Part 25

One of the most ingenious--perhaps we should say, one of the most scientific--tricks that we have heard of, in connexion with wine-doctoring, proves that the modern chymical brewers of superior beverages, which seem what they are not, are vastly superior to the mere experimentalists of former days. In the royal cellars of Carlton House, there was enshrined, if we may so speak, a small quantity of wine which, like the gems worn by the Irish lady, was both “rich and rare.” It was only produced by George IV. when he had around him his most select and wittiest friends. The precious deposit gradually diminished; year by year, as in the case of the famous sha-green skin of the French novelist Balzac, it grew less; until, at last, a couple of dozen bottles only were left, gleaming at the bottom of their bins like gems in a mine, and full of liquid promise to those who needed the especial comfort which it was their duty to impart. These, however, were left so long unasked for, that the gentlemen of the King’s suite who had the control of the grape department, deemed them forgotten, and at their own mirthful table drank them all but two, with infinite delight to themselves, and to the better health of their master. They soon found, however, that there was “garlic in the flowers,” as the Turkish proverb has it; and their embarrassment was not small, when the King, giving his orders for a choice dinner on a certain night, intimated his desire that a good supply of his favourite wine should grace the board. In Courts, “to hear is to obey;” and the officials who had drunk the wine, at once resorted to an eminent firm, well-skilled to give advice in such delicate wine-cases. The physician asked but for a sample bottle, and to be told the exact hour at which the favourite draught would be asked for. This was complied with, and in due time a proper amount of the counterfeit wine was forwarded to Carlton House, and there broached and drunk with such encomiums, that the officers who were in the secret had some difficulty in maintaining an official gravity of countenance. The brewer of the new wine was certainly a first-rate artist; and if he ever achieved knighthood and a coat-of-arms, I would give him a “Bruin” for his crest, and, “The drink! the drink! dear Hamlet!” for his device. This anecdote, I may farther notice, has often been told, and nearly as often been discredited; but I am assured by an officer of the household, who speaks “_avec connaissance de fait_,” that it is substantially true.

One of the merits of the wine above mentioned consisted in its great age. There has, indeed, always been a sort of mania for wine that bears the load of years. But this rage is pronounced by Cyrus Redding to be one of the most ridiculous errors of modern epicurism. The “bee’s wing,” the “thick crust on the bottle,” the “loss of strength,” and so on,--all these are declared by the best judges to be nothing more than forbidding manifestations of decomposition, and the disappearance of the very best qualities of the wine. Many years ago, I made a “note” on this subject, but am now unable to recollect from what work, nor can I say whether the following remarks on the qualities of wine were made by the author of an original work, or by a reviewer commenting thereon. Such as they are, however, they are not without value.

“The age of maturity,” says the writer, “for exportation from Oporto, is said to be the second year after the vintage; probably sometimes not quite so long. Our wine-merchants keep it in wood from two to six years longer, according to its original strength, &c. Surely this must be long enough to do all that can be done by keeping it. What crude wine it must be to require even this time to ameliorate it! the necessity for which must arise either from some error in the original manufacture, or a false taste, which does not relish it till time has changed its original characteristics.

“Port, like all other wines, ripens in a shorter, or longer, time, according to its lightness, or its strength, the quality of the grapes, according to the fermentation they have undergone, and the portion of brandy that has been added to it. Also one cellar will forward wine much sooner than another. Sound good port is generally in perfection when it has been from three to five years in the wood, and from one to three in bottle.

“Ordinary port is a very uncleansed fretful wine; and we have been assured by wine-merchants of good taste, accurate observation, and extensive experience, that the _best_ port is rather impoverished than improved by being kept in bottle longer than two years; that is, supposing it to have been previously from two to four years in the cask in this country; observing that all that the outrageous advocates for _vin passé_ really know about it is that sherry is _yellow_, and port is _black_; and that if they drink (more than) enough of either of them, according to the colours, it will make them drunk.

“White wines, especially sherry and Madeira, being more perfectly fermented and thoroughly fined before they are bottled, if kept in a cellar of uniform temperature, are not so rapidly deteriorated by age.

