Journal of Wine Economics Volume 17 | 2022 | No. 1

The first section covers five traits of wine, beginning with body. It ranks 47 red wine grapes, from Brachetto as the lightest to Zinfandel as the richest. Similarly, it ranks body among 39 white wine grapes from Melon to Chardonnay, five sparkling wines, and nine dessert wines. It also notes the interactions of the other four traits with body.

The second trait is sweetness, where the authors distinguish five levels of sweetness for still wines and seven for sparkling wines, noting that although sweetness is mea- sured as grams of residual sugar per liter, that measure is not well correlated with one’s perception of sweetness because of the interaction of the other traits with how sweet a wine tastes.

The third trait is tannin, or the polyphenols, found in the grape skins and seeds and in wooden barrels. The authors point out that the health benefits of wine come from tannin, but that wines higher in tannin will taste more bitter; they also rank 44 grapes in their tannin level.

Fourth, they consider acidity, ranking types of wine on a pH scale, with whites generally having higher acidity (lower pH) than reds. Higher acidity wines are lighter bodied and taste less sweet.

The final trait is alcohol or the ethanol level, which is typically 12–15% but can range from 5 to 22%.

Included in the first section’s advice on how to taste wine is a detailed chart on aromas, which lists nine primary aromas, such as black fruit, red fruit, dried fruit, etc., with each of the nine primary aromas subdivided into more specific aromas. For example, the “black fruit” category lists within it seven fruit aromas such as black cherry, blueberry, and boysenberry. In addition to the nine primary aromas, the chart lists 14 secondary and 13 tertiary aromas. Readers are encouraged to write which of these aromas they detect when tasting wine. The first section also includes brief notes about serving and storing wine as well as how wine is made.

In addition to its information on pairings of food and wine, the second section contains brief notes on cooking with wine.

The long third section contains descriptions of 100 common wines, grapes, and blends, including tasting notes and food pairing suggestions. It uses the five traits described in the first section, ranking each of the 100 wines or grapes on a one-to-five scale for each trait. It also gives information on aromas of each of the 100 wines and grapes; my favorite was cat pee for sauvignon blanc. It offers advice on the type of glass to use to serve the wine, the temperature at which to serve it, and whether it should be decanted. There is a circular bar chart for each wine showing where it is grown and the worldwide acreage devoted to it, as well as similar varietals that one might wish to try. In several places, the book help- fully includes suggested pronunciations.

The final section—on the major wine-producing countries—has a map for each of 14 countries, showing its various grape-growing regions and the type of grape grown in each region. For each country, it has notes on several of its wines. The notes are more extensive for some of the countries than for others. They are espe- cially extensive for France, giving as much space to each of its wine regions as several of the other countries; there are also extensive notes for Italy, Spain, and the United States.

“I believe that people write autobiographies for two main reasons. The first may be called the ‘Chronicler’s urge.’ The second may be called the ‘Ecce Homo motive.’ Both impulses spring from the same source…: the desire to share one’s experiences with others… The Chronicler’s urge expresses the need for the sharing of experience related to external events. The Ecce Homo motive expresses the same need with regard to internal events…

Thus the business of writing autobiography is full of pitfalls. On the one hand, we have the starchy chronicle of the stuffed shirt; on the other, the embarrassing nakedness of the exhi- bitionist …Apart from these two extremes there are various other snares which even compe- tent craftsmen are rarely able to avoid. The most common of these is what one might call the ‘Nostalgic Fallacy.’…

Next among the snares is the ‘Dull Dog Fallacy’… [which] requires that the first person sin- gular… should always appear as a shy, restrained, reserved, colourless individual…”

Of course, none of these faults need much explanation to anyone who has read even the best of autobiographies! So how do the memoirs of Gerard Basset (1957–2019), the world’s favourite sommelier, stack up against these criteria?

I first turn to some facts about his life.

Gerard’s mother was a good cook, and in his early career, it seemed more probable that he would end up being a food expert than a wine expert—especially because his parents knew little about wine and he grew up without ever drinking any—quite an achievement for someone who grew up in la France profonde! Gerard left school at the age of 16 but ended up as a Master of Wine and a Master Sommelier, with an MBA and an MSc degree, and was a recipient of the OBE—more letters behind his name than most, as Jancis Robinson pointed out in her tribute.4 In the process of getting there, he held down a very wide range of jobs, all of them part of a search for whom he wanted to become. These included a shop assistant, factory worker, candy maker, delivery assistant and waiter in a restaurant. Some of these were short-lived, others lasted for a few years, but all seem to have contributed to his future success in one way or another.

For example, his early passions were cycling, watching, and playing football, and it was the latter that took him to the United Kingdom (Glasgow) for the first time. His second soccer trip was to Liverpool. His view of the English before the Liverpool trip:

“Liverpool itself didn’t excite me much and nor did the English – my impression was that they were all strange. They drove on the wrong side of the road, had a boring cuisine, loved tea instead of coffee, drank beer at room temperature and had policemen known as ‘Bobby’ who wore funny hats. And they still had royalty, whereas in France we had been a republic for a long time. To top off the list of peculiarities, it always rained in England, or so I believed.

