Book 'Em, Wino!

Several sommeliers that I’ve spoken with have explained that the best way to understand wine is simply to drink as much as one can. Sadly, said formula presents some serious setbacks. Not the least of which is the vast chasm of access between them and I.

Hence, I am left to my own devices (which generally results in disaster… make that adventure!) Much of my wine knowledge is garnered from books, and then applied in public. My latest two acquisitions of pulp and print are Willliam Echikson’s Noble Rot: A Bordeaux Wine Revolution and Robert Parker’s seminal work, Wines of the Rhone Valley. The latter will take me a lifetime to process and the former took me about two trips on the C Line to read.

On Wines of the Rhone Valley…
I want to dislike Robert Parker. He exceeds 800 Pound Gorilla status; the man has been downright deified. (Really, his nickname is “God” Parker!) Supporting Bob feels like rooting for the Dallas Cowboys.

The problem is that Parker is perplexingly proficient at his preferred profession.

- Parker is good, really good. Those individuals fortunate enough to see him at work describe having their doubts washed away by a machine who can blindly identify dozens of wines consecutively.

- Parker is actually fairly humble, living in a modest home in Maryland and not causing much of a stir outside of the Sixty Minutes piece, and, ohh, that Shovel-eer business with Chirac.

- Parker really does his best to look out for the little man. Echikson describes his disgust with ’79-Oil-Crisis-Style of price gouging following his rave write-up of Bordeaux’s millennial harvest. “God” readied his bolts demanding an adjustment and declaring, “I don’t write for rich businessmen. The consumer is getting screwed by all this market manipulation.”
(If Melvin Van Peebles were a wine critic, he couldn’t get much more badass!)

As you’ve probably inferred, the book itself is must-buy. For starters, the subject matter is oft neglected, but vital; the Rhone Valley is widely regarded as possessing the best price to quality ratio of any region in the world and some knowledge is nice. Unlike the author’s recent forays into coffee table books, this work is all meat. Parker provides explanations of the major regions and producers, some faux-vintage maps, tasting notes, and a little history, personal and oenological. No, he does not write like Clive Coates, far more sanitized, yet, Parker succeeds in packing a tremendous amount of information into the volume without turning his diction too flowery or resorting to an excess of charts and numbers. The work is great for looking up specific details or reading, not reading straight through; in short, it’s a “bathroom book.” On the other end of the spectrum…

On Noble Rot…

Echikson’s book is the gastronomical equivalent of an airport novel; the writing is easy to process and the substance is, well, unsubstantial. The work did have some pedagogical value. However, the piece on French wines was constructed like a California wine: excruciatingly engineered and formulaic, not to mention devoid of soul. The author presents a jumble of historical facts on Bordeaux, but fails to build a compelling narrative, and any reader with a modicum of background knowledge finds themselves patronized by the insertion of metaphorical sugar into the juice. The writing attempts to straddle a fine introductory line, but ultimately, it is far more Dr. Seuss than Ogden Nash.

That said, reading said story was not some sort of Manichean struggle, and I did enjoy parts, particularly the following two factoid/quotes…

- The first known review of Bordeaux was found amongst the voluminous diaries of Samuel Pepys. After a night at London’s Royal Oak Tavern in 1622, he wrote, “Drank a sort of French wine called Ho Bryan [sic] that hath a good and most particular taste that I ever met with.”

- When Le Monde criticized for Yquem’s medieval (literally!) practices, i.e. employment through a system that involved all workers living on the estate and issuing checks to the family, as opposes to the individual, scion, Count Alexandre de Lur-Saluces “Rural society permits social relations that would escape the understanding of Parisian journalists.” (Echikson also notes that the family advocated the restoration of the Bourbon Monarchy well past the Second World War!)