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...