SWIMMING IN BORDEAUX
IT’S A MIRACLE ANYONE’S LIVER SURVIVED THE MANY SEDUCTIVE POURINGS that blotted out our afternoons in the seventies when France’s winemakers found affluent New Yorkers so ripe for temptation. The grandiloquent grape-juice peddlers flew into town to woo retailers and indoctrinate the growing bubble of wine journalists. And we were ripe to swallow imported wisdom.
Eric Rothschild, the new generation running Château Lafite Rothschild, was young and beautiful and single when we first met in Paris. One thing led to another, as it often did in the sybaritic seventies. Now he’d come to New York to show off a dozen vintages of his family’s great Bordeaux to a froth of wine press and trade at Seagram’s, his distributor. Eric had a business dinner but agreed to meet my friends and me at a club in midtown where men and women—naked except for a few bundles of grapes attached strategically—lolled on nets suspended from the ceiling. My friends had expected a Rothschild to be stiff and uptight, but Eric just laughed at the silliness of it all. We had a drink at the bar and then I spirited him off to dance at Xenon.
The next evening, Eric was expected at a dinner of the Commanderie de Bordeaux, hoity-toitiest of a hoity-toity lot of men-only wine societies. “They won’t let me come because I’m a woman,” I complained to Eric. “It’s a disgrace. Make them come into the twentieth century, Eric,” I begged. “There are so many women winemakers and wine writers now. If you insist that I come, no one will be able to object.” Eric, as always a diplomat, was not a candidate to commit cultural terrorism.
“Those dinners are so stuffy and boring,” he insisted. “You’d hate it.”
“I hate more that they don’t invite women.”
“I’ll just go to their dinner for a course or two and then I’ll come to you,” he said.
“You’ll only see me if I’m not out doing something better,” I replied petulantly.
It was after 11:00 PM when my bell rang. I walked to the door in a sheer black nightgown.
Eric bounded up the one flight of steps to where I stood, a bottle of Lafite in each hand, his Commanderie de Bordeaux medal bouncing on a ribbon around his neck, and kissed me. Kissed my mouth, my ear, and my neck. He followed me to my balcony bedroom. He was a charming, graceful lover, exactly as I remembered from Paris. He lingered for an aristocratic few minutes, murmuring pillow talk, then scrambled back into his tuxedo, tucking the tie into a pocket and reaching for his medal. I walked him to the door, naked in the light of the street lamp.
“I think I deserve that ribbon,” I said.
He laughed, then solemnly placed the ribbon around my neck, where the medal fell between my breasts. He kissed me lightly on each cheek.
That’s how I finally got my ribbon from the stubbornly chauvinist Commanderie de Bordeaux.