Everything’s Coming Up Rosé

Summer’s here — at least in New York it is! — and for me the season is the color of rosé wine. I’m not talking about the horrid Mateus that we all used to drink back in the days of candlewax dripping down fiasco-shaped bottles of cheap Chanti. I mean lighter, drier bottles that suggest a break from the heavy red wines of the rest of the year, but are every bit as refreshing as a Chard or Sauv Blanc – in fact, even more so, because the taste is unexpected. It’s like drinking flower petals, and you don’t have to pay a fortune to do it. The New York Times’s wine columnist, Eric Asimov, even extolled rosé’s virtues recently.

The girls are checking out what everybody else is having. Doug’s digging the wine list. I’m about to order rose.

Most people my age turn their noses up at rosé, probably because of that too-sweet Mateus experience (it was so popular in North America that in its heyday, Mateus accounted for more than a third of Portugal’s wine export business). So it was that, during a vacation on the French Riviera (hey, we had a free place to stay!) with our dear friends Doug and Kathie Ross – winelovers supreme – at a sun-drenched but wonderfully temperate lunch outside by the seashore, I surprised them by suggesting we order rosé. It turned out to be perfect, and that lunch remains one of my most treasured memories: I can’t crack open a bottle of rosé now without thinking of Doug and Kathie, who were skeptical at first. “Bottled poetry” is like that: you make lifelong connections, just like you do with a favorite song.

A typical spread on the terrace. Everything you see, including wine, was bought on the fly.

There was a terrace outside our apartment in Monte Carlo. During the days we’d explore (one day we rented a car and Doug negotiated the stick shift around hairpin turns that would have challenged James Bond; of course, we weren’t going 100km/h), but we tried to make it back for mid-afternoon. We sat out on that terrace for hours, watching the sun set, talking about cabbages and kings, and enjoying cold cuts, fruit and cheese, and lots of wine, imbibed over so many hours that I never became intoxicated with anything but the magnificent setting. The others felt the same way. Over food, friends and the grape, we were only pretending to be Europeans. But it was so much fun.

Cork Torque

Gotta recommend a wonderful book to you: THE BILLIONAIRE’S VINEGAR, by Benjamin Wallace. What a read. It’s a forensic mystery, a slice of history, a funny look at obsessives and oddballs, and, just maybe, the story of a truly audacious “long con.” And it’s all true.

The bottle in question.

On December 5, 1985, at Christie’s in London, a single bottle of wine was sold at auction for the equivalent of $156,000, making it far and away the most valuable bottle in history. It was a 1787 Chateau Lafite (later dubbed one of the “first growths” of Bordeaux, among the most ageworthy and expensive wines on earth) with this engraved on the glass: “Th. J.” The auction catalog noted that these “are the initials of Thomas Jefferson.” The wine was discovered, it was claimed, by workers tearing down a house in Paris who found a false basement wall and, behind it, bottles that had been preserved for nearly 200 years.  The auctioneer was Michael Broadbent, one of Britain’s most respected authorities on wine. The consigner was a German named Hardy Rodenstock, who traveled in the most rarefied circles of wine collecting. Both men staked their considerable reputations on the authenticity of this incredible find.

The bottle’s buyer was Malcolm Forbes, of the eponymous business magazine, who had no intention of opening it. He would display it alongside other Presidential relics in the Forbes Galleries, a small “museum” in the company’s headquarters building on lower Fifth Avenue in New York. These galleries were one of the city’s least-known but most enjoyable destinations; I took visitors there all the time. I saw the Jefferson bottle, displayed behind glass under dramatic lighting. Then one day it just wasn‘t there. Skeptical people were challenging its provenance, along with other similar bottles; the doubters’ ranks grew as more of them came to market.

The ol' tippler himself.

This book recounts the fascinating attempts to date the wine and true it up with Jefferson’s own obsessive records. You meet him, one of America’s first oenophiles (he tries bravely to establish a vineyard at Monticello), touring Europe’s vineyards and shipping case after case to other Founding Fathers during his five years in Paris. You swirl and sip with the many eccentrics who make up the rare-wine elite, and look over the shoulders of the scientific community that tries to bring technology to bear on the tantalizing puzzle. And you follow Broadbent, whose VINTAGE WINE is the greatest collection of tasting notes ever published; if the Jefferson wine turns out to be phony or adulterated, that would call into question many of his notes on other 18^th- or 19^th-century bottles, most of which had been served him by Rodenstock.

