The Accidental Connoisseur by Lawrence Osborne

Author:Lawrence Osborne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2004-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

How, then, does France fare in this braver newish world of psychedelic taste sensations? My own earliest memories of that country are precisely of that protocol-driven sobriety which makes for profound wines on the one hand and the sinister gloom of the Restaurant Verot-Dodat on the other. I have always thought of it as a place inimical to the aroma wheel, to organized happiness, to cheap chocolate, and to infantile hysterias all around. But its depth is also its Achilles’ heel, the fount of its mournful scorn.

And what about Parker, the man who has remade the image of France for legions of accidentally inclined bibulists? For many, the ultimate proof of Parker’s democratizing credentials is his championing of the garagistes, the small-time grassroots wine makers of Bordeaux who are now making fortunes for themselves by going over the heads of the haughty Medoc châteaux, their uneasy and reluctant neighbors. Nothing gives the Jeffersonian Parker more satisfaction than the thought of the châteaux getting their comeuppance from lone iconoclasts working out of their own garages. For Parker, this is the hopeful new France.

Garage wines are typically made by wealthy individuals who imitate artisanal wines—as a public personal hobby. They’re described as being intense, dark, small-production wines made with an artisanal attention to detail. Being dark and dramatic, of course, they appeal to Parker’s “overendowed” palate.

The apostle of the garage style is Jean-Luc Thunevin, an Algerian pied noir and ex–bank clerk who bought his first parcel of vines in Saint-Émilion only in 1991. Since then, with his ex-nurse wife, Murielle, he has learned to make a highly profitable wine called Valandraud, which in the 1995 vintage Parker scored at a staggering 95 points.

Indeed, all of the vintages from ’93 to ’99 scored high marks, the ’94 reaching a majestic 94 points. Overall, their charms were (as Parker puts it) a “tell-tale thickness of color,” “high class toasty oak,” “a gorgeous nose of black cherries,” as well as a string of nasal qualities beginning with iodine and ending with pain grillé. The ’95 was seamlessly constructed with layers of fruit and glycerin, and overall contained “the stuff of greatness,” this being contained in generous scads of various berries—blackberries, currants, cherries, the usual suspects. “The finish,” Parker added breathlessly, “lasts for over 30 seconds.”

Bordeaux responds by pointing out that Parker’s nose is still an American organ, and that it drifts by nature toward what they like to call robustly obvious flavors. Nor are the garagistes the plucky Davy Crocketts they are so disingenuously made out to be. They are sly operators who have glommed onto the Parker system by carefully crafting “hedonic” wines which the Master is bound to love.

Moreover, in Bordeaux it is often pointed out that most of the garagistes have bought land at the edges of the Saint-Émilion appellation, where land is relatively cheap because it has always been considered undesirable. In this, it is the wisdom of generations which speaks, for by common consent the best lands in Saint-Émilion are places like the plain of Figeac.

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