Chapter 5 Passing The Bottle.

A brass button from the coat of Saint Peter, was at one time shown to visitors among the treasures of a certain church in Nassau; possibly some traveler of more experience may have met with a false collar from the wardrobe of Saint Paul.

The intellect displayed of old by holy saints and martyrs, we may reasonably believe to have surpassed the measure of a bishop's understanding in the present day; for [pg 607] we have the authority of eyesight and tradition in asserting that the meanest of those ancient worthies possessed not less than three skulls, and that a great saint must have had so very many heads, that it would have built the fortune of a man to be his hatter. Perhaps some of these relics are fictitious; nevertheless, they are the boast of their possessors; they are exhibited as genuine, and thoroughly believed to be so. Sir, did your stomach never suggest to you that doctored elder-berry of a recent brew had been uncorked with veneration at some dinner-table as a bottle of old port? Have you experience of any festive friend, who can commit himself to doubt about the age and genuineness of his wine? The cellar is the social relic-chamber; every bin rejoices in a most veracious legend; and, whether it be over wine or over relics that we wonder, equal difficulties start up to obstruct our faith.

Our prejudices, for example, run so much in favor of one-headed men, that we can scarcely entertain the notion of a saint who had six night-caps to put on when he went to bed, and when he got up in the morning had six beards to shave. Knowing that the Russians, by themselves, drink more Champagne than France exports, and that it must rain grapes at Hockheim before that place can yield all the wine we English label Hock, and haunted as we are by the same difficulty when we look to other kinds of foreign wine, we feel a justified suspicion that the same glass of "genuine old port" can not be indulged in simultaneously by ten people. If only one man of the number drinks it, what is that eidolon which delights the other nine?

When George the Fourth was Regent, he possessed a small store of the choicest wine, and never called for it. There were some gentlemen in his establishment acquainted with its merits; these took upon themselves to rescue it from undeserved neglect. Then the prince talked about his treasure-when little remained thereof except the bottles; and it was to be produced at a forthcoming dinner-party. The gentlemen, who knew its flavor, visited the vaults of an extensive wine-merchant, and there they vainly sought to look upon its like again. "In those dim solitudes and awful cells" they, groaning in spirit, made a confessor of the merchant, who, for a fee, engaged to save them from the wrath to come. As an artist in wine, having obtained a sample of the stuff required, this dealer undertook to furnish a successful imitation. So he did; for, having filled those bottles with a wondrous compound, he sent them to the palace just before the fateful dinner-hour, exhorting the conspirators to take heed how they suffered any to be left. The compound would become a tell-tale after twelve hours' keeping. The prince that evening enjoyed his wine.

The ordinary manufacture of choice wine for people who are not princes, requires the following ingredients: for the original fluid, cider, or Common cape, raisin, grape, parsnip, or elder wine; a wine made of rhubarb (for Champagne); to these may be added water. A fit stock having been chosen, strength, color, and flavor may be grafted on it. Use is made of these materials: for color-burnt sugar, logwood, cochineal, red sanders wood, or elder-berries. Plain spirit or brandy for strength. For nutty flavor, bitter almonds. For fruitiness, Dantzic spruce. For fullness or smoothness, honey. For port-wine flavor, tincture of the seeds of raisins. For bouquet, orris root or ambergris. For roughness or dryness, alum, oak sawdust, rhatany or kino. It is not necessary that an imitation should contain one drop of the wine whose name it bears; but a skillful combination of the true and false is desirable, if price permit. Every pint of the pure wine thus added to a mixture is, of course, so much abstracted from the stock of unadulterated juice.

You will perceive, therefore, that a free use of wine, not highly priced, is likely to assist us very much in our endeavors to establish an unhealthy home. Fill your cellar with bargains; be a genuine John Bull; invite your friends, and pass the bottle.

There is hope for us also in the recollection, that if chance force upon us a small stock of wine that has not been, in England, under the doctor's hands, we know not what may have been done to it abroad. The botanist, Robert Fortune, was in China when the Americans deluged the Chinese market with their orders for Young Hyson tea. The Chinese very promptly met the whole demand; and Fortune in his "Wanderings" has told us how. He found his way to a Young Hyson manufactory, where coarse old Congou leaves were being chopped, and carefully manipulated by those ingenious merchants the Chinese. But it is in human nature for other folks than the Chinese to be ingenious in such matters. We may, therefore, make up our minds that, since the demand for wine from certain celebrated vineyards, largely exceeds all possibility of genuine supply, since, also, every man who asks is satisfied, it is inevitable that the great majority of wine-drinkers are satisfied with a factitious article. The chances are against our very often meeting with a glass of port that has not taken physic. So, let us never drink dear wine, nor ask a chemist what is in our bottles. Enough that they contain for us delightful poison.

That name for wine, "delightful poison," is not new. It is as old as the foundation of Persepolis. Jemsheed was fond of grapes, Ferdusi tells, and once, when grapes went out of season, stored up for himself some jars of grape-juice. After a while he went to seek for a refreshing draught; then fermentation was in progress; and he found his juice abominably nasty. A severe stomach-ache induced him to believe that the liquor had acquired, in some way, dangerous qualities, and, therefore, to avoid accidents, he labeled each jar, "Poison." More time elapsed, and then one of his wives, in trouble of soul, weary of life, resolved to put an end to her existence. Poison was handy: but a draught [pg 608] transformed her trouble into joy; more of it stupefied, but did not kill her. That woman kept a secret: she alone exhausted all the jars. Jemsheed then found them to be empty. Explanations followed. The experiment was tried once more, and wine, being so discovered, was thereafter entitled "the delightful poison." What Jemsheed would have said to a bottle of port out of our friend Hoggin's cellar-but I tread on sacred ground.

Of good wine health requires none, though it will tolerate a little. Our prospect, therefore, when the bottle passes briskly, is encouraging. Is the wine good, we may expect some indigestion; is it bad, who can tell what disorders we may not expect? Hoggins, I know, drinks more than a quart without disordering his stomach. He has long been a supporter of the cause we are now advocating, and therein finds one of his rewards. It is not safe to pinch a tiger's tail; yet, when the animal is sick, perhaps he will not bite although you tread upon it heavily. Healthy men and healthy stomachs tolerate no oppression.

London is full now; elsewhere country folks come out of doors, invited by fine weather. Walk where you will, in country or in town, and look at all the faces that you meet. Traverse the Strand, and Regent-street, and Holborn, and Cheapside; get into a boat at London bridge, steam to Gravesend, and look at your fellow-passengers: examine where you will, the stamp of our civilization, sickliness, is upon nine people in any ten. There are good reasons why this should be so, and so let it continue. We have excluded sanitary calculations from our social life; we have had hitherto unhealthy homes, and we will keep them. Bede tells of a Mercian noble on his death-bed, to whom a ghost exhibited a scrap of paper, upon which were written his good deeds; then the door opened, and an interminable file of ghosts brought in a mile or two of scroll, whereon his misdeeds were all registered, and made him read them. Our wars against brute health are glorious, and we rejoice to feel that of such sins we have no scanty catalogue; we are content with our few items of mere sanitary virtue. As for sanitary reformers, they are a company of Danaids; they may get some of us into their sieve, but we shall soon slip out again. When a traveler proposed, at Ghadames in the Sahara, to put up a lantern here and there of nights among the pitch-dark streets, the people said his notion might be good, but that, as such things never had been tried before, it would be presumptuous to make the trial of them now. The traveler, a Briton, must have felt quite at home when he heard that objection. Amen, then; with the Ghadamese, we say, Let us have no New Lights.