'White wine is like electricity. Red wine looks and tastes like liquefied beefsteak,’ James Joyce once declared. A sketch by the English painter Frank Budgen of the two men drinking wine in Zurich, where both spent the First World War, shows precisely the kind of convivial setting in which such a pronouncement might be made. The wine in the carafe on the table between them may have been a Fendant de Sion, Joyce’s favourite Swiss wine – and the writer’s fanaticism on this subject cannot be underestimated. Fendant, made of the indigenous Chasselas grape, is very dry, with traces of mineral, smoke and gunflint on the nose and a long, bitter finish. Joyce nicknamed the wine ‘the urine of the Archduchess’ after its pale amber colour.

James Joyce Experience, Dublin Day, !DublinNight@lemm.ee.

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