Feast of St. Amand (d. 679). Monk. Hermit. Abbot. His association with vintners originates from his preaching and teaching in the beer and wine regions of France, Flanders and Germany.
Birth of James Busby. Born in Scotland, Busby was a viticulturist, writer and public servant, known as the “Father of the Australian Wine Industry.” Took first collection of vine stock from Spain and France in the 1830s to Australia. Australian Chardonnay and Shiraz trace their origins to his vine imports.
If Parker has few challengers, it’s because few wine experts have his strength and focus in words. Historians have said that one of Ulysees S. Grant’s great strengths was the ability to communicate, in the confined space of a dashed-off telegraph, directives to his commanders on the field (in the Memoirs, too, his style has a remarkable directness and clarity). The capsule mini-reviews in Wine Bargains, a large survey of bottles costing less than $25, are the work of an orderly mind and a lawerly one (that was Parker’s training before the legendary trip to Paris that revealed to him his onephilic gift). Wine writers such as Alice Freiring may offer headier sentiments, as she does on her entertaining blog, where she opens by saying she wants the Trotskys, the Philip Roths, the Chaucers and the Edith Whartons of wines. You might wonder why anyone would want a wine to match the death- and sex-obsessed turbulance of a Philip Roth, but hers is an understandable approach, a desire to summon the romantic mystery that makes wine such a rich experience. (She christened her book with the jokingly provocative title: The Battle for Wine and Love: Or How I Saved the World From Parkerization. ) But this won’t necessarily make you a kingpin. Wine is not bottled and sold and shipped because the muses are stirring the breezes. Parker is much more to the point, brusquer and also less deep—if anything, he is wine’s Daniel Plainview, the oil-drilling antihero of There Will Be Blood.
Parker himself wrote only a few of the chapters in this book, which allots no formal ratings and notes up to three dollar-signs to indicate the expense of the bottle. But if you read through his entries you see how he is dedicated to utility and lack of nonsense, and how his firm sense of cadence marches you through his clauses and sentences:
“This is a heady, succulent red.”
“It is full-bodied, pure, and deep.”
“A display of oak along with good stuffing, attractive berry fruit, a hint of wet stones, and a spicy finish.”
“A superb, full-bodied red with terrific precision, definition, and concentration.”
“This is a serious Cotes du Rhone, sexy, round, and medium to full bodied.”
All very concrete. Parker doesn’t search for metaphors or allusions, partly because he does not allow himself the space, but mostly (one suspects) because he sees no need to think of wine this way—apart from, say, powerful or perhaps sexy. You sometimes get the sense that somewhere in his mind is the image of an old movie poster of Ava Gardner—but then, that would be falling into the sort of thinking that Parker avoids. He leaves it to the drinker and the poet-drinkers to attempt anything more imaginative.
The career of Eric Rohmer is filled with one exquisite masterwork after another. But for a wine lover, Autumn Tale (Conte d’automne, 1989) is perhaps the essential film: a delicate romantic comedy about middle age, it is set among the vineyards and farms of the Rhone valley: Here are people for whom wine is the beginning of many a conversation, many a deliberation and even many a relationship. The same might be argued of Woody Allen’s Vicky Christina Barcelona, one of his most enjoyable late comedies precisely because it’s so close to Rohmer in its calm, somewhat detached analysis of love’s adventures and mistakes: There is a great deal of wine drunk in that movie as a prelude to lovemaking, but for the most part it’s a matter of American girls getting drunk and losing their inhibitions to dazzlingly erotic Spaniards. I don’t think Allen himself gives a hoot about what anyone is drinking.
Autumn’s romance, which blossoms only late in the film, begins a with a glass of 1989 Cote du Rhone drunk at a wedding: a businessman, well north of 40, samples a wine. Eagerly beside him stands the vigneron herself, Magali (Béatrice Romand)—she’s a middle-aged widow and, as is so often the case in Rohmer, not only prickly but indefatigably, combatively articulate. The gentleman, Gérald (Alain Libolt, who looks like a more elegant, sensitive Bob Dole), tells her it’s aging very nicely, and compares it favorably to a Gigondas he had with lunch the day before. Magali is elated. This is a triumph: We’ve already learned that, as a woman who practices principles that are essentially biodynamic, Magali plants a low yield, doesn’t use pesticides and doesn’t weed between the rows in her fields. As a result her fields are a bit of a mess, like her great windblown crown of dark hair. Her refusal to weed, she tells her friend Isabelle (Marie Rivière), has earned her the ridicule of her neighbors, but she doesn’t care. Well, we know this is mere bravado. She may also pretend that she’s indifferent to having a lover, but she cries to Isabelle about her loneliness and the burden of running the place alone.
