Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh Read online

  GQ, march 1989

  G R E A T E X P E C T O R A T I O N S

  A comprehensive new wine book, The New Frank Schoonmaker Encyclopedia of Wine, contains a surprising omission between the entries for spiritueux (French for “spirits”) and spitzen (German for “peak”).

  The missing word is spitting (English for “not getting drunk at wine tastings”).

  I attribute the exclusion of this topic not to error but to modesty, because the man who recently revised the encyclopedia, Alexis Bespaloff, is without question the greatest wine spitter in America today. Because he is humble by nature, he is loath to agree. “I’m not a spit-meister,” Bespaloff protests. “I’m just a wine taster, and spitting is a method of self-preservation. If you don’t spit, you’ll be pickled before lunchtime.” I am of a different opinion, for I recognize greatness. Bespaloff may not be quite the equal of the venerable John Smithes of Portugal, who is described by Ben Howkins of the port firm of Taylor Fladgate as a man who can “hit the ear of a dog at twenty paces,” but he is a national treasure. Being rated the greatest domestic spitter is nothing to purse one’s lips at.

  Spitting is a mandatory activity practiced by oenophiles, yet it is seldom given its due. Christian Moueix, the co-owner of Château Petrus, says, “Sometimes I must tell people tasting my wine that it is all right to spit. They are not comfortable. They think the wine is too good or too expensive.” The word spitting has odious connotations—other than wine tasting, I cannot think of a single activity associated with it that 2 9 6

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  one should do in the company of friends. It also requires certain skills that have never received the attention they deserve. Those who excel at it, like Olympic kayaking champions, are seldom rewarded. Yet, as Howkins points out, “If people have never seen great spitting before, it’s quite an impressive thing.”

  Bespaloff claims to possess merely “an ability to spit out of my mouth and not get any on my shoes,” but he is being unduly self-deprecating.

  I watched him not long ago at a Bordeaux tasting, and I thought he performed with uncommon grace, a veritable Baryshnikov around the spit bucket.

  When tasting, he first aerated the wine in his glass with three or four economical flicks of the wrist, then he threw back his head and drained about a half-inch of the liquid. There was none of the ostenta-tion of the novice, no gurgling or hissing or obvious intake of air. With closed mouth, he appeared to chew. He paused, scribbled a few notes, chewed another dozen or so times, reflected briefly, then spit.

  Around him, tasters were hunched over buckets in unseemly positions, allowing wine to dribble out of their mouth. Others were attempting to spit from significant distances but going about it so sloppily that the results were reminiscent of a bomb going off in a paint factory.

  When Bespaloff spit, out came a discreet stream that hit the bucket dead center, achieving what in rifle competition would be known as a tight shot group. When he saw me watching him, he stepped back and fired another masterful blast, this one from about three feet away. “I’m pretty accurate,” he explained, “but I’m not what you’d call a great distance spitter. It’s not like I stand ten feet back and spit in magnificent parabolas over people’s heads.”

  Bespaloff says there was nothing in his upbringing or training to indicate that he would become a world-class spitter, but nobody in the wine world really knows what makes one person a maestro and another a mess. There are as many theories on spitting as there are wines to be spit. It is thought by some that a gap between the two front teeth is an anatomical advantage, but, Bespaloff points out, “If that were the secret, then Lauren Hutton would be the best.” Mike Grgich, owner of Grgich F O R K I T O V E R

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  Hills Cellars in California, says all great spitters must be tall. He is five-six. Author Hugh Johnson attributes whatever small status he has achieved as a spitter to the trumpet lessons he took as a child. “A good embouchure, the lip muscles, contributes,” he says. Louis Latour, the famed Burgundy vineyard owner and négociant, says the key to precision spitting is sobriety.

  Alas, there are no definitive answers, even from Bespaloff. This is a gentleman with consummate knowledge of the wine business, a man with more than a quarter-century of experience as a wine writer, a professional taster who can identify the most obscure varietals from the most inaccessible regions, yet when I asked him for the secret of spitting, he claimed to know nothing he could pass on. “The secret is years of self-denial and low wages,” he said, reverting to the standard excuse given by every wine writer to explain every shortcoming. Come to think of it, none of us is particularly well paid.

