Port in fiction books

[Michael Hann]

What fiction books do you know that write powerfully about drinking port wine? I vaguely recall port wine being involved in some minor incidents in a Dorthy Sayers' "A Busman's Honeymoon," a detective novel featuring Lord Peter Whimsey. I recall only Lord Peter giving instructions to his servant about transporting some dozen or two dozen bottles of port up to his country estate where Lord Peter would be spending his honeymoon. Surely there are fiction books that write passages about drinking port that are highly evocative and create a mystique about port.

As I am thinking about this thread, I have thought of something that relates to a challenge identified by Dan Carbon in the November "Guest Corner." This was the challenge of growing the community of port wine drinkers -- educating the public about the great pleasures of drinking port wine. It is very common to employ shrewd product placement in motion pictures and in television series to create hightened public awareness of specific products and to create a desirable ambience or attitude about the product. I wonder if product placement could be used to good effect for increasing public awareness of port wine? James Bond, instead of drinking Bollinger 1957, drinking 1970 Taylor's vintage port? Perhaps the issue is that such product placement is an expensive game and port houses may not have the marketing budget to do this.

[Derek T.]

Charles Dickens mentions port in lots of his books. However, I don't think his writing style would suit a modern marketing campaign to attract more people to drinking Port

[Mike Kerr]

Funny this subject should come up. November is National Novel Writing Month (www.nanowrimo.org) where folks who have that novel trapped inside are encouraged to get it down on paper through the month of November. The National part I think is from its roots in the US, but it's a worldwide effort.

I've been working on my own and Port will play a part in it, so I'm doing what I can.

Mike.

[Michael Hann]

Charles Dickens mentions port in lots of his books. However, I don't think his writing style would suit a modern marketing campaign to attract more people to drinking Port

Derek: My question about port in fiction was for my own interest. I think I would enjoy reading some books that incorporate some nice evocative descriptions of the general experience of drinking port (not tasting notes or accurate descriptions . . . but instead suggestive, evocative). Since it seems few people read much any more, using fiction as a marketing vehicle would probably fizzle. For the marketing, which was an idea only triggered by my thought about port in fiction but otherwise not linked, I think the way to a mass audience could be through some sort of video. I suppose another mass market alternative would be through popular music. What about a rap song about port? Snoop Dog chanting the praises of vintage port? 50 cent singing about tawny port? No, I don't think so.

[Peter W. Meek]

The characters in Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series (Master and Commander, etc) drink enough port to float their boats from here to the Antipodes.

[Peter W. Meek]

Michael took this to a PM discussion. After looking it over we decided that it might as well be part of the main thread. Here it is:

Subject: Port in fiction books

The characters in Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series (Master and Commander, etc) drink enough port to float their boats from here to the Antipodes.

Peter: I see there are quite a number of books in this series. "The Wine-Dark Sea" where Aubrey pursues an American privateer around South America was reviewed positively on Amazon. Are you familiar with this book, and does it involve descriptions of port? Can you recommend another specific O'Brian book that you had in mind?

Just read them in order. "Master and Commander" Is the first volume; it is also the title of a movie derived from (I think) two of the books. I think there are frequent references to port in almost all of them. They are a continuous series, so reading them in order makes the most sense. It's military history (British Navy in the times of the Napoleonic Wars) dressed up as fiction. Like another Hornblower series. (There are actually about 3-4 more series and countless single books about the same sort of thing: cabin boy to admiral with cannons going off everywhere - )

You will either like the style of his writing or you won't. If you do like it, the complete set in hardcover is available from Amazon (and possibly elsewhere) for about $125; that's cheaper than paperbacks! (I just checked again - this is an "omnibus" edition, with all the books published in 5 fat volumes. User comments suggest that there are a lot of editing/typographical errors. Maybe not recommended to buy them this way.)

I think I paid over $400 when I got my set. If you REALLY like the books, Easton Press will sell you a full set bound in leather for some $50-60 per volume (20 or 21 books in all).

If what you are looking for is good historical tasting notes about specific ports, you will be disappointed. It's all just port, and they are drinking for the alcohol, not the subtile nuances that FTLOPers are interested in. This series got me interested in the military history of the era - first, naval history, then general military history (and fiction - there is another very good series about the wars on land by Bernard Cornwell - the "Sharpe's Rifles" series - this time it's private to commander of a company - with cannons going off everywhere ) and finally general history of the late 1700 - early 1800 period. There is a pretty good BBC series of movies about the Sharpe's Rifles as well. (No port in these, just looted Spanish and Portugese wine.)

Peter: Thanks for the information. I've seen the movie and liked it. I have heard about this series of books in another context, and what I heard interested me. I'm not likely to undertake plowing through this series -- too many other things to read, and my time for reading is limited -- but reading one is something I can shoe-horn in.

No, I'm not looking for substantive tasting reviews of port bottlings. It seems that this kind of information can best be obtained on FTLOP! I find it interesting to read the reviews of the different ports people have had and to compare between the reviews of the same port by different people. It is also then interesting to compare those reviews with reviews I see published by grand wine critics. For example. I've got a single bottle of 1997 Quinta do Vesuvio sitting in my modest wine rack. When to drink it? I've usually heard about 20 years after the vintage -- very standard rule of thumb, not adjusted for specific vintage characteristics or for the specific character of a particular bottling. I was just reviewing some comments published by James Sucking about Quinta do Vesuvio 1997. Per James Sucking, the Vesuvio 1997 is ready to drink up now!!! And this was an article published in 2007, based on a tasting of many 1997s ten years after the vintage. I began to look over the reviews of 1997 Quinta do Vesuvio by folks on FTLOP and I'm seeing reviews that suggest holding another 10 years -- pretty close to the cannonical 20 years for vintage port. I think I'll trust the reviews I saw on FTLOP and hold my Vesuvio another few years.

