Wines for usurers, (rugger-) buggers, and lunchtime.
Three free wine recommendations and their unusual etymological relationships. And invitations to in-person sessions and recommendations for paid subscribers.
This Thursday 19th - 7pm UK/8pm Europe we’ve a paid-subscriber meetup. Bring a bottle and as many wine questions as you can conjure up. I hope you will bring a bottle with connections like the three below.
AND… Sunday 22nd sees our first ever wine writers session at 7pm UK/8pm Europe/11am PST. This is a kick start of our rolling programme of paid-subscriber posts, meetups, one-to-ones, and writing sessions on wine and drinks writing, podcasting, and broadcasting. I’ll be distilling 35 years of writing for The Herald, Saga Magazine, and trade publications, as well as the lessons of a rather dull textbook “Managing Wine and Wine Sales”. Interested in broadcasting about wine? You too can learn the secrets that led to me being described as “rather dull for most viewers” by The Canberra Times. And winning Wine Personality of the Year and Wine Communicator of the Year by the IWC and IWSC. You’ll also learn how you can’t please everyone.
I’ll send links for both in paid posts this week
1. Message in a bottle - how to throw shade with wine gifts
Do you have a loathsome friend who works in finance? Of course you do. Well next time they invite you to their dead-eyed “home” to show off their Rolex collection, bring them a bottle of Cahors.
Cahors is the usurer’s wine. “Usury is the practice of making loans that are seen as unfairly enriching the lender”. “Unfairly” is a relative term. But I would suggest that their Rolex collection and “home cinema” are all the evidence you need.
In the often confusing pantheon of Christian sin, Cahors is to usury what Sodom is to buggery. The town’s “Cahorsins” were well-known as Christian moneylenders who charged interest. And in Dante’s Inferno he suggests the Cahorsins and Sodomites occupied a similar afterlife:
Sodom and Cahors hence are doomed to lie
Within the narrowest circlet surely sealed;
And to make the point of what he thinks of them (well, what God thinks of them) he says that that next circlet contains the slightly more virtuous…
Pimps, barrators1, and suchlike residue.
“Suchlike residue” surely lies with Peter Cook’s celebrated “vile piece of ordure” in the pantheon of insults. I’ve made a note to use it in the future.
To really drive the point home, your banker’s gift should be Morrison’s The Best Cahors Malbec (£9.75).
This is an outstanding wine, widely praised by critics, and deservedly so. It also comes from a supermarket headquartered in Bradford2 and favoured by “ordinary, working people”. Not some swanky, luxury London wine merchant favoured by Royals and/or Russians.
Until the revolution comrades, we must seize these small acts of resistance.
2. Message in a bottle - for friends who play rugby, are homosexuals, or indeed both
I have to say I rather feel for the Sodomites. Imagine, you just happen to love men, Madonna, and the musical theatre, and the next thing you know you’ve to spend eternity with someone in a gilet droning on about Credit Default Swaps.
I suspect that “narrowest circlet” of Dante’s inferno will have something of a humour imbalance too. My gay friends are my funniest. The bankers… the least. And there were gay laughs all round when I brought a bottle of Soli Merlot (around £14.00) to a recent supper.
This Bulgarian red is consistently brilliant. In the best years it has troubled assorted “Top 100” lists. It has a plush, generous baby-Pomerol feel and if you decant it you’ll confuse wine aficionados.
I shall be reading “Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity” by Diarmaid MacCulloch when it comes out. In the book MacCulloch explains how the word buggery comes from the French word “bouggerie” meaning “of Bulgaria”, “because medieval Christians accused heretics who were thought to come from Bulgaria of it”.
One for your broad-minded gay friends. Or “rugger-buggers”. Who are by default broad-minded.
3. Not every word is connected
Three hours east of Cahors is the Basque country. Basque - the language - is as far as I can tell one of only two languages in Europe whose word for wine does not derive from “vino”. Basques call it “Ardo”. And I can heartily recommend Txakoli, the light, frothy, and refreshing “ardo” you enjoy in Donostia-San Sebastian. In the UK try Rezabal Txacoli, Getariako Txakolina 2023 (£12.50) from The Wine Society.
It has a gentle spritz that you can enhance by pouring from a height. And at 11% makes an excellent lunchtime drink3.
The other language is Greek, where wine is κρασί or krasi. This comes from the habit of the Greeks to mix their wine with water. The thing they mixed it in was called a “krater”, and sat in the middle of the room where stewards would mix the wine and then fill up your cup.
I’d always imagined Finnish would have their own word for wine. They have their own words for everything else. But it turns out it’s “viini”. I mentioned a few weeks ago that I had tried Finnish (fruit) wine. And Finland has the northernmost vineyards in the world. It’s a 0.1 ha experimental plot of zilga grapes. It survives as it is warmed up by waste heat from the Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant, 200 kilometres northwest of Helsinki.
Which is an excellent excuse to repost this sign posted at Helsinki Airport a few years ago…
“One who is guilty of barratry, vexing others with frequent and often groundless lawsuits; a brangler and pettifogger”.
Incidentally, the European City of Culture. Although, I have to say I was born in Bradford and have a great deal of fondness for the city, but even I am finding this a stretch.
Can we please bring back the civilising effect of a little, light, lunchtime drinking?