The Wine Raconteur

I was putting away some new wine purchases in storage, when I looked at the fixture that I was filling with bottles and smiled.  There on the top of this fixture I have a couple of empty wine bottles that I just kept for the ambiance of the room.  I know that they are there, but normally I don’t think of them as I am either putting bottles away or fetching some wine for dinner or a party.

The bottle that caught my eye and imagination today was a bottle of Brights Canadian Champagne in a magnum.   I was very young when that bottle entered into my life.  My family is from Canada, my Father was born in Hamilton, Ontario and we have relatives all around that area.

An uncle of mine came to our house in Detroit and I do believe he was celebrating some very good news.  He had started the first pizzeria in St. Catherines in the 1950’s, sold that business and was going to start a fast-food venture.  Each time when he would come to Detroit, he would study and observe trends, hence first the pizza business and then the fast-food concept.  He was one of the most personable men, you would ever meet, and quite an entrepreneur.  Excuse my haziness of memory, but I am sure this was the reason for the celebration and the champagne.  The house was full of company and the bottles were popping, some were opened improperly and champagne would erupt like a volcano when the cork popped.  Very exciting scene for a young man to observe, and I remember someone even handing me a glass of champagne so that I could join in the festivities.

My first tasting of real wine (prior to that I had tasted what was referred to in pre-PC times as “Dago Red” the wines that some of the older immigrant men would make in their basements).  I remember that the wine tickled from the bubbles and it was just a little sweet, but the occasion was heady and it was fun, and I was part of the “boys.”

T.G. Bright & Co. Ltd. of Niagara Falls was or is the largest winery in Canada; they survived the aftermath of Prohibition in the States, the Depression, and World War II.  They were the first company to plant French wine grapes in the area and they were successful.  The company is still in existence and still making wines.  My Bride and I are going to Niagara-on-the-Lake this summer for a wedding, so I am going to make some time from the nuptials of my cousin to go to some of the wineries.  There is always more to learn and more to taste.

As I am writing this, I think back about my uncle, who later on sold his fast-food enterprise and created a steak and lobster restaurant.  He was very eclectic in his businesses, but always successful and had the pulse of the public.  I mention this, because on one of my many trips to St. Catherines my uncle gave me one of his extra swag light fixtures with leaded glass.  I had this fixture for years safely packed in a carton, not quite sure what to do with it, as it had more of a tavern appearance or maybe it was just my pre-conceived thought about it.  When I built my wine cellar, I remembered the lamp and placed in the cellar as the sole illumination.

Now that I reflect, it is a small but honoured salute to my late uncle, who may be gone, but not forgotten.

Chateau Margaux is one of the four, then five Premier Crus (First Growths) of the 1855 classification of the Medoc.  The Medoc is the glorious part of the Bordeaux region that makes everyone think of wine.  Chateau Margaux had a rather famous omniscient advertiser for a while; the late Margaux Hemingway.  Legend had it, that she was conceived after her parents had enjoyed a magnum of Château Margaux (true or not, it does make for a great story).

Margaux is the name of the commune in the district of the Medoc which is in the Department of the Gironde.  I may talk about this classification system during another chat, which is the joy of being a raconteur.  Margaux is one of the areas that is really known as Claret as any good Anglophile would say.  There are several important chateaus in the commune of Margaux, but there is only one Chateau Margaux.  A very happy point for all the other chateaus in Margaux, because none of the other great communes have a world-class winery with the commune’s name so prominently linked like Chateau Margaux.  There is no First Growth called Chateau Pauillac.  This is why even a generic blended bottle of Margaux gets to share the sunshine and prestige of this famous château.

