Wine

Malbec, observed Hugh Johnson, is a “conundrum.” Sometimes it is light in color as well as body. That’s what it tends to be like in the Loire, where the grape is called côt (apparently its original name). It used to be grown in Bordeaux, where it was used primarily as a sort of filler, rounding out the cabs and merlots. In Cahors, its major French venue today, it is sometimes called côt noir or Auxerrois. There malbec tends to be bold, spicy and dark. “Dark,” in fact, is one of the wine writer’s favorite adjectives for this allotrope of malbec. This was the “black wine” that Thomas Jefferson would sometimes add to his claret to deepen its color. But malbec is a fussy grape. The French climate is a challenge.

Most wine columns resemble recipes from Larousse Gastronomique or Mastering the Art of French Cooking in this way: they have happy endings. This column, alas, proceeds with a melancholy burden. The world of wine, it pains me to report, is in the doldrums. Is it because of a new infestation of phylloxera, the blight that devastated French vineyards in the 19th century, or some other pest? Is it some novel tyranny of teetotalers, outlawing the production and consumption of wine? No. It is something closer to original sin or what Immanuel Kant on a dreary afternoon called “the crooked timber of humanity” out of which nothing straight can be fashioned. In short, it is the news that the wine industry itself is dying. Why?

Here we are at the beginning of a new year. Since I don’t have any childcare “learing centers” to offer my readers, I thought, the weather being frigid here in the northeast, I would reach out with the warmth of – no, not “collectivism,” to which I am allergic – but of some recent discoveries in the world of wine. Much cheaper, believe me, and much more palatable. It is only fairly recently that the Santa Cruz Mountains have come into their own as a California wine-producing region. I was deeply impressed by the 2021 Estate chardonnay from Rhys Vineyards. Sourced from three spots in the mountains, with elevations ranging from about 700 to 1,400 feet on a variety of soil types, this chardonnay is exceptionally well-structured.

You know what they say about America: beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain. But its fruited plains – specifically its vineyards – and amber waves of grain aren’t doing her neighbor to the north much good at the moment – at least not in the beverage department. In the Loyalist province of Ontario, just as in la belle province of Québec, no California wines have graced the store shelves for more than half a year. American tipple is out. As far as eastern Canada is concerned, the minions of Francis Ford Coppola crush grapes in vain, all is quiet along the Yakima and it matters not whether pinot noir still reigns supreme in the Willamette Valley. Ask not for whom the Napa flows; it’s not for thee.

Anyone who writes about wine for a while finds himself coming back to old friends as the years go by. This wine here was actually fuller and more sumptuous in that vintage five years ago, while that wine over there really came into its own in the most recently released vintage. Just as with people, some wines with early promise somehow go astray and never amount to much, while others that were disorganized and introverted when young suddenly blossom and turn outward as they age, the magic sunflowers of viticulture. Most writers about wine will have similar stories. It’s a bit rarer for most of us, however, to get in on the ground floor and stand by while a new vineyard, fawn-like, is born, manages to stand up on its own and then goes trotting off.

Apropos the subject of this column, videlicet, wine, a friend told me an arresting story about the once-famous British theater critic and playwright Kenneth Tynan (1927-1980). Sometime in the 1960s, when the prickly Gamal Abdel Nasser ruled Egypt, Tynan went sailing on the Nile. One night, he came ashore to enjoy dinner at the Luxor Hotel. The wine list was impressive. He ordered a famous bottle that cost practically nothing. The head waiter swept over to tell him, so sorry, they’d drunk the wine out. Tynan manfully looked again at the list and asked for the second best bottle. Alas, the waiter replied, that wine, too, had been exhausted. “Well, what do you recommend?” Tynan asked. To which the answer was: “We have no wine of any kind.” That hasn’t happened to me yet.

The story of the golden calf is preserved in Exodus 32. Moses had gone up into the mountains to see a man about the law. He tarried. The people grew restless. Eventually they turned to Aaron, Moses’s elder brother, and said, “How about it?” Aaron could see trouble brewing as well as the next chap. “There’s lots of gold in them there earrings,” he said, looking around at the multitude. “Give me the gold and I’ll make you something to worship.” Hence the golden calf, which the people rallied round, much to the irritation of Moses and the higher authorities when they caught wind of it.

