Benjamin Lewin MW, In Search of Pinot Noir. Vendage Press, 2011.

Burgundy makes Burgundy, Benjamin Lewin reports (quoting a local producer). All the rest make [merely] Pinot Noir.

What should we make of Burgundy’s self-proclaimed status as king of the Pinot Noir hill? Lewin circled the globe to find out and this fascinating book is his report. I recommend it with enthusiasm.

To the Summit

Burgundy dominates the book, as one would suspect, both for its wines and because it is the standard of reference, and in the final pages Lewin reveals his conclusion: Burgundy does indeed stand at the summit based in part upon its superiority ability to age and develop in the bottle (with DRC and Domaine Leroy at the peak of the peak).

But Lewin’s search for Pinot, which takes him to Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Oregon, California, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia, reveals a number of near-rivals and raises many questions. The Pinot world may not be very big (compared with Cabernet and Chardonnay, for example), but it is a bigger world than Burgundians might like to think. And it is changing fast.

Dr. Lewin’s Lab Notebooks

Pinot Noir (along with Riesling) is thought to be the ultimate “terroir” wine, so the wines themselves should tell the story. In vino veritas as they say. This line in inquiry takes us into the detailed tasting notes that are appended to most chapters. These are Lewin’s lab reports (he is a famous scientist — a cell biologist — so it is unsurprising that he would evaluate claims empirically). At best the tasting notes are insightful observations of the ways that wine changes as time and place are varied. Sometimes, I have to admit, they are a bit like wine porn, read to vicariously share Lewin’s delicious work.

Do the wines of Burgundy live up to the myth of Burgundian terroir? Sometimes is Lewin’s answer. Burgundy at its best reveals its terroirist magic, but it doesn’t always turn out that way; caution and care are warranted. Winegrowing and winemaking practices can highlight terroir or disguise it. It just depends.

And climate change threatens to make Burgundy more like everyone else’s Pinot Noir by fundamentally altering growing conditions. Indeed, the book’s final pages ask whether Burgundy will be able to maintain its subtle complexity in the face of climate change and other challenges.

New World Challengers

I received my copy of In Search of Pinot Noir just as I was leaving to give some talks in Oregon Pinot country and I reported Lewin’s conclusions to my audience, which including many wine industry people. If you taste wines from different Oregon AVAs made by the same producer, Lewin writes, you can taste the terroir — just like in Burgundy. But when you taste wine from different producers in the same AVA, no strong common terroir thread emerges. Terroir is a weak force in the New World, it seems. Why? Lewin has an answer.

If you taste the best available Burgundies against the best available Pinots from Oregon and California, Lewin writes, the French wines “blow away” the competition. But it’s a biased comparison since the very best wines from New World producers never see the marketplace. They are tiny production single vineyard wines that disappear into allocation list buyers’ cellars. Ironically, they have no impact on the regions’ reputations and cannot define a signature terroir style.

The best available wines are more comparable to Burgundian village wines than the grand crus, according to Lewin. No wonder they suffer by comparison to the best of the best Burgundy has to offer. No wonder that Burgundy is Burgundy and the rest are not. Interesting.

Much to Like [and to Learn]

In Search of Pinot Noir, like Lewin’s earlier books (What Price Bordeaux? and Wine Myths and Realities) is big and bold, filled with colorful (and informative)  charts, maps and photos. The depth and breadth of Lewin’s analysis is impressive as he breaks down each Pinot Noir region into the historical, cultural, economic and natural forces that shaped it in the past and continues to influence it today. A great wine economist read. A great read period for anyone with a serious interest in Pinot Noir.

I think I learned something new on almost every page. But the most interesting parts  of the book for me are the questions, not the answers. Almost every chapter ends with a question about the future of Pinot Noir. Sometimes they seem to be leading questions (where you are pretty sure how Lewin would answer them) but others are very much more open.

I sense that the search for Pinot Noir is open, too. Market forces and climate change mean that the future is up in the air. Will Pinot Noir retain its special status as the ultimate terroir wine? Or will it become just another “international variety” with subtle differences slowly lost as styles converge on a rich, ripe “international style?”

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What make’s Pinot Noir different? Here’s the famous scene from Sideways where Miles makes the case for Pinot Exceptionalism. Enjoy! (Click here to watch the video if it does not appear above)

Eric Arnold, First Big Crush: The Down and Dirty on Making Great Wine … Down Under. Scribner, 2007.

I don’t know why it took me so long to get around to reading this 2007 book about wine-making in New Zealand. I am very interested in Kiwi wine and I’ve written about it on several occasions. Can’t explain my why I didn’t find time for it until now.

Delayed Reaction

First Big Crush is Eric Arnold’s account of a year he spent working at the Allan Scott winery in Marlborough. It is a chronological record of what he did in the vineyard and cellar, the people he met and the flow of life, wine and commerce as the seasons changed.

I felt a personal connection as I read the book because Sue and I spent part of that same year in New Zealand and so I visited some of the places Arnold describes and met a few of the same people.

