“Wine has not passed through me in vain”.
Having spent my life talking about what other people do, here I am talking in the first person. As many of you already know, I like to chat at the table. On the other hand, I’m not a tribune man, and even less so a grandstand man. So please bear with my allegedly bad performance. And read on: I’m getting better at writing. But first things first. I often define myself as a professional foreigner, with this nuance: born in a wine-producing country, I have rarely lived in non wine-producing countries. And perhaps that’s why, when it comes to wine, I have no chauvinism other than that of my own taste. Of course, there’s history and myth. Haut Brion, Yquem or Dom Pérignon, for example, have been around for centuries, served in the world’s imagination by an ecumenical altar master.
But little by little, from Jerez to Vin de Constance, from Tokay to Vega Sicilia, this imaginary, label-mounted wine has become a common good, albeit not for the average person. Since then, my balloon journeys have allowed me, for example, to take a chauvinistic view: the only great whites are French. And when I say this, I’m not just thinking of the aristocracy of Burgundy, but rather of the ensemble that makes it possible to find the different expressions of chenins, semillons or muscats, translated into all the languages and patois of France, always with the characteristics of a wine to be eaten; a wine that is not for the table, but for the table. And precisely because of this law of the soil, we become intractable to any ersatz. And we even refuse cabotage trips for grapes.
For example, when Bordeaux Merlot replaces Carignan, which loses 43% of its surface area in Languedoc Roussillon; or, still in France, when Cabernet Sauvignon grows by 44% and Syrah by 88%! Since 1992, when Florence Mothe published her book “Toutes hontes bues”, I’ve been quoting her: “I’ll say it loud and clear,” she writes, “that the vine cannot be transported on the soles of one’s shoes; it grows and prospers where the alchemy of the soil roots it and nowhere else. And he adds: “Terroir is the first wealth and the only necessity”. But how can we reconcile such fundamentalism with reality? Are the Bordeaux grape varieties planted before phylloxera in Argentina or Chile defectors or survivors? And what about Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, rooted in the Ribera del Duero to cope with the phylloxera failures of Bordeaux and La Rioja? Is Tempranillo, which became tinta dei pais over a century ago in the Ribera del Duero, now indigenous?
A contemporary urban superstition invents an unchanging countryside, traditions from the past. To refute them, all we have to do is think about the fact that we’ve just celebrated the first century of the tractor, or that in 1902, so near and yet so far, when the “mechanical horse” arrived, 80% of the population lived in the countryside. And when it comes to table traditions, I often say that if you take away the American arrivals, which took two or three centuries to make their way through Spain after the discovery of America, before becoming established everywhere, goodbye to corn-fed fattened ducks, gratins dauphinois and other cassoulets. Farewell too to Maximin’s zucchini flower, Robuchon’s mashed potatoes and Paul Bocuse’s pumpkin soup. Farewell to Provençal-style tomatoes and Espelette peppers. And because there’s no smoke without fire, farewell even to cigars.
In the Bordeaux splendor of the Parker years, it’s almost impossible to imagine how and why today’s renowned Château Lynch-Bages ended up in a gardener’s basket. Simply because “from the beginning of the century,” recalls Florence Mothe, referring to the 20th century, “and right up to the middle of it, livestock farming was the essential activity in the Gironde, not winegrowing as one might think”. And yet, whether farm worker or master, the winegrower has always been a different kind of farmer. Even today, when in France, with barely 17% of farms and 3% of farmland, viticulture contributes almost 5 billion euros to the French agri-food surplus, the sector receives only a tiny fraction of the subsidies paid to farmers. As the newspaper Le Monde wrote on November 14, “This is enough to reinforce the profession’s feeling that it is a world apart, not represented by the traditional agricultural unions”.
But let’s face it, winegrowers are more often in the limelight than, say, lettuce or bean growers. And according to the same newspaper, French winegrowing has both the highest revenues (for appellation wines) and the lowest (for table wines) of all agriculture. Beyond this, then, is a landscape as vast as the questions it raises, populated increasingly by red wines made from a handful of grape varieties, which reproduce everywhere. Today, on a global scale, we are witnessing a war of taste that has always existed. Except that, until now, it has tended to be a matter for the Majors, with the central buying office having moved from London to New York. And at the time, there were no wines other than French, sometimes, it’s true, medically assisted by wines from elsewhere.
