In vino in memoriam
C
an you hear, as the poet Baudelaire could, the wine’s soul sing in the bottles? What promises it offers. It is “a song which is full of light and brotherhood”. The wine is crying to be drunk, crying out to you to become drunk on its spirit. It wants to share itself, and have you pour it out in sharing with others. Wine is, in a way no other beverage can claim, a drink of fellowship. It inspires generosity, prompts and prods and even provokes it, and endows us with more when we are momentarily lacking. It is more than the simple sharing of an entity, goes way beyond the sharing of this quantity in the bottle before you. It is a mutual partaking in a unique experience. “Wine is life”, Petronius reflected, and to share wine is to share those things that are best in life.
Close your eyes a moment. I’d like to take you out of here, out of this room and away. Somewhere you can get dirt on those fine shoes, and smell the ripening grapes all around you. You say you can’t sense these things, picture yourself there in your mind’s eye? Here, take a sip, that’ll do the trick. Wine can be a portal to a different time and place. And wine can draw the resonance of the past into the present. The most noble of draughts, that it may summon in us these yearnings.
At sunset on Santorini the buildings seem impossibly white. It can leave you almost snow-blind. Only the aquamarine of distant cupolas provides a distraction of color and a kind of relief to your eyes. Looking out over the caldera, at the fire-crested waves and the inky indistinctness of the “burned islands” — this is perfection in setting. It was just such a view that was laid out before us at our chosen cliff-top restaurant. It was end of season and we had the place, and the waiter’s attentions, pretty much to ourselves. I’d spent the day walking all over, around the fractured coastline, through ruins and into numerous vineyards I’m not sure I should have been walking through. I had a mind to drink the island’s own wine, this island considered by some to be what’s left of Atlantis (and, while a born skeptic, I found myself pining for the kind of wine which might encourage such mythic musings). A white to start and I asked the waiter to bring what he considered Santorini’s best. He brought an assyrtiko, luscious mouth-filling medley of stone fruits with a finish that seemed never to end — or maybe that was just how I was feeling about the night.
Wine, he said, is a divine gift of the gods, a bounty to man, a sacred blessing and remedy for all ills.
As we finished that bottle our waiter (who bore, for his sins, one of those Greek names unpronounceable to a thick Anglo tongue and now lost to memory) returned with another, a red this time. Not a Santorini wine, this instead came from the mainland’s north. He wanted to give this wine, his favorite, to us. To sit and share it with us and so share in our mood. It was a xinomavro, literally “sour black”, mellow with bottle age, soft but deep, an enveloping wine. The waiter talked his passion for his country, its myths and history and its wines. Wine, he said, is a divine gift of the gods, a bounty to man, a sacred blessing and remedy for all ills.
“No thing more excellent nor more valuable than wine was ever granted mankind by God”, said Plato. In his Laws he declares it “a medicine given for the purpose of securing modesty of soul and health and strength of body.” Wine played a central role in the development of classical Greek philosophy. After dinner wine would be taken in symposium — literally “fellow drinker” — as the great questions of logic, ethics and aesthetics were discussed. In Plato’s Symposium Alcibiades complains of Socrates’ inviolable sobriety, not born of abstemiousness but rather from an enviable capacity, “He will drink any quantity that he is bid, and never be drunk all the same”. (Quite unlike his presentation in Monty Python’s Philosophers Song, “Socrates himself will not be missed / a clever little thinker but a bugger when he’s pissed.”)
Dionysus, god of wine and revelry, was perhaps the most human of gods. This from the most anthropomorphic pantheon in the history of myth and faith, truly man creating his gods in his own image, with all attendant flaws. He was, it’s true, the god of intoxication, but for the Greeks this was enthousiasmas, “divine possession”. He was also, through his cultivation of the soil, celebrated as the patron of civilization, and bestower of order and law. The patronage of Dionysus even extended to the theater — and his fruits prove to be no less an inspiration for the theater that continues still to unfold wherever wine is drunk.
The ancient
Greeks, it turns out, would always mix water with their wine. To do otherwise was considered barbaric. Or perhaps it was simply an issue of taste,
those early wines being “strong and sweet and thick” according to Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat’s
voluminous History of Food. Still, in Coriolanus
Shakespeare has the noble Menenius Agrippa — friend and conscience of the
play’s tragic hero — reflect on “a cup of hot wine with not a drop of allaying
It seemed as though we were drinking antiquity.
Wine and its drinking in company, then — truly a promoter of friendship and good will, a fosterer of custom and of civilization itself as it has come to us. These were the things we talked of as we looked out over the “wine-dark sea” of Homer’s Iliad. It seemed as though we were drinking antiquity.
I’d never previously heard of assyrtiko and xinomavro. Have I drunk better wines? Undoubtedly. But all I can say is that this persists as my most treasured wine-drinking memory. Would tasting either wine again bring back that night with greater force and immediacy? I couldn’t tell you. I’ve never tasted either again, deliberately (or as deliberately as I can lay claim to — neither variety is likely to cross your path unless you seek it out in earnest, and perhaps not even then). No, I couldn’t tell you, because I wouldn’t want to put at risk the perfection of the recollection as it stands.
