Immerse In Adventures On The Wine Route: A Wine Buyers Tour Of France Executed By Kermit Lynch Offered As Printed Matter

the various levels of wine knowledge are, this book assumed I was exactly one level above where I actually am.
That made it an entertaining read some of Kermit Lynch's opinions seem hilariously pedantic to a layperson, but a difficult one to read on a plane without the use of Google.


I enjoyed the afterword, where Lynch reflects on many of his observations and the winemakers he has met, and where his softening with age is obvious.
He is undoubtedly skilled at his craft, Overall, this one was a bit too nameheavy names of winemakers, vineyards, regions for a novice wine enthusiast like me but it was joyfully atmospheric at times amp I definitely learned a few things about winemaking!

Lynch has a clear appreciation for wine and knows an interesting bottle when he tastes it, but acknowledges how his thinking can sound like an old man complaining about the “good old days.
” I honestly found the afterword, writtenyears later, to be the most interesting Lynch prefers a lowintervention wine but avoids dogmatism, finding a middle way between the bigname vineyards, and the natural wines taking up an increasing share of the market today.
This was clearly such an important book about wine at the time of its original publishing, and it stood the test of time and feels so fresh and relevant now.
Lynch's voice is personal, unassuming, rough around the edges in all of the right ways, and this book reads like an honest account of a pioneering career in wine.
Interestingly, I read it shortly after Rajat Parr's Sommelier's Atlas of Taste, and the two books have parallel structures organized by region, with personal anecdotes of visits to winemakers and travelogue style tips mingled with educational knowledge about the winemaking and wines themselves.
The travel advice is the only part of the book that really feels dated everything else feels perfectly relevant for a modern wine lover, especially when considering how original many of Lynch's insights were during his time.


The starting point here is particularly notable, as Lynch emphasizes a lot of what was going wrong with wine in thes/s: pressled tastes for big wines, leading to heavy extraction styles yielding generic tasting high alcohol wines processes such as chaptalization to meet these tastes technological change often coinciding with generational change at wine estates leading to homogeneous wines inconsistencies in bottling/shipping techniques leading to risk aversion in the industry.
And Lynch's role in working toward solutions was clear: investing in temperature controlled shipping, persuading winemakers to bottle unfiltered cuvees for him, seeking out and encouraging producers experimenting with less chemical processes, etc.
He often refers to 'natural' and 'living' wines, which is interesting given his timing around the start of some natural wine trends but also argues against absolutism

around things like sulfur dosing.
Understood around the starting point of wines of the time, the trend toward more distinctive and 'natural' wines that resisted homogeneous monotony seems like a great evolution but also suggests that maybe today's natural wine movement has gone far beyond the point of sensibility.


Lastly, the profiles of many of the vignerons and the transition away from the 'old France' make for interesting studies of character and place the stories of the Peyraud family of Tempier, and the Bruniers of Vieux Telegraphe, were particularly enjoyable.
Some of Lynch's forebodings for the future proved prescient, while others were happily avoided: his fear that Guigal's success would prove a poisoned chalice for Cote Rotie disproven by subsequent trends, his worries over the succession of Gentaz's wines and legacy mixed, and his concern over Chauvet's lack of natural Beaujolais heirs disproven due to Lynch's work with the Gang of Four which is discussed in the afterword.


This was a highly worthwhile read in my wine education and will be a pillar of my wine library for years to come.
At a recent wine tasting we were comparing notes on the bottlings we liked bestcan there be any surprise they were all Kermit Lynch imports, including one from his touchstone producer, Domaine Tempier These wines all embodied a certain kind of honesty, integrity, and truth to form, especially the Tempier.
Indeed, it is the philosophy of Tempierhard work, graciousness, respect for tradition, and innovation that is at the heart of this wonderful, wonderful book.


"Adventures on the Wine Route" is not a rosetinted look at France and its wine producersKermit is extremely critical of many things, and it is a testament to his writing ability that the reader hangs on every word, cringing along with him when he goes to Chablis, or witnesses a favored producer cut corners in the name of "progress".
Though it is tempting to view the book as an antiglobalization tract avant la lettre, it is really much more than that Lynch has spent forty years importing French and Italian wines into the heart of California wine country, he is hardly an antimondialiste! What he does do is advocate passionately for natural wines, made true to their conditions, their terroir.
This book was published inmany of the devastating trends that Kermit was witnessing at that time have continued in their course.
At the same time, however, the "natural wine" movement has entered the mainstream and continues to grow and find advocates.
Thus, the dated quality of some of the observations and remarks only serves to add power to their prescience.
Did I mention the characters This book is packed with memorable figures from all over the hexagon, such as you can only meet in France passionate, crotchety, gracious, conniving, brilliant.
. . they live on in the reader's mind, long after the book has been closed

