I have always wondered whether The Compleat Angler, Izaak Walton’s piscine classic, would have enjoyed its wide and longstanding recognition absent the antique spelling “compleat.” I somehow suspect that a book titled The Complete Angler would not have made the same impression, especially on modern readers. First published in 1653, the book went through many editions in Walton’s life and after. It is a charming, leisurely guide, “not unworthy,” as its original title page observed, “the peruſal of moſt Anglers.” (Those long “s”es add a little something, don’t you agree?) It is said that Walton, a staunch anti-Cromwellian, good fellow, was particularly fond of the saying “Study to be quiet.” The Compleat Angler, ambling about the River Dove between Staffordshire and Derbyshire, is an aid to that ambition.
“Compleat,” like its somewhat sterner twin “complete,” comes from the Latin verb compleo, which means to finish, achieve, consummate, fill up. With respect to drink, it means to satisfy or to sate. I’d wager the late English wine writer Cyril Ray had both that etymology and Walton’s memorable orthography in mind when he embarked on his long-running series of anthologies The Compleat Imbiber. The first volume, consisting of some 40 short pieces – essays, recollections, poems – and fetching illustrations (Hoffnung, Edward Ardizzone, et al.) appeared in 1956. The last appeared in 1971. When old volumes began fetching higher and higher prices among second-hand booksellers, an enterprising publisher brought out a successor volume in 1985 under the title The New Compleat Imbiber.
It was a stellar cast of contributors that Ray assembled. He himself was a well known figure in the world of London journalism – a foreign correspondent as well as a celebrated, down-to-earth oenophile – and he was able to attract such stars as Sir John Betjeman, Kenneth Tynan, Sir Compton Mackenzie, Iris Murdoch, Nancy Mitford, Margery Allingham, Marghanita Laski, Anthony Powell, J.B. Priestley, Raymond Postgate, V.S. Pritchett, John Mortimer, Peter Fleming, James (as the travel writer then was) Morris, Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth David, among many others. There were also a few bona fide wine writers in the mix, but Ray, the opposite of a wine snob, was determined to make good on the subtitle he bestowed on most of the volumes: “An Entertainment.”
In the introduction to the first volume, Ray says that he imagined the collection “as a sort of dinner party.” There had to be order, naturally. Order becomes a dinner party. Discipline doesn’t. “No, no; not discipline.” The result is a browser’s delight. Did you know that Peter the Great’s ladies used to wash their hair in vodka, which they later drank? Possibly that story belongs in the capacious cask marked “too good to check.” But what of Betjeman’s recollection of dinner at high table at an Oxford college over which presided an ancient and revered scholar, “a man of few words and those remarkable”? One evening, a teetotaler was brought in as a guest. The meal concluded, he was offered a glass of port. He recoiled and declaimed in a loud voice “I would rather commit adultery than drink a glass of port.” That ancient and revered head of house broke the ensuing silence by saying, “And who wouldn’t?”
You might think that these volumes are only incidentally connected to wine. That would be not be an accurate assessment. Why? Not so much because many of the morceaux collected here do, in fact, touch on wine and grapes and vintages and terroir and all the other accoutrements of those emotions recollected in tranquility that fire a wine writer’s pen. Rather, it is because the world of wine is essentially coterminous with the world of human interaction. Embark on something human and you are immediately drawn into the story of wine. And vice-versa. The Compleat Imbiber pays homage to this panoply.
Ray wrote histories of several celebrated houses, including the Champagne maker Bollinger and the Left Bank claret stars Lafite and Mouton Rothschild. Ray was a friend of Baron Philippe de Rothschild, who in addition to his activities as a Grand Prix race-car driver, playwright, poet and theatrical producer, was the proprietor of Mouton Rothschild from the age of 20. He writes movingly about the 1918 vintage in The New Compleat Imbiber. I thought about that when getting outside a magnum of the 2009 Mouton with some friends at Washington, DC’s hottest refectory for the politically mature, Butterworth’s at 319 Pennsylvania Avenue SE. Bart Hutchins, the chef and one of the owners, had rummaged around in the cellar and produced this marvel.
I mention it here just in case someone sniffs that I haven’t actually spoken about any particular wines in this column ostensibly about wine. So here you go: grab a magnum of the 2009 Mouton Rothschild for your sins. The Wine Spectator says the 2009 reds from that bit of Bordeaux are “lush, rich, and beautifully polished.” They are too. Nab a volume of The Compleat Imbiber to add some polish to your enjoyment. I think you will thank me for the introduction.
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