Regina Janes writes Author: Regina Janes, Emeritus Professor of English, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY. Author most recently of Inventing Afterlives: The Stories We Tell Ourselves About Life After Death, Columbia University Press, “Lemuel Gulliver, Mapmaker,” Studies in Philology (awarded the journal’s Wilson Prize), and “García Márquez in Africa,” Oxford Handbook of Gabriel García Márquez. The omission of my husband’s name is deliberate. I think that would be his preference.
He lived before wine lists were published online. So every new restaurant meal began with a long tedious silence as he paged through the wine list for something cheap and good, or at least affordable and good, consulting his Hugh Johnson and complaining about the light, while his son squirmed and I studied the menu and wondered how long this was going to take this time. Sometimes tensions rose. When he had real trouble finding something, the list was slammed quietly down on the table, thrust at me for a suggestion or solution or recognition of the problem. Then he would have to be soothed and calmed and sent back to the list because I certainly wasn’t going to go without wine, though I wouldn’t put it quite like that. He knew—though I didn’t—that I sulked if I didn’t like the wine, so he carried a double burden: the wine and my mood. He grew up in an evangelical American church that prohibited alcohol, music, dancing, and movies. In high school he went to Germany with AFS and learned about beer; went to university and plunged into theater, and then a friend gave him the 1976 Hugh Johnson wine guide. He was self-taught—with assistance—and well taught. I didn’t pay much attention. I do remember how he glowed when the maître d’ at Boyer’s Les Crayères complimented him on his choice of a Puligny Montrachet (the dollar was then 11-1 on the franc). Whose it was I don’t recall, nor how he knew to order it, but it set a standard for what he would order for us. There were small adventures enabled by his curiosity, research, and good taste and my high school French. Securing access to Jean Thévenet’s cave in Macon and encountering a beautiful pair of young Hugels exiting having ordered their cases of Thévenet; finding Patrick Javillier’s actual house and deciding we had best descend to the shop in town rather than ringing the bell; gazing down the driveway of Coche-Dury in silent awe. In Alsace, the priest blessed the vines before harvest, and the town shared an enormous kugelhopf. I persuaded him to spend a year near the Pic St Loup just as Robert Parker discovered it, and Baubiac, Lancyre, Mortiès, Hortus, Cazeneuve, Bruguière, Lascaux were ours, including a wine dinner at the Auberge du Cèdre, where I sat next to the maître of Mortiès, a mourvèdre magician, and Jean Chevalier, Lascaux, recited his poem to the vines. There were small triumphs—he discovered Bart Marsannay before Hugh Johnson’s guide did. The Mas Jullien vineyard near Gignac in the middle of nowhere, impossible to find, was overrun with buyers who, unlike us, could carry cases home; the clerk at Bourgeois pointed out that the Monts Damnées were right there to be photographed with us. There were amusing catastrophes: a furious young sommelier in Ireland who expected him to buy a more expensive wine when we returned within the week—so did I—but he judged the p/e ratio and stayed with what we had had. A diligent search for La Tonnelle in Bordeaux, with its Johnston profile and Jefferson citation and cases and cases we had carried up-country from NYC, led to a small industrial space that had no name and no invitation or access for its admirers. Workers scurrying back and forth, we drove around, they looked at us oddly, but we could see no way in and could not figure out how to address them or what to ask. From a co-op shop in Fronsac we selected an old Canon Fronsac from a dust-covered, undisturbed, very full bin; when we drove back three days later to buy all of this wine of our dreams, the bin was empty. Someone else was very happy. There were costs: his son remembers France as long days, endless afternoons, sitting in the back seat of the car while his father was in a vineyard or a wine shop. I was bored, too: it was like being in fabric shops with my mother when I was a child, tedium piled upon tedium. I’d look for a bottle I recognized and twiddle. Then he died, after the summer of Mas Jullien, in the winter, ten days before Christmas, five days before his birthday. He left a small cellar and wine library; I catalogued the bottles and shelved the books. When he died, I knew what I liked, but not what anything was. So I had to start learning, to replace him, to internalize him, to continue living the life he would have lived if he could have lived. I am now slightly older than he was when he died, and I am still learning what he is still teaching me. But at restaurants I cheat: to spare our son, I always study the wine list online beforehand, when it is posted. When it is not, well, his father is with us again, taking his time.
The collage of photographs, titled 'Lost in a Land without Vineyards', is the author's own work.
