Reviews (June 2009)

Wine review
Book Review: In Search of the Moderate Muslim
Book Review: The Holy Island of Lindisfarne

By Helen Savage

A few weeks ago I was sent three samples of the same wine. One had a ‘Stelvin’ screw-cap, one was sealed with a natural cork and one had a plastic cork. They were bottled by a leading producer of Soave Classico at the behest of their English importers who want them to switch from natural cork to Stelvin. But the Italian authorities are unhappy. According to their rules only a natural cork will do, and they insist that the wine with the screw top must be de-classified as simple ‘bottled Soave’. This may seem like a subtle and insignificant distinction, but the quality of the wine in the three bottles revealed some surprising differences.

That sealed with a natural cork was very good. The wine showed clean lemony fruit, and a gently spicy finish – gained through a short period of maturation in oak barrels. The bottle with a plastic cork was a considerable disappointment: with less aroma, less flavour, it was, frankly, rather dull. The screw-top won hands down. The wine was fresher, more pungent, zingy, and altogether more exciting. It is my wine of the month.

There’s little doubt that the Stelvin screw cap works wonderfully well. It’s easy to open (unless you have arthritic fingers) and the wine arrives at your table in much the same condition that it left the winery. Natural corks also work pretty well; but quality control is a bit of a nightmare. It may be an eco-friendly, sustainable method of sealing a bottle, but the failure rate is still unacceptable. The plastic cork, as well as being the very devil to pull (I’ve broken more than one corkscrew) is not an effective seal. Even after a few months, a wine deteriorates markedly.

But then there are plastic corks and plastic corks. That chosen to seal the Soave sample was solid and unyielding. There are much more sophisticated plastic closures on the market, with a softer, spongy centre.

One of the main manufacturers of these, Normacorc, decided to take me to task over an article about wine packing I’d written in The Journal. They invited me to meet their chief wine scientist who wanted to tell be about the clever research they are doing with ‘oxygen management’. The wine trade loves to talk about OTR (‘oxygen transfer rates’), but most of us haven’t a clue about the clever science that goes on behind the scenes. We just rely on our taste buds.

I was greatly impressed by the Normacorc people, but I didn’t get a word in edgeways for almost three quarters of an hour. It was a very odd interview. I managed to one slip in one question, eventually, on the lines of, “if your research proves that a screw cap is best, would you manufacture those instead?” “Good question”, replied the Vice President for marketing and Innovation after a pause, “there’s clearly place for different systems. There is no unique answer.”

To be fair to Normacorc, they are trying very hard to look at how oxygen affects wine right through the manufacturing process as well as in the bottle. Their work has thrown up some fascinating issues. After all, wine is not like orange juice. It ‘matures’ and ‘develops’. It isn’t just a matter of packaging fresh produce to preserve as many of the primary fruit flavours as possible. Even the Normacorc folk admit that ‘complexity’ in a mature wine may occur as a result of processes that are technically spoilage.

But their goal of giving the consumer ‘exactly what the winemaker intended’ is surely impossible. Young, fresh fruity wines with a very short shelf life are as close to orange juice as a fermented liquid gets, but wines designed to ‘live’ longer are more problematic. What is better: fresh and fruity or mature, complex and (technically) spoiled? And surely attempts to resist the effect of ageing are, ultimately, futile? Again to be fair to Normacorc, this isn’t what they claim to offer: they would just like to control the process of aging more closely – rather like the way in which some of us try to arrest the passage of the years by plastering our faces with all sorts of creams filled with all the right vitamins. You have to decide what’s best, the ‘new wine’ or ‘well-aged wine’? I’m relieved to see that both feature in the biblical vision of the great feast.

Wine of the Month: Monteforte Soave ‘Passo Avanti’ 2006 Waitrose £6.99
Delicously fresh, zingy Italian dry white with spicy, lemony fruit and a hint of spicy oak. Superb with good fresh fish.

Book Review: In Search of the Moderate Muslim

Jon Gower Davies: In Search of the Moderate Muslim, Social Affairs Unit, £10.95

‘Moderate Muslims’ are a group of people much courted and praised by the government and the churches. They are said to be the ‘real Muslims’, those who practise a faith that promotes peace and good will, not bigotry and terrorism. Organisations like the Quilliam Foundation (named after an early British convert to Islam) have sprung up seeking to promote moderate Islam and arguing that Western Muslims should be free of the cultural baggage of the Indian sub-continent or the political passions of the Arab world.