  Bespaloff has more than 1.5 million copies of his books in print and is one of the largest-selling authors of wine books in the world. As his reputation as a wine writer grew, so too did his reputation as a wine spitter, although he never paid it much heed. There came a time about ten years ago when a small magazine acknowledged his preeminence by featuring him in an article on spitting. He showed it to his mother, pointing out the professional recognition that had come his way thanks to the top-notch university education she had provided her son. “She gave me a funny look,” he says.

  It is unfortunate that spitting is such a spurned science that even a mother cannot take pride in her son’s accomplishments. Within the wine community, this is not the case, particularly in Portugal and Australia, where fine spitters achieve legendary status. Peter Cobb, a director of the Cockburn’s firm in Portugal, says of the aforementioned Smithes,

  “He’s around eighty now, hasn’t got a tooth in his head, and still spits prodigious distances.” Adds Bruce Guimaraens, the winemaker at Fonseca, “He’s the best we’ve had in the past fifty years in the port trade. He can drown a fly on the wing at fifty feet.” John Burnett, the managing director at Croft and the likely successor to Smithes as Por-2 9 8

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  tugal’s top spitter, calls himself “probably one of the best living [spitters] today,” but he concedes that he doesn’t ring the spittoon with quite the same authority as Smithes.

  In Australia, the hot spitters are Len Evans, a writer and wine producer, and Greg Clayfield, the winemaker at Lindemans. Clayfield, a good two decades younger than Bespaloff, bows to the American’s experience and ranks himself as merely a first-rate regional spitter—“the best in the cooler climates of Australia.” Interestingly, Clayfield predicts the day will come when the top spitter in the world will be a woman, which surprises me. Women tend to spit discreetly and world-class spitting requires presumptuousness. “I believe women can be more accurate spitters than men if they work at it,” Clayfield says,

  “but they are incredibly bad novices.” Eunice Fried, an experienced wine writer, concedes that men are superior spitters, but she blames it on upbringing, not on physical limitations. “The problem is that girls were brought up to be young ladies and young ladies never spit. I wrote back in the mid-seventies that women should start practicing to catch up.” The British wine writer Jancis Robinson, a Master of Wine, says, “I’ve seen quite a few ace spitters and they’ve all been male. That’s because men are more into sports and ace spitting is a sport. It’s speed and accuracy and power. All we women want to do is not make disgusting exhibitions of ourselves. We do it neatly. We are not so competitive.” Distance alone does not make one a great spitter. I would never speak ill of the late Alexis Lichine, one of the major figures in the wine community, but in truth his presence was feared in tasting rooms. The wine writer Anthony Dias Blue recalls Lichine spitting “a laser-thin stream six feet into a bucket,” but others remember a man of considerably less accuracy. Bespaloff, otherwise a great admirer of Lichine’s, tells of attending a stand-up tasting with Lichine and Peter Sichel, a vineyard owner and wine importer. “Peter was telling us proudly about his new slacks. A moment later, Lichine leaned over without looking and spit red wine toward the bucket. The stream went over the top and hit Peter in the pants.�
� Thomas Matthews of The Wine Spectator F O R K I T O V E R

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  says the spitter he most fears is Edmund Penning-Rowsell, the dean of British wine writers. “He’s long but insouciant,” says Matthews. “He takes a sip and if there is a spit bucket in the vicinity, there it goes. At a tasting, he’s a menace. There’s a huge circle around him of empty space and stained carpet.”

  Not all spitting stories are sad sagas of soggy socks and soiled shoes.

  Jean-Louis Brillet, a producer of Cognac, says the most precise spitter he has seen is the legendary French oenologist Emile Peynaud but he adds, “The greatest thing is that we see Mr. Peynaud take in very large quantities of wine and spit out very small quantities. Where is the rest?” The famous Italian winemaker Piero Antinori says that as a child he was in awe of his family firm’s seventy-five-year-old oenologist, who would taste and spit with a lit cigarette in his mouth. Jean-Michel Cazes of Château Lynch-Bages in Bordeaux has seen an equally wondrous sight: “My grandfather and [Bordeaux wine-merchant] Emmanuel Cruse had the same technique. They would sit there, tasting and spitting with pipes in their mouths.”

