HOMEWARD

IF THE nerve-jangling freeway that circles Paris, the périphérique, is not too jammed (bouché, or corked, as they say in Provence), Charles de Gaulle Airport can be less than a two-hour drive from Chablis. The last time I left France, I stayed the night in a Chablis hotel and shared a brunch of Chablis and oysters with the Raveneau family the next morning. Chablis with oysters is a stimulating combination which goes back at least to the tenth century, if the dating of this poetic fragment is correct:

Chablis is so good with oysters

that I’m tempted to leave these cloisters

and find true love whe’ere I’m apt to.

Oysters washed down with a crisp, minerally Chablis invigorate the spirit. I felt good. The empty feeling that comes after weeks on the road was gone. I was excited and happy to be heading home. The autoroute was empty, the air was crisp and clear through my open window, traffic on the périphérique moved along at a wondrously sane pace, and my flight departed on time. Twelve hours later I was home in California, where my wife had some smoked salmon and a chilled half-bottle of Bandol rosé prepared for me, along with other long-awaited comforts of home. By far, it was the easiest departure and arrival I have experienced.

Life on the road. No one envies a traveling salesman. What am I if not a traveling buyer? Still, mine is a beckoning road whereupon my morning might be spent in a château with Count so-and-so and the afternoon in an earthen, wine-stained cellar under a farmhouse. Yet life on the road, even on the wine route, provides plenty of occasions to sing a traveling man’s blues. There was the time I walked through the gates of a winery property near Beaune. I was on time for the rendezvous and the sign on the gate said ENTRÉE, so I entered. Instantly I found myself surrounded by five snarling dogs. Except for a near crash landing, I have never been more terrified. The smallest of the five, a German shepherd, snapped a morsel out of my rear end. I made no purchases; the wines were dogs, too.

Second verse of my blues: hotel and restaurant disasters have been numerous. For example, the empty hotels during the winter season whose proprietors are too stingy to turn on the heat or hot water for one single guest, or that hotel on the beach near the Spanish border when the night was too hot to leave the windows closed, but once they were opened, a massive gathering of bloodthirsty mosquitoes turned the ceiling black. Bzzzz. The hotelkeeper offered me a bug bomb the size of a fire extinguisher, and I sat there trying to choose between slow death by insecticide poisoning or sacrificing myself drop by drop as nourishment for a mosquito orgy. I slept, sort of, in my car.

Once, I had booked an early-morning flight home and I felt a desperate need for a relaxing night’s sleep before departure, so I decided to skip downtown Paris. I checked the Michelin guide and found a hotel/restaurant recommended in a speck-sized village about twenty minutes from the airport. It was freezing out, so I sat in bed with a mystery novel while I waited for the dinner hour. Then the lights blinked off, which is not that unusual in France, but as I waited for them to blink back on, I began to notice the chill invading my room. I felt my way through darkened corridors to the lobby, where I was informed that the gas and electric workers were on strike, didn’t I read the local papers, and no one knew when they would throw the switch back on. I lay under the covers in the dark and noticed what seemed like a rumble of thunder. My hotel was situated in the center of town, where the main highway narrowed, dipped, and took a sharp turn a few steps outside the door. A nonstop convoy of truckers had to brake, navigate the curve, then step heavily on the gas to accelerate out of the dip. In addition to the constant throb and rumble, the trucks also deposited a fog of diesel fumes, which collected in the basin where my hotel sat. The odor was nearly unbearable. The hotel’s restaurant must have had a generator, because when I entered, it was brightly lit. The table settings were garishly ritzy with candelabra, several wineglasses, and lots of glittering silverware around the plates, all the meaningless accouterments that are necessary to obtain a listing in the Guide Michelin. I was the only diner. The waiter recommended the andouillette with mustard sauce. An andouillette is a tripe sausage. It can be delicious and sounded French enough to be an appropriate farewell dinner. Three or four bites were all I could force down, but they were enough to provoke relentless waves of nausea thirty minutes after I left the table. I was awake all night, shivering in the dark, gagging on diesel exhaust, and retasting that excuse for an andouillette. The next morning, weak and trembling, I barely made my flight.

Hotel disasters, food poisonings, auto breakdowns, airline horrors, so go the lyrics to a traveling man’s blues.

After my last tour, taking off directly from Raveneau’s table, I believe I finally found the best departure formula. Then, settling into my seat on the 747, I spent a couple of hours catching up on the American wine press. My office had forwarded a batch of recent publications to me.

I learned that a French insurance group had purchased Château Pichon Baron, a second growth in Pauillac, for a reported $45 million. What is an insurance group doing in the wine business? And if they have $45 million extra hanging around, why did they not refund it or lower their rates?

I learned that 50 percent of the Médoc is now harvested by machines. Man becomes more and more alienated from the means of wine production.

