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one should do in the company of friends. It also requires certain skills that have never received the attention they deserve. Those who excel at it, like Olympic kayaking champions, are seldom rewarded. Yet, as Howkins points out, “If people have never seen great spitting before, it’s quite an impressive thing.”
Bespaloff claims to possess merely “an ability to spit out of my mouth and not get any on my shoes,” but he is being unduly self-deprecating.
I watched him not long ago at a Bordeaux tasting, and I thought he performed with uncommon grace, a veritable Baryshnikov around the spit bucket.
When tasting, he first aerated the wine in his glass with three or four economical flicks of the wrist, then he threw back his head and drained about a half-inch of the liquid. There was none of the ostenta-tion of the novice, no gurgling or hissing or obvious intake of air. With closed mouth, he appeared to chew. He paused, scribbled a few notes, chewed another dozen or so times, reflected briefly, then spit.
Around him, tasters were hunched over buckets in unseemly positions, allowing wine to dribble out of their mouth. Others were attempting to spit from significant distances but going about it so sloppily that the results were reminiscent of a bomb going off in a paint factory.
When Bespaloff spit, out came a discreet stream that hit the bucket dead center, achieving what in rifle competition would be known as a tight shot group. When he saw me watching him, he stepped back and fired another masterful blast, this one from about three feet away. “I’m pretty accurate,” he explained, “but I’m not what you’d call a great distance spitter. It’s not like I stand ten feet back and spit in magnificent parabolas over people’s heads.”
Bespaloff says there was nothing in his upbringing or training to indicate that he would become a world-class spitter, but nobody in the wine world really knows what makes one person a maestro and another a mess. There are as many theories on spitting as there are wines to be spit. It is thought by some that a gap between the two front teeth is an anatomical advantage, but, Bespaloff points out, “If that were the secret, then Lauren Hutton would be the best.” Mike Grgich, owner of Grgich F O R K I T O V E R
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Hills Cellars in California, says all great spitters must be tall. He is five-six. Author Hugh Johnson attributes whatever small status he has achieved as a spitter to the trumpet lessons he took as a child. “A good embouchure, the lip muscles, contributes,” he says. Louis Latour, the famed Burgundy vineyard owner and négociant, says the key to precision spitting is sobriety.
Alas, there are no definitive answers, even from Bespaloff. This is a gentleman with consummate knowledge of the wine business, a man with more than a quarter-century of experience as a wine writer, a professional taster who can identify the most obscure varietals from the most inaccessible regions, yet when I asked him for the secret of spitting, he claimed to know nothing he could pass on. “The secret is years of self-denial and low wages,” he said, reverting to the standard excuse given by every wine writer to explain every shortcoming. Come to think of it, none of us is particularly well paid.
Bespaloff has more than 1.5 million copies of his books in print and is one of the largest-selling authors of wine books in the world. As his reputation as a wine writer grew, so too did his reputation as a wine spitter, although he never paid it much heed. There came a time about ten years ago when a small magazine acknowledged his preeminence by featuring him in an article on spitting. He showed it to his mother, pointing out the professional recognition that had come his way thanks to the top-notch university education she had provided her son. “She gave me a funny look,” he says.
It is unfortunate that spitting is such a spurned science that even a mother cannot take pride in her son’s accomplishments. Within the wine community, this is not the case, particularly in Portugal and Australia, where fine spitters achieve legendary status. Peter Cobb, a director of the Cockburn’s firm in Portugal, says of the aforementioned Smithes,
“He’s around eighty now, hasn’t got a tooth in his head, and still spits prodigious distances.” Adds Bruce Guimaraens, the winemaker at Fonseca, “He’s the best we’ve had in the past fifty years in the port trade. He can drown a fly on the wing at fifty feet.” John Burnett, the managing director at Croft and the likely successor to Smithes as Por-2 9 8
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tugal’s top spitter, calls himself “probably one of the best living [spitters] today,” but he concedes that he doesn’t ring the spittoon with quite the same authority as Smithes.
In Australia, the hot spitters are Len Evans, a writer and wine producer, and Greg Clayfield, the winemaker at Lindemans. Clayfield, a good two decades younger than Bespaloff, bows to the American’s experience and ranks himself as merely a first-rate regional spitter—“the best in the cooler climates of Australia.” Interestingly, Clayfield predicts the day will come when the top spitter in the world will be a woman, which surprises me. Women tend to spit discreetly and world-class spitting requires presumptuousness. “I believe women can be more accurate spitters than men if they work at it,” Clayfield says,
“but they are incredibly bad novices.” Eunice Fried, an experienced wine writer, concedes that men are superior spitters, but she blames it on upbringing, not on physical limitations. “The problem is that girls were brought up to be young ladies and young ladies never spit. I wrote back in the mid-seventies that women should start
