The Wine Lover's Daughter: A Memoir

by Anne Fadiman

  A few weeks later I spent an afternoon with Larry Marks, a scientist who studies sensory perception at the John B. Pierce Laboratory at Yale. Dr. Marks was a distinguished gray-haired man who looked far too thin to be a taste researcher (and indeed had also published work on synesthesia and ventriloquism). He told me his three basic food groups were black coffee, dark chocolate, and red wine, starting with Thunderbird at seventeen and working his way up to Côtes du Rhône.

  Dr. Marks led me to a table on which sixty tiny plastic cups, each containing 5 cc of clear liquid, had been arrayed in precise rows, as if for an unusually well-organized game of beer pong. First came the “gustation test.” The thirty cups on the left contained either plain water or water with very low concentrations—undetectable by some people, unidentifiable by many—of salt, sucrose, citric acid, quinine, or MSG. Following Dr. Marks’s instructions, I swirled the contents of each cup in my mouth, spat into a dedicated sink that had received the expectorate of countless tasters before me, rinsed with water, and moved on to the next cup: more or less like a wine tasting, but without the wine. I wrote down whether each sample tasted salty, sweet, sour, bitter, umami, or flavorless.

  The thirty cups on the right contained either water or a very weak solution of blueberry, strawberry, peach, banana, or vanilla flavoring. They constituted an “olfaction test,” a term that led me to assume, incorrectly, that I’d be sniffing them. Instead, I was instructed to hold my breath, place each liquid in my mouth for a few seconds, and then spit it out. I couldn’t taste a thing until I exhaled, at which point I apparently experienced each flavor as its vapors wafted up my pharynx and into my nose. I dislike—in some cases, like Dr. Utermohlen, hate, hate, hate!—many fruits, and had not eaten a peach or a banana since I was a child, though I had smelled them, with displeasure, when others had eaten them in my presence. I did not expect to recognize these flavors, and when I did I wished I hadn’t, even though they were the faintest of zephyrs.

  After I’d completed both tests, Dr. Marks extended his hand, as if proffering an after-dinner mint. He was holding an envelope that contained several small white disks. PROP! I’d finally found it. Even though I knew that the trials I’d just undergone might be a more complete predictor of taste sensitivity, it still vibrated with talismanic power.

  I placed a disk on my tongue.

  Ewwwwwwwwwww.It was the bitterest substance I had tasted in my entire life. And the bitterness lingered, even after I had plucked the offending scrap of filter paper from my mouth.

  Dr. Marks handed me a piece of paper with a graduated line on which seven levels of sensory intensity were marked and labeled. The instructions, though only one sentence long, were epic in scope: “Please rate in the context of the full range of sensations that you have experienced in your life.”

  All sensations? Well, childbirth was worse. Also, to be fair, my tongue had not thrashed like a hooked fish. I drew a mark partway between the top two levels, “Very Strong” and “Strongest Imaginable.”

  A lab assistant brought in the score sheets from the earlier tests, and Dr. Marks summarized my results. In the gustation test, I had been unable to distinguish between the salty and the umami samples, but I had correctly identified four of the five water samples, four of the five sour samples, and all five bitter samples. In other words, I was sensitive to sourness and very sensitive to bitterness. In the olfaction test, I had correctly identified twenty-eight of thirty samples, including all ten samples of the flavors I hadn’t tasted in decades. I was exceptionally sensitive. In the PROP test, I was exactly on the border between medium taster and supertaster. So close and yet so far! (Dr. Marks told me he was on the border between non-taster and medium taster himself: he could tell that PROP was bitter, but just barely. No wonder he liked black coffee.)

  Dr. Marks had been trained as a cognitive psychologist, and he cautioned me to remember that biology is not the sole determinant of taste preferences. Experience matters too. For instance, he noted that if a child grows up in Mexico and starts eating chili peppers as a toddler, she’ll get used to them, and probably even learn to enjoy them, whether or not she was initially sensitive to capsaicin. However, he had no doubt that my sensitivity to bitterness was responsible for my dislike of wines with high tannin levels—the more tannins, the more I’d balk. I asked him why, if I was so good at distinguishing flavors, I wasn’t better at telling wines apart. He explained that it was partly a matter of practice—I just hadn’t drunk enough—and partly because my general sensitivity overwhelmed my capacity to discriminate.

