My Life in Wine
The Good, the
Bad, and the Bubbly
My
life in wine—like the other thirty-odd years of it—has had its ups and downs.
If I had that time to live over, I’d strive to become a complete writer,
oriented more toward mastering the craft of fiction and less toward appraising
the virtues of nectars of the grape. But since I joined the field and stayed
there due to my own stubborn volition, I can hardly complain. I’ve had happy
and proud moments with writers, winemakers, cooks, and other people who love to
eat and drink, though there have been times of sweat and strain, and, of
course, some disappointments.
It began in the early sixties, when
I took a job at the Rome Daily American
and cultivated a true amateur’s devotion to vino,
canvassing Italy for novel names and flavors. I collected labels and notes, but
didn’t begin writing about Italian wine until I moved to Paris, to the news
desk of the International Herald Tribune,
and acquired a farmhouse near Cortona as a retreat and research base.
My first article, in 1971, was a
profile of Franco Biondi Santi and his Brunello di Montalcino—names that became
legends but were then scarcely known beyond the province of Siena. “Wine for
People with Patience” was the title, an irony of sorts, since I’ve never had
the diligence to let a fine bottle collect dust in the cellar.
My aspirations grew until, in 1977,
I turned down a generous offer to become managing editor and quit the IHT—my last gasp of stable employment—packed wife, kids, and a dog named Grappa into a Peugeot
station wagon and headed for Tuscany. While waiting more than two years for a
phone to be installed in our home at an isolated burg called Teverina, our link
to the outside world was La Posta
Italiana, which functioned at about the speed of Pony Express. Verdicts on
my career choice among colleagues and friends leaned decidedly more toward
crazy than courageous.
I’d already begun writing a book about Italian wine, though,
aside from an insatiable craving for the stuff and a gift of taste memory, my
qualifications were practically nil. Yet I did have something going for me. At that
time, few English-speaking readers were aware of the vast and varied compass of
Italian wine. So, after traveling around meeting winemakers and recording
impressions, I filled a void with a book called Vino, the Wines and Winemakers of Italy, published in 1980 by
Atlantic-Little, Brown after a dozen or so rejections.
Vino even won some praise from
Francophile U.K. critics, perhaps amused that an upstart Yank would dedicate an
entire book to a country noted for cheap and cheerful Chianti in the straw-skirted
flask—or fiasco, as it’s called in its native Tuscany. Besides Chianti, the
U.S. market then overflowed with sweet Lambrusco (Italian Coke), bleached blond
Soave, Frascati, and Verdicchio, and jugs of dago red.
More books followed—principally The Pocket Guide to Italian Wine, 1982; The Wine Atlas of Italy, 1990; Treasures of the Italian Table, 1994; Burton Anderson’s Best Italian Wines,
2001—along with articles, columns, booklets, lectures, conferences, videos, and
more. Everywhere I’ve gone, people have alluded to my luck in having such a
cushy job. Imagine getting rich lounging around the pool in Tuscany sipping
Brunello and Barolo.
Get real. The free-lance adventure has
comprised thirty-five years of scraping together
funds to finance a family, homes, college tuitions, research, travel,
fiscal bumbles, lawsuits, and the mandatory ex-pat visits to far-away
relatives. Forget vacations. I might have tried more gainful pursuits, but
never got around to it. Too busy meeting deadlines, I suppose.
Through it all, I’ve watched Italy surge to the
forefront of world wine, though that was inevitable, given the country’s
ubiquitous aptitude for vines and its people’s ingenuity. Still, I like to
think that I gave a small nudge to Italy’s modern renaissance of wine. And I
get a contrarian’s kick out of reminding legions of doubters of Italian
potential that I told them so.
Sour Grapes
Soon after the turn of the century,
and the publication of the unrewarding Burton
Anderson’s Best Italian Wines, I decided to point my literary career in new
directions. My way of writing about wine, which intuitively traces quality and
character to people and places, had been superseded by the summations of
taster-raters, led by Robert M. Parker, Jr., whose peerless palates spew
verdicts in points with notes as sacrosanct as papal bulls.
