An importer of considerable influence and impeccable taste, Rosenthal is at his finest in this memoir when conjuring up the experience of sampling a new wine. Consider this long passage:
At its best, wine captures and transmits all of the elements of the ambience from which it is born. In the ’61 Chambave, one could smell the skin of the hares that scamper through the vineyards and the gentian and the juniper that fill the surrounding fields; the taste captured the myriad berries, black and red and blue, that grow in abundance on the mountainside; and, lingering in the background, in the aroma, as a supplemental flavor, and in the texture of the tannins, is the stern minerality of the slate-infused soil. We drank and we ate, and now, twenty-seven years later, every second of that experience is with me.
That’s a lovely marriage of romantic pictorialism—those scampering hares, that juniper in the fields—to a sensible, undergirding appreciation of the earth chemistry at work in the wine. It captures the small, happy miracle of wine. The book is less successful at bringing to life the vignerons he has cultivated in developing his renowned business (something doesn’t register—the mix of concrete detail and poetic feeling is off). His prose, when not on the specific topic of wine memories, can get lofty and magisterial and stiff. Wine, he writes near the start, “has invaded my thoughts much as a benign bacterium settles into milk to create pungent cheese.” If he had made his career as a dairy farmer, would he invoke Bordeaux to discuss his love of cheddar? Luckily, at any rate, his sensibility has been for wine.
