The Wines of Provence and the Armies
of Allah
The interplay between cultures of faith and the culture of wine in
midst of the clash of civilizations.
by John Zmirak
(This article, an excerpt from The Bad Catholic’s Guide to Wine, Whiskey
and Song, appeared on Taki's Top Drawer, and appears here with
permission from the publisher.)
The region of France with the oldest claim to civilization is Provence, whose
Mediterranean coast was honeycombed with Greek colonies as early as
600 B.C., of which the most important was Massalia (later Marseilles). The
Hellenes brought with them the written alphabet, diverse and (ahem!)
innovative sexual practices, philosophical discourse, and the art of making
wine. Since these are precisely the cultural attributes about which
Frenchmen still boast today, it behooves us as residents of the Hellenic
colony of Astoria, NewYork, to remind the Frogs where they learned it all—
from the Greeks. It was Grecian colonists who introduced the rude, blue-
painted Celts to techniques of cultivating vineyards, planting the grapes
which would thrive there for the next 2,600 years.
One of the oldest varieties in Europe, the Ugni grape dates back to the first
Greek settlements—and still forms the backbone (if not quite the taste bud)
of wine making. The most widely planted white grape in France, it also
accounts on its own for a third of Italian white wine—filling carafes of $8
Trebbiano for impecunious college students on first dates even today. As
you may have gathered, Ugni is not the finest or most interesting grape. It’s
beloved by winemakers for its hardiness in bad weather and tendency to
grow abundantly even in bad conditions. When one’s most delicate grapes
wither and die, he can count on the Ugni to keep springing up and keeping
the barrels full. Its plain, almost neutral flavor makes it useful as the base to
which other, more flavorful varieties can be added, and also lends itself to
distillation. Juice from Ugni grapes forms the backbone of many cognacs
and brandies, and at least one brand of vodka—Ciroc, whose producers
boast they still employ the techniques introduced by tenth-century
Benedictines of the Abbey of St. Michel.
The Greeks did more than teach the Gauls how to plant the grape. They
inducted the Gauls into the vast, pan-Mediterranean economy of trade,
which linked in a web of growing prosperity the forests of Scotland with the
granaries of Egypt, the purple factories of Tyre, and the spice merchants
who carried their wares along the great Silk Road from Asia. This
benevolent globalism is the single factor which, according to historian Henri
Pirenne, allowed the Mediterranean region to become the most prosperous
and advanced culture in the world. The wealth that resulted from this web of
complementary trade is what lifted all of Europe and the Middle East from
the Iron Age, and made possible the empires of Persia and later of Rome. If
a metaphor helps, imagine the Mediterranean as a vast octopus of
prosperity, with its head somewhere near Crete, tentacles reaching to
Portugal, Scotland, Morocco, and India, exuding instead of ink the many
varieties of worldly goods which traversed the wine-dark sea.
So how did this vast, mutually beneficial system of trade give way to the
chaos and near-starvation which marked the Dark Ages? Traditionally,
historians have pointed to the fall of Rome, the collapse of central authority
and the incursion of vast numbers of untutored tribes of barbarians into
Gaul and even Italy. Indeed, the sniffy Whig historian Edward Gibbon faulted
the Christian Church for the empire’s collapse, and hence the next 700
years of relative darkness. But Pirenne offers another explanation, and one I
like much better: He blames the Moslems.
Okay, he doesn’t really blame them. When an army of theologically
motivated conquerors try to bring down the “infidel” civilization of their
enemies, who can really blame them? Our own Puritan founders did the
same favor for the Indians, and the Spaniards for the Aztecs. It seems to
arise from a basic human urge to obliterate otherness, and far be it from me
to moralize about this sort of thing. Nevertheless, as partisans of European
civilization and peoples (I like to root for the underdog), I can’t resist pointing
to Pirenne. In his ground-breaking history Mohammed and Charlemagne,
Pirenne argues from archaeological and documentary evidence that the fall
of the Roman empire was not in fact a catastrophe, that the disruptions of
order which accompanied the fall of Rome were not sufficient to wreck the
ancient economy. He shows the continued use of currency, the widespread
trade and relative prosperity which continued under “barbarian” rulers who
claimed continuity with Rome, learned to read and write in Latin, and quickly
adopted Catholicism. To most residents of the old Roman empire, Pirenne
argues, between the fifth and seventh centuries, the switchover from rule by
Roman generals commanding barbarian armies to barbarians
commanding themselves was not all that traumatic. In fact, life went on
much as before.
