Wine and Words

There's nothing like a glass of wine and a good book. Curled up by the fire, sipping at each turn of the page, what could be more civilised? Ernest Hemingway knew that: 'Wine is one of the most civilised things is the world' he wrote in 'Death in the Afternoon', 'and one of the natural things of the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection'. But if you are going to read Hemingway, can you drink Hemingway? As the matching of wine to food obesesses some, why not the matching of wine to books?

In a way Hemingway is easy. He loved Valpolicella (which was a bit unfortunate because he famously couldn't pronounce the letter 'L'), but he had an easier time with the other drinks he loved including Scotch Whisky, daiquiris, tequila and bourbon.

You see novelists are often keen drinkers. Henry Fielding loved Champagne. So anyone leafing through his jaunty romp 'Tom Jones', would surely receive his approval if they enlivened their reading with a glass of the fizzy stuff as well. Other writers loved Champagne too, although sometimes not for themselves. Thakeray was a Claret man, but for women he recommended Champagne: 'make 'em drink, make 'em talk: - make 'em talk, make 'em do anything'. But he cautioned people to be generous: 'if you wish to save' he wrote 'save upon your hocks, sauternes and moselles, which count for nothing, but disappear down careless throats like so much toast and water…'

Dr Samuel Johnson had firm views on which wines were best. 'Claret is the liquor for boys, port for men'. In particular he was a fan of a punch called 'Bishop', a blend of Port, orange and sugar, but he had to give it up after an illness. Never one to doubt his own intellect he felt uniquely able to cope with this. As Boswell remarked in the 'Life of Johnson': 'He said that few people had intellectual resources sufficient to forgo the pleasures of wine. They could not otherwise contrive how to fill the interval between dinner and supper'.

Another Port fan was Alfred Lord Tennyson, whose favourite meal was a steak washed down with a pint of port. Other fans of fortified wines included Lewis Carroll who loved sherry, nonsense poet and artist Edward Lear who described himself drinking Marsala and the Irish playwright Oliver Goldsmith who drank madeira. But maderia's heady fumes were too much for Goldsmith's fellow Irishman James Joyce, a lover of aromatic whites like Riesling, Swiss Fendant, white Chianti and the rarely seen Neufchatel.

Thackeray has already been mentioned as a Claret fan, and he's not alone among writers in that. Trollope too loved claret and Keats was known to be a fan of Chateaux Margaux, writing 'How I like claret!… It fills one's mouth with a gushing freshness, then goes down cool and feverless; then you do not feel it quarrelling with one's liver'. Like a lot of them, his passion for wine sat along his passion for ladies, as in the poem 'Give me wine, women and snuff, Until I cry out "hold, enough"'.

And in this way he is rather like Byron in Don Juan: 'Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter, Sermons and soda water the day after'. But then you can go too far in matching your reading to drinking. Byron once drank Burgundy from a human skull….