People who aren't interested in cooking read Nigel Slater, just as people who can't even drive watch Top Gear, but so far no one has managed to score an equivalent success with wine. Most wine books are bought by those we can politely describe as wine bores. As a self-confessed wine bore, I find this baffling. Wine is a subject, like food, that can encompass all human experience: war, history, poetry, economics, sensual pleasure and yet it struggles to break out of its ghetto. Enter Eric Asimov
Asimov is wine critic for the New York Times. His latest book is described as a memoir and a manifesto. So we have a description of his upbringing in New York, his college years and then his time at various newspapers. It is not a remarkable life and Asimov is not a born storyteller so inevitably there are longueurs. Within the space of a few pages we have: "in the pre-Watergate 1970s", "this was the 1970s", "in the rebellious spirit of the early 1970s" and finally "this being the 1970s, I smoked my share of marijuana " I think I get it: the 70s were a crazy time.
As these autobiographical episodes neither illuminate Asimov's personality nor have much relevance to his views on wine, I kept asking myself why he was telling us all this. There are a few attempts at vinous epiphany a Beaujolais drunk as a teenager in a wine bar in Paris, and a sweet Beringer drunk in Texas but the only one that convinces is his description of a 1955 La Mission Haut-Brion drunk with his parents on their wedding anniversary: "I was riveted by my glass, as if it were a Cézanne still life " This moment apart, the memoir and the manifesto elements never cohere. Unlike Asimov's hero, Hugh Johnson, who wrote A Life Uncorked, Asimov hasn't spent a life in wine. It's just been a part of his life.
More interesting are his views on modern wine culture. He is a romantic. He believes that an instinctive personal response to wine is more revealing than one clouded by specious knowledge. The reason people are so awkward around wine, he argues, is because they feel confused by its language and arcane rituals. Strip wine of these trappings and then it becomes pleasurable. You might even attract a mass readership for your book.
The targets for Asimov's attack are the three pillars of modern wine criticism: blind tastings, scores and tasting notes. By extension, though his name does not come up much, he is attacking the world's most influential wine writer, Robert Parker (there's also a sly dig at Jay McInerney). I agree with Asimov on the silliness of trying to fix something as changeable and personal as wine with a score out of 100. And surely he is right about the impossibility of getting the measure of a wine from a brief swill among hundreds of others: "If you really want to get to know a wine, you need to open a bottle, pour yourself a glass and drink it." Wine cannot be taken out of context and judged objectively. Blind tastings (trying a wine without knowing what it is) tend to reward power over subtlety.
Asimov has fun mocking the pretensions of over-confident critics who use terms such as "maduro tobacco" and "ambitious mocha". Daft as they are, I'm not sure why he damns all tasting notes. Surely the problem with many wine writers is not that they write tasting notes but that they aren't very good writers. Critics good and bad are trying to do something very difficult, to put tastes, smells and even emotions into words. Is it any wonder that so many of them fail?
I think that Parker et al would be the first to admit how limited tasting notes and scores are at describing something as intangible and beautiful as the smell of a Chambolle-Musigny. I very much doubt that "they believe that the soul of wine can be best expressed in scores and tasting notes", as Asimov claims they do.
His view that "wine is an expression of culture and cannot be fully understood and appreciated outside of that context" contradicts his belief in "letting the wine in the glass do the talking". Learning the history, geography and language of wine is part of the fun; at least it is for me. With wine the sensual and the intellectual are inextricably entwined, and Asimov does not always have a firm grasp of his subject's history. The technology for the wine-making "revolution" came from Germany and France not the New World. And European farmers haven't taken their grapes to local co-ops for centuries because most co-ops weren't founded until the 1930s. He is on much surer ground as a journalist. My favourite passage in the book is a visit to a maverick producer in Bordeaux, Jean-François Fillastre of Domaine du Jaugaret. Here local politics, history and a character study combine to enhance our understanding of the wine.
It may not be entirely consistent but there is much to be said for Asimov's pretension-free approach to wine. Not least because the sort of wines that he (and I) love don't do well in blind tastings and therefore have low scores which means bargains for the canny enthusiast. He has come up with a test to distinguish between genuine enthusiasts and poseurs if you like Beaujolais, a wine with no status, then you are a sincere wine lover. Despite its shortcomings as a memoir, what shines out of this book is Asimov's endless curiosity about wine. As a guide, he's modest, likeable and not afraid to admit that he's often wrong. On finishing it, I thought how much I'd rather have supper with him than most of his rival critics though after this review, I'm not sure I'll be invited.