Today, it’s more like a vast foreign legion. Whether we like it or not, we war correspondents are obliged to see red: red wines being today, like Aesop’s tongue, the worst and the best of things. Nuance, once again. They say you have to be in the right place at the right time. By the chance of birth and the will of travel, I was able to witness first-hand the upheavals of the last quarter century, perhaps the most important for wines in the West since the phylloxera years of the late 19th century. For wine, the 20th century was a century of labels, of course, and of “château bottling”. But it was also the first century in which consumption ceased to be either nourishing or hygienic, wine having until then been a healthier beverage than water, more civilized let’s say, to become first and foremost a pleasure purchase, and also a luxury, for collectors and, little by little, the key to an increasingly vast choice which, to put us in Europe, began by awakening AOCs that were unaware of each other, and even inventing some. And, in the end, it will take the whole world by tasting table.
My days of wine and roses – never rosés – began precisely in what the oenologically correct call the New World, but which from Argentina to South Africa, for the most part, has been cultivating vines for at least four centuries. In the 60s of the previous century, there was nothing in this world but quality lunars, more homogeneous in Chile, for example. But if you put your hand in your glass, there was no generalized quality in the Old World either. Quite the opposite. France speaks of May ’68 as a universal cataclysm, ignoring the fact that, just as the American Revolution preceded that of France, before May ’68 there was Swinging London, with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but also Mary Quant and the mini skirt. And there was Berkeley, with Marcuse’s one-dimensional man. Not to mention the first doubts about the message’s medium or media quality.
And soon after, the military beginnings, as usual, of what would become the Web. Similarly, the cybernetics honed in the machine-gun nests of America’s WWII B52s would become computers and company. But most importantly: perhaps for the first time in history, multiplication, in both the literal and figurative sense, will not necessarily imply a loss of quality. Without all this, and without the profound transformation that France was to undergo in the 1970s, there would have been no new cuisine, no new sommelier, no new oenology. Jean-Robert Pitte winks in Gastronomie Française (Fayard, 1991): “A good dinner is a rare thing these days. Gastronomy is like poetry: it is in complete decline”. A complaint so topical that it was published in the Courrier de Paris on March 27, 1858. And Pitte adds: “We can’t forget that, until recently, even if women spent some time cooking, most French people ate food that was barely sufficient and not very varied: little or no meat, cabbage soup, potatoes, stale bread, water, often dubious, more or less mixed with mediocre wine, little vitaminized food for six months of the year”. Go and talk to these unfortunate people about respecting the seasons!
Natural food, yes,” writes Pitte, “but healthy only up to a point. Preserving salted or smoked pork is not an easy task in all seasons, just like potatoes that sprout and cereals or vegetables that go mouldy so easily. “No doubt people ate a little better in the city, but workers had to make do with the contents of a lunch tin, reheated as best they could and swallowed on the run. As for the school and company canteens, you had to be very hungry to use them! Without in any way wishing to absolve current practices, it should be remembered that, in the 1960s, a large proportion of chickens tasted of the fishmeal they were fed, veal was almost systematically hormone-treated, sea fish was pretty much only fresh in Paris, dairy products were unstable, and you had to run a long way to find acceptable ice creams.
And for what brings us together here, he adds: “Do we also remember what wine was for the vast majority of French people? Aramon from Languedoc fortified with 14° from Algeria! Finally, in restaurants, the state of the kitchens was often repulsive; the cooks were destroying their health, as were the regulars, who were stuffed with overcooked dishes (which avoided intoxication), drowned in buttery Spanish dishes”. Less than a month ago, in an interview with Mr. Jean-Jacques Guillois, now Director of the Maison de Danemark restaurants in Paris, I once again immersed myself in a more than imperfect past, gradually perfected by men of the trade. Like Monsieur Guillois, forever inscribed in the roll of honor of historic chefs for having cooked the first one-sided salmon in history. As well as other chefs of the new French cuisine, capable of recovering a small is beautiful agriculture just when Europe in general and France in particular were plunging into intensive farming, pesticides, hormones and fertilizers.
And, at the same time, just as courageous, as if to contribute to the early beginnings of an industry that for the first time believed that quantity and quality could not be opposed. As if that weren’t enough, the same chefs also took an interest in wine, sometimes almost against the grain, as in the case of the apostle Senderens. Whether by chance or necessity, for the first time the vineyards were openly and regularly to sommeliers, who until then had been forced to train their palates with the bottoms of bottles and even glasses in the best houses. Passion being contagious, and training courses and competitions a branch of the restaurant trade, new wines and products of choice, new techniques and industrial technology more respectful of gastronomy, spread to the West. Perhaps for the first time in history, farmers, winemakers, oenologists, chefs, sommeliers, master cheesemakers and other culinary professionals, in large numbers, began to march together in the same direction, that of quality.
