Tessender

Book Notes: Lawrence Osborne – The Accidental Connoisseur (2004)

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TitleThe Accidental Connoisseur: An Irreverent Journey through the Wine World.
AuthorLawrence Osborne
PublisherNorth Point Press (Farrar Straus & Giroux)
Date2004
ISBN978- 0865476332 (hardcover)
978- 0865477124 (paperback)
978-1429935111 (e-book)
Pages262
SummaryIn his search for wine that is a true expression of the place that produced it, Osborne takes the reader from the high-tech present to the primitive past. From a lavish lunch with wine tsar Robert Mondavi to the cellars of Marquis Piero Antinori in Florence, from the tasting rooms of Chateau Lafite to the humble vineyards of northern Lazio, Osborne winds his way through Renaissance palaces, $27 million wineries, tin shacks and garages, opulent restaurants, world-famous chais and vineyards, renowned villages and obscure landscapes, as well as the great cities which are the temples of wine consumption: New York, San Francisco, Paris, Florence, and Rome. On the way, we will be shown the vast tapestry of this much-desired, little-understood drink: who produces it and why, who consumes it, who critiques it? Enchanting, delightful, entertaining, and, above all, down to earth, this is a wine book like no other.
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Find a copy search.worldcat.org/title/52509427

A wine travelogue about Califorina, Italy, and parts of France, with visits to both famous and obscure wineries where Osborne tastes (and drinks) wine and talks about taste with the wine makers. Great stories, well written, and, like any good travel book, provides inspiration to explore (if not the place, then at least the wine).

In 2004, the documentary Mondovino also came out about the impact of globalization on wine production. Sense of place (terroir) versus industrial wine production is a common theme in both film and book and we also encounter some of the same people: Mondavi, Guibert, Rosenthal (and Parker).

– Mondovino (2004) | IMDB

About the Author

Lawrence Osborne (1958) is a British novelist and journalist. His has written fourteen books and many articles for numerous publications, including a column about wine and spirits for Men’s Vogue, “Cellar”. On the topic, besides The Accidental Connoisseur, Osborne also wrote The Wet and the Dry, a travelogue about Islam and alcohol, published in 2013.

Lawrence Osborne – Photograph by Denise Malone (cover)

About the Book

After a short chapter discussing taste, Osborne starts his wine journey in Italy with a visit to the Le Terazze Winery of Antonio Terni. Next is a lunch with Robert Mondavi and several winery visits in Napa, Monterey, and Santa Cruz (Inglenook, Opus One, Chalone, Mount Eden, Ridge, Bonny Doon). Osborne returns to the Old World with a visit to Lafite (where he may or may not have spotted Robert Parker)) and the Languedoc in the footsteps of Kermit Lynch. Osborne then teams up first with wine merchant Neil Rosenthal to visit the Rhône and the Langhe and later with Johnny Madge for a visit to Lazio, in between also stopping by for some Super Tuscans (Antinori and Incisa della Rochetta e.a.) and ending in Puglia.

A Matter of Taste

Lawrence Osborne about the notion of taste from a restaurant we get back to in the The Colossi of Gaussac chapter.

de gustibus non disputandum est

A Road to Sassoferrato

Osborne visits Antonio Terni of the Fattoria Le Terrazze Winery, a hotel in Sirolo, and a agriturismo in Sassoferrato to drink and discuss wine and terroir. Sassoferrato is where Bob Mondavi’s parents were born and married.

Terni makes two distinct styles of wines. One is “international”, and the other is a “terroir wine”. Terroir is a wine’s certificate of authenticity, its link to the deepest sense of place. The international Style is the opposite of terroir. It’s like airport architecture: ‘a sort of nowhereness.”

  • Lorenzo Magalotti, « Sopra il detto del Galileo. Il Vino è un composto di umore, e di luce. Al signor Carlo Dati : lettera V », dans Lettere scientifiche, ed erudite, p. 43 
  • Altos Las Hormigas – Winery founded in 1995 by Alberto Antonini and Antonio Morescalchi. To find the right sites, they collaborated with Pedro Parra.


Lunch with Robert Mondavi

Osborne has lunch with Bob and Margrit at the Mondavi Winery restaurant where they taste and discuss wine, comparing the best of California with Bourgogne and visits Copia (The American Center for Wine, Food & the Arts) funded by Mondavi (2001-2008), and ponders the wine list of Don Giovanni

Blockheadia Ringnosii sounds like an Eastern European horror movie actor from the 1920s.

The Vinelife

About consumption and status and rise of American wine: “a nation of angry Prohibitionists had become a nation of accidental connoisseurs.”

She is the only country that drinks other people’s wines as extravagantly as she drinks her own. And it is this fact which has helped make Napa the cockpit of global wine.

Visits Niebaum-Coppola (since 2011 Inglenook, again), Beringer, and –back at Mondavi– the To Kalon vineyard with manager Mitchell Klug and the winery with Ralph Ewing, Opus One‘s guest relations man (not open to visitors).

“We preserve a sense of peace here.” Subtext: no hoi polloi.


Oh Brave New Wine!

Osborne discusses wine engineering with Leo McCloskey, Enologix, and the rationalization of California’s viticulture (Maynard Amerine, Wines: their sensory evalutation, “mostly a work of statistics”) and the inspiration, the Bordeaux classification of 1855 (Cocks and Feret, Bordeaux et ses vins, classé par ordre et mérite) a brand-creation system, Pasteur and Chaptal.

