Barons who start love affairs with wine at the tender age of 11 and wouldn’t mind drinking wine produced in bathtubs are rare. The one-time-war-correspondent baron Aernout Van Lynden combines this rarity with more - he heads the Journalism and Mass Communication department at the American University in Bulgaria, where he teaches journalism to clutches of eastern European brood, organises weekly social evenings with VIP Bulgarian guests that end in pizza and Damianitza wine consumption, and in the meantime secretly dreams of retiring and owning a winery somewhere.
Van Lynden himself is half-Dutch, half-Brit, but his affair with wine started in France - and not just anywhere, but in the Bordeaux. At age 11, he was sent there to learn French with a family. It seems it was one of those beautiful and rare gestures of fate that the father of the family also happened to be in the wine trade. With every lunch and dinner, he served a different wine, which he encouraged the young Aernout to try.
“He and his wife also took me to many of the chateaux to show me how wine was made and learn how different the wines, even within one region, can be. That, I guess, set me off,” he says. Most of his current wine favourites come from the Bordeaux, unsurprisingly, “given that their red wines are a mix of at least four grapes (and) have an enormous complexity of taste, with a wonderful variety too between the more austere wines of the Medoc and the often hedonistic wines from St Emilion and Pomerol.”
If Aernout were to describe himself as a wine, he would call himself “a hedonistic St Emilion of course!” And if he had to write a journalistic lead on his favourite wine, the Le Tertre Roteboeuf 1990 - “Great name! Literally: ‘the hill of the belching beef’, from St Emilion” - it would read like this: “A dazzling wine that has got better the older it gets. With a deep, dark colour and a knockout nose, with a mix of fruit, earth and vanillin. Rich in the mouth - the complex mix of flavours, above all of berry fruit, linger for several minutes. An outstanding, full-bodied and yet very smooth wine. The best buy I ever made.”
He bought several cases at eight euro a bottle, which now sell for over 300 euro a bottle - “not that I am planning on selling it,” he says. On the contrary, he is improving the size of his own, “very modest” cellar in the Hague at the house of a friend of his who is also a wine lover. “My friend’s collection is much bigger than mine - several thousand bottles. I have about 700,” he says. “Only Bordeaux - but various different chateaux of course.”
He says wine culture in Bulgaria is still struggling. “Too many (Bulgarians) still seem to be drinking Rakia - not a drink I personally care for. Or making their own, not very nice, wine. But a wine culture is clearly growing and I hope that will continue.”
Until moving to Sofia in 2001, Aernout had never drunk Bulgarian wine. So far, he has tasted many and says he is most impressed by the Damianitza winery, above all the Uniqato Rubin 2003, Uniqato Melnik and the Red Dark. He thinks the quality of Bulgarian wine is overall very uneven. “Some are good, like the ones above, which I would give a seven or eight out of 10. Others are very poor - cheaply made, or indifferently produced. Many producers appear to be only paying attention to the labelling and the packaging and not to the rather more important matter of what is actually inside the bottle.”
However, Bulgarians’ wine-producing enthusiasm doesn’t compare to the ingenuity of the Spanish ambassador to Tehran, who decided to produce wine in the bathtubs of his residence just after the Islamic revolution. All alcohol then was of course banned, as it still is. Aernout was invited to his residence and this is what he saw: “He proudly proceeded - somewhat to my surprise - to lead me through his house showing me how he was making homemade wine in his bathrooms. With every bathtub full of a different variety - Rioja here, Cabernet Sauvignon there. It was hilarious, and the wine pretty appalling - but an improvement on a diet of tea and water!”
