Nº1 •
Liquid Pearl
Antiquity’s most famous lovers were also fond of wine, especially the sweet wines of Egypt. Cleopatra reportedly seduced Antony by betting him that she could spend ten million sesterces on a single banquet.
She then dissolved a pearl, worth that amount, in a cup of vinegar and drank her pearl-essence-liquid. The pearl probably came from one of her earrings, which were made of two legendary large pearls that had belonged to Julius Caesar. Antony was so impressed by her gesture that he declined to drink his own pearl, and instead kissed her.
Anyone who devours a bottle of fine alcohol merrily will tell you: it’s about the memories you make while drinking it. They align to shape a life’s path, love or even history itself. All the royal wines of banquets be damned, that one glass of acid-washed pearl must have tasted delightful.
The following year, Octavian besieged Alexandria, and the lovers committed suicide.
Nº2 •
The Royal Taste of Global Warming
The king and queen of the Netherlands often drink the elegant mineral wines from the Dutch house of Apostelhoeve. I’ve been told this by the winemaker and have seen the wine in photographs of royal banquets. The wines from Apostelhoeve are somewhat of a miracle, and right now the vineyard is making the best wines of its existence. Their grapes infuse flavours of Limburg’s marl and pebble soil into the wine; they are the sun-drenched product of global warming, which is making the otherwise cold Dutch soil eerily similar to the famous vineyards of Bordeaux in the first half of the last century. You might wonder if the king and queen think of this when they drink it. How, somehow, this late stage of global warming is creating a marvellous form of wine previously impossible in the Netherlands. I know I do, whenever I have the chance to drink it.
But it’s just wine, I think to myself, with the sweat in my palms pooling. The small bones in my fingers are gripped around the stem of a glass so thin it could break from breathing too hard. The nerves on my tongue are aching. Of course it’s just wine! Just like the love of your life is also just a person, and the careless smile of a child is ultimately also just the careless smile of a child.
And yet, it’s so much more. Wine is a vessel that transports soil, thus life itself, through time. It’s a living organism that evolves, changes, grows tired and gets uplifted again. It’s woven into the fabric of history itself, even when you don’t pay attention to it. It’s all the events of a year, captured in a bottle for posterity. It’s the king, putting the sweet taste of inevitable climate catastrophe to his lips and liking it.
Nº3 •
Sad Champagne Era 🙁
After the iconic video of her serenading him with ‘Happy Birthday Mr President,’ Marilyn Monroe reportedly drank Champagne with John F. Kennedy. I wonder if at any point she slurred her words. If she drank to celebrate, or just to feel something. If they talked about the salinity or caramel notes in the wine. If they drank to taste, or just drank to drink.
During the filming of the 1959 crime comedy Some Like It Hot, it was reported that Monroe drank a bottle of Dom Perignon Champagne every day. It’s one of those pieces of trivia, one of those facts, that goes on to lead a life of its own, possibly because it’s just so thrilling to think of stardom as this carefree, alcohol-infused Hollywood dream.
In Balloon Pop, Outlaw Black (2012), Patricia Lockwood writes of Popeye that ‘His pants are not white, they are empty. His face is not white, it is empty. His arms are not white, they are empty. When we say “pants, face, arms” what we mean is “where ink ends and the rest of him begins.”’ The same is true for Marilyn Monroe, whose life is coloured by lore and myth, while those are merely where the traces of her begin. The filming of Some Like It Hot was very stressful and chaotic, with frequent delays and reshoots due to Monroe’s erratic behaviour and forgetfulness. Monroe was known to have a difficult time memorising her lines and often required many takes to complete a scene. While the image of Champagne is carefully curated to be the designated juice of celebration, it doesn’t sound like there was much to celebrate during the shooting of the movie. So how about those who drink without anything to celebrate?
Dom Perignon: the vintage prestige cuvée from luxury conglomerate LVMH. Its luxury lies mostly in its image, because although nobody knows the numbers, there are millions of bottles of the wine on the market and, yes, it’s expensive, but it can’t really be that scarce. Dom Perignon is a wonderful product of delicate blending, ripening and myth-making. Somehow the perfect Champagne for Marilyn Monroe to be associated with. Her Dom Perignon is not a Dom Perignon, it is the empty space inside her, and when we say Dom Perignon we mean: tragic film star death.
Although referred to as ‘the Jefferson Bottles,’ these bottles of wine never actually belonged to Thomas Jefferson but were crafted by the German collector Hardy Rodenstock.
Nº4 •
Filthy Rich
The relationship between wine and financial markets seems permanent now that it’s an asset class being invested in. But many of today’s most notable wine houses were just as famous before the age of branding, before global capitalism even existed.
Thomas Jefferson visited Bordeaux in 1787, and noted that Château Lafite was one of the four vineyards of first quality. He was so impressed with its wine that he ordered several cases of it annually. And to this day his choice proves to be a good one. The wines of Château Lafite have existed since the seventeenth century, and by 1855 would be among the first classification of great Bordeaux.
