A Fool for Wine

The love of my professional life is wine--but it was not at first sip. Quite the opposite: It began as an arranged marriage. Love came later. I can say this now, having given wine 20 years of devotion, fidelity and nearly all of my discretionary income.

When we first met, wine seemed snobbish, complicated and too much of a bother. I was no more interested in getting involved with wine than I was in learning Sanskrit. What I was interested in was food. I was enthralled by cooking. (To this day, I do all the cooking; for two decades my wife has never made a meal.) I became a food writer. And that’s when wine got me--or rather, got to me.

The angels did not sing. Instead, a publisher barked. “What do you know about wine?” he demanded as I walked into his office after returning from a three-month cycling trip through Europe. I was to begin my professional life as a food writer and restaurant reviewer, which was then my heart’s delight and consuming--in every sense--ambition.

“I don’t know anything about wine,” I replied honestly. “It comes in red, white and pink and that’s all I know.” Sure, wine had class, but it also had what struck me, anyway, as an unsavory class consciousness. People--no, let me be precise, men--seemed to use wine as a weapon. All that James Bond business about vintages, all those names, all that nonsense about which wine went with which dish. No thanks.

The publisher, however, had no such qualms. Advertisers liked the idea of a wine column. I was to write it. I repeated my protest: “I don’t know anything about wine.” “That’s all right,” replied the publisher. “Neither does anybody else.”

I started drinking wine the day I started writing about it. Oh, sure, I drank the usual French vin ordinaire after a hard day’s cycling. But I honestly don’t think I had pulled a cork from a bottle until the day I was shoved into wine writing. (The cheap French stuff had--still does--a deep-dimpled plastic cap that fits snugly in the top of the bottle. You just pull it off.)

I don’t know when passion crept in. You’d think that it would have been inevitable. But that’s not so. Strange as it sounds, wine could just as easily have become a job. I know fellow wine writers whose feeling for wine is no greater than what a bus driver might have for his vehicle.

Yet wine ignited, and continues to fuel, something that makes me more passionate about it now than ever. It’s not just this bottle or that one fueling the excitement. It’s not about vintages, snobbery or the age of the wine. Rather, it’s what the world’s best wines tell us, generation after generation, about particular spots on the planet.

I’ve drunk many of the fabled wines and vintages that plump the pages of wine books and magazines everywhere. But once you’ve had your 1921 Chateau d’Yquem or ’47 Cheval Blanc or ’55 Leroy Chambertin, it soon becomes a case of been there, done that. All gunslingers grow weary.

Wine captured me because of its originality. The more you taste wine, live with it, think about it, the more you realize that, as the French novelist Jean Giono observed, “The world is filled with so many sorts of tenderness. To understand them . . . one must yield to them.”

Although it’s unfashionable to say so in these relativist, deconstructionist times, there are eternal truths. Wine offers us a vehicle for discovering some of them. This may seem highfalutin’, and I apologize for that. But it deserves to be said.

I probably fell in love with wine in 1978, on my second trip to Burgundy. I remember my cynical disbelief about Burgundy’s many vineyard delineations. Here’s a place where they grow, effectively, just two grape varieties: Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. In a narrow, 32-mile strip of land, the Co^te d’Or, generations of winegrowers have drawn boundaries to create thousands of named vineyards.

I was certain those wily French were pulling a fast one. How much difference could there be between two Pinot Noirs from contiguous vineyards made the same way, by the same producer, in the same vintage? I wasn’t going to let myself get suckered.

I got worse than that. The French, as always, have a phrase for it: coup de foudre. It’s a resounding thunderclap of emotion that sweeps all reason aside. Our phrase “love at first sight” doesn’t quite capture the tsunami effect involved.

I simply couldn’t believe what I was tasting. Each Burgundy grower patiently explained that, “No monsieur, my wines are not made differently. They are made the same way. No monsieur, I didn’t add anything to the wine.” (The impudence of such a question!) They were kind. And amused. But they saw then what I see now: A young American bowled over by an age-old truth. They even had a word for what thrilled me: terroir.

