Tender at the Bone

by Ruth Reichl

  Then there was no more to be tasted and we simply shook hands all around and left. Is this how it’s done? I wondered. It was all so polite. When do they get down to business?

  “Were the wines good?” I asked Kermit as we drove through the vineyards in the fading autumn light.

  “Very good,” he said. “The duke respects them and leaves them alone. The trouble with Americans is that they keep saying Burgundies are too thin. They like strong wines. To please them the wine makers simply add sugar. It is called chaptalization and it makes the wine more alcoholic.”

  He pointed toward the stubby grapevines climbing up the slopes of gently rolling hills. “Look,” he said, “you can see the difference between the grand cru vineyards and the rest.” He was pointing to the place where the mountains just begin to rise, the place right in the middle. “Those are the great grapes,” he said. It was all much smaller than I had expected.

  As we drove, the night came on, black and clear. By the time we stopped for dinner the air was so crisp it shimmered. I got out of the car and inhaled deeply; I could smell the cold. I listened to the gurgling of a nearby brook. We took three steps down the gravel driveway and behind us the car disappeared into the darkness. Kermit took my hand as we groped toward the restaurant. Then the door swung open and the sound of laughter rushed out at us. It was warm inside, and a fire crackled in the grate. We were in the middle of nowhere; the dining room was packed.

  We ordered a warm terrine of duck and a mousse of pike and Kermit studied the wine list for a long time. Finally he put down the list and said something to the waiter. “I’ve ordered a Crépy I’ve never tasted before,” he said.

  “Always working,” I teased. He didn’t smile.

  “God, this is good,” he said when he tasted the wine. I liked it too; it was crisp, with a faint bitterness. Kermit began to mumble to himself and I could see that he was doing some quick calculations. Watching him I thought how unlike a wine merchant he looked, with his curly hair and scruffy beard. But he was all business.

  “The restaurant sells this for thirty-four francs,” he mused. “That means they pay about eight.” He stopped for a minute, calculated again, and said, “Great! I could sell it for eight dollars a bottle. It almost makes the day worthwhile.”

  “But what about the duke’s wines?” I asked.

  “Oh,” he said offhandedly, “I’m not going to buy them this year.”

  “I thought you loved them,” I cried.

  “I do,” he snapped, “but do you know how much he wants for them? Thirteen dollars a bottle for the Puligny. That’s before shipping, insurance, duties, tax. I like to sell affordable wines. Like this.” He took another satisfied sip of the Crépy.

  Then he relented and added, “Besides, I found a better deal yesterday. You’ll see: I’m taking a bottle of Ampeau’s wine to the man we will visit tomorrow, Monsieur de Montille. I removed the label. I want to see what he really thinks.”

  Monsieur de Montille swirled the wine and watched how it moved. He held it up to the light. He stuck his generous nose into the glass and inhaled the fragrance. He took a sip. He considered. A solid man with a smooth, bald pate and the shrewd look of the lawyer that he was, he threw back his head as he tasted the wine, letting it linger in his throat. From the walls of his dining room, which looked as if it had not changed in centuries, his ancestors looked indulgently down.

  “There is sunlight in the glass,” he said finally, “much sunlight. It is from a very good year.” He took another sip, nodded, turned to his wife. They conferred. Not a ’69, surely, it was not that old. A ’71 then, they were agreed. “Such glycerine,” said Monsieur, “what can it be?”

  When Kermit told him what it was de Montille cried, “But I have this wine in my cellar!” He turned eagerly to Kermit and asked, “Did Ampeau sell to you?”

  Kermit nodded smugly.

  “Consider yourself honored,” he said, “and don’t count on it happening again. He has whims.” Kermit looked glum.

  “Don’t take it personally,” put in Madame de Montille gently. “He is the strangest man. They say that even when he goes to mass he runs in putting on his clothes. And as he leaves the church he is already undressing so as not to lose time. He is devoted to the vines.”

