A Hedonist in the Cellar: Adventures in Wine by Jay McInerney

Author:Jay McInerney
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Cooking, Beverages, Wine and wine making, Wine & Spirits
ISBN: 9781400096374
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
Published: 2007-11-06T03:44:06+00:00

JILTED LOVER

Auberon Waugh

Novelist Evelyn Waugh, in his fiction and correspondence, provided us with some fine observations on wine and its enjoyment, but perhaps his greatest service to the world of wine was to sire Auberon Waugh. Best known as a novelist, columnist, book reviewer, and curmudgeon, Auberon Waugh wrote a wine column for Tatler and later for Harpers & Queen. His vinous writing is collected in Waugh on Wine, which, page for page, is the liveliest and most pungent wine writing of the century. Waugh called himself “a practitioner of the vituperative arts”; an article he wrote about Islam incited an angry mob to burn down the British council building in Rawalpindi. He believed that wine writing should be no less extravagant and intemperate than political commentary.

“The purpose of the aperitif is definitely not to make one drunk,” he says of the first drink of the day. “This should come with the wine, or, failing that, with the port and other delights afterward.” This passage displays Waugh’s rhetorical powers in all their glory, the first sentence misleading us into imagining that Waugh has gone Methodist or politically correct on us, the second putting that idea to rest with a right jab and a quick left hook. This is called humor, for those of you who have been reading too many wine publications.

“Wine writing should be camped up,” he wrote in one essay. “The writer should never like a wine, he should be in love with it; never find a wine disappointing but identify it as a mortal enemy, an attempt to poison him. Bizarre and improbable side tastes should be proclaimed: mushrooms, rotting wood, black treacle, burned pencils, condensed milk, sewage, the smell of French railway stations or ladies’ underwear.”

He made good on this pledge. “A tremendous amount of unnecessary suffering goes on under the name of liebfraumilch,” he declared. “Filthy” and “disgusting” were his favorite descriptors. As the head of a wine club, he once proclaimed an offering “anal,” and was delighted to report that it immediately sold out, a fact that, he felt, said a lot about his countrymen. In a Tatler column, he described his cousin’s house wine as a drink of “stupendous horror … the foul beverage itself tasted of vinegar, blue ink, and curry powder.” Not content with this, he said that it reminded him “of a bunch of dead chrysanthemums on the grave of a stillborn West Indian baby,” a remark that got him fired from Tatler. (He explained to the press council, who called him up on charges of racism, that it was the curry taste that suggested the image.)

Bron, as everyone called him, was more vivid in insult than in praise, but in his wine writing, unlike his literary criticism, he was always looking for love. He described red Bandol as “a beautiful, swarthy, scorched-earth red, which improves with keeping.” He could wax rapturous about Condrieu and Châteauneuf-du-Pape. His first love was Burgundy or, rather, a swarthy beverage of that name that he remembered from his father’s cellar.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.