Is This Bottle Corked__ The Secret Life of Wine - Kathleen Burk [15]
But one thing the last two and a half thousand years of human thought has taught us is that language is a slippery thing, and that words may describe the things we see but also can shape how we see the things we describe. Perhaps the better theory of how the ancient Greeks saw color—these strange people, so much like us yet so utterly different, who described only three colors in the rainbow—is that they weren’t talking about the same thing as we are. When Homer described the “wine-dark” sea, perhaps he was talking not about its color but about its essence. He was saying not less but more than the modern wine critic or the photographer’s color meter: something about the essential nature of that sea at that time, which was also true elsewhere of a sheep’s coat or of the wine itself, from which the epithet sprang. In the same way that Leonardo da Vinci first noticed and then was enthralled by the similarities between a young woman’s flowing hair and the running water of a millstream, so, perhaps, Homer was drawing his attention, and ours, to an underlying connection in nature.
Whatever the truth of it, the next time someone holds that glass speculatively up to the light and that misty look comes into her eyes … jump in first and say your piece. Sometimes it’s not connoisseurship that counts but gamesmanship.
Who was the first American connoisseur of wine?
THERE IS NO competition here: it was Thomas Jefferson. Not only did he have a great knowledge of wines and a palate to be admired, but he also took steps to ensure that the wine he received was the same as the wine he had bought. Because the new United States needed a minister to France, in 1784, at the age of forty-one, he left the United States for Paris. Here he discovered fine wine. He began to purchase it seriously, and burned to find out more about the best wines. So he became a grand tourist, seeing the sights and drinking the wines, always making detailed tasting notes. Over two years, he traveled through the great wine regions of France, as well as Italy and the Rhine Valley. After tasting dozens of wines, he decided, as quoted by James Gabler, that a white Hermitage from the Rhône Valley was “the first wine in the world without a single exception” (these vineyards now belong to the house of M. Chapoutier and their grapes go to produce Chante-Alouette), but he also bought dozens of bottles of Yquem. He decided that it was best to go directly to the producer to buy his wines: he had discovered that the merchants in Bordeaux and elsewhere blended the wine after selling it to the customer, sometimes adding brandy, and therefore the purchaser could never be certain of what he would eventually receive. Furthermore, if it was shipped in cask from the producer to the merchant, there was a real danger that the wagoners would tap it, consuming some of the wine themselves and allowing oxidation of what was left. He decided that the only remedy was for the producer to bottle the wine at the château before it was shipped to him, a practice on which he was to insist. It would be well over a century before this was common practice.
What was Napoleon’s favorite wine?
NAPOLEON spent relatively little time thinking about food and drink and scarcely more time consuming it—he was a grabber and a gobbler, and those who were invited to dinner frequently took the precaution of eating at home before dining with the general. Wine was necessary as a beverage, given the doubtful quality of most available water,