by Adam Gopnik
So that’s the sauce. It interests me, you know, that it is another three-step process: wine, stock, and mustard. Or, to go with chicken or steak, just wine reduced, crème fraîche added and cooked down, mustard stirred in off heat. The rule of three seems to be the rule of cooking. There are some two-step dishes, and a few—a very few—worthwhile four and fives. But mostly, the good things to eat take three steps. Three steps to pan sauté: the sauté, the reduction, and the finish. Three steps to make a cake: the liquids, the butter, and the dries. Three steps to stew (brine, braise, reduce) and three to make a pasta sauce: the spice base, anchovies, and garlic; the tomatoes; the scissored-in herbs. Three steps to grill: the marinade, the grill, and the salsa. Even rice and beans…. The spice base there, too, then the rice, then the beans. Let us mark it down as another secret o’ life: the rule of three will always rule.
Is there a pattern of making here, more universal than it might at first seem? Jasper Johns once said, with the high, significant disingenuousness of faux-naïf genius, that the way to make art is to take something and do something to it and then do something else to it. And this is true—nine times out of ten, when art fails to satisfy, it is either because the artist has merely taken something and done something to it (as in illustration and bad conceptual art) or else because the artist has taken something and done something to it and then done something else and then done even more. The rule of three is the rule of life, even when cooking for four.
I suspect that this is so because the rule of three really expresses the three stages that are always at the base of any good thing we make, from soup to David Salle: there is first the raw thing, then there is the transformative act, and then there is the personal embroidery. The rule of three applies, because it captures an enduring truth of life, that, at best, people always have three terms to play with: what I take from nature, what I’ve learned from my tribe, what I do myself: nature, culture, me. Something borrowed, something done, something only I can do. Nature’s Way; Our Tribe’s Way; My Way. Or else History, My Time, My Talent. The chicken that grew on a farm upstate, the sauté pan I was given at our wedding, the sauce made just as I choose to make it. The fish from the cold ocean, the oven inherited from the previous tenants of this apartment, the lemon and olive oil I bought tonight to pour over the fish. The rule of three is the rule of making.
Yours,
Adam
PART III
Talking at the Table
AFTER THE napkin has been unfolded and the menu scrutinized and the choices made, what is there to do but talk? The test of a good meal is the loft of the talk around the table, the way that it rises with the heat of conversation and debate. “I dogmatize and am refuted,” Dr. Johnson said of this, “and in this cycle find my delight.” And what better thing to talk about than… food, and all its meanings. Each time we do, we talk about more. “In every home I’ve ever known / the living room’s a tomb,” the little bit of rhyming runs. “In every home I’ve ever known, the dining room’s the room.”
10. In Vino Veritas?
SOMEWHERE in the middle pages of 1984, Winston Smith is being inducted into the shadowy and, as it turns out, nonexistent “Brotherhood” of resistance to Big Brother, and, to celebrate, the Inner Party member O’Brien pours him a glass of wine. Winston has never had wine before, but he has read about it, and he is desperately excited to try it, since he expects it to taste like blackberry jam and to be instantly intoxicating. Instead, of course, the wine tastes the way wine tastes the first time you taste it—a bit acidic and bitter—and a single sip, or glass, isn’t intoxicating at all. The intensity of this experience as a model of disappointment was significant enough for Orwell that he inserted it in his dystopia right there among all the greater horrors—as though the future weren’t bad enough, that whole wine thing will go on, too.
Sixty years later, we live in a wine world where, for the first time, there are wines that do taste like blackberry jam and are instantly intoxicating, or nearly so—I mean all the wines of the “Southern” regions, the New Zealand Pinot Noirs and California Zinfandels and Australian Shirazes—and a literature has grown up to try to sort them out in relation to the tastes of the Old World. “Wine,” Saul Steinberg once said, “is the only thing that makes us happy as adults for no reason.” Wine books, on the other hand, find a hundred ways of making us unhappy for lots of reasons. The space between what the wine writers say and what the wine novice tastes is a standard subject of satire. (The best was written, exactly contemporary with Orwell, by Stephen Potter in the “Winemanship” section of his peerless Lifemanship books.)
Some of the weakness of wine-writing is complex. Being an expert on wine and writing about it is what the English call “naff,” embarrassing and uncool, while being a nonexpert on wine and writing about it anyway sounds merely boozy. No subject produces a literature so anxious, expressed not so much in its grandiosity as in its defensive jokiness and regular-guydom. A book on wine will always begin with the assurance that it is not like all those other books on wine, even though all those other books on wine begin by saying that they’re not like those other books on wine, either.
Running through most of the best wine writing of the past decade, though, is one story, a common time frame and a central fable. The time frame is the past thirty years, and the central fable is the defeat of the French tyranny over wine values, first by American wines, then by American experts, and then by the world at large. And what one sees, again and again, in book after book that tells the tale of the French decline and the American—and more latterly the Australian—rise, are all the pieces of a first-class Henry James comedy about the brutality of New World innocence, the helplessness of Old World sophistication, and the need for intoxicants that are always called by some other name and claimed for some other purpose.