I have had the good fortune of having tried three different vintages of this famed château. One was from the outstanding vintage of 1961, but that will be a story to be told at another time, because of the unique situation that I enjoyed it.  The bottles that I will reference today are from the 1967 and 1976 vintages.  The 1967 vintage year was an abundant and very dependable year from the Medoc.  Unfortunately I do not recall the dinner party or the dinner that accompanied this storied wine, but I do recall the wine.  It had a deep color, a wonderful bouquet or nose and a taste that is still recorded in some back remote corner of my brain.  This was actually one of the first Margaux wines that I had ever had, by good fortune, and ever since then my “taste memory” will remind me that the other Margaux wines that I have had don’t measure up to my ’67 Chateau Margaux.  It really is not fair to the other wines, but that is what tasting does to you.  As for the 1976 Chateau Margaux we had that at dinner at The English Grill in The Brown Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky.  The 1976 vintage was not a great year, but my brother-in-law brought it to the restaurant as he wanted to see how it would fare, as he had a couple more bottles in his cellar.  It had good color and a decent nose, but for me, it did not compare to the 1967.  It did enhance a wonderful meal, which was a joy in its own right.  That was the case until I did have the ’61 Chateau Margaux.

For a working man of modest means to have had three bottles of this wine is just pure heaven on Earth.

After reading the Bespaloff book, I decided that I wanted to try some of the more esoteric wines of France.  I knew that I would have no problems finding wines from the popular regions like Bordeaux or Burgundy.  Every restaurant and wine shop with any self-respect would carry a fine assortment from these areas, so that would be easy.

One area the tickled my fancy immediately was Anjou in the Loire Valley of France.  After all, in literature a famous quartet would have picnics on the ramparts, prior to or after a military maneuver.  If the wine was good enough for Athos, Porthos, Aramis and D”Artagnan, I should endeavor to try it.  You see in my youth, I had high aspirations and colorful role models.

Several shopping trips led to no success.  In the early seventies when I started my wine education, the selection of wines even in better shops was limited.  I am sure that a lot of the distributors were more interested in securing the rights to sure-sellers.  Also you really couldn’t blame a retailer for wanting to carry wines that would sell on their own, with a song and dance by the owner.  It would be easier to wax poetic for fifty dollar wine, then to exert time and energy for a ten-dollar wine.  Business is business.  I finally found a bottle of Anjou, not only an Anjou, but a more unique one.  A Rose de Cabernet made from the Cabernet grape and not the Groslot grape.

Since it was a rose wine, I waited until the weather turned warmer, which was very soon.  I chilled it, and tried it with cheese and some deli cuts.  My first reaction (from the time I bought the bottle) was the unique color of the wine.  It had an orange shade to the red and the nose was very soft and as they say unassuming.  On the warm day, that I had it, it was refreshing.  Alas, I knew that I would not join the ranks of the famed quartet of Frenchmen, but my curiosity had been sated.

When people know that you are into wine, sometimes they find something that they haven’t used or forgotten about.   Cordon Rouge 1937 is an example of this.   This is a very celebrated bottle of champagne from the Mumm Company.  Champagne producers do not like to declare vintage years, because of the blending they do, to produce a quality and a singularity of taste to their product.  When a year is stellar, and all the stars and sun and moon all line up, there is a vintage year, with all the hoopla that they can muster.

This bottle was probably a gift that was given, and forgotten about.  The storage of it was also, I would venture not the best.   I received it in the late seventies, not expecting it to be even salvageable, I still accepted it graciously.   I am rather unique, in that I do not, return or re-gift, gifts.  I feel that if somebody has taken the time to find something for you, accept it, smile and thank them deeply.

So here was a unique item, in my limited knowledge of wines.  A bottle of vintage champagne, that was surely to be over the hill.  Do I keep it as a curio, or should I be curious and hope for the best.

One night, I went for the gusto and I chilled the wine.  Then the moment of truth was at hand.  I uncorked the bottle; there was no pop, and no whoosh.  It was like opening a bottle of wine without a corkscrew.   I poured the wine into a glass, one of the old style glasses, which at the time were considered traditional for champagne.  A side note to that style glass, is that it was supposedly molded from a woman’s breast, leave it to say, that she was not one, that was overly well endowed, but I digress.  Actually the flutes, that most restaurants use are much better suited for champagne, as they allow the bubbles to rise slowly to the surface, and retain the taste for a longer period.  The flat sherbet style glasses dissipate the bubbles too quickly.

As I stated, there was no pop, the wine was poured and there was no bubbles.  I looked at the wine in the glass; the liquid was clear, not cloudy.  I then cautiously raised the glass to inhale the smell.  It was not corky, “skunky” or having whiffs of vinegar.  So the next step was to try it, I was this far along, so I was game, even with my naive status.  The wine was still drinkable.  Even though champagne is made from Pinot Noir and Chardonnay grapes, this bottle had more of a Chardonnay taste, then a white burgundy.

