On Wine (1)

That immodestly used saying "The more I know, the more I realize how much I do not know" I could use with some variation about wine: The more I drink, the less I am certain about what I am drinking. After some fifty years of often very good - even outstanding - bottles, I have only become certain that there's a lot of wine I don't care for and that of all the good wines produced outside my favorite regions in France (Burgundy and the Southern Cote du Rhone), Italy (Tuscany and Piedmont) or Spain (Rioja and Ribiero del Douro), none has seemed worthy of the few dollars left in my retirement budget. Obviously I am not an adventurous or even sophisticated drinker. Of course, most "bistro" type eateries around here, even when they have pretty good food, rarely have "my" wines, most don't feature any French or Italian ones at all. Thus there's California and Oregon. i.e. Merlot, Cabernet, Zinfandel and what have you, with very little Pinot Noir, which in my experience is most satisfactory to my taste espec. those from the Willamette Valley, of which I had two different ones by the glass in the last week, the most reliable.

These thoughts were occasioned by two books and a New Yorker article (two of which provided by some friends and one I bought because the other material had raised my curiosity once more). The article, a "Reporter at Large" one, called "The Jefferson Bottles. How could one collector find so much rare wine?" by Patrick Radden Keefe (Sept 3, 07), is concise and to the point. It is also a good read as the New Yorker, after the Tina Brown tenure, has regained some of its stature as a literate magazine. (In the Ross and Shawn days I subscribed to it and when a student asked what it meant to be sophisticated, I used to say "When you can read the New Yorker without a dictionary" - which I rarely could. Anyway it has more to do with general education then sophistication which a wise, older colleague defined as "the tolerance of ambiguity."). The book The Billionaire's Vinegar by Benjamin Wallace (N.Y., 2008) deals with the same subject. As the title suggests it is a bit sensational (the two main characters aren't billionaires) and much of the space is filled up with mildly gossipy revelations about the life of several of the actors, not all of which are relevant to the story. But much of my interest in reading the book was "spoiled" by first having read (twice actually) the Keefe article. In fact the question arose whether Wallace, who refers to Keefe only towards the end of his story, when the mystery of the bottles begins to unravel, was inspired by the article and decided to jazz up the story by "backgrounding" the many characters he introduces. Yet, he adds some new information about the whereabouts of the "Jefferson bottles" between approx. 1800 and their recent discovery in an odd locale in Paris where they could have been stored only since about the mid-19th century (where were they in the intervening years since 1800?). This information was released rather lately and the auctioneer who tasted the "Jefferson" wines assumed that there was no documented provenance other than the engraved Th.J on the bottles. I must say, as a birder, that I get a thrill when thinking I see a "lifer," but I like to have it confirmed and even on my own I tend to check and check to make sure. This, of course, remains a private (and amateurish) matter. Auctioning off a pretty impossible Jefferson wine after tasting it and pronouncing it as such, even when the experts at Monticello throw doubt about the bottles, appears suspect to me.

The main character in the mystery calls himself Hardy Rodenstock (not the name on his birth certificate) who came up with the bottles (as well as many other rare wines). One of the buyers of an alleged Jefferson bottle was Bill Koch - actually a billionaire, if only barely - who called the mystery of the provenance of the bottles "a fun detective story" and he hired a retired federal sleuth to get proof of Rodenstock's fraud so he could take him to court. Because of his extensive treatment, Wallace shows up Michael Broadbent the wine expert and auctioneer at Christie's as a rather disreputable character who is convicted of complaisance in Rosenstock's schemes by his own words in his autobiography, in his interviews and correspondence with Wallace. Other Christie people don't come of well either.

