Victoria Iphigenia Warshawski (aka V.I.), a character by Sara Paretsky

To start with, a bio quote to set some of the background story behind this latest Paretsky crime novel, Breakdown, that I just found so hard to put down.

"Before there was Lisbeth Salander or Stephanie Plum, there was V I Warshawski. Sara Paretsky revolutionized the mystery world in 1982 when she introduced V.I. in Indemnity Only. By creating a believable investigator with the grit and the smarts to tackle problems on the mean streets, Paretsky challenged a genre in which women typically were either vamps or victims. Hailed by critics and readers, Indemnity Only was followed by fifteen (now actually 16 and soon 17) more best-selling Warshawski novels.  The New York Times writes that Paretsky “always makes the top of the list when people talk about female operatives,” while Publishers Weekly says, “Among today’s PIs, nobody comes close to Warshawski.”

As far as I know, Warshawski has been on film just once, with Kathleen Turner (above) as the actress. To me the actress playing V.I. should definitely have dark hair, not died blonde. But who knows what goes on in the minds of Hollywood producers? This lady below (I think she is a French actress but I cannot remember) is more the image I have of the young Victoria Warshawski.

Anyway I have just finished what I think must be about the number sixteen in the Warshawski series of "crime" novels by Sara Paretsky, and our heroine is now going on 50. I have been a fan for some years and have read most of the previous books. In fact I hadn't seen one for years and was afraid the author had let her die or something. Breakdown is one of the longest, best and most intricate of the lot. It also digs deeper into the various ramifications and themes that Paretsky has drawn upon as ressources and inspirations for the previous novels featuring the totally likeable, tenacious and tough lady private eye from Chicago named, interestingly, Victoria Iphegenia Warshawski.

I don't make a habit of relating plots in my articles on books, and I am not about to make an exception here. It would only spoil the story for anyone out there encouraged to go out and get a copy of the book in question, and, when I see this way of "filling" an article used by book critics, I rarely find that it adds much to the interest of the article. The plot and suspense of Breakdown is intricate, as I said, and includes themes like the Holocaust and its incidence on people's lives, then and afterwards, immigration to the USA, dishonest and demagogic politicians and TV barons (plenty of them around!), and ways of corrupting and frightening people when money and/or power is at stake. Anf, of course, crime of various sorts.

Sara Paretsky when she began the Warsahwski series, in front of a house that was the inspiration for the detective's childhood home.

So the mainstay of Paretsky's novels is a female private eye called V.I. Warshawksi, whom she made to grow up in the rough part of Chicago. Her father, of Polish origin, was a policeman and her mother, who came from Italy, a very good singer. V.I. studied law and has been, for many years, a private investigator. Her style and guts are, as with many private eyes, part of her attraction as a character, but Paretsky's books are not just about style and off-the-cuff smart talk, although Warshawski can do both very well. There is also the defending the weak and poor, and, as a female investigator, showing nasty men that women are not to be underestimated in any field. So we have social, political and economical angles mingling with the suspense all through most of the novels featuring V.I, Warshawski. 

Victoria Iphegenia was given her second name by her mother through her passion for opera, and her love of and respect for of her now dead parents add yet another dimension to her already complex personality. Are there men in her life ? yes, but they come and go with some gaps and rarely play any major part in the novels. And sex is in a ùminor key, suggested by never described, and lokned always to her love of the moment. In Breakdown she is with a classical musician who is younger than herself, as Warsahwski is now aged 50 and, although still very fit, is not afraid to mention her age as part of the background. Outside of her love life, Victoria's friendships tend to be lasting. And the city of Chicago is a constant feature. Probably one of the traits of Paretsky's own life that gets into her character's is dogs (see below). Warshawski has two golden retrievers  and they regularly feature, their outings to the lake and being looked after by V.I.'s neighbour Mr Contreras regularly punctuating the hotter action and investigations.

the author, Sara Paretsky, with dog and Breakdown, her latest book

Why do I like V.I. so much? Well, all of the above really. Plus she is instinctive, using reasoning to back up and fathom her hunches. And she is funny: an essential quality in any person.