So, this was a learning point for me, never presume that a wine is over the hill, and to try any wine that is offered.  The worst that can happen is that you don’t like the wine, and you have to open another bottle.  There are much worse things that can happen in life.

As I write these pages, I like to think that we are having a quiet conversation with a bottle of wine, cheese, crackers and other assorted munchies that are really enjoyable.  Now onto the business at hand, a wine scrapbook.

This was fun to do, and I still like looking at the names of the wines that I have had.  Years ago the labels were very easy to soak off of the bottles, and then I could paste them on a page.  Today the labels tend to be much more of a challenge to soak off, and I have even asked at some of the wineries for suggestions.  One of the suggestions they offered was to add some white ammonia to the water, while they soak.  I still have two cases of empties where the labels refuse to budge, so I have to try some other ideas.  If I find one, I will certainly make mention of an idea that works.  If anyone reading this knows of something, please share. The new labels are now printed as self-stick for ease of production (similar to the self-stick postage stamps we use now to pay a bill or send greeting cards.  I now use a very thin and flexible steel pancake flipper that I can get under the label after having it soak in hot water.  The flipper is flexible enough to curve around the bottle.

Sometimes I made additional notes on the tasting, but most of the time I just glued the label into the book.  I tried to keep pages of like wines or areas together, as a reference to myself.  I smile as I look at these pages now, there may be a generic blend of the region next to legendary label, but each had their day in the sun to me.  Sometimes I marvel at the good fortune I have had, to have tasted these wines.  I now realize that at the time, I may have been too immature to fully appreciate each bottle at the time, but that all adds to the enjoyment of wine.  To me, almost every bottle has a story, and that is what I am, a teller of stories and anecdotes, in other words a raconteur.

I no longer mount the labels in a book, as they have become the wallpaper in my wine cellar, which I will talk about in later ramblings.  I am showing a couple of random pages from my scrapbook, just to give you an idea of how I started it.

This was the title of the book that Mr. Paul Mann suggested for my initial reading.  I still have the book, and still is my first “go-to” for quick reference.  It was written by Alexis Bespaloff.  The book was published in 1971 (and it was the Seventh Printing).  Mr. Bespaloff was with the Alexis Lichine Company of New York, as well as an author and contributor to different publications and a wine consultant to Time-Life Books.

The first sentence in the Introduction is “America is not a wine-drinking nation” and he proceeds from that assertion.  He discusses how to read a wine label, and how wine is made.  Then he goes into the different wine regions of the world, the bulk of the book is devoted to European wines.  He always discusses wine in restaurants, pairing with food, even the proper tools one should have at home, including the different shape of glasses.  Still a great book to explain the enjoyment of wines, without a holier-than-thou attitude.

Two curious notes about my copy of the book (because of the year of publication) is that Chateau Mouton-Rothschild is still listed as first of the second growths (not in the first growths where it is now placed, deservedly so) and that only twelve pages of two hundred some pages are devoted to all of California.  This book was written prior to the great blind wine tasting in France that made California an overnight sensation.  America began to have passion, romance, pride and a new appreciation for wine.

For a feel good night, select a good bottle of wine, and some cheese and crackers.  Watch the film “Bottle Shock.”  I like to think of this movie as the “Rocky” of the Napa Valley and how Chateau Montelena beat the French on their turf.

One night I was having dinner in the old Statler Hilton Hotel on Washington Boulevard in downtown Detroit.  The dinner was at Trader Vic’s (which at the time was the flagship restaurant of the Hilton chain).  We had ordered dinner and the wine steward came to the table to make a suggestion.  I don’t remember what wine we had that night, but he suggested a wine that was a favorite of a Mr. Paul Mann.  I said that I had no idea who Mr. Mann was.   I was then informed that he was the Wine Buyer/Consultant for the J.L. Hudson Company.   I just remember having a great dinner that night, and another fine bottle of wine, out on a date.