  Alan Stillman, a Manhattan restaurateur, recalls that nearly twenty years ago he and his wife stopped for a picnic in Burgundy just outside the fence surrounding the vineyards of the famed Domaine de la Romanee-Conti. “A man wandered up. We didn’t know it then, but he was the cellarmaster of DRC, and we were sitting on DRC property. I introduced myself, offered him a glass of red wine. He took a mouth-ful and must have spit it thirty feet. He said, sneering, ‘Bordeaux!’ ” Michael Aaron, the owner of the Sherry-Lehmann wine shop in Manhattan, was working in Bordeaux in 1959 when he attended a wine tasting at Château Cos d’Estournel and observed the spitting equivalent of a rear-end collision. Taster number one learned over the spit bucket at the precise moment that taster number two swung toward the same bucket. Number one was a balding fellow, and number two’s stream hit him precisely on the crown, causing him to take offense.

  “They had to be separated. There was almost a fistfight,” Aaron says.

  Bespaloff recalls that it was 1963 when he spit in a wine cellar for the very first time. He was tasting Beaujolais and, he says, “I understood 3 0 0

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  that it was all right to spit on the ground in a cellar, but to avoid embar-rassment, I tasted a little more slowly than the proprietor. When he spit, I spit.” Since then, Bespaloff has grown in stature and prowess to become an icon of this arcane art, a virtual spitting savant, yet he still reacts uneasily when his greatness is recognized.

  “I modestly lower my head,” he says.

  Is it modesty? Or is he checking to see if he got any on his shoes?

  GQ, march 1990

  $ 2 5 , 0 0 0 W I N E W E E K :

  A T A L E O F E X C E S S

  I have friends who regularly travel to Europe on wine-drinking pilgrimages, excursions into decadence that leave me gasping with envy. After hearing their stories, I find myself imagining I’m one of them. I see myself picking up a wine list at a magnificent restaurant such as Monaco’s Le Louis XV and ordering a grand cru white Burgundy with a rim as golden as the Limoges china—there I am, leaning back and gazing upward, as the bouquet of my perfumed Corton-Charlemagne soars toward the nymphs and angels gamboling on the twenty-five-foot ceiling.

  This past January, I gathered up my courage and my bankroll and announced that I would be joining them on their upcoming trip to France and Monaco. The itinerary included La Beaugraviere in Provence, a restaurant that is unstarred in the Michelin guide but has an enthusiastic following among wine drinkers, as well as four of the most esteemed establishments in Europe, all with three-star Michelin ratings: Le Louis XV; Troisgros, in Roanne; Paul Bocuse, outside Lyons; and Guy Savoy, in Paris.

  My fantasy was not just to accompany these wine connoisseurs but to be one of them. It was not long into the trip, at the distressingly appointed La Beaugraviere, which looks as though it was transported intact from Guadalajara, that I learned how deluded I was. We were sitting around, gulping complimentary hors d’oeuvres and perusing wine 3 0 2

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  lists, a predinner ritual of ours, when I spotted a treasure, an old-vines Châteauneuf-du-Pape from a fabulous vintage. I couldn’t wait to tell them about it. I was certain they would carry me to the dinner table on their shoulders. I gulped my gougere and tried to get their attention.

  The man I’ll call Sommelier No. 1 was asking the man I’ll call Wine Merchant No. 1, in a wine-weary sort of way, “Do you like Clape’s wines?” Auguste Clape is a renowned producer of Cornas. To the group of connoisseurs I was with, Cornas is just a simple, heat-soaked Syrah of little consequence.

  Excitedly, I interrupted. “Look, the 1989 Domaine de la Janesse Vielles Vigne, only a hundred twenty dollars.” Nobody looked up. The merchant turned to the sommelier and replied, “I find them rustic, never really appealing.” I was beginning to understand my place. I was a noncollector, a nobody. The sounds I made were as insignificant as those of a small forest animal rustling the underbrush. That evening we did not quaff my wonderful wine discovery. It did not rate consideration. I was among my betters, as far as selecting wine was concerned.

