by Jim Harrison
I recently meditated over a mixed case of three Gigondas, a difficult assignment for a peculiar reason. I have drunk more Gigondas than any French wine except Domaine Tempier Bandol. This kind of familiarity often makes us poor critics of wives, lovers, or longtime friends. A poet friend, Ted Kooser, described the end of his first marriage beginning with the line, “Neither of us would clean the aquarium.”
With wine we are back in college wondering if our professor corrected our brilliant essay before or after dinner, before or after he got laid, before or after his usual fantasy about Ava Gardner in the pool house. My main objection to numerical rating of wine is that it presumes the falsest of sciences.
That said, I thought a bottle of Château du Trignon 1999 was soft but a little weak, a boy who would never do a chin-up because he was lazy. The second bottle, however, was drunk with a snack, a freshly sautéed wild brown trout on a bed of sliced tomatoes from my daughter’s garden. This made the Trignon quite acceptable in a not very compromised way. Fine with bold food, not alone.
With Domaine de Cayron 1999 we enter another arena. I have drunk a hundred bottles of Cayron Gigondas. It is a nostrum for blues and fatigue in Paris or anywhere. I’ve spent a goodly amount of time with Jeanne Moreau, the French actress, and the Cayron reminds me of Moreau at age twenty-eight, mildly irritated at you for forgetting flowers, but surpassingly agreeable when you share a bottle of Cayron. If you drank it before the usual obnoxious meeting you wouldn’t hate anyone. Last week I drank it at my cabin with two roasted woodcock for lunch and they married pleasantly. The flavor penetrated my rib cage.
The Domaine Les Pallières 1999 threw me off a bit as I had learned to expect more from past experience. There was a sense of the androgynous rather than a decisive move in either direction, and it was rather flattish compared to the Cayron. Of course why tell a reasonably good poet that he’s not Lorca or Auden, for that matter? At a dinner two of the company preferred the Pallières to the Cayron. There are no gods to direct us in this matter, but we must do our best without pretending we are Solomon, much less Moses.
Is Winemaking an Art?
Is winemaking an art? Is writing an art for that matter? It can be but rarely is. A discipline or craft is closer to the work in 99.99 percent of the practice and practitioners in either wine or writing. Nothing is more evanescent than the ancient aesthetic tests of range, durability, resonance, the stark requisites of beauty.
Some of us are waiting for a future puff piece called “The Hundred Best Wines of South Dakota,” but then how can you blame a mid-range geezer with discretionary capital who may have exhausted his interest in golf, adultery, or fishing and hunting for waking up one spring morning and saying to his wife, “Ethel, I think I’ll plant some grapes.” (He may even think you plant ripe grapes at this stage.) It’s an ancient urge. On a more basic level in many rural areas I’ve lived in or visited I’ve been asked to taste some bumpkin’s apple, strawberry, cherry, or rhubarb wine. This is frankly not a pleasant experience. You’re standing in the parlor and there’s no place to spit. At least when you move up the economic food chain you are dealing with varieties of grapes.
In America there’s always been a touching effort to democratize the arts. As humans we are seemingly genetically immodest. We are always trying to discover our hidden and miraculous potential. A young lout like I once was reads a Shakespeare or Keats poem and says, “I’m going to write me a poem just like that.” A mogul with an especially fat wallet tastes a Cheval Blanc, a Clos de la Roche, a Romanée-Conti, or even a Côte-Rôtie, or Heitz Martha’s Vineyard, and says to himself, “I can do this.”
Only he can’t. He’ll probably forever bear the same relationship to fine wine as a publisher does to fine writing. If he produces a passable wine, assuming he owns good earth, he’ll attend award ceremonies but everyone there will know that someone less well tailored on the back row has put the “juice” together, as it were. There is nothing so irascibly difficult as making a truly fine wine, given a thousand unpredictable variables. Just watching the weather would be like three months of labor pains.
There’s also the question of why anyone who knows publishing, or the art, food, or wine world for that matter, would wish to be an “artist.” At best it’s a calling that happens when you’re young. And so often in winemaking the calling is hereditary. You might during a pleasant evening tasting the ten best wines of the world wish to call the man most directly responsible for each an “artist,” but if I were him I’d rather be called a “fine winemaker.” In an age when every third athlete is called “great” what do we have left for the Sistine Chapel or Dostoevsky? There is no more uneven ground than the field of the arts.
