Kermit Is Almost As Good A Wine Importer As He Is A Writer
Synopsis
From the cover:
Kermit Lynch's recounting of his experiences on the wine route and in the wine cellars of France takes the reader through the Loire, Bordeaux, the Languedoc, Provence, Northern and Southern Rhone, and the Cote d'Or.
My Thoughts
When reading the casual conversational writing style of Kermit Lynch, time seems to stand still as the pages simply fly past. In my experience, most books focused on wine or wine production are about as entertaining as going to a toddlers birthday party; you want to be excited but ultimately, you'd rather be at home watching a James Bond marathon. That is simply not the case with this book. It reads almost like a spy thriller as Lynch searches the backroads of France looking for the rare gem of a producer that still made wine with character. That said, Lynch holds no punches when talking about the state of the wine industry, at least as it was in the mid 80s.
…I decided to stop taking part in blind tastings. They seemed such tomfoolery. Blind, yes, that does sum up the vision involved in this popular method of judging quality. The method is misguided, the results spurious and misleading. I realized that I could not trust my own judgment under such tasting conditions.
Written from Lynch‘s point of view as a wine importer from the 1980s, Adventures On The Wine Route puts the reader in the passenger seat as he visits some of the lesser known wine regions. Beginning in the Loire Valley in the north, through Bordeaux, to the Languedoc in the south, and winding back up Burgundy to finish in Chablis, Lynch reflects on his many cellar tastings, numerous meals (some memorable and some he would prefer not to remember), and the characters he meets along the way. From being practically held at gunpoint and forced to attend a dinner with a negociant to driving through a wine region along the coast of the Mediterranean and literally watching storied old domaines being torn down to make room for condos, Lynch has seen it all in his noble pursuit of wine.
Rejecting a wine because it is not big enough is like rejecting a book because it is not long enough, or a piece of music because it is not loud enough.
That's not to say the book doesn’t show its age; the first edition was printed in 1988. At one point, Lynch complains about the rising price of California wine and declares he once saw a bottle of Chardonnay released at $50! I pine for the days when $50 was considered exuberant for a bottle of California wine!
All of a sudden, Cabernets from the Golden West were selling for twelve dollars, then twenty dollars, then thirty dollars, even forty dollars per bottle. I recall one limited production California Chardonnay released to the public at fifty dollars per bottle!
On the flip side, the intriguing part of reading a book this old is seeing how Lynch accurately predicted multiple trends in the wine industry long before they became main stream. He was a huge proponent of what would now be referred to as the natural wine movement. And maybe that's not entirely accurate, minimal interventionist would probably be more in line with his point of view. He disparages wines fermented in stainless steel tanks in wine regions where fermentation in a barrel is a key feature of the finished wine. He rails against the use of filters, calling them nothing more than pieces of cardboard, prior to bottling wine, claiming it strips any of the charm and character that was previously bursting from a glass, leaving behind a shadow of the wines former glory. He says organic wines would be impossible to sell in his world renowned wine shop but he envisions a day soon where they will be embraced by the average wine consumer with open arms. This in a time when the label organic on a bottle of wine was a signal that the bottle would most likely be spoiled.
At the end of the day, Adventures On The Wine Route is a very enjoyable read looking into the life of a wine importer who was at the forefront of a movement. Lynch was one of the first importers to utilize refrigeration when shipping wine in containers so as to avoid heat damage and he was preaching from the gospel of natural wines long before it was fashionable or trendy. He practically begged winemakers not to filter their wines for fear of the wine loosing its character and often paid more per bottle just for them to bottle his wines separately and on his terms. Others have followed in his footsteps but Kermit Lynch was a pioneer, charting the course for wine importers of the next generations to follow.
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