There is a small, largely unknown area in southwest France called Jurançon. Sitting up against the wall of the silvery, daggerlike Pyrenees that line the Spanish border, and blessed with a dry, clean Atlantic climate, Jurançon is beautiful, rather Edenic actually, and it produces a golden wine that would have been perfectly at home in the first garden. The Jurançon moelleux.
Years ago, I met a man, a sensory wizard, and he had, once, tasted a Jurançon moelleux, and he wanted to taste more of them, and now it is morning, and I am driving with him down the highway from Toulouse’s airport. This man—he’s Italian, Argentine, and French, and sort of English—is a genius of smells and tastes. He loves them. I asked him: “Why?” He thought, and then answered with wine: “I suppose because I’m French, and France is a country of smells. There’s something called pourriture noble, ‘noble rot.’ It’s the fungus botrytis. It grows on grapes, draws the water out, concentrates the juice wonderfully, adds its own fungal flavor, and then you make wines like the sweet Sauternes. Paradise. From rotten grapes.” He rolled his eyes. “In America they’d hand out antibiotics to exterminate half the food in France.”
Luca Turin is a biophysicist. He has created a new theory that may have solved a baffling scientific mystery: how we are able to smell. And he was led into the theory through his love of perfume. Turin is the author of the best-selling perfume guide in France, Parfums: Le Guide.
Of Gucci’s Rush, he writes: “This thing smells like a person. In fact, due to its milky lactone molecule, it smells like an infant’s breath mixed with his mother’s hair spray.” Perfume is his smell passion. His taste passion is wine. “In 1982,” he told me, “a scientist colleague brought to the lab the first good Sauternes I’d ever tasted, a Château Lamothe-Despujols 1981. I bought a case of that stuff, and every time I had a glass it was a religious experience. The guy showed us a photo of the fungus attacking the grape; that, of course, got me seriously into Sauternes, which is, believe me, an expensive habit to acquire. These things have been famous since the 1750s, commanding huge prices forever.
“Years later, when I sold my flat…” (Turin lives with his wife and two young children in London) “…I bought a 1959 Rieussec—a hundred and ten pounds. Some friends and I wolfed it down in the lab. Utterly sensational. A honeyed, summery exterior covering a late November liquid. There are three elements—a beeswax, a woody, and a floral banana—with a perfect balance between extreme acidity and huge, heavy, oily sweetness, like a blend of jasmine and musk. The ’59, in a bottle for forty years, comes out the way James Bond emerges from a wet suit in a perfect tuxedo and murmurs, ‘What kept you?’ ”
But one day he stumbled onto a bottle of sweet wine he’d never heard of that astounded him. “I was in St.-Émilion, and they had a very interesting wine store. I noticed a bottle that looked like a Sauternes—clear glass bottle, gold lettering on a white label. But it was from Jurançon.” (If Jurançon whites are undiscovered in the U.S., astonishingly they also remain little known in France itself.) “The woman said, ‘It’s Clos Thou. Eighty euros.’ I said, ‘A Jurançon for eighty euros? It’d better be good.’ She said, ‘Try it.’ It was incredible. Probably the best sweet wine I’ve ever had. I thought, ‘Who are these guys? Why aren’t they famous?’ ”
And that is why we are driving away from the Toulouse airport in pursuit.
Pinterest