Terroir is everything that affects a vineyard: soil, subsoil, air and water drainage, exposure, ground temperature and more that we have yet to divine. Somehow, the grape captures and conveys this.

For the Burgundians (and many others) an explicit value is at work: A wine that reveals its terroir is superior to one that is mute. Keep in mind that not every site has something to say. Such sites make ordinary wines. The world is chockablock with them.

Wines that deliver what might be called a “sensation of somewhereness” are not exclusively French. Some snobs would have you think so, but they’re mightily wrong. Terroir is democratic. Many places can--and do--have it. The only edge the French have is simply that they’ve spent centuries looking for such sites and then sorting through which grapes best amplify the somewhereness.

For example, California has its known pockets of somewhereness, with many more yet to be discovered. Anyone who tastes wines from the Santa Cruz Mountains--single-vineyard wines such as Mount Eden Estate Chardonnay or Ridge Montebello Cabernet--can know in one sip that these wines could not have come from just anywhere.

This business of somewhereness can also be broad-based, rather than pinpoint. Whole areas such as Santa Barbara County’s Santa Maria Valley have a familial similarity when expressed through Chardonnay. Collectively, they are thick-textured and redolent of coconut and lime.

Mendocino County’s cool Anderson Valley excels with Riesling and Gewurztraminer, delivering a flavor purity, finesse and delicacy like no other in California. Something happens with Cabernet Sauvignon in Napa Valley’s Stags Leap District that happens nowhere else in the world, creating wines of uncommonly lush texture and consistently distinctive flavor notes of bitter chocolate, black currants and cherries.

Elsewhere on the planet the list is vast. Italy has so many sources of somewhereness that it would take an encyclopedia, if not the vast reserves of a CD-ROM, to catalog them. Germany has as many vineyard delineations as Burgundy, thanks to its equally ancient and painstaking pursuit of terroir through Riesling.

All of which is to explain why I find wine more invigorating, more compelling today than ever. With wine we eavesdrop on the murmurings of the earth. This is a wonderful time to be tasting. More wines, from more places, are being made with this eavesdropping purpose in mind.

Truth to tell, I’m a poor “blind taster.” The problem is that, like a kid stuck in school on a sunny day, I’m not paying attention. The great blind tasters are as clinical, analytical and methodical as surgeons. I, on the other hand, am always mooning about looking for somewhereness in the wine. Sometimes it’s there, sometimes not. I like to think these great tasters don’t have as much fun at the dinner table as I do, but that’s probably not so.

I do consider myself a pretty good wine buyer, though. I love buying wine. I get catalogs from across the nation and I pore over them, comparing prices and offerings. My biggest problem, though, is that I frequently buy what I write about. This gets spendy, especially since I’m of the opinion that it’s always best to buy by the case.

Wine lust is rarely discussed publicly. Some of us don’t talk about it because it’s, well, unseemly. How do you explain why you’re so excited by an obscure vineyard in Italy growing a grape variety you yourself hadn’t heard of until last week? And that the wine is only 10 bucks a bottle? My wife has learned to say, “That’s nice, dear,” in every language except Apache.

Still, I try to restrain myself. I don’t want to be a wine geek. There’s more to life than wine. But I’ll say this much: Life would be less without wine. It makes life better because when wine is really interesting, it’s a message worth hearing. I’ve been at dinners with self-absorbed sorts who barely know that others exist. Yet somehow wine gets through. They take a sip and stop the blather, at least for a moment. “This is really good,” they say. “Yeah, isn’t it?” I reply. At that moment their universe expands, however briefly. Good wine can do that--every day, if you like.

The poet Jack Gilbert wrote, “We stopped to eat cheese and tomatoes and bread so good it made me foolish.” Wine, too, I might add.