So what happened to turn wealthy sixth-century Gaul into the howling
wasteland it would become just a hundred years later? According to
Pirenne, it was the Islamic conquest of the Middle East and North Africa,
which cut Europe off from the ancient centers of grain production in Egypt,
and Asiatic trade in Syria and Persia. Returning for a moment to my
metaphorical cephalopod, it’s as if the tentacles of the Mediterranean
octopus reaching into Europe had been hacked off. One of the first
measures the new Islamic occupiers of these still mostly Christian regions
took upon conquering the countries was to cut off all trade with France, Italy,
and any other region inhabited by infidels. This draconian economic boycott
had devastating effects, Pirenne reports—helping within a century or two to
virtually destroy urban civilization in Europe, whose towns could no longer
sustain their populations. He documents how cities such as Rome and
Marseilles dwindled in size and wealth, ceasing to be cosmopolitan centers
of trade, and shrinking into feudal forts surrounded by struggling farms.
Instead of exporting wine to Africa and importing grain from Egypt, the
Christians of regions such as Provence were reduced to a simple,
subsistence economy. Those in Spain were simply conquered by Moslem
invaders, and subjugated for 700 years. While this meant religious
persecution, it at least entitled them to take part in the vast Islamic
economy—which helps explain the so-called “golden age” of medieval
Spain.
As for the winemakers, Islamic invasion frequently meant the end of their
industry. As Desmond Seward notes in Monks and Wine:
In the tenth century, much of southern France was ravaged by Moors, whose
unwelcome presence is still commemorated by the Montagnes des
Maures. True to their prophet, they uprooted the heinous vine wherever they
met it; according to the Koran, “there is a devil in every berry of the grape.” (p.
47)
These vines, which had flourished for over 1,200 years, were painstakingly
replanted in most cases by Benedictine monks, the only men educated and
organized enough to undertake this delicate task. In the Bandol wine region
near Marseilles, the monks of the Abbey of St. Victor in the eleventh century
restored the vineyards which produced Clairette, Sauvignon, and of course
the Ugni grape.
The Abbey of St. Victor was an ancient center of Christian preaching in
Provence. It was founded by the important theologian St. John Cassian in
the 400s in an abandoned quarry that had been turned into a secret
Christian cemetery. From the Church’s earliest years, Christians had made
a practice of conducting the liturgy on the tombs of holy people and
venerating the relics of the dead. This gave rise to the custom, current today,
of placing in every Catholic altar a saint’s relic. Indeed, priests who are
traveling in hostile regions without access to such altars carry an “altar
cloth” with the bones, hair, or other relics of a saint sewn into the fabric, so
they can make an altar out of any flat surface at need.
This abbey contained, most famously, the body of St. Victor (hence its
name), a Roman officer executed in the second century for refusing to
worship the emperor. It also boasted, tradition tells, fragments of the cross
on which St. Andrew was killed, the clothes of the Virgin Mary and St. Mary
Magdalene, and even the coffins which held the Holy Innocents slain by
King Herod. Okay, so sometimes “tradition” likes to fib. (In reality, this was
the site where Jesus and Mary Magdalene honeymooned, before taking off
to found a goddess religion and sire a race of bumbling Merovingian
monarchs. I know this for a fact: I read it on the beach.)
This abbey was destroyed several times by invaders during the chaos and
poverty that descended on the region in the wake of its artificially induced
economic collapse. The Benedictines built a new abbey on the site in the
tenth century, which quickly became a center for evangelizing the region.
The monks prudently built around their chapel an enormous fortress, with
an eye to the still-rampaging Saracens, Vikings, and even Magyars.
(Perhaps you haven’t dealt with many Hungarians, but if you have, you know
they do still sometimes revert to type—unlike the poor Scandinavians, who
seem to have entirely lost their “edge.” As for the Saracens… check today’s
newspaper.)
The abbey became famous for its faithfulness to the Benedictine Rule, and
its monks helped reform dozens of other monasteries throughout Europe.
Two former abbots of St. Victor rose to become popes—albeit Avignon
popes.
The abbey was destroyed, like nearly everything else of value in France,
during the Revolution (See Drinking Song #7)—whose partisans tore down
hundreds of historic churches, including the enormous Abbey of Cluny, one
of the greatest cultural centers of European history, an exquisite building
almost the size of St. Peter’s in Rome. It was blown up, and a highway built
through its ruins.
As the post-Christian French—to the horror of the faithful remnant among
them—complete the deconstruction of their Christian heritage, the heirs of
the Moors and Saracens who once again populate Provence and other
regions in prodigious, fertile numbers, meekly wait their turn to inherit the
earth. If and when they do, I expect that the vast, green fields of Ugni grapes
will once again be torn up and burned. So drink the stuff while you can.
of Allah
The interplay between cultures of faith and the culture of wine in
midst of the clash of civilizations.
by John Zmirak
(This article, an excerpt from The Bad Catholic’s Guide to Wine, Whiskey
and Song, appeared on Taki's Top Drawer, and appears here with
permission from the publisher.)
