The Road to Burgundy: The Unlikely Story of an American Making Wine and a New Life in France. Ray Walker. New York, NY: Gotham Books, 2013. 293 pp. $26.00 cloth (ISBN 9781592408122); 26.00 electronic (ISBN 9781101621714).
Divine Vintage: Following the Wine Trail from Genesis to the Modern Age. Randall Heskett and Joel Butler. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. xiv and 274 pp., maps, photos, notes, bibliography, and index. $27.00 cloth (ISBN 9780230112438); $12.99 electronic (ISBN 0230112439).
Wine attracts ink like no other beverage. It has been so for at least two millennia for many cultures tracing lineages to Europe, the Levant, and the Fertile Crescent. Some oeno-centered locations even have separate public wine libraries, so voluminous is the wine literature. We all know what the Bible tells us that Jesus did with some water. Milk, whiskey, tea, coffee, and chocolate simply do not make the grade in the world of the written word.
With the spread of wine growing to new corners of the earth, and given the ease of publication in the twenty-first century, wine volumes continue to appear in expanding numbers. Two efforts illustrate the divergent paths authors could follow in putting wine thoughts to paper. The Road to Burgundy offers an unusual tale of a determined individual led down the path to fermentation. It is not an intellectual work, but a personal monologue about the trip, a partial autobiography. In contrast, in a more scholarly vein, Divine Vintage takes us back to wine's beginnings, moving to wine's historic appearance in biblical lands and then examining the beverage's status in those lands today.
In The Road to Burgundy, a twenty-something Californian named Ray Walker, married and with a toddler, decides to make wine in Burgundy. Not that others have not attempted a similar adventure, but Walker has never made wine, has worked only one year in a winery, and knows no French. A far-reaching analogy might be a geography major with one year of studies, and never having been to Latin America, prancing in to a Big Ten university and talking his way into a tenure-track position as a Latin Americanist scholar. What are the chances!?
Walker traces the roots of his decision, and then recounts his experiences in setting up a wine-making operation. Astonishingly, he is able to secure financing in California from people he does not know, he is able to acquire fruit in Burgundy from some premium quality vineyards, and his wines receive praise from leading wine reviewers and sell at handsome prices.
The attraction in this read is the number of improbable circumstances that Walker is able to overcome in a compressed time frame. It helps that the author possesses a single-mindedness and dedication that few could duplicate. Were the evidence not there that this has really happened (just Google “Maison Ilan” and you'll see), one might conclude that Walker has published a modern-day fairy tale that few would accept as a real possibility. Several reviewers have been most kind to Walker, but I believe their laudatory talk births more from the unusual nature of the story than the quality of the prose.
Walker leads the reader from one episode to another in his determination to make fine Burgundies. Where the read becomes a bit tedious and a bit of a slog is his continual expression of amazement at each milepost along the way. It is as though he is on a continual 8 a.m. super-caffeine high and cannot come down. Equally, he is forever up against some kind of time constraint and repeatedly relates (in so many words) “all is lost now,” “this can't possibly happen,” and so on. Every time, though, he ends up a winner and it all works out. I cannot emphasize enough how inconceivable are the outcomes of his many episodes, whether it be finding French folks who will help him, or acquiring wine grapes from very desirable domaines, or obtaining financing in ways and amounts that few could imagine. Walker, the tenderfoot, the novice, walks into Burgundy, and before he makes any wine, obtains contracts for grapes from Le Chambertin and Charmes Chambertin vineyards, both Grand Crus. Pardon the search for another outlandish analogy, but for those unfamiliar with Burgundian vineyards, this might be something like a high school baseball player signing a contract with the San Francisco Giants, making the team, and hitting a couple of home runs in his first game. It just does not happen.
Much of his success results from the warm assistance and aid offered by the many Burgundians he encounters, all but a couple of whom show no resistance to this Yankee interloper trodding their ground. For the geographer, Walker's dedication to terroir, the idea that the earth speaks to us through the character of a wine, shines through. He acquires fruit from distinct vineyards and he is determined to let the terroir of each parcel express itself by making the most minimal interventions in the wine-making process. His guides in proceeding are three nineteenth-century French wine and viticulture classics, written between 1816 and 1855. In short, although he is not French, he is determined to be authentically Burgundian in his wine making and to do things the nineteenth-century way. The French are impressed and cooperative. His wines have received acclaim in many quarters, and the quality of his wines has been proclaimed on the pages of the New York Times and Wine Spectator, among others.
But The Road to Burgundy covers little more than a moment of wine-making effort and success. Walker made his first wines in 2009 and the book appeared in 2013. This book is not a reflection on a long and distinguished career, nor a tale of repeated success and achievement.
Finally, Walker is not only a novice wine maker, but apparently a novice writer as well. Neither elegance nor polish walk his pages. Hominess and earthiness dance through his story and its worth lies in peering in at an amateur at every level (wine making and writing) making good all around without stuffiness or braggadocio.
Divine Vintage pairs two authors of distinct provenance, one (Heskett) a biblical scholar with appropriate publications who has also worked in the wine world, and the other (Butler) a Master of Wine and longtime wine judge who has plied the wine path in various capacities. Their tome is really two books, the first half of the volume focusing on the historical and the second half an attempt to illustrate wine making today in the biblical world.
In the book's first half, Heskett and Butler follow a roughly chronological path from the earliest wines to Roman times. When speaking of evidence of ancient wine, the authors lean heavily on the work of Patrick McGovern, the foremost scholar in this regard. The when and where of early wine receive treatment with a focus on the role of wine in the ancient cultures of Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and the Levant. They are particularly interested in the religious significance of wine in the belief systems of the day marching forward from around 6000 BCE to the early Christian era.
