What I Can’t Get in Cambridge

PORTOLA VALLEY, Calif—“Is it herbal?” “Maybe it’s just a grassy flavor.” “The finish is too acidic.” “I taste oak.”

This banter is par for the course for a Northern California dinner party. And yes, it’s wine talk. I grew up talking like that for 18 years of my life.

It’s hard to be a wine aficionado in college. Whenever I stare into a plastic cup full of God-knows-what at a Harvard party, I always think of that scene from Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited” where an intoxicated Oxford student vomits on another, and one of the drunkard’s friends explains to the vomitee: “The wines were too various….It was neither the quality nor the quantity that was at fault. It was mixture.”

At a recent dinner party, it certainly was the mixture that did it—a quintet of five glorious wines that brought me back to loving California, inebriation not required (or achieved). It’s the little things you appreciate about a place, and Northern California’s patent wine snobbery sends me into epicurean revelry. Don’t get me wrong: I love Cambridge. But let’s face it, the closest an average Harvard student gets to enjoying wine is guzzling a seven-dollar magnum of Yellowtail, which might as well be packaged in a box with a plastic pour spout.

On the other hand, there’s something about sitting outside on a balmy California evening, munching on asparagus with wasabi mayonnaise and sniffing at a champagne flute to pick the precise flavors (the nose) out of the sparkly background that brings me home and sets me afire with passionate love for the California milieu.

My oenological revelation occurred at the home of former Thompson Professor of Government Morris P. Fiorina, known to the rest of the world as a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Wendt Professor of Political Science at Stanford.

Unlike his students, I grew up knowing him simply as “Mo,” not Prof. Fiorina. In my mind he was (and still is) a wine aficionado before an academic. He may argue otherwise, but I don’t think he’d care too much. He’s too affable and fun to argue those kinds of semantics.

Dinner at his house is always a treat. He and his wife are wonderful cooks, but the wines he serves generally outpace any other gastronomic offerings at the table.

The first bottle was an interesting, fun champagne with adequate fruit that slid all over my palate. Our second bottle, a Chardonnay from Sonoma, came out firing with pungent and powerful flavors accented by a smoky, herbal nose that evoked hickory-smoked nettles.

The third wine was probably the best red I’ve ever tasted, a 1992 Château Montalena (a famous Napa Valley winery). The nose was complex, hinting at everything from grass to pepper. The wine itself tasted of subtle herbs with full tannins. What was most interesting was how it opened up with oxidation and food. I dug into my steak au poivre and swished the wine around the glass, and all of a sudden a bouquet of hitherto-absent garden flowers opened in my glass, demanding the attention of my entire palate.

The next bottle was a Montalena again from the next year. It’s remarkable how different two wines from the same vineyard can be. This one was a veritable fruit festival with huge, open flavors for everyone at the table to savor. I preferred the ’92, but this was still a great, fun wine.

And to close the meal, Mo bestowed a celestial gift upon us in the form of dessert wine, this one a 2002 from Château Memoires Cadillac in Sauternes, France. Imagine a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice laced with a sweet fragrance and no bitterness, and the flavor of this magnificent wine comes into focus. It had a perfect sugar/acid balance, an effervescent aroma of orange peel, and a slight cedar backbone.

Hosanna, hosanna, I had found the dessert wine of my dreams!

If there was such a thing as heaven on earth, it was in this bottle, and I had a small glass of it in my fridge, courtesy of Mo. When I would travel to this heaven was up to me, but it was nice to know that I was going to be hanging around the Pearly Gates all whole summer.

And even when heavenly flavors don’t make it to my dinner table, I enjoy my nightly glass of wine. Drinking wine isn’t about getting drunk or anything else you happen to be doing at the time. The flavors are so various and so unlike any other food or beverage you can consume that it demands your full attention. The pleasure of drinking wine stems from identifying these flavors, savoring them in unique combinations, and doing so with a group of like-minded friends.



Despite all of Harvard’s cosmopolitan hauteur, wine aficionados are still an endangered species in Cambridge. But that’s okay, because it gives me something to look forward to when I come home.



Kyle L.K. McAuley ’09, a Crimson Arts edior, is an English concentrator in Leverett House. He hopes he never sees a magnum of Yellowtail again.