The Wine Lover's Daughter Read online

  Another reason was that I was confident I could learn. Fadimans were big on education. My father had been educated right out of Brooklyn. My mother had been educated right into an appreciation for La Tâche ’49. “The childish palate,” my father wrote, “will always at first prefer the excessive or the unbalanced taste. Upon certain primitive African or Melanesian tribes you cannot confer a greater gift than a can of peaches. That does not make canned peaches a delectable food.” Setting aside my suspicion that my father made up this morsel of dubious ethnography, and also setting aside the fact that I didn’t like peaches, there was still an encouraging message to be found in the words “at first.” If I hadn’t been granted the sort of where-have-you-been-all-my-life recognition that had overwhelmed my father when he tasted that white Graves in the Bon Marché department store in 1927, well, then, I could learn oenophilia, just as he’d learned how to speak proper English and wear a dinner jacket. Had he not observed that hosts should serve the best wines they could, even to as-yet-unenlightened guests, because “the palate is as educable as the mind or the body”? My tongue could already speak the language of wine; surely the appetite would follow.

  A third reason is that if I liked wine, it would have made my father really, really happy. Jono liked wine; Kim didn’t. He still held out hope for me.

  So I continued to hope too. And I continued to fudge. When my father flew to New York for his Book-of-the-Month Club meetings, he always took me out to an expensive restaurant, and he always ordered wine. Although I never said I loved it, I never said I didn’t. My friends all assumed I did. In my mid-twenties, once I had a regular paycheck from a magazine job, I could be counted on to show up for dinner at their apartments with a dull, safe, mid-priced bottle in hand, always French, usually red (it seemed more sophisticated): Saint-Émilion, Côtes du Rhône, Brouilly. If it was late autumn, a Beaujolais Nouveau.

  When I got married, in my thirties, I was grateful to my father for ordering the wines for our wedding. (George is a beer drinker who wouldn’t have known where to start.) The red was a Monterey Vineyard Pinot Noir, the white a Julius Kayser Piesporter Michelsberg: budget choices. I think it was beginning to dawn on him that it would be a waste to uncork any Latours for me.

  I was even more grateful after Kim opened the borrowed ice cream maker in which he planned to crank five quarts of mint chip ice cream, a festal offering that, to my still-childish but potentially educable palate, no hundred-dollar wine could equal. The canister was rusty. Before you could say “butterfat,” my father flagged a cab to a restaurant-supply store on the Bowery, bought a shiny new one, and saved the day.

  15

  Drunk

  My father often mentioned something he called “the letter Hemingway wrote me when he was drunk.” It was written on November 26, 1933, on board the SS General Metzinger, en route from Marseille to Mombasa. The writer and the addressee had never met. A month earlier, my father had written a New Yorker review of Winner Take Nothing in the form of an open letter to Hemingway. Though largely complimentary, the review had taken Hemingway to task for rehashing his old themes of sex and blood instead of plowing new ground. It ended with a wicked parody that used bullfighting terminology to describe a game of Ping-Pong. My father’s secretary bet him a hundred dollars that Hemingway would be unable to resist responding. She won the hundred.

  Late at night, continuing even after the ship’s writing room was supposed to close, Hemingway poured out 1,734 words on Gertrude Stein, Leon Trotsky, unappreciative reviewers, and the General Metzinger’s toilets, “which burst up like geysers when the ship rolls, plastering your arse with what you hope is at least your own excrement.” He sounded angry at everyone but my father, whose review pleased him so much that he extended the cordial invitation “Will be glad to have you come to lunch when I break Max Eastman’s jaw.” (Max Eastman was one of the unappreciative reviewers.) In the fourth postscript, which wound up and down and around the margins, he wrote:

  Look, I’m 35, I’ve had a damned fine life, have had every woman I ever wanted, have bred good kids, have seen everything I believe in royally f----d to hell (for Scribner’s sake amen), have been wounded many times, decorated many times, got over all wish for glory or a career before I was 20, have always made a living in all times, staked my friends, written 3 books of stories, 2 novels, a comic book and one fairly exhaustive treatise and every chickenshit prick who writes about my stuff writes with a premature delight and hope that I may be slipping. It’s beautiful. But I will stick around and write until I have ruined every one of them, and not go until my time comes. So would not advise you to hedge yet.

  My father would never have written this letter. Nothing could have induced him to cross his Maginot Line of Permissible Obscenity by using the terms “fucked to hell” (even with four letters redacted in mock deference to a prudish publisher) or “chickenshit prick,” or mentioning getting his arse plastered with excrement—especially when addressing a stranger. Nor would he have talked about being wounded and decorated, since he had lived a life of conspicuous inaction in which his chief physical exertions consisted of lifting pens and pulling corks (though he was proud to claim second-or-third-cousinship with Sidney Franklin, né Frumkin, known as the Brooklyn Bullfighter, a friend of Hemingway’s who dispatched a large number of bulls with a double-edged Valencia-steel sword and survived three gorings).

