I'd never actually seen anyone eat an entire bowl of salsa before. I don't mean chip by chip – I mean the whole bowl, sucking it down in one big slurp. Not that it was a huge bowl. But the size wasn't important. It was the eating of it that was important.
I was sitting at the bar of the Benchmark, on Saranac Avenue. I preferred Jimmy's, on Main Street, but it was Tuesday night and Jimmy's was closed on Tuesdays. I had played basketball in a pickup game at Lake Placid High School earlier in the evening, showered, and then driven to the Benchmark for something to eat and to watch baseball on television. It was early in April, the Yankees were in Texas, and my recollection is that this was the first game of the season, although on that point I'm not sure.
After a while two guys walked in and sat near me. One guy was large and boisterous, with a nest of unruly dark hair and a Z.Z. Top beard but no mustache. The other was smaller and clean-shaven. It took a while before I recognized him from the zig-zag bend in his nose – as if it had been broken sideways rather than flattened.
“Schlitz,” he said to the bartender.
“No Schlitz.”
“Vodka tonic,” he said.
He drank the vodka tonic, then another, and it was then that he picked up the bowl of salsa, stood as if needing to get in better position, lifted the bowl to his mouth and slurped the salsa down. I don't remember if it was medium or hot. When the bowl was empty, he sat down and watched the ballgame.
He had a reputation as being a wild man and an ornery cuss. He had had a chestnut beard and long hair that made him look as if he had just staggered out of the deep woods. His nickname was Stunt, and I assumed that was because he wasn't exactly risk-averse in his avocation, which was driving a bobsled. He was the best in North America and one of the best in the world. The local reporters whom I hung around with before and during the Olympics told me he never talked to the press. On a couple of occasions during the trials before the Games I saw him at the track, in or near the shed before a run or waiting in the cold for the truck that would drive his sled back to the top. I could have spoken to him then, but the warnings of the reporters had intimidated me. I was reluctant to ask a dumb question. How do you feel? You think you have a good chance? Will this finally be the year when the U.S. wins a medal again? That would have given him an excuse to be ornery, and nothing had happened during his trial runs to prompt a better question.
In the Olympics he finished sixth in the two-man. At a press conference afterwards he gave simple short answers to reporters' questions, with no hostility but with no particular expansiveness either. I asked him what had happened during his third heat to cause him to drop from fifth place, with an outside shot at a medal, to sixth. He said he had made a mistake on one of the curves high on the track, came in with a slow time, and simply did not think he had a realistic hope of making it up in the final heat. His voice was low and mumbly. As he finished, he looked at me for a second or two.
In the bar, I recognized the bent nose first and then the low, mumbly voice.
As quiet as he was, his friend was noisy, talking with the bartender and with the two or three other people who sat at the bar, drinking beer after beer. He called him “Stuntboy” and “Lamont” and “Mr. Olympic,” as if he were a kid cousin whom he felt at liberty to mock good-naturedly but whom he was ultimately responsible for.
He pretty much ignored this loud friend. He seemed to realize that in the small world of Lake Placid-Saranac Lake, people recognized him, and he carried on purposely, not to make himself larger than life but almost as if he wanted to be smaller than life. He seemed torn between wanting attention and not wanting it, so that when he received it he acted coarsely, to repel those who watched him. He and I watched the game and talked baseball. He knew the players on both teams. He said Lou Piniella was overrated because all he could do was hit. Late in the game he thought Reggie Jackson, whom he referred to as “Weggie,” should sacrifice bunt. He told me he hated the Yankees. He bought me a beer. He said he had eaten psilocybin mushrooms earlier in the evening. He was very drunk. In the middle of an exchange about the merits of one of the ballplayers, he turned toward me and said, “Didn't you ask me a question at a press conference?”
“I did. I wanted to see if I could get you to talk to the press.”
“I don't even remember what it was I said.”
The game ended in the bottom of the eleventh inning when Goose Gossage threw a wild pitch to Richie Zisk with the bases loaded.
We drank more beer. He sat with his elbows on the bar and told me he'd be there again in 1984. He said that even if some good young drivers come up, they wouldn't be able to beat him. He told me he was 28, had been driving for eight years, and was getting better.
“Before I quit I'll be in the top three. I'm in the top ten now, and that's pretty good.”
“Not that good,” I said.
“Better than being in the top twenty.”
Then he said that in the Olympics he had made a mistake near the start of the third heat and wasn't able to make up the time either in the lower half of the run or in the next heat. So he settled for sixth.
“This is what I tried to explain at the press conference,” he said.
He drank another beer.
I asked him if he thought he’d be able to beat the world champion, a great driver from Switzerland.
“He cheats,” he said.
I looked at him. I had heard a story about how bobsledders applied a substance to their sleds' runners to go faster, something that disappeared by the time the sleds reached the bottom, so the race officials couldn't detect it, if they even cared. An A.P. reporter had told me.
“I cheat too,” he said.
“How do you cheat?” I asked.
He sat quietly for a few seconds.
He said, “It's a secret among the drivers.”
He looked straight ahead. Outside it had begun to snow lightly. I pulled my hooded sweatshirt over my head, put on my jacket and got up to leave. He called the bartender over and ordered another beer.
Tuesday, March 01, 2005
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Modern Houses in New Canaan & Pound Ridge
Scattered throughout New Canaan, Conn., and Pound Ridge, N.Y., are dozens of prime examples of an innovative architectural movement from the mid-twentieth century that today seems on the brink of a revival even as builders continue to impose ostentatious mega-houses on the landscape.
These remnants of the Modern movement were simply and efficiently designed, and built to fit in among the hills, ridges and rock outcrops that characterize the area. They were also a rejection of middle-class and upper-middle-class styles and tastes, even though most of their owners were upper middle class.
Today some are still owned by their original owners, but many have been snapped up by a younger generation of people who are restoring them and who appreciate their differences in style from the typical suburban "colonial." In an era when people are starting to question the appropriateness – economically and aesthetically – of the 9,000-square-foot McMansion, Modern houses seem like a workable return to a more efficient past.
Among those who agree is John Vorisek, who inherited a Modern house on Eastwoods Road in Pound Ridge, and who has lived there with his wife, Colleen, for 3-1/2 years.
Built for Vorisek’s father and mother by two architects said to be disciples of Frank Lloyd Wright, the house is constructed of stone, tongue-in-groove cedar, and glass, with the flat roof that typifies Modern houses, on a bluff several hundred feet back from the road in the woods.
“We pretty much came to the conclusion that it would be nuts to start from scratch, to tear the place down,” Vorisek said.
The reason was that although it needed renovation, the house was sound and well-constructed, its 3,000 square feet met their needs for sufficient though not extravagant space, and it appealed to their design sense.
Today, as many as 80 Modern houses, built from the late 1930s through the 1950s, remain in New Canaan and Pound Ridge.
Many, like the Vorisek house, are hidden in the woods. But motorists who find their way to Chichester Road and Laurel Road in New Canaan can see about a dozen houses employing the variety of styles and textures that Modern domestic architecture comprises.
In Pound Ridge, the Eastwoods Road-Trinity Pass area contains a more modest assemblage of five Modern houses, including one of the earliest built in Westchester County, but most are hidden from the road.
Pound Ridge, with its sparse development and 4,700 people, clearly stands in New Canaan’s shadow as a center of Modern architecture. New Canaan still has about 70 Modern houses, 30 of which experts consider to be “significant” examples of the style.
And New Canaan was the home of some of the giants of Modernism – the so-called Harvard Five: Marcel Breuer, Philip Johnson (who still lives in his world-renowned Glass House on Ponus Ridge Road in New Canaan), Elliot Noyes, Landis Gores, and John Johansen.
“What happened here in New Canaan 40 and 50 years ago is remarkable,” said Laura Pla, who recently organized a Modern House Symposium for the New Canaan Historical Society. “There was such a collection of architecture and architects!”
Richard Bergmann, a New Canaan architect who worked with Noyes, said the principles of Modern architecture include “an honesty of materials; developing spaces that meet the client’s needs and aren’t just done because that’s the way you do it; and a sensitivity to the site.”
He also said Modern architects generally followed three criteria that should – but often don’t – apply to all architecture:
-- an understanding of the external influences on a site, such as zoning, climate, views, the approach to the site, the angles of the sun, the landscape;
-- the internal influences, such as the client’s needs and budget;
-- and the design, which grows out of the first two criteria.
“Each house should be totally different because the program’s different and the budget is different,” Bergmann said.
Building designers have used those principles in numerous historic periods, he said, including ancient Greece, Roman, early Gothic, Shaker, and early colonial American – “when they were built for shelter and not for trying to impress your neighbors,” he said.
Modernism was born in Europe in the early years of the twentieth century, and encompassed artists working in many fields – Hemingway and James Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky, and Nijinski, among many others.
In architecture and design, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe were the leading theorists and practitioners. Among those who followed was Marcel Breuer, a student of the Bauhaus School in Germany.
Breuer came to America during the Nazi era and taught at Harvard, where his students included Elliot Noyes, Landis Gores, Philip Johnson and John Johansen – the Harvard Five.
Noyes was the first to move to New Canaan; the others followed.
“When they were originally built,” Bergmann said of the first Modern houses in New Canaan, “there was a lot of controversy. A lot of the old stodgy New England types couldn’t stand these houses. They thought they should all be Colonial.”
When Johnson lectured on Modern architecture in New Canaan, a curmudgeon wrote a letter to the town paper asking him and his compatriots to get out of town with their “packing box” houses.
Instead, the Harvard Five drew a younger generation of people who were settling down after World War II. Many of them worked in the creative arts, and while they no longer wanted to live in New York City they also wanted to break from the prevalent styles and tastes that white clapboard Colonials and farmhouses represented.
Among them were Helen and Gene Federico, a graphic designer-illustrator and advertising art director, respectively, who in 1949 saw in a newspaper ad that a house designed by Breuer in New Canaan was for rent.
The Federicos shared the house – on Sunset Hill Road – with Helen’s sister and brother-in-law, Muriel and Joseph Hinerfeld. While the Federicos combed the Pound Ridge area for land to buy on which to build a house, the Hinerfeld’s bought a Modern house built in 1939 by the Moore & Hutchins architectural firm (they also designed the New Canaan Library) for a Bertram F. Willcox.
The house, which is on Bender Way in Pound Ridge, was one of the first Modern houses in Westchester County. (My wife and I acquired it from the Hinerfeld estate in 1999).
The Federicos, meanwhile, found a five-acre site about a half-mile away on Eastwoods Road and began to work with architect Leroy Binkley, a student of Mies van der Rohe’s, on a design for a house.
“We were always interested in building in a contemporary way,” said Helen Federico, who still lives in the house. “That was very important. And not making a statement on the landscape, which certainly a lot of people did even then.”
The Federicos chose a nearly-flat rock outcrop on which to build. The house, which was finished in 1951, was constructed of gray cypress and glass, and has a fieldstone fireplace and black slate floors with radiant heating.
Easy maintenance was one of their important goals, and one of the characteristics often cited by Modern house owners. In the Federico house there’s hardly a painted surface to be found.
“We couldn’t face having it painted, having had enough experience with painters in apartments in New York,” Helen said.
The Federicos were followed to Pound Ridge by another art director, Bob Gage, and his wife Fay, who built a Modern house on Old Stone Hill Road, and then by Ann and John Strauss, who commissioned Edward Larabee Barnes to build a Modern house for them near the Federicos on Eastwoods Road.
In New Canaan, the Harvard five and their followers ultimately built more than 80 houses, some of them first-rate and built to last, others built rather cheaply for clients with meager budgets, Bergmann said.
