Notes on Notes on a Cellar Book
As a buying guide, George Saintsbury's Notes on a Cellar Book is useless. He recalls the wines he's enjoyed in 60 years of drinking, but you'll never get to taste the bottles. It's bad enough that he mentions the '69 this or the '72 that, but these are years from the nineteenth century, not the twentieth.
As a window into wine appreciation 80-100 years ago, however, this book is fascinating. Offhand comments remind you that oidium, phylloxera, and Prohibition were current events. Wine came from "shippers," and you bought it by the cask. German wine was called "hock," after Hochheim in the Rheingau. England was the center of wine criticism and the export market everyone wanted to be in.
But the armchair time travel isn't just between the lines. Saintsbury opens with chapters on sherry and port, topics often left out of today's general-purpose wine books. His choice wasn't odd; England imported these wines by the boatload as a residual effect of British imperialism—to this day, most major Port companies belong to English families. Bordeaux and Burgundy, on the other hand, share a chapter. Aside from Champagne, the rest of the wine world is dealt with in a chapter entitled "Hock, Moselle, and the Rest." Saintsbury suggests wine and spirits as cures for specific diseases, and gives glimpses of his and other cellars where you'd find beer casks and containers holding a mix of port and sherry, combined when each had gotten stale in the decanter. And he has none of the prosy tasting notes we're so used to seeing. The modern tasting note is a fairly recent invention; Saintsbury merely praises the virtues of different drinks. Even I, who hates the blandness of modern tasting notes, wanted to know how those wines tasted.
On the other hand, it's easy to draw modern parallels to Saintsbury's opinions. He argues that wine's proper place is alongside good food and charming company, an early version of the romantic wine writing we find today. He rails against England's temperance movement, much as we shake our heads at states where you can't purchase wine on Sunday. He takes shots at the blanket opinions covering all wines from a single vintage, a silliness that persists to this day.
At least, that's what I think he says. My inner wine geek enjoyed the comparison of connoisseurship then and now, but my inner writing geek noticed how the definition of good writing has changed in the same period. Clauses and tangents interrupt the text like facial tics. Saintsbury assumes that his reader can blithely translate French or Latin phrases, know the meanings of uncommon words, and understand shorthand allusions to poets and other contemporary writers. I often had to re-read sentences to make sure I had followed his meaning through the maze of asides. On the other hand, Saintsbury might find my "cut all that you can" style terse and staccato.
My mission as a wine writer is to make the subject approachable to more people. But I admit that a part of me enjoys this glimpse of a more elite wine scene. Elaborate parties, with true ladies and gentlemen bedecked for dinner. Tables laden with crystal. Clubs where members sipped sherry and played dominoes. But in the end, I'm happy to draw the curtains over that window and look out my own, where everyone gets to play the wine game.
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