Mary Dowey delights in a new book that is 'so zany, so stimulating, so viciously witty'
Because it's still early September, the annual crop of wine books aimed at the Christmas market hasn't yet been harvested. Even so, I'm pretty sure I have already identified the best book of the year. I opened it in a desultory way while on holiday and kept going back for more until the whole thing had been devoured - in much the same way that you might not be able to stop yourself from emptying an unexpectedly delicious bottle of wine.
In a corner of publishing dominated by dreary how-to manuals and syrupy me-and-my-château memoirs, The Accidental Connoisseur by Lawrence Osborne is so zany, so stimulating, so viciously witty, that it stands out like a piercingly fresh Riesling among a gross of bland Chardonnays.
Osborne, a writer based in New York but brought up in England (his first experience of wine, from the altar of his local church in Haywards Heath, was probably a Sainburys Beaujolais, he reckons), decides to try to find out more about the whole business of taste. "I have always been haunted by the same question: Do I really know what I'm drinking and why? For that matter, how do I know that my tastes are authentic? Wine is a dangerous game. Wherefore a sinister little hunch always creeps into my mind as I am drinking it: I do not trust my own taste." Millions of wine drinkers are with him on that.
So off he sets on what his subtitle describes as "An Irreverent Journey Through the Wine World". Travelling through California, France and Italy, Osborne mingles with some of the most powerful figures in wine today - from Robert Mondavi, the Emperor of Napa, to Marchese Piero Antinori, mesmerisingly urbane in his 14th-century Florentine palazzo; from Aimé Guibert, the so-called Lion of the Languedoc, roaring about the evils of George Bush and supermarkets, to Paul Draper of Ridge Vineyards, one of America's most quietly reflective winemakers.
Along the way, Osborne meets obsessive artisan producers, mad bartenders, exuberant chefs and eccentric bed-and-breakfast owners such as the combative couple in the Marche in whose organic wine "I smelled at once an odour of fungus, straw and simmering insanity". You never know where he's going to end up next. An enthusiastic drinker more given to polishing off opened bottles than following the safe route of the spittoon, he often doesn't seem to know himself.
Sober or inebriated, Osborne retains his flair for sharp observation, underpinned by a probing scepticism. One of the most absorbing sections of the book focuses on Robert Parker, the world's most influential wine critic. "By his own estimate Parker tastes approximately 10,000 wines every year and claims to be able to remember each one as if photographically," Osborne writes. "The critic therefore is not just an intelligent man with a singular passion; he is a deformity of nature equipped with powers you or I do not possess."
You can see the laconic smile behind the words. He ridicules Parker for comparing wines to "crisp stones", "crushed seashells" or "caramel-coated autumn leaves". The American is the inventor of a "florid patois" whose new catchwords are "all drawn from the exhausted Western boudoir: 'pillowy', 'ravishing', 'overendowed' - tender words which prove that Americans are actually far more interested in edibles than they are in sex."
Parker fails to reply to Osborne's letter requesting an interview for the book. But one day, while lunching in a restaurant in the Médoc, he thinks he glimpses the American super-palate at the far end of the dining room. Later that afternoon, towards the end of an appointment at Château Lafite, he senses tension in the air, then finds "a tall, thickset American in Hush Puppies" - the man seen at lunch - in the château's tiny waiting room. Is it really Parker? He can't be sure. "I made only the briefest note of the bulldog features before tumbling out on to the gravel." For Parker, probably a lucky miss.
Another fascinating section describes a visit to Enologix, a California consultancy which helps many high-profile wineries to fashion whatever style of wine they want (Château Lafite? No problem). It also undertakes to increase their Parker scores. (The American is famous for his 100-point system: wines scoring 90-plus tend to sell out overnight.) It's done via a digital database which processes information to predict the optimum that any given winery can achieve.
Through all his meanderings, Osborne grapples with a fundamental question. Aren't wines becoming more and more alike - shaped to suit international tastes? In a Napa store he sees hybrid categories labelled "Cal-Ital" and "Cal-Rhône" - Californian wines modelled on European styles. It occurs to him that some ripe, modern Bordeaux could legitimately call themselves "Bordeaux-Cals". "Soon every wine in the world might be hyphenated. There will be Chile-Cals, Pinot-Argies, Americo-Provences, Australo-Barolos, Kiwi-Loires ... It's the same principle as the 200 different coffee styles at Starbucks, all of which taste like Starbucks coffee."
Wines which express a sense of place, or terroir, are of course the antithesis of soulless global hybrids, so many of the winemakers Osborne meets boast that their best creations have a unique character, drawn from a particular patch of soil and a particular microclimate. He isn't always convinced. Nor is Randall Grahm, the refreshingly outspoken winemaker at Bonny Doon in the Santa Cruz Mountains. "Americans babbling about their terroir is - as yet - utter bull-shit," he maintains.
Osborne also explores the popular notion that wines are like the people who make them - assertive, reticent, polished, rough or whatever. The theory holds up well until near the end of the book, when our Accidental Connoisseur goes to visit Patience Grey, a famous British food writer of the 1950s whom he tracks down in her Puglian farmhouse. He finds a remarkable octogenarian with a fighting spirit and no time for modern luxuries such as electricity.
"All through my journey I had made an attempt to link the geniality of a given individual with the geniality of the wine he or she makes. I admired Patience, admired her intelligence, grit and sophisticated elegance. But when I drank her wine my vision went blank ... It was, all in all, the vilest wine I have ever drunk."
And the best wine to cross Osborne's lips on a journey which helped his sense of taste to develop, he says, by a modest degree or two? A simple local white, served up in a hamburger-and-mussels joint on a deserted Italian beach. Nothing savoured at Château Lafite was half as good. "Wine is 99 per cent psychological - a creation of where you are and with whom," he warned us at the outset. Wine writers don't much like admitting that, but it's absolutely true. mdowey@irish-times.ie
The Accidental Connoisseur by Lawrence Osborne, published by North Point Press, New York, is available from www.amazon.co.uk (£12.06)