INTRODUCTION

WE AMERICANS with our New World innocence and democratic sensibilities tend to think that all wines are created equal and that differences in quality are simply a matter of individual taste.

The French, with their aristocratic heritage, their experience and tradition, approach wine from another point of view. Just as France had its kings, noblemen, and commoners, French wine has its grands crus, premiers crus, and there is even an official niche for the commoners, the vins de table.

The wines produced by each nation are different, and the wine of each is well served by the two national viewpoints. One understands the style of California wines better when one understands the pioneer spirit, and one cannot appreciate French wine with any depth of understanding without knowing how the French themselves look at their wines, by going to the source, descending into their cold, humid cellars, tasting with them, and listening to the language they employ to describe their wines. It is not the vocabulary Californians employ, and often a precise translation of wine terms from one language to the other is impossible. I spend a third of the year tasting with the French winegrowers, and my book is about my experiences on the wine routes and in the wine cellars of France.

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Some people think wine is a glamorous business. Witness the influx of big money into California’s Napa Valley. It is not merely a decent glass of wine that motivates investors, nor do they want to see their manicured fingernails stained purple. It is the dream of a certain lifestyle that lures them. I have even noticed people respond with an enthusiastic glimmer of envy when they learn of my profession, wine buyer and importer. Once I enjoyed a confrontation with a platinum-blond wine groupie who told me how exciting my buying trips must be, traveling through France, the fancy restaurants, the posh hotels, the little old winemakers. The fine black fabric of her blouse might have been diaphanous, but a look long enough to say for sure would have been prying. “If you need someone to carry your suitcases, or whatever, let me know,” she said. “I would love to go with you next time.” A day or two of it might be glamorous, but I wonder what she would have thought after a few days on the road.

When I opened a wineshop in 1972, I envisioned some tastes of glamour myself. I did not start by importing my own selections. I sold domestic and imported wines purchased from distributors, but I had dreams of going to the source. The first time I did buy wine directly from a winery, I went to an Italian grower near Martinez, California. After I had made a couple of visits to taste and buy his Zinfandel, he telephoned and invited me to lunch. Now I’m getting to the heart of things, I thought, real winery cooking and some old treasures from his private cellar. And he did have a way with a tuna sandwich. He poured himself half a glass of red from an unlabeled bottle. I supposed he wanted me to guess the vintage. He passed the bottle to me, then grabbed a pitcher and filled his wineglass the rest of the way to the top with a murky-looking liquid. He offered the pitcher to me.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Iced tea,” he said.

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The most important event in my career after opening a wineshop occurred in 1973 when an importer invited me to accompany him on his annual buying trip to Burgundy.

This importer purchased his Burgundies from various négociants. In Burgundy, a négociant buys wine in bulk from the individual growers and bottles it himself. I was barely aware an alternative existed, and in fact there were not many growers in those days who did estate-bottle their wine.

We tasted all morning long, broke for lunch, then continued tasting and placing orders in the afternoon. The négociants wined and dined us until my digestive system clunked to a halt.

One evening we were invited out to dinner by a négociant who had that very year taken over the reins of the old family firm. We were to arrive at his estate outside Beaune to share an aperitif with him and his bride before going to Le Vieux Moulin, which was in those days the Côte d’Or’s most starred restaurant.

The négociant, whom I shall call Gaston, was a short, uncertain, self-conscious fellow. He wore his mustache; it looked like a prop or a masquerade, an attempt at maturity. Alone, one had the impression, he probably peeled it off to be more comfortable with himself.

