Rules of Thumb About Wine

Man has been drinking alcohol since the day he discovered that there is always something alcoholic out there that will make you drunk. Whereas beer is a fermented drink that comes from barley and hops, wine is what you get if you let grape juice ferment and rot. The reason why people don’t throw out rotten grape juice is because somebody discovered thousands of years ago that it will get you drunk if you drink it instead. That’s why people drink wine.

The first basic fact about wine is that there are two kinds of wine: white wine and red wine. Now, some “white” wines look yellow or a tad grey, but if it isn’t red or pink in colour, it’s a white wine. Red wines are always some shade of red, only some red wines are darker than others. Now, if you come across a bottle of white Merlot and it looks red or pink, it’s still technically a white wine. It’s called a white Merlot because it was made from the flesh of a red grape rather than the skin. So when you buy a bottle of Champaign to celebrate the New Year, what kind of wine is it? It’s a white wine. A dark red Burgundy, of course, is a red wine.

Which leads us to the second basic fact about wine: red wines are almost always made from the skin of the grape while white wines are made from the flesh. However, some white wines are made from the flesh of red grapes, which is why we have wines like “white” Merlot. You could make a wine from the skin of a white grape and have a “red” wine, but the reason why it isn’t done is because it wouldn’t taste very good.

Once upon a time, classifying wines was easy. Port was Port because it came from the Oporto region of Portugal. If it was a red wine from the Bordeaux region of France or a white wine from the Asti region of Italy, the wine was a Bordeaux or an Asti. If it was from the Mosel region of Germany, it was a Mosel. Then places like Calfornia started getting into the act of making wines. Naturally, the French didn’t like the idea of California calling its wines Bordeaux or Burgundies, so the Californians now have to call their wines Merlots, Cabernet Sauvignons, or Rieslings, depending upon what kind of soil they grow it in and how they make it, etc.

Now, if a Merlot or a Cabernet comes from the area around Bordeaux in Bordeaux, it is still a Bordeaux. A red wine from Bordeaux is a Merlot if it was grown in the loamy soil on the right bank of the Gironde River while a red wine grown in the clay soil on the left bank of the Gironde is a Cabernet Sauvignon. Cabernet Blanc is grown in the same kind of soil as Cabernet Sauvignon, except that the Blanc is a white wine. When you ask for a French wine, you must specify whether you want Bordeaux, Burgundy, Sancerre, etc., not Cabernet Sauvignon or Cabernet Blanc.

There are two basic kinds of white and red wines: table wines and dessert wines. Table wines are the kind of wines that you drink when you sit down at table to eat, whereas as dessert wines are usually what people drink after dinner. Table wines are mostly dry or semi-dry while dessert wines are usually sweet or very sweet. Now, you don’t have to drink a dessert wine with your cake and ice cream after dinner, but if you wanted some kind of wine with dessert, you would probably want something sweet, like a Moscato or a Mosel. A personal favourite of mine is Tokay, a white wine from Hungary that looks and tastes like a Riesling, though its sweetness is measured from 1 to 6 on what is called the “Puttonyos Scale.”

How do you choose a wine for dinner? The rule is that red wines generally go better with red meat while white wine goes better with fish, poultry or pork. How dry you want it generally depends on how you cook the meat. If your food is very spicy or has lots of seasoning, chances are that you won’t want something that’s very dry or has a very full body, or what they call a “big bouquet.” The Italians have a term called chiarroscurro, which means “light and dark.” If you’re eating some kind of meat that has a dark or heavy flavour, chances are that you might want to lighten up a little on the wine.

One rule of thumb that you might want to follow is this: match the region of the wine with the origin of the food that you are eating. I discovered Tokay, a Hungarian wine, while looking for something to go with chicken paprika, which is a Hungarian dish. If you like food native to the Tuscan region of Italy, like spaghetti, you probably won’t go wrong with a Tuscan wine like Chianti. Likewise, good barbecue wines often come from areas where people like barbecues in the summer, like Australia, South Africa, or northern California. If you like Greek dishes like mousaka (fried eggplant) or souvlakia (lamb on a skewer), you should be able to find a decent Greek wine.

