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What is a connoisseur?

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INTRODUCTION

Where do we begin?

If this were a book about what wine to drink with what food, it would be easy. If this were a book about what wine to buy to impress your friends and/or business associates, it would still be easy. If this were a learned volume on the effect of the phylloxera aphid on the French wine industry, it would probably be easier still.

But this is none of those books. It is, rather, to wine writing what the cabinet of bibelots was to Edwardian interior decorating: a collection of, one hopes, charming diversions to catch the eye, divert the mind, and perhaps provoke conversation. When you read the tale of the weeping sommelier, or consider “comet wines,” or spend a moment considering potlatch, wine diamonds, Hippocrene, terroir, or gout, there is nothing that we want you to do. All we would like is for that part of your mind that is occupied with good living in general, and wine in particular (which may be a large or a small proportion of your mind, according to personal disposition), to be diverted, entertained, and primed with the sort of curiosities that make human society so much fun.

Yet again, where do we begin? Wine is perhaps more profoundly dug into—or poured out upon—human history than any other artifact, natural or man-made. Its history stretches back perhaps eight thousand years; certainly, it makes its appearance in the first written story we now possess, the four-thousand-year-old Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, which comes from what is now Iraq and was then the Kingdom Between the Rivers, Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization. There the king’s friend is told by a temple slave to drink seven goblets of wine; there King Gilgamesh himself encounters

the woman of the vines

Siduri the maker of wine.

She lives beside the sea;

She sits in her gardens by the sea’s edge

Her golden bowl and golden vats given by the gods,

Veiled …

Where there are grapes, there is wine; where there is wine, almost without exception, it is not only a source of good fellowship but a crucial symbol of ritual. At Jewish weddings, the bride and groom drink the kiddushin wine from two goblets and the nisuin wine from one, symbolizing the union of the couple. Timothy is encouraged to “drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and thine often infirmities.” Jesus of Nazareth transformed water into wine at Cana, and blessed it at the Last Supper (the kiddush, or dedication of the wine to Elohim, begins each Sabbath meal); and in almost every Christian community the action is repeated and remembered to this day in the communion prayers or the Canon of the Roman Catholic Mass. Wine was consecrated in sacramental banquets of the Roman temples of Mithras; it is found in Hindu ceremonials; it is one of the great subjects of the Rubá’iyát of Omar Khayyám who, in Edward FitzGerald’s ecstatic translation, sings of

divine

High-piping Péhlevi, with “Wine! Wine! Wine!

Red Wine!”—the Nightingale cries to the Rose

Hard to imagine such paeans to beer, or liturgies celebrated in gin and tonic, however fine. Not that we would go so far as the medieval Germans, who regarded beer as the drink of pagans and barbarians, while wine represented civilization and Christianity; nor would we join forces with Hilaire Belloc, who claimed that beer was the drink of the dull Protestant north, wine the libation of the exuberant Catholic south. He has been often misquoted as declaring:

Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine,

There’s always laughter and good red wine.

At least I’ve always found it so.

Benedicamus Domino!

though what he actually wrote was:

But Catholic men that live upon wine

Are deep in the water, and frank, and fine;

Wherever I travel I find it so,

Benedicamus Domino.

Whatever he wrote, though (and he wrote, too, of “The fleas that tease in the High Pyrenees / And the wine that tasted of tar”), the truth remains that wine has bathed humankind in its benevolent light (scarlet or golden, according to your choice)