Claret and Olives, from the Garonne to the Rhone. Angus B. Reach
a grenadier vine, growing to at least six feet, and supported by a corresponding stake. But the low, two-feet dwarfs are invariably the great wine givers. If ever you want to see a homily, not read, but grown by nature, against trusting to appearances, go to Medoc and study the vines. Walk and gaze, until you come to the most shabby, stunted, weazened, scrubby, dwarfish, expanse of snobbish bushes, ignominiously bound neck and crop to the espaliers like a man on the rack—these utterly poor, starved, and meagre-looking growths, allowing, as they do, the gravelly soil to show in bald patches of grey shingle through the straggling branches—these contemptible-looking shrubs, like paralysed and withered raspberries, it is which produce the most priceless, and the most inimitably flavoured wines. Such are the vines which grow Chateau Margaux at half a sovereign the bottle. The grapes themselves are equally unpromising. If you saw a bunch in Covent Garden you would turn from them with the notion that the fruiterer was trying to do his customer, with over-ripe black currants. Lance's soul would take no joy in them, and no sculptor in his senses would place such meagre bunches in the hands and over the open mouths of his Nymphs, his Bacchantes, or his Fauns. Take heed, then, by the lesson, and beware of judging of the nature of either men or grapes by their looks. Meantime, let us continue our survey of the country. No fences or ditches you see—the ground is too precious to be lost in such vanities—only, you observe from time to time a rudely carved stake stuck in the ground, and indicating the limits of properties. Along either side of the road the vines extend, utterly unprotected. No raspers, no ha-ha's, no fierce denunciations of trespassers, no polite notices of spring guns and steel traps constantly in a state of high go-offism—only, when the grapes are ripening, the people lay prickly branches along the way-side to keep the dogs, foraging for partridges among the espaliers, from taking a refreshing mouthful from the clusters as they pass; for it seems to be a fact that everybody, every beast, and every bird, whatever may be his, her, or its nature in other parts of the world, when brought among grapes, eats grapes. As for the peasants, their appetite for grapes is perfectly preposterous. Unlike the surfeit-sickened grocer's boys, who, after the first week loathe figs, and turn poorly when sugar-candy is hinted at, the love of grapes appears literally to grow by what it feeds on. Every garden is full of table vines. The people eat grapes with breakfast, lunch, dinner, and supper, and between breakfast, lunch, dinner, and supper. The labourer plods along the road munching a cluster. The child in its mother's arms is tugging away with its toothless gums at a bleeding bunch; while as for the vintagers, male and female, in the less important plantations, Heaven only knows where the masses of grapes go to, which they devour, labouring incessantly at the metier, as they do, from dawn till sunset.
A strange feature in the wine country is the wondrously capricious and fitful nature of the soil. A forenoon's walk will show you the earth altering in its surface qualities almost like the shifting hues of shot silk—gravel of a light colour fading into gravel of a dark—sand blending with the mould, and bringing it now to a dusky yellow, now to an ashen grey—strata of chalky clay every now and then struggling into light only to melt away into beds of mere shingle—or bright semi-transparent pebbles, indebted to the action of water for shape and hue. At two principal points these blending and shifting qualities of soil put forth their utmost powers—in the favoured grounds of Margaux, and again, at a distance of about fifteen miles further to the north, in the vineyards of Lafitte, Latour, and between these latter, in the sunny slopes of St. Jullien. And the strangest thing of all is, that the quality—the magic—of the ground changes, without, in all cases, a corresponding change in the surface strata. If a fanciful and wilful fairy had flown over Medoc, flinging down here a blessing and there a curse upon the shifting shingle, the effect could not have been more oddly various. You can almost jump from a spot unknown to fame to another clustered with the most precious vintage of Europe. Half-a-dozen furrows often make all the difference between vines producing a beverage which will be drunk in the halls and palaces of England and Russia, and vines yielding a harvest which will be consumed in the cabarets and estaminets of the neighbourhood. It is to be observed, however, that the first-class wines belong almost entirely to the large proprietors. Amid a labyrinth of little patches, the property of the labouring peasants around, will be a spot appertaining to, and bearing the name of, some of the famous growths; while, conversely, inserted, as if by an accident, in the centre of a district of great name, and producing wine of great price, will be a perverse patch, yielding the most commonplace tipple, and worth not so many sous per yard as the surrounding earth is worth crowns.
How comes this? The peasants will tell you that it doesn't come at all. That it is all cant and blague and puff on the part of the big proprietors, and that their wine is only more thought of because they have more capital to get it bragged about. Near Chateau Lafitte, on a burning afternoon, I took refuge beneath the emblematic bush; for the emblem which good wine is said not to require, is still, in the mid and southern districts of France, in universal use; in other words, I entered a village public-house.
Two old men, very much of the general type of the people of the country—that is, tall and spare, with intelligent and mildly-expressive faces and fine black eyes, were discussing together a sober bottle. One of them had lost an arm, and the other a leg. As I glanced at this peculiarity, the one-legged man caught my eye.
"Ah!" he said, "looking at our misfortunes; I left my leg on Waterloo."
"And I," chimed in his companion, "left my arm at Trafalgar."
"Sacré!" said the veteran of the land. "One of the cursed English bullets took me in the knee, and spoiled as tight a lancer as they had in the gallant 10th."
"And I," rejoined the other, "was at the fourth main-deck gun of the Pluton when I was struck with the splinter while we were engaging the Mars. But we had our revenge. The Pluton shot the Mars' captain's head off!"—a fact which I afterwards verified. Captain Duff, the officer alluded to, was thus killed upon his quarter-deck, and the same ball shattered two seamen almost to pieces.
"Sacré!" said the ci-devant lancer, "I'd like to have a rap at the English again—I would—the English—nom de tonnerre—tell me—didn't they murder the emperor?"
A rising smile, which I could not help, stopped him. I had spoken so few words, that the fact that a son of perfide Albion was before them was only manifested by the expression of my face.
"Tiens!" continued the Waterloo man, "You are an Englishman."
The old sailor, who was evidently by no means so keen a hand as his comrade, nudged him; a hint, I suppose, in common phrase, to draw it mild; but the ex-lancer of the 10th was not to be put down.
"Well, and if you are, what then, eh? I say I would like to have another brush with you."
"No, no! We have had enough of brushes!" said the far more pacific man of the sea. "I think—mon voisin—that you and I have had quite enough of fighting."
"But they killed the emperor. Sacré nom de tous les diables—they killed the emperor."
My modest exculpation on behalf of Great Britain and Ireland was listened to with great impatience by the maimed lancer, and great attention by the maimed sailor, who kept up a running commentary:
"Eh! eh! entendez cela. Now, that's quite different (to his friend) from what you tell us. Come—that's another story altogether; and what I say is, that's reasonable."
But the lancer was not to be convinced—"Sacré bleu!—they killed the emperor."
All this, it is to be observed, passed without the slightest feeling of personal animosity. The lancer, who, I suspect, had passed the forenoon in the cabaret, every now and then shook hands with me magnanimously, as to show that his wrath was national—not individual; and when I proposed a bottle of rather better wine than they had been drinking, neither soldier nor sailor had a word to say in objection. The wine was brought, and very good it was, though not, of course, first-class claret.
"What do you think of that?" said the sailor.
"I wish I had as good every day in England," I replied.
"And why haven't you?" said the fierce lancer. "You might, if you chose. But you drink none of our wines."
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