A Hedonist in the Cellar_ Adventures in Wine - Jay McInerney [44]
As a retailer, importer, and author, Lynch has followed his nose and his palate, discovering and introducing Americans to some of the greatest, most distinctive wines of France. Zind-Humbrecht, Raveneau, Vieux Télégraphe, Mas de Daumas Gassac—these are among his finds. And he has memorably described his quest in Adventures on the Wine Route, to my mind one of the best books on wine in the English language, with its uncommon combination of poetic insight and skeptical common sense.
He is a pioneer in his appreciation of the regional traditions of French wine, and his position in the wine world might almost be described as reactionary. Of California wines he says, “I taste them and I wonder, Can a white man sing the blues?” As for the Bordelaises, he thinks they are trying to imitate the Californians. “Bordeaux doesn’t taste like Bordeaux,” he says over a lunch of grilled vegetables. “It tastes like California Cabernet. The last real Bordeaux vintage was ′81. Now they dress their wines up with lipstick and high heels.” (Less metaphorically, he thinks the Bordelaises are growing too much, and tarting up the juice with sugar and gimmicks like reverse osmosis, which removes water from the juice.) Describing the old style, he quotes Cardinal Richelieu, who commended the wines of Bordeaux as having “an indescribably sinister, somber bite that is not at all disagreeable.” Lynch misses the sinister bite with today’s flirty Bordeaux. He gives Marcel Guigal credit for reviving interest in Côte-Rôtie, while criticizing his heavily oaked blockbusters as lacking regional and varietal character. Opinions like these, not to mention his tendency to corner the market on certain desirable wines, have made Lynch a somewhat controversial figure in the wine world.
By his own description, Lynch was a Berkeley hippie when he first became interested in wine. A musician who wrote for the Berkeley Barb and made purses out of Oriental rugs, he found a buyer for his handicrafts business and went to Europe on the proceeds. He returned to California in 1972 and borrowed five thousand dollars to open a tiny wine store. Alice Waters, who had just launched Chez Panisse, was one of his early customers. At the time, the California wine boom was barely in its infancy, and the American market for French wines was largely restricted to the top growths of Bordeaux. Lynch created a niche by visiting the less celebrated regions of France and importing distinctive regional wines. He says his decision to concentrate on European wines was almost accidental; the late California winemaker Joseph Swan was a friend, and Lynch loved his Zinfandels. But when Swan ripped up his best Zinfandel vineyard and planted Pinot Noir, Lynch hated the results. “So rather than lose a friend,” he says, “I made a rule: no California wines.” One suspects this isn’t the whole story, but Lynch gives good anecdote.
In another happy accident, Lynch met the legendary expatriate food writer Richard Olney when looking for a translator on one of his wine-buying trips. (He has since become fluent enough to fend for himself.) Olney’s knowledge of French regional wines was as invaluable as his linguistic skills. “He would listen to a wine to see what it had to say,” says Lynch. “He changed the way I taste.” Like Olney, Lynch believes in context—the context of a wine’s origins, and the context of its consumption with certain foods. He scoffs at blind tastings, vintage charts, and numerical wine ratings. “It’s ridiculous to rate a Muscadet on the same scale as a Montrachet,” he says. “One of the great things about wine is diversity.” Diversity is his mantra. Yes, he imports Coche-Dury, the hottest white Burgundy on the planet, but he seems just as excited by the inexpensive wines of Corsica, with their unique native grape varietals and herbal