Opening a bottle of Lafite can feel a little like witnessing a magic trick. A single bottle can fill a room with the scent of ripe red fruits and pencil shavings. The wine drinks like entering a cathedral, growing larger and larger by the second. In particular, Bordeaux wines from great years are somewhat indestructible – they continue to drink great long after every hand that plucked the grapes has passed away – which is why they often fetch high prices at auction.
When bottles from Jefferson’s personal wine collection were discovered, it made world news. What a miracle to uncover a portal to a historical time. These wines belonged in a museum. Instead, they went to auction. Most sold for astronomical prices, which was unfortunate as they later turned out to be fraudulent bottles.
They were crafted by the illustrious German collector Hardy Rodenstock, who seemed to have an endless supply of great wines. (And who, when yet to be unmasked as a fraudster, also designed the best modern wine glass for sweet wine from Sauternes, still available to purchase through world-famous glass-maker Riedel.)
Rodenstock doctored old wines to appear even older. The wine world’s original grifter was even ballsy enough to invite known experts to drink from his seemingly endless supply of rarer-than-unicorn bottles. The book The Billionaire’s Vinegar (2008) details the case along with his ultimate downfall, but I mostly think about the defrauded buyers. All these men who wanted history to pass through their bodies, who wanted something immortal in their bloodstream. How they wanted it to be real. How, for a brief moment, before the wines were uncorked, it was.
Château Mouton Rothschild is renowned not just for of its delicious wine but also for its 1945 ‘V for Victory’ label that commemorates the end of the Second World War.
Nº5 •
The Art World and the Wine World Hook Up
Salvador Dali, Jeff Koons, Dorothea Tanning, Joan Miro, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol and Anish Kapoor are artists who have all drunk the wines of Château Mouton Rothschild, as they designed labels for it. Payment for this honorary job is made in cases of wine. The idea came from Baron Philippe Rothschild, owner of the château since 1922, who was an art lover and the heir to one of the great houses of Bordeaux.
The most iconic bottle of Mouton he produced, one you could rightfully call one of the most extraordinary wines on the planet, had a label designed by the (still) relatively unknown illustrator Philippe Julien. For the 1945 label, the baron commissioned him to create the ‘V for Victory’ label that distinguishes the Mouton from this year.
The estate itself suffered during the war, as it was occupied by the Wehrmacht and used as a headquarters. Rothschild, himself being Jewish, fled to England but was able to return in time for the 1945 harvest. While the harvest was smaller than usual, the grapes had become intensely ripe, bursting with flavour. But above all, there was an emotional component to this particular vintage: it was the year Germany was defeated. It was a wine that marked how the war and its years of suffering had ended. It now fetches record prices at auction, which is understandable for a wine that captures the celebration of a free life.
Nº6 •
Pride and Prejudice and Poisoning
The author of Pride and Prejudice (1813) was a moderate drinker, but she enjoyed a glass of claret, the common style of red wine from Bordeaux. Jane Austen mentions wines several times in her letters and books, often as a symbol of social status or refinement. She wrote: ‘For elegance and ease and luxury […] I shall eat ice and drink French wine, and be above vulgar economy.’ I imagine her drinking mostly in company. The regency era was great because it predates the invention of the potluck, and so the dinner parties must have been so much better. And drunker.
Due to awful shipping conditions for fine wines, most claret and Champagne exported at the time was probably blended with a fortified brandy, preventing the wine from arriving cooked to a vinegar. If the regency affair seems erratic, imagine how they were daily drinking the equivalent of a New York sour. Austen herself once wrote: ‘I believe I drank too much wine last night at Hurstbourne; I know not how else to account for the shaking of my hand today,’ having drunk enough to feel the crushing power of alcohol poisoning.
In their purest form, claret wine blends are doppelgängers of Austen’s work. The claret wines of Bordeaux are all about their own relative balance, about the way the different grapes fold into each other. How they synchronise to hold tension, joy and lust. When a claret is good – and it can be close to perfect – you would forget that a cellar master had a hand in its production.
Not at all unlike a Jane Austen novel.
Nº7 •
A Sonnet in the Form of a Haiku
In a now famous photograph, Rihanna walks out of an LA restaurant with a bottle of wine. On Twitter, somebody asks what beverage would be worth taking for leftovers. Of course, it’s Sassicaia. A luscious, gripping, complete rollercoaster of an Italian wine that originated in the Bolgheri region of Tuscany. The name Sassicaia means ‘place of many stones,’ and refers to the gravelly soil of the vineyards. The wine was an invention of Marchese Mario Incisa della Rocchetta, who planted cabernet sauvignon vines on his estate in the 1940s, inspired by the wines of Bordeaux. He initially produced the wine for his own consumption, but in 1968 he released the first commercial vintage of Sassicaia, which received acclaim from critics and wine lovers and has become somewhat world famous. Sassicaia is considered one of the first ‘super Tuscans’; wines that broke away from the traditional rules of Italian wine making by using non-native grape varieties. It’s like declaring to write a sonnet in the form of haiku.
