By the time I started coming to lunch, Frascati had closed, and the group had migrated a few blocks away to Café Swiss, assembling promptly at 11:30 every Saturday morning, rain or shine, at a long table at the back of the patio. They abided by simple rules: Everybody brought at least one bottle of wine, which could be anything from a curiosity to a treasure; the bottles could be presented as they came or “blind” (concealed in paper bags), as their owner preferred; everybody ordered an appetizer and a main course; nobody ordered dessert, but one of the group always brought a wedge of Brie from the nearby Cheese Shop of Beverly Hills; and the check got evenly split, with our long-suffering regular waitress, Judy, getting a handsome tip.
Bill continued to use the lunch to open samples from suppliers: a complete line from some new California winery; the most recent vintages from some prominent Burgundy shipper; something we’d never heard of from Italy or Spain. Marty kept us up to date on his latest wares, which might mean new low-priced chardonnay from Fetzer or drop-dead wonderful Chianti or barbaresco shipped from Italy by the Enoteca Internazionale de Rham, and he sometimes threw in a good German wine from his own collection. The businessmen, the attorney, and the ophthalmologist liked to bring show-off wines from their cellars—pricey white Burgundies or older red Bordeaux, expensive offerings from Italy or California, vintage port. My own contributions were often oddball bottles I’d found wherever I’d just been (Majorca, the Canary Islands, Morocco, Luxembourg, the Valle d’Aosta). Roy was the wild card, showing up with anything from an old Madeira to a homemade wine a friend of his had fashioned. On one occasion, he brought a Château Mouton Rothschild decanted into a California cabernet bottle, to illustrate his contention that most people, even wine distributors, drank with their eyes more than their palates. One of the more vocal of our number, predictably, dismissed the wine as not very interesting at first and then, when its identity was revealed, said, “You know, it’s starting to come around, yes, I’m really getting the breeding now.” Roy just smiled.
Guests were sometimes invited to the table—one Saturday when I wasn’t there, one of the businessmen brought Gloria Steinem, under circumstances whose particulars now elude me—and visiting winemakers sometimes attended, at their own peril: Wines were opened with no ceremony, passed around, tasted, and, if they were found lacking (as they often were), quickly poured out—even if their creator was sitting right there. More than one winemaker, beginning to explain the subtleties of his masterwork, realized to his horror that it had already been consigned to the dump bucket.
The wines at some of our lunches were just remarkable, random collections of celebrated bottlings both domestic and imported, hundreds and hundreds of dollars’ worth. One Saturday in 1975, for instance, my notes remind me that we had a 1969 Heitz McCrea Vineyards pinot blanc, four top-of-the-line California cabernets (1963 Louis Martini, 1969 Chappellet, 1968 Beaulieu Vineyard Georges de Latour Private Reserve, and 1971 Ridge Eisele), three distinguished Bordeaux (Troplong Mondot, Ducru-Beaucaillou, and Pichon-Longueville) from the highly rated 1966 vintage, a Ficklin ribosa piave—an extraordinary and very rare red wine made from an obscure Italian grape for only a few vintages by an old-line California port producer—and a Mayacamas 1968 late-harvest zinfandel, an unusual and superb Napa Valley dessert wine. Another week, in contrast, we grumbled through a couple of barely drinkable white zinfandels, two wan California gamays, a tired 1961 generic Graves from a mediocre shipper, and a pair of thick, coarse Amarones.
If the wines varied widely from meeting to meeting, there was a certain predictable, almost ritualistic quality to the occasions nonetheless: same time, same table, same food, same people making the same jokes. One of the group was married for a time to a rather humorless European woman who once exclaimed, with undisguised disapproval, “I don’t know how you can stand to just sit there and say the same things to each other week after week!” She didn’t understand that the very predictability of the lunches was part of their appeal.
