in these days “can afford to smile” at Dr Middleton’s “ungracious behaviour” in defining her sex as “Creation’s glory, but anticlimax following a wine of a century old.” Another male supremacy lies low! Man is lord of the cobwebbed bins no more; the cellar-key, even as the ballot-paper, has been snatched from him by a stronger hand.

Now women’s real taste in wine is notoriously for such as are sweet. Fielding, who knew the sex better than most, and was far from ungallant, was not the first to remark on it. In one of his now forgotten plays, as Mr André Simon reminds us, the hero, or some kindly male character, after making the same observation, sends out for a pint of “Mountain” (the luscious, honey-sweet Muscat wine now known as Malaga, but no longer obtainable in an age vowed to a cult of dry wines except in the humbler public-houses) to comfort a lady’s vapours or soothe her alarums. Of course, many men also secretly prefer sweet wines to dry. Our national wine, Port, is decidedly sweet, and could not possibly be called “dry” in the sense that Sherry often is. But Vintage Port, the feminist authority declares, “is not a woman’s taste in wine,” though it must surely be a nearer approach to it than either Vintage Claret or Vintage Burgundy. Anyhow, Port, as the classic monologue “My fust ’usbing was a Guardsman” clearly shows, is the most popular wine among women in the saloon-bars of public-houses. At present all women are exclaiming with a single voice that they execrate sweet wines and have always preferred dry, the very driest in fact, even in those dim and distant days when they were not as yet fashionable. This is only a parrot cry catching up the echo of the vogue of the moment—“Tell me what is being drunk and I will tell you that I like it best”—which need deceive nobody. It is like those terrible headaches, unknown to their grandmothers, which have induced them one and all to shear off their tresses and shave their napes. M. Daret, the distinguished _Maître de Chaix_ at Château Yquem, perhaps the greatest authority on _vins liquoreux_, knows better and is far from being dismayed. Sauternes was never dearer than it is to-day. It can only be assumed that drinking it in secret enhances its price. Mrs G. B. Stern in “Bouquet” furiously denounces Sauternes and claims that it is as monstrous to suppose that women are incapable of sharing “men’s” taste for dry wines, or Cognac, as any other hereditary “male” passion, preference, proclivity or prowess. This delightful, if unconvincing, book ends on a note of wistful nostalgia for the first properly mixed icy-cold cocktail waiting to reward her for a strenuous and rather hustled tour of _dégustation_ through the principal French viticultural districts. I very much suspect that during the course of this pilgrimage “A Deputy was King.” The real G. B. Stern was probably in spiritual residence at that “Palace” in Nice or Monte Carlo all the time. Even Mr, Mrs or Miss Chaloner owns that on this topic “we are brought up against the very objection that many women have to Claret, since they find its lack of sweetness distasteful.... Most women begin with a marked preference for wines that are frankly sweet (so do boys), or perhaps _demi-sec_, and there is a touch of austerity about Claret that makes them long frankly, or privately, to add a little sugar to the glass.” Quite so; the feminine education up to dry wines is purely a question of following the prevailing mode and a fresh manifestation of the eternal and servile imitation of man. This is indirectly confirmed by the authoress herself (I will plump for authoress and a hundred to one against author) when she adds: “Though the vine flourished long before mankind, and man is believed to have enjoyed its produce as a beverage as long ago as the neolithic period, women are only just beginning to give it their serious attention.” “The fault of their ignorance” (an ignorance which is not found in wine-growing countries) is naturally placed “partly at the door of the opposite sex, who in bygone days were only too well pleased with it.” Similar reproaches have been levelled against man for his former tyrannical exclusivity in such domains as higher mathematics, marine zoology, coal-mining, boiler-stoking, Rugby football and legislative procedure. It is doubtless theoretically arguable that “women should possess finer palates than men” and be able to detect and eliminate corked bottles when decanted—what time their husbands are presumably peeling potatoes or scolding the cook. But this is by no means the only preliminary to wining claimed for them. “Where the hostess, or even women-servants, take over the duties of cork-drawing, it is of real help to use a mechanical cork-screw.” At first blush one feels inclined to say “amen” to this, but on second thoughts it seems brutally unfair that, if men are allowed to draw corks with ordinary corkscrews (which being far simpler and more satisfactory are usually preferred by them), women should be debarred from the same male privilege. To provide women with patent corkscrews is clearly to treat them as inferiors. Sex equality is no better than a hollow mockery if such unsporting handicaps are to be allowed to remain, or the hostess’s anxious concentration in studying the grammar of “the international language” of the wine-list is to be flurried by idle male gossip.

There is a singular propriety in women arrogating to themselves the right to choose wines and lay down cellars “like men” in an age in which so many of them lack the ability to boil an egg. Yet “venturing into her cellar without a candle” the mistress of the house is told that she ought to know how to distinguish Bordeaux from Burgundy or Hock bottles by the exercise of that very tactile sense which now so often fails her in sewing on a button. “In a well-known women’s club” Miss Chaloner was recently scandalised to find that the head-waitress, when asked for some Beaune, had not “even the vaguest notion whether to look for Claret or Burgundy, or even whether the wine asked for was white or red.” This pained surprise I am not polite enough to pretend to share. “However, a discreetly dropped hint that the contour of Burgundy and Bordeaux bottles was different ... began an interest and education that doubled the value of the maid to the members of the club.”—From which it might almost be conjectured that the education in question was imparted to the members by the maid. When so many prominent judges, divines, scientists, Cabinet Ministers, university professors and thoughtful clubmen eagerly follow every passing change in the design of “Camiknicks,” it is melancholy to be told that “wines ... are seldom appreciated or used to the best advantage in women’s clubs.”

