potonthefire

by Pot On The Fire Free(Lit)

  At first glance, it might seem that attending tastings at a local wine store would serve this purpose, but these turned out to be of very little use to us. If only you could go into the store and select six or seven bottles of Sonoma County Cabernet Sauvignon that interest you, and then ask the wine merchant to open each of them for you to sample, and perhaps in the bargain have him say, “Well, if you’re drawn to these, there’s another you should try,” and go getthat bottle, too.

  Wine merchants might do this if customers like Matt and me bought our wine, as people did fifty years ago, by the multiple case. Today, however, we buy by the bottle, and on those rare occasions when we do buy a case, it is usually a mixed one, bought simply to get the 10 percent case discount. The wine merchant’s task, then, when we come in to buy one bottle, is to see that we leave with three or four—and wine tastings, like store newsletters and the tasting notes pasted about the shop, are geared to that end.

  The proprietor of a small and actually rather discriminating local wine store recently introduced a selection of inexpensive red wines by claiming that these were the pick of “literally thousands we’ve tasted during the past year.” Given the profit margin on a five- or six-dollar bottle of wine, the act of tastingthousands of such to find the eight most worth drinking suggests—does it not?—that the place must be run solely for the benefaction of fellow wine lovers. So, when the bottles we purchase seem to bear no relationship to his tasting notes—“rich, lushly flavored … the bouquet mingles blackberries and herbs … the flavors have a rustic, earthy slant and velvety texture”—well, whose palate must be at fault?

  In truth, not necessarily ours. Like used-car salesmen or real-estate agents, wine merchants cannot magically change what they have at hand to match their customers’ desires, and so they must maneuver their customers into desiring—and purchasing—what they have. Why should they point us toward a wine that is so good that almost every other wine in the store will seem lackluster by comparison? Far better to encourage us to learn to like the moderately decent wines that fill their bins and about which they write such fulsome encomia.

  Still, if our wine merchant was not going to be our Monsieur Boirebien, who was? On these shores, only one sort of person—the wine writer—gets to replicate the experience of what elsewhere is that of the ordinary wine consumer. He or she gets to taste wine freely—by which I mean not only without paying but as a self-directed process meant to promote the education of a particular palate. It is the wine writer alone who is in a position to provide the rest of us with considered, knowledgeable, and honest evaluations.

  As I said, I resisted this conclusion. I hated the idea of appearing at the wine store with a copy ofBest Wines! Gold Medal Winners from the Leading Competitions Worldwide tucked under my arm. But Matt felt differently, and in her persistence had begun to select some very decent bottles. It was already obvious that ours would necessarily be not a real but a virtualnégociant —where else were we going to encounter him? Thus it was that we began to acquire the rudiments of a wine library.

  As I dipped into these books, however, I soon discovered that a number of wine writers seem to have confused unlimited access to wine with some sort of inherent superiority over the rest of us. They’ve set themselves up as wine explainers in the way that—years ago—those with a college education, when such was a privilege limited to the wealthy few, used their “higher” education to become a now extinct breed of popular explainer (of opera, poetry, classical music, the Great Books of Western Civilization).

  Take, for instance, Matt Kramer’s highly recommended series of books on “making sense” of the wines of Burgundy, Bordeaux, California, et cetera. I’m sure these books do that, as well as provide pleasant reading for those searching for some sort of contact with the vineyards that produce their favorite wines. But how do we separate the fantasy of visiting these places from the fantasy of being Matt Kramer visiting these places?

  More important, how much do we want to confuse wine itself with wine as the subject of a book? Wine exists to be drunk, not read about, and we should be careful not to bury this simple purpose beneath more than we ever need to know about grape varieties, the history of various wine producers, or the life of thevigneron.

  The same is true for books that purport to teach us the “basics” of wine. The mouth learns by tasting, not listening—drink enough truly good wine and you’ll find you can connect the dots as easily as anyone. These books exist because good wine is so difficult for the beginner to get hold of, but they lack the necessary specificity to help find it. Better, then, to push such distractions aside and devote all our energy to the search for the elusive bottle.

