WINES FOR THE SEDENTARY.
GLANCING the other day over a little book which had just appeared on wines, we observed without surprise that its author had avoided any discussion on the effect of different wines on health. Writers on wine always make that omission. Because teetotalers condemn all wines as con- taining alcohol, those who admire wine praise all wines as equally beneficial, which is by no means the case, at least for sedentary persons,—that is, for three-fourths of all those who live by the exercise of their brains. Men who work with their hands all day, or who live eight hours of the twenty-four in the open air, may, if otherwise decently healthy, drink, as they may also eat, what they like in moderation ; but the sedentary should exercise more discrimination. For them, at all events, fermented liquors are not in the least alike. Beyond a tablespoonful of liqueur brandy at 12s. a bottle—. all cheap brandies are poisons—say once a week as a tonic, they should never touch spirits at all, for if they do they will speedily ruin their digestions besides giving themselves a tendency to renal disease. Beer, which, when it is good, is the most wholesome of all potations for the hard-working and the active, is for the sedentary ruinous, as it over-stimulates the liver, and betrays its effect at once in bad temper, irritability, and a dyspeptic kind of sleepiness which takes the edge off mental power. In a long experience of the sedentary classes we have hardly ever known this axiom fail, and believe neglect of it, or rather defiance of it, to be one considerable cause of Indian break- downs. The " peg " is not a greater enemy of the Indian services than the iced light beer which they are accustomed to believe so harmless. Sherry, even when it is old and dry and costly, is for the sedentary as bad as beer. Why the English like this, the only positively disagreeable wine, we never could understand, but they do, and they have a habit of taking it in the very worst way, either as a " pick- me-up " between meals, or immediately after the soup, before they have swallowed any solid food. They say, we believe, that they want a fillip, but granting their right to indulge that fancy, they could find a fillip less certain to give them heartburn and indigestion. Half a glass of old port, or still better, of that delicious wine still almost unknown in England, old white port, would give them the stimulus they wish for without producing the bad effects of sherry, that is, without disturbing their stomachs or their tempers. Port, in truth, if old and really good, is probably the healthiest, as it is the most delicious of all wines. It is not gouty, though it is believed to be so, and its evil repute arises solely from the fact that as its usual strength is to brandy as 23 to 50, it can only be drank by the sedentary in the strictest moderation. Three glasses a day is the utmost we should allow to a thin, pale man, and only two to one of full habit or visible rubicundity. Many men, however, it must be admitted, who work their brains, have indulged rather more than this, and yet lived in health to eighty, but they have, it will be found on inquiry, drunk very little else. The common notion that the truth expressed in the old proverb "in vino venus" is specially applicable to port is, we are told, an error, founded only on the fact that the proverb is undoubtedly true as regards all excess in alcohoL Certainly many drinkers of port have been among the straightest livers. Cheap port is, of course, bad, being almost invariably too strong, even when it is not a decoction fall of astringent matter. About champagne it is difficult to be precise, there are so many varieties of the wine, and its effect on different constitutions is so singularly unequal. The present writer has himself seen an over-worked lawyer take a bottle of champagne a day for weeks with no apparent effect, and an officer in the Army madly exhilarated and boastful after a single glass. As a rule, however, champagne is an unsafe wine for the sedentary, who, if they take it, should never mix it with other wines, and should especially avoid touching it except at dinner. The worst case of delirium tremens with which the writer ever came into personal con- tact was caused solely by champagne drinking between meals, the victim, a wealthy man, increasing his quantum every week until his executors absolutely, though erroneously, refused to believe in the wine merchant's bills. One tumbler a day without other wine is the highest limit we should allow of champagne to a man who was not engaged in active exercise for at least three hours in the twenty-four.
