Lawrence Osborne, The Accidental Connoisseur

Lawrence Osborne, The Accidental Connoisseur, North Point Press, A division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2004

Roman gourmands could tell if a fish had been caught between the city bridges or lower down the Tiber; French palates could easily detect the special flavor of the leg a pheasant leans on when it rests. (8)
…sweetness, sourness, saltiness, and bitterness. Curiously, only the buds most sensitive to salty flavor are scattered evenly over the tongue. Sweet-sensitive taste buds are concentrated on the tip of the tongue, sour flavors are detected at the sides of the tongue, and bitter flavors at the back. (9)
Before I left the Serafina, Cosimo gave me a wooden box with a bottle of his dessert wine in it, a sweet red which he made secretively in his basement on his days off. It looked like the coffin of a mummified baby. To my surprise, he had no hangover whatsoever and was busy plucking baby carrots from a patch of dark gray earth dominated by a ragged teddy bear serving as a scarecrow. He was still a little suspicious. After I had paid for the room he asked me if I would be going to California. / “Most probably.” / “If you see that bastard, tell him we still love our carrots!” / He held up an earthy bunch of them threateningly. I said I was sure that Mondavi loved organic carrots as much as he did. / “No, no, you tell him. We won’t roll over and die!” / As it happened, I soon would be able to tell him: Robert Mondavi was about to invite me to lunch. [28] / “Come back after the general strike!” Cosimo called after me. / In a field somewhere near Spoleto, within sight of that town’s strangely Herculean aqueduct, I opened the dessert red with a piece of Gorgonzola and a peach and drank it for a while, lying among wet poppies. Later, walking back to the road, I laid the bottle in a garbage can and drove quite soberly into Spoleto. I found to my dismay that there was indeed a faint but sharply unpleasant taste of mushrooms under my tongue, and that I had no way of interpreting it. (28)
[Mondavi] “I’d go so far as to say that the food and the wine transported us into a world of gentleness and balance, of grace and harmony.” / I asked him if that mental world was specifically European. / “At that time, yes. It was astonishing to us.” / And was that what wine should offer, the transporting of our minds into a world of gentlness and balance? / “Well, I would say so. Wouldn’t you?” / Perhaps, then, taste is a reflection of an altered state of mind, onw in which those two qualities are paramount? (41)

Because France is such a potent exporter, she cannot afford to ignore the dictate of her customers’ taste, and Anglo-Saxon tastes, as she is discovering, are not necessarily her own. (49)

Widely spaced vines are “unstressed,” which tends to make them larger and more productive. The more unstressed a plant is by nearby competitor plants, the more relaxed and happy it feels. And thre more relaxed and unthreatened it feels, the more energy it puts into growing leaves and fruit. Conversely, the more stressed a vine is by being too close to a competitor, the more energy it puts into reproducing itself—that is, it pours its energy into the grapes. It doesn’t produce more of them, but the grapes it does produce have greater density and complexity. [54] … Per plant, the yield goes from twenty-five pounds of grapes a vine to about eight pounds. It’s unsurprising, then, that Napa growers were initially outraged by the French system; … The Mondavis decided to spend the money and replanted with the close French spacing… (54-55)
Now Pomerol is the most expensive land in France—it’s $13 millon an acre. That compares with about $260,000 an acre for top land in Napa.” (56)
“That’s what’s strange about Bordeaux: it’s a recent invention, not an ancient tradition. We adopted their spacing only about thirty years after they did. Not centuries.” (56)

“Know which country is the biggest alcohol consumer in the world? China. The wine business is just starting out there: they give away a free bottle of lemonade to every client who buys a wine. The Chinese hate Cabernet, it’s too acid for them, too dry. The like sweet Moscato. (62)
“In the $100-plus category, Parker rules. It’s you white middle-aged male Ritz-Carlton crowd. Between $40 and $60, it’s the Wine Spectator. But, you see, women actually buy 65 percent of all wine, and women are much stingier about how much they’ll pay. Women will pay between $15 and $20, rarely more. Women don’t fetishize wine. It’s true across the world. Women motivate the consumption of wine—the romantic dinner—but not the collecting of it.” (63)

By now I had already heard “the Australians” referred to as the ultimate wine spooks. They were the gimmick-technology spoilers whose Coca-Cola wines were like a bad parody of California, but they were armed with even greater marketing chutzpah. A perceptible scorn was directed at them and their gadgets: they were the real avatars of the machine in the mind! (69)

Amerine’s most famous book, Wines: Their Sensory Evaluation, published in 1976, is mostly a work of statistics. In it he penned an astonishing sentence which beautifully sums up his attitude: / Our basic premise is that wine consumers and professional enologists alike will enjoy their wines more and will make [72] more intelligent decisions about wine quality and value if they understand how and why they make such decisions and how to determine, when necessary, the statistical significance of those decisions. (72-73)

