A Hedonist in the Cellar_ Adventures in Wine - Jay McInerney [1]
Selected Bibliography
INTRODUCTION
My careers as a novelist and as a wine writer could both plausibly be said to have their humble beginnings in the Westcott Cordial Shop in Syracuse, New York. While studying with Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff in the Graduate Writing Program at Syracuse University, I was working behind the counter of this boozeteria, located in a marginal neighborhood a mile or two from the university campus, when I heard that my first novel had been accepted for publication by Random House. And it was there, in between working on the revisions of the novel and riding out the occasional stickup at gunpoint, that I read through the proprietor’s dusty collection of wine books. A significant portion of our business was in the sale of that spirit-fortified grape juice which sustained hardcore, low-budget alcoholics: Night Train, Wild Irish Rose, MD 20/20. But we also sold some real wine—that is, grape juice that had actually undergone fermentation—and it was a tradition among the clerks to take home a bottle each night. I started with, as I recall, a two-dollar bottle of Yugoslavian Cab and worked all the way up to Freixenet, a Spanish sparkler that sold for $5.95 at the time. The owner also kept a small stock of Bordeaux and Burgundy on a shelf near the cash register, dusty bottles that had never moved during my tenure in the store. The day I heard my novel was to be published I bought one of them, a 1978 Smith-Haut-Lafitte, and while, objectively speaking, it was far from the best Bordeaux I’ve ever had, I don’t for a minute believe that wine appreciation is a strictly objective enterprise: I’ve gotten far less pleasure out of more expensive and highly regarded bottles of Bordeaux in the years since.
Bad as some of the wine I was lifting from the store shelves was, it was probably an improvement, in an aesthetic and toxicological sense, from the harder stuff to which I subscribed in my early years in Manhattan. Oenophilia was a way of channeling the hedonistic impulse, of refining and intellectualizing it to some extent. Wine is an intoxicant, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise, although you might never know it on the basis of most of what’s written in the wine journals. And let’s face it: if it weren’t, we wouldn’t be drawn to it. But it can provide intellectual as well as sensual pleasure; it’s an inexhaustible subject, a nexus of subjects, which leads us, if we choose to follow, into the realms of geology, botany, meteorology, history, aesthetics, and literature. Ideally, the appreciation of wine is balanced between consumption and pleasure on the one hand and contemplation and analysis on the other.
My interest in the grape has led me to some of the more beautiful parts of the world—Alsace, Tuscany, Provence, the Cape of Good Hope, the Willamette Valley, to name a few— and brought me into contact with some of the most stimulating and congenial eccentrics of our time. Wine people are as a rule gregarious, generous, and passionate. The cult of Bacchus doesn’t include many anal-retentive personalities. I learned a lot about viticulture from Angelo Gaja over dinner at a trattoria in Barbaresco, but what I remember most vividly was the story of how he smashed his television set with a sledgehammer after he decided his kids were watching it too much. And I’ll never forget Joan Dillon at Château Haut-Brion talking about hijinks on President Kennedy’s yacht, or Allen Ginsberg disrobing in the offices of the Paris Review. Our love of wine is the fraternal bond that brings us together, and it is the lubricant that stimulates our conversation, but it’s a polygamous relationship that encourages and enhances our other passions. It leads us to other subjects and leads us back to the world. It lifts us up and delivers us from the mundane circumstances of daily life, inspires contemplation, and, ultimately, returns us to that very world, refreshed, with enriched understanding and appreciation.
Fermented grape juice is a far more potent catalyst for contemplation and meditation than