Sour grapes? You bet, but what are old
farts for if not to bitch and grumble? The change of direction, among other effects,
reinforced my conviction that I was not too old to make it as a serious writer.
Others have expressed serious doubts, inciting me to swallow my pride and take
a walk on the wily side. Among suggested schemes:
1. Dash off a book on Italian wine
with points and tasting notes. I get it. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. But
at my age could I master the wine guru lexicon, that list of two-hundred—or is
it two-hundred-and-fifty?—terms describing odors, flavors, colors, and more,
through often gaudy analogies to animal, mineral, and vegetal sensory perceptions,
including every imaginable fruit except grapes? No cakewalk that. Also I’d have
to brush up on counting backwards—not having had much practice since high
school team-bus choruses of “A Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” But since
wine is the subject, I suppose I’d only need to count down from a hundred to
around seventy-five. To the raters, that’s already purgatory, just a point or
two from hell.
2. Whip together a recipe book with
lots of great pictures. After cracking Julia Child’s weights-and-measures codes
for boeuf bourguignon and bouillabaisse—risking a crise de nerfs in a cramped Paris kitchen to conceive the best
versions of those dishes I’ve tasted—I swore off recipes forever. I’ve since
played it by nose the Italian way, sniffing out the best ingredients at hand,
preferably home grown, while holding the cooking to a respectful minimum.
3. Become the Peter Mayle of
Tuscany. Uh-huh. Or maybe the Walt Disney. Dare I admit that I’d bitten into as
much as I could swallow of A Year in
Provence by about Page 40—which more than doubled my endurance mark for Under the Tuscan Sun. Am I being snotty?
Could it be that I lack the bestseller gene in my DNA?
Anyway, shunning those and other
shenanigans, I knocked out a novel to try my hand at the fiction I should have
pursued much earlier. Entitled Boccadoro,
it’s a romantic thriller about a middle-aged Yank with a golden palate who
takes up with a gorgeous Italian widow running a restaurant on a Tuscan island.
While writing, I envisioned it as a terrific movie starring Jeff Bridges and
Carla Bruni. Might be a little late for that now.
Attempts by agent Alan K. to push
it to publishers drew nixes, some with remarks. One: “Hilarious insider stuff
on Tuscany, food, wine and people, but slow in spots and short on sex.”
Another: “Builds to a convincing climax of suspense, comedy and romance, but
early chapters read like a travelogue.” I more or less agreed with the latter,
but instead of tightening and rewriting, I self-published Boccadoro with iUniverse in 2007. (Boccadoro is an e-book, selling for $4.10 at Amazon.com Kindle Store)
Meanwhile, I dabbled away at Boso’s Tuscany, a tale of a long-lost
ancestor who was head man in Tuscany in the 10th century. Sample
chapters submitted by Alan and an English rep elicited perplexity. One reply:
“Wonderfully wacky. Loved it, but fear it won’t sell.” Another: “Might work if
Anderson cut back on the history and assumed more of a Peter Mayle style.” Him
again. How about Boso’s Provence? My
ancestor was born at Arles, by the way.
With Boso on the back burner, I
turned my attention to building a house—and selling another—and, just for the
hell of it, writing about the experience. Even the nascent Rockfort Chronicles risked getting waylaid when, in the fall of
2009, a hyperactive
wine wizard, Ian D., talked me into co-authoring a new version of my first book
Vino.
Ian, who bills himself as “Italy’s
foremost wine expert,” said that Vino
had inspired his own career. He offered to supply the bulk of information while
I wrote in my style. With the data at his fingertips, he figured we could dash
off the book by October for the Christmas market—self-publishing with the
expectation that a big-name house would pick it up for a handsome fee and make
it a bestseller. Sure thing, while I metamorphose into the speed king of ink
slingers .
