Wine Criticism And
Literary Criticism (Part II)

In my first installment on wine and literary criticism, “Odious Comparisons,” I became a bit strident in these contentious arenas, and a small portion of the feedback was aggrieved. The reaction brought to mind the children’s story of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Depending on your religion only Jesus, Muhammad, and the Buddha are faultless. All other mortals betimes lack certain articles of clothing. Once when I was a child fishing with my father he told me to my consternation that the Queen of England had to go to the toilet the same as the rest of us. There is evidence that Einstein was on occasion an unfaithful husband and I recall an article that said, “Picasso was insensitive to the needs of women.” Even so awesome a creature as the president of the United States is occasionally wrong­headed. Earlier in my career my collection of novellas called Legends of the Fall was maliciously attacked in the London press by the renowned C. P. Snow. I yawned and wandered down to the bank to make yet another deposit. We fear the negative but without it there’s no positive.

My main point in both wine and literature was to insist on the primacy of creation over comment. I take as bedrock Benjamin Franklin’s statement, “Good wine is a constant reminder that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” We must remember that we’re not dealing with proud death or the fate of nations, or the dozens of fatal asteroids whirling in our direction. Tastes in wine and literature are as personal as dogs. I can’t quite imagine my response if someone referred to my beloved English setter Rose as a “nitwit fleabag.” If guests don’t like the Domaine Tempier Bandol I serve them they’re no longer welcome in my home. Two years ago I broke off a nascent friendship when the gentleman, a Yale graduate, attacked the work of my adoptive uncle, Henry Miller.

Wine and literature affections are not a science but a matter of taste and emotion. I revere Emile Peynaud, Gerald Asher, Clive Coates, Jancis Robinson, Simon Loftus, and yes, Robert Parker himself in the major books, and Kermit Lynch has also established himself in this austere group of ultra-worthies. I also have five personal friends, Peter Lewis, Guy de la Valdène, Will Hearst, Gérard Oberlé, and Michael Butler, whose personal taste in wine I consider more exacting and elevated than my own. I’m what you call an Ace Consumer in the area of food and wine and a producer in the literary field. This is a disclaimer of expertise in wine but not intelligence.

Both book and wine reviewing, however, bring to mind my memories of the wonderful old comedian Pigmeat Markham and his routine “here come da judge.” Among us mortals even the most profound spiritual experiences are freely marketed. Witness the television evangelists. On a lesser level you can buy a star and name it after yourself. In wine and literary reviewing and criticism we have the questionable relationship with the wine industry and the book industry. The rich, squeaky wheels tend to get all of the grease and one’s credibility feels tampered with. How often in literature have I noted that fine works are basically ignored if not published by the mainstream companies. The lesser, off-brand publishers do not contribute to the advertising revenue of the large reviewing media and cynicism becomes freely nurtured in the savagery of the marketplace. The concept of a level playing field is as laughable as peace in our time.

I’m fairly sure that the numerical system of rating wines was not devised as a marketing tool but that’s what it has become. The truly great Russian writer Dostoevsky insisted, “Two plus two is the beginning of death.” Aesthetic values are decidedly non-digital and can no more fairly be applied to wines than to a thousand or so “top” books a year. I could rather freely trust Parker in most areas but I would prefer a comment to a number. After Parker, however, the food chain descends toward the Proterozoic. Since this isn’t a science, how does a judge become qualified? In my years in Hollywood I watched hundreds of cads pass themselves off as “producers” to young starlets. Both in the press and on television news there are hundreds of pundits who assume that talking is thinking. Evidently pundits are pundits because they say they are, and the same with many creatures in the wine press.

In a Paris restaurant last November I had a mildly irritating but comic experience. I was seated near an American couple in their mid-thirties and the man was driving the sommelier batshit by looking up the numbered ratings in a book for the wines on the “carte.” By the time the customer finished, his wife looked like she wanted to run for it and the sommelier was searching for a club or at least a riding crop. I’ve seen versions of this before but not to an extent that became so transcendently silly. I could imagine this dweeb going in a bookstore and wondering why the stock didn’t have spine stickers with ratings. French magazines run cartoons about such American “wine lovers.”