  My sensitivity to bitterness was later reconfirmed after I ordered a kit from 23andMe, a genetic testing company, and spat into a little plastic tube. I was duly informed that I had several variants—none of them particularly rare—in TAS2R38 and TAS2R13, two of the genes that encode for the taste receptors that perceive bitterness. One set of variants intensifies the perception of bitter flavors in general, including PROP; the other specifically intensifies the perception of bitterness in alcohol. All the variants were heterozygous, which meant I had inherited them from only one parent (I feel pretty sure it was the milkshake lover) and not from the other (the wine lover).

  So there it was. I didn’t taste what my father tasted.

  This knowledge made me both happy and sad. It was a relief to know that I might not be such an anhedonic stick-in-the-mud after all. I wished I’d met Dr. Utermohlen and Dr. Marks years ago. I would have felt, if not completely exonerated, at least less convinced that my inability to appreciate wine was a character flaw.

  But it wasn’t exactly good news. It made me feel like a child with a palate so finicky that she is doomed to eat only Nilla Wafers. Forever.

  Or a woman who is doomed to drink Pinot Grigio, the perennial darling of ladies’ luncheons, and Merlot, or, as the wine snob in Sideways called it, “fucking Merlot.” That’s the advice I was given by myVinotype, an online quiz created by one of Dr. Utermohlen’s colleagues, a taste researcher named Tim Hanni. After answering a brief series of questions about my food preferences (one of which was whether I hated cilantro), I was informed that my “Vinotype Persona” was Hypersensitive, which seemed to be code for “has pathetic taste in wines.” Hanni believes that wine stores should organize their bottles not by origin and varietal but by alcohol content and intensity of flavor, and that every sommelier should learn to assess a diner’s taste sensitivity and recommend wines accordingly. He may be right. But I’m stuck. The only wines I might want to drink are the ones I would never want to drink.

  Not long after my taste tests, I had dinner with two writers. One of them, a wine critic, brought a Beaune Les Avaux 2001, a Premier Cru Burgundy; the other, a poet, brought a Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, a rustic red from central Italy that looked nearly opaque. I tried the Beaune. The usual. Too strong. The wine critic was disappointed; he had thought, as everyone always does, that even if I didn’t like wine, I’d like this wine. I didn’t dare even try the Montepulciano. I knew it would knock me to the floor. After hearing about my exquisite papillae and my off-the-charts olfaction score, the poet said, “You’re like an Empath!” Empaths are inordinately sensitive humanoids or human-humanoid hybrids on Star Trek, one of whom suffers horribly when she absorbs the pain of Captain Kirk and Dr. McCoy on a mission in the Minarian star system. The poet wasn’t giving me a compliment; she was expressing sympathy.

  One night, as I was looking at a diagram of a tongue on my laptop screen, I thought to myself, My father would have hated all this. Not because he disliked science; he had enjoyed reading biographies of scientists and edited two anthologies of stories and poems about mathematics. But he would have thought that “fungiform” and “circumvallate” were ugly words—words that Wally the Wordworm would never have wanted to eat. He would have felt that reducing wine to a series of tests and charts and genetic acronyms would be like feeding a Keats sonnet into a computer and spitting out an analysis of metrics and phonemes, or grinding up Chartres Cathedral in order to
weigh the stone and the glass.

  My father wrote that wine contains “an inexplicable élan vital.” Inexplicable. It not only couldn’t be explained, it shouldn’t be. He would not have wanted to know which trigeminal receptors he had used to taste the Château Lafite Rothschild 1904 at his eightieth-birthday lunch, just as he would not have wanted to read a chemist’s account of how it had been produced. He liked to think of wine as made partly by human beings but mostly by the glorious lottery of soil and slope and sun and rainfall, no two vineyards alike, no two years alike, no two bottles alike, the whole enterprise risky, suspenseful, and at least partly accidental.

