wine, for it is the same complexion that noblemen's coats be of." This gentleman must have been a strenuous admirer of the aristocracy. The old Gascon growth was, however, in all probability, what we should now call coarse, rough wine. The district which is blessed by the growth of Chateau Margaux and Chateau Lafitte, was a stony desert. An old French local book gives an account of the "savage and solitary country of Medoc;" and the wines of the Bordelais, there is every reason to believe, were grown in the strong, loamy soil bordering the river. By the time that the magic spots had been discovered, blessed with the mystic properties which produce the Queen of Wine we had been saddled with—our tastes perverted, and our stomachs destroyed—by the woful Methuen treaty—heavy may it sit on the souls of Queen Anne, and all her wigged and powdered ministers—if, indeed, men who preferred port wine to claret can be conceived to have had any souls at all, worth speaking about—and thenceforth John Bull burnt the coat of his stomach, muddled the working of his brain, made himself bilious, dyspeptic, headachy, and nationally stupid, by imbibing a mixture of strong, coarse, wines, with a taste but no flavour, and bedevilled with every alcoholic and chemical adulteration, which could make its natural qualities worse than they were. See how our literature fell off. The Elizabethans quaffed sack, or "Gascoyne, or Rochel wyn;" and we had the giants of those days. The Charles II. comedy writers worked on claret. Port came into fashion—port sapped our brains—and, instead of Wycherly's Country Wife, and Vanbrugh's Relapse, we had Mr. Morton's Wild Oats, and Mr. Cherry's Soldier's Daughter. It is really much to the credit of Scotland, that she stood staunchly by her old ally, France, and would have nothing to do with that dirty little slice of the worst part of Spain—Portugal, or her brandified potations. In the old Scotch houses a cask of claret stood in the hall, nobly on the tap. In the humblest Scotch country tavern, the pewter tappit hen, holding some three quarts—think of that, Master Slender,—"reamed," Anglice mantled, with claret just drawn from the cask, and you quaffed it, snapping your fingers at custom-houses. At length, in an evil hour Scotland fell:
"Bold and erect the Caledonian stood, Firm was his mutton, and his claret good; 'Let him drink port!' the English statesman cried. He drank the poison, and his spirit died!"
But enough of this painful subject. As Quin used to say, "Anybody drink port? No! I thought so: Waiter, take away the black strap, and throw it out."
Upon the principle, I suppose, of the nearer the church, the further from God, Bordeaux is by no means a good place for good ordinary wine; on the contrary, the stuff they give you for every-day tipple is positively poor, and very flavourless. In southern Burgundy, the most ordinary of the wines is capital. At Macon, for a quarter of a handful of sous they give you nectar; at the little town of Tain, where the Rhone sweeps gloriously round the great Hermitage rock, they give you something better than nectar for less. But the ordinary Bordeaux wine is very ordinary indeed; not quite so red-inky, perhaps, as the Vin de Surenne, which, Brillat Savarin says, requires three men to swallow a glassful—the man who drinks, and the friends who uphold him on either side, and coax, and encourage him; but still meagre and starveling, as if it had been strained through something which took the virtue out of it. Of course, the best of wine can be had by the simple process of paying for it, but I am talking of the ordinary work-a-day tipple of the place.
A few days' lounging in Bordeaux over, and hearing that the vintage was in full operation, I put myself into a respectable little omnibus, and started for the true claret country. In a couple of hours I was put down at the door of the only auberge in the tiny village of Margaux, and to any traveller who may hereafter wish to visit the famous wine district, I cordially commend "The Rising Sun," kept by the worthy "Mere Cadillac." There you will have a bedroom clean and bright as a Dutch parlour; a grand old four-poster of the ancient regime, something between a bed and a cathedral; a profusion of linen deliciously white and sweet smelling; and la Mere will toss you up a nice little potage, and a cotelette done to a turn, and an omelette which is perfection; and she will ask you, in the matter of wine, whether you prefer ordinaire or vieux? and when you reply, Vieux et du meilleur, she will presently bustle in with a glorious long-necked, cobwebby flask, the first glass of which will induce you to lean back in a tranquil state of general happiness, and contemplate with satisfaction even the naughty doings of the wicked Marguerite of Burgundy, and her sisters Blanche and Henriette, with Buridan and Gaulnay, in the Tour de Nesle—illustrations of which popular tragedy deck the walls on every side.
