THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY

What do we talk about when we talk about wine?

Somewhere in the middle pages of “1984,” Winston Smith is being inducted into the shadowy and, as it turns out, nonexistent “Brotherhood” of resistance to Big Brother, and, to celebrate, the Inner Party member O’Brien pours him a glass of wine. Winston has never had wine before, but he has read about it, and he is desperately excited to try it, since he expects it to taste like blackberry jam and to be instantly intoxicating. Instead, of course, the wine tastes the way wine tastes the first time you taste it—a bit acidic and bitter—and a single sip, or glass, isn’t intoxicating at all. The intensity of this experience as a model of disappointment was significant enough for Orwell so that he inserted it in his dystopia right there among all the greater horrors—as though the future weren’t bad enough, that whole wine thing will go on, too.

Fifty years later, we live in a wine world where, for the first time, there are wines that do taste like blackberry jam and are instantly intoxicating, or nearly so, and how these wines came into being is the subject of a new book, “Noble Rot” (Norton; $24.95), by William Echikson. The book tells the story of the wine life of the Bordeaux region of France over the past twenty years, and, though Echikson does not quite have the narrative skills to assemble it, he lays out all the pieces of a first-class Henry James comedy about the brutality of American innocence, the helplessness of French sophistication, and the need for intoxicants that are always called by some other name and claimed for some other purpose.

“Wine,” Saul Steinberg once said, “is the only thing that makes us happy as adults for no reason.” Wine books, on the other hand, find a hundred ways of making us unhappy for lots of reasons. The space between what the wine writers say and what the wine novice tastes is a standard subject of satire. (The best was written, exactly contemporary with Orwell, by Stephen Potter in the “Winemanship” section of his peerless “Lifemanship” books.) But some of the wine-writing weakness is more complex. Being an expert on wine and writing about it is what the English call “naff,” embarrassing and uncool, while being a non-expert on wine and writing about it anyway sounds merely boozy. No subject produces a literature so anxious, expressed not so much in its grandiosity as in its defensive jokiness and regular-guydom. A book on wine will always begin with the assurance that it is not like all those other books on wine, even though all those other books on wine begin by saying that they’re not like those other books on wine, either.

Echikson is no exception, and includes a lot of normal-person-like-you, let’s-demystify-this-stuff talk. But he also embarks on some absorbing storytelling, in a form now familiar from ten years of the little-thing/big-thing books: take a micro-history of something or other (cod, salt, the color mauve) and turn it into a macro-history of something else that provides, in parable, a mega-history of some larger third thing. Echikson’s micro-history is that of Château d’Yquem, the Bordeaux château that makes the greatest sweet white wine in the world and that, in the past decade, passed from private hands into those of a conglomerate. (“Noble rot” is the term of art for the mold that settles occasionally on some Sémillon grapes and makes them sweeter.) His macro-history is that of the wine region of Bordeaux generally, which also got transformed, though for different reasons, and ended up making bigger, stronger, fatter blackberry-jammish wines. His mega-story is the canonical one of backward France and forward America.

Echikson’s approach lands him with a problem that he never really solves: he is telling a big story about dry red wine through the vehicle of the small story of a sweet white wine. While, as a writer, Echikson is not a man who, seeing a cliché go winking by, can easily resist its charms—Gallic tempers rise, tensions flare at the top end of the market, and a golden world of the past seems lost, and that’s all one page of the preface—he has the crucial journalist’s knack for getting the confidence of people who ought to be wary of talking to him. (And who now are sorry they did: he is being sued for defamation in France.)

The story opens in the early nineteen-seventies, when the cult of claret—well-aged Bordeaux wine—was locked in place, especially in England, which dominated the wine trade as the Germans had earlier dominated the champagne trade. Bordeaux produced hard, tannic wines that often took a decade to be good to drink. (Then they were really good to drink.) Even when they weren’t good, though, everyone went on drinking them, because they were claret. The best wines, if far from cheap, were available, not collector’s items: anyone with a taste for wine could expect to drink Château Margaux or Château Cheval Blanc more than once in a lifetime, and the lesser grands crus were there for everyday drinking. The preëminence of French wines was simply taken for granted, like the skills of Jewish internists. Within Bordeaux, the classification of 1855—which had fixed the vineyards in a hierarchy of first-, second-, and third-growth classes—still hummed along, dominating everything.

