How did the triple-expansion steam engine of the late 19th century
drive Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec to absinthe, La Fée Verte?

By Michael Bywater

The wonderful John Aubrey, snapper-up of well-considered trifles, wrote in his Brief Lives that “When a boy, he did ever love to converse with old men, as living histories.”1

You might say the same of wine; each bottle, each vintage, each vineyard is a living history, and to drink it happily is to enjoy a conversation, not only with one’s companions gathered around the corkscrew, but with the wine itself. And curiosity about wines begins much the same as curiosity about other people: their names, their provenance, their appearance, the essentials and differences of their personalities.

And, as with people, as time goes on more intimate or idiosyncratic curiosities emerge. We start to ask questions. What are their stories? What are their peculiarities? Why is this rot foul, but that rot noble? Who was the original Robert Parker? Why are there great bunches of jangling mechanical grapes on the organ at Weingarten Abbey? Why did that most celebrated of wine nations, France, suddenly turn to the frantic and crapulous absinthe? How did a wine-bibbing Symposium of classical Athens actually go? Do we really drink red wine too hot now, and why?

Follow the trail and historical curiosities elucidate themselves, just as if we were gently questioning a new friend on her life. The foul rot attacks the cork, while the noble sweetens the grape. The first recorded version of the influential and utterly confident wine critic Robert Parker is none other than the tireless encyclopaedist Pliny the Elder, who died at Vesuvius in 79CE. The mechanical grapes are an homage to the local wines that enriched the monks and paid for the organ. The triple-expansion steam engine shortened the Atlantic crossing until the phylloxera aphid could survive the journey and devastate the French vineyards, whose roots were vulnerable to its attacks; no wine, but the French had to drink something, and so they turned to La Fée Verte. The Symposium was, you might say, hell. Red wine too hot? Yes; for our houses are now far hotter then they were, and so “chambré” is hotter, too.

The difficulty, as always, is knowing when to stop. There is always another cork to be drawn, and always another story to emerge, genie-like, from the bottle.

1 John Aubrey, Brief Lives. Ed. Richard Barber (Rochester, NY, 1982)

Michael Bywater is author with Kathleen Burk of Is This Bottle Corked?: The Secret Life of Wine. He is also a well known broadcaster, and culture critic.