The Lip and The Cup

A Loving Treatise on Wines and Their Virtues, by a French Connoisseur

PAUL MORAND

THERE are times when it is possible to I impugn the majesty of the wine of Noah, Osiris and of Bacchus, either by drinking something else or by prohibiting all drink. Such attempts are unavailing: men die but wine goes on forever. There should be only one form of legislation the world over: that which would authorize wine and beer and prohibit all alcoholic by-products. As a matter of fact, come what may, wine can be expected to interest only a tiny minority of rich people because:

First, wine exists only in France. The wines of Spain, Italy and other countries arc beverages but they arc not wines, (with the single exception of Rhine wine).

Secondly, in France itself there arc only a few vintages and they are of none too great abundance and with a very few good "years".

These two principles being enunciated I should like to express to the only sensitive palates now left in a world of low pleasures and hurried materialism—I mean of course, the readers of Vanity Fair—some of my ideas about, and something of my acquaintance with, wine. One of the most painful spectacles I have ever witnessed took place a fortnight ago in one of the old restaurants of Brussels on the Place Aux Herbes: it was the sight of an American family ordering woodcocks flambées and drinking with the birds—what do you suppose? I defy you to guess—hot chocolate! My heart still bleeds when I think of it. If my readers will be good enough to listen for a moment to the author of these lines, who is one of the great tipplers of Paris, they will be guided in the path of Truth and will have nothing to regret the next time they come to France.

In the first place, let me say that the mixture of water and wine is simply monstrous. I once saw at Larue's, on the Place de la Madeleine, an American putting Perrier water in a Burgundy of 1878! I had to leave the restaurant. As one of my friends who has a celebrated palate says, "Liqueurs should be drunk in Bordeaux glasses, Bordeaux in Champagne glasses, Champagne in water-tumblers, and water should be left where it belongs, which is to say, in wash-basins".

IT is not at all necessary to drink very much. II Horace and Anacreon drank too much. For one thing, even in France, wines have become very expensive; for another, we shall soon learn that the idea that only one wine should be drunk with each good meal is untenable; and as it is difficult to mix several wines while drinking much of any of them, it is clear that the age of great drinking-bouts is ended. Nobody clamours any more in the words of Rabelais, as if he were sounding the charge: "Net, net a ce pot!" Or as Rabelais says elsewhere: "No sooner was Gargantua born, than instead of squealing like the others: "Mie! mie! mie!," he cried out in a loud voice: "A boire; A boire!" Every country has its own rainbow of colourful phrases to describe the effect of wine as it grows stronger. In this, America is behind nobody. The best moments arc the early ones when we "feel fine", and then when we "feel gay". The real wine-bibber finds little pleasure in the epithets which follow: "tipsy", "dizzy", "woozy", "squiffy", "tight", "bozzled", "pie-eyed", "stewed", "boiled", "soused", "drunk", "passed out", and so on ad nauseam. Remember this, that a wine-bibber never drinks to the point of drunkenness.

Wine has three homes: the barrel, the bottle and the glass. It is well to avoid carefully the modern art-glass, stained pink or opaline blue, that falsifies the natural colour of wine and obliterates the first joy of the drinker, which is that of seeing what he is about to drink. On the contrary, a wine-bibber who knows what he is about will choose very thin glasses of pure white and of pure transparency, except when drinking Rhine wine. What is more beautiful than a bottle of Burgundy set on its wide bottom, or a bottle of Bordeaux with its discreet long lines, its high cork, hard as oak, its seal testifying to the fact that it was bottled in the cellars of a Château? These things incite the imagination and stimulate the appetite, particularly when the bottle is covered over with a venerable dust or with the still damp sand of the cellar. Brought tenderly forward in its wicker basket by a meticulous wine waiter, it is set down carefully at an angle on the table. This is the moment when, in a restaurant, I can tell whether or not I am seated beside foreigners who know how to drink wine. If the tone of the conversation is not lowered somewhat when the beautiful bottle arrives; if the host docs not follow the movements of the wine waiter with an uneasy eye as he brings the cork up to his nose to discover whether or not the wine has a "corky" odour, I take it as a bad sign.