  Here, books likeParker’s Wine Buyer’s Guide andThe Connoisseur’s Guide to California Wine —which provide ratings of specific wines—can be of real help, since they offer succinct descriptions of the style that a particular wine maker strives to achieve (powerfully rich and intense, say, versus smooth and well balanced) and an objective judgment as to how well, year by year, this vision has been realized.

  Disappointingly, though, the actual ratings turned out to be of surprisingly little use. By the time these books reach the bookstores, they are already out of date. What you find instead is the same wine but of a later vintage than the one in the book. Because your appetite is already whetted by the description of that wine, you buy this one instead—and find it not nearly as good. It is the rare wine maker who charges ten or so dollars for a wine that is dependably excellent, year after year—and then produces enough of it to reach your local wine store.

  The problem of availability plagues the recommendations in wine magazines as well. Their ratings are current enough, but—because their imperative is to keep turning up undiscovered “finds”—their top ratings are often given to wines produced in hundreds, sometimes dozens (rather than thousands) of cases, which means that the chances of finding any are very slim indeed.4In the end, these ratings do little more than provide a gloss to their real purpose, which—like any other life-style publication—is to encourage their readers to spend money … on wine, yes, but also on official wine-tasting glasses, thermostatically controlled wine-storage systems, ingeniously devised wine racks, posters of grape varieties, tours of the California wine country. And this is as it should be, because most wine drinkers, even serious ones, prefer the sweetness of wine myth to the dryness of wine truth.

  All this time Matt and I were slowly learning what I have come to believe is the single most important lesson about buying wine:there is nowhere near enough good wine to go around. It is a lesson that I have never seen spelled out in a beginner’s guide; indeed, almost everything in the world of wine writing seems to conspire against our learning it at all.

  This became almost painfully obvious to us when we came across a little wine publication uniquely tailored to our needs: theQuarterly Pocket List of Top-Rated Wines for $15 or Less. Its editor, John L. Vankat, searches through the latest issues of selected wine publications (The Wine Advocate, Smart Wine, The Wine Spectator,and so on), selecting only bottles in the stated price range that have received a rating of B+ or higher, arranges them by grape varietal, and prints them up in an easily consulted, thirty-six-page-long, pocket-sized publication—and he gets this out to his subscribers before those wines have vanished from the shelves.5

  At the time our first issue arrived, we were buying our wine at three places: two specialty shops and a giant supermarket. This last devoted one side of a whole aisle to it, more than two-thirds of which—several hundred bottles—were at least one cut above jug wine and many of which were several cuts above it. Even so, there were fewer than adozen bottles in the entire aisle that our guide rated at B+ or better. Since these were spread among the varietals, there were few of each (sometimes just one) to choose from. Only four bottles in the whole aisle received an A-, and just one received an A: a 1993 Chateau Ste. Michelle Cabernet Sauvignon. (Veryfew wines are rated A+ in theQuarterly Pocket List, and we have yet
to come across one.)

  The more carefully selected collections at the specialty stores did a little better—we found some particularly good wines there, including a memorable Benziger 1994 Cabernet—but notthat much better. Over time, this has proven to be a depressing rule of thumb: no matter how large or carefully chosen a store’s selection, you can count on one hand the wines of any particular varietal—Sauvignon Blanc, Zinfandel, Pinot Noir—priced at fifteen dollars or less that have been rated B+ or better.

  To understand the full import of this, you also have to realize that we’ve found most wines rated B+ to be not—as that rating is supposed to indicate—“very good” but something more like “moderately pleasing” or “hey, not bad.” The wines that actually tastevery good have almost always received at least an A- rating, or, according to one estimate, about1 percent of all available wines.

