Alexander Waugh, in an American Conservative review of Christopher Buckley’s new memoir about his celebrated parents, Bill and Pat, mentions a stinging little father-son anecdote from Losing Mum and Pup. Christopher Buckley writes that when he sent his father a case of wine for his 75th birthday, Pup asked: “How much was this?”
“It’s a nice wine, Pup. Happy Birthday.”
“I asked you how much was it?”
“About seventy dollars a bottle.”
“Take it back. I wouldn’t enjoy it.”
Now, one might interpret this to mean that powerful old reptile objected to Christopher spending so much—but, no, clearly it was because Christopher didn’t spend enough.
Now this resonates with both Aldo and me, not because our fathers ever snubbed an offering of wine, but because it brings up a topic any wine drinker is likely to entertain at some point, or at many points: A serious wine lover, preoccupied with status and having lots of money, might be unwilling to open a bottle that costs merely $75, but what about serious wine lovers without status or pots of money? Are we mere oenophilistines? vinoposeurs? The truth is, I have some expensive bottles in storage, but the average bottle we drink with dinner is closer to $20, and I rarely review a bottle that would have met old Bill’s standards.
With wine, there is always this awful yet vague issue of price and money and value, isn’t there?
Are Aldo and I missing out on a special subliminity by not being as demanding and economically flush as Bill Buckley?
Or was Bill Buckley, a man of wit and brilliance, just kidding himself? If he’d somehow lost all his money with Bernie Madoff, forced to deplete his cellar, would he have made do with a mere Muscadet?
Well, it goes without saying a good expensive bottle of wine is almost certainly going to offer more of a drinking experience than a good cheap bottle. Wine isn’t like literature: a cheap paperback edition of Dickens isn’t going to offer any less rewards than a first edition, so long as the words are identical, and they are. Wine perhaps is more like art: If you see a Botticelli at the Uffizi, you’ll realize that the color prints you’ve grown up seeing in textbooks don’t capture its translucent beauty. But how much more beauty, if you will, can a wine deliver as you go up the price range?
Is wine maybe more like a piece of designer clothing, with increasingly subtle materials and tailoring and details? Up to a point, yes … although an expensive bottle of wine may always prove to be corked—worthless—or past its prime. Then that hoity-toity standard simply evanesces—and becomes useless.
And at what point does the palate cease to differentiate nuance? Will drinking a $200 pinot noir be markedly different from one that costs $150 or $100? Wine is a sensual melody driven by the fundamental, if you will, bass note of alcohol. You get the bass note with every bottle—but money may buy you better music. You can get Cole Porter instead of Barry Manilow. But perhaps your palate is no better than your ear—you hear “C’est Magnifique” and wonder, “Is that from Les Miz?”
I suspect I’m barely beginning to make any sense of it. Aldo has been reading this over and says he’s not sure I am making sense, period. But I’m fumbling after a larger concern here.
All right, a case in point: The other night we had an unusual and, we both agree, very recommendable California wine, Wind Gap Russian Valley Pinot Gris 2007. You’ve probably never seen a pinot gris that looks like this in the glass: a tawny, slightly occluded copper (winemakers Pamela and Pax Mahle leave the wine to macerate in its skin to produce what they call a “pinked red”). The aromatically robust nose gave off notes of peach skin, earth, baked apple and floral perfume. The broad, richly muddled palate carried flavors of pear, apricot skin, honey, guava and lychee. Aldo said the color and warm flavors made him think of the luminous jeweled quality of a Bonnard painting. “With or without the nude lady getting in and out of the tub?” I had to ask. It’s an unusual wine, especially from California. A style of wine more akin to those small, quirky winemakers from Slovenia. But at nearly $40.00, was the value of this wine diminished simply because it failed to reach a particular economic measure?
Ironically, and even sadly, if William F. Buckley were alive, that great champion of the idiosyncratic nuance simply wouldn’t consider it.
Aldo did this little illustration in celebration of the EU’s decision not to allow—and so cheapen—the definition of rosé to include blends of white and red grapes. Admittedly, this is a drawing of a rather demurely happy garden-variety rose, which is not the same thing as rosé. But Aldo says he’s tired of drawing bottles, and besides this is a fairly accurate depiction of his emotional state when sharing a good rosé. And I’m not sure I disagree. It seems to be beckoning others to join it.
