Is This Bottle Corked__ The Secret Life of Wine - Kathleen Burk [42]
But is there any truth in it? Hunt through the libraries, trawl the Internet, and you will find thousands upon thousands of assertions that so it is: drink takes away the per for mance. Look more carefully, though, and it begins to acquire something of a slightly shady air. Dr. Irwin Goldstein, who founded the Institute for Sexual Medicine at Boston University Medical School, told a television audience that “alcohol use was actually not a statistical indicator of erectile dysfunction unless and until the alcohol consumption was fairly excessive. There are lots of reports that minor use of ethanol actually prevents vascular disease, which turns out to be probably the basic underlying dysfunction.” In other words, a few drinks keep the pipes clear and should make things better, not worse. And the authoritative Merck Manual of Geriatrics—not, alas, a listing of the distinguished and venerable, but an extensive guide to the frailties of humanity under the scourge of time—does acknowledge that alcohol may be a contributory factor in up to 25 percent of cases, but it makes the same claim for anticonvulsants, anti-infective agents, antiarrhythmics, adrenergic blockers (centrally or peripherally acting), beta-blockers, calcium channel blockers, anxiolytics, antidepressants, antipsychotics, cocaine, lithium, narcotics, anticholinergics, acetazolamide, baclofen, cimetidine, clofibrate, danazol, disulfiram, interferon, leuprolide, naproxen, and others besides.
None of which, however, is known for provoking the desire; nor would they have made such a good speech for the Porter.
So the answer to our question is: it seems to, sometimes, but we don’t really know why.
Yet what a fragile flower the act of love proves to be, particularly from the male’s point of view. Cast by a harsh world in the character of ravening satyr, he is truly so delicate that the very elixir of a southern hillside needed to brace him up to approach his desire can prevent him from consummating it—though the reason would seem to be not alcohol itself but an excess of alcohol. Falling asleep, an attack of the whirling pits, a raging thirst, or an attack of nausea are equally effective at terminating a night of passion before it has begun. The fault (as Shakespeare almost observed) is not in our glass but in ourselves.
What was a “comet wine”?
DID YOU EVER briefly wonder what was meant (in “The Stockbroker’s Clerk”) when Dr. Watson says, “Sherlock Holmes cocked his eye at me, leaning back on the cushions with a pleased and yet critical face, like a connoisseur who had just taken his first sip of a comet vintage”? In the nineteenth century, French wine-makers believed that comets were hot objects, and that this heat produced particularly good grapes. Therefore, they claimed, years when comets appeared were great vintage years. This conviction apparently began with the appearance of Flaugergues’s Comet in 1811, which happened to coincide with a hot, dry summer. According to Michael Broadbent in his Vintage Wine, this “comet vintage” was possibly the greatest vintage of the nineteenth century throughout the European wine regions.
During the nineteenth century, the night skies appear to have been littered with comets, with at least three dozen of them making an appearance. The question was, did great vintages coincide with the appearance of comets? If one compares Broadbent’s listing of outstanding wines of Bordeaux during this period, the answer is yes: 1811, 1825, 1844, 1846, 1847, 1848, 1858, 1864, 1865, 1870, 1875, and 1899. However, it is immediately noticeable that this is only a dozen years, and they do not include, for example, 1835, when Halley’s Comet made its periodic appearance, nor the years of the Great Comets of 1843, 1861, and 1882. However, with nearly every decade combining at least one great vintage with a comet, it is clear why the French wine brokers latched on to a great marketing opportunity, with advertisements in newspapers and entries in cata logues listing comet vintages: it was a claim