Wine Reads

A Literary Anthology of Wine Writing

Jay McInerney

• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780802146717
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Culinary Arts

"For wine enthusiasts and newcomers alike, a sharp gathering of writing about wine's multidimensional, occasionally subversive pleasures." — Kirkus Reviews In this anthology, Jay McInerney—bestselling novelist, winner of a James Beard MFK Fisher Award for Distinguished Writing, and acclaimed wine columnist for Town & Country, Wall Street Journal, and House and Garden —selects over twenty pieces of memorable fiction and nonfiction about the making, selling, and of course, drinking of fine wine. Including short stories, novel excerpts, memoir, and narrative nonfiction, Wine Reads features big names in the trade and literary heavyweights alike. We follow Kermit Lynch to the Northern Rhône in a chapter from his classic Adventures on the Wine Route. In an excerpt from Between Meals, long-time New Yorker writer A.J. Liebling raises feeding and imbibing on a budget in Paris into something of an art form—and discovers a very good rosé along the way. Michael Dibdin's fictional Venetian detective Aurelio Zen gets a lesson in Barolo, Barbaresco, and Brunello vintages from an eccentric celebrity. In real life, and over half a century ago, Jewish-Czech writer and gourmet Joseph Wechsberg visits the medieval Château d'Yquem to sample different years of the "roi des vins" alongside a French connoisseur who had his first taste of wine at age four. Also showcasing an iconic scene from Rex Pickett's Sideways and work by Jancis Robinson, Benjamin Wallace, and McInerney himself, this is an essential volume for any disciple of Bacchus. "There are plenty of bright notes of flavor in this anthology to make it worthy reading, preferably with a glass in hand." — Publishers Weekly

NORTHERN RHôNE

Kermit Lynch

Nowadays, when heading north from Provence, I hear Paul Tardieu’s passionate exclamation, “Once you know Provence, you don’t ever want to leave it. No one ever goes back north, no one!” If over the years I have grown attached to Provence, in terms of wine itself my heart belongs to the great reds of the northern Rhône. The best combine a reminder of the sunny Mediterranean with the more self-conscious, intellectual appeal of the great Burgundies farther north, which is not a bad combination. And these prized wines of the northern Rhône are France’s rarest: Hermitage has 300 acres planted in vines compared to 7,900 at Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Gigondas has 2,600; Cornas, only 130. To bring it into perspective, Vieux Télégraphe, a single domaine at Châteauneuf-du-Pape, has the same surface in vines as all of Cornas. Vieux Télégraphe’s vineyard can be cultivated by tractor despite the stones, whereas at Cornas a tractor would topple sideways down the hillside. Yet Châteauneuf-du-Pape and Cornas sell at about the same price, which explains why so many of the northern Rhône’s best vineyards have been abandoned: they must be worked by hand, and the pay stinks.

By autoroute, Cornas is only one hour from Châteauneuf-du-Pape, but everything changes.

That vast luminous Provençal skyscape is gone, and with it the expansive feeling it engenders.

In the north, you see what spawned the name Côtes du Rhône in the first place, the “hillsides of the Rhône.” Most vineyards have a view down to the river.

The talismanic olive and cypress trees disappear, and though one sees aromatic herbs like rosemary and thyme in the northern Rhône, they do not grow wild but must be cultivated.

Butter and cream replace olive oil in the cuisine of the northern Rhône. Garlic and tomato play a lesser role. This is the midlands, so the fish markets exude a less appetizing odor.

The northerners are supposedly harder workers, and more cerebral. They accuse their neighbors to the south of being lazy and superficial. But the southerners pity the uptight northerners, who are thrashed this way and that by their cold winter wind.

Those stonework walls that define the northern vineyard landscape are not to be found in the southern Côtes du Rhône, although farther south at Bandol the hills are once again adorned with them, so let no one slander the Provençaux for being lazy. The hand-made walls transform the landscape to an extent the artist Christo would envy. Painstakingly constructed over the centuries, the dry-stone terraces bear witness to the value the ancients accorded these viticultural sites.

After the dizzying number of appellations in the south, the northern Rhône is easy. There are but a handful, including some of France’s noblest: Saint-Péray, Cornas, Saint-Joseph, Hermitage, Crozes-Hermitage, Condrieu, Château Grillet, and Côte Rôtie. And in contrast to the numerous grape varieties permitted down south, the northern Rhône reds are the result of a single variety, the Syrah. One would think that a blend of grapes could create a more complex range of aromas and flavors than a lone variety, yet the Syrah juice eked out from one of those steep hillsides can produce wines of dazzling complexity, wines whose exotic aromas seem to shimmer and change like the flashes of color gleaming from a jewel.

