Lawrence Osbourne

Finished Lawrence Osbourne's The Accidental Connoisseur: An Irreverent Journey through the Wine World over the weekend. It was so-so.

It is not a book about wine. In fact, it is not entirely clear what the book is about. If anything, it is about winemakers, their personalities, and their relationship to the idiosyncrasies of the global market. That's not at all what Osbourne makes you think at the beginning, however. He starts out by postulating that he knows nothing about wine and therefore has no taste, and he proceeds to travel through several wine-producing regions, ostensibly in an attempt to acquire one. He does a miserable job pretending to be a bumbling amateur. From the first few pages, it is abundantly clear that he has been drinking wine for decades, likes it, and knows far more about it than he lets on. His attempts to speak the “wine language” (really, the wine critics' language) at every winery in a manner that would betray his ignorance are contrived in the extreme. There is a silver lining to this, I suppose – he ends up demonstrating how inane and useless such language is, and maybe that's his intent here, but that's not exactly news.

So the book is not about taste and how to acquire it. What it ends up being instead is a series of sketches of a number of winemakers in California, Loire and Rhône in France and Piedmont, Tuscany and Puglia in Italy. This is potentially interesting – Osbourne's portrait of Robert Mondavi (sadly timely) is quite good. It really did give me a good feel for the plucky Italian immigrant who worked his butt off most of his life to make a fortune in classic American fashion and then used it to make an even bigger one by taking advantage of, and eventually even shaping and encouraging, the Americans' unrelenting consumerism.

After a while, however, the profiles of the winemakers and their wines all start to sound more or less the same. The stories are predictable to the extreme: the Californians either embrace the commercialism and the marketability of clean, generic-tasting “new world” style wines, or, more rarely than I expected, lament the disappearance of the Napa Valley of the old, pre-commercial days. Europeans invariably complain of the American market's juggernaut that forces them to make smooth wines with no sense of terroir.

The question of terroir actually gets a fair amount of ink. This is an interesting question, one of the great mysteries of wine, but Osbourne is inconclusive. I got a sense that he wanted to suggest that the whole idea is bunk, but he wanted his winemakers to make the point for him, and many of them did not cooperate.

Osbourne also does not do himself any favors. He seems to spend vast amounts of time drinking copious quantities of wine alone, driving drunk, and living the fairy-tale life of a wine journalist on a publisher-financed junket through places most of us plebeian wine drinkers will never see except by spending tons of our own money, and even then will not come anywhere near casually tasting a '99 Beaucastel in a private cellar in France. He does have a knack for a good turn of phrase now and then, and he does manage to paint a surprisingly distasteful picture of Italy, full of foreigners eviscerating the native culture until there is nothing left, but those things alone are not worth the effort. Skip this one.