When the importer and I rang at the courtyard gate, there was no response. Is this the right night, we wondered. We rang again. The bells were loud enough for all the village to hear. When we were about to give up, the gate swung open and Gaston thrust out his hand for shaking. He seemed out of breath, agitated, and his pupils were dilated. I smelled an aniselike aroma coming from him amid a cataclysmic dose of aftershave lotion. I wondered how anyone who smelled so bad could make a good-smelling wine. He led us up worn stone steps into the salon, where we met his new wife, a charming young woman showing intelligence and apprehension in her eyes. At first I thought the glimmer of fear was a sign of her discomfort in her new role as wife of a wine négociant with its attendant social responsibilities, including receiving strangers into her home. As we sat and drank a Kir as aperitif (Gaston abstained), I began to notice that her husband was the object of her uneasiness. With each ponderous tick of the clock against the wall across from us, Gaston’s over-excitation seemed to be changing to inebriation, yet he still was not drinking with us. His speech grew slurred and he began to tilt in his seat. It was the strangest thing, and it was happening right before our eyes.

Suddenly he sprang up and rushed over to me. “You come with me,” he said, grabbing my arm and pulling me to my feet. I thought perhaps he was taking me down into the cellar to pick out some old Burgundies for dinner.

In the passageway to the courtyard he waved toward a bridle and saddle hanging up on the wall. “Bring those along,” he commanded, as if I were his valet. When I ignored him, he yanked them down himself in a fury. He threw the bridle to me, hoisted the saddle onto his shoulder, and staggered off. “Follow me,” he said, and I obeyed, not wanting to annoy a supplier, although in truth I would have preferred to go straight on out the gate.

We arrived at his stable. A beautiful chestnut-colored mare stood eyeing us warily as Gaston climbed through the wooden fence and I passed the saddle over to him. By then he could barely stand. He stumbled up to the horse and threw the saddle up and over her back. He stood mystified, as if the saddle had disappeared into the twilight zone. It had merely fallen to the ground on the other side of the mare. Gaston figured it out and tried again. And again. And again. He wore an expression of bewilderment worthy of Buster Keaton. With each toss of the saddle, the horse grew more appalled and began to shy away. Gaston kicked at the saddle in frustration and resorted to fitting the bridle over the horse’s muzzle, hoping to hold her still with the reins. She was having no more of it and began loping around the stable, with Gaston following along behind, trying to dig in his heels to check her. He fell but still did not let go of the reins. He slid, dragging along the ground through the mud and horseshit.

I snuck back to the salon. “Let’s get out of here,” I whispered to my importer. “That guy is bonkers.”

My importer politely asked Gaston’s wife if her husband had overdone the tippling before our arrival.

No, she had not seen him take a drink all day. I thought of the bizarre smell of his breath. Had he chugalugged a fifth of some anise-flavored liquor while we were ringing at the gate?

Here he came then, lurching into the room, splotched and smeared from head to toe. He bounced off the walls into another room and came right back out clutching a good-sized revolver. He weaved and harangued and gestured wildly, giving each of us a chance to stare down the barrel of his pistol.

In a relatively calm voice his wife suggested that we postpone our dinner date. I stared at her. How could she achieve normalcy when I expected to die any second?

Gaston did not like her suggestion, so he bullied us until we all filed out to the car at gunpoint.

Ah, France, the great restaurants, the little old winemakers …

Gaston babbled in the backseat, toppling over into his wife on the curves. I awaited a bullet through the seat cushion. The car smelled like horseshit, anise, and aftershave.

When we pulled up outside the restaurant, I hopped out quickly. My companions joined forces to try to convince Gaston that we postpone our dinner. He struggled to get out of the car, but was really too far gone to stand up under his own power.

“We can’t postpone,” he whined. “My father wouldn’t like it.”

Finally my importer, who probably weighed 200 pounds to Gaston’s 140, blocked the doorway and said, “You sit back there and shut up, or I’ll shut you up!” I was impressed, and so, apparently, was Gaston, who sat back, keeled over in slow motion, and seemed to pass out. Not a peep from the tiger, even as we carried him up to his bathroom, dropped him on the floor, and left his poor wife to clean up the mess.

Later I learned from village gossip that Gaston had suffered all his life from a tyrannical father who belittled him at every turn. Gaston loved a local girl who tended his horses and stable, but his father threatened to disinherit him if he married her. The father then arranged a proper marriage to the woman I met, permitting Gaston to become lord of the manor. He was paying a certain price, however.

