THE FUTURE OF EMPIRE WINES
During the South African War we were urged to think imperially. After the World War, the nation, in spite of saturation with American films, was considered to have pondered sufficiently in an imperial sense for the time to be ripe to ask it to eat, drink and clothe itself imperially as well. The dogma of Free Trade was definitely abandoned and several minor Empire preferences were offered us as grist for mental stimulus. To food for the mind we were exhorted to add food for the body, though the reverse process might have made a stronger appeal with a more logical nation, besides simplifying the necessary change in purchasing habits which had survived the outworn doctrines of Bright and Cobden who had been instrumental in moulding them.
To smoke and drink imperially is rather a different matter to eating and dressing imperially. Most of us would gladly smoke and drink what our fellow-Britons grow if the question of quality did not persist in intruding itself between the cup and the lip. Even when we are prepared to ignore this aspect of practical patriotism, imperial flattery of the palate has a way of forcing itself on our attention at the very first puff or sip. Nor are we always quite honest with ourselves when we make a resolution to eat, drink, smoke or dress imperially for the future, because on these occasions we often refrain from making an inventory of the mental reservations which, consciously or unconsciously, we bring to the list. Not even the most ardent patriot, until at least he loses his palate, can pretend that Borneo Cigars or Burmah Cheroots are superior to Havana Cigars and Manilla Cheroots. So it is with Empire Wines. Australian “Burgundy” and South African “Hock” could not pass muster for the French and German wines they so unblushingly pretend to be with the wine-waiter of the National Liberal Club.
It is an axiom in wine that quality can only be forthcoming in countries where viticulture depends primarily on the home market, and even then it is less often attained than otherwise. For all practical purposes there are only four provenances of Empire wines: South Africa, Australia, Palestine and Cyprus, which already produce more than they can readily dispose of, as only the first and last are in any real sense wine-drinking countries. A little wine is grown in Cashmere, Canada and Malta as well, but the quantity is negligible. From climatic and geological deductions it seems probable that vineyards could be successfully planted in parts of New Zealand, Kenya, Rhodesia and the middle slopes of the Himalayas, Ghats and Nilgherry Hills in India, but there is no potential demand for fresh sources of supply unless their produce is of a vastly superior quality to anything now grown on British soil. The Cyprian Commanderia wine of Paphos is historically one of the world’s most famous growths, but it is doubtful whether its peculiar flavour will ever make any strong appeal to the British palate. Little of the ordinary wine of the island is now exported to England, the bulk of such as is being absorbed by the manufacturers of a well-known brand of “Tonic Wine,” which is very popular with rigid teetotalers and connoisseurs of patent medicines. Quantitatively, there is little hope for Empire wines, even when protected by substantial preferential tariffs. Algerian common wines, to say nothing of the most ordinary French, Spanish and Italian growths, will always be cheaper and more abundant than any similar wines grown in Australia or the Cape, which have to pay far higher freight and are cultivated by vine-dressers that are far more highly paid. Even should the Algerian supply fail for any cause, and at present it is increasing steadily every year, larger and larger quantities of Argentine and Chilian wines are becoming available for export. Algerian wines are not particularly choice—they have only been cultivated for about sixty years—but some of them are superior to anything produced within the Empire. Moreover, except in England, they are sold under their local Algerian name as Médéa, Miliana, Mascara, and Coteaux de l’Harach, etc., and not as Algerian “Claret,” “Burgundy,” “Chablis,” “Graves,” and “Sauternes”; though our own wine-merchants, save when, as is not infrequent, they use them anonymously, do not hesitate to give them these absurd and mendacious titles.
