A PLAGUE OF SOMMELIERS

I've just about had it with the general invasion of all commentary on wine that has been perpetrated by sommeliers. Maybe it's because people are going out to restaurants that employ this odd breed of waiter/corkscrew-slinger: the public is just more familiar with that relationship, and as a result, sommeliers have more say, in more outlets, than before. Of course, it always degenerates into the same thing: food pairings. Is anything more depressing than wine-and-food pairings? I was heartened not too long ago when I found out that Eric Ripert, chef at Le Bernardin, the best restaurant in New York, drinks red Bordeaux with everything. Huzzah, Eric! Screw pairings. I've been advocating that people do this for quite some time, find something they like and drink it with everything they eat. Makes life so much simpler.

I don't dislike sommeliers--for sure, I respect greatly the ones who manage massive wine programs at top-level restaurants--I'd just like to see their position as the definitve authorities on all things vinous dialed back a few notches. The drinking public needs to obtain perspective on wine from some other sources.

McINERNEY'S LAST CALL


Here's a review I wrote of Jay McInerney's latest collection of wine columns. It was supposed to run in the NY Observer, but never did. The basic idea that was to generate some debate about the absolutely sorry state of wine writing. McInerney has had and always will have his foes, but I've always thought that when it comes to writing about wine, he's sort of the last man standing. That is, someone who doesn't just do picks and tips and scores, but tries to advance the genre. Make up your own minds.

A Hedonist in the Wine Cellar: Adventures in Wine
Jay McInerney
Knopf, $24
320 pages

Those of you who lost track of Jay McInerney circa 1989 may be surprised to learn that, since the mid-1990s, he has been writing about wine for House & Garden magazine. Those of you who knew that he was writing about wine—and I include myself in that number, as I reviewed McInerney’s previous collection of wine columns, Bacchus & Me—may be surprised that he is still writing about wine.

Well, he is, but as the columns gathered in this volume clearly indicate, he’s getting tired. Bacchus & Me drew a self-portrait of a both a recovering cocaine user and a recovering ‘80s-vintage novelist. McInerney, the most brat-packy of the Reagan-era Brat Pack writers (he partied often, he dated models), no longer seemed quite as engaged with the marathon that is the career of a significant American novelist. One wasn’t really seeing the outlines of a Saul Bellow-grade oeuvre with the publication of Model Behavior. And apart from Bright Lights, Big City—which remains an incisive chronicle of the decade that blended right-wing restoration, the last-gasp of countercultural innocence, and the myth of literary rock-stardom—his catalog isn’t exactly read-and-reread material. Bret Easton Ellis has achieved a delayed cult status, his output now looking, collectively, as if there was always a larger ambition and design. Jay Mac, however, had come off as weary for quite some time.

Wine writing flooded his world with new material. In the beginning, you could tell that he was loving it. All those slick European vintner-aristocrats! The clever British oenophiles! The blazing-hot New York restaurant scene of the 1990s! So, so tasty—and so much better than hanging in there as a novelist of debatable endurance. It helped enormously that McInerney was just great at his new gig. As wine writing increasingly degenerated into “wine criticism” and the field became dominated by supertaster Robert M. Parker, Jr., and by the score-obsessed editors of my one-time employer, Wine Spectator, McInerney represented a throwback sensibility. No one adapted the Old School habits of the English wine-loving amateur to an American audience better than Jay.

Ten years has taken its toll. Whereas Bacchus & Me virtually thrummed with joy, pleasure, enthusiasm, and no small whiff of sexual associations, A Hedonist in the Cellar comes off as… well, what you might expect if you took a hedonist and locked him in a cellar. It’s a prison memoir. It’s a lament. But at least it’s a lament for wine writing, which when McInerney is finished with his enviable gig, will be pretty much dead. “If I’d had a role model,” he writes of his initial inspiration for his column, “it would be Auberon Waugh.” The late Waugh, son of Brideshead Revisited author Evelyn, was responsible for a little book called Waugh on Wine, published in 1986. People who like to read and write about wine regard it with the sort of reverence the movie-buffs devote to the 1970s. “Bron” Waugh, as he was known, was funny, irreverent, fustily decadent, and he truly enjoyed wine. He was completely uninterested in evaluating the ancient beverage for a consumer audience. “I consider Waugh a forebear of sorts,” McInerney claims. You can see why.

Like Waugh, McInerney shows a consistent reluctance to create lists of picks, although in their original form, his columns did include them (they aren’t given here). Unlike Waugh, McInerney physically gets around when covering wine (Waugh, like a good Englishman of the Philip Larkin era, mainly stayed home), ranging from France to Italy to South Africa and New Zealand, with plenty of stops as various snazzy eateries and lots of culinary-insider name-dropping thrown in. The columns are brief, showcasing Jay Mac’s flair for concision, as well as a talent for one-liners and for zeroing in on what’s hot, when it’s hot. For example, he caught the ascent of the so-called “grower Champagnes,” French bubblies that don’t hail from big Champagne houses, early on, and he has long been wise to the evolving, Bordeaux-style codification of California Cabernet. Taken as a whole, these essays add up to a subtle warning. Read between the slurps and sips and you will see the inevitable melancholy of hedonism-for-hire take over.

These are dreary days for devotees of words about wine. Newspapers have largely come to view the subject as part of the ever-expanding “service” category: wine-country travel is mingled with primers of this or that style of wine, with occasional profiles of winemakers tossed in. Parker, with his Wine Advocate and eRobertParker.com website, has converted an ineffable beverage with a vast and enthralling history into something that’s graded like a high-school science project (it’s also becoming obvious that Parker is not and never has been the monumentally gifted evaluator he has always promoted himself as). Sure, with thousands of bottles from all over the world appearing on wine-store shelves, the consumer needs a quick way to distinguish between the good and the bad. The much-derided 100-point scale is ultimately a useful thing. But with the wine magazines following Parker’s lead, McInerney’s column in House & Garden has become the only place to get any kicks reading about bottled poetry. They say wine is a living thing, but only McInerney seemed determined to keep it alive by incessantly connecting it to popular culture.

But man, is that every hard work! Waugh possessed a gentle, diffident, quietly lacerating talent with the pen that dovetailed perfectly with a patience-demanding topic such as wine. McInerney is, to use a word he applies to certain powerful wines, like the super-rich Amarones of northern Italy, turbocharged. Having gone at it more or less full-bore for a decade, he’s fading. But at least it was he who got to hold the gun that finally put wine writing out of its misery. For all his flaws, which he himself has copiously explored (drug abuse, divorce), no one every said Jay couldn’t slap together a memorable English sentence.

Who knows, maybe he’ll keep at it. There were rumors, however, that when The New York Times was looking for a new restaurant critic a few years back, McInerney tried to get the job. Perhaps after all this time, Jay has had enough to drink. Now, like an addict finally at the end of his binge, he’s ready for something to eat.