Post by cjm on Feb 23, 2014 4:43:47 GMT
Peynaud p251 et seq
ON THE PROPER USE OF WINE
I have borrowed this heading from a paper produced by the Vin et Nutrition group, led by Jean Trémolières when he was director of the Laboratoire de Nutrition humaine à l’Institut national de la Santé et de la Recherche médicale (Human Nutrition Laboratory at the National Institute of Health and Medical Research). I would like to have been a student of his; he understood wine better than the wine specialists.
Everyone who has studied the history of alcoholic drinks agrees on the universality of their production, once, that is, a society has reached a certain technical level and progressed from an economy based on gathering food to one based on culture of the soil and the processing of natural products.
Before this stage man either smoked, chewed or infused vegetable substances which had stimulant, narcotic or dream—inducing effects. This constant search for calming or hallucinatory substances suggests that they meet a need and perform a social function common to mankind regardless of time or place. Most ancient societies showed a very lively attraction to fermented drinks.
The fermented product is often in a more stable form for keeping, but storing fruit or grain based food in this form was not the point. Nor was its appeal based_solely on flavour, indeed one sometimes had to accustom oneself to this; its attraction lay in a search for intense pleasure linked to the sensations of exaltation, transcendence and light-headedness brought about by drunkenness and its approach. In a state of alcoholic euphoria man feels a sense of split personality, with the impression of being able to stand outside himself. For these reasons drunkenness had a sacred character for primitive peoples. There were no feasts without drinking, important matters were negotiated cup in hand, and the ability to drink was also proof of virility and valour.
Later, with the advent of monotheism, drunkenness lost its religious associations and a civilization of wine began to develop gradually. Not that habits changed very quickly. In the middle of the eighteenth century Sallengres had no hesitation in writing a panegyric in praise of drunkenness. After all, he said, eulogies had been written in praise of folly, lying, idleness; vice had never lacked for support. All the same, he defined the rules which made drunkenness acceptable to him: no one should be forced to drink and he only approved of those who got drunk occasionally, in good company, with good wine and without going too far. The drinker of the period drank to forget and there was always something that needed forgetting: grief, insecurity, deception, the injustice of fate, old age and its ills, the drama of man’s destiny, death. And then, to drink was to live, he proclaimed: “Alas, it is true then that wine lives longer than man. Let us drink, friends, wine and life are the same thing.”
Wine has the reputation of promoting wit and good humour, it stimulates and provokes a spirit of repartee: “A man animated by wine is wittier, friendlier and livelier.” The convivial nature of wine is legendary, one cannot drink alone: “Wine and the pleasures of the table are what foster the bonds of friendship.” At the same period Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote about drinkers with a touching indulgence: “Generally speaking they are friendly and sincere; they are almost all good, just, faithful, brave and honest people.” Two hundred years previously Olivier de Serres was wiser and more realistic when he said in talking about wine: “Drunk in small quantity, it stimulates and revives those who are dying from a failing heart; drunk in quantity it drugs and kills the drunkard: on the one hand, becoming an instrument of intemperance for those who dissolutely abuse it, and on the other enlivening the wit of those who use it wisely.”
In reality the art of drinking wisely took a long time to develop and one cannot even pretend that it is particularly widespread today. Instead there is a different form of vanity: that of resisting the drunken state, of being able to hold one’s drink, of drinking without adverse effect. It is astonishing to discover this stupid failing in otherwise eminent people.
With a very childish chauvinism, Brillat—Savarin gives the title of “National Victory” to the story of a fight to the finish against two Englishmen, which ends in their defeat by the forces of “claret, port, madeira, punch and spirits”. This was how he gained his reputation as a heavy drinker. Balzac himself, better known as a coffee drinker, boasted that he gave wine no quarter, “whatever quantity my stomach can absorb”. He relates with satisfaction that, challenged by one of his friends, he triumphed, if not in very good shape, at the seventeenth bottle and finished the evening off at the Théâtre des ltaliens. Even today many consumers say of a good wine: “See how it warms one up.” The effect produced by wine is of more interest to them than the pleasure to be had from its taste.
The relationships between man and wine can be divided into three:
1. The pleasure of the taste sensations that it produces, and this book [The Taste of Wine] has enabled them to be better understood and more easily discovered.
