Published in 1984 as the Introduction to the University of California Sotheby Book of California Wine, this essay sums up the role wine played in M.F.K. Fisher’s life. Not just a drink, wine was essential to her being: “Wine is life, and my life and wine are inextricable.”
ICAN NO MORE THINK OF MY OWN LIFE WITHOUT thinking of wine and wines and where they grew for me and why I drank them when I did and why I picked the grapes and where I opened the oldest procurable bottles, and all that, than I can remember living before I breathed.
In other words, wine is life, and my life and wine are inextricable.And the saving grace of all wine’s many graces, probably, is that it can never be dull. It is only the people who try to sing about it who may sound flat. But wine is an older thing than we are, and is forgiving of even the most boring explanations of its élan vital.
In some ways there is nothing much more encouraging about man’s stumbling progress than his growing deftness in making good wine better and then getting it to the mouths and minds of more people. On the other hand, perhaps it has lost some of its mystery and luster in its new availability. The leap from a high priest’s sacramental flagon on a marble altar to the plastic container in a motel icebox is shorter than we care to ponder.
Myself, I am glad that people almost everywhere can find potable and honest wines more easily than they used to, even in supermarkets. It was impossible to buy anything alcoholic in Whittier, where we went when I was about four, because it was a town founded by and for the Quaker way of life. My father Rex respected this aim, but as a non-Quaker he did not subscribe to it, and some of the best times of my young life were spent driving into the beautiful hills and hidden quiet valleys of southern California with him to buy house-wines. I loved the cold smell of wine cellars as much as I did the fine whiff of ink and fresh paper at the daily News.
It never surprised me that the ranchers always seemed glad when we drove up their roads in our open Model-T. The women would put tumblers and a long loaf of their last baking, and cheese or a dry sausage, on the kitchen table or under the grape arbor “out back.” When the men came with two or three bottles from the old barn or hillside cellar where the casks were stored, they would eat and try the wines and talk. The women and I stayed carefully apart, and I was always given a seed-cake or a piece of bread and jam. Finally the jugs Rex had brought along were filled, and sometimes he took older bottles for special days ahead, and we drove away gently so as not to jiggle them too much.
The wines were probably crude and dirty, compared to what we can buy everywhere today. They were unpasteurized, unfiltered, unfined, not made to last long. Although I know that now and then I was given some at the little ranches, well watered to a sickly pink, I cannot remember anything except that I loved the bouncy rides and the fair countryside, and my father for taking me along with him.
My anglophile mother liked to serve heavy brownish sherries occasionally with desserts, and I was always given a ceremonial sniff or sip, which I still associate with the communion wine I did not taste until after I was twelve, of course, in our small Episcopal church. By then, Prohibition had been in effect for over a year, and we were firmly known in Whittier as the only so-called religious group in town that deliberately flouted the law and served “liquor” from its altar rail. This was, I learned later, because my father, as a respected vestryman, refused flatly to invest in the barrel-washings that were then called sacramental wines, and managed somehow to have a comparatively fine imported sherry sipped from the St. Matthias chalice. It always made our empty stomachs rumble at the Early Service, but at least it was decent stuff, and although Rex himself only went to church on Christmas and Easter mornings, he felt it his duty to protect his elected brethren from what he mildly referred to as Volstead Swill.
Until 1919 and Prohibition, though, I really enjoyed beer more than I did wine as a day-to-day tipple. Before World War I, I went often with Father to Anaheim, where we filled the back of the Ford with fresh bottles from two or three of the small German breweries there. As I now understand it, this was almost as easy in southern California as it had been in Albion, Michigan, where my parents had run a smaller newspaper than the News and had started a family. There, and then in the little Quaker town, my father put the paper to bed by about three o’clock, six afternoons a week, and walked home to sit on the front porch or by the fire and drink a bottle of beer with Mother. And I got to carry the empty bottle and two glasses to the kitchen and tip back the last few delicious drops of bitter dead brew. (If for no other good reason, this early sampling taught me the mighty difference between real beer and the pale foamy water we now mass-produce in the United States.)
All during Prohibition we kept two decanters on the dining room sideboard, half filled with fairly good sherry and a mediocre port, mostly used to make an occasional Tipsy Parson when our teetotaller grandmother was out of town. We never drank at the table when she was in residence, out of respect, but that was a time of frequent church gatherings for her, so that almost any birthday or fiesta, sacred or profane, meant a good bottle on the table. We children always had a sip or two in our own glasses but seldom drank them. And Cresta Blanca is the only wine name left in my mind, for a round rich red. The others were unlabeled, from a little vineyard off the Workman Mill Road, or Futelli’s over near Cucamonga, or Old Man Johnson’s back of Corona. They had to be honest to be good, and good meant drinkable.
