by John Mole
In our part of the world they grow Savatiano grapes, which are said to have originated in Greece. They are resistant to disease and drought and have an adequate yield on poor soil but, like the innocuous Chardonnay grapes before the wine makers muck about with burnt oak chips, don’t have much flavour. The growers have only one quality standard and that is how many kilos they can produce. They fertilise and water the fruit so that they are big and fat and juicy as table grapes. Unfortunately, this is not what you need for wine. Fat, juicy grapes in a hot climate make thin wine with high alcohol and low acidity, what tasters call flabby, flaccid, mousy, lacking in nerve and all the other things they used to say about me when I was in the school cadet force.
Around this time every housewife treats you to a dish of moustalevria. Fill a saucepan with fermenting grape juice and bring it to the boil. Throw in a handful of wood ash tied in a cloth to take away the bitterness. After boiling for ten minutes take out the ash, let it sit for half an hour and then strain through muslin. Boil for another half an hour, let it cool and beat in a handful or so of semolina. Pour into little dishes and let it set like blancmange. Garnish with chopped nuts and sesame and cinnamon. Taste a spoonful and leave the rest. Ah, Proust again – memories of baby sick come flooding back.
Instead of waiting for the winery to finish the job, you can make your own retsina. You buy a plastic barrel, say a hundred kilos. It lies on its side and has a hatch on the top so it looks like a fat little one-man submarine. You take it to the factory and they fill it up with raw juice, in which all the wild bacteria and yeast have been killed off with one of the sulphur derivatives. You go to an oenologist, who gives you little packets of chemicals with instructions when to tip them in the juice. Who are these masters of the art of wine making? Chemistry students, science teachers, anyone who knows the difference between a sulphate and a sulphide. You park the barrel round the side of the house or in the garage or the shed. You leave the hatch open, covering it with muslin to keep out the insects, until the last dose of chemicals, after which you close it tight.
After a month or so, you draw off some of the liquid into a bottle. You have a sly swig, which you wish you hadn’t because it tastes like fruity vinegar, and take the rest to the oenologist, unless he has gone back to school in Athens or been driven out of town because he mixed up his sulphides and his sulphates. He fiddles with litmus paper and little glass floats and gives you another packet of chemicals to tip into the mixture. Just before Christmas you draw off half a kilo to see if it is ready and it gives you colic for two days, so you lay in a couple of cases from the supermarket for the holidays.
At last, around February, everyone agrees that the wine is ready and you bring it triumphantly to the table. They all say it is the best anyone has ever tasted and you lose your temper if anyone in the family buys anything else to drink and you give it away to friends and relations, with the unavoidable result that they give you theirs. It is either better than yours, in which case you are in a bad mood, or not as good, in which case you get an even bigger headache than from your own. It’s hard to know what gives Greek wine a worse name, the wineries or the jobbing oenologists.
The best meals I have ever eaten have been in Greece:
honey-sweet red mullet fried deep pink …
summer horse mackerel, self-basted on charcoal …
octopus dried in the sun, browned on the grill, weeping every taste of the sea …
spit-roast lamb marinated with wild herbs and mountain grass …
suckling pig roasted in a stone oven on ashes of olive wood …
wild greens blanched and dressed with olive oil and lemon …
or baked in a tissue-thin filo with sheep’s cheese …
winter hare simmered with onions and spices on a bed of garlic purée …
pot-roasted kid wrapped in paper on a bed of hot mashed aubergine …
pork stewed in celery on rice dressed with garlic and sheep’s butter …
onions sweet enough to scoff like apples …
tomatoes red and rich as a setting sun …
rigani, wild mountain oregano, heady as incense …
olive oil, thick and green to chew on or delicate and pale to anoint with …
cucumbers tasting of … of … of …. Cucumber …
washed down with copper jugs of cheek-puckering, lipcurling, gum-shrivelling, tongue-gagging, tooth-aching, head-shuddering, throat-burning, stomach-churning, bowel-trembling, squit-shitting, arse-burning turpentine.
