The Juice by Jay McInerney Page A

greatest growths of Burgundy and Bordeaux. But he never lost his affection for the rosés of Tavel, which sustained him during that first year in Paris and which before him had been the favorite beverage of Louis XVI and Honoré de Balzac. When Liebling first landed, Tavel was synonymous with rosé; now that pink wine is produced throughout France and around the world, and is enjoying a period of fashionability, it’s worth revisiting the motherland of rosé, as well as the writings of one of its biggest fans.
    Situated across the Rhône from Châteauneuf-du-Pape, just north of Avignon, the small village of Tavel and the surrounding commune have been producing rosé for hundreds of years. Originally, the wines were composed of Cinsault and Grenache, although since 1969 Syrah and Mourvèdre have also been permitted under the rules of the appellation. Typically, the juice from these red grapes is briefly macerated with the pigment-bearing skins, then bled off before the pink juice turns red. Unlike other regions, where rosé is an also-ran, a by-product of red wine production, Tavel produces nothing else. For Liebling, it was “the only worthy rosé.”
    The son of a well-to-do furrier, Liebling had previously been working as a reporter for the Providence, Rhode Island,
EveningBulletin
when—always a great storyteller—he invented an engagement with a loose woman in order to convince his father to send him to Paris. “The girl is ten years older than I am,” he told him, “and Mother might think she is kind of fast, because she is being kept by a cotton broker from Memphis, Tennessee, who only comes North once in a while. But you are a man of the world, and you understand that a woman can’t always help herself.” When he claimed he intended to marry the girl, his father immediately agreed to finance the trip.
    Liebling’s funds arrived monthly, an allowance not so generous as to permit him to indulge his heroic appetite indiscriminately, and he considered this a key aspect of his training as a gourmand. “If,” he wrote later in
Between Meals
, his great memoir of Paris, “the first requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite, the second is to put in your apprenticeship as a feeder when you have enough money to pay the check but not enough to produce indifference to the size of the total.” A rich man would start at the top of the food chain—the most expensive dishes and the most expensive restaurants—without learning about the basics of
la cuisine française
, while the poor man eats only for subsistence.
    The same principles applied to learning about wine: “Our hypothetical rich
client
might even have ordered a Pommard, because it was listed at a higher price than the Tavel, and because he was more likely to be acquainted with it. He would then never have learned that a good Tavel is better than a fair-to-middling Pommard—better than a fair-to-middling almost anything, in my opinion.” Pommard, of course, is one of the great communes of Burgundy’s famed Côte d’Or, and Liebling was certainly a fan. But his esteem for Tavel was undiminished even after he could afford the good stuff.
    At the Maison Teyssedre-Balazuc, a Left Bank restaurant where he did much of his apprentice eating in 1926 and 1927, the Tavel
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was three and a half francs. The proprietor bought the wine in a barrel and bottled it in his basement. “The taste is warm but dry,” Liebling wrote later, “like an enthusiasm held under restraint, and there is a tantalizing suspicion of bitterness when the wine hits the top of the palate.” This strikes me still as a fine description of a good Tavel, especially the touch about bitterness, which keeps the wine from being cloying.
    Liebling used to torment himself trying to decide between the regular Tavel and the more expensive
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, but almost inevitably chose the latter. That he hated to deny himself was illustrated by his considerable girth. He once