Through a Glass Lightly/Cellars

by T. T. Greg

CELLARS

CELLARS

Not to have a cellar is derogatory to the dignity of man. Yet it is notable that, while every petty clerk or budding draper clamours for a bathroom, not one in a thousand will insist upon his wine vault; and so it comes to pass that Jerry the master-builder squeezes a new-style tepidarium into every one of his vulgar thirty-pounders, and the million which would be clean, but is not, flocks to wash therein. Yet is a hole under the stairs, or the divided honour of the larder held good enough depositing ground for the counterfeit presentments which—with the Lower Upper-Middles—do duty for Château Margaux and Sandeman’s vintage ports. Apart from sentiment, which should hallow the Cellar no less than the boudoir, these people ignore the absolute necessity for a fit and proper wine place; and they are not a few who, like the sometime student of Gray’s Inn, keep their wine under their beds (with the subtle plea that so it will be drunk the faster), or imitate that undergraduate who entertained a cask of beer by his bedside in case he might wake o’ nights and feel athirst. But of such men we can seldom look for good wine; so it were idle to expect they should be duly considered in this matter, though there be few wines, and they the headiest, that can endure indifferent cellarage. Not even the perfect affinity which is the attribute of Hock, nor the brandied sinews of Port, can prevent their owners from being lamentably undone; while as for your delicate French wines, their portion is ruin, and the red precedes the white on the road to ruin. It is not every one, and least of all a Londoner or town man, who can scoop him a cellar under the living rock, which is the true matrix for the development of good wine; but you will find no finer hold than that which lies deep, some forty to fifty feet, as the soil allows, without excess of moisture, nor with any opening save one to the north alone. In populous cities pent, the least you should insist on is. a chamber in stone or brick, contrived at such a depth as will secure an even temperature all the year round. Let it not be subject to the fickleness of the outer air; for in truth nor rain, nor drought, nor heat, nor cold, nor temporal things, nor things celestial, should vex the contents of your storied urns. If so be that you can have double doors, see to it that they are there, this one some four feet behind that other; so that the outer being closed ere the inner be set wide, one equal temperature of fifty degrees may be achieved, week in week out, throughout the ages. It is the habit of man to curse his wine merchant for sending another wine than that he sampled: yet it is very often not his wine merchant but his cellarage that has played the knave, and has given him the worse end of a bargain.

It is not less than marvellous that a good glass of wine is ever ours in town, for the urban cellar is not often ventilated, so that foul air and rank mists still penetrate through cracks and fissures in the brickwork. We can keep our neighbour out of our dining-room, but we cannot barricade our cellars against his atmosphere. These, for the most part, are run out beneath the street; the never-ending flow of traffic keeps up a perpetual perturbation over our stacks of bottles, and, as over the engaging Williams, “drives for ever the uproar of unresting London,” so that our wine, being never utterly reposed, is never wholly clarified. Moreover, unless our walls and our floors be damp enough, our corks will grow thin, and the wood of darling vat or cherished cask contract and gape; and the essence, the animula, within escapes; and the New Humourist is there to talk of whines from the wood. On the other hand, an excess of moisture breedeth mildew, which warps for wrong and rottenness the ail-too susceptible cork. Thrice happy he, in truth, who can keep two cellars (as who should say a twin orchid house), the cool one for his more delicate exotics, his clarets, and his dry champagnes, the other for his more luxuriant growths, his vins de liqueur, his madeiras, sherries, ports! In this second chamber he may clap on an extra ten degrees and no harm done. For it must ever be borne in mind that wine is no mere fluid, but is informed with sensitiveness and has a most incomparable soul. There should not be so much as a keyhole for the random gust of sewer gas; no squalid waft of cabbage water should ever whiff it to these secret shrines. In well-regulated houses, even the beer cellar is kept distinct from the palace of the grape; for it is a law of conduct with the true drinker that you shall not vulgarise your wines by so much as suffering them to neighbour with the baser potables. Procul, procul! Hence, far hence, let beer and stout and cider and such hob-nailed minor prophets be removed!

And, then, the bins and the mode of storage—what colossal opportunities are here for error! The shelves should be of stone or of brick, but of wood—never! No thickness of lime can wholly whitewash wood: no fermentable material, no acid, no liquor in a state of acetous agitation may enter the cellars of the blest. Above all, you shall flee from the spell of sawdust, the guide, philosopher, and friend of idiot butlers and ’prentice householders. For sawdust, if you only leave it long enough, breeds the creeping thing, and in decay it generates a gas no wine of delicate parts may breathe and live. Laths of wood, or, still better, slips of earthenware or terra cotta, alone should keep the crystal palaces apart; or you may imbed your happiness in quartz sand well washed in fresh water, in which wise you shall escape the outer darkness and enter upon the kingdom of light. Also remember that “A wine-cellar too hot or cold Murders wine before ’tis old”; and be your own cellarman.

A waitress, being a woman, cares nothing about wine and knows less. A butler either cares about wine, or does not. If he does, he drinks it; if he does not he gives it away. And let your cellar be a pattern of neatness, so that yourself can descend thereunto with pleasure, and conduct your friend with pride. Let it not be littered with the straw wigwams which protected the bottles ere yet you drew them into your own ensheltering pale. Remove those garish papers of primrose yellow and cold hard magenta which shrouded the taper elegance of your Hocks, or the mighty bulks of the giant guardsmen of Champagne, and drill their wearers with precision; for henceforth they are to be your Yeomen of the Guard, and not one of them but will quicken you with some bright jest or troll you off some score of merry songs. A brave tenant is worth a noble home; see you that he gets it. Let all be in order and in place: as in the heaven above, so in the earth beneath. There is none to dispute that all wines have a body, these Titanic and huge, those of more lissome build. Whatever their physical constitution, yours be it to maintain the existence of the soul and the imagination in them. You will find that though there be many dreams in a flagon of Burgundy, they are not of the stuff that common dreams are made on, and that you can interpret them or let them slip past you into thin air, according as you house your liquor well or ill. Place it in squalid tenements and among bare surroundings, and it will speak squalor and breathe base thoughts and low ideas. But place it in the palace that is its due, and the world shall find that when you go down into the bowels of the parish for a bottle, you bring up far more than a mere quantum of drink.

For the rest, let one simple rule prevail. Avoid the advertising vintner as you would the Devil, and hie you only to that fine, old, crusted, long-matured variety—known as the Old- Fashioned Wine Merchant. He will look after the buyer: it is for the buyer to look after the cellar. This reads like a verbal jest, no doubt; but it is a profound truth.