If it is so bad, why have we drunk so much of it over the years? Why do we always have a jerry can of the stuff in the basement and a bottle in the fridge and a copper jug on the table? A wooden barrel of the best retsina, properly made, light and clear and fresh and redolent of fragrant vines and shady pines, terracotta vineyards and marble mountains, is a world apart from anything that ever came out of a plastic barrel or a steel tank or a bottle with a fancy label. It reverberates with layer on layer of flavour and aroma, from springtime zephyr at the top of the register to a myrrhic basso profundo. Nothing cuts better through the Mediterranean diet of olive oil and lamb grease and fish oil and pork fat. A slug between mouthfuls cleanses the palate and the tongue and the gums and the sinuses and gets them ready for the next delicious bite of unctuous, chin-glistening, cheek-buttering lipids.
So how do you find this nectar? By getting to know who makes it the traditional way from their own grapes. If it’s for themselves, they go easy on the weedkiller and fertiliser. Compared with the fruit they sell to the winery, the grapes are small and thick skinned and brown speckled and full of taste. They let the bacteria that lives naturally just under the skin do the work for them rather than using commercial wine yeast. They crush it with their feet in a wooden barrel or a stone vat or they use an Italian hand crusher. Then they throw in a fistful of fresh resin.
Anyone who makes wine knows that the three most important elements are grapes, grapes, grapes. The quality of retsina also depends on the quality of the resin. The best does not come out of bottles or packets but straight from the sprawly, feathery Aleppo pine that perfumes the mountains of central Greece. Ours comes from Strapontes on Mount Dirfis in the middle of Evia. This pine juice is nothing like the harsh, astringent stuff that goes into turpentine, paint and glue. It belongs with the fragrant resins and gums that make frankincense and myrrh. It should be tapped in the year the wine is made, starting in spring when the sap rises and finishing in autumn’s second spring. You don’t need more than a few fistfuls. Two or three kilos of resin per thousand kilos of grape juice is enough.
Everyone has their own tips and tricks. Yannis lets the retsina oxydise enough to leave a hint of caramel on the back of the tongue, but not enough to make it flat and brown like tea that’s been left too long in the pot. Vasilis tips a jug of olive oil into the barrel at the end of the second fermentation around the end of November. The oil floats to the top and seals the wine off from the air. The disadvantage is that it is harder to clean the barrels and if the wine lasts more than a year the oil can go rancid. Barba Nikos puts half the resin in at the first fermentation and half in at the second, because he likes the fresh resin taste. Aussie Alekos likes a deep yellow colour, so he leaves the skins in for the first fermentation. At Easter Dimitris racks his wine, tipping it into new barrels to stop the fermentation and get it off the lees.
These wines are different from each other and the taste changes throughout the year and from year to year. What they have in common is a Proustian extravaganza, compressing time and experience in a kaleidoscope of tastes. Stin ya mas. Our health.
A beautiful late summer’s day. Hot sun, bright light, tender breeze. Chirring cicadas, zizzing flies, droning bees, snoring wife. I should have been mortaring the slates on the terrace, but instead I lay on the bed watching a long-tailed wood wasp, harmless and dozy, hover round the reeds in the ceiling looking for a nest or food or just passing the time of day. On my stomach was a book by a Swiss archaeologist about th
e temple to Isis in Eretria. Egyptian merchants probably founded the temple in about 300 BC. Who was Isis? An Egyptian goddess, who became very popular in Greece and Rome until the second century AD. She had a litany of names including Queen of Heaven, Mother of God, Mother of Mankind, Help of the Dying, Star of the Sea …
History and comparative religion lay too heavy on a day like this. Better see what the kids were up to instead. They were in the field at the back, huddled over an elaborate wasp trap that they were making out of plastic bottles and honey water. The wasps were more interested in the octopus hanging by its neck from the washing line. I had bought a frozen specimen in Aliveri and smuggled it to the beach in the hope of bolstering my street cred by bringing it out of the sea on the end of a spear, but I was rumbled by a tentacle dangling out of the crotch of my swimming trunks. The more water you dry out of octopuses the better they taste. I like them leathery as biltong. Put them on the grill and they twist and turn and bubble with oil, the essence of everything that lives in the sea.
