The US satirist and journalist Ambrose Bierce died somewhere and at some point in Mexico while following the Mexican revolution (his mysterious disappearance is fictionally described in Carlos Fuentes’s Gringo Viejo or The Old Gringo). His work had an uncompromising bite to it, most notably in The Devil’s Dictionary, a hilarious and alternative series of definitions of common words and phrases. It was mostly written in the 1880s while Bierce was a journalist in San Francisco, a city where the sabbath was “an unknown quantity” (279), published as a compilation as The Cynic’s Word Book in 1906, and fittingly renamed The Devil’s Dictionary in 1911. The Devil’s Dictionary is a self-knowing book with its own independent life-force (it became The Enlarged Devil’s Dictionary in 1967, long after Bierce’s presumed death) and which both follows and defies Bierce’s own definition of a dictionary: “A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic” (96).

The witticisms (“a sharp and clever remark, usually quoted and seldom noted” [318]) gathered in The Devil’s Dictionary cover all topics, naturally including wine and the wider subject of drink. Writing in the 1880s when the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (founded in 1874) were generating a debate over American drinking habits which eventually led to Prohibition, Bierce’s definition of wine cuts to the core of the fanatical nature of the temperance movement: “Wine: Fermented grape juice known to the Women’s Christian Union as ‘liquor,’ sometimes as ‘rum’.” Bierce concludes the definition with a dry aside: “Wine, madam, is God’s next best gift to man” (318). The joy of The Devil’s Dictionary is skipping from one entry to another; Bierce’s definition of rum follows the satiric attack on the temperance movement: “Generically, fiery liquors that produce madness in abstainers” (278).

The Devil’s Dictionary is a mixture of the literal and the sardonic, and it can be sometimes hard to tell the difference as Bierce merges the two together. Alcohol is correctly termed as coming from the “Arabic al kohl, a paint for the eyes,” an etymology which Bierce turns into a description of the effects of alcohol: “The essential principle of all such liquids as give a man a black eye” (44). These debilitating effects of overconsumption are further described in the definition for “Corned”: “Boosy, swipy, soaked, hog drunk, set up.” Noting in parentheses that the term corned is “Very low and vulgar,” Bierce adapts the famous line from William Congreve: “Hell has no fury like a woman corned” (78). Bierce certainly did not moderate the bite of his satire; he attributes the quote to Hector Stuart, a local San Francisco writer of whom he (rightly) elsewhere wrote: “I do not care for fame, and he does; and his only earthly chance of being remembered is through his humble connection with what I write” (Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company, 157).

San Francisco and Wine

San Francisco is surrounded by wine regions, from Napa and Sonoma to the north and Santa Cruz and Monterey to the south. The city itself served as the distribution centre for those regions in the nineteenth century, and riotously ignored Prohibition. There are still wineries based in the city, and there are many great wine shops, bars, and restaurants.

Bierce’s writings for the San Francisco Examiner were renowned for their unadulterated attacks on local dignitaries whom he felt needed taking down a notch or two. One such dignitary was Arpad Haraszthy, son of Agoston Haraszthy, one of the founding fathers of California wine. Arpad Haraszthy was famous for his Eclipse Champagne, the state’s first successful sparkling wine, and was also the founder of San Francisco’s Bohemian Club. Despite the success of Haraszthy’s wine, Bierce clearly had little time for it: “The wine of Arpad Haraszthy has a bouquet all its own. It tickles and titillates the palate. It gurgles as it slips down the alimentary canal. It warms the cockles of the heart, and it burns the sensitive lining of the stomach.” Such a description prompted Haraszthy to threaten libel action, which resulted in a retraction from Bierce even more damning than his original assessment: “The wine of Arpad Haraszthy does not have a bouquet all its own. It does not tickle and titillate the palate. It does not gurgle as it slips down the alimentary canal. It does not warm the cockles of the heart, and it does not burn the sensitive linings of the stomach” (Alone in Bad Company, 200).

Books Referenced

Ambrose Bierce, The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary (Penguin, 2001 [1967])

Roy Morris, Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company (Oxford University Press, 1999)