I insisted on trying for an advance from a
publisher. So I turned again to Alan K., who as a lawyer had managed to free me from a
quarter-century of bondage as an author-serf to the U.K. publisher I call Mitchell
Beastly. Alan liked the Vino-2 idea,
calling it a potential winner. But he doubted a big advance, reminding me that
the golden days of publishing were over and that even authors like Dan Brown were
having trouble. Poor Dan. Poor me.
I humbugged it through the holidays, working to
organize the project and have a précis ready for potential publishers by
January. Meanwhile, I heard nothing from Ian, who was not answering e-mails.
His odd silence continued until I sent him a note saying forget it, I’m going
on my own. That brought no reply either, then or ever. Oh well, co-authoring
always struck me as something on the order of sharing a mistress or of two dogs
gnawing on the same bone.
Alan reported two rejects: from Simon &
Schuster, with a couple of ho-hum lines after a three-month wait, and Norton,
whose culinary matriarch Maria G. reviled me: “There’s no place for Burton
Anderson in a Parkerized world where people buy wine by numbers.” Gulp.
The proposal went to Thames & Hudson in May 2010, but I heard no more about
it. So much for hot-wired wine wizards, warmed over
culinary matriarchs, well-meaning agents.
The Rating Game
I’m beginning to suspect that I’m a
slow learner—not so good when you’re over seventy. After a decade-long
sabbatical, it was presumptuous to suppose that I could write an opus on the
rapidly evolving realities of Italian wine. On the other hand, I might have
come up with a passable guide filching info off the net. But that would have
been too much like the easy way, which I seem to resist by nature, along with
anything that smacks of styles or trends. Exhibit A: my wardrobe.
One thing I have learned, though,
is that times have changed. And how. When I started out in wine—and well
through my journeyman years in the eighties—writers, producers, and people in
the trade got together to taste and have fun and exchange views. I rarely took
notes, recalling details about wines, winemakers, vineyards, and cellars
through the acumen that rewards a devotee’s ardor.
At the start, I followed a simple
rule. If I liked the wines, the people, and the ambience, I’d write about them.
If I didn’t, I tried to ignore them. Fair enough for an unknown. But, when
published, as my name got around, all that changed. I became the target of a
new breed of predator: once-clueless producers who’d discovered the powers of
PR (and/or the benefits of BS). They barraged me with hype, invitations,
propositions, samples, gifts, none of which I asked for—though, I confess, I
never went to the trouble and expense of sending the baksheesh back. It was no
mean feat to make it known that I couldn’t be bought. That attitude, as I’ve
been reminded too often for comfort, made me a rare bird in Italy’s flock of
wine hawks.
Yet I couldn’t avoid getting
involved, however modestly, in the rating game. That U.K. house I mentioned
earlier published many guides, following a formula of evaluating wines using
stars in a range of one to four. In my often updated Pocket Guide to Italian Wines, I used the scale mainly for
collective denominations (i.e. Barbera d’Asti *à***; Taurasi **à****), although appraisals couldn’t be avoided for
well-known individual wines from noted producers.
Since the system was vague, and the
sliding scale wishy-washy, I followed it in a perfunctory way. I’d always
believed that describing wines in words is more meaningful to readers than
rating them on a scale, whether using numbers, stars, or other symbols. Dream
on. Only a slow learner would have failed to fathom the impact of the worldwide
web on the literature of wine.
In the nineties, raters came to
dominate the wine media, beginning in America with Parker, whose 100-point
system was copied by The Wine Spectator
and others. Their sphere of influence spread to Europe and beyond, changing
patterns of buying, selling, and even producing wine from California to the historic
vineyards of France, Italy, Spain, and Germany. Newsletters, blogs, and
websites provided instant access to all the info needed to buy a ranked bottle
at the nearest shop (where you’d be certain to find the pundits’ scores already
posted).
