In Search of Bacchus: Wanderings in the Wonderful World of Wine Tourism [Lingua Inglese] - Brossura

Taber, George M.

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1416562443 ISBN 13: 9781416562443

Casa editrice: Scribner, 2013

Riassunto

From the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of Judgment of Paris and To Cork or Not To Cork comes a delightful, entertaining, and informative exploration of the thriving world of wine tourism.

George M. Taber set out on the wine lover's ultimate dream: a journey to the twelve most beautiful and fascinating wine-producing regions around the globe. In Search of Bacchus chronicles that experience: the gorgeous landscapes, conversations with winemakers, unforgettable meals, must-do activities, and of course, the taste of the wines. Here he offers suggestions for travelers, commentary on trends in the wine world, charming anecdotes, and recommendations of vintages available in the United States, so that oenophiles at home can live vicariously through his travels.

From the Napa Valley, where the art of wine tourism was perfected, to the deserts of Argentina, to a thousand-year-old monastery in Tuscany, to the famed châteaux of Bordeaux, Taber discusses the history, architecture, and culture of each destination in fascinating detail. He provides insight into the latest in the technology, politics, and business of wine, and uncovers a host of interesting characters who are major figures in their local wine worlds, including a Chilean arms merchant, a German-born Polish refugee living in South Africa, the dynamic woman who started the Wine Tourism Movement in Italy, and many more. Taber blends his own wine in Portugal, bungy jumps in New Zealand, and goes on a safari in South Africa, all in the attempt to quench his thirst for fine wine and adventure.

An accessible blend of wine lore and travel memoir, In Search of Bacchus is another engaging, immersive read from George M. Taber, sure to satisfy wine lovers everywhere.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

George M. Taber is the author of Judgment of Paris, the 2006 wine book of the year for Britain's Decanter magazine. His second book, To Cork or Not to Cork, won the Jane Grigson Award from the International Association of Culinary Professionals and was a finalist for the James Beard Foundation Award for best book on wine and spirits and the Andre Simon Award for best wine book. Before turning to writing wine books, Taber was a reporter and editor for Time.

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In Search of Bacchus CHAPTER ONE
Three Pioneers

Wine fans for centuries have traveled to the birthplaces of their favorite wines in order to enjoy the special pleasure of drinking them where the grapes are grown and the juice fermented. Here are just three—one from the seventeenth century, one from the eighteenth, and one from the nineteenth.

John Locke, the English political philosopher whose ideas had a major impact on the American Revolution, was one of the most influential thinkers in the Age of Enlightenment. Among Locke’s revolutionary ideas were the concepts of “government with the consent of the governed” and “the rights of life, liberty, and property.” The latter found its way into the Declaration of Independence as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Because of political setbacks at home and his problems with a chronic cough probably due to tuberculosis, Locke, a trained doctor, sought out a more temperate climate away from his home in London. In November 1675, he left for France with the intention of traveling as far south as Montpellier, a city with a major medical practice and where the weather would be much warmer. During his three and a half years in France, the philosopher wrote more than fourteen hundred pages of notes on what he saw and experienced.

While living in Montpellier, Locke made several trips to nearby wine regions. He carefully recorded how winemakers went about their craft, the quality of the wine, and the prices. Locke wrote that locals “seldom make red wine without the mixture of some sort of white grapes, else it will be too thick and deep colored.” He also noted that peasants grew several varieties in the same vineyard and described in detail how farmers planted and pruned their vines.

The French taught Locke the importance of terroir, the untranslatable term for local vineyard growing conditions, and of blending different kinds of grapes. As he wrote in his notes, “The goodness of their wine to drink seems to depend on two causes besides the pressing and ordering the fermentation.” These were “the qualities of the soil” and the “mingling a good quantity of white grapes with the red.” Near Montpellier he noted with some perplexity, “Two vineyards, bounding one upon another, constantly produce the one good and the other bad wine.”

Locke learned vines could be productive for “nay 100 years,” and “the older the better” the wines. Young vines produced “commonly green i.e. sour” wine. He wrote that French wine was generally aged for many years in wooden barrels before it was drinkable, but winemakers had ways to speed up aging. “When they have a mind to have their wine fine sooner than ordinary, they put in a cask pretty good quantity of shavings of fir, and, in some places, of hazel, and with it they sometimes put some whole white grapes.”

Many local viticulture practices clearly offended the Englishman: “[A]nd in all other parts of their making wine they are sufficiently nasty, according to their manner. The grapes are often rotten and always full of spiders. Beside that, they say they put often salt, men’s dung and other filthiness in their wine to help, as they think, its purging.”

When leaving Montpellier to return to Paris in March 1677, Locke decided to take a western route to see more of southern France. On Friday, May 14, he was in Bordeaux and rode a horse out of the city to what he described as “President Pontac’s vineyard at Hautbrion,” today’s Château Haut-Brion. Locke had enjoyed wine in London, and now he wanted to see it at its place of origin. Although Locke by then spoke good French, he had trouble communicating with the working people at the winery because of his “want of understanding Gascoin,” a dialect of the Occitan language spoken in southern France. Nonetheless, he wrote an insightful description of the vineyard: “It is a little rise of ground, lying open most to the west. It is nothing but pure, white sand, mixed with little gravel. One would imagine it scarce fit to bear anything.”