But whether they were built to last or not, many of the Modern houses have been torn down in recent years, replaced by the oversized stately homes that contemporary builders are imposing on the landscape. (Modern houses aren’t the only victims; disproportionately large McMansions have replaced farmhouses in many places along New Canaan’s Oenoke Ridge Road, West Road, Ponus Ridge Road, and White Oak Shade Road.)
Among the first-rate examples of Modernism to be demolished was the Stackpole house, on Ponus Ridge Road, designed by Elliot Noyes in 1951 and taken down in 1999.
Laura Pla happened to be driving along at the time, saw the demolition, and was appalled. Bergmann saw others being demolished elsewhere in town and was likewise concerned.
No regulations exist in New Canaan to prevent the demolitions, and so independently of each other, Pla and Bergman tried to stir up public opinion.
Bergmann helped organize a symposium on the issue about five years ago, and Pla and the historical society put together a symposium and tour in October 2001 that drew 150 people.
“My goal primarily was preservation,” Pla said.
Pla said she thinks there is still ample reason to enact local regulations that make it difficult to tear down architecturally-significant Modern houses. But by celebrating their qualities, Pla and others may be helping to introduce them potential buyers who will preserve and restore them.
John and Vorisek are only one example of people who have done so. In Pound Ridge, Sue Haft and Eric Moss bought and renovated a Moore & Hutchins house on Bender Way that one of the firm’s partners, John C.B. Moore, built as a weekend retreat for himself.
Next to it is the Moore & Hutchins house that the Hinerfelds owned. It looks substantially the same today, after a renovation that included new heating, electrical, and plumbing, as well as construction of a small addition (there is a photo of it on Sphere, taken a couple of weeks ago).
Sixty years after the first ones were built, the Modern houses of New Canaan and Pound Ridge have become as much a part of the historical heritage as the remaining farmhouses and old stone walls. That awareness is just starting to take hold, but it may be enough to preserve what is left.
These remnants of the Modern movement were simply and efficiently designed, and built to fit in among the hills, ridges and rock outcrops that characterize the area. They were also a rejection of middle-class and upper-middle-class styles and tastes, even though most of their owners were upper middle class.
Today some are still owned by their original owners, but many have been snapped up by a younger generation of people who are restoring them and who appreciate their differences in style from the typical suburban "colonial." In an era when people are starting to question the appropriateness – economically and aesthetically – of the 9,000-square-foot McMansion, Modern houses seem like a workable return to a more efficient past.
Among those who agree is John Vorisek, who inherited a Modern house on Eastwoods Road in Pound Ridge, and who has lived there with his wife, Colleen, for 3-1/2 years.
Built for Vorisek’s father and mother by two architects said to be disciples of Frank Lloyd Wright, the house is constructed of stone, tongue-in-groove cedar, and glass, with the flat roof that typifies Modern houses, on a bluff several hundred feet back from the road in the woods.
“We pretty much came to the conclusion that it would be nuts to start from scratch, to tear the place down,” Vorisek said.
The reason was that although it needed renovation, the house was sound and well-constructed, its 3,000 square feet met their needs for sufficient though not extravagant space, and it appealed to their design sense.
Today, as many as 80 Modern houses, built from the late 1930s through the 1950s, remain in New Canaan and Pound Ridge.
Many, like the Vorisek house, are hidden in the woods. But motorists who find their way to Chichester Road and Laurel Road in New Canaan can see about a dozen houses employing the variety of styles and textures that Modern domestic architecture comprises.
In Pound Ridge, the Eastwoods Road-Trinity Pass area contains a more modest assemblage of five Modern houses, including one of the earliest built in Westchester County, but most are hidden from the road.
Pound Ridge, with its sparse development and 4,700 people, clearly stands in New Canaan’s shadow as a center of Modern architecture. New Canaan still has about 70 Modern houses, 30 of which experts consider to be “significant” examples of the style.
And New Canaan was the home of some of the giants of Modernism – the so-called Harvard Five: Marcel Breuer, Philip Johnson (who still lives in his world-renowned Glass House on Ponus Ridge Road in New Canaan), Elliot Noyes, Landis Gores, and John Johansen.
“What happened here in New Canaan 40 and 50 years ago is remarkable,” said Laura Pla, who recently organized a Modern House Symposium for the New Canaan Historical Society. “There was such a collection of architecture and architects!”
Richard Bergmann, a New Canaan architect who worked with Noyes, said the principles of Modern architecture include “an honesty of materials; developing spaces that meet the client’s needs and aren’t just done because that’s the way you do it; and a sensitivity to the site.”
He also said Modern architects generally followed three criteria that should – but often don’t – apply to all architecture:
-- an understanding of the external influences on a site, such as zoning, climate, views, the approach to the site, the angles of the sun, the landscape;
-- the internal influences, such as the client’s needs and budget;
-- and the design, which grows out of the first two criteria.
“Each house should be totally different because the program’s different and the budget is different,” Bergmann said.
Building designers have used those principles in numerous historic periods, he said, including ancient Greece, Roman, early Gothic, Shaker, and early colonial American – “when they were built for shelter and not for trying to impress your neighbors,” he said.
Modernism was born in Europe in the early years of the twentieth century, and encompassed artists working in many fields – Hemingway and James Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky, and Nijinski, among many others.
In architecture and design, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe were the leading theorists and practitioners. Among those who followed was Marcel Breuer, a student of the Bauhaus School in Germany.
Breuer came to America during the Nazi era and taught at Harvard, where his students included Elliot Noyes, Landis Gores, Philip Johnson and John Johansen – the Harvard Five.
Noyes was the first to move to New Canaan; the others followed.
“When they were originally built,” Bergmann said of the first Modern houses in New Canaan, “there was a lot of controversy. A lot of the old stodgy New England types couldn’t stand these houses. They thought they should all be Colonial.”
When Johnson lectured on Modern architecture in New Canaan, a curmudgeon wrote a letter to the town paper asking him and his compatriots to get out of town with their “packing box” houses.
Instead, the Harvard Five drew a younger generation of people who were settling down after World War II. Many of them worked in the creative arts, and while they no longer wanted to live in New York City they also wanted to break from the prevalent styles and tastes that white clapboard Colonials and farmhouses represented.
Among them were Helen and Gene Federico, a graphic designer-illustrator and advertising art director, respectively, who in 1949 saw in a newspaper ad that a house designed by Breuer in New Canaan was for rent.
The Federicos shared the house – on Sunset Hill Road – with Helen’s sister and brother-in-law, Muriel and Joseph Hinerfeld. While the Federicos combed the Pound Ridge area for land to buy on which to build a house, the Hinerfeld’s bought a Modern house built in 1939 by the Moore & Hutchins architectural firm (they also designed the New Canaan Library) for a Bertram F. Willcox.
The house, which is on Bender Way in Pound Ridge, was one of the first Modern houses in Westchester County. (My wife and I acquired it from the Hinerfeld estate in 1999).
The Federicos, meanwhile, found a five-acre site about a half-mile away on Eastwoods Road and began to work with architect Leroy Binkley, a student of Mies van der Rohe’s, on a design for a house.
“We were always interested in building in a contemporary way,” said Helen Federico, who still lives in the house. “That was very important. And not making a statement on the landscape, which certainly a lot of people did even then.”
The Federicos chose a nearly-flat rock outcrop on which to build. The house, which was finished in 1951, was constructed of gray cypress and glass, and has a fieldstone fireplace and black slate floors with radiant heating.
Easy maintenance was one of their important goals, and one of the characteristics often cited by Modern house owners. In the Federico house there’s hardly a painted surface to be found.
“We couldn’t face having it painted, having had enough experience with painters in apartments in New York,” Helen said.
The Federicos were followed to Pound Ridge by another art director, Bob Gage, and his wife Fay, who built a Modern house on Old Stone Hill Road, and then by Ann and John Strauss, who commissioned Edward Larabee Barnes to build a Modern house for them near the Federicos on Eastwoods Road.
In New Canaan, the Harvard five and their followers ultimately built more than 80 houses, some of them first-rate and built to last, others built rather cheaply for clients with meager budgets, Bergmann said.
But whether they were built to last or not, many of the Modern houses have been torn down in recent years, replaced by the oversized stately homes that contemporary builders are imposing on the landscape. (Modern houses aren’t the only victims; disproportionately large McMansions have replaced farmhouses in many places along New Canaan’s Oenoke Ridge Road, West Road, Ponus Ridge Road, and White Oak Shade Road.)
Among the first-rate examples of Modernism to be demolished was the Stackpole house, on Ponus Ridge Road, designed by Elliot Noyes in 1951 and taken down in 1999.
Laura Pla happened to be driving along at the time, saw the demolition, and was appalled. Bergmann saw others being demolished elsewhere in town and was likewise concerned.
No regulations exist in New Canaan to prevent the demolitions, and so independently of each other, Pla and Bergman tried to stir up public opinion.
Bergmann helped organize a symposium on the issue about five years ago, and Pla and the historical society put together a symposium and tour in October 2001 that drew 150 people.
“My goal primarily was preservation,” Pla said.
Pla said she thinks there is still ample reason to enact local regulations that make it difficult to tear down architecturally-significant Modern houses. But by celebrating their qualities, Pla and others may be helping to introduce them potential buyers who will preserve and restore them.
John and Vorisek are only one example of people who have done so. In Pound Ridge, Sue Haft and Eric Moss bought and renovated a Moore & Hutchins house on Bender Way that one of the firm’s partners, John C.B. Moore, built as a weekend retreat for himself.
Next to it is the Moore & Hutchins house that the Hinerfelds owned. It looks substantially the same today, after a renovation that included new heating, electrical, and plumbing, as well as construction of a small addition (there is a photo of it on Sphere, taken a couple of weeks ago).
Sixty years after the first ones were built, the Modern houses of New Canaan and Pound Ridge have become as much a part of the historical heritage as the remaining farmhouses and old stone walls. That awareness is just starting to take hold, but it may be enough to preserve what is left.
Sunday, January 02, 2005
The Swiss Cheese Maker
The occasion for this post was a piece in the Times Magazine about a Modern house built in an ancient village in eastern Switzerland. We live in a Modern house, we like Modern domestic architecture, and we like Switzerland, and this house happened to be in a village -- Soglio -- we had visited twice. By now the Times' website has archived the story, and the archives don't include pictures, so there's no sense linking to it. But Soglio is worth knowing.
It is a tiny village perched on a terrace above the Val Bregaglia that we visited twice, in 1987 and in 1989. To get there, you follow the valley of the Upper Engadine, the famous winter sport region, past St. Moritz, Sils Maria and Sils Biselgia – an area now scarred by highways that have muddied the air and robbed the valley of much of its beauty – and through Maloja.
In ’87 we were traveling on the cheap (if that’s possible in Switzerland) and so did not rent a car. We’d take the train or the post bus to a village, find a place to stay, and head out for long hikes in the mountains.
One of those places was Maloja, where in early June it was still late winter. The larches and beeches had yet to put out leaves, and as the snow melted, entire meadows glistened with moving water. We hiked along the Via Engiadina through tiny villages that served as summer residences for cowherds – Blaunca, for example, a cluster of 20 or so stone structures with shale roofs, 6,700 feet above sea level. A carving on one of the houses said it had been built in 1436 and renovated in 1963. Near there we encountered a flock of 10 steinbock – mountain goats – and watched them feed contentedly.
