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

by Kermit Lynch

One restaurant that I return to is l’Oustalet, the only restaurant in centre ville Gigondas.

“Once you know Provence, you don’t ever want to leave it,” he says. “No one ever heads back north. No one!”

I asked how others manage to produce two to three times more from an equal area of vineyard. “Oh, it’s easy. When you prune, you leave longer shoots. You use fertilizer. That’s all there is to it. It’s what we call fait pisser la vigne, making the vine piss.

And these prized wines of the northern Rhône are France’s rarest: Hermitage has 300 acres planted in vines compared to 7,900 at Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Gigondas has 2,600; Cornas, only 130. To bring it into perspective, Vieux Télégraphe, a single domaine at Châteauneuf-du-Pape, has the same surface in vines as all of Cornas.

It is useless to discuss whether Saint-Péray has a taste of this or a taste of that. The problem is finding any taste at all. The wines seem to have been concocted by freshman students trying to pass an enology exam in sterilization.

Underground in one of the several cellars it might as well be 1885 or 1785. And with a dense, vibrant Cornas in your glass, you are tasting a wine not unlike what was poured in 1885 or 1785.

This is Syrah country. Cornas is the first village where the grape shows its true colors, so to speak, and it does not start off timidly. The taste of Cornas is as bold as its appearance. You chew it around in your mouth, and it seems to stain the palate.

In Celtic, Cornas meant “roasted slope.” Now the INAO is considering allowing the plateau above Cornas to be planted in vines whose wine will be sold wearing a Cornas label. Welcome to our brave new world of French wine in which there may be no côte in your Côte Rôtie and no cornas in your Cornas.

when they set their minds to it the French can outwhore anybody.

Syrah without a hillside is like Saint George without a dragon: boring.

“When people think of the Côtes du Rhône, they always imagine huge domaines. They should know that the surface area of the Hermitage vineyard totals only three hundred acres. It is tiny, even smaller than Côte Rôtie or Saint-Joseph. And it should also be known that the area planted in vines has remained the same for centuries. An appellation that has not been altered is an extremely rare thing, especially in the Rhône.”

The wisps, webs, and curls of mold are colored from velvety black to silvery white and everything in between. Some have a green tinge, some blue. Some patches glisten with droplets of moisture. The stuff hangs from the ceiling, the walls are draped with it, and while it is not exactly teeming, it does appear to be taking over. Thus, the visual backdrop as you regard the robe of the wine in your glass. The cool, damp air is pleasantly thick with aroma. There is the rowdy, backward smell of new red wine in barrel, the mysterious hoary/fresh smell of the fungus, and the continual evaporation of all the wines that have been spit onto the dirt and gravel floor since who-knows-when. It is a setting in which you feel a lineage with the ancients who preceded you, who made the same clinking sounds with a glass thief as the glasses are filled, the same slurping, chewing, spitting sounds, the same lip-smacking, murmurs, and grunts of approval. Chave has vines growing in several

Oak is tighter, more compacted, so the exchange with the air is slower, resulting in a firmer, more closed-in wine. The pores of chestnut are larger. It breathes more easily, resulting in a wine that is more supple, more advanced.”

Chave then pulled the cork on his 1976 rouge, 1975, 1974, 1969, then the 1942. Blissful appreciation replaced the immense effort of concentration required to appraise the younger cuvées. Going back through the decades of Chave’s Hermitage, you witness as wild, turbulent youth evolves into something sophisticated and profound.

At harvest, the Hermitage hillside is a colorful scene bathed in a soft sunlight in which there is a suggestion of autumn’s arrival. The vine’s green foliage cascades from wooden stakes, but the impetuous growth of late spring and early summer has passed and the plant looks spent. The Syrah clusters are dark purple and so small, few, and far between you wonder (trying to get a foothold on the steep slope) at the effort that went into producing them. And then suddenly a bottle of Hermitage seems cheap.