All other Empire wines, with one or two honourable exceptions, such as the South African Riebeeck Kastel and the Australian Highercombe Amber, produce, on their own label avowals, nothing but self-styled imitations of the leading European wines, prefixed by the safeguarding qualification Australian, South African or Palestine, as the case may be, which reduces these fraudulent claims to nonsense. Even where local names are adopted, such as Schoongezicht, Paarl and Drakenstein, they are used to qualify the meaningless title “Hock.” It is a lie. The wines of these three districts—and they are about the best which the Empire has to offer—are, and always will be, nothing but Schoongezicht, Paarl and Drakenstein respectively. They are not, and cannot be, “Hocks,” even though grown from the choicest Rhenish Riesling vines, because Hock is a purely German wine to which the Rhineside town of Hochheim-am-Main has given its name. Hochheim is in the Regierungsbezirk Wiesbaden of Prussia, and not in the Cape Province of the Union of South Africa. Nearly all Australian, and a great many South African, red wines describe themselves as “Burgundies” (there are, to be sure, a few “Clarets” and “Hermitages” as well) and often perpetrate a further, and yet more laughable, contradiction in terms by claiming that they are grown from Cabernet or Malbec vines: classic French vines, it is true, but native to the Bordelais and not Burgundy, where their cultivation is quite unknown. Burgundy is the product of a certain type of vine grown from time immemorial on a particular kind of soil with a particular exposure, at a particular altitude, in a particular climate prevailing between a particular longitude and a particular latitude that coincide in eastern France: a concatenation of elements and circumstances which cannot possibly be reproduced in Australia, South Africa or anywhere else. Nor does “Burgundy,” as is sometimes supposed, denote a certain strength of red wine, a full-bodied growth, in contradistinction to “Claret” (which by the accident of a name, that should rightly be Bordeaux, is not the fraud it sounds, since “Claret” really means no more than a light-red wine) as a term used to imply a lighter-bodied and much less alcoholic type. The alcoholic contents of good Bordeaux and Burgundy, quality for quality, are usually more or less identical. The strength of wines is calculated in alcoholic degrees and not by appropriating names filched from certain representative growths. The essential vinous ethers of these spurious “Hocks” and “Burgundies,” scanty and not very subtle though they are, would, like the rose’s perfume, exhale bouquets just as bland under their own, or any other, names. If a single swallow does not of itself herald an English summer, all the Emus in the Commonwealth cannot transmute a South Australian vintage into the Grande Année of a Côte d’Or Tête de Cuvée.
Even if it be true that vigorous and psychologically intelligent advertising can increase the sales of any article, irrespective of its worth or utility, this would scarcely seem to apply to that particular brand, notable among “Burgundies” which are “generous but not spirity, soft but not sugary” for being sold under the device “Every Meal a Banquet.” That slogan “Every Meal a Banquet” is nicely calculated to deter any normal person from buying this particular brand—and that without even tasting it. Banquets are usually heavy and singularly depressing functions which people like Lord-Lieutenants, princes of the blood, mayors, chairmen of companies, politicians, public officials and diplomats accept with a heavy heart, and only because such occasions are part of their regular duties. Secretly they dread these orgies of ceremonious and oratorical eating as a pernicious waste of time, nefarious to their digestions. Thus we surmise that a wine capable of transforming every meal, however simple, intimate and unpretentious, into that portentously aldermanic and dyspeptic thing, a banquet, must be singularly heavy and soporific in its effects.
If real quality in Empire Wines is to be attained at all, it can only be by abandoning the existing methods of mass-production of Type-Wines and deliberately fostering the particularisation of certain small, but promising, local growths. South Africa, where irrigation of the vineyards is not as common as in Australia—irrigation more than doubles the yield and more than halves the quality—has already made some progress in this direction. As has already been noticed, wines are grown in the Cape at certain localities called Schoongezicht, Paarl and Drakenstein, which we assume, just because they are named, are probably of far better quality than the unnamed South African growths. The Australian Type-Wines, on the other hand, are apparently not even regional specimens of their kind. The average consumer of flagon wines knows nothing whatever about them except that they are grown somewhere in a vast Dominion which is a continent in itself. Keystone, Tintara, Ophir and Harvest are registered trademarks, not places on the map.
That these Australian and South African masqueraders under French and German colours can be sold in Great Britain has been amply proved. In 1926 the consumption of Australian wines increased by over a million gallons. That their sale would fall away by nearly as much—drinking imperially is a habit that, to be abiding, requires some little time to form—were the preference and bounty removed there can be little doubt.