Let’s look at another chapter. The one on Sparkling wines caught my eye. This chapter does a good job teaching about the locales in Champagne, the Méthode Champenoise, and different styles of Champagne while providing a taxonomy of twenty-five well-known houses classified from light-delicate to full and rich.

How many Champagne labels can you name? I cannot get to 10. Did you know there are thousands? I first read about Champagne in Michael Broadbent’s (1980) Great Vintage Wine Book in the 1980s and decided that if Winston Churchill liked Pol Roger, that was good enough for me. I could not tell the taste difference, but I bought it and liked it. It was only years later that I learned from Gary Westby of K&L Wine Merchants that no-name labels could taste as good as famous ones. The book says that there are “more than 260 Champagne houses,” and the pie chart on the same page implies that those houses comprise 80% of the total number, so there must be about 325. Where are the thousands of other labels? I assume that Champagne labels and growers differ, but the course does not offer an explanation.

Horizontal and vertical comparisons of wines are familiar to readers of this Journal. The book recommends at least three such comparisons of two or more wines in each chapter, but not one suggests a “triangle test,” which has become standard in the testing/tasting world (Weil, 2007). Mr. Zraly may not prefer such tests, but should not a complete course alert readers to their existence and merits (or demerits)?

Readers of this Journal will be interested to know that the course omits oenometric research findings from its teachings. There is a discussion of the effects of weather on wine, but there is no mention of the now-classic work of Ashenfelter and others using auction prices to identify the relationship between weather and wine quality (Ashenfelter, 2010). Elsewhere, the course discusses wine words and descriptors but does not question whether anyone can reliably describe, then replicate, wine tastes and smells (Lehrer, 2009). The book also describes and illustrates the steepness of the growing hills in Germany, but unfortunately does not mention the analysis, which has estimated the degree days hitting the grapes on those hillsides as a function of the steepness and orientation of the hillsides, and then has related the degree days to the higher prices the wines fetch, and hence the higher quality of the wine (Ashenfelter and Storchmann, 2010). I do not know whether Mr. Zraly is unaware of oenometric research or whether he finds it irrelevant. I will not speculate, as I am trying not to be grumpy.

Based upon many discussions over the years with oenophiles and with those who have relatively little interest in wine, here are just a few questions I believe ought to be addressed in a course about wine (but are not in this book). How do I deal with wine in a restaurant? What should I do when the waiter hands me the cork?2 What do I do if I do not like the wine? Should I buy and lay down wine? Or buy later at auction?

The narrative focuses on four men, ranging in age from 60s to mid-80s, their well- trained dogs, and their closely guarded territories in the forest outside their Piedmont village.

The men. They are old but enviably vigorous. (This reviewer is old but not so vig- orous!) They care for their dogs, treating them as family members. One of the men, seriously contemplating his mortality at age 87, worries about who will care for his dog once he is gone. He has nightly conversations with his dog on the subject.

The dogs. Amazing! Historically, pigs were used for hunting truffles. The problem was that they ate most of the product. So, truffle hunters turned to specially trained dogs who were more easily encouraged to locate, but not eat, the truffles.

The territory. The forests of Piedmont are commonly held; there are no enclosures or property rights to tracts of forest land. Given the high value of harvested wild truffles,2 and the inability of truffle hunters to claim territorial property rights, truffle hunting is a very secretive affair. The old men and their dogs head for their favorite hunting grounds at night, alone and unwilling to reveal their locations. This has a labor market implication as well. The men are so secretive that they are loath to take on younger apprentices. While it is unclear how the old men orig- inally learned their vocation, their unwillingness to pass along their skills to younger men threatens to force younger men to reinvent the wheel.

The film itself is cinematographically absorbing—picturesque Piedmont land- scapes lusciously portrayed; interior shots of modest homes of wood stoves, rough plastered walls decorated with religious icons, windows open to village and forest; and the dogs tramping through the dampness with their owners. The music by Ed Cortes reminds us that these are not ordinary villages and forests, but Italian ones. There is a certain sadness conveyed in the fact that old men, not long for this world, will take their secrets to the grave. Indeed, in one scene, a priest reassures one of the men that there is truffle hunting in heaven.

There is another sense of sorrow in this film. As in so many other industries, traditional ways of doing things are vanishing. The skills associated with hunting itself are not being learned by a younger generation. The old ways of marketing the truffles—individual hunters taking their product direct to local consumers in village farmers’ markets—are giving way to deals with middlemen who market the product worldwide. The high price of the product is inducing cutthroat competition—the poisoning of dogs by outsiders is not uncommon. Thus, the beauty of the cinematography and music is touched by melancholy.