Letter from London
I know nostalgia isn’t what it used to be, but in the flurry of year-end “10-best” lists, one caught my eye and gave my normally curmudgeonly self a rare and rosy glow, remembering the way things were in a different time. The list was compiled by TripAdvisor – a travel Web site with 25 million monthly visitors – and it rated the most popular destinations for wine touring.
There were several surprises, starting with the number-one pick: Bordeaux. For those of you who haven’t been to that part of France, let me just say that most of the time, Bordeaux is closed, or at least the doors of the Grand Chateaux are – the idea of actually meeting us commoners generally gives the wine world’s aristocracy the tremors. Number two wasn’t a surprise, though: the Napa Valley (or, as my old friends in the San Joaquin Valley used to call it, Disneyland North). Then came Tuscany. Actually, the wine tours aren’t quite as good as everything else in Tuscany, but that would be too difficult, and besides, who cares once you’re there?
The nicest surprise, and the occasion for the heart-warming, was number seven: the Sonoma Valley. That puts it ahead of Stellenbosch in South Africa and Marlborough in New Zealand, both absolutely gorgeous and hospitable, and Burgundy and Oregon’s Willamette Valley, two of the world’s nicest places, which didn’t even make the list.
When I first landed in what was then usually known as the Valley of the Moon, wine touring was easy. You went to the Sonoma Plaza and hung a right (coming from San Francisco, anyway). Sebastiani was the first stop – Green Hungarian was a big seller, always offered in the tasting room – then down the road a short way to Buena Vista and Hacienda, and you were done. Most of the time, you’d run into Gus Sebastiani in his bib overalls, and over at Hacienda, Frank Bartholomew, a little better turned out, but just as happy to chat. Back at Vella’s, you’d pick up some Sonoma Dry Jack and sourdough, and a small map for the brand-new Sonoma Farm Trails, which was then a handful of farmers and what we now call “artisanal producers.” If you padded out the trip with a visit to Jack London State Historic Park, you could stretch it into a weekend. Simple, but in its own gawky, idealistic sort of way, it was pretty terrific.
OK, nostalgia’s over. The thing is, as our version of wine touring evolved, it gave the rest of the wine world a nice model. Not universally – some places have followed the Napa Valley route of edifice complexes, like Rioja, which has gone ga-ga with world-famous architects who create ultra-modern museum-style wineries and tasting rooms, and parts of South America, where the ambition is more inspiring than the roads. But if you drive through the southern Rhône Valley, Alsace, rural Burgundy, Tuscany, the Marche, the Barossa and Hunter Valleys in Australia, even Long Island, and the Finger Lakes in New York and the Okanagan in British Columbia, you can enjoy the best side of wine: A simple but considerable pleasure, good food on their version of farm trails, an ode to joy and still based on a damn fine template.
And Bordeaux, for those of us who would not, despite its suspiciously high ranking, set off from Paris with high hopes? With record prices for its 2005 “vintage of the century” pushing up the cost of the 2006 and 2007 vintages, and the 2008 arriving at the same time as the credit crunch, it may just be that someone over there is going to notice the profit margin on T-shirts and the value of hospitable personal contact. Bib overalls are optional, of course, and baseball caps embossed with “Château Lafite” or “Petrus” probably won’t work, but once they get the hang of it, I’m sure they’ll think of other helpful touches.
When he’s not on the road, Brian St. Pierre is at home in London and at www.foodandwineinlondon.com