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Tastings in the négociants’ cellars were marathon events, so I had to learn to spit out each taste. It is not difficult, nor does it interfere with one’s appreciation of a wine. You simply savor the wine, sucking it over your tongue, then aim it into the bucket, sink, or onto the floor if it is gravel. To be tipsy by ten o’clock in the morning is unprofessional, and each firm offered a huge range of appellations for tasting, from Burgundy to the Chalonnais, Beaujolais, and the Rhône. Some of them were available in several different vintages. At one cellar I purchased Burgundies from 1971, 1969, 1966, 1961, 1959, 1953, 1947, and 1945.

Strange as it seems, each négociant’s wines showed a house style that influenced their taste more than each particular appellation or vintage character. For example, a 1970 Volnay from Gaston resembled his 1949 Nuits-Saint-Georges more than it resembled other Volnays or other 1970s. There was a disconcerting, nearly impenetrable sameness to the wines throughout these négociant tastings. I chalked up my difficulty sorting out differences to my own inexperience. I figured my uneducated palate could not handle the subtle nuances. Now I am not so sure that my palate was the culprit, thanks to incidents such as a conversation with a grower in Chambolle-Musigny. He told me he had sold off his 1977s to a négociant because he was not happy with them. The négociant’s tanker truck arrived and into it went the Bonnes Mares (a grand cru), the Chambolle “Les Amoureuses” (a premier cru), and his Chambolle villages. All into the same tank. Yet the négociant also picked up the documents that would allow him to market bottles under the separate labels Bonnes Mares, Les Amoureuses, and Chambolle-Musigny. The repercussions of his little tale resound endlessly.

After a wine tour of France, Thomas Jefferson wrote advice to a friend about how one should go about buying French wine:

The vigneron never adulterates his wine, but on the contrary gives it the most perfect and pure care possible. But when once a wine has been into a merchant’s hands, it never comes out unmixed. This being the basis of their trade, no degree of honesty, of personal friendship or of kindred prevents it.

One “merchant,” or négociant, poured us a lovely 1954 Bonnes Mares. My importer told him that Americans considered 1954 an off vintage. Although the wine itself was fine enough, it would be difficult to sell.

“What would you like?” asked the négociant. “I can label it 1953 or 1955, whichever you prefer.”

If he would do that, I wondered, why would he have any compunction about sending me a different wine than what I had actually tasted and ordered? It made me nervous.

Gaston’s wines were remarkably unlike the others I was tasting. They were unusually weighty and tannic for Burgundy. It was two years afterward that I recognized Gaston’s house style in the Châteauneuf-du-Papes that I tasted during my first trip to the southern Rhône, the same weight and tannin, shockingly similar flavors.

However, on that initial visit to Burgundy I did not know better, and subsequently Gaston’s “Burgundies” enjoyed quite a success because in those days the California palate (mine included) demanded big mouth-filling wines at the expense of any other virtues, including authenticity. For the most part négociant-bottled Burgundies enjoyed a near monopoly, so one lacked a point of reference. And of course the California palate had been formed by the big, gutsy, sun-drenched local wines. Burgundy is not sun-drenched.

Previous to that first trip, my only tasting training, if one can call it training, consisted of frequent blind tastings, with the labels masked to keep the tasters blind to each wine’s identity. Supposedly blindness ensured objectivity. Winning wines were invariably the blockbusters, wines loaded with tannin and alcohol, the more the merrier. Such wines are overwhelmingly impressive, particularly the first sniff and sip, which is what counts in a blind tasting. However, tannin and alcohol overwhelm the taste buds. One’s capacity to taste is physically impaired. For real-life drinking, at table where wine belongs, it is difficult to sustain one’s interest in tannin and alcohol. “That’s a BIG wine” was a common appreciation at those blind tastings when it came time to state the reason for one’s preference. Therefore, on my first buying trip, I looked for BIG wines. A Corton might smell like Châteauneuf-du-Pape, but if it was a chewy wine I bought it, and if the wine did not bite back I dismissed it. Which is to say, regretfully, I preferred a big, gutsy wine with vulgar flavors to a light wine with exquisite flavors.

