Well-traveled

Scenes From the Life of Jancis

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Jancis Robinson and Julia Harding

“And people think this is so glamorous,” Jancis Robinson chortled as we walked through the courtyard of Chateau Pichon-Lalande in the town of Pauillac. It was 5:45 in the afternoon; our teeth, tongues, and gums had been stained purple; and we’d just completed our last appointment of the day—a day that had started in a hotel dining room on the outskirts of Bordeaux almost 10 hours earlier.

Robinson, a master of wine (the oenological equivalent of a Ph.D. and an incredibly rare distinction; there are just 244 MWs worldwide), is wine columnist for the Financial Times of London, the author of numerous books, including the indispensable Oxford Companion to Wine; and, for my money, the most entertaining and insightful wine writer in the business. Though Jancis and I had never actually met, I have done some wine writing for the FT, and we have occasionally traded e-mails. When I decided to attend this year’s en primeurs tastings, I asked Jancis if I could tag along for a day with her and her assistant, Julia Harding, also an MW, and she generously agreed.

Tagging along with them meant joining a scrum of British writers, including several legends of the vine: Michael Broadbent, the former head of Christie’s wine department, a man who has probably tasted more historically significant wines than any human being alive; Hugh Johnson, author of the also-indispensable World Atlas of Wine (Jancis is now the co-author) and other seminal wine books; and Steve Spurrier, organizer of the now-immortal “Judgment of Paris” tasting in 1976, which saw a group of esteemed French experts rank several unheralded American wines ahead of the best names from Bordeaux and Burgundy. This would be heady company for any wine geek.

We all met promptly at 9 a.m. at Chateau Palmer in the village of Margaux, the first of the major Medoc appellations on the road out of Bordeaux. The remarkable thing about the Medoc is how unremarkable it is. The land is strangely flat for prime winemaking territory, the surrounding towns somnambulant. Napa this is not. The only real tourist attractions are the chateaux themselves. Alas, most of the best wineries accept visitors by appointment only; no walk-ins. Many of them also refuse to take part in the organized tastings that are held during the en primeurs period—they consider it beneath them—which means that anyone wishing to try the wines has to be invited to the chateaux.

The visit to Palmer was a quick one, with only two wines tasted—the chateau’s second wine, called Alter Ego de Palmer, and the marquee vin, known simply as Chateau Palmer (a disappointment, with a greenish note on the palate). From there, it was off to Chateau Margaux, one of Bordeaux’s five first growths; these are the left bank’s premier wines and invariably sell for well north of $100 a bottle, even in weak vintages. The stop at Margaux was a longer one, in part because there were more wines to taste, in part because Paul Pontallier, the winemaker, was a first-rate raconteur. As usual, the wines were terrific.

Following Chateau Margaux, Jancis, Julia, and I headed off to another tasting of other wines from the Margaux appellation, as well as wines from a few satellite districts. The tasting was put on by the Union des Grands Crus de Bordeaux, or UGC, a group that represents 130 Bordeaux wineries and organizes a number of events for journalists during the en primeurs season. If a writer so wishes, he can be fed, housed in a chateau, and ferried from appointment to appointment by the UGC. I passed on everything except the tastings. (A decision I briefly came to regret when my hotel nearly went up in flames one night. A group of Dutch, German, and Irish businessmen, some of them oddly stripped down to their underwear, were having a raucous drinking session in the lobby and apparently made a bonfire with their cigarettes, filling the hotel with smoke.)

The tasting could be done one of two ways: blind or with the labels showing. Jancis preferred blind, as did I—it is just a more honest way of arriving at an assessment. We had 27 wines to work through, and work it was. The wines, being infants, were brutally tannic, and by the time we got to the last few, I had trouble moving my tongue, and it felt as if the roof of my mouth were cracking. The sliced baguettes and bottles of mineral water—smelling salts for wine tasters—helped, but not much. When judging young wines, it is easy enough to sort out the dreck, but it is also easy to be fooled; wines that are highly extracted and slightly sweet are catnip for fatigued palates, yet the same wines may well taste over-the-top and vulgar at the dinner table.

While I have a lot of faith in my palate, I will admit I was intimidated tasting alongside Jancis Robinson. When I put Wine 17 to my nose—we had only numbers to go by—I immediately noticed there was something wrong with it; the wine had an off-aroma that clearly indicated it had been damaged. Ordinarily, I would have said something, but in this case I felt, well, inhibited. A few moments later, Julia whispered to Jancis that she thought 17 was a bum bottle. I was annoyed at myself for not piping up; annoyed, too, for not doing a better job of wiping my chin—it was only later, after lunch, that I discovered a purple stain on my chin (the clothes emerged unscathed, however, no small achievement).

It took us just over an hour to finish the tasting. We were all underwhelmed by the wines (for my taste, Lascombes and Malescot St.-Exupery were the highlights) but the Margaux appellation is often the weak link in the Medoc. We then headed over to a buffet lunch in another corner of the chateau. Here, I witnessed a few minutes in the Life of Jancis. Jancis in person is pretty much Jancis in print; if I had to describe her in tasting-note terms, I’d say crisp, elegant, and authoritative, with a slight suggestion of naughtiness. As soon as we walked into the room, two winemakers made a beeline for Jancis and more or less attached themselves to her. They offered her the run of their chateaux; they offered to name vineyards and first-born children after her. Jancis was gracious, but she also put just enough curtness in her voice to indicate that she wanted to be left alone. Unfortunately, the hint wasn’t taken, so we ditched the lunch, hopped in the car, and spent 45 minutes doing doughnuts around the vineyards. The vines, neatly arrayed in long rows, were entirely bare—gray crosses in a wine graveyard.

The afternoon was a whirlwind of chateau visits. From Ducru-Beaucaillou (normally one of my favorite wines, but a little disappointing in 2003), we went to Grand-Puy-Lacoste (also a favorite, and stellar this year), Leoville-Las-Cases (excellent), Latour (orgasmic), and finally Pichon-Lalande (very good). On the ride back to Bordeaux, Julia, Jancis and I chatted about politics, the London broadsheets, and how nice a glass of champagne would taste. But after wading through nearly 60 wines, we mostly just rested our mouths.

A few hours later, I lifted myself off the bed and headed into Bordeaux for a bite to eat. I ended up at a restaurant called Bistrot du Sommelier, where the food was middling, but the wine list was superb. What my tongue really needed was an ice pack, what it got instead was a half-bottle of the 1999 Petit Cheval, the second wine of the illustrious Chateau Cheval Blanc. I ate my dinner reading David Remnick’s recent essay about A.J. Liebling and drank a silent toast to a writer whose life—and waistline—were dedicated to the proposition that more is good.