• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 466 0

(growths), and, second, to list the best sweet white wines of Sauternes and Barsac in two categories, premiers and deuxièmes crus, with Château d’Yquem on a pinnacle of its own as premier cru supérieur. But they did nothing so unnecessary as to taste the wines in order to put each in its rightful place. Rather, they listed the wines in descending order according to the prices they fetched in the market, assuming that the prices reflected the relative quality of the wines. There had been earlier classifications of quality, a rough one in 1647 and another in 1767, and these provided a context. They also paid some attention to lists compiled by well-known connoisseurs such as Thomas Jefferson and the respectively English and Scottish connoisseurs and writers Cyrus Redding and Dr. Alexander Henderson. The list was then issued through the Chamber of Commerce.

The list is undeniably useful to wine merchants and for those wine buyers unable to taste before buying—that is, most of them—but it has significant flaws. First of all, it seems to be virtually immutable, with only one new entrant into the classification of premier cru, Mouton-Rothschild in 1973. This also means that châteaux whose quality demands that they should be elevated to a higher classification, those whose depressing level of quality should cause them to be thrown out, and those wines classified cru bourgeois whose quality should admit them to the system are frozen in the positions they held when the dance ended in 1855. Second, the wines around Margaux were the focus of the brokers, while those situated further north, particularly those around St. Estèphe, were largely disregarded. This was overwhelmingly because the lack of a railway to the northern Médoc meant that transport costs to the city of Bordeaux were high. And third, the mergers, acquisitions, and breakups affecting virtually all of the estates over the past century and a half mean that the fundamental basis of the classification—that of a wine produced from the grapes grown on land belonging to a named estate—is, at the least, muddied. The whole situation supports the theory that the human quest for certainty is stronger than the desire for a more truthful ambiguity.

Have some madeira, m’dear?

She was young, she was pure, she was new, she was nice

She was fair, she was sweet seventeen

He was old, he was vile, and no stranger to vice

He was base, he was bad, he was mean

So begins Flanders and Swann’s great hymn to the evil seducer, which manages to entangle the innocent madeira in its toils, and not since Clarence drowned in his malmsey butt has this harmless and indeed benevolent drink taken such a blow to its reputation. The innocent escapes in the end, but not before:

Unaware of the wiles of the snake-in-the-grass

And the fate of the maiden who topes

She lowered her standards by raising her glass

Her courage, her eyes and his hopes …

How did madeira come to be linked with the wiles of elderly rakes, so that no man now could offer a girl a glass of it without hearing an admonitory voice whispering in his ear and feeling himself twirling an imaginary mustache?

Madeira is such an innocent drink, and for a very long time one that arrived at adulthood only after severe trials. Originally unfortified, it was found to suffer on the long sea journey from its home in the mid-Atlantic; in the second part of the seventeenth century, it became clear that madeira fortified with brandy was somehow improved during the voyage to India, in the ships of the East India Company, and became even better if it made the round trip back again, gaining the status of vinho da roda.

As North America expanded, a new market for madeira grew, to such a degree that by 1800 fully a quarter of all madeira was being sold there; the Declaration of Independence was sealed with a toast of madeira in 1776.

But history and biology dealt madeira some harsh blows. First powdery mildew and then the phylloxera louse almost obliterated the vineyards; production had hardly got back to normal when first the Russian Revolution