Women and drinking
`I MAY not omit here' — wrote Robert Burton — 'those two main plagues, and common dotages of human kind, wine and women, which have infatuated and besot- ted myriads of people. They go commonly together.' Other writers throughout the millennia of male-dominated culture which have recently ended have mentioned the two together, usually with more apprecia- tion than the saturnine anatomist. Luther, of all people, is credited with the classic couplet linking the two Ws with song, which was to inspire Johann Strauss the younger with one of his most libertine waltzes: 'Who loves not women, wine and song Remains a fool his whole life long.' Women and wine, these jolly chauvinists repeat, exist for pleasure — for men's pleasure, of course — and they are especially good in combination.
You have to be careful not to overdo it, however — the wine, that is. 'It provokes the desire, but it takes away the perform- ance,' as the Porter so pithily put it. Ovid, so civilised, so long ago, compared the effect of wine on love with that of a draught of air on a fire — a little fans it, too much blows it out. Hardly a word from, or about, the woman's point of view, with the magnificent exception of the Wife of Bath. No husband however tyrannical could have prevented her from drinking, she says, and why should he have wanted to, when the effects were as she describes: 'after wine on Venus moste I thynke . . . . In wommen vinolent is no defense — This knowen lechers by experience.'
Perhaps because of these potentially dangerous side-effects, genteel women of later times were encouraged to drink pro- gressively less, until in the 19th century Mrs Trollope could report from Vienna that `among the circles of the highest ton a young lady cannot touch wine of any kind, without very materially tarnishing the de- licacy of her high breeding thereby.' Thence came customs like the banishing of the women from the table for the after- dinner port ritual, which is now, except perhaps in circles of the highest ton, obsolescent, and the Victorian association of certain types of wine with a fate worse than death.
At the same time, certain presumptions about female taste in wine became current, and waiters would try to ingratiate them- selves with young courting men by suggest- ing 'a little sweet white wine for the lady. sir'. Any wine waiter foolish enough to suggest such a thing nowadays would risk having his head knocked off with his bottle of London-bottled Barsac or whatever which is in fact partly a sad reflection on the prejudice virulent among both sexes against sweet wines of all kinds.
It is also, of course, a sign that women are taking their timely revenge on men for treating them as providers of pleasure, like wine, and claiming their fair share in the enjoyment of wine. Not just the enjoy- ment: the world of wine journalism has become almost a female preserve, as first Pamela Vandyke Price, then Jancis Robin- son and Serena Sutcliffe, followed by Jane McQuitty, Kathryn McWhirter and Alice King have come to dominate the wine pages of the Times, Decanter, Wine and Spirit and Which? Wine. Even the tradi- tional English 'carriage trade', for so long a bastion of chauvinism and Jermyn Street shirts stuffed with the finest public school material, has been breached by some ambitious, determined and competent women.
More important maybe are the women involved in the production of wine. Much of the back-breaking work of the vineyards and cellars has always been done by female labour, but now women can hope for more than a life of drudgery, pruning and pick- ing, bottling and packing. The formidable Mme Bollinger, who took over the running of the champagne house after her hus- band's untimely death in 1941, was famous for her energy, bicycling to all parts of the estate in all weathers, and equally re- spected for her expertise in the crucial art of blending. Recently Mme Mentzelo- poulos similarly stepped into the breach at Ch. Margaux when her husband died soon after buying the property. The reputation of the château, which was to say the least tarnished, has been very quickly restored.
In the Mosel, Anne-Gret Reh directs operations at the Kesselstatt estate, and I recently witnessed a remarkable proof of her skill in identification. She was the only person at a gathering of distinguished growers from the Rhine and Mosel who identified a devilish trick bottle, a 1980 dry Eiswein from Bernkastel. No one else, your correspondent included, got any- where near.
Ausonius
Previous page
