I DON’T KNOW all the reasons that other people love French wine, but I know why I love it: in comparison to similar wines from other countries, French wine is almost always, over 95 percent of the time, better, in any type of vessel from which it’s drunk.
PETER HELLMAN is a journalist who has written for Wine Spectator, New York, the New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, Food & Wine, and other publications. He wrote the “Urban Vintage” wine and food column for the New York Sun until 2008, and is the author of The American Wine Handbook (Ballantine, 1987) and When Courage Was Stronger Than Fear: Remarkable Stories of Christians and Muslims Who Saved Jews from the Holocaust (Marlowe & Company, 2004).
THE FRENCH INSIST that the unique glory of their wines originates in the soil—le terroir. For once, these rather immodest people are shortchanging themselves. The true source of French wines issues from their very own heads, hearts, and finicky palates. Otherwise, any batch of happy peasants could have invented Champagne, or determined that it takes thirteen different grapes to make a proper Châteauneuf-du-Pape, or managed to classify the great red wines of Burgundy (all made from the same Pinot Noir grape, mind you) into more than 250 grands crus and premiers crus.
This last fact struck home years ago as I drove along a tiny country road that hugged the vine-draped Côte de Nuits—a first pilgrimage to the region of my favorite wine. A sign marked the spot where the commune of Morey-Saint-Denis ended and Chambolle-Musigny began, fabled names to anyone who adores red Burgundy. The wine map in my head told me that the vines sloping gently upward to my right had to be the grand cru of Bonnes-Mares, a thirty-seven-acre appellation that straddles the two communes. (Full yet delicate, meaty yet refined, a well-aged Bonnes-Mares is my dream of red Burgundy.)
A woman was pruning vines near the road. I pulled over. “This must be Bonnes-Mares,” I said to her confidently.
“Mais non, monsieur,” she said reproachfully. “This is only plain commune wine.”
I told her about the wine map in my head.
“Bonnes-Mares is not here,” she repeated firmly. “It’s over there.”
She pointed to a spot no more than half a dozen rows away. No undulation, dip, or break of any kind that I could see separated the vines of the grand cru of Bonnes-Mares from the communal stuff. Yet one wine fetches triple the price of the other. If you are lucky enough to drink a twenty-year-old bottle of Bonnes-Mares from a good vintage, I’ll lay odds that you won’t find it overpriced.
How serious are the French about le terroir? It’s said that the members of the INAO (Institut National des Appellations d’Origine des Vins et Eaux-de-Vie), entrusted with dividing the Côte d’Or into appellations as small as two acres (La Romanée), wouldn’t hesitate to actually taste the soil. How else to detect subtle differences between similar-appearing plots? Perhaps such differences accounted for the otherwise undetectable boundary between Bonnes-Mares and the lesser stuff.
Burgundy is the extreme example of the French compulsion to divide up territory. There are hundreds of appellations and an astounding number of place names. Charles de Gaulle once noted how difficult it is to govern a country that has a different cheese for every day of the year. How about a choice of wines for every cheese, mon cher général?
You’d think that so many wines would be a source of rampant confusion for the poor consumer. Actually, there’s comfort in the rigidly monitored appellation system. That’s because the French—an individualistic people in some ways—don’t try to create an individual statement with their wines the way so many New World winemakers do. They are best satisfied when they make a wine that conforms to the standards of their appellation. On the Médoc peninsula of Bordeaux, for example, wines from the southernmost commune of Margaux are typically highly perfumed and delicate. Wines from Saint-Estèphe, at the Médoc’s northern end, tend to be hard edged and meaty. You might say that Margaux draws curves and Saint-Estèphe right angles.
Here in Bordeaux, as in Burgundy, lines are sharply drawn in the soil. Just beyond the priceless vineyards of Château Lafite Rothschild in the commune of Paulliac, for instance, is land where no grapes deserving of the name Bordeaux may be grown. It’s only a stone’s throw from the most esteemed vineyard land in the world to the domain of reeds and bullfrogs.
