Notes on a Cellar Book

London. Macmillan and Company. 1920. Handsomely custom bound in 3/4 Tree Calf and marbled boards. Gilt ruled spine compartments with elaborate gilt tooled motifs.Gilt tooled raised bands.Gilt titled red morocco labels.Marbled endsheets. 12mo.(5.25"x7"). The First Edition. Writing in the 1920s, Saintsbury (1845-1933) was more than an avid drinker and collector; he was a legendary professor of literature in the British Isles, the author of something like 80 books and innumerable articles, and an unregenerate Tory who once staged a demonstration to keep classical Greek as a requirement for undergraduates. So when he pulled together these reflections on what he had recorded over the years about his alcoholic beverage inventory and how it had been consumed, he naturally sprinkled it with an amazing thicket of literary allusions, asides, quotations, things in quotations for no apparent reason, tirades against Prohibition in the US, and much, much more.Saintsbury himself apparently realized the book might be a bit much; he included his own footnotes to his more elliptical prose.But don't get the idea that there is anything ponderous here--it's a romp from start to finish. You'll find Saintsbury musing on any topic on which you might want enlightenment: cut glass decanters, raki, mulled Port, small beer, cider, bottle shapes, rum punches, corked wine, the perils of drunkenness, the time his cellar in Cambridge flooded, the time the rats took over his cellar in Edinburgh. You will find advice on how to keep whiskey and brandy in barrels in your cellar, how best to take medicinal brandy in bed, and the relationship between Port and the English character. And yes, thoughts on just about every wine and spirit available in his multi-decade drinking career--this guy tried it all.We also get a sampling of menus from the extravagant dinner parties of the era. Sign me up for the one with Calf's Head à la Terrapin, Aspic of Tunny, Braised Beef, Roast Guinea Fowl, and the Anchois Zadioff, whatever that is. All washed down with an 1873 Dos Cortados Sherry, an 1889 Giseler Champagne, an 1870 Chateau Margaux and an 1885 La Tache. And some Port.On another level, the Notes are a marvelous window into an important era in the history of wine, the period at the turn of the 20th century. At that time rich and/or educated Brits like Saintsbury--well, nobody was quite like Saintsbury--had appointed themselves arbiters of the world's wines, and were busy establishing Bordeaux as the reference point for fine wine, sorting out the Ports and Sherries, crowning the Mosel, and establishing the idea of well-aged wine as the Holy Grail. In broad terms, the opinions of Saintsbury's cohort are the conventional wisdom of today's wine world--and here we see them being created." - Tim Patterson Review in Vinography. A Very Fine, elegantly bound copy.