Wine

Ovid’s little how-to manual, The Art of Love, is full of good advice. Let’s say you are interested in a girl. Take her to the games. Sit close to her. If a speck of dust falls on her lap, ‘flick it off with your fingers. If none falls, flick off — none.’ The Art of Love is full of such useful tips, elegantly expressed. Practical chap that he was, Ovid knew that even so subjective a pursuit as love could be helped along by the mastery and deployment of certain techniques. Among the many impressed by Ovid’s handbook was the German Renaissance humanist Vincent Obsopoeus. In 1536, he published De Arte Bibendi (The Art of Drinking), an allegro poem deeply inspired by Ovid’s Ars Amatoria.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the US edition here. I had to go to Hillsdale, Michigan, home of Hillsdale College, to make my first visit to Healdsburg, the Sonoma County town that is the epicenter of about 100 California wineries and tens of thousands of vineyard acres. On this first, virtual trip, I dipped my toe into the Alexander Valley, the region north-northwest of Healdsburg. There are more than 40 vineyards in the Alexander Valley and I sampled two of the best, Silver Oak and Jordan. At least since Plato’s Symposium (Greek for ‘drinking party’), it has been understood that the essential accompaniment to wine is not food, though that is nice, but conversation.

Close your eyes and think about the word ‘winery’. What image comes to mind? I’m guessing you will say, ‘A large stone pile from the 17th century or before surrounded by lovingly tended gardens and row after row of neatly staked vines.’ That is not wrong, but it is incomplete. There are plenty of wineries in France and elsewhere that feature modernist architecture. And there is one in Brooklyn, New York at 175 Van Dyke Street, towards the end of Pier 41 at the old Navy Yard. With a spectacular view of the Statue of Liberty and the New Jersey waterfront, Red Hook Winery — a retail tasting room in front, barrels and vats in the back — occupies a fetching but improbable spot. Red Hook was started in 2008 by Mark Snyder.

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. I think it was from the late Roger Scruton, back when he was writing about wine for another magazine, that I learned the importance of being a terroiriste — not, nota bene, a terrorist. That, as Qasem Soleimani learned to his sorrow, is something else entirely. No, what Sir Roger had in mind was the importance of environment to the production of delicious wine. Terroir means the composition of the soil, yes, but it also means so much more. One dictionary sums it up as the ‘complete natural environment in which a particular wine is produced, including...the soil, topography, and climate’.

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Cyril Connolly famously opined that every young man of spirit wants to do two things: start a magazine and start a chicken farm. That’s about half right, I think. It would have been more accurate if he had included a true, if often unspoken, heart’s desire: to be a wine critic. Do you know anyone — anyone you still speak to, I mean — who hasn’t wanted to be one? Every Sunday, my family and I participate in an august ceremony that extols a beneficent God through whose ministrations we accept the gift of vinum...fructum vitis et operis manuum hominum: ‘wine… fruit of the vine and the work of human hands’.

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. ‘No nation is drunken where wine is cheap,’ Thomas Jefferson famously said, laying the blame for insobriety firmly on ‘ardent spirits’. The third president was a notorious wine-fancier with a particularly soft spot for Sauternes, yet it is true that countries with a long history of winemaking tend towards more easeful drinking. Despite the ghastly interregnum of Prohibition, America has become a serious wine-producing nation — and yet ardent spirits seem to have left far stronger a mark, on the national mindset and on the nation’s prose.