Bookmarks: Adventures on the Wine Route by Kermit Lynch
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ADVENTURES ON THE WINE ROUTE, by Kermit Lynch
In the beginning, there was wine.
And about thirty seconds later came the wine trade.
The marketing of this product has had a life no less complex than the product itself, from amphorae-filled slave-rowed ships on the Mediterranean, to barrels shipped down Gothic rivers to then be carried down Roman roads, to secluded monastics drinking nothing but what they could grow within the walls of their compounds. Finally the modern era has provided us with smaller, more clearly defined epochs in this whirl of capitalism: the Saintsbury era of buying by the barrel and bottling at home; the Simon era of unfortified, dry table wines; the Lichine era of the great growths of Bordeaux and Burgundy; the Broadbent era of epic wines sold off by lot in Christie's; and finally, the magazine epoch, of 100-point scales, of wines assembled in laboratories by computerized palates, of novus homo CPAs pouring ten-ounce libations of Aussie Cab as if prohibition loomed just around the corner.
This latter period may prove sufficient for your average American Dreamer, your suburban Joe Everypaycheck. Yet is this indeed a dictatorship of the proletariat, whereby the great heights that wine might achieve are made available to the common man-or is it that your average nouveau riche has been convinced that the wines he likes are in fact the Olympian ideal of wine?
Kermit Lynch, in his exceptional work Adventures on the Wine Route, would at his calmest argue the latter. When out in the fields of the Domaine Tempier or on the hill-slopes of Le Montrachet, when sipping wines that make the mind water and the mouth churn, the thought of supermarket swill makes him violate the otherwise picturesque tranquility of his environs. He would argue that what is available to the common consumer is not only bad, it is not even worthy of being called wine.
Once describing himself as a "recently defected hippie," Kermit found in wine a practical field in which his philosophies of purity and naturism might be expressed in directly discernable qualities. He has promoted the proper handling of wines in a way not insisted upon since Thomas Jefferson first began stocking the White House cellars some two hundred years ago. He has begged growers to treat their grapes with respect, patronizing organic and biodynamic wineries and preferring the ancien to the modern wherever possible. He looks for raw wines, for living wines, for wines that are true expressions of their country.
And then he imports them.
So of course, any publication by a person who also sells a product must be taken with a grain of salt. Yet what Kermit has presented is a clearly defined aesthetic system which is more than simple theoretical philosophizing. Respectfully-treated wine from respectfully-treated grapes, he argues, is simply better than its mass-produced, mass-marketed counterparts. He gives a dozen reasons for this, but his arguments always return to the fact that he simply finds that such wines taste better, are more enjoyable, say more and teach more and represent so very much more than the bland plonk of Modesto and the 7-11 shelf.
He presents his aesthetic in a variety of stories which deal with his discovery of new products to purchase and the sad occurrences that have forced him to abandon previously respected wines to the refrigerator units of the local gas station. These stories seem to wander like a Buddha, yet they are divided in a geographic manner that a wine lover might laud. The wines of such places as Chablis and Chateauneuf-du-Pape might be utterly dissimilar, but they (and their growers) might still teach us similar lessons.
His greatest bane is interference, the greatest tool of which is technology. Wine, he argues, ought to be barreled "without chaptalization...bottled directly from the barrel, unfiltered. Nothing added, nothing taken out!" And this is the only sort of wine he will import.
While the engaging majesty of the book cannot be denied, as an aesthetic text, as a philosophical testament, and as an oenophile's veritable Bible, it is also an absorbing series of wonderful stories, even for a casual reader. Filled with eccentric personalities, dedicated characters, soaring vistas, and romantic countrysides, Adventures on the Wine Route is a clear demonstration of the France that so enthralled some of Kermit's friends such as Richard Olney and Alice Waters. It is the rustic warmth and the soul of the country that Kermit attempts to find in every bottle of wine he imports-and for this reason, however much it might benefit him, readers of his works can only thank him for allowing them to become consumers of his product.
Adventures on the Wine Route: A Wine Buyer's Tour of France is available from North Point Press. Lynch's wines are available wherever fine wines are sold; look for the woodcut on the reverse label, positioned, as always, next to the Thomas Jefferson aphorism: "Good wine is a necessity of life for me."