1930 The Savoy Cocktail Book

Human care can do almost nothing towards it ; it is all celestial wizardry, the orbits of planets, sunspots. Follow with your finger, my fair readers, on the map, beneath the eye of Nectar, the honours-list of the " years." Learn your vintage chronology and the litanies of Saints Estephe, Julien, Emilion . . . Fashion would have it so. If—still in the name of Fashion—you do not eat enough, at any rate you have lately learnt how to drink. You lack discernment and preference, and in this these charts will help you. It is sweet, merely by uttering the names of our provinces and our towns, to sing the praises of the venerated vineyards. It is profitable both to the mind and to the body—believe me—to taste wine in its home, in the country which gave it all it possesses. What surprises has not a carefully thought out pil grimage in store for you ! Young wine, tried in the dim light of the wine-cellar—virgin Angevin wine, uncorked beneath a dusty bower beside a high road on a stormy summer afternoon—or exciting^ odds and ends discovered in an old cellar which either does not know its wealth or has forgotten it ... . From such a cellar, in Franche-Comte, I once fled as though I had robbed a museum .... Some crazy furniture, sold by auction in a little village square, included, between the dressing table, an iron bedstead and some empty bottles, six full bottles ; it was there that I made, whilst yet a young girl, the acquaintance of a Prince, fiery, imperious and treacherous as are all great seducers : Juran(;on. These six bottles made me more interested in their country of origin than any professor could have done. I admit that at such a price geography lessons arc not at everyone's beck and call. And we drank this glorious wine, oneday, inthelow-ceilinged parlour of an inn, so dark that we never even knew the colour of the wine. Its memory is like that which a lady traveller retains

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