Adventures on the Wine Route: A Wine Buyer's Tour of France (25th Anniversary Edition)

by Kermit Lynch

Père Loyau was born on August 26, 1896, nine decades ago. He is mystified that his son, who ran a tabac in Tours, retired before he has. Loyau is five foot four, wiry (I saw him lift two full cases of Vouvray at the same time), white-haired, and invariably appears in a dapper, tightly knotted necktie. His cave is indeed a cave in the hillside: chalk walls, dirt floor, stone-cold. Once I met another old fellow, an octogenarian, who had worked all his life under refrigeration in a meat-packing plant, and like Loyau he had a delicate, rosy, remarkably wrinkle-free complexion. Is the icy cave also responsible for Loyau’s incredible exuberance? Let us hope the wine of Vouvray contributed something, because we can all lay our hands on some of that.

Loyau is a man worth listening to. He speaks with the wisdom of nine decades. Unfortunately, repeating his words does not convey the wonderment and awe he expresses when he discusses just about anything. For René Loyau the real world is the most incredible thing one could possibly imagine. It is miraculous, mysterious, profound. He sometimes flashes a look of pure amazement, like a baby who has just discovered how to rattle a rattle. Beaming forth from the visage of a ninety-year-old, it is an unforgettable expression.

“When I think about it I don’t know how we started over again. We were completely ruined! Our hotel had eighty rooms, all furnished, plus the restaurant … But one has to go on. I had two sons in school. I had to hide them from the boches. They took my third son to Germany. We had to suffer ghastly horrors. My father had to be committed; he lost his mind. But my wife, she was extraordinary, very patriotic, very courageous. We survived. But, you know, all of that forms a man, it gives a man character. You have spirit, you resist, you fight, but you become more generous, nobler in a sense, because you have seen such misery. Truly, those were extraordinary times, educational, but alas, brutal.

I shall always remember that splendid fifteenth-century house with its magnificent furnishings. He had a bottle for us to taste, a sort of contest, you know, to guess the vintage. There were local négociants, winemakers, agents, enologists, mayors … Some said 1933, some 1928. The monsieur said, looking at me, ‘And you, you have not said anything.’ I told him that I had written my guess on a piece of paper and placed it in my hat so the others would not accuse me of copying them. I took off my hat and gave him the piece of paper. ‘You are right,’ he said. ‘No one else guessed it correctly. It is a Bourgueil 1906.’ I went on to tell him that the taste reminded me of a wine I once bought three vintages in a row from a Monsieur Landry, from a little parcel of vines behind a church called Le Coudreau. He was astonished because his 1906 had been purchased by his father from the father of that same Monsieur Landry!” How had he identified its origin so precisely?

The modern style was already in bottle because modern methods allow one to coerce a wine to do quickly what takes months if the wine is left to its natural inclinations. It tasted bland and innocuous. It smelled of cardboard because it had been filtered through sheets of cardboard. Wine is incredibly impressionable. It is influenced by the most subtle details, from the soil in which the vines grow to a neighbor’s black-currant patch. Squeezed through the sterile pads, the poor wine expressed sterility and cardboard. Then we began tasting, from barrel to barrel, cuvées from the same vintage that had been vinified following a tradition developed over many centuries. There was one big oval cask, called a demi-muid, that was ravishing. Here it is, I thought. This is why I drink wine, this why I put up with jet lag and cold hotel rooms. There was every reason to express my enthusiasm for the wine. They agreed sadly. Of course it tasted better.

As a Bordeaux proprietor, you do not even need a good winemaker, although having one might mean a few extra centimes per bottle when the day’s price quotes appear. You need only have been included in the classification of 1855, 130-some years ago. Your vineyard might now be ten times larger than it was in 1855, your production per acre five times larger, your grape varieties blended in different proportions, your vinification new-fangled (but concealed behind a façade of varnished oak vats) … No matter. If your château’s name was included in the classification of 1855, you are on good terms with your banker. You may even be a banker. No, the image cast by Bordeaux is not one of pious monks breaking up rocks in quest of unappreciated perfection. Here the world’s currencies shower down like confetti.

And finally, I like to buy direct because it is the only way that I can control the physical condition of the wine from the moment it leaves the château cellars until my client walks out of the shop with it.

