Has anyone ever said, “Let’s fly to London and taste some fine teas”? Flights across the ocean are far too perilous to gamble on anything but extreme pleasure. In all of my years as a commercial pilot flying the biggest birds created by man I was always mindful that death was my true copilot. That’s why when I hit the ground, as it were, I was off and running to a wine bar to hoist down a mag or two. In Paris that meant Juveniles and Le Rubis.
Of course in actuality I’m only a novelist and poet and have been so since I received my essential calling at age fourteen while reading John Keats. I immediately set about learning the territory which I quickly surmised included women, nature, and wine, a triumvirate virtually forming the spine of literature, not to speak of a vigorous life.
Returning to earth I recall myself as an eighteen-year-old listening to Berlioz’s Requiem with my sister with a seventy-cent fifth of Gallo and a burning red candle, a metaphor of the hotness of our souls on the verge of real life, which seemed somewhat distant from the rural Midwest. My wine drinking, mixed with other forms of alcohol, began and continued in a rather disorderly fashion until this early winter when I came down with type 2 diabetes. My valves were blown according to the body mechanics, the doctors, my threads stripped bare from purported overuse. For the time being no more wine, pasta, potatoes fried in duck or goose fat, or pomegranate soufflés, and as for alcohol a mere two ounces of vodka a day, the kind of paltry drink a publisher has when bent on cheating a writer. I also had to drop thirty pounds, which meant throwing away the hundreds of thousands of dollars I had spent on my ample tummy that many women in the world considered an objet d’art. But most of all it was the absence of good wine that brought me to tears and occasional sobs. Literary writers aren’t gunslingers or poker players. Our gifts demand fragility and extreme vulnerability to life. I didn’t want to be manly, I wanted wine and her shy handmaiden, fine food, with the intensity that a man marooned on a glacier for four months might desire a Big Ten cheerleader.
After four nasty months of improbable physical exertion which included pushing back from the table before I was ready, and pondering the mysteries of yogurt which even my dogs scorned, I was ready to return to earth. I invented a project to visit Collioure in France and search for the missing manuscripts of Antonio Machado, one of my favorite poets, who had lost a valise of poems while escaping Franco’s Spain with his family in 1939. Machado was a great poet, and there was an ineffable melancholy about the matter that had troubled me for a long time. Another reason to go to Collioure is that I had seen an extraordinary film about the vineyard of Christine Campadieu and her husband, Vincent Cantié, Domaine La Tour Vieille.
Fortunately my friend and wine maven, Peter Lewis, had French intentions for writing a wine bar piece, so we decided to travel together as we had done before on what we euphemistically call our “wine and food tours.” Peter has amazed a number of my French friends with his knowledge about their wines. These are not the most agreeable people, as we all know, habitually greeting the most splendid meal with a sardonic pas mal. Peter is a modest fellow and burgeoning novelist, agreeing with my contention that wine criticism bears the same relationship to wine as fustian theology does to God. As a novelist and poet I value the judgment of those who have created notable works. If I were a vintner and Mr. Brunier of the fabled Vieux Télégraphe in Châteauneuf-du-Pape told me he liked a bottle I had created, I would be thrilled, less so by a positive review in a wine magazine.
I do, however, value the experience when Peter speculates aloud why I like a particular wine so much. It’s really not adequate at times for me to merely say “yummy” or “mother dawg.” It’s fun to talk about wine without saying, “There’s a chiaroscuro of flavors here reminiscent of the colors of a fledgling finch, or perhaps the saddle of Lucrezia Borgia.” After a few hasty days in Paris, the high points being the seafood at La Cagouille and everything possible at Lulu’s Assiette over on rue Château, we had two mediocre days in Lyon until Thierry Frémaux who runs the esteemed Institut Lumière and also runs the Cannes Film Festival took us out for an extraordinary meal at Le Passage.
Our intentions, however, were elsewhere. As we drove southwest toward Collioure, the only problem was my feet. I’m a country boy who only rarely walks at length on cement and the formula the doctor concocted of walking two to three hours for every bottle of wine was mildly punishing though it is fun to feel like a faux marine.
In this remote corner of France it is easy to slide into the realm of the senses where we quite comfortably belong. I felt quite at home in Collioure and I was in my hotel room for an entire ten minutes before I sipped a glass of La Tour Vieille. From the balcony I could see the rooming house where my hero Antonio had perished, and I had a splendid sense of freedom from the Roman Empire that the United States has become. An hour later we were at the house of Vincent and Christine eating Christine’s wonderful home-cured anchovies (Collioure was the center of the French anchovy fleet) and then some rice and tiny squid in their own ink covered with a layer of the best langoustines I had ever had. As we drank a number of vintages of La Tour Vieille I reflected that the wine felt as if it emerged from the local earth in the same manner that Domaine Tempier belonged to Bandol. For several days we wandered the area, including the nearly vertical vineyards which explained why Vincent and Christine are both handsomely slender. Another evening Christine fixed a stewed rabbit and a bowl of fresh favas with blood sausage, the splendid food of the earth from which the wine had sprung. The third night we visited Le Cabaret, a restaurant owned by Antoine Delmas, an old friend of Cantié’s, and were served, among other things, a four-kilo loup de mer en gros sel, one of the most pleasurable fish dishes of my life.
In a curious way the true nature of our trip only became apparent a month later when in a complete slump I made a round trip between Montana and Michigan and on the way home on a route through northern Wisconsin I saw a sign for Redwine Road in a remote rural area. Under this blessed road sign I semi-dozed and relived my trip, the gorgeous eel stew at the home of Jean and Nicole Meurice near a salt marsh (frankly I’ve had food in a number of French homes that exceeded in quality anything at a half dozen three-star restaurants), the bottles of Château La Roque of Pic St.-Loup I drank in the Montpellier region in keeping with the theme of terroir. I find Montpellier an engaging city and we were lucky to discover a relatively new restaurant manned only by Chef Jean-Christophe Blanc and his wife Whitney. The food here is simple and direct but utterly elegant. One day at lunch we raised our glasses of Pic St.-Loup to a woman having her hundredth birthday party. She smiled at us and drank deeply from her glass of red.
We had a fine dose of the natural during a day in the Camargue, then made our way to Anne Igou’s Nord-Pinus in Arles, my favorite hotel in the world, bar none. Arles is a splendid walking town and has a marvelous market with a tinge of the proletarian absent in high-rent areas such as Avignon. There’s a dearth of Texas women in five-hundred-dollar sunglasses carrying their dogs that are crossbred from monkeys and rats. In Arles I’m close enough to the territory to confine my wine drinking to Domaine Tempier’s Bandol. In fact, Lulu Peyraud’s vineyard was our last stop before we returned to Paris. This completely private restaurant is my favorite place to eat in France along with Gérard Oberlé’s fabled kitchen in Burgundy. My obnoxious, self-administered blood test in the morning revealed that I had passed again, having failed only one day in twenty when I missed my three hours of walking, certainly a small chore compared to the pleasure of wine.
How can humble grapes produce something so delicious with the cooperation of human alchemy? Drinking wine is beyond the vagaries of language and numbers and finds its essence, like sex, totally within the realm of the senses. Would you rather read The Joy of Sex or play Parcheesi with Penélope Cruz in Collioure?