The next morning, we boarded a bus at Maloja and descended through the Maloja Pass, an incredible series of hairpin curves that dropped us from the late winter of the Engadine into the full spring of the Val Bregaglia, from 5,900 feet to 2,700. The larches sprouted leaves, the conifers changed to birch and beech and chestnut, the gardens became planted, the fields full of yellow and white and blue and violet. At Promontogno we hopped a connecting bus and rode another thousand feet up the hillside to Soglio.
There we found a hotel, had lunch in the garden of an old hotel called the Palazzo surrounded by trees, hedges, and flowers. Two giant sequoias rose from the rear of the garden and nearby a sign asked for money to keep them alive. After lunch we walked through the outlying meadows, a riot of beautifully-colored wildflowers — buttercups, cow parsnip, harebells, bluebells, three kinds of mints, daisies, bladder campions, trefoil, red clover, white clover. Then we strolled through the churchyard and stopped in across the road at a dairy, or lattaria, where we met a fellow who made goat cheese. Here's what we saw and learned, from the unpublished Andersen Diaries.
It is a tiny village perched on a terrace above the Val Bregaglia that we visited twice, in 1987 and in 1989. To get there, you follow the valley of the Upper Engadine, the famous winter sport region, past St. Moritz, Sils Maria and Sils Biselgia – an area now scarred by highways that have muddied the air and robbed the valley of much of its beauty – and through Maloja.
In ’87 we were traveling on the cheap (if that’s possible in Switzerland) and so did not rent a car. We’d take the train or the post bus to a village, find a place to stay, and head out for long hikes in the mountains.
One of those places was Maloja, where in early June it was still late winter. The larches and beeches had yet to put out leaves, and as the snow melted, entire meadows glistened with moving water. We hiked along the Via Engiadina through tiny villages that served as summer residences for cowherds – Blaunca, for example, a cluster of 20 or so stone structures with shale roofs, 6,700 feet above sea level. A carving on one of the houses said it had been built in 1436 and renovated in 1963. Near there we encountered a flock of 10 steinbock – mountain goats – and watched them feed contentedly.
The next morning, we boarded a bus at Maloja and descended through the Maloja Pass, an incredible series of hairpin curves that dropped us from the late winter of the Engadine into the full spring of the Val Bregaglia, from 5,900 feet to 2,700. The larches sprouted leaves, the conifers changed to birch and beech and chestnut, the gardens became planted, the fields full of yellow and white and blue and violet. At Promontogno we hopped a connecting bus and rode another thousand feet up the hillside to Soglio.
There we found a hotel, had lunch in the garden of an old hotel called the Palazzo surrounded by trees, hedges, and flowers. Two giant sequoias rose from the rear of the garden and nearby a sign asked for money to keep them alive. After lunch we walked through the outlying meadows, a riot of beautifully-colored wildflowers — buttercups, cow parsnip, harebells, bluebells, three kinds of mints, daisies, bladder campions, trefoil, red clover, white clover. Then we strolled through the churchyard and stopped in across the road at a dairy, or lattaria, where we met a fellow who made goat cheese. Here's what we saw and learned, from the unpublished Andersen Diaries.
Yesterday during a visit to the lattaria, Gina struck up a conversation with the proprietor, who invited us to come by this morning and watch him make cheese. So we ate our breakfast early, and shortly after 7 walked through the rain to his shop next door.
It is a stone building with a workroom of roughly 20 feet by 20 feet, and a thick wooden door and a stone floor, and lit by fluorescent lights. There are two large copper-and-cast-iron cauldrons, a scale hanging in one corner, a trough into which water trickles constantly in another corner, stainless steel pots, a small stove, a wooden table with loaves of bread and a coffee machine, and a refrigerator.
The proprietor is a man of about 40, with curly dark hair turning gray. He wore rimless eyeglasses, and a blue-and-gold plaid shirt and grey corduroy pants. He told us he had had a minor disaster that morning — some milk spilled, I think — and was going to advise us not to bother coming over. But he had gotten it under control and figured he could still make his cheese and talk to us at the same time.
"Now I will make my coffee, which I need badly," he said.
The label on the cheese says "Ziegenmilch Produkte" and the proprietors are listed as "R+H Gutekunst." I asked. "Which are you, R or H?"
"Horst," he said, "which is the eagle's nest."
There is not much goat-cheese making in Switzerland. Five to seven customers from the village walk over between 7 a.m. and 7:30 to deliver their milk. One of those, a young man with a cigarette in his mouth, came in carrying two buckets of milk, a red plastic one and a stainless steel one. He wore a maroon jacket, green coveralls. He poured the milk into a larger bucket that was hung on a scale.
Shortly after an older woman in a gray-green coat and a kerchief on her head did the same. Horst joked with her and she smiled broadly as she said "arrivaderci." Later a young woman wearing a blue jacket and brown corduroys, with a handkerchief covering her head, came in with her morning's supply. As she entered I whiffed the sweet smell of goats.
The goats go as high as 2,000 meters up the mountain in search of grass. One goat produces up to three liters of milk a day and there are 120 goats in the town — from 30 of which Horst buys milk.
He spoke English well although slowly, articulating words carefully but occasionally falling into a curious usage. The temperature of the milk while it is cooked, he said, was "the warranty" that the cheese would turn out right. And, "How to make yogurt is very simple if once you have milk," he said.
He said he lives 7 kilometers down the road and comes up to the shop twice a day. He alternates, one day making yogurt, the next day cheese.
When his coffee was ready he fixed himself some bread and butter with orange marmalade.
I asked him what the building was used for before he began his lattaria, which he said was six years ago.
"Fifty years ago the whole thing was active, with big pots — in the winter time only," because the animals remained in the barns. In other seasons people drank their milk or made cheese themselves on the hillsides. Also before he started, "They always had a problem in hay time," because when each day's field work was done, there was no time to make cheese with the milk.
Because he buys so much milk, and because there is only so much cheese and yogurt one can sell in a village the size of Soglio, "I have invented a few things," he told us, including a sort of liquid health food he calls Milkofit.
Outside the rain fell steadily, as it had since the previous night, the water sliding downhill over the cobblestones, past the church across the road.
Gina noticed and admired a hologram on the wall. He said it was his work. "I was doing some kind of an art, you know — I wanted to do it, I must say."
He said he is from Basel, "The capital of chemistry."
"Before I started this kind of work I was in scientific field — I have knowledge of several fields," he said, including electronics, physics, biology, and chemistry.
He gave Gina a detailed account of how to make cheese and yogurt and perhaps also could not resist giving us his world view, which is optimistic, particularly regarding the relations between the superpowers. With Gorbachev in power things are looking up, he said, and he gave as a recent example of a good move the decision to stop jamming transmissions by the Voice of America.
"The world is going to be a little bit better," he told us.
"The simplicity of the matter is, people are always hungry, you know."
Americans come in and sniff around suspiciously, he said, not sure of what to make of such an operation.
"They laugh. It's blowing them out because it's too much nature. They'd rather eat something plastic, instead of eat something original that has quality."
A small woman came in whom he greeted with great pleasure. He introduced her to us as Mrs. Giovanoli, a name we had seen often in the churchyard across the street. He said she is originally from Soglio, was back for a visit. It is she, he said, who taught him how to make cheese.
[Two years later we visited Horst again. He told us he no longer made many goats' products because a political fight in the town caused many of the goatkeeprs to give up the goat business.]
Wednesday, December 15, 2004
The Last Fisherman
I met Dan Dzenkowski well before dawn on a Saturday morning in July 1989, at his dock, which was next to a fish market on an inlet called Stirling Creek, in Greenport. Dan was the last pound net fisherman on Long Island Sound. We shook hands and boarded his boat. He was 64, friendly and open and perfectly willing to accommodate me and my questions. His brother Joe was another story. I shook Joe’s hand and he scowled, and kept scowling for the entire trip.
The other mate hadn’t shown up yet and after a wait of a few minutes, Dan telephoned him, woke him up, and reminded him that they were working that morning. He turned out to be a much younger man, named Jim, who went about his business without any nonsense but without any hostility either.
As we waited, a trawler eased alongside the fish market for its supply of ice, which the one-man crew shoveled into three tubs the size of bushel baskets. Dan told me than Greenport used to be far busier. Each day an ice house would deliver a ton or more of ice to keep the catch fresh. Fishing boats would line up for ice in the morning and return later, their holds filled with weakfish and striped bass and squid. These days, Dan said, three or four boats at most needed ice.
Dan maneuvered his boat down the creek — which he pronounced crick — and through Greenport Harbor, turning south past Long Beach Point, and then east along Peconic Bay toward Orient, an hour away. Joe stayed on deck for the duration. Jim dozed in the cabin. I talked with Dan as he stood at the wheel.
He told me – no surprise here – that the fishing was not as good as it used to be. Fishermen have retired or found other work and few young men want to sacrifice the security and relative ease — weekends and holidays off, steady hours — of a conventional job. And there aren’t as many fish as there used to be.
As a young man Dan grew potatoes and cauliflower on a North Fork truck farm, catching lobsters evenings and in winter. Fishing accounted for a substantial part of his income for about half of his 64 years. By then, however, most of the small farms were gone, and their maritime equivalent — the fishing boat with a crew of two or three men — was disappearing too. Stirling Creek had been taken over by cabin cruisers and condominiums.
At the lighthouse beyond Orient Point we made a hairpin turn and plowed through Plum Gut into Long Island Sound. The sky was growing lighter although the sun hadn’t risen yet. Only one of Dan’s six nets were in the Sound – the others were in Gardiner’s Bay, but we were heading to the Sound first because the net is staked close to Plum Gut, which funnels water between Gardiner’s Bay and the Sound at six knots, and the only safe time to work it is at slack water, which was approaching.
A pound net is set up perpendicular to the shore. The fishermen stick eight or ten large posts into the water leading out from the beach, and then string a net along the posts. The net intercepts the fish as they’re swimming along the shore and forces them to swim out from shore. The pound, which is also made of netting, is attached to poles at the far end. The fish are led into the pound which is constructed so that once they get in, they can’t find their way out.
Dan’s judgment that morning was solid — the water was calm and he easily edged the boat against the pound net’s outer side. Without exchanging a word, the crew moved into action.
On the bow, Jim looped a rope to one of the net’s outer stakes. The boat rocked briefly, then stabilized. Then Jim and Dan each dropped into one of the dinghies we had been towing. Each found his balance standing on the bow and maneuvered along the net to the far end of the pound. Now Pulling themselves back toward the boat, they began to raise the net by unhooking it and re-hooking it at a higher spot, flapping it to loosen the hundreds of spider crabs that clung to it, making the pound smaller and smaller as they progressed. When Jim arrived at the boat, Joe hopped down onto his dinghy alongside him, and together they returned to the far end of the pound, where Jim crossed onto Dan’s dinghy. Joe returned to the boat and tied the dinghy to the stern.
Now standing in the same dinghy, Dan and Jim began easing their way back toward the boat, hoisting the net with hooks, closing it even further, shaking the spider crabs loose.
I could look down from the deck of the boat into the pound, which the three men had made much smaller by tightening the net. The fish knew they were trapped, and they looked panicked, flashing and bolting across the pound and around its edge, quick as lightning.
When Dan and Jim were about five feet from the boat, Joe extended a grooved plank to their dinghy and Jim used it to climb up on board. Joe grabbed a mechanical scoop net, and Jim, operating a pulley fastened to the cabin, lowered it into the pound, where Dan, who had his own scoop net, filled it with fish.
Joe called out, “O.K.” Jim switched on the pulley, lifting the scoop net over the deck and opening its bottom to spill fish into and over the edges of a plastic basin. The fish smacked together. Dan filled the scoop net twice more before the pound was empty. Then the men lowered themselves into the dinghies to reset the pound. I counted the catch — winter flounder, fluke, an eel, bonito and bluefish, lobster, moss bunkers, butterfish, scup, spider crabs and horseshoe crabs, squid, sea robin, skate, Spanish mackerel.