Read on .....

When the underdog wins: the final of the French rugby championship

Many of us tend to like it when the underdog in any form of contest wins whatever the struggle, fight, or competition may be. Call it the David vs Goliath complex, or the small is beautiful syndrome, or the (back to school here) beat the big bully story re-told.

There was one more example of this just over a week ago when, in the final of the French rugby union season (XV-a-side) Castres Olympique beat the Rugby Club of Toulon quite convincingly, despite the apparently close score of 19-14 (finals are usually close).

The Castres team celebrate their 19-14 victory over the Toulon all-stars

It should be said the Toulon had just, 2 weeks previously, won the European Cup (known as the Heineken Cup on account of its main sponsor), beating the favourites, another French team called Clermont. But Toulon were clear favourites for this French cahmapionship final, having defeated the title holders, Toulouse, in one semi-final, and despite the fact that Castres had beaten (to most people's surprise) Clermont in the other semi-final.

Rory Kockott, the South-African scrum half for Castres, who is hardly a world name but who is a key player in their game, scores the try that turned the match.  

Rugby Union is now a fully professional sport and, in France, all top teams recruit a growing proportion of their players (and even their trainers) from all over the rugby-playing world. This requires money, and the more you have, the more you are able to recruit star players from wherever, and this tend to draw more spectators into the stadoums where you play. Toulon is a prime example of this pattern, with stars, albeit somwhat ageing, like Jonny Wilkinson (England) Bakkies Botha (South Africa), Matt Giteau (Australia) or Chris Masoe and Carl Hayman (New Zealand). But Castres, although it has some players recruited from outside France, has no international stars in its line-up and been trained for a number of years by a little-known (but well respected in rugby circles) French tandem, Laurent Labit and Laurent Travers. One of the main reasons for this is the relative modesty of the town of Castres (in the Tarn departement of South-West France), and hence its budget. Even with a big pharmaceutical company (Pierre Fabre) as its main and historical sponsor, the Castres Olympique's annual budget comes in at under 16 million euros per annum, placing it in 9th place in the top budgets for French professional rugby clubs and looking tiny alongside that of Toulouse, which stands at 35 million.

So the underdog won. So what? Well, for a start, it showed that monay cannot buy everything, even in modern sport. It also rewarded several years of consistent hard work and good results from this club who has regularly finished in the top 4 or 6 teams of the 14-team championship recently. Yet they hadn't won this competition since 1993. What goes around comes around, and all I can now hope for is that the club I support, Stade Français Paris, whose performance over recent years has been, shall we say, disappointing (only 10th place in the French championship this year, but a finalist in the second European cup) will do much better next year with its budget that places it amongst the top 4 or 5 spenders.

Here and Now, a correspondance between Paul Auster and John Coetzee

A note of apology and some anger
I realise that it is now quite some time since I wrote anything on this blog. To regular readers, I must apologize: work has been quite intense over the past few months for me. Occasional readers will probably not mind too much. As for the spammers who have now started to invade the comments section of this blog with their clumsily phrased and stupid pretexts for hooking unsuspecting readers into their various web activites, would they please piss off!

And now for the real article.

I have just read, in almost one go, this shortish (about 250 pages) book which contains correspondance between two famous authors, one American, living in New York (Paul Auster), and one South African, living in Australia (J.M. Coetzee). Here and Now (that is the title) is always interesting, often extremely stimulating, occasionally funny and also moving. Two sharp minds striking sparks off each other and with a growing friendship that is quite patent as one moves through this correspondence that covers the years 2008 to 2011. As witness to the extent of the friendship, Coetzee, who is clearly the more reserved of the two, starts off by signing his epistles to Auster with "all good wishes", but finishes with a "yours fraternally".

There are too many good things in this book to name them all, but the sincerity and spontaneity of the tone, and the authors' capacities to jump from one topic to another whilst remaining interesting are remarquable characteristics throughout. The subjects covered are as varied as the authors' centres of interest: writing and reading, naturally enough, but also sports (both watching and playing), political situations here and then, financial crises, friendship, eating habits, travel, the significance of street names, sex and love, music and films.....

