Is This Bottle Corked__ The Secret Life of Wine - Kathleen Burk [48]
Which Liebfraumilch isn’t Liebfraumilch?
POOR LIEBFRAUMILCH has had a bad press in recent years, perhaps because of its associations with branded supermarket wines such as Blue Nun, the sweetish, fruity, mass-market harbingers of faux sophistication and nightmarish Abigail’s Parties in carefully managerial housing estates.
Poor Liebfraumilch. You couldn’t call it glamorous. Blue Nun’s main competitor in the 1970s, for example, was that icon of unsophistication, Mateus Rosé. And the fruity, low-acid Müller-Thurgau varietal from which most cheap Liebfraumilch was made was largely grown because it was a more profitable crop than knobbly, proletarian old sugar beets. No, not glamorous.
Poor Liebfraumilch. Its name isn’t even German, but a sort of pidgin Deutsch; the real version would be Liebfrauenmilch—“beloved lady’s milk”—a reference to the Virgin Mary (just as the Blue Nun herself bore striking resemblances to the traditional iconography of Mary, but not enough to rouse the Catholics).
Despite its multiple, generic, and downscale by-blows, the original Liebfraumilch, from the Liebfrauenstift-Kirchenstück, the vineyards around the Liebfrauenkirche in Worms, can still be had. But Madonna Liebfraumilch, as it is labeled, is not a Liebfraumilch. It is far too posh for that, being officially a “QmP”—a Qualitätswein mit Prädikat, the top level of the German classification—while its déclassé relations are mere Deutscher Landwein, one up from the bottom.
Poor Liebfraumilch.
What wines did Chaucer’s pilgrims drink?
BORN THE SON and grandson of vintners (wine importers), Geoffrey Chaucer, who lived from c. 1343 to 1400, was primarily a civil servant, although of an exalted sort. He had married the sister of the third wife of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster and younger son of King Edward III, and Gaunt’s patronage was important in securing Chaucer’s appointment to various positions. But Chaucer had another life, that of a reader, translator, and writer of books; Canterbury Tales is only his most widely known.
Wine was plentiful in England. Part of Chaucer’s payment for some years was a jug of wine each day, while later on he was to receive a cask of wine each year. Wine makes a frequent appearance in the Tales, although what type of wine is often unclear. In the Prologue, for example, the Summoner drank strong red wine, while the Host at the Tabard, a high-class hostelry, provided strong wine for the group of pilgrims. What was it? The obvious answer should be red wine from Bordeaux, which at that time still belonged to the English Crown. But most Bordeaux wine was not “strong”: rather, it was very light red (what the French called clairet) or even the color of a rosé. Indeed, Hugh Johnson in his Story of Wine points out that it was what the French called a vin d’une nuit. The grapes were trodden, and the wine fermented on the skins in the vat for no more than twenty-four hours—a single night—before the liquid was run off into barrels to ferment as a clear, pale juice. A small proportion of the must (juice) was left in the vat with the skins to become redder, but the resulting wine was too harsh and dark to serve on its own; some would be added to the paler wine to darken it and give it some “edge.” Johnson compares it to modern Beaujolais Nouveau. The Tabard was too upmarket to give the pilgrims the inferior wine, and therefore it seems likely that Chaucer’s “strong wine” must have come from elsewhere.
A strong possibility is that it was wine from Spain. From about 1250, wine was regularly shipped from Bilbao to Bristol, Southampton, and London. The best wines were very good: when prices were fixed by Edward III in 1364, the best Spanish wine cost the same as the best Bordeaux. Coming from a hot climate, the wines were high in alcohol and