Category: Food and Drink

Review

Wine Report 2005, by Tom Stevenson. (Dorling Kindersley, 432 pages, 2004). $20.00.

This annual guide was one of my favourite finds last year. Its aim, as described by editor Tom Stevenson, is to “provide a one-stop update on what has happened in the world of wine over the previous 12 months.” In my review of last year’s guide, I likened it to “a compendium of the best magazine writing of the year on wine.” In this, its second year of publication, Stevenson has reassembled his gang of experts to send in their reports on all the world’s wine regions, along with their opinions on the local issues affecting the wine industry in each place. There have been a number of changes, the most significant being the addition of two more regional chapters, one for Luxembourg as well as one for Belgium, the Netherlands and Scandinavia. Future editions will see additional chapters on Morocco and Algeria, and even unknown wine producing countries such as Zimbabwe, Malta and Ireland are promised, if and when Stevenson can find the experts.

Though this just arrived less than a week ago, I know I’ll be immersed in it for many months. This would be an ideal “stocking stuffer” for the not-quite-novice wine enthusiast who is curious about more than just what bottle to buy. At the end of each regional chapter, each expert lists the best wine producers in their region, as well as the up-and-comers, along with lists of “Best-Quality Wines,” “Best Bargains,” and most interestingly, “Most Exciting or Unusual Finds”. It’s refreshing to read an annual guide that’s not solely focussed on discussing specific wines. Instead, this dense little book is content to educate and let the reader explore the store shelves, restaurant wine list, or agent’s price list(!) on their own.

Review

A Tale of Two Valleys: Wine, Wealth, and the Battle for the Good Life in Napa and Sonoma, by Alan Deutschman. (Broadway Books, 221 pages, 2003). $22.95.

With such an unwieldy title, I feared that this book might turn out to be an impenetrable sociological treatise. Fortunately and unfortunately, it’s more breezy and gossipy than that. It begins rather more ominously, though, warning of a coming plague.

The glassy-winged sharpshooter is a small insect that feeds on, and kills, vines. It had been ravaging vineyards in the southern part of California and was now moving north. The people of Sonoma and Napa were preparing for the onslaught and it seemed to stir up grievances, between the rich newcomers drawn by the lure of more riches in the wine business and the “townies” who had lived here for generations.

Alan Deutschman was in a unique position to observe life in the two valleys, staying with wealthy friends over the course of a year. But I’m not sure that he’s aware that this very fact tends to compromise his apparent sympathy with the “regular folks” against the rich newcomers.

Where the book is most entertaining is in its comparison of the cultural differences between the two valleys. Sonoma has long been a bohemian-friendly place where rugged individualism is tolerated, even admired. One telling example is near the beginning of the book when the Sonoma town council has to decide what to do about the large number of chickens freely roaming around the town square. Napa, by comparison, is the playground of the rich and the corporate. While Sonoma farmers grow a number of other crops (mostly fruit), their Napa brethren seem to have torn out everything else to plant wine grapes. Napa hosts many more wine “entrepreneurs”, people who want to make a lot of money and who don’t care much for anything or anyone that might remind them that making wine is basically just a type of farming.

But of course, with success comes compromise. Sonoma is changing, and Deutschman planted himself in the middle of a number of political battles that seemed to be about what Sonoma would become. Of course, the most important was how to deal with the glassy-winged sharpshooter. Most of the people who actually lived in Sonoma year-round were opposed to a plan to dump massive amounts of insecticide on the crop, but their victory (in the name of preserving their way of life, and their health) could mean devastation for the very commodity that keeps their economy afloat.

This small book gives the reader a glimpse of the wine country that the visitor never sees. When the tasting rooms are closed and the tourists go home, the residents of these idyllic places are engaged in a struggle with their own “success”. The insect problem almost seems a blessing in disguise to some of them. A Tale of Two Valleys scratches the surface of some very important issues facing tourism and the wine industry worldwide. As more and more business people and tourists flock to Napa, or Sonoma, or Tuscany, or New Zealand, or any number of other picturesque wine spots around the world, those places lose a part of their souls. The glassy-winged sharpshooter is at least a more honest predator.

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.

Review

The World Atlas of Wine, Fifth Edition, by Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson (Mitchell Beazley, 352 pages, 2001). $75.00

As I was reading Kermit Lynch’s book, I realized just how indispensible a wine atlas has become. It’s fine to know vaguely where Burgundy and Bordeaux are located, but when authors (and wine critics) start dropping the names of microscopic plots of land, you’ll need a solid reference book to find them. Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson’s beautiful volume, first published in 1971, is much more than just a collection of maps.

There are fine introductory sections on the history of wine, growing grapes, making wine, and even enjoying wine. Next follow the maps, with France taking up a hefty 100 pages. The maps are extremely useful, showing not only the location of leading producers, but details such as elevation lines and actual vineyard boundaries. The text accompanying the maps goes into admirable detail concerning the soil types, sun exposure and other aspects of terroir that are impossible to determine from a wine label.

Despite the hefty price, this is a book that will pay for itself over and over for the wine lover eager to move from Beaujolais to Beaujolais-Villages to Moulin-à-Vent, or who wants to know exactly where and what Chateau Pichon-Longueville de Baron is, and not just the price or what score Mr. Parker gave it.

Review

The Hachette Guide to French Wines 2004: The Definitive Guide to Over 9,000 of the Best Wines of France. (Mitchell Beazley, 1,019 pages, 2003). $50.00.

Boasting over 9,000 entries, the annual Hachette Guide is one of the most comprehensive wine guides to this most intimidating of wine producing countries. 900 wine experts make the selection of wines from over 30,000 entries during blind tastings. Though the editors note the omission of several well-known producers, it is not clear whether their absence is due to elimination by the judges or simply a failure to supply wines for the tastings, which may be the book’s largest weakness. Nonetheless, the guide’s breadth and depth more than make up for any omissions.

Some very helpful introductory material includes a summary of the life cycle of grapevines, how to read French wine labels, and a “What’s New” section with vintage reports for each region. In addition, there are almost 50 maps detailing the appellations of each region. Though not wine atlas material, these are useful for locating producers in relation to each other.

As with all guides of this type, each entry is densely-packed with information that is often difficult to cipher out. Some simple rules here make sense. If an entry is accompanied by a photo of the wine’s label, it is an indication of a strong recommendation from the committee. The rating system is a simple system of one to three stars, indicating wines of good, excellent and exceptional quality. Each entry also has a vintage guide, with the best vintages circled, good vintages in bold, and the text colour indicating which vintages should be kept (black) or drunk (red).

This guide is undoubtedly valuable for lovers of French wine, but unfortunately for us in Ontario, only a tiny percentage of these wines will ever make it to the LCBO’s shelves. Some of the wines listed will be available through consignment agents like Lifford, but you may have to search the web to find out if the wine is represented in Ontario and by whom. Of course, this isn’t the fault of the fine people who assemble this guide each year, and it doesn’t prevent me from recommending it as a great source of information particular to France, particularly if you want to discover some tiny (ie. less than 1 hectare of vines under cultivation) producers of quality. Getting the wines in Ontario will be your particular quest, but this is the treasure map you’ll need to get you started.