  Kermit was eager to get down to business, but in Burgundy the meal always comes first. This one had been created to show off the wines. It began unexceptionably with a modest Passetoutgrains and a salad laced with herbs and rich with garlic.

  Then there was civet de lièvre. “The specialty of the region,” said Madame proudly as her husband went around the table pouring out a ’64 Rugiens. He sipped the wine and nodded with satisfaction.

  The less hardy ’66 Rugiens was served with cheese made by neighbors. And then, finally, Monsieur de Montille brought out a mold-encrusted bottle of ’57 Volnay to serve with the tarte aux pommes. I took a sip and it danced in my mouth. It was alive with flavor, like no wine I had ever tasted. I looked around to see if everyone liked it as much as I did. Monsieur de Montille looked happy; even Kermit looked impressed. Then Monsieur de Montille took a second sip and his smile faded. “Too bad,” he said softly.

  I took another sip. The dance had stopped. “C’est mort,” said Monsieur de Montille with finality.

  Lunch over, we descended into the cellar. It was a low-ceilinged room filled with casks; the bare bulbs cast a dim golden light. We tasted the Passetoutgrains, the Volnay, the simple burgundies. Monsieur de Montille shook his head. “We made a mistake this year,” he said sadly. “We made too much. It was a very big harvest. The wine is fine, it will be very correct, very comme il faut, but …” As we moved to the ’78s he nodded appreciatively and said, almost to himself, “This is a wine with character. The ’79s will never be like the ’78s.”

  “I wish there were more like de Montille,” said Kermit as we drove to the next appointment, “it’s just so hard to find honest wines nowadays. But I keep trying.” We drove through vineyards that ran right up to the edges of old stone villages. Fancy new cars careened crazily through streets far too narrow to contain them. It was the same in village after village and then we were in Rully, following the signs up to the church, twisting and turning to the top of the town. The bells were ringing when we got there, the sound bouncing back and forth between the old stone buildings.

  “I have a bargain with the priest,” said the courtly old gentleman who came out to greet us. He had pink cheeks and silver hair. “Sometimes when I have guests I ask him not to ring the bells. I was born here and the sound is good to me. But some people do not like them. Come, let us taste the wine.”

  Monsieur Monassier was walking as he talked, leading us out of his house, through a courtyard, and down, down into the hill into which his cellars were dug. “The ’79s are not very pleasant right now. Some of them are going through their malolactic fermentation.” He removed the bung from one of the barrels and stuck a long glass pipe into the wine. It was cloudy and even I could tell that it tasted terrible. We sniffed, swirled, gurgled air through our teeth and spit the wine onto the cement floor. Then we poured what was left in our glasses back into the barrel and moved on to the next. This wine was light, fruity, lovely. Monsieur Monassier shook his head. “It’s the same vineyard,” he said. “I wish I knew why this happened.”

  We worked our way through the clean cement cellar, tasting the wine from each vineyard. “Now we will go upstairs and taste some older wine,” he said, leading us into the warmth of an ancient room filled with heavy wooden furniture. In the center sat a thickly carved table holding a bottle and glasses and accompanied by a tray full of cheese, sliced sausages, and fat chunks of crusty bread.

  The business began delicately. By the time we had reached the ’71s the spit bucket was no longer in use and Monsieur Monassier was saying sadly that it was too bad that wine had to be sold before its time. “Most wine makers,” he said, “can’t afford to keep the wine until it is ready to drink. My own problem is
different. I can permit myself not to sell the wine until it is ready, but I have too soft a heart. When somebody I like asks me for the wine, I cannot say no.”

  Kermit permitted himself to think that Monsieur liked him well enough, perhaps to sell him some wine. Alas! Monsieur had the unhappiness to tell him that all his wine was in 73-milliliter bottles.

  “Does not the new American law require 75?”

  It does.

  “I am so sorry, but you cannot expect all of France to change their bottles at some whim of the American government.”

  “Damn!” said Kermit as we drove down the hill.

  “Was that a wasted afternoon?” I asked sleepily, feeling full of wine and sunshine and sausage.

