In full colour

Avant Garde French artist Yves Klein would have had a problem if born in Russia. His enduring contribution to culture was the design of the colour International Klein Blue (IKB) to portray his artistic vision. If Yves was born Yevgeny Kleinovich in Yakutsk, designing IKB would be tricky as Russian has two blues: sinii which we might call ‘royal blue’ (but Russians might find offensive after those unfortunate events involving the tsar in a coal cellar in Yekaterinburg) and goluboy or ‘baby blue’ and perhaps not coincidentally Russian slang for ‘gay’.

Goluboy is not a shade of sinii. It is a different colour, which makes you wonder what flavours a St Petersburg Platter’s would deploy. A funky mushroom (along with vodka and caviar, important components of the balanced Russian diet) note might be masliyonok (with an oily mouthfeel), gorkoshkee (with a bitter finish), podberiozovik (Thelema-style with a hint of mint) or plain seeroyejhka. The catch-all ‘forest floor’ just wouldn’t cut it at all.

While Pinot pundit Emile Joubert and cork captain Joaquim Sa were upset when Caveau Wine Bar refused them BYO (even for Peter-Allan Finlayson’s 5-Star Crystallum Cuvée Cinema Pinot Noir 2008), when I visited Vladimir Tsyganov, former Moscow all-in wrestling champion, in his home town, we would often take our own mushrooms to local restaurants; the fungi having been mailed to Vladimir by his babushka in Siberia.

Le Petit Corporal (Napoleon Bonaparte) may have had less fond memories of Moscow than I, but it was enlightening to read the tasting note from Jancis Robinson for the banned Crystallum in the Weekend Financial Times: “Richer and much more integrity than the Peter Max Cuvée. Fresh, smooth textured with good, fresh acidity and some sweetness. The name derives from the fact that Napoleon Bonaparte was filmed on this site apparently.”

It did come as quite a shock to read that ‘Boney’ had visited the Hemelen- Aarde Ridge, as did the news that movies were made in South Africa in the early 19th century.

While Russians have a surfeit of mushrooms and blues, for Biblical Jews, the sky was not blue, nor was it for ancient Indians in their Vedic hymns, according to Guy Deutscher in Through the Language Glass (Heinemann, 2010). If you do a word count on the collected works of Homer, you will find he used ‘black’ 170 times, ‘white’ 100 times while his next most popular colour was red, used a mere 13. Homer was clearly not writing in Czech, a language with two different words for red: cžervený and rudý.

Perhaps he had been smoking mushrooms, as he called the sea oinops (winedark), a colour he also used for oxen (or perhaps there was a red tide). Likewise, he used chloros (green) for honey, wood and the faces of people (who’d perhaps eaten the red-tide mussels). Ioeis (violet) was applied to wool, iron and… the sea. So either the mushrooms were magic, or his perceptions were not the same as those of Constantine P Cavafy.

Nineteenth-century Finnish ophthalmologist Hugo Magnus called the ancients colour blind, with vision similar to our own at twilight, with little colour discrimination; colour perception being something that developed late in our evolutionary descent from the trees.

Cue the observation of Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees, that evolution is far from finished. With our sun less than halfway through its lifetime, with six billion years left to burn, our descendents will most likely be as different from us as we are from bacteria, presumably with enhanced vision, smell and taste, making our own tasting notes as monochromatic as a charcoal by William Kentridge.