Those who have become accustomed to it, will drink their wine no other way, claiming it is never so sweet as when drunk from the _porro_.
"_Du miel délayé dans un rayon de soleil._"
"_Boire la vie et la santé quand on le boit c'est le vin idéal._"
Apparently every Catalan peasant's household has one of these curious glass bottles with its long tapering spout, and when a Catalan drinks from it, pouring a stream of wine directly into his mouth, he makes a "study" and a "picture" at the same time.
A variation of the same thing is the gourd or leathern bottle of the mountaineer. It is difficult to carry a glass bottle such as the _porro_ around on donkey back, and so the thing is made of leather. The neck of this is of wood, and a stopper pierced with a fine hole screws into it.
It comes in all sizes, holding from a bottleful to ten litres. The most common is a two-litre one. When you want to drink you hold the leather bag high in the air and pour a thin stream of wine into your mouth. The art is to stop neatly with a jerk, and not spill a drop. One _can_ acquire the art, and it will be found an exceedingly practical way to carry drink.
It is a curious, little-known corner of Europe, where France and Spain join, at the eastern extremity of the Pyrenees, at Cap Cerbère. One read in classic legend will find some resemblance between Cap Cerbère and the terrible beast with three heads who guarded the gates of hell. There may be some justification for this, as Pomponius Mela, a Latin geographer, born however in Andalusia, wrote of a _Cervaria locus_, which he designated as the _finis Galliæ_. Then, through evolution, we have _Cervaria_, which in turn becomes the Catalan village of _Cerveia_. This is the attitude of the historians. The etymologists put it in this wise: _Cervaria_--meaning a wooded valley peopled with _cerfs_ (stags). The reader may take his choice.
At any rate the Catalan Cerbère, known to-day only as the frontier French station on the line to Barcelona, has become an unlovely railway junction, of little appeal except in the story of its past.
In the twelfth century the place had already attained to prominence, and its feudal seigneur, named Rabedos, built a public edifice for civic pride, and a church which he dedicated to San Salvador.