Drinking is a lost art, eating a forgotten ceremony.  The pendulum has swung from Trimalchio back to Trimalchio.  Quality is lost in quantity.  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.  But the lover of wine, the more he has the less he drinks, until, in the refinement and exaltation of his taste, it is sufficient to look upon the dust-mantled bottle and recall the delicious aroma and flavor, the recollection of which is far too precious to risk by trying anew; he knows that if a bottle be so much as turned in its couch it must sleep again for years before it is really fit to drink; he knows how difficult it is to get the wine out of the bottle clear as ruby or yellow diamond; he knows that if so much as a speck of sediment gets into the decanter, to precisely the extent of the speck is the wine injured.

In serving wines, we of the Western world may learn something from the tea ceremonies of the Japanese,—­ceremonies so elaborate that to our impatient notions they are infinitely tedious, and yet they get from the tea all the exquisite delight it contains, and at the same time invest its serving with a halo of form, tradition, and association.  Surely, if wine is to be taken at all, it is as precious as a cup of tea; and if taken ceremoniously, it will be taken moderately.