The first wine village encountered as one enters the northern Rhône produces white wine exclusively. Old wine books mention Saint-Péray’s “taste of violet,” boast that Pliny and Plutarch both regarded it highly enough to single it out in their writings, and that it was a favorite of composer Richard Wagner. What more could you ask?

No one can argue with past appreciations because we cannot taste the Saint-Péray they were obviously enjoying, but in our day and age something has gone haywire. Saint-Péray is full of subterranean cellars. Someone must be making good wine because the ingredients exist: hillside vineyards and the same grape varieties that make white Hermitage. But each time I go to Saint-Péray I am so indifferent to what I am offered that it takes two or three years to overcome the taste memory and convince myself to return and try again. It is useless to discuss whether Saint-Péray has a taste of this or a taste of that. The problem is finding any taste at all. The wines seem to have been concocted by freshmen students trying to pass an enology exam in sterilization. A+ ! No one is going to write a Parsifal with a glass of technological Saint-Péray for inspiration.

As you survey the terraced slopes from below, the boundary between Cornas and Saint-Péray is indiscernible. It is weird, because in terms of what you find in your glass the two are opposites. Unlike its neighbor, Cornas does not produce white wine, but calling Cornas red does not do it justice. Should your pen run dry, fill it with Cornas, but this is not the wine to uncork the evening of the day you paid to have your teeth cleaned. Actually, there are wines as dark and darker, but rarely as remarkably vivid.

Because the vinification has remained old-fashioned, there are several excellent producers at Cornas. For some reason, Invasion of the Enologists has yet to appear at the Cornas cinema. Underground in one of the several cellars it might as well be 1885 or 1785. And with a dense, vibrant Cornas in your glass, you are tasting a wine not unlike what was poured in 1885 or 1785. The curé of the parish wrote in 1763, “The Mountain of this village is nearly all planted in vines which produce a very good black wine which is sought after by the trade because it is so heady [fort capiteux].”

This is Syrah country. Cornas is the first village where the grape shows its true colors, so to speak, and it does not start off timidly. The taste of Cornas is as bold as its appearance. You chew it around in your mouth and it seems to stain the palate. There is nothing like it.

Why, then, is there so little of the stuff? Why are there only 130 acres planted when there are 1,300 acres of Cornas available for planting? Is there not enough demand worldwide to sop up 1,300 acres of Cornas?

Auguste Clape, the best-known grower in Cornas, regrets that there has never been a négociant of importance with vines at Cornas, someone who understands commerce better than the small local growers, someone who could help the appellation become better known, as Guigal has done for Côte Rôtie. It is a point well taken; after importing Cornas for years, as recently as 1982 I felt obliged to offer an “introductory price” in order to tempt my clients to try Cornas.

Then again I think I would just as soon Cornas stay lost lest the twentieth century take notice and decide to sophisticate this monumental relic. And yet, if it remains unknown, if its price does not soar, the Cornas slopes will not again be covered with vines.

Even if the price becomes more interesting to the growers, replanting the abandoned terraces is not certain. Once untended, oak and pine trees seem to multiply and sprout up like weeds. In order to replant vines, the trees would have to be uprooted, but most of those terraces are too narrow to permit the kind of earth-moving equipment necessary. Manually? Today? Forget it. A recent menace is the appearance of several new homes in the heart of the Cornas appellation. In the old days, the villagers worked the slopes and lived on the plain. Now they want to live on the slopes for the breeze and the view and cultivate the flatlands because it can be done by tractor. But, God help us, the results are not the same, and the difference between the two wines is not subtle. One is Cornas and one is not. Auguste Clape has Syrah growing on both terrains, and he says of his flatland wine, “It makes a decent table wine, but nothing more, and yet it is exactly the same Syrah clone that makes my Cornas. The only difference is the terroir.“

Qualms aside, let us consider how Cornas is drunk, once one has mastered the art of bending one’s elbow and swallowing. In the wine literature, it is repeatedly advised that Cornas must be aged several years before it is worthwhile, but there is something about a brand-new Cornas that should not be missed. Muhammad Ali may have grown more savvy as he matured, but who can forget the young Ali, that dazzle and explosiveness? A bottle should be uncorked when it appears on the market, in order to experience its youthful extravagance of color and size. But then Cornas shuts down for three or four years, after which its aromas begin to develop. For some reason, a perfect Cornas is never as aromatic as a perfect Hermitage or Côte Rôtie. When asked how else Cornas differs from Hermitage, Auguste Clape answered with a trace of a smile that Cornas is more rustre (loutish or brutish), while his friend up the road, Gérard Chave, who makes Hermitage, used the polite word ruslique (rustic).

