The Wine Raconteur

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.

My name is John  and I have a passion for and romance for the wines.  I can sing praises about the wonders of wine.  People have suggested that I should start a blog and I thought first why should I blog, when there are great periodicals and websites that rate wines and technical facts.  Well, currently I have the time to be reflective and retrospective.  That would not be my intention, I am more a raconteur, and I shall wax poetic about stories and incidents that have fueled my ardent passion for the wines.

I came from humble beginnings growing up in southwest Detroit, not a major center for wines, especially in the sixties.  It was a working class area, that had many watering holes, but they were establishments where one could have a few beers or shots with friends, not the place to study the nuances of the toil of the winemakers.

It is from this location, that I eventually discovered “the grape” and I have been discovering it ever since.  At times I may seem to be rambling in my expositions, and I probably will.  Stories may be short and sweet, or long depending on my muse.