Is This Bottle Corked__ The Secret Life of Wine - Kathleen Burk [73]
We give you this bit of information as a sort of consolation prize because—unlike all the other questions, which we go on to answer—we really don’t know the answer to this one.
The scene is an agreeable house in the Vaucluse region of Provence, within a stone’s throw (and sometimes we wish we had done) of Peter Mayle, author of A Year in Provence. The house has some land attached. On that land are vines. The vines are cultivated by a local farmer who, by way of rent, hands back a certain amount of the wine he makes from them.
It is late summer, shading into early autumn. We arrive back from the nearby village to find a case of bottles in the porch. They are unlabeled but clearly contain white wine. We prepare a modest lunch and open a bottle: what fun! The vin doesn’t come more du pays than this.
We share a bottle with our companion: it is unsophisticated, slightly sweet, but otherwise nothing to complain about. But we notice at the end of lunch that there is none of that gentle elevation you’d expect, none of that feeling that it’s siesta time and not a moment too soon. Maybe (we think) it is simply weak. We open another bottle. We drink it. We look at each other.
“Anything?”
“No. You?”
“Nope. Stone cold sober.”
Hmm. We wonder whether we are somehow fooling ourselves and this is grape juice. We decide on an experiment. We pour a glass into a small pan and heat it to a little below boiling point, then light a match and hold it over the pan. There is a gentle paf and a blue flame ignites.
Grape juice does not give off anything that, when heated, bursts into flame.
We repeat the experiments—both the drinking experiment and the flame experiment—several times over the next few days, with identical results. At the end of the process we have three pieces of information:
The stuff is made from grapes; of that there is no doubt.
When heated, it gives off a volatile and inflammable hydrocarbon.
That hydrocarbon is not alcohol.
Perhaps this is some new experiment in winemaking. If so, it seems unlikely to catch on. If any reader can explain precisely what this agreeable but perplexing beverage actually was, they might be good enough to write in to the publisher and let us know. The prize will be a bottle of the fabled wine of Antipaxos.
Who wrote an elegy to a wineglass?
THERE IS SOMETHING about the sight of an empty glass that can move the soul to poetry. Sometimes the more sensitive of the company can be moved to recite the closing ruba’i of Omar Khayyám:
And when like her, oh Saki, you shall pass
Among the Guests star-scatter’d on the Grass,
And in your joyous errand reach the spot
Where I made one—turn down an empty Glass!
How does one top that? As always, we have the answer. A simple reference to a poem addressed simultaneously to a wineglass and extolling German wine should do the trick, and we have just the thing: “Auf das Trinkglas,” by Justinus Kerner, a doctor, city medical officer, and author of a treatise on animal magnetism.
Here it is, in all its glory: to the drinking glass of a dead friend.
O wondrous glass, you empty lie,
Which he would raise with joyful hand;
The spider now around you spins
A web of somber mourning-band.
But now you fill for me anew
Moon-bright with gold of German vines
And in your deep and holy glow
I cast my solemn trembling gaze.
What in your depths I may discern
Is not for every human heart
But in that moment, I well know
That friend from friend can never part.
And in this truth, my dearest glass,
I raise, and drain you joyfully!
And see the mirror’d golden stars
Clear-cupp’d in your most precious blood.
The silent moon moves o’er the vale,
The solemn midnight bell doth toll.
The glass is drained! The holy note
Sounds yet within thy crystal bowl.
It is, of course, somewhat better in the original German. But it’s certainly worth its weight in one-upmanship, and if you encounter any resistance, you can add that it was set to music by Schumann (Kerner-Liederreihe, Op. 35, No. 8).