The story always opens in the early 1970s, when the cult of claret—well-aged Bordeaux wine—was locked in place, especially in England, which dominated the wine trade as the Germans had earlier dominated the champagne trade. Bordeaux produced hard, tannic wines that often took a decade to be good to drink. (Then they were really good to drink.) Even when they weren’t good, though, everyone went on drinking them, because they were claret. The best wines, if far from cheap, were available, not collector’s items: anyone with a taste for wine could expect to drink Château Margaux or Château Cheval Blanc more than once in a lifetime, and the lesser grands crus were there for everyday drinking. The preeminence of French wines was simply taken for granted, like the skills of Jewish internists. Within Bordeaux, the classification of 1855—which had fixed the vineyards in a hierarchy of first-, second-, and third-growth classes—still hummed along, dominating everything.
Into this story come two new forces: Japanese money and American numbers. In the mid-seventies, the Japanese developed a taste for expensive French wine, and for buying the big names. This vastly expanded the market and seemed to justify investment in higher yields: more grapes, and more land. But this meant that the lower reaches of second- and third-growth wine were now all that most Americans could drink, though in a less equable and accepting mood. In 1976, in Paris, an American Cabernet beat the French Bordeaux in a blind tasting. This was not quite the event that it has since come to seem. To the French winemakers, it was more like an American loss to the Lithuanians in basketball—wrong game at the wrong time—but it did mark a trembling of the earth beneath their feet.
More significant, a lawyer named Robert Parker, from the suburbs of Baltimore, began to mimeograph, and then publish, his own newsletter, The Wine Advocate, listing all the châteaux and grading them on a hundred-point system. His virtues were limited: he was a very ordinary writer with few pretensions to the grace notes of French, or even English, wine writing. What he brought to the table was what Americans always bring: encyclopedic ambitions and a universal numerical system. Not since Bernard Berenson made his lists of true and false Italian pictures had an American expert on the arts so fundamen
tally changed the economics of European culture. As with Berenson, what mattered was not so much that the list was right—who could tell for sure?—as that the list existed.
In retrospect, it seems that Parker was doing to wine what Bill James was doing to baseball in the same years, and in the same way. Both Parker and James began, in the late seventies, as unknown amateurs with privately printed newsletters, rapidly found a hungry and enthusiastic audience, and by the mid-eighties had become the reigning authorities among people impatient with the old wisdoms. Both were uncannily successful because they were apostles of a radical American empiricism—an insistence that facts and numbers could show you what was really going on, against everything tradition told you. James was weakly predictive, but brilliantly analytic: his explanations of why things had happened were mesmerizing and convincing, but his guesses about what would happen next were often wrong. (His system had the Brewers winning the ’82 series.) Parker was weakly analytic but brilliantly predictive; he could never really explain why wines tasted good, but he claimed that the ’82 vintage was going to be great, and it was.
The difference was that Parker’s game had always belonged to the French. And from the French point of view he was poison. Like all Henry James heroes, Parker was a true American innocent, meaning only to help and purify his European friends. The wines that receive the most consistent and adulatory praise in his system are the conventional favorites of conventional French taste: Château Margaux and, Burgundy, Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. No one could have been more single-mindedly rapturous about Château d’Yquem. In France, though, the greatness of those wines was accepted not as effort well rewarded but as the natural order of life. There had to be not-so-good wines below to have great wines above; the hierarchy was part of the pleasure. Parker assumed that if some wines were not as good as others it was because some winemakers were not doing as good a job.
Although, in a defensive move, the French government gave him the Légion d’Honneur—he cried when he received it—his Francophilia did him no good with the French; the vintners set dogs on him. In a Henry James story, he would marry a French comtesse with a fading château, and have to decide whether to be true to his system by rating her wines properly or be true to her and lie. (In the James story, he would lie, and suffer.) Without intending to, he was wrecking the second rank. He was able to do this because, for the first time, there was a solid second rank of claret-style wine in the world, and it wasn’t the second growths of Bordeaux.
One common complaint has been that Parker’s idea of good was too narrow. People who know wines now disparage Parker for preferring “flavor bombs,” big wines that are exploding with fruit and alcohol, and which showed up better in tastings—with the not very convincing implication that there is something second-rate about liking such blackberry-jam wines. But the essential “character” of many of the wines that he ruled out was the quality of not being very good.
Meanwhile, beginning in the 1980s, there was more good wine around than ever before, and most of it was coming, as it still does, from the then-underexploited warm-weather vineyards of other continents. It is hard to find a less than delicious bottle of Australian Syrah or South African Cabernet or California Zinfandel, or, these days, New Zealand Pinot Noir. Even southern Italy, and Sicily in particular, began to fall into line. Mouton Cadet, the old standard Bordeaux plonk, has almost disappeared from dinner tables.
