Bottle of black Michael S. Sanders's Families of the Vine BY ANDY KING
	What Michael Sanders says   About Château du Cèdre, available at the Portland Greengrocer: "These wines are more international in style — the reds heavier, fruitier, and marked by the wood . . . Olivier Tesseire, the winemaker, has shown himself willing to try different things, to our great good luck." _AK

A glass of 2000 Château du Cèdre pours dark into the glass, living up to its reputation as "the black wine of Cahors," a title conferred upon it by the British during the Hundred Year’s War. Although the wine sits heavy and tannic, with plums lingering far after the glass finds its way back to the table, one can only imagine the kick one of those ancient beauties must have had back in the day when those vines on Lot River produced wine actually preferred by the Brits over its perennially overshadowing brother, Bordeaux.

But, of course, that was back in the 1300s. Seven hundred years later, it’s a different story, as it was back when you could signal what year it was on one hand while slaves accompanying the Roman Empire’s conquest of Southern France began to wring wine from the vines.

Two thousand years of wine tradition. This is what makes intriguing French wine, books on French wine, and especially books like Michael Sanders’s Families of the Vine (HarperCollins), which chooses to concentrate on a region long on history but short of press. I’m not going to harp on this, as I enjoy the technologically souped-up and fancily packaged New World as much as the next guy, but what’s the oldest Sonoma wine you’re going to buy from a local dealer? 2000? Not for many years will we know the joy of buying a case of Walla Walla’s finest red, and drinking it over a period of 20 years or more, tracking the progression as tannins soften, aromatics emerge and sink back into the ether, and color changes from ruby to rusty.

In short: American wines squint into the future for their inspiration while the French inhale the past.

Sanders’s decision to spend two years walking, talking, living, and working among three winemakers in the Cahors region was borne out of his previous book, From Here You Can’t See Paris, which deals, similarly, with an area rooted in its tradition, so much so that it threatens to leave its inhabitants in the past. Such is the story of the small wine producers in France, whose constant, double-edged battles with not only drought and rain but industrious members of their own profession — quite often independently wealthy gentlemen who are not tied to the land, as is the case of the slightly villainous but painfully correct Alain Dominique Perrin, who spearheaded an effort to cut away the poorest vines, thus the poorest wineries, so as to heighten the region’s reputation — threaten to dry up business, along with hundreds of years of family tradition.

This book is as much about the author’s journey as it is about the winemakers’ link to the past, as Sanders struggles on a day-to-day basis to make complicated sense out of a complicated task, and keeping up with frustratingly advanced palates. "The only nose I have is, sadly, the rather large one on my face," he writes early on, "and I am told that the discrimination of a true connoisseur begins with innate gifts I apparently lack and necessarily requires training from an age far younger than my present years."

Wine is daunting, too daunting, but where he starts is where many of us start: slightly intimidated, but determined. What he finds is the same thing many of us who have ever entered a field swept over by romance by those who only devour the finished product find: It’s a job, and a hard one. "In the lives and minds of the winemakers themselves, too, there is little of the exotic or romantic in what they do, or even in the way they think. Seen through their eyes, wine is not a mystery or an elixir reserved for members of the inner temple, but a product wrung from the earth by honest labor."

Exactly. But, true to the differences we see in ourselves after a transformative journey, both Sanders and the winemakers finally allow themselves moments of reverie as the pages and his time grows short, such as when, uncorking the romance of a 26-year-old vintage, Yves and Martine Jouffreau of Clos de Gamot remember their union ("Ah, 1977, that’s the wine of our love!" they coo). The author, however, is careful not to soak in these moments too long, so as not to tighten the reader’s palate with too-cloying prose; there are enough adjectives like "crappy" and "stupid" to keep even the most casual wine drinkers engaged.

Families of the Vine takes you to the source of history, and allows you to stare, with the producers themselves, into the rich tapestry of the past, and the ever-present black hole of the future.

Andy King can be reached at dinnerwithandy@yahoo.com