La bataille des vins – Wine fight!

by

Gillian Polack

I once did a summary of an old French poem extolling wines. It started off as a full translation. Alas, there was so much typing for so little plot arc that I wimped out. I’ve re-edited and added more notes and I've had some thoughts about it. Originally I was mainly excited by the evidence it gave for the wine varieties that abounded in thirteenth century France. Then I fell in love with some of the images. Right now, however, my interest is rather more mundane. Let me start with the wine fight itself, and then I’ll talk about this oddly mundane interest.

The wine fight

The poem starts off calling the audience to attention.

VOLEZ oïr une grant fable
Qu'il avint l’autrier fus la table
Au bon roi qui ot non Phelippe,
Qui volentiers moilloit fa pipe
Du bon vin qui eftoit du blanc.

King Phillip is thirsty. He needs wine. He’s also fussy. Not just any wine will do him. He wants the best, and he wants the best to be white. The wine must be not too young. The value of wine in Medieval shipping records suggests that old wine was not valued either, so the wine must be neither too young nor too old. Somewhere between a season and a year old, perhaps?

The bulk of the poem is a list of wines that might match the king’s needs. A wine that matches the king’s desires might not be a wine that rhymes easily, however, so occasionally other elements creep into the poem. My personal favourite is the explanation that a wine from Cyprus is not at all the same thing as beer from Ypres. Beer wasn’t one of the wines fighting, but Ypres and Cyprus made a rhyme and got the Henri d’Andeli (the poet) out of a hole.

Henri d’Andeli grouped the wines by region (roughly) which made for a confusing list. Some places had similar names. To me this says loudly that the poem was for listeners who knew their stuff. They knew their wine and where it came from. I’ve alphabeticised the list, but left the names in Old French. The wines, lined up for the fray:

Angouleme
Anjou
Anni
Argences
Argentueil
Ausois
Aussai
Autel de Tauçons
Auxerre (Medieval happiness may well have been a bottle of this)
Aviler
Beauvaisis (two wines!)
Bediers
Betesi (Héron suggests this may be either Béthisy-Saint-Martin or Béthisy-Saint-Pierre)
Biaune (I recollect a Medieval family surname from Beaune; it translated as “Who doesn't drink water.” Imagine signing your documents as Adele Who Doesn’t Drink Water or Raoul Who Doesn’t Drink Water.)
Bordiaus et Saintes
Carcassone
Chablis
Chagni
Chalons
Chambly
Chastel Raoul
Châteauroux
Espernai le Bacheler
Flavigni
Gastinois (either the modern Gâtinais or Gâtine)
Goditouet
Hautvillers
Ile-de-France (3 wines—the king's local brands)
Issoudun
Jargeau
La Rochele
Lassy
Le Mans
Melans (possibly Milan)
Meulan
Montmorillon
Montpellier
Montrichard
Moselle
Mossac
Moussele
Narbonne
Nevers
Orchise
Orleans (a way popular wine at that time, according to a note by Héron)
Palma
Plesence
Poitiers
Provence
Rains
Rennes
Saint-Brice
Saintes
Saint-Jehan d’Angeli
Saint-Melÿon
Saint-Pourçain (this wine also got a lot of Medieval press)
Saint-Yon
Samois
Sancerre
Savigny
Sézanne
Soissons
Spain (note how Spanish wines were generic, but French named according to town)
Tailleborc
Tonnerre
Tors
Treneborc
Trilbardou
Verdelai
Vermendois
Ysoudun

The wine of Argentueil was as clear as tears of sorrow (“Qui fu clers comme lerme d'ueil”), the poet says, which moved a wine-lover to declare it best of all. Naturally, this led to physical rowdiness and some name calling.

This is where I detour to talk (briefly) about the fine art of Medieval insults. It was indeed a fine art. The low ones and the ones that did not appear without base intent were the scatological. Then there are the ones that appear in epic battle scenes. They can be graded according to effect, with the strongest and most powerful being an immediate incitement to fight and focussing on the seven deadly sins and on proper behaviour. It was not a good thing if someone called you a treacherous liar, but it was much worse to be called a glutton or the son of a prostitute. The most appropriate insult in the context of a wine battle was one that included two of the seven deadly sins: “son of a gluttonous prostitute,”—filz a putain glouz!

The French wines fought well. When their alcohol content was put into doubt, they boasted about their flavour. The effects of alcohol were discussed and the battle finally came to an end after three days and three nights with no sleep but with an inordinate amount of drink.

Why I was interested in the wine fight

I was looking at an e-text of life in early Australia today. It was somewhat slow and turgid. Not easy to read aloud. It popped up when I was hunting some astronomical information for the twelfth century (which was research for fiction, so my work was a novel and my not-work is . . . I need to stop dwelling on confusion). Then the wine tale appeared and started muttering in my head and I needed to get it out of my mind so that I could get back to that 1181 supernova. The best way to get something out of my brain is to write about it. I hand it over and let someone else’s brain take the burden for me.

