PROSTITUTION
The outstanding example of the menace to the survival of wine in its natural form is the wholesale demand for what the French call the “champagnisation” of all kinds of wine, great and humble, good, bad and indifferent, red, white and rosé, quite irrespective of their suitability for gaseous treatment, which tends more and more to absorb choicer and rarer, rather than poorer and more abundant, qualities. This insatiable public appetite for effervescence ignores the amount of those surplus qualities that are available and, in certain cases, readily adaptable, for the purpose and so degrades fine still wines from their lawful sphere by constraining them to pop, froth and bubble in indignant and impotent protest instead of gurgling majestically into the glass of honour in a tranquil and limpid stream. Our spendthrift generation is convinced that the sparkling variety of any given wine must needs be its highest, because its costliest, expression. Even to-day, few growths have remained wholly immune to this vandalism, while the commercial pressure brought to bear on the few conscientious recalcitrants is increasing yearly. It would seem that in the United States, where the real meaning of simple words is even more often misunderstood than in England, wine, in common parlance, always implies a sparkling wine of sorts, whether genuine or spurious Champagne. The youth of Europe, hypnotised by jazz strains, convulsions and idioms, is doing its best to make the word have the same ignorantly exclusive and inglorious significance in lands that have spontaneously evolved their own languages and ancestral wassailing traditions. It is arguable whether sparkling wine is really wine at all. What admits of no sort of cavil is that its name needs qualifying by some such admonitory adjective so as to distinguish it from the natural wine from which it is, or purports to be, manufactured.
Happily there is yet no sign of a vogue in fortified “qualities” of famous natural wines, but with Port dearer and stronger than ever owing to the new schedule of wine-duties, there is no reason to be over-sanguine. Thanks to the spirited competition of Australian sweet wines, made possible by the considerable preference accorded to Empire wines in this country and an export bounty of 3s. to 4s. the gallon granted by the Commonwealth Government, Portugal and Spain are not likely to have a monopoly of this market for the future. Already, too, a home industry has sprung up for the manufacture of fortified “British Wines”—the unfermented must being imported from abroad in a muted state and “worked up” in this country into a liquid on which the courtesy title of “wine” has been bestowed. Mr Churchill, in the course of his speech on the Budget for 1927, tempered the unwelcome compliment of rendering these concoctions liable to duty by promising to taste them before that measure had the force of law. A less fearless man in his position might well have preferred to renounce the project of raising revenue from such an unpalatable source.
The transformation of various wines (Chablis, Vouvray, Anjou, Mercurey, Cap Corse, etc.) into “tonic wines” or apéritifs (the different proprietary brands of Vermouth, French and Italian, together with the numerous “Quinas,” “Quinquinas,” “Kinas,” and the like, to say nothing of those combined with meat-extract sold by English apothecaries) by an admixture of quinine and other “appetising” herbs and “restorative” drugs, is another barbarism that is now assuming considerable proportions. This heinous practice is at all events of more respectable antiquity than “champagnisation,” having been familiar in classical times, with rather different but no more inviting ingredients, in the guise of “wine tempered by the nymphs.” As it is, Great Britain imports more Italian Vermouth than Italian wine. Non-alcoholic wine, or sterilised grape-juice, which is now prepared in France, Germany, Switzerland and the United States, is the most recent fad in the way of Weinersatz. It has been claimed that this emasculated beverage has considerable medicinal value. Doubtless it will soon be advertised in this country under some such slogan as “Take the Modish Grape-Cure of Meran at Merriest Margate (or in your own home) with Vincent’s Vitamined Verjuice.” These parodies of wine, it is hardly necessary to add, belong to the same school of “refreshing pick-me-ups” as Cydrax, Kop’s Ale, Herb-Beer, Kola Champagne, Raspberry Sherbet and other mineral-water and Soda-Fountain eruptions. The survival of these dismal and sickly tipples depends on the survival of the Teetotal Dogma which ordains the purging of the pride of the palate with one or other of these potable Puritan penitences.