There is a Proustian element to drinking wine. The aromas we smell in a wine evoke childhood memories when our sense of smell was stronger than as adults and our olfactory impressions were formed; this is why we all describe wines in different ways, using different language. But it's not just our impression of a wine which is shaped by our childhood experiences. Drinking a wine also awakens memories - of supping fruity Shiraz while watching football when we were first legally able to buy wine; of our first serious encounter with sherry in an ill-lit bar in Madrid; or of the first time we tasted Tignanello.

The memories wine evokes - or, to put it another way, how we think about the past through the wines we have drunk - is apparent in the works of Sybille Bedford, a masterful, underrated twentieth-century writer, who explored the past to try and understand the present. Growing up, she was surrounded by wine, one of the many topics she uses to help recreate past experiences.

Bedford’s pan-European background – “conceived at Cadiz: sherry and the Armada” (Jigsaw, 279), born into a fading aristocratic German family, and brought up in France and England – is reflected in her writing, beginning with her first novel A Legacy (1956). This fictional but semi-autobiographical work is a conversational, immediate, meandering, but nevertheless precise account of the demise of aristocratic German society in the face of progress and modernity in the late nineteenth century. Industry replaces quiet, rural self-sufficiency, democracy supplants the established institutions, and nationalism, in the light of a newly unified Germany, creates a rigid adherence to cultural structures.

Bedford draws on her upbringing throughout A Legacy, from the Berlin Jews of her father’s first wife and her father’s own rural, Catholic family in Baden. It is the latter family, the von Feldens, who are particularly immersed in wine: “They drank hock and claret, but they also drank and knew how to make their own wine” (A Legacy, 23). Their attitude towards wine is part of a family who look outwards (towards Rome and France, whose language they continue to speak even after German unification) and who know how to live finely and to cherish the comforts of that life. The family drink Montrachet, enjoy “vintage Oloroso and Havanas” (54), and “they really did have Tokay Essence” whose “cork bore the stamp of a year in the eighteenth century” (44). The rich, long meals, drunk with madeira and port, are examples of a family immersed in their own pleasures: “she sat almost silent through the cream of chicken, the crayfish in aspic, the vol-au-vent, the calf’s tongue and currants in Madeira, the chartreuse of pigeon and mousse line of artichokes …” (145).

References to wine are part of Bedford’s style, mentioned casually, elliptically, without explanation of context, forming part of an overall picture a reader understands in impressions. Historical context underpins the book indirectly; so too with wine, as in a reference to phylloxera: “The disaster. The American vine louse” (114). The von Feldens ride above such historical context, wishing to be oblivious to the effects of contemporary events, as is seen in the manner by which Bedford’s fictional father, Julius, has access to the best Cognac despite the phylloxera epidemic:

"We should like to know what you think of this, sir," said the head-waiter. Julius tasted. "All right, Ricardo," he said. "I haven't come across anything like these days. I have to send for mine from England, you know." "Berry Bros. are running low too, I hear." "I suppose you wouldn't have a bottle or two to spare?" "I have already thought of it, sir. Guillaume has put half a dozen aside; I shall see that they are sent to you, sir." "That must be hard luck on your other guests," said Sarah. "Madame - most of our guests have been drinking Spanish brandy under Hennessy labels. It is always a please to serve Monsieur le Baron; Monsieur le Baron pays attention to what he eats and drinks." (114)

phylloxera

Phylloxera is a louse brought over from North America in the mid-nineteenth century. It attacked and devastated European vines by eating their roots. Once a vine is affected with phylloxera, there is no cure. One can only imagine European wine regions and drinkers faced with the complete devastation of vineyards. A solution, however, was found: to graft rootstock from North American vines on to European vines. Only a handful of regions have never been affected with phylloxera, including South Australia, Chile, and Washington.

This attention to fine wine is indicative of a society that knows how to look after itself, even if it increasingly lacks the money to do so. It also shows a society too concerned with maintaining their old standards to move with the times. Contemporary events are leaving them – and their money – behind. Julius is drawn to Bedford’s mother by a shared affection for the wines of Bordeaux:

When the voice behind them said, Mouton '64, she gathered herself like someone who hears the Anthem struck for an instant of respectfulness. "You really like claret?" said Julius. "I love it." "It is unusual." "For my under-privileged sex? I daresay. My father taught me. He was very fond of it, poor dear. I was an only child you see, and I suppose papa had rather have me drink up his claret than let it go to his cousin." ... "So the cousin has the claret now?" "The cousin has the claret." (195-96)