Do you know Charlotte Mulliner’s charming poem “Good Gnus”? It was transcribed by P.G. Wodehouse in his short story “Unpleasantness at Bludleigh Court.” I went shooting with friends last weekend at a magnificent rural fastness in a semi-secure, undisclosed location near Millbrook, New York. Although we were shooting clays, not pheasants or other fauna, the opening of “Good Gnus” nevertheless floated into my mind like a tocsin with its irrefragable psychological insight.

It’s been a while since we have traveled to Beaujolais, that ancient wine growing region along the Saône River north of Lyon. Since summer is nigh, it’s time for another visit. Beaujolais is an ideal summer red wine. It is almost always made exclusively from the Gamay grape, a cross between Pinot Noir and an ancient white varietal called Gouais. It is light, flowery, full of pleasing acidity and fruitiness, satisfying by itself and notably food friendly. Of course, anyone who writes about Beaujolais these days has to begin by issuing a little advisory, like the Surgeon General’s warning on packs of cigarettes and certain medications. A few decades back, Beaujolais was plagued by scandal.

Among the minor aporia bedeviling the universe is a question about Alsatian wine. “What is it?” someone asks. “Wine from Alsace,” comes the answer. “But where is Alsace?” This is where things get fraught. The answer is not latitude and longitude (for the curious, Grok offers 48.57º N and 7.75º E for Strasbourg, a plausible anchor for the area). The answer is not found in geography either. “West of the Rhine and east of the Vosges mountains” is all well and good. But it does not impinge upon the real question, which is a question of identity. Not to belabor the point, but should we think of Alsace as primarily French or primarily German? With that, as Jeeves might have said to Bertie Wooster, rem acu tetigimus.

I have to begin this column with a glass of Pol Roger cuvée Winston Churchill. It’s fancy stuff, and — according to some — it’s a bit early in the day to be quaffing Champagne.  “How early is too early?” I’ve often wondered that. The jury is out but most of the best authorities say that any time before actually awakening is too early.   Why the shampoo (as David Niven was wont to denominate the beverage)?  It seemed like the appropriate expedient in response to a bulletin I received from a Trump-skeptical friend. It came in over the headline, “Trump’s first mistake.

On April 26, 1336, the poet Petrarch, accompanied by his younger brother, climbed up the windy slopes of Mount Ventoux in the Rhône Valley. He said that he was the first person to climb that Alps-adjacent peak, which isn’t quite true. But it may well be true that he was the first person to go mountain climbing for fun. Petrarch wrote about his outing in 1350 in a famous letter called “The Ascent of Mount Ventoux.” The twentieth-century German philosopher Hans Blumenberg (speaking of mountains) wrote that Petrarch’s climb marked “one of the great moments that oscillate indecisively between the epochs,” namely between the medieval world and the Renaissance. Today, we like mountains. They mean picnics, sight-seeing, natural beauty.

In November, I was privileged to attend the 91st Paulée de Meursault. There are three coveted invitations at that time of year in this part of Burgundy: the world-famous wine auction held in Beaune and the luncheons called la Paulée de Beaune and la Paulée de Meursault. La Paulée de Meursault celebrates the fine wines grown in this small village. It is home to eighty wine-growing families and the area is known for its charm and terroir, that unique blend of soil and climate that has been producing exceptional white and red grapes for centuries. I had heard from our family about this festive celebration ever since our daughter and son-in-law moved to France fifteen years ago to work in wine.

Winter is a natural moment for a little recherche du temps perdu. For my band of serious thinkers, the usual aides-mémoire are not petites madeleines dipped in tea but some of the various wines the holidays afforded us. Wordsworth said that poetry “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” The jury is still out on the accuracy of that neatly phrased observation. But regardless of its pertinence to the art of poetry, its pertinence to the art of wine appreciation can hardly be gainsaid. With that in mind, I offer, as a minor public service, a brief recollection of some of the wines that a beneficent providence vouchsafed us as the winter solstice came and went and the house was redolent of evergreen and wood fires.

Last month we took a quick trip to Tuscany. Among the wines we sampled was Sassicaia, the fabled Cabernet blend from Bolgheri on the Tuscan coast. I said that the wine was an “instant sensation,” but an alert reader pointed out that it was only when it was sold commercially, in the late 1960s, that it took the wine world by storm. Before that, it was the private province of its creator, the marchese Mario Incisa della Rocchetta, who began experimenting with Bordeaux grapes in the 1940s. I also said that Tignanello was another superlative Super Tuscan from “the region.” But that same alert reader noted that while the region was Tuscany, Tignanello comes not from Bolgheri but from Chianti, several miles to the East.