If all French wines, Bordeaux in particular, were born beautiful, they’d be less wondrous when they come of age. In fact, there’s nothing meaner in the mouth than young Bordeaux from a strong vintage. In my own cellar is a cru bourgeois called Château Marsac-Séguineau, from the intense 1975 vintage, bought when it was young. A brilliant royal purple, it ripped my gums with its tannin—the vinous equivalent of an assault rifle. The wine stayed that way for more than a decade, and I gave up hope that it would ever mellow. But then, after a long hiatus, I gingerly tried another bottle. Eureka! That snarl had turned to silk. Well, almost. At sixteen years of age, the wine was still angular enough to provide the classic contrast to the rich taste of roast leg of lamb.
As we get older, there’s something deeply affirmative about the progress of well-aged Bordeaux. We hope that as the sap of our youth is left behind, we will show greater depth of character, soften our sharp edges, and become more interesting people. In short, we want to believe that with age we can still bloom. That’s precisely the path of a fine claret from youth to the fullness of age. We drink it overtly for pleasure. But we also drink it as a reminder that we can get not just older but better.
Usually it’s red wines and such sweet wines as Sauternes that we save for aging. A very few dry white wines can also improve with age. My memory settles on a dusty case of 1964 Corton-Charlemagne, a grand cru Burgundy from the esteemed shipper Robert Drouhin, that a friend and I found forgotten in the back of a wine shop in 1977. The proprietor, happy to get rid of wine he presumed to be over the hill after thirteen years, sold us the case at a bargain. We’d planned to hold off until dinner before trying a bottle, knowing that the wine might indeed be over the hill. Instead, on the way home, we pulled over to a shaded roadside picnic table. Out of the glove compartment came clear plastic cups and a corkscrew.
The smell of that wine mingled oak, freshly toasted country bread, and an elusive tang of lime. In the mouth came a rush of flavors and a texture that was simultaneously stony and unctuous. I’d be more specific, except that it is better to marvel at a great old white Burgundy—or red, for that matter—than to dissect it.
A year or so later, during a visit to Burgundy, I mentioned this marvelously youthful Corton-Charlemagne to a winemaker working in the Roman-era cellars of Drouhin located in Beaune. We were only a few miles from the hill of Corton.
His eyes lit up. “Ah, yes,” he exclaimed. “In 1964, you know, the secondary aromas never really gave way to the tertiaries. It was most unusual.”
The winemaker was alluding to the three phases into which French enologists divide a wine’s evolution—as perceived by le nez. Primary aromas are those of the fresh juice of the grape. Secondary aromas develop with fermentation, the smell of young wine. The best wines go on to develop a bouquet in which multiple scents perform a dance as complex and as evanescent as a Balanchine ballet.
You needn’t speak wine techno-talk to appreciate a wine like that ’64 Corton-Charlemagne. But the precise terminology does drive home a point: the best French wines are not produced by happy little peasants. They are an expression of the unique French blend of sensuality and science. It wasn’t by chance that fermentation was demystified by a wine-loving Frenchman named Pasteur.
We think of formal meals as the only way to properly honor a great wine in its prime. But that’s not necessarily so. I once carried home from Paris a single magnificent bottle of Burgundy, a 1961 Musigny from the Comte de Vogüé. I don’t mind saying that I have never, before or since, paid so much for a single bottle of wine. It awaited only a suitably lofty occasion to open it. For a long time, that opportunity never presented itself.
Then, for a birthday dinner, my wife prepared a favorite dish, potato and salt-cod purée, or what the French call brandade de morue. Its smell flowed from the oven and filled the house. As it came out of the oven, I heard a crash. Dashing in from the dining room, I found our beautiful old oval ceramic dish on the floor in shards, the brandade splashed everywhere and my wife in tears.
“This calls for the best bottle in the house,” I said as we cleaned up.
