Adventures on the Wine Route - Kermit Lynch

This is a book for people who like two things - wine and France.  Lynch is wine buyer with a wine shop that demands high quality wines to sell to his clientele and he makes an annual trip to France to sample, explore, and discover the right wines to buy.

It ends up being a travel log that documents many classic wine areas - describes the land and introduces the reader to fascinating wine makers and even some classic restaurants.  The wines he drinks are wines I cannot afford, but would love to taste, yet it is not the fact that these wines are out of my budget that matters - it is the discussions that he has with the wine makers, the connection he makes with the land, the cellars and caves, and the importance of the right process.

He compares the wines and challenges the reader to trust his own palate and not to be overly influenced by the wine scores.  He is not worried about the wine scores, but frustrated by them because the scores drive the industry and cause the wine makers to try to make uniform wines in the style that gets the score - not the wine that the grapes and terroir would suggest.

He sees vineyards that he had bought for years become uniform and boring.  He sees the old oak barrels replaced by glass and steel and the wine becomes a laboratory experiment instead of a unique personality. As the vineyards "modernize" he loses his sources and finds disappointments in many caves where the wine is great in the barrel and terrible in the bottle.

Because people want a wine without the sugar sands that are natural the vineyards go to bottlers who filter twice and remove the character and nose of many classic wines.

The author advises us to celebrate the diversity of the wines and vineyards to accept some fizz, some sediment, some cloudiness.  "There is so much contained in a glass of good wine.  It is a gift of nature that tastes of man's foibles, his sense of the beautiful, his idealism and virtuosity."

The book was published in 1988.