The man I’ll call Sommelier No. 1 was asking the man I’ll call Wine Merchant No. 1, in a wine-weary sort of way, “Do you like Clape’s wines?” Auguste Clape is a renowned producer of Cornas. To the group of connoisseurs I was with, Cornas is just a simple, heat-soaked Syrah of little consequence.
Excitedly, I interrupted. “Look, the 1989 Domaine de la Janesse Vielles Vigne, only a hundred twenty dollars.” Nobody looked up. The merchant turned to the sommelier and replied, “I find them rustic, never really appealing.” I was beginning to understand my place. I was a noncollector, a nobody. The sounds I made were as insignificant as those of a small forest animal rustling the underbrush. That evening we did not quaff my wonderful wine discovery. It did not rate consideration. I was among my betters, as far as selecting wine was concerned.
After nearly a week of frustrating meals with these men, I still call them my friends, which demonstrates my forgiving nature. Our dinners typically lasted five hours, including the time we spent studying wine lists while sipping glasses of simple, $100-per-bottle Chablis. On the single occasion when one of my friends knocked over a glass, the sort of accident one might expect when men drink long into the night, the person soaked from neck to waist was me. I told these men I would protect their identities, describe them only by their professions or hobbies, and it was Wine Collector No. 1 who marinated my Giorgio Armani Collezioni shirt ($175, on sale) in 1990 Beaucastel Hommage à Jacques Perrin Châteauneuf-du-Pape ($710, in magnum).
I can only demonstrate so much journalistic integrity: Thanks a lot, Alan Belzer.
The group included two wine directors from top New York restaurants, two principals in one of Manhattan’s most prestigious wine shops, and F O R K I T O V E R
3 0 3
two wine collectors. Five of the six characterize themselves as bargain hunters. The sixth, Wine Merchant No. 2, says he refuses to spend excessively but is mostly interested in finding once-in-a-lifetime rarities. To them, seeking out well-priced wines means paying less for a bottle on a list in France than they would pay for it in a shop in America. For the most part, that meant drinking cult wines from Coche-Dury (white Burgundies), Henri Jayer (red Burgundies), Guigal (single-vineyard Côte-Rotie) and, to a lesser extent, Jaboulet (Hermitage).
They also admire the unrivaled wine service they encounter in France, because it encompasses discreet attention, appropriate glassware, and formidable knowledge. I anticipated exquisite service, even though we were American tourists, and for the most part we received it. French restaurant owners, like all restaurateurs, are very polite to customers who spend $3,000 to $4,000 each night on wine. I’ve always believed that rational persons should not consume magnificent wines in high-priced restaurants, because of excessive markups, which only proves that I’ve spent too much time dining in New York. At Alain Ducasse’s Le Louis XV, the 1992 Coche-Dury Corton-Charlemagne, a mineral-laced bombshell of a white, cost $400. Wine Merchant No. 2
said, “Anytime you see Coche for four hundred dollars, you should drink it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. This bottle is about a thousand dollars below the retail price in New York.” At Troisgros, we paid $825 for 1990 Jayer Cros Parantoux, a stunning (although youthful) red Burgundy. I had recently seen it on the list of a reasonably priced restaurant in New York for $3,750. None of these men, no matter what they already had in their cellars at home, was able to resist a bargain, much as a woman with a dozen pair of $800 Manolo Blahnik shoes in her closet at home cannot stop herself when she sees another pair on sale for $400. To them, Henri Jayer is the Manolo Blahnik of wine.
Almost every wine we ordered came from a memorable vintage, although we did have a 1991 Comte de Vogue Musigny ($620, in magnum) at Le Louis XV because my friends knew the estate had produced a long, sweet, beautifully colored Burgundy in that difficult 3 0 4
A L A N R I C H M A N
year. They know years the way rabbis know the Ten Commandments, the way Roman Catholic priests know the Stations of the Cross.
They know when hail fell in the Côte de Nuits (most famously in 1983) and when labor shortages caused difficulties with the harvest in Germany (most infamously in 1945). On impulse, we sent a glass of the 1991 Musigny to a man dining alone, and he sent back a charming note wishing us luck and thanking us for making him feel a part of such a fortunate group. “Doing something like that makes me feel like a god,” said Wine Merchant No. 2, an unintentionally perceptive remark, because wine collectors often see themselves that way.
Their weakness where wine is concerned is a disinclination to experiment. At Le Louis XV, I spotted a bottle of 1982 Cotnari Grasa Selection de Grains Nobles in the La Moldavie section of the list. It was a sweet wine none of us had ever heard of, and for all we knew, 1982
was as great a year in Moldavia as it was in Bordeaux. I could not have resisted the call of an authentic Marxist-Leninist wine produced in Romania during the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu, but my friends refused to try it. Wine Collector No. 2 said, “We seek out opportunities we will remember for the rest of our lives. We are not here to rough it.” Only once did they drink a wine of my choosing, and that was because I arrived before they did at Guy Savoy—they took taxis, I rode the Metro. I selected a 2000 Ostertag Pinot Gris, overpriced at $140, but I feared these connoisseurs would have sneered at
