Jim Harrison on WIne

https://www.kermitlynch.com/blog/2017/05/04/from-the-archives-my-problems-with-white-wine/

https://www.kermitlynch.com/blog/2019/02/21/richard-olneys-final-book-reflexions/

Wine Strategies: https://www.kermitlynch.com/newsletters/0501-January2005.pdf

http://www.bradburykuett.com/2018/02/03/for-the-writer-jim-harrison-a-bandol-red-of-the-domaine-tempier-was-his-reverie-his-lyric/


https://www.kermitlynch.com/newsletters/0712-December2007.pdf

ONE GOOD THING LEADS TO ANOTHER by Jim Harrison

I am intensely knowledgeable on all matters nutritional but somewhat ineƒective in applying this knowledge to myself. A friend, the novelist Tom McGuane, once said to me, “You can lecture a group of us on nutritional health while chain smoking and drinking a couple of bottles of wine in less than an hour.” Sad but true, but how sad? Ben Franklin said, “Wine is constant proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” Despite this many Americans own a hopeless puritanical streak that makes them beat on themselves as if they were building a tract house. The other day I took out a pound of side pork from the refrigerator, exemplary side pork raised by E.T. Poultry which I favor above all domestic pork. I put the package on the table and circled it nervously like a nun tempted to jump over the convent wall and indulge in the lusts of the body. My intellect warred against this side pork while my heart and taste buds surged. I was again modern man at the banal crossroads where he always finds himself bifurcated like Rumpelstiltskin. Naturally the side pork won. My art needed it, plus I knew that a simple bottle of Domaine La Tour Vieille would win the battle with pork fat if drunk speedily enough to get down the gullet to disarm the gobbets of side pork. To achieve health one must be able to visualize such things in terms of the inner diorama. A number of doctors have been amazed that I am still alive, but the explanation is simple: wine. I started out in a deep dark hole being born and raised in northern Michigan which demographically is the center of stomach cancer in the U.S. Up home, as it were, they love to fry everything and when short on staples they favor fried fried. To be frank, the French raised me, though I didn’t get over there until my thirties due to a thin wallet. Since my mid-teens I loved and read studiously French literature so that at nineteen in Greenwich Village I was scarcely going to drink California plonk while reading Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Apollinaire. Instead I drank French plonk la Roche, beside his plate, though this fine Burgundy is mostly aƒordable to moguls who unlike me don’t have the time to hunt woodcock, grouse, doves, quail, and Hungarian partridge. Since I love wild food and wine I have been kept active in the sporting life by these addictions. I will shu‰e through the outdoors for hours to shoot my dinner though in the case of woodcock they are better hung for a few days. If the weather is too warm a 42-degree refrigerator works fine, though you keep your eye on how you rotate the birds. I’ve never had a woodcock turn “high” on me but you must be much more careful with the white-breasted grouse. I have frequently eaten the “trail” of woodcock, the entrails minus the gizzard, on toast, a French tradition that some of my American friends are squeamish about. I insist that the best cooking method for woodcock is to simply roast the birds over a woodfire making sure the breast interior is pinkish red. Much like doves and mallards an overcooked woodcock is criminal. Last year near our winter “casita” on the Mexican border I shot well over a hundred doves but when I cooked a few of them minutes too long my wife was utterly disgusted. Perhaps I did something truly stupid like answering the phone. So wine fuels my sporting life but the hunting season ends and I become a bird-watcher rather than a hunter partly to keep moving and make sure my appetite is revved. Woodcock don’t freeze well but Hungarian partridge and grouse do, plus there are gifts from friends of elk, antelope, moose, and venison, which all cry out rather silently for red wine. We had a nasty summer in Montana due to a two-month heat wave. I ate sparingly and shed ounces like dandruƒ, sensing that I was becoming too light on my feet for Montana winds. The heat forced me to drink whites, my favorites being Bouzeron and La Cadette’s Bourgogne blanc, their Vézelay blanc, too, and also a lot of lowly Italian prosecco which was amenable to the weather. My appetite recovered slightly when the garden flourished in August but it wasn’t until September that I could again fully embrace my first love, French reds. The City of Lyon has kindly decided to give me a medal and is flying me over in a few weeks. Only by dint of tromping through forests and fields several hours a day can one be physically ready for Lyon, which makes me the man for the job. After each meal in Lyon I will climb the mountain, glance at the cathedral but not actually go inside, and then trot back down. Bishop Irenaeus of Lyon irritated me when in the second century he proclaimed animals don’t go to heaven because they can’t contribute monetarily to the church. I adore the classic bistros in Lyon, also a restaurant called Aux Fins Gourmets. These sturdy folks eat sturdily and I will ferret away a collection of fromage de tête (head cheese) in my hotel room in case I awake in the night disconsolate. After Lyon I will positively reconstruct the nature of my blood in Narbonne, Collioure, and Bandol. Most intelligent people recall the established scientific victory of the Mediterranean diet over half a dozen others. The eƒect of the south is immediate. Once while writing for a week at the splendid Hotel Nord Pinus in Arles, I became daily less somber and tormented so that what I wrote there was untypically jubilant. Doubtless if I wrote a whole novel in the south of France I would lose my winning reputation for melancholy. Once on the streets of Arles, for instance, I met a very undoglike lassie who was half-French and half-Egyptian. My knees buckled and I had to have two glasses of wine to make my way a mere block to the hotel. Our last evening at the cabin we had grouse and woodcock again, and a leg of lamb from my neighbor’s ranch in Montana. A friend, Rick Baker, brought along some Beychevelles from the eighties, a Grand Cru Mondot from Saint Emilion, and more Domaine Tempiers. The Mondot was a little muddy, perhaps from shipment. All in all it was a decidedly non-triumphant summer. In mid-September I made game pies from venison, mallards, doves, Hungarian partridge, ground veal, and pork fat with a lard pie crust. Superb. Unfortunately it was hot again and I had to eat one with a white Cadette. It worked, but in the middle of the snack it occurred to me that weather is God’s work while wine is man’s. René Char told us not to live on regret like a wounded finch. A few years ago a friend gave me an ’82 Pétrus and I swilled it before I learned I could have sold the bottle and bought a ticket to France where I’m closer to the heart of the matter, wine and its lover, food.

