Heavenly Vault

HEAVENLY VAULT Words by Jeffrey T. Iverson Photography by Olivier Metzger

Paris – where the marriage of food and wine is elevated to an art.

Here, the status of a great restaurant rests not only on the grandeur of its cuisine but on the depth of its cellar. Yet perhaps the most profound of all is hidden beneath a Left Bank Vietnamese restaurant named Tan-Dinh.

50

THE CELLAR OF TAN-DINH

HEAVENLY VAULT Words by Jeffrey T. Iverson Photography by Olivier Metzger

Paris – where the marriage of food and wine is elevated to an art.

Here, the status of a great restaurant rests not only on the grandeur of its cuisine but on the depth of its cellar. Yet perhaps the most profound of all is hidden beneath a Left Bank Vietnamese restaurant named Tan-Dinh.

50

THE CELLAR OF TAN-DINH

Several years ago, the Revue du Vin de France compiled a list of the 100 most important figures in the French wine world. Titans of wine, from LVMH president Bernard Arnault to flying winemaker Michel Rolland, were ranked one and all. But the editors also heralded a singular connoisseur who, outside of his rarefied circles, is little known: “He is as influential as he is discreet.

At his Parisian restaurant on Rue de Verneuil – Tan-Dinh – Robert Vifian offers a staggering wine list, one of the most remarkable in the capital.

Friend of Robert Parker, lover of great Pomerols, he has 45,000 bottles in his cellar, including cuvées vinified according to his specifications and labelled with his name.” Tan-Dinh’s is a deep cellar indeed, built over a lifetime by a man consumed by his passions for French wine, Vietnamese cuisine and the endless possibilities in pairing the two.

So when, late this spring, Robert Vifian offered us the chance to tour his cellar, we heartily accepted.

It proved a privilege indeed, not just because Tan-Dinh’s insurers would rather no one visit this treasure trove, but because the cellar of a great oenophile is far more than a banal storeroom – it’s a window into a mind.

A maze of stone, dust and glass, it retraces a prodigious, personal journey through the obscure and winding labyrinth that is the world of wine.

With a jangling of keys and grinding of heavy bolts, Robert Vifian, lithe and salt-and-pepper-haired, opens the cellar door, a rush of cool air emanating from the darkness.

“Watch your step,” he warns, as a few lightbulbs flicker to life. Hesitantly, we follow him inside a cramped, slightly gloomy entry room, while strange sounds of brittle wood creak below us. A glance downwards reveals why: the entire floor is embedded with full cases of wine. “I decided long ago that in my cellar, you should walk on the bottles. Wine is just a beverage

PROFILE

51

after all, it’s not sacred, so I don’t want my cellar to be a shrine.” Some of the cases have splintered open, and the bottles inside clink and squeak as they rub against each other under our feet. “I’ve never done psychoanalysis into my relationship with wine, but I suppose it would be one of those stories of love and hate,” he laughs.

After we cross the threshold, the entryway narrows to a long stone passageway. A wall of bottles in wooden shelves runs along the left, stacked floor to ceiling, marked with ambiguous letter and number codes. No cipher is needed, though, to recognize that Vifian’s collection begins with Burgundy. The names of ancient villages peek out from the stacks – Chambolle-Musigny, Gevrey-Chambertin… Vifian dusts off a mythic Meursault from Domaine Coche-Dury. “The first time I tasted wine I must have been two years old,” he muses. “Just a drop of wine added to my water glass… I remember I loved the way the red diffused in the water, and the slightly sour taste.” Very likely, it was the taste of a premier cru.

Vifian was born in 1948 some 10,000 km from France (in Saigon, then the capital of French Indochina), yet fine wine seems always to have been nearby. “My family has had French nationality for three generations. My grandfather always called my brother Freddy and me ‘les petits français’. He was a wealthy real-estate owner with a number of boutiques, including an imported food and wine shop. Sometimes, to annoy my parents, he’d sneak us a glass – and he had serious wines!

I remember the labels, like Volnay from d’Angerville. Can you imagine, Volnay in Vietnam?” The colonial era was waning, but cultural ties with France were strong. Vifian’s family even lived in Paris for a short time – across the street from the Clos Montmartre vineyard! Returning to Vietnam after his fifth birthday, Robert brought home memories of grape harvests.

52

Browsing through Burgundies, we spot a choice cuvée from Domaine Leflaive, an estate founded in 1717 and world-renowned for its sublime Montrachet. In the 1930s, the legendary French gastronome and culinary writer Curnonsky famously named Montrachet on his list of the five greatest white wines in the world – one of many bold assertions from the author of the 28-volume La France gastronomique (1921–8). In fact, one of his maxims changed the course of Vifian’s life.