One of my strongest memories of that trip (which produced a chapter called “Globalization versus Terroir” in my 2005 book Globaloney) was a conversation with Jane Hunter. Hunter had just come from a difficult meeting with growers where she told them the bad news — they’d need to drop more grapes to preserve quality. Growers (who are usually paid by the ton) understood the need for a green harvest, but it wasn’t what they wanted to hear.

Arrested Development

Arnold does a great job putting that difficult day (and many others like it) into context. And although wine economists are surely not the author’s target audience, I found Arnold’s explanations of the economic side of the business very interesting, especially the stories about grower relations and handshake contracts (that sometimes are literally worth the paper they are written on), vineyard labor relations and the crazy market for bulk wine within the New Zealand industry, which reminds me of a game of wine-infused Twister.

Although I am glad that I read this book for the reasons I’ve just explained, I have to admit that there were several points where I nearly stopped reading. The problem? Well, Arnold reports a lot of crude behavior often using crude language. Some of the humor would not be out of place in a middle school locker room. I guess I’m not surprised that this sort of thing goes on among wine-makers since it goes on every where else. It’s just not my cup of tea (or glass of Sauvignon Blanc?).

Olivier Magny, Stuff Parisians Like. Berkley Books, 2011 (official release date: July 5 2011).

France is a real paradox when it comes to wine.  Outsiders imagine that wine holds a special place in French culture and, while this might once have been true, it seems that it is today just a romantic myth. French per capita wine consumption has fallen by about 5% per year in the last decade, from 58 liters per person in 2000 to less than 40 liters in 2009.

If that sounds like a big drop consider this: the French consumed more than 125 liters of wine per capita in the early 1960s. Wow — what a collapse!

I’m always looking for insights into how French attitudes towards wine are changing, so I was pleased to receive a review copy of Stuff Parisians Like. The author knows Paris and he knows wine; Olivier Magny is, as the press release says, “Ô Chateau Sommelier, Wine Bar Owner & Parisian Ambassador of Hipness.”  The book is based on his blog called, naturally, Stuff Parisians Like.

Because wine is so important to Magny, I was pretty sure that he would tell me all about the Parisian wine scene and, in the process, update my understanding of French wine culture. This he did, but not in the way I expected.

What do Parisians Like?

Parisians apparently like lots of stuff and learning about it helped me to better understand my experiences in Paris and my Parisian friends.  Parisians like conversation, for example, but its is not about having an exchange of ideas according to Mangy, it is about winning the exchange. Conversation, to a Parisian, is a contest and there is always a winner and a loser. This explains a lot about my friend M, who will never give up on a losing conversation.  Choosing at random from the short, punchy chapters, Parisians like …

• Having Theories;
  

  A Unicef Card

• Making Lists;
• Crossing the Street n a Bold Way;
• Saying They Like Classical Music;
• Bitching About Waiters;
• The Idea of Moving Overseas;
• The Idea of Sailing;
• New York;
• Urinating in the Street;
• UNICEF Cards;
• Bashing Tourists;
• Scarves and Wearing Black;
• Despising les PSG (you need to be a soccer fan to understand this title);
• and so on for more than 250 pages.

Where’s the Wine?

I admit that I enjoyed this tour of the Parisian psyche, but I soon became impatient. What about wine? What kind of wine “stuff” do Parisians like? I expected to read about wine right at the start but, by about page 200, I began to worry that wine might never appear.

I was almost right. Wine is invisible until page 274 (right after the chapter on why Parisians like Barack Obama). The last chapter is titled Why Parisians like … “Not Drinking Wine.”

Zut Alors! (I learned that in my 7th grade French class — Magny teaches that a Parisian would probably say “Putain!” instead.)

“It is very easy to spot tourists in a Parisian cafe,” Magny writes, “They are the ones drinking wine.”  Having a glass of wine gives the tourists pleasure. Not drinking wine is what Parisians like to do.

Even if I hated the rest of the book (which I obviously don’t), these few pages would be worth the modest price of admission. Magny, with obvious frustration, enumerates all the reasons wine has fallen from grace in Paris. Once it was the default choice, he says, but now young people especially understand that they have many choices, most of which are easier to comprehend and have better marketing behind them. Water, beer and spirits — these are the go-to beverages of Paris now.

There’s a Theory for That

Women are a particular problem, Mangy says. They think drinking wine makes them fat and encourages them to lose control. No Parisian woman would want that!

When Parisians do drink wine, he says, they drink bad wine. This is especially true for the bobos who flock to wine bars specializing in vins naturel, (“natural wines,” made with minimum manipulation) which hide their obvious technical flaws under a cloak of “authenticity.” I guess this is evidence that Parisians like “Having a Theory” (real wine = natural wine) more than they like “Not Drinking Wine.”

I started this book hoping to learn how Parisians are different from the rest of us, especially with respect to wine. I am struck instead, however, by how much the Parisian way of wine is not as different as we (and they) might want to think. Oh, the poor people of Paris!

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