You don’t have to know a thing about wine to enjoy this book. The author gives you everything you need, and nothing extraneous, in a clear, concise narrative. It is as propulsive as an intense mystery, for that’s what it essentially is. It will make you laugh at times, recoil in horror at others. It could inspire a terrific movie, and one is in the works. Don’t pass this one up.

Spo-Dee-O-Dee

Cork trees in Portugal, showing the number which indicates when they can next be harvested. (See Comments)

My first experience with wine was in the balcony of the Millsaps College Christian Center Auditorium, where certain members of my college theatre group would wile away the boring hours of Friday-night “photo call” with cheese and Dixie cups full of Gallo “Hearty Burgundy” or, even worse, “Tokay.” The wine was in a fiasco-shaped jug (that’s the Chianti-bottle-with-the-dripping-candle shape) covered in imitation brown leather, little brass lion’s heads on either side with rings through their noses, and an absurdly colossal stopper. It was a present from a girl much sweeter than I, but just as naive; you wouldn’t dare take it to Cole Porter’s place, but it might have impressed Henry VIII, say, as he tossed that last turkey legbone over his shoulder. So: I had my very own wine flask, let’s get some wine to put inside it! We thought we were having a wonderful time, and that’s because we were. This, I discovered much later, is the first rule of wine appreciation: if you like it, then it’s good. We weren’t drinking for intoxication (we had intermittent photo calls ourselves and would have been forever banished), but for conviviality. Unlike beer, the college man’s staple, this stuff wasn’t meant for quaffing, but for sipping. Away from photo call, we tried a “fortified” wine once — these are ultra-high-alcohol “misery” wines like MD 20-20, made, shamefully, principally for winos — and nobody could stand it. Wine snobbery in its infancy.

We’re talking late Sixties here, just as far-sighted pioneers were transforming Napa and Sonoma from Mayberrys into Edens. In those days, California wine was a joke. (Where do you think our jugs of “Hearty Burgundy” came from?) It had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with fine dining to the snobs back East and in Europe, where such matters were adjudicated. It reminds me of how New York State wines are treated today, even in their own state. Come back in twenty years and see if you can afford a case of the top North Fork Riesling. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

One night an older and more sophisticated friend (actually, any bit of sophistication would have constituted “more”) invited a few of us to dinner. Grilled steaks. He cracked a bottle of Saint-Emilion (not only can’t I remember the chateau, I thought St-Emilion was the brand name, so that’s what I strove to remember). This was the first time a drop of Bordeaux — for, of course, that’s what it was, even if I couldn’t yet tell — had ever touched my tongue. It wasn’t the taste of the wine alone. It plus the steak produced a third taste in my mouth, a glorious flavor that made it both the best bite of steak and the best sip of wine I’d ever experienced. Many wine lovers have had similar epiphanies. Gallo Hearty Burgundy was now like a former friend whose personal hygiene makes you uncomfortable. I would order St-Emilion by that name in restaurants, sometimes annoyingly overaccented, and direct the waiter to “put it in the fridge until you bring the entree,” a tip my steak-grilling friend had shared. (Note from the Reality-Based Community: :15 of fridge chilling before you serve a just-glommed red wine will barely change the temperature of the outside glass, but the faux erudition, I must confess, has been known to engender a salutary effect in certain women. For you, make it about an hour, like my grilling mentor must have done; less patient imbibers might use an ice bucket bath — half ice, half water — to achieve cellar temp in about :05. Yes, it’s OK, even for still red wine that somebody just now brought over.)

Today, of course, any decent restaurant will have already taken care of that for you. But in the Deep South of the early and mid-Seventies, where our tale takes place, waiters weren’t expected to be wine experts. Any knowledgeable server would have thought either: “This guy digs a specific appellation from the Right Bank: he’s James Bond!” or “This idiot gets the Cheval Blanc and the bill that comes with it!” But I continued to think I was having a wonderful time, because, once again, I was. Others back then were drinking stuff like Lancers or Mateus, maybe Blue Nun (brilliantly marketed to America with radio spots featuring Stiller & Meara; it’s a German Liebfraumilch which isn’t all that bad). A girlfriend used to make the best quiche, and with it we’d drink Anheuser Bereich Bernkastel, a flowery Riesling blend that I can taste right now. But wine still hadn’t become a part of my everyday dining, as in Robert Mondavi’s dreams, and everything we’ve mentioned so far since I weaned myself off the Hearty Burgundy comes from the “Old World.”

