Dracula’s top tipple
QUESTION In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Jonathan Harker is served a bottle of Tokaji on his first night in Dracula’s castle. What other tipples would make a literary wine-tasting evening? TheRe is no shortage of wine references in literature!
Starting with a glass of bubbly, The Great Gatsby writer F. Scott Fitzgerald said: ‘Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right.’
Winston Churchill — who won the Nobel Prize in Literature — famously commented: ‘Remember, gentlemen, it’s not just France we are fighting for, it’s Champagne.’ his name was indelibly linked with Pol Roger, who supplied him with convenient pint-sized bottles.
Ian Fleming’s iconic spy declared Taittinger Blanc de Blancs Brut 1943 to be ‘probably the finest Champagne in the world’ in 1953’s Casino Royale, the first James Bond novel.
however, his taste proved fickle. In 1955’s Moonraker, he says that Taittinger was ‘only a fad of mine’.
And in the film Goldfinger, he says: ‘My dear girl, there are some things that just aren’t done, such as drinking Dom Perignon ’53 above the temperature of 38 degrees Fahrenheit.’
Goldfinger introduces 007 to Chateau Mouton Rothschild 1947 and, in the same novel, Bond has a Piesporter Goldtropfchen 1953, a Riesling from Germany’s Mosel area, which he describes as ‘ice-cold nectar’.
he drinks a bottle of Mouton Rothschild ’53 in On her Majesty’s Secret Service; and in Live And Let Die (1954), Bond, Felix Leiter and Captain Dexter of the FBI drink ‘as good a Liebfraumilch as you can get in America’.
In the 1991 film version of Thomas harris’s chiller The Silence Of The Lambs, hannibal Lecter, the cannibalistic killer played by Anthony hopkins, states: ‘I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.’ But in the book, Lecter quaffs a different wine: ‘A census taker tried to quantify me once. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a big Amarone.’
Clearly, the producers felt that the public would not recognise this classic Italian dry red wine.
In serving up a Tokaji to Jonathan harker, Dracula chose one of the great dessert wines of the world. This sweet wine from north-east hungary is made from grapes affected by noble rot, a fungus that gives a distinctive flavour.
‘The Count himself came forward and took off the cover of a dish, and I fell to at once on an excellent roast chicken. This, with some cheese and a salad and a bottle of old Tokay, of which I had two glasses, was my supper,’ says harker.
James Tulley, New Milton, Hants. QUESTION How is the game The Archdeacon’s Cat played? AS ChILDReN in the Fifties, we knew this as The Parson’s Cat. Adults and children sit in a circle, describing the parson’s cat alphabetically.
The first round might start: ‘The parson’s cat is an adventurous cat.’
each person repeats the sentence, adding a new word beginning with A — ambient, artful, etc. Then the second person will begin with the letter B, and so on through the alphabet. Anyone not coming up with a suggestion drops out.
For years afterwards, if there was a lull in the conversation or someone said anything embarrassing or controversial, a voice would pipe up: ‘The parson’s cat is an awful cat . . .’ Jonathan Peat, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk. QUESTION An earlier answer mentioned the Biblical book of Ecclesiasticus. Is this another name for Ecclesiastes? IN ADDITION to the previous response, the Catholic Church considers ecclesiasticus to be part of the Bible.
The name is referred to by St Cyprian (AD 200-258) and, together with the books of Wisdom, Judith and Tobit, it was admitted late into the Canon of the Bible. There had been an initial hesitancy regarding their provenance, as they do not feature in the hebrew Canon.
Nevertheless, in the New Testament, St Matthew’s Gospel and the letter of St James allude to it.
St Augustine of hippo considered these deuterocanonical — added later to the Canon — books to be divinely inspired.
Marco Villani, Chertsey, Surrey.