WINE, STEEL AND STEAM
In the dining car of the Venice Simplon Orient-Express, 1929 (restored). Photo by Hakone Lalique Museum, Japan.
By Bill St. John
The waiter placed the small glass tumbler of wine in front of me.
I was lunching in Car No. 4141, a dining pullman of the Venice Simplon Orient-Express, built in France in 1929. Opposite sat my host, Monsieur Raymond Winiecka-Ripotot, maitre d'hotelier and chef du train. We were in northern Italy at the Dolomites, on our way to Paris.
"What is it?" asked Monsieur Raymond. "Can you tell me what the wine is?"
I glanced up. There were the same Lalique crystal panels that were set behind Albert Finney—detective Hercule Poirot—as he plotted his interviews in the 1974 movie “Murder on The Orient-Express.”
I hate tests like this. Cripes, the wine could be anything.
Monsieur Raymond knew that I had requested his company at lunch because I wanted something from him. But first, he was going to get something from me. He wanted to assay what sort of writer on wine I really was.
The fellow most probably had had his fill of hind-teat journalists, people who squirrel themselves in their cabins, pack away their meals and a complimentary bottle or two, and doll up the obligatory article so that it glows in the dark—but does nothing useful.
I was on the train to write, too. But I wanted to work in the train's kitchen and cook alongside the chef, Christian Bodiguel. He and I had become friends during his visit to Colorado a year earlier. He speaks little English, I speak respectable French, and there you have it.
I wanted to write about Bodiguel's impossible cuisine: two, teeny 10-square-meter kitchens and 200 first-class meals at each service. How did he do it, all the while jostling back and forth over the rails? I couldn't find out just eating lunch.
But no writer had ever cast a shadow in the kitchen of the Orient-Express. ''One doesn't do that sort of thing," I was told by the marketing department in London. So, to breach the kitchen door, I had to earn the nod of Monsieur Raymond—and surmise the name of this glass of wine.
The wine was white, not red. Good. More than half of the wines of the globe eliminated. Its color was pale straw yellow, but with a glint of brown. Surely, I thought to myself, Monsieur Raymond isn't passing me an "off" wine.
Or is he?
If it wasn't a spoiled white, it got that color on purpose. Sherries are like that—and so are a number of other wines. Happily, only a small number.
What other factors should I toy with? The train's kitchen was French, but the cellar master was Italian. What kinds of lightly oxidized Italian wine do French chefs cook with? Whoa, fella—too much thinking.
I must barter on just my first sensory impressions. They're the strongest and the most reliable. So, I said, after a preliminary sniff and sip, ''Well, it's like a fino sherry but it isn't one. It doesn't have the fino's tang."
This report occasioned one carefully arched Gallic eyebrow. I was getting warm.
What the wine had was a faint, farmyard-y taste I had tasted only once before. So, with a deep (but discreet) breath—for if I failed, would I too appear the wheedler writer?—I said, "This is a vin jaune de Jura"—the obscure "yellow wine" of the Jura region in eastern France.
The French have a phrase, "Cela m'étonne," that describes more carefully than our word "surprise" the substance of Monsieur Raymond's reaction.
"What may we do to help you?" he asked as he smoothed his napkin in place.