There are marvelous semi-comic aspects to the problem. Wine magazines and the wine press in general offer tip sheets like those you buy when entering the grounds of Aqueduct, Churchill Downs, or Santa Anita. Many of us stay removed other than at a nominal level from wine pundits because we wish to make our own discoveries, draw our own conclusions. The furthest thing from my own aesthetic judgments is the world of numbers, let alone price. I am admittedly an outsider, a mere consumer, but wine simply can’t be graded like a teacher grades term papers. In writing, Ezra Pound advised against giving credence to someone who hadn’t produced a notable work. If there was a system that directly involved the hundred best winemakers in the world I would subscribe, but these men are far too busy. Meanwhile I see hot new California wines highly touted that remind me of Rose Bowl floats that are garish and silly and doomed to last no longer than their plucked roses.
Is winemaking an art? Maybe for a few, and their identities are somewhat concealed except to a few. The apprenticeship requires the entire life. You often have to wait twenty years or more beyond the publication or release date to have any idea if art has been “committed” despite the immediate reviews. Ultimately you are working in a medium that is rarely understood beyond the immediate sensation of pleasure. Like a fine chef’s your work reaches fruition only when it disappears into someone’s mouth.
My Problems with
White Wine
May we politicize wine? I will if I wish. This is a free country though it is quickly becoming less so. I have noted, for instance, that the Bay Area has become fatally infected with the disease of sincerity. Early last December in San Francisco I naively looked for a bar where I might enjoy a glass of wine and a cigarette. Instead I sat in the park across from the Huntington Hotel without wine, smoking an American Spirit and welcoming the frowns of a passel of dweebs doing tai chi. They birdlike lifted their legs as if afflicted with farting fits. When I lived briefly in San Francisco in 1958 it was an active seaport full of jubilance, music, merriment, and heartiness. The morning I left town on my recent trip I heard of the local campaign against the evils of butter.
All of which is to say that you can’t talk about wine without the context in which it exists, like life herself. Even in non-Marxian economic terms it is far more difficult to find a favorable white wine at a decent price than a red. Is it partly because the aforementioned sincere people who drink only white wine have driven the price up or because they are dumb enough to drink any swill if it doesn’t own life’s most vital color, the color of our blood?
We certainly don’t celebrate the Eucharist with white wine. Christ couldn’t have spent forty days in the wilderness alone fueled by white blood. The great north from which I emerge demands a sanguine liquid. White snow calls out for red wine, not the white spritzers of lisping socialites, the same people who shun chicken thighs in favor of characterless breasts and ban smoking in taverns. In these woeful days it is easy indeed to become fatigued with white people, white houses, white rental cars.
This said, let’s be fair. The heart still cries out for a truly drinkable white under twenty bucks. I’ve tried dozens and dozens. I need white wine when I eat fish and shellfish. Of late several have been acceptable if not noteworthy: Ch�
�teau de Lascaux, Reuilly, a Les Carrons Pouilly Fuissé, and an Ermitage du Pic St. Loup kept me alive until I could get at my main course and a restorative red.
Whenever I have wine or food problems I consult Mario Batali in New York, or Gérard Oberlé in Burgundy, France, but my most reliable trump card is Peter Lewis in Seattle, whom I consider to have the most wide-ranging and educated palate in North America. In recent correspondence Lewis said common “white wines tend to the flaccid. The ‘international style’ in which they’re made these days emphasizes the exotic: the overly floral, tropical phenolic profile coupled to heavy-handed oak treatment strips the fruit of its delicacy; whereas the truly exotic, as in Viognier from Chateau Grillet or Lys de Volan, combines true power with all the femininity of peach fuzz and honeysuckle (the seductive quality of the minute hairs on the back of a woman’s thigh in high summer).” There!
But isn’t life a struggle to gather the funds to cover one’s vices? For thirty years since I first had a glass I’ve had an affection for Meursault, even lesser vintages than those of Henri Boillot. I’ve drunk Meursault when the weather was a tad chilly, say in the early spring with a simple sauté of sweetbreads, fresh morels, and a few wild leeks. To be sure my single eye flickers to the red sitting on the sideboard in readiness for the substantial main course. I wouldn’t drink the Meursault alone unless it was over ninety degrees and I was sitting with a French vixen in a shaded courtyard in Beaune and she demanded the wine. Any fool except maybe a congressman loves Chassagne-Montrachet. I could drink three bottles of Didier Dagueneau’s Sauvignon Blanc with a gross of oysters in Cancale if there were an available bed three feet away for my nap. The bed would be on a pier and the great French singer Esther Lammandier would croon a medieval ditty.
