More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Kermit Lynch
Read between
September 30 - October 11, 2018
He told me he had sold off his 1977s to a négociant because he was not happy with them. The négociant’s tanker truck arrived and into it went the Bonnes Mares (a grand cru), the Chambolle “Les Amoureuses” (a premier cru), and his Chambolle villages. All into the same tank. Yet the négociant also picked up the documents that would allow him to market bottles under the separate labels Bonnes Mares, Les Amoureuses, and Chambolle-Musigny. The repercussions of his little tale resound endlessly.
the California palate had been formed by the big, gutsy, sun-drenched local wines. Burgundy is not sun-drenched.
For real-life drinking, at table where wine belongs, it is difficult to sustain one’s interest in tannin and alcohol.
His cranium is not smooth like a billiard ball; it looks as if a sculptor had left his marks on it.
When a woman chooses a hat, she does not put it on a goat’s head to judge it; she puts it on her own. There is a vast difference, an insurmountable difference, between the taste of a wine next to another wine, and the same wine’s taste with food.
Take two impeccable wines, the Domaine Tempier Bandol rosé, which The Wine Advocate has called the finest rosé in France, and a bottle of Château Margaux, which many critics consider the finest Médoc of the day. Compare the two side by side. Award points. Do not be surprised if the Margaux wins handily. Now serve the same two wines with a boiled artichoke and rate them again. The Margaux is bitter and metallic-tasting, whereas the Bandol rosé stands up and dances like Baryshnikov.
Comparing them side by side, you will find one a winner, the other a loser. Served intelligently at table, neither wine loses, your pleasure crescendos, and you, finally, are the winner.
those people who would always drink the Musigny over a Monthelie no matter what they have on their plate are not wine lovers. They are status seekers.
great wine is about nuance, surprise, subtlety, expression, qualities that keep you coming back for yet another taste. Rejecting a wine because it is not big enough is like rejecting a book because it is not long enough, or a piece of music because it is not loud enough.
Two lessons in one simple snack: you find gold kicking around in the unlikeliest places (Bandol, for example), and something can be created by matching food with wine that surpasses either of them standing alone.
I have never been colder than in that cave.
“It’s not shitty,” he said. “It’s ultra-shitty. Shit-de-merde!” he exclaimed, laughing as he pounded his glass on the table.
Of course, it is impossible to know how much my judgment is influenced by the fact that I know the man, as well as the wine.
It was cheap, but when you are broke, nothing is cheap.”
I do not care whose vintage chart you choose, you could turn it sideways and upside down and it would still be no less helpful as a guide to buying a good bottle of wine. Vintage charts are the worst kind of generalization; great wine is the contradiction of generalization.
“It is a memory for tastes. There is a certain aftertaste in which the character of a wine manifests itself. The 1906 still had a little taste of wild plum and a suggestion of hawthorn blossom that reminded me of the cuvée Le Coudreau that Monsieur Landry sold to me.”
Vouvray exhibits a natural desire to pétiller, or sparkle. A generous dose of sulfur dioxide will suppress this desire, but that is a bit like whipping a dog for wagging its tail.
Finesse is a word that does not have much meaning to American tasters, who use it when they are trying to find something positive to say about a light-bodied wine,
Joan of Arc was transformed from peasant girl to historical figure within the stone walls of the château at Chinon. Richard the Lion-Hearted died there. One of its proprietors was the sinister, ingenious Cardinal Richelieu. Leonardo da Vinci is buried in the chapel of the château at Amboise. Louis XIV, the Sun King, used the same château as a prison.
While the Rhône is powerful and swift, the Loire glides along with a stately air and makes you feel as if you are in too much of a hurry.
If Vouvray has the chalk, Savennières provides the blackboard, and the two wines are strikingly different.
There are only about a dozen wine domaines at Savennières. The most celebrated is the Coulée de Serrant. Its wine was drunk by D’Artagnan and his musketeer pals, thanks to the good taste of Alexandre Dumas.
Sulfur dioxide smells like a matchstick the moment it has been struck, and some tasters have mistaken sulfur dioxide’s matchstick nose for gunflint, an aroma, a desirable aroma moreover, produced by certain soils, including Savennières’s! After all, it is not difficult to tell the two apart. Sulfur dioxide sears the nasal passage; gunflint is subtle and fine.