The surest way to find a wine that’s right for you is to experiment. It also doesn’t hurt to ask for advice from people in wine stores or a sommelier at an expensive restaurant. The thing to remember, however, is that regardless of what advice anybody gives, you are still the King or Queen. The rules of thumb that I have just given you are only rules of thumb. My brother insists that Shirazes make the best barbecue wines, but I have found that Lindeman’s (a South African firm) makes a Cabernet Sauvignon that’s just fine for barbecues. I have a female friend who only likes sweet wine, so I don’t try to tell her that she should drink a dry wine or a semi-dry wine with dinner.

Whatever you do, don’t become dogmatic and start a crusade in support of your favourite wine. Let other people find for themselves what wines they like to drink. The great thing about wine is that while nobody is born an expert, anybody can become one.

Secularism and the War on Terrorism

Since September 11, 2001, the war on terror is no closer to being won than it was the day before the attacks. It has been nearly a decade since nineteen members of Al-Qaeda hijacked four airliners, flew two of them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and crashed another into the Pentagon. The passengers on the fourth one successfully forced the hijackers to crash into a field, preventing them from hitting their target. If victory remains elusive for the United States and its allies in NATO, what does Al-Qaeda have to show for its efforts? The war has been a stalmate.


When terrorists managed to hijack four airliners, two of them from Boston’s Logan International Airport, it was a sign that airport security was lax. Not anymore. One expects to wait at least an hour to pass through metal detectors at any airport in the U.S. while removing all loose change from one’s pockets and taking off one’s shoes. It’s an inconveniance that we have been forced to accept as the price of flying the friendly skies and reaching our destination in one piece. If a terrorist is, by definition, someone whose goal is to inspire fear or terror, then the terrorists have already won the war: people are at least more afraid to fly on an airplane than before 9/11. The increased vigilance of airport security was a major concession to terrorism that had to be made.

Starting with former U.S. President George W. Bush, the United States government has tried to define the war not as a Christian crusade against Islam, but as a war against political and religious extremism originating in the Middle East. Mr. Bush conceded that we can’t brand all of Islam as the enemy when he called Islam “a great religion” along with Christianity and Judaism. He understood that we needed allies among the very people that extremists like Osama Bin Ladin wanted to recruit the most: religious Muslims.

There are Muslim allies who want to engage the West in a spirit of itjahid or "rational discourse." It is the fondest hope of the U.S. State Department that there are really Arab and other Muslim leaders who consider Christianity and Judaism to be "great religions" too.

For millions of people in the West, the war is still a conflict between rival faiths, Christianity and Islam. In this corner, wearing the crown of thorns and the red, white and blue boxing trunks, Jesus Christ. In the other corner, wearing the green boxing trunks with the white star and crescent, Muhammad. Of course, Jesus would be expected to punch and counterpunch with one hand while carrying his cross with the other hand while Muhammad would punch and counterpunch one-handed while carrying a Quran. People like Pat Robertson (who saw the earthquake in Haiti as divine retribution for the existence of voodoo in that country) would love to phrase the war on terror in those terms. There really isn’t much difference between a Christian crusader and a Muslim mujihad. Both are willing to fight and kill for God.

For this writer, Al-Qaeda’s war against the West is really a war against the Enlightenment. The West has largely gone secular since the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, with freedom of religion, and even freedom from religion, in all the countries of Europe and the Americas. While Pope Benedict XVI has expressed an interest in the revival of Catholicism, and the fear that millions of Europeans have of a hostile takeover by Muslim immigrants in Europe, those days are gone when a pope could make speech in a small village like Clairmont in France and launch a crusade.

Conditions were very different in 1095, when Pope Urban VI was able to inspire the First Crusade by shouting to thousands of peasants: “Deus volt.” God wills it. If Urban could have come back nine-hundred years later in 1995 to the same village and the same country, he wouldn’t have recognized the place. Not just because of the automobiles, airplanes, and telephone lines, but because France is ruled by a secular government where the separation of church and state has become enshrined as a sacred principle. Try to resolve that contradiction.

