what purported to be a hiatus from college and went with my girlfriend to Europe, where we drove around in a severely beat-up old Opel we bought on the street.
After many months of wandering, we ended up back in Munich, since old family friends had told me the army usually had jobs available for civilian “components” of the Department of Defense, and of course we'd run out of money in a fraction of the time we'd imagined. This, improbably, is where Hugh Johnson comes in.
Our Saturday evening bottle soon morphed into our Friday and Saturday evening bottles, which in turn became Friday-Saturday-Sunday. We liked drinking wine more often—fledgling sybarites, you see. I shopped for wine each week, and all of it was supermarket plonk. Then three things happened.
I'd bought a random bottle we happened to like a whole lot, and when I went to buy more it was all gone, ausverkauft, never to return. The moral: when the wine's good, buy more fast. Thus was born a wine cellar, a terribly important way of describing our few dozen bottles on plastic store-bought racks. But any bunch of wine in excess of what you're drinking right now is a de facto cellar, and now I had one.
Second, I bought a bottle of something called “Riesling” for the first time. This was different! I had never tasted a wine with so much flavor that wasn't “fruity.” It tasted like mineral water with wine instead of water. I needed to know what this odd new thing was.
One of our benefits was access to the army library, and one of the books in the army library was, yes, Hugh Johnson's World Atlas of Wine and Spirits. “The pictures are pretty, in case I can't deal with all these words,” I reassured myself. But what words they were! Open to any page and there was something, an urbane turn of phrase, a stray bit of poetry, and, most striking to me, an unabashed emotionality. The Saar (which I could reach in a few hours” drive) “makes sweet wine you can never tire of: the balance and depth make you sniff and sip and sniff again…every mouthful a cause for rejoicing and wonder.”
Rejoicing and wonder? All right, I can see rejoicing; I mean, after all, there's a moment of rejoicing in the first bite of a perfect cheeseburger if you're alert to it. But wonder? Was there more to this whole wine thing than I'd imagined? Was wine an object of beauty?
So I set about locating the wines Johnson wrote about, as best I could, and as best I could afford. I tried to taste them more attentively, to see whether they spoke to me. Sometimes they did, and sometimes I was groping. But the pictures in the book sure made wine country look pretty. Maybe it was time to see for myself.
And since we lived in Germany, and since these were the days before German wine became uncool, German wine country was the shortest distance from us. Armed and provisioned with maps and lists of recommended vineyards and producers, off we went. We parked at the edges of many wine villages, and went knocking on winegrowers” doors.
I don't suppose many of the growers we visited had ever been dropped in on by some hirsute freak with a list of geeky questions and a minuscule budget. But to my immoderate good fortune, then and many times since, I found German winegrowers to be the most generous and hospitable people I'd ever encountered. If you were interested and curious, there were few limits to the time they'd take or the samples they'd pour. If I asked about vineyards, they'd grab my arm and walk me up into the hills, explaining minutiae of geology and microclimate; if I asked about vintages, out came the bottles and the corkscrew. I protested lustily, but for naught. I said I needed to buy small amounts of a lot of different wines so that I could learn by surveying, to which they answered, Buy what you buy, it's no problem.
My entire world changed. It was May 1978, and I had found the thing I didn't know I was seeking. Or it had found me.
Wine, I discovered, could indeed be a thing of beauty. It could make you feel. It was endlessly changeable, and it played ever-wonderful variations on its themes; it wasn't just lovely, it was interesting. It was made in beautiful countryside, by sweet-natured people. And in many wines there were flavors I couldn't begin to account for. Music was similarly evanescent, but music's effects could usually be described; happy, sad, eerie, morose, pastoral, ecstatic, tender…but wine? What was going on here?
I lived five more years in Europe and visited most of its important wine regions, spent far too much money on wine and far too much time obsessing over it, not to mention boring the eyelashes off anyone around me if, God forbid, the subject of wine came up. We are all a little insane when we're infatuated. But my run of good luck continued; I experienced each new wine region by actually being there, absorbing its vistas, smells, horizons, whether the dogs were on leashes or roaming free, if it seemed welcoming (like Burgundy) or austere and taciturn (like Bordeaux), and I did this with Johnson's (and others') prose playing background music in my mind. There is no better way not merely to learn but also to know about wine. I belonged to no tasting groups, attended no wine classes. There was no Internet with its bulletin boards and exchanges of geekery. I did it alone and feverishly. My girlfriend became my first wife, Tina, and she was a very patient woman. Wine, for me, became something most vitally intimate; only later did it become something I connected to social life and conviviality.
I was driven to write about it long before I had anything of value to say. I liked to write; it seemed to complete my experiences, both of individual wines and of wine in the abstract. Somewhere in a dusty old shoebox is a primitive manuscript of a wine book I had no business producing. I could find it, but I doubt I could bear to read it. Yet even that early need to catalog information and describe experience was helpful, not least when
I cannibalized sections of the book into magazine pieces for an American journal called Friends of Wine. They paid me! Spent the first check on wine, of course; 1970 Montrose and Las Cases, as I recall. Finally opened the Montrose after staring at it nostalgically for twenty-six years.
In early 1983, when I returned to the United States after ten years in Germany, I wanted a job in the wine business. Suffice it to say I made my way. My progress was hardly picaresque; it was tedious. But it was progress. I put together a little portfolio of German wines from most of my old friends. Years later I helped introduce the splendid new wines of Austria to the States, and, undeterred by the indifference and derision that had become my daily lot, I assembled a slew of small Champagne growers to sell to the wary trade, effectively strapping a safe to my back to add to the grand piano already there as I pushed my rock up an endless hill. I seem to have had a fiendish gift for selecting uncool wine categories. For reasons still obscure, German wine was dead in the water in the mid-eighties. Nine years later, no one had heard of Austrian wine except that they put antifreeze in it some time ago. And no one believed they could sell “no-name” Champagne.
It's not that I relished a challenge; I just wouldn't shrink from one. But I didn't go looking for weird or difficult wine categories, I just followed my odd little bliss. Years later, when interviewed for a magazine profile, I was asked, “So how does it feel to have perennially unpopular taste?”
“Just lucky, I guess,” was my reply then, and it still would be today.
In June 2008 I received the James Beard Award for outstanding wine and spirits professional, our industry's equivalent to an Oscar. As I accepted the award I flashed back on those first formative years, overwhelmed with all I'd been given. This book will tell you how I got from those early quiet walks through remote, hilly vineyards to the longer-seeming walk onto the stage at Avery Fisher Hall after my name was called. It's time to give back. It's time to tell what wine can mean in a person's life.
But to do this I have to ask you to accept the ethereal as an ordinary and valid part of everyday experience—because the theme of this book is that wine can be a portal into the mystic. And we hate the very thought of the mystic, which seems so esoteric and inaccessible. But it isn't; it happens all the time.
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