Into this story come two new forces: Japanese money and American numbers. In the mid-seventies, the Japanese developed a taste for expensive French wine, and for buying the big names. This vastly expanded the market and seemed to justify investment in high yields, more grapes, and more land. But it was, as Echikson might put it, a poisoned chalice. It meant that the lower reaches of second- and third-growth wine were now, of necessity, being drunk by Americans in a less equable and accepting mood. In 1976, in Paris, an American Cabernet beat the French Bordeaux in a blind tasting. This was not quite the event that it has since come to seem—to the French winemakers, it was more like an American loss to the Lithuanians in basketball, wrong game at the wrong time—but it did mark a trembling of the earth beneath their feet.

More significant, a lawyer named Robert Parker, from the suburbs of Baltimore, began to mimeograph, and then publish, his own newsletter, The Wine Advocate, listing all the châteaux and grading them on a hundred-point system. His virtues were limited: he was a very ordinary writer with few pretensions to the grace notes of French, or even English, wine-writing. What he brought to the table was what Americans always bring: encyclopedic ambitions and a universal numerical system. Not since Bernard Berenson made his lists of true and false Italian pictures had an American expert on the arts so fundamentally changed the economics of European culture. As with Berenson, what mattered was not so much that the list was right—who could tell for sure?—as that the list existed.

In retrospect, it seems that Parker was doing to wine what Bill James was doing to baseball in the same years, and in the same way. Both Parker and James began, in the late seventies, as unknown amateurs with privately printed newsletters, rapidly found a hungry and enthusiastic audience, and by the mid-eighties had become the reigning authorities among people impatient with the old wisdoms. Both were uncannily successful because they were apostles of a radical American empiricism—an insistence that facts and numbers could show you what was really going on, against everything tradition told you. James was weakly predictive, but brilliantly analytic: his explanations of why things had happened were mesmerizing and convincing, but his guesses about what would happen next were often wrong. (His system had the Brewers winning the ’82 series.) Parker was weakly analytic but brilliantly predictive; he could never really explain why wines tasted good, but he claimed that the ’82 vintage was going to be great, and it was.

The difference was that Parker’s game had always belonged to the French. And from the French point of view he was poison. Like all Henry James heroes, Parker was a true American innocent, meaning only to help and purify his European friends. The wines that receive the most consistent and adulatory praise in his system are the conventional favorites of conventional French taste: Château Margaux and Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. No one could have been more single-mindedly rapturous about Château d’Yquem. In France, though, the greatness of those wines was accepted not as effort well rewarded but as the natural order. There had to be not-so-good wines below to have great wines above; the hierarchy was part of the pleasure. Parker assumed that if some wines were not as good as others it was because some winemakers were not doing as good a job.

Although, in a defensive move, the French government gave him the Légion d’Honneur—he cried when he received it—his Francophilia did him no good with the French; the vintners set dogs on him. In the James story, he would marry a French comtesse with a fading château, and have to decide whether to be true to his system by rating her wines properly or be true to her and lie. (In the James story, he would lie, and suffer.) Without intending to, he was wrecking the second rank. He was able to do this because, for the first time, there was a solid second rank of claret-style wine in the world, and it wasn’t the second growths of Bordeaux.

One common complaint has been that Parker’s idea of good was too narrow. People who know wines now disparage Parker for preferring “flavor bombs,” big wines that are exploding with fruit and alcohol, and which showed up better in tastings—with the not very convincing implication that there is something second-rate about liking such blackberry-jam wines. But the essential “character” of many of the wines that he ruled out was the quality of being not very good.

Meanwhile, beginning in the nineteen-eighties, there was more good wine around than ever before, and most of it was coming, as it still does, from the then underexploited warm-weather vineyards of other continents. It is hard to find a less than delicious bottle of Australian Syrah or South African Cabernet or California Zinfandel, or, these days, New Zealand Pinot Noir. Even Southern Italy, and Sicily in particular, began to fall into line. Mouton Cadet, the old standard Bordeaux plonk, has almost disappeared from dinner tables.