The religions of Ancient, Greek, and Roman civilizations and their connections with wine receive their due, but this book's real center delves into biblical wine references, their significance, and how the role of wine changes, yet remains central, from Noah through Jesus and his various biblical spokespersons. Wine gets 280 mentions in the Bible, along with abundant metaphors with “the vine.” Heskett and Butler seem to use most of those mentions by the time they are through. Noah, Abraham, Joseph (Jacob's son, not the later carpenter), and Jesus feature heavily as the story progresses. Much of the Bible plot in this period develops in what was some of the premier wine-producing turf of the time. The authors offer profuse divination about which biblical figure might have imbibed what kind of wine.
At times, the focus shifts considerably, though, as the authors explore “all about winemaking” in classical Egyptian and Roman times. They describe viticultural methods, sources of the best fruit, cultures' attitudes toward wine, and festive practices associated with “wine culture.” When commenting on the top wines of Roman times, they seem to stray considerably from their apparent stated mission. A multipage discussion of the individual wines and locations, and what Pliny and Columella and others had to say about them begins to generate fog. The intent becomes one of the authors demonstrating Roman wine knowledge as opposed to the central theme of wine and religion.
One of the positives of this volume is the bringing together of so much biblical wine material and offering evidence and interpretation of its significance and meaning. The sense of various Hebrew words forms part of the narrative. Alas, the counterbalance to the positives is a consistent florescence of “probablies,” “would haves,” “might haves,” and “could haves.” Speculation abounds. Heskett and Butler want to sell us on the importance of wine and the religious foundations of Western civilization. To do so, they become proselytizers. Possibilities become probabilities in their view, and too often the collection of probabilities does not sell the message convincingly.
The real reach in this book, however, is connecting its first half to its second half. With discussion of Rome, early Christianity, some comparisons of the role of Dionysus, Bacchus, and Jesus, and wine's role in all of these, the first half ends. “By understanding how wine has evolved from the beginning of time to the present helps us to understand how the Bible Wine Trail still is fertile and again producing fine wines today” (p. 122) is the terminal sentence. The second half, called “The Modern Divine Wine Trail,” adopts a country-by-country look at wine today, including Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and Greece. The book now becomes somewhat of a “here's a great winery” and “here are some of its best wines” blog, with some tasting notes, like too many other oeno-centered tomes. The scholarly role diminishes and the wine journalist appears.
But not totally. Because of their training and historical knowledge of the area, the authors produce some informational nuggets. Visiting different wine regions in Turkey is a real lesson in cultural geography. Muslim wine grape growers prosper here and in parts of Lebanon and elsewhere. In some growing areas, Muslims make and sell wine. Walid Jumblatt (Chateau Kefraya) and the Druze in Lebanon's Beka'a Valley step forth in this regard. Migrant Bedouin families harvest the fruit. Lebanese wineries, no matter the owner's religious affiliation, feature French words in their names—chateau, clos, domaine, cave, coteaux.
In Israel and the West Bank, wineries and vineyards have been established on sites of ancient wine operations. Known ruins, some thousands of years old, remain in evidence; other ruins have been unearthed. In Turkey and Greece especially, local varieties are abundant and the authors pay plentiful attention to them. In a world where French and Italian varieties have appeared from China to South Africa to New Zealand, locales where the local prospers and provides a connection to the past make a good story. Climate, geology, and soils receive attention in each area visited.
The authors end their biblical wine quest with a short chapter, “Seriously, What Wine Would Jesus Drink?” They look at contemporary bottled wines that they think resonate with wines being produced during Jesus's life. To call this a “stretch” might be an understatement. Technology, grape varieties, sanitation, and viticultural practices today vary markedly from those of 2,000 years ago. Yet, Mas Des Tourelles, a southern Rhone winery, has “planted a Roman-style vineyard and created a Roman-style winery, using re-created Roman equipment (press, treading floor, dolia) to make authentic ancient wines according to the precepts and recipes of ancient authors, especially Columella” (p. 248). The authors think Jesus would have been attracted to some of these Rhone wines.
The major contribution of Divine Vintage is its proposition that wine frequently occupies center stage in Western Religion, ancient or modern. The authors argue that there is a consistent story to tell from Noah, the Assyrians, the Sumerians, the Judeans, the Egyptians, the Israelites, and onward. They thoroughly parse wine and vine mentions in the Bible to anchor their effort, but also look for support from the classical (Pliny and others) to the latest scholarly work (e.g., McGovern). Yet this production suffers from significant flaws, already alluded to: How can one realistically connect the two halves of this book into one consistent volume? How many “probablies” are authors allowed to make a convincing argument? There is also a loss of focus at times where they merely center on “vintage” rather than “divine vintage.”
Additionally, production miscues plague this publication. Incompatible statistics flare up. On page 187, one finds that “Israel had 110,000 acres (4,450 ha) of vineyards” in 1963; or on page 202 the claim that one Israeli winery had planted its vines 11,000 to 16,500 vines per acre (4,400–6,700 vines/ha). Some proofreader missed these gross errors. The reader should be prepared for paragraphs that too often lack a topic sentence and coherence. It is not a smooth read much of the time and one wonders what has happened to manuscript editors. On page 87, at one point we are told that classical Greeks preferred young wine, then a bit later on the same page that they preferred old wine! The maps provide some help in discussion of places and areas that many might have little familiarity with, but too many locational text references are absent.
Wine volumes continue to roll off the presses. Neither of these productions represent the best of the genre. The Road to Burgundy provides a sniff of a Horatio Alger plot, and a quick, mainly enjoyable read. Divine Vintage offers scholarly moments and some worthy arguments, but suffers from laborious flaws.