CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Last Drops

The Driest Wines (and the Drollest)
Are in the Museum

By HOWARD G. GOLDBERG

Intoxicating dry wine in open bottles, stoppered decanters and goblets lies within easy grasp throughout the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This wine, mainly European and American, never spills or ages. It is a blend of the painter’s palate and palette.

The canvases in many galleries reward a wine lover’s single-minded search for wine themes in the Met. Literal and symbolic, these motifs are central and incidental to depictions of life and the afterlife. Some take on fuller dimensions in marble, bronze, lead, earthenware and plaster.

No surprise. From the birth of civilization, wine has stimulated personal and cultural highs, as the fevered revels (chaperoned by Eros) on the Met’s ancient Greek pottery illustrate. Lows, too: Take wine coolers, the pop-top refresher concocted from chintzy grapes and fizz in the ’80s. Wine words and meanings, like wine styles and preferences, change with the times. The Met shows us the original coolers, one in mahogany (attributed to Duncan Phyfe, in the Luce Center), which speak of nights at table, not under it.

Had servants named Bartles and Jaymes poured wine at dinners given by Sir Robert Walpole, England’s first prime minister, they might have fetched the bottles from water in the hexagonal silver cooler embossed with his coat of arms, which is housed near the English period rooms. A silver monteith, perhaps like the one in the Landsdowne House dining room, would have chilled the glasses.

Wine artifacts, secular and sacred, prosaic and ethereal, are so profuse in the permanent collections that they need no structured tour, just a taste for serendipity and a patient, selective eye. The best visiting times are Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, when every gallery is open. Once attuned to the miniature and the splashed grape clusters, leaves and tendrils that are engraved, raised and carved in gold, glass, stone and clay, romantic visitors can imagine themselves in mini-arbors.

The Vine, a Beaux-Arts bronze by Harriet Whitney Frishmuth gracing the Engelhard Court of the American Wing, personifies the Met’s commitment to viticulture. Several Fokine Ballet dancers posed for the figure of a nude bacchante who, the label redundantly says, is “shown stretching upward and outward in imitation of a living vine.” There is no evidence of pruning.

Nearby, nurtured by the court’s Rhine-like sunlight and humidity, the ripe fat blue, purple and green fruit in two tall stained-glass Tiffany panels of trellised grapevines taste juicy and sweet to the imagination. On the balcony, a 19thcentury pressed-glass wine urn that resembles an oversize decanter with a spigot, probably made in New England, awakens envy in sideboard owners.

One aperitif is Prudence, a 15th-century glazed terra-cotta roundel by Andrea della Robbia, near the door of the Lehman Collection, which in part depicts meaty bunches of dark grapes resembling ripe cabernet sauvignon.

In the Wallace Wing, the bottle and grapes, a voluptuary’s delight, in Bonnard’s Terrace at Vernon leave the impression that life is wine and roses, but other oils have different ideas. Vanitas, a Pieter Claesz still life in a European gallery, is explained this way: “Here a skull, an overturned glass roemer with its fleeting reflections, an expired lamp . . . suggest that worldly efforts are ultimately in vain.”

Maybe so, but you won’t get far telling it to the overwrought wine-driven satyrs and maenads negotiating eternity on Greek and Roman pottery (discreetly placed far from the Met’s delicately wrought chalices). And if the origin of “enophile” remains a mystery to wine snobs who affect that title, innocence is lost among the labels’ Greek prefixes: “oinochoe,” for wine jug.

The modern Greeks’ practice of putting a resinous flavor into wine, now fortunately dying, perhaps originated in their ancestors’ habit of mixing two parts of water to one of wine in immense vessels. Many such kraters are shown, along with an enough cups, bottles, bowls and storage jars to have stocked an Attic branch of Macy’s Cellar.

The Greeks diluted wine, an everyday beverage, to keep it from turning into vinegar and because there was a cultural taboo against intoxication. Taboo? Who, surrounded by these orgies, would ever dream of such a thing? The Met ought to offer a leaflet written, say, by Robert W. Wallace, professor of classics and ancient history at Northwestern University. He knows about such antique matters as selfdiscipline and would readily offer a reminder: “Drunkenness was barbarous. You lost control, and that was not a thing to do. The Greeks thought that drinking wine straight drove you crazy. The ritualized revels were sanctioned by the gods and controlled by overseers.” Funny, not an overseer in sight.

