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WINE This file contains two texts: - Wine of the Kingdom (1996) - And He Shall Laugh Them to Scorn (1997) The Wine of the Kingdom (Smoke Signals #19, October 1996) "When I depart this world to appear before my beloved Lord to account for my sins which have been scarlet, I shall say to Him: I cannot remember the name of the village; I do not even recollect the name of the girl, but the wine, my God! was Chambertin." (Hilaire Belloc) In autumn, the village of Dunham in the Eastern Townships becomes the centre of civilisation in this part of the world. For where else in Quebec more than in Dunham with its four vineyards, L'Orpailleur, Les Côtes d'Ardoise, Les Trois Clochers, and Les Blancs Côteaux, are the simple gestures of our cultural heritage being repeated more often and with greater reverence: the picking of the grapes, their crushing underfoot (so to speak), and the fermentation of their juice? For civilisation as we know it is inconceivable without wine, but then so is Catholic Christianity which is the religion of wine. The Blood of the Earth The recent development of vineyards in our midst finally allows us to do the one sacramental gesture that had hitherto been denied us, viz. to drink the blood of our own land. For wine more than any other product of the earth concentrates the essence of a place. And by this sacramental communion, the blood of the earth becomes our own blood... and in Medieval lore, it was well known that if meat begets flesh and vegetables beget excrement, wine begets blood. So if you feel anaemic, forget your spinach and get yourself a bottle of wine (invalid port?). Perhaps one of the few glories of our times is that we can drink at will all the wines of the world, yet that obscures local wine, the only one to have any sacramental value. My own first initiation to wine came in 1970 when we spent nearly a year in Toulouse and the High Pyrenees; I vividly recall my first sip of Jurançon, that noble wine of the Pyrenean foothills (near Pau in Béarn)... said by Hoffmann to be "the perfect accompaniment of religious music". Until then my experience was that wine (if Canadian Sherry can pass for wine) was what women and children sipped at Christmas in the kitchen, while men gobbled down whisky in the pantry. I later learned in graduate school in Ontario from expatriate "Brits" to drink cheap Australian and South African "sherries", the potables that lubricated our evening musings and gave me my first hangovers. So living in Toulouse amidst the vineyards of Languedoc was a golden opportunity to learn that wine not only came in two colours, but that it offered the most glorious palette of sensual experiences that one could imagine, and that each of these was tied to a particular bit of land. And thus, each meal was a sacramental occasion in which the bottles on the table, the red and the white, the dry and the sweet, opened up for us an unsuspected world of wonders... and civilisation. And we experienced the south of France through the palate: Madiran, Bergerac, Monbazillac, Cahors, Gaillac, Minervois, Corbières, Frontignan, Listel, Limoux... Back in Canada, the sin tax on wine put an end to all that pleasure and wine changed from a daily companion to a distant and occasional friend. The magic that united the wine we drank and the land we trod vanished... until a few years ago when we lived for the greater part of a year in Germany and the glorious experience began anew, as we enjoyed the great Rieslings of the Moselle, the multifarious hocks of the Rhineland, the generous Bocksbeutel-wines of Franconia, and the endearing red Trollingers and Schwarzrieslings of the Black Forest. And so the dozen or more vineyards of southern Québec finally offer us the opportunity to act civilised at least on occasion. And it is particularly fitting that the wines they produce not be available at the SAQ where they would be lost and desecrated in the great warehouses of ostentatious consumption amid all the potables of the world, all of them expatriates. The implantation of vineyards is a great step forward and one hopes a permanent one. Some of the old Quebec vineyards have not been so lucky. I recall in boarding school that the good fathers had a vineyard which was in production for nearly a century; it had been planted by Alonzo Wright, "the King of the Gatineau" and the original owner of the estate in the 1850s. The school, Le Collège apostolique St-Alexandre de la Gatineau, had been originally founded in 1905 under the patronage of a rich Parisian