Palestine, the latest recruit to the wine-lands of the Empire, produces imitations—very bad imitations, too, though the wines to which these illustrious and illusory resemblances are attributed by their Zionist growers are, in their rough and humble way, sometimes quite passable wines—of all the classical growths of France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Hungary and Greece: everything, in fact, except an honest and avowedly Palestine wine tel quel. That some of these vineyards are now being turned over to the cultivation of table-grapes, or transformed into orange-groves, for lack of a market for their plagiarising wines, cannot be regretted as long as the Holy Land, of all regions of the earth, has not the proper pride to say of its first-fruits, “a poor thing, but mine own,” rather than “these are extremely fine reproductions, made purposely to resemble the best-known growths of other countries in all respects, and sold under their names at a very reasonable price.”
Thus it is all the more discouraging and humiliating to find that, according to the “Times Trade Supplement,” the British Empire Producers’ Organisation counsels Empire wine-growers “to give more study to questions of bottles and labels, using accepted shapes and designs and leaving alone certificates of purity.” The circular which recommends the expedient of putting new wine into old bottles, a practice recognised as disastrous even in biblical days, closes with the extraordinary statement that “Empire wines are sounder than most foreign wines at similar price, and are only prejudiced by devices (perhaps just the absence of these superfluous certificates of purity?) not usually associated with good wines.” This advice does scant justice to the commercial probity and intelligence of a nation of shopkeepers. It is clear that the very reverse is desirable. Empire Wines should evolve their own shapes of bottles and designs for their labels, just as much as they ought to develop their own individual flavours and other inherent characteristics, to say nothing of discovering their own names. Several of the smaller French growths (notably Anjou and Frontignan), which have recently experienced some difficulty in disposing of their wines remuneratively, have adopted individual types of bottle, and find this policy promotes interest on the part of the public and undoubtedly helps to increase their sales.
If Britons do not have a little more proper pride in their own husbandry, “Empire Produce” will soon come to have something of the purely imitative significance formerly associated with that familiar hall-mark for cheapness and shoddiness: “Made in Germany.” German wines, however, are neither of these péjoratif things, for in German vineyards, which are far from extensive, quantity has always been subordinated to quality. The result is that the yield is very small indeed, while growths like Steinberger and Schloss Johannisberger fetch prices more than double those of the finest French wines, white as red, which are in no wise inferior to them. The reason once again is that German wines do not imitate any others and are content to be unique of their kind. The very considerable difference in price, fine vintage for fine vintage, prevailing between them and the choicest French growths is in ratio to the much larger production of the latter. The royal road to an enhanced quality in Empire Wines is in imitating the painstaking methods and local pride of French and German wine-growers instead of aping the names of their inimitable wines. Empire Wines, even if they are only ordinary beverage wines, must dare to be themselves and brave the risk of standing on their own merits and being sold under their own, and nothing but their own, names. The industry of no nation can take the same pride in slavishly copying the wares of another country as in developing the particular indigenous excellencies of its own. Less than a century ago the Cape produced one wine which became world-famous. That Constantia has disappeared from the tables of European epicures need occasion no surprise. The reason was a simple one. The demand for this wine, which became as fashionable as Madeira, soon exceeded the supply. Constantia was grown in a single vineyard. Increasing popularity led to over-production of its vines, and the growing of much spurious “Constantia,” that was really bad imitation Port, from hastily planted and badly tended vineyards in the surrounding countryside. To-day Constantia, like the Maronean and Pramnian of the Classics, is no more than a memory, though the vineyard still survives and produces, I believe, a “Constantia Claret” (it might have been yet another “Burgundy” but for the irresistible appeal of alliteration) in its stead. The moral is a clear one. Constantia, a fortified red wine, was sold as Constantia and not as Cape “Port,” or Cape “Alicant.” True, it was often referred to as “Cape Constantia,” but this was evidence not of a specious fraud but of a certain local pride in its unusual origin, since no European wine existed of the same name.
The vine has now been acclimatised in South Africa for nearly three hundred years, thus giving the older vineyards time to work out some of that virgin rankness of soil which is a serious handicap to the attainment of fine quality. What South African and Australian viticulture most needs are poorer and more worn soils, more carefully chosen exposures and altitudes for vineyards; and sterner pruning of the vines so as to ensure a far smaller yield per acre.