The wine-and-food crowd will adore The Feast of Achelous by Rubens and Jan Bruegel the Elder in the European department. Theseus and his companions, fresh from a boar hunt, dine at the cave of the river god. The setting teems with oysters and lobsters. Purists may be appalled because the god is serving red wine with fish, but the collaborators redeem themselves by putting a white on the table.

Artists work the angles. The chalice in Vermeer’s contemplative Allegory of the Faith is predictably vertical, that is, upright, complementing an adjacent woman personifying Faith. Nearby, a glass of luminous pinkish wine held aloft by a roisterer in Steen’s riotous Merry Company on a Terrace is slightly canted, implying that the character is off-center.

A highlight of the northern European decorative arts is a 17th-century German cabinet with a partly gilt silver panel in relief showing Bacchus hoisting a cup while seated on a barrel from which wine issues from a spout.

The museum’s artifacts bring wine down to earth, even if they have heaven in mind.

The liturgical silver Attarouthi Treasure is the centerpiece of the aisle to the south of the grand staircase. Its nine huge chalices, we’re told, “were made for offering the Eucharistic wine to entire congregations,” probably in two churches in a thriving merchant town in northern Syria in the sixth and seventh centuries; a strainer used to prepare wine is a curious sidelight. The early Christian Antioch Chalice, a plain inner cup (once erroneously thought to be the Holy Grail) inside an ornate openwork cup, lies a few feet away. In the opposite aisle, a golden Greek libation bowl, perhaps from the fourth century B.C., is a standout, as are six darling sixth-century silver Cypriot wine jugs, all under an inch high.

Few millet-wine artifacts fuse the spiritual and material worlds as movingly as the elaborate set of 13 bronze ritual altar objects—containers, vessels, cups, beakers and a ladle—dating from the 11th century B.C. The set is featured in the gallery of ancient Chinese art. A monumental covered bronze wine container from the ninth to the eighth century B.C. is another standout. Among the especially rich Asian rice-wine implements is a stark, sharply formed bronze vessel (just north of the grand staircase) that has inlaid gold, silver and brass, and dates to the Ming dynasty. The Korean storage jars, bottles and ewers in stoneware and porcelain invite leisurely inspection.

In the Rockefeller Wing, four ornate wooden cups carved by the Kuba people of Zaire were intended not only for palm wine but also as status symbols, as were a carved animal horn and an elaborately decorated storage gourd from Cameroon. All date from the late 19th or early 20th centuries.

Ancient Egypt was lotus land for wine drinkers, especially aristocrats. Tomb paintings and reliefs and storage amphoras document virtually everything about winemaking and consumption habits. Throughout the galleries, endless processions of slaves bear black and green grapes and other fare to banquets. Grape bunches in crisp relief are notably vivid in a wall of the chapel of Ramses I at Abydos, in the Sackler Wing.

A visit would be incomplete without seeing the trellised arbor wall painting from a villa buried by the Vesuvius eruption in A.D. 79, off the Great Hall; the Bordeaux room, a salon taken from a villa in that French city; Bernini’s ecstatic vine-wreathed sculpture Faun Teased by Children, near the Petrie Sculpture Court; six 1830–1840 American Champagne glasses in the Baltimore Room and chalices in the Medieval Treasury. And don’t miss the luminous gold Drinking Vessel Terminating in the Forepart of a Lion in the Iranian gallery; a manuscript painting showing two men treading grapes, in the Islamic collection (despite the religious ban on alcohol);and the bird-shaped modern claret jug designed by Archibald Knox, in the Kravis Wing.

Did Frank O’Dea, who prepares the Met’s wine lists, sweet-talk the department of Greek and Roman art? Is it coincidental that not long ago a second-century Roman statue of Dionysus, described as the “god of wine and divine intoxication,” was positioned near the entrance to the first-floor restaurants?

Dionysus, interviewed, recommended a split of Jean Cordier white vin ordinaire in the cafeteria ($4.75), a lunchtime 1991 Robert Mondavi white zinfandel (to keep the mind clear) in the white-tablecloth restaurant ($17 a bottle), a lateafternoon glass of 1990 Beaulieu Vineyard Rutherford cabernet sauvignon ($6.50) in the cafe and a Charles Heidsieck special brut nonvintage Champagne in the fourth floor members-only Trustees’ Dining Room ($35 a bottle).