  I saw my father drunk only once. That is remarkable, given that he drank wine virtually every night of his adult life. The occasion was a family dinner at a Los Angeles restaurant. He and my mother shared a bottle, as usual, but it was the Negronis that preceded it—usually one, but on that evening two or three—which put him over the edge. I’m sure he would have passed a walk-the-line test, but he slurred his words slightly and mixed up a couple of them. I remember this half a century later because it was so anomalous.

  Of course he had gotten drunk in earlier decades, starting with the very first time he tasted alcohol. He was fourteen or so. While visiting his brother Ed, he was left alone one afternoon with unfettered access to the liquor cabinet. The most interesting bottle in the cabinet was a small flagon that looked like an artifact from a Grimm’s fairy tale. Its label, in Gothic lettering, read “Kümmel.” As he recalled, “There was no one to tell me that an ounce of kümmel”—a sweet German liqueur flavored with caraway seeds—“is a better thing than two ounces, and a far better thing than twelve ounces.” When Ed returned, his little brother was incoherent but not unhappy.

  My father’s speakeasy days must have contained their share of benders and hangovers, and well into middle age he conformed to the standards of an era in which, as far as I can tell, everyone drank like an unusually capacious fish: a merlan, perhaps. When he was in his fifties, Holiday magazine sent him first class on the RMS Queen Elizabeth to write a series of articles from England. (Oh, how the lot of the journalist has plummeted since the days of the fathomless expense account!) His first night out, he wrote my mother a letter from the ship that, although impeccably phrased, had every reason to sound like the letter Hemingway wrote from his ship. “Finished the champagne,” he reported, “had a glass of port at dinner, a sherry before dinner, two cigars and two ales—and feel fine.” But the multiplicity of beverages was already atypical. He sounded more like the father I knew by the third night of the voyage, when he wrote that he had shared a Château Lafite ’52 (a gift from his editor), and the fourth, when he shared a Clos de Vougeot ’53. (He derived particular pleasure from the Queen Elizabeth’s galley and cellar because they provided such a cheering counterpoint to railroad cuisine, which in his view had grievously declined; after a particularly unfortunate meal in an East Coast dining car, complete with tenth-rate wine, he commented that the Donner Party had eaten better.)

  My father wasn’t an alcoholic; not even close. He might well have been if he hadn’t inclined so steeply toward wine, a tilt that began in his twenties and became more pronounced with each decade. By the time he was in his se
venties and we were dining at the Quilted Giraffe, spirits occupied only a small corner of his drinking life.

  In his view, wine was not about getting drunk. Pleasantly jazzed, yes; lit up like the Commonwealth, no. The longer I knew him, the better I understood this. Wine was about conversation.

  In 1975, he sat down with an interviewer in Milwaukee and, as she described it, “one of the thin Cuban cigars he obtains through devious channels.” He posed a question: If the same four people drank martinis on one night and wine on another, how would their conversations differ? He said he’d be willing to bet that on the night they drank wine, their conversation would be mellower, more tolerant, and less egotistical—in short, more civilized.

  Milwaukee was not one of my father’s usual literary way stations; he stopped there on a book tour to promote The Joys of Wine. I had never seen him happier than he was during the years he spent assembling this eight-pound compendium—as one reader described it, not just a coffee table book but a coffee table—of oenological facts, charts, recipes, pictures, stories, poems, and essays, including some of his own. Joys provided an opportunity not only to drink a lot of wine and get paid for it but to collaborate with his old friend Sam Aaron, a man of gusto and brio and mojo (as well as many other estimable attributes that didn’t end in o), for whose wine-store catalogs he had written many introductions over the decades and been paid in many fine bottles. My father called Sam “the vintner of my discontent,” but he was precisely the opposite. Fadiman and Aaron went together, according to The New York Times, “like Mouton and Rothschild or Moët and Chandon.” (The pair was actually a trio. Much of the research was done by John Laird, the nascent connoisseur at my brother’s birthday party, for whom a stint on the sales floor of Sam’s shop, Sherry-Lehmann, had served as the first rung of his ascent up the wine-industry ladder.)

  My father wrote in The Joys of Wine, “Generally speaking, we demand something from hard liquor: a punctual reaction. But we expect a wine of quality to demand something from us.” He pointed out that the Founding Fathers drank wine, and that Andrew Jackson’s preference for corn liquor reflected a coarsening of the national tone. To his Milwaukee interlocutor, he observed that our country had two drinking traditions—rum, whiskey, and gin on the one hand, and Prohibition on the other—and that he disliked them equally. Wine was superior to both: “in moderation, of course.”

  Sam Aaron and my father on tour with their oversized offspring, 1975

  And—though it seems strange to say this about a man who put away half a bottle nearly every night—he was moderate. He drank only with dinner. Unlike Hemingway, who said he never drank when he wrote but didn’t always mean it, my father would never have drunk wine or anything else while he was working, any more than Julia Child would have drunk while she was on camera. (That glass she raised every time she said “Bon appétit!” contained water tinted with Gravy Master.)

  16

  High

  After drinking too much wine with Peter in the New Hampshire farmhouse when I was eighteen, I got mildly muddled on a few occasions, but never more than mildly, which means that—improbably, embarrassingly, pathetically—I have been truly drunk only twice in my life.