“The temperature of a good cellar is nearly the same throughout the year. Double doors help to preserve this. It must be dry, and be kept as clean as possible.

“The art of preserving wines is to prevent them from fretting, which is done by keeping them in the same degree of heat and careful working, in a cellar where they will not be agitated by the motion of carriages passing. If persons wish to preserve the fine flavour of their wines, they ought on no account to permit any bacon, cheese, onions, potatoes, or cider, in the wine-cellars; for if there be any disagreeable stench in the cellar, the wine will indubitably imbibe it; consequently, instead of being fragrant, and charming to the nose and palate, it will be extremely disagreeable.

“It must be well known that almost all our home-made wines, for public sale, are made, and suffered to cool, in leaden vats. Nothing can be more injurious or detrimental to health. Every chymist is aware that any vegetable acid that comes in contact with lead, and is suffered to remain only a few hours, produces what we call ‘sugar of lead,’--a most deadly poison. How many there are that complain that cider will not agree with them! and several who cannot take even a wine-glass full without vomiting almost immediately. They know not the reason; and thus many are prevented from taking a most delightful beverage in warm weather; while others are labouring under its baneful influence. Often do we see servants run for vinegar in a pewter or publican’s pot; and the answer we receive when correcting them for the same is,--they have often done the same without any serious consequence. May be so; but if vinegar, or any other vegetable acid, as before said, be suffered to remain in such vessels only a short time, the health and constitution must suffer from the acid so taken; and we will venture to say that almost all paralytic affections are caused by persons, predisposed to such attacks, drinking water impregnated with lead. For if there be any carbonic acid in the water, which there most assuredly is in every kind, a carbonate is thus formed, just as injurious as the acetate (sugar of lead); and where shall we find a cistern in London that is not made of this pernicious, yet highly useful, material?”

The consideration of these subjects, when drinking home-made wines, (if, indeed, there _be_ people bold enough to venture on such an experiment,) or the other beverages mentioned above, might serve the purpose of the custom observed among the ancient Egyptians. It was one less barbarous than singular. A skeleton of beautiful workmanship, in ivory, and enclosed in a small coffin, was carried round at a feast, by a slave, who, holding it up to each guest, remarked, “After death you will resemble this figure; drink, then, and be happy!” It must have encouraged the mirth “consumedly.” But there was a grave wisdom in the custom, notwithstanding.

IMPERIAL DRINKERS AND INCIDENTS IN GERMANY.

The stories of the gigantic drinkers of antiquity are startling; but I think they may be accounted for. Natural philosophers inform us, that objects seen through a mist are magnified to the senses; and so it is with the feats which we are asked to contemplate through the mist of ages: they are probably not so astounding as they appear. One may say of each story, so venerable and enlarged by age, as the good Dominican did to the congregation whom he had affected to tears by the warmth of one of his legendary sermons. “Do not cry so, my brethren,” said the Preacher; “for, after all, perhaps it’s not true.”

It must be allowed, however, that the stories of wine-bibbers of later times than those when the son of Aristides gained his living by singing ballads in the streets of Athens, or the heir of Cicero drank draughts longer than his sire’s orations, lack nothing whatever of the marvellous. And this reminds me of an incident, _quod alibi narravi_, and which I will narrate here, by way of illustration of this portion of my subject.

AN INCIDENT OF TRAVEL.

It is now some twelve years ago that I was, in company with two Norwegians, in Prague, loitering beneath the tower of that sacred edifice dedicated to the fearful dancer, St. Vitus. The tower was the same which the drunken Emperor Wenceslaus had caused to be shortened, by some thirty or forty feet, because he took it into his head that it would one day fall, and crush him as he lay on his uneasy couch in the Hradschin. I remarked to my companions, that the empire, in its palmy days, had often been well-nigh lost through the mad caprices of tippling Kaisers.

“There was not a Kaiser of them all,” said Löwenskiold, “who permanently injured either himself or his country by his devotion to drinking.”

“What!” said I; “not even Maximilian?”

