WRITING THE BOOK ON WINE

Reading about it might not be as fun as drinking the stuff, but one man’s notes on the wine world still have an impact today, writes

Sometimes, I’m asked what books I’d recommend to someone wanting to know more about wine. The answer is – there are so many. Today is probably the best time in history to be a reader interested in learning more about wine and the culture around it.

Global collaboration and funded research has produced encyclopaedic reference books on the history and science of wine. There are reissues and first time translations of classic texts, and new perspectives on very new, or even very old and nearly forgotten, corners of the wine world. Many of these books are themselves beautiful design objects to behold.

However, for me, Kermit Lynch’s Adventures on the Wine Route: A Wine Buyer’s Tour of France is always at the top of the list. Because it’s a great read, yes, but, as I’ve come to realise over the years, it also encapsulates the things that make wine not just another commodity. It’s a book that shows us the value of wine will always be greater than can be measured by its price on a market, or the opinion of a critic, or the analysis of a technician. The joyful stuff that made me fall for wine to start with.

Lynch is an importer of French and Italian wine in the US. His influence on what switched-on wine drinkers around the world drink extends far beyond his base in Berkeley, California. Once you’re aware of his range – much of which is from producers he’s been working with for several decades, or from whom he started buying before anyone, even their own compatriots, had heard of them – you see it repeated in the catalogues of wine merchants the world over, including in New Zealand.

Lynch has great taste. What guides him? Not a palate for blockbuster wines, or an ability to give a sterile and detached overview of how a wine ranks in an anonymous metric or algorithm. He’s passionately opposed to blind tasting and points scores. Instead, Lynch’s selections are driven by an instinct for adventure, for great characters and for authenticity. It’s these same instincts that make his Adventures on the Wine Route such a rollicking read. The book is full of personality: his own, those of the winemakers he falls for, and those of the places he discovers.

First published in 1988, it takes in Lynch’s first years visiting the French wine regions. Many of the producers and regions that pop up are today globally famous, but in the 70s when Lynch makes his first encounters, they were undiscovered. There’s a real sense of risk-taking in the wines and people he invested his passions and livelihood in – he describes himself as fearful he’s running a cultural preservation society rather than a business. There are tales of an inebriated negociant serving insipid wine and forcing Lynch to accompany him to dinner at gun point. His enduring love of the wines of Domaine Tempier in Bandol, Provence, is expressed through stories of big family dinners. There’s a “tasting” in an Alsatian cellar that leads to an eight-bottle dinner, where the host fails to serve any food, leading to a belly full of the finest vintages of Alsace and a long stumble home.

There are the wins, like finally being able to buy the outstanding wines of Chablis producer François Raveneau, who refused to accept his wines could travel well, after years of trying and the help of several noteworthy friends. And the lows of crappy hotel rooms, food poisoning from bad andouillette (tripe sausage), deathly cold cellars, and the loss of authentic wines and winemakers to new generations seduced by technology, efficiency and ego.

You could treat Adventures as a shopping list of producers and wines to try, and you’d drink bloody well. Check out his website, look at who he is importing now, and wait to see those wines pop up in the New Zealand market. Lynch is still an influence on smart wine merchants. And rightfully. Nearly 50 years since his first forays into France, Lynch’s selections remain true to their ethos of authentic people, places, and living wine. I was lucky to find myself in the company of some of Lynch’s employees on the ground in France, and they shared that same sense of fun and zest for life, the best parts of wine.

But a shopping list of names, however great they are now, is really not what Adventures is about. It’s part adventure, part travel story, definitely a love story, and a manifesto for living well that sorts the good (authentic people and wine) from the evil (filtration and Robert Parker). It’s occasionally tragic, but mostly those tragedies turn out pretty funny.

Adventures captures the character and characters of great wine, and reminds me why I keep falling in love with wine. It gets me thinking about what I’m drinking next and who with. It reminds me to drink better wine, something I never get from reference books.