It makes a certain sense that the Vancouver International Wine Festival chose Bard on the Beach as their new beneficiary after the Vancouver Playhouse called it curtains two years ago.
The local Shakespearean troupe stands to gain around a quarter of a million bucks from the latest annual gathering of wealthy oenophiles, and it’s unlikely William Shakespeare would disapprove of the official sponsorship.
Bard’s artistic director Christopher Gaze expressed his gratitude for the windfall to a crowd of industry insiders, wine bloggers and various and sundry media types at a launch party at Joey Bentall One on Monday.
“What can we do at Bard with the world of wine to increase the love and knowledge and delight of good vino in British Columbia?” he asked. “Well, we will support it with all our might as you support us.”
Fermented grape juice was as popular in the Elizabethan age as it is today — perhaps more so given that clean drinking water was often hard to come by — and every single one of his plays contains at least one reference to alcohol.
Wine in particular gets heavy mention, with variants such as mead, sack, malmsey and canary all getting individual shout-outs. Richard III calls for a bowl of wine to help restore his “cheer of mind” while the hard-partying Falstaff complains a buzzkill companion is so “soberblooded” that nobody can make him laugh. “But that’s no marvel, he drinks no wine.”
However, being the smart person that he was, Shakespeare was also well aware of the downsides of loving wine a bit too much. One of his best known passages about heavy drinking comes from Twelfth Night, a play about a shipwrecked woman named Viola who pretends to be a man because hilarity.
Feste, by far the play’s sharpest character, describes drunks as being “like a drown'd man, a fool, and a madman. One draught above heat makes him a fool, the second mads him, and a third drowns him." In Othello, Michael Cassio finds himself in deep trouble with his boss after getting hammered on the job, prompting him to declare: “O thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou hast no name let us call thee devil.” And surely King Duncan’s night staying over at the Macbeths would've gone much differently if he and his men had gone easier on the sauce.
Shakespeare was also familiar, possibly from personal experience, with the boner-killing consequences of overindulging — “it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance.” Something for men to keep in mind if attending any of this year’s festival's dozens of events across the city.
It is possible, though, that the Bard might’ve had a problem or two with this year’s official theme country — France — given his own country’s time-honoured custom of being at war with them. Even if they do make much better wine than the Brits.
