Drink

by Iain Gately

  Brannan had ambitious plans for his new settlement, which he intended to develop as a West Coast Saratoga for the wealthy inhabitants of San Francisco. At the ground-breaking ceremony, Brannan is claimed to have been overcome with drunken exuberance and to have sworn he would create “the Calistoga of Sarafornia.” The name stuck, and when Calistoga opened for business in 1862 it featured a sizable hotel, landscaped grounds, a racetrack, a swimming pool, a skating rink, and a goldfish pond. Over the following decade the Napa Valley filled up with settlers and was divided into a patchwork of small farms and ranches. A large proportion of the immigrants were Germans, a number of whom established little vineyards in which they attempted to replicate the delicate white wines of their native land, thus introducing another style to the region.

  The net effect of the émigrés, visionaries, financiers, and mountain men on the production of Californian wine was enormous. By 1862, the state was home to 10.5 million vines—a 40 percent increase in just two years. This created problems of success—first in the matter of labor. Few emigrants would deign to sully their hands tending vines or grape picking for the low wages offered by winery owners. Moreover, many of the people who had arrived in California were professionals—doctors or lawyers who followed the sensible philosophy that it was easier to obtain gold from miners than from the ground. Haraszthy solved the problem on his estate by recruiting Chinese labor, at eight dollars a month with board, via a contractor in San Francisco named Ho Po, who sourced agricultural workers from Guangdong Province in China. Initially, such guest workers were welcomed in the Golden State, as unobtrusive, law-abiding “coolies,” who were usually kept secluded from “proper,” i.e., white, immigrants. Their anticipated role in the future was set out in the pages of the California Farmer, which hoped that they should be to the state “what the African has been to the South,” but with the advantage that they went back to China at the conclusion of their contracts.

  However, a number of Chinese came to California to settle as well as to perform labor for a fixed term, and they introduced their own drinking customs to the state, and indeed to America. These were more or less unchanged from those that had been observed by European visitors to China in the sixteenth century. Much of their drinking was therapeutic, and when they wished to become intoxicated they smoked opium in preference to getting drunk. Their favorite drinks were rice or plum wine, imported from their homeland, which were consumed in small measures, and with a degree of ceremony. They also imported medicinal beverages, including snake wine, which they believed to be a cure for rheumatism. Its reputation as such spread beyond the Chinese community, and other Americans began to manufacture imitations, which they sold under the generic name of snake oil.

  While Chinese labor enabled the California wine industry to keep growing, Chinese Americans were of little assistance in solving the second problem generated by the success of the industry as a whole, which was how to dispose of its increased production. The eastern states of America, which might have been expected to be buyers on patriotic grounds alone, were perceived of in California as being obsessed with whiskey, if they drank at all. In the opinion of Arpad (son of Agoston) Haraszthy: “The great obstacle to our success, is that the average American is a whiskey drinking, water drinking, coffee drinking, tea drinking, and consequently a dyspepsia-inviting subject, who does not know the use or value of pure light wine taken at the proper time and in moderate quantities. The task before us lies in teaching our people how to drink wine, when to drink it, and how much of it to drink.”

  In the event, California demand accounted for much of its new production. By 1861, the state had over 380,000 inhabitants, compared with a little less than fourteen thousand immediately prior to the gold rush. Many of the newcomers were from wine-drinking cultures in Europe who considered the fluid to be a necessity of life. Furthermore, the surprising number of professionals who’d trekked across the prairies or shipped around Cape Horn also had at least a familiarity with wine, and once in California they drank the local vintages. The prestige attached to wine drinking also made it attractive to miners. Those wishing to distribute some of their newfound wealth felt they made a better show if they bought claret or champagne with their gold dust. That much of what they drank was made in California mattered less than labels declaring it to be French. Finally, any surplus in production was taken up by distillation. For those die-hard Yankee immigrants who considered spirits to be the only drink worthy of the name, overproof brandy was as good as a similar beverage distilled from corn, and if the vintners occasionally labeled their product whiskey, few of its end consumers noticed the deception.

  22 GOOD TASTE

  The discovery of a new dish confers more happiness on humanity than the discovery of a new star.

  —Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

  Man’s frenzied love of all substances which exalt his personality, whether healthy or dangerous, bears witness to his greatness.

  —Charles Baudelaire

  In the same decades that Americans were forging trails over and building towns in wildernesses, the French were aspiring to civilize their already-settled nation and to perfect every detail of sedentary life. Even such biological imperatives as eating and drinking were scrutinized and transformed, so that a meal or a bottle of wine no longer served merely to fill the belly or to quench a thirst, but was also expected to provide an aesthetic experience. There was artistry in cooking and winemaking, and nineteenth-century French connoisseurs trained their senses to identify, to appreciate, and to applaud it. His or her training ground was comprised of the restaurants of Paris, which were appearing in their dozens all over the City of Light. They were the creatures of the French Revolution. Some were started by the cooks of the nobility who had lost their places when aristocratic households were broken up, many more were opened to satisfy a growing desire for equality of access to luxury: Citizens with the money and inclination to indulge their taste buds should have the opportunity to do so in the ideal republic.

