T H I S+W E E K If it's Tuesday, I must be tipsy By Jan Morris Jan Morris drinks her way across Europe D E P A R T M E N T S The Surreal Gourmet By Bob Blumer Throw a salmon on the barbie Postmark: Philadelphia By Mary Elizabeth Williams City of Brotherly Weirdness Passages: "In Light of India" Beholding Bombay By Octavio Paz - Books on India - Getting there Readers' Tips and Tales New York Stories - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Your virtual travel agency - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - LA S T+W E E K Tuesday, May 13 Foucault au lait By David Downie I pose, therefore I am. "Philocafes" conquer Paris. A full list of all Wanderlust articles

I L L U S T R A T I O N B Y R A F A E L L O P E Z Two whites and a red | page 2 Next, on to a certainty of a very different kind -- the Côte de Beaune in Burgundy, where Jaguars from Switzerland cruise around looking for rich luncheons and crates of the most expensive white wine in the world. This is a long, long way from the storks and homely boulevardiers of Haro. Here one after another the wine villages succeed each other in well-heeled complacency, like clichés: Their narrow streets are spotless, their charming courtyarded villas all look as though they were steam-cleaned last week. They seem to be mostly deserted except for meandering gourmands and the odd viniculturist stepping in or out of his Range Rover, but on every other corner a discreetly sculpted sign announces an opportunity of dégustation. Being a rough islander myself, and an iconoclast at that, I decide to buck the certainties here. I buy, for the first and probably the last time in my life, a Grand Cru Montrachet -- Marquis de Laguiche, vintage 1993. I get a kindly waitress in a cafe to uncork it for me, and pick up a hefty ham-and-cheese baguette to go with it. At that moment a viniculturist happens to arrive in his Range Rover. "Kindly direct me," say I, "to the exact patch of soil that has produced this bottle of wine." He raises his eyebrows slightly on seeing its label and the napkin-wrapped sandwich in my hand. It's not much of a day for a picnic, he says, but perhaps the wine will help -- and with a wonderfully subtle suggestion of disapproval he points the way to Le Montrachet. "Bon appétit," he brings himself to say, for your Burgundy viniculturist is nothing if not charming. And so a few minutes later I find myself sitting on the low stone wall that bounds the vineyard of Le Montrachet. The wall could have been made for picnickers. I reach out and touch the vines, and look slowly across the little road in front of me as a large gray snail crawls with every sign of equanimity toward the scarcely less-illustrious vineyard on the other side. There I sit and eat my baguette and drink, out of a plastic mug, the most famous dry white on earth. It is very peaceful -- rather like picnicking in a very upscale cemetery. These textbook wine villages ornament the landscape north and south -- Meursault and Poligny, Pommard and Santenay. Down the hill an occasional car scurries along the Route National toward Beaune, and a constant low hum of traffic, like the humming of bees, reaches me from the great north-south motorway in the distance. Otherwise, all is elegant calm. Not a bird twitches or a lizard flickers. Once or twice people in cars, on the little vineyard road, slow down to take a look at me, swinging my legs on the wall, and respond with wary smiles when I raise my mug to them. All around the vineyards symmetrically extend, neat as can be, perfect in their regularity, part of the very contours of the land, as though no human hand had ever tilled or planted them. The wine is divine, of course. It seems to me the essence of everything Burgundian -- accomplished, fastidious, exquisitely polite, perhaps a bit Range Rovery, a little lofty in the aftertaste. But then wouldn't you be snooty, to find yourself drunk from a plastic mug with a ham sandwich, there in the very vineyard that had made your name celebrated among connoisseurs for 400 years? Four hundred years? That's nothing. A vineyard I visited this morning in the Rheingau, the greatest of the German wine areas, has been in the hands of the same patrician family since the 14th century. And the Rhine wine I drank, a 1993 Auslese, was from the Schloss Johannisburg, which was granted to Prince Metternich by the Hapsburg emperor after the Congress of Vienna, and is still partly the property of his descendants. If gentlemanly elegance is the hallmark of Burgundy, power seems to impregnate the soil of the Rheingau: constant, immutable power, impervious to history, sometimes latent, sometimes brazen. I have been staying at the spa of Bad Kreuznach, on the west side of the river, which is where the spike-helmeted German General Staff had its headquarters in 1917, and where 30 years later Adenauer and de Gaulle met to lay the first foundations of the European Union. Just over the hill to the north is the awful memorial by which the Germans commemorated their victory over France in 1870, and the foundation of the Second Reich. The vineyards around have always been the fiefs of mighty magnates -- Prince Frederick of Prussia, the Landgraf of Hessen, Prince Lowenstein, sundry counts and barons, descendants of Metternich. Where else to drink my wine then but on the terrace of Schloss Johannisberg itself, which stands on its proud hill, rather like another triumphant memorial, surveying the Rhine below? The landscape is majestic. The scattered towns lie here like so many tenancies. The Rhine itself is power liquefied, marching down past the Lorelei to Koblenz and away to Rotterdam and the sea, alive with its constant stream of barges -- whose chugging reaches me, like the motorway hum in Burgundy, above the calm of the vineyards. And look! There goes as telling a symbol of German continuity as you could ask for -- the venerable paddle-steamer Goethe, streaming flags and foam, which has been sailing the Rhine in the service of the same owners since before the First World War. I am looking at one of the continent's most fateful frontiers, and one of its most profitable conduits. It is the energy of all Europe that is streaming past down there. Beneath the flowering chestnuts on the belvedere of Schloss Johannisberg I pick up my bottle (with its elegant label of the Schloss itself and its inscription "Furst von Metternich") as if I am about to pour an oblation. I have never in my life tasted a top-class Rhine wine, and it precisely suits this high balcony of history. Rich and golden it flows into the glass; it is a mighty wine, a noble wine, sweet but not sickly, complicated, a wine of elaborate consequence, such as bishops and margraves might toast Holy Roman emperors with, or big-mustached field marshals might order to celebrate victories. A blossom or two floats past me on to the trestle table. The Goethe is disappearing around the bend toward Rudesheim. Time to go home. Temporarily reassured by my European certainties, with the beauty of the organic, the elegance of self-esteem, the perverse grace of arrogance all blended in a profound continental aftertaste, I head for Wales, tea and game pie. Oh, the writer's life for me! May 20, 1997 Share your tales of drinking abroad in Salon's Table Talk.

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