Kursuus-sectâ

Twenty years ago, I learned of an exhibition that had been staged in Rotterdam in 1983 called Imaginaire Landen, which collected various artworks that mapped or described imaginary locales. Intrigued by some of the names of the artists and writers represented in the show, I ordered a copy of the exhibition catalogue. This, when it arrived, turned out to be a box containing numerous unbound leaflets printed in Dutch, along with sundry additional pieces of ephemera, among them a box of matches bearing the name of a non-existent airline (but with real matches inside); a weird card-game; a button-badge; numerous maps, blueprints, charts and tables; schematics of dreamt-up metro networks; a musical score; and even a little bag containing coarse black sand, some pebbles, and a broken cockle-shell, purportedly from the imaginary island of Atipé. Also there was the wine-label shown above.

The fictional location that produced the wine was one called Spokanië (or Spocania) an island-group ostensibly in the Atlantic to the south-west of Ireland: originally the brainchild of Rolandt Tweehuysen, a Dutch linguist. Given his line of work, it’s no surprise that the language of Spokaans (or Spocanian) is a significant part of his creation. According to wikipedia, it has a “a dictionary of over 25,000 entries” and is “one of the most elaborated artistic languages ever created”. Many other aspects of the islands and their inhabitants have also been described by Tweehuysen and others, with two books and an extensive old-school website devoted to the subject.

Back to the wine-label. From this page on the web-site (with the help of Google Translate), I’ve learned that it’s from the southern side of the Tjokky Mountains in the Neno district of the island of Tigof. It’s specifically a product of the Hogorit-Qualâ estate, and is a Kursuus-sectâ (or ‘blood wine’), a term used in that part of Spocania for light red wines akin to French Beaujolais or Burgundy. What kind of vintage might 1980 have been, I wonder?