2. Its physiological, nutritional and pharmacodynamic effects. These are not simply those of alcohol; the alcoholic base confers on wine certain unique biological effects: increased tolerance, antiseptic properties, effects on the vascular system. In addition, alcohol is not just a poison. “Today’s scientific, economic and technical society is wilfully Manichean in spirit. It needs to classify people and things into ‘good’ or ‘bad’, whence its difficulty with alcohol which is neither one nor the other. On the one hand, they see truth, reason and good; on the other, passion, folly and evil. As though everything, ourselves included, were not at one and the same time good and bad, desire and reason. Thus alcohol is at once a choice drink and a dangerous food, a benefit as well as a curse, something which can both discover and destroy a personality.” (Trémolieres)
3. Its psychological, social and cultural value. Wine, first a drink of the Latin people and then of Christians, remains charged with symbolic value; it appears as a cultural element closely linked with western civilization.
The words of Trémolières once again; “Contemporary science has established why wine, consumed in sensible quantities (for men not more than half a litre daily, a litre in exceptional circumstances; for women a quarter of a litre less) is a food which may be consumed profitably and without risk to the body. It also calms one down and produces a sense of euphoria, and one day science hopes to be able to explain why. lts toxicity is not in the wine itself but rather in the way it is abused. Alcoholism is thus clearly a problem to do with one’s way of life; it is maladjusted behaviour attempting to cope with a situation of anxiety. It is the sickness of escapism, flight from both external and internal reality.”
The art of drinking, like the art of eating, is thus part of the art of living. More so perhaps because it is easier to abuse drink than food. The limits of one’s appetite stop one eating whereas alcoholic saturation does not always stop the drinker. What makes man drink is first of all the desire for pleasure and it needs a strong will to remain a sensible drinker. If I had to define the art of drinking I would say that it conforms to two rules: moderation and good taste, which can be summed up in two simple formulas: “Drink little, but drink well,” or else “Drink little so that you can continue to drink for a long time.” It is certainly good wines which will enable one to follow these precepts most easily. They teach self-restraint to whoever wants to listen to their message. It is by tasting wine with care that man can learn to drink in a civilized way.
ON THE PROPER USE OF WINE
I have borrowed this heading from a paper produced by the Vin et Nutrition group, led by Jean Trémolières when he was director of the Laboratoire de Nutrition humaine à l’Institut national de la Santé et de la Recherche médicale (Human Nutrition Laboratory at the National Institute of Health and Medical Research). I would like to have been a student of his; he understood wine better than the wine specialists.
Everyone who has studied the history of alcoholic drinks agrees on the universality of their production, once, that is, a society has reached a certain technical level and progressed from an economy based on gathering food to one based on culture of the soil and the processing of natural products.
Before this stage man either smoked, chewed or infused vegetable substances which had stimulant, narcotic or dream—inducing effects. This constant search for calming or hallucinatory substances suggests that they meet a need and perform a social function common to mankind regardless of time or place. Most ancient societies showed a very lively attraction to fermented drinks.
The fermented product is often in a more stable form for keeping, but storing fruit or grain based food in this form was not the point. Nor was its appeal based_solely on flavour, indeed one sometimes had to accustom oneself to this; its attraction lay in a search for intense pleasure linked to the sensations of exaltation, transcendence and light-headedness brought about by drunkenness and its approach. In a state of alcoholic euphoria man feels a sense of split personality, with the impression of being able to stand outside himself. For these reasons drunkenness had a sacred character for primitive peoples. There were no feasts without drinking, important matters were negotiated cup in hand, and the ability to drink was also proof of virility and valour.
Later, with the advent of monotheism, drunkenness lost its religious associations and a civilization of wine began to develop gradually. Not that habits changed very quickly. In the middle of the eighteenth century Sallengres had no hesitation in writing a panegyric in praise of drunkenness. After all, he said, eulogies had been written in praise of folly, lying, idleness; vice had never lacked for support. All the same, he defined the rules which made drunkenness acceptable to him: no one should be forced to drink and he only approved of those who got drunk occasionally, in good company, with good wine and without going too far. The drinker of the period drank to forget and there was always something that needed forgetting: grief, insecurity, deception, the injustice of fate, old age and its ills, the drama of man’s destiny, death. And then, to drink was to live, he proclaimed: “Alas, it is true then that wine lives longer than man. Let us drink, friends, wine and life are the same thing.”
