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Alexander Curtis |
Bacchus |
Chapter 3 |
In the cellars, my spirit seeps persuadingly through the maturing brews - like olive oil soaking into bread. Throughout history I have sought to obey the Socratic command, know thyself; and each new development in viniculture has prompted new insights into the nature of the world that is myself.
[12]
For many centuries the Ancient World had been shocked by the knowledge that Etruscans not only ate two full meals a day but that they ate them together with their womenfolk, husband and wife reclining next to each other on couches. The upright Greek woman seldom saw her husband outside the bedroom, the only women welcome at a symposium being the dancing and harp girls of low moral status. More often than not bare-breasted, these women's presence at the table was seen solely in terms of the amorous distractions and musical entertainment they provided. For the Romans the scandal lay more in the fact that Etruscan women were allowed to drink wine at all. At that time, the staple diet of Rome was porridge and the Romans had little interest in, or need of, the rough brews that passed for wine. A man finding that his wife had been drinking wine was legally entitled to kill her if he wished. But as Rome defeated first the Etruscans and then the Carthaginians, her attitudes relaxed and the last case of a husband divorcing his wife on the grounds that she had drunken wine occurred in 194 BC. It was also around this time that the first commercial bakery opened in Rome and the Roman diet of porridge was to be replaced by bread. From then on the demand for wine and the interest in it could only increase.
[13]
If ever the Albanian Sea rises and is drained by the Romans in the ritually correct way, then says the Etruscan book of fate, Veii is doomed to fall.
The Albanian Sea is a crater lake in the Albani hills just to the South of Rome. If the water rises too high, there is the danger of the crater wall bursting and unleashing a disastrous flood on the surrounding countryside. Etruscan haruspixes had long foreseen this danger and still to this day, the excess water is drained off by a 1200m long tunnel which they bored through the rock. But after the Etruscans lost control of Latium the tunnel became neglected so that in the autumn of 398 BC it was blocked and the water level was rising alarmingly. The Romans made numerous sacrifices but to no avail and so a delegation was sent to Delphi. After consulting the oracle, the envoys returned with the answer that certain ritual procedures should be undertaken. Which procedures these might be, remained however, unspecified. But one night, below the walls of the besieged city of Veii, Roman sentries heard a frail voice chanting a strange prophecy, Never will the Romans conquer the city without draining the water of the Albanian Sea.
After ten years of siege, relations between the Etruscan and Roman soldiers were not altogether unfriendly and one of the Roman sentries found out that the mysterious singer had been a haruspix. On the pretext of wanting a consultation about a personal matter, he arranged to meet the seer below the walls of the city. The two met and against a background of shouting from dismayed Etruscans watching from their city walls, the soldier bodily carried the old man back to Roman lines. The people of Veii must have sorely angered the gods, the old man later explained to the Roman commander, for what he had uttered that night in a holy trance, he was now duty-bound to explain. The haruspix then described the tunnel at Lake Albanium and gave instructions on how it was to be cleared. Soon after the prophecy fulfilled itself and Veii, the most beautiful of Etruscan cities, fell.
[14]
I have often suspected Hera of instigating the death penalty for a Roman woman found drinking wine. This she would have done, not only out of spite and to safeguard the, to her, sacred institution of marriage, but also in the hope that, in preserving the stern attitudes of its citizens, Rome might one day suppress the Etruscan city states. Of these, Veii was the first of the last. Certainly it had been Hera, or Juno as the Romans called her, who had helped the Etruscan nobility overthrow their dictator and make Rome a democracy. Then, predicably enough, the Etruscan minority found themselves being slowly but surely excluded from the affairs of the city their ancestors had founded.
Once the excess water in the Albanian Sea had been drained away, the siege of Veii was to end with the city being stormed through an abandoned drainage shaft and I need hardly say under which god's temple the tunnel ended. As the Roman legionaries were assembling, ready to break out through the floor of the temple, above them a sacrifice was being made to Juno and the haruspix prophesied that victory would go to whichever side captured the liver of the sacrificed animal. On hearing this, the legionaries broke cover and stormed into the temple. They soon gained possession of the liver and by evening the city was in Roman hands. The next day, while the citizens were rounded up to be sold into slavery, the temples were stripped of their gold and the terracotta statues toppled from their roofs. In the temple of Juno, the enormous statue of the goddess was being made ready for transport to Rome. Knowing that according to Etruscan ritual, only a priest was allowed to handle a deity's image, the soldiers making the preparations were nervous. To relieve the tension one of them jokingly asked, Does Juno want to go to Rome? According to Pliny, all present swore the statue nodded.