In the story of wine there is nothing more intriguing than trying to imagine the mentality of the ancient French vigneron.
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.
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. His dramatic comparative tasting gave me the perfect opening to hammer away at my direct-buying policy.
according to Goutreau the Bordelais chaptalize almost every year and some even chaptalized in 1982. “Either that,” he said, “or the winemakers’ wives made an awful lot of jam, because at harvesttime you could see the sacks of sugar piled up at the wineries.”
once you have good grape juice, the role of a winemaker is “not to screw it up.”
There’s a saying here in the country … I won’t be cold in the grave before they sell this château to buy a villa at Saint-Tropez.
I’ll never forget the view out the window, a wintry scene of leaves swirling down upon an icy, rippling pond with two stoic white swans cruising like props on a stage set.
It is almost, but not quite, Provence.
It is a grand, depressing place that shouldn’t be missed. Just don’t eat there.
Brillat-Savarin noted two features that distinguish man from beast: 1. Fear of the future. 2. Desire for fermented liquors.
How anyone can take a few swirls and sniffs and sips of two or more wines and pronounce a winner and a loser, can look at the wine and recognize its true breed … Oh well, I haven’t noticed Château Latour pleading for mercy. The truth will out over many years as corks are pulled on magnificent bottles of Latour and on an array of flat, dead, blind-tasting champions.
(These vignerons in the Languedoc are not the most humble race I’ve encountered. At nine in the morning they speak with the pomp of an Irish poet after he’s had a few.)
The most impressive development at Daumas Gassac is the adaptation of the Cabernet Sauvignon to its environment. As the vines mature, that dominating Cabernet taste, so presumptuous in the 1978 and 1980, has gone from forte to piano, and one finds instead all those wild aromas with which the air there is charged. They are present in the 1983, a sensual, aromatic delight that shocks the senses by virtue of its originality and seems to penetrate right into one’s bloodstream.
Provence is good for the psyche.
the Cassis of the Clos Sainte-Magdeleine, whose vines grow on a narrow fifteen-acre cape that juts right out into the Mediterranean. The fish can almost nibble the grapes.
But then of course Cassis tastes better at Cassis! Debussy sounds better after a walk through the foggy, puddled streets of late-night Paris. You are in the midst of the atmosphere that created it. The wine is not different; the music is not different. You are.
Domaine Tempier near Bandol.
His is equipped with a roll bar because farmers have been maimed or killed when their tractors toppled over on these hillsides.
If one imagines a vine’s activity, commencing after the harvest, speeded up in the manner of a time-lapse botany film, and the twelve-month cycle were reduced to one minute of film, the director would say, “Lights, camera, action!” and nothing would happen, because from late October until early April a vine is dormant. It would stand as sculpted by the early-winter pruning. Generally speaking, you would see the gnarled trunk with four arms or branches nearly amputated to leave two eyes or buds remaining on each one. In the film we would wait ten, twenty, almost thirty seconds before witnessing
...more
“The vine is a plant which needs to be bullied from the point of view of circulation of the sap.
Their 1971 was four years completing its fermentation. Most winemakers would have panicked and attempted by artificial means to speed everything along. They might have forced it to finish more quickly, but the wine would have been altered, perhaps even tired out by those manipulations.
it took four years for it totally to lose its sugar. It fermented each year at springtime or in the summer. Whenever the weather warmed up, it came alive and continued to evolve. We waited to bottle it until it had finished completely. Others would have heated their cellar and added yeast to hasten it along,
Then they surprise me by pulling out two bottles of 1983. “One is filtered, one unfiltered,” says Frédéric, the quiet Brunier whose expression tells you more than his utterances.
The filtered smelled as clean as it looked, but what little nose it had seemed superficial compared to the unfiltered, and it gave an impression of fatigue, which is not illogical because filtration involves pumping, or pushing, the wine through a long series of cardboardlike plaques. The less you work a wine, the more vitality it retains.
At Châteauneuf-du-Pape, one finds the drinkable and the undrinkable, the majestic and the tired, orange-colored, overalcoholic flop. Drinking a great one is an event.
Contrary to almost universal opinion, ripest is not always the finest.
“C’est la deuxième fois que je ne suis pas content avec vous, Monsieur Lynch, c’est la deuxième fois que je ne suis pas content avec vous!”
