A Hedonist in the Cellar_ Adventures in Wine - Jay McInerney [51]
Now that the second great American Revolution—the one in which Robert Parker played George Washington—has become the new wine orthodoxy, it can be curiously refreshing to check in on the old country. At New York’s Veritas, a holy site for American wine drinkers, Broadbent’s entrance causes a stir. Even those diners who don’t recognize him pause to take in the tall, stately figure who somewhat resembles the late Ralph Richardson, with the addition of a full head of silver hair. After a few minutes, Broadbent pierces the churchly hush with a loud declaration. “You Americans bloody well should drink more,” he says. “There’s too much talking and writing and sniffing and tasting. Drink!”
As, since 1966, the head and later the executive director of Christie’s wine department in London, Broadbent has tasted more old bottles than almost anyone on earth, and has kept notes on all of them—137 identical red notebooks full of scrawled commentary, transcribed by his wife, Daphne. His Vintage Wine is an incomparable record of fifty years of tasting that covers some three centuries. At one point in the evening we found ourselves discussing the ′67 Yquem. I thought we were talking about the 1967, whereas Broadbent was referring to the 1867.
Broadbent is one of the last representatives of a great tradition of Bordeaux-centric British oenophiles. Above all else he loves the slightly austere, Cabernet-based wines of the Médoc, which have been the backbone of the English wine trade for centuries. His was a generation, as Jancis Robinson told me recently, “who thought even Pomerol slightly vulgar.” When I ask him about this he concurs, saying that the wines of Pomerol and Saint-Émilion “are too easy. Even Pétrus, it’s a little like Gewürztraminer: after a few sips, I’m tired.” This sounds shocking in 2004. For the past two decades the small-production, Merlot-based wines of the right bank, like Pétrus and Le Pin, have become more fashionable and expensive than Latour and Lafite. He is similarly skeptical about many of the “garage wines” of Saint-Émilion and the cult Cabernets of California, although he is open-minded enough to judge them individually. (He loves Screaming Eagle.) Here’s his note on the ′97 vintage of the superfashionable Le Tertre Roteboeuf: “One of those modern, chocolaty, very sweet, very fleshy, over-the-top wines. Frankly awful.” (I agree with the first sentence and disagree with the second.)
Although a Robert Parker blurb graces the back of Vintage Wine, and Broadbent says of Parker, “I admire his honesty and thoroughness,” Broadbent is, for all intents and purposes, the anti-Parker. At Veritas he tells me, “Parker doesn’t understand the difference between fruit and wine.” Most of the wine that Broadbent admires has long since lost its youthful fruit. The new international style of wine, he claims, tastes like the product of “two machines, one with black currant and one with vanilla.”
Jancis Robinson was the first wine professional I ever met—at the table of novelist Julian Barnes some fifteen years ago. Although I found her dauntingly attractive, I was relieved that she was modest and unpedantic; in the end we almost had to beg her for some comments on the wine. Besides being entertaining, her remarks somehow made me feel smarter. That evening helped demystify wine appreciation for me. I suspect Robinson has done the same for many readers over the years. Robinson passed the grueling Master of Wine exam in 1984, back when the MW was largely a badge of the hyper masculine Brit wine trade. In the past two decades she has become a major star in the dowdy world of wine. The wine columnist for the Financial Times, she is best known to American oenophiles as the editor of The Oxford Companion to Wine and for her former column in the Wine Spectator.
The glamorous, scholarly Robinson has helped shape a more wide-ranging,