While driving through France with Peter Lewis and Guy de la Valdène I sensed a number of times from the backseat that I was driving them crazy with some of my peculiar wine questions but they willingly answered because the option was to have me start singing songs like “Shrimp Boats Are Coming” or my Wilson Pickett or Sons of the Pioneers medleys. Peter, who is expert in both wine and literature, made the point that it would be helpful if there was a way to contextualize the judgments of wine critics. Good literary critics like Edmund Wilson, George Steiner, or F. K. Lewis clearly establish where they stand. It would be useful indeed to have a specific idea of the tastes of wine reviewers and critics. You would then know what particular direction they were coming from in their virtually thousands of judgments.

Science does offer us a detailed consolation in the matter of taste, but it won’t fit into any ballpark. In January there was an item in the New York Times Science section that at the same time clarified and clouded the issue. The fact is that taste buds in the human mouth can be quantified. “About 25 percent of the population are supertasters, blessed or cursed with a heightened sensitivity because the concentration of their taste buds can be a hundred times as great as the concentration in nontasters, who also make up about 25 percent of the world. Regular tasters, about half of all people, fall somewhere in between.”

These facts raised some troubling considerations. Should all of those who judge wine be forced to troop off to Mayo Clinic in Minnesota to have their taste buds counted? Minnesota is a good idea as a California clinic couldn’t very well be trusted in this matter. Literary reviewers could be given a simple diagnostic test of world literature and many would flunk outright. Imagine giving members of Congress a test on American or world history! But in the arena of wine this is explicit evidence that there are a large number of possible supertasters. In our population at large that means there are about seventy million people with this potential.

Last night I awoke at four a.m. brooding about these matters. The old saying “You shouldn’t lose sleep over it” came immediately to mind as I stared at the waning moon, the same moon on which one of our astronauts had swung a blasphemous golf club. We Americans are extraordinarily proud of our pragmatism though this xenophobic pride often borders on the fungoid. I said in my memoirs that we seem better at everything than the French except how to live life, which includes food and wine. I have met French oenophiles who are scornfully amused by our numerical systems but these same people are irrationally attached to their Michelin Guides.

My mother, of 100 percent Swedish derivation, once said to me, “what if everyone was like you?” I admit that might be a sad situation. Why resist a system that so many find helpful? Maybe I have a numbers phobia? By general agreement I’m not allowed a checking account because I’ve never been able to fill out a stub. I have no talent at dates and can recapture most incidents of my life only by remembering what dogs I owned at the time.

So if I can’t accept pragmatism in wine or literature perhaps it’s my own problem. I fear the banality of the uniform. Will the wines of the future all adhere to the style of the wines judged to be in the high nineties by certain people? Once in New York City I studied the Racing Form all morning, went out to Aqueduct, and lost every bet. I’ve read about touted wines that on tasting I thought unworthy of a Missouri truck stop, but then how many well-reviewed books have I read that carried the scent of Limburger cheese? In literature our pragmatism can be perversely wrongheaded if you look at the hundred or so MFA programs at universities that hope for a uniform approach in teaching people how to write poetry and fiction. It becomes California Cabernet fiction and poetry with only a couple out of a thousand worthy of our attention. Some of these schools yearly outproduce the English Romantic movement.

I’m cooking guanciale in a pasta sauce this evening. I trust that there will be no overtones or hints of bacon, brisket, shrimp, or tongue. Before dinner I’ll give my dog a chunk of the sharp cheddar she loves, pour a twelve-ounce goblet of humble Rasteau or Bandol, and listen to some Brazilian guitar music. In critical terms I won’t try to figure out if this predinner experience is commensal or symbiotic or etiolated. This is an after-work hour of humility where I’m free to ponder, if I wish, the memories of the thousand or so bottles of great wine I’ve drunk in my life. I won’t wonder if the Rasteau is an eighty-three or an eighty-five, or if my new novel is a forty-seven or a ninety-one, or if the girl I saw at the coffee shop is a ninety-nine point eight, the same as my body temperature and the evening air in Bahia.