In this way, Parker’s achievement wasn’t so much to Americanize French wine as to Southernize Northern palates—to favor the fruitier and more forward wines common to South Africa and California and Australia over the drier and more astringent tastes of young Bordeaux and old Burgundy. He liked wines that tasted good. His favorite French wines, the ones he loves from the heart (“This is the kind of wine I would drink if I were not always tasting,” he once wrote plaintively, apropos a simple Guigal Côtes du Rhône), are Southern, too, from the Rhône valley. An “educated” palate may seek to explain why this is a limiting taste, but is unlikely to win over the Winston Smiths. It is a little like the educated eye trying to explain why Poussin is better than Rubens; people may listen, but they look at those thighs, and doubt.

The French response to Parker and Parkerism is Echikson’s real subject. Once Parker had established his reputation, the French had to decide whether to fight or to change, and they changed. Echikson’s heroes are the garagistes and “right bankers,” the winemakers from the wrong bank of the Gironde, who, one by one, are either taking control of old estates or making their own wine in the back yard. Following his heroes from château to château, Echikson gives a strong hint throughout that making good wine is more like making good peanut butter than it is like writing great poetry. Low yields (meaning not too many grapes per hectare), sweet fruit allowed to ripen as long as possible (there is always pressure on growers to harvest early, because of the threat of a late rain or an early frost), no stems, minimal “handling”—the formula is pretty simple. Wine is good grape juice gone bad, and, as many of the new French winemakers seem to suggest to Echikson under their breaths, there is something to be said for the Australian system where grapes are collected from around the country, sorted through, and fermented in great big well-controlled vats, and terroir be damned.

Echikson ends with a toast to “breathing new life into Bordeaux’s old order.” But the reader, even one with Parkerized tastes, may, on reflection, find the French objections to Parker’s lists and numbers more complicated than Echikson allows. The debate is not about whether the numbers are right but whether it is right to have numbers. Everyone agrees that Parker is, on his own terms, a completely honest scorer; but by scoring he intends to serve the consumer, and makes the wine drinker into one. What consumers want is reliable beverage products, and, once wine is a reliable beverage product, it isn’t quite wine.

Demanding absolute excellence on an unchanging universal numerical scale is not, after all, our usual measure of sensual engagement. A man who makes love to fifty-some women and then publishes a list in which each one gets a numerical grade would not be called a lady’s man. He would be called a cad. And that, more or less, is how a good many Frenchmen think of Parker: they don’t doubt his credentials; they question his character. A real man likes moles and frailties; a real man marries his wine, as he marries his wife, and sees her through the thin spots. Being impatient with the tannins in a Margaux is like being impatient with the lines on your wife’s face. They are what makes it a marriage rather than a paid assignation.

For one of the defining characteristics of most French terroirs is not to make very good wine. To alter that is to put them in the beverage business. No one says this, exactly—but when you are handed a glass of thin and astringent country wine in France and asked to admire it for its character, there is a reasonable point in which its character does consist in its having some. The French connoisseur believes that, with his glass of turpentiney Gascon wine, he is in a truer relation to history and reality than the American searching for his jammy high-scorers. I wouldn’t actually drink like this, but I understand it.

Of course, if the ladies were offering their favors at forty dollars a go, it would seem fair for somebody to grade them, and that is, more or less, what Parker’s defenders say: a product that is being bought and sold should be subject to the market discipline of all other things that are bought and sold, and all the guff about earth and history and the ineffable singularity is just a way of avoiding giving the customer what he ought to get for his money.

Well, what does make wine taste bad or good? Is there really a standard, or a way to agree on one? Within the heart of every wine drinker, there is the suspicion that no one really knows. I was once at a dinner in Paris, seated by a big “name” in wine tasting, and, along about the third bottle, she leaned in and announced, half gaily and half conspiratorially, “You know, it’s really all about the same.” Of course, she didn’t actually believe that—but I also had the sense that in another way she did believe it, that she was confiding something significant about her own profession.