I came to lunch at Café Swiss, wine in hand, almost every week for probably ten or eleven years, and then managed to appear sporadically for another few years after that—though by that time I was married and living in Venice, a twenty- or thirty-minute drive to the west, and couldn’t always manage the logistics. My sessions with the group exposed me to wines from probably every corner of the world that produced them, and to every style and quality imaginable. Because the selection was so arbitrary, so unpredictable (and often so mysterious, if the labels were concealed), I was pretty much forced to consider each wine on its own merits, without expectations or preconceived ideas. I can’t imagine how I could have had a better training in how and what to taste.
But then, too, there was Roy. Roy was a mathematician who’d worked as an aerospace systems analyst at the Rand Corporation and elsewhere before retiring to devote his time to writing about wine and teaching wine classes. He had a good head start on almost everyone else in the field: He’d decided, back in the 1940s, to teach himself about wine—a decision, he once said, that “just came out of the blue, no more courted than web-footedness.” In pursuit of wine knowledge, he studied most of the available texts on the subject, which at that time were primarily the work of British wine merchants or historians from the early years of the twentieth century, and started visiting the California wine country, where he got to know many of the pioneers of the state’s modern wine industry. He also started buying wine—back when nineteenth-century Madeira, his greatest passion, went for five bucks a bottle and twenty-five would get you a case of Château Margaux—and installed it in an underground “cellar” he had dug himself, with the help of friends, next to the token grapevines in the backyard of his home in the San Fernando Valley. Before long, he was writing about wine, too, initially for the quarterly published by the urbane British-based Wine & Food Society, and later for a variety of other publications both scholarly and popular.
Roy was a laconic fellow, alternately avuncular and curmudgeonly, with white hair and white muttonchop whiskers and a limp from childhood polio, which worsened as he aged. Though he would probably consider this a libel, were he still around, Roy was the closest thing I had to a wine mentor. Over the years, by his example and not by the usual wine-expert pedagogy, he taught me many valuable lessons about wine. Chief among these was to judge it by the way it smells and tastes, not by its label or reputation or price—and then to keep my mouth shut about it unless I had something smart to say.
From the beginning, Roy’s writing showed not just intelligence and humor but also unusual good sense and restraint. He was an enemy to jargon and cliché. If he read somewhere that a certain wine had “flavors” of raspberry, he’d ask, “How many flavors does a raspberry have?” If somebody quoted the wine merchant and writer Frank Schoonmaker’s description of Almadén zinfandel as being “brambly,” he’d say, “Have you ever tasted a bramble?” And this was one of his favorite jokes: “Did you hear the one about the famous wine writer who was so fat when he died that they couldn’t find a coffin big enough to bury him in? Well, they gave him an enema and buried him in a shoe box.”
It wasn’t that Roy didn’t appreciate the romance and lore of wine; it was more that he didn’t like it when the romance and lore were mistaken for the reality. He had strong opinions about what he tasted but was stingy with them, and you drew them out of him at your own risk. When a fellow diner pressed him, once, about why he obviously disdained a wine that had been poured, Roy finally replied, in exasperation, “Because it’s no damn good.” He was similarly economical with praise: The definitive Roy Brady story, which he told on himself, was about the time he once sat through a long, boring wine and food dinner at which “it became all too apparent that absolutely every soul present was going to be called on to comment at length on a wine or a dish.” When it was his turn, he stood up, drained his glass of whatever vintage it contained, and, after a suitable pause, said “Mighty tasty”—then sat down.
I GRADUATED FROM UCLA in
1969 with bachelor’s degrees in philosophy and history, avoiding a ticket to Vietnam through a series of student deferments and then the good luck of a high draft lottery number. Professionally, I’d gradually been able to establish relationships with several publications that would take my writing. I did book reviews and a number of little music features for the Chicago Sun-Times; The Christian Science Monitor bought several brief travel pieces from me; and I somehow got linked up with an underground paper out of Miami called The Daily Planet, reviewing albums and covering music events in L.A. I never understood why such events would be of interest to the citizens of southern Florida, but, hey, I got paid (a pittance)—and better still, my pieces brought me to the attention of the record companies, and they started sending me advance copies of new albums and inviting me to opening nights at the Troubadour and the Whisky a Go Go. This, in turn, brought me to the attention of more outlets.