If you'll forgive the egregious insertion of a literary reference, allow me to posit that Kermit's wine philosophy contains something of Hemingway's remark about writing "one true sentence" the producers he favors write "the truest sentence" they know.
And unlike many of Papa's writings, they are always worth reading, Lately, reading about food and wine has been putting me in a happy place, This book is from the lates so some of the info in it is probably outdated, but that doesn't take away from how delightful this is to read.
This was such a good book and it didn't hit you over the head with tons of wine terminology etc.
that just can become so boring and not enjoyable at all, It just let you learn about it all through a great travel/memoir type book about his journeys buying wine in France and all of the interesting people he encounters trying to buy wine for his shop in Berkley and what an innovator he was in the wine world.
If you are into wine and into France or even if you are just into France or just into wine, this book is a fun read.
I enjoyed it a lot,and best reads pile, I also must add that I had the pleasure of drinking one the wines that he imported the other day at dinner.
I ordered it not knowing he was the importer and when I looked at the back of the wine, there was his name, what a pleasant surprise, and it was a really great bottle of wine.
So there's that too. I was brought to this book from a NY Times book review podcast that recounted some of the great books on travel and wine.
It was an interesting account, and I am inspired to become more sophisticated in wine consumption.
However, I am dubious that many readers could relate at all to the terminology and the subtleties of this account.

Written about travels in the mids, much of the book concerns the rapid changes the author perceives about wine making in the various regions of France.
There is an unapologetic and repeated claim that wine making at this time was regressing from a grand tradition of yore.
Good wine cannot be made except by grizzled craftsmen who honor tradition and eschew changes, Great wine can only derive from orchards that have low yields, and most all of the labor must be by hand.
There is a grudging possibility that despite the regression, the overall quality of wine is somewhat better than in the past.
However, the improvement is debatable, and it is achieved at virtually eliminating the potential for greatness.

With such a pessimistic vantage, how is one to account for wine of the present,years hence The only possible sense is that the days of great wine making must be extinct, and today's connoisseur's
can only read about the fabled past.
And this sorry state is for the elite! The rest of us are to be pitied, indeed.
At the end of the book is a paragraph that includes advice about drinking a case of one wine, and then another, and.
. . at some point becoming enlightened into the subtleties that result in a miraculous wine drinking experience.
He says that wine is living art, but unlike other art, it does not require genius to conceive only the humble farmer, dutiful to tradition, detail, and craft.

I am inspired towards a more sophisticated approach to something I enjoy, but I very much doubt I have enough ambition to do the work to achieve that improved sophistication, especially when the wine making world has all gone to hell.
Book rec. from R. Sterling in "How to Eat around the world" I don't think I would have enjoyed this book nearly as much were I not already quite familiar with the wines and wine regions of France, and the wine industry in general.
When he tells about drinking a Vouvray from thes, my mouth watered, When he tells about his first meeting with the Bruniers, I thought of the several bottles of Vieux Telegraphe I've been lucky enough to have drunk, and the wine grew even richer in my memory.


However, even if you are not a seasoned wino, the many annecdotes about the people he encounteres on his wine tours and little nuggets of French culture in general are very delightful.
His descriptions of cuisine are wonderful, as are those of the landscapes,

It's also an interesting read for anyone interested in the evils of globalization and corporate takeovers many of the passionate pleas that Lynch makes herewithin resonate highly with the antiestablishment of the wine industry such as myself: the sterilization and homogenization of regional wines in the hopes of appealing to a global market, the evils of wine "scores" and "blind tastings," and the struggles of small wine merchants to keep up with huge banking corporations who can afford to pay more for a prized winemaker's juice.
These points of contention were most recently and quite forcefully reiterated by the film Mondovino, but are done so much more eloquently, and in my opinion, effectively, here by Lynch.


Although the book is technically "out of date" for the current wine market, most of it holds up very well.
In fact, trends Lynch sees in the midlates the beginnings of trends which only continued to become more prevalent, giving this book an almost prophetic feel.
The principles he espouses are as worth pursuing and fighting for now as they were then.


If you enjoy this book, I must highly recommend the wine writing of Terry Theise: in the same vein, but Theise is like the Keith Richards to Lynch's Mick Jagger: not so in the spotlight, but possibly even more rock n roll in many ways.
sitelink skurnikwines. com/msw/terry

Kermit Lynch was an innovator of importing wine, and remains a savior of sorts.
Above all, he is an example to anyone with a passion to pursue their passions,


.