This was a vermentino we had bought in Nice on a vacation to Provence in 2005—a beautiful Indian Summer trip at the end of October unexpectedly blessed with blue skies and high temperatures. The only day of rain had been when we were at Arles, and even then a downpour suited our walk in the mossy ancient cemetery. But Nice was perfection: We walked along the Baie des Anges that we knew principally from an old Jeanne Moreau movie. And at dinner on our first night—at the restaurant Chantecler, in the Hotel Negresco—we had our first bottle of local wine, a charming, brisk and lemony vermentino from (so our sommelier told us) the finest estate in the area. That would be Ch. de Bellet, a vineyard that didn’t bother exporting to the States.
Well, we decided,we must have this fermented souvenir! A case!
With our not very strong command of French, we drove out of town and up through small, curving roads to the chateau itself, where we met with the grand dame of the house. She was a dignified old woman with fine gray hair, a fine tailored suit and—so it seemed—no great confidence that we weren’t con men, murderers or just dumb American tourists who had alighted on her property like a couple of flies. Although she kept telling us that it was her daughter who handled sales, we agreed to buy a case of her 2003 Cuvée Baron G., promising to return after our planned driving tour of the area.
We did return a few days later, almost at dusk (hours were squandered getting lost): The chateau was dark, and a huge dog barked in warning from the yard. The moment felt ominous and existentially dire. We actually called out “Hello!” or, in a simulation of the French, “Allo!” No light was switched on, no door was opened. We were annoyed and perplexed and insulted, although if this were the States the lady of the house would probably have been concealed behind curtains with a loaded gun. Or she would have sent out her security squad.
In any event, the little convenience store down the road sold her Bellet. We bought a few bottles there and lugged them with other accumulated bottles onto the plane home (actually, we left them all in the rental car at the airport, which resulted in some panicked scrambling). Then we put our cherished baby Bellets in the warehouse. As time inched along, our bottles of Bellet gained a nostalgic glow. We imagined uncorking them, expecting the wine to transport us back to Provence and that Indian Summer.
And yet we procrastinated—I suspected we shouldn’t, that a 2003 Bellet was not a wine to be aged into 2006, 2007, 2008…. But Aldo kept saying we should put it off, mostly (I suspect) because he didn’t feel like going to get it from the warehouse. Sometimes he acts as if a walk through Chelsea is a journey across the moors.
Ah, Aldo, inestimatable travel companion, I should not have trusted you on this point.
When we finally had the Bellet last week in a rather celebratory mood—spring finally seemed to have arrived—it was no longer the Bellet. The color had taken on a tint somewhere between amber and molasses, and the wine was as dead on the palate as a sardine on a cracker. Where was Provence? The drive through the Gorge du Verdon and the flat marshes of the Camargue? Mont Ventoux? All that crisp burnishing late afternoon sun? Gone.
All we tasted was the formidable shadow of Madame de Bellet.
British writer Paul Torday’s second book was published in 2008 as The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce, subtitled A Novel in Four Vintages, but the recently brought-out American edition is called simply Bordeaux. That makes the book’s wine theme more obvious, while dropping the moral and psychological mysteriousness suggested by “Irresistible.”
And who is Wilberforce? The narrator of the book, he’s a shockingly dissolute wine snob, a former software programmer who made his fortune and then retired, purchasing the estate—and the vast wine cellar—of a declining, unmarried gentleman named Francis Black. When we first meet Wilberforce, he has entered a smart London bistro where he plans to nibble on whatever he happens to order—food isn’t terribly relevant to him—while achieving a sort of vino-transcendence as he savors a rare 1982 Petrus that will cost him 3,000 pounds. Finishing the bottle, he realizes he may not soon or ever have another, and orders a second, the last in the restaurant’s cellar.
Given that he regularly consumes something on the order of five bottles in the course of a day, the Petruses—which he downs while talking to himself and chasing phantom memories that seem absolutely real to him—knock him into a temporary coma.
Wilberforce, in other words, is a walking disaster. When he comes to, his doctor warns him that he is on the verge of permanent dementia and worse. Scarcely acknowledging the doctor, Wilberforce is more disturbed that he can’t really taste wine properly anymore. He never stops thinking about wine, or his wonderful collection of bottles out at the country house.
This opening section is beautifully done, both in laying out Wilberforce’s accurate if pompous musings on vintages and tasting (Torday credits Robert Parker in a brief note), but also in its depiction of Wilberforce’s hideous, self-destructive seediness, his haughtiness, his grim sense of irony (he is much more acute than he realizes, or pretends to be with us).
