[p. 3 of 4]

[Mathews continues...]

Georges Perec's death, I decided that I would do a memorial for him, which was, theoretically, a version of something he himself had done years before: a list of all the food and drink he had consumed in the previous year. So I kept a list all through that tenth year. But I soon discovered that he had not done that. I got in touch with the editor of Action Poetique, who had commissioned Georges to do the piece, and I said, listen, this is ridiculous—what Georges had published as his year's consumption of food and drink I had surpassed in a few months. And I didn't eat and drink as much as he did.

SK: Was he legendary in that regard?

HM: He was an eager eater and drinker. But the editor confessed to me that in fact it was only a quarter of the year.

AH: Harry, if you were a wine...

HM: If I were aligned?

AH: No, if you were a wine... interviews have to have stupid questions in them, for comic effect. If you were a wine, what wine would you be?

HM: Romanée-Conti. There's nothing like it in the world. It's like paradise made.... like the best wine in the world, with something more. That is to say the best wine in the world—a strong gutsy, masculine wine—that has a feminine element added to it. A little while back, in 1994, Marie and I bought a case of Domaine la Romanée-Conti. We bought the 1992 vintage. It was very "cheap" at the time, a relative term when it comes to these wines. The guy who runs the domaine, and who also has his own little vineyard in Southern Burgundy, told me, "You have to wait 15 years to drink this, otherwise it will still be asleep." On the 13th year we opened a bottle, and it was delicious, but not what it should yet be. And the year after we tried another one and it still wasn't there yet. But on the 15th year, when we sold our New York apartment, which was where I was keeping the case, we had ten bottles left. And we drank them all during a two week period. And they got better, and better, and better.

On the last night, the night before we left the apartment forever, we had a meal, with good but lesser Burgundies, which were wonderful in their own right. We certainly didn't need any more to eat or drink, but the apartment had this little terrace that looked out over a little courtyard between 10th and 11th Streets of yore, and the courtyard was covered with wisteria. Marie had found some wonderful fresh goat cheese—that's what the Burgundians eat with these great wines. And we drank the last bottle of 1992 Romanée-Conti. I'm sorry guys, we wouldn't have shared it with you. People make the mistake of saving their best wines for parties. They should be shared with one's lover.

AH: But if your lover is out of town...

HM: Then with another lover. [Laughter]

AH: How did you get to know wine? Who told you about it?

HM: My parents. I used to be given glasses of great wines, great Bordeaux wines and things like that, when they cost as little as a dollar a bottle, before the War. There was a great crisis in the French wine industry at that time.

AH: And you parents were American, right?

HM: My mother was half Italian, but fully American. Anyway, when I was 14, I was at a beach party on Long Island, with my mother and her friends, Mies van der Rohe, all kinds of fabulous people. We were all drinking jug Chianti, and it was pretty good. And I realized that this stuff could do something for me. So I started pursuing my mother's beautiful friends, chasing them into the water. We were all naked... nothing happened, alas. But that's when I started drinking wine. Then when I got to Europe, at the age of 18, I started drinking it more regularly.

AH: That was when you were in the Navy?

HM: Well, of course I drank wine then, but no, this was earlier. When I went to France as a student in 1948, my father, who was then one of the partners in Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, had helped out an aspiring Italian architect by securing him a position as a draftsman in his office. In return he asked the young man to ask his mother, who was an American and from the prominent Gould family of Boston, if she could contact her relations in Italy to help find some young ladies to spend time with me while I was in Florence that August. Her relations included Signor Rucellai. This was the man who had inherited, and still inhabits, I believe, the Rucellai Palace, which, with its façade designed by Alberti, is one of the great examples of Renaissance architecture.

Anyway, the problem is, there are no young ladies in Florence in August, they're all off at the seashore. But there was one left that summer—her name was Lisa Ricasoli. She was allowed by her family to see me until five o'clock in the afternoon—no later. A-very nice-a young lady, she took me around Florence and showed me a lot of things I might not have seen without her. Finally she decided I was OK, so she had me invited down to her father's castello in Brolio.

Now, Brolio is a big name in Chianti. There were two kinds of Chianti: the one in the straw basket, the fiaschi, and the one that was put into regular bottles. I decided that I should learn something about this wine before I went to the castello. So I would go to Sabatini every night, which was

[continues...]