Anatomy of the Wine Trade: Abe's Sardines and Other Stories

Simon Loftus is a wine merchant, hotelier, restauranteur and writer of wine catalogs and two other food and wine books, Puligny-Montrachet: Journal of a Village in Burgundy and A Pike in the Basement: Tales of a Hungry Traveller. His family has been a major investor in the Adamas beer and wine business in the United Kingdom for almost a hundred years; he joined the firm when he was 17 with an unimportant job brewery's tiny wine department, where he "couldn't do much harm. He learned the wine merchant business, literally from the ground up. "I love wine passionately. I love the taste and variety, but what has always kept me going as a wine merchant and stopped me getting bored is constantly meeting new people and exploring new regions." This book contains a number of short essays describing the business of making and marketing wine. The opening pieces profile diverse vineyards, small, traditional wineries in Northern Italy and Burgundy, grand estates in Bordeaux and modern operations in California. Loftus contrasts the "regional chauvinism that typifies many of the viticultural backwaters of France" with the high-tech West Coast approach to environmental control. Janics Robinson explains the unusual subtitle of this book in an essay on which wines make the best investments: "It is as well to keep in mind an anecdote from Simon Loftus ... which he attributes to the late Peter Sichel: `Abe bought a shipment of sardines that had already been traded many times and each time profitably. Unlike previous buyers, Abe decided to try a can of his purchase. The sardines were terrible. He telephoned Joe from whom he'd bought them only to be told 'But Abe, those sardines are for trading, not eating!'" Shorter quotes have their interest: "Standing in a dank cellar at 9 o'clock on a cold February morning, trying to make some sense of the raw astringency of a dozen cask samples of four-month-old claret, it is possible to doubt one's vocation." Pierre Coste, a Bordeaux negociant (shipper): "The wine market is a market of pleasure, deluxe. It is not a first necessity." Describing the typical Bordeaux negociant's office: "A certain dreary fustiness, that particular smell of dusty, overstuffed plush furniture, of polish and typewriter ribbons; the musty scent of chests full of old papers, of tables littered with back numbers of old magazines; these are the stuff of waiting rooms to which each profession adds its identifying odor, in this case, the heady aromas of rare wines." I didn't find this book up to the standard of Loftu's other two books, but despite its uneven quality, there is much of interest here for the wine lover. Robert C. Ross 2007, 2008