  The new restaurants were theaters of gastronomy. The machinery and the raw materials with which their chefs worked their magic were banished from the stage—the kitchen itself was hidden behind closed doors, through which wondrous culinary creations would emerge, perfect and complete, paired with wines absolutely suited to their complex flavors. As the nineteenth century progressed, they became social and cultural institutions, with their own vocabulary and, indeed, ideology. To the connoisseurs, or gourmands, who patronized them, an exquisite dinner at a legendary restaurant was a quasi-religious experience.

  The discipline of the gourmand was pioneered by Alexandre Balthasar Grimnod de la Reynière, who published his gustatory adventures in his Almanach des gourmands (1803). The Almanach purported to be a guide to the best food in Paris and to have invented the literary genre of the restaurant review. Unlike prior commentaries on eating, which sought to combine consumption with moral, economic, or medical observations—the wastefulness of the rich, the brutishness of the poor, the dangers posed by red wine and radishes to people of a phlegmatic disposition—the Almanach portrayed a good meal as an end in itself. The book was both successful and controversial. Its opponents claimed it encouraged the sin of gluttony by promoting an unhealthy obsession with delicacies. Gourmands who “build the weaknesses of their private lives into doctrines and propound them in a public forum” were fetishists of the worst order. Controversy stoked sales, and the Almanach ran through eight editions by 1808, by which time it was established as a reference work and was taken perhaps more seriously than its author had intended. It possessed more than a streak of gothic fiction in its style. The judgments contained in the Almanach were claimed to have been pronounced by an anonymous jury of taste, a gastronomic grand inquisition, whose seventeen members met every Wednesday at an undisclosed location to consider, in conditions of strictest secrecy, the offerings of the best chefs, confectioners, pastry cooks, and wine merchants in Paris. Moreover, there is a love of the macabre, and the
revolting, in the text. Readers of the Almanach were advised, for instance, that the best way to tell if a turkey carcass was fresh or not was to insert a finger into its anal cavity and then lick the finger.

  The cult of restaurant-going that Grimnod had encouraged gave rise to a new occupation—that of the sommelier. The word derives from Old French, where it served as the title of the individual in a noble household responsible for the management of pack animals and provisions. Over time, in the same manner as the English butler came to denote a domestic servant entrusted with the provision of drinks to the dinner table, the sommelier became charged with the care and presentation of wine. After the Revolution, many attached themselves to the restaurants opened by the chefs they used to work alongside, and with the appearance of gourmandisme, their role was elevated to a level of similar consequence. The sommelier’s tasks included the purchase of appropriate wines, their storage under suitable conditions, and the provision of advice to customers as to which wines matched which foods. Their prophet was André Jullien, author of the Sommelier’s Manual and the Topography of All the Known Vineyards.

  Once it was established that there was a genuine public interest in the critical appraisal of good food and drink, fresh publications on the subject expanded its scope, from the what, where, and when of gourmandizing to the why. The Physiology of Taste (1825), subtitled Transcendental Gastronomy, by Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, was the first to attempt to codify its ethos. Brillat-Savarin believed that prejudice had grown against the art of discrimination, to the detriment of civilization: “I have looked through various dictionaries for the word gourmandise and have found no translation that suited me. It is described as a sort of confusion of gluttony and voracity. Whence I have concluded that lexicographers, though very pleasant people in other respects, are not the sort of men to eat a partridge wing gracefully from one hand, with a glass of Lafitte or Clos de Vougeot in the other.”

  In order to remedy this sorry state of affairs, Brillat-Savarin, via a series of anecdotes (including one concerning a wild turkey hunt in Connecticut, where he spent several years in exile), and meditations on such ancillary aspects of gourmandise as dreams and obesity, aimed to create a philosophy that justified the pleasures of discrimination. When it came to drinking, the watchword was to do so slowly: “True [gourmands] sip their wine. Every mouthful thus gives them the sum total of pleasure which they would not have enjoyed had they swallowed it at once.” Furthermore, the aspiring sensualist should never tipple to the point of intoxication, and those who did so were “utterly ignorant of the true principles of eating and drinking.” While he ruled out drunkenness, Brillat-Savarin expected his disciples to have strong heads—any man in good health should be capable of drinking two bottles of wine every day, and those of exceptional constitutions considerably more. An example of this latter class was provided in the person of General Bisson, a French hero of the Napoleonic wars, “who drank eight bottles of wine at dinner every day, and who never appeared the worse for it. He had a glass larger than usual and emptied it oftener” but nonetheless “he could jest and give his orders as if he had only swallowed a thimbleful.” The concept of savoir boir —to know how to drink—was further illustrated by an anecdote from Brillat-Savarin’s years in the United States, where he and a pair of fellow French exiles had drunk a collection of American planters under the table, by controlling the speed at which they consumed and by lining their stomachs with appropriate foods prior to the contest.

  The devotees of gourmandise, if they paid close attention to the philosophical and practical advice in the pages of the Physiology of Taste, might aspire one day to possessing the powers of the elect of the discipline, who could “tell the latitude in which any wine ripened as surely as one of Biot’s or Arago’s disciples can foretell an eclipse.” They were also taught how to steer clear of bad wines, such as the infamous vin blanc of Surenne. According to Brillat-Savarin, three things were needed to get rid of a single glass of this fluid: “A drinker, and two men to hold him down in case his courage fails.”

