Published in House & Garden Magazine in 1984, “A Vintage Spat” recounts the prejudice M.F.K. Fisher faced in the late 1940s while trying to enter the wine world. Despite her efforts to be professional and rule-abiding, she’s accused by Angelo Pelligrini, an Italian immigrant, author, and bon vivant, of being too girlish and perfumed to be taken seriously. Did she really douse herself in rose water?
ALTHOUGH I HAVE KNOWN VERY FEW MEN of letters intimately, excluding my husbands, of course, Angelo Pellegrini is the only one I have ever shared a spit-bucket with.
Perhaps the nearest I ever came to this was one noontime in a heat-spell in New York, in about 1944, when I waited a long time for Somerset Maugham to get up from his luncheon rendezvous with a handsome blonde and then sat as soon as possible on his chair. It was warmer than the weather, almost hot from his plump old bottom, and I felt it voluptuously through my whole being, like fine tea or perhaps a noble Chambertin sat upon and in, rather than drunk as common mortals would absorb it.
And sharing a bucket at the Pomona County Fairgrounds with Angelo Pellegrini, in about 1946, was even headier … or perhaps I should say soul-shaking. He detested me.
It was at the Los Angeles County Fair in Pomona. To please an old good family friend, Harold Richardson, I had agreed to be one of his crew in the first serious public wine-judging south of Sacramento, from whence had come all our official vinous nods until then. Of course we were frowned on, by anyone south of Santa Barbara, for stepping on hallowed tradition, but Harold felt that the time was right, and he asked a mixed lot to meet with him at the Fair Grounds “down south.” I was the only female there, and in fact the first of my sex ever to be on a California wine panel, as far as I know.
Of course it was very hot in September, and I dressed for coolness and changed my usual personal habits only by cutting out all soap and toothpaste and lotions for two weeks; I did not smoke anyway, but I stopped any tea-coffee-wine-booze for five days before the judging. In other words, I was a Good Girl, a white Anglo-Saxon non-Christian.
The equipment for judging was very primitive then. For one thing, we were supposed to “do” about 180 bottled products in three days. For another, the “judges” were seated two by two at a long table with of course the bottles-on-hand and the sparse glasses in front of each one and then a bucket, a plain old five-gallon bucket, between each pair. No dentist-office neat installations!
The first day we judged white wines. The second we whipped through reds. The third and final day we did fruit wines in the morning and brandies after lunch, and toward the end of that day we swallowed quite a bit, instead of spitting it hopefully toward our partners and fairly deftly into our shared buckets.
I had a hard time spitting in public, at first. I knew I would have to when I accepted Harold’s invitation, because I had watched wine men do it nonchalantly in Burgundy and Switzerland. But they were always men. I had never seen a woman do it, probably because they had never gone into the courtyards outside their husbands’ wineries when anyone was there. I did not count there as a woman, being a foreigner and by nature invisible anyway. But in Pomona, when I had to spit like a man, facing my companion across the bucket and trying to guess what he thought of the wine we had just let swirl and unfold in our separate mouths, I was at first almost appalled at myself. I was nearing forty, and I had never done such a thing as spit, except in a closed private space, and alone.
My partner was Angelo Pellegrini. At least, that was what was marked on our cards and announced in the sheet Harold had sent to each judge. I admired Angelo very much, and felt awed that I would actually meet him at Harold’s little gatherings. I reread The Unprejudiced Palate, and felt more strongly than ever that it was the first true statement I had yet read about living as it can and should be in the western coastal America that I love. It did not occur to me that I would have to spit in front of this Pan-like man. And for a while it looked as if I wouldn’t.
I sat alone at my slot and pretended to taste a few white wines, and watched how my neighbors acted, and even learned how to eject the juices without dribbling, before Harold hurried in from his office with a short dark furious man fuming alongside. Introductions were impossible as Harold’s replacement put us through our paces and we gradually got into our own rhythms of tasting, marking, moving along through the rows of unmarked bottles. Beside me Angelo inhaled and swirled and swished noisily, and spat contemptuously almost everywhere but into our bucket, our private shared spittoon.
He was plainly in a gigantic rage.