We have certain freedoms that we have come to take for granted. Not just freedom of religion, but also freedom of speech and freedom of the press. We also have freedom from unreasonable search and seizure and the right to a fair trial. In the war of terror, these rights have come under attack. An American Muslim convert, Colleen LaRose has recently been indicted for her role in a plot to assassinate a Swedish cartoonist for exercising his right to make fun of Muhammad in an editorial cartoon. A Dutch Member of Parliament, Theo van Gogh, was assassinated for taking a position against radical Islamism. Another Dutch politician, the Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, has also been threatened by Islamic extremists for speaking out against female genital mutilation.

To be fair, the Islamists aren’t the only people waging war on human rights. With bills like the Patriot Act, we have granted extensive powers to governments in the war on terror. On could say that the legal principle of Habeas Corpus itself has been under attack. The United States and several European countries have measures that allow the police to hold terrorism suspects in custody longer without the right to counsel or the right to be formally charge. Many of us know about Guantanamo, where suspected members of Al-Qaida and the Taliban are still being held. Many of us also know that terrorism suspects were sent to countries like Syria and Jordan to be tortured there because they couldn’t be tortured in Europe or North America.

Few people have noted, however, that Colleen LaRose was held for months in communicado without being charged or allowed to see an attorney. She was arrested in October of 2009, but she was only formally charged in federal court on March 16, 2010. It seems that we have become used to living in a grey area where, if human rights abuses don’t run rampant, they are always just below the surface.

The degree to which Habeas Corpus has been suspended is a counterterrorist measure. Laws in Europe like France’s law against the wearing of “obstensible religious symbols,” aimed at Muslim women who wear veils, may also be construed as counterterrorist measures. While Islamist terrorism can rightly be seen as a war against freedom and secularism, counterterrorist measures, in the long run, may be just as dangerous, if not more so. Our secular civilization is under assault from both sides. If Muslims radicals in Europe had their way, all women would be forced to wear the veil, and everybody would be less free and government would be less secular. By forcing women not to wear the veil, however, the secularists would strip away more of Europeans’ rights in the name of a secularism that they want to strengthen but would be weakening. Either way, freedom and secularism lose.

Militarily, it makes sense for the U.S. and its NATO allies to take the war to the terrorists by hitting targets in Afghanistan and Yemen rather then simply waking suspects up in the middle of the night and taking them to an undisclosed location to be interrogated. However, the public in the West must keep itself current on developments that threaten its freedoms; people need to be more aware. Regardless of how we feel about terrorism suspects like Colleen LaRose, we need to ask why certain individuals are being held without being charged and without access to a lawyer. We have to protect the rights of even the people that we least want to protect.

While engaging with moderate religionists in the Middle East, we also need to keep from being too beholden to the religious extremists in the West. Contrary to what many people believe, the West is not just Christian anymore. The West is multicultural rather than just Christian or Judeo-Christian, with roots in several traditions, including Christianity and Judaism. Our laws, for instance, are based more on Greco-Roman principles or (in the case of the English-speaking world) Anglo-Saxon Common Law than on the Ten Commandments. While people’s moral and ethical behaviour are likely to be strongly influenced by religious beliefs, we must maintain a separation of church and state in political affairs.

We also need to maintain the freedoms that we hold most dear. That would be the most effective strategy against terrorism.

What is Turkey's Place in Europe?

Like the Roman god of time, Janus, Turkey sits astride two continents, Europe and Asia, looking both east and west. The city of İstanbul is the only city in the world that sits on two continents. On the west side of the Bosporus is Europe; on the other side is Asia. At the height of its power, the Ottoman Empire penetrated Europe as far north as the Danube River and as far west as the Straight of Gibraltar. Thus, Turkey has a heritage that is uniquely both European and Middle Eastern.

Kemal Atatürk’s revolution in the 1920s has led to Turkey being the most secularist country in the Middle East. Though Turkey’s population is almost all Muslim (more than 99 per cent), the Republic of Turkey has no state religion (unlike England, whose state church is the Anglican Church). What’s more, the Constitution promulgated by Atatürk outlaws such vestiges of the old Ottoman Empire as the veil, the fez, and the harem. They don't legally stone adulteresses anymore, though "honour killings" of women who bring shame to the family still take place. The Kemalists sought a secular republic modelled after those in Europe, with a complete separation of politics and religion. While Turkey has a Ministry of Religious Affairs like other Middle Eastern countries, the Turkish government uses this ministry to ensure that religious officials and religious schools are in compliance with Turkey’s secularist principals, not to further the Islamic faith or ensure religious orthodoxy.