As Calvin Trillin explained in these pages a while ago, if you simply put red food coloring in white wine, even experienced drinkers can’t tell it from red wine. And, according to scientists who study smell and taste, that’s just the beginning. Rachel Herz, a professor of psychology at Brown, conducts research into the effects of “frames” on the perception of smells. (Wine tasters are “noses” first of all.) Smells, she reports, “are so malleable when it comes to verbal context that when reasonable verbal information is available it will override and even replace the olfactory information.” The effect is pronounced when the smells are, in some way, ambiguous—tell people that they’re smelling vomit, and they’ll smell vomit; tell them that the same smell is Parmesan cheese, and they’ll smell Parmesan cheese. With wine, the most basic verbal categories (it comes from France, it comes from America, it’s cheap, it’s expensive) seem to be able to throw even an educated nose off track. The illusions, Herz suggests, “work the way, in a familiar illusion, arrowheads either going in or feathering out extend or shorten straight lines. Word labels on smells are the same kind of context effect, and these context effects are markedly more powerful with nose sensations than they are with other kinds.”

To make things worse, the nose turns out to have the shortest memory of all the senses. A simple experiment, Herz suggests, shows just how powerful nose amnesia is: think of a familiar tune—say, “Yesterday.” Now think of a familiar picture—say, the “Mona Lisa.” Now think of the smell of a tuna-fish sandwich. You can do the last, of course, but where the other sensory memories are strong, clear, and sharp, the tuna-fish sandwich smell is general and vague. What the nose knows, in effect, is not much, and that soon forgotten. (Wine lovers protest violently when they are told this, but their protest, from the academic point of view, is a bit like the protest of eyewitnesses who are sure they saw what they say they saw.)

Yet to accept this is not to say that the elaborate language of wine evaluation is necessarily phony. It is exactly because smells are so labile and hard to grasp that they need more help from words than other sensations. When it comes to wine, we are all like early-Alzheimer’s patients who have to be coaxed into memory and appreciation. (“Remember, Dad—that’s the woman we saw on the beach at Wellfleet.” “Oh, yes! Her.”)

The real question is not whether wine snobs and wine writers are big phonies but whether they are any bigger phonies than, say, book reviewers or art critics. For with those things, too, context effects are overwhelming. All description is impressionistic, and all impressions are interpretive. Colors and shapes don’t emerge from pictures in neat, particulate packages to strike the eye, either, any more than plots and themes come direct to the mind from the pages of books. Everything is framed by something.

Anyway, no elaborate rhetoric of compliments is meant to be “accurate”; it is meant to be complimentary. When Shakespeare compares his lover to a summer’s day, he doesn’t really mean that she (or he) is like a summer’s day in that she is hotter in the middle and cooler in the end—though, then again, he might. Wine writing is of the same type: a series of elaborately plausible compliments paid to wines. When the French wine writer Eric Glatre declares, say, that in the aroma of a bottle of Krug “intense empyreumatic fragrances of toasted milk bread, fresh butter, café au lait, and afterthoughts of linden join in a harmonious chorus with generous notes of acacia honey, mocha, and vanilla,” he is suggesting that, of all the analogies out there, this might be one that expands our minds, opens our horizons, delights our imaginations. He is offering a metaphor, not an account book.

In this way, the intersection of French sensibility and modern science suggests not so much the limits of Parker as the limits of naïve American empiricism: numbers and honesty and transparency only get you so far in the world. Our experiences of everything are too mediated—by contexts and intentions and likeness—to be summed up in a number. It is exactly the disputable quality of the compliments we pay to wine that makes them touch the lower edge of art. De gustibus solum est disputandum. Only matters of taste are worth arguing over.

Between the rhetorical and the real lies ritual. And wine is a ritual thing before it is any other kind of thing. In a remarkable new book, “Ancient Wine” (Princeton; $29.95), the archeologist Patrick E. McGovern shows that six thousand years ago an entire “wine culture” was already associated with special serving and drinking vessels. From the beginning, wine and wine culture has been a halfway house between the sacramental and the social. The question about ritualized aesthetic discriminations is not whether they exist—they exist in the minds of the people who feel them; that’s enough—but what they are about. For the wine snob, they are about the ability to make them, and this is just sad. For the French wine critic—a generalized type, but one who exists—they are about the ability to put a map inside your mind: to taste tastes and see places. For the American wine critic, they are about the ability to offer consumers a quality beverage.

