Food & Drink

The weight of history — a seemingly infinite vista of incident — hangs heavy in the Languedoc in the South of France. The region (also called Occitania) is the place where people said ‘oc’ rather than ‘oui’ for ‘yes’ — langue d’oc instead of langue d’oïl. Gauls, Romans, Visigoths, Franks, Moors, Cathars: one by one they came, they pillaged or prayed, slaughtered or were slaughtered. A plaque in the Carcassonne cathedral reminds us that only yesterday St Dominic (1170-1221) preached there during Lent. A lot of nasty things have happened in Languedoc over the centuries. Perhaps that is one reason the people are so cheerful now. The area is also the biggest wine-producing region in France, which also contributes to the quota of cheerfulness.

I used to be terrified of homemade alcoholic drinks. Someone would bring out the elderflower champagne at a picnic, and I’d wave it away: ‘I’d love to. But I’m driving...’ Bottles of homemade cabernet would be pressed on me with irrepressible warmth at Christmas time; I’d accept them with a lying smile on my lips and an inward resolution to boil the contents for seven hours with sugar, oranges and cinnamon sticks and fob it off on guests as mulled wine. And for my narrow-minded ways I now repent. As I must, because with maturity comes the realization that, as Solzhenitsyn said, there is no us and them. The line dividing good from evil, the poised socialite from the homemade-liquor inflictor, cuts through the heart of every man.

I’m trying to cut down on energy drinks. I know, that’s a rather pathetic undertaking compared to going sober or quitting smoking. But it is hard. I wade through mental fog, yawning yawns that rival a buffalo’s bellow. Switch to coffee? Yes, I could. But hot drinks are not the same. I like the cold, refreshing quality — and the ring pull’s crack. Perhaps I will give up giving up and just embrace addiction. It’s a small one anyway. That is my defense, but also my confession. We can understand, if not excuse, people endangering their health for the sake of alcohol or cigarettes — but for a caffeinated soft drink? Or perhaps there are darker forces at play here.

If I am going to talk about summer wines, I am going to have to introduce you to Gaius Plinius Secundus, known to us as Pliny the Elder. Pliny was a busy chap. Army commander and admiral in the Roman navy. Gourmand. Pal of the emperor Vespasian. Pliny did not have writer’s block. He published the first 10 books of his sprawling Historia Naturalis in 77 AD. Despite its title, the book is about a lot more than natural history. Really, it is a sort of proto-encyclopedia. Pliny hadn’t finished revising the rest when he went to investigate the strange things that were happening down at Mount Vesuvius in 79. He died in the conflagration. The chap we know as Pliny the Younger — the elder Pliny’s nephew and heir — was with him.

We all have our daily rituals. We’re told they’re a necessity to live a healthier, happier, more productive life. Some pride themselves on an early start, a morning jog, or a half hour spent journaling in their wellness notebook. Not a morning person, I’d be nervous to jot down — and read back — my view of the world at 7 a.m., so I’ve never taken up the fad. But I reserve no judgment for those who do. Why then, is there such judgment about my routine, which every day involves fueling up on decaffeinated coffee? To be fair and objective, I’m guilty of nothing more than ‘fitting in’. Coffee ranks as one of the most popular drinks worldwide, with more than 400 billion cups consumed every year.

When Jayson Pahlmeyer left the practice of law in the mid-1980s in order to devote himself to winemaking, he said, ‘All I wanted to do was to create my own “California Mouton” — a rich, powerful Napa Valley Bordeaux blend, a wine that would drop wine lovers to their knees.”’ He did it in 1986, the first vintage of his Proprietary Red, a luscious Cabernet blend that won plaudits throughout the world of wine. Pahlmeyer’s Merlot and Chardonnay have been similarly decorated, and I may return to them in a future column. For now, I want to focus on the Proprietary Red.

In 146 BC, Scipio Aemilianus laid siege to and destroyed the city of Carthage, thus bringing the third Punic War to an end. Scipio made a gift of what remained of the Carthaginian library to the kings of Numidia, Rome’s old ally against Carthage. At the direction of the Senate, however, he held back one book, the agricultural treatise of Mago, which he sent back to Rome. It was duly translated into Latin, but all that remains are fragments, which is too bad, for Mago apparently had a lot to say about many exigent matters, including the cultivation of grapes and making of wine. It appears that it was the Phoenician precursors of the Carthaginians who, around 1500 bc, first planted grapes in the Iberian peninsula.

Long before Achilles chased Hector around Troy and Homer wrote about the οἶνοψ πόντος, the ‘wine-dark sea’, people living in what is today the republic of Georgia were making wine. Archaeologists have found evidence of wine making there dating from 8000 BC: an impressive statement to the inventiveness to which necessity gives birth. Stretching from the Black Sea to the Caucasus Mountains, Georgia is home to a wide variety of climates, types of soil and geographical physiognomies. Today it is home to some 500 varietals, few of which are familiar to westerners (even though many if not most western grapes probably have precursors in Georgia and the Black Sea ‘cradle of wine’).

