Wine - An evening companion

Sebastian Morello on the pleasures of Coteaux Bourguignons

On many evenings, with the children settled, and my wife returning the home to order after our progeny bestowing a day’s chaos upon it, I sneak off to my study where I pour myself some wine and open a book. Recently I have been dividing this sacral wine time between studying Integralism by Fr Thomas Crean OP and Alan Fimister, The Realm by Fr Aidan Nichols OP (both books are superb, though very different), and meditating on the Psalms. Wine is like a companion for my evening mental pilgrimages, like Tobias’s dog, or, if it is a really good wine, like St Raphael.

This week the wine of choice has been a Coteaux Bourguignons (a new appellation) from Paul Fontaine, a nonvintage Burgundy found at an affordable price at M&S. If you are looking for something really special, this is not it. If, however, you are looking for a quaffing wine which possesses the power – when encouraged with a few pistachios – to transcend that base purpose to join you in noble thoughts, like those prescribed by St Paul to the Philippians (4:8), this can do the trick. They have lightly oaked this wine, probably with chips, which gives it a silky finish. Think apple and blackberry crumble in a bottle.

‘Burgundy’ can of course be said of wine in two senses. There is the Burgundy which refers to any red made from Pinot Noir grapes, wherever it is from in the world; thus, one can speak of a ‘New Zealand Burgundy’. There is also the Burgundy which refers to the region, in which different grapes are grown; for example, the Coteaux Bourguignons I have been enjoying is made from 100 percent Gamay, a grape associated with Beaujolais. ‘Burgundy’ and Pinot Noir came to be used synonymously because, up until quite recently, Pinot Noir was the only grape grown in Burgundy. The great Cîteaux Abbey of the Cistercians, where St Bernard was a monk, is located in Burgundy, and it is not inaccurate to say that Burgundy as a wine region is a product of the Cistercian Order. Those monks cultivated this place into a land of fine wines, and they were utterly devoted to the fickle and delicate Pinot Noir vines with which they enjoyed a monogamous relationship. Indeed, the viticultural principle of terroir comes to us from the Burgundian Cistercians’ Dionysian science. The same grape type, with the same ancestry, can be planted one hundred yards apart and bring forth utterly different wines solely due to the soil in which they were nurtured. Traditionally, when you were drinking Burgundy, more than with any other wine you were encountering a very specific plot on the Earth, this spot made pleasing to God by the dedication and innumerable prayers of countless holy men consecrated under the Rule of their holy father Benedict.

For these reasons, when drinking this new wine of the new Coteaux Bourguignons appellation, I was somewhat perturbed to discover that I was not drinking a true Burgundy, not in the sense of the term which has so developed as to ever honour those holy monks. Indeed, this Gamay wine was too full-bodied to pass as a true Burgundy. This, however, almost gave it the character of what the Italians call a vino da meditazione – good for my purposes.

Nevertheless, sipping a Burgundy (in the literal, unpoetic, and therefore impoverished sense of the term) got me thinking about the importance of terroir. Perhaps the source of our many contemporary maladies comes from being insufficiently rooted in the soil, so to speak. We have largely forgotten concrete things, like earth, vines, wines and pistachios, and have become hysterically obsessive over mere abstractions, abstractions that would be tolerable if they corresponded to something in the world, but this does not seem to be so with the abstractions tormenting us today. Indeed, we have recently seen entire cities thrown into pandemonium over something as abstract as race. This indignation began over a murderous Minneapolis policeman, but by the time people were vandalising Stirling’s statue of Robert the Bruce it had clearly ceased to be about the initial outrage. It is widely believed that an array of moral conclusions can be inferred from one’s allocation to the abstract categories of ‘white’ and ‘black’, as if it were that black and white. I have in fact never met a white person or a black person; all the people I have met have been of different skin pigment intensity, and I have found their skin-pigment to be their least interesting attribute. We undoubtedly need fewer fanatics and more terroiristes.

Our ideas, the possession of which indicates the nobility of our nature, have become our tormentors. This is one of the reasons why liturgy must be profoundly incarnational, with chant, incense, beautiful vestments, candles, statues, mysterious gestures and postures, all filling and elevating the senses. We must be rooted in concrete things, rather than fetishizing useless abstractions. This is one reason why it is so dangerous to get rid of so-called liturgical ‘trappings’, and opt for a whitewashed versus populum liturgy centred on transmitting ideas through the vernacular – this is the last thing the modern mind needs.

Wine is to the hearth what liturgy is to the sanctuary. It has a ritual of its own: cutting the foil, twisting the corkscrew, drawing out the cork, pouring, swilling, smelling, sipping, contemplating; indeed, the imposition of the screw-top is like replacing the Canon with new prayers written on a napkin. Wine roots you in a place, fills the senses, accompanies you up to the sphere of ideas while keeping your feet on the ground, recalling you back each time you pick up the glass.