Inspiration for wine walking
While I started my wine walking website just two years ago, I actually began wine walking in September 1986, when I arrived in France to work at the OECD.
Prior to this, I had read a few books by the English author, Roald Dahl, a writer of macabre adult short stories, as well as children’s books. A short passage from Dahl”s book, “My Uncle Oswald”, was the inspiration for my wine walking.
“… my own father loved wine above all other things in life, including women. He was, I think, a genuine expert. His passion was for burgundy. He adored claret, too, but he always considered even the greatest of the clarets to be just a touch on the feminine side. ‘Claret,’ he used to say, ‘may have a prettier face and a better figure, but it’s the burgundies that have the muscles and the sinews.’
By the time I was fourteen, he had begun to communicate some of this wine passion to me, and only a year ago, he had taken me on a ten-day walking tour through Burgundy during the vendange in September. We had started out at Chagny and from there we had strolled in our own time northward to Dijon, so that in the week that followed we traversed the entire length of the Côte de Nuits.
It was a thrilling experience. We walked not on the main road but on the narrow rutted tracks that led us past practically every great vineyard on that famous golden slope, first Montrachet, then Meursault, then Pommard and a night in a wonderful small hotel in Beaune where we ate écrevisses swimming in white wine, and thick slices of foie gras on buttered toast.
I can remember the two of us the next day eating lunch while sitting on the low white wall along the boundary of Romanée Conti – cold chicken, French bread, a fromage dur and a bottle of Romanée Conti itself. We spread our food on the top of the wall and stood the bottle alongside, together with two good wineglasses. My father drew the cork and poured the wine while I did my best to carve the chicken, and there we sat in the warm autumn sun, watching the grape-pickers combing the rows of vines, filling their baskets, bringing them to the heads of the rows, dumping the grapes into larger baskets which in turn were emptied into carts drawn by pale creamy-horses.
I can remember my father sitting on the wall and waving a half-eaten drumstick in the direction of this splendid scene and saying, ‘You are sitting, my boy, on the edge of the most famous piece of land in the whole world! Just look at it! Four and a half acres of flinty red clay! That’s all it is! But those grapes you can see them picking at this very moment will produce a wine that is a glory among wines. It is also almost unobtainable because so little of it is made. This bottle we are drinking now came from here eleven years ago. Smell it! Inhale the bouquet! Taste it! Drink it! But never try to describe it! It is impossible to put such a flavour into words! To drink a Romanée Conti is like having an orgasm in the mouth and the nose both at the same time.’
I loved it when my father got himself worked up like this. Listening to him during those early years, I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. He taught me that if you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it full speed ahead. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good. Hot is no good, either. White hot and passionate is the only thing to be.
We visited Clos de Vougeot and Bonnes-Mares and Clos de la Roche and Chambertin and many other marvellous places…”