Book Review: Adventures on the Wine Route

Review

Adventures on the Wine Route: A Wine Buyer’s Tour of France, by Kermit Lynch (HarperCollins, 288 pages, 1988). $24.00

Kermit Lynch is in the same business as Lifford. He imports and sells wine. Except that Kermit travels around France and personally chooses the blends and barrels of wine that he wants to import and sell to his customers. This is considered unusual, and Kermit definitely has the air of a curmudgeon about him. Except that he is curmudgeonly only because of his passion for wine. He has very strong opinions about the state of the wine industry, how corporations have crushed the small winemakers and homogenized the flavour of the product. So he seeks out the tiny producers, those cranky farmers who refuse to sell to him until after several meetings and then only in minute quantities.

He passionately believes a number of things about getting the best wines to his customers intact: he only ships wines in refrigerated containers, he is adamantly against filtering of any kind, and he has an innate mistrust of tampering with traditional methods. His championing of refrigerated transport sets him apart from many of the low-tech (or no-tech) reactionaries, but his views are in large part similar. He values wine in all its forms, as long as it is well-made. He disparages the modern wine culture’s monomania for big, rich wines and its blind reliance on numerical “scores”.

At the same time, the book is a fascinating travelogue, guiding us around some of the most famous (and least famous) vineyards in France. He profiles many of the rugged individualists he admires, from Gérard Chave, maker of fine Hermitages, to Auguste Clape who makes Cornas in the Northern Rhône, to Alain Roux in the unsung Languedoc. The personalities of these men are directly related to the way they make their wine, in Lynch’s view, and his relationships with them form a large part of his enjoyment of their wines. In the same way, his enthusiasm has helped sell some previously unknown wines to his many customers.

Each chapter is named for a region, and some (Beaujolais, Chablis) merely function as jumping-off points for Lynch to lambaste the entire population of growers of the region for ruining historically great wines. He refers to the production of Beaujolais as overchaptalized and overalcholic. He laments the lack of real Chablis even in Chablis: “Chablis that tastes like Chablis is so hard to find even in the cellars of Chablis that I have trouble working up any sympathy for the French howls of noble outrage when they begin raving about our supermarket jugs of Chablis and even Pink Chablis.”

The only weakness to this book might be its age. Because it was published in 1988, it’s hard to know what might have changed since then; who might have died or retired, which wineries may have been bought out by corporations or closed their doors. Even though Kermit Lynch continues to sell wine, he has said that he won’t write another book. But how about at least a new introduction or an afterword? Something to either give us hope that things are changing for the better, or to confirm Lynch’s worst fears. I suppose the next best thing is to read the monthly mailers that Lynch still writes and sends out to more than 15,000 customers. You can get on the mailing list by writing to Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 1605 San Pablo, Berkeley, CA, 94702.