In Vinos Felicitas
“What I like about this organization,” said my husband, raising his glass of Eitelsbacher Karthauserhofberg Burgberg Auslese, 1959, “is that there’s no uplift.”
“No uplift at all,” said I. Raising mine in turn, I paused to admire the pale yellow color of the wine and to inhale its bouquet (like wildflowers, only heavier) before taking a sip.
As a rule, there is too much uplift at our house: too many committees, too many worthwhile causes. So it was, really, the promise of a richly complicated, purely sensual good time that lured us to Chicago one weekend last May for the First International Convention of the Wine and Food Societies of the World. That, and a burning curiosity to learn what a gourmets’ convention would be like. Thus we found ourselves, at noon on a Friday, seated at one of several long, long tables in the Florentine Room of the PickCongress Hotel, tasting German wines.
Behind us, the dry, precise voice of the commentator told us about the village of Eitelsbach on the Ruwer, the Carthusian monastery, the monks, the grapes. The commentator was Peter Sichel, of the famous Sichel firm of vintners, and he said, “The wine in this case is from a great year, 1959, and it is an auslese. It has kept its characteristics very well. It has the balance and elegance typical to wines of this region, though here it has a fullness and body which one only finds in great years from wines made from ripe and overripe grapes.”
Eitelsbacher Karthauserhofberg Burgberg Auslese, 1959, was wine number three, and had been preceded by two 1964’s: a Wiltinger Sandberg Natur and a Graacher Himmelreich im Himmelreich. There were seven more wines to go before lunch; we would travel (or, rather, our taste would travel) the Saar, the Ruwer, the Moselle, and the Rhine, moving from the driest wines to the fullest.
But drinking with a commentator is not like regular drinking. And when, in addition, you are drinking to a printed program, with rows of polished, neatly numbered glasses before you and rows of highly trained, numbered waiters behind you; when you drink with convenient baskets of hard rolls to cleanse your palate and the knowledge that five more wine tastings, three luncheons, a banquet, and two dinners lie ahead of you over the weekend, it hardly seems like drinking at all.
The German wine tasting was the first full meeting of this convention, which had attracted over one hundred and fifty gourmets, gastronomes, epicures, vintners, enologists, bons vivants, and connoisseurs from throughout the United States (including two gentlemen from Hawaii), and from England, Scotland, South Africa, and Australia. It turned out to be the most extraordinary bash in American culinary history, and its like will probably never be seen again, though larger banquets have been given, and on occasion more wines have been drunk. But never have so many been served so much in so short a time.
The fact that this happened in Chicago rather than New Orleans, New York, Washington, London, or other supposedly more sophisticated cities only shows how much the American style of life has changed in the last twenty years. Before the war, any notion that there might be more to food and drink than a good steak and a bottle of bourbon was hard to find west of the Hudson. Now, tout au contraire, few cities are too rude or too provincial to lack at least one dedicated group of diners who think of their meals not only as entertainment but ultimately as a kind of art form. If this seems exaggerated, consider that the Wine and Food Society has chartered chapters in Buffalo, Kansas City, Mobile, Muncie, Phoenix, Omaha, Wichita, Spokane, Milwaukee, and Fresno; and that their menus are sent to the parent society in London, which prints them — like concert programs — in the back pages of its magazine, Wine & Food. So we learn that on November 2 of last year, Toast Lucca, Potage Gentilhomme, Filet de Sole àa la Marguery, Sorbet au Citron, Filet de boeuf à la Cendrillion, Salade de Maison, Crepes Walterspeil, and Fromages Assortis were eaten in Wichita. 0 temporal 0 mores!
On May 6 in Chicago, however, we were eating an authentic German lunch (so billed on the program), “accompanied by various brands of Liebfraumilch and Sekt.” Having already sampled ten various brands of Moselle, Saar, Franconia, Rheingau, Rhinehessen, and Pfalz, the convention had recovered from its first moments of hesitation and self-consciousness and was off to a flying start. Above the rattle of dishes and cutlery rose an amiable roar of conversation — a highpitched, pleasant sound peculiar to wine tastings, and quite different from the growling and howling heard at cocktail parties. Since cocktails are anathema to the gourmet, no spirits were served until German brandies and Stutterer Kirchwasser arrived with the coffee. No water, salt, or pepper appeared
on the table, nor was any smoking allowed during the meal: these are rigid rules of the Chicago chapter, the strongest and certainly the most formidable branch of the Wine and Food Society in the United States. Though many other chapters are for men only, few others are quite as strict with their members. But then, what other chapters have officers who wear silk robes the color of Burgundy wine, trimmed with gold, and bear titles of Sir Bacchus, Cup Bearer, Governor, Lucullus, Tacitus? (To me it was the one disappointment of the convention that these gentlemen, all Chicago businessmen and professional men, never wore their robes.)
Friday night there was an American wine tasting and dinner, and by a lucky accident we sat next to a California couple who had been making their own wine for several years. From them we learned something about California wines that we held always supposed but never known for sure: most vintage, unblended California wine is made and bottled privately, or in such small quantity that it is all sold before it reaches the market.
“ This wine is all right,” they said (we were drinking Grey Reisling, Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir), “but you should taste ours!”
We said we’d love to.
They said that because they were amateurs their wine couldn’t be sold or sent anywhere; it had to be food and drink — which, of course, it is. For when Simon passes judgment, that opinion is based, as he says, “upon experience gained during the sixty consecutive years during which I have drunk wine daily.”
On Saturday morning he made a short speech in a little room with hard chairs and a microphone, the kind that hotels reserve for committee meetings. Speaking of the founding of the Society, he gave a kind of gourmet’s credo which had been formulated in reaction to the gloom and austerity of Depression years, but which still applies today.
“We declared boldly and in simple, sober prose our faith in quality and our contempt for mediocrity. We claimed that it was not only legitimate, but sensible and advisable, to seek and serve and enjoy all that was best in food and drink —of course in moderation. We proclaimed that good wine was the best partner of good food, and that both were, plainly, essential conditions of a gracious way of living and also of physical fitness and mental alertness. We invited all men of taste and sense to pay an intelligent interest in the problems and pleasures of the table, to come together and enjoy each other’s company. . . .”
After that, there was a tasting of Portuguese wines, followed by a smorgasbord in the Great Hall.
The main event of the convention took place on Saturday night: a French banquet preceded by a dozen champagnes. For this single dinner two complete dress rehearsals — food and all — were held, one in November and the other in January, when the cooks and kitchen boys and a handpicked corps of waitersand sommeliers cooked and served the whole thing.
In hotel staff alone, it took eighty people working a full day’s shift to provide the convention’s wine and serve its food. Add to this the two years of work and planning done by members of the Chicago chapter, and the planning, shipping, and correspondence carried on by the London Society. . .
“It makes me tired just thinking about it,” said my husband when I told him about it at the Traditional English Luncheon on Sunday.
“Well, there’s another convention three years from now in Australia,”
I said. “Do you want to go?”
“Better wait until the one after that,”he said. “It’ll take more than three years to digest this one.”