"I am not one who was born in the custody of wisdom. I am one who is fond of olden times and intense in quest of the sacred knowing of the ancients." Gustave Courbet

07 August 2011

Yes.


WINE TASTING

One day we went to that cellars with Wilcox and saw the empty bays which had once held a vast store of wine; one transept only was used now; there the bins were well stocked, some of them with vintages fifty years old.

“There’s been nothing added since his Lordship went abroad,” said Wilcox. “A lot of the old wine wants drinking up. We ought to laid down the eighteens and twenties. I’ve had several letters about it from the wine merchants, but her Ladyship says to ask Lord Brideshead, he says to ask his Lordship, and his Lordship says to ask the lawyers. That’s how we get low. There’s enough here for ten years at the rate it’s going, but how shall we be then?”

Wilcox welcomed our interest; we had bottles brought up from every bin, and it was during those tranquil evenings with Sebastian that I first made a serious acquaintance with wine and sowed the seed of that rich harvest which was to be my stay in many barren years. We would sit, he and I, in the Painted Parlour, with three bottles open on the table and three glasses open before us; Sebastian had found a book on wine-tasting, and we followed its instructions in detail. We warmed the glasses slightly at a candle, filled it a third high, swirled the wine round, nursed it in our hands, held it to the light, breathed it, sipped it, filled our mouths with it, and rolled it over the tongue, ringing on the palette like a coin on a counter, tilted our heads back and like it trickle down the throat. Then we talked of it and nibbled Bath Oliver biscuits, and passed on the other wine; then back to the first, then on to another, until all three were in circulation and the order of the glasses got confused, and we fell out all over which was which, and we passed the glasses to and fro between us until there were six glasses, some of them with mixed wine in them which we had filled from the wrong bottle, till we were obliged to start again with three clean glasses each, and the bottles were empty and our praise of them wilder and more exotic.

“… It is little, shy wine like a gazelle.”
“Like a leprechaun.”
“Dappled, in a tapestry meadow.”
“Like a flute by still water.”
“… And this is a wise old wine.”
“A prophet in a cave.”
“… And this is a necklace of pearls on a white neck.”
“Like a swan.”
“Like the last unicorn.”

And we would leave the golden candlelight of the dining-room for the starlight outside and sit at the edge of the fountain, cooling our hands in the water and listening drunkenly to its splash and gurgle over the rocks.

“Ought we to be drunk every night?” Sebastian asked one morning.
“Yes, I think so.”

“I think so too.”

- Evelyn Waugh, from Brideshead Revisited

A scene from BBC's 1981 mini-series based on the novel ...



Vanbrugh, The Temple of the Four Winds, 1712


This garden building (above) is on the grounds of the famed Castle Howard (below) in North Yorkshire, England, where Brideshead Revisited was filmed. Click on the images for a closer look.



More on "Booze in Arcadia" and Scruton discusses "the wine that sets the tale in motion."

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