I see that women and food rather than government can help me abolish my prejudices, also an extremely fat wallet. Once before giving a poetry reading I was handed a glass of cheapish Californian Chardonnay and I said, “This might be good on pancakes if you were in the wilderness.” I actually chewed on the tip of a cigar to cleanse my mouth.
I admit I love Domaine Tempier rosé, which is about twenty-five dollars, and find Château La Roque rosé at twelve dollars a more acceptable deal in this twilit world of color and flavor compromise. I drink the latter because my wife and daughters drink it so it’s right there within reach, an important qualification. I just recalled that on a warmish day last year I also like Côtes du Rhône blanc from Sang des Cailloux with barbecued rabbit (a basting sauce of butter, garlic, lemon, tarragon, and dry vermouth).
White wine is Apollonian, the wine of polite and dulcet discourse, frippish gossip, banal phone calls, Aunt Ethel’s quiche, a wine for those busy discussing closure, healing, the role of the caretaker, the evils of butter, the wine of the sincerity monoethic. It occasionally, of course, rises to greatness, and you may have some if you’ve been economically diligent or are an heir of some sort. I’m sure that even the cheaper varieties have brought thousands of soccer moms sanity-healing sex fantasies.
We drink wine with our entire beings, not just our mouths and gullets. Temperaments vary. My mother used to torture me with the question, “What if everyone were like you?” I have it on good authority that both Dionysus and Beethoven drank only red wine while Bill Gates and a hundred thousand proctologists stick to the white. Peter Lewis added in a letter that we’re not crazy about white wine because we don’t get crazy after drinking it, because we tend not to break into song or quote García Lorca after drinking it, because white wine doesn’t make us laugh loudly, because it fatigues us and doesn’t promote unbridled lust, because it pairs less well with the beloved roasted game birds whose organs we love to suck and whose bones we love to gnaw.
Yes, we’re fortunate that everyone isn’t like me. I recall Faulkner saying, “Between scotch and nothing I’ll take scotch.” Meursault isn’t the color of blood but it’s the color of sunlight, a large item in itself.
Eat or Die
I have been enraged of late. At first I thought of it as only the slowly rising fetor of the holidays, preceded by a longish book tour of two months that began in France and ended in Mississippi. Book tours promote a ghastly self-absorption, a set of emotions inimical to art. Also an excess of deference, so that you’re startled when you finally return home and your dogs, cats, and wife exhibit a graceful disinterest in you.
And maybe the rage is because I wrote many poems in the summer, and when I boarded the first flight of the tour the muse fled on another flight with her usual suitcase of sexual aids. Since October I’ve only managed a simple tercet:
The old couple coughed and coughed.
The old couple coughed and coughed,
Then hit each other with wrinkled fists.
Catchy, isn’t it? And maybe the rage comes from the fact that our body politic in the United States has been fed by Chef Bush a fresh skunk hacked up with an ax and served with no sauce except the creature’s own verminish exudates. The social services departments in nearly every county in every state in this country offer courses in anger management, often obligatory for certain louts given to public mayhem. It’s been suggested I enroll. I have too few teeth left to gamble on any more fistfights. I recall that my grandfather Arthur had his last major fistfight at my current age, sixty-five, and then avoided further fights by dying. Memory can be a warning. He was also a good cook.
Actually, a few days before Christmas I received my first clue on how to deal with my current brain disease. The clue came in the form of three fresh truffles brought along by a friend, David Sanfield, who is a chef and caterer in Los Angeles. He also packed along the usual banal beluga, some French cheeses, and two capons that had admirably fulfilled their destiny by having been de-nutted.
David arrived in the evening and we ate the caviar before a simple green chile stew, a good restorative for a traveler. The combination of pork, hot chilis, and a head of garlic illustrates once again that peasant food can return errant fops to earth.
Before bedtime and after several bottles of Domaine Tempier Bandol, we shaved a goodly portion of truffle into a bowl with nine beaten eggs for breakfast. This makes for good scrambled eggs, after which a walk is in order, and then suddenly lunch looms and perhaps a thimble of wine.
