Vino

• kateshrewsday

The trouble with the old vino is, one glass and I lose all sense of time.

I have been teetotal for some years now. When asked for grounds for abstention, I mumble a variety of excuses. They bring on migraines, I whine. I used to be able to drink but it has become much tougher, I freestyle. One glass and I have lost the plot, I continue.

It’s all partially true. So much so that my personal teetotal mythological construct has me totally convinced.

One glass has always been the cause of me losing the plot, but I never used to see that as a reason not to have that one glass.

If we’re in the business of bragging, befuddled, into our almost empty glasses about our exploits, there was that time I had a glass at Hugh Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, just before I was due to get on a train and take a long and involved commute back home to Kent: and that five hours later I will still at Strawberry Hill, singing animatedly with my good friends, an umbrella group which appears to have expanded to include the whole student’s union.

When kids arrived in the Shrewsday household it became very clear that sobriety was not an optional, but an essential. A glass of vino became rarer and rarer, until it disappeared all together.

The archaeology of our past life disappeared and that abomination, Diet Coke, became our preferred tipple.

And yet wine is such a ribald pleasure. It cannot be any accident that Bacchus and Dionysius, those symbols of all that is exhilarating and sensual, have as their emblem the grape and its fermented juice.

Wine has flowed through literature from the earliest times. And yet, when I want the comic side of the wineskin, there are few better places to turn than Miguel de Cervantes, a man who filled the dawn of the seventeenth century with raucous laughter and profound insight.

For he is the man who brought us the hero who tilts with windmills, Don Quixote.

Retirement is a time of life when one might do as one wishes, and Alonso Quixano is no exception. He chooses to see a romance around every corner, to play a game of make-believe so real that it quite envelopes him.

We love him so, this insistent dreamer, and it is truly painful to see how the world mocks one who wills life to be a matter of chivalry.

What makes his plight bearable is his sidekick Sancho Panza, a neighbour who gets roped in as Quixote’s squire, and the pair’s insistence on having a wine skin to hand at all times.

Wonderful, indeed, then, when one squire meets another and they discover a shared appreciation for the finer wines in life. Let’s see Quixote to Sargossa, Sancho agrees slightly incoherently, and then we’ll see whether we just settle down to a wine-based existence together.

Sancho takes a long draft of wine at one point and exclaims with the most garrulous colour: “Ah, whoreson rogue, how catholic it is!”

Wine gives us florid tongues, and makes us tell the tallest of tales. Sancho tells of two relatives with excellent palettes, who were invited to taste a fine wine. One only had to taste it with the tip of his tongue: the other only had to bring it to his nose. The first said it tasted of iron, and the second of cordovan, a kind of soft leather.

But the owner insisted the cask was clean! Nothing could have got to it!

Yet when the cask was finished they found a small key, hanging by a cord of cordovan.

That was how good the two tasters were, Sancho slurred proudly.

At the same time the fictional Sancho held happy inebriated conversations in Spain, there were very similar shiftless dialogues going on in London.

And unbelievably,a site of so many tall stories, a Tudor pub, has been uncovered for the first time in almost 150 years.

Those casks, just like Sancho’s, gave it its name: it is called the Three Tuns, and it was sited next to the Holborn Viaduct in London- right next to the old coaching route which travelled west out of the city..

Archaeologists have been stunned by the quality of preservation of this tavern. From blue plaster walls to the water tanks used for on-site brewing, the clay pipes to the bone trinkets, it’s a key to the age frequented by sots like Sancho and Shakespeare’s Sir Toby Belch.

Naturally, they found an old glass medallion from a wine bottle. It has its own logo of three casks: and an inscription: “At the Three Tuns at Holborn Bridge”.

Tonight, Phil and I have a bottle of wine. And we’re going to open it, and pour a glass, and toast our early exploits, and Quixote and Panza, Sir Toby Belch and The Three Tuns.

Because a glass of vino does inspire the tallest of tales.

Image source and Museum of London Article describing the dig at Holborn can be found here

29 thoughts on “Vino”

  1. How exciting to find a Tudor pub called the Three Tons . . . no wonder you and Phil have plans to toast the discovery.

    Unless the kids are elsewhere, stop swapping stories before you’re Three Sheets to the Wind. 😀

    I am far from a teetotaler, but I usually stop at one beer, one drink, or one glass of wine. More than that gives me a headache and disturbs my slumber . . . which causes me to become cranky and irritable the following day,

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  3. *belligerently* So, what’s so special about a two-door pub? Most of them need a back entrance. And with only three tuns, the stock must have been rather low?
    Well, I might have said something like the above if I’d had my nightly couple of glasses. However, I have detected a bulge in the midsection – something I have been immune to, hitherto – and have decided to cry off for a while. And now there you are, tempting me …

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    1. ….yes, with all the fervour of one returning to the bottle, Col 😀 You belligerate so well.
      Three Tuns: three barrels were the sign of a guild, the Worshipful Company of Vintners. Three anythings was a guild apparently. Makes one wonder what Three Frogs were….there’s one of those near me…

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  4. I’m really into the way you write, and yes, wine is amazing!
    I’ll keep reading your blog, your writing totally got me 🙂

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    1. Me too, Penny – shame, a beautiful riocca used to be my absolute favourite -but I’ve found out I can cheat with a glass of rose or white and about three pints of water 😀

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  8. Two glasses used to be my maximum and then, if I was very careful I could walk down the passage in (almost) a straight line. Today I fear even that will be too much as I have not touched a drink for about a year.

    I would love to go on/see a real archeological dig in progress. Wonderful… Such an hilarious post!

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    1. Denise, you describe me when you relate your progress down that passage 😀 But recently I just hankered after that wonderful taste once more. Touch wood, I seem to be getting away with one glass…

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  9. I love coming here. I learn so much!

    Well, sure, I suppose I could read a newspaper from time to time, but this is FAR superior and much more entertaining.

    Amazing.

    PS wish I could stop at one glass… I’m an all or nothing person… either I have nothing or one glass simply leads to another… but that’s consistent with my character, I think! All or nothing.

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  11. Only one glass? Will you each have another tonight and the third tomorrow: there are six glasses in a bottle… or was the first ones in a large glass, leaving only a little in the bottle ? 🙂

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      1. “or was the first ones”

        please do excuse my grammar!
        (I’ve only had one glass of wine)

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