Confessions of a Francophone

Stretching metaphors, placing names, finding the special bottles, interesting symmetry

The Concinnitas Project Artists

Though mostly a normal person, I have a funny habit of reading wine lists from restaurants around the world. Sometimes, people send them to me when they want advice for choosing a good bottle. Really, wine lists are a semantic map, with an added dimension for time or vintage. Where on earth is the beautiful, inspiring, exceptional bottle of wine? Lifetimes go by in its pursuit, all against the irony that most of the very special bottles come to us unexpectedly, and very rarely after grand designs. A big reason for this is that surprise is an essential aspect of delight. It’s just part of the shape of a great wine. It’s a kind of a geometry and requires very little thought. The quality of a great wine is evident immediately, as you raise the glass to your nose. Where are these wines, and how do we find them?

When a wine is special, it is so for certain reasons, some necessary and some sufficient. For example, the 2014 “Bijou” from Jules Métras opened up with all of its necessary marks of greatness: purity of fruit, balance, complexity, structure, minerals, and typicity. Wines like these give me an almost cartoonish impression. An idealization.

Nick asks, “Is this wine corked?”

This is a hard and fast rule for judging a special wine. There has to be a brief moment where you take the wine to be hopelessly flawed. Compare this to the kind of off-putting or uncanny feeling you get when you hear a new song for the first time, one that you’ll eventually grow to like or love. It can’t be quite right? It demands an interrogative aspect of your attention. Who is this? What is this? Some of the best examples: Is this music? It’s as if, on the road to proper veridical judgment, a special wine or song or film must past through “perfectly wrong” before it is “perfectly right.” That cartoon shape of harmony supervening on the thing itself, more prior and more essential. We recognize that shape of cartoonish perfection before any of the individual qualities (flavors, notes, aromas, etc.), and that’s strange!

Lots of wines show beautiful fruit, are properly balanced, and all the rest. A special wine has this shape of pleasant perfection: a recognition in ourselves. For maybe the first time, drinking that bottle of Métras, I was cognizant of where that shape came from. The 2014 vintage in Beaujolais was so extremely important for me. I was working at Uva Wines in Williamsburg, surrounded by lots of talent and struggling to get a grip on the different terroirs of France. A few nights a week, Frank Locrasto and I closed the shop together. He decided we should try to taste through all the Crus of Beaujolais together, seeing how much our customers could take of the Flashstrap playlists.

With only 10 crus and one grape variety to contend with, the task didn’t feel so daunting. It was a digestible amount of information with clear lines of controls and variables.

The experience was also extremely pleasant. Frank was putting together his exotica band at the time, so the shop was full of Martin Denny and Les Baxter. The 2014 vintage was also immediately delicious, bottle after bottle. The Morgons were full of strawberry and cream. The Fleuries were more angular and purple, leaning ever so slightly towards the Rhône. Regnie was spicy and sometimes dank. Chiroubles was electric and sapid. A little model was forming in my head. I built a personal map of a place I hadn’t been, demarcated by only slightly arbitrary reasons, and once-in-a-while really logical ones.

The Morgon wines of Lapierre and Foillard just became those places for me, Regnie from Breton, Fleurie from Dufaitre, etc. Same for many of us. If you love French wine, it’s because of this mapping and correspondence. Pinot on limestone, Chenin on schist, this hill versus that hill, solar years and classical vintages, repetition with difference.

Beaujolais in 2014 served as a toy model I would apply as a function over all the great terroirs of France, from Champagne to Banyuls. I broke down the countryside into principalities of taste and shape. It became easier and easier to love the wines of France because they were easier and easier to recognize. What felt like an infinity (what is an actual infinity), became well-ordered such that there was recognition in novel bottles and glasses, not the wines I recalled from having tasted them. I even became slightly proficient in that parlor-trick type of blind tasting, but only really so in those tightly regulated pockets of France where these rules and models could guide me.

I’d go on to work for Fifi, an importer who represented Yvon Métras and his son Jules. I was very lucky to taste both of their wines over many vintages. I’m biased but not alone in thinking that wines from the Métras represent some of the best in the Beaujolais. So, I was even more fortunate to visit these places I’d mapped out and bring a more empirical perspective to bear. This complicated the picture as much as it shed light. Many of the “why?” questions snapped into place when one stood on top of Côte du Py or tasted a grape of Gamay, sparkling in a carbonic maceration — seeing anemic vines in alluvial soils or swollen grapes after lots of rain.

All these disparate pieces were coming together in this amalgamation that ordered each new piece. This was handy because, as an imbiber, I was never able to create an encyclopedic memory palace or recall how one or another bottle struck me after months or years. The analogy for me was Hilbert’s hotel, an illustration developed by German mathematician, David Hilbert, to describe the nature of infinity. Whenever a new guest walked up, there was always a free room at Hilbert’s hotel. There was always a room for each new bottle or glass, such that I had some notion of the small infinity of French wine all at once.

Probably all of that is trivial to anyone with a palate, but I often wonder if part of my judgment for bottles like that 2014 “Bijou” aren’t built into the architecture. When I tasted that wine, I knew precisely which room it belonged in, and that recognition, was shocking and uncanny, like meeting a stranger who feels like an old friend.