Wine has the reputation of promoting wit and good humour, it stimulates and provokes a spirit of repartee: “A man animated by wine is wittier, friendlier and livelier.” The convivial nature of wine is legendary, one cannot drink alone: “Wine and the pleasures of the table are what foster the bonds of friendship.” At the same period Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote about drinkers with a touching indulgence: “Generally speaking they are friendly and sincere; they are almost all good, just, faithful, brave and honest people.” Two hundred years previously Olivier de Serres was wiser and more realistic when he said in talking about wine: “Drunk in small quantity, it stimulates and revives those who are dying from a failing heart; drunk in quantity it drugs and kills the drunkard: on the one hand, becoming an instrument of intemperance for those who dissolutely abuse it, and on the other enlivening the wit of those who use it wisely.”
In reality the art of drinking wisely took a long time to develop and one cannot even pretend that it is particularly widespread today. Instead there is a different form of vanity: that of resisting the drunken state, of being able to hold one’s drink, of drinking without adverse effect. It is astonishing to discover this stupid failing in otherwise eminent people.
With a very childish chauvinism, Brillat—Savarin gives the title of “National Victory” to the story of a fight to the finish against two Englishmen, which ends in their defeat by the forces of “claret, port, madeira, punch and spirits”. This was how he gained his reputation as a heavy drinker. Balzac himself, better known as a coffee drinker, boasted that he gave wine no quarter, “whatever quantity my stomach can absorb”. He relates with satisfaction that, challenged by one of his friends, he triumphed, if not in very good shape, at the seventeenth bottle and finished the evening off at the Théâtre des ltaliens. Even today many consumers say of a good wine: “See how it warms one up.” The effect produced by wine is of more interest to them than the pleasure to be had from its taste.
The relationships between man and wine can be divided into three:
1. The pleasure of the taste sensations that it produces, and this book [The Taste of Wine] has enabled them to be better understood and more easily discovered.
2. Its physiological, nutritional and pharmacodynamic effects. These are not simply those of alcohol; the alcoholic base confers on wine certain unique biological effects: increased tolerance, antiseptic properties, effects on the vascular system. In addition, alcohol is not just a poison. “Today’s scientific, economic and technical society is wilfully Manichean in spirit. It needs to classify people and things into ‘good’ or ‘bad’, whence its difficulty with alcohol which is neither one nor the other. On the one hand, they see truth, reason and good; on the other, passion, folly and evil. As though everything, ourselves included, were not at one and the same time good and bad, desire and reason. Thus alcohol is at once a choice drink and a dangerous food, a benefit as well as a curse, something which can both discover and destroy a personality.” (Trémolieres)
3. Its psychological, social and cultural value. Wine, first a drink of the Latin people and then of Christians, remains charged with symbolic value; it appears as a cultural element closely linked with western civilization.
The words of Trémolières once again; “Contemporary science has established why wine, consumed in sensible quantities (for men not more than half a litre daily, a litre in exceptional circumstances; for women a quarter of a litre less) is a food which may be consumed profitably and without risk to the body. It also calms one down and produces a sense of euphoria, and one day science hopes to be able to explain why. lts toxicity is not in the wine itself but rather in the way it is abused. Alcoholism is thus clearly a problem to do with one’s way of life; it is maladjusted behaviour attempting to cope with a situation of anxiety. It is the sickness of escapism, flight from both external and internal reality.”
The art of drinking, like the art of eating, is thus part of the art of living. More so perhaps because it is easier to abuse drink than food. The limits of one’s appetite stop one eating whereas alcoholic saturation does not always stop the drinker. What makes man drink is first of all the desire for pleasure and it needs a strong will to remain a sensible drinker. If I had to define the art of drinking I would say that it conforms to two rules: moderation and good taste, which can be summed up in two simple formulas: “Drink little, but drink well,” or else “Drink little so that you can continue to drink for a long time.” It is certainly good wines which will enable one to follow these precepts most easily. They teach self-restraint to whoever wants to listen to their message. It is by tasting wine with care that man can learn to drink in a civilized way.