In this way, Parker’s achievement wasn’t so much to Americanize French wine as to southernize northern palates—to favor the fruitier and more forward wines common to South Africa and California and Australia over the drier and more astringent tastes of young Bordeaux and old Burgundy. He liked wines that tasted good. His favorite French wines, the ones he loves from the heart (“This is the kind of wine I would drink if I were not always tasting,” he once wrote plaintively, apropos of a simple Guigal Côtes du Rhône), are southern, too, from the Rhône Valley. An “educated” palate may seek to explain why this is a limiting taste, but is unlikely to win over the Winston Smiths. It is a little like the educated eye trying to explain why Poussin is better than Rubens; people may listen, but they look at those thighs, and doubt.
Once Parker had established his reputation, the French had to decide whether to fight or to change, and they changed. William Echikson’s heroes, in his book Noble Rot—the story of the ins and outs of the family who own Château d’Yquem but more broadly about post–Parker Bordeaux—are the garagistes and “right bankers,” the winemakers from the wrong bank of the Gironde, who, one by one, are either taking control of old estates or making their own wine in the backyard. Following his heroes from château to château, Echikson gives a strong hint throughout that making good wine is more like making good peanut butter than it is like writing great poetry. Low yields (meaning not too many grapes per hectare), sweet fruit allowed to ripen as long as possible (there is always pressure on growers to harvest early, because of the threat of a late rain or an early frost), no stems, minimal “handling”—the formula is pretty simple. Wine is good grape juice gone bad, and, as many of the new French winemakers seem to suggest under their breath, there is something to be said for the Australian system where grapes are collected from around the country, sorted through, and fermented in great big well-controlled vats, and terroir be damned.
Yet the reader, even one with Parkerized tastes, may, on reflection, find the French objections to Parker’s lists and numbers more complicated than many of the critics allow. The debate is not about whether the numbers are right but whether it is right to have numbers. Everyone agrees that Parker is, on his own terms, a completely honest scorer; but by scoring he intends to serve the consumer, and makes the wine drinker into one. What consumers want is reliable beverage products, and, once wine is a reliable beverage product, it isn’t quite wine.
Demanding absolute excellence on an unchanging universal numerical scale is not, after all, our usual measure of sensual engagement. A man who makes love to fifty-some women and then publishes a list in which each one gets a numerical grade would not be called a lady’s man. He would be called a cad. And that, more or less, is how a good many Frenchmen think of Parker: they don’t doubt his credentials; they question his character. A real man likes moles and frailties; a real man marries his wine, as he marries his wife, and sees her through the thin spots. Being impatient with the tannins in a Margaux is like being impatient with the lines on your wife’s face. They are what makes it a marriage rather than a paid assignation.
For one of the defining characteristics of many French terroirs is not to make very good wine. To alter that is to put them in the beverage business. No one says this, exactly—but when you are handed a glass of thin and astringent country wine in France and asked to admire it for its character, there is a reasonable point in which its character does consist in its having some. The French connoisseur believes that, with his glass of turpentiney Gascon wine, he is in a truer relation to history and reality than the American searching for his jammy high-scorers. I wouldn’t actually drink like this, but I understand it.
Of course, if the ladies were offering their favors at forty dollars a go, it would seem fair for somebody to grade them, and that is, more or less, what Parker’s defenders say: a product that is being bought and sold should be subject to the market discipline of all other things that are bought and sold, and all the guff about earth and history and ineffable singularity is just a way of avoiding giving the customer what he ought to get for his money.
Well, what does make wine taste bad or good? Is there really a standard, or a way to agree on one? Within the heart of every wine drinker there is the suspicion that no one really knows. I was once at a dinner in Paris, seated by a big “name” in wine tasting, and, along about the third bottle, she leaned in and announced, half gaily and half conspiratorially, “You know, it’s really all about the same.” Of course, she didn’t actually believe that—but I also had the sense that in another way she did believe it, th
at she was confiding something significant about her own profession. She didn’t mean that it all tastes the same—obviously, it doesn’t—but that, stripped away from its elaborate rituals, the distinctions that her livelihood depends on would be a lot muddier and mixed up.
The French cognitive psychologist Frédéric Brochet has done pioneering, if disconcerting, work on this subject. It was Brochet who first discovered that if you simply put red food coloring in white wine even experienced drinkers can’t tell it from red wine. What we see shapes what we smell. But his work goes further than that. In another study, he offered, at a week’s interval to a constant group, the same mediocre wine, first labeling it a vin de table and then as a grand cru. Predictably, the subjects’ tasting notes conformed more closely to the label than to what was “really” there. Nor did anyone seem to detect that it was the same wine with a new label. Once again, the frame frames. We lean on what we see, what we read, to create a context for what we think we taste and smell.
Nor does “expertise” seem to alter this effect very profoundly. Studying tasting notes from forty-four professionals at a wine exposition, Brochet discovered that “when a taster experiences a particular wine, the words they use to describe it are those that they link to this sort of wine.” That is, even the expert tastes what he expects to taste, and says what he has said before. If you called the last Côtes du Rhône “rich and peppery,” then that is what you will say about the next one; the words make the wine before the wine produces the words. What’s more, and it’s a slightly scary thought, Brochet showed that when you look at MRIs of the brains of wine connoisseurs who use different pet phrases to describe their wines, different areas of the brain light up—they are actually experiencing different things. To the degree that any “fakery” is going on, it is entirely sincere self-delusion.