Reading this correspondence, I felt pangs of envy not to have had such an opportunity myself, to be able to build a male friendship throught this epistolary means, as well as through the quite regular meetings that the two manage to contrive, together with their respective wives and despite the distance that separates them. The authors do not always totally agree on everything, but they share viewpoints on a wide range of subjects and manifestly stimulate one another with their points of view and observations. There are constant twists and turns in their minds as ideas flare up and then fizzle out. Reading this book is like sitting in on a fascinating conversation that lasts all day. And indeed I managed to read it during a day-long journey from Bratislava to Paris involving two buses, two planes and some time in two different airports. Time is never "wasted" if you have a good book with you!

I was struck by one passage, amongst others, in which Auster talks about a particular aspect of novel writing, namely setting the scene for the action. He says at one point, taking the reader's perspective and the example of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice which contains almost no visual descriptions: "But how can you see a room in a book if the author doesn't tell you what is in it? You therefore make up your own room, or graft the scene onto a remembered room. This explains why each reader of a novel reads a different book from every other reader of that novel. It is an active engagement, and each mind is continually producing its own images." 

I feel that this has an clear echo in my professional field of wine tasting. Each taster has his own experience of a wine, which is precisely why it can be very hard to get people to agree about the flavours and impressions of a given wine.

so read on ......

Another piece of Roth

I have written about a couple of books of Philip Roth before on this blog. This American author has to be one of the most talked about and yet difficult authors on the current literary scene. Well, almost current scene as he has recently announced his retirement from writing). 

Roth has perhaps been talked about too often for other reasons than his writing, which is brilliant, questioning, sometimes tortuous and always (at least in the 3 books that I have now read of his to date) totally fascinating. He can of course be annoying, repetitive, cantankerous, manipulative and so on. These are perhaps simply  other measures of his importance as a writer: Roth asks a lot of questions, of us as well as of himself, and they are not always comfortable ones, and not always easy to answer.

Take the latest book of his that I have just finished: The Counterlife, which was first published in the USA in 1986. The construction is as fascinating as it is sometimes confusing, as Roth alternates between the characters of two brothers, sort of alter-egos, and their ficticious lives, each of which may (or may not) incorportate auto-biographical elements. The theme of the book, apart from those of death, sex and married life, revolves quite extensively about "jewishness" as Roth puts it himself, as it explores various ways in which the current world, in New York, Israel or England, ignores or reflects this "condition" either as a claim to identity or as a reason for rejection, starting with what is perhaps the authors own point of view of distance and neutrality from all things not only religious but also concerning so-called racial "identity".

Although the commentaries seen on the cover of the edition that I bought laud Roth's "comic genius", this in not a hilariously funny book, although it is rife with derision and has its totally slapstick moments like the attempted hijacking of an El Al flight from Tel Aviv to London, and the baseball catch (a little earlier, and by the high-jacker) against the Wailing Wall of Jersusalem. His portraits of characters are as precise as they are pitiless, whether they be of prim and frustrated upper-class English ladies or of militant Zionist fanatics living in West Bank colonies.

Another highly recommended novel by Philip Roth who digs deeper and laughs more sardonically that most authors.


Read on.....

Street art can be beautiful and/or fun

This says : "Reciprocity is a mystery". I like that...

Actually this is on a window and not a wall, but I am sure that you get the idea. Most graffiti (sometimes pompously called "street art") that I see is ugly and garish and has been inflicted, undesired, on public places, just adding another layer of ugliness to areas which are already blighted, and sometimes acting as acne on otherwise quite acceptable faces of architecture. But there are occasional graffiti artists whose works I see on walls here in Paris that make me smile, or think, or laugh, or indeed several of these. The one above is on the window (in the window?) of the tourist office near where I live, and it is clearly signed by someone going under the intriguing pseudo of Miss-Tic.

