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By Root 502 0

and on his marches, he appropriated cellars, public and private, in order to provide wine to his troops. As for himself, although he drank a range of wines, he did have preferences. One was champagne, about which he reputedly made a comment that made its way into anthologies about wine: “In victory you deserve champagne, in defeat you need it.” It was certainly the case that he bought, and drank, a significant amount, primarily from Jean-Rémy Moët. The two had first met at the military academy at Brienne-le-Château, where Moët had gone to secure orders for his family’s champagne. They developed an enduring friendship, and before each of his military campaigns, Napoleon traveled by the Moët estate at Epernay to collect cases of champagne; the lone exception was his dash to Waterloo in 1815, after he had escaped from exile in Elba. His last visit had taken place on March 14, 1814, just before his forces fell to the Allied armies, and it was on this visit that Napoleon pinned on his friend’s coat his own Légion d’honneur. This was awarded for his distinguished service to France in increasing the worldwide reputation of its wines.

As for still wines, whenever possible he drank red burgundy, reputedly because he believed that drinking it helped in the conception of male children. His preferences were Clos Vougeot and Chambertin, but, considering that he often drank his wine chilled and diluted with water, it probably mattered little which burgundy was actually in the glass. As do most people, he often drank what was available. His carriage was captured after Waterloo, and it was discovered to contain nearly empty bottles of malaga and rum. After his defeat at Waterloo, Napoleon was exiled to the very remote Atlantic island of St. Helena from 1815 until his death in 1821. This was more than two thousand miles from the British Cape Colony (now part of South Africa), and over twice that distance from Europe. His house hold at Longwood House had supplies of champagne, clarets and burgundies, and madeira. Yet what is memorable was the Cape wine Groot Constantia, a fabled sweet white dessert wine drunk by all of the crowned heads of Europe. Napoleon took advantage of his relative proximity to the Cape to indulge his taste for Constantia, 297 gallons of which were shipped in wooden casks from Groot Constantia to St. Helena every year. On his deathbed, he refused everything offered to him save a glass of Constantia wine. Was he first offered champagne but turned it down? If so, the evidence seems to indicate that Constantia was his favorite wine—at the end, at any rate.

What was “the blushful Hippocrene”?

KEATS, in his “Ode to a Nightingale,” yearns for

a beaker full of the warm South,

Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,

With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,

And purple-stainèd mouth,

That I might drink, and leave the world unseen.

As far as wine writing goes, this is a confused, and confusing, piece of poetry. Hippocrene, for example, has a “true” identity and a Keats-given one. The true identity was that of the spring on Mount Helicon in ancient Boeotia that gushed forth when the foot of the flying horse Pegasus struck the earth. The Muses danced around the spring to find inspiration, and presumably Keats invoked it because by legend it conferred poetic inspiration on those who drank its waters. But he referred to it as a wine, and here the identity is even more confusing. The poet states that it is a red wine, and that it produces a purple-stainèd mouth. Yet if it is “blushful,” that seems to indicate a rosé, which hardly produces a purple mouth. If the beaker has beaded bubbles winking at the brim, it might be a sparkling wine of some sort. Keats, in fact, is calling for a wine that was probably badly made from watery wild grapes and intended to be drunk immediately after the vintage with, perhaps, a bit of fermentation still carrying on. In short, Keats was describing a cheap sparkling red wine—perhaps an ancient red Lambrusco?

What was “the blude-red wine”?

The king sits in Dunfermline town,

Drinking