[15]
Once they had mastered the secrets of drainage, the Romans, though they never reclaimed the swamps of the Maremma, were not slow in realising that drainage and viticulture go hand in hand. Situating their vineyards on slopes, they learnt to appreciate the micro-climates of each valley and experimented with grape varieties. Their first grand cru was the rightly famous Falernian of 121 BC. This was made from a Greek vine, Amineum, grown on the border of Latium and Campania, where the Via Appia forks left and the Via Domiziana forks right towards Naples. In my opinion it was the estate of Faustus that produced the best Falernian, in consequence of the care taken in its cultivation and its position on the mid-slope of the hill. Also made from the Amineum grape was the Albaner, grown on the hills around the fateful lake and producing soft, fleshy, golden to light amber wines, whose flavours successfully complimented the pungent spices of the Roman cuisine.
The city was to have two wine gates, one inland for wine coming down the Tiber from the Sabine hills and Umbria and the other on the seaward side for wine coming up the Tiber from the Campanian coast and abroad. Today a hill known as Monte Testaccio bears witness to the legendary thirst of Rome - for it consists of nothing but the bits of broken amphorae from the city's seaward wine gate.
Truffles
Honey
Flour
Olive Oil
White Wine
Salt
Stock
Pepper
Wash and season the truffles with salt, before browning lightly in an oven or under a grill. Then either slice, or puncture with a fork and allow to simmer for five minutes in a mixture of stock, olive oil, pepper, honey and wine. Thicken the sauce with flour if necessary and serve.
The best truffles are undisputedly the tuber magnatum, found chiefly in Piedmont, however black truffles, tuber melanosporum, are more abundant. Where white truffles can be simply sliced and served au nature, black truffles are nearly always cooked. And indeed, the delicate flavour and arresting aroma of the white truffle has little to gain by being cooked and much to offer as a condiment. Both black and white truffles are at their best in December, once they have ripened in the limestone soil. During the summer months, black truffles are white and are known as "summer truffles" but with the approach of autumn they turn brown and then black.
[16]
Administrators and codifiers par excellence, all questions pertaining to viniculture were duly set down and discussed by a number of Roman authors, this then being the form by which the finer points of the wine-grower's art were to survive the long night of the Dark Ages. Like the Greeks, the Romans recognised that a fine wine improves with age. Initially their taste was for very strong, sweet wines which were naturally inclined to keeping well. The Falernian was reckoned to be "drinkable" after ten years but only became "good" after fifteen or twenty, while the Surrentine needed even longer. A hundred years after the grand cru of 121 BC, Opimiam Falernian was still being served. Likened to fire it was drunk diluted, either with weaker wine or with water and sometimes even with sea-water. Wines such as these, it was discovered, could be left exposed to the sun, moon, rain and wind, the fluctuations in temperature speeding up the processes of oxidation and other symptoms of maturity. Alternatively there was the fumarium, a smoking chamber in which wines were stored above a hearth. There, the heat and smoke would age the wine so that it emerged lighter in colour, with a smoky flavour and a higher acidity. However accelerated ageing was not something that was done to first growths. Neither was it something to be done to the lighter wines, now arriving from the North, which could so easily be turned to vinegar by mistake. These wines were best left, like the grand crus, in amphorae sunk into the ground, well away from all disturbance. Once aged it was appreciated that though "thin", these wines had more aroma than their fuller-bodied, sweeter cousins. Soon a third of all amphorae passing through Rome's sea port at Ostia were coming from the North. The grand crus of the second century, no longer came from Campagnia but rather from vineyards closer to Rome, whose wines, once dismissed as harsh and acidic, were now being praised for their austerity and aroma. Augustus' favourite was the Setinum from the South of Rome, while other first growths were the Sabine and Tiburtine just to the North.
As it is the red grape's skin that makes a red wine red and as for their finer wines the Romans removed the grape skins after pressing, all these wines were therefore white. Red wine, pressed and fermented with its skins was considered unstable, something to be delivered as quickly as possible to the taverns for consumption by the masses. In order to help turnover while their costly white wines aged, wine-growers not infrequently resorted to the practice of soaking the leftover stalks and skins in water and fermenting them in order to make the feeble brew known as Lorca, which it was the lot of the army and lower classes to drink. The concept of a full-bodied, tannic wine, pressed and fermented with its skins and then carefully aged, still lay a long way into the future.