The first "street art" of this type of which I have a clear memory were the finely-drawn posters of the french poet Rimbaud that I saw stuck on dilapidated walls in Paris's 14th arrondissement in the late 1970's (see below).

These were my first contact with the remarkable work of the French artist Ernest Pignon Ernest, about whom I have written on this blog here.

With perhaps more humour, but a lesser sense of history, more recent street artists have done some fun things on the walls of the Butte aux Cailles district in Paris' 13th arrondissement. It should be remembered that this district is still a bastion of artists' studios and was a hotspot for rebellion during the Paris Commune movement in the 1870's, as well as during the "events" of May 1968, almost 100 years later.

Spontaneous and involuntary forms of sculpture are also a feature of what can loosely (and sometimes pompously!) be called street "art". The two photographs below are taken on the Pont des Arts, a pedestrian bridge across the Seine that links the Louvre to the Ecole de Beaux Arts. There is another bridge similarly decorated with lovers' padlocks a bit further upstream. I find this far more interesting than most so-called "installations" that one sees in galleries. The locks shine like gold in the sun and are densely packed on either side of the bridge. This has an interesting optical/kinetic effect as one walks across the bridge. Of course the scale and the site help a bit!

On a recent visit to the Slovenian capital of Lubljana, I saw the beginnings of a similar installation on a bridge there, so perhaps there will be, at some point, an international circuit to be followed of lovers' bridges. Better than that damned da Vinci Code circuit that seems mercifully to have died out. Love is eternal after all...

And if you go to this article, you will discover another good piece of graffiti that I spotted in Lubljana (one picture of it is below).

Pigeons as art critics

It seems that pigeons are able to recognize styles of paintings, so when will we see our first pigeon art critic? And, when I read some of the elucubrations of those who describe themselves as art critics, I wonder whether this might not be a peck forward.

Professor Watanabe with a jackdaw, NOT a pigeon. Are jackdaws better art critics than pigeons? We will just have to wait and see.

I was both fascinated and amused recently by an article in the Science & Techno supplement of Le Monde newspaper that informed about the experimental work of Shigeru Watanabe concerning pigeons and paintings. For some time now, this professor of psychology at Keio University has lead various experiminents that revolve around the visual and cognitive capacities of pigeons with regard to painting. 

Monet and Picasso. I have no idea which paintings by each artist were used in the experiment, but the difference here is clear enough, including for a pigeon (or an art critic)

The first published study of Watanabe and his colleagues on this subject dates back to 1995, when they trained pigeons to descriminate between colour slides of paintings by Monet and Picasso. After an initial training period, the pigeons were then shown works by these two artists to which they had not previously been exposed and they were able to discriminate them. They were not persuaded to spell their names however. Even more surprising perhaps, they were also able to categorize styles between different painters. Monet, Cézanne and Renoir were grouped together by the budding art-critic pigeons, whereas Picasso, Braque and Matisse were placed in another group. It is also interesting to note that when Watanabe presented the pigeons with a painting by Monet upside down, this disturbed their discrimination, whereas the same operation with a cubist painting by Picasso did not. The probable implication here being that a more realistic representation of an object can more easily be disturbed in the visual discrimination process than a more abstract one.

Chagall and Van Gogh might well have been a harder task for the pigeons, again depending on which paintings were used in the experiment

Then, in another article published in 2001 by Watanabe in Animal Cognition, he attempted to compare the relative capacities of pigeons and human beings in distinguishing the works of one artist from another. In this instance the two artists were Chagall and Van Gogh. Watanabe trained his pigeons to distinguish four paintings by each artist that were projected onto a television screen. The training was effected by feeding them grain when they pecked a button when a Chagall painting was shown, and nothing when a Van Gogh came on the screen. Then the process was reversed, with the Dutchman's paintings providing the reward. When the pigeons became 90% proficient in identifying the right painter, Watanabe introduced 3 paintings (2 by Van Gogh and 1 by Chagall) that the pigeons had never seen before. This did not notably phase the birds, neither did the removal of colour from the images, or indeed hiding half of the pictures. Watanabe then turned to human beings, just skipping the grain feeding part. I was quite relieved to read that the humans were as good as the pigeons in distinguishing the style of a Van Gogh from that of a Chagall. Were they fed biscuits instead?

