hello Bottlers.
When I taught a two-semester course in the history of food in the BU graduate gastronomy program, I used to joke that the description for it in the catalog should read: All the things you can do with food besides eat it. As you might guess from this, the course was heavily tilted toward how we put food into the service of things that don’t involve nutrition – things like politics, personal and class identity-building, war, sex, and much more. It seemed to me that you could learn where the tomato was first domesticated from many sources, but you weren’t going to get a broader picture of what food was good for without a bit of help.
In part because it’s so rich in imaginative content, wine is very good at providing this sort of wide-ranging utility and this week I came across a particularly fine example. It has to do with 17th and 18th century British politics, and if you’ll just bear with me for a moment I’ll give you the background.
Party politics really got its start in this era with the nation divided between a reform-minded set of (mostly) wealthy, urban, middle-class types who were interested in reining in the power and privileges of nobles and the court and feared, and a set whose power-base was in the country and derived from agriculture that was determined to preserve the status quo. Today we might call these liberal and conservatives, respectively, but in that age they were known as Whigs and Tories. In foreign policy, Tories looked to France for a model of powerful and autonomous monarchy and court, while Whigs hated almost everything French and feared that the king was really a crypto-Catholic who would bring the Church of England back under the authority of the Pope.
I’ll bet you can guess where this is going. The Whig fear and loathing of everything Gallic pushed them in the 1680’s to slap an embargo on French wine – and that meant, mainly, the red wines of Bordeaux known as claret. By 1700, the drinking of claret was more than just something you did to brighten your table. Tories proclaimed their loyalty to the king by drinking his health with the French wine, while Whigs raised tankards of beer, dreadful homemade wine, or, increasingly, wines imported from Portugal. It’s at this point that the British become enamored of Port. Thanks to a favorable trade agreement Port was more affordable, more available, and with the ascent of the Whigs to a position of real political power in the 18th century, it emerged as the populist drink, the drink of real Englishmen. Concurrently, claret declined in favor as it was increasingly seen as something foreign, feminizing, even subversive.
Over time, these categories became blurred, the lines between them less starkly drawn – but only because the political passions that gave rise to them gradually became less heated. Today the red Bordeaux and the Ports at Central Bottle share shelf space peacefully, but I wouldn’t be surprised that if we conducted a poll there’d be no love lost between ’em.
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There was more conversation this week about the hard-to-pin-down status of organic wine when a guest came in determined to buy only an “organic wine.” Radmary did a good job of pointing him to a few bottles that met his criteria, but when Rad and I talked about this afterward it was clear that there’s still some confusion about this, in part because of the vexed problem of sulfites. So let’s go over this quickly. There is a new standard in place for organic wine in Europe that requires both organically-farmed grapes and adherence to a set of standards. The EU standards ALLOW for wine to contain residues of sulfur up to 100mg/l for red wine. Thus, as of the 2012 vintage organic wine (as opposed to ‘wine from organic grapes’) does exist in the EU. This is NOT the case in the U.S. where wine cannot be labelled organic unless its SO2 content is below a threshold of 10mg/l , including those sulfites that are nmaturally occurring. This is an almost impossible standard. This is why in the U.S. organic wine can only really mean ‘wine made from organic grapes.’
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A team of winetasters from MIT are participating in qualifying rounds for the left Bank Bordeaux Cup, a prestigious tournament that pits teams of students from Cambridge and Oxford in the UK as well as a number of U.S. universities (including Yale, Harvard, Stanford, and Columbia) against each other to determine who will win the coveted prize. Other teams will be competing in qualifying rounds in Asia and Europe. The finalists will meet at Ch Lafitte-Rothchild in Bordeaux to determine a winner on June 25. Read the details here.
That’s it for now.
-stephen
All weekly wine notes are archived at tableintime.com/weekly