Читать книгу: «Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434», страница 5

CLARET AND OLIVES. ¹

'Wine and Walnuts' was a good title for a gossipping book; 'Claret and Olives' is a better. It has a more decided flavour, a more elegant bouquet, a more gem-like colour. The other might refer to any denomination of that multitudinous stuff the English drink under the name of wine; or, if it has individuality at all, it relishes curiously of the coarse and heavy produce of Portugal, so beloved of Dr Johnson, and many other grave doctors, down to the last generation. This breathes all over of the sweet South; it babbles of green fields; it is full of gaiety and frolic, of song and laughter, and the sparkle of wit and crystal. The title, we say, is a good title; and the book has an unmistakable claret flavour—the best English claret, that is to say—which unites the strength of Burgundy with the bouquet of Château Margaux. Mr Reach despises a weak thin wine, and, by an idiosyncratical necessity, he has produced a sparkling, racy book. He traces the falling-off in our literature to a change in wine. 'The Elizabethans quaffed sack, or "Gascoyne, or Rochel wyn,"' quoth he; 'and we had the giants of those days. The Charles II. comedy writers worked on claret. Port came into fashion—port sapped our brains—and, instead of Wycherly's Country Wife, and Vanbrugh's Relapse, we had Mr Morton's Wild Oats, and Mr Cherry's Soldier's Daughter. It is really much to the credit of Scotland, that she stood stanchly by her old ally, France, and would have nothing to do with that dirty little slice of the worst part of Spain—Portugal, or her brandified potations. In the old Scotch houses, a cask of claret stood in the cellar, on the tap. In the humblest Scotch country tavern, the pewter tappit hen, holding some three quarts, "reamed," Anglicé, mantled, with claret just drawn from the cask. At length, in an evil hour, Scotland fell—

 
"Bold and erect the Caledonian stood,
Firm was his mutton, and his claret good;
'Let him drink port!' the English statesman cried;
He drank the poison, and his spirit died!"
 

This will look like treason to a good many of our readers; but we beg them to reflect, that in preferring claret to port, Mr Reach is, after all, an advocate of temperance; and they may therefore hope, that by degrees his potations will become thinner and thinner, till they at last come down—like Mike Lambourne's intentions—to water, 'nothing save fair water.' Our belief, indeed, is, that the excessive duty placed on French wines is a main cause of intemperance in its modern forms; for the dearth of the article drives people to spirits, and other intoxicating agents. Let the light claret (vin ordinaire) of France become a cheap and accessible drink, and we say advisedly that there would soon be a marked improvement in the matter of general sobriety.

As our author proceeds towards the claret district—for the book is in the form of a tour—he chats away very agreeably about everything he sees on the road. We shall not meddle, however, with this part of the volume, otherwise than to notice a peculiarity we have ourselves been frequently struck with—the countryness of small towns in France. There is no aristocracy to be met with there, no higher classes to set the fashion, no professional functionaries to look up to. 'You hardly see an individual who does not appear to have been born and bred upon the spot, and to have no ideas and no desires beyond it. Left entirely to themselves, the people have vegetated in these dull streets from generation to generation, and, though clustered together in a quasi town—perhaps with octroi and mairie, a withered tree of liberty, and billiard-tables by the half-dozen—the population is as essentially rural as though scattered in lone farms, unvisited, except on rent-day, by either landlord or agent.'