  When you think about it, this makes complete sense. If good wine were commonly available, very few bottles would be priced over twenty dollars, and wine drinkers would be as unsnobby and democratic a lot as beer drinkers—as they mostly still are in places where good wine can be taken for granted. Underlying any serious interest in wine is a gnawing awareness of scarcity, which can transform a wine collector into a vinous miser, with a cellarful of bottles that have become too good, too valuable, to drink.

  Scarcity, indeed, is the subtext of the wine business in all its aspects, which is why it celebrates the pleasure of drinking wine while at the same time subtly keeping us from seeking out the few bottles that are truly good. This can be most clearly seen in the comically conflicted attitude that many wine stores have toward wine ratings. Even the most respectable stores seem to have no inhibitions about milking the consumer’s response to positive ratings by such deceptive practices as leaving old ratings over bottles of a newer vintage, creating fake reviews by enclosing unattributed comments in quotation marks, and—as on video boxes—unabashedly flaunting a good rating no matter how lowly its source … all this to give the impression that about half their stock has received outside—hence, objective—acclaim.

  This means that these stores believe that wine ratings are a good thing, right? On the contrary. As the wine manager of a highly regarded local wine store (whose wine racks glitter with fluorescent-colored rating notes) sanctimoniously stated in a recent newsletter, “We have always thought poorly of numerical ratings, used by ineffectual writers to create a false shorthand for customers in a hurry.”

  I beg to differ. The wholepoint of wine ratings is to help us to judge a bottle without tasting it ourselves. And it is at best disingenuous to criticize the practice by pointing an accusing finger at the wine writer and the consumer, when it is the wine trade that gives us no choice but to buy first and sample later, often on the strength of their own spurious or misleading recommendations.

  Furthermore, it’s worth asking whether numerical ratings are as reductive as critics often claim. If a friend tells us a thriller she has just read is terrific, we don’t demand an entire book report to justify that claim. In the same way, the bottom line for the wine drinker is not whether a wine has nuances of cherry blossom and tobacco but how much it has to offer in comparison to the bottles in the racks on either side of it—information that can be clearly and unambiguously conveyed by a simple number.6

  Needless to say, wines with the same rating don’t taste equally good (Malbec, for instance, is a varietal that tastes rather like ink; a highly rated one tastes like delicious ink); nor do these ratings protect you from the occasional unpleasant encounter. Some publications overrate wines (especially those that sell the wines they rate), and all who rate wines have their biases (like Robert Parker’s notorious weakness for “big”—“gobs of fruit”—wines). But it has almost always been our experience that even when we don’t care for a highly rated wine, we find drinking it instructive rather than baffling; we can see why others may like it, even if we do not. And the more rigorously we restrict our purchases to such highly rated bottles, the more we find true delight in what we drink.

  The sort of deep-seated ignorance that is the subject of this essay does most of its damage by encouraging us to indulge in such venial flaws as envy, cynicism, self-pity, even—paradoxically, pathetically—self-congratulation. These character flaws regularly infect my system, along with what may be the worst of them all: the perennial hope that the condition that has tormented me for so long has somehow finally gone away. I know this, and so it has occurred to me that my obsession with finding the best possible bottles of wine might be more a symptom of my ignorance than part of its cure.

  Wouldn’t a real wine lover be more willing to take each bottle as it comes, to find its flaws as interesting, revealing, and ultimately almost as enjoyable as its virtues? If I believe—as I do—that a man interested only in beautiful women is not really much interested in women themselves, then, by analogy at least, this belief should reveal something telling about my relationship to wine. And, on reflection, I think it does.

  The truth—and this is something that many readers may already suspect—is that I don’t much like wine. What I like—and sometimes very much like—are a fewgood wines. When I take a sip from a glass of, say, Rabbit Ridge Zinfandel or Marietta Old Vine Red, I find the experience one of concentrated, complex voluptuousness. But because love of the grape is part of neither my patrimony nor my body’s chemistry—my palate, which adores the salty and greasy, has always had a problem with the sweet and sour—ithas to be about that good before I want to drink it at all.

