The Epicurean giant

by David Benjamin

“We should look for someone to eat and drink with before looking for something to eat and drink.” — Epicurus

MADISON, Wis.—Based on a whim and a need for frequent flyer miles, Hotlips booked us recently on a trip to Santa Fe. I was somewhat dubious of our destination, a town that purveys a surfeit of fakery and tchotchkes. But I welcomed the weekend escape as an opportunity to reunite with Pierre.

I met Pierre Seronde while ghostwriting for a consulting company in Boston. Pierre was a co-worker grossly miscast as a proofreader in the printing shop. He was only there because he had taken a self-righteous hiatus from his true calling.
Pierre, to state it mildly, stood out from the crowd at six feet, eight inches and roughly three hundred pounds, with a luxuriant black beard and the shambling gait of a St. Bernard. People acquainted with him used the cliché “gentle giant,” but the accurate description—unrelated to his magnitude—was “Epicurean.”

The philosopher Epicurus is typically, and slanderously, summarized in the phrase “eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die”—which, as far as I can determine, the guy never said or wrote.

I came to know Pierre as Epicurean in the sense that he pursued pleasure without excess. Epicurus, who deplored luxury, said, “Not what we have, but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.” Pierre fulfilled that ethic by identifying a pleasure for which he had both an affinity and an aptitude: wine.

When I met Pierre, I was a wine novice, largely ignorant on the subject. My current condition is still more a matter of what I don’t know than what I know. But I studied under Pierre. Above all, I came to understand that Pierre’s palate, a thin half-circle of cells within a massive and fragile body, was a sort of miracle. Pierre could taste subtleties, nuances and insinuations of flavor in food and drink insensible to almost anyone else. Besides the fact that he could discern the balance of tannin and fructose with a single sniff—not even bothering with his tongue—Pierre was an encyclopedia of wine. In California, he had launched a pioneering newsletter, but was forced out of business by the big Napa Valley wineries and, in frustration, had fled back to his native New England. There, in the offices of Arthur D. Little, his talent was wasted—except on me.

Despite his self-imposed exile, he was inescapably renowned as a guru of the grape. Among my memories of Pierre was an evening at a wine shop in Concord, Massachusetts. The proprietor had arranged a tasting party that featured a half-dozen reds. When Pierre and I arrived, the shop was packed with oenophiles, none of whom had dared to approach the row of wines. Everyone was waiting for Pierre.

The owner asked Pierre to be first to try each wine. The customers became Pierre’s audience, rapt with anticipation. Pierre’s approach to a just-uncorked wine was blunt and abrupt. We’ve all seen “wine experts,” on TV and in movies—James Bond, for instance—acting out a sort of gourmet offertory that includes sniffing the cork (which always smells like a cork), peering at the wine’s “legs,” inhaling several deep breaths from the glass, sipping and swishing from cheek to cheek, sucking air and fluttering lips, all this theater accompanied with a little eye-rolling. brow-lifting and a cryptic tilt of the head.

Pierre skipped the histrionics. Approaching a row of glasses, each holding a half-inch of fluid, he ignored the corks and gave the wine a cursory sniff—to note, hopefully, the absence of vinegar. Quickly, he tipped the first glass, held the wine in his mouth for three or four seconds, spit it out and said nothing. The crowd murmured and shuffled.

With bottle no. 2, same routine: sniff, drink, spit, no comment. Likewise, the third bottle. The whispers of the congregation were like the draft in a chapel. Pierre was enjoying this but it didn’t show. He took up glass no. 4, sniffed, drank, spat pensively and paused. He looked to the wine merchant and said, “How many cases do you have?”

The tasting was settled. Bottles no. 5 and no. 6 slipped untouched into inventory. The proprietor poured out glasses full of no. 4. Pierre added several cases of no. 4 to his cellar. Everyone bought no. 4.

A year or so later, Pierre pursued his ex-wife to Santa Fe, to stay close to his children and there, having overcome his animus toward Big Wine, went back into the market, specializing in providing French wine to retailers in New Mexico and beyond. I visited him once, lost touch for a while and, a few years ago, talked for a long time on the phone.

So, as soon as Hotlips and I got to Santa Fe, we visited wine shops, asking after Pierre, with no luck. That night, we had dinner at Santa Fe’s most overpriced restaurant, the Coyote Cafe, where I committed the rare—for me—rejection of a bottle. It was a Crozes Hermitage that tasted, to Hotlips and me, sour. When the replacement bottle arrived, it came with the sommelier, a guy named Brian. He both apologized for the faulty vintage and subtly implied that I didn’t know my ass from a Côtes du Rhône. He was probably right. But his visit afforded a chance to ask about Pierre. Brian said, yes, he knew Pierre, but hadn’t seen him since he’d retired to his hilltop home north of the city. “He’s still around,” said Brian.

The next morning, as we waited (in vain, it turned out) for Brian to call with Pierre’s phone number, Hotlips went into newshound mode. Scouring the internet white pages, she found several numbers that might be Pierre’s. The first we tried turned out to be a Pierreless beauty parlor. The second rang for a while and switched over to voicemail. I began to leave a message when a voice broke in.

“Pierre?” I said.

No. It was Pierre’s brother, Antoine, in Sedona, Arizona. After his great body had finally caved in on Pierre, he had lived there, until—three years ago—he died.

“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

Antoine accepted my condolence but I was really sorry for myself, for the loss of one who had not just been friendly to me, but who had been a true friend, who understood the gravity and obligations of friendship.

Epicurus wrote, “Of all the means to insure happiness throughout the whole life, by far the most important is the acquisition of friends.” I had “acquired” Pierre by happenstance but knew, after a few exchanges, that he would be my friend, wherever we were, as long as we both lived. Hotlips, of course, fell in love with him. He is the biggest thing she has ever hugged.

Years later, visiting California from Santa Fe, Pierre uncorked for us the rarest wine we ever drank and ever will drink. Kept in the cellar, it would have appreciated in value to thousands of dollars. But to save a wine—for the sake of its return on investment—that was ripe for drinking and ready to share was a sin against Pierre’s Epicurean ethos, and an affront to his friends.

“Pleasure,” said Epicurus, “is our first and kindred good. It is the starting-point of every choice and of every aversion, and to it we come back, inasmuch as we make feeling the rule by which to judge every good thing.”

In the movie, Dave, Kevin Kline is drafted as a lookalike stand-in for a comatose president. Ving Rhames plays Duane, Dave’s stoic Secret Service sidekick. As they get to know each other, Dave marvels over Duane’s willingness—as part of his duty—to intercept a bullet aimed at the president.

In the movie’s final moments, Duane, who has come to respect Dave more than the president for whom he had served, tells Dave, “I’d take a bullet for you.”

My huge friend, Pierre would have at least considered taking a bullet for me (preferably in the shoulder). And me? Well, I’m a smaller target, but I’d try.