# Through a Glass Lightly/Claret

CLARET
CLARET
It seems out of the nature of things that man should be drunken, as we use the term, on so admirable a liquor, and so it has ever appeared to me a mistake that Ripton Thompson should ​have been permitted to drown his five wits in Claret. Surely champagne had been meeter. But this Claret is ever being diluted with abuses, and it scarce surprises that a great man’s name should be evermore associated with a coloured concoction which the unthinking persist in calling Gladstone Claret even unto this day. So is a lordly title dishonoured in the application. Yet that one, of whom it has sometimes been asserted that his promises are writ in water, should find his immortality traced in the nobler fluid affords matter for thought.
But to the name itself there clings a romance no politician nor any touting advertiser can whollydegrade or dispel. His father-grape is himself a true patrician, abiding in fair Châteaux, with ancient honey-sounding ​names and yet so poor withal that, if truth were told, the most of these holds are unfurnished and dismantled, and many are not in France at all, but (alas!) in Spain. The soil of his garden is of such magnificent sterility that any of less lineage would starve. Yet has he such a grace as, search God’s most fruitful valleys as you may, you shall never find again; for it is the grace of gentle blood that is unadulterated with the prosperity of richness. What boots it that, flushed with the fat of Californian uplands, or bloated with the middle-class pride of Australian vineyards, these Colonial braggarts would seek to disinherit their brother of Bordeaux? They cannot do it; his title is indefeasible. So they come and go to the tune of “Tin-tara-boom-de-​ay” on a very brazen band: which is, perhaps, as it should be. And while ever trying to persuade the world they are as good as he of Bordeaux, they do not call themselves by names that enthral the ear and capture the purse, but are grossly ticketed Port type, or Sherry type, or Claret type, as the case may be. Where, then, the wonder if men turn to hear of Château Pichon de Longueville, Château de Beycheville, Château Leoville? What flood but would seem glorious from illustrious founts like these? Yet is the method, open to abuses. Such names are weavers of spells, and send you floating back to those happier ages when Scotland and France were more to each other than Scotland and England, and the link was this Claret; so that, as the years broadened into the ​later and bigger-drinking centuries, it came about that in Scotland there was good Claret and better Claret, but no bad Claret. They tell the same tale of Whiskey now: of Claret—not. Yet, though we may still find “Gladstone” flooding the cellars of Scots who should know better, there is a feeling in the air that traditions are not quickly broken, and that such Claret is still landed at the Port of Leith as the Port of London can never hope to acquire.
The world is growing bigger and bigger, and though the ranks of the Teetotaller are “swellin wisibly”, the God Dionysos still holds his cult, and the wine merchant looms large on the horizon. He comes on the wings of the circular, and clad in the raiment of hyperbole, flagrantly disregarding the adage that good ​wine needs no bush, and the pages of his catalogues are strewn with false and perjured epithets. So great are his eulogies of what he is pleased to call his “light Clarets” that for the real thing, if he have it, language falls too short for adoration. To begin with superlatives at the lowest rung of the ladder is to make sure of vertigo and a plunge into anti-climax from the top: so his “grand wines” remain in splendid isolation, whence their three figures alone convey a sense of excellence. Yet even here a man may be undone, and the Claret of his dreams remains an airy phantasm: for though he may find in a day, if his purse be long enough, a Port that is irreproachable, it demands a more arduous pilgrimage ere he come on an incomparable Claret.