1 Hare with Liver
Myrtle Berries
Pork Sausage Meat
Fennel Seed
Bread Crumbs
Celery Seed
Walnuts
Cumin
Raisins
Thyme
Stock
Mint
Honey
Pepper
Chop the walnuts and liver and mix in with the sausage meat, bread crumbs and some pepper, using an egg to bind the mixture. After stuffing the hare, tie it up with string and baste with olive oil before roasting
In a mortar grind together pepper, thyme, cumin, celery seed, fennel seed and fresh mint. On a stove, heat some honey and stock and add the ground spices, ripe myrtle berries and raisins. Heat and stir while the raisins swell and the flavours blend. Pour over the roast hare and return to the oven for half an hour before serving.
Originally grown on the shores of the Caspian Sea, the walnut was valued by Greeks for its oil. Beneath the hard shell, fresh walnuts have a green fleshy husk which encloses the kernel. When gathered at the time of the grape harvest, the kernel is green and can be kept for about two weeks. As the nuts mature the husk and kernel dry up but if soaked in milk overnight the dried nuts can be made to regain their fresh flavour. Alternatively they can be preserved in vinegar. It was the Romans who exported cultivation of the walnut tree to other parts of Europe and who first used dried nuts as an ingredient in the kitchen. Like all nuts, the walnut represents hidden wisdom but also symbolises fertility and longevity and was used as such at Greek and Roman weddings.
[17]
It can be generally said that it is in the Northern extremities of where a plant will grow that the fruit having the most flavour will be found. The sugars, being concentrated that much more slowly, provide a truer and more studied reflection of the world than their Southern counterparts. For a fruit, like the liver, is a reflection of the world, only where the liver reflects the world in all its complexity, fruits only reflect it as far as it pertains to the god to whom the fruit is sacred.
Among gods what makes me unique is the extent to which I identify myself with that which reflects me. It is this difference which makes me the god who conquers death, who may die time and time again only to rise from the dead. Although Athene has her olives and Zeus his oaks, their duties cannot be summed up or symbolised by an olive branch or an acorn. But whether as goat or bull, pomegranate or grape, whether I am torn apart by Maenads or trodden underfoot by peasants, in the moment of death I am one with what is being destroyed.
[18]
In order to make the strong, sweet wines to which the Ancient World was so partial, a variety of techniques lay at the wine-grower's disposal. Initially a high sugar-content was sought in the grapes themselves. This the Romans achieved by harvesting as late as possible, even when the grapes were frozen with frost. A Greek technique was to pick the grapes slightly under-ripe, to maintain a high acidity but then to leave them to shrivel in the sun, thus concentrating their sugar. A Cretan speciality was to twist the stalks holding the bunches so that the grapes would shrivel on the vine. A Tuscan and Umbrian variation is to partially dry the grapes by hanging them in the rafters of a house, usually above the fireplace so that they acquire a slightly smoky flavour.
A second method of raising the sugar-content of a wine involved boiling grape must over a slow fire. If reduced by a third, the resulting syrup was called caroeum, if reduced by a half, as it most commonly was, it was known as defrutum while reduced by two-thirds it was called sapa. These syrups could then be added to thinner wines to achieve the strong sweet taste so avidly sought. The must was cooked in lead cauldrons, the lead not only contributing to the sweet, succulent taste of the wine to which the syrup was added but also helping to stabilise it, preventing it from turning into vinegar. So effective are lead ions in inhibiting the growth of organisms that lead compounds may be used to stop wounds turning septic. Taken internally however, the result is a catalogue of afflictions, including gripes, fever, constipation, jaundice, loss of control over extremities, loss of speech, loss of memory, blindness, insanity, paralysis and eventually death. These effects were naturally concentrated among the Roman aristocracy so that consultation with their livers would have revealed alarmingly high concentrations of the metal. So wide-spread was the practice of adding sweet must that some wine-growers labelled their products with the words sine defruto, to emphasise the unadulterated nature of their wine.
The third and simplest way of obtaining a sweet wine was simply to add large quantities of honey, either to the unfermented must or the finished wine. The resulting mulsum, as it was called, was served as an aperitif to accompany the hors d' oeuvres of the evening meal. Honey however was an expensive commodity and reduced musts were therefore used as an often fatal substitute whenever possible.