After reaching Bordeaux, the tourist proceeded to the village of Margaux, in the true claret country—a general idea of which he gives by describing it as a debatable ground, stretching between the sterile Landes and the fat, black loam of the banks of the Garonne. The soil is sand, gravel, and shingle, scorched by the sun, and would be incapable of yielding as much nourishment to a patch of oats as is found on 'the bare hillside of some cold, bleak, Highland croft.' On this unpromising ground, grow those grapes which produce the finest wine in the world. As for the vines themselves, they have about as much of the picturesque as our drills of potatoes at home. 'Fancy open and unfenced expanses of stunted-looking, scrubby bushes, seldom rising two feet above the surface, planted in rows upon the summit of deep furrow-ridges, and fastened with great care to low, fence-like lines of espaliers, which run in unbroken ranks from one end of the huge fields to the other. These espaliers or lathes are cuttings of the walnut-trees around; and the tendrils of the vine are attached to the horizontally running stakes with withes, or thongs of bark. It is curious to observe the vigilant pains and attention with which every twig has been supported without being strained, and how things are arranged so as to give every cluster as fair a chance as possible of a goodly allowance of sun.' There are some exceptions to this; but the low regular dwarfs are the great wine-givers. 'Walk and gaze, until you come to the most shabby, stunted, weazened, scrubby, dwarfish, expanse of snobbish bushes, ignominiously bound neck and crop to the espaliers like a man on the rack—these utterly poor, starved, and meagre-looking growths, allowing as they do the gravelly soil to shew in bald patches of gray shingle through the straggling branches—these contemptible-looking shrubs, like paralysed and withered raspberries, it is which produce the most priceless, and the most inimitably flavoured wines.' The grapes are such mean and pitiful grapes as you would look at with contempt in Covent-Garden Market; and the very value of the soil contributes to its appearance of destitution—a rudely-carved stake marking the division of properties where a hedge or ditch would take up too much of the precious ground. The vineyards extend to the roadside, without any protection; and yet every living creature, whether man or animal, eats grapes habitually, morning, noon, and night, and to an excess that is perfectly wonderful.

When the fruit is ripe, the fact is announced to the community 'by authority;' and until the proclamation appears, no man must gather his grapes if they should be dropping from the bushes. The signal, however, is at length given, and the work begins. 'The scene is at once full of beauty, and of tender and even sacred associations. The songs of the vintagers, frequently chorussed from one part of the field to the other, ring blithely into the bright summer air, pealing out above the rough jokes and hearty peals of laughter shouted hither and thither. All the green jungle is alive with the moving figures of men and women, stooping among the vines, or bearing pails and basketfuls of grapes out to the grass-grown cross-roads, along which the labouring oxen drag the rough vintage-carts, groaning and cracking as they stagger along beneath their weight of purple tubs, heaped high with the tumbling masses of luscious fruit. The congregation of every age and both sexes, and the careless variety of costume, add additional features of picturesqueness to the scene. The white-haired old man labours with shaking hands to fill the basket which his black-eyed imp of a grandchild carries rejoicingly away. Quaint, broad-brimmed straw and felt hats; handkerchiefs twisted like turbans over straggling elf-locks; swarthy skins tanned to an olive-brown; black flashing eyes; and hands and feet stained in the abounding juices of the precious fruit—all these southern peculiarities of costume and appearance supply the vintage with its pleasant characteristics. The clatter of tongues is incessant. A fire of jokes and jeers, of saucy questions and more saucy retorts—of what, in fact, in the humble and unpoetic, but expressive vernacular, is called "chaff"—is kept up with a vigour which seldom flags, except now and then, when the but-end of a song, or the twanging close of a chorus, strikes the general fancy, and procures for the morceau a lusty encore. Meantime, the master wine-grower moves observingly from rank to rank. No neglected bunch of fruit escapes his watchful eye; no careless vintager shakes the precious berries rudely upon the soil, but he is promptly reminded of his slovenly work. Sometimes the tubs attract the careful superintendent: he turns up the clusters, to ascertain that no leaves nor useless length of tendril are entombed in the juicy masses, and anon directs his steps to the pressing-trough, anxious to find that the lusty treaders are persevering manfully in their long-continued dance.'

The pressure of the grapes is a curious part of the process in an age of mechanical improvement like the present. It is performed by men treading among the fruit with their naked feet. 'The wine-press, or cuvier de pressoir, consists, in the majority of cases, of a massive shallow tub, varying in size from four square feet to as many square yards. It is placed either upon wooden trestles, or on a regularly built platform of mason-work, under the huge rafters of a substantial outhouse. Close to it stands a range of great butts, their number more or less, according to the size of the vineyard. The grapes are flung by tub and caskfuls into the cuvier. The treaders stamp diligently amid the masses, and the expressed juice pours plentifully out of a hole level with the bottom of the trough into a sieve of iron or wicker-work, which stops the passage of the skins, and from thence drains into tubs below. Suppose, at the moment of our arrival, the cuvier for a brief space empty. The treaders—big, perspiring men, in shirts and tucked-up trousers—spattered to the eyes with splatches of purple juice, lean upon their wooden spades, and wipe their foreheads. But their respite is short. The creak of another cart-load of tubs is heard, and immediately the wagon is backed up to the broad open window, or rather hole in the wall, above the trough. A minute suffices to wrench out tub after tub, and to tilt their already half-mashed clusters splash into the reeking pressoir. Then to work again. Jumping with a sort of spiteful eagerness into the mountain of yielding, quivering fruit, the treaders sink almost to the knees, stamping, and jumping, and rioting in the masses of grapes, as fountains of juice spurt about their feet, and rush bubbling and gurgling away. Presently, having, as it were, drawn the first sweet blood of the new cargo, the eager trampling subsides into a sort of quiet, measured dance, which the treaders continue, while, with their wooden spades, they turn the pulpy remnants of the fruit hither and thither, so as to expose the half-squeezed berries in every possible way to the muscular action of the incessantly moving feet. All this time, the juice is flowing in a continuous stream into the tubs beneath. When the jet begins to slacken, the heap is well tumbled with the wooden spades, and, as though a new force had been applied, the juice-jet immediately breaks out afresh. It takes, perhaps, half or three quarters of an hour thoroughly to squeeze the contents of a good-sized cuvier, sufficiently manned.' In defence of this primitive process, it is alleged that no mechanical wine-press could perform the work with the same perfection as the human foot; and as for the impurities the juice may acquire from any want of cleanliness in the operations, these, and every other atom of foreign matter, are thrown to the surface in the act of fermentation.

