This wine critic gig began as a form of moonlighting. On my passport it says I’m a novelist., and my previous books haa all been works of fiction. I’ve had daydreams about accepting the Pulitzer Prize for fiction since I was seventeen; until recently I never really imagined myself standing in a cellar of Chateau Lafite at ten in the morning tasting the new vintage out of barrel, let alone publishing a book about wine.
It all started about twenty years ago with a phone call from Dominique Browning, an old friend who’d recently been given the mandate of resurecting House and Garden, the venerable Conde Nast shelter journal. In her wisdom, which runs pretty deep, Dominique decided that in the new post-tuna casserole America, she wanted to cover wine as well as food, couches and nasturtiums. And apparently she decided that it would be fun to hire an enthusiast who was not necessarily a specialist. Those assembled at one of the early staff meetings liked the idea. However, when the concept was fleshed out with my name, I’m told that eyebrows were raised, while jaws and even pins were dropped. The feeling seems to have been that I had made my name, such as it was, by writing about people who abused controlled substances and ravaged their nasal passages. (See Bright Lights, Big City, Vintage, 1984) What the hell did I know about wine?
Good question. As Dominique pointed out, I knew a little more than might be expected. As a friend she was aware of the fact that I had suffered a mild and relatively benign case of oenophilia for years. I was a collector and a drinker, a reader of wine journals and wine catalogues. And a talker. In providing an outlet for my passion she may have been thinking of our mutual friends, some of whom were possibly getting tired of listening to me hold forth on the subject.
My only formal credential in the wine trade was my year of employment at the Westcott Cordial Shop in Syracuse N.Y. I worked as a clerk for minimum wage while studying writing with Raymond Carver and writing my first novel. The neighborhood was a marginal one, situated between the university and the ghetto, and while we displayed bottles of vintage claret—I spefically remember the bottle of 1978 Smith Haut Lafite with its blue and yellow label–they tended to collect dust; much of our trade was in the area of industrially fortified grape juice–selling Wild Irish Rose and Night Train to guys with bad hygeine. Still, the proprietor of the shop was a Princeton man who had an extensive wine library on the premises and high hopes for the eventual gentrification of the neighborhood. I used to dip into the wine library between robberies and grad school assignments. And I used to dip into the stock when I left at night, it being the tradition among the clerks to supplement our paltry income with the odd bottle of Yugoslavian cabernet.
I worked my way up from the cheapest bottles of Eastern European table wine—we had quite a few in the two dollar range—all the way up to the Spanish bubbly, which at that time cost five or six bucks. It wasn’t a bad way to learn. Later, after my first novel was published and became a bestseller, I was able to afford some of those vintage clarets. By then I had developed the start of a palate. I certainly knew what bad wine tasted like. In Between Meals, A.J, Liebling makes the case for starting one’s gastronomic apprenticeship near the bottom of the food chain. “If the first requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite,” he says, “the second is to put in your apprenticeship as a feeder when you have enough money to pay the check but not enough to produce indifference about the size of the total.” The same can be said of wine. The poor man, the budget drinker, is forced to make choices and sacrifices which can only sharpen his discrimination and his appreciation of competing pleasures. Starting at the top one will miss out on the climb.
Perhaps the most significant event in my continuing education as an oenophile took place under strictly literary auspices: having quit the liquor store a year before, I was in London for the English publication of Bright Lights, Big City, where my English editor threw a party for me. Among the many people I met that night was the English novelist Julian Barnes, whose brilliant novel Flaubert’s Parrot I had just read and admired. I can’t quite remember how it was that he came to invite me to dinner—Julian is not the kind of guy who indiscriminately spews invitations—but a few nights later I found myself chez Barnes. Perhaps we had discussed wine at the party—when I arrived he had decanted two bottles of what I would later realize were legendary Chateauneuf du Papes, 1962 and the 1967 Jaboulet Les Cedres. I didn’t have much respect for Chateauneuf at the time, perhaps because it was the red wine I had first learned to appreciate when I was in college. By then I thought of it as a beginners wine. As soon as I tasted the sixty seven I realized I had a lot to learn. This was the beginning of my own love affair with the wines of the Rhone.
Julian was a year or two ahead of me in terms of his vinous education and his collecting—already he had a pretty significant cellar, composed mainly of clarets and Rhones. Subsequently I realized that drinking with Julian was like playing tennis with a slightly superior player—in fact he was a superior tennis player as well—the best possible way to learn and to sharpen your game.
Bordeaux was my first love as a wine drinker. It’s easier to understand than any other French wine region. Which is not to say that its simple. Clarets (as our teabag friends call the red wines of Bordeaux) age better than any other, acquiring amazing complexity over the years. But they are also more consistent than, say, Burgundies. And yet Burgundy is the wine that I eventually came to love the most, though in the meantime, I would explore the wines of California, Italy and most major wine growin regions in between thanks to Conde Nast’s generous travel budget and the encouragement of food editor Lora Zarubin, who usually travelled with me,
When House and Garden folded in 2006, I tbought I would retire from the wine writing biz, but the Wall Street Journal approached me to write a wine column and I spent the next three years doing so before I began my gig as the wine critic for Town and Country magazine at the behest of my old friend Jay Fielden, who was the editor. As I write this I am about to emebark on a new vinous adventure writing about wine for Air Mail, the sprightly and sophisticated online publication. Bottoms up.