Families of the Vine [antikvár]

Introductionc^V,I freely confess that, before I began traveling with my family to France for extended visits seven years ago, I knew very little about wine and even less about its making. The only nose I have is, sadly, the rather large one on my face, and I am told that the discrimination of a true connoisseur begins with innate gifts I apparently lack and necessarily requires training from an age far younger than my present years. I don't have a vaulted, thermo-controlled wine cellar but rather a basement, and it contains not thousands of bottles but fewer than a hundred, in a battered cabinet in one corner that was once used to store paint, to judge by the stains.These are not recherché wines of great vintage. The allure of Mar-gaux and Yquem and Cheval Blanc and Haut Brion is beyond my comprehension at the sums they fetch even in mediocre years, and I rarely participate, except in the most modest way, in the disorganized, oversold Wild West lottery that is Californian wine. That market is, by the way, currently undergoing what a Wall Streeter would call "a long overdue correction," after almost two decades of rampant speculation, overplanting, and the consequent inflation of the price of land, grapes, and wine to ridiculous and unsustainable levels.I first drank wine in the south of France when I was fourteen, the occasional half glass at dinner that my mother, bless her, allowed me to take as part of my maiden voyage of European discovery. I can remember one evening in particular, sitting on the garden terrace of a restaurant called Le Prieuré in Villeneuve-les-Avignon, where we drank a bottle of Vieux-Télégraphe Châteauneuf-du-Papemy mother, my grandmother, and I. A truffle omelette appeared in front of me, and I asked my mother where the truffles were. She laughed, pointing to two half-moons of