I’m trying to devise new strategies to counter my postelection melancholy, the sodden lump of emotions settling in the gizzard that on that late evening could be purged only by a good bottle of French wine, a Les Bécasses Côte-Rôtie, if I remember correctly, drunk in full, somewhat sullen gulps. When dawn came it became clear to me on the sofa that national politics were beyond my control.
Added to this was my recent diagnosis of diabetes so that I could no longer gulp a bottle (or two) of wine a day with my Adam’s apple leaping in victory at each swallow. Medical authorities, such as they are, have promised me that I can return on a more modest scale once this dread disease is under control. The glory days, however, are gone. Hara-kiri was an unsuitable option, but splitting a single bottle between Saturday and Sunday wrenched my heart. After Raymond Chandler had to quit drinking to avoid certain death, he remarked that life had lost its Technicolor.
Can a gulper become a sipper? That remains to be conclusively seen. Part of the diabetic regimen is to shrink the body, throwing away the precious pounds so lovingly added in France, the best restaurants in America, and my own home kitchen where moderation was given only minimal thought. Despite medical evidence there is the primitive idea that we should not throw away our weight when winter is coming. I’ve never needed those wine stopper gizmos because I thought it a sacrilege to let a partial bottle diminish in a long, lonely night.
Normal people don’t think they have a spare hour a day for walking. They are, of course, free to be as normal as they choose, but for an abnormal wine lover this hour is piffle compared to possibly having a half bottle a day by mid-April, when I expect to look like a male model with my abs rippling in the sunlight. Maybe I couldn’t walk an hour a day for my country, but I can for wine. Down here in Patagonia, Arizona, near the Mexican border, I can see the bottles shimmering at the end of the narrow country road where I huff along diverted by nature but also knowing that fermentation is a central fact of nature.
I’m currently saving money by not drinking wine, and I don’t want to. The numbers are insultingly obvious when you go from ten bottles a week to one. I’ve always been left-wing and socially aware, and I hate to cut into the income of the vintners of Côtes du Rhône. Even if I make my mid-April deadline for upping the ration to a half bottle a day, I’m a nothing muffin compared to, say, my September book tour in France where when I did a signing at any of a number of bookstores fine bottles would be opened on the spot. This grand French tradition does not exist in the United States, where in a recent thirty-five-day tour I was left with my own slender wallet. Ten years ago in San Francisco I was given a rich, thickish California Cabernet which was delicious poured on my hotel waffles. On one long tour in France I ended up with five cases of individual wines that I was tempted to roll on naked but thought it might be painful. I store these wines in Paris and Burgundy to avoid paying duty. To give my government any more money than the max tax I’ve been paying for twenty-six years is to encourage further bad behavior. I admit that this election I wrote-in Bill Clinton as a protest because one evening during his second term he ate two French dinners, one at six and one at ten. It is wisdom to double up on wine and food when you start too early. I think I read this somewhere in the Bible though not near the chapter on foreign policy.
Lucky for me, two days after I was diagnosed with diabetes my friend the New York chef Mario Batali arrived to join me and another friend, the renowned wine tutor Guy de la Valdène, for a visit. This four-day event for some hunting and fishing was my inadvertent swan song to a glorious life of excess to which my cowardly body had had a simple-minded reaction. Sad to say the Montana weather turned awful, the worst four days of the late autumn, and we bitterly resigned ourselves to eating and drinking with a small crowd. Mario had sent ahead three cases that included magnums of 1990 Le Pergole Torte by Monte Vertine, 1990 Brunello Riserva by Talenti, 1985 Gaja Darmagi, and 1997 Sori Tilden. We also had an ample supply of Joe Bastianich’s excellent Clerico in addition to a number of bottles from my diminished cellar including a 1970 Lafite-Rothschild, a 1960 Heitz Martha’s Vineyard, and a 1973 magnum of Mount Eden. (I admit I’m prejudiced against most California wines, which can be used to paint a house dark purple, but there are exceptions.) In early October we drank a couple of fine cases from the Rhône Rangers at Edmunds St. John.
Naturally you can’t drink this quantity without proper food. The first evening we cooked a simple carton of two-pound Kobe rib steaks, and in the ensuing evenings we had a white truffle extravaganza with homemade pasta and a wild piglet Mario braised with garlic and citrus. Fortunately for our health my wife Linda’s garden was still full of autumn vegetables. The four days constituted my at least temporary swan song to gluttony and drinking wine in proper volume. Back to intelligent strategies for the infirm. When my body and the doctors whisper to me, “Jimmy, you’re ready,” I intend to have on hand a quantity of bottles that I will drink at an austere speed. These, of course, will not include the grand bottles of the past that are mostly drunk by unworthy stockbrokers. Far in the past, remoter than Reagan, I see those magnums of 1949 Latour, 1953 Margaux, Clos de la Roche, and ordinary bottles of Pétrus and Cheval Blanc. Bill Gates could take his company to the top if only he began swilling these wines in quantity.
My own modest list will include wines that I can count on to restore my spirit, including Domaine Tempier Bandol (especially Tourtine and Migoua), Châteauneuf-du-Pape Vieux Télégraphe, Tour Vieille’s Collioure, Vacqueyras from Sang des Cailloux (writing novels is like drawing blood from rocks), Hermitage, the Nuits-Saint-Georges I had at lunch at the Confurons’ vineyard, and some Grands Echézeaux I’ll earn by climbing the Eiffel Tower naked in winter. I’m not a white wine enthusiast, but I’ll include Silex, Montrachet, and Meursault for warmish days.
Now I’m in the realm of the possible. Throughout this long winter I’ll be scaling mountains, or at least foothills, here on the Mexican border with our dogs Mary and Zilpha, who don’t need anything like wine to look forward to. Drinking a fine glass on the sofa while petting the dogs is a pleasure not afforded to us by politics much less by writing novels. Drinking a fine glass while petting Lucrezia Borgia might be even better, but I haven’t seen her in recent years. Not that long ago I said in a poem that our bodies were beautiful women who were never meant to be faithful to us.