Although I have never had the budget to be a victim of such a colossal fraud and never drank a wine older than a 1908 Chateau Ausone (at a Broadbent auction! and two small bottoms in large glasses, one a "sacrifice" from the friend who took me to the auction), remarks by people quoted by both authors make me worry about some of the (for me) expensive stuff I have in my cellar. For example: Italian authorities confiscated 20.000 bottles of "Sassicaia" in 2000. While I don't drink Italian wines not made from local grapes, the fact that expensive modern wines are imitated is of greater concern to me than a non-Vuitton suitcase. My tasting ability is not bad, but if a Broadbent can be misled by the first tasting (he maintained that his evaluation was correct once it became known) how would I know what I'm drinking, especially as the fraudeur takes pains to adjust "his wines" to fool the cognoscenti. And like Broadbent with the Jefferson wine, I have no way of comparing what I have with the real McCoy. I buy wine from well known growers and shippers based on an approx. 30 year experience much of which in situ, such as Latour and the (lesser known) Bachelet estate in the Cote de Beaune or the Burgundy shipper Joseph Drouhin. In Bordeaux (after the scandals of the 1970s) the classified Chateaux are generally reliable. But too often wines drunk on the spot are not available in the USA. Thus I drink a lot of Duboeuf, knowing that his wines are adjusted to the American market, their taste differs from Drouhin beaujolais (probably also adjusted), but these are not "great" and expensive lay-away wines. Unfortunately American shops often switch growers for one reason or another. Thus I can no longer find Rhone wines from Brusset or some of Bachelet's burgundies that I really liked.

There have been some notable scandals perpetrated by established figures in the wine trade. One, in the 1970s, involved the owner of Pontet-Canet, a classified Bordeaux, who was also a shipper of wines that he improved (gave more body and color) with wines from Southern France and another by a reputable Burgundy shipper who used Italian wines for the same purpose and had them bottled and labelled in the Netherlands as Burgundy appellation wines. Both were ruined by the enormous fines the courts imposed. I remember these two scandals for I liked the Bordeaux and the Burgundy shipper's wine I had drunk with meals in Michelin approved restaurants on my travels. And sometime after the labeling scandal played out in court I found that a case of first growth Cote de Beaune had two labels on each of the 12 bottles. Both labels were of 1st growth vineyards of the same grower and they were exactly identical but for the name of village and vineyard. I compared the wine I thought I had bought per the top label with the same vineyard and year from a different grower and did the same for the vineyard on the label underneath. For so far I could tell the top label referred indeed to the wine in the bottle. Remains the enigma of the double labels, probably a mal function at the printer's or, more likely during the labeling. The most recent scandal is the stretching of the small 2003 harvest of Brunello di Montalcino with French grapes by a few growers. Part of the problem here is that the inspection is done by people paid for by the Brunello consortium of growers. A fictionalized account of a different kind of fraud (but like the Jefforson bottle also based on the "hype factor") that began innocently enough, is provided by Peter Mayle in the charming A Good Year. (Forget about the movie!)

And of course there are estates whose wines no longer measure up to expectations as a result of a change in ownership, experimentation suggested by an expert oenologist, etc. But these are usually noted in such yearly buying guides as that by Hugh Johnson. This is where the book I bought comes in.

Neal Rosenthal, the author of Reflections of a Wine Merchant (New York, 2008) gives a very informative recount, in a language devoid of the jargon of coffeetable wine magazines, of some of his experiences over the last thirty years. His descriptions reminded me of Henry Yoxall's Burgundy and some other English literary musings about (French wines) that I read soon after I began earning a living in the 1960s. One reason why I like Rosenthal's book is that I can follow him on his descents into chilly and dank wine cellars with recollections of my own from the days I bummed around as a temporary worker in the late 40s or as a tourleader in the early 50s. Heady times! The one problem I have is accepting R's describing himself as a total novice when he "first stumbled into the wine business" and it "appeared in [his] life as an happenstance." He opened his shop having inherited the space from his retired pharmacist father. Until that time R. had been a lawyer. When he describes the qualifications of a "true wine merchant" he also includes a "set of gustatory standards." Much of the book is concerned with the application of these standards to the selection of wines he discovers on his travels. I guess standards can be raised through experience but the gustatory ability itself has for me always been a given. It can be lost (e.g. by inhaling Zycam, a cold medicine, for too long) or fauled up, for. ex. by smoking; the nose is as important as the palate. There are tastes I like and many more I do not. These preferences are to a large extent influenced by other sensory experiences as well as by social contexts. I don't like fish - mostly very bland - not because of its taste, but because when a child, our fishmonger's was dirty and smelled badly. There was also the smell of the public urinals along the canals of Amsterdam that had a similarly bad odor. I tried whiskey during my Anglophile period when I wore tweed jackets also. In fact the jackets survived while I gradually became a Francophile, having discovered Calvados in a pub in Amsterdam on the boulevard where I worked. I woke up to wine when at the age of 20 I worked as a merchant mariner on a freighter that took on wine in Pauillac for the Ivory Coast. While it was being unloaded several cases fell out of the cargo net unto the ship's deck and some of the unbroken bottles were appropriated by the deckhands. A few of these had exciting labels. After all Rothschild was the term to describe somebody very rich and Lafite was among the names of pirates whose adventures I loved. Thus my introduction to palatable wine after the plonk we teenagers had drunk on the sly. And in my Anglophile period Bordeaux (claret) remained my preference for some time. And my nose may have been trained for wine as my mother's father was a weekend flower gardener who had an adept follower in his daughter. While still a toddler, she would make me smell apple blossoms and other delights she grew.