I read about a California politician’s proposal that a special tax on wine provide funding for extra crime fighters. Why wine lovers were singled out to shoulder the burden was left unexplained, but is it not that in America wine is perceived as sinful? Too euphoric, perhaps. We sinners who enjoy wine are expected to foot the bill for the sinners who rape, loot, and murder.

Another article reported a wine auction in the Napa Valley where a six-pack wine cooler brought $2,800.

Then I read about a “Chardonnay shoot-out”! Château Wyatt Earp vs. Domaine Bat Masterson?

American wine critics were sounding the intellectual shallows, passionately debating numerical ratings for wine. The level of their debate: Which is better, a 20- or 100-point scoring system? Not one critic suggested the possibility that scoring wine by numbers is inappropriate, that numerical ratings lead consumers away from a realistic, meaningful appreciation of fine wine.

The wine that I liked enough to consume more often than any other during 1987, Domaine Tempier’s 1983 Bandol rouge, scored a measly 78 points in the Wine Spectator. So much for my palate! But consider the pleasure I would have missed had I followed the numbers instead of my own taste.

One wine writer claimed to have improved Paul Draper’s 1980 Ridge Geyserville Zinfandel by freezing it, pouring off some of the alcohol (which separates out and remains liquid), then thawing out the wine in a microwave, thereby, according to the journalist, improving the wine’s balance.

Another writer attacked the notion that wine improves with age. It is a myth, the propaganda of wine producers, the lore of “wine snobs”! That may be the least profound statement I have ever read about wine.

Then I read about California legislation that would require a pictograph of a pregnant woman and a giant wineglass with a slash through it on each wine label. Remember, I was on my way home from a country that regards wine as beneficial to health, where our French doctor advised my pregnant wife, “Of course you do not want to drink five liters a day, but a glass of wine with lunch and dinner will be good for you.” In fact, the wine press was full of news about possible cigarette-style health warnings and ingredient labeling on wine bottles. Never mind that throughout history man has recognized that wine is nourishing and healthy—not unhealthy, not even neutral, but healthy. Thomas Jefferson and Jesus Christ advocated wine for medicinal purposes. Top those sources! But once again, at the drop of a hat, we reject the experience and wisdom of our ancestors. Now we place our faith in a new deity, statistics, and we look to them for eternal life. However, the do-gooders select their statistics carefully. In fact, there are statistics which indicate that the traditional Mediterranean diet built around grains, olives, and wine lowers the incidence of heart disease, stroke, stress, and certain cancers, but strangely enough, those statistics are not legally permitted on wine labels. Statistics also support Thomas Jefferson’s assertion that wine-drinking populations suffer less alcoholism than others.

I am afraid the day is near when Mouton-Rothschild’s beautiful artists’ label and all the rest will be marred by misguided, nonsensical health warnings. I wish wine could be a constitutionally protected form of expression, to keep it out of the hands of pressure groups, politicians, hysterical moralists, and joy-enders. We risk screwing up what is actually a very complex, delicate thing. The more rules and regulations there are, the less chance there will be to import those two or three barrels of handcrafted natural wine. The advantage will belong to the factory operations, with their thousands of cases of processed wine and their well-equipped office staffs which will permit them to cope with costly, time-consuming, bureaucratic requirements. In the wine world, bureaucracy begets standardized wine.

Colette wrote that “wine makes the true savor of the earth intelligible to man.” And Nikos Kazantzakis wrote: “When you drank it, you felt as if you were in communion with the blood of the earth itself.” Compare their almost mystical respect for wine to the claptrap I had been reading.

I was returning home to another country. The fragrant, humid cellars seemed so distant once I was buckled into my seat on the 747. I recalled the men and the women I had met. Their rare potions. Soon the ships would sail and deliver the goods I had purchased. I had to wonder if my treasures would be frozen and microwaved, entered in shoot-outs, assigned simplistic numerical scores, drunk up too early because maturity is merely a wine snob’s myth. Would they be subjected to a sin tax? Would they be treated as a toxic substance?

Real wine is more than an alcoholic beverage. When you taste one from a noble terroir that is well made, that is intact and alive, you think here is a gift of nature, the fruit of the vine eked out of our earth, ripened by our sun, fashioned by man.

Once I took an afternoon off from wine tasting in Tuscany to visit a little museum in Florence where two recently discovered Greek statues were on display. The larger-than-life statues had a manlike shape and a heart-stopping, godlike presence. How had man created something so powerfully exquisite? Wine can produce the same reaction, but unlike music, literature, or visual arts, a great wine does not require a creative genius. A farmer working his piece of earth can produce something inspiring and profound.

There is so much contained in a glass of good wine. It is a gift of nature that tastes of man’s foibles, his sense of the beautiful, his idealism and virtuosity.