  “Accidental” is another word for “miraculous.” If the opposite of science is religion, then my father’s feelings about wine were as religious as he ever got. He wrote that “wine drinking is like music or mysticism. All three are in the end inexpressible by words.” (His own wine essays, including the one that contained that phrase, proved him wrong.) He compared the impossibility of writing about wine to the impossibility of writing about “the sensation of union with the Divine.” Although he thought Catholicism was foolish, he was moved by the Eucharist: to call wine the blood of Christ was to acknowledge its inestimable value.

  My researches made me feel different from my father not only in matters of gustation and olfaction but also in character. He liked to leave some things a mystery. I’d rather find everything out.

  In matters of wine non-appreciation, I have discovered I am far from alone. Everywhere I go these days I seem to run into people who belong to the club. Its members include two former students of mine, one who says that half a glass leaves her zonked and red-faced (I suspect an acetaldehyde dehydrogenase deficiency) and another who invests in wine futures—specifically, 2003 Château Pontet-Canet—but has never sampled his stock because he says wine makes his mouth hurt (trigeminal sensitivity). And my old Sedgwick boyfriend recently told me that his late father, who could easily have afforded Château Pontet-Canet, opted for half-gallon bottles of S. S. Pierce Sauternes, into which he stirred half a cup of sugar (genetic variant for sweet preference).

  And, of course, there’s my brother Kim. After I received the results of my 23andMe test, I called to tell him about TAS2R38 and TAS2R13. I thought he might want to send off a saliva sample himself, but he didn’t. Like our father, he finds data reductive. Also, he’d already told me why he thought neither of us liked wine. I asked him years ago. He said, “Because we didn’t need to escape our origins.”

  22

  Memorabilia

  My father didn’t leave much behind. A favorite family story involved Kim, at age two, watching him sit down at the breakfast table in a foul humor, and relieving the tension by shouting, from his high chair, “Throw everything out, Daddy!” The only material possession my father treasured was the giant copper wastebasket under his desk.To lighten his load when he traveled, he dismembered paperback books and discarded the pages he’d already read. Once, in an insomniac funk, he wrote, “It is selfish and I have been taught not to do it, but what paradise to die in possession of nothing but your own death-sweat.” He just about managed it.

  He had once wanted to leave us only books and wine, which he considered not objects but experiences. More than a thousand of his books are now on my shelves, including twenty or so about wine. I consulted them when I wrote these pages. His wine was gone before he was. He had never expected to live long enough to drink it all, or to have children who wouldn’t have wanted it even if there had been any left to inherit. My wine cellar consists of the two empty bottles in my study—the 1835 Madeira once owned by Elbridge T. Gerry, Jr., and the 1904 Château Lafite Rothschild we drank at the Book-of-the-Month Club on his eightieth birthday—and one full bottle, a 1981 Boyer Brut Blanc de Blancs, Cuvée Fadiman, from the Four Seasons dinner, with the photograph of my father on the label. I’ve been waiting for the right moment to open it. I’d use my father’s butterfly corkscrew, now mine, the one I saw him plunge and twirl and twist nearly every night of my childhood, though the auger is now rusty and the brass levers are stippled with verdigris. Drinking the Cuvée Fadiman might feel a trifle cannibalistic, like a Papua New Guinea tribesman incorporating the essence of his late father by eating him, but perhaps I would incorporate some of my father’s finer qualities, such as neatness and a constitutional inability to misuse a preposition. Unfortunately, the bottle is now thirty-three years old, a geriatric age for a white. Not enough tannins. And of course there’s that other problem: I probably wouldn’t like it anyway.