The first person ever to tell me something true about wine was my first real boss, a generous and wise woman who toted me along to the Frankfurt Book Fair with her for several years in my early twenties. At the time I drank mostly sweet red blends that came in denominations of ‘box’ or ‘jug’. When she sensed (or perhaps shared) my fear of humiliating us both when I was asked for my wine order at a long, formal luncheon in a rather famous hotel, she leaned across the many forks of her place setting and whispered to me, ‘Get the Grüner.’ She elaborated that the American white wines I’d had were probably sweet or buttery, but German whites, like dry Rieslings and Grüner Veltliner, were mineral and fresh and lovely. They paired well with all foods.

What’s the most famous story about wine in the last 50 years? My candidate is the so-called ‘Judgment of Paris’ of May 1976. It was actually two judgments, one of American and French Chardonnays (the subject of the movie Bottle Shock), the other, more consequential, of American and French Cabernets (well, French Bordeaux, which are predominantly Cabernet). The competition was organized by Steven Spurrier, now one of the world’s most renowned wine connoisseurs, then a 35-year-old British bundle of energy who in 1970 had moved from London to Paris and acquired a small wine shop off the Rue Royale.

It’s Lent again, and you know what that means: time for Christians to give up their favorite indulgences for 40 days in the spirit of penance and/or the hope of weight loss. I confess that in pandemic times, bagels and brownies have taken a backseat to booze as my preferred guilty pleasure. So I’m doing what I’ve got to do, for my soul if not my waistline, complexion, or sleep cycles: I’ve given up drinking for Lent. The uptick in my consumption over the past year is part of a broad and alarming trend. A study published last week in Psychiatry Research tracked respondents’ drinking over the first six months of the pandemic and found that ‘harmful alcohol use increased notably’. This surprises no one who remembers last spring’s huge spikes in at-home alcohol sales.

Trivia time. Put down the magazine, look away from the page and name as many green liqueurs as you can. Well? Did you get crème de menthe? Award yourself a point. Absinthe? Sorry, no point; absinthe contains no sugar, and is therefore a flavored liquor, not a liqueur. Note the difference in spelling: liquor can serve as a base to which sweeteners and flavors are added to form liqueur, but technically the one is not the other, and the other is not the one. What about Chartreuse? If you guessed it, well done: the Queen of Liqueurs claims the distinction of being the only naturally green-colored liqueur in existence.

Frank Zappa said writing about music is as absurd as ‘dancing about architecture’. Dan Keeling and Mark Andrew ask if you could say the same about wine. Our authors make light of their own or any attempts to quantify an ever-evolving liquid essence into words, points or subjective flavor interpretations whilst providing a helpful ‘Lexicon of Usefulness’ to assist the reader’s endeavors.

Some people think that appreciating wine is all about the taste of the beverage. Others, more cynical, think that, at bottom, it is about the efficient ingestion of that complex hydrocarbon that the body converts into sugar, and merriment, as it passes through the system. The name of that compound is ethanol, a type of alcohol produced by the fermentation of certain fruits. If you look up ‘alcohol’ in a sociologically or anthropologically disposed reference work, you’ll find owlish observations to the effect that ‘alcohol plays an important social role in many cultures’. This is a nod to fact that wine is a both a goad to conviviality and a glue binding up the multifarious wounds to our amour propre that are the natural result of the conduct of daily life.

A great friend of mine once beautifully summarized the appeal of smoking. He said that he could wake up early on a dark winter morning, with the prospect of hours of back-breaking work ahead of him, but if he had a cigarette he had a moment of pure peace and pleasure and the day somehow brightened. I feel much the same, except that my addiction, while perhaps less damaging, is less romantic — when I get up I can’t wait to crack open a can of Monster Energy. I can be tired, sick, stressed or sad, but somehow when those liquid diamonds fall out the can I feel much improved. Like cigarette smokers, energy drink enthusiasts have clear and particular tastes. Some love Red Bull. Some love Rockstar.

Enrique Tarrio, chairman of the Proud Boys, stood for a photo at a recent political rally in Portland, Oregon, arms outstretched in a V, flashing the ‘OK’ sign with both hands, peacocking in a manner reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s victory pose. With a depleted cigarette dangling from his lips, Tarrio wore the fraternity’s black-and-gold Fred Perry polo shirt, a baseball cap reading ‘The War Boys’ and dark sunglasses — part Gen. McArthur, part steampunk hipster. The most curious part of Tarrio’s togs was stuffed in the front pocket of his tactical vest, where the grenade should be: a can of the light, refreshing, low-calorie beverage White Claw.