I always wonder which farmer and which burgher were able to forget taxes, tithes, cold, hunger and plague, all the unpleasantness that we picture making up medieval life for the vast majority, to select the Cabernet Franc as the best prospect for St-Émilion or Chinon. Or bring the Melon from Burgundy to improve the sour wine of Muscadet. When life was nasty, brutish and short, you have to admire the men who perfected cathedral masonry, and the men (often, but not always, monks) who sipped and savoured, adjusted their pruning and their fermentation, trawled through the vineyard for the most
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