German Wine-drinking.
Now, with regard to the common people in France, the old habit of drinking large quantities of wine in the wine districts seems to have done wonderfully little harm. As the subject interests me I have asked for the opinion of several physicians, and they all say that the drinking of pure French wine is harmless if accompanied by exercise. Without exercise it may establish gout. The physicians dread the effects of spirits even in small quantities; they look upon wine as a kind of safeguard, and on spirits as a terrible danger. The reader may remember a passage in Lewes’s Life of Goethe, where the biographer says that the illustrious German “was fond of wine, and drank daily his two or three bottles. The amount he drank never did more than exhilarate him; never made him unfit for work or for society. Over his wine he sat some hours.” Lewes appended to this passage a quotation from Liebig in which he says that amongst the Rhinelanders “a jolly companion drinks his seven bottles every day, and with it grows as old as Methuselah, is seldom drunk, and has at most the Bardolph mark of a red nose.”
Wine a useless Expense.
Advantage of very cheap Wine.
Consequence of dearness in Wine.
Dangerous Drunkenness.
Wine has never been much of an evil in France except as a cause of useless expense. A Frenchman’s wine bill is usually out of proportion to his income, especially in the present day, when common wine is no longer cheap enough to make the quantity consumed a matter of indifference, nor yet dear enough to impose the other and still more effectual economy of abstinence, except in the poorest classes. For my part, I am convinced that to grow sound light wine, as the French once did at marvellously cheap rates (a penny a bottle or even less in years of great abundance), is an immense blessing to a community, because it is the most effectual rival of strong spirits.[52] Sound light wine exhilarates, but it does not brutalise; brandy, acting on excitable brains, drives many literally mad. The effect of dear wine in France has not been favourable to temperance, but the contrary, by increasing the consumption of poisonous spirituous liquors. That has now reached such a pitch in the working classes that drunkenness of the most dangerous kind—the kind unknown in wine countries—is established amongst them as it is in the lower orders of London or Glasgow. In fact, the worst form of Scotch dram-drinking is common in the great French cities.
Adulteration.
If a French workman buys wine he must buy it at a low price, and in Paris, where the octroi duties are so high, it is impossible that cheap wine can be unadulterated. I will not presume to say what the “wine” is made of, I do not pretend to know, but at present prices it cannot be the juice of the grape.
How the Cafés are maintained.