By 6:20 a.m. we were back around Orient Point, heading west in Gardiner’s Bay to repeat the routine at Dan’s six other nets. The sun suddenly was a dull orange disk above Plum Island. A tern cried as it flew past.
As he piloted the boat Dan told me pretty much what I had expected to hear: the fishing was not as good as it used to be. He said he was catching the same species as always but there were fewer of them: “You catch as much but you don’t catch as much of it,” Dan said.
He told me that the pollution scare of 1987 and 1988 — when medical waste was befouling beaches in New York and New Jersey — hurt him seriously. He sold some of his fish to the fish market near his dock in Greenport and sent the rest to Fulton Market. “Last year was the first time the guy I deal with called and said don’t send any more in,” he said.
At the time, there was a total ban on commercial fishing for striped bass, because of PCBs. Like all commercial fishermen, Dan believed the fears were exaggerated. When stripers were legal to keep, Dan would fish until Thanksgiving because bass are so numerous in the fall. At the season’s peak he would ship 200 60-pound cartons of bass every day for a week. Now, because of PCBs, Dan quits about October first. At the day’s first pound, when two fine specimens had thudded to the deck, Joe barely glanced at them. He grabbed them by the tails and flung them back into the Sound.
At the second net, in Peconic Bay, an osprey was sitting on a stake. “This is where the fish hawks get all their fish,” Dan said. “They just sit there and pick what they want.”
At the third net, every stake was a perch for a cormorant. “Especially in spring that net will be solid black with birds,” Dan said. “You get a couple of hundred birds on a trap, they can really do a job on them. Plus, they drive the stuff out.”
Black-backed gulls sailed behind us as the boat rumbled from one net to the next. They screeched in anticipation when a load of spider crabs — inedible and no good for bait — was dumped overboard. When the crabs hit the water the birds shut up, realizing that the crustaceans were not what they were hoping for.
The birds’ luck changed after the sixth net. Dan set the boat’s automatic pilot and the three men began cleaning bluefish: the belly of a large blue will sometimes hold a smaller fish, which will putrefy and ruin the bluefish. They worked fast, slicing open bellies with a ripping sound, scraping out the innards, which they tossed overboard, sending the gulls into a frenzy. The boat moved steadily forward, with Dan showing no concern as it neared the next pound. I stood alone in the cabin, looking from the pound, which was growing ever nearer, to Dan, who did not bother even to glance up. I held my tongue. The boat bore down on the pound net. I looked back at dan again. We were going to slam into the net. At exactly the right time – and at precisely the last second -- Dan quit cleaning bluefish, returned to the cabin, and guided the boat alongside the pound with such matter-of-factness that it could hardly even be called grace under pressure.
We were done by 9 a.m. At the fish market near the dock the men lifted the catch onto a platform, weighed the fish, and packed them with crushed ice in waxed-cardboard cartons. The market bought 45 pounds of Spanish mackerel, 17 pounds of bonito, 16 of squid, five of flounder, 12 of porgies, and 60 of bluefish. Dan, Joe, and Jim packed the remainder to be shipped to Fulton Fish Market — 370 pounds of blues and 48 pounds of porgies. They didn’t bother to weigh the bait fish, which they would sell to lobstermen and conch fishermen. The day’s total: 583 pounds of fish, or the equivalent of about 10 60-pound cartons. Five or six years ago, Dan said, he would ship 4,000 to 5,000 cartons a year to New York, half of them bass. Now he ships about 1,000. A decline on that scale takes its toll. Dan said only three crews fish pound nets on the North Fork of Long Island now. Two decades ago, he said, there were 25 or 30.
“It seems like every year you lose a few,” Dan said. “It’s something that a few years from now you probably won’t see any more.”
The other mate hadn’t shown up yet and after a wait of a few minutes, Dan telephoned him, woke him up, and reminded him that they were working that morning. He turned out to be a much younger man, named Jim, who went about his business without any nonsense but without any hostility either.
As we waited, a trawler eased alongside the fish market for its supply of ice, which the one-man crew shoveled into three tubs the size of bushel baskets. Dan told me than Greenport used to be far busier. Each day an ice house would deliver a ton or more of ice to keep the catch fresh. Fishing boats would line up for ice in the morning and return later, their holds filled with weakfish and striped bass and squid. These days, Dan said, three or four boats at most needed ice.
Dan maneuvered his boat down the creek — which he pronounced crick — and through Greenport Harbor, turning south past Long Beach Point, and then east along Peconic Bay toward Orient, an hour away. Joe stayed on deck for the duration. Jim dozed in the cabin. I talked with Dan as he stood at the wheel.
He told me – no surprise here – that the fishing was not as good as it used to be. Fishermen have retired or found other work and few young men want to sacrifice the security and relative ease — weekends and holidays off, steady hours — of a conventional job. And there aren’t as many fish as there used to be.
As a young man Dan grew potatoes and cauliflower on a North Fork truck farm, catching lobsters evenings and in winter. Fishing accounted for a substantial part of his income for about half of his 64 years. By then, however, most of the small farms were gone, and their maritime equivalent — the fishing boat with a crew of two or three men — was disappearing too. Stirling Creek had been taken over by cabin cruisers and condominiums.
At the lighthouse beyond Orient Point we made a hairpin turn and plowed through Plum Gut into Long Island Sound. The sky was growing lighter although the sun hadn’t risen yet. Only one of Dan’s six nets were in the Sound – the others were in Gardiner’s Bay, but we were heading to the Sound first because the net is staked close to Plum Gut, which funnels water between Gardiner’s Bay and the Sound at six knots, and the only safe time to work it is at slack water, which was approaching.
A pound net is set up perpendicular to the shore. The fishermen stick eight or ten large posts into the water leading out from the beach, and then string a net along the posts. The net intercepts the fish as they’re swimming along the shore and forces them to swim out from shore. The pound, which is also made of netting, is attached to poles at the far end. The fish are led into the pound which is constructed so that once they get in, they can’t find their way out.
Dan’s judgment that morning was solid — the water was calm and he easily edged the boat against the pound net’s outer side. Without exchanging a word, the crew moved into action.
On the bow, Jim looped a rope to one of the net’s outer stakes. The boat rocked briefly, then stabilized. Then Jim and Dan each dropped into one of the dinghies we had been towing. Each found his balance standing on the bow and maneuvered along the net to the far end of the pound. Now Pulling themselves back toward the boat, they began to raise the net by unhooking it and re-hooking it at a higher spot, flapping it to loosen the hundreds of spider crabs that clung to it, making the pound smaller and smaller as they progressed. When Jim arrived at the boat, Joe hopped down onto his dinghy alongside him, and together they returned to the far end of the pound, where Jim crossed onto Dan’s dinghy. Joe returned to the boat and tied the dinghy to the stern.
Now standing in the same dinghy, Dan and Jim began easing their way back toward the boat, hoisting the net with hooks, closing it even further, shaking the spider crabs loose.
I could look down from the deck of the boat into the pound, which the three men had made much smaller by tightening the net. The fish knew they were trapped, and they looked panicked, flashing and bolting across the pound and around its edge, quick as lightning.
When Dan and Jim were about five feet from the boat, Joe extended a grooved plank to their dinghy and Jim used it to climb up on board. Joe grabbed a mechanical scoop net, and Jim, operating a pulley fastened to the cabin, lowered it into the pound, where Dan, who had his own scoop net, filled it with fish.
Joe called out, “O.K.” Jim switched on the pulley, lifting the scoop net over the deck and opening its bottom to spill fish into and over the edges of a plastic basin. The fish smacked together. Dan filled the scoop net twice more before the pound was empty. Then the men lowered themselves into the dinghies to reset the pound. I counted the catch — winter flounder, fluke, an eel, bonito and bluefish, lobster, moss bunkers, butterfish, scup, spider crabs and horseshoe crabs, squid, sea robin, skate, Spanish mackerel.
By 6:20 a.m. we were back around Orient Point, heading west in Gardiner’s Bay to repeat the routine at Dan’s six other nets. The sun suddenly was a dull orange disk above Plum Island. A tern cried as it flew past.
As he piloted the boat Dan told me pretty much what I had expected to hear: the fishing was not as good as it used to be. He said he was catching the same species as always but there were fewer of them: “You catch as much but you don’t catch as much of it,” Dan said.
He told me that the pollution scare of 1987 and 1988 — when medical waste was befouling beaches in New York and New Jersey — hurt him seriously. He sold some of his fish to the fish market near his dock in Greenport and sent the rest to Fulton Market. “Last year was the first time the guy I deal with called and said don’t send any more in,” he said.
At the time, there was a total ban on commercial fishing for striped bass, because of PCBs. Like all commercial fishermen, Dan believed the fears were exaggerated. When stripers were legal to keep, Dan would fish until Thanksgiving because bass are so numerous in the fall. At the season’s peak he would ship 200 60-pound cartons of bass every day for a week. Now, because of PCBs, Dan quits about October first. At the day’s first pound, when two fine specimens had thudded to the deck, Joe barely glanced at them. He grabbed them by the tails and flung them back into the Sound.
At the second net, in Peconic Bay, an osprey was sitting on a stake. “This is where the fish hawks get all their fish,” Dan said. “They just sit there and pick what they want.”
At the third net, every stake was a perch for a cormorant. “Especially in spring that net will be solid black with birds,” Dan said. “You get a couple of hundred birds on a trap, they can really do a job on them. Plus, they drive the stuff out.”
Black-backed gulls sailed behind us as the boat rumbled from one net to the next. They screeched in anticipation when a load of spider crabs — inedible and no good for bait — was dumped overboard. When the crabs hit the water the birds shut up, realizing that the crustaceans were not what they were hoping for.
The birds’ luck changed after the sixth net. Dan set the boat’s automatic pilot and the three men began cleaning bluefish: the belly of a large blue will sometimes hold a smaller fish, which will putrefy and ruin the bluefish. They worked fast, slicing open bellies with a ripping sound, scraping out the innards, which they tossed overboard, sending the gulls into a frenzy. The boat moved steadily forward, with Dan showing no concern as it neared the next pound. I stood alone in the cabin, looking from the pound, which was growing ever nearer, to Dan, who did not bother even to glance up. I held my tongue. The boat bore down on the pound net. I looked back at dan again. We were going to slam into the net. At exactly the right time – and at precisely the last second -- Dan quit cleaning bluefish, returned to the cabin, and guided the boat alongside the pound with such matter-of-factness that it could hardly even be called grace under pressure.
We were done by 9 a.m. At the fish market near the dock the men lifted the catch onto a platform, weighed the fish, and packed them with crushed ice in waxed-cardboard cartons. The market bought 45 pounds of Spanish mackerel, 17 pounds of bonito, 16 of squid, five of flounder, 12 of porgies, and 60 of bluefish. Dan, Joe, and Jim packed the remainder to be shipped to Fulton Fish Market — 370 pounds of blues and 48 pounds of porgies. They didn’t bother to weigh the bait fish, which they would sell to lobstermen and conch fishermen. The day’s total: 583 pounds of fish, or the equivalent of about 10 60-pound cartons. Five or six years ago, Dan said, he would ship 4,000 to 5,000 cartons a year to New York, half of them bass. Now he ships about 1,000. A decline on that scale takes its toll. Dan said only three crews fish pound nets on the North Fork of Long Island now. Two decades ago, he said, there were 25 or 30.
