The Accidental Connoisseur - probably the funniest wine book ever written

“The connoisseur is always a little potty but in the case of wine the connoisseur is more than eccentric he is consumed by a ferocious pedantry.”

I meant to write about Lawrence Osborne’s The Accidental Connoisseur last year for its 20th anniversary but got rather bogged down in deciding what to put in and what not to. The whole book is so endlessly quotable and funny, that it might just be easier to tell you to buy a copy and leave it at that. But anyway, here goes.

The year it was published 2004 was a high point in wine and popular culture with the release of Mondovino which I covered last year and Sideways. Of the three Osborne’s book has stood up best. I didn’t find Sideways funny when it came out and last autumn managed to get halfway through before my wife suggested we watch something else. Beyond a few good lines and some admittedly fine acting, particularly by the supporting cast of Sandra Oh and Virginia Madsen, I found it hard work.

Lawrence Osborne, looking dapper

Osborne covers a not dissimilar ground to Mondovino. In his words it’s “the story of Americanisation of Europe and Europeanization of America”. At the time, American money and tastes driven by the great Robert Parker Junior were dramatically changing the wine world with wines being made to suit this new global palate - the dreaded international style. Osborne has a lot of fun with Parker’s vocabulary: “melted licorice?”: “a spherical sexy mouth”. At one point he thinks he sees the great man in a restaurant in Bordeaux: “about fifty-five, thickset, unsmiling in Hush Puppies. The Hush Puppies,I thought, irrationally must have some significance. Hush Puppies. Isn’t that exactly what a famous critic would be wearing?” Later that day a Parker-esque figure walks past him at Lafite.

The book is a journey through European and Californian wine meeting well-known winemakers and personalities. Osborne, an English novelist and travel writer, plays something of a Louis Theroux-type character, asking naive questions like “what is terroir?” or “what is a taste for fineness?” which elicited interesting and sometimes bizarre responses from his subjects. It’s something of a conceit as Osborne is both knowledgeable and knows his own tastes leaning towards more traditionally European wines. He writes at one point:

“I once tasted a fabulously expensive Helen Turley which I had thoroughly disliked. But it was not that I had disliked it so much as I had had the impression that it had not liked me. At 17 percent alcohol, it had merely made me wonder what it would do to my liver.”

Later he sees the phrase ‘helicopter attack’ on a CD which came with Francis Ford Coopola’s ‘Apocalypse Now’ cabernet (yes, really) and quips “It sounded like a Helen Turley wine.” Osborne is not afraid to upset some big names in wine. He compares Aimé Guibert from Mas de Daumas Gassac to Dr Strangelove, expertly skewers Robert Mondavi as a capricious Roman emperor and writes that Mondavi’s wife Margrit “made me think of Leni Riefenstahl”!

He can get away with all this because unlike most wine writers, he doesn’t depend on the largesse of producers for his expenses. Osborne seems to be travelling around on his own dime, or that of his publishers or perhaps one of the then fabulously wealthy American papers that he regularly wrote for. The book reflects a time, which sadly I missed, when the print media had budgets that enabled boozy British novelists to produce books like The Accidental Connoisseur.

Another ace Osborne has up his sleeve is his proficiency with languages. He’s fluent in French and Italian as well as Thai (he currently lives in Bangkok), as well as having a smattering of Khmer and Japanese. But the biggest difference between Osborne and other wine writers is that he never ever spits. The scenes of drunkenness in the book are some of its highlights. Early on he visits a restaurant in Abruzzo:

“I grew deliriously content. I began to tap my feet under the table and grin fiendishly at all the old ladies eating their snapper raviolis. Is there anything better than drinking? When the happiness of drinking overwhelms you, you cannot resist it. It descends upon you like a sudden fog, leaving you pathless and alone, just like the Greek drinkers who thought of their drinking room as a storm-tossed ship alone at sea.”

Ah booze! While he’s no fan of Parkerised, amped up Californian wines neither is he a naturalista avant la lettre. Perhaps the funniest scene in the book is where he stays on a agriturismo where the owner, a left wing activist, naturally, makes his own wine… naturally: “Cosimo was not just a farmer; he was an activist, a radical, a slow-food devotee, and possibly the stingiest man I have ever met.” Osborne continues: