KPB
Posts: 4654
Joined: 11/25/2012
From: Ithaca, New York
Status: offline
|
(18 using CT, 12 years on the discussion board). I like the project!
So, my wine story started at age 12. My parents had a sabbatical and opted to spend it in Paris, where 12 year old kids routinely get a sip of wine. My dad discovered his love for wine then… this was 1967 and 1968. So he would come home with something new to try from the ancient cellars of Maison Besse near the physics building at Paris IV. Sometimes student protests delayed his commute home… but those bottles were worth trying! They somehow paired with whatever the vendors at the market had talked my mom into cooking for dinner, complete with recipes and special tips. Of course that was 1967. These days, I mostly do the cooking…
They sent 12-year old me to a summer camp for working class French kids, and I found myself in the Alps a few summers in a row, spelunking, sailing and rock climbing based at St Étienne en Devouley, very high altitude near a ski area. A genuinely stunning place, physically tough, starting with the regional style of hole in the floor WCs. After a day of physical activity, the thirty or forty exhausted French (plus one American) kids drank wine with dinner and slept well (those who disliked rough red wines were permitted weak beer, but accompanied by comments about beer being the road to ruin). We even hauled wine deep into the caves we explored, with baguettes, cheese, chocolate..
So, I was hooked. By graduate school, in Berkeley, I had a favorite wine store and would taste through dozens of Napa and Sonoma reds and Sta Rita whites on the afternoons they were pouring. I met my wife there, while she was on a visiting exchange program from EPFL. Her family was Belgian, French and Swiss, so naturally they had cellars deep in bottles (often self bottled from casks they would buy and then share among two or three families). She told me that she was impressed when I grilled rabbit in mustard on a hibachi for her on our first date and fussed over which white wine to open, considering that the actual plan was to do homework together from some graduate course (and we did do that homework, in fact). Over in Europe, there was quickly approval that Anne had found a suitable guy, and I became the family sommelier.
We lived in Europe for a while, but eventually moved here to the northeast. Along the way both of us burned out our taste for three-star Michelin dinners, but I never lost my fascination with wine, which has been a constant of family life there and here now for forty-five years. More, really, starting back in 1967. But we now aim for two fork-and-knife places when guided by Michelin.
Meeting the folks who make wine has been fascinating for me, and while I don’t do wine tourism, I have shaken the hands of a few dozen absolutely amazing talents in the wine world and spent incredible mornings or afternoons with them. Jacques Reynaud (Rayas), Henri Bonneau, Laurence Feraud (Pegau), Robert Arnoux, Cory Empting, Ketan Mody, Peter Rosback…. a list that just goes on and on. By now half the bottles in my cellar have a tasting story or connection to one.
I can share a few examples. We were in Beaune, on holiday, and it turned out the restaurant / hotel owner was a friend of Robert Arnoux. So I go to taste with him, a big bull of a man, who said it was an ideal time to taste barrels ready for bottling…. and he did not spit. He allowed me to spit, but with a bit of skepticism. We must have tasted from thirty barrels. This went well, so then he starts pulling corks on high-end bottles! His 1988 Romanée Saint Vivant was otherworldly. But even with all the spitting, I drove maybe 500m, realized I needed to pull over, then dozed for two hours before driving back. He died a few months later…
Rayas is a place that is not at all welcoming to wine tasting visitors. They used to greet passersby with a shotgun full of rock salt and a dog who was quite good at faking rabies (but friendly if you were property introduced). But somehow I charmed the sister of the winemaker, Jacques Reynaud. Visiting there involved sitting around for hours in hot sun waiting, then being interviewed at length on family, religion, work, politics. But Reynaud was amazing, his wines were surreal, and I’ve purchased Rayas ever since. He, at least, poured tiny tastes and did not at all object to spitting, although you did have to aim for a bucket while standing and not spattering your shoes and pants.
Tasting at Bonneau was even harder to arrange, and I actually gave up. But then after years of this, his commercial partner suddenly invited me to join a small group, first visitors apparently in two years. What a fascinating guy Henri was! His cellars were Roman catacombs with plywood over the holes that used to have ladders for getting from level to level. His barrels were concrete on the inside (tartaric acid crystals) but spongy on the outside (century old wood…). And his wines would stay in those barrels so long that they seemed madierized yet, later in the bottle, would deoxidize and turn out to be totally amazing and unique.
