Wine

Before he was a celebrated travel writer, Patrick Leigh Fermor (who died in 2011 at 96) was a celebrated special operations soldier. In February 1944 he commanded a raid to kidnap General Heinrich Kreipe, the newly installed German commander of Crete, and take him to Egypt. Leigh Fermor, his fellow officer William Stanley Moss and three members of the Cretan resistance commandeered the general in his car and made a daring trek across the island pursued by the German occupiers. They spent one chilly night on the slopes of Mount Ida.

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.

‘If you swill it around, you look at the legs of the wine — we’re in the Naughty Room, so I’m sorry to talk about legs again!’ exclaims Prince Robert of Luxembourg, alluding to our saucy surroundings. We are tucked away in a bijou risqué room at 67 Pall Mall, a London private members’ club for wine lovers. The Naughty Corner, as it’s known, is adorned with erotic paintings, and a miniature sculpture of a naked man has been turned away from us. While members must be approved, there was little chance of Prince Robert being blackballed. His family owns the French wine estate Chateau Haut-Brion, the oldest of the great growths of Bordeaux.

I like vintners with a sense of humor. When Vern and Maxine Boltz retired — he from the Oakland Fire Department, she from flying the friendly skies of United — they decided to try their hands at making wine. That’s intrepid, not necessarily funny. But in 1997 they found a sweet parcel of 160 acres above the Navarro River in the Anderson Valley of Mendocino County and started planting. ‘Go forth and multiply,’ they said to the grapes and the grapes (Pinot Noir, mostly) did just that. In 2002 they produced 400 cases for sale and Toulouse Vineyards was launched. ‘Toulouse’? Yes, they reasoned, ‘What to do we have to lose?’ Fair warning: their publicity deploys variations of that homophonic witticism early and often.

I met Kingsley Amis only once. It was in the bar of the Garrick Club at about three in the afternoon. He had clearly been there for some time. I was with a friend who knew him, so cadged an introduction. I cannot say that we had a truly meaningful exchange. More like 1 Corinthians 13:12: ‘through a glass, darkly’. But the encounter did put me in mind of General Principle Number 1 from Amis’s amusing book on drink, candidly titled On Drink. ‘Short of offering your guests one of those Balkan plonks marketed as wine,’ he advises, ‘go for quantity rather than quality.’ If you had asked my opinion about that advice a couple of months ago, I might have demurred.

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.