The blast hit first. Whack. Bang. A gust of hot wind. The Turks have landed. The gas bottle has exploded. From our little field on the hillside above us rose a swirling white cloud. I dived on the children, pulling them together under me. Through half-closed eyes I watched the mushrooming cloud. Inside was the shadow of our ancient olive tree, hanging in the air, blown into parts like instructions for an Airfix model. It rained twigs and leaves and hard green olives, pattering down on the roof and the ground and my back. I waited for a trunk to break my spine or crush my skull, but got away lightly with a lancing pain in my elbow. Arfa ran out wearing only her pants, clutched her naked breasts and screamed when she saw us sprawled on the ground. The little ones started to cry.
‘What happened? What happened?’ she shouted.
‘I’ve been stung by a bloody wasp,’ I said. I got no sympathy. That was reserved for the children. She clasped them to her untrammelled bosom.
After reassurance and consolatory chocolate biscuits and a dab of ammonia for my throbbing elbow, we went up the path to our little field, still wide-eyed and trembling. Splintered logs lay all over the blackened grass around a smoking crater where the ancient olive tree had stood. Barba Fedon and two young lads were gathering bits of shattered wood and loading them on the donkey.
‘Forgive me,’ he said, smoothing down his comb-over, ‘I hope it didn’t frighten the little ones. The dynamite was old. I used two sticks just in case.’
‘What have you done to our tree?’
He looked genuinely puzzled. ‘Your tree? It’s my tree.’
‘It isn’t. We bought it from you. Last month. Have you forgotten?’
‘I sold you the field. I didn’t sell you the tree. Not for that price. There’s enough wood here to keep me through the winter.’
‘But we wanted the tree.’
‘Why didn’t you say?’ He looked aggrieved.
‘It was a beautiful tree.’
‘Eh. Your donkey will find shade under the bush. Make sure you give it enough rope.’
There was nothing more to be said. We were now the proud owners of a big hole in a little field. So much for thinking ourselves into Barba Fedon’s world. We should have defied ridicule for offering good money for an old barren tree and paid whatever he said. Now whenever I walked up the hill I had to look the other way.
The children were tougher. When the dirt and soot had gone away, mostly onto their clothes, they used the crater as a foxhole, a redoubt, a ship, a dungeon, a cockpit. A week after the late summer rains they came running into the kitchen.
‘Quick. Quick. The olive tree’s growing again.’
‘Yes, dears. Would you like a biscuit?’
But it was true. A tiny green shoot was sprouting from one end of the blackened stump.
‘We have to look after it very carefully,’ said Arfa.
‘Will it grow up to be a proper tree?’ asked Jim.
‘If it isn’t broken off by a child. If an animal doesn’t eat it. If it can stand up to the wind. If the snow doesn’t bend and break it. If it gets through the forest fires. If it’s not cut for a tethering post. If it fights off canker and worms. If it survives all those things, they will make it what it will be.’
‘Will we be able to sit in it again?’ asked Kate.
‘I don’t think so. But one day other children will.’
‘Where will we be?’ puzzled Harry.
‘Where will we be in a hundred years from now?’ sang Jack and Jim to the tune of the death march. ‘Your eyes drop in and your teeth fall out. Your brains come trickling down your snout …’
‘That’s enough,’ snapped Arfa.
‘It’ll be more than a hundred years,’ I said. ‘It could still be here in five hundred years. That little shoot is like a golden thread to the future. Think of all the things that will happen between now and then.’ But I was talking to myself. They had started a wrestling match and Arfa was halfway to the house. When I caught up I realised I was in trouble.
‘How could you? How could you?’
‘How could I what? I was trying to give some historical dimension.’
‘Teach them that song. It’s horrible. The little ones will have nightmares.’
‘But I didn’t. They must have picked it up in the playground.’
For once it was true. I was innocent, but I still paid the price. That night I dreamed of olive trees in Golgotha, heaped with skulls, and a great white mushroom cloud sucking up our children and our children’s children.
