During his three years as a hostage in Lebanon, Jean-Paul Kauffmann endured his captivity by reciting daily the “Tables of the Law” of Bordeaux, the great wine classification of 1855. An international correspondent turned writer, author of numerous novels about confinement, this lover of wine and words shares with us his recollections of the extraordinary Palmer 1961.
What if the mark of a legendary vintage like Palmer ’61, that which constitutes all its singularity and mystery, was a gulf in our own understanding? Faced with such exceptional wines, we crash against them as if against the walls of a fortress. By dint of having been commented on to excess and feverishly over-interpreted by those who attempt to unlock their secrets, they have ended up developing a kind of opacity that makes them veritable citadels of impregnability. Of course, one may come near them, prowl around them, maybe even peek inside, but hoping to penetrate the heart of such a fortress is an illusory pursuit. Truly fabulous vintages are imbued with truths and meaning that will never cease to escape us. To console ourselves, we can always conclude that it is the way one approaches such things that really matters; that the quest is more important than the conquest, and so on. Nevertheless, this impossibility ever to reach the temple’s inner sanctum is by nature a source of enduring frustration.
But let us return to palmer '61. It would seem there could be no dissent or discord over such a vintage. Everyone agrees that it is extraordinary. Personally, I have never tasted another wine like it. It is one of the two or three greatest emotions of my life as a wine lover. We praise its concentration, its opulence, and at the same time we marvel at its delicacy. This capacity to embody contradictory notions is the very signature of an exceptional vintage. You can't have it all, right – power and elegance? Yet that is precisely what Palmer ’61 does, masterfully reconciling this duel of opposites, combining a silky, caressing smoothness with an exhilarating energy. There is something confounding about its freshness that still remains on the palate after sixty years. We could also wax lyrical about the mid-palate, something which sets mythical vintages apart: the crucial moment, a kind of leap into the unknown, that arrives during a tasting, when everything changes and sensations are redoubled – like a new beginning.
To describe it is to amass a list of superlatives. Yes, Palmer ’61 contains all this – but also something more. That something is the missing piece, the untranslatable and irreducible part of the wine, that je-ne-sais-quoi described by the philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch, a quality which reason cannot express. This silent and indescribable centre is at once the most delectable, the most voluptuous part of the wine and the most elusive.
Read Robert Parker's appraisal of Palmer ’61, for example. You can truly sense his awe – he is laudatory in the extreme. At the same time, you can discern a certain malaise, as if he were hindered by words. In fact, I believe he is fully aware of this, as he is of his own misunderstanding. Let us dwell on this notion of misunderstanding, because it is an inherent aspect of the tasting experience. No doubt the expression constitutes something of a lexical sleight of hand on my part, but such artifice is necessary. It is even useful, because the misunderstanding we speak of often reveals a truth that we would prefer to hide. Parker tosses out adjectives, he longs to convey the reasons for his enthusiasm, but he cannot. He all but admits it at one point, writing: "The bouquet is difficult to capture in words." He knows perfectly well that this difficulty applies not only to the bouquet but to all the rest as well, which is actually even more ineffable and incommunicable. But let us at least give thanks to him, a remarkable taster, for having recognised the power that great wines possess, never to be encapsulated in any single portrait or tasting note, no matter how objective it supposedly may be.
“The bouquet is difficult to capture in words. Heavenly, ethereal, moving and profound. They are all applicable here.”
Robert Parker — Wine critic, May 2015
To extract ourselves from this embarrassing situation, we might be tempted to invoke the ultimate and unlimited principle – the infinite – by way of admitting our own powerlessness and ignorance. That which is complete, total and contains within itself the reason for its being necessarily represents a form of absolute, and yet does it belong in the domain of the infinite? Are not all human endeavours finite, limited in space and time? That which is considered completed has come to an end. It has been finalised; marked with a period. To suggest that the extraordinary character of any wine could have been conceived with an eye on infinity seems preposterous to me. Einstein said that two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity.
Personally, I find it reassuring to believe that wine, as the fruit of a quest for perfection, belongs to the finite universe. Much like each of us, isn't a wine, even the most accomplished, subject to its own limitations? The fact that one year among so many manages miraculously to rise to heights never seen before will raise the bar for all to come, just as it allows us to trace the elevation’s contours. And by definition, the summit is a point that cannot be surpassed.
It is true that great vintages never die, being assured of a kind of permanence, if not eternity, by having been engraved in our memories, but let us be frank: the ultimate purpose of a wine is to disappear. Once the tasting is over, nothing remains save a "disappearing apparition", to use another expression from Jankélévitch in his book on Debussy. But this nothing is everything, because it is there that the life of the memory begins. The wine is no more, but the emotion we felt, etched in us at the moment of tasting, will never cease to haunt us, hence the wine lover’s desperate quest to find this unique sensation in the other wines he or she tastes. The life of a connoisseur is nothing more than a hunt for memories, an attempt to resurrect these rare legendary vintages we encounter, like Palmer ‘61. It is a matter of endless reconnaissance, a search to rediscover in the present an emotion already experienced in the past yet equivalent in its potency. This noble and generally futile pursuit endows such wines with a form of inviolability that nothing can take away, even as it reaffirms their inherent limits as creations of humankind.