“Not even Maximilian,” remarked Knudtzen. “The people, indeed, were occasionally a trifle startled at seeing their ruler proceed, either to the camp or council, with as much white wine in him as might serve the universe for sauces. They slightly objected, on hearing that he walked rosy and reeling to confession; and they were not edified at understanding that his private Almoner stirred up his punch with a silver crucifix. They even remonstrated with Maximilian when he had been once within an ace of destroying Ulm in a drunken frolic. And what was his reply? He kept the deputation of remonstrants the whole night in his palace, and invited the citizens to assemble, at day-break, on whatever spots commanded a view of the towers of the cathedral. The Emperor and the Committee of Moderates finished two hundred and ten bottles of Rhine wine while they waited for sunrise. This, among a temperate party of one score and one, was a tolerable allowance for each individual. At dawn, all Ulm was up, and every eye directed to the cathedral. The towers had scarcely flung back the first rays from heaven, when a joyous procession issued from the imperial residence. The whole party, the Emperor excepted, were as drunk as Æschylus. With difficulty did they follow their Lord, who, at the very top of his speed, and carrying a heavy waggon-wheel on his shoulder, ran to the cathedral, ascended the stairs leading to the summit of one of the towers, and appeared on the rampart, before his straggling followers had reached the low-arched door beneath. With a light bound, he sprang on one of the highest parts of the castellated portion, where there was scarcely footing for him. In that position, however, he poised the wheel aloft with his right hand, let it gently descend on to the foot which he extended above the heads of the multitude, and, holding it there for a moment or two, ended by hurling it into the air, and catching it again, ere it fell on the astounded and admiring crowd below.

“‘There, you calves!’ cried the Emperor, as he gazed tranquilly down on the sea of heads below; ‘do you dare complain that Niedersteiner touches your master’s nerves?’

“‘Never again!’ exclaimed the delighted mass. ‘What can we do to testify our affection for Your Majesty?’

“‘Toss those gentlemen into a tub of Selzer-water,’ said Maximilian, ‘and send me half-a-dozen of Hochheimer, and half-a-dozen blood-puddings, for breakfast.’”

I could _almost_ believe this tradition; for I had seen a nearly similar feat once performed by a woman on a projecting mass of rock in the Ahr Thal. The rock is, doubtless, well known to all who have ascended that lovely Rhine-valley, at eve, to eat _Forellen_, and drink Wallportzheimer. They who do so, generally return the next morning with an inclination for nothing but the cooling mineral waters to be had at Hippingen.

“Besides,” said Knudtzen, “_à-propos_ to cathedrals, sober principles have done them more injury than jolly Emperors. Do you forget that Caroline Bonaparte razed a cathedral in Italy to the ground?”

“I remember hearing of the deed as connected with a church,” said I; “but I have forgotten the reason alleged for it.”

“It was a very sufficient reason for a Bonaparte. Her Highness lived next door to the church; and she had it destroyed, because the noise of the organ kept her awake, and the smell of the incense made her head ache.”

“Royal minds,” I remarked, “cannot condescend to the weaknesses of common people. According to our ‘Philosophical Transactions,’ the pigeons at Pisa were as destructive as Caroline Bonaparte. Pigeons, for many ages, built under the roof of the great church there. Their dung spontaneously took fire at last; and the church was consumed. But, to return to the old, defunct King of Saxony. He was afflicted with a super-delicate attack of virtue; and, during the prevalence of the disorder, he issued a decree for the expulsion, from his picture-gallery, of all those master-pieces, the merit of which lay in the glory of their flesh-colouring. He had grown as modest as the Monk who declared that he had never seen any portion of his body save his face and hands. He is worthy of going down to posterity arm in arm with that old Polish King, who was a cleaner, but not a less delicate, man than the Monk, and who boasted to his Confessor that his purity of mind was so excessive, that he had never touched his own skin with an ungloved hand. In short, the old King of Saxony admirably illustrated the saying of Dean Swift, that ‘a nice man was a man of nasty ideas.’ He had not been a sparer of the wine-flask. Indeed, he had rather sinned that way; and, in expiation thereof, he undertook to perform a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre on foot. A fever of expectation shook Dresden, all the china in it, and the whole line of road, at the idea of again beholding a Christian King turning to the neglected shrine. The expectation was not altogether fulfilled; but the Monarch, nevertheless, performed the pilgrimage.”