Locke later wrote in a more detailed report of his visit to Château Haut-Brion: “There is such a particularity point in the soil that the merchants assured me that the wine growing in the very next vineyards, where there was only a ditch between, and the soil, to appearance, perfectly the same, was by no means so good.” That ditch, and the difference in the wines from the two vineyards, are still there today.

Locke stayed in Paris for a year before he and a student who had been placed in his charge returned to southern France in July 1678. The two again took a western route, going through Tours and the Loire Valley. They stopped at the home of Nicolas Thoynard, a fellow scholar who shared Locke’s wide range of interests. The two men discussed the writings of the evangelists in the Bible, new forms of ammunition, and Thoynard’s proposal for sealing bottles of wine with a glass stopper rather than a cork. They also shared “a large bottle of Muscat or Jenetine wine of Orléans stopped with a glass stopper.”

As he traveled, Locke was shocked to see the drop in wine prices since he had been there only a year earlier. Wines were selling for one-third as much as before. The reason was a glut of wine precipitated by a war between France and Holland, which had severely reduced exports to both Holland and England. In Saumur he wrote, “The white wine here in this town is very good & wine so plentiful that they sell it for 18 deniers the pint at their boushons i.e. where people in private houses sell their own wine by retail.” Locke also noted that ten deniers of that went to the king as excise taxes, while the vintner got only eight deniers. Later in Angers, wine was selling for one-fourth as much as before. In the port city of Rochelle, the price of wine was down 50 percent, with the exception of President Pontac’s and “some others of particular note” that still sold for twice as much as the rest. While going through Bordeaux on his second trip, Locke did not revisit Haut-Brion.

Three months before leaving France in the spring of 1679, Locke wrote a treatise entitled Observations Upon Vines that brought together all he had learned about wine in France. Despite his long stay in the country, he had not become a great fan of the French, writing in the introduction, “The country where these observations were made hath vanity enough to over-value everything it produces.” He recounted in detail when and how the French planted their vineyards. His preference for aged vines was clear: “The older the vineyard, the fewer the grapes, but the better the wine. Newly planted vineyards produce more, but the wine is not as good.” Locke added that in the village of Galliac near Montpellier, “If a peasant there should use any but birds dung about his vines, his neighbors would burn his house because they would not have the wine of that place lose its reputation.”

Locke recorded in his report the local belief that “a sheep’s horn buried at the foot of a vine will make it bear well even in barren ground.” But he quickly added, “I have no great faith in it, but mention it because it may so easily be tried.”

In late April 1679, Locke boarded the Charlotte in Calais for the return trip home, and two days later, he landed at the Temple stairs, on the Thames, in London. John Locke never again returned to France.



A little more than a century later, Thomas Jefferson, on July 31, 1784, arrived in France to join Benjamin Franklin and John Adams as representatives of the new United States of America, which less than a year before had signed the Treaty of Paris, ending the American Revolutionary War. Although Jefferson was familiar with the political philosophy of John Locke, there is no evidence that he was aware of his writings on French wines. Nonetheless, Jefferson was to follow many of the Englishman’s tracks across France’s wine country, which he recorded in even greater detail.

Jefferson had already long enjoyed wine and had made unsuccessful attempts to grow wine grapes at his Monticello estate in Virginia, where he had a well-stocked cellar. Thus it was not surprising when, four days before he was to depart for France from Boston aboard the sailing ship Ceres, Jefferson bought four cases of German white wine from the Rhine to get him through the voyage that was to take twenty days. And less than two weeks after arriving in Paris, he purchased 276 bottles to start his new cellar there.

Jefferson’s partners in the diplomatic mission were also fond of French wine. Benjamin Franklin had a Paris cellar of more than eleven hundred bottles with an emphasis on Champagne. John Adams had landed in Bordeaux in April 1778 when he first came to France and had seen some of the wine country there on his way to Paris. Jefferson, though, had a substantially stronger interest in wine and set out to learn more about topics such as Burgundy wines, which were almost totally new to him.

During his first years in Paris, Jefferson stuck to his work of learning French and observing the internecine world in the court of Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette. After two and a half years of diligent work, however, Jefferson, in early 1787, decided to tour France for several months. The explanations for the trip were many. The official reason was that he was going to look into the potential for exporting American tobacco and whale oil to southern France. The clandestine one was that he was going to meet a Brazilian revolutionary in Marseilles who was trying to get American support for a movement to drive the Portuguese out of his country. Another story was that he was going to Aix-en-Provence in hopes that its famous thermal springs could help heal his right wrist, which had been injured during some horseplay with Maria Cosway, his then romantic interest. Jefferson’s overriding reason, though, was to visit vineyards and to buy wine directly from producers. Jefferson had grown suspicious of wine dealers and thought the only way to be certain of getting the real product, rather than a forgery, was to buy it on the spot. “Genuine wines can never be had but of the vigneron,” he wrote.