The market for wine books by literary-minded
authors plummeted. But since print publications are in crisis everywhere, the
raters can’t be held entirely to blame. Even disgruntled literary types like me
will admit that the best of them are skilled tasters and judges of quality, though
there are plenty of copycats, sycophants, and second-raters (pun intended) in
their ranks.
What aggravates me is
the often arrogant way many of them use, and abuse, their palates. The standard
rater ritual entails tasting through a series of wines in a limited time:
sniffing, sipping, analyzing the wine in the mouth without swallowing, then
spitting it out. Points, or other criteria, are assigned to each with descriptive
notes. Such reports
provide insights into a wine’s quality at a moment of its life. But all too
often critics have the gall—and, worse, readers the gullibility—to regard such judgments
as definitive.
The Godfather
The virtuosos often taste in solitary confines remote from the atmosphere in which wine is normally consumed: with food, in company in convivial surroundings, as a drink to be savored and admired, not as a specimen being put to the test. It depresses me to witness wines being judged clinically, scrutinized and analyzed by impersonators of wine-tasting robots.
Obsessed with omniscient numbers,
people sometimes seem to forget that wine’s main role is to provide
enjoyment—where, in times past, it was a basic nutrient used prevalently for
medicinal and religious purposes. Yet, even in the
old days, wine was exalted by those who knew it as the paragon of pleasures of
the table and the noblest expression of man’s mastery over things that grow.
Most of us veteran writers have
done extensive analytical tasting, enough to know that evaluating wine requires
concentration, experience with grape varieties and places of origin, and the
knowledge that the subject of our scrutiny is in a phase of evolution. I’ve always taken into account the
enduring factors that determine a wine’s quality over time, the natural and
human elements that govern development of individual character.
Here I’m talking about wines that bespeak their
origins. And, yes, I’m an advocate of the tenets of terroir, the credo of cru,
as conceived by the French and embraced by winemakers everywhere who work with
grapes from designated vineyards. To us terroiristes,
it’s essential that procedures in vineyards and cellars respect the nature of
the soil, the ecosystem, the variables of each vintage, the bona fide ways of producing
and aging wines. Such wines carry an indelible pedigree, whether they come from
a grand cru chateau or a devoted vigneron’s half hectare.
The pedigreed class excludes a majority of the
world’s wines, as processed and priced for popular markets. I don’t mean to be
condescending; the overall quality of everyday wines has never been better. More
pointedly excluded from the category are designer or proprietary wines, blends
of unstated origin ostensibly tailored to the tastes of influential critics and
the cults that follow them. Closely related are artsy-fartsy wines devised by companies
that put more stock in packaging—posh bottles, labels, corks, capsules, crates,
etc.—than the integrity of the product.
Beyond cliques and fads, mainstream wine
drinkers often base purchases on points rather than personal tastes. Some lack
experience and the confidence or means to buy and compare. Those who can afford
them, tend to covet wines that rate 90 or more, regarding anything from 89 down
as second class. Conscientious merchants steer customers toward worthy
alternatives, ignoring the scores. But many retailers seem only too happy to let
the critics do their work for them.
In Italy, winemakers keep an eye on
the main domestic guides—Gambero Rosso, L’Espresso, Veronelli—but by now the world
brotherhood of raters has fixed standards so stereotyped that they hardly need
to bother. The universal trend has been toward wines that are richer in flavor,
bouquet, color, body, and alcohol, thanks to advances in cellar techniques, as
well as the bags of tricks used to ameliorate mediocre vintages.
The points of Parker, and a choice
few others, not only determine the commercial success of certain wines, but dictate
styles that winemakers strive to emulate. This phenomenon is so widespread that
critics condition global production trends—most conspicuously at premium levels
where points can make or break a wine. In doing so, they boost the egos and
earnings of producers whose top-ranked bottles often sell at wildly inflated
prices.