With the formation of the European Union, the Republic of Turkey has sought admittance into this union. The reasons are several. One, most Turks consider themselves to be Europeans. Even though only 5 per cent of the country, the part called “Thrace,” lies west of the Bosporus in Europe, these people use geography to bolster their argument. As well, millions of people that one might call “Lost Turks” have been living and working in Western Europe as “guest workers” since the 1960s. Many of these guest workers have had families in countries like Germany and the Netherlands with children born in the host countries rather than in Turkey; their children tend to speak the languages of their host countries rather than Turkish. What’s more, Turkey’s economy has become more integrated with Europe’s economy since the end of World War II, even though Turkey lags far behind even the poorest countries in the EU economically in terms of productivity and standard of living.

Despite the fact that Turkey’s population is universally Muslim, Turkey has modelled itself after the West rather than the East. Though there is a minority of Islamists in Turkey who want to bring back the veil and Sharia, most Turks do not want an Islamic republic modelled after Iran’s. Rather, Turks consider their country to be a western democracy.

However, most Europeans have a problem trying to integrate a country like Turkey into the European Union. For one thing, most Europeans do not consider Turkey to be a part of Europe. Ninety-five per cent of Turkey, the part called “Asia Minor” or “Anatolia,” lies east of the Bosporus in the Middle East. If the Russians or the Greeks poured into Thrace and wrested it from Turkish control, then 100 per cent of all Turkey would be in the Levant. With Turkey’s population growing at a rate of about 2.5 per cent a year, Turkey would soon have the largest population in Europe, with over 65 million people now. What’s more, many people have a problem trying to absorb a country that is over 99 per cent Muslim, because of differences of culture and religion. As well, the European Union is reluctant to take on Turkey’s problem with its Kurdish minority and make it a European problem. There’s the problem of Cyprus, too: the Turkish army still occupies 40 per cent of that island, though Turkish Cypriots only make up 17 per cent of the population.

Then there’s the problem of Turkey’s economy: though Turkey’s economy has grown at a rate of 8 per cent a year since Recip Tayyip Erdoğan became Turkey’s prime minister in 2003, Turkey’s economy still lags far behind the rest of Europe’s economy. The donkey is still a means of transportation in Turkey. Most of the Turkish guest workers in Europe are unskilled, and Turkish membership in the EU would result in more unskilled Turkish labourers tramping about Europe in search of jobs. As well, many Europeans are afraid that high-paying jobs in Western Europe will be out-sourced to Turkey. Surely, Turkish factory workers would be willing to work for less than what Volkswagen and Renault pays workers in Germany and France, since VW and Renault could still pay Turkish workers more than what they are getting now.

What one seldom hears about, however, is the precedent that Turkey’s membership in the European Union might set. Turkey is not the only Muslim country with guest workers in Western Europe. Though Turkish guest workers form the largest ethnic minority in Germany, most of the Muslims in France, Spain, and Italy come from North Africa, while most of the Muslims in Britain come from India and Pakistan. What if Morocco, Algeria, and Libya wanted to join the EU? If Morocco, Algeria, and Libya join, why not have Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon join, too? Why not Saudi Arabia or even Israel? Just as the Mediterranean was a Roman lake in the days of the Roman Empire, surely there must be some temptation to make the Mediterranean a European lake again. The problem with that scenario, however, is that postmodern Europe's Mare Nostrum might include Muslim countries like Morocco, Algeria, and Libya as well as western countries like Spain, France, and Greece.

A big problem that Europe has with the Middle East is the human rights records of the countries there. Most Europeans don't want their governments torturing their fellow citizens. Despite the efforts of countries like Turkey, Egypt, and Jordan at establishing democracies in the Middle East, only Israel has a form of government that could truly be called democratic by western standards. Since World War II, the Turkish military has overthrown elected governments four times, most recently in 1983. When the leader of the Islamist Welfare Party, Abdullah Gul, was elected prime minister in 1993, he was unable to take his seat. The military forced the Turkish parliament to ban the Welfare Party (as well as the two major parties, the Republican People’s Party and the Democratic Party). Gul was only allowed to become president after the Welfare Party reincorporated and became the Justice Party, and Erdoğan was elected prime minister in 2003.