What they rarely seem to be about is drinking wine. Remarkably, nowhere in wine writing, including Parker’s and Echikson’s, would a Martian learn that the first reason people drink wine is to get drunk. To read wine writing, one would think that wine is simply another luxury food, like smoked salmon or caviar or chocolate; the one idea that is banished is that it is a powerful drug, which can wash away, in a few minutes, the ability to discriminate at all. The end of food writing is to turn eating into a metaphor for wanting, of all kinds. The end of wine writing is to turn drinking into a metaphor for judging. Since we know that this is false, we feel the falsity, and the pathos of the falsity.

For it is not wine that makes us happy for no reason; it is alcohol that makes us happy for no reason. Wine is what gives us a reason to let alcohol make us happy without one. Without wine lore, and wine tasting, and wine talk, and wine labels, and, yes, wine writing and rating—the whole elaborate idea of wine—we would still get drunk, but we would be merely drunk. The language of wine appreciation is there not because wine is such a special subtle challenge to our discernment but because without the elaborate language—without the idea of wine, held up and regularly polished—it would all be about the same, or taste that way. Wine talk and wine ceremony are not simply snobbish distractions that lead us away from the real experience; they are part of what lets the experience happen. To turn wine away from happiness is the drinker’s sin. A good fruity bottle of a Santa Barbara Pinot Noir, with a pretty label and a decent story, makes us happy, and happier than that we don’t really deserve to be. In that James story, of course, the innocent empirical American’s reward and punishment would come when he marries that comtesse and retires to her château, where they spend the rest of their lives drinking nothing but water, for their health.

Here is the paragraph I want to talk about:

“For one of the defining characteristics of most French terroirs is not to make very good wine. To alter that is to put them in the beverage business. No one says this, exactly—but when you are handed a glass of thin and astringent country wine in France and asked to admire it for its character, there is a reasonable point in which its character does consist in its having some. The French connoisseur believes that, with his glass of turpentiney Gascon wine, he is in a truer relation to history and reality than the American searching for his jammy high-scorers. I wouldn’t actually drink like this, but I understand it.”

Yes. But I don’t think Gopnik has made a valiant enough case for the French way (as Gopnik labels it). First, he seems to presume that if you want big, fruity, flavorful wines, then you have to go Californian, Aussie or American-style Bordeaux. This is to ignore the fact that great examples of various French (and other European wines) can be not only just as fruit-filled, but at the same time more complex, and therefore, more rewarding than their one-large-size-fits-all American counterparts. The problem is not that the goal of European winemakers is a lesser goal—it’s actually higher—but that it is harder to attain. Unfortunately, you have to go through about 9 expensive red burgundies to get that one great experience. However, if you are a living, sentient being, you will be able to appreciate what is a deeper, richer, more intellectually (and therefore emotionally) satisfying experience. The same goes for Alsace, Germany, the Rhone and elsewhere, only instead of 10 to 1, the odds are more in your favor.

Gopnik makes quite a fuss about the idea of wine as a reason to get drunk. He mentions that some experts couldn’t tell the difference between a red and a white wine with red food coloring. Okay, I may not be Robert Parker, but I would have to be pretty far gone to not be able to tell red from white, blindfold or no blindfold. The reason wine writers don’t talk about the “getting drunk part” of wine drinking is that these are two separate issues. If you don’t believe me, go to a tasting and watch people spitting out the wine. Or watch me drink a half a glass of something and then stop. It is possible (if unlikely).

Let me un-summarize. The American ideal of getting more fruit for your money is valid. Most European wine is overpriced, too dry, too thin and not fruity enough. But if great wine should be only about the amount of fruit and nothing else, then I suggest you just find your favorite California cab, and buy twenty cases, and leave the real wine for me.

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