To hear the raters tell it, their numbers and notes provide a key consumer service as guides to what to
buy, and what to avoid, through fearless criticism of wines that don’t meet
standards and lofty praise for those that do. What could be loftier than a Parker
score of 100? What could be lowlier for a wine of established reputation than
an 80? But is Parker to blame if his
judgments are taken as gospel by customers and as godsends by commercial
interests that profit from propagandizing his points? Isn’t he, after all, just
doing his job?
Of course he is, having become rich and famous in
the process of advocating what a Parker biographer called “the new world order”
of wine. Good for Bob. Bad for those of us who pursue the once honorable calling
of putting wine into words.
If, in the beginning, I’d imagined that one day
the most important figure in wine would be a taster, a rater, I might have chosen
to explore more venerable subjects of interest to me, such as archeology or
architecture. The biographer called Parker “the Emperor of Wine,” concluding
that he has a “unique semi-divine tasting ability.” Wow. As the boss of bosses
of production, commerce, and consumption, Godfather might be more to the point.
Or, in a not so different sense, Big Brother.
Great Expectorations
But, hey, no hard feelings that couldn’t be assuaged by the laughing cure (for a jocular fifteen minutes daily). In my active days, I did a lot of tasting myself, most of it decorously, but not always. That’s what I was referring to earlier when I mentioned palate abuse, a subject I know a thing or two about.
An extreme example was a tour de force tasting of a hundred and eighty Italian red wines over the course of a day in London in 1999. The event was arranged to expand the data base of the New York Times website Wine Today, of which I was a columnist. Also on the panel were three British critics, including the actor-singer-tasting champ Oz Clarke. Our job was to assess the qualities of various Italian wines without actually ranking them. The session began in mid-morning, as
we focused eyes, noses, mouths, and wits on endless rows of glasses—swirling, sniffing,
ogling, sipping, sucking, swishing, gurgling around the tongue, and spitting, a routine often repeated two or
three times. We evaluated each wine using criteria the details of which I’ve gratefully
forgotten. The line-up included major Italian reds, spearheaded by Tuscans and Piedmontese,
but I don’t remember much about them either. I shudder to imagine how many
gallons of fine wine were dispatched into the salivated murk of spit buckets that
day.
The Wine
Today organizers commended my speed and accuracy in identifying types in a
marathon that went beyond testing tenacity to pushing palates toward licensed
torture. I tried to be judicious, but my senses weren’t always up to the task. In
the afternoon, I ran ahead of the pack, aware that by spending, say, fifteen to
twenty seconds on a wine I could analyze it better than if I dwelled on it longer.
Oz took it easier, ducking out for a leisurely lunch with a lady friend, a neat
excuse for skipping a good third of the tasting.
Normally, when I taste wines in sequence,
I sample each and come back later for another exam, as aromas and flavors evolve.
Not during that blitz. Some critics have more acute senses of taste and smell
than others—and I’d always counted myself among the adept. But no matter how
sharp and disciplined we claim to be, sensory research has shown that we lose lucidity
in tasting multiple wines in succession.
Much as we spit and rinse with
water, we inevitably swallow a little wine, amounting to a notable alcohol
intake over the course of a long tasting. This ingestion desiccates the oral
cavity as salivary secretions decrease, dulling taste buds and blunting “mouth
feel” the perception of texture, weight, and balance. Repeated exposure to
wines’ odors causes olfactory fatigue, attenuation of the all-important sense
of smell.
The studies concluded that to be
accurate and fair in tasting wines, one needs frequent breaks to clear the nose
and mouth. Only a layoff of at least five minutes between wines permits reasonable
recovery of olfactory perception. In any case, it’s not physiologically possible
to judge the thirtieth or fiftieth or hundredth wine in a series as precisely
as one judges the first ten or fifteen. Yet self-proclaimed supertasters
pooh-pooh the evidence while immortalizing up to a hundred and twenty-five wines
at a sitting. Follow their scores if you will. It’s your money.
