A Hedonist in the Cellar_ Adventures in Wine - Jay McInerney [23]
Of the many hours I have spent lost on back roads of wine regions around the world, I doubt if I ever felt more lost in the wilderness than I did looking for the property of pro golfer David Frost in the remote foothills of Paarl. Frost gives lousy directions, but his Cabernet is a big currant bomb, and he is what the South Africans call a rugger bugger and what we would call a good old boy—a generous and gregarious host despite the fact that he was feeling the effects of a long night with his good friend Anthonij Rupert the night before. After the long hangover from apartheid-era isolation, South Africa’s red wines, like its actresses and golfers, are ready to compete internationally.
THE BLACK WINE OF CAHORS
When the estate of the late Bill Blass was auctioned by Sotheby’s, I couldn’t help wondering about the fate of a certain item—a medal he had received at a ceremony in New York inducting him into the Confrères des Chevaliers du Cahors some five or six years ago. I was also inducted into the society that night, though, like Blass, I was slightly baffled by the honor, and hardly knew where Cahors was at the time. I have since visited the region and sampled many of its wines, and when I drink the big wines of Cahors I often think of Blass, a big man who exuded a hypermasculine sense of personal style.
Cahors is butch. Peter the Great was one of its many admirers, and his enthusiasm was shared by his countrymen. The “black wine” of Cahors was renowned for its power and density and was sometimes used to punch up the wimpier reds of Bordeaux. This muscular, tannic red wine of Cahors developed alongside the hearty, fatty cuisine of the southwest: foie gras, cassoulet, confit, and maigret de canard.
From the Middle Ages until the middle of the nineteenth century the reds of Cahors were as famous as any in Europe, until phylloxera wiped out the vineyards. When initial attempts to graft the local Auxerrois vines onto disease-resistant American rootstocks failed, many growers planted hybrids that produced insipid vim ordinaires. By the middle of this century the big inky drink that was le vrai Cahors was almost extinct.
After devastating frosts in 1956 and 1957, a Cahors native named José Baudel left his post as the head of the government research center in Bordeaux to take over the local cooperative wine cellar and to save the wine of his homeland from oblivion. Baudel worked to banish the hybrids and propagate Auxerrois (known elsewhere as Malbec), a tannic grape that seems to have a particular affinity for the soils and climate of the Lot River Valley and the adjacent plateau.
In the last decade Cahors has made a comeback, as its winemakers groped to integrate their traditions with new technology and the international marketplace. “Ten years ago there was a midlife crisis,” says Ariane Daguin, proprietor of D’Artagan in New York, which specializes in the cuisine of her native region. “The wines, which had evolved in symbiosis with that heavy cuisine, were big and tannic. When people started eating lighter, they had to learn to lighten them up a little.” That said, Cahors will never be a dainty, aperitif kind of drink. It will never make a nice accompaniment for a plate of steamed vegetables, nor should it go to the beach. But it ought to find favor with advocates of high-fat, high-protein diets à la Atkins.
Locals consider Cahors to be the logical accompaniment to foie gras, and to most dishes involving black truffles— Cahors being more or less the heart of the Périgord region. The preternaturally boyish Pierre-Jean Pebeyre is a fourth-generation truffle negotiant; dining with Pebeyre and his wife, Babethe, in the town of Cahors I have experienced some stunning food-and-wine pairings involving black truffles and Cahors. The Pebeyres taught me to make a sauce of butter whisked into warm truffle juice (available in tins) with pureed black truffles, which eroticizes almost any simple dish.
Stendahl once remarked on the resemblance of this part of France to Tuscany, and as in Chianti,