A Hedonist in the Cellar_ Adventures in Wine - Jay McInerney [5]
Lora was later recruited by Dominque Browning for House & Garden, and it was she who suggested that the magazine should have a wine column, although she was initially highly skeptical when Dominique proposed my name. Ten years later we’ve spent hundreds of pleasurable hours together—and a few unpleasant ones when we were lost and exhausted and sick of each other on some back road in Provence or Piedmont. (We once spent the better part of a night in a French police station, but that’s another story.) Lora’s passionate belief that food and wine are inseparable companions has resulted in our working and traveling together. (I suspect she has also convinced upper management at House & Garden that I am far too scatterbrained to travel by myself, which is at least half true.) She’s organized where I’m improvisational; she is the superego to my id. She drives because my driving makes her nervous. Much of what follows is the result of our travels, racing from winery to trattoria, pilgrims of the palate, devout hedonists in search of the next ecstatic revelation.
It’s my ambition to share some of those epiphanies in this book and to encourage readers to seek out their own.
Let’s be honest: there’s only one activity more satisfying than drinking good wine with good food; and if you’re drinking wine in the right company, the one pleasure, more often than not, will lead to the other.
MY FAVORITE WHITE
I hate when I’m asked to pick a favorite anything: a book, movie, or song. Sure, I love “Norwegian Wood,” but do I like it more than “Angie” or “Alison”? How am I supposed to choose between Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and Fellini’s 8½? But I think I can actually say with some certainty that Condrieu is my favorite white wine. I really shouldn’t be telling you this, because there’s not very much of it made and there never will be: the steep hillsides above the Rhône River on which it’s grown are extremely hard to work and the appellation is tiny and nowhere else in the world, not even on similar slopes half a mile north or south of Condrieu, does the Viognier grape produce such sublime juice. Viognier has shown some promise in certain sites in California and elsewhere, but drinking these non-Condrieus is kind of like watching The Magnificent Seven; fun, perhaps, but it makes you long for the original.
Why do I like it so much? you may ask. Parsing out the pleasures of Condrieu is a little bit like trying to explicate a haiku. But I can tell you that I love it because white peaches are my favorite fruit and Condrieu frequently tastes like white peaches, though it sometimes verges on apricot. I like its texture, which is fleshy, viscous, and round in the mouth. I like the floral bouquet, which often reminds me of honeysuckle. Certain English tasters equate the aroma with May blossoms, but for me, nonhorticulturalist that I am, it simply reminds me of certain gardens in springtime. I like it because it evokes Gauguin’s Tahitian paintings. And finally, perversely, I like it because it lacks two qualities that great wines are supposed to possess; namely, acid and the ability to improve with age. High-acid Riesling is much food-friendlier, and white Burgundy from Meursault or Puligny will last much longer and gain complexity over time. But so what? Love isn’t based on practical considerations. Condrieu is a wine for romantics.
Like Côte-Rôtie, the red wine appellation that borders it on the north, Condrieu was nearly moribund after the Second World War, its steep vineyards largely abandoned and its exotic wine on the verge on extinction, until Georges Vernay took over his family domain in the early fifties and became chairman of the appellation, encouraging other landowners to replant the old vineyards even as he lobbied to tighten regulations. Less than twenty acres of Viognier remained on the hills of Condrieu at the time. In 1988 the boundaries of the appellation were limited to the steep hillsides. By the time