I used to buy a few cases of vacation holiday wines when we would gather for annual summer get togethers near Avignon, Gigondas, etc. Family tradition… so, I would drive up to Tavel for Mordorée rose, be greeted like a local regular, and then head 15m east to CDP. I tasted so many times at Pegau and Marcoux that I knew those places inside out. In fact once when Laurence had to leave and while Paul was boxing my selection, this kid wandered in but didn’t speak French. So I did the tour. He turned out to be Cory Empting, and had just become the new winemaker at Harlan and Bond and Promentory (although back then Bond was still a concept and Promentory was not yet even at that stage). Paul pulled samples, I translated back and forth, and the level of questions got more and more technical… seriously technical. Eventually Paul asks whether Cory was a student studying wine (he was pretty young, and in fact it turned out that he had literally just graduated at UC Davis... he was so talented that a summer internship at Harlan simply turned into their next winemaker when Bob Levy retired). Paul was flabbergasted to realize that Cory had one of America’s top two or three winemaking roles. His advice: Cory was ordered to find an old timer for advice for the first decade or so. He said that at Pegau, Laurence ran every decision past him, and that this was as it should be.
Tasting at Harlan and Bond and Promentory over the subsequent years connected me to a network of winemakers who had interned for Cory, all making wines I actually really like in Napa, where I had basically stopped buying out after the valley was taken over by a Parker-driven wave of sweet, heavy, ripe, hot stuff. But Cory and this crowd make wines that are much leaner and more site-specific, with focused inner palates and distinct stories to tell. Through Cory (or at least dropping his name) I met Françoise Peschon, Ketan Mody… a lunch with Ketan up at his Janud property is always going to be one of my top visits to any winery, anywhere. This spring I can finally taste a finished wine off that site, but just hanging out with him and his development partner Leaf, drinking Beta wines and walking the site, it was amazing. Every little section of the land had its terroir. Every vine had its own story.
Now I’m approaching 70, and the family has another generation of adults and spouses. These days, meals have grandchildren running around, and our "kids" are in their mid-30's and enjoying the wines on the table. And just as in the past, nobody ever drinks to excess, which would be very strongly disapproved and simply does not happen (well, it happened once back in the 1990’s, ending with a teenager somewhat new to wine falling into the swimming pool: let that be a lesson! That story is still told now and then). When we sit down as a group for lunch or dinner, there are always bottles on the table.
Tough habit to break now that I’ve decided to cut back, not in the sense of less alcohol but just the habitual pleasure of sipping and swirling something new and often amazing. For me it has been a part of life. Fortunately, by now the concept of a nondrinking designated driver is totally embraced, although the older generation (I mean the one prior to my generation) sometimes quietly scoffs at it. In their era the credo was something like: “a gentleman never drinks to excess, and a person who does not drink to excess is a safe driver.” That attitude used to be troublesome, decades ago. Glad to see it fade away.... and it also is making it easier to limit myself to one glass. If someone is pouring a bit heavily I can always plead that I have to drive and they usually don't push back on that.
Of course there are people in the family by now who prefer Belgian beers and there was a stage when people were sipping on a finger or two of single malt or cognac or calvados after dinner. Sometimes I still do. But that mentality of never allowing it to reach a point where you feel the alcohol is deeply ingrained.
These days, though, I find that my wine crowd here where we live is diminished. Many Americans seemingly can’t moderate themselves and drink until they burn out some vital organ, then have to do a hard stop. There is also a broad perception in the US that anyone who drinks wine... drinks way too much wine. And in fact by the charts, I suppose that I generally am a bit above the average. Yet there are all those warning signs around me. A few friends ended up having heart attacks, and then were put on medications that genuinely preclude alcohol. As for me, I worry about weight now, too. Too many relatives developed diabetes at my age (or earlier). I wish I could still bicycle like a lunatic, which is how I used to burn calories. But what worked at 40 gets less viable at nearly 70.
This has me cutting back, although I’m definitely not going to phase wine out. I’m currently thinking I’ll use Coravin to stretch a bottle for a week or two, and dedicate a section of the fridge for a few of those. That would let me cut down to a single glass with dinner, and perhaps a single dram of something interesting after dinner now and then. I might also take up the idea of dry days two or three times weekly.
But wine will remain a part of who I am. The stuff is just too darn good!
< Message edited by KPB -- 1/23/2024 11:06:34 AM >
_____________________________
Ken Birman
The Professor of Brettology
|
Printable Version
19 years on CT - 
New Messages
No New Messages
Hot Topic w/ New Messages
Hot Topic w/o New Messages
Locked w/ New Messages
Locked w/o New Messages
Post New Thread