Gratitude Monday: Wine, wassail & love

On Friday, my sister’s body won the fight with her brain. By the time she died, at 0300 on Saint Nicholas Day, she’d been under sedation for a week; she must have been exhausted from acting out all the bizarre orders her disease had been giving her. Everyone who loved her—which is to say, everyone who knew her—was heartsick at her passing, but relieved that the struggle was over. She lasted just about three years after her Alzheimer’s diagnosis.

I am grateful that three years is all that bastard got of her life. And I am so grateful that I had so many decades of her life to share.

Up until the diagnosis, Penny enjoyed her wine. Red or white, many’s the glass she and I had with many, many the meal. She taught me how to pour sparkling wine so it doesn’t fizz over the rim of the glass. (At the time of teaching, I’d been drinking champagne for a fair few years, but clearly I still had things to learn.) I think of that every single time I pour some bubbly, and I’m grateful.

When we made dinners from the Time-Life series Great Meals in Minutes, we always started out by pouring ourselves a glass of the specified wine. That may or may not have contributed to the fact that we did not once ever get the meal on the table in the promised “less than 60 minutes”. But we had absolutely rollicking good times, for which I'm grateful.

And the meals were pretty good, too.

(When I saw her in February, she could remember that we used to cook together, but could not recall the one we did every Christmas we spent together, butterflied grilled leg of lamb with a savory sauce.)

There’s one wine-related incident that I think of every time I have a glass of red. It was the 80s and we were having dinner at a restaurant on the fringes of Old Town Pasadena. We had a bottle of red with the meal (I don’t remember what main course I had, but the appetizer was carpaccio, and it was stupendous) and then we decided to have a glass of dessert (red) wine, which was quite nice. Penny being well known to the restaurant, the manager came by and topped up our little glasses. At this point we realized that our tongues had turned purple, so we sat there in the trendy restaurant, sticking our tongues out at each other and laughing like maniacs.

(Don’t @ me about the fact that Penny drove us home. It was the 80s and we were admittedly irresponsible that night. Big gratitude that all was well.)

Two years ago, when I took her and two of her friends out to dinner, I was drinking a glass of red. I poked her and stuck out my tongue, asking if it was purple. It was, and she remembered the dinner. That she did is a blessing, and I am grateful for it.

Well—back to Advent. In Penny’s honor, today we’ll have one of the approximately 12,347 variants of seasonal songs about mobs forming to rove villages in search of booze. This version is from Gloucestershire, because it’s called the “Gloucester/Gloucestershire Wassail Song”. I mean, I’m taking that as a clue.

Wassail, in case you are a little unclear, is one of the approximately 12,347 variants on mulled cider or wine or beer or mead. Mulling involves heating [mead, wine, beer or cider]; adding spices such as ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon and the like; and topping it with a slice of toasted bread, as a sop. (Sop: you know—like the toasted slices of baguette or croutons on the top of soup. Think: French onion soup.)

Oh, and it’s drunk from one big, communal bowl. No germ theory here.

Wassail dates back to Medieval times. I don’t know when all the spices started to be added, because they would have been extraordinarily rare and prohibitively expensive during that period. And I’m not sure about the significance of the toast being white; white flour and bread were also very expensive, and therefore only the very wealthy could afford it.

The custom of wassailing—roving around the village singing and demanding booze—is bifurcated. In apple and cider country in the west of England, you go out to the orchards in mid-winter to, you know, wake them up. To serve notice that the trees will have to shake off their winter sleep in a couple of months, and get back to work, because those apples are key to the local economy.

Wassailing through the village focuses on a kind of jolly-faced exchange between the peasants and the landlord class: here we’ve come to wish you well (wassail comes from Old English, and means “be thou hale”), oh—and have you got any food and drink on you? Great. Hand it over.

This explains all the verses in the song about wishing the master all the best: a good year, a good piece of beef, a good Christmas pie, a good crop of corn, blah, blah, blah. Just the slightest bit on the toadying side, but hey—it’s Tradition.

I’m giving you a performance of “Wassail” by the Utah State University Chorus.

I especially love this version because—even though it’s a Concert, they’re having such fun with it. I also love the fact that, it being Utah State, and the composition of the performers and audience is probably heavily Mormon and therefore strictly tee-total, they’re totally delivering on the progressively tipsy nature of the piece.

Penny would have got such a kick out of this, and I’m grateful for that, too.

©2024 Bas Bleu