And at noon, after one of the most miserable mornings of my life, Harold told me that Angelo had roared into his office a few minutes before the judging and had said that he would never consent to have a woman present at a wine-tasting, much less sit next to him. He swore in two or three languages and was noisy in every possible way. He was, in other words, an insulted Italian, than which . . .
Harold, in his own more decorous way, was furious at having his actions called whatever Angelo called them, and finally he assumed all his legal sternness and said put up or shut up, and Angelo agreed to sit by me for one day.
But after lunch he stormed into Harold’s office again and said that he could not go on. He was leaving for Seattle this afternoon.
Harold, by now smooth and silky and in general the successful criminal lawyer trying his most important case, had no need to counter-question his client to discover that not only was the person appointed as his fellow wine judge a female, but that she smelled. She smelled of perfume. She was plainly unfit to sit next to a highly qualified and respected wine man-author-bon viveur, a true American, but also a living example of good Italian sensitivity and general machismo. “She must go,” he said, “Or … I go. She stinks.”
Of course all these painful stormings were a painful interruption to Harold’s plans to direct and cosset and teach and in general bend his first selected jury to his enological will. It was his show. He was supposed to be out there leading his flock, not closeted with a wild-eyed sputtering Italian professor. It was probably self-survival that got him to seat Angelo beside me again, still unintroduced and openly sneering, but able to function as a wine judge. (He still spat before I did, and in several directions, and never looked at me nor spoke.)
After work that night, Harold took me to dinner and, as soft-voiced and gentle as always, told me that Angelo Pellegrini, the man I so admired for his vital literary style, said I smelled. “To me, you do not,” Harold added firmly, and I told him of my ascetic preparations for his unprecedented panel of wine judges, and he smiled approval in his usual avuncular-paternal manner, and said something like “Carry on!” We finished our unusually dull meal, saltless-sauceless-wineless for our palates’ purity and next day’s scheduled reds, and parted without visible tears.
It was a bad day, but at least Angelo was there the whole time. He never looked at me nor spoke, but his spitting was spotless. Whenever Harold picked up our scorecards he smiled a little, because we seemed to be marking the same things about the same bottles.
The next day was the last, thank God. I had never lived through such a miserable experience. My female honor felt bruised by the dark unsmiling man sitting with such obvious impatience and distaste beside me, sharing the same horrid bucket for our public rinsings, sucking in his breath whenever I had to lean toward him so that I would not pollute his pristine taste-buds with my stench. I prayed for patience to get through the fruit wines, through the raw brandies, and away.
When we went into the plain bleak room, the glasses and first bottles and buckets were set out, and we placed ourselves, but Harold and Angelo were not there. In about ten minutes they hurried out and almost ran toward me, so that I stood up anxiously: was it bad news about my little girls, my ailing mother? Angelo, flashing a beautiful boyish giddying smile, bowed low over my hand, and kissed it passionately. Harold almost danced around us. Probably all the other judges, middle-aged respected medicos and tycoons and physicists, looked on with bemused patience, ignorant of our little drama, as Angelo begged me to forgive him for his cruel actions and Harold explained patchily but almost as passionately that Angelo’s motel soap smelled, and therefore he smelled, and especially his hands smelled. I did not.
The rest is obvious. Years fell from my shoulders, and I was young, beautiful, desirable. Angelo was alive beside me, as only a healthy Italian can be. We spat in unison into the suddenly attractive puddle of fruit juice and water we shared, and a newspaper paparazzo from Los Angeles shot our jets in midair meeting just above the bucket. And halfway through the long last afternoon tasting of brandies we all began to swallow, and ignored most of the other rules, so that before we all parted after a fine meal of heavily spiced delicacies and plenty of our best bottles from the first two days, I was carissima forever, to the Pan of the Pacific coast, Angelo Pellegrini.
I still am, with the full consent of his wife, and the tacit agreement of scores of other fellow females in every direction from Seattle. Now and then Angelo remembers me, and sends me a clipping of something he has written, or a picture of his prize pumpkin, or a blurred snapshot of a new grandchild, all askew but eminently handsome and healthy because they came from Angelo Pellegrini: from him, the great god Pan of this Western world.