The 1945 was closer to black than brown in color, and it was undrinkably over the hill. Five hundred dollars had been paid for the bottle. The 1961 had only one foot in the grave. With those two older vintages, the problem was probably a combination of bad shipping and many years of bad storage. The same vintages tasted at Château Margaux are glorious. But the younger vintages, too, had all been cooked. Some were well done, some medium, but none tasted rare. Mistreatment had robbed them of nuance, rendering them practically uniform in aroma and flavor. After years tasting wines in the growers’ cellars, one learns to recognize the taste of a vibrant, healthy wine. None we tasted were in mint condition, none tasted as they do at Château Margaux, all had lost some luster, which is not Château Margaux’s fault unless one wants to reproach them for not taking the responsibility to insist that their pricey product travel at a proper temperature. I

After a taste of Beethoven, Chopin, and the Chevalier 1963 blanc, he served two of his old reds side by side. It was up to the guests to divine the vintages. One bottle had aged as one would wish oneself to age. It still had spirit and vigor. All its faculties were intact. The other wine belonged in a rest home, if not the morgue. Everyone came up with their guesses, and quite logically attributed to the healthy old bottle a great birth year like 1928 or 1929. Everyone guessed a different “off” year for the senile wine. Ricard then astonished his guests by revealing that both bottles were vintage 1928. The hale Chevalier had come out of the domaine’s cellar, the tired Chevalier he had purchased recently from the cellar of a Bordeaux négociant.

Jean Goutreau is a négociant who purchased a château in order to make his own wine. Strange that he of all people is one of those who are willing to sell to me directly, bypassing even his own négociant firm, but that is only one of the many things that set him apart from the norm at Bordeaux. He says things that one does not hear elsewhere. Speaking with his négociant hat on, he says, “If I offer a petit château at fifteen francs per bottle, everyone demands a sample. They must taste it before buying. But if it is a château at a hundred and fifty francs they will buy it without sampling. It is the label that counts.” When I arrived in early 1986 to taste Goutreau’s own wine, Château Sociando Mallet, the stampede to buy the 1985s had already begun. The wine journalists had provoked a buying frenzy. “Year of the century! Year of the comet!” I asked Goutreau whether the vintage honestly deserved the hoopla. “Look,” he said, rolling a little cigarillo from one side of his mouth to the other, “in 1982 the Bordelais produced more wine than they ever had. A record harvest. A bonanza. In 1983 more or less as much. In 1985 30 percent more! What do you expect? Sure, there are good wines, but don’t be surprised if many are a bit liquid, a bit diluted.” Such candor facing a potential buyer is typical of Jean Goutreau. When we were tasting his 1982, he remarked, “1982 is a very special vintage, the first time we have not chaptalized since 1961.” I began to worry for his safety. No one...

The proprietor of the Château de l’Hospital in the Graves district near Bordeaux has thick graying hair that likes to fall into her lively eyes. Her attire is fine and careless, an earthy-brown-flecked sweater, a charcoal-colored wool skirt, and worn leather loafers. She has class, she has character, she is a character. Closer to seventy than to sixty, she is what the French affectionately call la vieille France, the old France. Some people probably think she is a chatterbox, but I love her chatter.

One of her favorite subjects is fraudulent or badly vinified wine. “Near here,” she begins confidentially, pulling her hair away from her eyes, “there is a little winery, and what a traffic there is through it. C’est incroyable! There are wines from Corbières, Italy, Algeria, wines from all over, both reds and whites. Sometimes after an evening out I come home by that route, and my God, you should see the trucks lined up. Those wines leave that cellar with a Graves label—ça, c’est grave—or with other Bordeaux labels. One of these days there will be a scandal there, I’m sure.” Her shattered expression, her eyes wide open and incredulous, conveys the seriousness of such a dreadful deed, a sin perpetrated against earth, man, and the laws of the appellation contrôlée. “Incroyable,” she sings, falsetto.

She has the same pained attitude toward the large, commercially oriented châteaux, including some rather famous names. “It’s a factory,” she will declare, or, “He’s a good cook,” meaning the winemaker concocts his wine from a dubious recipe with who knows what in it. Then she shivers with horror as she recounts the winemaking practices of her neighbors. “Right now there are only three proprietors here in Portets, including myself, who analyze the sugar content of their grapes before they harvest. No one does it! They pick the grapes, and then en route. If it is raining, they pick anyway. If it rains the night away, they pick the next day, and no one worries about it. The great châteaux as well as the petits. Last September I weighed my must, which was at 13 degrees alcohol. To make a good wine, you don’t need more than 11 degrees. And someone said, ‘I hope you’ve added some water to it.’ What a horror. Add water to my wine? I don’t want to see frogs crawling out of my vats.” I believe that wine can reflect the personality of the m...

“I must say, I had a neighbor who was very kind, who came over to give me advice. He told me, ‘When the thermometer in the fermentation vat reaches 35 degrees [centigrade], you must rack the wine, transfer it to another vat, in order to cool it down.’ After dinner I toured the cellar. I checked the thermometer. I couldn’t believe it. I hurried back to the kitchen and told the pickers, ‘We absolutely must rack the wine.’ So we had some tea and worked through the night. We worked until five in the morning, and at eight we started again as if nothing had happened. It was a rough day, but in a way I was lucky because 1964 was an excellent vintage, relatively easy to make.” I have tasted her 1964 and it is as perfect a wine—aromatic, flavorful, and complete—as wine can be. It is not all that unusual for a first effort at vinification to provide results that might never be surpassed. My theory, another vague conjecture that cannot be proven, goes like this: The winemaker is nervous and lacks self-confidence. “There are the grapes—what do I do now?” So they stick to the book. They use the simplest, surest, most primitive techniques. They fuss over their wine as if it were their firstborn child. And then, voilà! something exceptional is bottled. So they decide that they are talented, gifted, and the next vintage they begin to intervene instead of allowing nature a chance to make the wine. I remember the words of California winemaker Joseph Swan, who told me that once you have good...