The museum’s shop sells such eye-catching reproductions as a pewter version of an early Hellenistic kylix or wine cup ($42), a pewter copy of a 19th-century Moroccan kiddush cup ($38), a silver copy of a 19th-century Viennese kiddush cup ($450) and a pewter duplicate of a 19th-century English bottle coaster.

Alas, there are curatorial lapses. Who had the bright idea to put Self-Portrait by the British painter William Orpen in a conspicuous spot in the Wallace Wing? It features, of all retrograde things, whisky and soda! More important, the Metropolitan should deaccession the Caccini statue in the Spanish Courtyard. It is called Temperance.

July 1993

The Big Grape: Nouveau York City

By HOWARD G. GOLDBERG

The wine merchant William Sokolin, in a published letter commenting on how to produce good vintages, has suggested that cabernet sauvignon grapes should be planted in Central Park. In fuller bloom, that idea offers the prospect of a new New York—or, more aptly, a new Nouveau York. In short, turn Manhattan into a vineyard.

Geography offers grounds: Has no one noticed the uncanny resemblance between the Médoc, home of Bordeaux wine—made largely from cabernet sauvignon—and Manhattan? Both are roughly on a north-south axis; both are surrounded on at least two sides by water, which benefits viticulture; both lie within 4 degrees north latitude of each other; both are inundated with French restaurants—though perhaps Manhattan holds an edge.

Why buy Beaujolais Villages when you can drink Greenwich Villages (plural, of course, because of the East and West Village)? Why bother with a Rosé d’Anjou when you can enjoy a Rose of Washington Square?

In a grander vision, Fort Tryon Park is to Champagne, France’s northernmost wine region, as the Battery is to the Midi, the south. That makes Central Park the equivalent of Burgundy; science thus mandates, with apologies to Mr. Sokolin, that City Hall plant pinot noir there.

Since pinot noir is a basic grape of Champagne, George Steinbrenner, the Yankees’ owner, and Nelson Doubleday, the Mets’ chief owner, have a stake in it. Even as a “vintage of the century” is always proclaimed, so their teams will again take a World Series. Why must so much expensive Moët & Chandon be wasted in locker rooms to shampoo the champs? Fort Tryon brut would be far cheaper.

Soil, climate and the vintner are the heart of successful winemaking. Soil quality can so vary from field to field that a path between tracts can separate celebrated from middling wine, as can the terrain’s slope, drainage and exposure to sun. Centuries of trial and error have taught which grape grows best where; the trick is to find the ideal Manhattan locale for each varietal.

It should be easy. Certain wines have long histories in the city. For example, surely the 1924 notebooks of the anarchist Emma Goldman, years after her angry departure from Russia, will show these tasting notes: “Union Square Reds—coarse, earthy, lack finesse, too much acid, unbalanced, you get a headache.”

Take riesling, the noble grape of exquisite, costly German wine. Like other classic varietals, it thrives only in inhospitable soil, especially on steep terraced slopes overlooking the Rhine and Mosel. Its comparable Manhattan site would be the glass-and-marble Trump Tower. Riesling’s roots, sunk deep into the glistening metal, would produce a liquid of unrivaled steeliness. The bottle label would simply say: “Qualitätswein mit Prädikat Anbaugebiet Neuyork 1984er Fifthaveneuerund-Eastfiftysixthstreeter Schloss Trumptowerer Bonwittellerbergstein Trockenbeerenauslese Erzeugerabfüllung.” Just go in and ask for it.

What to plant on Wall Street? The viognier. On the vine this rare Rhône Valley grape, like many Big Board stocks, offers a low yield. But its rich taste and bouquet are found in blue-chip whites such as Château-Grillet, whose price, the wine critic Hugh Johnson observes, equals that of Montrachet, Burgundy’s regal white.

The sémillon, a fairly late ripener, is thus the scholar’s grape. Its aroma in young, dry wines recalls green apples—that is, freshmen. It takes five years in the bottle—a B.A. and M.A.—to reach complexity. More important, it is the basis of renowned dessert wines like Château d’Yquem, the Sauternes.

