FOR THOSE WHO WISH TO LEARN NOTHING
I like to wait for a visit to Missoula to buy cases of wine. Montana has no sales tax (nor does Oregon), and so I can avoid there the 8.9% nick I would suffer in my hometown of Walla Walla. If I drank little wine, I might not care, but I drink wine regularly, like any good Franco-Finno-Italiano-Americano of my generation, so the taxes can add up. The two shops I like in Missoula both offer 10% case discounts, as do wine merchants here in Walla, but in Montana, I don’t see my mark-downs marked back up at the tax-hungry cash register.
One day last May, I was standing in the wine aisle of one of those Missoula stores – both happen to be grocery stores with fine international wine selections – when a woman appeared beside me and began doing what I was doing, quietly examining the bottles before making a selection. We were both peering at the French end of the aisle. I was snooping around in the Loires, interested in Chinons and a few fine Chenin Blancs from Vouvray and Saumur, while I noticed the woman gazing at the white Burgundies to my left. She lifted a bottle of Mâcon-Villages from the shelf and asked if I happened to know that wine. I assumed she was asking for an opinion from a fellow Francophile.
“I don’t know that particular wine,” I said, “but I do tend to like Mâcon. Really nice Chardonnays, and still affordable for us mortals.”
She wrinkled her nose.
“Oh. Well, I can’t stand Chardonnay,” she said, setting the bottle back down. She reached instead for the bottle next to it – a Pouilly-Fuissé from the same producer – and I noticed that it cost nearly twice as much.
“I really love this wine,” she said. “I’ve had it several times. Pricey but what the hell? Today is Mother’s Day.”
She strode away, happy with her selection. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that Pouilly-Fuissé is also a Chardonnay. 100%.
I have encountered the same confusion many times; I remember sharing in it. When I first started experimenting with the grape back in college – do you remember Mateus? Gallo’s Hearty Burgundy? Half gallons of Almaden “Chablis”? Johannisberg Riesling? – I ran across an Australian Shiraz I liked it a lot. I could afford it, and bought it as my first case of wine. I went through all twelve bottles before someone told me that Shiraz is the Australian name for Syrah. I thought it was a grape unique to the down-under. Wine nomenclature has always been daunting.
Which is one the best things about being an oenophile. It’s a learning experience, and a vast one if you really get into it. More than 10,000 varieties of Vitis vinifera – the kind of grapes used in wine making – are documented in genetic databases. Somewhere around 1,500 varieties are grown for commercial wine production, but a scant 33 comprise 50% of the world’s vineyards. One might think that the dominance of so few kinds of grapes would make learning the nomenclature easy, but no. European tradition, by and large, identifies wines not by the variety of grape found in the bottle, but by the place where the wine is raised. In France, wine bears the name of the region, or the village, it comes from. So you’ve got to know how the where relates to the what.
The Chardonnay-hating woman in the Missoula grocery story almost certainly thought that Pouilly-Fuissé was a grape, but in fact it is a subregion within the Mâconnais region in southern Bourgogne. A bottle labeled Pouilly-Fuissé comes from somewhere amid a cluster of four villages within the Mâconnais: Fuissé, Solutré-Pouilly, Vergisson, and Chaintré. The label Pouilly-Fuissé is just a shorthand way of indicating this. To the most highly discerning – I am not among them – a Pouilly-Fuissé will show some peculiar but extremely subtle characteristics of a Chardonnay raised and vinified in this very small area of Bourgogne. But nothing on the bottle the woman bought indicated that the wine was Chardonnay. A French wine drinker would simply be expected to know it.
We Americans hate this. We are a plain-spoken people, and we want our labels simple. When an American wine-maker bottles a Chardonnay, she, goddam it, calls it Chardonnay. Truth in labeling. As a red-blooded American wine drinker, how could I be expected to know that a French red labeled Bourgueil is actually a Cabernet Franc (grown near the village of Bourgueil in the Loire Valley)? Or a Cote Rotie is Syrah (grown on the “Roasted Slope” of the northern Rhone Valley)? Or a Gigondas will be a blend dominated by Grenache (or even just pure Grenache), grown in the southern Rhone?
And as to blends, don’t even get me started on red Bordeaux – wines that are almost always combinations of two or more varieties drawn from a list of five officially approved for this famous region? Those devious French get away with hiding their blended wines beneath the facade of “Bordeaux”: Pomerol or Paulliac, or St. Estephe, or some other asinine name I can’t pronounce. Is this a fucking Merlot, or what, goddam it?
Place names found on the labels represent decades, centuries, of careful viticulture which showed over time where certain varieties of Vitis vinifera expressed itself best in the glass. This revered tradition of naming wines is the essence of terroir, the expression of place in a wine, or a food. Terroir is that congeries of ingredients that makes a carefully raised agricultural product shine with the truth of locale: climate, soil, topography, even the land or water adjacent to the vineyard or field contribute to it. And yes, there is a measure of mystery – but that only adds to the intrigue.
I remember my dismay the first time I noticed the names of grape varieties on French wines labeled for the American market (I assume the same happened in Australia and New Zealand and other markets new to wine). I felt let down but realized the nature of the capitulation. Vintners do have to sell their product, and the U.S. market, over time, became vast, irresistible. But why talk down to us? Why not make us learn something about this ancient and most complex agro-gustatory enterprise? Would it hurt our Chardonnay-lovers to ask them to learn about the differences among Mâcon-Villages, Pouilly-Fuissé, Chablis, and, say, Meursault – with the first thing to learn being that all of them come from the same grape? Would it kill us to ponder how a good Oregon Chardonnay might stand up among those revered ancestral sites?
Emperor Joseph II in the film Amadeus complained of “too many notes” in the prodigious music of Mozart. It’s a wonder the emperor was not an American, a mindless super-consumer who couldn’t be bothered with the vexing complexities which arrive with true cultivation – the thing we now dismayingly refer to as “artisanal.” What a grave disappointment – to think that what we eat and drink today is largely an immense stream of industrial effluents. Empty simulacra of the real. Hence, the need to distinguish with a degrading term that smacks of “artiness,” something pretentious and effete.
I enjoy the twinge of intellectual stimulation that comes with wines named for places-of-origin instead of grapes. I love thinking that in some of those French or Italian or German growing regions, the grapes represented in the bottle reached the zenith of their expressions as wine hundreds of years ago, and so remained. I love thinking of 12th century monks moaning with delight as they sip a cool white elixir from their goblets, knowing they had discovered something magnificent. Imagine! Kimmeridgian limestone moldered over eons into a chalk-colored clay marl soil that can produce a white wine unlike any other. Crisp, delicious, razor-sharp Chardonnay the French insist on calling Chablis.