Through a Glass Lightly/Claret

by T. T. Greg

CLARET

CLARET

Those there are to whom it has ever seemed the gravest of misconceptions that a man cannot love two at once: that (so to speak) he cannot carry a change of raiment in his knapsack, when no climate in the world is so captious or so variable as that of the Land of Love. But I have never shirked the confession that, though full-blooded Lydia may sway my grosser affections, gentle Dorinda hath ever the softer place in my heart. Therefore, it is with no dread of a charge of inconsistency, “the foolish hobgoblin of little minds,” that, while firmly avowing myself the leal bondman of Port, the master-wine, I would still go far out of my way to take the wages of that gentler sovereign of the senses, Claret. Between comparison and contrast is a great gulf, the one being odious and futile, the other obvious and of purpose. So in men’s minds shall these two wines be still at strife for mastery, and none can dogmatically declare who is premier, and it shall remain a question of individual palate till the end. Also a man's mood shall set now this and now that in the foremost place. For if he would go down in a fiery-heated flood, oblivious of all save the glory of his submerging, by all means let him plunge into a sea of Port. He shall the quicker reach the shade, and once there, whether it be grape or gooseberry is all one. But there be times and times, and there lurks in all of us the longing to scale Olympus, and be lifted into the Muses’ battle; and at such a pass, it is the hour of Hautbrion, the moment of Margaux, the instant of Latour and Larose. Pactolus himself flowed with no richer burden; better than grains of gold are borne in Larose’s smooth-tongued flood, and whoso drinks of his ts “purple tide” from him the cares of the world go vanishing, vanishing, with a voluptuous and entrancing effect of delay. With Port we go down gloriously, but precipitately, into the couch of kings; we nestle into Luxury’s lap; but we sleep on the instant. To a splendour of light succeeds an abysm of dark; there is no moment of twilight, no tutelary crepusculum, wherethrough to watch the fading glow we leave, and discern the gradations of the nearing dark. But Claret bears us ever up and up toward the light. Liquid rejects its inherent properties: the stream mounts high and higher to the fount and source of things, even Aganippe’s self. Skyward soar the fancies, airier grow the wits, the summit is in view, and man is worthy his privilege. With Port we lose the senses, with Claret we exchange them. The commonplace becomes romantic, the accountant precedes a poet. He has spurned the brute earth, and his hand has touched the shoulder of Pegasus himself. That he cannot mount is no fault of the charger that is ready to bear him heavenwards. Not even Claret is omnipotent.

It seems out of the nature of things that man should be drunken, as we use the term, on so admirable a liquor, and so it has ever appeared to me a mistake that Ripton Thompson should have been permitted to drown his five wits in Claret. Surely champagne had been meeter. But this Claret is ever being diluted with abuses, and it scarce surprises that a great man’s name should be evermore associated with a coloured concoction which the unthinking persist in calling Gladstone Claret even unto this day. So is a lordly title dishonoured in the application. Yet that one, of whom it has sometimes been asserted that his promises are writ in water, should find his immortality traced in the nobler fluid affords matter for thought.

But to the name itself there clings a romance no politician nor any touting advertiser can whollydegrade or dispel. His father-grape is himself a true patrician, abiding in fair Châteaux, with ancient honey-sounding names and yet so poor withal that, if truth were told, the most of these holds are unfurnished and dismantled, and many are not in France at all, but (alas!) in Spain. The soil of his garden is of such magnificent sterility that any of less lineage would starve. Yet has he such a grace as, search God’s most fruitful valleys as you may, you shall never find again; for it is the grace of gentle blood that is unadulterated with the prosperity of richness. What boots it that, flushed with the fat of Californian uplands, or bloated with the middle-class pride of Australian vineyards, these Colonial braggarts would seek to disinherit their brother of Bordeaux? They cannot do it; his title is indefeasible. So they come and go to the tune of “Tin-tara-boom-de-ay” on a very brazen band: which is, perhaps, as it should be. And while ever trying to persuade the world they are as good as he of Bordeaux, they do not call themselves by names that enthral the ear and capture the purse, but are grossly ticketed Port type, or Sherry type, or Claret type, as the case may be. Where, then, the wonder if men turn to hear of Château Pichon de Longueville, Château de Beycheville, Château Leoville? What flood but would seem glorious from illustrious founts like these? Yet is the method, open to abuses. Such names are weavers of spells, and send you floating back to those happier ages when Scotland and France were more to each other than Scotland and England, and the link was this Claret; so that, as the years broadened into the later and bigger-drinking centuries, it came about that in Scotland there was good Claret and better Claret, but no bad Claret. They tell the same tale of Whiskey now: of Claret—not. Yet, though we may still find “Gladstone” flooding the cellars of Scots who should know better, there is a feeling in the air that traditions are not quickly broken, and that such Claret is still landed at the Port of Leith as the Port of London can never hope to acquire.

The world is growing bigger and bigger, and though the ranks of the Teetotaller are “swellin wisibly”, the God Dionysos still holds his cult, and the wine merchant looms large on the horizon. He comes on the wings of the circular, and clad in the raiment of hyperbole, flagrantly disregarding the adage that good wine needs no bush, and the pages of his catalogues are strewn with false and perjured epithets. So great are his eulogies of what he is pleased to call his “light Clarets” that for the real thing, if he have it, language falls too short for adoration. To begin with superlatives at the lowest rung of the ladder is to make sure of vertigo and a plunge into anti-climax from the top: so his “grand wines” remain in splendid isolation, whence their three figures alone convey a sense of excellence. Yet even here a man may be undone, and the Claret of his dreams remains an airy phantasm: for though he may find in a day, if his purse be long enough, a Port that is irreproachable, it demands a more arduous pilgrimage ere he come on an incomparable Claret.