Weird stuff! and raises an epistemic question about our ability to share the experience of any given wine. It’s a question that sat in the back of my mind of a long time. Then, I read this very good paragraph from Jeff Patten in a Flatiron Wines mailer:

There are many things that I love about Croatian wine, but to keep this simple, I’m going to focus today on my very favorite discovery: the red wine grape Plavac Mali. There is a style of red wine grape in Europe that is powerful, tannic, fresh, aromatically alluring, and elegant all at the same time. Nebbiolo is the best example. Aglianico is like that too. You also find lesser-known versions like Xinamavro in Macedonia or Baga in Portugal. Plavac Mali is part of this family.

Wow, I was sure he was going to say Cabernet or Syrah! “Powerful, alluring, tannic and fresh,” I knew, or figured, might describe a wine or two outside of France, but I consistently found it difficult to apply my French model outside of the wines on France, and in particular in for many of the wines of Italy. I wanted to have this concept that Jeff had, but I found I was missing a certain, fundamental difference between the wines of Italy and the wines of France, and I’ve finally come to believe that this difference is a sort of mathematical one.

Annoying? Perhaps, but the thought has opened up the world of Italian wine to me in a way that was heretofore closed. I think the impoverished state of education in this country has robbed normal people of the beauty of mathematics and the concepts and beliefs it can allow a person to have. I digress…

At least one thing had been clear to me, working with a lot of winemakers in Italy: the approach to vinification was markedly different. Where the French winemakers seemed to be after this realized shape — this completed product — Italian winemakers saw wine as an aspect of a meal, even an ingredient.

Like many of you, I’d fallen in love with the wines of Emilia-Romagna and Piacenza long ago. With a big plate of Mortadella, Lomo, Parma, or Grana Padana, the wines completely cracked open for me. Their balance was immediately evident relative to the foods they were paired with. In this region and with these wines, it was very easy to see why. Many of the same yeasts that work on the sugars in Barbera, Bonarda, and Ortugo also give their signature flavors to the salumi. But more and more it is clear that this idea generalizes across the majority of Italy such that the few exceptions prove the rule.

The great wines of Italy (even those “aromatically alluring, tannic, fresh…”) did not fit into the hotel. They were different types of things. Admittedly, a kind of French chauvinism in me made me believe that Chianti, Barbaresco, and Amarone were somehow missing parts, lacking the requisite material that was essential to the French wines of great beauty. This is categorically wrong, but neither is the opposite true. In just the way that there is an infinity of French wines, so too are there an infinity of Italian wines, but the Italian infinity is bigger!

I don’t mean this in a superficial sense whereby I’m saying that Italy makes wine from 3,000 varieties compared to the few dozen in France. It’s a little counterintuitive, but some infinities are simply larger than others. This was proven by a German mathematician, Georg Cantor, in the 19th century. He used an ingenious method of diagonalization to show that some sets or groups of things contain more elements than we have numbers, making out mathematical idea of infinity {1,2,3…} somehow smaller than uncountable infinities like that of the real number like (which contains irrational numbers like π and e and stuff like 2.309284972384…)

In fact, the “real” infinity or numbers between 0 and 1 is much larger than the infinity of natural numbers or integers. How much bigger, smart guy? We don’t have a mathematical way to describe that; we don’t know. Though we make use of rational and irrational numbers together in the same calculus, they are fundamentally different kinds of things, and I always found that a fascinating notion.

So, while there are many “powerful, tannic, fresh, aromatically alluring” wines in Italy, the wines qua wine outstrip what makes a wine in France. There are just more qualities, different qualities, that bear no relation to any counterparts. The wines are free to exist as they present themselves in nature because their balance and harmony can be supplemented by the richness of a simmering risotto or salty Talleggio, or a million other things.

Freisa can have this wildly bright and citric acidity that borders on copper. Sangiovese can have a volatility like a rubber glove. Croatina is often so sanguine and ferrous that they are nearly undrinkable without food. All these wines are still some of my most beautiful experiences and can exist as wine because of this latitude of culinary soul that lives in all the great bottles of Italy. Anyone who has suffered through a vertical tasting of Amarone knows that our Francophone attitude about the way wines should be tasted and judged is a flawed one, but one that should be confronted with nuance and not pure relativism.

It is something very specific that makes the great wines of Italy irrational to the concept of “good wine” that we have for French counterparts. It is something very specific that allows wine in Italy to outstrip the concept of balance and harmony in France. We should investigate these subtleties in earnest, rather than discounting them offhand for either blanket dismissal or useless relativism. Some wines are good and others are bad, but we can be precise about how and why. For myself, ironically, the more discerning I become about such things, the more things I find I am able to enjoy with sincerity. Think hard about wine and enjoy life.

Further Reading

• Garner, Michael. Barolo: Tar and Roses. Steiner Books, 1988.

• Potter, Michael D. Sets: An Introduction. Clarendon, 1991.

• Bastianich, Joseph, and David Lynch. Vino Italiano: The Regional Wines of Italy. Clarkson Potter, 2005.

• Wigner, Eugene P. “The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.” Mathematics and Science, Aug. 1990, pp. 291–306, https://doi.org/10.1142/9789814503488_0018.

This article is for my dear friend, Frank Graniero, who taught me how to love the wines of Italy and continually breaks me out of my dogmatic slumber. He sent me a lot of great literature, but best of all was his short review of the 1988 “Tar and Roses.” “He talks about great Barolo (and to me Italian wine) is a wine to be arrived at. That takes time and work to see the light, but that once you do its treasure becomes clear and addicting. I think this pertains to misunderstood Italian wines”