A RED Bordeaux should be decanted and served from a carafe, so that the tannin and the sediments, which have collected through many years, remain at the bottom of the bottle and do not rise to the lips of the drinker. White wines and the wines of Burgundy do not need to be decanted. The new English and American habit of serving only Champagne throughout an entire dinner can be justified either by the fact that foreign restaurants no longer have good cellars or by the fact that a hostess who gets up to dance between courses has not the time to look after her wines. It is convenient to serve only Champagne; but gourmets find it intolerable, for each wine ought to correspond to the course with which it has some affinity: it ought to be, in a way, an instrument in the ensemble of the dinner which should itself be an orchestration.

The order in which wines should be served is from the most temperate to the headiest. Besides, the tongue becomes saturated after the second glass, and the wine no longer awakens a vivid sensation. I should not condemn absolutely the drinking of cocktails in summer, or in hot countries, or a full hour before dinner, but I despise and refuse cocktails served at the moment when I sit down at table. They chill the temperature of the palate at the moment when, on the contrary, it ought to be heightened bv the soup.

Wine should be brought up from the cellar in the course of the afternoon so that the bottles may have time to rest before dinner. Red wines should not be placed beside the fire, where ignorant people place them, for the heat dissociates their qualities; they should instead be raised slowly to the temperature of the room. The best wine to drink with the soup is a dry Sherry. This excellent old 18th Century custom is still preserved in England. With the hors d'oeuvre should be served white Bordeaux or white Burgundy, very cold. With the fish, a Rhine wine; accompanying the roast, a red Bordeaux; with game or foie gras, a great Burgundy; with dessert, a bottle of Château-Yquem, and at the end of the dinner, the Champagne. Such is a good dinner.

HOW should one taste wine? There are people who think that in order to drink,all one needs do is open one's mouth. Such people have everything to learn. In the first place, as 1 have already said, you must know how to look at a wine, how to receive pleasure from it through the eye. Then it must be inhaled, not of course letting the nose rest on the glass, but holding the glass for a hundredth of a second a little higher than the mouth in order to appreciate the "bouquet" or perfume. Tasting, which is the most serious matter, comes next. (Forgive me for entering into these details which arc essential and which can shock only the falsely squeamish.) The tongue should receive the wine, pass it along the cheeks, conduct it to the depth of the mouth, stop it for a moment at the level of the nasal passage, and then let it roll down. "When the wine is in the mouth", says Brillat-Savarin, the king of gastronomers, "one is agreeably but not perfectly impressed. It is only at the moment, when one has finished swallowing that one can really taste what one has drunk".

Since the war, a passion for ChdteauY quern has grown up almost exclusively among Americans. This is a delicious wine with a marvelous colour, called "the wine of kings and the king of wines"; but aside from the fact that it fetches fabulous prices, it should not really cause people to neglect other great vintages. Besides, it is a wine de luxe. One can live and die very well without Chat eau-Yquem, whereas it is practically impossible to get along without a good red Bordeaux and an excellent Burgundy. Château-Yquem is an 18th Century wine. It belonged to the family of Sauvage d'Yqucm who transferred it by marriage in 1 78 5 to the Lur-Saluces, to whom it still belongs. And do you happen to know perchance that the great Montaigne was one of the ancestors of the Yquem family?

A good wine, in order to be perfect, should have been bottled for less than thirty years. After that it grows old, loses its perfume, and dies as all things die. I know of whole cellars of Burgundy which have been guarded too avariciously and are no longer drinkable. A wine that is young contains an excessive quantity of tanin, which gives it an acrid taste, also, it is unpleasantly stiff. It is essential to choose the proper moment and the good years. The good years—which are sufficiently indicated by the prices asked—are, as everybody knows, 1900, 1904, 1906, and 1909. Nineteen hundred eleven is a very great year; 19 14 is great for red Bordeaux; 1915, 1920, and 1923 for Burgundy; and 1906 and 1911 for Champagne. In short, it may be said that a wine five to ten years old is excellent; a wine ten to fifteen years old is perfect, and thereafter wines diminish in quality until they become mere grape syrup diluted in water. Take the advice of an old bibber and do not preserve your wines until they are too old.