The region of France with the oldest claim to civilization is Provence, whose
Mediterranean coast was honeycombed with Greek colonies as early as
600 B.C., of which the most important was Massalia (later Marseilles). The
Hellenes brought with them the written alphabet, diverse and (ahem!)
innovative sexual practices, philosophical discourse, and the art of making
wine. Since these are precisely the cultural attributes about which
Frenchmen still boast today, it behooves us as residents of the Hellenic
colony of Astoria, NewYork, to remind the Frogs where they learned it all—
from the Greeks. It was Grecian colonists who introduced the rude, blue-
painted Celts to techniques of cultivating vineyards, planting the grapes
which would thrive there for the next 2,600 years.
One of the oldest varieties in Europe, the Ugni grape dates back to the first
Greek settlements—and still forms the backbone (if not quite the taste bud)
of wine making. The most widely planted white grape in France, it also
accounts on its own for a third of Italian white wine—filling carafes of $8
Trebbiano for impecunious college students on first dates even today. As
you may have gathered, Ugni is not the finest or most interesting grape. It’s
beloved by winemakers for its hardiness in bad weather and tendency to
grow abundantly even in bad conditions. When one’s most delicate grapes
wither and die, he can count on the Ugni to keep springing up and keeping
the barrels full. Its plain, almost neutral flavor makes it useful as the base to
which other, more flavorful varieties can be added, and also lends itself to
distillation. Juice from Ugni grapes forms the backbone of many cognacs
and brandies, and at least one brand of vodka—Ciroc, whose producers
boast they still employ the techniques introduced by tenth-century
Benedictines of the Abbey of St. Michel.
The Greeks did more than teach the Gauls how to plant the grape. They
inducted the Gauls into the vast, pan-Mediterranean economy of trade,
which linked in a web of growing prosperity the forests of Scotland with the
granaries of Egypt, the purple factories of Tyre, and the spice merchants
who carried their wares along the great Silk Road from Asia. This
benevolent globalism is the single factor which, according to historian Henri
Pirenne, allowed the Mediterranean region to become the most prosperous
and advanced culture in the world. The wealth that resulted from this web of
complementary trade is what lifted all of Europe and the Middle East from
the Iron Age, and made possible the empires of Persia and later of Rome. If
a metaphor helps, imagine the Mediterranean as a vast octopus of
prosperity, with its head somewhere near Crete, tentacles reaching to
Portugal, Scotland, Morocco, and India, exuding instead of ink the many
varieties of worldly goods which traversed the wine-dark sea.
So how did this vast, mutually beneficial system of trade give way to the
chaos and near-starvation which marked the Dark Ages? Traditionally,
historians have pointed to the fall of Rome, the collapse of central authority
and the incursion of vast numbers of untutored tribes of barbarians into
Gaul and even Italy. Indeed, the sniffy Whig historian Edward Gibbon faulted
the Christian Church for the empire’s collapse, and hence the next 700
years of relative darkness. But Pirenne offers another explanation, and one I
like much better: He blames the Moslems.
Okay, he doesn’t really blame them. When an army of theologically
motivated conquerors try to bring down the “infidel” civilization of their
enemies, who can really blame them? Our own Puritan founders did the
same favor for the Indians, and the Spaniards for the Aztecs. It seems to
arise from a basic human urge to obliterate otherness, and far be it from me
to moralize about this sort of thing. Nevertheless, as partisans of European
civilization and peoples (I like to root for the underdog), I can’t resist pointing
to Pirenne. In his ground-breaking history Mohammed and Charlemagne,
Pirenne argues from archaeological and documentary evidence that the fall
of the Roman empire was not in fact a catastrophe, that the disruptions of
order which accompanied the fall of Rome were not sufficient to wreck the
ancient economy. He shows the continued use of currency, the widespread
trade and relative prosperity which continued under “barbarian” rulers who
claimed continuity with Rome, learned to read and write in Latin, and quickly
adopted Catholicism. To most residents of the old Roman empire, Pirenne
argues, between the fifth and seventh centuries, the switchover from rule by
Roman generals commanding barbarian armies to barbarians
commanding themselves was not all that traumatic. In fact, life went on
much as before.