The Classement also coincided with the railway age. When the Paris-Bordeaux line was opened in 1853, Bordeaux ceased being a rural backwater. The vineyards became a Parisian social scene, flooded with millionaires, aristocrats, and entrepreneurs. It’s worth recalling that there were virtually no “chateaux” until the boom created them. A so-called chateau was not a specific vineyard, nor even a great house of any kind. It was simply a method of wine making, … (74)

Huysmans has here described the sultry and addictive subversions of our own simulated tastes. For surely taste itself normally rests upon a belief in the superiority of what is “natural” over what is fake—yet technology itself believes in no such thing, and nor do we. Thus every engineer is a Des Esseintes. And perhaps, nowadays, every citizen is as well. (76)

[Bill Cadman] “Before that I traded stock. So I know how absurd the prices of wines are today. It’s a great fraud, really. The price-quality relationship is almost nonexistent.” / A dry laugh, and the pop of new corks. Cadman poured one of his Zinfandels. / “The sick thing is,” he said, “that people want to spend more money. It makes them feel reassured. I mean, how sick is that? It’s pure consumerist exhibitionism. (84)
“I look at Napa, the Wine Spectator, and I realize that’s a lifestyle thing ultimately. Wine and wealth follow each other around in the most obnoxious way. You have rich people building cellars with spotlights aimed at the bottles of Yquem and Petrus! And the wealthy like being told what to like. They need their Parkers.” (85)

When the Sterling men described their array of oak barrels as a spice cabinet, I had been skeptical; most cooks are profligate with their spices. (109)
“The enemy of place is the wine marker as star,” Draper continued, “as an Emeril-type figure. The wine maker who ‘creates’ miracles in his little lab. And the other enemy is the consumer consensus model—Gallo, say, or the Australians. Do you really feel a spirit of place in Australian wines? Of course not. You could manufacture most of them on Mars. Wines are like children, you can’t really impose yourself on them. They have a stubborn inner warp. You can let them speak, that’s all.” (110)

Draper was now relaxed. He had been a philosophy major at Stanford and there is still something of the quaffing don about him. (111)

I tasted a Gaja wine recently mixed from Nebbiolo and Cabernet. And I have to say, I was stunned, but not in a delightful way. It seemed to be a monster of thing, a Parker wine if ever I’ve tasted one, a Beringer almost! And I respect Gaja enormously. But I thought, what the hell is this? (111)

…Californian wines regularly won competitions. “But, then, why do we not like these yummy wines? Because we can’t find any mineral depth in them. Now, the mineral depth of European wine doesn’t show up in chemical analyses. Remember, six pounds of fruit per vine in Europe, thirty pounds in California. What does that mean? More minerality in European fruit. [115] … An American wine, in other words, is all fruit, alcohol, and oak. There is usually little else. It stands to reason that what we call place is also a matter of hidden minerals. (116)
“Paul Draper is always considered the apostle of terroir. Its high priest in America. I’m his opposite because I’m the agnostic of terroir. I’m like the agnostic who’s agonized by the absence of God. I wish we had terroir. But we don’t. (116)

…we can get everything out of the grape, everything, even if we don’t have deep minerality from a complex soil. With a chemically balanced grape, we get a lovely wine—but it’s a wine that has no real place. It’s a grape-driven wine. And that’s the American vice, normally. But we turn it into our virtue.” / “So your wines are agnostic wines. Wines pining for terroir?” / “Yes. I mean, so long as they’re genuinely pining they’re not a complete fake.” (118)

“You cannot mean Mumm,” he went on. “We’ll hear no more about Mumm.” There was silence. “The champagne to drink is Krug. I have a 1959 at my place,” he hissed. “It’s for my daughter’s wedding.” (123)
Needless to say, what Jefferson treasured most in Bordeaux wines was their subtle aristocracy. Wine was no more a democratic drink in the 1780s than it is now. Jefferson paid serious money for his wine habit and urged comparably endowed Americans to do the same. But the denouncer of aristocracy could not extend such a denunciation into the nonmaterial dimension of taste, where aristocracy—the rule of aristos, the best—is inevitable. (124)
Robert Parker…And no one is more a Yank at King Arthur’s Court than the man who has actually insured his wine-classifying nose for a mil-[124]lion dollars. (124-125)

British wine critic Jancis Robinson records the dismay of the novelist Julian Barnes when a wine he liked was panned by the great critic. Barnes was therefore confronted with the astonishing possibility that he shouldn’t like what he actually liked. A crisis of faith in one’s own tasting powers? “Clearly,” Michael Steinberger has written, “this is not a normal critic-consumer relationship, but then wine unnerves many people.” (125)