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Last updated August 2026
A subscriber recently asked if I’d read Kermit Lynch’s Adventures on the Wine Route. I’ve read it three times. The first time, I was in Burgundy, and it changed my life. Here’s the story:
The book
If you don’t know Kermit Lynch, here’s the short version. In the late 1960s he was a struggling musician in Berkeley paying his bills by making handbags out of oriental rug scraps for a company he called The Berkeley Bag. He sold the business, spent four months wandering through Europe in 1969, and came home obsessed with wine. Nobody in the industry would hire him. The wine shops were all firing, not hiring. So in 1972 he opened his own, with a $5,000 loan and thirty-five cases stacked on the floor. Alice Waters had opened Chez Panisse just up the road the year before and changed the way Americans think about food. Lynch did the same for wine.
He started driving around rural France, knocking on the doors of tiny producers, tasting in their cellars, and importing wines to America that nobody had ever heard of. Domaine Tempier in Bandol, which Richard Olney introduced him to in 1976. Vieux Télégraphe in Châteauneuf-du-Pape, whose owners he later talked into bottling unfiltered. Gérard Chave in Hermitage, the father of Jean-Louis Chave, who later took his oenology degree at UC Davis, same as me.
Kermit championed unfiltered wines before anyone cared. He named the Beaujolais growers who were fighting industrial winemaking “the Gang of Four”: Marcel Lapierre, Jean Foillard, Jean-Paul Thévenet, and Guy Breton, all of them students of the chemist Jules Chauvet. He backed serious dry Provençal rosé at a time when American pink wine meant Mateus and Lancers, and he talked the Peyrauds out of dropping Tempier’s rosé to make more red. And he was one of the first importers to ship delicate artisanal wine across the Atlantic in refrigerated containers. By 1983 his newsletter was selling a Petit Chablis partly on the fact that it had been “shipped at a controlled temperature.”
Lynch wrote Adventures on the Wine Route in 1988 because he genuinely believed industrial winemaking was about to kill everything he loved about artisanal wine. Chemical additions, oak chips, filters, pumps. He feared the oenologists and the consultants and the international style would erase what made each producer and each region distinct. So he launched a crusade for “the diversity and virtue of those wines.” The book has never been out of print. It was already in its twentieth printing by 2010. New York Times author Eric Asimov called it “one of the finest American books on wine.”
Last year, at 83, he published his first novel, At Poupon’s Table, set mostly in Provence. I haven’t read it yet, but the man earned his fiction debut. He has two James Beard Awards, a French Légion d’honneur, and six albums of blues and roots music to his name.
The obsession
After years living in a major US city, I had the urge to travel abroad with no end date. While working at a small tech company. I’d negotiated a fully remote arrangement, sold most of my possessions, and piled everything I owned into a backpack. I was going to take on the world as a digital nomad (it was a novelty pre COVID). Over the course of two years, I visited over 50 countries and hit all 7 continents.
I started learning about wine while visiting wine regions around the world. I worked a harvest in Australia’s Yarra Valley. I tasted through cellars in California and Portugal. But when I tasted my first Pinot Noir from Burgundy, something different happened. I didn’t just enjoy it. I became obsessed with it. How were the grapes grown? How was the wine made? How could something possibly taste that good?
I could have read more books. I could have taken a class. But somewhere in the middle of all this I picked up Adventures on the Wine Route, and Lynch’s descriptions of knocking on cellar doors in rural France, tasting unfiltered wine straight from the barrel, sitting with vignerons farming vines their grandparents planted, that was it. I didn’t want to read about it anymore. I wanted to do it.
The doors
I taught myself French. Tutors, Duolingo, whatever I could find. After a few months of studying, I flew to Paris, took a train east, and started knocking on cellar doors with one goal: find someone who would let me work a harvest.
I started in Sancerre, then Chablis, and worked my way south down the Côte d’Or. At every cellar door I would say, in my terrible, rehearsed French: “Bonjour, je m’appelle Jesse, et je voudrais faire une vendange.” Hello, my name is Jesse, and I would like to do a harvest.
The response was almost always the same. The winemaker would pause, look at this American kid standing on their doorstep, and say slowly: no, we don’t need help, thank you. But you can do a tasting if you’d like.
OK, twist my arm.
So I kept going south. Many cellar doors paired with many polite refusals followed by incredible tastings in cellars I had no business being in. Most vignerons didn’t want the hassle of a foreigner with no work visa, no cellar experience, and truly awful French; I don’t blame them.
Then, after about a month, just as I was losing hope, I met a local in St. Aubin who knew a winemaker in Rully. A few conversations later I was tentatively scheduled to start harvest work at Domaine Rois Mages in the Côte Chalonnaise. I had no idea it would change my life.
If you want the practical version of this (how to actually find and land harvest work), I wrote that up separately: How to Get a Harvest Job at a Winery.
The visa
There was the small matter of working legally. I enrolled in a crash course at the local wine academy. On completion I’d be able to work legally as a local harvest intern. Up to that point I had no formal training in winemaking at all.