There aren’t that many seriously cool secular entertaining texts that have survived from before the fourteenth century. Compare them to the administrative/legal texts and to religious texts and there hardly seem any at all.

Some of them are particularly loveable. Several of those adorable texts come from the hand of one writer in particular: Henri d’Andeli. “La bataille des vins” by Henri d’Andeli (preserved on folios 21-232 of Bibliothèque Nationale manuscript number fr. 837). What, after all, is sweeter and more charming than a bunch of wines toughing it out and rendering people drunk in the process. It’s like walking into a bar and there’s nothing on this earth more adorable than a bar. Although, I have to admit, it’s not the alcohol that's so very gorgeous: it's the way it talks.

When I first read this small tale, it struck me that it started like a chanson de geste. The precise words that begin the wine fight are: “Volez oïr.” I generally explain them (when someone asks) as “Shut up and listen, you plebs.” It really means “Be pleased to hear,” but that’s far too polite and I can’t deal with too much courtesy at once. However it’s interpreted, those words point to listening. They’re not really the same formula as the one that typically leads into an Old French epic legend, but they’re close. They’re close for an important reason: they instruct the audience to listen.

It’s the notion of hearing and texts that fascinates me. We read the wine fight. We read most books. Even when we have children and it’s bedtime and there’s reading, we often describe it as ‘reading to’ someone. For us, reading is about the eyes.

In Old French stories, it’s about the ears. The first words alert us to this, and the fact that so many stories are in verse just hammer it home. Verse sounds different. When the first V miniseries was written, the writer claims he used iambic pentameter to make it work better for the ear (I like watching the extras on DVD collections—one of my besetting sins). He knew what he was doing. He temporarily switched a massive television audience over from visualising words in their minds’ eyes to listening to them like narrative music.

The wine fight text doesn’t use iambic pentameter. Iambic pentameter requires beats, and Old French is not so conducive to that. It mostly measures in syllables. Eight syllables a line. Rhyming couplets. Not a complicated scheme. It’s very good for the ear, though.

It starts off as “Listen to this story” and so we do. We know that it’s going to be easy to follow because eight syllables ending in a rhyme lends itself to simple writing. (I want someone to rewrite Ulysses in octosyllabic rhyming couplets, just to see what happens to it.)

It also lends itself to short sharp sounds and to hurried clashes and to frenzied lists. Another of these Old French poems I love describes the street cries and street vendors of Paris: again, short sharp sounds, but without the hurried clashes and the frenzied lists. It’s a form that carries a surprising number of options.

That’s what I was thinking about today, underneath the wanders from book to book. I like the sound of words. It’s one of the reasons I love books. And all the wonder of modern technology means that our access to that sound is increasing.

I’ve taken to teaching sound as part of the way I teach writing. A poor writer (who was suffering being edited by me) was once forced to undergo a spontaneous exercise in the middle of a big shopping centre. She had a beautiful ear and a rich aural imagination. She had been taught to write for the eye only. She was translating from the ear to the written word and diluting her gift in the process. I made her listen until her words sang the way she dreamed them. Without Medieval poetry I might not have known what was wrong. A simple satirical poem that mostly listed wines helped change how I teach writing.

The question I have is which current writers do what Henri d’Andeli and turn an orderly dinner into a drunken array of half-empty bottles? I shall keep my eyes peeled and my ears aware. When I discover writers who are particularly splendid at drawing us in with the sound of their prose, I might have to report back.

Books mentioned in this column:
Les Dits d'Henri d'Andeli ed. Alain Corbellari (Champion, 2003)
Oeuvres de Henri d'Andeli, trouvère normand du 13e siècle, ed. A. Héron (Imprimerie de Esperance Cagniard, 1880)

Gillian Polack is based in Canberra, Australia. She is mainly a writer, editor and educator. Her most recent print publications are a novel (Life through Cellophane, Eneit Press, 2009), an anthology (Masques, CSfG Publishing, 2009, co-edited with Scott Hopkins), two short stories and a slew of articles. Her newest anthology is Baggage, published by Eneit Press (2010).One of her short stories won a Victorian Ministry of the Arts award a long time ago, and three have (more recently) been listed as recommended reading in international lists of world's best fantasy and science fiction short stories. She received a Macquarie Bank Fellowship and a Blue Mountains Fellowship to work on novels at Varuna, an Australian writers' residence in the Blue Mountains. Gillian has a doctorate in Medieval history from the University of Sydney. She researches food history and also the Middle Ages, pulls the writing of others to pieces, is fascinated by almost everything, cooks and etc. Currently she explains 'etc' as including Arthuriana, emotional cruelty to ants, and learning how not to be ill. She is the proud owner of some very pretty fans, a disarticulated skull named Perceval, and 6,000 books. Contact Gillian.