“It seems like every year you lose a few,” Dan said. “It’s something that a few years from now you probably won’t see any more.”
Burgundy with a Tea-Totaler and on a Budget
If I were to devise a personal definition of frustration, it might be this: being set free in Burgundy with a severely limited budget and accompanied by a wife who was three months pregnant and therefore not interested in even a moderate sampling of wine. Granted, a driving tour of France is not high on anyone's list of hardships. But for someone with an interest in wine, a visit to one of the world's great wine regions — some would say its greatest wine region — with a packet of traveller's checks notable for its thinness and a companion devoted to teatotaling can be a frustrating glimpse of what it might be like to spend a life in hell.
Burgundy — the wine, not the region — has become something of an obsession for me. To those who have fallen under its spell, it is the world's most intriguing wine.
"Something about Burgundy excites spirituality," Matt Kramer has written in his book, Making Sense of Burgundy. "Where Napa Valley restores hope that beauty has a future in the modern era and Bordeaux simply makes one want to live, so as to continue to sample its extraordinary array, Burgundy elicits a different emotion. Even the most skeptical are willing, after savoring a genuinely great Burgundy, to concede that there may well be — dare one say it? — a Presence in the universe beyond our own.
"One thing is clear: the Earth speaks in Burgundy as it does nowhere else. And the grapevine is its interpreter."
It is that notion — the Earth speaking through the wine; the wine being the absolute essence of soil and rain and sunshine and wind — that is among wine's attractions. Kramer does not refer to the estimable food writer Waverly Root, but in Kramer’s 1990 book he is talking about precisely the same thing that Root talked about in his 1958 book, The Food of France: "…food, with the exception of a very few minerals, is made up of the living things, vegetable or animal, which spring from the soil of a region, the people of which are made, in the most literal sense, of the food they eat. … The land [forms] the food. The food [is] intimately and inextricably involved with the geography and the climate and the history and the habits and the culture — in short with the entire environment — of the land."
In an era of factory farms, agribusiness, and chemical pesticides, it is a notion with no little attractiveness — food and wine as part of an ecological system, part of an absolute connection to the good earth. And in the wines of Burgundy, it seems, that connection has reached its greatest manifestation.
And so I admit that Burgundy is approaching the level of an obsession with me, or if not an obsession, an unrealizable dream. It is a dream inspired by inaccessibility. I do not mean you cannot stride into a wine shop and buy any number of bottles of excellent Burgundy. You can — if, that is, you have the approximate income of a big league outfielder. Burgundy is not only arguably the world's finest wine, it is the world's most expensive wine — to the frugal wine-lover's great disadvantage. The laws of supply and demand are nowhere applied more starkly than in Burgundy. The total production of wine is tiny compared to other wine regions, and yet Burgundy aficionados abound, passionate about the wine and willing to buy it, bad vintage or good. If you are interested enough in wine to peruse the wine columns and journals and many books that serve as a consumer's guide to the cabernets and Cote Roties, the pinot noirs and riojas, the barolos and barbarescos, then Burgundy's greatness is a fact you must constantly confront — in the frustrating abstract.
We started our tour in Dijon, an ancient, dingy city of 150,000 people, described lovingly by M.F.K. Fisher in her book "Long Ago in France." She lived there as a young woman 64 years ago, the wife of an American student, serving her apprenticeship as both a cook and an eater. Her Dijon was an inexpensive provincial town not far removed from the Medieval days when it was the seat of the powerful Dukes of Burgundy, a town with superlative restaurants and chefs, where even the ordinary residents excelled in the kitchen — a town where, it was said, it was impossible to get a bad meal.
Nor did we get a bad meal, six decades later. What we did not get, though, was a Burgundian meal. We arrived in Dijon late on a rainy, dank Sunday afternoon and, after checking into our hotel, set out on foot and under umbrellas. We found the restaurant recommended by our hotel keeper, and it looked wonderful — dark and cheerful, filled with people earnestly and happily eating their Sunday evening dinner. Alas, we next learned what we were to learn elsewhere — that in Burgundy, if not in all of France, restaurants have only one seating for dinner, and if you arrive after all tables are taken your only choice is to look elsewhere.
We did, but on a Sunday night the options were limited, and so we settled on a Moroccan restaurant where we were served excellent couscous, rich and savory with lamb and chicken. It was a quality meal, but it was less than satisfactory. We were in the gateway to Burgundy, after all, the city in which it was impossible to get a bad meal, and if I had wanted to eat North African food I would have gone to North Africa. I ate, though, and tried to hide my disappointment. Monday was another day, and lunch another meal.
Like Sunday, Monday was dreary. It rained on and off. The facades of Dijon are almost uniformly earth-toned, a palate not shown to its best advantage under sodden, leaden skies. There is hardly a pastel or primary color to be seen. Unfortunately for us the Monday noon hour in Dijon is also an off-time for restaurants. Again we settled — this time for crepes. I was hungry after a morning of museums, and the crepes were a perfectly adequate lunch. But for my second meal in a famous gastronomic city at the head of Burgundy, it was thoroughly disappointing. Where were the rabbits, the beef, the kidney and liver and sweetbreads? Where, as Fisher wrote, were "the snipes hung so long they fell from their hooks, to be roasted then on cushions of toast softened with the paste of their rotted innards and fine brandy"?
Discouraged, I skipped wine at lunch.
That afternoon we drove into the heart of Burgundy, wending our way slowly through the Cote D'Or — the Golden Slope — as one might nibble at the charcuterie served before a meal to sharpen and preserve one's appetite for what followed. We cruised through the towns whose names on the direction signs, as Waverly Root put it, let you feel like a tiny insect crawling across a magnified wine card: Gevrey-Chambertin, Vosne-Romanée, Aloxe-Corton, Nuits-Saint-Georges. This was where my frustrations as a perspective Burgundy-drinker would at last be satisfied, I hoped.
To travel north-south along the Cote D'Or, you can drive the superhighway that has been strung along the base of the slope — which is perfect, say, for hastening to Pommard or Volnay if you have no interest in Vougeot — or drive the ancient hillside road past the vineyards and along the narrow village streets, noting the famous names here and there on the winegrowers' headquarters. It has been said that winegrowing country is generally not beautiful landscape, but this northern half of the 30-mile Cote d'Or — the Cote de Nuit — was pleasant countryside, even under gray skies.
We stopped in two villages — Aloxe-Corton and Savigny-les-Beaune — and rejected hotels in each as too expensive. We tracked down several houses with rooms to rent, but they were filled. Finally we proceeded to Beaune, the ancient town that is the capital of Burgundy and the halfway point on the route down the Cote D'Or.
As we drove I was thinking both of Waverly Root and A.J. Liebling, who was a better writer than Root but who admired Root's first-rate book, "The Food of France," almost without reservation. Both lived in Paris as young men during the 1920s, the years of Hemingway and Gertrude Stein and the Lost Generation — though neither, apparently, found membership in that generation. (Root's amusing memoir of those years, "The Paris Edition," has a chapter called "I Never Knew Hemingway.") Both were too busy — Liebling as a nominal student at the Sorbonne who in reality was learning the gastronomic arts thanks to his father's unknowing largesse, and Root as a reporter and copy editor on the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune and a kind of independent gustatory researcher whose studies peaked with the bi-weekly arrival of his paycheck.
I was thinking in particular of an incident that Liebling relates in his own memoir, "Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris." Liebling toured Burgundy as he was leaving France for America, via the Mediterranean port of Marseille. It is hard to think of a more perfect locale for him to pass a week in the country, unless perhaps it is Bordeaux, or maybe Provence, or perhaps the Emiglia-Romana region of Italy. He was a prodigious eater and drinker who considered wisdom at the table and the stamina to put it to good use to be qualities of the highest order. He joked about Proust in his book and how the memory of a madeleine inspired "Remembrance of Things Past": "In light of what Proust wrote with so mild a stimulus, it is the world's loss that he did not have a heartier appetite. On a dozen Gardiners Island oysters, a bowl of clam chowder, a peck of steamers, some bay scallops, three sautéed soft-shelled crabs, a few ears of fresh-picked corn, a thin swordfish steak of generous area, a pair of lobsters, and a Long Island duck, he might have written a masterpiece." (It is gratifyingly obvious that Liebling, who lived part of his adult years on the eastern end of Long Island, was partial to the good regional food of places other than France.)
While in the Cote d'Or he ate and drank on a scale that I can only call Liebling-esque, separating his repasts with long walks that allowed the effect of one huge meal to wear off while rekindling his appetite for the next. The young writer made friends with an inn-keeper, who, although French, was not from Burgundy. The inn-keeper saw in Liebling a chance to gain access to the best cellars of his town, Gevrey-Chambertin. Introducing Liebling as a rich American bootlegger, the inn-keeper led him from one vineyard to the next, sampling all the greatest bottles. "In that way," Liebling wrote, "I got to drink more good wine than most men are able to pay for in their lives. … At night I would stagger home to eat the jambon-persillé — parsley-flavored ham with mustard and pickles — that every meal began with, followed by hare or beef or fowl in a sauce of better wine than you could buy in other regions in labelled bottles. All the good wine I could drink came with the meals, but [the inn-keeper] had invented the bootlegger story to get at the superlative wine of the vineyardists. He was a Lorrainer, from Nancy or Metz, and so an outsider, possessing no vineyards of his own." In Burgundy, it seems, even some residents must conspire to get their hands on the good stuff.
Liebling was aware of what an awesome treat he was being given — even then Burgundy was twice as expensive as excellent wines from Bordeaux.
"Burgundy is a lovely thing," he concluded, "when you can get anybody to buy it for you."
I had no hope or expectation of getting anybody to buy it for me. The question was whether I would summon up the cash and the nerve — it takes some courage, I submit, to drink a $50 bottle with dinner — to buy it for myself.
The hotel we stayed at in Beaune was ancient and, from the outside, beautiful. The reception area was a stone cellar with vaulted-ceilinged chambers that you stepped down into from the narrow cobbled street and it was lined with bottles of wine, which could be bought from the hotel keeper. But the rooms were ugly and dark, and noisy, and the price, although moderate, was too steep for ugly, dark, and noisy. The hotelkeeper did, however, recommend a restaurant in town that looked excellent. We hurried to it through the rain, slogging along the streets that wind in a maze within the walls of the old city, walking past wine shops and shops that sold wine accessories. But when we entered the restaurant, the proprietor dismissed us with a wave of the hand — no room, all the tables were taken. Likewise we were turned away from two other establishments, until finally finding one, on the outskirts of town, that had two seats for us. We had a decent if not spectacular Burgundian meal and I, drinking alone and so restricted by temperance and fear-of-hangover to the list of half-bottles, chose a Haute Cote de Beaune. It was a drinkable bottle of pinot noir, young and fresh — a burgundy, true, but not the burgundy I had been envisioning and hoping for, the old, muscular wine with the gout de terroir, the taste of the land, that burgundy lovers cherish.
The next morning we packed up early and left the hotel. We visited the famous Hospice de Beaune, an ancient hospital that raises its operating funds by doubling as a wine merchant and auctioneer. We also stopped at a nearby cellar where a middle-aged man showed us around briefly, uncorked a keg and, using a long glass tool that resembled a turkey baster, drew out a tube full of red wine with which he filled a glass. The wine was delicious. But the man, under the misconception that he could speak coherent English, immediately began regaling us with a tale that I think had something to do with Thomas Jefferson, although I'm not certain. In our haste to escape this speed-talker, who used English words with a complete omission of syntax, making his monologue vaguely familiar but incomprehensible, I forgot the name of the cellar and the wine.
