Think of this anthology of New York Times wine articles as a feast of tapas and sherries: small, savory bites and short sips. Check the table of contents as if it were a chalkboard list of specials. Start where you wish; jump around; cater to your mind’s momentary appetite, its whimsy. Two or three “plates” washed down by a few “ounces” can satisfyingly fill a half-hour breather; return for a bedtime “snack.”
A sampler, by definition, cannot be comprehensive. Rather, you have in hand a representative collection of some of the most rewarding wine topics and articles echoing the circumstances and interests of their periods that Times writers (and others) have addressed, mainly in the Living section and its successor, the Dining section. Some have been published in the Sunday Magazine. Longtime readers of The Times’s wine and food columns and wine-news reports may recognize bylines that, dating from the early 1980s, sweep across three decades.
Most of the articles have appeared under separate rubrics: Wine Talk, by Frank J. Prial (and Terry Robards and myself), and The Pour, written by Eric Asimov. (Drawing weightily on Wines of the Times, a title under which Asimov’s tasting panel makes recommendations, would be impractical because the vintaged bottles and prices cited have limited shelf lives.)
A dyed-in-the-Tricolor Francophile, the street-smart Prial, a genial and benign observer of the Human Comedy, has zero tolerance for pretentiousness, and punctures it without inflicting pain. His nonpareil storytelling is redolent of collegial schmoozing in yesterday’s smoke-drenched City Room.
I have always admired Prial’s down-to-earth manner and writing, and consider “A Twilight Nightcap With Alistair Cooke” (2004), a highlight of this collection, one of the most heartfelt wine articles I have read by anyone, anywhere, anytime.
When Prial’s Wine Talk column carried the headline “So Who Needs Vintage Charts” (2000) wine lovers might have read it as an obituary, in an era of proliferating appellations and terroir-oriented winegrowing.
“Over the years,” he wrote, “I have produced vintage chart after chart, always adding enough qualifications and caveats to make the reader wonder why I bothered in the first place.” He continued: “In the final frames of Little Caesar, Edward G. Robinson snarls, ‘Is this the end of Rico?’ To my way of thinking, that sacred talisman of the wine buff, the vintage chart, is just as dead as Rico was when the screen went to black.”
Eric Asimov, who holds the title chief wine critic, approaches wine as a staple of the dining table and a cultural object. His work forms the leading edge of this volume. He is an informal, scrupulously observant, politely skeptical, exceptionally pro-consumer commentator whose conversational prose conveys a strong aversion to geekiness. His basic tasting vocabulary is an antidote to the over-thetop tasting notes that spring up like Everglades grasses around the quicksands of winedom.
One of my favorite Asimov articles is “Pickers to Vintners: A Mexican-American Saga.” In 2004 he told readers: “Over the past few years the first fine wines made by former migrant workers, the children of those workers and other Mexican-Americans have been released, winning good reviews. All told, there are more than a dozen such labels. Fifteen years ago there were none. Mexican-Americans have also become managers or winemakers for important vineyards.”
Gastronomic orthodoxy was jolted in 2008 in “A Rule Just Waiting to Be Broken.” As Asimov wrote: “I know oysters and red wine sounds bizarre, but 20 years ago white wine with cheese sounded strange. Now, white wine is accepted as a delicious companion for many cheeses.”
Not every wine that Asimov and his predecessors have addressed has been readily findable. Still, learning about them is valuable. Take, as he put it, “idiosyncratic” Jacques Selosse Champagnes, made by Anselme Selosse, Jacques’s son.
“Anselme Selosse, 54, is not the usual emissary from Champagne, a smooth guy in a suit, talking about product positioning, luxury brands and lifestyles,” Asimov said in “Taking Champagne Back to Its Roots” (2008). “To hear them tell it, Champagne pops into this world like a genie from a lamp, ready to make magic.
“But to Mr. Selosse, the magic occurs long before there is a wine. It takes place deep underneath Champagne’s chalky soil, where the roots of the vines take hold of what Mr. Selosse calls the essence of the earth.”
In 2005 Asimov focused on “New Wine in Really Old Bottles.” His absorbing subject was Josko Gravner, an Italian producer. “Rejecting the modern trappings of the cellar, Mr. Gravner has reached back 5,000 years,” he wrote. “He now ferments his wines in huge terra-cotta amphorae that he lines with beeswax and buries in the earth up to their great, gaping lips. Ancient Greeks and Romans would be right at home with him. . . .”
In her column called Pairings, Florence Fabricant, a thorough, straightforward, bedrock, no-frills writer, is a fount of sophisticated food and wine combos. Hers are the plates that have launched a thousand sips.
Fabricant brought “A Dessert Wine That’s a Public Secret”—Monbazillac—to readers’ attention (2003). Less expensive than Sauternes, which also comes from southwestern France, “Monbazillac delivers exotic touches of honeyed mango, quince, passion fruit and citrus, often with a distinctive nuttiness in the aftertaste,” she wrote.
In 2007 she presented “A Rustic European Treat of Prunes Poached in Wine,” a dessert “rarely offered in the United States. Except at my house.” The introduction to her recipe says she prefers “everyday merlot or Chianti” but that Navarre reds recently tasted “suggested they could easily suit this purpose, too,” and in the recipe she recommended Navarre.
The cosmopolitan, larger-than-life R. W. Apple Jr.,—Johnny to one and all—ate, drank and wrote on a prodigious scale that even The New Yorker magazine’s legendary A. J. Liebling, a gourmand for all seasons, might have envied. This hunger gave birth to a thirst for illuminating such digestifs as Cognac, Armagnac, grappa and marc.
While at The Times Terry Robards, ruddy and wearing a mustache, resembled an Edwardian Englishman who relished his London club and its cellar groaning with rare claret. He had a gift for being invited to memorable dinners and capturing them and their principals, as, in 1983, “The Greatest Vintages of Alfred Knopf, 90.”
Robards wrote of his host: “Rarely acknowledged in all the accolades he has won over the years is that he was the dominant influence in gastronomic publishing in this country.
“He had the temerity to publish P. Morton Shand’s classic Book of French Wines in 1928, during Prohibition, and to come out with Julian Street’s Wines in 1933, the year Prohibition ended, when the public’s interest in wines was sharply curtailed by the Depression. . . .
“The roster of food and wine authors published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. includes James Beard, Julia Child, M.F.K. Fisher, Marcella Hazan, Maida Heatter, Alexis Lichine and Michael Broadbent.”
In “Memories Are Made of This” (1982), Robards describes a seven-hour dinner in a mansion on the North Shore of Long Island—“a gastronomic event of gargantuan proportions that might have stirred envy if not outrage even in Rabelais himself.
“Nearly all of the wines for this occasion have been hand-carried, bottle by bottle over a period of months, from the private cellars of the Cartier jewelry concern beneath the cobblestones of the Place Vendôme in Paris,” he recounted. “Louis Cartier, the firm’s founder, established one of the finest wine collections in France.”
One of my contributions to this collection was a 1987 “interview” titled “Jefferson on Wine: ‘The Only Antidote to the Bane of Whisky.’” Tom invited me, so to speak, to lunch at his pied-à-terre at Monticello, to explore our shared interest in Bordeaux.
I left thinking that Jefferson’s place in history was unquestionably nailed down, first and foremost, by having been a wine adviser to our first five presidents, himself included.
Howard G. Goldberg