Flagons of Comfort
MR. MAURICE HEALY has written a book after Professor Saintsbury's heart, and I doubt if there is any compliment which would please him more. Stay Me With Flagons is really a work of propaganda, all the more precious because there is never a word of preaching in it. It is inspired by a benign wisdom, a comfortable outlook on life and an understanding of its blessings, which befits a man of catholic experience and sympathies. The author has the rare gift of writing as he talks, and the reader can see him pondering over the miracle of a great wine and thanking God for it, though he may not agree as to the letter-box through which the gratitude should pass. There are arts for the eye and the ear, and the art of touch seems to be the privilege of lovers. No one has yet discovered for the sister senses of taste and smell a more perfect art than the appreciation of wine. Those who accept this statement will probably agree with Mr. Healy that " Claret . . . is the wine." Listen to his eulogy of the queen of wines and give life to the written word by imagining the rich brogue with which he would pronounce it over the perfect bottle like a pontifical benediction :
It is almost infinite in its variety. It is lovely in its colour, lovely in its fragrance, lovely in its
flavour, lovely' in its companionship. . . It is essentially an intellectual wine.
After such words no claret-lover could be tempted to argue with Mr. Healy about his exceptional predilection for the 1912 vintage. One can even forgive him for being interested in an effort to produce a French equivalent for Port from the grapes of Bordeaux—as though Cette did not produce a sufficiency of abominations labelled Porto from any must that may be available. A discussion about tastes implies difference, and I feel Mr. Healy is indulging in that glorious Irish contradictious humour which gives him an affection for mildew—" I suspect that I must like mildew, for I never drank a 1912 that I did not enjoy "- when he gives pride of place to the wines of the Palatinate over those of the Rheingau. He recalls a Forster of 1921 as the Rhine wine to which he looks back with most affection. He compares it cunningly with Chateau Yquem, hinting with a delicious use of the double negative concealed in the phrase " the lie of a negative " that the Palatinate wine was almost, if not quite as magnificent as an Yquem of some unmentioned vintage. I have tasted these marvels of complicated tastes and Odours, but the best of them have just a nuance of vulgarity and obviousness for all their splendour. Yquem at its best may be accused of "Pextravagance du parfait," but the fiercest foe of sweetness in wine could not throw into its teeth the insult of Teutonic vulgarity. Nor could that charge hold good against the great wines of the Rheingau, whose beauty is based on the austerity of the Riesling grape.
• Mr. Healy has enriched our meagre wine vocabulary with a most valuable word—" fumosity." English writers about wine have always been handicapped because they felt that most of their readers would not realise what they meant by the gunflint savour. " Fumosity " seems to me to describe exactly that curious appeal in certain wines, which reminds one of the days When as children we struck flints together to produce a spark.
Mr. Healy chooses Pouilly, the Pouilly qualified as Fuisse, tolutre or Chaintre, as a representative white Burgundy. He Is well aware that it is a Maconnais, and therefore no more than a cousin of the C_Aite d'0r,' but he assures his readers that it was a Pouilly which first opened his eyes to the excellence of white Burgundies. Personally, I have enjoyed many delightful Pouilly's, but I have always felt that a great gulf is fixed between them and glorious Montrachet with its gallant follower, Meur- sault. Few wines have tastes so distinctive as those of Montrachet and Meursault, but I have never been able to connect them with the Pouilly flavour. I almost suspect that Mr. Healy's memory of Pouilly as the typical white Burgundy has led him so fai astray as to omit Montrachet from his list of white wines worthy of being treated as reverently as the great red wines of fitordeaux and Burgundy, leaving the rather odd selection of Sauternes, Hock and Tokay.
There are many minor points on which wine-lovers may be inclined to argue with Mr. Healy, but they will all enjoy his rfrook, which remains an abiding joy for all who believe that
e fermented juice of the grape is one of the most precious gifts
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