Our next stop was across the street, at the Marché aux Vins — the Wine Market. I knew this would be my chance to taste Burgundy, not just from one town or vintage but from many. At the Marché we were given a tastevin, a wide, shallow metal cup traditionally used for tasting wines in Burgundy. We descended into the catacombs. The long, low, vaulted passageways were lighted by dim bare bulbs and candles, and paved with gravel. Wine racks and bottles leaned against the walls. Every 10 feet or so was an upended keg on top of which sat a candle and an open bottle of wine — 19 kinds of wine in all: white burgundies, beaujolais, and lower-end red burgundies. Back upstairs, in the nave of an old church, was the real thing — 18 top-flight red burgundies.
If not exactly heaven, what lay before could at least have been considered a version of paradise.
And yet it was 11 in the morning. And these wines were for tasting, not — in these circumstances, anyway — for lingering over: vino de meditazioni, wine to meditate over, as the Italians say.
When I had emerged, an hour or so later, into the surprisingly bright daylight of that overcast morning, I had sampled 15 of the 37 wines. White and red, young and old — an '85 Chassagne-Montrachet, an '88 Vosne-Romanée, an '89 Monthelie, an '83 Aloxe-Corton, a '77 Mussigny, a '78 Charmes-Chambertin. It was a wonderful experience. The old wines in particular were something completely different, transformed into a drink that was beyond my previous experience with wine.
But it was also a tease. It was not possible for me to justify buying any of those bottles, priced at $50 or $60 and higher (even though that was half or one-third what they would sell for in the United States). Wine is made to accompany food — "Food is the meaning of wine," as Matt Kramer put it — but I was tasting in a vacuum. What my $40 admission to the Marché aux Vins got me was an intriguing and seductive taste of Burgundy, but only a taste.
With lunch that day I drank a small pitcher of Passe-Tout-Grain, a wine produced of gamay and pinot noir grapes \. It was fresh and fruity, and I enjoyed it enough to have the waitress jot down its name for me — but it was not Burgundy. That afternoon we left the Cote d'Or and drove south through a downpour to the Beaujolais region, where the wine is priced far more accessibly than Burgundy. I had andouillette for dinner, accompanied by a half-bottle of Moulin-a-Vent, fresh and delicious, the way Beaujolais is supposed to be. But it was not Burgundy.
All of which is not to say that we did not have wonderful meals and wine in France. There was a memorable roasted quail and a hare stew with a bottle of Tavel in Provence. In Lyons, at the exciting, crowded, noisy little restaurants called les boucherons, there was a superlative veal liver, and the sweetest mussels I've ever eaten, and a carp cooked in red wine that tasted like the essence of a fresh-water lake on a plate, all accompanied by a pitcher of the Beaujolais village that serves as the house wine in bistros throughout France. Also in Lyons, there were baguettes and coffee for breakfast at the giant food market — Halle de Lyon, a fantastic place where the beauty and bounty of the displays of Roquefort, brie, blood oranges, grapes, leeks, haricots vert, Charolais beef, patés, blue-footed Bresse chickens, pheasants, brioche, turbot, and clams make up for the shopping-mall decor — followed in mid-morning by a couple dozen fresh oysters and two glasses glasses of muscadet.
We'll return to Burgundy someday. I'm already in training, working out on the cote de Rhones, the Australian sirahs, the South American cabernets that are affordable and drinkable — although I realize that moving on to Burgundy will be like preparing to face Tom Seaver by playing slow-pitch softball. And I will admit to having three or four bottles of the most inexpensive Burgundies stored away. I'll drink them sometime and try to capture some hint of what the real stuff, the good stuff, must be like.
Until then I'm resigned to echoing A.J. Liebling: Burgundy is a lovely thing, when you can get anybody to buy it for you.
Burgundy — the wine, not the region — has become something of an obsession for me. To those who have fallen under its spell, it is the world's most intriguing wine.
"Something about Burgundy excites spirituality," Matt Kramer has written in his book, Making Sense of Burgundy. "Where Napa Valley restores hope that beauty has a future in the modern era and Bordeaux simply makes one want to live, so as to continue to sample its extraordinary array, Burgundy elicits a different emotion. Even the most skeptical are willing, after savoring a genuinely great Burgundy, to concede that there may well be — dare one say it? — a Presence in the universe beyond our own.
"One thing is clear: the Earth speaks in Burgundy as it does nowhere else. And the grapevine is its interpreter."
It is that notion — the Earth speaking through the wine; the wine being the absolute essence of soil and rain and sunshine and wind — that is among wine's attractions. Kramer does not refer to the estimable food writer Waverly Root, but in Kramer’s 1990 book he is talking about precisely the same thing that Root talked about in his 1958 book, The Food of France: "…food, with the exception of a very few minerals, is made up of the living things, vegetable or animal, which spring from the soil of a region, the people of which are made, in the most literal sense, of the food they eat. … The land [forms] the food. The food [is] intimately and inextricably involved with the geography and the climate and the history and the habits and the culture — in short with the entire environment — of the land."
In an era of factory farms, agribusiness, and chemical pesticides, it is a notion with no little attractiveness — food and wine as part of an ecological system, part of an absolute connection to the good earth. And in the wines of Burgundy, it seems, that connection has reached its greatest manifestation.
And so I admit that Burgundy is approaching the level of an obsession with me, or if not an obsession, an unrealizable dream. It is a dream inspired by inaccessibility. I do not mean you cannot stride into a wine shop and buy any number of bottles of excellent Burgundy. You can — if, that is, you have the approximate income of a big league outfielder. Burgundy is not only arguably the world's finest wine, it is the world's most expensive wine — to the frugal wine-lover's great disadvantage. The laws of supply and demand are nowhere applied more starkly than in Burgundy. The total production of wine is tiny compared to other wine regions, and yet Burgundy aficionados abound, passionate about the wine and willing to buy it, bad vintage or good. If you are interested enough in wine to peruse the wine columns and journals and many books that serve as a consumer's guide to the cabernets and Cote Roties, the pinot noirs and riojas, the barolos and barbarescos, then Burgundy's greatness is a fact you must constantly confront — in the frustrating abstract.
We started our tour in Dijon, an ancient, dingy city of 150,000 people, described lovingly by M.F.K. Fisher in her book "Long Ago in France." She lived there as a young woman 64 years ago, the wife of an American student, serving her apprenticeship as both a cook and an eater. Her Dijon was an inexpensive provincial town not far removed from the Medieval days when it was the seat of the powerful Dukes of Burgundy, a town with superlative restaurants and chefs, where even the ordinary residents excelled in the kitchen — a town where, it was said, it was impossible to get a bad meal.
Nor did we get a bad meal, six decades later. What we did not get, though, was a Burgundian meal. We arrived in Dijon late on a rainy, dank Sunday afternoon and, after checking into our hotel, set out on foot and under umbrellas. We found the restaurant recommended by our hotel keeper, and it looked wonderful — dark and cheerful, filled with people earnestly and happily eating their Sunday evening dinner. Alas, we next learned what we were to learn elsewhere — that in Burgundy, if not in all of France, restaurants have only one seating for dinner, and if you arrive after all tables are taken your only choice is to look elsewhere.
We did, but on a Sunday night the options were limited, and so we settled on a Moroccan restaurant where we were served excellent couscous, rich and savory with lamb and chicken. It was a quality meal, but it was less than satisfactory. We were in the gateway to Burgundy, after all, the city in which it was impossible to get a bad meal, and if I had wanted to eat North African food I would have gone to North Africa. I ate, though, and tried to hide my disappointment. Monday was another day, and lunch another meal.
Like Sunday, Monday was dreary. It rained on and off. The facades of Dijon are almost uniformly earth-toned, a palate not shown to its best advantage under sodden, leaden skies. There is hardly a pastel or primary color to be seen. Unfortunately for us the Monday noon hour in Dijon is also an off-time for restaurants. Again we settled — this time for crepes. I was hungry after a morning of museums, and the crepes were a perfectly adequate lunch. But for my second meal in a famous gastronomic city at the head of Burgundy, it was thoroughly disappointing. Where were the rabbits, the beef, the kidney and liver and sweetbreads? Where, as Fisher wrote, were "the snipes hung so long they fell from their hooks, to be roasted then on cushions of toast softened with the paste of their rotted innards and fine brandy"?
Discouraged, I skipped wine at lunch.
That afternoon we drove into the heart of Burgundy, wending our way slowly through the Cote D'Or — the Golden Slope — as one might nibble at the charcuterie served before a meal to sharpen and preserve one's appetite for what followed. We cruised through the towns whose names on the direction signs, as Waverly Root put it, let you feel like a tiny insect crawling across a magnified wine card: Gevrey-Chambertin, Vosne-Romanée, Aloxe-Corton, Nuits-Saint-Georges. This was where my frustrations as a perspective Burgundy-drinker would at last be satisfied, I hoped.
To travel north-south along the Cote D'Or, you can drive the superhighway that has been strung along the base of the slope — which is perfect, say, for hastening to Pommard or Volnay if you have no interest in Vougeot — or drive the ancient hillside road past the vineyards and along the narrow village streets, noting the famous names here and there on the winegrowers' headquarters. It has been said that winegrowing country is generally not beautiful landscape, but this northern half of the 30-mile Cote d'Or — the Cote de Nuit — was pleasant countryside, even under gray skies.
We stopped in two villages — Aloxe-Corton and Savigny-les-Beaune — and rejected hotels in each as too expensive. We tracked down several houses with rooms to rent, but they were filled. Finally we proceeded to Beaune, the ancient town that is the capital of Burgundy and the halfway point on the route down the Cote D'Or.
As we drove I was thinking both of Waverly Root and A.J. Liebling, who was a better writer than Root but who admired Root's first-rate book, "The Food of France," almost without reservation. Both lived in Paris as young men during the 1920s, the years of Hemingway and Gertrude Stein and the Lost Generation — though neither, apparently, found membership in that generation. (Root's amusing memoir of those years, "The Paris Edition," has a chapter called "I Never Knew Hemingway.") Both were too busy — Liebling as a nominal student at the Sorbonne who in reality was learning the gastronomic arts thanks to his father's unknowing largesse, and Root as a reporter and copy editor on the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune and a kind of independent gustatory researcher whose studies peaked with the bi-weekly arrival of his paycheck.
I was thinking in particular of an incident that Liebling relates in his own memoir, "Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris." Liebling toured Burgundy as he was leaving France for America, via the Mediterranean port of Marseille. It is hard to think of a more perfect locale for him to pass a week in the country, unless perhaps it is Bordeaux, or maybe Provence, or perhaps the Emiglia-Romana region of Italy. He was a prodigious eater and drinker who considered wisdom at the table and the stamina to put it to good use to be qualities of the highest order. He joked about Proust in his book and how the memory of a madeleine inspired "Remembrance of Things Past": "In light of what Proust wrote with so mild a stimulus, it is the world's loss that he did not have a heartier appetite. On a dozen Gardiners Island oysters, a bowl of clam chowder, a peck of steamers, some bay scallops, three sautéed soft-shelled crabs, a few ears of fresh-picked corn, a thin swordfish steak of generous area, a pair of lobsters, and a Long Island duck, he might have written a masterpiece." (It is gratifyingly obvious that Liebling, who lived part of his adult years on the eastern end of Long Island, was partial to the good regional food of places other than France.)
