Tea at Trianon: Wine: At the Heart of Civilization

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, July 18, 2018

Wine: At the Heart of Civilization

From The Spectator:

Wine was revered in ancient times as the work of a god. Its subsequent place at the heart of our civilisation justifies that attitude. Wine has been, for us, a glowing threshold through which we pass from work to play, from business to friendship, and from means to ends. In due course wine became an essential part of the sacrament that defines the Christian religion, singled out by Christ himself as the right way to honour him, to be taken at communion in remembrance of his sacrificial death. Through all our art and literature wine displays its distinctive light, offering shared moments of joy, and shining a light of forgiveness on our everyday misconduct.

As a writer and philosopher I owe much to wine. Those long days before a blank page, attempting to capture the thoughts that hover just out of reach like captious flies, have almost always been crowned by some small success when, at 7.30, I pour myself a glass of white Burgundy. However badly the day has gone, the words will then begin to gather into sentences. Life never appears so rosy, Napoleon said, as when viewed through a glass of Chambertin. I would add that, for me, words never assemble so obediently, as at the bottom of a glass of Montagny. (Of course, they would assemble even better at the bottom of a glass of Montrachet, but my budget is more limited than Napoleon’s.)

At a certain stage, when the left-wing press was united behind the great project of forbidding the joys of Old England, the New Statesman took what I assumed to be a suicidal step in inviting me to write a wine column. Our new rulers were keen to target the things that they disliked — hunting, shooting, smoking, the Christian curriculum, the old idea of marriage and anything else that might be tainted with the vestiges of our rooted way of life. And who knows if they might not one day set their sights on wine? (Read more.)