Praises of the Wine of Montepulciano
Oh! how widely wandereth he
Who, in the search of verity,
Keeps aloof from glorious wine!
Lo! the knowledge it bringeth to me.
For Barbarossa, this wine so bright,
With its rich red look and its strawberry light,
So invites me
And so delights me,
I should infallibly quench my inside with it,
Had not Hippocrates
And old Andromachus
Strictly forbidden it
And loudly chidden it,
So many stomachs have sickened and died with it.
Yet discordant as it is,
Two good biggins will not come amiss;
Because I know, while I’m drinking them down,
What is the finish and what is the crown.
A cup of good Corsican
Does it at once;
Or a cup of old Spanish
Is next for the nonce:
Quackish resources are things for a dunce.
Cups of chocolate,
Ay, or tea,
Are not medicines
Made for me.
I would sooner take to poison,
Than a single cup set eyes on
Of that bitter and guilty stuff ye
Talk of by the name of coffee.
Let the Arabs and the Turks
Count it ’mongst their cruel works:
Foe of mankind black and turbid,
Let the throats of slaves absorb it.
Down in Tartarus,
Down in Erebus,
’Twas the detestable Fifty invented it;
The Furies then took it,
To grind and to cook it,
And to Proserpine all these presented it.
If the Mussulman in Asia
Doats on a beverage so unseemly,
I differ with the man extremely.
There’s a squalid thing called beer:—
The man whose lips that thing comes near
Swiftly dies, or falling foolish,
Grows, at forty, old and owlish.
She that in the ground would hide her,
Let her take to English cider:
He who’d have his death come quicker,
Any other Northern liquor.
Those Norwegians and those Laps
Have extraordinary taps:
Those Laps especially have strange fancies:
To see them drink,
I verily think
Would make me lose my senses.
But a truce to such vile subjects
With their impious, shocking objects,
Let me purify my mouth
In an holy cup o’ the south:
In a golden pitcher let me
Head and ears for comfort get me,
And drink of the vine of the wine benign
That sparkles warm in Sansovine;
Or of that vermillion charmer
And heart-warmer,
Which brought up in Tregonzano
And on stony Giggiano,6
Blooms so bright and lifts the head so
Of the toasters of Arezzo.
Francesco Redi (1626–1696).