“We never heard of it,” exclaimed the travellers, looking at each other with some manifestation of surprise.

“That is to say,” I resumed, “that his Majesty performed it after a fashion. He inquired the distance from his own country-house at Pilnitz, to the Armenian Convent at the Holy City; and, in spite of his education, he was nothing less than astonished, to find that it was something more serious than a promenade to Töplitz. I do not know if he had a vision of boiling his peas, as an English pilgrim did, of whom I could tell you something; but he certainly experienced some unpleasant sensations at the idea that, the way being so long, he might chance to find himself without peas to boil. He wept at the reflection that he might not only be a devout, but a hungry, King, while one-half of Dresden were solacing their appetites on the terrace of Bruhl, and the other, at the Baths of Link, or at the Bastei. He thought of the dangers; but he _would_ be devout. The attendant pains were great; but the resulting pleasures were not to be denied. In short, he would _not_ go to Jerusalem; but he _would_ perform the pilgrimage. Accordingly, the exact distance having been ascertained, he started from his room, and walked the entire number of leagues by pacing up and down a long gallery, deducting from the distance the amount of water passage, which was but fair. If admiration had been great at the commencement, surprising fun was excited during the performance. Every evening the citizens of Dresden knew how far their religious Ruler had proceeded on his way, or how far he would have proceeded, if he had but set out. _Now_, he was breakfasting, in imagination, at Breslau; sleeping (in fancy) at Olmutz; and passing, by a pleasant fiction, through Buda. During two days that his Majesty suffered from a real bilious attack, the result, perhaps, of a Barmecidal repast at Essek on the Drave, the King rested at Belgrade, while confined to his bed in Dresden. But his zeal soon re-invigorated his liver; and, as he glided to and fro by his palace windows, the mystified multitude below learned that the Monarch was lodging in the house of the Saxon Legation at Istamboul. The pilgrim-traveller suffered a little from the heat (of the room) as he descended from the western coast of Asia Minor; but the inconveniencies of the route were things beneath the thoughts of him who--whether at Bursa, Smyrna, or any other locality on his way--could ring his bell in the Desert, and order Champagne out of his own cellar. The King was puzzled one mid-day, (he had by calculation just reached Beyrout,) his progress being checked by the unexpected arrival of a portion of the imperial family from Vienna. Visitors of such condition must be attended to; nevertheless, his pilgrimage must be continued; and he, like the clever and facetious palmer that he was, did both. He attended his guests with much politeness, during their stay of two days; and he put down the time thus spent, as consumed in a sea voyage from Beyrout to Acre. The moment they left, the royal pilgrim went ashore again, and happily accomplished the remaining distance to Jerusalem, through Nassara and Nablous, without any other hinderance or obstruction than his going one night to see a French _vaudeville_, while supposed to be enjoying his well-earned repose at Rama or Muddin. And thus was accomplished that royal pilgrimage that was never performed. The King reached Jerusalem without going there; and the people saw _him_ return who had never departed.”

“Well,” said Harold Knudtzen, “the Kings of Saxony are no longer such simpletons. The present Monarch loves, indeed, good wine, ‘craftily qualified;’ but he also, like Uzziah, King of Judah, loves husbandry. Josephine herself had not half so frantic a passion for flowers as he; and not for flowers alone in their beauty,--not for botany, either, merely for amusement’s sake, but for phytology and pharmacy, as connected with it.”

“He lisped Linnæus,” said Löwenskiold, “before he could speak plainly.”

“And, by reputation, he knew Tournefort better than he did Knecht Rupert,” added Harold.

