Sometimes the best insights on a topic come from the most opinionated cranks. That’s true in food (Richard Olney) and it’s true in wine. Especially in Kermit Lynch’s book: Adventures on the Wine Route: A Wine Buyer’s Tour of France.
Kermit Lynch founded his eponymous wine store in San Francisco around the time his friend Alice Waters was starting to make waves with Chez Panisse. And like her, he evolved into one of the leading thought leaders on the meaningful relationship between how something is grown and produced (grapes) and how it is consumed (wine).
Versus any educational textbook on wine, Adventures On The Wine Route is an interesting “on the road again”-type tour of most of the major wine growing regions in France: full of opinions, encounters with quirky vintners, and great insights into the wine making process, from grape to bottle.
The most memorable and valuable sections of the book reflect where his heart resides. He writes most evocatively of the people, the landscape, the food, and the wine of Provence, and the Northern and Southern wine growing areas of the Rhone Valley.
He is also clear in what he doesn’t like: wine rating systems that assign numbers to wines, filtering, chaptalization, and anything involving modern machinery and the process of producing great wine.
If you are looking for the latest thoughts on recent French vintages, this is probably not the book, since it is a bit dated (1988).
However, in order to better understand the passion that the production and enjoyment good wine evokes, Adventures On The Wine Route is an essential addition to any foodie’s bookshelf.
To get a sense of where his head is at now on the wines of France, and the rest of the world, you can subscribe to Kermit Lynch’s wine shop newsletter.
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