While thus agreeably employed, then, I may enlighten you with a few topographical words about the claret district. Look at the map, and you will observe a long tract of country, dotted with very few towns or villages, called the Landes, stretching along the sea coast from the Pyrenees to the mouth of the Gironde. At one place the Landes are almost sixty miles broad, but to the north they fine gradually away, the great river Garonne shouldering them, as it were, into the sea. Now these Landes (into which we will travel presently) are, for the most part, a weary wilderness of pine-wood, morasses, sand-deserts, and barren shingle. On the other hand, the low banks of the Garonne are generally of a fat, loamy, and black soil, called, locally, Palus. Well, between the Palus and the Landes, there is a longish strip of country from two to five miles broad, a low ridge or backbone, which may be said to be the neutral and blending point of the sterile Landes and the fat and fertile Palus. And truth to tell, the earth seems as if the influence of the latter had much to do to bear up against the former. A Norfolk farmer would turn with a contemptuous laugh from the poor-looking stony soil. "Why," says he, "it's all sand, and gravel, and shingle, and scorched with the sun. You would not get a blade of chickweed to grow there." The proprietors of Medoc would be very glad if this latter assertion were correct, for the weeding of the vineyards form no inconsiderable item in the expense of cultivation; but this much may be safely predicted of this strange soil, that it would not afford the nourishment to a patch of oats, which that modest grain manages to extract from the bare hill-side of some cold, bleak, Highland croft, and yet that it furnishes the influence which produces grapes yielding the most truly generous and consummately flavoured wine ever drank by man since Noah planted the first vine slip.
You have now finished the bottle of Vieux. Up, and let us out among the vineyards. A few paces clears us of the little hamlet of Margaux, with its constant rattle of busy coopers, and we are fairly in the country. Try to catch the general coup d'œil. We are in an unpretending pleasant-looking region, neither flat nor hilly—the vines stretching away around in gentle undulations, broken here and there by intervening jungles of coppice-wood, by strips of black firs, or by the stately avenues and ornamental woods of a first-class chateau. Gazing from the bottoms of the shallow valleys, you seem standing amid a perfect sea of vines, which form a monotonous horizon of unvaried green. Attaining the height beyond, distant village spires rise into the air—the flattened roofs and white walls of scattered hamlets gleam cheerfully forth from embowering woods of walnut trees—and the expanse of the vineyards is broken by hedged patches of meadow land, affording the crops of coarse natural hay, upon which are fed the slowly-moving, raw-boned oxen which you see dragging lumbering wains along the winding dusty way.
And now look particularly at the vines. Nothing romantic in their appearance, no trellis work, none of the embowering, or the clustering, which the poets are so fond of. Here, in two words, is the aspect of some of the most famous vineyards in the world.
Fancy open and unfenced expanses of stunted-looking, scrubby bushes, seldom rising two feet above the surface, planted in rows upon the summit of deep furrow ridges, and fastened with great care to low, fence-like lines of espaliers, which run in unbroken ranks from one end of the huge fields to the other. These espaliers or lathes are cuttings of the walnut-trees around, and the tendrils of the vine are attached to the horizontally running stakes with withes, or thongs of bark. It is curious to observe the vigilant pains and attention with which every twig has been supported without being strained, and how things are arranged so as to give every cluster as fair a chance as possible of a goodly allowance of sun. Such, then, is the general appearance of matters; but it is by no means perfectly uniform. Now and then you find a patch of vines unsupported, drooping, and straggling, and sprawling, and intertwisting their branches like beds of snakes; and again, you come into the district