Draining French Wine Lake, Part Deux: Wedding at Cana

Maybe I've had too much time on my hands.  Maybe I've taken too much of that orange cold medicine that gets Sarah Silverman into so much trouble.  And maybe I just think too much about wine.

 

Voici the beautiful and scurrilous Sarah

Anyway.

I thought Monsieur le Comte needed to get out of France, like his new boss, and that he needed to broaden his horizons diplomatically, culturally and, er, diachronically as well.  (Better look that one up.  Save time, check here.)

As to how M le Comte can travel in time, it is of course due to a worm hole torn in the fabric of space-time, as any half-wit knows.   

As to how he managed to transport with him several million litres of wine from all parts of France, I must attribute that miracle to an honoured guest at that wedding in the Galilean hinterland, as any biblically attuned half-wit knows...

Hubert-Thierry Enarcon de Chateaudegueulant, aka Monsieur le Comte, found himself standing under an arcade surrounding a courtyard jammed with glum-looking people dressed in their 1st century best.  There was a great deal of food on the tables, but most of the guests were staring peevishly at their empty goblets.  So quiet it was that you could hear the drip drip drip off the beaks of the turtle doves ice sculpture in the centre of the courtyard. 

A guests few had taken notice of M le Comte -- tall, elegant, bald, hawk-nosed, supercilious and in his best Savile Row suit and shirt, a symphony of clashing colours and stripes.  One older lady with henna in her hair exclaimed, "Why is that man dressed like a barbarian?"  Trousers were the mark of the barbarian at that time.  Civilized men wore skirts.

They look as glum as Dutch burghers.  Need more vino.

"I am from France," M le Comte haughtily told her.  "Gaul."

"That explains it," she told her reclining table mates, "they have their own sense of style."  Muttering all around.  "What good," she whispered, looking over her shoulder at him, "can come from Gaul?"

Not far from him in the shadows a care-worn woman was remonstrating with her son.  "You with the miracles.  They ran out of wine an hour ago.  What are you doing about it?  It's ruining the happiest day in Amy's married life!"  She was just third cousin with Amy's dad, but still, wine was thicker than water.

"You with the miracles!"

His father Joseph, a spare little man who looked even more worn out with work, pleaded, "Joshua, think of your mother!"

Her son, tall for his time and typically hirsute, said wearily, "Pa, trust me, I'm working on it."  He glanced over toward M le Comte and said, "Give me five minutes, Ma.  Everything's gonna work out fine."

Joshua Josephson came to M le Comte and shook both hands.  "Welcome, brother wayfarer!  You've got the wine with you, haven't you?  The situation here is, as you see, rather..."

"Un catastrophe."

Joshua smiled quizzically.  "You sure have a strange way of pronouncing Greek, my friend."  He waved that comment way, laughing.  "Come on, show me your wine.  I want to get these folks happy ASAP.  I've got a lot of other things to accomplish before time runs out.  You know, a few miracles, Jerusalem, the palms, Pesach, a few betrayals, Gethsemane..."  A heavy sigh.

M le Comte, who was at Mass when transported to ancient Palestine, sighed too but said nothing.  After a long moment he said, more humbly than usual, "Come, dear sir, let us taste." He led the younger man out to the shady side of the house and handed him a Riedel glass.  Joshua was impressed, holding the stemless glass at different angles.  "Are these glasses from Gaul too?"

"Yes," lied the Count.  Joshua gave him a skeptical look. 

The first barrique M le Comte samples with his pipette was a blend from the Costieres de Nimes 2005.  "Not bad," Joshua said, spitting it out.  "But this is a wedding not Sunday night supper.  Next."

The second was a Melon Queue-Rouge 2000 from Jacques Puffeney in Arbois.  "I like this a lot," Joshua said.  "Too subtle for this crowd.  Save me some, though.  It'll take the curse off the charoses."

The third was a Cabernet Franc from the Touraine 2005.  "This is much better than they usually get.  The slaves and the disciples, I mean.  We'll take 100 barriques of this.  It should last a month or so."

"We have so much of it, sir.  Could you perhaps take a thousand?"  The count hated begging, but he considered it a form of prayer.  "It hasn't caught on in America yet."

