Is This Bottle Corked__ The Secret Life of Wine - Kathleen Burk [66]
Yet Luther was no teetotaler, and the services of the church that bore his name produced some of the greatest and most joyful music of all time, including the masses of Michael Praetorius and the music of J. S. Bach. Nor was he a celibate; indeed, he condemned celibacy, and wrote to a friend:
I shall never take a wife, as I feel at present. Not that I am insensible to my flesh or sex (for I am neither wood nor stone); but my mind is averse to wedlock because I daily expect the death of a heretic.
The heretic was, of course, himself. And in due course, he wrote, “suddenly, and while I was occupied with far different thoughts the Lord has plunged me into marriage.” He was forty-two and his new wife, Katharina—a former nun whom he had arranged to smuggle out of the convent in a herring barrel—was twenty-six; by all accounts, theirs was a thoroughly happy marriage.
So it could have been that Luther, knowing the triad already, merely turned it into a catchy verse. The great travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, in A Time of Gifts (which describes his walk from London to Constantinople in the 1930s), first enters Germany at a town called Goch, where, in an inn named At the Sign of the Black Eagle, he sees the verse painted “right across the walls” in “bold Gothic black-letter script.” Yet he sees it again, in the second of his trilogy, Between the Woods and the Water, this time in Romania. He remarks on this to the landlord, saying he’d seen it before in Goch; the landlord
laughed and asked me if I knew who the poet was. “No? It was Martin Luther.” I was rather surprised. Unlike the Lutheran Saxons, the Swabians were all Catholics.
It’s possible, then, that the attribution was some sort of slur against Luther. Possible, too, is that the rhyme was simply around, in the air, and Luther seemed a good person to attribute it to, just as it is as impossible to remove the quote “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is that the good do nothing” from its attribution to Edmund Burke as it is to find out where he said it.
The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations gives the attribution to Luther but acknowledges that there is “no proof of authorship.” Its transatlantic rival, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, offers the German poet Johann Heinrich Voss (1751–1826) as the most likely candidate. But in truth, it remains a mystery. Enough to say that we should all applaud the sentiment and raise a glass to the author—whoever he was.
What links wine and olives?
SOME DECADES AGO, an Oxford University history examination paper asked, “Liberty never flourishes where the orange tree grows. Discuss.” The Mediterranean is where the orange, the olive, and the vine all flourish, and, at the time, Spain, Portugal, and Greece were all dictatorships. The Fascist dictatorship in Italy was a relatively recent memory. (Fortunately, the question seemed to ignore California and Florida.)
But to the visitor to these countries, there is a magical relationship between the citrus fruits, the deep green olive trees, the wine, Homer’s “wine-dark sea,” and the smell in the Greek forests of the resin that flavors the national wine, retsina. The longevity of Mediterranean peoples is often attributed to their consumption of olive oil, red wine, and fish. Olive oil, like wine, is obtained by the pressing of a fruit, and like wine it comes in many grades and at many prices. It differs in not being fermented. In earlier times, olive oil and wine, being easily kept over the winter, provided people with a source of calories when other sources were relatively scarce.
The Romans used to float olive oil on top of wine as a way of preserving it. The olive oil would have slowed down the rate at which oxygen in the