The expressed juice is now carried away in tubs, and flung into the fermenting vats. Our author saw the vats in the Château Margaux cellars the day after they had been filled, and heard, deep down, 'perhaps eight feet down in the juice, a seething, gushing sound, as if currents and eddies were beginning to flow, in obedience to the influence of the working spirit; and now and then a hiss and a low bubbling throb, as though of a pot about to boil.' In a little while, it would have been impossible to breathe an atmosphere thus saturated with carbonic acid gas; and the superintendents can only watch the process of nature by listening outside the door to 'the inarticulate accents and indistinct rumblings' which proclaim a great metempsychosis. 'Is there not something fanciful and poetic in the notion of this change taking place mysteriously in the darkness, when all the doors are locked and barred—for the atmosphere about the vats is death—as if nature would suffer no idle prying into her mystic operations, and as if the grand transmutation and projection from juice to wine had in it something of a secret and solemn and awful nature—fenced round, as it were, and protected from vulgar curiosity by the invisible halo of stifling gas?'

The vintagers naturally claim our attention next. A portion of them are, of course, the peasantry of the village and neighbourhood; but a country like France, swarming with poor who are not mendicants, has of course a floating population, that surges almost instinctively upon every spot where there is pleasant work to do. The vintage not merely affords this work, but being attended with all sorts of jollity, the crowds it collects have a peculiarly vagabond character. You see at a glance that they are there upon a spree, and submit to the labour, not as anything they like, or are accustomed to, but as a mere passport to the fun. They are in France what the Irish harvesters and the Kent hop-pickers are in England, although always preserving the peculiarities, that distinguish the former country, giving even her vagabondage a melodramatic look, just as if they were 'made up' for the occasion. 'The gendarmerie,' says our author, 'have a busy time of it when these gentry are collected in numbers in the district. Poultry disappear with the most miraculous promptitude; small linen articles hung out to dry have no more chance than if Falstaff's regiment were marching by; and garden fruit and vegetables, of course, share the results produced by a rigid application of the maxim, that la propriété c'est la vol. Where these people come from is a puzzle. There will be vagrants and strollers among them from all parts of France—from the Pyrenees and the Alps—from the pine-woods of the Landes and the moors of Brittany. They unite in bands of a dozen or a score men and women, appointing a chief, who bargains with the vine-proprietor for the services of the company, and keeps up some degree of order and subordination, principally by means of the unconstitutional application of a good thick stick. I frequently encountered these bands, making their way from one district to another; and better samples of 'the dangerous classes' were never collected. They looked vicious and abandoned, as well as miserably poor. The women, in particular, were as brazen-faced a set of slatterns as could be conceived; and the majority of the men—tattered, strapping-looking fellows, with torn slouched hats and tremendous cudgels—were exactly the sort of persons a nervous gentleman would have scruples about meeting at dusk in a long lane. It is when thus on the tramp that the petty pilfering, and picking and stealing, to which I have alluded to, goes on. When actually at work, they have no time for picking up unconsidered trifles. Sometimes these people pass the night—all together, of course—in outhouses or barns, when the chef can strike a good bargain; at other times, they bivouac on the lee-side of a wood or wall, in genuine gipsy fashion. You may often see their watchfires glimmering in the night; and be sure that where you do, there are twisted necks and vacant nests in many a neighbouring henroost.' Mr Reach witnessed an altercation, respecting passage-money, between a party of these wanderers and a ferryman of the Garonne; and it ended in the vintagers refusing to cross the river, rather than submit to the overcharge, as they contended it was, of a sou. 'A bivouac was soon formed. Creeping under the lee of a row of casks, on the shingle of the bare beach, the women were placed leaning against the somewhat hard and large pillows in question; the children were nestled at their feet and in their laps; and the men formed the outermost ranks. A supply of loaves was sent for and obtained. The chief tore the bread up into huge hunks, which he distributed to his dependents; and upon this supper the whole party went coolly to sleep—more coolly, indeed, than agreeably—for a keen north wind was whistling along the sedgy banks of the river, and the red blaze of high-piled fagots was streaming from the houses across the black, cold, turbid waters.'

