Challenging American Drinking Habits

Champagne coupe glasses with champagne bubble poppers. Gilded age women were warned not to drink more than a little champagne as it may lead to unattractive, and certainly unfeminine, belching and gas. By the 1920’s, these were worn by flappers on long chains, for the same purpose while sipping champagne or fizzy cocktails.

GENEVA (By Mail)-Our subject is an earnest French wine grower from Saumur who has been calling on the American trade in New York and Boston and who is naive enough to hope that he will live to see a day when the American people, including Mr. Roosevelt's common man, will drink and appreciate wine and shun the cocktail which pickles the palate, as he says, and even avoid the cigaret for several hours before indulgence in wine.

Our subject says the cigaret has a tendency to fry or braise the tongue. Therefore, on mornings when he is engaged to judge the quality of wine by tasting the same he refrains from smoking until his work is done. His name is Baron Raymond de Luze, and he owns 18 acres of vines, the entire output of which he has just sold to American dealers. His is a sparkling wine, something like champagne. Your correspondent encountered him aboard the Ile de France en route to Europe.

18 ACRES PAY FOR LONG EXCURSIONS

It is an odd experience to come upon a farmer with an 18-acre patch whose crop is such that he can afford to go all the way to the United States on a fast, expensive boat, put himself in at hotels, ride the trains and buy a few wine dinners for his prospects merely to sell the produce of his 18 acres.

If the baron were in cotton or wheat or parsley in the United States, with only 18 acres under his plow, he would hardly find it worth while to go farther than the county seat to market his crop, and that in his own flivver. And if he were to buy a meal for a prospective customer it probably would amount to no more than a hamburger and a cup of coffee at the lunch wagon.

VINTAGE TRAILED HOME BY SENSE OF SMELL

Of course, the baron is one who can shut his eyes, roll a glass of wine under his nose, breathe deeply and tell you which side of whose hill it came from and how long ago. But for all I know there may be wheat farmers and parsley men who can do almost as much in their own respective lines. Although the good Baron de Luze is a farmer in a certain sense of the word, raising a product which comes from the soil, he is a dress-suit farmer and world traveler of aristocratic bearing and never to be considered in comparison with the mud-stained, hay-shaker of the United States who thought he was somebody when he put a bathtub in his home and sent his son to the State college of agriculture.

AMERICANS PROUD OF ABILITY TO GUESS

People do not ask who grew the wheat which goes into their bread or the cotton in their undershirts or in what year. There is a great difference there. For in wine the year is important, and even Americans feel a thrill of pride in their sophistication when they have learned at considerable cost in money and heartburn to guess when a wine was grown without squinting at the label on the bottle. For all the insistence of the Frenchmen that wine is a simple food and not a rite, all the literature on the subject tends to baffle and intimidate those very Americans to whom the customer appeal has been addressed since repeal.

MANY WINES LISTED ACCORDING TO REGIONS

The baron has given me a little book which lists hundreds of wines according to the region even the very acres which produced them, and their years, with a further important distinction as to whether they were bottled on their own home grounds or elsewhere in an assembling plant. The book says a certain wine is “still hard but getting better.” Another is “dryer than its neighbors.” It speaks of “body” and “finesse.” One authority says it is a crime to drink certain wine iced and an indecency to drink other wine in the noble, company of Montrachet. In the circumstances the American runs a grave risk of committing a serious offense.

Can this be salesmanship? Can any wine be so sublime that it were a crime to drink other wine in its presence? And if so, is it not, perhaps, as bad an error to wear silk socks grown in Japan, crop of 1931, in the same ensemble with a cotton undershirt, crop of 1926, from the fields of Zeke Which, of Corinth, Miss. Granted this, Mr. Which might take luxurious trips to Europe to sell the bales of his eighteen acres.

TASTE FOR FIGHTING LIQUOR CHALLENGED

But probably the baron is doomed to disappointment, for he is challenging a national taste for simple, fighting liquors, complicated with whipped cream, house-paint, cherries and pineapple slabs which existed long before prohibition and became a strong national habit during the long rebellion. He presents a product which reeks of mystery and fancy manners and preaches temperance to a people who drink only to get tight. So if it is true that Americans do not understand wine, then it is equally certain that anyone who recommends temperance does not know the character of the race.

A DAY'S WORK STARTS WITH SPLASH OF CHAMPAGNE

As a connoisseur the baron prescribes a small splash of champagne before dinner, a few delicate passes at a glass of white wine with the fish and a few sturdy licks at a red red wine with the meat, followed by champagne with the desert and brandy with the coffee. We know nothing about the traditional American meal of six whisky sours followed by a T-bone steak with fried potatoes, washed down with rye and ginger ale.

I should give something for the movie rights, with sound, to the scene of consternation on an Illinois Central diner should the baron put himself down to order a correct dinner from a wine list consisting of canned martinis and manhattans, sherry, port, whisky and gin. – The Oakland Tribune, 1935

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