So what happened to turn wealthy sixth-century Gaul into the howling
wasteland it would become just a hundred years later? According to
Pirenne, it was the Islamic conquest of the Middle East and North Africa,
which cut Europe off from the ancient centers of grain production in Egypt,
and Asiatic trade in Syria and Persia. Returning for a moment to my
metaphorical cephalopod, it’s as if the tentacles of the Mediterranean
octopus reaching into Europe had been hacked off. One of the first
measures the new Islamic occupiers of these still mostly Christian regions
took upon conquering the countries was to cut off all trade with France, Italy,
and any other region inhabited by infidels. This draconian economic boycott
had devastating effects, Pirenne reports—helping within a century or two to
virtually destroy urban civilization in Europe, whose towns could no longer
sustain their populations. He documents how cities such as Rome and
Marseilles dwindled in size and wealth, ceasing to be cosmopolitan centers
of trade, and shrinking into feudal forts surrounded by struggling farms.
Instead of exporting wine to Africa and importing grain from Egypt, the
Christians of regions such as Provence were reduced to a simple,
subsistence economy. Those in Spain were simply conquered by Moslem
invaders, and subjugated for 700 years. While this meant religious
persecution, it at least entitled them to take part in the vast Islamic
economy—which helps explain the so-called “golden age” of medieval
Spain.
As for the winemakers, Islamic invasion frequently meant the end of their
industry. As Desmond Seward notes in Monks and Wine:
In the tenth century, much of southern France was ravaged by Moors, whose
unwelcome presence is still commemorated by the Montagnes des
Maures. True to their prophet, they uprooted the heinous vine wherever they
met it; according to the Koran, “there is a devil in every berry of the grape.” (p.
47)
These vines, which had flourished for over 1,200 years, were painstakingly
replanted in most cases by Benedictine monks, the only men educated and
organized enough to undertake this delicate task. In the Bandol wine region
near Marseilles, the monks of the Abbey of St. Victor in the eleventh century
restored the vineyards which produced Clairette, Sauvignon, and of course
the Ugni grape.
The Abbey of St. Victor was an ancient center of Christian preaching in
Provence. It was founded by the important theologian St. John Cassian in
the 400s in an abandoned quarry that had been turned into a secret
Christian cemetery. From the Church’s earliest years, Christians had made
a practice of conducting the liturgy on the tombs of holy people and
venerating the relics of the dead. This gave rise to the custom, current today,
of placing in every Catholic altar a saint’s relic. Indeed, priests who are
traveling in hostile regions without access to such altars carry an “altar
cloth” with the bones, hair, or other relics of a saint sewn into the fabric, so
they can make an altar out of any flat surface at need.
This abbey contained, most famously, the body of St. Victor (hence its
name), a Roman officer executed in the second century for refusing to
worship the emperor. It also boasted, tradition tells, fragments of the cross
on which St. Andrew was killed, the clothes of the Virgin Mary and St. Mary
Magdalene, and even the coffins which held the Holy Innocents slain by
King Herod. Okay, so sometimes “tradition” likes to fib. (In reality, this was
the site where Jesus and Mary Magdalene honeymooned, before taking off
to found a goddess religion and sire a race of bumbling Merovingian
monarchs. I know this for a fact: I read it on the beach.)
This abbey was destroyed several times by invaders during the chaos and
poverty that descended on the region in the wake of its artificially induced
economic collapse. The Benedictines built a new abbey on the site in the
tenth century, which quickly became a center for evangelizing the region.
The monks prudently built around their chapel an enormous fortress, with
an eye to the still-rampaging Saracens, Vikings, and even Magyars.
(Perhaps you haven’t dealt with many Hungarians, but if you have, you know
they do still sometimes revert to type—unlike the poor Scandinavians, who
seem to have entirely lost their “edge.” As for the Saracens… check today’s
newspaper.)
The abbey became famous for its faithfulness to the Benedictine Rule, and
its monks helped reform dozens of other monasteries throughout Europe.
Two former abbots of St. Victor rose to become popes—albeit Avignon
popes.
The abbey was destroyed, like nearly everything else of value in France,
during the Revolution (See Drinking Song #7)—whose partisans tore down
hundreds of historic churches, including the enormous Abbey of Cluny, one
of the greatest cultural centers of European history, an exquisite building
almost the size of St. Peter’s in Rome. It was blown up, and a highway built
through its ruins.
As the post-Christian French—to the horror of the faithful remnant among
them—complete the deconstruction of their Christian heritage, the heirs of
the Moors and Saracens who once again populate Provence and other
regions in prodigious, fertile numbers, meekly wait their turn to inherit the
earth. If and when they do, I expect that the vast, green fields of Ugni grapes
will once again be torn up and burned. So drink the stuff while you can.
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