Already in 1884, Huysmans protagonist Des Esseintes in A rebours juxtaposes ” vin naturel et pur” with “les hauts crus fabriqués avec de basses vinasses traitées suivant la méthode de M. Pasteur“.

J.-K. Huysmans, A rebours – gutenberg.org

Osborne visits Greg Fowler at Sterling Vineyards, owned at the time by Diageo and before by the Coca-Cola Company, Seagram Seagram Chateau & Estate Wines and now Treasury Wine Estates (Penfolds, Lindeman’s, 19 Crimes, Stags’ Leap, …) and meets Evan Goldstein (now master sommelier San Francisco Giants): tutti-frutti, yum, and blurring lines between Old en New World wines. Goes on to visit Napa’s “garagiste” Bill Cadman, Tulocay.

The Spirit of Place

Different places on the face of the earth have different vital effluence, different vibration, different chemical exhalation, different polarity with different stars: call it what you like. But the spirit of place is a great reality. – Studies in Classic American Literature by D. H. Lawrence (1923)

Place is twofold: on the one hand, it is terroir; on the other, it is what is going on around you as you are drinking. The first is geological, the second psychological. And taste (…) a high-wire act balancing itselft precariously between the two.

  • Gerald Asher, Remembrance of Wine Past (1996)

Visits Don Karlsen of Chalone – the oldest producing vineyard in Monterey County since 1919, and 3rd place Chardonnay winner in the legendary 1976 Judgement of Paris.

Most American wine making is based on climate. That was the Davis rule, Maynard Amerine and all that. But here terroir is created by high minerality in the soil, as in Burgundy.

Visits Ellie and Geoffrey McPhearson of Mount Eden

Visits Paul Draper, Ridge vineyards.

Wine has to express a place or it’s basically just grape juice.

Visits Randall Grahm of the urban winery Bonny Doon

Paul Draper is always considered the apostle of terroir. Its high priest in America. I’m his opposite because I’m the agnostic of terroir. I wish we had terroir, but we don’t.

An Idea of France

About the tension between the American experience of France and about Robert Parker (cites from The Million-Dollar Nose by William Langewiesche, The Atlantic, Dec 2000).

Nowhere does this tension emerge with greater clarity than in the complex persona of Robert Parker, Jr. After the ambassador himself, (…) probably the most influential American in France today.

Book Notes: Elin McCoy – The Emperor of Wine (2005)

Describes the vocabulary of taste for wine and how it evolved (Ann Noble’s wine aroma wheel).

An Afternoon in Bordeaux

Osborne has lunch at the Lion d’Or in Arcins (was that Robert Parker wearing Hush Puppies)? First visits Château Lafite and meets Charles Chevalier and drinks Duhart-Milon, the garagiste Pierre Siri of Domaine Iris du Gayon (now discontinued).

The Colossi of Gaussac

Visits Jean-Claude Le Brun (1944-2016) of Prieuré Saint-Jean de Bébian first “discovered’ by Kermit Lynch and described in his Adventures on the Wine Route, comparing the wine to Châteauneuf-du-Pape or a Hermitage.

Those were strong words (…) It sent a shock wave through the wine world.

Book Notes: Kermit Lynch – Adventures on the Wine Route (1988, 2013)

Visits Jérôme Boutang of Fortant, in Sète.

Visits (like Kermit) Mas de Daumas Gaussac, “the Lafite of Languedoc” and its creator Aimé Guibert.

Visits Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert, a monastery of which the cloître is in the New York (The Met).

I wondered if the French would ever want it back, Elgin Marble style.

Visits Jean-Pierre Jullien at Mas de Cal Demoura (now retired) and talks about the 1907 Wine Insurrection (La Révolte des Vignerons).

Of Corks and Screws

With Neil Rosenthal, Osborne visits Robert Michel at La Geynale vineyard, Cornas (now Domaine Vicent Paris) and Paul Jeune at Domaine de Montpertuis, Châteauneuf-du-Pape (now Domaine Duseigneur).

In the Langhe, Osborne joins Rosenthal again at the Azienda Fratelli Brovia and meets Giacinto Brovia and Luigi Ferrando in Ivrea (at the time of 9/11).

Mondo Antinori

Visits Marchese Piero Antinori inside the Palazzo Antinori to taste Chianti and Tignanello, followed by a visit to Badia a Passignano.

Next stop is the Tenuta San Guido where Osborne meets up with Nicolo Incisa della Rochetta to taste Sassicaia.

After the Super Tuscans, Osborne visits Podere Pruneto (Roberto Lanza), the Castello di Volpaia (Giovanella Stianti Mascheroni) and Badia a Coltibuono (Eleanora Stucchi)

Walking with Dionysus

In the last chapter, Osborne visits the Falesco factory in Lazio, “one of the most ubiquitous Italian wines on earth” where they also make Est!Est!!Est!!! di Montefiascone, and meets with Pier Paul Chiasso. His guide is olive oil expert Johnny Madge (don’t drizzle, pour!).

The winery, though, was as bare as a hotel in the Gaza Strip.

Next stop is the La Palazzola winery where he meest Stefano Grillo (a bald handsome man with a black beard, the perfect simulacrum of an Arab pirate).

Last stop is Puglia, where Osborne visits Luigi Maffini and Armando Balestrazzi (Il Frantoio).

His last visit is to Patience Gray and Norman Mommens in Spigolizzi, who made their own wine.

It was, all in all, the vilest wine I have ever drunk. But Patience smiled beatifically and patted my hand. Don’t look so upset, my boy. There are worse things.

Book Reviews

Bonus

Lawrence Osborne writing about wine, article from 2004.

The Forgiven, Trailer