Is This Bottle Corked__ The Secret Life of Wine - Kathleen Burk [45]
What is sad is the falling into desuetude of the term hock to refer to wines of quality. By the 1970s, a hock was a generic white German wine, usually sweetened, which could regularly be found in large bottles on the bottom shelves of supermarkets.
Ceremonial: shall we combine?
IF YOU SHOULD be invited to dine at High Table at one of Britain’s oldest universities, your host may well ask this question, which is less sinister than you might think. “Combination” is one of the most appealing of the many wine-based ceremonies, and a sort of reversal of the old (and thankfully now defunct in civilized society) custom in which the women retire to the drawing room and the men stay behind at table to get blind drunk (in the eighteenth century) or to bore each other with talk of money and off-color jokes (the nineteenth and twentieth centuries).
College dining is, of course, collegiate in nature, with the students and Fellows (the senior members of the college) eating in the same room, generally simply called “Hall.” But instead of the junior members being thrown out like so many ladies, the Fellows and their guests throw themselves out, retiring to drink wine—usually port, claret, or a sweet dessert wine.
In other words, they combine with each other. (Cynics say that the tradition arose so that the senior members could get blotto without setting a bad example to the juniors, though the more observant might say that it works both ways and is merely the civilized turning of a mutual blind eye. But things are more decorous these days, anyway.)
Customs vary. At Magdalene College, Cambridge, for example, people sit in groups of two or three at small occasional tables arranged in a semicircle, looking out over the courtyard and illuminated by candlelight, and the wines are brought round by the most junior Fellow present. The strict rule is that you may not, as you sip your claret and nibble your Bath Oliver biscuit, sit next to the people you were sitting with at dinner.
At other colleges, they proceed to another version of the dining table, where, as well as biscuits, there may be cheese, fruit, nuts, and a collegiate snuffbox; in these cases the wines are kept in circulation, and strictly in a clockwise direction, so that each person gets the bottle presented to his or her right hand (and hard luck if you’re a southpaw).
Some years ago we had the good fortune to sit next to a distinguished woman, no longer young, who had acquired her husband—a lord, no less—by virtue of this tradition. He had invited her to High Table at his college, and after dinner, distracted by the presence of her beloved, she had inadvertently passed the wine—“a rather indifferent Sauternes,” she said; “I remember it clearly”—the wrong way. The ancient don on her right was startled and perplexed, she said. Quite obviously he didn’t know what to do at the sight of a bottle appearing by his left hand.
“Then I had a flash of inspiration,” she said. “I noticed the old chap was in a wheelchair. So I stood up, took his brakes off—I was a nurse at the time, my dear, so I knew all about wheelchairs—and wheeled him an entire circuit of the table in an anti-clockwise direction. I thought that if he arrived at the wine anti-clockwise, it would be the same as if the wine had arrived at him clockwise. Saved the day. Well. My beau watched entranced and afterwards said it was the most impressive thing he’d ever seen, that it was quite clear that I’d do, and would I do him the honor of becoming his wife. So that, my dear, is how I became Lady ———.”
Combining is seldom so literally interpreted. But it remains a charming tradition of commensality over wine. (And one small word of advice: there is no need for even the shyest to find themselves conversationally stuck. All you need to do is turn to your neighbor at such an occasion and say, “Tell me, what