We moved down Painter Avenue and into the country when I was eleven, and as money flowed faster in the decade before the Crash of 1929, the family served dependable bootleg liquor to their friends, and the wines came oftener and tasted more exciting. The two decanters still stayed on the sideboard, and it was understood that if we young ones wanted to drink in our own home, Father would gladly offer what he had to our guests, as long as they knew how to behave. We never accepted this tacit invitation, but as a clear result of it and of our complete lack of any need to find forbidden fruits, my younger sister and I emerged from our Prohibition teens with our livers intact and our palates unscarred by the poisons our dates carried in flat silver flasks to all the football games and dances. The flesh-warm booze was literally impossible for us to swallow, because we already knew what good drink tasted like, and we were young and healthy and had no need for extra stimulants. Other girls told us we must drink with our dates or have none, but we danced blandly past the Crash of ’29 and into the Depression, learning a lot about the drinking patterns of our times, but always backed by what we had been taught unwittingly since our youngest days. There was good wine if we cared to look for it, or good beer-gin-whiskey-brandy. And the best was none too good!
In 1929, I started to learn more seriously about wine-making and winetasting when I married and went to live in France, mostly in Burgundy, for three years. We were lucky to live there with the Ollagniers first and then the Rigoulots, who were as different as two middle-class French families can be but who shared a genuine zeal for learning how to live intensely. They used all their physical senses steadily and deliberately, like musicians or surgeons training their fingers, and they studied and talked and polished all their wits like artisans honing their tools.
When Paul Ollagnier, a municipal architect, had to inspect the attic beams in an old château down the Côte d’Or near Gevrey-Chambertin, for instance, he took us along, and we saw how to use the little silver tâte-vins and stand like polite awed sheep, in the cellars or courtyards, while the men went through their long obligatory tastings after the business at hand was over. The smell of ice-cold stone and wine and mildew was good. We were learning, with every cell and pore in our young minds and bodies.
On Sundays the Ollagniers took us on rough endless walks with the Club Alpin, and we ate and drank our ways through endless enormous meals in village cafés that seemed to live for our annual treks, and then we snoozed for endless train-rides back to Dijon and bed and the next week’s classes. And all week we discussed with the family the dishes and wines we’d absorbed on Sunday, as if they were Corneille or Voltaire or the futur indicatif of the verb “to understand.”
M. Ollagnier had a cousin in Belley in the Ain, who occasionally sent him a gamey pâté or some long-necked bottles of pale rosé or straw-wine from his vineyard farm, so I learned about Brillat-Savarin’s country and started then and there my “continuing delight” in that old man’s good company. I read the Ollagnier copy of his Physiology of Taste and was as surprised then as I still am that few Frenchmen knew of it.
And then the Rigoulots rented us along with the Dijon house and for many more months taught us a completely sensual and almost hectic approach to the pleasures of the table, as compared to the more academic detachment of the architect and his pianist-wife.
We ate too much and too heavily and drank fine bottles every day instead of on Sundays, as we hurtled with the passionate, desperate people toward their family ruin and then World War II. They had once been very rich, with a fine cellar, mostly of Burgundian and Alsatian vintages, and by then my husband and I knew more about what and why we were drinking. The good bottles and the delicate fine dishes and all the urgency of disintegration mixed into a strange dream for a time. What is left is sometimes sad in my heart, but always good, sans reproche.
Back again in California, there was the end of Prohibition, a forgotten blight while we’d been away. There was no extra money anywhere, so the new watery beer and the dregs of bootlegged booze were easy to forgo. Now and then a few of us would “chip in” for a gallon of young but decent red wine, and eat bread and maybe cheese and talk all night, and plan glowing beautiful exciting futures as the jug emptied. We never felt like clichés-in-Time, which of course we were, politics and poverty and gallantry and all. . . .
And since my first years and Father’s sure insistence that there could always be good wine if it were looked for, I have found it and not bothered with anything else. By now the skill of growing and making it in California has progressed so far that I feel more secure than ever in my lifelong pursuit. Of course there will be shoddy bottles forever, because of the shoddy men forever born to fill and market them. But they cannot harm me, because I have never stopped learning how to tell the true from the false, with at least six of my five allotted senses. Any good winemaker keeps on learning, too, and this collection of some of the reasons for doing so, and the ways devised to assure that, would give heart to my own first teacher, Rex.
He took a dim view of Brotherly Love, the Immaculate Conception, and Prohibition, according to critics as disparate as my mother and the County Boxing Commission, among others. He smoked cigarettes, mostly hand-rolled with Bull Durham, and pipe-tobacco until he lost his bite with dentures in his late years. He probably downed more than his share of drinkin-likka, as a newspaperman. He should have had a palate like well-tanned buffalo hide. But I never saw him smoke when honest wine was nearby, or falter in his first long silent appraisal of it, whether he was in a rancher’s dim barn up in the California foothills, or in a Swiss vintner’s cellar, or in a fine restaurant any place.
He was not my only teacher in this “appreciation course” that I shall continue to attend as long as I am conscient, but certainly he was the shaper, the power behind what I always feel when I know that I am drinking a good wine and that I may soon drink another. Prosit, to him and all such mentors!