People forget that a grape is a fruit. They would never eat a green peach, but they harvest green grapes. If they didn’t chaptalize, some growers would have a white Hermitage at 11 degrees alcohol this year. We are harvesting ripe grapes which will produce a wine with 13 degrees alcohol! The flavor of the two wines will be totally different.”

“In order to understand Côte Rôtie, you must climb up through the vineyards,” he said one day. “Looking out the window of a car is not enough.” He turned out to be a passionate guide who seems to know every nook and cranny, every stone’s mineral composition and geological origin.

“Ampuis is a small vineyard, one of France’s smallest,” he said. “We have less than three hundred acres planted in thirty different soils, and no more than a dozen acres share the same exact soil composition.” As one sees in Chave’s cellar, different soils create different wines, especially when the plant is Syrah.

The various Côte Rôtie bottlings from Guigal, the négociant at Ampuis, dominate blind-tasting events, dominate the wine journals, newspapers, and magazines to a degree that has become dangerous. The public is very close to deciding a Côte Rôtie is by definition oaky and alcoholic, and the next step is the rejection of the traditional Côte Rôtie, which is not oaky or alcoholic.

Why ask that a wine be jarring to the senses, a criterion that we do not apply to other arts like music or painting in which delicacy is valued, where shading, nuance, even silence or empty space can be considered remarkable. But keep an eye on the wine critics’ ratings. If a wine is black, packs an alcoholic, tannic wallop, and smells like a lumberyard, it receives high points.

Beaujolais has everything a wine-loving tourist could desire except good wine.

Value what nature gives, quirks and all. If ever you find a real Beaujolais, glory in its virtues, its immediacy, its spirit, instead of swirling and sniffing and seeking size and grandeur. Americans, comparative newcomers to fine wine, seem to look for a Great Experience every time they uncork a bottle. Beaujolais should not be a civilized society lady; it is the one-night stand of wines.

And after all, in Rully, wine interests are going to triumph over the civil rights of a jackass every time.

H. W. Yoxall, the English author, called the Chalonnais whites “acceptable,” a choice of adjective that is not going to cause a buyers’ stampede.

Chalonnais reds labeled Bourgogne have the possibility to be more interesting than Bourgogne from the Côte d’Or itself, because most Côte d’Or Bourgogne is from flatland vines while Côte Chalonnaise bottlings are likely to be from hillsides.

Others have made beautiful Pinot Noirs, but none arouse the passions like a true Burgundy. And no other wine seems so French. California has produced some remarkable bottles, but California Pinot Noir is to Burgundy what the Empire State Building is to the Notre-Dame.

I say if it is sterile it is not wine. Let us come up with another name for those grape-based drinks. Wine is alive.

Unfortunately for the others, the Pinot made its home here in Burgundy, and this is where it expresses itself best. It is a delicate little beast, the Pinot; it needs sunshine but not too much, rainfall but not too much. It is complex, all this, but it is here that the Pinot found the microclimate that suits it best. Above all, Pinot Noir means Burgundy. They make Pinot Noir elsewhere, but it is not the same.

Diversity is one of the qualities that make Burgundy glorious.

However, natural is alive. Death is stable. Living wines (in their glory) present a risk, and I’ve noticed that even those who demand a natural wine will be back with the bottle if the living wine goes haywire.

Sommeliers have become adventurous and unpredictable in their wine selections, and bravo to that. Instead of spending time chasing down the latest 100-pointer or their small allocation of Beaucastel, Guigal, or Raveneau, for example, they are making their own discoveries, introducing them to their diners, and if it is a wine from a little-known region or grape variety, what the hell, so be it—that seems to be their attitude these days.

I remember in the mid-1970s when Alice Waters complained that if she were to have a wine list at Chez Panisse that offered only two wines, a Mondavi Cabernet Sauvignon and Fumé Blanc, 90 percent of her clients wouldn’t mind at all.

Here is a quote from Loyau that I neglected to include in the original edition of this book: “Drinking water leads to suicide.”