While in the Cote d'Or he ate and drank on a scale that I can only call Liebling-esque, separating his repasts with long walks that allowed the effect of one huge meal to wear off while rekindling his appetite for the next. The young writer made friends with an inn-keeper, who, although French, was not from Burgundy. The inn-keeper saw in Liebling a chance to gain access to the best cellars of his town, Gevrey-Chambertin. Introducing Liebling as a rich American bootlegger, the inn-keeper led him from one vineyard to the next, sampling all the greatest bottles. "In that way," Liebling wrote, "I got to drink more good wine than most men are able to pay for in their lives. … At night I would stagger home to eat the jambon-persillé — parsley-flavored ham with mustard and pickles — that every meal began with, followed by hare or beef or fowl in a sauce of better wine than you could buy in other regions in labelled bottles. All the good wine I could drink came with the meals, but [the inn-keeper] had invented the bootlegger story to get at the superlative wine of the vineyardists. He was a Lorrainer, from Nancy or Metz, and so an outsider, possessing no vineyards of his own." In Burgundy, it seems, even some residents must conspire to get their hands on the good stuff.
Liebling was aware of what an awesome treat he was being given — even then Burgundy was twice as expensive as excellent wines from Bordeaux.
"Burgundy is a lovely thing," he concluded, "when you can get anybody to buy it for you."
I had no hope or expectation of getting anybody to buy it for me. The question was whether I would summon up the cash and the nerve — it takes some courage, I submit, to drink a $50 bottle with dinner — to buy it for myself.
The hotel we stayed at in Beaune was ancient and, from the outside, beautiful. The reception area was a stone cellar with vaulted-ceilinged chambers that you stepped down into from the narrow cobbled street and it was lined with bottles of wine, which could be bought from the hotel keeper. But the rooms were ugly and dark, and noisy, and the price, although moderate, was too steep for ugly, dark, and noisy. The hotelkeeper did, however, recommend a restaurant in town that looked excellent. We hurried to it through the rain, slogging along the streets that wind in a maze within the walls of the old city, walking past wine shops and shops that sold wine accessories. But when we entered the restaurant, the proprietor dismissed us with a wave of the hand — no room, all the tables were taken. Likewise we were turned away from two other establishments, until finally finding one, on the outskirts of town, that had two seats for us. We had a decent if not spectacular Burgundian meal and I, drinking alone and so restricted by temperance and fear-of-hangover to the list of half-bottles, chose a Haute Cote de Beaune. It was a drinkable bottle of pinot noir, young and fresh — a burgundy, true, but not the burgundy I had been envisioning and hoping for, the old, muscular wine with the gout de terroir, the taste of the land, that burgundy lovers cherish.
The next morning we packed up early and left the hotel. We visited the famous Hospice de Beaune, an ancient hospital that raises its operating funds by doubling as a wine merchant and auctioneer. We also stopped at a nearby cellar where a middle-aged man showed us around briefly, uncorked a keg and, using a long glass tool that resembled a turkey baster, drew out a tube full of red wine with which he filled a glass. The wine was delicious. But the man, under the misconception that he could speak coherent English, immediately began regaling us with a tale that I think had something to do with Thomas Jefferson, although I'm not certain. In our haste to escape this speed-talker, who used English words with a complete omission of syntax, making his monologue vaguely familiar but incomprehensible, I forgot the name of the cellar and the wine.
Our next stop was across the street, at the Marché aux Vins — the Wine Market. I knew this would be my chance to taste Burgundy, not just from one town or vintage but from many. At the Marché we were given a tastevin, a wide, shallow metal cup traditionally used for tasting wines in Burgundy. We descended into the catacombs. The long, low, vaulted passageways were lighted by dim bare bulbs and candles, and paved with gravel. Wine racks and bottles leaned against the walls. Every 10 feet or so was an upended keg on top of which sat a candle and an open bottle of wine — 19 kinds of wine in all: white burgundies, beaujolais, and lower-end red burgundies. Back upstairs, in the nave of an old church, was the real thing — 18 top-flight red burgundies.
If not exactly heaven, what lay before could at least have been considered a version of paradise.
And yet it was 11 in the morning. And these wines were for tasting, not — in these circumstances, anyway — for lingering over: vino de meditazioni, wine to meditate over, as the Italians say.
When I had emerged, an hour or so later, into the surprisingly bright daylight of that overcast morning, I had sampled 15 of the 37 wines. White and red, young and old — an '85 Chassagne-Montrachet, an '88 Vosne-Romanée, an '89 Monthelie, an '83 Aloxe-Corton, a '77 Mussigny, a '78 Charmes-Chambertin. It was a wonderful experience. The old wines in particular were something completely different, transformed into a drink that was beyond my previous experience with wine.
But it was also a tease. It was not possible for me to justify buying any of those bottles, priced at $50 or $60 and higher (even though that was half or one-third what they would sell for in the United States). Wine is made to accompany food — "Food is the meaning of wine," as Matt Kramer put it — but I was tasting in a vacuum. What my $40 admission to the Marché aux Vins got me was an intriguing and seductive taste of Burgundy, but only a taste.
With lunch that day I drank a small pitcher of Passe-Tout-Grain, a wine produced of gamay and pinot noir grapes \. It was fresh and fruity, and I enjoyed it enough to have the waitress jot down its name for me — but it was not Burgundy. That afternoon we left the Cote d'Or and drove south through a downpour to the Beaujolais region, where the wine is priced far more accessibly than Burgundy. I had andouillette for dinner, accompanied by a half-bottle of Moulin-a-Vent, fresh and delicious, the way Beaujolais is supposed to be. But it was not Burgundy.
All of which is not to say that we did not have wonderful meals and wine in France. There was a memorable roasted quail and a hare stew with a bottle of Tavel in Provence. In Lyons, at the exciting, crowded, noisy little restaurants called les boucherons, there was a superlative veal liver, and the sweetest mussels I've ever eaten, and a carp cooked in red wine that tasted like the essence of a fresh-water lake on a plate, all accompanied by a pitcher of the Beaujolais village that serves as the house wine in bistros throughout France. Also in Lyons, there were baguettes and coffee for breakfast at the giant food market — Halle de Lyon, a fantastic place where the beauty and bounty of the displays of Roquefort, brie, blood oranges, grapes, leeks, haricots vert, Charolais beef, patés, blue-footed Bresse chickens, pheasants, brioche, turbot, and clams make up for the shopping-mall decor — followed in mid-morning by a couple dozen fresh oysters and two glasses glasses of muscadet.
We'll return to Burgundy someday. I'm already in training, working out on the cote de Rhones, the Australian sirahs, the South American cabernets that are affordable and drinkable — although I realize that moving on to Burgundy will be like preparing to face Tom Seaver by playing slow-pitch softball. And I will admit to having three or four bottles of the most inexpensive Burgundies stored away. I'll drink them sometime and try to capture some hint of what the real stuff, the good stuff, must be like.
Until then I'm resigned to echoing A.J. Liebling: Burgundy is a lovely thing, when you can get anybody to buy it for you.
Sunday, December 05, 2004
Christmas on West 47th
I have no qualms about confessing that my experience with jewelry is limited. Except for my wedding band, I own none myself, and I’ve never splurged on silver or platinum or diamonds for my wife, Gina. Gina has rather specific tastes, and shows little compunction about making those tastes known when, for example, presented with a new scarf or sweater that does not meet her standards, so I’ve always been too intimidated to buy her rings or bracelets or necklaces. I didn’t give Gina a diamond engagement ring not only because I didn’t have the money but because we decided on a Friday that we would get married on Tuesday, and so didn’t really have an engagement that called for a ring. And as for my own wedding band, I dodged the whole question – she herself shopped for it and picked it out. True, I’ve bought her earrings, twice. The first time was when she announced, several weeks before her birthday, that she admired a pair of peridot earrings – peridot being her birthstone – in a jewelry store in New Canaan, near where we live. The second was when my daughter, who was four, and I went to another nearby shop that sells trinkets and picked out a pair for $5.
But this year, with Christmas approaching, I sensed that Gina needed a ring and that specifically she wanted me to give her one. Even more specifically, I knew which ring she wanted – a very expensive gold one sold by a very expensive international jewelry company that had recently displayed it in an elegant full-color advertisement in the Times Magazine. When she first saw the ad she showed it to me and told me how much she admired the ring. A few days later I noticed that she had torn it out and had left it on a table in her studio, next to a page of sketches she had made showing the ring from several perspectives. I can be oblivious, and I can fake obliviousness to avoid seeing what I don’t want to see, but there was no mistaking what I had to do. I wasn’t sure how I would find a ring maker, or even if there was any such thing for someone who didn’t own a jewelry store. But after some thought, I decided a likely place to find one would be in Manhattan’s diamond district.
I was scheduled be in midtown on business on the second Monday of December and so I told Gina about my plan – this was potentially too big of an undertaking for there to be any question of a surprise. She photocopied her sketches but, because of the dubious ethicality of copying a company’s design, we decided I should leave behind the ad itself.
My meeting was at the Sky Club, in the Met Life building, and in early afternoon, when it was over, I walked the few blocks from there to West Forty-seventh Street. I had been expecting a short, narrow, dark side street with maybe a dozen shops in which families of Hasidic Jews – everyone knew that the diamond district was run by Hasidic Jews – were huddled over their counters. Instead the sidewalks were packed and the insides of the shops were busy and gleaming with glass and fluorescent lights that made the diamonds, the watches, the pearls, the chains glitter seductively. I wasn’t sure what to do – the size of the place and its busy-ness and the self-assuredness of everyone intimidated me. Like a gawking tourist, I walked along the south side of the street, from Fifth Avenue to Sixth, looking into but passing every shop. Hawkers called out to me, asking if I needed help. No, I assured them, as if I knew what I was doing. When I reached Sixth Avenue, I took a deep breath and crossed the street, determined to go into the first shop I came to on the north side.
It was a small place, which was fine with me, and there were no other customers, which meant I wouldn’t have to embarrass myself in front of a more savvy shopper. Two women sat behind the counters. One of the women asked if she could help me.
“I’m interested in talking to someone about having a ring made,” I said. I unfolded Gina’s drawing and showed it to her.
“No,” she said, not unpleasantly. “Try fifty-five.”
It took me a second or two to catch on.
“Fifty-five West Forty-seventh?” I asked.
She nodded.
Fifty-five was a few doors to the east and much bigger than whatever number I had just been in. I opened the glass door and stepped in, and immediately a young woman behind a glass counter asked if she could help me. I looked around – the room was the size of a small grocery store, filled with glass counters, sellers behind them, and customers crowding the aisles. I took out the drawing and showed it to the woman. She had shoulder-length light brown hair and fake fingernails, and had not gone too lightly on the makeup. She looked carefully at the drawing.
“I’ll have to send you down to one of our jewelers,” she said.
Damn, I thought. She’s going to send me somewhere else. This would throw me off the track. Where was she going to send me down to? Thirty-second Street? The Lower East Side? I didn’t have time to go down to those places and was sure I wouldn’t have time again soon. She pointed to the back of the room where I could see a staircase. The jewelers were down there, she said.
“You might have trouble finding someone who speaks English,” she said.
“What do they speak?”
She looked right at me as if trying to figure out what I meant. Since I was thinking “Yiddish,” it occurred to me that she was examining me for signs of anti-Semitism.
“Cantonese?” she said.
“Oh. I thought maybe they spoke Brooklynese.”
She grinned. She said that if I had no luck downstairs, I should come back and she’d try to figure out where else I should go.
I zigzagged along the aisles and past the counters of Fifty-five. The room was dazzling, a smaller bazaar of faces and glinting light inside the larger bazaar of West Forty-seventh Street. Downstairs the room was smaller and the ceiling was lower but it was nevertheless another bazaar of booths, of jewelers rather than diamond sellers.