via: https://www.kermitlynch.com/newsletters/1008-August2010.pdf
WINE AND POETRY by Jim Harrison Women, Wine and Snuff John Keats Give me women, wine and snuff Until I cry out “hold, enough!” You may do so sans objection Till the day of resurrection; For bless my beard they aye shall be My beloved Trinity. This must have been written when John Keats was young and a bit of a rowdy. Underneath each old poet wherever he goes is an immense reservoir of sentimentality about his life as a young poet. When I was nineteen in Greenwich Village one stew bum bar to the east of Bleecker past MacDougal offered a glass of simple red for a quarter. On a possibly morose day this single glass was capable of producing literary ecstasy. Occasionally in extremis my nifty budget was a dollar a day for food, another for wine, and the last was for my seven-dollar-a-week room without a window. This austerity did not quell my obsession at the time for Rimbaud and Keats, the latter being the most singular lyric poet in English letters. As a mediocre student I wasn’t in the least interested in critical assessments and more than fifty years later still am not. I was drawn to what made my heart sing in what my father called “this vale of woe.” This meant wine and poetry. Wine crawls in the window of your life and never leaves. A young poet is at a loss because his calling has set him outside of so many comforting boundaries the culture offers and wine easily offers itself as a liquid fuel, making him think he might belong in this hostile country. Even Vergil’s father chided him about becoming a poet, saying, “Homer died broke.” Of course any young geek can think of himself as a dark orphaned prince from another country. Whatever works to keep the ego inflated without evidentiary fuel. One invariably becomes a poet long before writing actual poems. It begins with a general reverence for life and its intensely detailed existence, for women, trees, fish, dogs, rivers, birds, and of course for wine. As the great philosopher Wit Only yesterday did the circle of wisdom close more completely with a science factoid from NPR. We are genetically related to yeast! One would have thought so. We are fermented and naturally enough we ferment. The gods slipped us this gift in prehistory, noting our hardships, our cold and hunger and our battles with wild beasts. “O no, another glacier is headed our way, let’s drink some wine,” one imagines them saying. Way back then in southern France in the locale of many great present vineyards there were one-ton bears running around at top speed on their hind legs, an unattractive fact. It has been said by anthropologists that perhaps the Neanderthals lost out to our species because they drank too much. Alcohol presents obvious dangers. The guards of ancient Scandinavian kings had to be half bear and when drunk would errantly kill a king in their enthusiasm. Just recently there was a convention of seventy thousand AA members in San Antonio who must have been a disappointment to local restaurateurs whose profit margins depend on alcohol. Of course, one cannot question the legitimacy of an organization that saves so many from dying. Of my many poet friends, many have died from drink, though predominantly from hard liquor. One friend, the luminous Nebraskan poet Ted Kooser, for two years our Poet Laureate, told me he had to quit drinking decades ago so that he’d stop falling down stairs. This seems a valid reason indeed. I had to moderate in my mid-forties so that I wouldn’t have to quit. I had a fine cellar at the time and the thought of not drinking it was unbearable. I also didn’t want to spend the rest of my life not doing something. As the French poet Gérard de Nerval said, “One must drink or someone will drink in their place.” Obviously, though, one must give up a beautiful woman if you are abusing her. Ikkyu, the renowned Zen master of the fifteenth century, was a bit unorthodox in saying that the Buddha can also be discovered in wine and in brothels. He wrote: Dead winter but our poetry glows: Drunk after downing cup after cup. Years since I enjoyed such sweet love play. The moon disappears, dawn breaks, yet we hardly notice. For a number of years in my late teens and early twenties I worked on a horticulture farm and part of my duties involved pruning grape vines. Pruning time is usually cold, wet