lady, Madame Lebaudy, as an agricultural school for immigrant French farmers by a group of religious priests and brothers expelled from France by the infamous Combes Laws of 1903. In the mid-1950s, the estate still had all the accoutrements of the earlier institution: 2 000 acres of agricultural land, barns, stables (110 head of prize Holsteins), a pig-sty, a sheep-hold, chicken-houses, a bakery, an apiary (3.5 tons of honey), sugar-works (10 000 maple trees), orchards, and two small vineyards producing four tons of grapes - enough to make more than 3 000 bottles of wine. The farm even won a silver medal at the 1943 Provincial Fair even though "the bull was found lacking" (le taureau laissait à désirer). There was a jolly and rubicund Alsatian lay brother by the name of Frère Jean de la Croix (Camille Issler) who tended the vines from 1910 to the late 1950s and made the wine. He produced both for the altar and for the high table. I cannot say if the wine was any good, though I did steal the occasional sip from the sacristy or the Fathers' refectory. One night a group of boys sneaked out of the dormitory and made their way into the wine-cellar; they stole gallon-jugs of what they thought was wine but was actually vinegary lees dregs from the barrels. The stuff was well nigh undrinkable, so they added sugar. To make the story short, they had a great time, but the next morning at 5:40 a.m., they could not make it out of bed and the unmistakable smell of their purple vomit spewed all over the bathrooms gave them away... During class that day they were called to the prefect's office, and by recess time, they had disappeared, never to be seen or heard of again, as if they had never been... And through that silent lesson, we were taught the evils of alcohol... a straightforward illustration of Question #64 of the Catechism: What is the most dangerous kind of Gluttony? The most dangerous kind of Gluttony is drunkenness, which destroys reason, makes man like a beast, and often causes his death.... and evidently his expulsion from boarding school! A Sacred Drink From earliest times, wine appeared mysterious to humans. The ancient Mesopotamians could not fail to see that in order to get wine, the grapes had to die and rot, and from the rot rose the glorious drink. Life-death-resurrection, the latter body greater than the former. In the classical world, wine was associated with the god Dyonisios or Bacchus. Bacchus is a drunken god, whose essence lies in madness, but madness is of divine origin. - Bacchus is the god of the earth and of the seasons, god of the toil necessary to grow the grape, and therefore the god of order; - he is the god of pleasure, of joie de vivre, of love and conviviality; - he is the god of drunkenness, madness and disorder; - he is the god of culture, of artistic creation, of poetical inspiration, and of theatre; - since Bacchus and Venus are siblings by their father Jupiter, wine is the great catalyst of Love, "Wine, taken in moderation, predisposes to love, as a light breeze kindles the fire" (Ovid's Art of Love); still a great wind will extinguish the fire as surely as drunkenness is the enemy of Love. It is through its capacity to create illusion that wine succeed in this feat. "For thy love is better than wine" proclaims the Song of Solomon (1:2). Wine abolishes modesty and encourages transgressions and is thus the stimulus of illicit love affairs and is associated with the corruption of the world, as Noah, Loth and Holophernes can testify. St. Jerome in his treatise "On Maintaining Virginity" warns young women who wish to keep their virtue against wine. The prophets speak of those who "erred through wine" (Is 28:7) and remind the people that "Whoredom and wine... take away the heart" (Hos 4:11). Wine also generates truthfulness as the old saying proclaims "In vino veritas". The trouble is all truth is not fit to be said out loud; luckily the truth is often said to another as drunk as oneself, and hopefully he will have forgotten by the next morning. Drunkenness is now currently used, especially by men, as an excuse for criminal behaviour, and some judges have let the accused go scot-free because they were apparently not responsible for their actions. Not so, in Scottish tradition, the opposite would be argued: "If he would do this when he was drunk, what would he no' do when he was sober!" Finally wine is the "noir mélange - the dark brew" and the glaucous poison which engenders sottishness and solitude, as we are reminded by the "poètes maudits" of the 19th century, Baudelaire, Verlaine,..