If our author's picture of the vine is not couleur de rose, he is still less complimentary to the olive. Languedoc is the country of the latter luxury; and Languedoc is in the south of France—aptly termed 'the austere south.' 'It is austere, grim, sombre. It never smiles: it is scathed and parched. There is no freshness or rurality in it. It does not seem the country, but a vast yard—shadeless, glaring, drear, and dry. Let us glance from our elevated perch over the district we are traversing. A vast, rolling wilderness of clodded earth, browned and baked by the sun; here and there masses of red rock heaving themselves above the soil like protruding ribs of the earth, and a vast coating of drowthy dust, lying like snow upon the ground. To the left, a long ridge of iron-like mountains—on all sides rolling hills, stern and kneaded, looking as though frozen. On the slopes and in the plains, endless rows of scrubby, ugly trees, powdered with the universal dust, and looking exactly like mop-sticks. Sprawling and straggling over the soil beneath them, jungles of burnt-up, leafless bushes, tangled, and apparently neglected. The trees are olives and mulberries—the bushes, vines.' This is a picture that will not impress an Englishman with the due sensation of dreariness, unless he recollects that in France there are no enclosures—that the country lies spread out before him, in some parts and seasons, like a richly variegated carpet; in others, like an Arabian desert. The romantic, Eastern, Biblical olive!—what is it? 'The trunk, a weazened, sapless-looking piece of timber, the branches spreading out from it like the top of a mushroom; and the colour, when you can see it for dust, a cold, sombre, grayish green. One olive is as like another as one mop-stick is like another. The tree has no picturesqueness, no variety. It is not high enough to be grand, and not irregular enough to be graceful. Put it beside the birch, the beech, the elm, or the oak, and you will see the poetry of the forest, and its poorest and most meagre prose.'

The mop-stick appearance of the olive is an artificial beauty; to make it look like an umbrella is the ne plus ultra of arboriculture. But the present race of olives, twist and torment them as we will, are inferior to those of the times of our grandfather. 'Towards the close of the last century, there was a winter night of intense frost; and when the morning broke, the trees were nearly smitten to the core. That year, there was not an olive gathered in Provence or Languedoc. The next season, some of the stronger and younger trees partially revived, and slips were planted from those to which the axe had been applied; but the entire species of the tree had fallen off—had dwindled, and pined, and become stunted; and the profits of olive cultivation had faded with it.' Olive-gathering, it will be felt, is a slow affair. The getting in this harvest is 'as business-like and unexciting as weeding onions, or digging potatoes. A set of ragged peasants—the country people hereabouts are poorly dressed—were clambering barefoot in the trees, each man with a basket tied before him, and lazily plucking the dull oily fruit. Occasionally, the olive-gatherers had spread a white cloth beneath the tree, and were shaking the very ripe fruit down; but there was neither jollity nor romance about the process. The olive is a tree of association, but that is all. Its culture, its manuring and clipping, and trimming and grafting—the gathering of its fruits, and their squeezing in the mill, when the ponderous stone goes round and round in the glutinous trough, crushing the very essence out of the oily pulps, while the fat oleaginous stream pours lazily into the greasy vessels set to receive it; all this is as prosaic and uninteresting, as if the whole Royal Agricultural Society were presiding in spirit over the operations.'

Our readers will now see that this is a racy, vigorous book, full of new remark and clever painting; and we recommend them to test the correctness of our opinions, therefore, by having recourse to the volume itself, which is neither large nor expensive.