Host and Guest

by A. V. Kirwan

This production represents the Beaune wine of a yellow colour, inclining to the shade of an ox’s horn. It is very difficult to have a precise idea of such a colour. When the popes in the thirteenth century transported their pontificial chair to Avignon, the table of their holinesses, and of all their principal officers, were furnished with wine from the monastery of Cluni. This was probably a wine of Beaune; for Petrarch, writing in 1366 to Urban V. to engage him to come to Rome, and combatting the different reasons which retained the cardinals beyond the mountains, says, “I have heard it sometimes alleged that there was no Beaune wine in Italy. When, in 1510, the ambassadors sent by the Emperor Maximilian to Louis XII., travelled across France to find the prince at Tours, where he was, the queen, on their passage through Blois, sent them fresh sea-fish, with three barrels of old wine of Beaune and Orleans.”

There is a great deal of fashion and caprice in the rise and fall of wines. The reputation of different vintages may be compared to the characters of certain men. To rise above the crowd, it does not alone suffice to be possessed of real merit. Sometimes favourable circumstances or a happy chance is needed, which is more often sought than found. It has happened to us all to have drunk in a remote spot delicious wines, which only needed the recommendation of a consummate gourmet to obtain instantaneous vogue. It may also occasionally chance that a vineyard which, for a long time had but an indifferent reputation, may, by the industry of a new proprietor, by peculiar processes of making the wine, or by a better cultivation of the grape, become more perfect than it had been before. There are hundreds of examples of this, of which one may be cited. Who does not know that the wine of Romanée, so famed for more than a century (the estate on which it grows has since been purchased by the Prince of Conti), owes its celebrity to a Sieur de Cromanbourg, a German officer in the service of France, who, having married the heiress of this vineyard, rendered it at length one of the first in Burgundy. In each century some of the wines of the preceding fall in repute, and new vintages arise to take their place. Eustace des Champs (who died about 1420), in the numerous poetical MSS. which he has left, cites the vines of Burgundy, Gascony, La Rochelle, Chabli, St. Pourcain, Beaune, and Orleans, which had been already cited by authors anterior to him; but he also mentions the names of many new wines,—“Aï, Aussone, Cumières, Dameri, Germoles, Givri, Gonesse, Iranci, Mantes, Pinos, Tournus, Troy, and Verlus.” It was said more than seventy years ago that the wine of France which best bears transport is the wine of Mantes; and, in continuation of this fact, a French traveller of the sixteenth century is cited, who carried some of this wine to Persia without its being in the least injured. If this fact be true, it is not unexampled nor peculiar to the wine of Mantes.

It appears that, in the fifteenth century, Burgundy and Champagne disputed the palm among the wines of France. If Burgundy had its Beaune, Champagne had its Aï. These two wines were counted among the best in France. “This last,” says Patin, “is the wine that Baudius called Vinum Dei at the house of De Thou.” Paumier, in his “Treatise on Wine,” written in 1588, says it was the ordinary beverage of kings and princes. It is certainly true that Leo X., Charles V., Francis I., and Henry VIII. had each a vineyard in Champagne; and St. Evremond alludes to the circumstance in a letter to the Duke d’Olonne. Burgundy was, at this period, considered the wholesomest, the most cordial, and the most generous of wines. Erasmus, being tormented with nephritic pains, which he attributed to the harsh and bitter wines of the Rhine, took to drinking burgundy exclusively, and soon became perfectly restored. “Sic enim subito recreatus est stomachus,” says he, “ut mihi viderer renatus in alium hominem.” He has left us, in one of his letters, the praise of a liquor to which he was indebted for health. “Happy province!” he exclaims: “well may Burgundy be called the mother of man, suckling him with such milk!” He who first taught the art of making this wine ought to be considered, not merely as having gratified us with a new liquor, but as having given to us new life.