In 1968, Robert was a sharp, 20-year-old student on his way to becoming an English professor when war forced his family to flee Saigon and move to Paris. With mouths to feed, Vifian’s mother decided to open a Vietnamese restaurant in the Latin Quarter. “Just a few days after my arrival in France, I fell upon an old quote by Curnonsky in the magazine Cuisine et Vins de France,” he says.

“Essentially, he said that if Asian cuisine could be paired with wine it would be the best in the world.”

Curnonsky had travelled to Asia in 1902 to cover the world’s fair in Hanoi, and the dishes he tasted along the way had enthralled him. “His idea really intrigued me,” recalls Vifian, “so I took up Curnonsky’s words like a challenge.”

Robert said to his mother: other Asian restaurants have mediocre rosé at best, why don’t we offer something new? She agreed, tasking Robert and Freddy with creating a wine list. Now they just needed to learn about wine – but how? “At that time, for us as young, Vietnamese men, there was no one we could talk to about wine. There were no wine clubs we could join, no circles of wine tasters we could become part of. As a 20-year-old Asian in Paris in 1968, you had no hope of finding an introduction into that world.

So we had to teach ourselves.”

Pooling their pocket money, the brothers began educating their palates with weekly trips to the

PROFILE

53

Nicolas wine shop on Rue Monge.

“You wouldn’t believe the wines we could afford at that time. Premier grand cru Sauternes like Château Sigalas Rabaud cost 10 francs.

Pétrus cost 35 francs!” They adopted a tasting system inspired by an article on Michael Broadbent, the auctioneer at Christie’s in London, who religiously took notes on every wine he tasted.

“We did everything in a systematic way.

We took notes, divided every wine into half bottles to taste them all twice, and we inhaled every book and magazine we could find.” Still, Robert felt he was only scratching the surface of a far more complex world.

Towards the end of the row, Vifian pauses before a lovely old wine – a 1971 Corton. Below the label a seal reads: An Alexis Lichine Selection. “Lichine was the first great breakthrough in my wine education,” he says. “One day a book caught my eye in a shop on Rue des Écoles: Wines of France by Alexis Lichine, published in London in 1953.

It was the most interesting wine book I’d ever read. Everything else I’d encountered had just rehashed the same old ranking lists. Whereas Lichine would criticize Burgundy estates for not bottling on the property, or dare to say that a Bordeaux estate didn’t deserve its grand cru, or that a fifth growth was as good as a second.”

In Lichine – the polyglot son of a Moscow banker who fled the Russian Revolution as a child in 1917 – Vifian found a kindred spirit, a man exiled from his homeland who through sheer wits and chutzpah became the era’s most celebrated authority on French wine. The book provided Vifian with a foundation of knowledge, and a model of love and irreverence towards wine that mirrored his own.

Also, it recommended dozens of small estates for the brothers to visit, until at last their wine list was complete.

“The first journalist who recognized what we were doing was Henri Gault in 1972 for the magazine Gault & Millau,” he says. “He even titled his restaurant review ‘Grande Bourgogne’

54

THE CELLAR OF TAN-DINH

– Great Burgundy!” The article brought a stream of gourmets, including a young British wine expert named Steven Spurrier who had just opened a wine shop in Paris, Les Caves de la Madeleine.

As we round the corner and start down another narrow stone corridor, the layout of the cellar (essentially a backwards F) now becomes clear.

Suddenly, an odd juxtaposition of wines (one of many) catches the eye: a legendary Riesling cuvée by Trimbach, the ancient Alsatian producer, next to a bottle of 2000 Conn Creek Zinfandel from Napa Valley. “Ah, les Américains,” says Vifian, gently picking up a 1970 Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon from Beaulieu Vineyard. “Now that’s a great wine,” he smiles. “I bought my first Californian wines in the early 1970s, but the French still criticise me for having them on my list!” Fallout, perhaps, from Spurrier’s infamous 1976 Paris wine-tasting, when French judges ranked unknown Californian wines over French grands crus in a blind tasting? “I remember Steven calling me just afterwards, so excited.

The next day, we redid the whole Judgement of Paris again with the leftover wines. Our verdict was the same!”

Turning a corner, we enter a dead-end corridor filled with Bordeaux on both sides. “Tiens, I have some 1974 Château Palmer left,” notes Vifian. “That’s a good wine!

Which says something about Palmer, considering how difficult that vintage was.” Today, Vifian can’t see a bottle of Palmer without thinking of one of his oldest friends in wine – Michel Bonnefond, a man known less for his passion for Margaux than for his exceptional vineyards in the Burgundy grand cru of Les RuchottesChambertin. “Michel’s wine collection, around 20,000 or 30,000 bottles, is something of a model for me. He was good friends with the late Jean-Paul Gardère of Château Latour and Jean-Bernard Delmas of Château

PROFILE

55

Haut-Brion, and through them had met the Chardon family who ran Château Palmer for decades. Over the years, Michel has regularly had me taste old vintages of Château Palmer, including the famous 1959 and 1961.