Both agreed that Cornas is less elegant and more tannic than Hermitage.

Clape advised following Hermitage with Cornas at table. “I have often been to meals where the order was Saint-Joseph, Côte Rôtie, Hermitage, then Cornas. When we tried the reverse, Cornas followed by Hermitage, the Hermitage did not stand up well. A rustic wine,” he concluded, “will overwhelm a finer wine.”

Yes, normally when several wines are served, the progression is from light to heavy, following the theory that a heavyweight will knock a lightweight out of the ring. By the same token, the progression should go from simple to complex, from rustic to aristocratic, from young to old, the guiding principle being: one’s judgment is going to be influenced by whatever went before. The question is of some import because you do not want to diminish your appreciation of a perfectly good wine by serving it inappropriately. Hermitage is no lightweight, but we do not want it to seem so in the rough, tannic presence of a Cornas; a lighter wine following a heavier wine can actually seem thin. Likewise, a perfectly lovely country quaffer served after a noble growth might seem ignoble, or a young wine raw after a mellow old bottle. Cornas after Hermitage? To me, there is something jarring about the notion. Might not the Cornas seem rustre rather than rustique?

The dilemma helps bring into definition the difference between these two great Syrahs. A proper Hermitage will have a stronger, more eloquent bouquet. It is more distinguished, more the aristocrat. It sings like a chorus of several parts. Cornas sings great bass.

The solution is to give some attention to the vintages chosen, once it has been decided to serve Cornas and Hermitage at the same meal. I would refrain from serving the two at the same stage of maturity. Cornas 1980 could lead into Hermitage 1971, or Cornas 1976 into Hermitage 1966, and so on. A progression toward the older, more aristocratic bottle is a safe guideline to follow, but improvisations are not forbidden. An old Hermitage with roast bird could be followed by a purplish blast of young Cornas with cheese to wake up your party.

Saint-Joseph rouge possesses neither the dimensions of a great Hermitage nor the substantiveness (there is a lot of there there) of Cornas. Consequently, it is not respected to the same degree. But in reality Saint-Joseph is not a substitute that fails to measure up. Here Syrah can be enjoyed in another role. When in doubt about anything, it can be helpful to turn to Mozart, who in Don Giovanni provides an analogy: Zerlina (Saint-Joseph) may not match the emotional dimensions of Donna Elvira (Hermitage), nor is she as “heavy” as Donna Anna (Cornas), but Don Giovanni certainly finds Zerlina’s “farmer’s daughter” seductiveness distracting enough. Then Zerlina sings a playfully erotic song of comfort to her poor, bruised fiancé, Masetto. No self-respecting music critic would start throwing rotten eggs merely because her song lacks the emotional extremes of Donna Elvira’s passionate outbursts, but I believe today’s wine critics would. For them, big means good, light means less good; serious means good, playful is less good. What a humorless way to look at things. Which deity handed down the law that serious, heavy wines are better than gay, playful wines? It certainly was not Bacchus. Was it America’s Puritan God, who refuses to accept that wine can be pure unadulterated fun? When ranking Syrahs, the critics want us to believe that you can apply the same standard to all of them, as if when you uncork a bottle of Syrah you are always looking for the same qualities. The truth is, if a perfect Hermitage deserves an A+, or 20 points, or 100, or five stars, so does a perfect Saint-Joseph. Perfection is perfection, even if the wines taste different. Thank God they taste different! One of the miracles of French wine, one reason it is so endlessly enchanting, is its diversity, even within the same region employing the same grape variety. Rather than belittling it, exalt Saint-Joseph for being different. Here one can breathe in that wonderful, wild, hillside Syrah aroma without waiting years for the wine to soften or open up. And Saint-Joseph rouge is the one Syrah that might even be placed in an ice bucket on a summer day and served cooled down a bit with lunch, outdoors.

The white wine from Saint-Joseph is not easy to obtain because little is produced. It is a white that must be aged in wood in order to be worthwhile. In stainless-steel tanks, which have all but taken over in the cellars, the wine’s wonderful pit-fruit flavors do not develop. It remains closed and unpleasantly aggressive on the palate. But if it is vinified in used oak and if it has not been emasculated by efforts to clean it up or stabilize it, Saint-Joseph blanc can be a gorgeous, expressive dry white that ages well. A 1972 tasted in 1985 had a quincelike aroma, a chalky edge on the palate, and a fleeting suggestion of apricot skin in the aftertaste.

