Booze with a bit of bite
QUESTION Can you buy Golden Mediasch, a wine which, according to Jonathan Harker in Dracula, ‘produces a queer sting on the tongue’?
Golden Mediasch was a real wine, but it is no longer made.
Bram Stoker’s source for the episode in his novel, where his character Jonathan Harker has a memorable meal, was Andrew F. Crosse’s 1878 travelogue Round About The Carpathians: ‘The weather had been fair, though sport had been bad, so with a feeling not altogether sorrow like we sat down to a hearty good meal.
‘The wines were excellent. We had Golden Mediasch, one of the best wines grown in Transylvania, Roszamaber from Karlsburg and Bakatar. The peculiarity about the first-named wine is that it produces an agreeable pricking on the tongue, called in German tschirpsen.’
Today, wine production in the Medias (former Mediasch) area is limited to small- scale vineyards producing Riesling-style wines.
Jonathan Harker drank this wine in the fictional Golden Krone (Crown) Hotel in Bistritz. Fiction became fact in 1974 when the Golden Crown, the Hotel Coroana de Aur, opened in modern Bistrita. It served a wine it called Golden Mediasch, though its provenance is unknown.
Also on the menu was the meal Harker enjoyed there, Robber Steak, which is bacon, onion and beef roasted on an open fire with red pepper. Also on the menu was a dracula red wine and a plum-based spicy liqueur redolent of blood.
Today, it is a smart business hotel with an occasional nod to the vampire theme, though the Jonathan Harker conference suite isn’t very spooky.
Nigel Fox, Birmingham.
QUESTION Did the Soviets lead an expedition to find the mythical Buddhist underground kingdom of Shambhala?
UnlIKe Hitler’s secret services, which had a pseudo-archaeological body called the Ahnenerbe looking into the roots of Arianism, Soviet intelligence saw belief in the supernatural as anti-Marxist. Yet in any personality cult, such views are always likely to emerge.
The idea for the expedition came from Gleb Ivanovich Bokii, a Ukrainian Communist activist and revolutionary. He took part in the Red Terror, a period of political repression and mass killings carried out by Bolsheviks at the onset of the Russian civil war in 1918.
Bokii was an official in the oGPU, the Soviet Union’s secret police, from 1922 to 1934, in charge of concentration camps.
He became interested in mysticism and met visiting Mongol lamas. Together with his occultist friend Alexander Barchenko, he attempted to organise a Soviet expedition to Tibet in search of the legendary country of Shambhala.
A 14th-century Buddhist concept, by the 19th century, Western esoteric writers were describing Shambhala as a hidden land inhabited by a mystic brotherhood whose members labour for the good of humanity — much how Bokii viewed the Communist party. He believed the two could merge into ‘higher’ communism.
The Soviet government declared such an expedition a waste of time and money, and cancelled the project.
Bokii and Barchenko were executed in Stalin’s purges in 1937-38.
W. H. Lewis, York.
QUESTION Why is the Bradford pear tree so reviled?
PITY poor F. W. Bradford, a research scientist working for the U.S. department of Agriculture’s research facility in Glenn dale, Maryland. In 1964, he was honoured with the naming of an ornamental tree.
despite having nothing to do with the creation of the tree, his name is forever linked with one of the most widely hated species in America, disliked for its rapid proliferation, weak branches, thorny offspring and, above all, fishy smell.
The history of the Bradford pear began in the mountains of China. In 1918, agricultural scientists took seeds from wild Callery pears ( Pyrus calleryana) to breed trees resistant to the bacterial disease fire blight.
Crossbreeding experiments proved unsuccessful and the project was forgotten for decades, until researchers realised the plant had ornamental value.
The tree does have redeeming features: it puts on a gorgeous, early spring display of pure white blossoms; the small, red/ brown fruits that follow attract a wide variety of birds; and its vibrant autumn colours range from red and orange to dark maroon.
The scientists selected the most attractive examples and grafted these trees on to pear root stock. They developed a hybrid, the Bradford pear, which was unable to reproduce itself.
At first, the Bradford was lauded as one of the finest additions to the ornamental landscape. As well as being beautiful, it was disease and drought-resistant, could be planted in poor soils and grew quickly — perfect for gardens.
However, problems soon started to emerge. It was supposed to be a small to medium-sized tree growing 25ft to 30ft tall and 25ft wide, but it turned out it could grow to twice that size, making it too large for most American backyards.
It also had a serious structural flaw — nearly all of its limbs diverge from the tree at a single point, so they are weakly attached. once the tree reaches 30ft, a strong wind can snap off the branches, which can land on cars, roofs and sheds.
Worse still, the Bradford is not sterile. They never reproduce among themselves, but cross-pollinate with other pear trees. This includes cultivars such as Aristocrat and Cleveland Select, introduced to stop the splitting problem.
Hybrid pear trees have proliferated across the U.S. To make matters worse, the evil offspring has reverted to the ancient Chinese Callery, which forms impenetrable thorny thickets that choke indigenous plants. To add insult to injury, the Callery pear has a horrible scent — when it blossoms, it smells as if someone has opened a can of tuna!
Mrs Mary Williams, Sherborne, Dorset.