Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh by Unknown (rm book recommendations .TXT) 📕

practicing to catch up.” The British wine writer Jancis Robinson, a Master of Wine, says, “I’ve seen quite a few ace spitters and they’ve all been male. That’s because men are more into sports and ace spitting is a sport. It’s speed and accuracy and power. All we women want to do is not make disgusting exhibitions of ourselves. We do it neatly. We are not so competitive.” Distance alone does not make one a great spitter. I would never speak ill of the late Alexis Lichine, one of the major figures in the wine community, but in truth his presence was feared in tasting rooms. The wine writer Anthony Dias Blue recalls Lichine spitting “a laser-thin stream six feet into a bucket,” but others remember a man of considerably less accuracy. Bespaloff, otherwise a great admirer of Lichine’s, tells of attending a stand-up tasting with Lichine and Peter Sichel, a vineyard owner and wine importer. “Peter was telling us proudly about his new slacks. A moment later, Lichine leaned over without looking and spit red wine toward the bucket. The stream went over the top and hit Peter in the pants.” Thomas Matthews of The Wine Spectator F O R K I T O V E R

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says the spitter he most fears is Edmund Penning-Rowsell, the dean of British wine writers. “He’s long but insouciant,” says Matthews. “He takes a sip and if there is a spit bucket in the vicinity, there it goes. At a tasting, he’s a menace. There’s a huge circle around him of empty space and stained carpet.”

Not all spitting stories are sad sagas of soggy socks and soiled shoes.

Jean-Louis Brillet, a producer of Cognac, says the most precise spitter he has seen is the legendary French oenologist Emile Peynaud but he adds, “The greatest thing is that we see Mr. Peynaud take in very large quantities of wine and spit out very small quantities. Where is the rest?” The famous Italian winemaker Piero Antinori says that as a child he was in awe of his family firm’s seventy-five-year-old oenologist, who would taste and spit with a lit cigarette in his mouth. Jean-Michel Cazes of Château Lynch-Bages in Bordeaux has seen an equally wondrous sight: “My grandfather and [Bordeaux wine-merchant] Emmanuel Cruse had the same technique. They would sit there, tasting and spitting with pipes in their mouths.”

Alan Stillman, a Manhattan restaurateur, recalls that nearly twenty years ago he and his wife stopped for a picnic in Burgundy just outside the fence surrounding the vineyards of the famed Domaine de la Romanee-Conti. “A man wandered up. We didn’t know it then, but he was the cellarmaster of DRC, and we were sitting on DRC property. I introduced myself, offered him a glass of red wine. He took a mouth-ful and must have spit it thirty feet. He said, sneering, ‘Bordeaux!’ ” Michael Aaron, the owner of the Sherry-Lehmann wine shop in Manhattan, was working in Bordeaux in 1959 when he attended a wine tasting at Château Cos d’Estournel and observed the spitting equivalent of a rear-end collision. Taster number one learned over the spit bucket at the precise moment that taster number two swung toward the same bucket. Number one was a balding fellow, and number two’s stream hit him precisely on the crown, causing him to take offense.

“They had to be separated. There was almost a fistfight,” Aaron says.

Bespaloff recalls that it was 1963 when he spit in a wine cellar for the very first time. He was tasting Beaujolais and, he says, “I understood 3 0 0

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that it was all right to spit on the ground in a cellar, but to avoid embar-rassment, I tasted a little more slowly than the proprietor. When he spit, I spit.” Since then, Bespaloff has grown in stature and prowess to become an icon of this arcane art, a virtual spitting savant, yet he still reacts uneasily when his greatness is recognized.

“I modestly lower my head,” he says.

Is it modesty? Or is he checking to see if he got any on his shoes?

GQ, march 1990

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I have friends who regularly travel to Europe on wine-drinking pilgrimages, excursions into decadence that leave me gasping with envy. After hearing their stories, I find myself imagining I’m one of them. I see myself picking up a wine list at a magnificent restaurant such as Monaco’s Le Louis XV and ordering a grand cru white Burgundy with a rim as golden as the Limoges china—there I am, leaning back and gazing upward, as the bouquet of my perfumed Corton-Charlemagne soars toward the nymphs and angels gamboling on the twenty-five-foot ceiling.

This past January, I gathered up my courage and my bankroll and announced that I would be joining them on their upcoming trip to France and Monaco. The itinerary included La Beaugraviere in Provence, a restaurant that is unstarred in the Michelin guide but has an enthusiastic following among wine drinkers, as well as four of the most esteemed establishments in Europe, all with three-star Michelin ratings: Le Louis XV; Troisgros, in Roanne; Paul Bocuse, outside Lyons; and Guy Savoy, in Paris.

My fantasy was not just to accompany these wine connoisseurs but to be one of them. It was not long into the trip, at the distressingly appointed La Beaugraviere, which looks as though it was transported intact from Guadalajara, that I learned how deluded I was. We were sitting around, gulping complimentary hors d’oeuvres and perusing wine 3 0 2

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lists, a predinner ritual of ours, when I spotted a treasure, an old-vines Châteauneuf-du-Pape from a fabulous vintage. I couldn’t wait to tell them about