Is This Bottle Corked__ The Secret Life of Wine - Kathleen Burk [28]
In particular, the Greeks disliked Mothon, the goblin-spirit of drunkenness (and bestiality), and believed that only barbarians—like the Scythians and Thracians—drank their wine neat. Hence the dilution of the wine. Even half-and-half with water was considered risky, and the preferred dilution was five parts water to two parts wine. As we all know, it’s perfectly possible to get drunk on watered wine; you simply have to drink more. But dilution certainly shows the intention of controlling one’s drinking, and hence oneself.
Yet it was not infallible. James Davidson, in his scholarly and wonderfully entertaining study of the ancient Greeks’ appetites, Courtesans and Fishcakes, recounts “a bizarre story told by Timaeus of Taormina” (now a popular Sicilian tourist resort: “Book your Charme Accommodation and enjoy the Sun of Taormina!” announces the Web site) that “illustrates graphically the sense of separation between the world within and the world without the drinking-party”:
In Agrigentum there is a house called “the trireme” for the following reason. Some young men were getting drunk in it, and became feverish with intoxication, off their heads to such an extent that they supposed they were in a trireme, sailing through a dangerous tempest; they became so befuddled as to throw all the furniture and fittings out of the house as though at sea, thinking that the pi lot had told them to lighten the ship because of the storm. A great many people, meanwhile, were gathering at the scene and started to carry off the discarded property, but even then the youths did not pause from their lunacy. On the following day, the generals turned up at the house, and charges were brought against them. Still sea-sick, they answered to the officials’ questioning that in their anxiety over the storm they had been compelled to jettison their superfluous cargo by throwing it into the sea.
“Still sea-sick” is rather splendid, but the most telling words are these: young men. As generation after generation has found out in the two and a half thousand years since, you can regulate, ritualize, formalize, and even legislate as much as you like. (For the ancient Greeks—as for most of Europe now—eighteen was the age at which Plato suggested you could start to drink. Unlike most of Europe now, he also said that once you were over forty, and therefore old, you could summon up Dionysos and go for it.) But then, as now, throw young men into the mix, and it can all go quickly overboard.
Did the 1855 Bordeaux classification have anything to do with quality?
THIS HANDY setting-out in categories of the so-called best wines of the left bank of the rivers Gironde and Garonne has an apparently unbreakable hold on the throat of the wine trade and of the more affluent consumer. It must be said at the outset that any relationship between this classification and quality was indirect. In 1855, Prince Napoléon-Jérôme, organizer of the Emperor Napoleon III’s 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris, asked the Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce for a comprehensive exhibition of the wines of the Gironde, to be arranged by category. It was based on the red wines of the Médoc and on the sweet white wines of Sauternes-Barsac. St. Emilion’s classification had to wait until 1955 and that of the Graves until 1953 (reds) and 1959 (whites), while Pomerol still awaits its equivalent measured consideration.
The task was eagerly undertaken by brokers (courtiers), who were considerably more interested in the commercial possibilities arising from the exhibition than in anything else, although they were also keen to impose some order on a chaotic market. Their approach was, first, to list sixty of the leading châteaux of the Médoc plus the great wine of the Graves, Haut-Brion, categorizing them as premiers, deuxièmes, troisièmes, quatrièmes, and cinquièmes crus