My next trip to Burgundy changed all that. I returned in order to taste the domaine-bottled wines offered by Frank Schoonmaker Selections. Visiting small cellars up and down the Côte d’Or, I began to notice that each village—Fixin, Gevrey, Morey, and Chambolle, for example—produced wine with a character different from its neighbors’. After the négociant wines, it was as if I had been swimming underwater with my eyes open and suddenly someone presented me with a pair of goggles.

On the final day of the tour, one of the winemakers mentioned that in his opinion the most talented winemaker in Burgundy was Hubert de Montille in Volnay. I canceled my flight home and drove to Volnay.

De Montille stands out in a crowd because of his shaved head. His cranium is not smooth like a billiard ball; it looks as if a sculptor had left his marks on it. The bumps and indentations, contours and ripples, give an impression of intelligence, as if they were the outward manifestation of a labyrinthine mental process. At the same time, there is a country elegance to the man, heightened by his attire. His olive-green corduroy trousers show wear, but one could spend hours searching in the best men’s shops of Paris trying to find such high-grade fabric.

He conducted a tasting. Conducted is the word, because the series of wines unfolded like a set of musical variations. De Montille is a lawyer as well. Perhaps he structured the tasting as a lawyer builds a case. Whichever, it was a performance.

We began with his new wines, vintage 1974, from barrel. They were light and fragrant, the Pinot Noir fruit pure and seductive. Where before a wine’s body had been its most important quality, with de Montille’s Volnays and Pommards the body was absolutely without significance. Some were light, some full-bodied, some ethereal and delicate, others powerful and mouth-filling. The size was a trait which in no way influenced one’s positive or negative appreciation of the wine. But the aromas coming off those wines, the flavors and balance …

We considered the 1973s, ’72s, ’71s, ’69s, ’66s, ’64s, and terminated the tasting with a half bottle of his 1959 Volnay “Taillepieds,” which de Montille said was beginning to go over the hill. I wanted to go with it.

I was struggling to learn French, so we had to drive into Beaune to the Office de Tourisme to find a translator to help us negotiate the purchase.

I left France having made my first wine discovery, my first direct purchase from a French wine domaine, and totally dissatisfied with the other wines I was selling. On the plane, my thoughts were soaring. I wanted more de Montilles. I wanted a de Montille in Vosne, Nuits, Aloxe, Savigny, in each village of the Côte d’Or. I wanted the 747 to turn back so I could begin ferreting out growers. That one tasting was a revelation, and what had been an interesting business became a passion.

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My enthusiasm must have been contagious, because most of de Montille’s wines had been reserved by my clients by the time the first shipment arrived. When the ship was unloaded, I could not wait to pull a cork. I poured his 1972 Volnay “Champans” into a glass and raised it to my nose.

Where was that fabulous Pinot Noir quality? How had a wine so expressive turned dumb? The wine was not bad, but it bore no resemblance to what I had tasted in Volnay, so I telephoned France and asked Monsieur de Montille why had he not sent me exactly what I had sampled. He claimed that he had. He said that his was a natural wine, that perhaps it was not happy after its month-long voyage from Volnay to Berkeley. Put the wines in a cool cellar for six months to see if they recover.

They recovered, but when it was time to import another batch of de Montille’s wine, I decided to use a refrigerated container, just to see if the temperature during shipping made a difference. The shipping company thought I was crazy. “Reefers,” as temperature-controlled containers are called, were used for foods like cheese and meat. Perishables. But I had reason to believe that de Montille’s wine was perishable, too. My first shipment had not actually perished, but it had arrived with some sort of maladie.

Wine travels in metal containers that hold around twelve hundred cases. I asked myself, how hot does it become inside as it crosses the Atlantic, creeps through the Panama Canal, and steams up the Mexican coast to California? Would I survive the same trip in a metal container? It must be like an oven.