  “Oh no,” said Kermit. “I’ve made the contact and I’ll come back next year when he’s used up his supply of bottles and bought some I can import. But I’d feel better if I were able to buy it now.” He looked more cheerful as he added, “At least I know that won’t happen at the next place. We are going to St. Valerin to see Monsieur Vachet. I’ve been buying his Montagny for a long time. You’ll like him, I think. Around here they say that Vachet is just like his wines: austere at first but friendly at the finish.”

  We were in flat land, so we could see the house in the middle of the vineyards long before we reached it. And they could watch us coming. When we got there, Monsieur Vachet, a small spare man with fingers gnarled like grapevines, was standing in front of the house waiting for us.

  There were no pleasantries. “We’ll taste the wine now,” he said, leading us into a small old cellar filled with vast concrete tanks.

  “Where are the barrels?” I asked.

  “I don’t have any,” he replied, climbing up a ladder propped against a cement vat. “I believe that wine should taste like wine, not wood.” We tasted down the row of tanks, slowly working our way to the door. “It will be good,” he said, more to himself than to us.

  “Do you want to taste how the wine you bought last time is now?” he asked Kermit, indicating a neat pile of green bottles glistening dimly along one wall. Kermit nodded. Monsieur Vachet held out a glass. “This is the one you bought,” he said. He handed him another. “I like the other wine better.”

  The two wines tasted exactly the same to me. But the experts did not agree. Kermit swirled and sniffed and nodded to himself. “I was right,” he said firmly. “This one has more depth. How much do you have left of this lot?”

  “About a hundred cases.”

  “I want them,” said Kermit.

  The fog rolled in the next day, a soft mist that obscured everything. Kermit cursed softly; we were going to Beaujolais and it was a long drive.

  Monsieur and Madame Trenel were waiting, their faces painted with huge smiles. “You must have bought a lot last year,” I said as we got out of the car.

  “I did,” said Kermit.

  “Are you going to buy a lot this year?”

  “That depends on the wine.” There were no formalities; the Beaujolais nouveau was waiting and Kermit took a sip. His mouth went down. Madame Trenel twisted her hands anxiously as Monieur Trenel went to fetch another bottle. He opened it, poured, and they both peered at Kermit’s face. It was eloquent: he looked as if he had tasted something foul. “It is too round,” he said finally. And then he asked to use the restroom.

  I sat there with the Trenels, profoundly uncomfortable; I didn’t know where to look.

  “He doesn’t like it,” Madame Trenel hissed at her husband. “He said twelve point eight degrees alcohol was too much. I don’t think he’s going to buy.”

  “Yes, yes, he will,” he soothed. “He bought a few hundred cases last year. Where will he find better?”

  Madame Trenel turned to me. “We are not young,” she said. “It is a hard business. We have been at it thirty years.”

  When Kermit returned she scanned his face but the signs were not optimistic. Kermit looked decidedly unhappy. “I’ll take twenty cases,” he said finally. A sad silence descended on the room.

  Outside it was even foggier than before, and as we twisted down the narrow roads Kermit put a blues cassette on his tape deck and cursed the weather.

  “They were upset,” I ventured.

  “Good!” he said vehemently. “Twelve point eight degrees! That’s outrageous. Beaujolais nouveau should be low in alcohol. They’re putting in too much sugar; they don’t have to do that.”

  “But couldn’t you sell it?”

  “Of course I could,” he said. “It’s the best Beaujolais I’ve found. But if I take a stand this year maybe next year they won’t chaptalize it so much.” He seemed really angry. “Do you think I’m trying not to find wine? I was counting on that one. But I can’t assume the wines will be the same from year to year. And if I start importing wines I don’t respect, I might as well go into another business.”

  Kermit slowed the car and turned so he was looking at me. “Don’t you see?” he said, as if I had missed the whole point. “That’s why I have to keep making these damn trips. I have to keep tasting.”

  THE BRIDGE

  “When are you going to do something worthwhile with your life?”

