Pavane for a late Bordeaux. “Of course, it is only a question of wine, of pinard, of rouquin, of pif, call it what you want, but behind the arguments to disqualify an appellation, behind Bordeaux bashing and the so-called fight against the standardization of tastes, have amalgamated very French resentments with a now universal, triumphant, purifying discourse, which adores abstractions (“Nature”, “Living”, “Climate”) and wants to see Good triumph in all things rather than Truth. » The stage is set. That of a book of struggle, anger and regrets, which understood above all that wine is always much more than wine. Especially Bordeaux, massively neglected these days from the tables and cellars through which our culinary modernity claims to be established, for lack of having understood in time that from now on it would be appropriate to prefer the bottle to intoxication… In In defense of Bordeaux winesthe editor and novelist Jean Le Gall, the oenologist and essayist Jean-Luc Schilling and the writer Jean-Paul Kauffmann joined forces to undertake, against the tide of the times, a courageous, almost quixotic operation , of rehabilitation of a wine, of a terroir, which is first and foremost a story. If we had to date the disenchantment, perhaps we would have to go back twenty years with the release on screens of Jonathan Nossiter’s multi-award winning documentary, Mondovinoso caricaturedly opposing the evil bourgeois of Bordeaux, supporters of a globalized wine economy, to the authentic winegrowers whose appellations and estates would be so many Asterix villages. Since then, unable to indulge in the marketing gimmicks required, Bordeaux has gone out of fashion and, in fact, the wine industry (apart from the great wines which are still authoritative) has sunk into a deep crisis. But let’s make no mistake – and Jean Le Gall reminds us in a magnificent text all darkened with anger – what is being erased with this wine is also a civilization, that of a long time, and an art of living. And what is true for wine is true for literature. “Elimination of style, complexity, eradication of so-called “lengthiness”: literature and wine seem to have traveled together. » In these matters, everything is always a matter of style and this book of struggle and melancholy really does not lack it.
Jean-Luc Schilling, Jean Le Gall, Jean-Paul Kauffmann
In defense of Bordeaux wines
Le Cherche Midi
Edition: 3,000 copies.
Price: €21.90; 312 pp.
ISBN: 9782749180137