When the second shipment arrived, I uncorked a bottle right out of the reefer and there in my glass was the true de Montille in all its splendor. It tasted exactly as it had in his cellar. After that experience, I used nothing but reefers for all my wine shipments, be they rare, expensive Burgundies or cheap little country wines.

The difference between a wine shipped at cellar temperature and one shipped in a standard container is not subtle. One is alive, the other cooked. I can taste the difference. And one never knows exactly how much the wine will suffer, because the climate en route cannot be predicted. It might arrive dumb like those first de Montilles, or it might arrive dead. By reefer the shipping costs are higher, but the wine is not damaged.

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Around the same period, I decided to stop taking part in blind tastings. They seemed such tomfoolery. Blind, yes, that does sum up the vision involved in this popular method of judging quality. The method is misguided, the results spurious and misleading. I realized that I could not trust my own judgment under such tasting conditions. A number of wines are set up side by side, tasted, compared, and ranked. A tally is taken. One wine wins. The others are losers. Democracy in action.

Such tasting conditions have nothing to do with the conditions under which the wines will presumably be drunk, which is at table, with food. When a woman chooses a hat, she does not put it on a goat’s head to judge it; she puts it on her own. There is a vast difference, an insurmountable difference, between the taste of a wine next to another wine, and the same wine’s taste with food.

Test it yourself. Take two impeccable wines, the Domaine Tempier Bandol rosé, which The Wine Advocate has called the finest rosé in France, and a bottle of Château Margaux, which many critics consider the finest Médoc of the day. Compare the two side by side. Award points. Do not be surprised if the Margaux wins handily. Now serve the same two wines with a boiled artichoke and rate them again. The Margaux is bitter and metallic-tasting, whereas the Bandol rosé stands up and dances like Baryshnikov.

Which is the better wine? Which wins?

Or compare a good Musigny with a good Monthelie. More likely than not, if the wines are well made, the Musigny will win, but your own pleasure at table would best be served by a light, spirited young Monthelie with, for example, fresh egg noodles and truffles, and an older, nobler Burgundy like Musigny afterward with the proper cheeses. There you see a sensible progression of two impeccable wines. Comparing them side by side, you will find one a winner, the other a loser. Served intelligently at table, neither wine loses, your pleasure crescendos, and you, finally, are the winner.

And those people who would always drink the Musigny over a Monthelie no matter what they have on their plate are not wine lovers. They are status seekers.

A wine can only be judged as it relates to the environment in which it is served. The Chardonnay that looks best in the context of a comparative tasting is not likely to win next to a platter of fresh oysters.

I began to notice that most of the blind-tasting champions in my own cellar remained untouched, because I had no desire to drink them. Just as they had overwhelmed the other wines to win a blind tasting, they overwhelm practically any cuisine. Drink with Stilton? lamb fat? enchiladas?

Those big rock-’em-sock-’em blockbusters perform one function admirably—they win tastings. (One score sheet at a comparative tasting allotted four points out of twenty for BODY!) Usually such wines give their all in the first whiff and sip, but great wine is about nuance, surprise, subtlety, expression, qualities that keep you coming back for yet another taste. Rejecting a wine because it is not big enough is like rejecting a book because it is not long enough, or a piece of music because it is not loud enough.

As those tasting champions aged in my cellar, I learned that body has little to do with aging potential. Many ripe, tannic monsters lost their fruit but remained tannic monsters. They assault the palate; it hurts to drink them.

Well-balanced wines of whatever size developed well. In 1985 I tasted a 1954 La Tâche. It was rosé-colored. In terms of body it was almost not there. However, its aromas and flavors were magical, and I will never forget that wine. Light as a snowflake, it was sublime at thirty-one years of age.

In 1983 I tasted a 1900 Château Rausan-Ségla. It was not old-tasting; it was vibrant, alive, à point. During its first forty or fifty years, how would it have fared in a comparative tasting? It must have been closed, chaste, tight, unyielding.

