Is This Bottle Corked__ The Secret Life of Wine - Kathleen Burk [43]
What did Dr. Johnson challenge his Master to drink?
HERE BEFORE US as we write is a rare first edition of Dr. Johnson’s epic 1755 Dictionary … no; let’s give it the full ceremony of its title:
A Dictionary of the English Language in which
The WORDS are deduced from their ORIGINALS and
ILLUSTRATED in their DIFFERENT SIGNIFICATIONS
by EXAMPLES from the best WRITERS.
How does this most convivial and clubbable of men—he defined the word club as “an assembly of good fellows, meeting under certain conditions”—define wine?
Soberly enough.
“WINE,” he writes: “The fermented juice of the grape,” and that (compare the EU definition) is that. Straightaway, Johnson is off on a list of supporting quotations, beginning with Shakespeare (“The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees / Is left this vault to brag of”) and working through the Bible (“Be not amongst wine-bibbers, amongst riotous eaters”), Bacon (“Where the wine-press is hard-wrought, it yields a harsh wine that tastes of the grape-stone”), Sandys, Milton, Herbert, and Pope, ending with the satiric Swift (“If the hogshead falls short, the wine-cooper had not filled it in proper time”).
His secondary entry is a quote from Arbuthnot, which goes straight to the point discovered by anyone who has ever had a glass of terrible homemade parsnip wine, and, indeed, by elephants, who allegedly throw fruit into water holes and come back later when it has fermented: “Preparations of vegetables by fermentations called by the general name of wines, have quite different qualities from the plant; for no fruit, taken crude, has the intoxicating quality of wine.”
A modest enough explanation of one of the most far-reaching discoveries of all time, but then, surprisingly enough for the great conversationalist of his age, Dr. Johnson forswore his drinking, thereafter more likely than not to be confining himself to water when those about him were downing the stuff by the bottle. Yet there were few subjects on which he enjoyed conversing more than wine, one of which brought about his celebrated quarrel with the artist Sir Joshua Reynolds. In the middle of a discussion about wine at the house of General Paoli, Johnson, fueled on nothing more than water, suddenly bellowed, “I won’t argue with you any more, Sir. You are too far gone.” Far from taking it on the chin, the great painter snapped back, “I should have thought so indeed, Sir, had I made such a speech as you have now done.” It wasn’t the only occasion, either: at Richard Cumberland’s house, Johnson asked for another cup of tea, only to be told by Reynolds that he had already had eleven cups. “Sir,” roared the Great Bear, as he was known, “I did not count your glasses of wine. Why should you number up my cups of tea?” But the occasion ended in laughter.
Dr. Johnson, when not on his water diet, was known for the strength of his head and once famously drank thirty-six glasses of port at one sitting “with a sugar-lump in every glass” without showing any effects. But port could cover a multitude of wines, some of them sinful. When Johnson challenged his friend and benefactor, the wealthy brewer Henry Thrale, whom Johnson referred to as his “Master,” to a drinking competition, it was not port he suggested. In the presence of Fanny Burney, he said:
I wish my Master would say to me, “Johnson, if you will oblige me, you will call for a bottle of Toulon,” and then we will set to it, glass for glass, till it is done; and after that, I will say, “Thrale, if you will oblige me, you will call for another bottle of Toulon,” and then we will set to it, glass for glass, till that is done; and by the time we should have drunk the two bottles, we should be so happy and such good friends, that we should fly into each other’s arms, and both call together for the third!
Three bottles of Toulon might have been enough to set Thrale a-going—according to Johnson, “his conversation does not show the minute hand, but he strikes the hour very correctly”—but what actually was it