Is This Bottle Corked__ The Secret Life of Wine - Kathleen Burk [14]
A connoisseur of madeira, Washington bought his own casks, storing them at Mount Vernon. Once he became president in 1790, the President’s House (after 1814 known as the White House) was stocked by his secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, with plenty of wine—but, alas for madeira, much of this wine was French, with a particular emphasis on champagne, Château d’Yquem, Frontignan, and Château Lafite. Was it because Washington secretly preferred it? Did his guests expect it? Or was it postnatal defiance of Great Britain?
What color was the “wine-dark sea”?
SOONER OR LATER in every wine lover’s life comes the terrible moment when someone raises a glass of wine to the light, peers at it quizzically, and murmurs, in that special tone of voice that people use when they are being deep and poetical, “Ahh … the wine-dark sea.”
The usual location for this utterance is on the terrace of some benighted Greek taverna overlooking the Aegean, when the owner has just produced something “very special” from the back room with a label made on an inkjet printer that very afternoon. (While the Greeks are keen to bring their wines up to a high international standard, and are frequently succeeding, they are still being undercut in their efforts by tourists who equate Greece with cheap wine and by tavernistas who are only too happy to play along.)
The same thing may, indeed, happen in your own home, perhaps over something you brought back from Poros, perhaps over a glass of young and almost black Madiran, pressed from the Tannat grape in southwestern France (or indeed Uruguay, to which it was taken by émigré Basques as a taste of home), a wine that, if you catch it on the wrong foot, comes snarling out of the bottle like some Homeric monster, probably a Cyclops.
But the great question is: what does one say? The usual option is to nod and sigh soulfully, but readers of this book are beyond such behavior. You know only too well that the quote is from Homer, and, more specifically, from Andrew Lang’s 1883 translation of the Iliad. The word that Homer used was oinos, which is usually translated as something along the lines of “sunset red.” Homer uses it only three times: at sunset after a funeral, during an all-night voyage, and when Odysseus’s ship founders in a tempest. But even that is misleading and gets us no further toward working out what color, exactly, the “wine-dark sea” really was.
The Iliad and the Odyssey were set in the Ionian archipelago, around the island of Ithaca (although a recent theory has proposed that Homer’s Ithaca was in reality now a peninsula, then an island, on the tip of nearby Cephalonia). Sometimes, when one looks out toward the western Ionian Sea at sunset on a stormy evening, the sea can take on a deep purplish red color not unlike a young Tannat or a taverna’s hell-brew. “Aha!” we say to ourselves. “The true, the wine-dark sea!”
But we might be wrong. It might just be that oinos or “wine-dark” had nothing to do with color at all—or not as we think of it. It wasn’t just the sea that Homer called “wine-dark;” it was also sheep. He described Hector’s hair as kyanos, which seems to be the glinting blue of pottery or lapis lazuli. Honey and nightingales are green—or at least what we’d think of as meaning green. Perhaps his bronze sky isn’t so odd, but otherwise Homer’s use of color, and his very restricted color palette, seems distinctly odd to modern eyes.
So the question is, if sheep were the same oinos as the sea, did Homer see sheep as wine-colored, or indeed wine as the color of sheep?