Of course a wine’s size or body is important, but only as it relates to its service, its placement in the progression of the other wines to be served, and its alliance with the specific cuisine to be served.

Comparative tasting results can make front-page headlines. They have had such an impact that vinification practices have changed in order to produce wines that conform to the winning formula. Bordeaux wines of today are designed to seduce the journalists and “blind” tasters upon release, in order to provoke early consumer demand. A wine such as that 1900 Rausan-Ségla will not be produced in the present commercial climate.

Bordeaux, Burgundy, Beaujolais, almost all of France’s wine regions are guilty of overchaptalization (adding too much sugar to the fermenting grape juice in order to boost the wine’s alcoholic content), because the public demands BIG wines, and high alcohol equals full body. Beaujolais used to be a light, sharpish little quaffer. One could down a bottle of it at lunch without needing a nap. Today, that full-bodied Beaujolais you taste may have begun its existence at 10 degrees alcohol (light wine) and end up in bottle at 14 degrees alcohol (BIG wine). But, after all, the consumer has to decide: Does the wine smell good and taste good, or does it simply pack a wallop? When the public taste changes away from size to aroma and flavor as the most important criteria, we will all be drinking finer wine.

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In 1976 my limited French was still causing difficulties. A friend told me about an American who had lived more than two decades in France who might be persuaded to interpret for me in the cellars, who knew wine, and might also have a few addresses for me. His name, Richard Olney, meant nothing to me, but when I mentioned him to Alice Waters, who has Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, her mouth dropped open. “Richard Olney! Don’t even think about it. Pack your bags and get on the plane.”

I remember waking up at Richard’s hillside home in Provence the morning after my arrival, the morning of our departure for the wine country, jet lag and the November chill numbing my bones. Before his kitchen fireplace we warmed ourselves with coffee and toast while a mistral tried to raise the roof. By the time we were prepared to leave for Châteauneuf-du-Pape it was 11:30 a.m., and Richard suggested we have a bite of cheese in order to avoid an immediate stop at a restaurant. He brought out a platter of cheeses on a bed of autumn-colored grape leaves and uncorked a 1969 red from nearby Bandol. It sounds simple, but I was astonished by that marriage of wine and cheese (mostly mild chèvres of various ages). And by that wildly delicious red wine!

What is a Bandol? I wondered.

And when it was sipped with those cheeses, it became one of the most fantastically delicious wines I had ever tasted.

Two lessons in one simple snack: you find gold kicking around in the unlikeliest places (Bandol, for example), and something can be created by matching food with wine that surpasses either of them standing alone.

After one week Richard had introduced me to Hermitage, Cornas, Côte Rôtie, Condrieu, Muscat de Beaumes-de-Venise, Côtes de Brouilly, and Mercurey, in addition to Bandol.

Moreover, he changed the way I tasted, judged, and selected wine. He did not instruct me. I observed him tasting, observed him matching wine to food and food to wine in restaurants, listened to his appreciations in the cellars as he searched for whatever distinguished each wine. He did not taste with a fixed idea of “the perfect wine” in mind. He valued finesse, balance, personality, and originality. If a wine had something to say, he listened. If a wine was a cliché, he had little interest. If it was different, apart from the rest, he appreciated it more.

From one producer in the Beaujolais, Richard bought a twenty-five-liter barrel of a light, tart nouveau to bottle at home. I told him that it would be impossible to market such a wine in California. “It is too light, too green.”

“But that’s exactly what I like about it,” he responded.

Together we bottled it, corked it, and sloshed down a happy quantity one afternoon. No, we did not discuss the pH, the oak, the body, the finish. But there was a gaiety to it; the tart fruit perfumed the palate and the brain; it seemed thirst-quenching, and yet our thirst was never so quenched that another purplish slurp seemed out of order.

Wine is, above all, pleasure. Those who would make it ponderous make it dull. People talk about the mystery of wine, yet most don’t want anything to do with mystery. They want it all there in one sniff, one taste. If you keep an open mind and take each wine on its own terms, there is a world of magic to discover.