Port

Thanksgiving is probably my favorite holiday, and not only because it offers an excuse to dine lavishly among friends. It also provides an occasion to live up to its name and give ourselves the pleasure of correcting Aristotle. Man, the old Greek said in a distracted moment, is the rational animal, ζῶον λόγον ἔχον. Clearly, what he meant to say is that man is the ungrateful animal, ζῶον αχαριστίαν ἔχον. Since Thanksgiving is all about enumerating one’s blessings, it is one of those rare opportunities in which everyone’s favorite pastime, virtue-signaling, can be indulged while thoroughly enjoying oneself.

Just as tastes in female beauty have differed widely through the ages — take a comparative glance at the damsels Rubens featured with those of Botticelli (I leave the Venus of Willendorf out of account) — so, too, does the taste in wine vary through the ages. The British critic George Saintsbury was a giant in the field of literary scholarship. He was also an avid apologist for wine, and his Notes on a Cellar-Book (1920) is a classic in the literature of wine writing. A modern reader, however, cannot help but be struck by the prominent place given to wines that have fallen out of favor today, especially such fortified wines as sherry, Madeira and port.