  Both gourmands and the restaurants that nourished them continued to thrive as the nineteenth century progressed, whatever the political climate. They multiplied under the Bourbon and Orléans monarchies and survived the revolution of 1848, so that by the advent of the Second Republic Paris was recognized as the culinary capital of the world. This eminence was a matter of national pride, which itself was a sentiment that Napoléon III, who ruled France between 1852 and 1870, did his best to encourage in his subject-citizens. Louis Napoléon was a modernizer. Under his guidance, France was to have factories, steam trains, and businessmen. Gourmands were natural supporters of his program. The spreading railway network whisked delicacies from the provinces to the capital in so short a time that they could be served in its restaurants while still fresh. A gourmand need no longer take to the countryside in pursuit of exquisite, if highly perishable, game such as ortolans when they could be had without effort in Paris with their blood still warm.

  In order to fix an affection for progress in those French who were not enthusiasts for it, Napoléon III decided to arrange a Universal Exposition in Paris in 1855, which would serve as a showcase for industrialmight and human ingenuity. It was to be modeled on “the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations” that had been staged in London in 1851. The British example, while bristling with machinery, had had very little on show for the gourmand. There were no fine wines, for the temperance brigade had sought a bar on alcohol beverages. Their general absence from the exhibits was lamented in the press as being wrong in principle: “Regardless of their value in the arts, or as an article of food or medicine, they were not allowed to be exhibited, because they are sometimes turned to a bad purpose. For similar reasons, types might have been prevented, because bad books were sometimes printed.” The few examples of alcoholic drinks that managed to slip through the temperance net and into the Crystal Palace would have made a gourmand blanch: “Six bottles of champagne wine manufactured in England from rhubarb stalk.”

  In Paris matters were to be different. The “Preparation and Conservation of Alimentary Substances” category of exhibits had “Fermented Drinks” as a subcategory. When invitations were sent out to every area of France, asking that regional officials consider what items of manufacture they could submit to the exhibition, both Burgundy and Champagne replied that they would send their wines. Bordeaux, in contrast, rummaged around for something suitably industrial and considered sending samples from its rope factories. However, when representatives from Burgundy got in touch with the idea of a joint display of fine wines, a notice was published in the local papers inviting Bordeaux’s vintners to a meeting to discuss the matter. These latter were enthusiastic about showing their products at the Exposition, and it was decided that a display dedicated to the wines of the region, of all qualities, should be prepared.

  Once the decision had been taken to send wine instead of ropes to the Universal Exposition, a problem emerged that threatened to scupper the plan. For nearly a century the wines of Bordeaux had been subject to an informal classification based on the concept of cru, or growth. Wines belonging to the premier cru commanded higher prices than those of the second or third class; indeed the pricing for each year’s vintage was made with reference to the amount paid for the first growths. Winemakers were exceedingly jealous of their rankings, and it was feared that some might try to take advantage of the exposure they would receive in Paris to manipulate their position. The dilemma was summed up by the Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce. While it believed that “this solemn occasion should not be missed to remind our compatriots, and especially foreigners, that in the production of wine, France, and the Gironde in particular, is one of the most favored regions in the world,” if “the proprietors of a particular region seek to profit from the Exposition to mount a fight among themselves with the aim of destroying a classification based on the experience of long years, we would not hesitate to declare that it would be b
etter, in our view, that none of our wines appear at the Exposition.”

  This informal “classification,” which was deemed more important than a Universal Exposition, was the result of the careful compilation of prices paid for the various wines of the region over the years by its wine merchants and brokers. Thomas Jefferson’s notes from his visit to Bordeaux in 1787 had reproduced it in part, and versions had been set down in the wine guidebooks that had become popular in the first half of the nineteenth century. The most complete of these was contained in the Treatise on the Wines of the Médoc and the Other Red Wines from the Gironde Department by William Franck, a wine merchant of Bordeaux, which, by its third edition in 1853, listed sixty-two crus divided into five classes. A number of variants on it appeared in other guidebooks, but all reflected a near consensus in the proper ranking, at least at the top of the cru pyramid. They were all agreed that there were only four first growths—Château Lafitte, Château Margaux, Latour, and Haut-Brion, and more or less ten second crus. Below the third tier, however, they often differed.

  This, then, was the position of the classification of Bordeaux wines at the time of the Universal Exposition. It was a controversial matter: A superior ranking, even among its lowest echelons, meant belonging to a higher price bracket. Hence the trepidation of the Chamber of Commerce in Bordeaux about allowing any of its wines to be exhibited. The solution it settled upon was a single large display containing all the wines of the region, which were to be labeled with their place of origin and rank, but not the name of the producer. A giant map—a Carte Vinicole—was also to be prepared, whose key linked the bottles on show to the communes in which they had been produced. Thus, visitors would receive a striking visual impression of the variety and excellence of Bordeaux wines, and gourmands would be able to point out the plots of land where their favorites were produced and plan tours of the vineyards.