Champier makes a remark, which is truer now than it was in the sixteenth century, namely, that there was no country on earth which had such excellent, or a variety of such admirable wines, as France. He counts among this number the wine of Arbois and the muscat of Languedoc; and tells us that, in Arbois and Hainault, there was a demand for Beaune wine, but that the remaining portion of Flanders preferred the wines of Orleans. Beaujeau vaunts the wines of La Crau; and Rabelais those of Auxerre, Mirevaux, Migraine, Canteperdrix, and Frontignan. At the repast which the King of France gave, in 1602, to the Swiss ambassadors, Canteperdrix wine was served. Madame de Noyer (in her “Lettres Historiques et Galantes”) says that this may well be called the wine of the gods, since it was sent to Rome for the private drinking of the holy father. There is no such wine as Canteperdrix known, in the present day, by that special designation. It is now called the vin de Beaucaire, and is a red wine of Languedoc. As to the wine of Arbois, it was the favourite beverage of Henry IV., as we learn from an anecdote related in Sully. When the Duke of Mayenne had laid down his arms, and treated with Henry IV., the king, in order to fix the fidelity of his vassal, gave him two bottles of Arbois wine. “Car,” said the lively, good-hearted monarch, “je pense, mon cousin, que vous ne le haïssez pas.” When Sully, being created duke and peer, gave a grand repast on the day of his reception, the king surprised him by appearing among the number of the guests. “But,” says the duke, “as he was hungry, and they were dilatory in serving the dinner, he ate, in the interval, some oysters, which he washed down with wine of Arbois.” And a good preparation for a dinner it was.

Paumier, a Norman physician, has written a treatise on wines, in which he counts four different colours,—white, red, blackish, and œil de perdrix, i.e., reddish. He says that France then produced no red wine which was sweet, excepting in the Bordelais, in which district there were red and black wines of great sweetness. His description of the wines of Gascony is, that they were hot, vinous, easy of digestion, and of a red or partridge-eyed colour. This description, in two particulars holds good to the letter to the present day. These wines are still vinous and easy of digestion, but they are not hot, nor are they generally of a partridge-colour until they are old, and in a state bordering on decomposition. The doctor further states that the wines of Château Thierry were agreeable, but so dangerous, that the greater part of the inhabitants were afflicted with the gout from their tender infancy, and died before they attained the ordinary age.

Château Thierry is on the borders of Champagne, and, whatever may have been the case in the time of Paumier, in the sixteenth century, it is certainly not true in the nineteenth that the inhabitants have the gout from their earliest years, or that they die so prematurely. But their wine is still good. “The red wine of the Clos de St. Thierry, a league from Rheims, is of a quality between burgundy and champagne, and is very highly esteemed by the connoissieur.” The idea of having the gout prematurely is preposterous. The gout is a disease scarcely known in Champagne; and, if it be very common in England, as must be admitted, after occasional excesses, it does not arise from the drinking of champagne solely, to which it is most frequently attributed, but from the mixture of a variety of wines, champagne among the number.

Baccius, in his treatise “De Viniis,” printed at Rome in 1596, has a chapter on the wines of France. He praises the wines of Arles, Beziers, Bordeaux, Frontignan, Gaillac, and St. Laurent. Nor does he omit the wines of Avignon, which arrived in small barrels, hooped with iron; the white wines which sparkle out of the glass, and which please the smell as much as the taste (probably he means champagne); and the wines of Paris, which yield the palm to none in the kingdom. What Paumier says of the wines of Paris will appear, at present, very strange. The contempt with which the wines of the neighbourhood of the metropolis of France are at present treated will appear the more extraordinary when it is known that they enjoyed, for fourteen centuries previously, the highest reputation.

Liebaut praises, in a bad poem, written in 1605, the wines of Ruel and Surenne; and the Abbé de Marolles those of Surenne, Argenteuil, and St. Cloud; “which,” says he, “are pure, and not unwholesome.” Paumier is endless in his praises of the wines of Paris, which have not the inconvenience of drying up the blood, like those of Gascony; do not fly to the head, like those of Château Thierry and Orleans; and do not occasion obstructions and humours, like those of Bordeaux. According to him, burgundy, when it has lost its roughness, and is in its best state, may be alone compared to the wine of the environs of Paris. Patin, writing in 1669, says, “Long live the bread of Gonesse, with the good wine of Paris, Burgundy, and Champagne!” Chaulieu, in a piece of poetry written in 1702, represents his friend, the Marquis de la Fare, as going often to Surenne to drink the wine:—

“Et l’on m’ecrit qu’ à Surênne,

Au cabaret on a vu