When love is in the air, the air changes. It becomes lighter, freer, effervescent. This effect, invoked by Donne, Spenser and Chaucer in their various poems for St Valentine's Day, is conveyed, too, by the old silver Latin poem for the feast of Venus, the "Pervigilium Veneris". Maybe we are not so aware of the change, now that love has no seasons, and must be unearthed with great efforts from the junk heap of lust. Still, every now and then even the hardest heart recalls the time of first love, when, one day, your mind emptied of all concupiscence and your desires focused on the magical other, you woke up to discover that the air had changed.
Wine for St Valentine's Day ought to recapture that experience. It should affect the soul like the air of the sea, and place a halo around even the smallest thing that has to do with the wished-for object. It should not distract you from love's dialogue, which is a dialogue of looks and glances rather than words. It would be bad taste to sit down with the object of your desires, only to bury your nose in a glass of fine old claret. It would be the height of folly to swig back a beaker of frothy Valdepenas while groping around for that elusive knee.
Corney & Barrow's solution is to search the hills and vales of Italy for the new kind of Italian wine, on the assumption that Italians are excellent lovers, but only when their thoughts are of home - true love being, after all, the attempted passage from one home to another. The Pinot Grigio from the Alto Adige is a characterful, soil-flavoured wine, vinified, according to the bumf, by "gentle pressing followed by light maceration on the skins".
That summarises Italian love-making pretty well, though the next stage after maceration is better accompanied by the extremely flavoursome Sauvignon from the Colli Orientali del Friuli. This is a zippy, eager wine, whose face is hung with fruity ornaments, and which fairly giggles with naughtiness as it slides down the tube. Its tube-worthiness is even signalled in its brand name (alas that it has one) - La Tunella.
The Barbera d'Asti bears the name of a family, not a brand - that of the Marchesi Alfieri, lords of San Martino, who have been growing wine there since the 12th century. The most famous Alfieri, whose austere tragedies are the high point of Italian 18th-century literature, is for ever esteemed in the annals of love for his constant and undeviating attachment to the Countess of Albany, wife of the young pretender. This dark, bottomless wine has the tragedy and the power of a lifelong attachment, and we regretted that it ran out so soon.
As for the cheerful Chianti Classico, drink it the next day, as a perfect tribute to the future - if there is one.
