WINE PORN

One of the necessary intensifiers of all pornography is the presence in it of something extremely desirable that you can’t have.

So let me tell you about my having shared one of the rarest and finest bottles of wine in the world with its maker.

David Graves and Dick Ward were pals in the great winemaking school of the University of California at Davis back in the mid-1970s.  When they were in their first apprenticeships—Graves at Chappellet and Ward at Stag's Leap Wine Cellars—they dreamed that somehow they might get hold of some really great grapes, and that if they could they would try their hand at a small batch of very serious cabernet sauvignon.  They were lucky in having another friend from Davis named John Kongsgaard who knew a vineyard owner named Nathan Fay.  (Kongsgaard is himself a famous winemaker today, and Stag’s Leap’s Fay Vineyard wine is among the greatest Napa cabernets.)  Kongsgaard managed to procure a couple of tons of hand-picked Fay fruit, from the very good 1978 vintage, and divided it among himself, Dick and Dave, and a few other Davis buddies.

Dick and Dave fermented their half-ton in Dick’s garage in Davis.  The wine was enough to fill one barrel with unblended Fay cabernet.  They named it The Lark, after a San Francisco literary journal of the 1890s.

In his 1949 book about the early days of California wine, Vines in the Sun, Idwal Jones wrote that the writers and artists behind The Lark liked to gather at a restaurant called Coppa’s, and there they enjoyed “unending flows of dark Napa claret.”  Graves and Ward chose these words for the label of The Lark.  It was hardly an unending flow; 1978 was The Lark’s only vintage.

(David Graves and Dick Ward went on to found Saintsbury in 1981, in the Carneros district of Napa County, where they continue to produce pinot noir, chardonnay, and, recently, syrah, all of glorious quality.)

“The Lark suffered from only one serious shortcoming,” Graves recalls.  “Even right after bottling, it was too easy to drink.”  The twenty-five cases the barrel had yielded dwindled all too quickly to the three bottles that remained when Graves and I watched a waiter delicately extract the pieces of the crumbled cork at the House of Prime Rib in San Francisco a few evenings ago.

Immense rib roasts in polished brass wagons, hot pans of Yorkshire pudding hurrying from the kitchen, the lingering juniper-tang of our ritual preprandial martinis—these aromas made a classic background against which to inhale the plume of bouquet that billowed from our glasses.  The wine was still young, and intensely pure.  I have tasted Château Margaux only a handful of times in my life, but somehow it immediately came to mind.  There now remain on this earth two bottles of The Lark, and I’m wondering what I may have to do to get in on one of them.

Is there something obscene in the passion such a wine arouses?  I leave that question to the aficionado of oeno-porn.