Wines and Spirits [antikvár]

Jtearning theJoys of Wine, the Pleasures of spirits T X he wine lover need not know and usually does not care that a peeled ripe peach, pricked 99 times with a fork, revolves slowly in a bubbling glass of cold champagne. Nor does it matter to him that this is a delectable summer drink called Stachelschwein, "the porcupine," in the Rhineland, where it is popular. Such knowledge is reserved for the bookworm. As for the neophyte among wine lovers, there are thousands of other pieces of informarion (of great or little importance) that lie ahead of him. As he gets into the subject, he will find greater enjoyment in the beers and wines and spirits of his choice when he knows something of the history and characteristics of each type and its place of origin. Everyone has his own point of departure in such an exploration. For the author of this book it was his family home in England. For me, it was far from home in Belgium. I still remember that I first enjoyed the experience of tasting wine in Brussels, at a little restaurant on the Quai du Bois a Bruler. It was right after World War I, in January 1920, and I had painfully learned, as an American student in a Belgian school, how little the postwar American relief effort in Europe was appreciated by its beneficiaries. But one Sunday my mother took me to lunch and let me have a small glass of an excellent young and fruity Moulin-a-Vent. My homesickness for New York was drowned right then in this one first glass of a light French wine. It launched me on a life that has been filled by love of the unlimited variety of the vintages of the world. Much later, spending most of World War II in Spain and Portugal, both great wine-producing countries, I had many opportuniues to enjoy local vintages from north to south, from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. (French and German wines were completely unavailable in this area at the time.) I had a small ^uinia, or vineyard, at Colares, near Lisbon, where the Ramisco grape grows deep in the sand dunes of the coastal plain—so deep, in fact, that these vines never suffered from the killing phylloxera plague of the 19th Century. The wines of Colares are unusual in being virtually the only European vintages that are still made from the ancient vines of Europe, vines that do not need to be grafted onto phylloxera-resistant American roots. I got to know other Portuguese table wines very well. As a student in Spain I had gained a rather thorough knowledge of the wines of that country; now I had the opportunity of tasting most of these wines in the course of thousands of miles of travel. Including port.