In Wine We Trust Harvard oenophiles brim over with enthusiasm
by Nell Porter Brown
Like children waiting with open bags at the door on Halloween, a dozen adults crowded around a table at the Skinner auction house wine preview in Boston, proffering empty goblets for a sip from the coveted bottles for sale. With great ceremony, Philip Minervino, of the Lower Falls Wine Company, poured an inch of the 1997 Château Lafite Rothschild, turned the glass to the light and gently swirled the garnet-colored liquid before breathing in the bouquet and finally tipping the contents to his lips. “We’re just checking that they are all OK to serve,” he tells the eager crowd, his blue eyes twinkling. “Who will be first?”
Among those in line that September night was Bruce McInnis, M.B.A. ’76. He favored the “delightful fruit” of a 1994 Opus One, but wasn’t particularly taken with 1970 Mouton, a first-growth Bordeaux: “It was good, from a good vintage and a good name, but not sufficiently delicious to warrant the price,” he said. “For me, status isn’t important, all that matters is what’s delicious.” The retired executive from Amherst, Massachusetts, trolls the wine auctions at Sotheby’s and elsewhere, adding this and that to the 1,000 bottles already in his cellar by using a simple strategy: “I try to get great bottles from secondary properties in the best vintages,” he allows. “I like the Sauternes and the ports, but I’ll bottom-fish on the Bordeaux and Burgundies.”
There was plenty to cast for at Skinner’s auction, held two days later. The first of its kind in the region in at least a decade, it featured more than 1,100 bottles, including 350 majestic, “old school” Bordeaux from the 1970s. All told, the auction raised $300,000—and almost everything sold at or above staff estimates.
Five cases of prized 1970 Château Latour went for $5,676 a case, while bidders forked over $19,120 for 24 bottles of 2000 Château Lafite Rothschild—“a stellar year that can be laid down for decades and only get more perfect,” notes Marie Keep, Skinner’s director of wines. “New England collectors are savvy. They know what’s out there and they know how to buy it and what a good price is.”
Photograph by Stu Rosner
Boston wine merchant Leonard Rothenberg recalls the days before California dominated the U.S. market
This has not always been true. Leonard Rothenberg ’69, the owner of Federal Wine and Spirits in Boston, started selling wines in the early 1970s when collectors focused solely on those from Bordeaux and Burgundy “and maybe a little bit of German wine—but that was only for the lunatic fringe,” he explains. “People who were wine lovers tended to be academic types, some of whom went to California with the crazy idea of making wine modeled after the great European traditions.”
The popularity of wine in America within the last 10 to 15 years has grown steadily. California wines now represent two-thirds of all wine sold in the United States (about $17.8 billions’ worth a year), and U.S. drinkers consume 10.8 percent of the world market—third in line, after France and Italy, according to the Wine Institute, a California wine trade group. “In the 1990s, there was an explosion in the interest in food and wine, which have been elevated to the level of culture,” Rothenberg explains. “A lot of people like to take their culture orally.”
Nearly every night in the Greater Boston area there are tastings at wine shops or gourmet grocers, extravagant food and wine pairings at fancy restaurants with guest speakers, and any number of wine classes available. Hotels and inns across the region offer wine weekends, seminars, and festivals, while travel companies arrange tours to New England’s wineries—and around the globe.
Moreover, the Internet offers wine sales, auctions, and industry rankings and reviews as well as peer-to-peer websites with recommendations, commentary, and news traded among oenophiles at all levels of experience and wealth. (Among the useful sites are savoreachglass.com and http://corkd.com, and the podcasts of tv.winelibrary.com and http://winefornewbies.net.)
Rothenberg, an admitted old-guard palate, draws the line at video bloggers who “sit there, slurp their wine, and let us know how wonderful it is.” That’s just not the point. “The interesting thing about wine is that it comes down to a small number of people who share an experience contained in a bottle, and the bottle only goes so far,” he says. “Tasting wine is a continual process of marginal differentiation. It is a kind of discovery, and it can be a revelation.”
