Evelyn Waugh wrote beautifully and candidly about wine, but as connoisseur or snob? Bruce Palling looks beyond Brideshead Revisited to reveal the complicated role that wine played in the author’s life and work
Drink and, more importantly, the consequences of excessive drinking, saturated Evelyn Waugh’s life and work. In the first paragraph of his first novel Decline and Fall, the Oxford bursar and junior dean are discussing the inevitability of excessive drinking at the Bollinger Club. In his next novel Vile Bodies, we have only to wait until page 3 before Lady Throbbing and her twin sister Mrs Blackwater are knocking back a bottle of Champagne to ease the pain of a rough Atlantic crossing.
When Brideshead Revisited was published 15 years later, wine references were even thicker on the ground. In the opening chapter, Sebastian Flyte invites the narrator Charles Ryder to escape the confines of his dreary Oxford College.
You’re to come away at once, out of danger. I’ve got a motor-car and a basket of strawberries and a bottle of Château Peyraguey—which isn’t a wine you’ve ever tasted, so don’t pretend. It’s heaven with strawberries.
Ryder earlier explains he only got to know Flyte because he stuck his head into his rooms through an open window to be sick. One of Flyte’s inebriated friends explained to Ryder the cause of this sudden illness:
“The wines were too various,” he said; “it was neither the quality nor the quantity that was at fault. It was the mixture. Grasp that and you have the root of the matter. To understand all is to forgive all.”
The later encounter of Sebastian and Charles with the detritus of the cellars of Brideshead Castle is probably the most famous description of wine drinking in English literature (see box, pp.98–99). Ryder says that it was at Brideshead that he “first made a serious acquaintance with wine and sowed the seed of that rich harvest which was to be my stay in many barren years.” Less well known, but perhaps even more interesting, is the dinner Ryder arranges in Paris with Rex Mottram, a brash Canadian adventurer with more than a passing resemblance to Conrad Black. What is of further interest is that Waugh actually toned down this portion of the book 15 years later, explaining that the months immediately before the D-Day landings in June 1944 were
a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster—the period of soya beans and Basic English— and in consequence the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language, which now with a full stomach I find distasteful. I have modified the grosser passages but have not obliterated them because they are an essential part of the book.
Given Mottram’s offer to pay and Ryder’s relative poverty, he orders “a soup of oseille, a sole quite simply cooked in a white wine sauce, a caneton à la presse, a lemon soufflé,” but fearing it might all be a bit simple for such a vulgarian as Mottram, he adds caviar aux blinis at the last moment.
For wine, Ryder chose a bottle of 1906 Montrachet, then at its prime and, with the duck, a Clos de Bère of 1904. (This is corrected to Clos de Bèze in the revised edition.) No further mention is made of the Montrachet, but the “Clos de Bère” gets the full Waugh treatment.
I rejoiced in the Burgundy. How can I describe it? The pathetic fallacy resounds in all our praise of wine. For centuries every language has been strained to define its beauty, and has produced only wild conceits or the stock epithets of the trade. This Burgundy seemed to me, then, serene and triumphant, a reminder that the world was an older and better place than Rex knew, that mankind in its long passion had learned another wisdom than his. By chance I met this same wine again, lunching with my wine merchant in St James’s Street, in the first autumn of the war; it had softened and faded in the intervening years, but it still spoke in the pure, authentic accent of its prime and, that day, as at Paillard’s with Rex Mottram years before, it whispered faintly, but in the same lapidary phrase, the same words of hope.
Initially, Waugh’s actual tastes ran far more toward ale, then Port and Champagne, rather than claret or Burgundy. Waugh admits in A Little Learning, his autobiography, that his account of two undergraduates making free in a fine-wine cellar and “exulting in their acquaintance with wine” was not his happy experience.
Asked about sports at Oxford, Waugh allegedly quipped, “I drank for Hertford.”
Drink and, more importantly, the consequences of excessive drinking, saturated Evelyn Waugh’s life and work. In the first paragraph of his first novel Decline and Fall, the Oxford bursar and junior dean are discussing the inevitability of excessive drinking at the Bollinger Club. In his next novel Vile Bodies, we have only to wait until page 3 before Lady Throbbing and her twin sister Mrs Blackwater are knocking back a bottle of Champagne to ease the pain of a rough Atlantic crossing.
When Brideshead Revisited was published 15 years later, wine references were even thicker on the ground. In the opening chapter, Sebastian Flyte invites the narrator Charles Ryder to escape the confines of his dreary Oxford College.
You’re to come away at once, out of danger. I’ve got a motor-car and a basket of strawberries and a bottle of Château Peyraguey—which isn’t a wine you’ve ever tasted, so don’t pretend. It’s heaven with strawberries.
Ryder earlier explains he only got to know Flyte because he stuck his head into his rooms through an open window to be sick. One of Flyte’s inebriated friends explained to Ryder the cause of this sudden illness:
“The wines were too various,” he said; “it was neither the quality nor the quantity that was at fault. It was the mixture. Grasp that and you have the root of the matter. To understand all is to forgive all.”
The later encounter of Sebastian and Charles with the detritus of the cellars of Brideshead Castle is probably the most famous description of wine drinking in English literature (see box, pp.98–99). Ryder says that it was at Brideshead that he “first made a serious acquaintance with wine and sowed the seed of that rich harvest which was to be my stay in many barren years.” Less well known, but perhaps even more interesting, is the dinner Ryder arranges in Paris with Rex Mottram, a brash Canadian adventurer with more than a passing resemblance to Conrad Black. What is of further interest is that Waugh actually toned down this portion of the book 15 years later, explaining that the months immediately before the D-Day landings in June 1944 were
a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster—the period of soya beans and Basic English— and in consequence the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language, which now with a full stomach I find distasteful. I have modified the grosser passages but have not obliterated them because they are an essential part of the book.
Given Mottram’s offer to pay and Ryder’s relative poverty, he orders “a soup of oseille, a sole quite simply cooked in a white wine sauce, a caneton à la presse, a lemon soufflé,” but fearing it might all be a bit simple for such a vulgarian as Mottram, he adds caviar aux blinis at the last moment.
For wine, Ryder chose a bottle of 1906 Montrachet, then at its prime and, with the duck, a Clos de Bère of 1904. (This is corrected to Clos de Bèze in the revised edition.) No further mention is made of the Montrachet, but the “Clos de Bère” gets the full Waugh treatment.
I rejoiced in the Burgundy. How can I describe it? The pathetic fallacy resounds in all our praise of wine. For centuries every language has been strained to define its beauty, and has produced only wild conceits or the stock epithets of the trade. This Burgundy seemed to me, then, serene and triumphant, a reminder that the world was an older and better place than Rex knew, that mankind in its long passion had learned another wisdom than his. By chance I met this same wine again, lunching with my wine merchant in St James’s Street, in the first autumn of the war; it had softened and faded in the intervening years, but it still spoke in the pure, authentic accent of its prime and, that day, as at Paillard’s with Rex Mottram years before, it whispered faintly, but in the same lapidary phrase, the same words of hope.
Initially, Waugh’s actual tastes ran far more toward ale, then Port and Champagne, rather than claret or Burgundy. Waugh admits in A Little Learning, his autobiography, that his account of two undergraduates making free in a fine-wine cellar and “exulting in their acquaintance with wine” was not his happy experience.
Asked about sports at Oxford, Waugh allegedly quipped, “I drank for Hertford.”