Look upon the wine when it is read
Peter Levi
THE HISTORY OF WINE by Hugh Johnson
Mitchell Beazley, f25, pp.480
What wine writers are any good? Not the ones whose metaphors float like clouds in the sunset, but that thin stream of dryish writers who hang a lifetime's experience on an arresting phrase: Montaigne, I suppose, and, in English, Saintsbury and Mr Berry; Hugh Johnson puts Saintsbury down as slight, but he is pregnant. I do not know of any decent writer in the past who would dare to write the entire history of wine. Mr Johnson has carried it off with extra- ordinary energy and learning. In every chapter, unfamiliar facts unbalance and remake the reader's sense of a region or a period. The method is more or less Macaulay's, and history will never look the same again. Of course, this great work stands on the shoulders of other books, but it is abundant in its information, generous in its specialised knowledge, while it is dry and smiling in style. I found it far more useful than any wine atlas. It is admirably illustrated, from the firing of an anti-hail cannon in 19th-century Beaujolais, to the great tun of Konigstein (1725), which supported a dance floor about 60 feet by 30 perched on its roof. It is rare to encounter an object at once so ugly and so elegant.
Wine intoxicates, but it was also at one time the only known antiseptic. Homeric wounds were washed in it, and in sacrifice to the gods it was an equivalent to blood. Mr Johnson seeks its origins in Georgia and Armenia, but the vine is native to central Asia, and one is permitted to give rein to one's fantasy further east and longer ago. Today, excellent wine is pro- duced more or less all over the world. It is pleasing to encounter the photograph of Philippe de Rothschild in this connection. Andre Simon was the first European apos- tle of Chilian and Australian wine; he visited Chile in 1907, when that country enjoyed the highest champagne consump- tion in the world. But it was Baron Philippe, in cooperation with Robert Mon- davi in the Napa Valley, who set a seal of perfection on Californian wine, which is not bad for the best modern translator of Elizabethan poetry into French. This is a vast, intricate book, like one of those enormous, rambling vines that grow in the alleyways of Bath and the orchards of Afghanistan. The most enlivening chapters to the historical sense are the mediaeval ones, but the central material is the early modern period, which is often a shocking history, and almost equally unfamiliar.
In so wide a range, there must be something to criticise. The 'traditional black Mavron' grape of Cyprus just means black: I have somewhere a list of some 20 or 30 Greek vine names, many of them black, and this grape species could surely be more exactly identified? Some 'tradi- tional' Greek vines such as the Santo- meriano are French. The heroic role of Pomba! in Portugal was repugnant to me: Pombal embodied the paradoxes of his time and place, and he can equally be viewed as blood-soaked, rapacious and Machiavellian. Not much attention has been paid to the results of Roman archaeology, or to the listed contents of English public houses at the death of their owners, which are a more reliable guide to the comparative popularity of sack (less than Mr Johnson estimates, I suspect) than the immortal words of Falstaff. And very occasionally, and untypically, the prose style nose-dives into fine writing: 'quietly metamorphosing into plenitude'. But one cannot have everything. There ought to be founded a serious academy of the history of wine, and Hugh Johnson ought to have its first gold medal. His footnotes alone, on such subjects as Alsatian Tokay (there is also delicious North Italian Tocai), on Cognac, on Canary, and on Magellan's stores (more spent on wine than on arma- ments), deserve the highest reward.
It is not very often one enjoys a book from the first page to the last. I was particularly pleased to read a clear, fasci- nating account of the native American vines of the East Coast, the awful Vitis labrusca seedling called Concord, which is the basis of the grape-jelly industry and the ruination of north-east American wine, and the amazing Catawba, transplanted from North Carolina to Maryland in 1802 and found there growing beside an inn. It was the first vine to fulfill the American Dream of native wine, but what Mr John- son calls its 'strange, strawberryish liquor', once compared with hock or champagne, and hailed by Longfellow in an ode as 'dulcet, delicious and dreamy', died of fungus and the Civil War. This history offers to imagination an abundance of lost wines, turnings not taken, including Sil- lery, the best still champagne of the 18th century, never made since the year of Waterloo, though the name survived, and those American Madeiras that used to be named after the ships that carried them, or simply by style, Rainwater and Miss Wright's Delight.
It is just as well that we can now wander a long way for wine. Claret is big business, with vineyards owned by trusts and com- panies and changing hands for 110 million pounds (Latour in April, with cases at £2,500), or 20 to 30 million pounds for a Sauterne vineyard I had never heard of. If all wine cost like that, I think I would give it up and drink cider. But the history of wine reveals many points of fresh growth. It is a lively subject, full of curious rever- sals. Hugh Johnson does not deal very thoroughly with modern economics: he is right not to do so, because they are part of a deadly boring money game, not the wine game, which is essentially sweetness and light. A history of money would be in- teresting of course; so would a history of prostitution to some readers. But the history of wine has more depth and para- dox and mystery.
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