Chateau frickin Margaux. About as Old World as it gets.

Europeans, particularly Brits, who have an uncommon love for Bordeaux (they call it “claret”), never saw the next wave coming. Steven Spurrier, one of the few wine experts who had been looking back over his shoulder, traveled to California wine country and was quite impressed by what he saw. A natural publicity machine, Spurrier proposed a wine tasting in Paris for 1976, the American Bicentennial. Wow. New World vs. Old. California vs. France. The distinguished panel of French judges shocked themselves, and the world. A bottle each of the winning vintages of Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon now reside in the Smithsonian — because the winners were American. The “Great Tasting” — depicted in part (the white wine competition only) in the underrated film BOTTLE SHOCK — is probably the most important wine event of my lifetime. Not only did California wines establish that at their zenith they were the potential equal of anything else in the world, but ordinary Americans also began to take notice. By the time scientific evidence emerged that red wine in moderation is actually good for you, things had irrevocably changed. And I myself had begun seriously paying attention.

Another trend which shadowed the emergence of “New World” wines (not just American, but also from Australia, Argentina, South Africa, and an ever-expanding list) was wine democratization. Mirroring the personalities of the aw-shucks Napa and Sonoma winemakers, wine snobbery itself became declasse. And there’s really not much you have to know, because if you like it, then it’s good. I popped the corks I could afford, started writing down the ones I really enjoyed (yikes: St-Emilion’s not a brand, but a place!). A little later I had a job that occasionally took me to Marin County, so I hooked up with my old high-school buddy Lew Perdue, who was publishing wine industry trade mags from Sonoma. He showed me around, and I got to see first-hand the gorgeous countryside that was able to transform its visual majesty into what Robert Louis Stevenson called “bottled poetry.” I got on the mailing list of one winery, the lavender-studded Matanzas Creek. (They have different winemakers now, but the lavender is still there.)

Um, this is Saint-Emilion, as it looked on a lovely 2017 Bordeaux visit.

I’ve never lived in a place where you could buy wine in a grocery store, but I travel to those states all the time. It seems so naughty. (I’m looking at you, you hedonistic libertines of Arizona!) But, of course, that’s part of the mind-set which has to change, probably by slow attrition, before wine takes its place at the table as just another food item. For several years, greedy New York liquor wholesalers prevented out-of-state wineries from shipping directly to my house, using desperate, ludicrous arguments. But there were ways. A winery in Indiana packed caselots for shipping in unmarked boxes, and the local post office branch looked the other way. I never had a problem. A friend was on the Williams Selyem mailing list and we’d split cases. He’d drive to the one store in New York state that served as a “branch office” and thus could receive shipments; they still couldn’t forward the wine to you, so you had to pick it up. But the jammy, fruity Pinot Noir, some of the finest anywhere, was worth the trouble. And all the time, as Napa Valley turned into one of the country’s leading vacation destinations, more and more New Yorkers were becoming outraged when the nice man in the tasting room declined to ship a case or two home; it was illegal. Finally, in a highly anticipated 2005 decision, the Supreme Court found that in-state wineries can ship direct to “reciprocal” states — if we can ship to you, you can ship to us. Battle won — but didn’t Coors lose a bit of its taste once it became available east of the Rockies?

I’m very glad I was a wine innocent up in that balcony in college, for that’s how I was able to enjoy humble Gallo Hearty Burgundy without shame or irony. As in Eden? Naw, let’s leave that metaphor back in the second paragraph, where it belongs. There’s so much we can learn, so little we need to know. Robert Parker, the most influential wine critic there is, recently produced a tiny 16-page booklet, and damn if there’s any more info you really do need beyond what’s in there. If I could keep only one comprehensive wine reference, it would be Karen MacNeil’s THE WINE BIBLE. But the book I use the most is WHAT TO DRINK WITH WHAT YOU EAT by Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page. It’s a reverse “dictionary,” pairing food to wine, then wine to food. I consult it several times a week, and once I read something five or six times, it begins to stick. When I’m in a restaurant these days, I don’t unwittingly embarrass myself like I used to (now it’s all wittingly), but I find that the more I discover about wine, the more I’d rather simply ask the server’s advice and try something I’d never have thought of on my own. If the kid I used to be had known to do that, he might have impressed any young lovely within reach.

The brand spanking new Williams Selyem tasting room during a thrilling spring 2018 visit. The right wall? That’s all great WS bottles lying flat.