Having tasted it many times, often next to Latour or Haut-Brion, I can completely understand why such a legend has grown up around this wine. Perhaps it has to do with its higher proportion of Merlot, but Palmer has always stood out for the abundance of its charm.”

Before he fell for Burgundy, Vifian admits his first love was for old Bordeaux. “The first wine I truly appreciated was a 1952 Château Lynch-Bages. Yet early on I found it almost impossible to visit any châteaux in the region. Only the largest estates had any infrastructure to welcome the public; most opened only to wealthy buyers. It was really thanks to introductions by Steven Spurrier that doors finally started to open for me.”

Passing by bottles of Saint-Émilion, including some Château Ausone, we stop in front of a 1982 Pétrus (quite unceremoniously crammed next to bottles of Roussillon by Gérard Gauby).

“Pomerol is special,” says Vifian.

“Sociologically, it’s similar to Burgundy. The estates are comparable in size, very small, about five to six hectares on average. Often, only one or two couples manage the estate, and they actually live on site.”

That human scale attracted Vifian, who quickly became a Right Bank specialist. His interest didn’t go unnoticed. On his first visit to Pétrus, he stopped at the town hall beforehand to request the harvest declarations. “When I arrived at Pétrus later, Christian Moueix welcomed me, then asked, ‘Monsieur Vifian, are you conducting a police investigation?’

He’d been tipped off! Harvest declarations are like income tax returns for winemakers, they don’t like people snooping through them!

But we laughed when he realised I was harmless. It’s true that I try to shine

56

THE CELLAR OF TAN-DINH

a light in the shadowy places of the wine world, but I do so only for myself, like a child who takes his toys apart to see how they work.”

With his mixture of curiosity, intelligence and contagious enthusiasm, Vifian charmed his way into the dark corners of wineries across France. With Pétrus winemaker Jean-Claude Berrouet he explored the chemical make-up of a wine, from the acid levels to sulphur, and its expression on the palate.

He studied the perception thresholds of the human palate and their variances from person to person, and analysed his own olfactory sensitivities down to the nanogram.

Soon he was commissioning private cuvées for Tan-Dinh. Robert points to a stack of fabulous Fronsac by Château de Carles. “I went a long way with Carles. I bought my own 1,200-bottle barrel, chose my oak, asked for thirty-nine months of maturation, and bottled it by hand without added sulphur or filtering.”

After the Vifians relocated Tan-Dinh to Rue Verneuil in 1978, the brothers took over from their mother, with Freddy frequently in the role of maître d’, and Robert becoming manager and chef.

To establish his recipes Robert took an anthropological approach, interviewing Vietnamese friends and their grandparents for their different versions of traditional dishes, then drawing out the common cores to create elegant, flavourful, minimalist interpretations of Vietnamese cuisine using only a few ingredients.

By reducing the complexity of his recipes, Robert found he multiplied the possibilities for wine pairings.

Thus, dishes like shrimp with garlic breadcrumbs in lime and pepper sauce, or ravioli of smoked goose, mint and black mushrooms, could just as easily be paired with a dry, crystalline Vouvray as a full-bodied ChassagneMontrachet. In the former, acid cuts the richness of the dish; in the latter, the wine’s depth matches that of the dish. As Vifian puts it, “Food

PROFILE

57

and wine pairing is based on either what is complimentary or what is analogous.” Opposites attract, but so do the like-minded.

So… did Robert prove Curnonsky right? “It was a long process before I felt this gamble was a success,” he says. One milestone came in 1985, a year that began with Tan-Dinh receiving the Wine Spectator Grand Award for its world-class wine programme and ended with it becoming the first Michelin-starred Asian restaurant in France. But perhaps the most meaningful watershed was 2018 – Tan-Dinh’s 50th anniversary.

A half-century after the Vifians fled their home to carve out a new life in a faraway land, one can’t visit the Tan-Dinh cellar without seeing it as proof of their success. Not in terms of its value as a collection, but as a testament to the hundreds of relationships it is built upon.

Perusing the shelves with Robert, it seems that behind every bottle is a friend. Spurrier, Bonnefond, Berrouet, Lichine… a Cheval Blanc brings to mind the chef Alain Dutournier, a Bouzeron evokes times shared with Aubert de Villaine, a Monbazillac from Château Tirecul la Gravière (a Robert Parker 100/100) leads to tales of Vifian’s adventures with “Bob”. As filmmaker Jonathan Nossiter wrote in Liquid Memory (2010), Robert Vifian is “one of those rare souls capable of maintaining friendships with the widest range of people”. As we turn to leave, the crunching of wine cases beneath our feet, which was initially rather jarring, has taken on a joyous ring to it, and somehow the cellar doesn’t seem half so sombre anymore, as if our path were illuminated now by the amiable glow of hundreds of candles.

58

PROFILE

59