Through a Glass Lightly/Port

by T. T. Greg

PORT

PORT

“Claret for Boys” (methinks I hear the Great Doctor with superb finality), “Port for Men, and Brandy for Heroes.” Probably he was right—he so often was right. But a change has come: at this present he would scarce endorse his judgment. Not with unquenchable thirst, and head and nerves immovable, do we drain off those brandies and waters on which our Benbows suffered and were strong. Men have been since Agamemnon, and men will be. The heroic is still attainable; but it has changed its environment, and to seek it in the petit verre, sipped as a digestive after the banquet’s close, were a vain and idle thing. But Johnson speaks truth in the main; for to hack our retracing way through the impenetrable thicket of the years into that sweet and flowering meadowland of adolescence, where the wine was but an attribute of dessert, and it was among the dried cherries and the Elva plums that you looked for its essentials; to transport our big hulking bodies into that ineffable backward, when power was potentiality at best, and ignorance at worst was bliss; to do this, I say, is merely impossible. If Claret be for Boys, and I neither admit it nor deny, then is that cellar closed. But to be Men is for all of us; so for Men is Port. I had said it is the sole and only drink; though many excellent—comparatively excellent—folk there be that give the palm to ginger beer. And yet, on maturer reflection, the earlier thought, quick-leaping and unpremeditated, was best. Yes; Port is the only drink. Drink, mind you: not nectar, as some would have you believe! Nectar is but a vague and shilly-shallying poetasterism, which can by no stretch of language be applied to the nobler stuff. For the gods, and Primitive Man in their image, drank only when they were athirst. They never sipped their liquor. Not theirs (poor devils!) to roll it round the tongue, to toss it playfully against the palate, to let it trickle exquisitely down a gullet of educated sensibility. They quaffed it, they swilled it, they sluiced the drouth out of their systems with it. Nectar was mere stuff with a flow in it; a bulky flux which they drank from great bowls and tankards. They knew nought of palate; only that Nature abhors a vacuum. The state they ambitioned was at best a kind of convivial repletion. In the matter of liquor, the Olympians were co-mates and brothers in ignorance with the Teutons of the Dark Ages. These called their “bene bowse” Nectar, those others, Mead. And Mead, in truth, it was: sweet, clammy, cloying, over-rated Mead.

It is otherwise with Port. Only when the grosser cravings are appeased; when a ruined continent of beef has been toppled down the kitchen stairs; when the jellies and kickshaws are laid waste; when the crumbs are brushed away; when the fair stretch of napery has been whisked into space, and your glowing face beams back at you from the warm, rich, hospitable lustre of the mahogany; when silver reflects its reverted image, and the whole table is alive with light and gladness—only then does the Chief Priest bring on, in that splendid shrine, agleam with an hundred facets, the drink for which Boys are inapt and Heroes unsuitable. In his baize-keeled cradle the giant magnum moves slowly with all the solemnity pertaining to a religious rite around the brilliant woodway; then tongues are loosened, and the joy of life runs high. It is great and good, this antique use of drinking after dinner. What boots it that gourmets like Sir Henry Thompson declare against it? ’Tis dying, if you will; but it dies hard as things British are wont. It has its enemies. The cigarette—a poor thing and anybody's own—makes advance all but impossible: also a fatal fashion would seek to cast the great liquor from us, and, ignorantly, would have us eschew our Port as a fiery and a heady creature, the sure and faithful ally of the Old Campaigner, Gout. Yet these same weaklings, still constrained by a custom they abhor, are found offering at the dinner’s end the three fallen Graces—Port, Sherry, and Claret. Still the Triumvirate (for with wine there is no sex, only age and origin) goes its unhonoured round. For who greatly lusts after the cellars of moderate drinkers, men who too often buy at a venture? And especially is this the case with Port: in whose quest they betake them to their wine—merchant as one should go to his doctor, with medicinal rather than purely hospitable motives. Thus cometh in our midst the Old Tawny, long in the wood, a renegade and traitor, which hath imparted to dead timber that rare and fragrant quality which should have exalted a living palate. Of a brave look, but sans character, sans style, sans everything but liquidity, who does not know the wretch, and, knowing him, long for the days that were? In truth, the modern tipple (it deserves no better word) is miserably wanting in the great bulk and body and splendour of the vintage wines. Ah, those wines! Whence cometh the wonder of them? The pure grape they are not: for they are garrisoned with the mercenaries of other lands, they are stored with the heroic afflatus, they are watered with the Water of Life. Yes; the great Englishman was right when he pronounced them the drink of Men; and had he but laid down his liquor as he laid down his law, there had been some mighty drinking in Gough Square. Yet it is recorded of him that he would drink twelve cups of tea at a sitting, and barter the wealth of Oporto for the tailings of Bohea! Of such differences are our best and worthiest compact.

He is a true aristocrat, this Port of ours. He disappears into the mists of antiquity, but even thus you see the round and top of his royalty dim shining through the haze which is years. The living generation—republican in fibre, revolutionary in spirit, redolent of fusel and of fizz—recalls not the vintages coeval with Nelson, contemporary with the Duke. Waterloo Port is a tradition, indeed; for itself we know it not, nor are worthy to know. The “crowning mercy” of ’32 (the Reform Bill) was followed by the blessed vintage of '34—post hoc sed non propter hoc; and it has been said with truth that the chief, if not the sole, effect for good of that middle-class Magna Charta was the building of the Reform Club; for here at least are cellars stored with the wine of wines, and thereof some of Mr Gladstone’s starkest opposites counted it their especial privilege to drink. And thereafter Time hath marked his line of advance with halt after halt of noble vintages: even as our Royal Edward planted a cross at every resting-place of his Queen on her solemn march to Westminster. There is ’47, matchless, incomparable, rare and precious, as the sea-otter; there is ’51, honoured, as they say, though not drunk by the austere editor of Truth, which shows that in the radicalest of us lie the germs of nobility; there is ’58, whose dry humour is appreciated of all them that love their Burton and their Lamb. And, there is ’63; and thereby hangs a tale: for a reserve cuvée of him lay long unknown in the Reform Club cellars; and it had been there unto this day, had not a misguided Committee invited the Devonshire to sojourn for a while. There was a second Exodus of the Chosen People, as erst of their fathers under Pharaoh. And centuries of persecution were avenged in six weeks; and the face of ’63 has vanished from the R.C. list.

Of ’65,’70,’75, and ’78 you shall easily judge for yourselves. Last, but not least, is the Port of Victoria’s first Jubilee. That our Sovereign should rule an Empire over which the sun sets not is a trifle, an astronomical juggle, a common jingo yawp. The true secret of her strength lies here: that at least nine times in this glorious reign of hers, she could have filled the dungeoned cellars of Windsor with more illustrious prisoners than the Tudors; just as the secret of her weakness—if she have any—consists in that she didn't do it. Oh, the pity of it! If you may believe your society prints, she drinks nothing but whisky-and-water and a little dry champagne. Yet, at the last, her subjects and their descendants shall softly close their eyes, and drink in Jubilee Port the memory of her in whose honour it is named. So shall their loyalty stay unimpeached and unimpeachable. And yet it is hard to think of what might have been—and is not. One statue less, and—well, well! The Doctor was right; and Port is, after all, the drink of—not Boys, not Heroes, not even Empresses and Queens, but—Men.