Toujours Provence(15)
Months before, in the winter, I had met a man called Michel at a dinner to celebrate the engagement of two friends of ours. The first bottles of wine came. Toasts were proposed. But I noticed that while the rest of us were merely drinking, Michel was conducting a personal, very intense ritual.
He stared into his glass before picking it up, then cupped it in the palm of his hand and swirled it gently three or four times. Raising the glass to eye level, he peered at the traces of wine that his swirling had caused to trickle down the inner sides. His nose, with nostrils alert and flared, was presented to the wine and made a thorough investigation. Deep sniffing. One final swirl, and he took the first mouthful, but only on trial.
It obviously had to pass several tests before being allowed down the throat. Michel chewed it for a few reflective seconds. He pursed his lips and took a little air into his mouth and made discreet rinsing noises. Lifting his eyes to heaven, he flexed his cheeks in and out to encourage a free flow around tongue and molars and then, apparently satisfied with the wine’s ability to withstand an oral assault, he swallowed.
He noticed that I had been watching the performance, and grinned. “Pas mal, pas mal.” He took another, less elaborate swallow, and saluted the glass with raised eyebrows. “It was a good year, ’85.”
As I found out during dinner, Michel was a négociant, a professional wine drinker, a buyer of grapes and a seller of nectar. He specialized in the wines of the south, from Tavel rosé (the favorite wine, so he said, of Louis XIV) through the gold-tinged whites to the heavy, heady reds of Gigondas. But of all the wines in his extensive collection, his merveille, the one he would like to die drinking, was the Châteauneuf-du-Pape.
He described it as though he were talking about a woman. His hands caressed the air. Delicate kisses dusted his fingertips, and there was much talk of body and bouquet and puissance. It was not unknown, he said, for a Châteauneuf to reach fifteen percent of alcoholic content. And these days, when Bordeaux seems to get thinner every year and the price of Burgundy is only possible for the Japanese, the wines of Châteauneuf are nothing less than bargains. I must come up to his caves and see for myself. He would arrange a dégustation.
The time that elapses in Provence between planning a rendezvous and keeping it can often stretch into months, and sometimes years, and so I wasn’t expecting an immediate invitation. Winter turned to spring, spring turned to summer, and summer melted into August, the most lethal month of the year to be toying with a fifteen-degree wine, and then Michel called.
“Tomorrow morning at eleven,” he said. “In the caves at Châteauneuf. Eat plenty of bread at breakfast.”
I had done what he suggested and, as an extra precaution, taken a soupspoonful of neat olive oil, which one of the local gourmets had told me was an excellent way to coat the stomach and cushion the system against repeated assaults by younger powerful wines. In any case, I thought as I drove down the twisting, baked country roads, I wouldn’t be swallowing much. I would do as the experts do, rinse and spit.
Châteauneuf came into view, trembling in the heat haze, just before eleven o’clock. It is a place entirely dedicated to wine. Seductive invitations are everywhere, on sun-bleached, peeling boards, on freshly painted posters, hand-lettered on monster bottles, fixed to the wall, propped at the side of vineyards, stuck on pillars at the end of driveways. Dégustez! Dégustez!
I drove through the gateway in the high stone wall that protects the Caves Bessac from the outside world, parked in the shade, and unstuck myself from the car. I felt the sun come down on the top of my head like a close-fitting hat of hot air. In front of me was a long building, crenellated along the top, its façade blind except for huge double doors. A group of people, outlined against the black interior, were standing in the doorway, holding large bowls that glinted in the sun.
The cave felt almost cold, and the glass that Michel gave me was pleasantly cool in my hand. It was one of the biggest glasses I had ever seen, a crystal bucket on a stem, with a bulbous belly narrowing at the top to the circumference of a goldfish bowl. Michel said it could hold three-quarters of a bottle of wine.
My eyes adjusted to the gloom after the glare outside, and I began to realize that this was not a modest cave. Twenty-five thousand bottles would have been lost in the murk of one of the distant corners. In fact, there were no bottles to be seen, just boulevards of barrels—enormous barrels lying on their sides supported by waist-high platforms, their upper curves twelve or fifteen feet above the ground. Scrawled in chalk on the flat face of each barrel were descriptions of the contents, and for the first time in my life I was able to walk through a wine list: Côtes-du-Rhône-Villages, Lirac, Vacqueyras, Saint-Joseph, Crozes-Hermitage, Tavel, Gigondas—thousands of liters of each, arranged in vintages and dozing silently toward maturity.