The tables groan, the cooks groan, the guests groan,-- feasting is a nightmare.
Wine is a subject, not a beverage; it is discussed, not drunk; it is sipped, tasted, and swallowed reluctantly; it lingers on the palate in fragrant and delicious memory; it comes a bouquet and departs an aroma; it is the fruition of years, the distillation of ages; a liquid jewel, it reflects the subtle colors of the rainbow, running the gamut from a dull red glow to the violet rays that border the invisible.
But, alas! the appreciation of wine is lost.

Everybody serves wine, no one understands it; everybody drinks it, no one loves it.
From a fragrant essence wine has become a coarse reality,--a convention.

Chablis with the oysters, sherry with the soup, sauterne with the fish, claret with the roast, Burgundy with the game,--champagne somewhere, anywhere, everywhere; port, grand, old ruddy port--that has disappeared; no one understands it and no one knows when to serve it; while Madeira, that bloom of the vinous century plant, that rare exotic which ripens with passing generations, is all too subtle for our untutored discrimination.
And if, perchance, a good wine, like a strange guest, finds its way to the table, we are at loss how to receive it, how to address it, how to entertain it.

We offend it in the decanting and distress it in the serving.

We buy our wines in the morning and serve them in the evening to drink the sediment which the more fastidious wine during long years has been slowly rejecting; we mix the bright transparent liquid with its dregs and our rough palates detect no difference.