A few days later, I made it a point to go to the wine shop at Hudson’s to look around.  While I was there, I asked if Mr. Mann was there.  He was paged, came down and I related the other evening’s events.  He smiled, and proceeded to start making suggestions and adding to my knowledge.  I am not sure if he realized how young I was, but he took the time to talk and to educate me.  One of the first suggestions he made to me, is that I should start a wine scrap book and soak off the labels from every one that I drank, so that I could start making references and build on each memory.  I still have the books that I started (which are why there may be some labels that I show that have part of another label overlaid).  To this day I still save labels.

We talked for a good hour, and then he took me from his shop, without selling me a single bottle and took me to the book department on the mezzanine.  He proceeded to sell me a paperback book, which he said was the most concise and informative book he could think of.  He then told me to read the book, before I start to make any wine purchases, so that I wasn’t shopping in the dark.

A fine gentleman from the old school.

Back in my day, when you took a young lady out for a date you had dinner as part of the evening.  At local places that were the norm for us, you would have to have twenty pieces of identification, and you should have probably brought your parents with you for additional verification.  Not what you wanted to do on a date.

By happenstance I was attending the finest high school in Detroit.  It was located in the downtown area, and that is where the finer restaurants at the time were.  I remember the first time I took a date downtown, you had to dress up for dinner and because of this, we would look older.  The food on the menu was different, from the local restaurants in the neighborhood.   Sometimes they would even be written in French and I would have to ask for guidance even for the food course, but what a great early addition to my education.  Then the waiter would ask you if you would like to look at the wine list.  Imagine asking you if you wanted to have a drink without asking you for ID before hand… a teenager’s heaven.  So I would look at the wine list for something affordable and would ask for help.  A great meal, alcohol and I appeared to be a big man to my date.  Nirvana was attainable.

So of course,  as many as the dates as possible were in better places, especially if they had a wine list.  I had to start studying the wine lists, so that I would seem natural at it, but at the same time I was trying to taste as many different wines as I could afford.  At the same time I was developing my taste palette and started to discover that certain types of wines appealed to me more, but I still wanted to taste more.

As a teenager I remember going with the other guys to the park, and drinking beer, not a great tasting beverage to me, as I always thought it had a bitter taste, but it was the beverage of choice in those days.  It also was the way to achieve the expected results to prove our maturity.

Mixed drinks were cumbersome at a park setting or a make-shift baseball game, in those days, so beer it was.  There were the occasional nights of current wines of the moment like Boone’s Farm, Mad Dog etc as we sang “Bottle of Wine, fruit of the vine, when you going to let me get sober.”  Adolescence was charming and this was way before the internet, so we thought these were just the rites of getting older, especially since none of us were of legal age.

This was also the era before big advertising campaigns for wine.  Outside of beer commercials, where no body could be seen drinking a beer, except for the one that Frank Sinatra did.  That was immediately pulled off the air (and in Canada they couldn’t even show people and beer in the same picture – remember the “Skating Clown”).  Smirnoff had Woody Allen doing commercials for Moscow Mules (Smirnoff Vodka and ginger beer). Then there were  the commercials for Mateus Rose, Riunite Lambrusco and Cella Lambrusco.

Please bear with me, as I give some background exposition, before I get into the actual stories about wines.   This is all to set the stage for my discoveries and to explain why I enjoy the grape so much.

My earliest recollections of being around brewed beverages were in the local establishments in Detroit and Windsor, Ontario (as my family was originally from Canada).  I think that were times when my father would “baby sit” me as a child, so he dragged me around to see his friends.  Those days were the days of shells, perhaps a Canadian term for draught beer, or draft here in the States.   They would order trays of shells, as they were a nickel or dime depending on the “exclusivity” of the establishment, so why bother the server for a glass at a time, when one was thirsty.  You have to remember that at that time, people believed in the bill board advertising “Drink Canada Dry” and they always tried.

In Canada back then there were Taverns and Bars, I believe these were the legal terms for them.  One only served beer and were men only places, women could enter accompanied by a man.  The other was a place for both sexes and it served whisky and other hard drinks as well as beer.

Since I was a child, I really should not have been there, so if the local gendarmes would walk in, I would become a coat rack that is all the coats and jackets would be piled on top of me, and my glass of coke would be left on the table.  I still smile when I think of the times when I was a clothes rack, and remember the heady days of being one of the boys with my father.