  One important aspect of wine that one often looks for in vain in the higher reaches of wine writing is that it is a potently alcoholic beverage (it has twice the alcohol of beer) and that this is the fundamental reason why people drink it. If it were just grape juice—no matter the location of the vineyard or the spectacularity of the growing season—there would hardly be any interest in it at all. To rephrase a remark of Bertold Brecht’s: first the buzz, then theterroir.

  And the buzz is something that I don’t really care about. I am already anxious and fuddled by nature; inebriation only makes that worse. My taste in narcotics leans toward those that leave me mentally sharp and emotionally calm—famously nicotine (I smoked furiously for about twenty-five years), but also caffeine. My image of mind and body at absolute sensual ease is not a snifter of cognac after an elegant dinner but a cigarette and a second mug of coffee after a good breakfast.

  So, if I’m offered some coffee and then told it will be made from a year-old jar of instant, I groan inwardly but still say “Okay.” For me, bad coffee is better than no coffee, and that makes me, pure and simple, a coffee lover. In the same way, a true wine lover drinks Gallo Hearty Burgundy if that’s what it takes to ensure a glass or two with every meal. Not me. I’d rather have a glass of water.

  All this is probably enough to guarantee that my relationship to wine will remain problematic, but there’s something else that guarantees it—my inability to establish true feelings of connection to a place.

  I have visited only one vineyard in my entire life—in New York State, yet—but it made an impression, since the memory of it remains clear even after twenty years. The day was a lovely sunny one in late September. The winery was situated at the top of a hill. Row after row of grapevines flowed down its side, with grape harvesters trudging back up, the baskets strapped to their backs heaped to overflowing with fresh-picked bunches of green grapes. Each basket was emptied into a large open hopper cart that stood in the winery’s courtyard. The air was full of the buzzing of yellow jackets and a deliciously tart yet syrupy aroma of crushed fruit.

  The winery itself was housed in an enormous barn, and tastings were offered on the lower level in a large and open room with a cement floor and walls of rough-hewn granite blocks. Crates of wine were stacked helter-skelter; under the one window was a massive, grape-stained wooden table littered with half-empty bottles and used paper cups. The vintner, also huge and grape-stained, stood behind it, sipping his own
wine and chatting to some customers who had driven from Manhattan for the afternoon.

  I slunk up as inconspicuously as I could to try some and, as usual, found myself stumped: to my mouth, the stuff was simply awful. Suddenly, I felt the eye of the vintner upon me and reluctantly turned in his direction.

  “So, what do you think?” he asked.

  “Very interesting,” I stammered, and, picking up a single bottle, added, “I guess I’ll take this.” Meanwhile, the New Yorkers were loading case after case into the trunk of their black Cadillac Seville.

  At the time, I thought them dupes, too much wanting to boast of their “own little vineyard” to actually taste what it produced. However, at this point in my voyage of wine discovery, I think differently. The connection those visitors felt to that vineyard might have been tenuous, but that doesn’t make it laughable—as anyone who has ever spent a week in Paris can attest to. One trip there may not make you Parisian, but it gives you more of a handhold on the place than a lifetime of book reading ever could.

  That vineyard wasn’t Paris, of course, but it was about the only one that was a pleasant afternoon’s drive from New York City. That made it local enough, and what is local can be as legitimately, if differently, good as that which possesses objective distinction (although it’s especially nice when the two converge). Otherwise, most of us would be unable to feel any loyalty to our own high school but would wearANDOVER orBOSTON LATIN sweatshirts instead.

  When it comes to wine, what makes “local” delicious is only partly a matter of flavor. This kind of deliciousness is based (as already noted) on familiarity—which is itself a concatenation of a complex and diffuse range of experiences. The production of wine is rife with particularly evocative experiences, which is one reason why exploring wine country can be so much fun. But a visit offers nothing compared to the presence of a local vineyard. Then you get to know the vintner, see the vineyards in the first flush of springtime green, earn spending money as a teenager helping with the harvest, join the party when that year’s wine is pronounced ready to drink.