Keats and Claret

In terms of a literary pairing for Claret, nobody wrote with such enthusiasm for the wine of Bordeaux as the English poet, John Keats. In the spring of 1819, he wrote to his brother George as follows:

“Now I like Claret and whenever I can have Claret I must drink it. It is the only palate affair that I am at all sensual in. For really it is so fine. It fills the mouth, one’s mouth with a gushing freshness, then goes down cool and feverless, then you do not feel it quarrelling with your liver, no it is rather a Peace maker and lies as quiet as it did in the grape. Then it is as fragrant as the Queen Bee; and the more ethereal part of it mounts into the brain, not assaulting the cerebral apartments like a bully in a bad house looking for his whore and hurrying from door to door bouncing against the wainscot; but rather walks like Aladdin about his own enchanted palace so gently that you do not feel his step. Other wines of a heavy and spirituous nature transform a Man into a Silenus; this makes him a Hermes, and gives a Woman the soul and immortality of Ariadne for whom Bacchus always kept a good cellar of claret.”