Reviews (April 2009)

Wine Review
Byzantium: 'our other half' ?

By Helen Savage

Social responsibility sells wine: Fairtrade wines can now be found in every major supermarket. So maybe it’s a sign of the times that Gateshead’s new Ethical Superstore, which sells everything from eco-friendly nappies to organic vodka, also lists over 80 wines.

It’s a very impressive and well-chosen range, but in order to learn more about what makes a bottle of wine (or a pack of nappies) ‘ethical’, I went to meet Twanna Doherty, the Ethical Superstore’s Head of Business Development, and John Hinton, the Head of Ethical Sourcing.

They explained that the Ethical Superstore was set up in 2006 by Vic Morgan and Andy Redfern, who like Twanna herself had worked for many years for Fairtrade pioneers Traidcraft, now one the Ethical Superstore’s close neighbours in the Team Valley. Their vision was to offer a much broader range of products, which as John explained, ‘enables people to buy in line with their own ethical standards. We try to give people detailed information about our products to help them make an informed choice.’ It’s an approach that’s neatly summed up by their slogan: ‘Buy What You Believe.’

Items are stocked if they fulfil criteria such as organic, Fairtrade, eco-friendly, re-cycled, vegetarian, vegan or energy-efficient, ‘We look at each wine and check that it ticks one or more of our boxes’, Twanna told me. ‘We want a quality product. And if we don’t have a champion in house, we look to a number of partners for help. There’s no-one here that’s a wine expert, so we rely on an ex-Waitrose buyer and Master of Wine to be a kind of category manager for us.’

It turns out that the main boxes that a wine must tick in order to be ‘ethical’ are based either on how the wine is made (organic, biodynamic or ‘sustainable’), or its social impact – Fairtrade, or if it comes from South Africa, Black Empowerment.

Some wine producers, critics and consumer groups have raised sharp questions about just how sustainable some initiatives really are - especially that in the New Zealand wine industry. Is it a case of double standards, to claim for example, that a winery is ‘carbon-neutral’, and then to go out and use vast quantities of a systemic weed-killer in the vineyards?

But as with almost any ethical issue, the process of choosing between right and wrong is seldom simple.

The idea of ‘Buy What You Believe’ is welcome in that the Ethical Superstore doesn’t set out to preach, but to give us, the consumers, the information to make our own choices - though I fully accept that some Christians may find it hard to accept such a level-playing field of values.

I’ll put (one of) my own cards on the table. Although I find that many biodynamically produced wines are superb, I have great difficulty with the philosophical underpinning of biodynamics, based, as they are, on the teachings of Rudolph Steiner. His understanding of the world and of spirituality is not mine. I do not, for example, believe as Nicolas Joly (the latter-day guru of biodynamic viticulture) does, that, for example, church steeples are shaped as they are in order to ‘call down cosmic forces.’

Nevertheless, I was delighted to see that the Ethical Superstore stocks Catherine Wallace’s brilliant biodynamic Saint Chinian, Château Combebelle 2005 (£8.50) - packed full of ripe black fruit, but perfumed with violets. It’s a wine destined to become one of the superstars of southern France. I also hugely enjoyed Johan Reyneke’s superb Pinotage 2005 (£12.50), again biodynamic, a deep ruby red from Stellenbosch in South Africa, with a gorgeous smell of creamy black cherries and plums, chocolate and spice and then backed up by silky smooth tannins - another classic.

In order to keep costs (and carbon-footprints low) all sales are done online (there’s no retail outlet). Their website is www.ethicalsuperstore.com. Once online, it’s very easy to choose wine according to whichever ethical ‘box’ matters to you.

Wine of the Month
Sagila Sauvignon Blanc 2006 (£8.25 from The Ethical Superstore) is as fine a Sauvignon from the Cape as I’ve ever tasted, with ripe grapefruit and peachy fruit and a deliciously dry minerality. It’s also a Black Empowerment wine.

Byzantium: 'our other half' ?

By Leonard Skinner

Here we are in the western part of the Roman Empire - or at least we were once - and we know how church life came to dominate our lives and how all our history is bound up in the story of Christendom. We have around us the architecture and art-and-design of the church, some of it now in museums and galleries. We are also heirs to the divisions that arose in our western church life, including the puritanical zeal which destroyed so much that was beautiful in our church buildings. But what about our ‘other half’ - the life and work and the inheritance today of the eastern part of the Roman Empire and its church? Just now there is a great surge of renewed interest in all that.

In Newcastle recently the ‘Insights’ lecture was given by Judith Herrin of King’s College, London who was described as the doyen of her subject: Byzantium. Judith signed copies of her latest book which Penguin published last year. Much of what is illustrated in her book, as it was in the lecture, has been on display in London at the Royal Academy. A fine catalogue accompanied the exhibition. Let’s ask for these books in our libraries!

We can explore this civilization. ‘Byzantium’ was the name of an ancient city which was rebuilt in 330 by the Emperor Constantine and became ‘Constantinople’, the capital of the Roman world, especially as the western ‘Rome’ fell in 476. Constantine of course had embraced and promulgated Christianity as the state religion and the story of church life cannot be separated from Byzantine life in general; Patriarch and Emperor were in constant dialogue or conflict with one another until the city was conquered by the (Islamic) Turks in 1453.

In Constantinople, the great church ‘of the Holy Wisdom’ was built (in the 500s - Justinian was Emperor). It was filled with mosaic representations of the Christian story and Christian theology. Through hundreds of years, the Empire encouraged the making of objects of art, with Christian reference more often than not, culminating in the establishment of icon painting as we still know it today - and wonderfully represented in the London exhibition. We were shown, however, some of the more ordinary aspects of the lives of ordinary people, including, touchingly, a little woven tunic that some Byzantine child would have worn.
The production of grand and beautiful art was interrupted by the east’s own onslaught of Puritanism and destruction of images (about 730 to 843); the re-establishment of image-making as the ‘correct’ theology was – and is - celebrated as ‘the Triumph of Orthodoxy’. A psalter of 843 shows men attacking an image of the crucifixion.

The Byzantine state and church were always interacting with other states and (us) the church of the west. The Emperors sent their princesses to marry into other royal families and encouraged foreign princesses to marry into their families. Attila the Hun comes into this story! Judith Herrin says it was almost as though they created a family of kings based on Constantinople - and the children of the subordinate allies were brought up in the court of that city. The Bulgars, the Georgians, states of southern Italy, and then on to Serbia, on to Russia - they are all part of the story of this ‘other half’ of the Empire and therefore of the Christian church. (Kiev has its own Church of the Holy Wisdom.)

In 1204 the so-called ‘crusade’ sacked Constantinople; many treasures and relics were stolen; in the exhibition many objects were from the Treasury of St Mark’s in Venice. Although the Byzantines returned, the Empire shrank - in Syria, the Holy Land and North Africa the forces of Islam predominated, and in 1453 the city itself fell to the Turks. The remaining Greek-speaking people have been driven out of the city in modern times, and only a small remnant stays now around the Patriarch, who is yet regarded as the ‘first among equals’ of the Orthodox Church leaders. In many ways of course, so far as the western churches are concerned, this ‘other half’ is now here with us, as a result of emigrations and dispersals. I wonder what future historians will find in this eventually? Will the movements of people today help bring together again our two halves?