Free The Juice by Jay McInerney Page A

something of an upstart,” according to the importer Frank E. Johnson, “and Lichine never had much faith in Schoonmaker’s salesmanship.” There was also romantic competition, Schoonmaker eventually marrying one of Lichine’s girlfriends. The differences might ultimately be summed up by acknowledging that in the end, Schoonmaker was a partisan of Burgundy and Lichine was a Bordeaux man—sort of like the dichotomy between breast men and leg men, or between Mets and Yankees fans. (The first chapter of Lichine’s
Wines of France
is titled “Bordeaux: The Greatest Wine District.”)
    When war broke out in Europe and they were cut off from their French sources, they went to California to seek domestic wines. Eventually, both men enlisted, Lichine with army intelligence and Schoonmaker in the OSS. Although Lichine rose to the rank of major and was decorated for bravery, his wartime service was an extension of his civilian profession. “I was an aide to a very wine-minded general stationed in Corsica,” he told an interviewer some thirty years later. He seems to have brought his gift for the good life to war. Landing on Elba, he managed to spend a night in Napoleon’s bed. By his own account, he endeared himself to his comrades by slipping through enemy lines in the South of France and returning with several bottles of drinkable rosé. He was subsequently charged with contacting Cognac producers and arranging shipments to troops on leave in southern France. Eventually, he ended up as an aide-de-camp to General Eisenhower, in whichcapacity he met Winston Churchill. “The prime minister talked war for a while,” he recalled, “then started telling me about wines over his claret. I politely intervened, and he finally sat down and said, ‘You do the talking and I’ll do the listening, young man.’ ” It’s a great story, whether or not it’s true; all of these anecdotes of his service were provided by Lichine himself, a true master of self-promotion.
    What is indisputable is that on his return to New York, he married the countess Renée de Villeneuve, whom he’d met in Marseilles, though the marriage lasted only a year. Lichine went back to France in 1948, trying to persuade growers to sell their wines in America exclusively through him. These buying trips also formed the basis for his
Wines of France
, which in turn helped to create a market in the States for his wines. Within a few years he’d made enough to purchase the run-down Prieuré-Cantenac—ranked as a fourth growth in the 1855 classification—not that the initial purchase price was high; his son, Sacha, told me he paid about $16,000 for the former priory and some twenty-five neglected acres of vines. Within a year, with a consortium of banker friends, he bought the nearby Château Lascombes, a second growth. He restored and managed both properties in between sales trips to the United States.
    Lichine’s proselytizing was indefatigable. According to Sacha, “He’d hop on a Greyhound bus, go to Buffalo and Syracuse and Chicago, drop 150, 200 cases.” It’s difficult to imagine the dashing and impeccably tailored Lichine on a bus, yet he seems to have been able to summon the common touch, speaking to ladies’ clubs, going on radio shows, conducting wine tastings. Dining at Galatoire’s in New Orleans, he ordered six wines at once, declared three of them undrinkable, and promptly revamped the wine list with the stunned acquiescence of the proprietor. He brought American-style salesmanship to Bordeaux, where the great châteaus had always been closed to the public, by opening a tastingroom at the Prieuré and posting billboards on the main road. He gave Georges Duboeuf, the king of Beaujolais, his first job, and at one point owned 25 percent of his company. He also had a flourishing career as a ladies’ man, from which he took a brief hiatus when the actress Arlene Dahl became his third wife. (His second wife, Sacha’s mother, was Frankfurt-born