Susannah Cibber was a terrific singer, by all accounts. Handel gave her the contralto solos in Messiah, and she had a great acting career as well: she became the highest paid actress in England.
What did she sound like? Not the most polished of singers by contemporary accounts, but very expressive, very moving, very sweet, and with a wide vocal range. And that’s pretty much all we have to go on.
Nor do we know what ancient musical instruments sounded like, or what the music sounded like in Greek theatres. Prehistoric bone flutes have been discovered, and played: you can hear them online. They sound rather modern. But what music was played on them we do not know.
Nor do we know what wine tasted like in the past. Wine, like music, is a performance art, but unlike music now it can’t be recorded. The second taste can be different to the first, even from the same glassful, and especially if food is involved.
And so we’re obsessed with pinning it down, writing yard-long tasting notes most of which convey nothing for all their length, except how many adjectives we know. The more tasting notes from different tasters you put together to try and arrive at a consensus, the more you end up with the information that it tasted like, well, wine. Apart from the few seconds in which it is in your mouth, or the scent in your nose, wine is virtual. It is either past or future.
Which do we enjoy more? Memory or anticipation? It works for mice too, apparently. According to a report in The Times the other day, baby mice exposed to the smell of citronella while living in the lap of luxury (cornflakes, running wheels, playmates) loved the smell of citronella in adulthood. Those who did not associate the smell with pleasurable experiences were indifferent to it later. Which, as an aside, is useful information for anyone wanting their Christening gift of a case of 2024 Port to be properly appreciated by its recipient: wave a glass of good Vintage under their noses while they’re having a happy time pulling the legs off their enemies on Tik Tok, or whatever children do for amusement now. In future years those memory networks will spring into action every time Port comes their way and they’ll be raiding your cellar long before you’re dead enough to hand them the key. The wine trade’s problems will be solved for another generation.
Think of Chaucer’s Pardoner, being transported to ‘Spaigne, right at the toune of Lepe’ by three draughts of ‘wyn of Spaigne’. Or taste a Very Very Old Port – perhaps a Tawny, perhaps a white like Taylor’s latest release: it’s freighted with memories, and thanks to photography they don’t even have to be our memories. Nobody under 85 remembers the Douro Valley 80 years ago, which is the average age of the wine; but we’ve seen photographs. Photography, I contend, has done more to increase the enjoyment of wine by association than anything else. Photographs link us to the shooting parties, the picnics, the basking river (not yet dammed), the proudly shown new cars, the dresses, the improbable suits in hot summers. The taste of wine can transport us to somewhere we never were.
An even older wine – one older than photography – is weirdly less vivid. I’ve tasted Madeira from the 18th century, and I told myself, as I pinched myself, that this was made when Marie-Antoinette was on the throne of France! This was made when George III was alive! But the thrill was less because the references were less personal. A faded photograph of a group of people one never knew looking faintly uncomfortable in a spot one has never visited strikes far more of a chord than the formal relics of a century or more earlier. Momentary experience, caught on film, responds to the momentary experience of the wine.
A friend of mine will hunt down obscure bottles of Burgundy and take them to their vineyard to drink them. It’s fun, but literal. If I taste Mouton-Rothschild I’m less likely to be transported back to particular corners of that vineyard, and more likely to remember Philippine and the time I went to interview her in Paris and she was hopelessly late and I was starving hungry and the maid brought some petits fours and I wondered how many I could eat without looking desperate. Give me a taste of Mouton-Rothschild and I think of those petits fours.
Fungal networks in soil spread out way beyond the roots of a plant to reach other plants, other fungal networks. A single photograph of a Spanish peasant with a wineskin extends our memory networks to a culture we never knew. Rather as an oak tree might depend in winter on networks stretching for miles for its nutrition, so wine depends on the links provided by forms that extend way beyond memory to sustain its glamour, and to give the moments of tasting a resonance far beyond a few adjectives.
The indifference, the quick snap of the camera is far more effective in this than the weighted imagination of the painter. Vladimir Nabokov in Speak, Memory mentions somebody looking at home movies made before his birth: ‘He saw a world that was practically unchanged – the same house, the same people –and then realised that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence.’
The photographs in The Australian Ark, Andrew Caillard MW’s monumental history of Australian wine, are extraordinarily evocative. My copy of Volume I falls open at a picture from the 1870s: a young woman in a torn, shabby dress and worn shoes standing composedly in the doorway of the Gulgong Tobacconist in NSW, which sold cricketing equipment – ‘bats, balls, stumps & gloves of every description’, tobacco, ‘cigars of the best brand’, bread for 4d a loaf (the sort that would be £6 now) and ‘Colonial Wine’s’ [sic].
Volume II of The Australian Ark has a 1942 photograph of ‘Australian Army officers sampling Champagne intended for the messes of the AIF in the Middle East’: Charles Heidsieck, cases stencilled ‘Zone Franche Privée, Beyrouth’, the officers – ciggie in mouth, paper cup in hand, trying not to laugh. It takes my thoughts in more directions than I can count: my father in the British Army, my uncle in the Australian Air Force, Beirut and the long and cosmopolitan history of Levantine culture, Champagne, Dad’s Army, pinewood wine boxes, forest fires in the Landes…
There is a portrait of Susannah Cibber, by Thomas Hudson, in 1749. It’s a very nice portrait of a young woman, not a beauty, dressed in heavy satin with pearls in her hair, her face the anonymised female face of the day. It would look very good over a fireplace on in a panelled hall. She, like a bottle of wine, was a performance artist. Like unrecorded music or wine in the bottle, she is mute.
Photo by Kyle Head on Unsplash