Richard Olney

I love the writing of Richard Olney, especially when he writes of wine. This is one of my favorite passages. It is from "Ten Vineyard Lunches". Inside he presents menus from all the great wine regions of France. (Except Champagne—he does make a kind of excuse for this). This book is very interesting especially for pairing wines with food. And you can find it for very little used online.) This passage is from the Loire Valley lunch.

The Touraine red wines — Bourgueil and Saint-Nicolas-de-Bourgueil on the right bank, Chinon across the river and, adjoining Chinon across the border in Anjou, Saumur-Champigny — are the friendliest of wines: jubilant, frank and open, mingling herbal, grassy scents and flavors with an intense wild berry fruit that some define as raspberry, others as blackcurrant or bramble, and that may simply be the fruit of Cabernet franc.

When drinking one of these wines, cool, on a hot day in the mottled shade of the grape arbor, I have only to close my eyes to recapture a child's summertime sensation of lying face-down in the grass and cutting out the whole world except for vegetal and earthy scents and the lonely plaint of mourning doves in the silent air.