Before I knew it, The Hollywood Reporter was assigning me to cover concerts by Nana Mouskouri, John McLaughlin, and Gladys Knight and the Pips; Lester Bangs at Creem was basically letting me review any albums I wanted to; and I was getting lots of work from a publication called Phonograph Record Magazine, published by United Artists Records, and also writing liner notes and artists’ bios for the company. (I’m pretty sure I’m the only food writer who has ever been nominated for a Grammy, an honor I was accorded in 1975 for the extensive notes I’d written for a two-disk Miles Davis reissue. I lost to Sam Samudio of Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, of “Wooly Bully” fame, who had penned heartfelt autobiographical notes for his own album.)
I became part of the music business for real in 1972, when I was hired by Atlantic Records. I used to like to describe my position as (in reference to an early Rolling Stones song) “under-assistant West Coast publicity man.” My job included following up on invitations to rock critics for concerts and club dates and writing press releases for forthcoming releases. I did this for, among other landmarks, the first Bette Midler album and Jackson Browne’s debut LP. Atlantic also gave me my first expense account, a fairly generous one. Though I’d only just started writing about restaurants, I was apparently already known in some circles as something of a gourmand, because when I got the job, a columnist for the music business trade magazine Cashbox observed that “suddenly, everybody in town wants to interview Atlantic acts over lunch.” (The truth is that I didn’t care for the company of a good many of the music writers in town, and often just went to lunch alone, ordering expensive bottles of wine—I was in a white Burgundy phase—and three-course meals and charging it off to one act or another. I owe you guys one, Delbert and Glen.)
I got into magazine editing, indirectly, through a freelance job for United Artists Records. They’d hired me to write a press release about the new Traffic album, The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys. I was a fan of the group, but didn’t care for the LP that much, and my feelings must have shown through, because the company turned down my release. Not out of any desire for revenge, but simply as a way to make a little more money out of my efforts, I rewrote the release into an overt critique of the album, which I dubbed “The Low Marks of Well-Heeled Boys,” for a strange little local arts and entertainment monthly called Coast. (Today, I can’t imagine what I was going on about. I quite like the album, and a few years ago, in the bar at the Mansion on Turtle Creek in Dallas, I got the chance to sing informal drunken backup, with my chef friend Tim Keating, on the LP’s title song, behind Steve Winwood himself.) The editor of Coast liked my piece enough that when he decided to leave his post a few months later, he offered me the job. I’d never edited anything outside of school, but I thought it sounded like fun, and the magazine’s publisher agreed to hire me away from Atlantic for the princely salary of twenty thousand dollars a year, which seemed like a fortune to me at the time. My first magazine job, then, was as an editor in chief.
I had great fun at Coast, even though the staff consisted of only a managing editor, a part-time art director, and a combination receptionist, fact checker, and copy editor. Our entire editorial budget was a thousand dollars per issue, to pay for every piece of text, every photograph, every illustration. Somehow we got pretty good stuff anyway. Coast was probably the first glossy magazine to publish Armistead Maupin, several years before he started writing “Tales of the City” for the San Francisco Chronicle. We ran stories by Lester Bangs, the Los Angeles Times media critic David Shaw, the English critic and novelist Sally Beauman, onetime Interview editor Glenn O’Brien, the author and journalist Sheila Weller. Our art director, a rangy North Carolinian named Don Owens, somehow seduced artists and illustrators like Ralph Steadman and Milton Glaser into working for us; Annie Leibovitz shot a cover for us. One of Don’s few failures was with Andrew Wyeth: I listened in on the phone one day, agog, as he tried in vain to talk the aging icon into painting a cover image for the exceptional price, to us, of $150; Wyeth, of course, said no, but in a manner that was not only polite but sounded genuinely regretful.