However, the European Union probably didn’t mind it that the Turkish military prevented an Islamist party from coming to power; few Europeans want homegrown Muslim clerics having a great influence in European affairs. What Europeans find most disturbing, however, is Turkey’s human rights abuses. Before the military coup of 1983, Turkey’s Military Intelligence Service (MİT), rivalled the Savam in Iran and Saddam Hussein’s Revolutionary Guards in brutality. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have sited the MİT for the torture of both leftist and Islamist dissidents, as well as the torture of Kurdish separatists. What’s more, Turkey has had the death penalty until recently. The majority of Europeans believe that the integration of a country with a military and a police force that might run amok would be impossible.

This is not to say that Turkey hasn’t made some movement in the area of human rights. For instance, Turkey no longer has the death penalty, and the leader of the Kurdish People’s Party, Abdullah Öcallan, has had his death sentence commuted to life imprisonment. What's more, civilian rule has been restored since the 1983 coup. However, Turkey still has a long way to go in human rights. For instance, it is still a crime to mention in a speech or in print the Armenian holocaust in Kars Province during World War I. (This is called "insulting Turkishness.") As well, Kurds are still not allowed to speak their language publically in Turkish Kurdistan. A Kurdish member of the Turkish Parliament, Leila Zama, was sentenced to fifteen years in prison in 1995 after she spoke one sentence in Kurdish while being sworn into office. While Zama has been released from prison, she still has to fight attempts on the part of the Turkish government to imprison her again.

Then there’s still Turkey’s constitutional amendment banning traditional Muslim dress. Religious Muslim girls in Turkey often have to make the choice between wearing the veil or the head scarf and continuing with their education, because Turkish institutions of higher learning are required by law to ban the scarf and the veil. However, Turkey and the rest of Europe have at least found some common ground here. France has a law banning “obstensible religious symbols,” and other European countries, like Germany, are contemplating doing the same thing. Both the secularist European Union and the secularist Republic of Turkey have the same fear of somebody establishing an Islamic republic in the heart of Europe.

We need to pay attention to what is being said here as well as to what is not being said. Though the European Union might not mind incorporating small and destitute Muslim countries like Albania or Kosovo, the EU obviously believes that Turkey would be a more difficult pill to swallow. Both the EU and Turkey have the same antipathy towards Muslim fanatics, but it is unlikely that Turkey shares the same European antipathy towards Muslims in general, because most secularists in Turkey also consider themselves to be Muslims. One might say that the march towards secularism in Turkey is far less complete, at least the way Europeans see it, because the majority of secularists in Western Europe claim to have no religious affiliation at all. While Muslims are only a minority in Western Europe, attendance at mosque is highter in Europe than church attendance.

Europe has a push-me pull-you relationship with Muslims that is defined by the desire for cheap labour and the desire to keep out as many Muslims as possible. European businesses need Muslim immigrants to work in French bakeries, squash grapes to make French and Italian wines, and work in sanitation, but any limitation or ban of Turkish immigration to Western Europe would be unacceptable after Turkey became a member of the European Union. For Turkey, Muslim supremacy even in a secularist European Union would be preferable to a Europe dominated by the Vatican.

Liberté, fraternité, and égalité are treasured European ideals, but so was apartheid. Since the end of European colonialism in the 1960s, the question facing Europe has been: how committed to democratic principle is Europe really going to be now that immigrants from the Third World are desperate to enter by any means necessary, including illegally? The question facing Europe now is: if Europe cannot be both free and white, would it rather be free or white? Is it democracy or apartheid?

And what about Turkey: Can Turkey every really be integrated into a united Europe?

Right now, Europe is the only continent that has attempted a Common Market. Maybe Turkey should look towards some kind of zollverein with other countries of the Middle East, including Israel. That is, southern Turkey imports Lebanese olives at par while Israel sells its oranges in Egypt. The problem with that scenario is that we are many years from seeing it happen, at least openly. Most of the oranges that Egyptians eat are probably from Israel, but nobody in that part of the world wants to talk about free trade or opening borders just yet. These things take time.

The Europeans don't think that Turkey is ready for prime time just yet.