Is This Bottle Corked__ The Secret Life of Wine - Kathleen Burk [65]
On the other hand, champagne and other sparkling wines keep very easily. Just put the bottle back in the refrigerator without bothering to stopper it. The slow evolution of carbon dioxide bubbles will keep the air away for a long time before the wine goes flat.
Ceremonial: should you turn your back on the loving cup?
SPARE A THOUGHT for King Edward the Martyr, slain in 978 at Corfe Castle in Dorset—some say by his own mother, Aelfryth—while raising his hands to drink. The drinking horns were heavy and took both hands to raise; the body was thus exposed and vulnerable to a knife blow.
And so (it is said) began the custom of the loving cup, still practiced by livery companies, the Inns of Court, many Oxford and Cambridge colleges, and similar institutions. Inexplicable unless you know a little of its underlying purpose, the loving-cup ceremonial becomes clear if you think of Edward.
The two-handled cup, usually of silver or silver gilt, is filled with wine or a spiced wine often referred to as “sack” (for a different interpretation) and passed around the tables. Each person on receiving the cup bows to the one who handed it to him, on the right, and to their neighbor on the left. The one on the right remains standing; the one on the left rises and holds the cup cover in his right, or dagger, hand. Thus while the drinker is taking his wine, he is protected on the right, and watching the potential assailant on his left, who in any case is disarmed by the cover.
It sounds more complex than it is, but although it may now seem otiose, like all ceremonial it exists in commemoration of something that once was real. And like all ceremonial, too, there are constant arguments about whether the protector should stand facing away from the drinker or, literally, watch his back.
We would probably take the latter position, since it’s the one adopted by the Worshipful Company of Armourers and Brasiers, who should really know all about such things if anyone does.
Wine, women, and what was the other one?
THERE IS A venerable rhetorical figure called the hendiatris, consisting of three words joined together to express one idea. “Lock, stock and barrel” comes to mind, as do “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll,” “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” and, indeed, “blood, sweat and tears.”
But there can be few more appealing than “wine, women, and song.” The three stand or fall together as an image of the good earthly life—at least, the good earthly life if you happen to like all three.
Wine and women? A house of ill fame, perhaps. Wine and song? A drunken knees-up. Women and song? A gospel choir. But all three together: ah, there’s lovely, as they say in Wales.
But who first said it? The usual answer is also the strangest. The couplet is generally given in German, as in the epigraph of John Addington Symonds’s book of medieval German student songs, published in 1884:
Wer liebt nicht Weib Wein und Gesangb
Der bleibt ein Narr sein Lebenslang.
Literally, “Who loves not wine women and song / Remains a fool his whole life long.”
And to whom does Symonds, without doubt or hesitation, attribute the couplet? Why, none other than Martin Luther, the great reformer and founder of the Lutheran Church.
It seems somehow improbable, and there are cracks around the attribution into which refreshing incredulity can