Up and Down Back and Forth
and Sideways

Napa Valley - Photo ©2005 Russell Johnson
Audio: MP3

I have spent way too much time going up and down and back and forth on airplanes in the last few months: Europe, Asia, Mexico, Arizona, adjusting my torso to the molded plastic chairs of airports, stuffing myself into winged metal skins like a Farmer John wiener, breathing thin, reprocessed air, numbing myself with wines ranging from screwtops in Economy to First Growth French in Business and trying to fall asleep.

So, what else do you do on long haul flights? You read, you watch movies, you drink wine and you snooze, if you can find a comfortable position. A couple of weeks ago I managed to engage in all four activities, all related to wine, on one flight from San Francisco to Hong Kong: I watched the movie "Sideways," read a book called The "Accidental Connoisseur" and a devastating article about wine vintage nonsense in the Wall Street Journal and I tasted my way through a Chablis (French not fake), a California Cabernet, an Aussie Shiraz and a so called "listed" French Burgundy, a dud despite its breeding. Then, of course, there was sleeeep.

Unlike the critics, I didn't like Sideways. I didn't care about these annoying characters. I have known sweet schlumps like the aspiring author whose tenuous grasp at self-esteem was an encyclopedic mastery of wine gibberish. I have also known guys like his pal who, if he had the right stuff, tried to bed anything with two X chromosomes or if geeky, traded junk bonds or played with guns. At least HE wasn't a fundamentalist wine snob.a terrorist of the terroir.

Terroir is a French word that means a placewhere earth, climate and other je ne sais quoi variables come together, like fissionable uranium, to create atomic, blast me to the moon wine grapes. Terroir is a word that you must know, along with legs, nose, body and other terms that also attributable to dogs, if you are to be accepted by the wine tribe.

I love wine, but hate the market-generated cost and pretense. I have enjoyed a daily ration of plonk since I was in my 20s before it was deemed healthy. I have stayed with families in Italy who bottled their own. A year ago my wife Pat and I drove from Normandy to the French Riviera leaving a trail of deflated dollars in trade for simple "house wines." We enjoyed every delicious, unassuming drop.

Wine makers, like makers of designer handbags, discovered a long time ago that it is easier to sell an overpriced marginal wine than a fine lower priced vintage. Snobbery equals profits. That is one of the points Lawrence Osborne makes in "The Accidental Connoisseur: An Irreverent Journey Through the Wine World." Osborne isn't exactly irreverent, he has a deep respect for some the inhabitants of this world, but he does chip away at the pretense.

Osborne is one fine writer. Last week's New Yorker contains a lean, beautifully written piece on his trip to Papua New Guinea. His gift for language extends to wines as well, not just his obvious mastery of the writing craft, but in his analysis of the changing Lingua Vinoteca. Until the 70s, wine was culturally associated with France. It had finesse, elegance, breeding and distinction. In the 70s, that jargon was replaced by a more plain speakin' Americanized vocabulary, descriptions of flavors of cocoa beans, citrus, plums and figs, everything except, it seems, peas and carrots. Definitely nothing snobby or European about that. Then the language got a little weird and loose: pencil lead, iodine and pig blood were added to the descriptions. The "me" generation gave wines psychiatric personalities: diffuse, sensual, while the new wine-speak tarts up its descriptions with boudoir-speak: pillowy, ravishing, overendowed. Wine has gone from the court of Louis IV to that of Heather Lockyear.

Osborne's "Accidental Connoiseur" is an honest wine book and a fine wine pilgrimage through France, Italy and California's Napa Valley.

On this same flight I read an account in the Asian Wall Street Journal about a guy who bought several vintages of the same French wine, ranging from about $40 dollars a bottle, to top years costing several hundred a pop. He judged most of the vintages, with the notable exception of the youngest and cheapest, rather bad. That's my attitude. Buy'em young and cheap, drink'em right away.

By the way, have you tried the Chateau Canard Mort? Gamey, past its time but hey, I'll drink anything on an airplane. Cheers.