Jancis Robinson - Tasting Pleasure: Confessions of a Wine Lover

Table of Contents

Jancis Robinson has written for the Financial Times since 1989, and wrote for the Wine Spectator from 1990 to 1997. Among her most important books is The Oxford Companion to Wine, which earned her seven major international awards and which The New York Times writer Frank Prial called easily the most complete compendium of wine knowledge assembled in modern times. Robinson is a Master of Wine and Decanter magazines (Wo)man of the Year for 1999; her distinctions include two James Beard Awards. She lives in London with food writer Nick Lander and their three children, vintage dated 1982, 1984, and 1991.

In memory of
W.v.S, K.v.S and E.H.L.

I take full responsibility for this books execution, but all credit or blame for its existence must go to Al Silverman of Penguin Putnam Inc., who dreamt it up in 1993, before we had even met, and waited with extreme courtesy and unprecedented patience until I was ready to write it. He has been a delight to work for and with.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Clare Alexander oversaw its birth, while Helen Fraser responded magnificently to the challenge of publishing such a personal book by an old friend at a time when she had many other more important matters to see to.

Professional minence grise, as always, has been my splendidly colorful, claret-loving literary agent Caradoc King.

Writing this book has shown me powerfully just how much I owe to those in and around the world of winenot just the generous friends described in these pages, but a host of others who have been deemed to distract from such narrative line as there is, and many who may only have been passing acquaintances. In this gracelessly inclusive way, I would like to thank the hundreds, possibly thousands, of people in and out of the wine business who have opened a bottle or door for me, shared a taste or their knowledge with me, or devoted even a few minutes to me and my questing palate.

And finally, my family. All authors, and particularly those with young children, inevitably owe an enormous debt of time and support to their nearest and dearest. But I am acutely aware that they play an even more important role in a book as autobiographical as this one. I could not possibly have written it if I had not been lucky enough to enjoy a happy and indulged home life both during childhood and with my own family. For the last seventeen years I have owed most of all to my husband, Nick, but my children, Julia, Will and Rose, have also been endlessly forbearing, just like their grandparents.

Franois Mitjavile was born in 1948 into a family synonymous in France with road transport. Mitjavile trucks pound Frances auto-routes; Mitjavile calendars hang in offices all over the country. When he was old enough he was given the chance to run one of the familys subsidiaries in Leeds in the north of England, but at the age of twenty-six he discovered something that made his heart beat much, much faster. Because of that, and his extreme dedication, there is now another world in which Mitjavile is an important name, the world of wine.

Franois is interesting because he was one of the first examples of a phenomenon that is revolutionizing the way that world works, and is dramatically improving the quality of what it produces. Until quite recently, vine growing and winemaking were thought of as activities fit only for the uneducated. The aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie might well earn considerable sums from the wine produced on their land, but they would not dream of physically involving themselves in the production process. Wines image in France was that of peasant lubricant. Wine was typically a crude drink made and drunk in quantity by shuffling old countrymen in berets. Young people were encouraged to aspire to the professions or an executive desk in some office block, with perhaps something as chic as un malt to enliven their social lives. But in France, as throughout much of the Western world, this has changed considerably in the last twenty years. Just as disaffection with urban life (particularly life in the cities of northern France) has become widespread, so the life of a vigneron has taken on a new nobility. Wine is more readily associated with craftsmanship, its appreciation come to be regarded as an art.

All over France, and the rest of the world, individuals who in another era might have earned their living in a role more traditionally associated with the highly educated are turning to wine production with a passion. Some of them are motivated by a bucolic vision that almost certainly incorporates the word lifestyle. They tend to produce serviceable rather than exciting wine. A few of them are motivated by money. Their wine is usually worse. But there are some who are driven by the sheer magic of being so in tune with their plot of land that they can coax the best wine possible out of it.

Like all of these self-propelled enthusiasts, Franois Mitjavile is very much a loner. Even as recently as June 1994 when I last visited him, when the name of his property was well known by bordeaux lovers throughout the world, there was still no sign giving a hint which turnoff from the smallest of back roads out of Saint-milion might lead to Chateau Le Tertre Roteboeuf. And there was nothing about the modest farmhouse, apparently plonked down in the middle of an orchard full of long grass, nettles and fig trees, that suggested it had any link with wine, much less one of the worlds most sought after. The Mitjavile residence in fact is one of the very, very few of the thousands of modest farmhouses around the tourist mecca that is Saint-milion that does not advertise its claim to be a wine chateau. But then with only about 2,000 cases of wine to sell each year (1,999 after Ive bought mine), this is perhaps not surprising. In any case, as he has explained to me, he wants to be free to work his vines and his wines, and have just enough free time to entertain properly a small handful of true amateurs de vin.

But this is strange in a way because talking is so obviously what he likes. An intense and thoughtful man, he speaks rather breathlessly with unmistakable enthusiasm and lots of smiles. But then again what he says is not really talk, it is rather what the French would call rflexions, not artful or polished disquisitions, but ideas with a spin on them. It is typical that he says with pride that Tertre enthusiasts are nonconformists. This is one of the four reasons he gives for the extraordinary fact that he has never applied, and probably never will apply, for membership in Saint-milions official elite, the Grands Crus Classes. The others are that there are anyway enough people who love Tertre, for it is probably the only Saint-milion other than the top-ranking Ausone and Cheval Blancand nowadays he would have to add Valandraudto sell out as soon as its released. He also argues that not having the magic word Class on his label imposes the discipline of having to make a wine every year that is good enough to sell on its quality alone.

Id rung while filming in the area and he had obviously been delighted I could visit only in the evening. Je suis bte, he admitted happily, a fool in his devotion to work. I arrived as the warm sun was lengthening the shadows cast by his extremely beat up old Volvo to find that hed added some gray hairs since Id seen him last but that, like his apple-cheeked wife, Miloute (a persistent corruption of Emilie), he still had a marvelously unlined, outdoor face. Framed by curly hair, his face reminded me again, with its long upper lip and lazy lids, of Chico, the Marx brother with the hat, although Franoiss humor is wry rather than slapstick. He showed me with pride how they had faced the simple eighteenth-century farmhouse with clay and chalk from the vineyard since my last visit, and how much finer this looked than the sand and chalk facing on an adjoining outhouse.