A Moveable Feast by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-74220-596-0
Publisher: Lonely Planet Publications
Published: 2010-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

Dinner with Dionysus

HENRY SHUKMAN

Henry Shukman won the 2003 Jerwood Aldeburgh Prize for his first poetry collection, In Dr No’s Garden, which was also a Book of the Year in the Times and Guardian, and was shortlisted for the UK’s Forward Prize. He has been Poet in Residence at the Wordsworth Trust, a Royal Literary Fund Poetry Fellow at Oxford Brookes University, and now lives in New Mexico, where he writes for the New York Times and teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts. His poems have appeared in the New Republic, Iowa Review, Hudson Review, Harvard Review, Times Literary Supplement and London Review of Books. His novel The Lost City was Guardian Book of the Year in the UK. Most summers he teaches fiction and poetry in Loutro, Crete, at the World Spirit Institute (www.worldspirit.org).

The red copper wine carafe endemic to Cretan tables is a highly unpredictable source. Out of it comes local wine that’s sometimes crimson, sometimes pink (not rosé, but truly pink) or sometimes yellowish-brown, and that more often than not tastes of blackberry juice mixed with a little vinegar. But just occasionally, you get a real surprise.

The Old Phoenix Hotel stands on its own little bay on the barren, vertiginous shore of southern Crete, a half-hour walk from the village of Loutro – which is itself a sweaty, death-defying two-hour cliff walk from the nearest town, Sfakia. This part of the coastline is so steep and lofty, at a spot where the White Mountains stomp right down to the shore in grey cliffs 2000 feet tall, that no road has yet been built. If you want to visit Loutro (not for the faint-hearted), unless you take the ferry, a hike or a pitching open boat are the only ways to get there. If you do take the ferry, the little steep bay will keep you prisoner until you get back on it.

The Old Phoenix stands all alone on its rocky shore. Some intrepid German hiking families come to stay for a few days, some backpackers pass through, and some of the Loutro visitors will hike or kayak around a headland for the afternoon. But it’s just too inaccessible ever to be thronged, even in the middle of summer. Yet it’s well worth the journey. The restaurant, which is just a terrace under a trellis of vines overlooking the pebble beach, has some unexpected treats.

The first of them is the wine. This year, it’s brown. I don’t think I’ve ever had brown wine before. It’s a colour distantly related to the rosé of a Bandol rosé from Provence – a brownish, peachy pink – but darker, dirtier. The white wine that they have here is fine, drinkable, unremarkable, but this stuff, an ancient liquor that has been around since before Homer’s day, whose legacy probably reaches back beyond the Minoan past, over 3000 years ago, and for which the epithet ‘red’ is a euphemism, is another matter. It’s a special thing. Trodden (rather than pressed) by the

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