The lights of Tokyo

Posted on | September 13, 2005

I recently returned from Japan just at the moment when the debates on European integration in France attained unimaginable heights of mediocrity.  With the sentiment that the current world will develop without us and far away from us. A comfort is all that remains, less enviable than it appears, to imagine that if we no longer participate in the construction of history at least we will survive as guardians of our own museum. And because of a lack of  truly prominent intellectuals or artists we will fill our museum full of ‘grands crus’. For at least in this area we continue to be admired and our products are surrounded with a care which is unthinkable at home. Thus, in all the luxurious or traditional restaurants where I ate in Tokyo, the serving of our wines benefitted from the same application and perfection of execution which characterises their cuisine that one prepares before ones very eyes. Admirably clean and proportionate glasses, without the slightest bad taste of chlorine, signs of water marks or even cloth that our own three star restaurants do not always avoid are filled with a sense of the relationship between contents-container which significantly overtakes the IQ of young sommeliers. The nose of the wine thus expresses itself with a precision the existence of which I had forgotten, inasmuch as the temperature at which they are served, which is faultless.

Fresh and clean
Let me take advantage here to remind oneself of the rules. For white wine, the greater the origin the nearer the wine must approach the temperature of a cool cellar: 14° or 15° after about ten minutes in the glass (so serving at 12°) one appreciates better the innumerable naunces in the terroir better than at 10° (and often less) found in our cold rooms! For reds, the sense of purity and freshness will be reinforced if the differencc between the room and the bottle is at least four or five degrees. It is not thus the real temperature of the wine in the glass which counts but its relationship with the temperature in the room. Professional Japanese instinctively understand this type of refinement because their cooking balances with a similar virtuosity the ‘cuisson juste’ and the the appropriate temperature of the food.

Clear and precise
But the measure of the surprise came from the place of wine, in its economy as much as its culture, in the press – specialist and general, maintained by journalists with a rigour and independence of spirit which is a hundred miles from the infantilism of the prejudiced or the dark ignorance which surrounds us in the same subjects. Many times I was asked questions about my job as a taster, to know how I could advise on the number of samples tasted with the precision of judgement required, or how I contructed criticisms which permits me to judge a work I would unable to do myself! Far more agreeable than having to reply to the habitual accusations in my own country, including from some colleagues, on the arrogance, incompetence or the corruption of said gurus, above-all when they are American citizens! And what a comfort to not have to battle to convince people that in the field of production of great wines that terroir without ‘man’ is nothing other than the dust from which we are born and to which we will return! On my return to Paris I started to read once more the Forums of the wine enthusiasts dominated by the sentiment that the great art of the vigneron is to disappear before the terroir. But I now know what it is to force a smile.

Michel Bettane

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