Our memories are ours, truly and only our own at the deepest and most personal level. They are ourselves as we once were and ourselves in continuity and perpetuity. No-one else with whom I shared that evening possesses the memory as it resides in my own mind. Nor can I know what persists within their power to recollect. Was my waiter marked in the ways I was? It’s doubtful. No doubt he was preoccupied with the end of season and his imminent return to home and family. But he has his own past to nurture, as I have mine to burnish, hoard and most of all protect. For what other possession could be more important and more intimate?
Memory won’t be protected. Instead it tends to rise unbidden when it senses its own cue (whether we wish it or not)...
We are, however, not always so in control of these things as we’d perhaps like to think. Memory won’t be protected. Instead it tends to rise unbidden when it senses its own cue (whether we wish it or not). I was, some years after Santorini, startlingly taken back there, to that restaurant in that company and that mood. Something as slight as the taste of an apricot brought the wine to mind, and with it a re-experiencing of that evening’s feelings. My own kind of Proustian revelation. But be that as it may, I’ve continued to this day to avoid those varieties — dreading to think of either of them tasting flat on my palate.
In Remembrance of Things Past (since that was the title when I read it — no, scratch that, when I started it — I’ve never been able to bring myself to call it In Search of Lost Time) Marcel, Proust’s narrator, has a similar experience of memory evoked by taste and smell (though one far more delicately rendered). Visiting his mother, she serves him tea and little cakes called madeleines. The taste of the two together brings on an exquisite feeling of well-being. He tries to determine what in that taste had set off this state of mind. “And suddenly the memory revealed itself”, a scene from childhood full of childish pleasure. He has been for a moment that child again, but he can’t be only that. He is also the man who reflects on the past that he can only return to, and then only fleetingly, in memory — when it permits. (I’m moved, perhaps by the memory of my Greek waiter, to consider the Greek origins of the word “nostalgia”. Nosto — “I return”. Alghó — “I ache for”.) “But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest: and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection”.
My own recollection, if I’m honest, isn’t pure. Even as I call it up I know it’s been revised, distorted and elaborated. The scene shifts between two viewpoints, two modes of memory. For a moment I see things through my own eyes, and then I watch myself as merely one of three at the table and witness from outside myself my own engagement and reverie as I recall them. Field memories and observer memories they’ve been dubbed by science. Not, it’s true, the most poetic terms. Still, they’re proof of some unavoidable corruption of recall. Yet even so, in a sense what happened is less important than how it’s remembered. For the events of the past as they played out engaged who we were, while our current recollection (rightly or wrongly) comprises who we are now.
Little wonder then that wine... can so powerfully urge forgotten episodes on us, or seem to provide a means to recapture what we once had and don’t anymore.
Smell and taste, of all our senses, are the most evocative of the past through memory. What the poets and philosophers knew intuitively and intrinsically, cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists have since proven experimentally. Recollections elicited by an odor or flavor carry far greater emotional weight than those triggered by a visual, auditory or tactile cue. That’s not to say that memory doesn’t frequently respond to some sight or sound or certain touch. Only that the memories drawn back by taste and smell are the more forceful and intense, and in essence the more moving. Little wonder then that wine, defined by our senses of smell and taste, can so powerfully urge forgotten episodes on us, or seem to provide a means to recapture what we once had and don’t anymore. And in sharing wine, we can bring someone with us into our own past, or accompany them into theirs.
I dined once
with a friend who’d just returned from
Keats’ Ode on Melancholy is brimming with wine imagery. In the very first line the reader is enjoined “go not to Lethe”. Dionysus was sometimes called the son of Lethe, forgetfulness or, more extremely, oblivion. The poet continues to urge against seeking oblivion — through “Wolf’s bane… for its poisonous wine,” or “nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine” — in order to escape the pain of melancholy and loss. And in a strange way that’s what I’ve been doing with my Santorini wines — my avoidance driven by the fear of loss, not its reality. Perhaps I should instead track down those wines, embrace the inevitable and trust them to inspire and not to disappoint. Share the experience of these wines as they were shared with me. And in so doing, attach new memory to old association. As Keats completes his theme,
Ay,
in the very
Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine
The pain of never being able to attain what was had just as it was had is small price for re-immersion in past pleasure. Drink all manner of varieties, then, - assyrtiko, xinomavro, and every wine you’ve ever drunk with everyone you’ve ever loved — and forge new memories that honor, not spoil, the old.
This theme is elaborated in the book The Psychology of Wine...truth and beauty by the glass, published by Praeger Publishers June 2009.
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Sources
Charles Baudelaire, The Complete Verse, Volume 1, Anvil, London, 1986
Petronius, Satyricon, Penguin, Harmondsworth, London, 1986
Plato, The Laws, Penguin, Harmondsworth, London, 2005
Plato, The Symposium, Penguin, Harmondsworth, London, 2003
Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl
Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, History of Food, Blackwell, Oxford, 2006
William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1981
G K Chesterton, poem "Wine and Water", authors' own loose copy
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Volume 1, trans Moncrieff and Kilmartin, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1984
John Keats, The Complete Poems, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1985.
