Perfect Wines

In search of the 100 pt wine

The excerpt below is from “The Secret Life of Wine: mostly true stories from the vineyards”.

“Never cook with a wine you wouldn’t drink,’ he said. Though I guess that presupposes that there is a wine I wouldn’t drink.” – Lev Grossman

At this point in the book, I have spent the day in Stagecoach vineyard on top of Atlas Peak in Napa Valley, searching the vineyards for perfection or a 100 pt wine, whichever comes first.

The sun is setting and it’s time to climb back in the van and risk death by owl attack on the way back down Soda Canyon Road. At the end of the day, the owls leave their owl boxes to hunt for critters under the vines and the bluebird boxes empty their bluebirds in search of insects that are natural enemies of grapes.

All this fuss over fruit is over 8,000 years old and it’s not going away any time soon. And, after all, the quest for perfection is the point of being human isn’t it? Sure it is. For some of us, anyway.

It’s good to remember that perfection in the winemaker’s art comes in many different packages. Gallo box wines are 100 point wines, if that is what you love. I have been with in-laws who consumed an entire magnum of 15 year old Andre’s Cold Duck with sublime pleasure. And no, Andre’s doesn’t last 15 weeks much less 15 years. But, it didn’t matter.

That wine is one of my fondest memories. For them ,in that moment, in that place, that bottle of Andre’s Cold Duck—the color of a dark brown carpet—was perfection. They had saved it for years for a special occasion. And for them, it delivered. I am genuinely privileged to have been there.

“There are thousands of wines that can take over our minds. Don’t think all ecstasies are the same!” – Jalaluddin Rumi

It’s the feeling that you get that counts, not the cost of crawlers and clusters or the number of points it got in a magazine. I think too often that we in the business, forget why people drink wine in the first place. To get drunk of course, but not just that.

You can get drunk on cough syrup. They are in search of a feeling they don’t have words for, and can’t explain, but they will know it when they get it. Part sensuality, part social status, part God.

We, who work in the business, may get fired if the Wine Advocate or the Wine Spectator doesn’t like what we’ve done. We do get fired for that all the time. But, that is why you need the moments on the mountaintops, above the fog, listening for an owl’s wing.

That’s why you need Andre’s.

Most of the time it is difficult for me to remember what wine was like when I first heard about it, or when I first tasted it. When I first sold it is however, branded onto my brain like the side of an old Angus bull.

Salesmen and owners, especially salesmen who are owners like me, often forget that it begins and ends here in the sensual interplay between sun and grape and earth. Cash flow, accounts receivables’ gaps, inventory turnover, distributor bill backs, and the vagaries of gross profit burn the earth and sun out of you.

Facing down the big guy in a dress who’s on PCP and is whipping a switchblade in front of your face in your liquor store, nodding quietly while the mafia tells you how many cases of Dewar’s that you’ll be taking this Christmas, listening to your Boss tell you about the hillside vineyards which are actually on a railroad track on the flats in downtown Healdsburg—all these and more can blind you to the miracle that is wine.

They don’t talk about this stuff in the wine magazines. I don’t know of a single wine blog that has ever mentioned what it takes to get the business of wine done. I don’t think they know.

Critics and experts seem to think the wine in their local store sprung bottled and boxed out of the ground. Or, that the money to ship them those free samples of $100 wine is money made out on the back patio and touched only by the liliest of white hands by divinely selected virgins.

They don’t think about who made sure that bottle of authenticated allocated bubble-tagged Cabernet got here, just how important they are because they have it and you don’t.

God didn’t intend wine to be vertically tasted through 25 old vintages at once. Only rich people do that. If the noblemen in the Valley of the Kings in Ancient Egypt had the access to old wines we have now, I’m sure they would have done that too. But, your body is not set up to consume that much alcohol, and your tongue can’t taste anything but Turpentine after the 3rd or 4th vintage.

Napa Valley Vineyard, photo by Larry Leigon © 2021, all rights reserved

Overindulgence comes easy in the wine business. I wouldn’t be surprised if King Tut himself slipped now and again on all that Western River stuff. All these things and more turned my young soul bitter and cynical when I began. It stayed that way for a long time.

The truth is complicated when you first come across it. Simple was a long time coming for me.

I was the top salesman at three different companies before I ever even saw a vineyard. Two years before I ever even tasted wine. Two years. I just listened to the other sales people and said what they said. If a customer asked me if I had tasted this wine, I’d say, perfectly honestly, “not this particular bottling”. Absolutely true. Not this bottling or any other bottling.

They say you have to know your product, but you don’t. You have to know your audience. Young salesmen always make that mistake of thinking their opinion of wine matters on the street. It doesn’t. It can be a crushing lesson to find out otherwise. But, it must matter to you or you go insane.

It took decades for me to find the romance again. Curiously, when it was all said and done, nothing had changed except me. Maybe that’s the way it should be. Cynicism is easy. Wonder is hard.

Back Road in Napa Valley, photo by Larry Leigon ©2021, all rights reserved

But, right there, with the sales rep in Texas telling you he’s sorry you lost the order, but the other wine has a better hooker than you do, that moment at the top of the mountain comes back.

Right there, when a critic is telling you how to make wine even though he has never made wine in his life, that moment at the top of the mountain suddenly rises up, grabs you by the throat and makes you laugh out loud at the wonder of it all.

As we turn back onto the main road on the valley floor, the clusters swing in the night wind, thumping against each other in the dark while far below them the birds are sleeping, and sleeping, don’t notice the bobcats padding slowly beneath them or the snakes slithering under the moon.

We think we’ve tamed the vines, that science has probed the secrets of creation. But, it’s the vines that have tamed us. The vines have tricked us into cloning their strengths and cutting out their weaknesses, into planting them in the best soil, shading them from the hot sun and pruning them to produce wines far beyond anything they ever dreamed they were capable of.

And, the strange thing is, they have convinced us that we did it all.