This encounter at the wedding, in fact, is Isabelle’s doing. Isabelle has found Gérald—the son of a vigneron, incidentally—for Magali. Isabelle, who is married, took out a personals ad—but, this being Rohmer, she has allowed a small, reckless bit of guile to worm its way into her generous impulse. She initially pretends to be Magali—to protect her, she finally confesses to Gérald—yet she seems to enjoy lightly flirting with him at leisurely lunches in the local towns.
These sort of devices, which could be played very broadly, with Rohmer unfold with a Mozartean clarity: Happiness is usually, ultimately arrived at in movies like Autumn (it’s one of four with a seasonal theme), but the film is not about the contrivances that drive its leisurely narrative. It’s about how Rohmer’s characters use (or misuse) their often overfine philosophical and moral intelligences to reach their ends. And, unlike Vicki Christina, wine never muddles anyone’s thinking. You get the sense, rather, that an opened bottle stimulates the intense deliberations of these characters.
The film ends with a party celebrating Magali’s harvest—her concerns about her crop nearly kept her from attending the wedding—and if you follow this final scene all the way through the credits, you’ll see a wonderfully revealing moment—just a somewhat bemused but genuinely regretful glance—that reveals Isabelle’s true feelings.
Rohmer is too subtle an artist to dwell on the metaphor of the vineyard, of the growing and gathering in of a life, but it’s there, anyway. Magali’s vineyard has a beautiful, simple richness, shot often in the high sunlight of afternoon rather than the prettifying gold of late day: The air is full of insects, but also the buzz of planes and cars. Not too far off, the monumental shapes of the Tricastin nuclear towers are unavoidable monuments on the horizon. In Rohmer’s eyes they are not necessarily hideous— Gérald, we learn, is fond of industrial architectute: They are just there, the work of man amid the word of nature.
Here is a modest biography (less than two-hundred pages, plus notes) that can be gulped down without losing any of its fizz. Tilar J. Mazzeo’s life of Barbe-Nicole Clicquot’s ascension and lasting success as a commercial titan is a lively, smoothly written history that can be recommended for anyone wanting to know about the birth of the global Champagne market in the 19th century.
The Widow Clicquot inherited her husband’s business by the time she was 30—he died of typhoid, presumably, although he had a depressive streak, and Mazzeo doesn’t altogether rule out the rumors that he may have committed suicide. His widow, on the other hand, was an indominatable woman who lived on and on (she was 89 when she died in 1866), and saw her Champagne concern grow and grow. The key to her initial success was the Russian market—Möet and then later Pommery had a better grip on Britain—although the endless ups and downs of trade during the Napoleonic wars meant that her market often threatened to vanish overnight. Her shrewd gamble (and it was a gutsy one) was to secretly send a huge shipment to Russia just as peace was achieved in 1814. By not waiting for the formal lifting of trade embargoes, she found a country ready to celebrate with her Champagne, and zero competition. Mazzeo relates Clicquot’s perilous international challenges especially well—sprintingly—and her discussion of Champagne technique is also blessedly painless. That’s no small feat.
But there are a few bubbles to pop. This isn’t a very deep study—the depth, one might say, is closer to a coupole than a flute. Mazzeo is stuck with the fact that there’s little solid detail about Clicquot’s daily life, or thoughts or beliefs. No diary, no memoir, and not many remembrances from third parties. She was a celebrated name, but not a celebrity. One way to deal with this would have been to create a tapestry of denser textural detail around Clicquot. Mazzeo writes, for example, that references to Clicqout Champagne are to be found throughout classic literature—why then relegate examples to the notes section? Why not weave them into the book itself?