I surveyed the room for several seconds and then approached the first counter. The man behind it was short, stocky and bald, and he wore a crew neck sweater with a crucifix hanging from a chain around his neck.
“I’m looking for someone who can make a ring like this for me,” I said.
I showed him the sketches. It was clear that he barely understood me. He looked at the sketches. He looked some more. It was as if he had no idea what he was looking at, as if I were showing him a subway map for a city he’d never heard of and asking him to direct me.
“It’s a ring,” I said. “Can you make one like it? Gold?”
“Yes.”
“How long will it take?”
“Two week.”
“Can you give me an idea how much it will cost?”
He frowned. He tilted his head.
“Five hundred dollar,” he said.
I was impressed. This was less than I had expected.
“OK,” I said. “I’m going to talk to some others down here. If I find someone lower, should I come back to you?”
“You can try,” he said.
I walked into the middle of the room and stopped at a counter with a Chinese man and woman sitting behind it. I showed the sketches to the woman. She appeared to think I wanted a watch. But when I made it clear that the sketch was of a ring, she directed me to another Chinese man at another booth. I sighed and was starting to walk toward him when I heard a voice behind me.
“You need something made?”
I turned to see a young guy with short dark hair and wearing a dark football-type jacket.
“Yeah. A ring,” I said.
“I know somebody. Come with me.”
“Does he speak English?” I asked.
He looked at me over his shoulder and grinned slightly: “Yeah.”
I noticed that as he walked, he tucked away a large wad of cash.
“He’s good,” he said. “I go to him and I’m in the business.”
He led me off the main floor and down a corridor. I thought, who is this guy and where is he taking me? Maybe I’m going to get bonked on the head and sold into slavery. More plausibly, maybe I’m going to cornered and rolled for my cash. The corridor was lined with what normally would be small offices, or large closets, but which instead appeared to be used as jewelry-making businesses. Each had a Dutch door and in each I could see one or two people working. After passing four or five, he stopped and called out a greeting to a fellow in one of the closets, and then told him that I was looking for someone to make a ring.
“He’s good,” he said to me as an aside. “He makes copies of Tiffany stuff all the time.”
Since I was looking for someone to copy a ring designed by another expensive jewelry company, I considered that a reasonable reference. In a tone that suggested they had done business on friendly and satisfactory terms before, he told the jeweler to do a good job for me. Then he turned and disappeared down the corridor.
The jeweler – the owner, apparently, of this very small business – was one of three men working in this glorified closet. As he and I talked, the other two continued to work; one of them using some kind of Bunsen burner-type tool. I showed him the drawings and asked him how much it would cost to make. In perfectly understandable English with a Spanish accent, he asked me what kind of gold I wanted – 14 carat, 18 carat? I had no idea so I said 14 carat. He got a calculator, tapped in some numbers having to do with the price of gold per hundredweight, and gave me a figure. It was so much lower than the $500 quoted by the first fellow I visited that I had a hard time believing it. How about for 18 carat, I asked. He calculated again and showed me a moderately higher price. I told him 18 carat would be fine. He asked if he could keep the sketches and then he produced a spiral notebook and made a sketch of the ring himself.
“When can you have it done?” I asked. “I’d like to have it for Christmas.”
He thought for a moment. “Call me Thursday. You can look at the wax on Friday.”
The wax? I liked this idea: he would make the ring for much less money and I would have a chance to look at a wax model before I decided.
He told me he’d need a deposit, at least $20. I had $24 in my pocket, so I gave him $20 and he gave me a receipt.
Upstairs I passed the counter where the woman who had sent me downstairs was working.
“Do you know any of the jewelers downstairs – which ones are good?” I asked her.
She shrugged. “They’re all good.”
I told her the name of the guy I had found, as if it would mean something to her.
“How much is he charging?” she asked.
I told her. She looked at me and raised her eyebrows.
“You can’t beat that,” she said.
Two weeks later we had the ring.
The contents of this page are copyright 2004-2005 by Tom Andersen
But this year, with Christmas approaching, I sensed that Gina needed a ring and that specifically she wanted me to give her one. Even more specifically, I knew which ring she wanted – a very expensive gold one sold by a very expensive international jewelry company that had recently displayed it in an elegant full-color advertisement in the Times Magazine. When she first saw the ad she showed it to me and told me how much she admired the ring. A few days later I noticed that she had torn it out and had left it on a table in her studio, next to a page of sketches she had made showing the ring from several perspectives. I can be oblivious, and I can fake obliviousness to avoid seeing what I don’t want to see, but there was no mistaking what I had to do. I wasn’t sure how I would find a ring maker, or even if there was any such thing for someone who didn’t own a jewelry store. But after some thought, I decided a likely place to find one would be in Manhattan’s diamond district.
I was scheduled be in midtown on business on the second Monday of December and so I told Gina about my plan – this was potentially too big of an undertaking for there to be any question of a surprise. She photocopied her sketches but, because of the dubious ethicality of copying a company’s design, we decided I should leave behind the ad itself.
My meeting was at the Sky Club, in the Met Life building, and in early afternoon, when it was over, I walked the few blocks from there to West Forty-seventh Street. I had been expecting a short, narrow, dark side street with maybe a dozen shops in which families of Hasidic Jews – everyone knew that the diamond district was run by Hasidic Jews – were huddled over their counters. Instead the sidewalks were packed and the insides of the shops were busy and gleaming with glass and fluorescent lights that made the diamonds, the watches, the pearls, the chains glitter seductively. I wasn’t sure what to do – the size of the place and its busy-ness and the self-assuredness of everyone intimidated me. Like a gawking tourist, I walked along the south side of the street, from Fifth Avenue to Sixth, looking into but passing every shop. Hawkers called out to me, asking if I needed help. No, I assured them, as if I knew what I was doing. When I reached Sixth Avenue, I took a deep breath and crossed the street, determined to go into the first shop I came to on the north side.
It was a small place, which was fine with me, and there were no other customers, which meant I wouldn’t have to embarrass myself in front of a more savvy shopper. Two women sat behind the counters. One of the women asked if she could help me.
“I’m interested in talking to someone about having a ring made,” I said. I unfolded Gina’s drawing and showed it to her.
“No,” she said, not unpleasantly. “Try fifty-five.”
It took me a second or two to catch on.
“Fifty-five West Forty-seventh?” I asked.
She nodded.
Fifty-five was a few doors to the east and much bigger than whatever number I had just been in. I opened the glass door and stepped in, and immediately a young woman behind a glass counter asked if she could help me. I looked around – the room was the size of a small grocery store, filled with glass counters, sellers behind them, and customers crowding the aisles. I took out the drawing and showed it to the woman. She had shoulder-length light brown hair and fake fingernails, and had not gone too lightly on the makeup. She looked carefully at the drawing.
“I’ll have to send you down to one of our jewelers,” she said.
Damn, I thought. She’s going to send me somewhere else. This would throw me off the track. Where was she going to send me down to? Thirty-second Street? The Lower East Side? I didn’t have time to go down to those places and was sure I wouldn’t have time again soon. She pointed to the back of the room where I could see a staircase. The jewelers were down there, she said.
“You might have trouble finding someone who speaks English,” she said.
“What do they speak?”
She looked right at me as if trying to figure out what I meant. Since I was thinking “Yiddish,” it occurred to me that she was examining me for signs of anti-Semitism.
“Cantonese?” she said.
“Oh. I thought maybe they spoke Brooklynese.”
She grinned. She said that if I had no luck downstairs, I should come back and she’d try to figure out where else I should go.
I zigzagged along the aisles and past the counters of Fifty-five. The room was dazzling, a smaller bazaar of faces and glinting light inside the larger bazaar of West Forty-seventh Street. Downstairs the room was smaller and the ceiling was lower but it was nevertheless another bazaar of booths, of jewelers rather than diamond sellers.
I surveyed the room for several seconds and then approached the first counter. The man behind it was short, stocky and bald, and he wore a crew neck sweater with a crucifix hanging from a chain around his neck.
“I’m looking for someone who can make a ring like this for me,” I said.
I showed him the sketches. It was clear that he barely understood me. He looked at the sketches. He looked some more. It was as if he had no idea what he was looking at, as if I were showing him a subway map for a city he’d never heard of and asking him to direct me.
“It’s a ring,” I said. “Can you make one like it? Gold?”
“Yes.”
“How long will it take?”
“Two week.”
“Can you give me an idea how much it will cost?”
He frowned. He tilted his head.
“Five hundred dollar,” he said.
I was impressed. This was less than I had expected.
“OK,” I said. “I’m going to talk to some others down here. If I find someone lower, should I come back to you?”
“You can try,” he said.
I walked into the middle of the room and stopped at a counter with a Chinese man and woman sitting behind it. I showed the sketches to the woman. She appeared to think I wanted a watch. But when I made it clear that the sketch was of a ring, she directed me to another Chinese man at another booth. I sighed and was starting to walk toward him when I heard a voice behind me.
“You need something made?”
I turned to see a young guy with short dark hair and wearing a dark football-type jacket.
“Yeah. A ring,” I said.
“I know somebody. Come with me.”
“Does he speak English?” I asked.
He looked at me over his shoulder and grinned slightly: “Yeah.”
I noticed that as he walked, he tucked away a large wad of cash.
“He’s good,” he said. “I go to him and I’m in the business.”
He led me off the main floor and down a corridor. I thought, who is this guy and where is he taking me? Maybe I’m going to get bonked on the head and sold into slavery. More plausibly, maybe I’m going to cornered and rolled for my cash. The corridor was lined with what normally would be small offices, or large closets, but which instead appeared to be used as jewelry-making businesses. Each had a Dutch door and in each I could see one or two people working. After passing four or five, he stopped and called out a greeting to a fellow in one of the closets, and then told him that I was looking for someone to make a ring.
“He’s good,” he said to me as an aside. “He makes copies of Tiffany stuff all the time.”
Since I was looking for someone to copy a ring designed by another expensive jewelry company, I considered that a reasonable reference. In a tone that suggested they had done business on friendly and satisfactory terms before, he told the jeweler to do a good job for me. Then he turned and disappeared down the corridor.
The jeweler – the owner, apparently, of this very small business – was one of three men working in this glorified closet. As he and I talked, the other two continued to work; one of them using some kind of Bunsen burner-type tool. I showed him the drawings and asked him how much it would cost to make. In perfectly understandable English with a Spanish accent, he asked me what kind of gold I wanted – 14 carat, 18 carat? I had no idea so I said 14 carat. He got a calculator, tapped in some numbers having to do with the price of gold per hundredweight, and gave me a figure. It was so much lower than the $500 quoted by the first fellow I visited that I had a hard time believing it. How about for 18 carat, I asked. He calculated again and showed me a moderately higher price. I told him 18 carat would be fine. He asked if he could keep the sketches and then he produced a spiral notebook and made a sketch of the ring himself.
“When can you have it done?” I asked. “I’d like to have it for Christmas.”
He thought for a moment. “Call me Thursday. You can look at the wax on Friday.”
The wax? I liked this idea: he would make the ring for much less money and I would have a chance to look at a wax model before I decided.
He told me he’d need a deposit, at least $20. I had $24 in my pocket, so I gave him $20 and he gave me a receipt.
Upstairs I passed the counter where the woman who had sent me downstairs was working.
“Do you know any of the jewelers downstairs – which ones are good?” I asked her.
She shrugged. “They’re all good.”
I told her the name of the guy I had found, as if it would mean something to her.
“How much is he charging?” she asked.
I told her. She looked at me and raised her eyebrows.
“You can’t beat that,” she said.
Two weeks later we had the ring.
The contents of this page are copyright 2004-2005 by Tom Andersen
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