The light white wines are little drunk here, and are sup- posed to be innocuous,—a delusion unless they are taken in a moderation as strict as if they were heavy wines. Those who like them should read Mr. Hamerton's account of them in "All Round my House," and if sedentary, leave them resolutely alone. They never quite satisfy the palate; the temptation is to take still another glass of what seems so harmless, and a habit is set up which is nearly incurable, and which destroys the nerve and lowers the physical tone almost as badly as drinking spirits. This is most true of all the Sauternes, and least true of fine Rhine wine, though the taste for the latter, when indulged, is recognised by all German doctors as most dangerous. Its victim is apt not to know how much he takes. There remains claret, the most delightful and, in moderation, the safest of all wines, modern-
tion meaning half a bottle a day of a fairly good brand, or if it is swallowed only with food—not after dinner, mind— possibly a little more. That is the allowance which was suggested some years ago by the committee of experienced physicians whose report was published in the Nineteenth Century magazine and reproduced in our pages. With the -exception of port, restricted as aforesaid, claret is probably the only wine which is positively beneficial to the sedentary, —that is, which quickens the blood, serves as a tone to the -nerves, and acts as a fillip to jaded muscles without pro- ducing any dangerous or even perceptible reaction. Of course, the better the claret, the safer ; but unless the wine is not claret at all, but grape-juice and water fortified with some raw Spanish stuff, even cheap claret is not injurious. All writers on wine abuse "Gladstone claret," partly from affectation, partly because they prefer something stronger, and partly from good taste; but the experience of millions is against them. The sober majority of France and Italy drink claret, or a vin ordinaire akin to it, every day through their whole lives, and suffer much less from it than Bavarians do from beer, or sober Hebrideans from whisky. It may not be nice stuff to drink, but that it produces no injurious effect on health is the testimony even of those who abominate every form of alcohol, and attribute to its consumption mischiefs which are due only to its consumption in excess. In excess claret, like every other liquor, is bad for everybody, and specially bad for the sedentary, shattering the nerves, as it does, as certainly and fatally as whisky or inferior brandy. It is one of the advantages of claret that it takes a good deal to do serious mischief ; but there are plenty of men whose lives have been wrecked by passing, almost unconsciously, the thin line which separates " drinking " from moderation.
Has anybody ever discovered, so as to be able to state accurately, the strangely obscure canses which in the matter of wine differentiate one constitution from another ? We have written as if the main distinction were between sedentary lives and lives in the open air, and it is the main one ; but there must be many others. It is quite certain that there are men upon whom wine, even in very large doses, makes no perceptible impression, and men who are not " themselves " when they have taken one glass, besides the men, known to every one who has visited the tropics, who, having taken one glass, cannot stop, but crave suddenly and irresistibly for the happiness of unconsciousness. It was, we are firmly persuaded, a, conviction derived from experience that this was the usual or universal proclivity of Asiatics which induced the early Hindoo law-givers, and after theta the Massulman law-giver, to prohibit the drinking of wine absolutely and finally as morally a crime. Their belief is not true of Europe, where the most violent differences, alike of taste and of capacity for drinking, have always existed. The writer, though he fears not to be believed, had personal knowledge of a man who was sobered by a bottle of port after drinking eighteen wineglasses of whisky ; and every doctor knows of cases where one glass of spirits means a disordered head. It is by no means certain, however, that these inequalities will always last. It is greatly to be feared that the increase of temperance in this country, which is most decided, is not wholly the outcome of increased self-control, but is the result of an instinctive recoil, produced by a sense that the man cannot " carry " liquor. All old men admit this, and most of the young, who almost disbelieve the facts which they find in literature not yet sixty years old. The powers of men in regard to drinking have changed as well as their habits; and we see no proof that the change is due in any large degree to the bibulous ways of our immediate ancestors. We should rather believe that a constitutional change was going on like that which has affected teeth, and which may last, at all events, for many generations. If that is the case—and the change has been observed in France and America as well as England—the desire to prohibit the use of alcohol altogether may one day become as strong in Europe as it must have become in Hindostan and Arabia, and may lead to experi- ments in lawmaking of which we at present never dream. Nothing short of total prohibition of the manufacture, as well as the sale, will ever be of the slightest effect, and no such prohibition will ever be enforced without a radical change in moral opinion. Such a change seems at present dreamily impossible ; but if men, as we believe to be the case, are growing with every generation more conscious that they must for safety's sake leave liquor alone, the change may be nearer than we imagine. A hundred years is a short period in the life of a nation ; and a hundred years hence the majority may positively dread even wine, not, as at present, for others, but for themselves.
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