The grape is attacked by a mold that penetrates the skin, shriveling it and enabling water to evaporate; in autumn, as in thought, the retained juice concentrates into nectar. The mold is known in Latin as Botrytis cinerea—in French, familiarly, as pourriture noble, or noble rot. Obviously, the sémillon qualifies for planting on campuses, particularly if mulched with discarded monographs.

Another luscious after-dinner wine would be produced at Eighth Avenue and 41st Street by the port authority.

And what would the United Nations vinify? Châteauneuf-du-Pape. This southern Rhône wine is a blend of up to 13 grapes—and no two vintners can agree on the proportions. It contains the highest minimum level of alcohol in any French wine, 12.5 percent, a degree not unknown in the North Delegates’ Lounge.

The dolcetto, grape of the full and velvety red Dolcetto d’Alba in the Piedmont region of Italy, would flower in Lincoln Center, whose wine would be named Dolcetto d’Opera—or, simply, Vino Verdi. Used during the first-act drinking scene in La Traviata, it comes in a magnum or, some say, a magnum opus.

Wonder about chardonnay, the white mainstay of Burgundy’s Côte d’Or, or Golden Slope? Down the median strip of Park Avenue. As for Catawba, Delaware, Ives, Niagara and scuppernong grapes—along the Avenue of the Americas. On East 96th Street, psychoanalysts would spend their hours uncorking native Liebfraumilch. And, last, vins de pays, or regional wines, which don’t always travel well: certainly no shipments from Chelsea to SoHo.

This river of wine, after the annual crush, would flow, for storage and aging, into the still-to-be-completed East 63rd Street subway tunnel, a chilled cave stacked floor to ceiling with oak casks and barrels stretching far into the distance, under Gothic arches, candles dripping from cast-iron chandeliers, everywhere cobwebs draping dusty racked bottles whose yellowing labels tell of ancient vintages, of a distant, nearly forgotten time when people didn’t know about a Kir but only about a two-cents-plain.

Where would it all lead—the trellises, the pruning, the spigots? To a small notice in the newspaper every November: “Alternate side of the street parking will be suspended Friday and Saturday for a bacchanal.”

November 1984

Jefferson on Wine:
“The Only Antidote to the Bane of Whisky”

By HOWARD G. GOLDBERG

Thomas Jefferson—wine collector, student of winemaking and merchandising, grape grower and wine adviser to the first five presidents (himself included)—pulled a decanter from his wooden traveling wine chest and poured us both an aperitif. He had granted a wide-ranging interview about foreign and domestic wines, his first in 161 years. The occasion was the 200th anniversary of his tour of French wine regions, from which he emerged the father of American connoisseurs.

During lunch in his Monticello, Va., dining room, Mr. Jefferson showed off the two wine dumbwaiters he designed. They are built into the fireplace and drop down to his cool brick wine cellar.

He displayed his meticulous bin records listing Bordeaux, Burgundy, Champagne, Chianti, Frontignan (a favorite), Hermitage, Lacryma Christi, Madeira, Malaga, malmsey, Marsala, port, Sauternes, sherry and Tokay—to name a fraction. To keep the historical record accurate, he answered my questions by quoting his own words from years of wine correspondence, diaries and other records.

Mr. President, as envoy to France from 1784 to 1789, you observed Louis XVI’s wine drinking and other habits. How did you characterize them to John Jay, Secretary of State?

He hunts one-half the day, is drunk the other, and signs whatever he is bid.

You were abroad when the Constitution was written. As a rural Virginia farmer observing the wine regions of France, how did you depict, in your diary, royalty’s treatment of French agricultural society?

The people of Burgundy and Beaujolais are well clothed, and have the appearance of being well fed. But they experience all the oppressions that result from the nature of the general government, and from that of their particular tenures, and of the seignorial government to which they are subject. What a cruel reflection that a rich country cannot long be a free one!

What economic conditions did you find in Burgundy?

At Pommard and Voulenay I observed them eating good wheat bread; at Meursault, rye. I asked the reason of the difference. They told me that the white wines fail in quality much oftener than the red, and remain on hand. The farmer therefore cannot afford to feed his laborers so well. At Meursault only white wines are made, because there is too much stone for the red. On such slight circumstances depends the condition of man!

