Wine Salon Sessions — No. II Wine & Literature
- Victoria Daskal
- 24 hours ago
- 3 min read
“In Europe then we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well-being and delight. Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary, and I would not have thought of eating a meal without drinking either wine or cider or beer.”
— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
This week we travelled — without leaving our seats — to the Left Bank of Paris, sometime in the 1920s, where a young Hemingway was learning to write, learning to eat, and most certainly learning to drink. The second instalment of Wine Salon Sessions was, by any measure, a splendid evening.
Thank you to everyone who played their part: those who dressed up and arrived in the spirit of the era, those who read passages aloud from A Moveable Feast with such feeling, those who took on the six-word writing challenge with wit and imagination, and all who shared their thoughts so freely on the wines and the broader theme. The room, as they say, was alive.
Here is a little glimpse of the evening:
The Wine Guide
The wine planning for the evening was delightfully simple: I used Hemingway’s memoir as our wine list. He never mentions producers, but he was wonderfully precise about villages and regions. Loire, Burgundy, the deep south of France. Each wine we poured was a footnote made real, a place name lifted from the page and placed in the glass.
Wines tasted:
Champagne: Ayala Brut (magnum) — Waitrose, £75
Muscadet: Manoir des Herbauges Vieilles Vignes 2024 — Laithwaites, £13.99
Sancerre: Joseph Mellot, Le Montarlet, Sancerre 2024 — Tesco, £25
Mâcon: Cave de Lugny Chardonnay, Mâcon-Lugny, Les Charmes — Waitrose, £17.50
Beaune: Domaine Jean-Jacques Girard, Savigny-lès-Beaune — Waitrose, £41.50
Cahors: Jean-Luc Baldès, Malbec du Clos Cahors — Waitrose, £13.25
A Few of the Passages We Explored...
Each wine we tasted was anchored to a moment from the book — a scene, a friendship, a particular afternoon in a Parisian café or roadside restaurant.
Sancerre — A False Spring
“Another day later that year when we had come back from one of our voyages and had good luck at some track again we stopped at Prunier’s on the way home, going in to sit at the bar after looking at the clearly priced wonders in the window. We had oysters and crab mexicane with glasses of Sancerre.”
Mâcon — Scott Fitzgerald
“We had a marvellous lunch from the hotel at Lyon, an excellent truffled roast chicken, delicious bread and white Mâcon wine and Scott was very happy when we drank the white Maconnais at each of our stops. At Mâcon I had bought four more bottles of excellent wine which I uncorked as we needed them.”
Corsican — With Pascin at the Dôme
“At home, over the sawmill, we had a Corsican wine that had a great authority and a low price. It was a very Corsican wine and you could dilute it by half with water and still receive its message.”
Cahors — With Pascin at the Dôme
“At the Negre de Toulouse we drank the good Cahors wine from the quarter, the half or the full carafe, usually diluting it about one-third with water… In Paris, then, you could live very well on almost nothing and by skipping meals occasionally and never buying any new clothes, you could save and have luxuries.”
Hemingway on Wine
Hemingway’s appreciation of wine was simply woven into the fabric of daily life — as ordinary and as essential as bread. In his memoir he never fails to note what he drank alongside what he ate, and in doing so he leaves behind something more than a record of meals; he leaves a portrait of a way of living.
“Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the most natural things of the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection, and it offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than, possibly, any other purely sensory thing.”
— Ernest Hemingway
There are three more events coming up in the Wine Salon Sessions which I am working on as I write my book.
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