Originally, Saint-Joseph referred to a single hillside between Mauves and Tournon which is now the property of the Chapoutier family. Then the name Saint-Joseph began to be applied to the wines from the series of terraced slopes between Châteaubourg and Vion, which included the exceptional vineyards of Mauves, Tournon, and Saint-Jean-de-Muzols, whose wines had once been marketed under their own names, such as vin de Mauves and vin de Tournon. In those days, prices varied from parcel to parcel even within the same village because the ancients knew the lay of the land and the quality of the juice it gave.

And what of Saint-Joseph today? How did it grow from 240 acres in 1970 to over 700 today? Why, when the quantity produced is increasing, is Saint-Joseph an appellation in decline? The answer is to be found on the abandoned hillsides, grown over with weeds and straggly remnants of vines.

The French wine bureaucrats of the INAO (lnstitut National des Appellations d’Origine) enlarged and redefined Saint-Joseph, lumping together practically everything on the west bank of the Rhône from Cornas to Ampuis, approximately forty miles, including flatland soil along the riverbanks that had never been planted with grapes. They allow bottles of this stuff to sashay out onto the marketplace decked out in a Saint-Joseph label. Never mind the consumer or truth-in-labeling. Never mind some possible twinge of responsibility to our predecessors who labored to carve those steep hillsides into a shape hospitable to the vine, who left behind thousands of miles of hand-built stone walls because the wine was finer from up there. Nothing is sacred to these officials of the INAO who continue to devalue these historic sites even though they were hired to protect them.

Think about it. Côte means “slope,” or “hillside.” Rôtie means “roasted.” Today, wine from the flat plateau above the “roasted slope” can legally call itself Côte Rôtie.

In Celtic, Cornas meant “roasted slope.” Now the INAO is considering allowing the plateau above Cornas to be planted in vines whose wine will be sold wearing a Cornas label. Welcome to our brave new world of French wine in which there may be no côte in your Côte Rôtie and no cornas in your Cornas.

When I praised the wine of Saint-Joseph, I did not mean the ordinary wine whose grapes were mechanically harvested on flat terrain thirty miles from the original Saint-Joseph hillside.

But let them plant the plateaus, the hollows and sinks, let them grow grapes in their belly button if they want to, laissez-faire, but do not call it Côte Rôtie, Saint-Joseph, or Cornas.

The French are capable of such noblesse. At its inception, the system of appellation contrôlée was elaborated with admirable rigor. Here was a noble idea. But when they set their minds to it the French can outwhore anybody. Imagine someone trying to convince you that red is green, or a square, round. The current bunch in control of the INAO would have us accept the notion that a slope is flat. This is more than preposterous, it is legalized fraud.

Crozes-HERMITAGE? Here we go again. Hermitage is that one majestic hillside tilted south like a solar receptor. If there is any single vineyard that the Creator obviously designed expressly for wine production, it is Hermitage.

I suppose someone might be inspired to try a Musigny after tasting a good Chambolle, or a Montrachet because of a good Puligny, but would sampling a bottle of Crozes-Hermitage motivate anyone to try an Hermitage? It is as likely as Muzak leading someone to Bach.

Crozes-Hermitage is by far the largest appellation in the northern Rhône. It includes terrain that does not even deserve to be called Côtes du Rhône. Where’s the côte? Since the appellation was redrawn and expanded to include sandy flatland soils, that is where most of the growers have moved because they can attack with tractors and harvesting machines and because the yield per acre is so much higher. Profit! Facility! The best of all possible worlds!

In other words, by changing the legislation the INAO has, purposefully or not, encouraged the growers to abandon the sites that give the best wine.

The grape variety at Crozes, at least, remains the same as at Hermitage. However, Syrah without a hillside is like Saint George without a dragon: boring.

In reality, Crozes is a sleepy village just behind the Hermitage crest. There are vineyards near Crozes, above the Rhône at Gervans, for example, which provide an environment for the vine similar to that at Hermitage. In olden days the wines from certa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Taste
• A Stunning Upset
• Blind Tasting
• The Notion of Terroir
• The Wineführers
• My Fall
• Wine
• from Sideways
• Perils of Being a Wine-Writer
• East of Eden, 1963–1965
• Afternoon at Château d’Yquem
• from A Long Finish
• The Assassin in the Vineyard
• Burgundy on the Hudson
• Just Enough Money
• from Sweetbitter
• Northern Rhône
• The Importance of Being Humble
• The Secret Society
• A Pleasant Stain, But Not a Great One
• The Wine in the Glass
• My Father and the Wine
• from The Making of a Great Wine
• War and the Widow’s Triumph
• Billionaire Winos
• The 1982 Bordeaux
• Remystifying Wine
• Contributor Notes
• Credits
• Back Cover