Am I exaggerating? It’s true that in the example of the half-empty/half-full bottle, a very apt example here and now, I always tend to see it as half-full, even if it means buying another one. But despite the doomsday rhetoric, the facts are stubborn: both in the size of the young and the longevity of the old, we’re seeing a qualitative shift in quantity. Perhaps making an exceptional wine is as difficult today as it’s always been. On the other hand, not missing a wine has become easier. Like all changes, this one has shaken up many received ideas. For example, blanched, well-cooked fish fillets, covered in a thick sauce, with a Burgundy white, and meats also sauced, with a Bordeaux red, were for a long time the basic game for the sommelier of a top restaurant. But when faced with so-called modern cuisine, where the same plate will present the raw and the cooked, the sea and the land, with a sauce on the side, the sommelier can become Hamlet.
Above all, because today’s wine list includes many of France’s almost 500 AOCs, as well as some of the world’s finest wines. What’s more, when it comes to wine today, two cultures coexist. We can risk a certain reductionism and define them by two words: ancient and modern. But in the case of fine wine, there’s even more: an unidentified drinking object, a wine that is 30 or even 40 years old, but which is no longer the representative of its vintage and yet is the representation of a wine from elsewhere. In other words, it’s impossible to recapture the era and context in your glass, even if it’s the only food product that stands the test of time. This brings us to another reality, one that is all too often overlooked. Just as there are rural and urban dwellers, there is also a city wine and a country wine. The latter is culture in the broadest sense of the word. But this culture is becoming a cult in the city, in restaurants, through the care of wine lovers, wine merchants and sommeliers…
I, like so many others, came to wine through dreams. And it has to be said that dreams, like the restaurant itself, are rather an urban creation. What’s more, if there’s no Haut Brion des carottes, it’s simply because wine has been lucky enough to have literature. (And Poil de Carotte is not an agricultural treatise). The dream part doesn’t only come from the land, it doesn’t only come from winemaking, which is so important, but also so conditioned by tastes, commerce and fashions. From the Saint Julien of the 18th century, fortified by Alicante wines, to today’s Formula 1s, all in concentration and substance, wine still occupies a world apart, as magical, as fragile, as capricious as that ruled by food fashions. But, as the exceptions confirm the rule, no Jerusalem artichoke, no potato even if it’s a ratte, has ever stolen the limelight from great wines.
Without the reverential existence of the menhirs, a Romanée Conti, a Château Grillet, a Vega Sicilia, how can we understand today’s wines at a thousand euros a bottle, i.e. more expensive in origin than 95% of the menus in the finest restaurants? Perhaps, in part, because on another December 5, just like today but in 1766, Mister James Christie held his first auction in London, and decided to include wines. In this way, wines became units of value. From then on, we’d talk about vintages and reference prices. And wine became a liquid not to be drunk, since it promised cash. Wines kept in a cellar are no longer agricultural products that prudence advises storing to prevent famine, but ingots, treasury bills.
So what does this have to do with agriculture? We’ve talked enough about added value. There’s still some poetry there when you take away even the usefulness of this wine (that it’s still fit to be drunk, for example) when it comes to setting a price for it? At this point, wine has escaped the sad fate of raw materials, so primary, and this has happened thanks to a conjunction of facts of civilization called bottle, label, cellar, restaurant, sommelier, chronicler, especially literature. Imagine a carrot in a humidity-controlled box, with its label and date of canning, the origin and name of the grower, and the speculation that follows. When it comes to wine, I can define myself by everything I’m not. I’m not a winemaker, I’m not an oenologist, I’m not a sommelier. And I’m not even a wine columnist, at least not if by that you mean a judge with a palate sharper than a computer, capable not only of detecting the virtues and faults present in the cup at the end of a mouthful, but also of prophesying the future of said wine.
So am I, the author of hundreds of columns, a chronic oenophile? Rather, I’m still a journalist, a curious person who also deals with wine, and why not, while trying to take care of the consumer that we all are. Personally, I don’t believe in small everyday wines, simply because every day I like to drink great wines, even if they’re not ruinous. By great wine I mean what I find in my glass beyond prestige and price, values that are always metaphysical; a wine whose objective apogee coincides with my subjective taste. One thing is certain: I became a journalist because I had a basic curiosity about others and a thirst for knowledge. Let’s just say that, thanks in large part to many of you, I’ve been able to quench far more concrete thirsts.