Bedford revisited her upbringing in the more directly personal and autobiographical Jigsaw (1989). Again, wine permeates memories of her childhood. Bedford’s recollection of tasting wine with her father is a moving example of their close but formal relationship and his fastidious manner that belonged to an earlier historical period than the beginning of the twentieth century. He had learnt to cook for himself by watching “the French and Italian chefs of the Eighties and Nineties” (Jigsaw, 26), in order to maintain some of the standards of fine living his upbringing had led him to be accustomed to. He passes that appreciation for food on to his daughter, whom he also teaches how to taste wine:

In front of us stands a large clear glass with a stem, my father lifts the decanter by his hand and pours precisely - each glass is one third full. Lina [the maid] is about to add water to hers and mine, my father stops her, Water in Bordeaux, quelle horreur! I sniff mine, take a mouthful slowly, twirling the wine in the glass, as he has told me to. He is serious about this as he is about anything involving ritual and skills, but he is not fussy or anxious. Enjoy your wine, he says, and I do. ... we drink claret at night. We don't have to worry, he says, we have a decent amount of wine left in the bins. He has taught me to pronounce the names on the labels and to look at the pictures of the châteaux, he has been to them, has met the owners. (27)

The two of them live together – Bedford’s parents separated early – a quiet, rural echo of her father’s aristocratic but agricultural upbringing: “We had poultry, we had eggs, we grew vegetables, and grapes on a south wall. From these in October my father made a small quantity of fine white wine” (30). Despite his reduced circumstances, his winemaking sets her father apart from the rest of the small, rural Baden village: “Nobody in the village, except the priest and the mayor, drank grape wine” (34).

After her father’s death, Bedford spent an itinerant childhood following her restless mother and Italian artist stepfather. Her education in fine food and wine continued, however, especially living in Provence in the late 1920s. The area was then still remote, only just discovered by the French writer Collette. The food was rich, affordable, and, like the wine, uncomplicated: “The wine, some honest, some not so honest, red Vin du Var was for regional consumption. A family of Swiss vignerons, called Roethlisberger, produced a reputable white wine along with their good red, a forerunner of the big, complex post-war wines that achieved the Appellation Bandol” (87). Bandol’s wines are not the only small Provençal town’s she remembers: “Cassis,” a small coastal town known for its white wines, “was then the liveliest, most aromatic dry white wine to be had in Provence” (244). Much of the wine Bedford recollects enjoying in Provence was simple but good, but there were occasions for indulgence: “We drank Cassis with the shellfish, Pouilly-Fuissé with the quenelles, Bordeaux with the roast birds, burgundy with the cheese, and champagne (sec not brut) with the ice pudding” (245).

Proven
çal wine

Bedford was writing about Provence in the late 1920s, its wines, like the region itself, historic but rustic and underdeveloped. The Roethlisberger family she mentions was indeed instrumental in making Bandol a high-quality red wine appellation, along with Domaine Tempier’s Lucien Peyraud. Some of the world's best rosés are made in Bandol, the grapes grown on steep terraces rising up from the Mediterranean, as well as full-bodied red wines based on the Mourvèdre grape.

Part of Bedford’s childhood was also spent in interwar England, whose drab food culture provides a sharp contrast with both Germany’s and France’s. Instead of “coquilles Saint-Jacques” she was forced to eat “jam roll, bread and Marmite for tea, fish and chips for supper, with tinned salmon and pineapple cubes as stand-bys” (75). She ate the food happily enough, but “what I missed was wine.” She goes on to describe an English wine culture that had only just changed for the better by the time she was writing in 1988:

I had no idea for a long time, that the very best claret, let alone port, was shipped to and drunk by (a few of) the English; I only knew what I saw and that was that wine with meals was an exception not the rule, which happened to be true then for most people. How we have changed all that now that England has entered a golden age of wine! (With quality and variety on offer greater than in any other country in the world.) Let us count our blessings. (75)

By those who have read her, Sybille Bedford is considered one of the finest writers of the twentieth century. Her style is at once measuredly languid and cutting, as she reflects on and reworks the past. Her immersion in wine culture from an early age is reflected in her work, not just in references to wine, but in her style: patient, refined, with nuances that slowly develop, opening up an appreciation of time long past.

Works Cited

A Legacy (1956)

Jigsaw (1989)

We would also recommended reading A Visit to Don Otavio (1953), which contains amusing accounts of drinking Mexican wine.