1930 The Savoy Cocktail Book

THE LUCKY HOUR OF GREAT WINES. By " Colette." I was very well brought up. As convincing proof of such a categorical assertion, let me say that when I was barely three years of age my father, who believed in gentle and progressive methods, gave me a full liqueur glass of a reddish-brown wine sent to him from his native Southern France ; the Muscat Wine of Frontignan. It was like a sun-stroke, or love at first sight, or the sudden realization of a nervous system ; this consecration rendered me a worthy disciple of Wine for ever afterwards. A little later, I learnt to quaflf my glass of mulled wine, aromatic with cinnamon and lemon, to a dinner of boiled chestnuts. At the age when one can barely read I was spelling out, drop by drop, red Burgundies, old and light, and dazzling Yquems. Champagne passed in its turn, a murmur of foam, leaping pearls of air, aeross birthday dinners and first communion festivities : with it came grey Puisaye truffles. ... A fine lesson from which I acquired familiar and discreet knowledge of wine, not swallowed greedily, but measured out into narrow glasses, absorbed in mouthfuls with long spaces in between, and carefully reflected upon. It was between my eleventh and my fifteenth years that this beautiful educational programme was completed. My mother feared that, as I grew older, I should beeome anaemic. One by one, she un earthed from their dry sand some bottles which were ageing beneath our house in a cellar—it is, thank Heavens 1 still intact—carved out of the granite itself. Whenever I think about it, I envy the little

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