The wine is a blend of cabernet sauvignon and cabernet franc that is aged in French oak barrels for at least two years. It’s wine that is elegant, complex and accompanied by the flavours of black fruits, spices, herbs and tobacco. It’s a wine that can age for decades – I once had a bottle of the 1985 that made me wish I myself would taste that young at thirty. I later drank a bottle of 2016 that I knew would outlive me. Wasting a drop, as Rihanna knows, would be a little like dying.
In the music video for her song ‘Feeling Myself,’ Beyoncé pours a bottle of Ace of Spades Champagne into the hot tub for some extra moisture.
Nº8 •
Champagne Terrorism
In a 2015 video, Beyoncé is seen pouring a bottle of rosé Ace of Spades Champagne into a bathtub. There is something ethereal about that image, of Beyoncé in that bathtub of Champagne, seeing the body of one the most famous living pop stars of the century, bathing in what can only be described as an act of utmost opulence. It was bell hooks who called Beyoncé a terrorist, referring to her specific liberal brand of feminism.
But if anything, Beyoncé’s brand of feminism is, in regards to Champagne, perfectly curated. Despite the obvious reading of Champagne as a symbol for lavish living, juice of the elites or Marilyn Monroe cosplay, there is a politically significant weight to it as iconography.
Champagne is seldom recog-nised as an artform that was changed by women. Unfairly. Just as the first brut-style Champagne was invented by Madame Pommery, Apolline Henriot founded the house of Henriot in 1808. Elisabeth ‘Lily’ Billecart was the successful head of the Billecart-Salmon company, Lily Bollinger was the head of the house Bollinger for thirty years, and Veuve Clicquot Champagne became world famous due to Madame Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin, a French widow who took over her husband’s wine business when she was only twenty-seven years old. She invented a revolutionary technique for producing rosé Champagne by blending red and white grapes together, and she also improved the quality and clarity of Champagne by creating the first riddling table. More than a terrorist, Beyoncé can actually be read as a propagandist for the female invention that modern Champagne is.
Nº9 •
Napoleon and his Thirst
The emperor of France and conqueror of Europe had a passion for Chambertin, a red wine from Burgundy. He drank it before and after battles, believing that it gave him courage and strength. He always carried silver flasks with him that had been specially designed to hold a bottle of Chambertin each.
Chambertin is the name of a grand cru vineyard in Burgundy that yields around 51,000 bottles per year. This is split over twenty-five producers, who all own a few hectares each of the iconic vineyard. Where most pinot noirs, unlike the name suggests, are fairly light in colour, most Chambertin ranges from bright to deep ruby red, and is sometimes even black cherry in colour. It’s the type and shade of colour that Byredo would release as a lipstick, and you can understand why they’d call that specific hue of red ‘burgundy.’
The wine’s taste is robust. Did you ever see any of the portrayals of Napoleon where he looks pudgy, utterly serious and bordering on grumpy? You could very well mistake the description for a young Chambertin. These robust, full-bodied wines will reveal a firm structure, velvety tannin and a meaty texture – but only if you catch them right in time.
I’ve drank a bottle only once, feeling connected not just to Bonaparte but to the origins of European winemaking itself.
In the second century ce, wine was made in Burgundy by monks who meticulously documented all of its best soil. Thus, most famous Burgundy vineyards are just building upon a tradition passed down for centuries. They all have an exceptional status and majestic quality; the best Burgundy bottles sell for the price of a very fast and very shiny German car.
Napoleon himself once said that ‘nothing makes the future look so rosy as to contemplate it through a glass of Chambertin.’ Which might be why he even carried a bottle of Chambertin with him when he was exiled to St Helena.
Nº10 •
Honey, Apricot and Death
The emperor also had a par-ticular fondness for a sweet wine from South Africa known as Grand Constance, which he drank daily while in exile. According to his valet, Louis-Étienne Saint-Denis, Napoleon preferred this wine to all the other wines that were available to him on the island. He even asked for a glass of it on his deathbed, but it was too late to fulfil his wish.
Grand Constance is still produced at Groot Constantia, the oldest wine estate in South Africa, founded in 1685. The wine is made from muscat grapes, which are sun dried and fermented in wooden barrels, resulting in a rich and aromatic sweet wine with notes of honey and apricot. The wine was highly prized in Europe, especially in France, where it was known as vin de Constance or Constantia. The first time I drank it I was sure the taste would never leave my tongue. It’s like swallowing a blanket while enjoying the sacred feeling of being held
by one.
In 2016, a bottle of Grand Constance dated 1821 and intended for Bonaparte was sold for €1,550 on the online auction site CataWiki. That seems like a low price to pay for the liquid memory of the death of an empire.