Wise and Unwise Drinking, Part II

Wise and Unwise Drinking

 John Betjeman 

You, dear readers, as I said earlier, fall into none of these categories. You know the true value of drink. We enjoy being alive, and we are meant to enjoy being alive with our eyes and ears and our noses. I like pictures and architecture and reading books, I like listening to poetry being read and to plays and variety performances, and if I were musical I would enjoy going to concerts. But all that accounts for eyes and ears only. There is also the nose, with which taste is associated. When you’ve got a cold in the nose you can’t taste anything. Then drink is purely a medicine. But for those few days of the year when you have not a cold in the head, what a delight a good drink can be. For me, late in life and through a friend who collects vintage wines, I have been brought to appreciate the varying joys of different vintages, particularly clarets which were comparatively cheap, There is, indeed, a tiresome language all about ‘noses’ and ‘richness’ and ‘fruitiness’ connected with wine, sometimes comparing it to buildings, at others to old books and sometimes even to people. It has been parodied effectively and finally by Thurber in his caption – under a drawing of two wine snobs. ‘This is rather a presumptuous little wine. I hope you will pardon its impertinence.’ Really, all that chatter is not about nothing. A good wine can have a most wonderful taste like almonds and strawberries and grapes and the smell of roses. No words can properly describe it. Only smelling and tasting can tell. And some wines smell different from their taste, and some taste of one sort of beautiful assortment of fruits and nuts and scents which changes to another as you swallow it. Some wines linger, some disappear from the palate’s memory. As one becomes attuned to it, one’s nose becomes more and more sensitive. Wine drinking is not expensive. You can buy your wine cheap if it is known to be a good year, and if you have a cellar or a wine merchant to keep it, and it will mature and increase in value until it is too old to drink. There is a cellar to this villa where I live, and it is slowly growing with wine, which, if I can only restrain myself for a few years until they mature, will blossom and fruit into the most gorgeous scents and taste imaginable, to mellow my guests, to delight my heart and body and mind, and to please even my teetotal wife. For though she does not like wine, she likes the smell of it and can understand at least that much of the pleasure.

We are a country of ritualises – even though we may not all be ‘High Church’, that is to say Catholic Anglicans such as I am -and we enjoy ceremony. Masonic functions, processions, taking the collection round, watching a fête being opened, and people being invested and, though we sometimes laugh at them, we rather fancy the idea of being a Mayor or a Bishop or a Peer. And we do ceremonies with more dignity and reverence than any other nation. We complain a good bit beforehand about what a bore it is going to be, all this dressing up, and then we dress up and produce something like the Coronation, which puts every other coronation in the world in the shade. Because we know how to deal with ceremony, we shine at organising public dinners. The putting on of best clothes, the oaths and searching for lost studs beforehand, the washing behind the ears and round the neck, the clean collar, etc, the getting there in time. And there we are all ranged round the tables, how essential a part of the feast is the drink: sherry, the wines, and the port and brandy. What a beautiful procession they make, often so much better and more digestible than the food! How dull the feast would be without them. And how the tongues are loosed, the hearts warmed, the better qualities brought out, how strangers overcome shyness through sitting next to one at a club or public dinner. And if the wine is good how well we all feel after it the next day, for good wine is the best possible tonic. What incense is to religious functions, wine is to public banquets – it is a dignified and uplifting part of the ceremony. It enables us to enjoy to the full with our eyes, ears and nose the good things by which we are surrounded.

(From The Compleat Imbiber, An Entertainment edited by Cyril Ray, published 1956)