The book probably isn’t meant to be a lecture on the dangers of wine mania and alcoholism, but anyone who is tempted upon emptying one bottle to uncork another might find it useful. Ask yourself: “Am I Wilberforce?”
If your reading group or wine club says yes, you have a problem.
The rest of the book is never less than readable, but it also becomes more facile as it goes: Torday tells the story in reverse, 2006 to 2002, so that by the end we have moved back to the days when Wilberforce barely drank but, sensing that a life spent at the computer was lonely and empty, stumbled on the friendship of Mr. Black and, along with him, a socially elite group that includes the woman Wilberforce will come to love. This isn’t a new trick (Harold Pinter used it in Betrayal, for one thing), and it doesn’t really resolve the enigma at the center of the book: Wilberforce’s relationship with the older Francis, who at the very least is a surrogate father but, in a way that doesn’t seem intentional, sometimes gives off an elusive, furtive sense of homosexual connection. Who is this Francis, with his vast but disorganized wine cellar (which may not be as priceless as Wilberforce thinks it is)? Is he taking advantage of Wilbeforce’s awkwardness and naivete? Is he deluded about his wine collection, as well? Why is there something sinister and manipulative about him?
A good novelist (and Torday is) isn’t required to answer any of this—he hints very strongly at one possible answer—but the intriguing obscurity of the bond between Wilberforce and Francis is much more powerful, and more tantalizingly real, than the linear (if inverse) narrative of Wilberforce’s downfall. There’s a whole other novel hidden in the labyrinth of that wine cellar.
Aldo’s birthday dinner at Corton in Tribeca was probably the finest culinary experience we’ve had in a year—the best, perhaps, since we ate at Beast, and that was in Portland, Oregon, and that was last summer. Absolutely nothing comparable in New York comes to mind, unfortunately. The restaurant scene here just hasn’t been as much fun since the economy collapsed. Aldo tried to rearrange his finances so that part of his portfolio could be redefined as a philanthropic nonprofit, the funds to be dispersed in the form of meals for two at top-flight establishments. But his accountant balked, and then oddly enough the accountant up and died, leaving Aldo unable to proceed.
Corton, though, is doing well enough that I had trouble getting a reservation. It certainly deserves its success and critical accolades. The meal we had there last week was much more memorable than one we had at the address’ previous tenant, the famous Montrachet. But we went to Montrachet late in its run, on a bring-your-own-wine night, and we uncorked a Sauternes so off it smelled and tasted like a banana wrapped in damp socks.
The restaurant’s name reflects one of the Grand Cru wine appellations of Burgundy’s northern Côte de Beaune, and so does its eminent wine list, from Chablis to the Jura. The room is boxy and pale and elegant: Most noticeable are the vines with gold leaves designed in bas-relief along the walls. The effect is something like a vineyard in the hush of a heavy snowfall.
The chef, Paul Liebrandt, gained a certain notoriety with his previous high-profile restaurant, Atlas, where some critics claimed he pushed the envelope so far the envelope eventually was perforated and the contents fell out onto the floor. Incidentally, I think I pushed that metaphor too far, and now it’s all over my lap. At Corton, at any rate, the cuisine was impeccably artful, playful and harmoniously delicious.
I started with something called, with a certain Martha Stewart poeticism, “Violet Hill Farm Egg.” It turned out to be a beautiful, omeletty puff—the egg floating on a base of salt cod and baby squid, the whole thing buoyed by pheasant consomme. Aldo, who once described himself in his diary as a “mad hog for foie gras,” was very happy with Corton’s presentation of it. The menu describes it as accompanied with “hibiscus-beet gelee and blood orange”—it was a small landscape of deep, burnished color. Aldo said it was the cleanest foie gras he has ever had. He couldn’t explain it further, he said, but meant it as a compliment.
The entrees, which so often are a slight letdown at high-end restaurants—as if the chef were an architect who took greater pleasure in crafting models than actual houses—were in fact a perfect continuation of the meal: Pheasant was served with a small but luscious cassoulet of coca beans, red-cabbage gelee and albufera sauce. And for Aldo, the unaging birthday boy, there was a happy little fish duet of John Dory and diver scallop.
My only complaint about the evening was that food was slow coming out of the kitchen. Then again, it was so good, neither of us cared. Besides, we were kept entertained with a veritable conga line of amuse bouches.