  After nearly a week of frustrating meals with these men, I still call them my friends, which demonstrates my forgiving nature. Our dinners typically lasted five hours, including the time we spent studying wine lists while sipping glasses of simple, $100-per-bottle Chablis. On the single occasion when one of my friends knocked over a glass, the sort of accident one might expect when men drink long into the night, the person soaked from neck to waist was me. I told these men I would protect their identities, describe them only by their professions or hobbies, and it was Wine Collector No. 1 who marinated my Giorgio Armani Collezioni shirt ($175, on sale) in 1990 Beaucastel Hommage à Jacques Perrin Châteauneuf-du-Pape ($710, in magnum).

  I can only demonstrate so much journalistic integrity: Thanks a lot, Alan Belzer.

  The group included two wine directors from top New York restaurants, two principals in one of Manhattan’s most prestigious wine shops, and F O R K I T O V E R

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  two wine collectors. Five of the six characterize themselves as bargain hunters. The sixth, Wine Merchant No. 2, says he refuses to spend excessively but is mostly interested in finding once-in-a-lifetime rarities. To them, seeking out well-priced wines means paying less for a bottle on a list in France than they would pay for it in a shop in America. For the most part, that meant drinking cult wines from Coche-Dury (white Burgundies), Henri Jayer (red Burgundies), Guigal (single-vineyard Côte-Rotie) and, to a lesser extent, Jaboulet (Hermitage).

  They also admire the unrivaled wine service they encounter in France, because it encompasses discreet attention, appropriate glassware, and formidable knowledge. I anticipated exquisite service, even though we were American tourists, and for the most part we received it. French restaurant owners, like all restaurateurs, are very polite to customers who spend $3,000 to $4,000 each night on wine. I’ve always believed that rational persons should not consume magnificent wines in high-priced restaurants, because of excessive markups, which only proves that I’ve spent too much time dining in New York. At Alain Ducasse’s Le Louis XV, the 1992 Coche-Dury Corton-Charlemagne, a mineral-laced bombshell of a white, cost $400. Wine Merchant No. 2

  said, “Anytime you see Coche for four hundred dollars, you should drink it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. This bottle is about a thousand dollars below the retail price in New York.” At Troisgros, we paid $825 for 1990 Jayer Cros Parantoux, a stunning (although youthful) red Burgundy. I had recently seen it on the list of a reasonably priced restaurant in New York for $3,750. None of these men, no matter what they already had in their cellars at home, was able to resist a bargain, much as a woman with a dozen pair of $800 Manolo Blahnik shoes in her closet at home cannot stop herself when she sees another pair on sale for $400. To them, Henr
i Jayer is the Manolo Blahnik of wine.

  Almost every wine we ordered came from a memorable vintage, although we did have a 1991 Comte de Vogue Musigny ($620, in magnum) at Le Louis XV because my friends knew the estate had produced a long, sweet, beautifully colored Burgundy in that difficult 3 0 4

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  year. They know years the way rabbis know the Ten Commandments, the way Roman Catholic priests know the Stations of the Cross.

  They know when hail fell in the Côte de Nuits (most famously in 1983) and when labor shortages caused difficulties with the harvest in Germany (most infamously in 1945). On impulse, we sent a glass of the 1991 Musigny to a man dining alone, and he sent back a charming note wishing us luck and thanking us for making him feel a part of such a fortunate group. “Doing something like that makes me feel like a god,” said Wine Merchant No. 2, an unintentionally perceptive remark, because wine collectors often see themselves that way.

  Their weakness where wine is concerned is a disinclination to experiment. At Le Louis XV, I spotted a bottle of 1982 Cotnari Grasa Selection de Grains Nobles in the La Moldavie section of the list. It was a sweet wine none of us had ever heard of, and for all we knew, 1982

  was as great a year in Moldavia as it was in Bordeaux. I could not have resisted the call of an authentic Marxist-Leninist wine produced in Romania during the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu, but my friends refused to try it. Wine Collector No. 2 said, “We seek out opportunities we will remember for the rest of our lives. We are not here to rough it.” Only once did they drink a wine of my choosing, and that was because I arrived before they did at Guy Savoy—they took taxis, I rode the Metro. I selected a 2000 Ostertag Pinot Gris, overpriced at $140, but I feared these connoisseurs would have sneered at something less expensive. The sommelier agreed to serve it blind.