Mazzeo instead falls back on novelized touches of speculation: In a breathless opening rendered with rich cinematic feel, little Barbe-Nicole is rescued from her convent school and smuggled back to her anxious, prosperous family through seething Revolutionary crowds in the streets of Reims. The only problem is that, as Mazzeo admits, this may actually have been Barbe-Nicole’s sister. Oh. She often pauses to have Clicquot savor a moment of domestic feeling or social power as if she were a cougar out of Danielle Steele: “Barbe-Nicole caught the twinkling, knowing eye of her father across the room and she smiled back at him wryly.” Not implausible, although what’s to say she didn’t turn and suppress a gassy Champagne burp? I could have used a little more of Balzac’s hard glint of ambition and money. Mazzeo cites the reminiscence of a man who met the ancient Widow near the end of her life: ”a dwarfish, withered old woman … whose soul was in business, scanning over each day to her last the ledger of the commercial house to which she had given her name.” Mightn’t this be the true Widow Clicquot practically from the getgo?
The title itself, taken from a George Herbert poem, strikes the precisely correct balance between the spiritual and, well, spirits: “When God at first made man/ Having a glass of blessings standing by/ Let us (said he) poure on him all we can.”
Pym’s comic novels are parochial affairs involving, mostly, tensions in Anglican vicarages and the lives and longings of highly literate, rather lonely people who occupy their time with careers as index-compilers, translators, proofreaders at scholarly journals and the like. Blessings is a little different in that its narrator, 30-year-old Wilmet, is comfortably married, with subtle but not inexpensive taste (“I always like myself in deep clear colours”). She has a great deal of leisure time in which to flirt and be flirted with, although she approaches men with an innocence not far removed from Jane Austen. Nothing outwardly momentous occurs in the book, although she clears up some misconceptions about her marriage, friendship and romantic fantasies—and this is momentous enough.
The road to this new maturity is dotted with constant breaks for lunches and dinners, usually with company that is highly amusing and quite happy to share a cocktail, a glass of wine or sherry. She will have a Tio Pepe while waiting alone for a late lunch companion. On another occasion she will have a glass of Chablis with a chicken fricasee at home. She invokes a spumante, its bubble gone flat, when remembering her younger days in Italy.
Pym, a quiet master of the comic novel, uses such details very carefully: These references to wines and drinks are slipped in nearly always in a scene in which Wilmet is feeling gay, nostalgic, romantic, triste or all of the above—scenes in which she is being most essentially her daydreaming self. Just as she dresses, so she drinks: Alcohol seems to be a matter of “deep clear colours” that add a certain lilt to her mood. If, in an early chapter, Wilmet elects to have a martini at the start of a dinner party, it’s because “it doesn’t seem quite the weather for sherry—too mild or something.”
The conversation turns to which sort of wine would best complement a dessert of gooseberries. “If you like,” says a guest, “I will raise the matter with my own wine merchant—a man of considerable courage, even panache.”
Much later, Wilmet has lunch with her old friend, Rowena, and with both affection and envy the two of them observe young lovers meeting at a nearby table:
“They’re going to drink a whole bottle of claret,” said Rowena in a low rather sad voice. “What will they do afterwards? Walk in the park? … They might go to an art exhibition… Really modern art is extraordinarily sympathetic when you’re in love and have eaten and drunk well.”
There’s no need to go overboard with any of this, except that Pym captures so well, and so glancingly, how subtly wines and spirits feed a sense of glamour, anticipation and sensuality. (Pym’s characters tend toward a frumpy, tentative mousiness, which might make the transfigurative aid of wine even more significant.) You can also argue that she includes a cautionary note of the abuse of alcohol: Wilmet is mildly (and misguidedly) infatuated with an old friend, Piers, who clearly drinks too much. But that doesn’t make him any less funny or charming—it just hints at a personal conflict within him that Wilmet is slow to understand.
I suppose this is really a very roundabout way to encourage people to read this wonderful writer. And if you have a glass of sherry with it, you won’t be any the worse.
Last night our dinner guests left relatively early—they have these things called “children,” and apparently you have to get home to them—so Aldo and I decided to pop one of our favorite Hitchcock movies into the DVD player. It was Notorious—you know, the one about the 1934 Pommard.
Many people, I suppose, may think of this 1946 classic as the one with Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant or, more significantly, a beautifully sustained thriller of intrigue and lush sadomasochistic romanticism: Bergman and Grant play a spy and her handler. They become lovers (how could they not?) but nonetheless spend most of the movie lurching between extremes of rapture and disdain even as they try to bring down a house of Nazi scientific schemers presided over by Claude Rains—who in turn loves Bergman with a deluded, puppyish ardor that ultimately is more touching than Grant’s brusque, manly conquest.
