Why I Like Wine

So Much

I wasn't thinking about drinking wine - I was busy selling it, trying to keep up during a Friday night dinner rush, when a party of four people came in to Riddle's with an outstanding game plan for the evening. They started with a bottle of 1993 Kistler Chardonnay, a highly polished, multifaceted little gem from a vintage you're unlikely to find on another wine list anywhere in town. Then with dinner they ordered two other bottles at once, both so rare and so long out of general circulation that I'd be surprised to find either of them available for purchase anywhere else in or around St. Louis. One was a 1985 Dominus Estate, a proprietary red wine from a legendary Napa Valley vineyard, made by a celebrated winemaker, from a highly acclaimed vintage. Putting the size and depth of Riddle's huge wine list to inspired use, they paired the Dominus with a bottle from the Bordeaux estate of Chateau Lynch-Bages (pronounced Linch-Baashz) of the same vintage, 1985.

The keen acumen that these folks demonstrated in selecting such extraordinary wines was exceeded only by their generosity in offering me a glass from each of them, a practice which I wholeheartedly encourage. You know, sometimes, the sale of these beautiful, older vintages which I acquired at the time of their release, carefully storing them until I thought they would show their very best, counting them down as they disappear from my cellar one by one, is actually somewhat painful to me. The blow, however, is considerably softened when the buyer invites my participation in their demise, allowing me the chance to bid a personal farewell to an old friend.

Which was the better of the two? my guests asked, hoping I would weigh in on one side or the other of what was evidently a friendly disagreement between the two couples. The wines were nearly indistinguishable in their appearance, both limpid, deep garnet/mulberry in color. They looked so similar that I was briefly concerned I might get them mixed up, but that was before I raised them to my nose, when the difference became obvious. The Napa Valley wine smelled delightfully of cherry fruit and cedar wood, the Bordeaux of black currants and earth.

The 1985 Dominus is a magnificent wine, among the handful of the world's finest, with an impressive concentration, powerfully expressed, of black cherry, cedar and mint flavors firmly balanced in a framework of oak tannins that may well make for a longer-lived wine than the softer Lynch-Bages. Dominus is even made under the direction of a famous winemaker from Bordeaux, Christian Mouiex. Standing alone, or by comparison to any other wine made in this country, the 1985 Dominus is a stunning achievement. But tasting it side by side with the Lynch-Bages, sipping the one and then the other, my own preference, purely personal, became clear. Here's where I had to 'fess up. I'm an incorrigible Francophile.

The aroma of the French wine suggests to me the fragrance - and beyond the fragrance, even a mind's eye glimpse - of the old, stone-walled cellar, deep in the earth, where it spent a year and a half in cask and then longer still in the thick, green bottles, resting in the cool darkness. There is blackberry-like fruit, not a faint aroma like blackberries themselves, but the full, rich, flashy smell of a fresh blackberry pie with a butter crust, right out of the oven, intertwined with smoky oak, like an autumn leaf fire and that smell of the earth, good fresh damp loam, full of life, the primal mother earth. (Note to younger readers: at one time, Americans ritualistically gathered together dry leaves in the fall to burn in huge outdoor bonfires, a custom now illegal in urban areas. It is to your everlasting impoverishment if you don't know how this would smell.)

But then - the taste of the wine: intense, rich blackberry and black currant fruit with oak and smoke and truffles and leather; a sprawling, spicy cacophony of flavors that fills every pore of the tongue, alerts every taste bud, engages, if you allow it to, even the cheeks and the gums with a soft buzz of tannins.

The juicy, black fruit flavors of the 1985 Lynch-Bages are so fresh and so immediate that they conjure a vision of the verdant, sun-dappled vineyard - not 12 long years in the past when this fruit was actually on the vines, but just outside the window, right now, today.

There is a kind of orderly turmoil in the complexity of flavor as it expresses both the freshly contemporary-tasting fruit and the earth beneath the very old vineyard from which it came. It's what the best Bordeaux wines do so very well, if given enough time. The '85 Lynch-Bages did not temper its brash freshness of fruit with this elegant, stately complexity in, say 1989 - it couldn't, it was too young. This depth, this balance and composure, is the reward of patience, evidence of a maturity you hope to someday see in your wines as well as in your children.

It must be my preconceptions about the long and honorable history of the noble wines of Bordeaux that this last swallow, with its rush of profoundly intense, ripe fruit and it's very long, very slow disappearance in my mouth, brings to mind the progression of a large, ancient army, moving by foot, at first right before me, now receding into the distance, the clang of iron and bellow of voices that once overwhelmed my attention now ebbing slowly, disappearing, nothing left of them but the dusty aftertaste and the echo of their passage down my throat. Maybe it's the Roman Legions that I'm imagining, which in the time of Christ marched the dirt roads and drank the wines of these very vineyards, back when the city of Bordeaux was called by the stubborn name of Burdigala and the untamed countryside around it was known, beautifully, lyrically, as Aquitania.

The subjective, personal answer to the question Which of these two wines do I prefer? must be obvious by now. And the Objective, Universal answer to the question Which of these two wines is better? just doesn't exist. The question itself is, delightfully, moot. Certainly, the next time I have these two great bottles open at once, I'll think about it some more.

In the service of nothing more serious than pure enjoyment, it is precisely the complex and subjective interplay of what you taste and smell with what you think and remember, that can make this beverage, almost uniquely among human diversions, the fascinating, life-long magical mystery tour that it is. And that's why I like wine so much.

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