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

by Kermit Lynch

My enthusiasm must have been contagious, because most of de Montille’s wines had been reserved by my clients by the time the first shipment arrived. When the ship was unloaded, I could not wait to pull a cork. I poured his 1972 Volnay “Champans” into a glass and raised it to my nose. Where was that fabulous Pinot Noir quality? How had a wine so expressive turned dumb? The wine was not bad, but it bore no resemblance to what I had tasted in Volnay, so I telephoned France and asked Monsieur de Montille why had he not sent me exactly what I had sampled. He claimed that he had. He said that his was a natural wine, that perhaps it was not happy after its month-long voyage from Volnay to Berkeley. Put the wines in a cool cellar for six months to see if they recover. They recovered, but when it was time to import another batch of de Montille’s wine, I decided to use a refrigerated container, just to see if the temperature during shipping made a difference. The shipping company thought I was crazy. “Reefers,” as temperature-controlled containers are called, were used for foods like cheese and meat. Perishables. But I had reason to believe that de Montille’s wine was perishable, too. My first shipment had not actually perished, but it had arrived with some sort of maladie. Wine travels in metal containers that hold around twelve hundred cases. I asked myself, how hot does it become inside as it crosses the Atlantic, creeps through the Panama Canal, and steams up the Mexican coast t...

Moreover, he changed the way I tasted, judged, and selected wine. He did not instruct me. I observed him tasting, observed him matching wine to food and food to wine in restaurants, listened to his appreciations in the cellars as he searched for whatever distinguished each wine. He did not taste with a fixed idea of “the perfect wine” in mind. He valued finesse, balance, personality, and originality. If a wine had something to say, he listened. If a wine was a cliché, he had little interest. If it was different, apart from the rest, he appreciated it more.

From one producer in the Beaujolais, Richard bought a twenty-five-liter barrel of a light, tart nouveau to bottle at home. I told him that it would be impossible to market such a wine in California. “It is too light, too green.” “But that’s exactly what I like about it,” he responded. Together we bottled it, corked it, and sloshed down a happy quantity one afternoon. No, we did not discuss the pH, the oak, the body, the finish. But there was a gaiety to it; the tart fruit perfumed the palate and the brain; it seemed thirst-quenching, and yet our thirst was never so quenched that another purplish slurp seemed out of order.