A Chapter for Every Bottle
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

This has shaped up to be a season of what might literally be described as big wine books. Size apparently does matter.
The great American wine critic Robert Parker Jr. has issued a 704-page tome titled “The World’s Greatest Wine Estates: A Modern Perspective” (Simon & Schuster, $75). It is mostly an exercise in repackaging Mr. Parker’s pensees from his newsletter, the Wine Advocate. Mr. Parker is unrivaled in his market influence, thanks to exhaustive wine tastings that are reported in breathless yougotta-have-it prose. His palate is acute, his opinions are expressed with assurance, and his followers are legion and well-heeled. Mr. Parker is not just the stuff of legend, but also of envy, fear, derision, and (deserved) admiration, as well as a full-fledged biography published this fall: “The Emperor of Wine: The Rise of Robert M. Parker, Jr. and the Reign of American Taste” by Elin McCoy (Ecco, $25.95).
And the great English wine writer, Hugh Johnson, has, for his part, served up a handsomely produced but surprisingly – for Mr. Johnson is a superb stylist possessed of a fine mind – vacuous rehash of his thoughts in the form of a 384-page memoir titled “A Life Uncorked” (University of California, $34.95).
As memoirs go, “A Life Uncorked” isn’t much of one. The life Johnsonian remains tightly stoppered, with a paucity of personal detail. What is displayed, apart from a lot of blather about dusty bottles gone by, is an unabashed longing for a wine world before Mr. Parker came along – and for the now gone days when Mr. Johnson and his British colleagues ruled the wine-dark sea of scribbling.
“Taste in the past was largely a matter of harmless fashion,” Mr. Johnson writes. “In American hands it feels more like a moral crusade. … Imperial hegemony lives in Washington and the dictator of taste in Baltimore,” he writes, referring to Mr. Parker, who lives in Monkton,Md. If you still don’t catch his drift, a few paragraphs later we are told that “Wine is not the only field in which American culture has an imperialistic swagger.”
Happily, not all of this year’s wine tomes are so lusterless. One stands out as a model of all that is good and true and considered in wine writing. “The Wines of the Northern Rhone” by John Livingstone-Learmonth (University of California Press, $55) is nothing less than an exemplar of superb, carefully considered and researched wine writing. At 704 pages and nearly 4 pounds, it’s no lightweight in any sense.
“The Wines of the Northern Rhone” may seem an overly narrow focus in this era of encyclopedism. But it is saved by the fact that France’s northern Rhone Valley is home to two of the world’s greatest red wines, Cote-Rotie and Hermitage, and at least one of the greatest whites, the underappreciated (but alas, not underpriced) white Hermitage.
You might well ask how a wine like white Hermitage can be underappreciated and yet not underpriced.The answer is the influence of Robert Parker Jr.His passion for the wines of the entire length of the Rhone Valley single-handedly restored fame, respect, and not least, new price levels, to a region that only 15 years ago languished in obscurity.
Mr. Livingstone-Learmonth, whose palate does not seem congruous with Mr. Parker’s, acknowledges, albeit briefly, Mr. Parker’s welcome influence. But market impact, however essential, isn’t everything.
Mr. Livingstone-Learmonth, for his part, has made his own longstanding contribution. And he takes a back seat to no one in his ardor for the wines of the Rhone. Indeed, this latest volume is more the newest nacre on an already existing pearl, since the author originally published a book on Rhone wines in 1975.That was when, he recalls, “so few peo ple bottled their own domaine wine that a sleuthing visit to the Post Office was obligatory to find out who those growers might be.” His latest effort includes excerpts from the introductions to the prior editions of 1975, 1982, and 1991.
Gratifyingly, the 2005 version is massively revised, as well as more closely focused (other editions included the southern Rhone as well). It is no mere toot on an old tune. Instead, it’s a culmination of what’s been building for decades, namely, one man’s loving yet carefully considered look at wines – and winegrowers – he has communed with for decades.
An intentional (and very British) preference for assigning stars, expressed in one to six asterisks, rather than America’s preferred 100-point system, is consistent with Mr. Livingstone-Learmonth’s nuanced, between-the-lines approach to wine criticism. The six-asterisk accolade is charmingly defined as “Outstanding, the cat’s whiskers. Grand Vin – sumptuous, majestic, seductive – a wine to make even the veteran drinker stop, pause, and reflect. Bank loans permissible to purchase these wines.” Can you doubt a writer’s enthusiasm after such a definition?
Not everything is affectionate gush, though. In a lengthy and largely admiring examination of the wines of M. Chapoutier, an important Rhone shipper and grower with the largest holdings of anyone in Hermitage, Mr. Livingstone-Learmonth notes that in Chapoutier’s red wines in the early to mid-1990s “there was often too much extraction, with too many wines tasting similar. Now they are usually more stylish and more nuanced, with a greater chance of expressing their place or terroir.”
Similarly, in a long and largely deferential examination of the Rhone’s single most important shipper, Marcel Guigal (who was put on that profitable pedestal by Mr. Parker, who adores his wines), Mr. Livingstone-Learmonth inserts these comments on Mr. Guigal’s five signature Cote-Rotie wines, three of which are collector’s items selling for hundreds of dollars a bottle:
“None of these is typical Cote-Rotie – they are Guigal Cote-Roties.Their prolonged exposure to new oak and the use of grapes allowed to ripen to a near extreme mean they are heavily soaked in oily, cooked flavors. Their depth is solid, their breadth secure, their finishes long and textured.They carry a brewed tone and are chunky youngsters in the deepest vintages.”
Clearly, Mr. Livingstone-Learmonth is less a fan of Mr. Guigal’s wines than, say, Mr. Parker. But there’s no bile here. Nor is there any sense of competition or of being supplanted by a dictator, imperialistic or otherwise. Instead, “The Wines of the Northern Rhone” is magisterial in every sense. It is the last word on the subject.
If you (or someone on your holiday gift list) have the least bit of interest in wines such as Hermitage, Cote-Rotie, Condrieu, Croze-Hermitage, Cornas, Saint-Joseph, or Saint-Peray, this book is more than indispensable. It is tonic. Not least, it’s a welcome reminder that the alliance of fine wine with a fine palate, along with a fair-minded sensibility, is its own small but essential monument to the civilized life.