No, what I'm looking for as far as descriptions of port in fiction is just some sort of atmospheric evocation of the satisfaction of drinking port. Oh, I don't know, some sort of description of educated, refined men sitting in leather chairs in a dark mahoganny paneled room discussing subjects of great pith and matter -- at least some of the gravitas and brilliant intuition of their conversation induced by drinking port wine. I suppose in part I'm hoping to enjoy vicariously the pleasure of drinking port by reading a fictional account of others drinking port -- since I can't drink my 1997 Vesuvio for another ~8 years (or my 1997 Taylor, or my 1997 Graham, or my 1997 Smith Woodhouse -- I started accumulating modest amounts of vintage port only recently, and the oldest VP in my local shops in any quantity are the 1997s). To some extent, of course, reading fiction is much about living vicariously.

No, what I'm looking for as far as descriptions of port in fiction is just some sort of atmospheric evocation of the satisfaction of drinking port. Oh, I don't know, some sort of description of educated, refined men sitting in leather chairs in a dark mahoganny paneled room discussing subjects of great pith and matter -- at least some of the gravitas and brilliant intuition of their conversation induced by drinking port wine.

Well, you won't find that image in O'Brian!

Visualize a dozen guys who haven't had a bath in months, wearing clothes that haven't been washed in about as long, sitting in a cramped officer's cabin with such a low ceiling that everyone must walk in a crouch, stinking of stale smoke, stale bilge-water, and stale people. Now visualize them telling pointless jokes, and making endless rounds of toasts, to less and less relevant subjects, (to the King! to the Queen! to the Admiral! ... to the Bosun's pet chicken!) each of which requires draining the glass and pouring another. "Sir! The decanter stands by you!" (The 1800 version of "Don't bogart that joint, my friend.")

This is not the whole of the series (as you know from the movie), but it pretty well describes drinking port aboard one of His Majesty's ships in the late 1700s, according to most fiction writers covering the period. The series itself is a good, long adventure yarn with a lot of fairly accurate history embedded. (Although it is peculiar that Aubrey and Maturin seem to find themselves involved in every notable historical event and yet true historians never seem to have noticed.)


As far as time available for reading, I read VERY quickly. If not interrupted, I can read three of these books in a day. I've read the entire series many times. While they were being published, I re-read all the preceding books before reading each new one. I have perhaps 15-20,000 books in my library and get back to many of them every few years.

This should be in the main "Port in fiction books" thread. With your permission, I'll tidy it up and copy it there.

Peter: Absolutely, transfer it to the public thread. I only sent this as a PM in the event that this may not be of general interest. That's quite an image you painted -- stale bilge water, no baths, low ceiling. Still, that is part of what I was hoping to find.

[Michael Hann]

Here is a bit involving port wine from Charles Dickens's "Bleak House," Chapter 22:

In his lowering magazine of dust, the universal article into which his papers and himself, and all his clients, and all things of earth, animate and inanimate, are resolving, Mr. Tulkinghorn sits at one of the open windows enjoying a bottle of old port. Though a hard-grained man, close, dry, and silent, he can enjoy old wine with the best. He has a priceless bin of port in some artful cellar under the Fields, which is one of his many secrets. When he dines alone in chambers, as he has dined to-day, and has his bit of fish and his steak or chicken brought in from the coffee-house, he descends with a candle to the echoing regions below the deserted mansion, and heralded by a remote reverberation of thundering doors, comes gravely back encircled by an earthy atmosphere and carrying a bottle from which he pours a radiant nectar, two score and ten years old, that blushes in the glass to find itself so famous and fills the whole room with the fragrance of southern grapes.
Mr. Tulkinghorn, sitting in the twilight by the open window, enjoys his wine. As if it whispered to him of its fifty years of silence and seclusion, it shuts him up the closer. More impenetrable than ever, he sits, and drinks, and mellows as it were in secrecy, pondering at that twilight hour on all the mysteries he knows, associated with darkening woods in the country, and vast blank shut-up houses in town, and perhaps sparing a thought or two for himself, and his family history, and his money, and his will--all a mystery to every one--and that one bachelor friend of his, a man of the same mould and a lawyer too, who lived the same kind of life until he was seventy-five years old, and then suddenly conceiving (as it is supposed) an impression that it was too monotonous, gave his gold watch to his hair-dresser one summer evening and walked leisurely home to the Temple and hanged himself.

[Eric Menchen]

...a man of the same mould and a lawyer too, who lived the same kind of life until he was seventy-five years old, and then suddenly conceiving (as it is supposed) an impression that it was too monotonous, gave his gold watch to his hair-dresser one summer evening and walked leisurely home to the Temple and hanged himself.

Too monotonous, or maybe he just ran out of Port?

[Michael Hann]

Eric:

I haven't read the book, so I can't say. It smells a bit like some foreshadowing of things to be revealed later in the book. I was just interested in the evocative and impressionistic description of the drinking of the 50 year old port. On the other hand, perhaps you are correct. Ran out of port or found that his butler had dropped a precious bottle on the cellar floor?

This is off subject, but no matter. I do not recollect EVER dropping and breaking a bottle of any wine, and I have drunk many bottles of wine in my 53 years. Bottles of milk, I've broken them. Plastic jugs of milk, I've dropped them and had them burst on the floor. Never a bottle of wine. I'm not sure what this says about me. I will argue that this demonstrates that I am not an alcohol abuser!

[Al B.]

If I recall correctly, there is a reference to a non-existent vintage of Quinta do Noval Nacional in the book "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo".