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NEW YORK: For music and for wine, David Chan says, language has its limitations. He should know. Chan is a concertmaster of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, the position traditionally held by the leader of the violin section, and he is also a wine lover and Burgundy fanatic. He is a Harvard graduate who was named concertmaster in 2000, at the ripe old age of 27, and he sees a crucial similarity between his twin passions.
“Talking about wine is like talking about music,” he told me over dinner recently at Bar Boulud, across Broadway from Lincoln Center. “If I could tell you in words, then there wouldn't be any point in playing it. A great piece of music, and a great wine, holds your attention and has more than you can say in words.”
It's a piece of wisdom that seems obvious, especially when I find myself trying to describe the sensation of a wonderful 15-year-old Puligny-Montrachet with phrases like “sluicing a mouthful of pebbles.” Yikes! I'm sure describing the effect of a telling passage of music is no easier.
Perhaps it's the necessity of embracing the nonverbal that so often binds music and wine. Chan says that almost any orchestra or group of musicians will include a significant minority who are involved in tasting groups or who gather regularly to have dinner and share wines. It was one such group that got him interested in wine in the first place.
Chan grew up in San Diego. His parents, who came from Taiwan and met as graduate students at Stanford University in California, were not wine drinkers. They had heard that children who studied music did better in math and reading, so they enrolled him in a violin class at age 3. He never stopped playing.
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He was first exposed to great wines at a summer music festival in La Jolla, California, where a few patrons with extensive cellars were opening bottles for the visiting musicians. But he began to develop his interest when he got to the Met and fell in with a crowd of wine-loving musicians.
At first, it was slow going. “They would talk about wine with all this jargon, and mostly I was kind of lost,” he said. The turning point came in 2002, after he married Catherine Ro, also a violinist in the Met orchestra. His father-in-law, a wine lover, had to give up drinking for health reasons and gave Chan two dozen special bottles, mostly top Bordeaux and cabernet sauvignons.
While he understood the greatness of those wines, it wasn't until he started to drink Burgundy that he fell head over heels into wine fanaticism. So began an obsession to get to know the Côte d'Or, the heart of Burgundy, almost vineyard by vineyard.
“As a teenager, if I discovered one Mahler symphony I had to know all of them - one Wagner opera, I had to know them all,” Chan said. “You can imagine how Burgundy hit me like a ton of bricks. If I had one producer's Meursault Genevrières one night, I had to have the Perrières the next night. Whatever would advance the knowledge.”
Burgundy, particularly the haunting perfume of red Burgundy, is often thought of as a wine that bypasses the brain to grab the soul. But Chan is captivated above all by the intellectual appeal of Burgundy, of linking great wines to the earth from which they originated. “It's not that they're not hedonistic, but wines of terroir clearly offer an additional level beyond all that,” he said. “Over time you get to know a terroir signature when you encounter it again and again in blind tastings or whatever. I definitely love that analytical element. It's irresistible to a certain nerdy personality that I have.”
Ah, terroir, that French word with no real English equivalent, pointing to the qualities of a place: the soil, climate, exposure to the sun, the human touch. While some scientists and winemakers outside of France dispute the notion of terroir, Burgundy lovers embrace it religiously.
Chan sees parallels between music and terroir: “Music that has lasted 100, 200, 300 years, there's a reason for it. Mostly, we've weeded out the music that isn't worthy. But there's more: they bring pleasure, they make you think about it, and they bear the stamp of the composer.”
Great composers are like great vineyards, he says. Both require a particular sort of selflessness to bring them to life. “If you seek to only be yourself, that's what you get, but if you seek to faithfully bring the composer to life, that will happen, and your personality will enter the picture because you're performing the task,” he said. “I think the same thing happens in wine. If you try to faithfully capture the terroir, inevitably you enter the picture, whereas if you're not careful, it results in a house style.”