Did you have any bad experiences in French wine country?

When one calls in the taverns for the vin du pays, they give what is natural and unadulterated and cheap: when vin étrangère is called for, it only gives a pretext for charging an extravagant price for an unwholesome stuff, very often of their own brewery.

The people you will naturally see the most of will be tavern keepers, valets de place and postilions. These are the hackneyed rascals of every country. Of course they must never be considered when we calculate the national character.

You fell in love with Sauternes, especially from Château d’Yquem, and imported a great deal. What did your first tasting notes say?

This proves a most excellent wine, and seems to have hit the palate of the Americans more than any wine I have ever seen in France.

When you encountered wine snobs, what did you tell them?

We could, in the United States, make as great a variety of wines as are made in Europe, not exactly of the same kinds, but doubtless as good.

You rated four Bordeaux vineyards “of first quality.” They were “Chateau Margau,” “La Tour de Segur,” “Houtbrion” and “Chateau de la Fite.” They are still around, and fetch celestial prices; should today’s middle class pay them?

The increase of expense beyond income is an indication soliciting the employment of the pruning knife.

What did you learn in the Champagne region in 1788?

The white wines are either mousseux (sparkling) or nonmousseux. The sparkling are little drunk in France but are almost alone known and drunk in foreign countries. This makes so great a demand, and so certain a one, that they endeavor to make all the sparkling if they can.

We share a taste for German wines. When you toured Rheingau vineyards in 1788, what did you find?

Though they begin to make wine, as it has been said, at Cologne, and continue it up the river indefinitely, yet it is only from Rudesheim to Hochheim that wines of the first quality are made. What is the leading Italian wine? There are several crops under different names but that of Montepulciano is the only good, and that is equal to the best Burgundy.

Let us focus on America. Vintners in minor wine states—Tennessee, New Mexico—who try to make ends meet would agree with your words in a 1787 letter to a law instructor at William and Mary College. You said “the vine” is “the parent of misery.” Please elaborate.

Those who cultivate it are always poor, and he who would employ himself with us in the culture of corn, cotton, etc. can procure in exchange for that much more wine, and better than he could raise by its direct culture.

You tried to cultivate European vinifera grapes, which make the best wines, but failed. Northerners are baffled by your love of wine from North Carolina’s scuppernong, a floozy of a muscadine grape.

Her scuppernong wine, made on the south side of the Sound, would be distinguished on the best tables of Europe for its fine aroma and crystalline transparence. Unhappily that aroma, in most of the samples I have seen, has been entirely submerged in brandy. This coarse taste and practice is the peculiarity of Englishmen.

Today’s wine language is pretentious. How have you described wine?

Dry, sparkling, acid, barely sensible, rough, astringent, elegant, higher flavored, delicious, excellent, delicate, silky. By our term “silky” we do not mean sweet, but sweetish in the smallest degree only.

During your first year in the White House, you spent nearly $3,000 on wines—more than on groceries. While president from 1801 to 1809, you allocated $11,000 for wines. As a free-trader, what did you tell protectionist Congressmen at your table?

No nation is drunken where wine is cheap; and none sober where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage. It is, in truth, the only antidote to the bane of whisky. Fix but the duty at the rate of other merchandise, and we can drink wine here as cheap as we do grog, and who will not prefer it? Its extended use will carry health and comfort to a much enlarged circle.

Please recite that poetic thought you wrote to your good friend Dr. Benjamin Rush in 1811 when you were 68 years old.

I find friendship to be like wine, raw when new, ripened with age, the true old man’s milk and restorative cordial.

What are you pouring to toast independence this weekend?

Vin de Nice. The crop called Bellet, of Mr. Sasterno, is the best. This is the most elegant everyday wine in the world and costs 31 cents the bottle. Not much being made, it is little known at the general markets.

(Bellet, in the hills behind Nice, still makes good red, white and rosé wines. I made a mental note to buy some. But Bellet is not easy to find in New York. What to do?)

“Mr. President,” I said. “Can you recommend a good cheap hotel in Nice?”