I’m no scientist, but I can sure as
hell vouch for the validity of the aforementioned research. During the London grind,
a cartoon kept coming to mind of a chimpanzee—J. Fred Muggs, I believe—holding
a glass of wine with the caption: “It’s a rotten, thankless job, but somebody’s
gotta do it.” To judge by my wooziness toward the end, I’d guess that I imbibed
the equivalent of way over a liter.
Our mouths were stained purple:
lips, teeth, gums, tongues, no doubt even gullets. Mouthwashes didn’t help, nor
did brushing with strong dentifrices. Bubbly wine, Champagne no less, tickled our
parched tongues. But the true antidote turned out to be a London pub crawl, quaffing
beers until we’d giddily chased away the demons of the day’s nightmare. I recorded
the experience as Great Expectorations, all the more fitting since we were in
Dickens’s old bailiwick.
Soon after that I quietly bowed out.
Wine Today folded, Burton Andersons Best Italian Wines
flopped (at least in terms of earnings), and I got to thinking how warped and
weird my once wonderful world of wine had become. The few times I’ve mingled
with modern wine crowds since, I’ve felt awkwardly out of my element.
The last event I attended was a comparative
tasting of Chianti Rufina and Barbaresco, held in a chichi Florence hotel in November
of 2009. I’d reluctantly agreed to serve on the panel, where my role seemed to
be that of the wizened veteran recounting the good (read preposterously quaint)
old days on the Italian wine trail. There must have been eighty or so participants,
tasting, making notes (mainly on laptops), and taking themselves extremely seriously.
It dragged on for more than five hours; my attention span, even in the best of
times, is well under three.
During the endless Q&A, I felt an
uncomfortable sense of pity watching people make work of what my generation of scribes
and aficionados would have turned into a festive occasion with a little
learning as a bonus. It was as though I’d accidentally wandered into a meeting
of scientists, whose grim visages might have been those of lab technicians
analyzing specimens of body wastes or—perish the thought—pathologists examining
cadavers.
Most of the discussion was in
Italian, naturally, spiked with foreign terms—savants love to flaunt erudition
in mispronounced English. Much of it sounded like shoptalk in a lingo that could
have been Mandarin for all it meant to me. A colleague explained that Roman
wine geeks had devised a lexicon to cover minute details of vinous sensorial analysis,
adding that the Rome school was way ahead of everybody in the field, even
Parker.
I nodded in wonder, recalling that
in my time there in the sixties I rarely came across a Roman whose knowledge of
wine went beyond his daily doses of dubious Frascati—often diluted with fizzy
libations, including—I swear to the wine god Bacchus—Coca-Cola.
All of a sudden it was my turn to
speak. Dispirited by the somber mood, I felt like shouting, “Don’t worry. Be
happy!” But I couldn’t get up the nerve. So I murmured into the mike memories of
my early (read preposterously quaint) experiences with Chianti Rufina and
Barbaresco. That soliloquy seemed about as welcome as a whiff of corked Barolo.
After an embarrassedly polite applause, the crowd returned to the earnest
business of anatomizing wine.
Forbidden Fruit
Even if my literary links to wine have
become casual, I still consume far more than my fair share of the stuff. After decades of buying no more than, say, a
third of the wine I drank, the balance has tipped dismayingly the other way. These
days I’m forking over for about nine bottles out of ten. Gift cartons arrive
now and then, mainly from old timers who appreciated my work. Now, more than
ever, I appreciate their generosity.
During my career, I’ve never requested
a sample bottle from a producer, let alone a handout or a gift. It’s not so
much a question of ethics as a matter of respect, trust, even pride. Asking for
something for nothing isn’t in my nature. Besides that, to be persnickety, how could
a critic who solicits a sample be sure he’s getting the genuine article? Who’s to
know if a shifty point-seeker slipped a superior wine into the bottle?
