I’m no wine connoisseur, but if you are looking to
understand French wine better, a book that has helped increase my knowledge is
Windows on the World,
a book named in parallel with and connected to the restaurant on the 106th
and 107th floors of the former World Trade Center.
From the link I provided:
Until 8:48 a.m., on September 11,
2001, [Window’s] sold 10,000 bottles a month and had 1,400 bottles on its list.
Now, 78 of 450 employees are presumed dead. Others are out of work. A
50,000-bottle cellar is atomized.
… On Windows’s final business day,
its $37 million annual revenue made it America’s top-grossing restaurant.
Stuffy types shunned the dining room, calling it a corral for Midwestern
tourists, but democrats enjoyed the non-elite style and Executive Chef Michael
Lomonaco’s imaginative menus.
Now I only happened to read through the French red wines
section of the Windows book (an earlier version of the book that my wife picked
up back in college during the eighties). The book puts a nice, quick, and layered
structure around how to tackle wines. The layered structure allows one to dive
deeper as needed and as your brain capacity will allow. I’ve tasted hundreds of
wines. Never really had a way to hone in on what kind of wine to buy after all
of that drinking other than by type of wine (e.g., Cabernet Sauvignon, Zinfandel).
Now I have much more of a structure for appreciating red wines from this region
of the world.
The Windows book has helped to formulate in my mind *very
rough* mental shortcut maps for French red wines (note the maps are rough and
not precise) such as the following:
- Bordeaux – Blends of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, or Cabernet Franc grapes
- Burgundy – “100%” Pinot Noir or Gamay grapes
- Cote du Rhone – Blends of Syrah or Grenache grapes.
As an example of how the information is layered, if one looks within the Burgundy wine
family, one can get a proxy for quality (e.g., where other designators are not
there) by using some simple, but powerful shortcuts on reading the labels (listed
from higher quality to lower quality) as opposed to memorizing geogrpahy or every single wine and vintage:
- Grand Cru wine – only the name of the vineyard is on the label
- Premier Cru – both the village and the vineyard is on the label
- Village wine – only the name of the village is on the label.
In any case, by understanding how to select French wine
better, it has increased my demand for French wine more. (Of course, being in France right
now also increases my demand, but that is beside the point!)
I still think I prefer California over French wines, but the
Window’s book has really helped me to appreciate the depth of the French wines
and their history. I now contemplate things like why it is that French wines
and California wines (or US wines in general) taste so different to me. In the hundreds of
wines I have tasted, it only hits me now that I have never had a California
wine that tastes like a French wine (if there is such a thing as a wine being in
the French style). As the climates don’t seem too divergent to me at a gross
level, it seems as though it might have more to do with the grapes then. I
would think that the wine-making process itself is much easier to replicate
(say if a French entrepreneur wanted to start a business in California) than carrying over the vines and
grapes. Perplexing to a layman.
In any case, I am thankful for the opportunity to discover
the Windows book. The book, in the context of the significance of World Trade
Center events, also gives
me moment to reflect on the knowledge captured within.
