The Juice by Jay McInerney Page B

described one of his ideal meals as consisting of “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.” All of this would presumably be washed down with a bottle of Champagne and at least two or three bottles of Tavel. “No sane man can afford to dispense with debilitating pleasures,” he wrote in
Between Meals
. “No ascetic can be considered reliably sane.” For Liebling, “Hitler was the archetype of the abstemious man.”
    He returned to Providence after his year abroad and eventually washed up at
The New Yorker
, with which he remained associated for the rest of his life, returning to France in 1939 to cover the war, only to retreat ahead of the German occupation. He later accompanied the Allied troops who liberated Paris in 1944 and was awarded the Legion of Honor for his war reporting. He wrote about many subjects, including boxing and horse racing, and practically invented modern media criticism, but for me
Between Meals
, his final book, is his most luminous and enduring achievement, a memoir of Paris that bears comparison with Hemingway’s
Moveable Feast
, as the great James Salter suggests in his fine introduction to the 1986 reissue of the book.
    Only traces of Liebling’s Paris remain, but his favorite wine,from the sunny southern Rhône Valley at the edge of Provence, is little changed, although its fame has been diluted by the proliferation of pink wines from other regions. Tavel remains the archetypal rosé, a wine that pairs well with almost anything you might be eating in the summer, from shellfish all the way to grilled lamb. Don’t let the color fool you—it’s a dry wine, although the Grenache gives a slight impression of sweetness, offset by that mid-palate bitterness that Liebling found so appealing. Like all the wines of the southern Rhône, it’s easy to understand and to enjoy, more rock and roll than jazz. “ ‘Subtlety,’ that hackneyed wine word, is a cliché seldom employed in writing about Rhone wines,” Liebling aptly observed. “Their appeal is totally unambiguous.”
    The Château d’Aquéria has been making Tavel for more than four hundred years in the southern corner of the appellation. My favorite producer, the Domaine de la Mordorée, is based in nearby Lirac, also a source of fine rosés. It makes three cuvées of Tavel rosé, including the rich and complex Cuvée de la Reine des Bois, which makes the similarly expensive Domaines Ott Château de Selle, from the Côtes de Provence, seem like pinkish plonk by comparison. I like to imagine that it resembles Liebling’s beloved Tavel
supérieure
. I recommend drinking it, or any other Tavel you can lay your hands on, while reading
Between Meals
.

Grape Nuts

The Founding Wine Geek
    “Life is much more successfully looked at through a single window, after all,” says that famous voyeur Nick Carraway in
The Great Gatsby
, a line decanted by John Hailman in his introduction to
Thomas Jefferson on Wine
. Then again, perhaps viewing a life as multifaceted and eventful as Jefferson’s through the narrow lens of oenophilia is like training an electron microscope on an orgy; one is apt to miss some of the major events, or to see them from a bizarre perspective (as in the section on the American Revolution, titled: “The Revolutionary War: Gross Inflation in the Wine Market”). And yet, that said, for some of us the question of whether or not Jefferson sired children with Sally Hemings is less urgent than whether he preferred Bordeaux or Burgundy.
    In addition to being an architect, archaeologist, astronomer, jurist, musician, natural philosopher, slaveholder, statesman, the author of the Declaration of Independence, and the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson was the country’s first wine geek. Most of the