Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [107]
Why We Love French Wine
PETER HELLMAN
I DON’T KNOW all the reasons that other people love French wine, but I know why I love it: in comparison to similar wines from other countries, French wine is almost always, over 95 percent of the time, better, in any type of vessel from which it’s drunk.
PETER HELLMAN is a journalist who has written for Wine Spectator, New York, the New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, Food & Wine, and other publications. He wrote the “Urban Vintage” wine and food column for the New York Sun until 2008, and is the author of The American Wine Handbook (Ballantine, 1987) and When Courage Was Stronger Than Fear: Remarkable Stories of Christians and Muslims Who Saved Jews from the Holocaust (Marlowe & Company, 2004).
THE FRENCH INSIST that the unique glory of their wines originates in the soil—le terroir. For once, these rather immodest people are shortchanging themselves. The true source of French wines issues from their very own heads, hearts, and finicky palates. Otherwise, any batch of happy peasants could have invented Champagne, or determined that it takes thirteen different grapes to make a proper Châteauneuf-du-Pape, or managed to classify the great red wines of Burgundy (all made from the same Pinot Noir grape, mind you) into more than 250 grands crus and premiers crus.
This last fact struck home years ago as I drove along a tiny country road that hugged the vine-draped Côte de Nuits—a first pilgrimage to the region of my favorite wine. A sign marked the spot where the commune of Morey-Saint-Denis ended and Chambolle-Musigny began, fabled names to anyone who adores red Burgundy. The wine map in my head told me that the vines sloping gently upward to my right had to be the grand cru of Bonnes-Mares, a thirty-seven-acre appellation that straddles the two communes. (Full yet delicate, meaty yet refined, a well-aged Bonnes-Mares is my dream of red Burgundy.)
A woman was pruning vines near the road. I pulled over. “This must be Bonnes-Mares,” I said to her confidently.
“Mais non, monsieur,” she said reproachfully. “This is only plain commune wine.”
I told her about the wine map in my head.
“Bonnes-Mares is not here,” she repeated firmly. “It’s over there.”
She pointed to a spot no more than half a dozen rows away. No undulation, dip, or break of any kind that I could see separated the vines of the grand cru of Bonnes-Mares from the communal stuff. Yet one wine fetches triple the price of the other. If you are lucky enough to drink a twenty-year-old bottle of Bonnes-Mares from a good vintage, I’ll lay odds that you won’t find it overpriced.
How serious are the French about le terroir? It’s said that the members of the INAO (Institut National des Appellations d’Origine des Vins et Eaux-de-Vie), entrusted with dividing the Côte d’Or into appellations as small as two acres (La Romanée), wouldn’t hesitate to actually taste the soil. How else to detect subtle differences between similar-appearing plots? Perhaps such differences accounted for the otherwise undetectable boundary between Bonnes-Mares and the lesser stuff.
Burgundy is the extreme example of the French compulsion to divide up territory. There are hundreds of appellations and an astounding number of place names. Charles de Gaulle once noted how difficult it is to govern a country that has a different cheese for every day of the year. How about a choice of wines for every cheese, mon cher général?
You’d think that so many wines would be a source of rampant confusion for the poor consumer. Actually, there’s comfort in the rigidly monitored appellation system. That’s because the French—an individualistic people in some ways—don’t try to create an individual statement with their wines the way so many New World winemakers do. They are best satisfied when they make a wine that conforms to the standards