Wine - Stellenbosch

In the first in a new series, Sebastian Morello looks at ‘Cape wine’, much-loved by Napoleon - and by the Latin Mass Society!

As the threats of unjust land-snatching continue to loom over South Africa, a place I called my home for some years as a teenager, those who have a particular liking for the wines of that country are beginning to worry about the future of its grapes. The Stellenbosch region, near Cape Town, has for centuries been known for producing especially tasty wines (at least since the mid-seventeenth century), with apricotty whites that perfectly accompany the lobsters you can eat on the cheap at the Cape, or full-bodied reds, deliberate claret imitations of Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon blend to satisfy the descendants of the English who live in the area.

It is a strange fact, therefore, that Napoleon Bonaparte, that great enemy of the English, had such a liking for the wines of South Africa, so suited to the Anglo palate. Old documents sold at auction in Salisbury in 2015 reveal the daily booze allowance for the emperor and what remained of his court during imprisonment on St Helena: a bottle of Champagne, ten bottles of claret, half a bottle of Madeira, three bottles of white Bordeaux, a bottle of ‘Tenerife’, and thirty-one bottles of ‘Cape Wine’. Sounds like my kind of imprisonment! That ‘Cape Wine’ was very likely the sort of stuff from Stellenbosch we have come to so enjoy at the Latin Mass Society’s Iota Unum evening talks in London.

Each month, throughout 2019, a talk has been delivered under the Warwick Street church in central London as part of the many initiatives of the LMS; these are the Iota Unum talks. They have been wonderful occasions for the capital’s traditional Catholics to meet, chat, encourage one another, pray together, further their own formation by listening to a thought-provoking talk, and… drink wine together. The house-wine of the Iota Unum series has become, due to popular demand, an especially full-bodied Stellenbosch, heavy on the Merlot, with a sufficiently serious finish to carry you through the forty-five minute talk (at the end of which one is invited to leap up and recharge one’s glass).

Vineyards at Stellenbosch: ‘The daily allowance for Napoleon included thirty-one bottles of Capewine…’

We have had superb speakers at the Iota Unum series, among whom have been Prof. Thomas Pink, Prof. Stephen Bullivant, Peter D. Williams, and Fr Edward van den Bergh; 2020 will see historian Charles Coulombe, Maria Madise, and Mgr Keith Newton, among others. One of the ideas that has repeatedly emerged throughout this lecture series concerns the Church’s ill-fated internalising of Enlightenment rationalism, a corruption of the intellect that has been repeatedly condemned by the Church and Her defenders since the eighteenth century, but nonetheless has become a dominant underlying feature of Catholic culture and liturgical practice, in particular in the last century.

There is something both ironic and charming, therefore, about the fact that one of the favoured tipples of the imprisoned Napoleon, that violent enforcer of rationalist utopianism, has become the drink of choice for a group of traddies who meet each month in a church basement. It is a bit like when the Poles and Austrians baked bread in the shape of Islamic crescents – the genesis of the buttery croissant – for breakfast after the Battle of Vienna in 1683, but a little less dramatic.