The reason I bring this up is that
I’ve heard of critics who claim to be simon-pure. That seems to mean that, to
avoid being influenced, they don’t accept advertising, gifts, favors—free trips,
hotels, meals, etc.—from wine-related interests. Some declare that they buy the
wines they rate. Swell, but if samples arrive at the door, what do they do, donate
them to the Salvation Army? The way I look at it, either you’re simon-pure or
you’re not. There’s no almost. It’s a bit like virginity or, maybe closer to
home, biting or not biting into forbidden fruit
But there I go again berating
raters for pretending they don’t do what the rest of us do with guilt-free
guile. By the rest of us I refer to a mixed bag of authors, journalists, correspondents, columnist, bloggers,
hacks, flacks, and loonies loosely defined as “wine writers.” Ours is not one
of literature’s high callings, even if certain practitioners may tell you
otherwise. Nor, in my case anyway, has it been lucrative. But the job has its
plusses, first among them freebies.
It’s hard to resist becoming a freeloader when
nearly everybody you run into in your line of work—from producers to merchants
to restaurateurs to PR and marketing folks—foists wine and food on you. Taste
this, try that, bottles and more arriving for the holidays, gala banquets,
trumped-up awards and honors, all-expenses paid junkets to bacchanalian
paradises in exchange for such bothers as traipsing through vineyards and
cellars and tasting wines. As I learned in my conversion from a hard-nosed
newspaperman to a free-lance drifter, wine doesn’t lend itself to objective
reporting. Ours is decidedly not a calling for the simon-pure.
After a decade away from the circus, I
sometimes pretend that those days of fortuitous mooching are over. But I know perfectly
well they aren’t. Over the recent holidays, while visiting friends who run wine
bars and eateries, do you suppose I managed to extract my wallet? When I’d ask
for the bill, they’d hoot at me like a comic who’d cracked a bad joke. At the
Enoteca-Vinoteca Lenzi, my hangout in Castiglione della Pescaia, when I mumbled
something about being mollycoddled, Luciano, the owner, shut me up by thrusting
a chalice of Pol Roger Cuvée Sir Winston Churchill at me with the reminder that
among real friends bubbly is always on the house. Why argue?
I’ve never been a wine snob, if for
no better reason than that I couldn’t possibly afford to be. I mean, how could I lord it over
less fortunate imbibers if the superlative stuff I’ve been privileged to sip over
these years hadn’t come gratis?
No, I prefer to think of myself more along the
lines of an upper echelon wino. Most of the time
lately I’ve been forced to follow self-imposed rules of austerity in the limbo
between Oliveto and Sassofortino that’s found me strapped for cash. Times are
tough all over, they say. But, you know what? Life on a limited wine budget
isn’t nearly as dreadful as I’d feared.
One reason is that enhanced techniques, including more or less legitimate
gimmicks, have made winemaking so slick and risk-free that it’s sometimes said
there’s no such thing as a bad bottle anymore. That’s poppycock. Even technically
correct wines don’t always taste good, at least not to my weathered palate,
which reflexively rejects wines that are overblown and overpriced.
Yet there’s no denying the steady increase in good to very good bottles available at popular prices. The world
economic crisis has made markets so competitive that once uppity European houses
have reassessed aims and put the emphasis back on wines of quality-price ratios
to match values coming from the New World, notably the southern hemisphere. In
combing shelves of Italian shops and cellars, I’ve found a surprising number of
wines with the sort of pedigrees I mentioned earlier selling at €5 to €10—with
a quantum leap if you up the limit to €15. I refer to full-fledged estate wines
of exemplary class and character.
My current budget would probably not permit
bottles that rate a 90 or over from Parker and company—not that some wouldn’t
deserve it. I’ve learned to make do nicely with wines they’d likely relegate to
89 or under. Come to think of it, if I were still in the rating game, that’s what
I’d assign my career in wine: a solid 89. No false modesty. But just imagine
what that score might have been if my taste-buds were semi-divine.