The week was a whirlwind of tastings, quizzes, vineyard visits, and more information than I could absorb. I shared the course with 28 harvest interns from around the world, all heading to different wineries around the Côte d’Or.
Most of these “grape chasers” were seasoned winemakers with years of schooling behind them, finally testing their mettle in one of the most famous wine regions on earth. I didn’t want to stand out as a complete novice, so I mostly kept quiet during the wine discussions. But after a few glasses at dinner, nobody seemed to notice nor care. I blended right in.
The harvest
Three months later I was back, living with the family that runs Domaine Rois Mages. They made me feel like one of their own. For three months they housed me, fed me, and pulled me into long dinner conversations as we laughed and joked after long workdays.
One benefit of a boutique winery is that you see every part of the process. I picked grapes, sorted fruit, moved it to the fermenters, punched down caps, pumped over juice, stacked barrels, kick-started fermentations, racked wine, and cleaned. Lots and lots of cleaning.
We rose early and worked through the day, but always stopped for baguettes, cheese, and wine. Bread and cheese in the vineyard at eight in the morning is a Burgundian tradition I will never stop trying to replicate.
Of course I made mistakes. Like the time I forgot to shut off the pump while racking into a barrel and sent precious Pinot Noir across the cellar floor. Or the time I nearly went headfirst into a fermenting vat. These are the stories the family still brings up.
I also managed to try a few bottles of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti at a tasting in Lyon on that trip. That may have been life-altering too.
The moment
Working in Burgundy made me think about life differently. It was the first time I felt genuinely happy with the work I was doing; a different feeling than sitting at the desk staring into a laptop abyss. Sitting in a row of vines one morning, filthy from the pick with the sun on my back, I saw the big picture: working with wine is what makes me happy, and it should be my life’s work.
That moment led to everything after: Working harvests in California, Portugal and Washington, enrolling at UC Davis for a degree in Viticulture and Enology, and eventually started making my own wine. Cassie and I launched Wine Scribes to connect the wine community with the boutique winemakers and overlooked regions we kept finding. Then we started our own label, Vespera Cellars.
Our first Pinot Noir comes from our own estate vineyard, and we use Burgundian practices in everything we do, both in the cellar and in the vineyard. After all, they’ve been making the world’s best Pinot Noir for a long, long time. It felt right to learn from the source and preserve the tradition.
Full circle
The reason I keep coming back to this book is that Lynch wrote it out of fear. Fear that authenticity in winemaking was dying. Fear that industrialisation would erase the very thing that makes wine worth caring about: that each bottle, from each vineyard, made by each family, tastes different for a reason.
Nearly forty years later, Wine Scribes exists out of the same fear, and the same hope. We write about small producers and overlooked regions because those winemakers deserve the same champion Lynch was for the vignerons of France. I just happened to read his book at exactly the right moment, in exactly the right place.
If you haven’t read it, pick it up. It might not make you move to France and knock on cellar doors. But then again, it might.
A version of this story was originally featured in France Today magazine [paywall]. Jesse Schwartz is the co-founder of Wine Scribes and Vespera Cellars.
More wine books worth reading
If you enjoyed this, here are a few more that shaped how we think about wine:
- Adventures on the Wine Route by Kermit Lynch — the one that started it all
- At Poupon’s Table by Kermit Lynch — his 2025 debut novel, set mostly in Provence
- The Billionaire’s Vinegar by Benjamin Wallace — the wild true story of the most expensive bottle of wine ever sold, and whether it was a fake
- Cork Dork by Bianca Bosker — a journalist embeds in the sommelier world
- Wine Folly: Magnum Edition — the best visual reference for beginners and improvers
FAQ
Yes. Most wine books teach you regions and grapes in the abstract. This one takes you into the cellars of the growers Lynch actually imported, and people who pick it up tend to come out obsessed. First published in 1988, it has never been out of print, and Eric Asimov called it “one of the finest American books on wine” in the New York Times.
It’s a memoir by the American wine merchant Kermit Lynch about travelling through France in the 1970s and 1980s, finding small artisanal producers and importing their wines to the United States. There’s an argument running under the travelogue: that filtration, chemical intervention, and the international style were flattening the differences between wines that made them worth drinking.
Kermit Lynch is an American wine merchant, importer, author, and musician based in Berkeley, California. He opened his shop in 1972 and became one of the most influential figures in American wine by championing small French producers, unfiltered bottlings, and cold-chain shipping. He has won two James Beard Awards and been made a chevalier of the French Légion d’honneur, and he published his first novel, <em>At Poupon’s Table</em>, in 2025.
For a visual introduction, <em>Wine Folly: Magnum Edition</em> is the clearest starting point. For something you’ll actually finish, <em>Adventures on the Wine Route</em> teaches through storytelling rather than instruction. You absorb how wine is grown and made while following someone around rural France.
Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, usually shortened to DRC, is widely considered the most prestigious wine producer in the world, based in Vosne-Romanée in Burgundy. Its wines regularly sell for thousands of dollars a bottle and are among the most sought-after by collectors anywhere.
