Educated Tastes: Food, Drink, and Connoisseur Culture

5. Teaching Wine Tasting

105 Teaching Wine Tasting john ducker Much of my professional time these days is spent teaching others about wine and its pleasures. I am careful always to put this civilizing drink in the context of food, where I believe it belongs. I was first introduced to the pleasures of wine drinking in the 1960s, when no one in Britain could have anticipated the welter of bright New World flavors now crowding our supermarket shelves. Today at least 50 percent of the UK off-license wine market is from the “New World,” which is providing an ongoing wake-up call in various “Old World” wine areas, particularly France. The 1960s and ’70s were the heady days of “Cape Brandy,” “British Wine,” sweet Cyprus “Sherry,” and the more affordable so-called London-bottled clarets, which although accurately bearing the name of their Bordeaux provenance were shipped to Britain in cask and bottled in unromantic-sounding places west of London like Basingstoke. My own earliest wine memories, apart from the surreptitious sips of El Rei Madeira I stole as a child from my father’s wine cabinet— and which I found quite shockingly strong—were of the semisweet Liebfraumilch variety. One could safely pour out a glass of this silvery, totally anonymous “off-dry” libation when taking one’s girlfriend out to dinner—and the chances were that neither she Chapter Five 106 Learning to Taste nor I would be offended. One could certainly hope for no more. Dryer tastes in cheap white wine in my early tasting days led almost inevitably to Lutomer Riesling or to another underpowered , neutrally flavored shelf-filler from the former Yugoslavia. I knew people at the time who swore by liter bottles (or larger) of a barely alcoholic sweetish stuff from the prolific German vineyards of the Rheinhessen, labeled simply as “Hock,” which they consumed uncomplainingly if unsuitably alongside their steak and fries. Among the long-lost red wines of the day were the dumpy straw-covered flasks of simple, cherry-flavored Chianti, the clustered “empties” of which tended to adorn the walls of Italian trattorie in London’s Soho and in provincial towns. If stronger meat was required, a generic-branded red wine like Bull’s Blood, from Hungary, generally filled the bill. My own enthusiasm to learn more about wine was fueled in part by a visit to Paris shortly after my wife and I were married and where torrential rain forced us both to take immediate shelter. We found ourselves in the portico of a restaurant not far from the Gare de l’Est. To our amazement the ambience was unfamiliar, surprisingly un-French. Had we had stepped quite by chance into an upmarket, Ruritanian beer cellar? No Paris bistro here. Given the establishment’s setting within a stone’s throw of the Seine, rather than the Rhine, we little guessed how authentically alsacien the food would prove to be. Not only did we find ourselves introduced to the menu’s curious offerings of dishes, including surla-werla, flammekuche, and baeckeoffe, but also to one of the most distinctive of the region’s wines, Gewürtztraminer, which had been suggested by our waiter as a suitable partner for our main dish, a civet of wild boar. The advice he gave was inspirational, and we both felt that we had mined gold in a bottle. Our waiter would never have realized that his recommendation would prove such a catalyst to my later wine career. Every mouthful of food was aromatized and seasoned by this amazing spicy liquor. We thought to ourselves that if this gestalt was just one of the Teaching Wine Tasting 107 authentic gastronomic manifestations of Alsace, then what else could the region offer? A visit to this magical eastern départment of France was arranged as soon as time and our joint budgets permitted. I recall a visit to a village shop in northern Alsace in order to buy quiches or patés for a picnic lunch. My entrance had interrupted the shopkeeper’s conversation with another customer (in a completely impenetrable local patois). Concluding my own shopping deal in my schoolboy French, the change was carefully counted back to me in German. The quiches were delicious, and zewelwäia—Alsace onion tart—is probably the most long-standing dish of my own domestic repertoire de cuisine. Today I am still cooking, and I am keenly aware of how the...