Home at last
The house was as finished as it would ever be. We went to bed one evening, weary and aching, with hands red raw from scrubbing paint and plaster and hair thick with cement and sawdust. We woke up next morning and there was nothing more to do. It was as if we had never seen the place before. We looked at it like strangers. We were glad we had taken the trouble to use old tiles, rough planed chestnut, reeds from the lake and all the other materials that we had scavenged and toiled over. We knew where everything came from, where the stones had been found, where the trees grew, who felled and sawed them. We knew every inch of it. Our skin and sweat and blood were part of it.
To celebrate, we decided to throw a party and roast a lamb on a spit. As Barba Vasilis drove his flock of fifty sheep past our house twice a day, it seemed polite to buy one from him.
‘Why not Ajax? He’s got a mausoleum full,’ he suggested.
‘I want it fresh from our own hillside.’
‘Bravo. Which one do you want?’ he asked, waving his stick over his protégés.
This was a good time to reinforce the morality of meat eating. Let the children choose their dinner on the hoof. If the experience made any of them vegetarians, so be it, a sound moral choice, despite the inconvenience to the rest of us. So we formed a selection committee. Arfa thought that it was ghoulish and indecent. She would have nothing to do with it, although she had no rational arguments against the process, especially as she was partial to pork crackling and rare steaks and the fatty bits of a shoulder of lamb.
The children wandered among Vasilis’s flock and picked out our party food. Kate made the final choice, a sweet yearling with a patch of black wool on one side of his head like a French beret. They christened him Denis. We saw him at least twice a day, browsing in the field below, scavenging for weeds at the side of the path, mounting the olive and the mulberry for tasty new leaves, raffish in his beret. Every time the flock passed our house the children dragged their mother to the terrace and pointed out little Denis.
‘Ahh, Mummy, look, isn’t he sweet? Ahh, the little lamb.’
Arfa was an experienced parent and steeled herself not to run sobbing into the house with her hands over her ears but just said ‘Yes, dear’. Needless to say, when the rest of the committee were out of hearing, I got into trouble despite my sensible remarks about ethical upbringing, conversations that invariably ended with ‘and wipe that smirk off your face’.
The party was on Sunday.
Friday was the killing day. It would give the meat a couple of days to hang. Animals killed only a few hours before the spit taste metallic and grainy. I have always thought that when the heroes of the Iliad sacrificed hecatombs of oxen and sheep it was a shame that that they spitted and grilled the meat while it was still warm from the sacrifice. Sensible Greeks would have hung the meat for a couple of days and only eaten the hearts and livers and other tasty bits of offal, which are best consumed fresh. Perhaps they didn’t have the facilities on the plains of Troy.
On the Thursday evening, Denis trotted by the house with his little friends for the last time. It was a lovely late summer evening, golden grass glowing under the sun that he would never see setting again. The children were more subdued than usual, although they did drag their mother out to say bye-bye. ‘Au revoir, actually,’ I said and got a filthy look.
‘Johnny, I need you to help me kill the lamb tomorrow,’ said Barba Vasilis. ‘Since I had the cancer cut from my lip I can’t blow properly. We’ll do it in my field down below.’
He made puffing sounds by way of illustration. I knew what I would have to do. My first job would be to hold Denis’s legs while Vasilis slit his throat. Then Vasilis would cut a slit in the hind leg and I would have to blow into it to inflate the skin. I had seen it done with a pump before Haralambos’s wedding and even that looked hard work, worse than blowing up a double lilo.
‘How are you going to kill Denis, Daddy?’ asked Jack.
‘Will you chop him with an axe?’ asked Jim.
‘Does it hurt?’ asked Harry.
‘Will you bring the wool back?’ asked Kate.
That night we avoided meat, ate cheese fried in egg and talked about the following day. The gist of our discussion was that if you eat animals you should take responsibility for killing them, you should not palm the unpleasantness off onto other people, Denis would not have had any life at all if he was not meant to be eaten and so on. But I had a bad night’s sleep. Denis popped his raffish head over the end of the bed and winked at me. I brrrhed him away, but he didn’t leave me alone. He came to the side of the bed and nuzzled my arm. When I smacked him away he sighed and padded round the room. We could stomach the knife in the throat, the spurting blood, the strange metallic smell, the flies on the stomach, the black garbage bag, but it was the testicles the size of beach balls that kept me and Denis awake.
