TriumphAnt

Sigh, let he who is without sin cast the first… etc, etc.

I think I’m going to have to stop raving about other people’s spelling errors, after looking back over my previous entry in which I rabbited on about my snowblower’s “augur”.

For the record: “augur” means “bode: indicate by signs; for example, ‘These signs augur bad news’".

And “auger” means “Long tubular piece of equipment to move grain. Augers have a spiral screw inside an outer tube which pushes the grain from the lower end to the top end. They are usually powered by electric motors and vary in diameter from 75mm up to 300mm”.

I don’t think my snowblower is capable of indicating much by signs, beyond of course the simple sign that a non-turning auger augurs a driveway clearing that will take twice as long as usual, until a kindly neighbour points out that the auger is only half augering, thus auguring an augering that will take twice as long.

= = =

Two book reviews in one:

1. If you only read, or feel the need to own, one guide to the understanding and appreciation of wine, have I got the one for you!; and 2. A guide to the understanding and appreciation of wine that I would not recommend to anyone, except perhaps someone who enjoys reading publications like the phone book.

Contrast the following. Of her visit to the hallowed hills of Burgundy, Lettie Teague, in “Educating Peter”, writes: “There are more than thirty grand cru vineyards in Burgundy; theoretically they are where the greatest wines in Burgundy are from, although some are more famous than others (La Tâche, Le Montrachet, Corton) and some grands crus are greater than others. In fact, some select premier cru vineyards can produce better wines than some grand cru vineyards, depending, of course, on the producer. There are hundreds of premier cru vineyards, and their quality is even more various than the grands crus, though theoretically a premier cru wine is the second-best wine produced in Burgundy, after a grand cru. After the premiers crus come the hundreds of wines made from vineyards that aren’t officially recognized but can be of good quality; these unofficial vineyards are called lieux dits, or ‘place names’.”

Of her visit to a Burgundy vineyard, Natalie MacLean in “Red, White, and Drunk All Over” writes: “Over one wall, we see the fields of neighbours who use chemicals. We pull over to take a closer look. The earth between the vines is covered with tractor marks under a dusting of snow, compressed as though one of those evil Star Wars machines has rolled through. The blackened vine stumps look like victims in a burn unit, sitting up on their hard, white hospital beds, reaching with outstretched spindly arms for morphine. By contrast, Leflaive’s hand-tilled soil is a vibrant mahogany colour and smells like a forest floor: fresh, mushroomy, alive. The earth wraps like a lavish pashmina shawl around contented dark gray vines.”

If you’re still feeling uncertain about who will offer you the better read, here is Ms Teague describing a part of the experience of tasting wine: “In fact, aroma is all-important when it comes to judging the nature and the character of a wine. The famous French enologist Émile Peynaud (the great Bordeaux guru and so-called father of modern wine-making) once posited that aroma is what gives wine its personality. Some have even dared to put an exact figure to its importance, rating it a neat 80 per cent of the overall impression of a wine. But whether a full 80 per cent or otherwise, there is a great deal that can be learned about a wine from its aroma alone. For example, the aroma can tell you if a wine is dry or sweet, if it has lots of acidity or too much alcohol. Aromas also offer the first indication of trouble: a corked wine can smell like a damp basement or a pile of wet newspapers.”

And here is Ms MacLean on her encounter with what she calls her first “good wine”: “As I raised the glass to my lips, I stopped. The aroma of the wine rushed out to meet me, and all the smells that I had ever known fell away. I didn’t know how to describe it, but I knew how it made me feel. I moistened my lips with wine and drank it slowly, letting it coat my tongue and slide from one side of my mouth to the other. The brunello trickled down my throat and out along a thousand fault lines through my body, dissolving them. My second glass tasted like a sigh at the end of a long day: a gathering in and a letting go. I felt the fingers of alcoholic warmth relax the muscles at the back of my jaw and curl under my ears. The wine flushed warmth up into my cheeks, down through my shoulders and across my thighs. My mind was as calm as a black ocean. The wine gently stirred the silt of memories on the bottom, helping me recall childhood moments of wordless abandon... By the time we were on our second bottle, I started to feel so flammable that I wondered if I were violating the building’s fire code.”

My vote is for the one that required me to take a cold shower before I moved on to Chapter 2.

The “Peter” in “Educating Peter” is long-time Rolling Stone magazine film critic Peter Travers. As nearly as I was able to figure it, his role in the Teague book is to serve the same function as characters like the gravediggers in a Shakespearean play. Or Walter Brennan in a John Wayne western. That’d be comic relief. Either that, or simply to make the author look smart. Travers spouts idiocies and naive assumptions that allow Teague to display her encyclopaedic knowledge of “enology” (which is “oenology” pretty well everywhere else in the world but the US).

Teague’s book is also somewhat aggravating in that she takes the view that her long experience gives her the right to tell everyone else – Peter, certainly, but also most irritatingly, her readers – that if you hold to any perceptions but hers, then you’re wrong and all you need is time and money to come around to her way of thinking. Her book also becomes, rather swiftly, nothing more than what any competent encyclopaedia is -- a global review of the world’s wine regions. I gave up the lecture, and the tour, at about the halfway point.

But MacLean brings a more loosely organized structure to her book. As a result, she quickly strips away the pretension about wine and makes you genuinely want to widen your own tasting experience. Not least of all because she has a terrific sense of humour that makes her narrative infectious. And unlike Teague, she is also quick to dismiss the equating of very good wine with a very high price. (Burgundy is one of the hardest wines to nail down, she says, and very few people will even come close to understanding all its many variants. But as a rule of thumb, she writes that a good burgundy will cost you about $500 – $450 for all the mediocre bottles you will try before finding a good one for $50.)

Teague, frankly, sounded to me like a wine snob, an impression that was strengthened – as I’ve already mentioned – by her dismissively invalidating any declaratives about wine but hers. I’m hoping she and Travers were still friends by the end of the year she claims it took to “educate” him. But had I been Travers, I’m pretty sure I would have smacked her with an empty Chardonnay bottle by the end of the second month.

And MacLean? She quotes San Francisco wine expert Chuck Hayward: “Selling expensive wine is easy. Many people think if it’s pricey, it’s good. But expensive brands already have a following. All you have to do is play classical music and walk around with a grim expression and your hands behind your back, like you’re in a morgue.” (Hayward is no slouch, and he’s no snob. His own wine store in San Francisco is called The Jug Shop, and he was among the first to bring Australian wines commercially to North America. That’d be Shiraz, for example.)

MacLean even concludes with a joke: “As [New York novelist Jay] McInerney and I finish off the Rounier, he sits back thoughtfully and says, ‘This is why I could never be a socialist. I enjoy the good life too much.’ His features have softened with the liquid relaxation of the evening. He compliments me on my ability to hold my liquor. I tell him that I’m not affluenced by incohol.”

If you’re not up to 275-odd pages about wine – even 275 delightfully written pages – I recommend at least an e-dabble. She has her own website. (Click on “Wine Picks”, for example and pick a date from among the dozens and dozens you’ll find there.)

À la next time.