“They say I’m impossible. But they’re completely in the world of business. Business, business, business! They’re bachelors, both looking for an extraordinary woman. Me, I always tell them: no one is extraordinary, and even if you have a mistress who is, the day you marry her she won’t be extraordinary. They have many married friends and they see them arguing, you know, and they see the child with the measles, the mumps, and who knows what else. So, to their beautiful freedom, adieu! And that scares them.

One can continue south from Boutenac on the little roads toward the Pyrénées. The land is burnt sienna and vast, but by no means barren; if you photograph, you’ll find a lot to click about. And there are vines everywhere. Brillat-Savarin noted two features that distinguish man from beast: 1. Fear of the future. 2. Desire for fermented liquors. In this landscape you will delight in the revelation of mankind’s tenacious pursuit of number 2, because you will see vines planted upon the most impossible-looking terrains. The trouble is, almost all of it is swill. Most of it looks, smells, and tastes bad.

Phosphates? I have heard all manner of theories about the secret of making great wine. Here was a new one, and I shuddered at the thought of Alain stirring chemicals into his wine vats. But no, he laughed, phosphates are tilled into the soil in order to enrich the quality of his wine. “At Hermitage,” I said, “you have that one steep slope with its perfect southern exposure. Here you have all the little plots that are so varied as to soil and exposure.” “At Hermitage,” Alain answered, “they have only two soil types, granite and limestone. That’s all. Here we have a myriad of types, so we can do better. Yes, there are problems, but once the questions are posed correctly, I’m convinced that we will be able to solve them.” I am the first to admit that there are better wines than Alain’s Domaine de Saint-Jean de Bebian. If he had vines at Chambertin or Hermitage, one would take his success for granted because the quality of those sites has been proven over the centuries and from them we expect extraordinary wines. But Alain’s domaine is in the Languedoc. That is what gives his struggle a touch of the heroic.

But there was nothing funny about his fear of the autoroute and the new housing developments. The autoroute did more than bring noise and pollution. Bandol is now a thirty-minute drive from Marseilles. One can now commute from the Bandol area to earn a living in the metropolis. The land becomes more valuable for living space than for what it can produce, and we in the United States know what that can mean. You work in a downtown office and drive through heavy traffic to sleep in your housing tract, where the rural quality has been destroyed. The French taste displayed in these modern housing developments is immoderately tacky. One day, driving from Sanary, a charming little port between Bandol and Toulon where the weekly market is particularly colorful, Lucien pointed out a brand-new housing development, the boxy houses all alike and crushed up against one another. “That was the Château Milhière,” he said, “one of the greatest Bandol domaines.” I couldn’t believe my ears, or my eyes! The housing development should have been prohibited on aesthetic grounds alone. I would describe it as carnage, even though everything visible was erect and intact. It was so new the tenants had not yet moved in. “It was the property of Dr. André Roethlisberger, a man who understood very well the quality of the soil here. He made wines of a very great quality, red, rosé, but above all great white wines, due perhaps to the fact that he was of Swiss origin. “It was he who prepared all the histor...

Domaine Tempier’s red has a tendency to sparkle or pétiller a bit. This bit of sparkle is carbon dioxide (CO2), which has nothing to do with sulfur dioxide. Carbon dioxide is a natural by-product of fermentation, while SO2 is an additive. All wines have CO2, but it is usually removed before a wine is bottled, or quelled by dosing the wine with SO2. Some people like that CO2 sparkle. Richard Olney finds it charming, the sign of a natural wine, and so do I. Other tasters are shocked and consider it a flaw. Restaurants form an important part of Domaine Tempier’s trade, and this pétillance that appears in their wine from time to time (for example, when the weather warms up or storage conditions are not cool enough, or at the season of the grapevine’s flowering and at harvesttime) drives restaurateurs crazy. Monsieur Big strides in with a cute young thing on his arm. The sommelier pours a glass of Tempier. Mr. Big puts down his cigar, swirls the glass in a grand circle that practically covers the circumference of the table, sniffs it approvingly, takes a sip, then he grunts, wrinkles up his nose, and announces that the wine is fermenting in the bottle! “Take it back,” he commands while his date rubs knees with him under the table. It is a great night for him, but the restaurateur is looking at a ninety-franc bottle of wine that must go into the sauce. Instead, his solution is to recork it and send it and all the rest back to Domaine Tempier. While certain connoisseurs are clapp...