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

by Kermit Lynch

“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...