Another study was published in 2009, again in Animal Cognition. This is where we get to the point in my title about pigeons as possible art critics, as this time Watanabe introduced the notion of "good" and "bad" art. He had human observers classify several children's paintings as either "beautiful" or "ugly". Pigeons were then rewarded for pecking at the "beautiful" paintings and not rewarded for pecking at the "ugly" paintings. They were then presented with new sets of paintings of both aesthetic categories and the results showed that they were able to discriminate between the two. In another experiment, pigeons were also able to discriminate watercolour paintings from pastel ones. 

Then, to determine which cues the pigeons used for their discrimination, Watanabe conducted tests of the stimuli when the paintings were reduced in size or reproduced in black & white. In addition, he tested their ability to discriminate when the painting stimuli were mosaic, and also when they were partially occluded. The pigeons maintained their discrimination performance when the paintings were reduced in size, but this decreased when stimuli were presented as black & white images or when a mosaic effect was applied to them. Watanabe concludes from this that pigeons use both colour and pattern cues for their discrimination, just as humans do. That partial occlusion did not disrupt the discriminative behavior suggests that pigeons did not attend to particular parts, namely upper, lower, left or right half, of the paintings. The overall results suggest that pigeons are also capable of learning the concept of a stimulus class that humans name "good" pictures. 

My question to this is "who decides which paintings belong to each category", which takes us back, more or less, to square one! I am also slightly alarmed at the idea that we should let loose flocks of pigeons in galleries to see which paintings they peck at the most. This might of course help to destroy a lot of the junk that passes for art in many places, but, then again, they may decide to peck at all of it, "good" and "bad", in their search for grain. So maybe we are stuck with art critics after all. Perhaps we should try crossing them with pigeons, or else feeding them grain?

Promoting wine in retail outlets

My work and other inclinations lead me to travel a bit and I am often struck by the fact that France, where I live and which is one of the major wine producers in the world, seems to singularly lack imagination, and even elementary good sense, when it comes to encouraging people to try and enjoy its wines in bars and restaurants. 

One of the best examples of this is what happens (or rather what does NOT happen) in the major rail-stations and airports in France, when compared with what I see in other countries. I have already spoken on this blog about the comparison that is to be made between the way wine is treated at both ends of the Eurostar rail link between Paris and London, as well as here about the too-often appalling way some restaurants and bars in France treat what should be a source of pride, customer satisfaction and revenue for them. Such people (and unhappily my example is far from unique!) are ignorant about the produce they sell and very poor at serving customers.

In London's St. Pancras station one can try up to 44 wines by the glass (and in proper wine glasses) in the wine bar, not to mention the separate Champagne bar. At Paris' Gare du Nord the wine selection is miserable and unworthy, and is served in glasses better suited to cleaning one's teeth. In Rome airport one can taste a good selection of wines by the glass, well served and with delicious snacks. I have yet to find anything like this in a French airport. Why this carelessness and lack of interest? A mystery! And one should remember that airports and rail stations are often people's first and last points of contact with a country and hence tend to leave a strong impression on tourists. And France earns big money from tourism. So what the hell are they waiting for?

If someone wants an idea, I tried out a wine bar in Atlanta's international airport a few months ago that has some good ones. Not only is this place well sited, but it has comfortable chairs for clients, a very decent and truly international wine list with a good selection by the glass, and quality glassware to match. And also a great additional promotional idea which is to propose small themed tastings of three different wines that use the same grape or come from the same region, or have some other link to make them comparable. There was a choice of four or five different themes the day I went through and I selected the syrah theme, which included an Australian, a Californian and a Chilean wine. The wines are presented on a small wooden tray with a paper undercloth that explains each wine and its origins. And the wines were excellent too. A perfect way to while away an hour between planes or when waiting to board. Wake up you French restaurant people! 

