Born in the Valais, this former philosophy teacher is one of the most renowned wine tasters of his generation. The fruit of decades of peregrinations in vineyards the world over, this founder of the Club des Amateurs de Vins Exquis has now published a book: L’Archipel du Goût. A voyage of initiation into the world of wine, between rivers, seas, shores, hillsides, volcanoes, summits…
How did you approach this book?
Like a real road movie. With a starting point: Burgundy, the archetypal terroir. An imprint. For me, it’s where it all began: my first discovery of wine, climats, crus… It’s where I was lucky enough to meet people like Hubert de Montille, Henri Jayer, Lalou Bize-Leroy, Aubert de Villaine… And then, in this book, we head for the Rhône. Like Rimbaud’s Le bateau ivre, I travel down this river, arrive in the Mediterranean, head for the Aegean Sea to Mount Athos and, further on, Armenia, one of the countries where wine originated, along with Georgia… Each time, a new geography of tastes and encounters, like paintings, each different from the next, to be explored at your leisure. Because I also wanted rhythm. The very thing that, according to Roland Barthes, brings pleasure to the text. These days, stories are so formatted. There are no surprises. But life is full of surprises…
So this is not a technical book?
Not at all. After teaching wine, taking part in thousands of verticals, horizontales and other tastings of all kinds, writing numerous in-depth articles, notably for the biannual Vinifera, on estates, appellations, wine-growing regions, etc., I wanted something different. I wanted to take a different approach to wine, to help people who know nothing about it to appreciate it, to make them understand what it really is, through travel.
What exactly is wine to you?
Wine is a gift, something offered to us. It’s also a promise. It’s a promise to meet again, to spend a moment together, in a time that is suddenly free of all contingencies and worries. It’s a form of communion, a bond. Hence the name given to this book. Taste is eminently subjective. We all taste differently, depending on our physiology, our history… In this respect, everyone can be considered as an island. Despite this, and this is the beauty of it, representations of taste are being created everywhere, through communities, collectives, prescribers… Aesthetics of taste are thus being created, linking the islands that we are one by one.
Isn’t this link weakened?
Yes, we are losing it. No doubt because of a lack of historical memory. The younger generations, who are particularly addicted to social networking sites, don’t always think about where things come from or their original meaning. We’ve seen this in Burgundy with the counterfeiters, to whom I’ve devoted a few pages, who have misappropriated wine by using it as a social lift. This is fairly symptomatic of the current situation. More than ever, terroir represents the foundation on which the wine pyramid can exist, as a symbol that is both philosophical and even mystical. But in reality, its expressions do not even represent 5% of world production. Everything else is technological or industrial. We are at a crucial crossroads. Wine is under threat. It is increasingly associated with alcohol. That’s why in this book I look at the link between inebriation and sobriety. I think this is a fundamental issue. In my opinion, the best way to combat alcoholism is precisely the culture and civilisation of fine, terroir-based wines with a deep flavour. We need to promote them and, in a way, perpetuate the mission of the symposiarch who, at the banquets of ancient Greece, determined what each person could drink to achieve the right level of inebriation.
You talk about flavour: cuisine is a regular guest in your book…
Cuisine and wine are linked. Obviously. As far as I’m concerned, I started out as a cook. After eight years as a boarder at the Abbaye de Saint-Maurice, all I wanted to do was sit down at one of the great restaurants in Geneva, where I now lived. I was 20 years old. Two or three years later, I was off on the taste trail, never missing an opportunity, as soon as I’d put a bit of money aside, to try out a 2 or 3 stars restaurant. I was so passionate about it that I did a work placement with Frédy Girardet. He offered to keep me on, but I had other desires: I wanted to see and experience the world. Wine fuelled this ambition. I set up an import company and discovered a lot of little-known winegrowers like Jules Chauvet, Marcel Lapierre and Anselme Selosse. I worked with them. Everything had to be created. I was extraordinarily lucky…