Jon Gower Davies, who has taught both sociology and Religious Studies at the University of Newcastle and who served for over 20 years as a Labour councillor, is sceptical of the influence of moderate Muslims and he also questions just how moderate such people really are. His focus is not on Islam as a religion, but on how Muslims think and behave. ‘Islam’, he writes, ‘is what Muslims do’. This marks his study off from works by such writers as Patrick Sookhedo and Bernard Lewis who have come close to arguing that a tendency to aggression and violence is inherent in Islam as a religion.

Davies has spent a lot of time reading such sources as the Muslim Weekly and his book is based on a wide array of evidence. He quotes plenty of alarming facts and statistics. A Populus poll in 2006, for example, found that ‘only’ 13 per cent of Muslims thought the London suicide bomber killers should be considered martyrs. This adds up to 200,000 Muslims living in this country who support murderous attacks on fellow citizens. A Sunday Times poll in July, 2008, found that 33 per cent of Muslim students in Britain thought that killing for the sake of Islam could be justified.

Davies argues that while migrants from Bangladesh and Pakistan do not bring all their customs with them (they are trying to escape some of them) they still find it difficult to abandon their ethnicity and nationality and become British. He quotes polling data indicating that Muslim residents do not like the indigenous British people very much. They consider us selfish, arrogant, disrespectful of women, and prone to violence. Only 32 per cent of British Muslims have a favourable opinion of Jews. The proportion of Muslims in British prisons is alarmingly high but some will argue that this needs to be seen against the background of figures for unemployment and deprivation (something Davies disputes). Some 81 per cent of Muslims consider themselves Muslim before they are British. Davies claims it is a new development for a group to gain its identity from religion though others have drawn parallels between Muslims and Catholics of a previous generation. There is also evidence that for all their stress on the importance of faith, the Muslim community in Britain does fragment along ethnic lines.

Although Davies maintains his focus on what Muslims do, inevitably much of what he has to say raises questions about Islamic faith and teaching. Muslim countries score badly on human rights and slavery continues to exist in quite a number of them even when it has been outlawed in theory. Despite the wealth of many Arab nations, Muslim nations have produced little in the way of major scientific research. In the words of one expert Islam’s Golden Age is long past and ‘no major invention or discovery has emerged from the Muslim world for well over seven centuries’.

This book is essential reading for government ministers and civil servants who think that the problem of Islamic extremism can be solved by throwing money at moderate groups (a practice that actually makes it easy for extremists to discredit moderate organisations as ‘un-Islamic’ and arouses the hostility of other faith groups). The churches for their part need to practise ‘tough love’, showing respect for Islam as a faith and keeping the door to dialogue open, but also pushing hard questions about human rights (including the rights of converts). He may occasionally have stumbled, but the Pope has set a good example.
Paul Richardson.

Book Review: The Holy Island of Lindisfarne

The Holy Island of Lindisfarne by David Adam (published by SPCK, ISBN: 978 0 281 05898 3, £7.99)

This is a delightful book about Lindisfarne, which mixes personal reminiscing, with spiritual comment and a structured history of the island set in the context of the early development of Christianity to present day.

It does however tend to verge on the highbrow which will tend to make it less accessible to many readers. I suspect many will be attracted by the beautiful view of Lindisfarne Castle on the cover, but then find the content more challenging than anticipated. I did wonder about the target audience.

Some of the local descriptions, David Adam’s childhood memories of the island and later as a priest, such as opening up the outer door of St Mary’s Church early in the morning to allow the nesting swallows to go in and out, are very evocative and one certainly feels drawn into them. Lindisfarne has a very special quality and this is conveyed very effectively in places, but the spell is broken once the move into the historical background is made. The early history is somewhat difficult to follow .

The chapters on Aidan and Cuthbert are much more readable partly due to the fact they are so much more well known. The background to the Lindisfarne Gospels is fascinating and there is a huge wealth of knowledge imparted during the course of this book.

I just felt that somehow there has been an opportunity missed to access a wider audience, not only in the retelling of the history, but also in conveying a message of outreach, due to the pace and academic quality of the narrative There are moments when one feels inspired, captured by the description of Lindisfarne, but this somehow gets lost in the historical passages.

There is no doubt that the book shows Lindisfarne to be the cradle of northern Christianity with a huge spiritual significance, and is still very much a place of pilgrimage and that it has a wide and varied history. Perhaps in blending the spiritual and the historical, the message does not quite seem to hit home that within the fabric of its history it still is as much a place of God’s presence as it has ever been and is open to all who seek it or who are touched by its wonder during the course of their visit there.
Vanessa Ward

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