6 nations rugby, round 3

England vs France is always the scene of some folklore

The big match of the weekend was of course the France vs England game (aka "the Crunch"), played this year at Twickenham. I had bet on a close voctory for England, and the game should probably have had a closer end score than it actually turned out (23-13). With France having its back to the wall after successive defeats against Italy and Wales in the first two games of the series, despite being one of the favourites for this year's tournament, they were likely to be dangerous in this game and they did in fact pose serious problems to England's defense during the first half, scoring a brilliant try through Wesley Fofana and finishing just ahead at half-time (10-9).

France's Wesley Fofana goes over for his try, the most spectacular action of this game, after a 60 metre run and five avoided tackles. You can see some helpless English defenders on the floor in the background.

But the French team then tired in this very physical game after 60 minutes, and lacked both discipline and clairvoyance at crucial moments. The only English try was a lucky one, scored by Manu Tuilagi, who had always looked dangerous, making several breakthoroughs bofore this effort that more or less sealed the fate of the game.

Tuilagi scores England's only try, after a ball flies out of a ruck into his hands

"There will be blood" could have been the title of the scenario for this game, and Owen Farrell in particular appeared to lose his cool rather unnecessarily at times, although he was clearly tripped when going for a loose ball at one point: a foul that went unnoticed by the refereee and would have cost France a yellow card.

Overall England deserved their victory by their discipline and their constant attempts to vary their play and keep this in the adversary's half, but this was far from an easy victory and France can be proud of their performance. England now look very likely to win this tournament, and only Wales can seriously prevent them from winning all their games and so getting their first grand slam for 10 years.

Keith Earls looked dangerous for Ireland but was held by good collective defense by the Scots

The other games held lesser interest. I watched Scotland courageously defeating Ireland 12-8 in a tight game. Ireland badly missed their fly-half Sexton in this game. Ireland's 2 consecutive losses (against England and Scotland) will make them a difficult adversary for France who will travel to Dublin for their next game and try to avoid the wooden spoon award for being last in the tournament, even if their last game, against Scotland and at home, should be well within their capacities.

Mike Phillips spins out a pass for Wales

I did not watch the Wales vs Italy game but it would seem that the Welsh won quite easily (9-26 in this game played in a very wet Rome). The Italians must have sorely missed their captain, Sergio Parisse, who had been suspended the week before during a club game that I attended and for what seems to have been an imaginary "insult" proferred to the referee of that game, who has since been suspended himself for his poor performance on that day.

A good read: books of the past year

I tend to read episodically and mostly when travelling, at least as far as spending hours with a book goes. Maybe I need to get rid of my TV to push up my reading capacity? But there is rarely a day that passes without my dipping into some book, even for a few minutes. I also tend to read several books simultaneously, and of different natures. Not novels: these I read one at a time, but non-fiction of different kinds plus a novel. An acquaintance of mine who also has a blog (in French) recently published a list of the books he had read over the past year, with comments on each of them. I was impressed and thought I might do the same. However this list will not include comments on each work as, for many of these I have already written articles on this blog, and, if you are interested, you can find these in the section names "Read on".

I will try to separate the titles into categories. They are not in any specific order by the way and in no way indicate a preference. I am also quite certain to have forgotten some of the books read in the past year, including ones I have really enjoyed or which have taught me things, as I don't write them down as I go along. Maybe I should in the future...

Non-Fiction

Siri Husdvedt: Living, Thinking, Looking (essays)
This I am currently reading, in bursts and in an excellent French translation published by Actes Sud. Very thought-provoking, often brilliant, and sometimes quite hard to follow, at least in the essays that dip into neurology and pychoanalysis.

Etienne Klein : Discours sur l'Origine de l'Univers 
Also very hard to follow for a non-scientific, but the concepts make one dizzy as he approaches Planck's wall and discusses the varous theories of the origin of the universe, and even the concept that there was an origin.

