over the house to the next generation. “It's more space than we need,” Willi said, “and if Christoph's going to keep producing grandchildren”—here Christoph blushed becomingly—“they need room to play.” Schaefers senior would move to a little house on top of the hill—
“But I'll be down here at the winery every day”—and I enjoyed the thought of them having their breakfast and looking at the view over the valley. All of this was discussed as if it were merely pragmatic. But of course it isn't. Something the French might call a patrimoine was being handed down. You have arrived; it's yours now.
An hour later I was looking at a map I'd asked to see, a satellite view of the hillside, on which the Schaefers showed me each of their various parcels. They own roughly sixteen in the Domprobst vineyard, and several dozen in the Himmelreich, where the EU-wide land consolidation hasn't yet occurred. I wondered whether the organic purists would be brought up short at the logistical nightmare of trying to farm that way when your land consisted of thirty or forty postage-stamp-sized parcels scattered hither and yon over the hillside. But even more I wondered at the many wines the Schaefers bottle that are parcel-specific, and how these multiple bottlings of wines with the same name seem to annoy people; it's just those Germans being insufferably exact.
What they really are is a thing we should preserve as an endangered species. Look: a few people still exist who are willing to show you the intimacy of their accord with the land, and the beautiful detailing of nuance that results.
So we tasted, and then had some supper. We drank some old wine from Willi's cellar, but nothing extravagant. We laughed and were silly, as we often are together. Yet there's a happiness in this house that doesn't express as jollity. It has very little affect at all. You know, you try to be open-eyed, to convince yourself there are dark veils of shadow and thanatos even around these happy-looking lives. You don't want to sentimentalize them.
But you sit in the house with parents and children and look at pictures of the new babies, and you see everyone glowing just because—I mean, why wouldn't you glow? And you find yourself, your miserable skeptical self, thinking, “Life is supposed to be like this, and sometimes is.” And a sort of dopey desire visits you. Pare it down. It isn't that hard to be happy.
Families like this one are why I believe in terroir. It's neither a dogma nor a faith. It's just a simple fact. The wines themselves lead me to this belief. It's not only a rational empirical matter; it's also a question of Goodness. And this leads me to consider the schism between two groups of vintners and drinkers: those who feel wine is “made,” and those who feel it is grown. It is a fundamental split between two mutually exclusive approaches to both wine and life. If a grower believes from his everyday experience that flavors are inherent in his land, he will labor to preserve them. This means he does nothing to inhibit, obscure, or change them. He does not write his adorable agenda over his raw material. He respects the material. He is there to release it, to take this nascent being, slap it on the ass, and make it wail.
If, on the other hand, your work as a “winemaker” is all about the vision you have a priori, the wine you wish to “sculpt,” then your raw material is a challenge to surmount, almost an inconvenience. You learn to be expert at systems and procedures. You make wine as if you were piloting a plane, and there's nothing wrong with being a good pilot. But terroir-driven vintners make wine as if they were riding on the back of a bird.
This implies a modesty that we rarely understand, we worshippers at the altar of self-esteem. One effaces oneself without diminishing oneself—rather the opposite. And sometimes one's wines assume similar virtues, which we also misinterpret.
It is because of our thirst for wines that put on a show for us. But some wines are content to be the straight man and let the food get all the funny lines. One night I had a jar of some black truffle goop or other, and I wanted to use it. I thought of Daniel Boulud's notorious black truffle and foie gras hamburger, and I thought I too can be decadent, so my wife and I got some ground veal and made us some slutty patties with the truffle stuff, and just to totally gild the lily we stuffed a pat of D'artagnan black truffle butter in the middle of each patty to melt as the burgers cooked. Oh yeah, baby, it tasted as good as it sounds—but what do you drink with it?
We alighted upon a “basic” St. Laurent from Austria, from Erich Sattler. We might have also been happy with something like a modest Chorey-les-Beaune (assuming we wanted to pay triple the price), and though we had the option of upgrading to the “Reserve” quality wine, it would have had too much fruit, and maybe oak would show, and these wicked little burgers don't need all that mojo. They have their own. Our wine was so seamlessly perfect it was as if it too could taste those truffley burgers.
We're all insanely busy stretching toward the stellar; we've really got to RAWK the carafe. But if I stand for anything in this little wine-life of mine, it is to insist we learn to cherish wines of modesty and quiet. It will help us understand the beauty of the humble. Pssst! It'll also save us money.
I have a fantasy that somewhere up on a stage, some international wine megastar—Guigal comes to mind—is getting a big, ostentatious trophy for attaining an average “score” of 98.3 points for his over-$300 wines. Back in the big general tasting, they're cleaning up, and a guy approaches a Rhône grower whose $12 Côtes-du-Rhône gave him pleasure, and he says to the grower, “Thank you for this wine. It makes me happy.”
No question in my mind where I'd rather be, and who I'd rather be.
Things of noise lead us inexorably into greater and greater coarseness and sensual incoherence. Noisy wines are fun from time to time, but like most of the coarser pleasures, they are easy to abuse and very bad for us. I publish a wee manifesto in my sales catalogues, and I recently updated it with a deliberately ambiguous statement: Many wines, even good wines, let you taste the noise. But only the very best wines let you taste the silence. Few have commented to me about that thought. I suspect they're being polite because they find it silly. Who knows, perhaps it is. But I know what I mean by it.
First we need to understand this: silence isn't merely the absence of noise. It is the presence of eternity.
A wine that can offer such a thing to you is a wine that breaks bread with the angels. And yet I am aware that I've taken one ethereal statement and elaborated upon it with another. Let's try to get concrete. What do I want you to understand when I write about “tasting silence—? Is it just me indulging a taste for poetry, or is it palpable?
Think of the way a wine comes to greet you. Some tasters refer to it as “the attack,” the very first instant when the wine presents itself. It may be assertive, brash, massive, or it may be demure, flowing, bashful. But there is always that very moment with every new bottle, and I am aware that I anticipate it, as if I'm asking, “Who will this be?” It's like meeting a new person, before you know anything about him; you respond instinctually, chemically. There is something remarkably alive about us in that moment. Our receptors are buzzing, and we are alight with interest.
Some wines announce themselves. They really push at you. They work the handshake, they're riffing right away, full of schtick, one-liners, they want you to like them, and they work to amuse you. But sometimes you feel a melancholy suspicion it isn't at all about you; they do it with everyone—they need to be liked and approved of. It's their act. And often it's fun to encounter such people. And sometimes there's even a genuine and substantive person, underneath the bluster.
In wine terms that's “tasting the noise.”
Other times you meet someone who seems oddly composed and at peace. She doesn't seem to care what impression she makes on you, because she has nothing she's driven to demonstrate. Yet often she directs a lovely beam of attention on you, as if you are a surprising delight, and you spend minutes talking with this compelling new person, and you come away feeling roused, glad, as if you'd been seen in some keenly approving way. Ye t she is still a blank. She didn't talk about herself. She seemed to be demure.
You become extremely curious about such a person. What is the source of her composure? How does she seem so sure and so stable? How graceful she is, and how effortless she makes