Is there a last lingering doubt in the heart of the vinously educated hostess as to the propriety of offering her guests wine—a moral, an æsthetic, not a social perplexity, of course—it is soon allayed. “In the hands of the discriminating hostess, wine has the charm, the kindly welcome of the hearth to which she invites her guests, and if possessing in careless, or stupid use, some dangers, that is not a reason for banishing HER cellar. The hostess who ... still hesitates over so grave a problem as the ethical values of wine”—previously, no doubt, learnedly and exhaustively debated at her club: perhaps the very one where the head-waitress did not know Big Tree from Wonga-Wonga—“may yet take much comfort to heart.” But where does the model hostess’s husband dine on these occasions, since he has no longer a cellar of his own, or even a key to his wife’s? There is at least one occasion mentioned on which we may be quite sure that he would contrive to find a sufficient excuse for absenting himself to “the tyrant,” or even brave “the brute’s” wrath by taking French leave—when she “might desire to give her dinner a special character, reminiscent of a particular occasion, or holiday in Italy”; in which case, “she would have no difficulty in confining the choice of her wine-list to Italian wines.” Perhaps, too, the cigars (which in spite of the practical protests of Madame Hanska and George Sand have been allowed to remain a male monopoly for far too long) would be those delicious curling Minghettis? Italian wines are often excellent in Italy, when served with Italian cooking, but the prevailing quality of “what the vintners sell” in what ladies call “those funny little continental shops in Soho” (for Italian wines are not generally obtainable elsewhere), under the fair names of Chianti, Barolo, Cortese, Orvieto, Asti Spumante, etc., is enough to make the most chicken-hearted Fabian husband rebel.

In the future wine is likely once more to be considered, even in non-viticultural countries, as a FOOD essential to physical and moral well-being, rather than as a dangerous artificial stimulant, or the sybaritic indulgence of a few eccentric old epicures. In cultured epochs wine is sure to be held in honour as an integral part of taste, while spirits are certain to reign supreme in barbarous, philistine and sanctimonious centuries, whether permitted or proscribed by the law. The present renaissance of gastronomy in England, hesitant though it still is, is of happy augury for marking the eclipse of an age likely to be identified by future social historians with the perpetual swilling of whisky-and-soda by otherwise refined and self-respecting people; and as heralding the advent of an era in which wine will be purer, better, cheaper, more abundant and varied in its kinds, besides being more justly and intelligently appreciated by the nation at large. With the increasing shortage of cereals throughout the world, the making of grain-spirits will soon become indefensible, and the same consideration may ultimately apply to beer as well.

The survival of wine and male dominance, are, as Scandinavia has shown us, parallel issues. If wine survives feminism, which, in spite of the foregoing instances of its latest manifestation, is much more likely to be œnophobe than œnophil, there will be no place left for teetotal Puritanism in a wine-loving world.

* * * * *

Bacchus, when yet a child, fared one day along an unfamiliar desert path strewn with the bleaching bones of all manner of birds and beasts that had perished there of drought. Wearied, he sat himself down to rest on a heap of stones amidst a solitary patch of verdure growing by the wayside. He found the rambling shrub, the tender leaves of which cooled and caressed his bruised and heated feet, so green and gracious that he pulled it up by the roots so as to take it home with him and plant it in his garden. Fearing lest it might wither under the scorching rays of the sun as he bore it in his hands, he picked up a bird’s skull and put the roots, with a little earth, into the hollow of the beak. The plant grew so fast while he wended his way homewards that its roots soon outgrew the prison of their narrow sheath. Thereupon he imbedded the bird’s skull in the shoulder-blade of a lion. Nevertheless the roots began once again to overspread their allotted trough, so that he had recourse to the expedient of thrusting the lion’s shoulder-blade into the jaw-bone of an ass. When, at length, he reached home and went to plant the strange wild shrub in his garden, he found it impossible to extricate the knotted roots from the three bones incasing them; so he planted it just as it was, bones and all. The vine, for such was the name he gave this goodly creeping plant, throve luxuriantly and bore the young god, who tended and pruned the holy tree lovingly, tressing its branches into a shady arbour, an abundance of heavy bloom-dusted grape-clusters, both purple and golden: the juice of which he pressed and gave to the sons of men for their sustenance and comfort in sickness and adversity and to make glad their hearts on high festivals and days of family rejoicing. And, behold, as soon as the sons of men first tasted the blood of the grape—which they straightway called wine, meaning a sacred water—a prodigy came to pass! For when they began to drink they sang as do the birds of the forest; when they drank more they became strong and courageous as lions; but when they drank yet more, they grew foolish as jackasses.

Thus it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be.

FOOTNOTES

[1] The main reason is that predominantly cider- and beer-drinking Départements of the north and north-east have now become large consumers of wine: an appetite whetted by the much appreciated Army wine-ration, nicknamed “Pinard,” during the long years of mobilisation.

[2] _Piquette_ means sour, thin wine; it is to wine what small-beer is to ale.

[3] See note to page 17.