Wine historians haven’t seriously sought to answer the question I posed in my last post: Why was Pepys, rather than a wine connoisseur, the first to pen a description of early modern fine wine?
The two historians who have the most to say about Pepys and wine—Hugh Johnson and his French counterpart, René Pijassou—think the answer lies in Pepys’s affection for the new and the fashionable, and it’s true that in 1663 Chateau Haut-Brion was both those things. But to explain his description of fine wine as mere fashion-consciousness is too glib. Rather, since Pepys’s tasting note appears in his diary, digging into diary-writing as a genre and considering his unique take on diaries yields a deeper, better answer. And I think Pepys’s genuine interest in natural philosophy, or what we now call science, is more significant than his attraction to the fashionable.
Pepys’s commitment to science, and the traces of that in his diary, hasn’t received the attention it deserves. Instead, a strong sense of disapproval has shadowed Pepys’s diary from the day of its discovery among the three thousand books he left to his Cambridge College, Magdalene, and this distaste persists, perhaps surprisingly, in our wine historians’ thinking. While Pepys’s biographer, Claire Tomalin, is unequivocally enthusiastic about the diary and likens his literary achievement to that of Chaucer, Dickens and Proust, Johnson finds the work “peculiar,” and Pijassou labels the diary and its author “cynique et débauché.”
However, to say the diary is cynical and debauched is to miss clues that it was an experiment. Between 1660 and 1669, Pepys wrote the diary’s 1.25 million words in shorthand for privacy’s sake. It contained set-pieces, now famed for their vividness, of events such as the Great Fire of London of 1666, and it also included scenes from his business, social and scientific lives: descriptions of wine and the contents of his wine cellar; accounts of fights with his wife and visits to the Royal Society; the slight but evocative scene of stopping by his vintner’s to watch wine bottles decorated with his crest being filled; graphic depictions of his sex life and his horror at being caught in flagrante by his wife (“…the greatest sorrow to me that ever I knew in this world,” he grieved). So, I’d say Pepys’s diary was more keenly, startlingly observant than cynically debauched; the “debauchery” was just another true-to-life element in the richly varied and textured life he portrayed there.
That Pepys went further than contemporaries in his depiction of all aspects of life is apparent in a comparison of his diary with that of John Evelyn, Pepys’s great friend and, like Pepys, a Fellow of the Royal Society. Evelyn’s diary was intended to be read by his family and descendants, and it registered a far narrower, more decorous range of experience than did Pepys’s. He spoke of valuing the “Pleasantness of Taste” of wine in safely general terms, judged “incomparable” the wine he had pressed for himself on a trip to Italy, and described Haut-Brion simply as the “best of our Bordeaux wines.” There’s no tasting note for Haut-Brion, and little of Pepys’s specificity about his own experience and pleasure. Indeed, the historian Roy Strong remarks that from Evelyn’s diary we might never have known that Evelyn had a sense of humour, and it’s only from Pepys that we learn that at dinner one September evening in 1665, it was Evelyn who “did make us all die almost from laughing.”
Diaries became popular for the first time in the seventeenth century, and along with the related rise of the genres of memoir and autobiography, they opened windows onto previously closed private lives. In The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (1987), Colin Campbell remarks that the taste for diaries grew out of the Protestant emphasis on the inner life of individuals. The confessions of sins and yearnings became absorbing stories for others as a gauge of their own progress on virtue’s way. Confessional habits not only created a new kind of literature, they also encouraged the birth of a new kind of inwardly focussed self. Campbell points out that emotions, moods, and tastes “were re-located ‘within’ individuals, as states which emanated from some internal source…,” rather than being seen as aspects of the world beyond the self.
The tendency of the modern self to reveal private details and inner states generated criticism. For example, after the publication of Sir Thomas Browne’s 1642 Religio Medici (The Religion of a Doctor), a spiritual memoir known to Pepys, Sir Kenelm Digby publicly rebuked Browne for the sharing of trivial details. Digby—a courtier, natural philosopher, recipe collector, and inventor of the stronger modern wine bottle—questioned Browne’s discussion of his diet: “What should I say of his making so particular a Narration of personal things, and private thoughts…the knowledge whereof cannot much conduce to any mans betterment?” In the previous century, similar accusations of pointlessness had greeted essayist Michel de Montaigne’s revelations of his shifting tastes for white and red wine.
What’s especially significant here is that diaries, and all the new forms of self-revelation, were thus bound to break the ancient prohibition against speaking and writing about what Cicero called “small things”: the private, fleeting, low, bodily pleasures of food, wine, and sex. The rules of rhetoric only allowed for the representation of “small things” in the correspondingly low forms of comedy and satire. Pepys’s willingness to describe his sex life, and to note Haut-Brion’s “most particular taste,” along with the fact that he, as an individual, had “never met with” it before, was un-classical and modern. It was modern to make taste or flavour an experience worth savouring in one’s inner world, in one’s imagination and in memory, as Pepys did.
No one quite knows why Pepys began the diary, but Tomalin offers as plausible reasons his desire to keep busy, his recent fateful survival of a major operation (without anesthetic) for a bladder stone, writerly ambition, and unbounded curiosity about himself. I think Tomalin may be closer to the mark when she suggests the influence of Francis Bacon (1561-1626), the great promoter of the scientific method, who urged travellers to use diaries as a handy tool of observation. But I think Pepys, who had a telescope on his roof and a microscope in his study, and who first visited the Royal Society in 1661, was doing something inspired by the concept of historia. (Tomalin hints at this in her epilogue but doesn’t name and develop it.) The term, as Gianna Pomata and Nancy Siraisi explain in Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe (2005), meant a “collection of observations”—empirical knowledge gained through painstaking, direct observation that was at the heart of seventeenth-century science—rather than the study of the past that the English word “history” evokes for us. What else was Pepys doing in his diary than writing an historia, gathering observations of his life and the world he knew in the unsparing fashion of the scientist? Many of the scholars and friends around him were producing such “histories,” and an important programme (also inspired by Bacon) at the Royal Society was a “history” of the trades, one of which was a history of vintners, really a report on the faults in wines and their remedies, the “mysteries” employed by vintners to make wines less “stinking.”
Thus, Pepys was first to write a tasting note of early modern fine wine because in his diary he was secretly writing a “history” of himself, and Haut-Brion was one of countless particulars he found himself observing and bending the rules of politeness to record. He wrote of his experience with such tradition-breaking freedom that when his diary was first published in 1825, it was bowdlerized and re-written, with many descriptions of food, wine, and all those of sex, wiped away. I don’t think anybody has noticed or thought to comment before now that this meant that Pepys’s Haut-Brion remark remained unpublished until the late 1870s, and the first published reference I know of is in George Saintsbury’s 1920 Notes on a Cellar Book. The diary itself was only published in unexpurgated form in 1970, when the first volumes finally began to appear, released by a change in attitudes and obscenity law, though we’ve seen that Pijassou in the 1970s, Johnson in the 1980s, remained staunchly disapproving.
My next post, likely the final one on Pepys, will be devoted to how Haut-Brion was made in 1662, and what we know and can imagine of its taste.
A Most Particular Taste 