I had planned for my next post to be about the great meal I enjoyed at the Boyer Les Crayeres in Reims (Raaaaaahhhhmmmmm is about how you properly pronounce it, not "Reams" as I once heard some Brit say), but I think I will first tell the tale of my mother and Vieux Telegraphe Chateauneuf du Pape.
Chateauneuf du Pape is an excellent, complex red wine that I have always found drinks well when young, unlike some Bordeaux reds that can take decades "to come around."
My mother, who passed away in 1999, and is remembered, with other loved ones, at "Paris, Prague and Salzburg: A Remembrance," which I wrote in the Spring of 1999 on laptop computer in each of those cities and published at http://www.paulheidelberg.com/, had a humble upbringing on a farm near Marion, Texas, but she had innate intelligence and taste.
During my frequent trips back to Texas from Florida in the late 1980s, when I was working as a writer and columnist at the "Sun-Sentinel" newspaper in Fort Lauderdale, I would bring wines to share with my family or purchase them in San Antonio.
My brother Jim had introduced me to wines years earlier; we typically liked reds, and my sister-in-law Johnny Heidelberg, and my sister Jeanette Heidelberg preferred whites, such as a good chardonnay such as the chards Marimar Torres is creating in Sonoma County, California.
My mother liked reds, for a very interesting reason, and Vieux Telegraphe was her favorite, so I always bought a bottle of that wine for my Christmas visits.
I never met my grandfather Ernst Huebinger, as he died before I was born, but I heard stories about his making homemade wine and beer back on the farm in Marion (not far from San Antonio, now the seventh largest city in the U.S.) Early in my teens, I had a chance to experience that winemaking when we were cleaning the garage in San Antonio owned by my grandmother Frieda Huebinger, our "Oma" (German for grandmother).
We came across a huge -- and I mean huge -- ceramic container in the back of my grandmother's garage that she had forgotten about, that had made the trip from Marion to San Antonio, when my grandmother had moved there after my grandfather's passing 20 years earlier.
We Americans are not like the Italian kids I saw while stationed in Italy during four years in the U.S. Air Force: you'd see eight year-old boys walking down the street, drinking from two liter bottles of vino they had just gone to the local wineshop to get to take home to their families. So I was surprised to be allowed to have a taste of the wine all the relatives were making such a fuss about when I was not much older than eight; I was also surprised to think it didn't taste too bad.
That the wine had made it through all those hot Texas summers without being "cooked" is also surprising. After five trips to the Charente Region of France, home of the world's finest spirit, Cognac, I have realized that wine might have become fortified by the heat over the years. It might have been taking on some of the aspects of brandy.
Back to the Christmas tale.
Growing up on a farm, my mother did not have the opportunity to enjoy wine tastings as young American women now often do.
But the first time she tasted the excellent Vieux Telegraphe, she said, sounding like the most erudite oenophile in the world: "Do you taste the wood in it? It reminds me of my father's wine." That is when I learned my grandfather Ernst used to age his wines in wood. To make them, he used the wild Mustang grapes that covered the Central Texas landscape, not the 13 types of grapes that go into Chateauneuf du Pape, which includes the increasingly-popular-on-its-own Syrah, but he knew what he was doing when it came to making wine. I know because I tasted the product.
And my mother knew what she was talking about when she tasted wine, unlike some would-be wine lovers who use every adjective imaginable to make futile attempts to describe the tastes and smells they are experiencing (if I hear foxy one more time...).
My mother, raised on that farm in Texas with her sister and three brothers, could have competed with the most expert panel of wine tasters at a tasting in New York City or San Francisco: she had nailed it.