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Champagne is a very ancient wine. When, in the Middle Ages, the wines mostly drunk were those of the Orleanais and the environs of Paris, King Charles VI of France met Wenceslas VI, Emperor of Germany, at Rheims, and was able, with the aid of the wine of Champagne, then known as the wine of Ay, to obtain the Emperor's entire approval of his policies. In the 16th Century Francis I, Charles V, and Pope Leo X all had their vineyards at Ay. Champagne was at that time a rosy red. At the beginning of the 18th Century appeared the monk Dom Perignon, the veritable ancestor of the wine of Champagne, who invented the art of making this wine sparkle instantaneously without disturbing the body of the wine itself. (As a matter of fact it was the monks who originated the cultivation of wines in France.) He bequeathed his secret to his brother monks who carried it away with them during the Revolution of 1789. Their secret has never been divulged. Ever since, the body of Champagne is always disturbed in its preparation, and it is necessary to make it "degorger", that is to say, set the bottles upside down for a certain time and spin them around daily, uncork them, rid them of their deposit, lose much of the precious liquor, and then re-cork them, all of which involves a good deal of time and money. It is only after this handing that Cham pagne becomes clarified and is put to sleep in those subterranean cities—one of the great spectacles of the world—made up by the cellars of Pommery at Rheims, and of Moët at Epernay.

Champagne is composed of a mixture of purple and white grapes from different vineyards, one kind contributing the vigor, the "body", another kind the delicacy, a third the perfume, a fourth the lightness and sparkle, and so on. The shoots of these vines are worked not by the plow but still by hand with the hone (that very old mediaeval agricultural implement). Thereafter Champagne, the most famous of all wines, is ready to appear on the tables of the great and at gay supper parties, where it sparkles in glasses, in cups, or, better yet, in those "flutes" of other days which are beginning to come into fashion again with the drinkers who know that the sight of the foam and the rapid, rushing ascension to the surface of those thousands of little bubbles, form one of the delights of this wine.

Champagne should not be confused with Fine-Champagne. Despite the name, these have nothing in common. The great brandies, that of Cognac for instance, whose renown dates from the 18th Century, originated in the Charentes, that is to say, south of the Loire River. They are of two kinds: Fine-Champagne and Bois or grain. Fine-Champagne gets its name only from the fact of the resemblance between the chalky sub-soil of the district in which it is grown to the white earth of Champagne. This Fine is the finest in the world, for it is not excessively alcoholic and is perfectly smooth. As for the grain, that is harvested in quite another zone. It must not be forgotten that brandy does not age after bottling; it ages only in the vats or firkins. If, therefore, you buy a brandy harvested in 1811 and bottled in 18 12, although it may ostensibly be a hundred years old, its age in reality will be only one year. Do not let yourself be hypnotized by the label "Fine-Napoleon", particularly since brandy is infinitely more easy to counterfeit than wine.

By way of conclusion, and in order to leave my American friends, who are temporarily estranged from these marvels, a little regret, a little knowledge and the distant perfume which emanates from celebrated names (wines can be loved a little as Marcel Proust loved duchesses, for their beautiful names haunted by historic memories), let me say that the three great red wines of Burgundy arc: Romance Conti, Chambertin, and Clos-Vougeot (it was still the tradition a few years ago that when a regiment passed through Clos-Vougeot the drums sounded in the fields in honour of this celebrated vintage) ; the great white Burgundy is Monrachet. The kings of red Bordeaux are first ChateauLa file, belonging to Baron Edmond de Rothschild, and then Château-Margaux, both wines of Modoc. The great Bordeaux white is ChateauVquem. And now, since I must unfortunately abandon this fascinating subject about which a book could be written, and since I cannot even take time to speak of those local but exquisite wines of Anjou, Touraine, and the Rhone, praised by Meredith, let me say that the greater the bottle the better the wine. If there are more than two of you, never hesitate to order a double bottle, that is to say, a magnum; if you feel enough strength for it, attack that lovely flask called jeroboam, which contains two magnums; and finally, if you want all my respect and if your wine waiter is strong enough to carry it, order a Nebuchadnezzar, that is to say, six bottles in one. Immediately you will find yourself in Paradise.