Traveling at first incognito and with no servant in hopes of seeing what France was like outside the capital, Jefferson left Paris through the Porte d’Orléans on February 28, 1787, in a carriage pulled by three horses. He later recounted a detailed history of his travels in his report Notes of a Tour into the Southern Parts of France, & c. He recorded everything from the price of wine along the way to how long a farming family could live off a slaughtered hog, which was one year. He even offered tips for future travelers: “When one calls on the taverns for the vin du pays they give what is natural and unadulterated and cheap; when vin etrangere is called for, it only gives a pretext for charging an extravagant price for an unwholesome stuff.”

When he arrived in Dijon, Jefferson hired a manservant to help him with the local dialects since he spoke only Parisian French. In his report, Jefferson noted that corn grew on the plains, while on the hillside, known as the Côte, vines were planted. In the red-wine towns of Pommard and Volnay he reported that the staple of the diet was “good wheat bread,” but a little farther south in Meursault, where white wines were made, people ate rye bread. When he asked why, “They told me that the white wines fail in quality much oftener than the red, and remain on hand. The farmer therefore cannot afford to feed his labourers so well. At Meursault, only white wines are made, because there is too much stone for the red.” He noted that the villages of Chambertin, Vougeot, and Vosne produced the best reds, but he also liked Volnay, which sold for only one-quarter as much as the others. On the white wine side, he looked again for value. Montrachet sold for the same price as a Chambertin, but a Meursault from the Goutte d’Or vineyard was one-eighth as much. Jefferson then placed a large order for Goutte d’Or.

Traveling south, Jefferson next ventured into the Rhône Valley. The best red wine, he wrote, is “produced at the upper end in the neighborhood of Ampuis,” while the best whites came from “next to Condrieu.” He was particularly fond of “the wine called Hermitage ... made on the hills impending over the village of Tains.” The Hermitage vineyard, he noted, is on a hill and added that the last hermit died in 1751. Jefferson became a great fan of white Hermitage, which was then slightly sweet. Among other white wines, Jefferson liked Viognier, sold by “Chateau Grillé [modern day Château Grillet] by Madame la veuve [the widow] Peyrouse.” In the town of Nîmes he had high praise for the inexpensive “vin ordinaire, good and of a strong body.”

On March 25, Jefferson arrived in Aix-en-Provence, where he stayed for four days and underwent extensive treatment at the thermal springs that seemed to do little good. Yet on March 27, he wrote in a letter to his private secretary William Short, “I am now in the land of corn, wine, oil, and sunshine. What more can man ask of heaven? If I should happen to die in Paris I will beg of you to send me here, and have me exposed to the sun. I am sure it will bring me to life again.”

After a brief stop in Marseilles and other towns along the Mediterranean, Jefferson ventured into Italy on the back of a mule. He had originally hoped to follow the route Hannibal and his elephants had used for his invasion of Rome, but there weren’t enough landmarks to follow. In Turin, Jefferson delighted in the discovery of a new wine: “There is a red wine of Nebiule [modern Nebbiolo] made in this neighborhood which is very singular. It is about as sweet as the silky Madeira, as astringent on the palate as Bordeaux, and as brisk as Champagne. It is a pleasing wine.”

In Rozzano, Jefferson watched Parmesan cheese being made, recording the steps in great detail. Finally, he went to Genoa before returning to Nice via the Italian Riviera. Then he traveled through Provence and Languedoc, where he discovered Rochegude, a sweet white wine made near Avignon, and white and red Frontignan. They all became among Jefferson’s favorites. He bought 250 bottles of Frontignan and had them shipped to Paris. Like a man on a mission, Jefferson pressed on toward Bordeaux.

From May 24 to May 28, Jefferson visited Bordeaux, staying at the Hôtel de Richelieu in the center of town. He traveled all around the wine capital of France, keeping records on viticulture practices as well as how much vineyard workers were paid, noting that men earned twice as much as women. Picking up an informal classification used in Bordeaux wine circles, Jefferson came up with the “4 vineyards of first quality” for red wines. They were: “Chateau Margau, La Tour de Ségur, Hautbrion, and Chateau de la Fite.” He also gave the annual production and owner of each. With modern spellings they are Château Margaux, Château Latour, Château Haut-Brion, and Château Lafite-Rothschild. They were the top four wines in the French classification of 1855 and are still considered outstanding. He also listed wines in Second and Third Growths.

Just as Locke before him, Jefferson walked through the vineyards of Haut-Brion and wrote a similar description: “The soil of Hautbrion particularly, which I examined is a sand, in which is near as much round gravel or small stone, and very little loam.” Jefferson, who had first enjoyed the wine at the table of Benjamin Franklin, always had a soft spot for Haut-Brion, writing to his man in Bor...

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Scribner
• Data di pubblicazione: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1416562443
• ISBN 13: 9781416562443
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 328