I Dreamed I Saw Robert Mondavi

Oh lord, what have we wrought upon ourselves?

Many of us know Robert Mondavi was a visionary; a man of action as much as words. But he was also a contrarian. About thirty years ago he began to do more traveling around the country, telling everyone who would listen that the industry must produce wines that “blend seamlessly with food.” He would talk effusively about the wonderful things he and Magrit discovered during their visits to Europe, the physical and spiritual home of wine.

But somewhere along the line Mondavi’s message got lost. Instead, what we’ve experienced during the past thirty years is an industry driven by wines measured and merchandised primarily on the basis of 100 point scores rather than, say, food or terroir.

Some twenty years ago another contrarian, Kermit Lynch, came out with Adventures on the Wine Route; a book telling fascinating stories about vignerons, while making a case that terroir is not just about soil and climate but also about people who live and work it. Like Mondavi, Lynch made an impact on the way we define quality; although when it comes to the subject of food, he was even more brutal than Mondavi:

When a woman chooses a hat, she does not put it on goat’s head to judge it; she puts it on her own. There is a vast difference, an insurmountable difference, between the taste of a wine next to another wine, and the same wine’s taste with food.

I, for one, have taken this to heart; but not without misery: many years spent suggesting wines like Bandol Rosé (Lynch’s favorite), or other crisp, food-worthy wines like Picpoul, Albariño, and Grechetto, only to have guests peering over the wine list and asking, “Don’t you have Screaming Eagle?” Or worse yet, “How come your wine list has not won a Grand Award?”

I have never, I admit, come close to winning a “grand” anything. It’s hard enough to open up the yearly issue of our nation’s most popular wine magazine and read about the winners – one restaurant after another recognized for carrying over 1,000, 2,000, even 3,000 different wines. It’s not just size that makes a wine list “grand,” we are always informed, but also the content: multiple vintages of Pétrus and Margaux, the requisite DRCs, “cult” Californians like Screaming Eagle and Dalla Valle, d’Yquem and de Vogüé, Gaja and Guigal, Grace and Grange… the great wines of the world.

Nothing wrong with great wines, of course. But if you line up all these Grand Award winners in a row, it all becomes perfectly clear what is required to achieve grandness: you must carry exactly the same wines that other award winners carry, and lots of them; whether you’re a steakhouse or vegetarian restaurant, if your cuisine is French or Chinese, in Maui or New York

Who established these standards? Do they really reflect the wine consuming public’s expectations? Is this a conspiracy… a tyranny of a few magazines or journalists?

Personally, I think we did this to ourselves. We can’t blame publications, after all, because they only print what most of us want to read. Wineries produce wines that critics like, but critics give the highest scores to wines consumers, retailers and restaurants seem to want most. The reality is that most of us are more easily swayed by quantity rather than quality; just as we are impressed more by well hung, as opposed to well matched, qualities in a wine.

In every restaurant there is probably at least one wine that everyone – managers, servers or sommeliers, and often even the chefs – knows is dynamite with the cuisine. Imagine if wine lists were completely stacked with wines exactly like that; wines not meant to stand out alone, but to make the food experience that much better. But if this makes sense, why the compulsion to build wine lists that include every item in the Oxford Companion to Wine, as if this shotgun approach will unerringly effect memorable food and wine matches? Why are small wine lists, chosen to match food rather than win awards, considered second rate; never worthy of “grand?”

Here’s a thought: instead of bowing to conventional wisdom as to what constitutes great wine, and great wine lists, why don’t we decide for ourselves? Starting with wines that match our menus, and taking it from there. For one thing, at least we won’t have to feel inadequate because we don’t carry Screaming Eagle.

The worse that can happen? Wine lists with more variety and individuality, as opposed to sameness. Guests dining safely under the assumption that no matter what they pick it will go great with their food because someone made sure of that long before they walked in. And finally, sommeliers or servers living happily ever after, sharing those magical, serendipitous moments everyone loves in a restaurant: when everything comes together – seamlessly, the way Bob said it should be.

What a concept… what a pipe dream!