FRUIT OF THE VINE
FIRST IN A TWO-PART SERIES
PART TWO: Wine, Academics Prove Good Mix

Eight bottles stood in a row, many with slightly tattered labels, the green glass turning inky the deep ruby of the wine. Here in the Harvard Observatory, Senior Lecturer on Astronomy David W. Latham is showing his colleagues and students some burgundies from his personal cellar. Latham, like other confessed oenophiles at Harvard, loves teaching everyone else what the fuss over good wine is all about.

“Tonight I’ll show you what mature burgundies look like. They’re very hard to find in the U.S.,” he says. Latham pours a bit into the glass, the edges of the liquid showing a light brick-red color which confirmed its age.

Wearing Timberlands with his slacks and tweed jacket, Latham circles the room, grinning boyishly as he pours small portions into each glass and chats about the nose or whether the wine is too young. “Are you on number 3 or number 4?” He picks up a different bottle from his row and swung around the room again.

Latham is only one of the many connoisseurs on campus who hold tastings to introduce tyros to the world of oenophilia. And this isn’t just a Harvard phenomenon. Wine consumption in America is higher than ever before, according to a recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle, and the industry’s strength is evident at Harvard, where one wine tasting course counts for credit and, after a two-year hibernation, Harvard Student Agencies is resurrecting its own tasting course.

Latham, who has collected more than 1,200 bottles, has organized semi-regular weekly tastings for over two decades. “I wanted to establish a non-confrontational forum at which everybody was at the same level, an even playing field,” he says.

Last Friday, Latham was sharing a series of mature Côte de Beaune burgundies from his own cellar, a group that would be nearly impossible to find in any store. Latham’s personal notes on the wines ranged from “funky” to “great burgundy nose, what a pleasure to flood the senses with this nose.” The best were deep and richly fruity, even slightly tart, with an intoxicating smell.

Wine tasting can be seen as an utterly pretentious activity, but here it was laid back and comfortable. Graduate students in sweaters and jeans nibbled on slices of baguette, chatting only occasionally about the wine. As a surprise, Latham brought out a 1998 Hospice de Beaune chardonnay to prove that whites could be tasted after reds—or at least this one. The silky-smooth liquid clung to the tongue, and its echoes lingered long after the tasting was over.

But wine lovers don’t have to trek all the way to the observatory to taste good vintages.

This semester, Tom Conley, Lowell professor of Romance languages and literatures and master of Kirkland House, is teaching a seminar called “Oenography: For a Topology of Wine.” Though not listed as a House seminar or in the Courses of Instruction, the class will count for credit.

The class combines reading scholarly works with weekly tastings, and Conley says he hopes to impart an “enriched sense of geography, of location, and of taste.”

“It is so wonderful. The students came here not to get inebriated, but to work,” Conley says, sitting in the pleasantly dim library of the master’s residence, his two large Bernese mountain dogs by his feet. “At the end last year, I gave a blind tasting. They could tell where each wine was from.”

For the average Harvard student perhaps unfortunately familiar with Two-Buck Chuck and jugs of vinegary reds, this is an education of a different sort.

The course is not about “trying to be a wine snob, it’s trying to know what the hell you are talking about,” says Donald M. Coates ’07, one of Conley’s students.

Spencer B. Lazar ’07 says his reasons for taking the course “stem from a general skepticism about wine connoisseurs.” Years ago he read a New Yorker article questioning the ability of even the most trained connoisseurs to tell the difference between red and white wine under certain circumstances. “I had doubts of my own, and wanted to explore the contents of the article,” Lazar says.

“Wine is basically about storytelling, interesting anecdotes about a particular cultural item,” he says. “I’m interested in going through those stories, and being able to tell the more interesting ones.”

The seniors-only course had 15 students last year, the first year it was offered. This year, Conley says he received 70 inquiries from Kirkland residents alone and another 50 from other Houses. Trying to cut down the pool, he asked applicants to write a short essay—and received 110.

Twenty-five students are now taking the course, but Conley also offers one or two general tastings in the Junior Common Room.

Conley began collecting wine more than 35 years ago and now keeps a modest private cellar—he calls it is his cave (the French term, pronounced cahv)—from which he chooses wines for himself and House events. Like many of Harvard’s wine lovers, he was eager and garrulous when talking about his passion for wine and the highlights of his cave, ranging from late 1960s Châteauneuf-du-Pape to a group of 1982 Firestone Vineyards, “gathering a lot of dust as they age.”

Conley is by no means alone is his love of wine. “My good friend Lino Pertile, the master of Eliot, we talk about wines a lot. We pass judgment on what the host is offering at Masters’ meetings,” he said with a chuckle.

For those willing to spring for something more than Two-Buck Chuck, the Harvard Bartending Course is bringing back its wine-tasting course, which last ran in spring 2005, according to the manager of the bar course, Julius D. Krein ’08.

As Shakespeare observed in “Othello,” “Good wine is a good familiar creature, if it be well used.”

—Staff writer Alexander B. Fabry can be reached at fabry@fas.harvard.edu.