Michel Serres : Petite Poucette (essay)
A bit drawn-out and chatty. He has a point but he labours it too much and I couldn't finish this, short as it is

Benjamin Lewin, Wine, Myths and Reality 
Good, well written and clear. Debunks some things, explains many more. Very wide ranging and takes into consideration the markets for wines and their influences through history on the wines produced, an essential point totally ignored by most books on wine.

Martin Gayford: A bigger message, conversations with David Hockney 
Fascinating. I have already written about this here, and discussed Hockney's work which I greatly admire.

Gustav Herling : Un Monde à Part (memories of a Polish prisonner in Stalin's camps)
See article. Horrifying, obviously. Makes one admire human endurance also.

Steven Clarke: 1000 years of annoying the French (history revisited with humour)
Indispensable for anyone living between the two cultures of England and France (see article)


Fiction (crime etc)

Michael Connelly: The Black Box
Masterly: see article. I am pretty much a Connelly unconditional but this has to be one of his very best.

Jo Nesbo : The Leopard
First and only book I have read so far by this Norwegian crime writer. Very impressive (see article)

Philip Kerr: The Berlin Trilogy (March Violets, The Pale Criminel, A German Requiem)
Excellent dip into the murky past of nazi Germany and the suite of that war. He must have researched this extensively. There are another four in the series out and I will surely get to them some day.

James Lee Burke: ???
Read one book by this author of the US's deep south and loved it but I cannot for the life of me recall the title. I will return to Burke soon!


Fiction (other)

Albert Camus: L'Etranger
Re-read this short, relentless masterpiece in French after a 40 year interval. Indispensible

Sébastian Faulks : A Possible Life
Very good, with an unusual structure that sets up questions (see article)

Philip Roth: The Human Stain
This has to be one of the greatest novels I have ever read (see article)

John Fante: The Brotherhood of the Grape
Maybe not the best Fante but still a good read. Clearly very autobiographical

Julien Barnes: The Sense of an Ending
Moving and beautifully written in a low-key style (see article)

Denis Lehane: The Given Day
Brilliant "historical" novel that taught me a lot about aspects of US culture and early 20th century history (see article)

Sarah Blake: The Postmistress
Not indispensible. Has its moments though (see article)

Branimir Scépanovic: La Bouche Pleine de Terre
How fate and misunderstanding leads to horror. Short and pitiless story from this author from Montenegro, read in a French translation (see article)

Jean-Michel Guenassia: Le Club des Incorrigibles Optimistes
The best French novel I have read this past year.

Read on...

In praise of (some) older wines, of accessible pricing, and of Zinfandel

The world of wine seems increasingly turned towards a double polarity in the organisation of taste, media coverage, prices and even producers' discourse. At one end of the scale we have usually inexpensive wines that are made to an increasingly high technical standard but which can come from just about anywhere. These wines sell for, let’s say, between 3 and 10 euros mainly in supermarkets around the world. They use grape variety (or appellation) as their essential selling point, apart from price. At the opposite end of the scale we have very expensive wines that claim to be more « authentic »; in any event which are clearly signed by a producer who usually has high media profile in connoisseur circles. These wines are often (but not always) the object of considerable speculation on the part of intermediaries and thus end up in markets at prices than can and often do exceed 100 euros per bottle, and sometimes much more. The gap between these two price extremes, which can be situated at 1 to 1000, has never been so great, but it has also never been so hard to measure in terms of perceived quality. Such is the folly of man, his appetite for things that other men cannot possess, and the distortions of levels of personal wealth throughout most countries in the world. 

Of course this considerably simplifies the reality of wine, its diversity as well as its markets, but I find that the discourse on wine is becoming increasingly polarised, rightly or wrongly, between these two extremes. The whole debate on the role and impact of « terroir » on the flavour of a wine is just a part of this. For those who defend the role of the environment on a wine as the be-all and end-all of quality and interest, the natural tendancy seems to shift towards various forms of elitism within whatever the respective price range may be. And, by the same token, these same people tend to condemn wines that are made to suit markets and price points as indifferent, indeed unworthy examples of the vinous offering.