Courage is needed to prepare the coming dinner, poularde demi-deuil, wherein dozens of paper-thin slices of black truffle are slid under the skins of the fowl (thus the bird is in half-mourning). This is my favorite peasant food. The more truffle, the better the dish, right up until the fowl has an ebony hue.
My late mother, a Swede of iron temperament, liked to tell me to count my blessings when none were apparent. Do little things really mean a lot, as the song insists? I had obviously been living too high in my mind, which Jung suggested was a source of anger and depression. I needed to lower my sights to the nose level of the refrigerator. Gifts had arrived, including guanciale, pancetta, and salami sent by my friend Mario Batali in New York City; also a cooler of triggerfish, grouper, and shrimp from Charles Morgan in Destin, Florida; and cases of wine from Kermit Lynch in Berkeley, California.
Guanciale, which is made from the inner, meatier part of pork jowls, will bring you back to earth. My son-in-law, with a little help from me, made some last fall, but ours wasn’t of the sublimity of Mario’s. You cover these cheeks in salt and herbs for two weeks, then hang them in a cool place to cure. As with pancetta, you chop or julienne a goodly portion to begin certain hearty pasta sauces. The earthen flavor lifts the heart and mind well above the bad taste left by current politics and publishing, the sheer noise of pundit logorrhea, the deluge of rhinestones presented as crown jewels. Pork products are not hothouse flowers. Years ago in France, Gérard Oberlé, the famed Burgundian gourmand, made me a fifteenth-century recipe that required fifty pig noses, which, of course, had to be special-ordered. How else would I have been short-listed for the Prix de Gros Ventres in France?
Most artists understand the weeks just before the winter solstice are a dangerous time, rife with alcohol, suicide, and brooding until the elbows virtually grow into the worktable. Wise artists learn that the darkness that surrounds us can be dispelled by body pleasures. I eat well to avoid suicide, and now in mid-January my anger is largely dispelled, though Bush is still bushy and I’ll never get a solstice parade in New York. Anger can still make momentary visits. Last night, after a fine dinner of oxtail cannelloni at the Cafe Sonoita, I discovered we had locked ourselves out of the house and our hidden key had slipped down the crack between two timbers. My wife went out front and sat in the moonlight and listened to the creek while I picked up an ax and freed the key, though not with the ax Bush used to kill the skunk he’s feeding us.
Now I’m serene as Gandhi after he had one of his magnums of Lynch-Bages. It occurred to me I might help others with emotional problems in my new position as food editor of Brick. Serious suggestions are welcome—and I don’t mean curing lust by soaking your parts in ice-cold pineapple juice, an old Hawaiian nostrum. When the Chinese have fatigued tendons, they eat stewed tendons. ls it really that simple? In Wawa, Ontario, I once had a fried pork liver and onion sandwich that did nothing in particular, which illustrates that there are dead ends in this matter.
Paris Rebellion
During these times, many of us would have been far happier as trout making occasional little jumps up above the water’s surface for the view of the carnage. Has my country become a pack of wild hogs bent on eating the world? Tune in to the end of this column. Certain members of my family, in the midst of the usual Nordic emotional squalor, used to say, “It’s always darkest before it gets darker.”
I recently drove from Montana to my cabin in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan on Route 2. The road is so pleasant I returned the same way. During the entirety of the five days of driving, I was able to get CBC on the radio and became quite concerned with what our media calls “our northern neighbor”—our media, those desperate schoolmarms of banality. CBC is a great deal more pungent than our own National Public Radio. It was fun to be transformed into an “alarmed citizen” of another country. I became angry at Canada’s own lust for conquest when I heard of MP Peter Goldring’s plan to annex the Turks and Caicos. CBC then segued to the difficulties in the beef industry, the embargo being an obvious vengeance move by the Bush cronies for Canada’s refusal to join the party in Iraq. Having recently read Slaughterhouse Blues: The Meat and Poultry Industry in North America by Stull, Schlosser, and Broadway, I found it hard to warm to the problems of the cattle raisers, though in truth the middlemen—processors and retailers—are the central malefactors. Ranchers are much like writers who are told to feel fortunate when they receive 10 percent of the gross for their efforts. All in all, though, I wondered if I should have joined in the singing of “O Canada” at a garden party at Margot Kidder’s on Canada Day evening in Livingston, Montana. I actually mouthed the words, not having a singing voice, rather owning one that resembles shoveling coal. Rosie Schuster seemed to have forgotten her own national anthem, doubtless an alcohol-related glitch or a politically related stance.