  In my twenties and thirties, feeling the need for corrupting influences of some sort, I dipped a fraction of a toe into a few alternative reservoirs. I bought a small blue glass bong, not because I was a bona fide stoner but because my throat rasped whenever I inhaled an unmediated joint, much as I imagined my father’s throat must have rasped when he was breaking in pipes for the rich boys at Columbia. After half an hour, my sense of mild euphoria was trumped by a craving not for the traditional post-smoke extra-large pizza but for a Vicks mentholated throat lozenge. Even after its mollifying passage through my bong’s water-filled belly, the marijuana had too much taste. Just like wine.

  A friend who crashed for a few weeks at my place left a tiny pile of cocaine as a house present. I didn’t like it either. Snorting it through a rolled dollar bill made me feel like an idiot and also as if I’d just drunk ten cups of coffee. Why not just drink coffee, which I actually liked? One cup, not ten. Consumed through the mouth, not the nose.

  The only drug I enjoyed was Ecstasy. I once swallowed two thirds of a 100-milligram tab, painstakingly razored because I figured I weighed two thirds as much as the average male. (I was careful even when I was being careless.) My connection was a friend who had been given a couple of free samples by a psychiatrist he was photographing for Life. Ecstasy was still legal when he did the story, but by the time we tried it, it had been reclassified as a Schedule I narcotic: a thrilling transgression for someone so law-abiding that she thought long and hard before jaywalking. Forty-five minutes after I took it, I was sure I would never be grumpy again and uncertain why anyone in the history of the world had ever been grumpy. But during the next couple of weeks, I had an intermittent sensation of warmth on one of my knees, as if a shaft of sunlight were grazing it. Had the Ecstasy messed with my synapses, in which case might the next step be the inability to distinguish between “that” and “which”? And even if I decided to take that appalling risk, could I really imagine myself sallying forth to Washington Square and marching up to a dealer in my little black wool coat buttoned up to my chin and my fuzzy white Icelandic hat, the one that made me look like a mushroom, and saying, “Um, excuse me, sir…,” and returning home with a Baggie (was Ecstasy sold in Baggies?) of round white pills that (just my luck) would surely be adulterated with rat poison?

  If I wasn’t going to take drugs, and I didn’t like hard liquor, and I didn’t like beer, I was, ipsis factis, condemned to a life of monkish sobriety until my wine palate kicked in. Come on, I told it. What are we waiting for?

  The problem was that I sometimes wondered if, despite my ability to roll my rs, I might actually not be the kind of person who liked wine. Maybe I wasn’t educable after all. Even if I drank it in moderation—a foregone conclusion, since even a glass or two left me hot and groggy—I knew I couldn’t enjoy wine unless I thought it was fun to get at least a little buzzed.

  My father certainly did. He wasn’t talking about tannins when he wrote, “Neither wine nor hard liquor would be drunk unless they produced effects more interesting than those of milk.” Those effects were interesting not only because they were pleasant but also because they granted him a temporary release every evening from the anxiety that had filled his head or lurked in the wings all day: the conviction that he was awkward, counterfeit, permanently stuck in Brooklyn. He found other modes of self-emancipation enjoyable as well. When I was in high school, I discovered a neatly rolled joint in his desk, presumably furnished by the groovy writer with whom he occasionally took walks. My father didn’t need a bong.

  Release held little appeal for me. The simple truth was that I was scared of getting drunk. I didn’t want to be like Hemingway (indiscretions), or Peter (vomiting), or Charles Lamb (dead log), or Hartley Coleridge (ditches). I had understood my character all too well in the sixth grade when I aligned myself with let’s-go-to-the-library Apollo rather than party-animal Dionysus. All my life people had told me to relax. I didn’t like relaxing. I always took showers, never baths. I hated dancing. I held the steering wheel with both hands instead of draping one arm casually out the window on warm summer days.

  William James wrote, “Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes.” Maybe I was just the kind of person who says no.

  17

  Vintage

  I keep in my study an empty Madeira bottle that my father gave me. It has followed me since my twenties, from apartment to loft to house, a reliquary in which reposes not a saint’s bones but my father’s oenological residuum—his lees, you might say. A photograph I took of it is the wallpaper on my computer, which sits on my desk, ten feet from the bottle. It’s a little like looking at a framed picture of your baby while she’s sleeping right next to you.

  I’m looking at it now: the bottle, no
t the photograph. It’s stubby and wide, like an apothecary bottle, with a cylindrical stopper that was once sealed with wax. Inside, clinging to the clear glass, there is a tobacco-colored pattern of sediment—the desiccated remains of grape skins and pulp—that looks like a map of an imaginary continent drawn by a child.

  The liquid that once filled this bottle was made in 1835 on the Portuguese island of Madeira, off the northwest coast of Africa. Madeira was the most popular wine in colonial America. When my father wrote that the Founding Fathers drank wine, it was Madeira he was thinking of. They used it to toast the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Benjamin Franklin wrote that he would like to be embalmed in a cask of Madeira with a few friends and revived a century later so he could see how his country had turned out.