Is This Bottle Corked__ The Secret Life of Wine - Kathleen Burk [61]
Nor was it, indeed. The great prize in France at the time was wine, and for “prewar lemonade” we should read “pre-phylloxera wine.” Literally. W. E. Johns’s publishers had decided that wine drinking set the wrong example, and told Johns so. Like anyone who enjoys a glass or two, Johns took this glumly, and responded simply by changing every reference to “wine” to “lemonade.”
So Biggles was really one of us, after all.
Would this be the vin du pays?
ONE THING we don’t hear much about these days is whether or not a particular wine “travels well.” There was a time when some antipodean wines had a reputation for being a bit sketchy in that regard, but it was nothing to do with traveling well or badly; it was simply that as many as one in twelve bottles was corked. The explanation was that, in a sense, it was the corks that didn’t travel well; being furthest from Portugal, the New Zealanders were paying the price. So they changed over en masse to screw caps, and the problem was solved.
It’s easy to see why wine’s tolerance of travel was once an issue. When southern French wines were shipped out of Toulon their journey could be hazardous beyond just the inconveniences of poor winds, high seas, dismasting, and bilge-polluted barrels; there were the frequently war-afflicted Straits of Gibraltar to contend with, and then the notorious Bay of Biscay, through which consignments from Portugal also had to pass.
Add to that the perils of lurching oxcarts, careless stevedores, rutted roads, perilous mountain passes, and all the heartaches and the thousand natural shocks that wine is heir to, and one can see how the question arose, particularly in Britain, where there was precious little vin du pays available.
Now, of course, things are different. Fast, smooth container ships, speedy road transport, bottling on site or shipping in stainless-steel vessels, temperature-controlled transport, and, of course, the expensive but stress-free air transport (for ordinary freight, not “self-loading freight,” as the airline industry refers to passengers): all these have rendered wine’s voyage from its birthplace to the table infinitely less fraught.
Yet we should not forget the psychological perils of traveling wine. That crisply volcanic Greco di Tufo that so coolly charmed the palate in the little restaurant off the via Monserrato seems pale and thin back in Manchesters England and New Hampshire alike; the enchantingly idiosyncratic Antipaxos wine (and depending which version you got) so redolent of the wine-dark Ionian does not send your guests back in Düsseldorf or Melbourne into quite the rhapsodies you expected. The delights of the vin so often require the presence of the pays.
And even that does not always work. The historian, Arabist, author, traveler, wine connoisseur, and bon vivant Raymond Flower is the sort of figure England once exported around the world. Now there are sadly few of him, and none who could, as he legendarily (or perhaps mythically) did, spend a year living at the Palace Hotel, St. Moritz, to write a book about it.
Flower’s place in the oenophiles’ hall of fame rests on his book Chianti, a history of the region largely told through wine. But his place in Valhalla itself is ensured by a story we heard from his own lips many years ago, at his adopted home in a medieval torre in Tuscany.
He was being visited (he recounted) by the late Marika Hanbury-Tenison, gastronome, food editor, and cookery editor of the London Daily Telegraph. It can, even for so accomplished a host as Flower, be a nerve-racking business entertaining such a one at dinner, so, he said, he laid it on a bit.
Sitting on the terrace of his house, which stands, like all such ancient fortified buildings, on a small hill, with the Chianti dusk falling gently and the scent of his lemon trees on the air, he filled her glass.
“This,” he said, “is