PREFACE TO THE 1988 EDITION
KERMIT LYNCH, when we first met some twelve years ago, described himself to me as a recently defected hippie. I had been in France since 1951, had never met a hippie, and was not very clear about the definition of the species; I soon came to realize that Kermit was merely an old-fashioned bohemian who happened to possess a remarkable nose and palate.
Today, Kermit rattles off French with impressive facility, while taking voluminous notes on each barrel or vat of wine as he swirls, sniffs, sucks, chews, and spits, but at that time his French was on the primitive side and, to ease the problems of communication, he had asked me to accompany him on a week’s ferreting out of vineyards in the Côtes du Rhône and Burgundy.
Before we headed for Châteauneuf-du-Pape, the southernmost stop on the Côtes du Rhône itinerary, a visit to the Peyrauds at Domaine Tempier (Bandol) was inevitable. The instant spark of sympathy kindled between Kermit and the ebullient family of Peyrauds could be likened to spontaneous combustion. Today, Kermit spends half the year in his recently acquired house in the back hills of Le Beausset, where part of the Bandol appellation is also cradled. He has been absorbed into the Peyraud family, and to Lucien Peyraud he is mon fils.
Among the other vignerons encountered on that trip, who are now cornerstones of Kermit’s stable, were Gérard Chave in Hermitage, Auguste Clape in Cornas, Jean-Marie Ponsot in Morey-Saint-Denis … Still others, whose wines were beautiful then, have since faltered in their loyalty to commonsense methods of vinification; these have fallen by the wayside to be replaced by the constantly unfolding new discoveries, often vignerons whose wines were sold to négociants in the past, who have discovered that it is both more interesting and more profitable to raise and bottle their own wines.
This was not Kermit’s first wine-tasting trip to France, but I think that it may have been the real beginning of his Adventures on the Wine Route. If it was my pleasure to be able to open a few doors on that trip, it has been Kermit’s to open a great many more for me in the years that followed. I have, perhaps, been especially grateful for the discovery of certain wines from the less hallowed viticultural regions—inexpensive, clean, refreshing, and undemanding, ideal daily aperitif and summer luncheon wines; typical are Jean Berail’s white, Roque Sestière, and Yves Laboucarie’s vin gris, Domaine de Fonsainte, both from the southwest Corbières appellation.
Adventures on the Wine Route is an intensely personal book, permeated with an aura of intimacy between the author and the living, changing wines of which he writes, enhanced by the kind of knowledge born of experience. It is also generously truffled with opinions, tastes, beliefs, and attitudes, expressed with an impertinence which will delight most readers but which may trouble or outrage some members of the society that, in one of his brochures, Kermit has baptized the FWDP (Fine Wine-Drinking Public). His disdain for the contagious fad of blind and comparative tastings of unrelated wines will surely rub some furs the wrong way, as will his indifference to the New-Oak-Cabernet-Sauvignon global boom. Tant mieux …
Like father, like son. Kermit’s father was a preacher and so is Kermit, but the sermons that Kermit delivers to his flock deal with things more worldly than brimstone fire; often invoked are the emasculating crime of filtering wines and the dangerous pitfalls open to the vintage-chart mentality.
Coupled with this amassment of information, messages, insights, and convictions is a gallery of portraits, some only sketches, others fully brushed in, of the people who make the wines, their dedication, their passions, their beliefs, their strengths … and their weaknesses.
No book on wine and the people who make it has ever been written that remotely resembles Adventures on the Wine Route.
Solliès-Toucas, March 30, 1988
RICHARD OLNEY