and muddy but in a vineyard you become intimate with the mystery of wine. The vines and soil look dead and half frozen and you doubt the future of everything, including yourself. But then spring comes and the vines leaf out and you are lucky enough to have a girlfriend who likes to drive with you into the countryside with a blanket and a bottle of seventy-cent Gallo red and make love in a pasture or grain field. The wine, however cheap and it’s what you can afford to carry in your 1947 Dodge, allows you to ignore the mosquitoes. Wine produces memory. If I drink a Brouilly in Montana, the wine inevitably reproduces my sitting at Le Select on Montparnasse in Paris dozens of times drinking the same wine trying to recover from a day of interviews on a Paris book tour. When I drink a bottle of Domaine Tempier Bandol in our casita near the Mexican border, I invariably revisit my many meals cooked by Lulu Peyraud in Bandol in southern France. My memory helps me eat them again. If I drink a Bouzeron on a warm summer evening, I’m able to revisit some of the best trout fishing of my life on a lovely river when we would finish our floating on the last mile of river or so by opening a bottle of Bouzeron. We are delightfully trapped by our memories. I can’t drink a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape Vieux Télégraphe without revisiting a hotel bistro in Luzerne, Switzerland, where I ate a large bowl of a peppery Basque baby goat stew. A sip and a bite. A bite and sip. Goose bumps come with the divine conjunction of food and wine. An initial glass of whiskey might be helpful after a cold October day of bird hunting but I’ve tended to stick to wine in my hunting and fishing. Also, the sudden jolts offered by hard liquor lessen the possibility of making a good dinner, while the gradual all-suffocating warmth of wine tends to increase one’s cooking attention. More than thirty years ago I wrote a “Drinking Song” that begins with I want to die in the saddle. An enemy of civilization I want to walk around in the woods, fish and drink. I’m not presenting this necessarily as an article of faith but close to it, like Keats’s Trinity of wine, women and snuff. Sad to say, Keats died at age twentyeight of tuberculosis, a disease that cheated the world of many potential glories. I close with a glorious note on Claret from his letters. I never drink now above three glasses of wine—and never any spirits and water. Though by the bye, the other day Woodhouse took me to his coffee house—and ordered a Bottle of Claret—now I like Claret, whenever I can have Claret I must drink it,—’t is the only palate affair that I am at all sensual in. Would it not be a good speck [speculation] to send you some vine roots—could it be done? I’ll enquire—If you could make some wine like Claret to drink on summer evenings in an arbour! For really ’t is so fine—it fills one’s mouth with a gushing freshness—then goes down cool and feverless—then you do not feel it quarrelling with your liver—no, it is rather a Peacemaker, and lies as quiet as it did in the grape; then it is as fragrant as the Queen Bee, and the more ethereal Part of it mounts into the brain, not assaulting the cerebral apartments like a bully in a bad-house looking for his trull and hurrying from door to door bouncing against the wainstcoat [wainscot], but rather walks like Aladdin about his own enchanted palace so gently that you do not feel his step. Other wines of a heavy and spirituous nature transform a Man to a Silenus: this makes him a Hermes—and gives a Woman the soul and immortality of Ariadne, for whom Bacchus always kept a good cellar of claret—and even of that he could never persuade her to take above two cups. I said this same claret is the only palate-passion I have—I forgot game—I must plead guilty to the breast of a Partridge, the back of a hare, the backbone of a grouse, the wing and side of a Pheasant and a Woodcock passim. Talking of game (I wish I could make it), the Lady whom I met at Hastings and of whom I said something in my last I think has lately made me many presents of game, and enabled me to make as many. She made me take home a Pheasant the other day, which I gave to Mrs. Dilke; on which to-morrow Rice, Reynolds and the Wentworthians will dine next door. —John Keats, from Letter to George and Georgiana Keats, February 18, 1819