But Hitchcock, with his supremely suave cinematic style and fundamental cruel perversity, is a complex director, and his best movies can be appreciated from a number of perspectives. Which is why we think of Notorious as the one about the 1934 Pommard.
The Pommard, in fact, is only the most significant bottle in a movie awash in alcohol. Hitchcock (who was a lover of wine) took meticulous care in plotting out his thrillers, springloading the narrative with details that would trigger suspense while also swiftly establishing the psychology of his characters. Notorious begins with Bergman, the daughter of a convicted Nazi spy, behaving very badly, getting stinking drunk on hootch at a party in Miami while flirting with Grant, an uninvited guest.
Aldo and I always feel badly for Bergman in this scene—Hitchcock women who hit the sauce don’t often end well. (Remember the naughty lady with the spectacles in Strangers on a Train?) Recruited by Grant, Bergman flies with him down to Rio, where she cuts back on the liquor and falls for him even before getting all the details of her assignment.
As he goes off to headquarters to learn those very details, she tells him to bring back a nice bottle of wine for dinner. Needless to say, Aldo and I feel our pulses start to quicken at that instant.
What can wine signify but class and genteel, fade-to-black sex? It’s a stepup all around! Mr. Grant does better: He buys a bottle of champagne. In Hitchcock, champagne is what you get for the gorgeous high-society ice sculptures like Grace Kelly. But Grant forgets the bottle at headquarters when he learns, to his shock and disgust, that Bergman’s task is to fling herself back in the moral sewer by seducing Rains.
Ingrid is such a pro at the espionage game, she quickly goes beyond the call of duty. She becomes Mrs. Rains, which means that while she spies on him, she gets to run his large household and open all the closets for inspection—except for the wine cellar. Claude Baby won’t hand that key over. This is, for Aldo and me, a spiking moment of intense curiosity and excitement: We feel like two Mrs. Bluebeards wanting to get behind that bolted door. And Claude Rains wasn’t exactly Andy Devine: you know his stuff will be top-drawer.
We would have ordered the servants immediately to cut down a large tree from a corner of the garden and fashion it into a battering ram. Ingrid, however, must use greater spylike craft.
She throws a fabulous society party at which the best champagne is served—we know the champagne is good because, in Hollywood’s subtle telegraphic style, the words “Top Quality” are stamped on the foil. Bottle after bottle is opened and consumed—how excited Aldo and I are to see a party where the host doesn’t stint on champagne! Should we be having champagne ourselves? No, because the plot is sweeping us along—While the well-heeled guests are guzzling champagne upstairs, Bergman and Grant explore Rains’ wine cellar, where they suspect he and the Nazis have been hiding a secret project: What they find is a row of Pommards from a famous vintage, 1934. And look—the label! In closeup! Aldo and I couldn’t be dizzier if we were Kim Novak going off the belltower in Vertigo. When Grant accidentally knocks a bottle to the floor, it shatters—and we scream as if it were the shower scene in Psycho.
At this point, to be honest, Hitchcock lets us down a little: The glass splinters into shards, but no wine flows. The bottle—and presumably the other bottles in the row—was filled with a mineral ore the Nazis intend to use to make dangerous new bombs. Well, fine, now we know the real stakes behind the story—but where did all the Pommard go? Was it just wasted, dumped down the drain? Did Rains drink it alone in the tub or on one of his prize horses? Did his Nazi comrades have it served at one of their ironically elegant dinner parties at which they plot assassinations? Or did Claude Rains’ mother, a German dragonlady, buy the bottles as empties somewhere?
Hitchcock never answers these salient questions.
Instead, Rains and his mother start dosing Bergman’s coffee with a slow-acting poison. This is, for us, a stunning plot twist—and the point at which we always stop watching. I mean, Grant somehow rescues Bergman, doesn’t he? It’s just that we aren’t an audience who will sit there biting our nails over toxic caffeine. If we wanted high drama from coffee beans, we would have watched Out of Africa.
It seems a pity, really, that Bergman and Cary Grant didn’t get to enjoy the Pommard by themselves.