[19]
The liver is capable of reflecting the complexity of the world only in so far as an animal eats a varied diet of the plants sacred to the whole pantheon of gods. In Mediterranean countries, the earth used to be covered not just with grass but also with juniper, box, myrtle, rosemary, thyme and many other herbs. Goats, by virtue of their being browsers, provided a particularly balanced picture of the world. Although sheep eat predominantly grass, it only takes a few nibbles of an olive branch or a few leaves of oak for Minerva and Zeus to enter into the picture. Anyone wishing to know about some particular aspect of the future is however, recommended to feed the animal that is to be sacrificed a plant sacred to the deity under whose domain his interest lies. Then he may be sure the answer will be there, ready for the haruspix to read. Those desiring to know about marriage should feed their animal pear leaves, the pear tree being sacred to Hera, the patron of matrimony. Those who wish to know about war should mix a few sprigs of rosemary into their animal's feeding bowl, for rosemary is sacred to Ares, the god of war. Death is represented by Persephone's willow and matters nautical by Poseidon's ash. Poseidon and Aphrodite also share the myrtle, despite the fact that it is a tree of death. Apart from the laurel, of whose leaves only the Pythia at Delphi may chew, Apollo is represented by the poplar. Grass, falling under the care of Silvanus, the god of woodlands, fields and pastures, inevitably imparts an agricultural or land-management flavour to predictions, so that for the Etruscans, who based their predictions on the livers of sheep, even the fall of Veii was couched in terms of land-management.
Pears
Honey
Egg Yolks
Cinnamon
Sweet White Wine
Cumin
Stock
Pepper
Olive Oil
A native of the Middle East, it was the Romans who first cultivated the pear in earnest, increasing the number of varieties from the six recorded by Cato, to sixty, so that instead of the minute fruits of the wild tree, they could proudly boast of specimens weighing anything up to 500g.
[20]
With the invention of the barrel towards the end of the Roman era and the death of the amphora during the Dark Ages, wine became an unstable product. Though strong and sturdy, unlike the frail amphora, wood breathes so that the bacteria which turn wine into vinegar may flourish. Apart from a brief interlude during the Renaissance, from the fall of Rome right up until the invention of the cork in a bottle, only I was aware of what dimensions of taste were being missed due to the inability of wine-growers to age their wines. Sealed away in an amphora or bottle, the amount of oxygen available is limited and the wine is in a reductive state, any change reducing the possibility of further change. This allows the pigments, tannins, acids and other organic compounds to settle into a homogeneous composition instead of being just a rustic mixture. Left to mature, a good wine will acquire a complexity and depth that it did not have before. This is achieved through a certain amount of highly controlled oxidation. For the Romans the amount of oxidation that could take place was fixed by the amount of air between the wine and the cork stopper, while the speed at which it took place was limited by the cool temperature of the earth in which the amphora was buried. Nowadays oxidation is controlled by the length of time the wine is left in its barrel and by the cool temperature of the cellar. Subsequent oxidation is then limited by the minute amount of air at the bottle's neck and the cool temperature at which it is stored. The absence of lees, the residue left over after pressing, is also important, otherwise the lees will oxidise first, tainting the brew with a flavour of rotten fruit. In this the Romans, by not pressing too hard and by avoiding the pressed skins altogether, were intuitively correct. Only by racking can the potentially harmful lees be removed and the grapes be fully pressed so that the tannins and pigments can be released and then aged to make the wines we know today.
[21]
The art of successfully ageing a good wine consists in orchestrating the flavours into what might be called a bivandous symphony. Then, like a healthy liver, the wine will reflect the amber joys of a golden summer. Absorbed by plants and condensed in their fruits, imbalances and tensions in the world-order manifest themselves in the liver as scars and swellings. These, occurring in the relevant houses of the gods sometimes cause sickness and bad dreams. Often this occurs when the individual or animal has failed to eat a balanced diet of the plants sacred to the gods. By eating meat however, humans pass much of this responsibility on to animals.
In the macrocosm such imbalances can be corrected by sacrifice and prayer; in the microcosm they are most easily treated with herbal remedies. The appeasement offered to a god in sacrifice is effected in the liver by the eating of one of the plants sacred to that god. Then the imbalance will subside and the symptoms be alleviated. Alternatively, the drinking of a small amount of wine may help correct the imbalance. This only happens though, when the picture of the world presented by the grapes is such that it compliments, or makes up for that which is lacking in the picture afforded by the patient's liver. The wine and vintage must therefore be carefully chosen so that the view of the world therein contained does indeed have a reconciliatory effect and does not abet the problem. This approach could in theory be applied with any fruit or plant but in practice the herbalist only has at his disposal, the fruits of the present and is unable to reach for specimens coming from an age before the discord in question started.
As everyone knows, an excess of wine leads to scirrhosis of the liver and can sometimes only be cured by abstinence from my fruits. However it should be noted that in such cases it is not wine per-se that is the problem but the fact that the wines chosen have created an imbalance in the organ. A more balanced and prudent selection of vintages, from different ages and different places does not have such an effect. For what one wine lacks another contains in abundance. In this the grape is truly special. Preserved as wine it can survive the passing years, enabling different wines from different ages to compliment each other and thus provide a complete and balanced picture of the world.
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | References | Bacchus Table of Contents