Our largish party included a near-retirement age French
professor of history, I think he was, who taught at the Sorbonne. We
drank a lot of Romanian red wine, the luxuriant dry Byzantium Cabernet
Sauvignon from the legendary Dealu Mare vineyards, and went through
several courses over the course of several hours, a standard Romanian
repast. We talked mostly about food. After he had drunk more than a few
glasses of wine, the French professor held forth on various subjects,
discoursing in an elliptical way so that no one else could talk while
he spoke. He talked about Iraq, launching into a kind of History
Channel lecture on the Middle East, including a few indisputable,
uninspired opinions about military strategy. Something about Napoleon.
For him, the past was a series of coherent, causal events that fit into
a neat narrative. For my part, I tried to get in that the war was
nothing less than a calamity and then attempted to offer a few barbed
opinions about the idiot president, George W. Bush. But I don't believe
he heard me, possibly because he was giving a lecture rather than
engaging in a conversation. He also didn't think much of the
irrefutably superb Byzantium Cab, comparing it, predictably, to
Bordeaux and Burgundies. Nevertheless he drank glass after glass of the
vintage and got very drunk.
You aren't supposed to touch the wine bottle in a Romanian restaurant—it's practically an insult to pour your own. So the bottle that has been placed on the table in front of you rests there until the designated attendant picks it up and walks around the table silently, fluidly, ceremoniously pouring wine into glasses. The problem is that you can sit before an empty glass for twenty minutes, sort of watching it wistfully—the lonely half-full bottle sitting there in front of you, as well—waiting for the person charged with refilling a glass to come. This may be a consequence of the Communist days, when everyone was assigned a job, no matter how meaningful, though I'm not sure about that. It may go back to the time of Matei Corvin and Vlad Tepes. Or to Ovid, for that matter.
The French professor did not like to have wine poured into the glass that he'd been drinking from. He wanted a new wineglass each time he had a glass of wine, which was frequently, even if the burgundy liquid poured into it was the same as the one he had been drinking. He even threatened to smash his glass on the stone floor if he wasn't supplied with a new one every time a bottle was opened—he claimed that this was common practice in France. I'd never heard of this and, though I didn't offer my opinion this time, thought it was an excessive cultural ideal to enforce. Also, his theatrical refusal caused such a commotion that the guy appointed with the job of pouring the wine, upset, ran off to get the maître d'hôtel. This being Romania, it took a while for them to come. Meanwhile, my glass sat empty in front of me. When the maître d' and several members of the wait crew appeared, the Sorbonne professor, with practically no knowledge of Romanian, got into a row with them. He even wanted to stand up to make some kind of speech, but several of our party beseeched him to remain seated. Kind of swimming in the copious red liquid myself, I did try to say that I was originally from the West Coast, and that we replaced glasses sometimes when we changed wines at tastings, but I don't think I was heard above the fracas. I then realized why this professor from the Sorbonne was such a fucking idiot. This was his fly fishing.
You aren't supposed to touch the wine bottle in a Romanian restaurant—it's practically an insult to pour your own. So the bottle that has been placed on the table in front of you rests there until the designated attendant picks it up and walks around the table silently, fluidly, ceremoniously pouring wine into glasses. The problem is that you can sit before an empty glass for twenty minutes, sort of watching it wistfully—the lonely half-full bottle sitting there in front of you, as well—waiting for the person charged with refilling a glass to come. This may be a consequence of the Communist days, when everyone was assigned a job, no matter how meaningful, though I'm not sure about that. It may go back to the time of Matei Corvin and Vlad Tepes. Or to Ovid, for that matter.
The French professor did not like to have wine poured into the glass that he'd been drinking from. He wanted a new wineglass each time he had a glass of wine, which was frequently, even if the burgundy liquid poured into it was the same as the one he had been drinking. He even threatened to smash his glass on the stone floor if he wasn't supplied with a new one every time a bottle was opened—he claimed that this was common practice in France. I'd never heard of this and, though I didn't offer my opinion this time, thought it was an excessive cultural ideal to enforce. Also, his theatrical refusal caused such a commotion that the guy appointed with the job of pouring the wine, upset, ran off to get the maître d'hôtel. This being Romania, it took a while for them to come. Meanwhile, my glass sat empty in front of me. When the maître d' and several members of the wait crew appeared, the Sorbonne professor, with practically no knowledge of Romanian, got into a row with them. He even wanted to stand up to make some kind of speech, but several of our party beseeched him to remain seated. Kind of swimming in the copious red liquid myself, I did try to say that I was originally from the West Coast, and that we replaced glasses sometimes when we changed wines at tastings, but I don't think I was heard above the fracas. I then realized why this professor from the Sorbonne was such a fucking idiot. This was his fly fishing.
[Excerpted from "Fly Fishing Romania" at The Exquisite Corpse. Follow the link to get the whole picture.]