“He himself told us, when we met him in Dalmatia,” continued the latter, “that he could spell _Dodecandria_ and _Trigynia_ before he could read Grimm’s Story-Book; and that he knew the meanings of _monopetalous_ and _campaniform_ before he was acquainted with the languages from which the terms were derived. I never saw a man so eager in pursuit of _apetalous amentaceous_ flowers; and as for _carryophylous_”----

“Leave off your abominable phrases!” said I, “and begin by telling me how you two very modest fellows introduced yourselves to the acquaintance of the Sovereign of Saxony.”

“The introduction was effected through a very light-hearted and intelligent fellow-botanizer, whom we met on our way from Zara up to the mountains. We had all three lost our way while endeavouring to find an _infundibuliform_”----

“Nay,” interrupted I, “I care not what you found, if you choose to tell it in pentameters.”

“Well,” resumed Knudtzen, “we were in a wild part of the country,--weary, hungry, cold, and in the dark. Wanderers could not well be in a worse plight. We were as _flûté_ as Juno’s columns near the church of St. Helia; and the skeleton doing duty there for that of St. Simeon of Judæa, the pride and palladium of the people of Zara, looked in far better condition, and in, especially, better raiment, than could be boasted of by us humble pedestrians. We had walked many leagues, when we reached a sorry inn kept by a Gipsy, where we hoped to find rest and refreshment, but were permitted to enjoy neither. Our swarthy host stood in his door-way, like Horatius Cocles at the head of the bridge. Beds he did not even profess to find for travellers. He had not slept in one himself for years, and was none the worse, he said, for the privation. Leopold asked for wine.

“‘We have three sorts of wine,’ said the Gipsy, ‘which travellers like yourselves once tasted and paid for. I have the very wines which the seven Schwaben asked for in the Goldenes Kreutz at Ueberlingen.’

“‘What! old Sauerampfer?’ cried Löwenskiold.

“‘The same,’ said our singular host. ‘It is not quite so sour as vinegar, but it will pierce the marrow of your bones like a sword; and it will so twist your mouth, that you shall never get it straight again.’

“‘We will try something better than this acid water,’ said I: ‘we will’----

“‘Try the Dreimännerswein? I am sorry there are only women in the house!’

“‘What, in the name of all your saints in Zara, have your women to do with the refreshment we need?’

“‘Do! nothing in the world! that is precisely it! You will want three men each of you. For Dreimännerswein is three times as rough and ten times as sour as vinegar; and he who drinks it must be held fast by two men, while a third pours the liquid down his throat!’

“‘And what of the third of these Olympic beverages?’ said I.

“‘It is called _Rachenputzer_, and has peculiar qualities too. He who lies down to sleep with a flask of it in his body, must be aroused every half-hour, and turned over. Otherwise a pint of Rachenputzer would eat a hole right through his side!’

“The Gipsy laughed aloud as he uttered these words. We ourselves laughed in despite of our vexation; and, somewhat startlingly, a fourth voice took up the cachinnatory affection, and laughed even louder than the original three. As the new-comer stood in the light of the door-way, the landlord touched his cap, withdrew hastily into the passage, and slammed the door in our faces, leaving us in Cimmerian darkness, summer trousers, and a drizzling rain. The matter was no longer risible, and we were beginning to be seriously annoyed, when the mysterious stranger, whom we could but indistinctly see, invited us to accompany him we knew not whither, and hospitably to partake of we knew not what. We accepted the invitation most gratefully; and after a full half-hour’s walk, we found ourselves on the skirts of a wood. In less than half that time, we subsequently reached a neat little house within the wood itself; and I do not think ten minutes had elapsed, ere we had made such toilette as travellers may, and, with some doubts as to the reality of the circumstance, detected ourselves in the act of eating vermicelli soup, and wondering how it had reached us.

“Before our repast was entirely dispatched, our host, in whom we saw a young, well-made, and exceedingly amiable personage, informed us that he was on a botanizing expedition for the benefit of an establishment in Northern Germany; that he had been two months settled in the house in which we then were, and that he had already given temporary shelter to three plant-explorers, who had resorted, in their need, to the house of Djewitzki, the Gipsy, and who had found to their sorrow, that it had nothing of the quality of an inn about it, except the sign.