All that wine-tasters’ lingo about bouquet and tasting of tires or leather, not a patch on Keats’ description of the effects of good wine sipped in an arbour on a summer evening. Keats is at least as good a letter-writer as he is a poet, and his playfulness and zest for life come alive in them. Quaff this quotation in full below, and enjoy.
Source: John Keats, Selected Letters, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford World Classics, 2002/2009), p. 201
Photo credit: inkflo at pixabay.com
‘If you could make some wine like Claret to drink on summer evenings in an arbour! For really ‘t is so fine – it fills the mouth with a gushing freshness – then goes down cool and feverless – then you do not feel it quarrelling with your liver – no it is rather a Peace maker and lies as quiet as it did in the grape – then it is as fragrant as the Queen Bee; and the more ethereal Part of it mounts into the brain, not assaulting the cerebral apartments like a bully in a bad house looking for his trul and hurrying from door to door bouncing against the waist-coat; but rather walks like Aladin about his own enchanted palace so gently that you do not feel his step.’
(14 February – 3 May 1819)
0 Comments