Much about wine is problematic and open to nearly infinite conjecture. For instance, what is the sex of wine, and are we falling into a sump when we consider the question, a trap of silliness that professional wine tasters so easily fall into? Wine tasting is susceptible to parody, but so are other professions of great intrinsic value, from mad scientists to virtuous strippers to pure-hearted politicians.
But then it is always good to question the terminology of our enthusiasms. We can say that wine is essentially female because it comes from the earth and we don’t say “father earth.” The best things are female, including females, and allowing this characterization energizes our imaginations in ways not possible to other terminology. Blatant, loudmouthed, bad wines are, of course, male.
There’s a lot of tannin in the river beside my cabin, emerging as it does from a swamp. I’ve also visited a friend while he was, unfortunately, tanning the hide of an otter. I taste tannin in many vintages, especially American, but it’s no big deal if it is slight. Wines that have never seen an oak barrel are occasionally called “oaky” but why quarrel about this? From my childhood onward up in the country I have picked wild raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, and other berries, but I must say I do not find these unique flavors in wine, though many apparently do. My perhaps naive honesty prevents me from using these terms that would lie to my taste.
Our sensual memories are so vast, why shouldn’t we use the entire reservoir when we describe our affection or dislike for a wine? Sometimes our American tasters seem to be ascetically as serious as Cotton Mather when he “barbecued” Indians. There is black and white and the multifoliate variances of gray but an alarming lack of color, reminding me of the cartoons in French publications poking fun at American wine snobs. But how often have I tasted wines in France with a fine platter of charcuterie on a table or perched on a barrel before us, with joyous badinage, laughter, with no sense that we were deciding the fate of nations.
There is a definite possibility, and I say this with my usual modesty, that what I am saying is totally wrongheaded. My notes on Corsican wines that I tasted could not be published without being bowdlerized. Maybe a wine shouldn’t be allowed to remind me of “the thighs of a rich girl depleted by lassitude,” one of the tamer descriptions. Conversely we can say jug wines tend to be loutish, abrupt, faintly soiled, evoking memories of the locker room after a football game on a warm September evening. That sort of thing. Bad properly evokes bad.
I recently meditated over a mixed case of three Gigondas, a difficult assignment for a peculiar reason. I have drunk more Gigondas than any French wine except Domaine Tempier Bandol. This kind of familiarity often makes us poor critics of wives, lovers, or longtime friends. A poet friend, Ted Kooser, described the end of his first marriage beginning with the line, “Neither of us would clean the aquarium.”
With wine we are back in college wondering if our professor corrected our brilliant essay before or after dinner, before or after he got laid, before or after his usual fantasy about Ava Gardner in the pool house. My main objection to numerical rating of wine is that it presumes the falsest of sciences.
That said, I thought a bottle of Château du Trignon 1999 was soft but a little weak, a boy who would never do a chin-up because he was lazy. The second bottle, however, was drunk with a snack, a freshly sautéed wild brown trout on a bed of sliced tomatoes from my daughter’s garden. This made the Trignon quite acceptable in a not very compromised way. Fine with bold food, not alone.
With Domaine de Cayron 1999 we enter another arena. I have drunk a hundred bottles of Cayron Gigondas. It is a nostrum for blues and fatigue in Paris or anywhere. I’ve spent a goodly amount of time with Jeanne Moreau, the French actress, and the Cayron reminds me of Moreau at age twenty-eight, mildly irritated at you for forgetting flowers, but surpassingly agreeable when you share a bottle of Cayron. If you drank it before the usual obnoxious meeting you wouldn’t hate anyone. Last week I drank it at my cabin with two roasted woodcock for lunch and they married pleasantly. The flavor penetrated my rib cage.
The Domaine Les Pallières 1999 threw me off a bit as I had learned to expect more from past experience. There was a sense of the androgynous rather than a decisive move in either direction, and it was rather flattish compared to the Cayron. Of course why tell a reasonably good poet that he’s not Lorca or Auden, for that matter? At a dinner two of the company preferred the Pallières to the Cayron. There are no gods to direct us in this matter, but we must do our best without pretending we are Solomon, much less Moses.