Sour Grapes Page #2

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Who has an extraordinary palate.

The best palate of anyone

I've ever met in my entire life.

Any wine, from California to France,

any type of wine, any vintage.

Rudy was extremely, insanely,

unbelievably correct on all the wines.

The art of blind tasting,

it comes naturally,

but you have to make an effort.

You know, you really have to work at it.

You taste wine blind,

you identify the wine,

and you know, that's the badge of honour

for a sommelier.

You do a little swirl and just see

if there's anything with the alcohol.

Looking at the legs,

how slow or fast they fall.

Smell it, and then it kind of just

tingles off senses to your brain.

And then you look through

your rolodex in your mind

of all these different wines

you've tasted.

And I'm thinking, "What could this be?"

I think a wine palate

is very similar to athletic ability.

Sorry.

Wine tasting is a lot about

knowing the vocabulary

and being able to express,

using that vocabulary,

to other wine tasters

what it is that you're experiencing.

I totally get that peppery citrus

that you're talking about.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I met Rudy.

Tony!

-Tony, what's happening?

-What's up, Tony?

I met him at a tasting.

I was very, very impressed.

He identified almost all the wines blind.

He must have learned by drinking

an enormous amount of different wines.

That's the only way to learn.

You always wondered why and how.

That's why you know.

You know, 18 months and now I have, what,

pretty much like 3,000 bottles of wine,

you know.

We're going to make a booklet,

you know, yeah.

Rudy's Adventures.

I met Rudy first in 2004, I believe.

There was a luncheon

for one of the producers

and we quickly became friends.

He was very warm to everyone.

I really liked the guy.

It's fun because there's

a lot of wines today that I haven't tried.

We hung out a lot

and went to wine dinners.

-How you doing today?

-Good, man.

Tired, but good.

-Long trip?

-From 5:
00 a.m. in the morning.

Long trip.

Fourteen hours drive.

-Where'd you drive from?

-LA, man.

LA, man.

The people in this town,

excuse my language, are full of sh*t.

But not with Rudy.

Just wakes me up, you know.

Nothing he did was short of real class,

warmth and graciousness.

You like... You like everything so far?

For my birthday he gave me a bottle of,

I think a Pol Roger '49 champagne,

which is incredible.

-What do you have right now?

-Colgin, interesting.

-Yeah?

-Very different from the Herb lamb.

Yeah?

I don't know if it's 100%

Cab because... Like a Meritage.

He was just a lover of wine.

Is a lover of wine.

I keep talking in the past

because it's still very strange.

He never said something to me

that I could look at and find was untrue.

But he didn't ever say that much.

I was a reporter and I was curious

about the auction market,

and I sat there at the back of Christie's

and I noticed a very, very young man

spending a lot of money

surrounded by people that I knew

were movie producers,

clearly the focus of everyone's attention.

That's a story.

Who is this guy?

And why is he spending this kind of money?

And what does he want to do with his wine?

Today I can't, today's overbooked.

Tomorrow, call me. I might...

It took months to get him to sit down

and have a cup of coffee with me.

I've got to go in five minutes.

I have a big Burgundy tasting.

-Let me move around before...

-Go ahead! Go ahead! Go ahead!

I'll talk to you soon.

Let me have the honour to try my wine.

It was like another month or two

before I got him to sit down and actually

have an interview with me.

He proceeded to serve

some of his great wines.

Oh, my God, this is... It's corked.

No.

He lived with his mother in Arcadia

and the people around him would say

that his family owned

the Heineken distributorship

for all of China.

Fabulously wealthy,

and he was on a million-dollar-a-month

allowance for his wine,

and when I asked Rudy about this stuff

he said, "I don't talk about my family",

and he wouldn't tell me anything.

I sort of assumed he was a rich kid

looking for something to do.

The auction houses were giddy.

No one had ever spent

that much money that fast.

It was ruining the quiet little club

that the old guys had.

I've been collecting for 38 years I guess.

So, I've got, you know, lots of DRC labels

and they're all categorised by particular

domains or groups of domains.

There's Ponsots in here.

I've got mostly from the '80s.

That's some major wine, yeah, that's his,

one of his best.

Sometimes you only get to taste them

once in your life

if you get to taste them at all,

so it's kind of fun.

I was introduced to Rudy by John Kapon

at an Acker auction event

over in Beverly Hills.

I want to drink Burgundies.

That's me, of course, you know.

He said, "Well, you're a Burgundy

collector, what Burgundies do you like?"

And I said, "Well, my favourites

are probably Roumier, Rousseau

"and DRC,- Romane-Conti."

You got that right, my friend,

you got that right.

Right after that he said,

"You should buy wines with me",

he said, "I buy cellars and collections

in Europe all the time."

And then I remember Rudy asked me,

"What's the oldest Roumier

you've ever had?"

And I said it was a 1969.

And I told him I'd been lucky enough

to find a couple at auction,

that they're real hard to find.

And then Rudy said,

"Well, you know, in the last year I've had

"1945, 1949, 1955

"and 1962 Roumier Bonnes-Mares."

He picked the greatest red Burgundy

vintages from that era.

I was just flabbergasted.

I'd been looking for them for 25 years.

Burgundy is unique on the planet.

The band of slopes, we say, which is

70 kilometres long and 1 kilometre wide,

and composed

by 1,250 different appellations.

There are a lot of grapes this year

...but we won't see how it turns out

until the harvest.

Heaven, they say, is above us...

...but I believe that in Burgundy

it is down below.

Down below in the cellar

and in the roots of the vines.

We are just 11 metres

below the ground level here

and we are really with two feet

in the history of Burgundy.

See here are tiny roots, from vines,

which are probably here since 200 years.

The vine is sucking, so to say, the rock.

Going up on the hill on

the other side of the street,

the vines will not find

the same mineral elements

and they will never find the same taste

and aromas.

The most important for me

is what nature gives.

We are only a tiny element of the chain.

If one element breaks, the chain is broken

and you cannot reach the glass of wine.

Wine is the expression of place,

and Burgundy is the ultimate

example of this.

It's a wine for obsessives.

Someone who really knows their stuff

can tell you the difference, blind,

between something that was grown here

and something that was grown 40 feet away.

-It's really good.

-Look at where the fill is.

F***ing incredible.

This is probably insane.

This is where I go crazy.

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