  I had a respectable job. I was making real money. Every month my name appeared in print. I was even starting to write food articles for magazines in New York. Did this impress my parents? Not in the least. “Food!” said my mother disdainfully. “All you do is write about food.”

  I tried to get her voice out of my head, but it was always there. The more other people approved of my work, the louder my mother’s voice became. “You’re wasting your life,” she mocked.

  Then the panic attacks returned. One day, driving to lunch, I suddenly stopped breathing in the middle of the Bay Bridge. I was so ashamed and embarrassed I did not tell anyone, not even Doug. But I started finding excuses to use public transportation or tricked other people into driving.

  “Why this?” I asked myself. “Why now?” I didn’t have any answers.

  My fear of driving became so intense that when I was invited to a party honoring James Beard I almost didn’t go: it was in San Francisco and Doug wasn’t invited. In the end I decided that was stupid; the party was on Russian Hill, an easy bus ride.

  But when I got there I was sorry. I stood in the corner of a magnificent house looking at the view up Lombard Street, the crooked one, and thinking that I was wearing the wrong clothes. I was by far the youngest person at the party. Out of sheer nervous shyness I ate too many deviled eggs and wondered how soon I could politely leave.

  Everyone there knew “Jim” and they swarmed obsequiously around his massive figure. I watched from a distance, entertaining myself by writing a bitter little piece about the party in my head. Then a small man with glasses reached past me for a deviled egg, turned and said, “Hello.”

  He was very short, with thick glasses and a bookish air. His clipped British voice made him sound like a pretentious American who had once gone to Oxford. I thought he was probably a professor, although what he was doing in this gathering of foodies I couldn’t imagine. When he introduced himself I was so busy thinking all these things that I didn’t catch his name. Too awkward to ask him to repeat it, I asked the obvious question: “And what do you do?”

  “I work for a milk company,” he replied.

  I was first surprised and then pleased. Clearly he was not one of the great man’s famous friends. I relaxed and chatted with him, happy not to be a wallflower anymore. When he said, “Let me get you a glass of wine,” I revised the nasty little piece. Maybe the food mafia wasn’t as bad as everybody said.

  He returned with two glasses of wine and a towering woman; they looked like Mutt and Jeff. With her turquoise eyes and silvery blonde hair pulled back in a low ponytail she was absolutely the most beautiful older person I had ever seen. I guessed her at about sixty.

  “Hello, hon,” she said, taking my hand in a firm handshake.

  “This is Marion Cunningham,” said the man, “I thought yo
u should meet.” He handed me a glass and moved off.

  The tall blonde began asking questions in such an easy, interested way that it took me a while to realize that she had found out everything about me in ten intense minutes. Finally she said, “You must meet James.” Grabbing my hand, she barreled forward. The crowd parted and suddenly he was sitting in front of me in all his glory. I tried desperately to think of something to say to this famous person. I tried to remember the names of books he had written or some well-known recipe he had created. Suddenly the words “tomato pie” came to me.

  “My husband just loves the tomato and mayonnaise pie in your American cookbook,” I offered. “We eat it all the time.”

  He swept me with a contemptuous gaze. “Do you?” he said. He seemed utterly bored. I fished around for something else to say. He did not seem to feel the same compunction to keep the conversation going, and I felt like a fly buzzing around a fat Buddha. He waved his hands with irritation and I subsided. He sat. I stood. Finally I thought to ask, “Can I get you something to eat?” and he replied that he could do with a few of those deviled eggs. By the time I returned with the plate a new crowd had moved in, so I could hand it to him and melt back into the party.

  “He is much nicer to boys,” said Marion sympathetically when she found me. “I should have stayed with you.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I preferred the milkman.”

  Marion looked blank. “Milkman?” she asked.

  “You know,” I said, “the man who introduced us.” Marion put her head back and laughed, a deep sound of pure glee. I watched, thinking that I had never heard anyone laugh with less malice; it didn’t make me uncomfortable or embarrassed and I waited for her to let me in on the joke. “He must have told you that to put you at ease. That’s Gerald Asher.”