I assume Rosenthal must have developed an appreciation of wine before picking the wine trade as his new profession. The sudden availability of his father's store space and disenchantment with the law can't have been the only reasons. It appears that the challenge of "the difficult" was an decisive factor that becomes evident, for ex. in his preference for Burgundy with its "complexities, the ethereal interplay between soil, grape and climate [that] requires immense dedication." True enough and, as his adventures reveal, something that applies as well to the wines of Piedmont, Tuscany or the Rhone.

It seems to me that wines made from a single grape, Pinot Noir in Burgundy (admittedly Rosenthal's - and mine - favorite region), Nebbiano in Barolo etc., provide greater challenges than wines made from several grapes as in the Southern Rhone or Tuscany (where blending is either greatly reduced in favor of the Sangiovese grape or - unfortunately - done with Bordeaux types like Cabernet or -worse yet - merlot. This may appeal to marketing experts, but not to me). When one blends, one can compensate to some extent for the vagaries of the weather that even in Tuscany isn't always reliable.

It also seems to me that Rosenthal's desire to import wines from growers that were unavailable in the USA was another major challenge and his story of finding them and convincing the growers to sell as well as his ability to establish very long professional and even friendly relationships with them makes his book a good read. Though it must be said, I think, that he falls into the merchandising trap of praising relatively unknown vineyards as a "discovery" and when they apear in one the NYT's comparative tastings they are more expensive than similarly rated wines (and once $10. more than the same wine at another store). And I regret that his style does not really convey the warmth of these friendships or even his emotions when coming upon an exraordinary wine; for that it is too dry.

He deals, of course, also with such setbacks as heirs who change the style of the wine, of frauds and other disappointments but, what concerns his private enjoyment of the wines he sells, he is armed against these setbacks having laid away a few cases of his best finds in his own cellar. This brought to mind Omar Khayam who, in the literal translation, wrote:

to the goodness of quality wine nothing comes near.
I am amazed at the vendors of a liquid so dear
where they'll buy a better thing is not clear.

or in the better known rendering:

I wonder what the vintners buy
one half so precious as the goods they sell

which is more in line with Rosenthal's reflections for the best wines he settles on are way beyond my budget. But as he relates there are a lot of very good wines produced by great growers from lesser plots in the "shadow" of their "grand cru" holdings. And for burgundies I have been going slowly South (because prices passed $50/bottle and more, quickly since my retirement), down the Cote d'Or, from Chambertin to Beaune to Santenay, to Monthelie and Macon. So far, the santenays at less than $ 30 are the best and most like the beaunes of $ 40+.

This brings me back to the question of taste. Apart from an occasional comparison at dinners when I still could manage second helpings and survive more than two glasses of wine at a meal (ah! the advantages of youth) I have to rely on memory to determine whether a Nuits St. Georges commune wine is significantly different from the same grower's "first growth." Unlike Rosenthal's whose memory is refreshed by frequent tastings and drinking with foods, mine is only incidentally stimulated by great wines and those are usually of different types, for example a Volnay champans (of which I most likely bought 6 bottles) may be drunk at its appropriate time at a great meal, while at the next we'll have a Barolo and then a Gigondas and so forth. All I can do is record my experience and compare it with the notes in my diary of the previous occasion. It's not exactly a punishment, but the experiences are never quite the same for they are to a large extent determined "by the company one keeps." And as I grow older I find that my description of the food and the names of the guests are increasingly omitted. Although I know from experience that vinification in my preferred areas has much improved, I cannot shed the idea of "great years" and am still pleasantly surprised when a bottle from a lesser vintage strikes me a eminently drinkable (leaving me with the regret of having been too cautious with my money when they came on the market). This is where the reputation of owner/grower/vinifier/shipper becomes a factor.