Our abbreviated birthday dinner consisted of a salad, some good country bread, a wedge of Gruyère—and that Musigny. It gave me the greatest pleasure of any wine I’d ever uncorked. Except, perhaps, for that Corton-Charlemagne drunk at roadside from a plastic cup.
Radishes
I love radishes, especially the long and slender kind known as French breakfast radishes, which are a little less sharp than the regular variety. I love radishes with a big blob of tapenade; I also like them alongside hard-boiled eggs, aioli, and slices of pumpernickel; I like them thinly sliced on a buttered baguette as a sort of tartine; and I even like them sautéed. But my favorite way to eat radishes is to dip chunks in softened, unsalted butter (preferably French) and then in flakes of fleur de sel—wow.
Molly Wizenberg loves radishes, too, as anyone who’s read A Homemade Life already knows, and recently I was happy to discover that Kate McDonough, editor of one of my favorite Web sites, the City Cook (thecitycook.com), and author of The City Cook (Simon & Schuster, 2010), does as well. After I read McDonough’s essay “Spring Cooking” on her site, I asked her if she would permit me to share it with readers of this book. She kindly agreed:
While radishes may not be the first ingredient you think of when it comes to spring cooking, they are for me.
On my first trip to Italy, a trip filled with memory-searing experiences, I tasted my first risotto. It was in Florence, at a small ristorante located alongside the Arno, about two bridges down from the Ponte Vecchio. The chef had spent a few years living in California and loved to guide Americans through his menu, and he convinced me to try a spring radish risotto. About thirty minutes later (every risotto was cooked to order; none of this half-cooked-then-finished-later risotto done by most U.S. restaurants) the waiter brought me a plate filled with almost soupy, pale pink rice. Its flavor combined the sweetness of butter and garlic with Parmesan’s salt and the pepper of spring radishes. The pink, of course, was from the radishes’ red skins. And the tender rice, combined with the crunchy cooked radish, was the chef’s genius.
A few years later my now husband and I were again traveling, this time to the Normandy region of France. We had rented a car to drive the coastal towns where the Battle of Normandy was fought and where, nearly nine hundred years earlier, plans were laid for the Battle of Hastings depicted in the extraordinary Bayeux Tapestry. Today Normandy is home to some of the best apple groves and dairy farms in all of Europe, a kind of bucolic disconnect from the area’s violent past; it is common to see cows roaming among the remains of concrete artillery pillboxes in the grass-covered hills over Omaha Beach.
We arrived in Bayeux just in time for lunch and spotted its weekly farmers’ market under way in a parking lot not far from the Bayeux Tapestry museum. Since we always traveled with basic picnic tools, we headed to the market with a corkscrew and a Swiss army knife. We spread our lunch on the hood of our rented Peugeot, making sandwiches from pieces torn from a just-baked baguette, a smear of sweet butter (could any other butter taste as wonderful as one sold by a Normandy dairy farmer at his local market?), and white-tipped spring radishes that we had rinsed with bottled water. Dessert was a wedge of an apple tart cut crudely with the knife’s small blade. No meal has ever tasted better.
I’ve long promised to try to make that pink risotto. I never have. I suspect I don’t want to disrupt the remembrance of that dinner along the Arno with my then boyfriend, now dear husband.
But as for that radish sandwich—it is a favorite that I crave every spring and summer. A baguette is perfect but radishes will stand up to any bread you like, including a whole grain. Spread the bread with good sweet butter, maybe an imported Irish or French butter because they usually have a higher butterfat content than those made in the U.S. For the radish, the slightly sweeter, elongated white-tipped radish is a great choice, but these can be difficult to find, even at farmers’ markets. So select round, firm red radishes that have a little waxy shine to their surface and minus any signs that they may have spent the last few weeks in a warehouse. Snip off the stems and roots, give a rinse, and cut each into thick slices. Arrange the slices—be generous—on the buttered bread and add a tiny pinch of your best salt (this is a time to use a precious fleur de sel if you have it).
Add a glass of cold, chalky Sancerre and it’s a perfect lunch or first course of a spring dinner.