July 1987

The Spirit of Giving

By FRANK J. PRIAL

This is not exactly a Christmas story; it’s not really a wine story, either, although wine is central to it. It’s a story about living and dying and the occasionally surprising nobility of the human spirit. No, it’s not exactly a Christmas story but—for me—it evokes the spirit of Christmas more profoundly than a hundred recorded carols or a forest of lighted trees.

The story begins in Norway in 1908. That was the year that Peder Knutsen, then 19, immigrated to Canada to homestead on the vast western plains. Sometime later, he wandered down into North Dakota, settling in Kindred, a farming community of some 600 people that is 20 miles or so south of Fargo. He owned a bit of land, about two acres, worked as a farm laborer for his neighbors and made occasional trips back to Norway to visit a sister. He never married and, toward the end of his life, lived alone and apparently content in his small house, mostly on a $78 monthly pension from World War I. He died on Nov. 11, 1974.

Several months later, on Feb. 7, 1975, a small item appeared in The International Herald Tribune in Paris. It said that Peder Knutsen of Kindred, N.D., had died recently and left a will donating $30,000 to a home for the elderly in the town of his birth, Gol, in the Hallingdal Valley, about 140 miles east of Bergen. But it was no ordinary bequest. Mr. Knutsen specified that the income from his bequest must be used to buy wine for the old people in the home.

On Feb. 5, two days before the newspaper item appeared, the municipal council in Gol agreed to accept Mr. Knutsen’s gift “. . . even if the donation was odd and put this alcopolitical problem on our neck,” as the acting mayor at the time, Ola Storia, put it.

Mr. Storia and his fellow councilmen estimated that Mr. Knutsen’s bequest would provide about 1,000 bottles of wine a year, or about three bottles a day to be shared among the 23 residents then living at the home. Assuming that there are always a couple of nondrinkers, even in a group of Scandinavians, the bequest barely came to a glass a day for each resident.

But a glass of wine is just what many physicians prescribe for their elderly patients, and even one glass of wine, shared with others at the evening meal, might serve to brighten some long Arctic nights.

Shortly after the story about Mr. Knutsen’s will first appeared, a neighbor and, in fact, his landlord, spoke about him. “He was a wonderful old man,” said Delice Ebsen. “He never went to church, but he was a religious man. His Bible sustained him.”

The Ebsens had bought Mr. Knutsen’s two acres from him around 1970 for $3,000. They let him live on, free, in the house he had built. “He used to make rhubarb wine,” Mrs. Ebsen recalled, “and he enjoyed a can of beer now and then.” So far as she knew, he had had little experience with grape wine at all.

“We talked about what he would do with his money,” Mrs. Ebsen said, “and he liked the idea of leaving it to a home. But we had no idea he meant to leave it to a home in Norway and, to tell the truth, we had no idea how much money he had. There was the $3,000 he got from us, and he must have saved some money after selling his land in Canada.”

The story of Peder Knutsen might never have come to light had it not been passed along by another elderly gentleman, George C. Sumner, an American, now deceased, who lived in Paris at the time. A Yankee of distinguished lineage, sent forth by Harvard in the misty years before the Great War, Mr. Sumner carved out an impressive career as a wine exporter and broker in the decades following World War II.

Appended to the now crumbling clipping about Mr. Knutsen are a few lines by Mr. Sumner: “It is not hard to imagine the drab dullness of life for those whose working days are over and who are confined to the routine of a home and the same old conversation—if any—at meals.

“A few glasses of wine and the fellowship they incite can change the atmosphere of the dining room and make dinner something to look forward to.

“I believe there are some, perhaps many, who would like to leave such an endowment for those who have had their day but still have some time.”

It was Mr. Sumner’s idea that a fund might be raised to provide a glass of wine for other old people living out their years in days of dull routine. How well he succeeded, I have no idea. I hope he did. But even if he didn’t, it’s still pleasant to think, particularly at this time of the year, of Peder Knutsen and to raise a glass to him and the old people of Gol in Norway.

Surely most of the old folks who first enjoyed his largesse have joined him in another life. He lived alone with his Bible in North Dakota, but, thanks to him, succeeding generations of the elderly in a little town 5,000 miles away will, from time to time, enjoy a moment of warmth and friendship over a glass of wine.

I hope they enjoy their wine in a few days. They will help make this a true Christmas story.

December 1984