One of the most difficult - and hazardous - jobs in journalism must be that of wine correspondent. For, while this is to a great extent a beer and whiskey-drinking country, the spread of wine as an accompaniment to a meal, and even wine just to drink by itself in a bar, is one of the most striking social changes of our time - and preceded the arrival of that mythical tiger. Wines a generation ago came from well-known areas of France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Portugal (where did Red Biddy originate)? Now we have all the New World names and even in France, the south has opened, often with an updated technology, the whole of its Languedoc riches. And more will surely come. And wine, once the great friend of university common rooms, clubland habitues, and (perhaps particularly) legal men, is now shared with the man or woman who shops in the supermarket for wines read about in the newspaper columns.
Yes, legal men. And one of the noted legal men was Maurice Healy, author of The Old Munster Circuit but in this context the writer of Stay Me With Flagons. The odd thing, perhaps, is that he was born into a teetotal family. He writes well about the descent into drink of an impoverished people. "An evil political system had produced an evil social system. For hundreds of years a people had been politically degraded . . . the only pleasure they knew, the poor creatures abused it and drank it to excess." Father Mathew raised the temperance movement with the help of William Martin of the Society of Friends. The people learned, as time went on, that the abuse of a thing and the use of a thing were two different things. Maurice Healy later moved into enjoying wine. And he gives thanks to "the Giver of all good things, the most friendly of His gifts. `Come, fill the glass. Your good health'." It is a lovely read. Full of judgments you might, in these days, dissent from without affront. "Claret is wine. It is the wine," for example. Of Champagne he has much to say. "The digestion that is too delicate to stomach other wines will find that the sparkle in Champagne is a digestive. It has a tonic effect upon the brain more rapid than that of any other juice of the grape."
He does of course go through all the then known wines. Elitist? There are annotations through the text by a colleague which occasionally bring Maurice down to earth. This was published in 1940 in London, where he had moved from Munster. He died in 1943.