Joshua rolled his eyes.  "Their priorities...Sure, anything to help you out. Three thousand.  Why not?  You've been a good sport coming all the way here. And no frequent flier miles." 

M le Comte didn't know how to take this.  He laughed anyway.

The fourth barrique was a Beaujolais from a major negociant.  Joshua made a face.  "What did they put in this anyway?"  A vigorous spit.  "Come on, my friend, we're wasting time.  You know what these people like.  Let's give it to them.  The party's losing momentum." 

The Count in desperation sprinted way down the line of barrels to one of Barsac from a slightly off year, when the wines were considered a little cloying.  (High WA scores though.)

Joshua tasted it, spat, swirled, tasted it and swallowed.  "This is better than Schapiro's!  They'll love it!  Twenty barrels of this stuff now!  No, a hundred! Two hundred!  This wedding's gonna last three days and they've got the whole village to inebriate."  He summoned the slaves and made sure that his Aunt Esther, the lady with the henna in her hair, was the first to receive a full goblet.  ("What a joy to Miriam!") 

Joshua ordered a great deal more wine to give to others -- he was thinking ahead to Passover and all the secret tippling that occurred when the prayers went on too long, especially if they insisted on reading the whole Hagaddah in Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew (like his uncle Mort, who provided additional commentaries in all three languages for the edification of the children and women) -- and mentioned to M le Comte that another uncle, Si in Tyre, was a wine merchant who was struggling to meet demand in Rome itself because of a poor vintage in Europa last year.  "He'll take everything you've got here and pay you top denarius.  Don't let him hondle you!  The Emperor's desperate, the people are rebelling.  Si's got ships to fill, and you know half of them are going to end up as wrecks to explore on the Discovery Channel.  Just mention my name."

M le Comte had to pause at those juxtapositions. 

Within a few minutes everyone had had a glass of this new wine, and they exclaimed that it was the best wine they'd ever had, which M le Comte couldn't wait to tell to M le President of this coup for France when he, M le President, returned from Lake Winnessoppaquille or whatever outlandish place he was in.  Miriam cried that it was a miracle, care of her son.  ("See, Esther, didn't I tell you?")  M le Comte toasted Joshua and leaned in to tell him, "Even the Americans haven't thought of this."  The wine lake seemed to shrink to Swiss proportions, maybe Andorran, right in front of his mind's eye.

At this moment a very fat white-haired Bedouin in a Shetland sweater entered, wheezing as he led a mule laden with cases of wine labeled "Charles Shaw 'Napa' 'Chardonnay'."  It was a blessing no one could understand the subtleties of English punctuation.

"How many ya need?" he cried.  "I can keep your party going for a year with plenty left over.  Cheaper than Frenchie here, and how.  You want oak?  You got it, gumbah.  You want it sweeter?  Anything you want, sugar.  I'll even get a rabbi to do his thing and make it whatever.  Hell, it's already mevushal.  We boil all our wines.  More sanitary.  Makes 'em taste richer!  Sweeter!"  Mevushal is when wine is flash-boiled so that a Gentile can serve it to an observant Jew.

The wedding guests cheered and sent their servants to rush the overweight Bedouin.  Aunt Esther was overjoyed.  "To be honest," she confided to Joshua, "I thought the Gaul's wine was a little too hoity-toity.  And yum, what's this buttery taste I'm getting?"

Joshua shook his head sadly, shrugging at the disconsolate Count.  "Oak chips, Auntie.  And artificial vanillin."

"Well, my darling boychik, I don't know what those things are, but I love 'em."

Slowly M le Comte slowly turned and, step by step, as he approached the shekel-burdened interloper, was smashing Commandments, all 613 of them, in his vengeful heart...

Comments

[Alfonso]

sounds like a match -burghers and bored dough

[Richard]

I thought it was Lake WinniePissOften

[Terry Hughes]

@Richard -- Depends on how much wine we let her drink.

@AC -- I need to lay off the orange cold medicine.

[David J Rodriguez]

Hi, Terry--
thanks for all the good wishes & the Rx for my Piccola Insola re-entry blues...
hey, that TexItal Affonso is good'n fon-nee-
just started reading him, as good a writer as you n me!

[Terry Hughes]

DJR, it was very pleasing.