Edinburgh Central
Library is in the heart of the city’s Old Town, a tourist mecca. A stone’s throw
from the entrance, visitors will see a mass of scaffolding, behind which a
hotel has been hidden for years. It is an embarrassment to this once handsome
capital city, but nobody seems to want to do anything about it.
I went to the
Central Library not to see this eyesore, but to read The Wines of the Rhône
Valley and Provence, by Robert Parker, the ‘Emperor of Wine’. The
book was published a long time ago, in 1987, and is for reference only. It took
me back to my student days, when I whiled away hours reading texts which were
far less interesting.
It may legitimately
be asked why I bothered. Well, I wanted something to write about and I’m very
keen on wines from the Rhône Valley. I was curious
to discover what this legendary wine critic had to say about one of my
favourite regions.
I quickly
discovered that Robert Parker was a really excellent writer. I don’t think I’d
ever read that about him. He is still famous for having a profound influence on
wine styles before the Millennium, owing to his preference for very ripe,
full-bodied wines, but his talents as a writer seem to have been forgotten.
I found myself
laughing at his turn of phrase in that silent room around the corner from
Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. Gigondas ‘seems to have as many dogs and cats as human
inhabitants’, he wrote. Now of course a famous appellation, ‘Gigondas does not have
a distinguished history’. Hence the fact that ‘all the growers and négociants seem to relish’ its previous incarnation as a ‘booster wine’ for red Burgundy.
He was not a fan
of the wine villages in the département of the Drôme
in the southern Rhône, which he described as ‘one-horse
towns’. As for Vinsobres, which is these days considered a source of some
excellent red wines, its name ‘seems a contradiction in itself (“sober wine”)’.
The eastern side of the river in the southern Rhône,
an area of ‘sun-scorched, lazy hill towns’ and ‘spectacular vistas’, was ‘studded
with…red-faced vignerons offering a free taste of their wines’.
For someone with
such a famous palate, I found some of Parker’s comments about grapes and wines
puzzling. The white grape Bourboulenc, he wrote, ‘offers plenty of body’. I don’t
think I’ve ever heard that. On the contrary, I thought it was more famous for
having acidity, making it a rarity in the southern Rhône. I’d always believed
that Grenache Blanc, another white grape, was rather neutral. ‘Deeply fruity’
was Parker’s assessment, however. As for the rosés of Gigondas, these were ‘light, vibrant,
fresh, underrated’, in his view. Admittedly, my tasting experience is limited,
but the ones I tried were flabby and alcoholic.
Parker’s tasting
notes were surprising, to say the least. One of the aromas of the white grape Roussanne was ‘coffee’, in his estimation. I did a double-take when I read that. Likewise,
I raised my eyebrows when I saw that one of the ‘telltale aromas’ of the red
grape Mourvèdre was ‘tree bark’. His
assertion that the ‘best’ examples of Grenache had an aroma of ‘roasted peanuts’
also had me scratching my head. Either I haven’t tasted enough or Robert Parker
had an eccentric palate.
I didn’t read all
of it, but I enjoyed Robert Parker’s book very much. I’d say that he was a far
more gifted and entertaining writer than the vast majority of people writing
about wine now. Nor was he afraid of acknowledging his limitations. ‘Frankly, I
have no idea what this grape tastes like’, he wrote of Picpoul. Now that’s hard
to imagine.