  In his last years, with the help of his secretary’s eyes, my father gradually thinned his files until only what he considered essential—mostly medical, legal, and financial documents—remained. Everything else was dispatched to the copper wastebasket, which now sits under my own desk. The folders that survived the cull used to fit into a single lateral drawer in his Captiva study and now occupy a single lateral drawer in my study in Massachusetts. You might think that I would have read every page as soon as the boxes were delivered, hungrily sniffing out every last vestige of him, but I didn’t. Going through a dead parent’s memorabilia is a hazardous undertaking; there is a fine line between pleasure and pain. I enjoyed the CORRESPONDENCE folders (letters from eighty-seven famous or once-famous people, mostly writers, including W. H. Auden, Pearl S. Buck, Edna Ferber, M.F.K. Fisher, Ralph Ellison, Aldous Huxley, Alfred Kazin, Arthur Koestler, Walker Percy, Mary Renault, William Saroyan, Stephen Spender, James Thurber, Robert Penn Warren, E. B. White, and Thornton Wilder—an entire literary generation—that had been spared the copper wastebasket only because it dawned on my father around 1960 that they might be worth something). But I ran aground on FADIMAN, ANNE. Although he never kept copies of his own letters and had thrown out all the drafts of his own writing, he had kept twelve alphabetized folders containing my essays and articles, my report cards back to the sixth grade, all my letters (including the ones I sent from France when I was fifteen), and POST-TONSILLECTOMY WRITINGS (the notes I had passed him, unable to speak, while he read me War and Peace).

  It was a long time before I felt able to press on through FIDELITY BROKERAGE SERVICES, MEDICAL PLAN INFO, and STATE FARM AUTO INSURANCE, all the way to the end of the alphabet. I’d started working on this book and knew I had to look at everything. Near the end of the drawer, squeezed between WILLS, INCL. CODICILS and WORLD POETRY, there was a folder I had never noticed, because it was bulgier than its neighbors and had sunk half an inch below them, concealing its tab. The tab said WINE MEMORABILIA.

  I remember exactly where I was standing when I opened the folder. I placed it on top of the low bookcase that held the Encyclopædia Britannica my father had given me long before the Internet existed. (As a member of its Board of Editors, he got an employee discount.) I was surrounded by the books and papers I used in my job teaching in an Ivy League English department: the very thing he had most wanted to do himself. It was after dinner on a warm summer night. I was facing west.

  The folder contained a wine list, a menu, a magazine article, and his Cellar Book.

  His Cellar Book.

  I could practically recite the sentence in “Brief History of a Love Affair,” which I had reread countless times, that followed his description of his “happy marriage” with wine: “The record of our union is contained in my Cellar Book, the earliest entry being that of October 17, 1935, at which time I seem to have laid down a dozen Morey, Clos des Lambrays ’29 at a price ($28) that today induces wistful dreams. ‘Quite beautiful’ is the notation under ‘Remarks.’”

  This was it. The record of their union. It was like finding a sheaf of old love letters.

  My father’s Cellar Book was not exactly a book; it was a mismatched collection of documents with overlapping and missing dates. There were loose pages of various shapes and sizes, the paper foxed and some of the margins Scotch-taped, with entries from 1935 to 1950. The first six of those pages had been torn from the back of a wine book to which they served as a kind o
f appendix. (I later discovered that it was none other than Schoonmaker and Marvel’s Complete Wine Book, which my father had published at Simon & Schuster the previous year. True to form, he’d jettisoned the rest of the book.) There was also a 3¾-by-5-inch “Wine Account”—maroon leather covers, blue marbled endpapers, gilt-edged pages—with entries from 1948 to 1950. In his familiar handwriting, my father had recorded in these miscellaneous logs each wine he bought, along with the vintage, the number of bottles, the date, the storage location, and sometimes a tasting note. The loose pages made little protesting sounds as I pried apart the Scotch tape, which was glossy—it predated Magic Tape by decades—and yellowed to near-opacity. The leather Wine Account, which had caused the WINE MEMORABILIA folder to bulge in the middle and sink below the other files in the drawer, smelled ancient and fragile, as if I’d opened a fine Bordeaux so old its cork might crumble.

  I knew what the first entry was going to be: Morey, Clos des Lambrays ’29. There it was. Twelve bottles, $28. But I was surprised to see that the date on the first line wasn’t 10/17/35; it was 12/17/35. Five December entries were followed by a long series of October entries. It took me a few minutes to understand that my father had begun his Cellar Book near the end of the year but had recorded his earlier purchases as well. He’d made a minor mistake in “Brief History of a Love Affair”: he’d actually started collecting wine not on October 17 but on October 18, 1935, when his acquisitions had also included a case of Clos des Lambrays (its quantity recorded not as “12” bottles but as “1” case)—one that had indeed been “Quite beautiful.” Or, rather, “Quite Beautiful.” When he made the notation, he’d been so excited he’d capitalized the B.