It was in the pages of the magazine, in October 1972, that I published my first piece on wine. It was called “Variety or Varietals? The Small Wines of Bordeaux,” and it made the case that, while California cabernets—there were no California merlots to speak of at the time—were well worth drinking for their quality and consistency, similarly priced minor Bordeaux offered “a far wider range of wine-drinking experiences.” Because I didn’t have much confidence in my abilities as a taster of wine at the time—this was shortly before Roy first invited me to Café Swiss—and had never tested my oenological observations in public discourse, I decided to publish under a pseudonym, then see how people reacted. As my surrogate, I invented a mysterious Frenchman (for who knew more about wine than the French?) named Gaston Pinard—pinard, literally “red ink,” is French slang for cheap red wine—whom I identified as the author of a made-up book I dubbed Le Vin, la vanité, et la vantardise (Wine, Vanity, and Bluster). This first wine article of mine appeared shortly before I met Roy, and when I had the chance, I asked him if he’d read it and, if so, what he thought of it. “Not bad,” he replied, which I had already figured out was, from Roy, a veritable encomium.
Another man who taught me at least some good lessons about wine—and also about spirits and, most notably, cigars—was William Anthony Furness, better known as the Viscount Furness, or simply Tony. Tony was the son of the British shipping magnate Marmaduke Furness and Thelma Morgan Furness, an American diplomat’s daughter and twin sister of the elder Gloria Vanderbilt (Tony was thus the uncle of Vanderbilt’s grandson Anderson Cooper, the TV journalist). My parents knew Thelma socially, and dined with her frequently, but though Tony had visited Beverly Hills off and on for years, somehow I’d never met him. Learning from my parents that I would be passing through London on one of my first trips to Europe, however, he wrote to invite me to dinner, preceded by cocktails at his club.
When I arrived to meet him, wearing my only suit—a badly wrinkled concrete-gray double-breasted Carnaby Street mock-Edwardian number with exaggerated lapels, hand-rolled cloth-covered buttons, and twin vents in back—I found Tony standing at the bar with rosy cheeks and a look of perfect calm on his face. He greeted me warmly, and either didn’t notice the sorry state of my attire or (more likely) was too polite to acknowledge it. “Now, what can we give you to drink?” he inquired. I ordered an Irish whiskey, probably not the thing to drink at a Tory watering hole. He didn’t grimace, but simply asked, “Have you ever tried single-malt scotch?” I hadn’t. My scotch-drinking experience at that point had been pretty much restricted to Cutty Sark on the rocks at the jazz clubs of central Los Angeles. He said something I didn’t quite understand to the bartender, and a little glass of twelve-year-old Glenlivet arrived, with no ice but moistened with a few drops of bottled water. I picked up the glass and brought it to my lips and encountered something smoky, tart, a bit woody, and thoroughly extraordinary. It was, as the French say, a coup de foudre—a lightning bolt—at first sip. (A few years later, Tony introduced
me to another great spirit: vintage rhum agricole from the French Caribbean—another lightning bolt.)
Tony was a sputtering, stuttering, corpulent man, beset (judging from the collection of pills he carried) by countless ills, but he was also a gentleman, generous and (when you could understand him, which sometimes took some doing) witty and knowledgeable on a wide range of subjects. He had, among other things, a particular interest in Mongolia (he founded the Anglo-Mongolian Society), and was a proud member of the modern-day Knights of Malta (he was devoutly Roman Catholic); he belonged to the politically influential Hansard Society; he enjoyed the theater, and had once produced plays; he imported wine for a time and had a serious cellar.
He also seemed to have an inexhaustible store of jokes, everything from arch anecdotes to rambling shaggy dog stories, which he’d tell at the slightest provocation. (“Do you know,” he once asked me rhetorically as we studied the cheese cart at some establishment or other, “the three stages of ripeness in a Brie?” “Unripe, medium, and ripe?” I asked tentatively. “Not exactly,” he replied. “Firm, runny, and ‘Quick, Mildred, it’s heading for the door!’ ”)
My Usual Table: A Life in Restaurants Page 12