Through a Glass Lightly/Madeira

by T. T. Greg

MADEIRA

MADEIRA

Let there be no mistake: we were wholly cognisant that Spring—revivifying Spring—was in the air. Nature was in the ascendant; and for Art—why, let her go hang! The world at such a moment as this bade us rejoice, and would not recognise the cloud upon our own brow. And yet the essence of storm and stress was there, irrepressible and irresistible; for though fogs were gone and east winds barely here, we knew that with Candlemas came the great annual sacrifice, the great refusal, to wit, the closing down until November next of the great bin of peerless Madeira—bottled, oh! ever so many years before the Consulship of Plancus and the like of him. For the romance of war is still in its blood, the war of North and South, the War of Secession, when a glamour hung over Charleston as a halo. For old Jarrow of Manchester bought and fitted out a steamer at his own charges, as a gentleman should, and freighted it with arms and ammunition, forage and provant, and all things dear and precious to a beleaguered city. And for this latter end he sought help and equipment, among others, from our own progenitor, who, God bless him! stayed neither hand nor purse. And so this bark of good omen steamed bravely over the Mersey Bar, and as to what perils she ran through and what success achieved, are they not written in the ledgers of Jarrow and his compeers? But she emerged from Charleston Harbour unscathed and choked to the throat with her return cargo of cotton, and, longo tamen intervallo, once again passed over the Mersey Bar, which ceased for sheer joy from moaning and groaning as was its wont. And Jarrow divided the profits, pro ratâ, with those who had helped him. And lo! at this time there came into the cellars or bonded warehouses of Liverpool a noble consignment of Madeira, so old that even then the memory of man ran not to the contrary, and the price went fairly over the three ciphers. And out of his Charleston over-flowings, the progenitor, wise father as he was, and knowing his own sons (then unborn) gave out the mere dross of metallic gold, and took into his cellar the Lord knows how many dozen of a gold that had no equal; dark red, rich, beautiful sparkling gold. These he placed in a great cradle in a little room hard by and near to the genial warmth of his kitchen fire, and then he bade the youngest of his hirelings swing it night and day with a ceaseless, tireless motion; and so with this warm and gentle movement did he in his fervent imagination and young heart contrive to give his beautiful peerless wine a sea voyage to the East Indies, in his days considered an essential part of an incomparable Madeira’s education.

And now, grown old and practical, with his ardent imagination shrunken in the light of base and common day, he has transferred the wine from the cradle to its nursery in the solid sandstone. And yearly from Michaelmas to Candlemas do we his sons supplicate and partake of his bounty; and now, alas! Candlemas comes and passes. And so it comes about that Spring has no joys for me as it has for others, and I hear the throstle’s liquid warble and the blackbird’s piping with a mute indifference, for throstle and blackbird, thanks to God, reproduce themselves each year, but this Madeira is the last of his race, splendidly sterile and icily null, and already we seem to detect in the blood of him the faint suspicion of tartness, which tells us that the end is nigh. The bloom of age is passing away; he is already gliding into his second childhood, the end of which is death. And we fear, we brothers who mourn him together, that he should be drunk regardless of seasons. But for all that he is not a companion to dally with when the white chestnut blossoms are simulating snowflakes at Hampton Court, or the plash of Thames’ waves is straining this way and that the reeds and irises on the bank.

Rather, this venerable fellow is the companion of the advanced Sybarite. He is a product of extreme artificiality; he has nothing in common with nature. Moreover, he induces, so his enemies assert, the fell Podagra or gout. But his colour! his bouquet! his flavour! Why, with all the faults lying at the back of him, do not these virtues of his throw all other wines into the shades of discredited liquids? He is so rare, so select, so refined. Few there be who can ever meet him face to face. He is filled with curious and quaint learning, and he has picked up in the common rooms of Oxford colleges a knowledge of mixed oaths and the now dead languages. He appears at fitful intervals at the tables of men who have heavy and loaded clarets, and ports that are of little good save to administer to the dying poor to accelerate their end. Now the reason of this is not far to seek. He is such a mysterious fellow that he has hobnobbed with a man’s ancestors, and has taken up an abode in their cellars, and comes down to this ignorant generation by an accident of bequest or intestacy, and these modern heirs bring him out with a sort of mixed pride and diffidence, offering him as some old wine which “my grandfather” was sometime the possessor of; and few take him at a venture, lest, haply, he should pinch up their toes, and bring into their knuckle-joints those mysterious and painful globosities which are called chalkstones.

There is, indeed, a fashion to decry the wine, and he has suffered much from blight, and the roguishness of vintners; for when the demand in former years ran high, these sorry rascals substituted for the real Simon Pure low-priced fluids liable to turn acid, and so did he fall into disrepute. Also the First Gentleman in Europe in the early decades of this century, by cultivating and disseminating a preference for sherry, did much to put the nose of our glorious Madeira out of joint; for men are, alas! too apt to forget the glory of this Madeira and wholly to ignore his royal descent. It is a far cry to 1421, when Prince Henry colonised Madeira, the woody island, with grape stocks from Candia, and to this day the romance and joy lingers about these island vineyards. For the vines are planted upon lines of trellis-work in front of the houses, and the branches are deftly led over the tops, and the sun rays fall down and beat upon them horizontally, so that beneath is an arbour of shady and green coolness. And in other parts of the island they are trained up the wild chestnut trees, and themselves, as true children of freedom, acquire a vagabond and roving character. And again on the slopes, in full blaze and glare of the sun, do men grow the celebrated Malmsey, and the grapes whence proceed this notorious wine must needs be over-ripe and all but shrivelled, so that the juice expressed therefrom may be of an exceeding fragrance and superabundant richness. The highest quality Malmsey, with a proper sense of remoteness and insolent aristocracy, comes, or came, from a small avalanche of tufa lying at the foot of a cliff all but inaccessible. And one small farm only grows the wine which the Royal House of Portugal was wont to keep for its own exclusive use. And cousin-german to the Malmsey, through the collateral line, is the Sercial, descended from the grape which in other lands nearer home produced Hock; the wine of the Affinities.

So, do what we will, we cannot but doff our hats to this wine of ours, for we stand—in his presence—in the presence of royalty. And he has this endearing quality about him, that he and Time are such good friends and understand one another so well that age becomes him and is his charm, when with us poor men and women only too often youth is the one possession we are born with, which we have squandered ere we knew that it was worth anything. Now Madeira in his youth is harsh and austere, he has a pungent tongue, and speaks with bitterness; but age cometh over him, and, like a tender schoolmaster or parent, leads him gently along, and his tart sayings are metamorphosed into genial wit and a happy softness of utterance. His rough corners are rubbed off. The march of Time can do nothing against him, only to mellow and soften him and make us love him. Indeed, one can hardly be said to be on speaking terms with him unless we have him lurking in the wood these eight or ten years, and afterwards have completed his education and softened the acidities of his young temper in bottle for at least twice that period. Only after the lapse of several generations he falls into his second childhood, when he should be drunk and no more said. The ignorant bring him out with port and claret and sherry, and would have him play an insignificant fourth to the great triumvirate; but in reality he should come forth alone, he should sparkle and gleam in his flashing tower of old English glass. Alone and unaccompanied he should disappear slowly and with method down the throats of those who love him, conferring some essence of his own greatness upon them; for, great as he is in all other particulars, he has, above all, the indescribable qualities—style and distinction.