Another factor in the contemporary wine scene that strikes me as an impingement on diversity is the gradual but significant shift in taste from mature wines (one can read « old » for « mature » if one likes to) to young wines. More and more consumers never taste older wine (ie wines that are over 10 years old), including in the upper echelons of the rapidly stretching price scale. Indeed, as their palates are formed to the tastes of young wines, as soon as they step outside this taste frame they tend to reject the type of smells, flavours and textures that are the necessary result of a wine’s ageing process. Yet the joys and surprises that can be supplied by older wines was brought home resoundingly to me recently when tasting a bottle that had been lying around in my cellar for some time.

Apart from California, where it is widely planted and, in some circles, very well regarded,, Zinfandel is not a grape variety that is well known elsewhere in the world, with the exception of Puglia in Italy, where it is known as Primitivo. In particular, it is not often considered as a variety that ages well, probably on account of its relatively light tanninc structure and high alcohol levels. Apart from the two aforementioned regions of the world, Zinfandel has rarely been planted elsewhere. It has been proven by DNA analysis that it is identical to the Italian Primitivo, and that it originated, in all probability, along the Dalmatian coastline of Croatia, where one can still find fairly rare plantings of its synonyms, Crljenak ou Tribidrag. Croatian origin of this cultivar is not now disputed amongst most experts and would tend to be confirmed by a synonym found in Puglia: Zagarese, meaning « from Zagreb ». The oldest name for the variety is Tribidrag, and can be found  mentioned as from the 15th century in the region of Split. Interestingly, this fits both the sense of the Italian name Primitivo and the Croatian Tribidrag, which derives from the Greek πρωι καρποζ, and which signifies « early ripening ».

So what was the wine that I tasted and which released all this flow of thought?

Blaauwklippen Zinfandel 1996, Stellenbosch, South Africa 

This bottle was given to me by a journalist colleague in South Africa during a trip there several years ago and, I am ashamed to say, has been severely mistreated since by being first stored for years in my garage (too hot in the summer and sometimes too cold in the winter) before finally, for the past few years, gaining a more appropriate place in my electrical wine-cellar that has constant temperature.

I openened this bottle recently at lunchtime, just out of curiosity and expecting to find a thin weedy, acidic and totally oxidised wine. In fact I had brought another wine to the table as a backup, fully expecting to open it. Yet sharing this 17 year-old South African Zinfandel with my colleague Sébastien Durand-Viel was a source of immense pleasure for both of us, as the wine was well alive, vibrant and still full of fruit, showing its age with grace and having developped the level of complexity and subtlety for which one hopes in an older member of this world (vinous or human). We did not open the other bottle!

Blaauwklippen (meaning blue rocks, I believe) is one of Stellebosch’s historic estates, having been founded in 1682. They still produce a Zinfandel and current vintages on the market (2006 or 2007) retail in Europe for around 17 euros a bottle. I am not aware of other Zinfandels produced in South Africa. In Australia, which also has several regions with the mediterranean-type climate that suits this variety, I only know of Cape Mentelle, in Margaret River, that produces some. There are of course many very great Zinfandels from various parts of California (Lodi, Sonoma, Napa) and some, such as the admirable blended versions from Ridge (Lytton Springs and Geyserville) have proven their capacity to age very well. I have also tasted one from France’s Languedoc region, from Domaine de l’Arjolle, although curiously the variety was not officially authorized in France until very recently, so the producer just called it « Z ».

Here are my tasting notes on this wine:

The colour shows considerable evolution with brownish, brick-red edges. Perhaps normal given the above history. The nose is rich and complex, with cooked fruit and leather as the dominant tendancies. Plum pudding also comes to mind. These aromas are born and lifted by considerable freshness, probably quite volatile. This vivaciousness is equally apparent on the palate, but the fruit is still sufficuently dense and smooth to balance the acidity. This wine feels succulent and rich without being overpowering. Its refinement and silky texture makes me wonder just why we tolerate drinking so many wines whose youth tends to produce adolescent agression from most angles. This wine provided sheer pleasure and we easily finished the bottle between us and worked well afterwards all afternoon and a lot of the evening!