The Booklovers' Guide to Wine

by Patrick Alexander

  As the European bourgeoisie and middle classes of the new towns and cities of the late Middle Ages grew in prosperity, they wanted to display their wealth and improve their living standards. Rather than drink the thin, sour local reds that the peasants drank, they wanted to drink the expensive sweet whites that previously only the aristocrats could afford. Thus the demand for sweet white wines in Europe increased dramatically.

  By the eighteenth century, Cistercian monks in Germany had developed a reputation for strong sweet white wine made from Riesling grapes, which they stored in deep, cold cellars along the Rhine and Moselle river valleys. These German Cistercian wines (known as Rhenish in England) were stored and aged in huge oak barrels called tuns, which could hold fifty thousand gallons or more, and thus protected the wine from oxidization—meaning they aged well and improved.

  Sweet white wine, known as Tokaji, began to be imported from Hungary in the late seventeenth century, and Louis XIV called it “The King of Wines and the Wine of Kings.” The demand for sweet white wine reached even as far as South Africa, whose sweet white Constantia was the favorite wine of both Frederick the Great and Napoleon. Legend has it that Constantia was the wine that Napoleon requested on his deathbed. By the end of the eighteenth century, the most sought after sweet white wines came from the Sauterne region of Bordeaux. Thomas Jefferson loved Sauternes, and while he was US president, George Washington, after just one taste, ordered thirty cases of Château d’Yquem. Prior to the Russian revolution in 1917, many Russian aristocrats would drink nothing but expensive Sauternes, and even today, the Russian oligarchs and mafia retain the same taste for Château d’Yquem.

  Even though red wines have long since become the prestigious wines for serious drinkers and collectors, sweet white wines still command a loyal and wealthy following. As recently as 2012, a single bottle of 1811 Château d’Yquem sold for $115,000.

  Age of Reason

  Alternatives to wine as the drink of choice began to appear in the seventeenth century. Beer, of course, had always existed as an alternative, but until the discovery of hops, beer had an unpleasant taste and a very short shelf life. With the arrival of hops in England in the late sixteenth century, however, beer became much more popular. The hop vine is closely related to the cannabis plant, and adding hops to fermenting barley created a foaming beer with a pleasingly bitter taste and a much longer shelf life.

  About the same time that the English and Germans were experimenting with beer, the Dutch were experimenting with distillation, a process that had first been developed by the Moors in Spain. The Dutch started distilling the rather bland Ugni Blanc grapes on the west coast of France in the regions of Cognac and Armagnac, and called it brandewijn (burnt wine) from which we get the name brandy. Three advantages of brandy over wine were immediately obvious. It was far less bulky and therefore cheaper to transport it was much stronger and more potent; and finally, it would last much longer—indeed it improved with age.

  With the discovery and colonization of the New World, initially in the Caribbean, sugarcane provided another source of alcohol, and rum became a popular drink, especially with sailors. Further north, on the American mainland, the English and Dutch colonists started making their own alcohol from locally grown produce, such as wheat and rye to make beer, whisky, and gin.

  The problem was that wine was expensive and bulky to transport from Europe and had a shelf life that would barely survive a long ocean voyage. Sloshing around with the roll of the ship, in often leaky barrels, much of the wine evaporated while the rest quickly oxidized and became even less pleasant to drink. Unfortunately, as we shall discuss below, vines proved impossible to grow in the North American colonies, and so the colonists were forced to develop home-grown alternatives to wine. This is one reason that North America never really evolved a wine drinking culture, and why whisky became the national drink.

  Thomas Jefferson: One great champion of the consumption of wine as opposed to spirits was Thomas Jefferson, author of the American Declaration of Independence and US Ambassador to France. Jefferson was both a great connoisseur and consumer of wine, and he purchased large quantities of wine from all over France while he was ambassador. More importantly, he spent much of his life promoting the consumption of wine in America and trying, unsuccessfully, to plant vineyards in Virginia as the basis of an American wine industry. As we will discuss in more detail below, the European vine, Vitis vinifera, would simply not survive on the East Coast of America, and all Jefferson’s dedicated efforts were doomed to failure. Consequently, all wine had to be imported from Europe, which made it accessible only to the wealthy. Jefferson’s other doomed campaign was attempting to remove the duties on imported wine. Jefferson was concerned that because wine was so expensive, the citizens would prefer to drink gin and whisky, leading to public drunkenness. As he wrote in a letter to a friend in 1818, “No nation is drunken where wine is cheap; and none sober, where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage.”

  What was especially galling and frustrating for Jefferson was that while the English on the East Coast and even the French in Louisiana had consistently failed to produce local wine, the Spanish had been successfully planting vineyards all over the West Coast of what is today California.

  Coffee Houses: The seventeenth century also brought new competition to wine consumption from non-alcoholic sources. Coffee originally arrived in England from the Ottoman Empire via Venetian traders, and by 1675 there were three thousand coffee houses in London. Like wine, coffee provided a healthy alternative to water and with a pleasingly stimulating effect on the mind. Unlike wine, however, increased consumption did not lead to inebriated stupidity, but rather to increased intellectual acuity. This was the Age of Enlightenment, an era of rational thought and logical discourse, and it is a mystery that the taste for thin, vinegary, alcoholic wine ever survived the arrival of coffee. As though the competition from coffee were not enough, by the middle of the eighteenth century, tea had become the English national drink. Imported from China and then from India, mixed with sugar from the Caribbean colonies, tea was plentiful, cheap, and available to rich and poor alike.

  With so many alternatives to choose from, wine consumption in the eighteenth century began to decline. We are seeing the same phenomenon at the start of the twenty-first century in traditional wine drinking countries, from France and Italy to Argentina, where young people regard wine drinking as old-fashioned and are switching to sodas, cocktails, and even recreational drugs instead of wine. After centuries of enjoying a monopolistic control of beverages for human consumption, the wine producers of Europe were suddenly overwhelmed with competition from beer, brandy, whisky, gin, coffee, and tea. If they were to survive, they would need to improve their product.

  Quality control: The main challenges for wine producers were quality control and aging. Even the best of red wines turned to vinegar after about a year, and many wines turned bad and became undrinkable much sooner than that. There were many reasons for this. Wine merchants tended to mix wine from various sources, and so even an excellent wine could be degraded by being mixed with an inferior wine. Secondly, wine was stored and transported in barrels, and was thus increasingly exposed to air, resulting in oxidization. The main problem, of course, was ignorance; although Europeans had been successfully making wine for over two thousand years, nobody actually understood the chemical process involved. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that Louis Pasteur discovered the existence of yeasts and explained the effects of oxygen and the importance of hygiene in the winemaking process. Consequently, most red wine was of inferior quality.

  Faced with the threat of competition from other beverages in the eighteenth century, wine producers were already making improvements. The biggest change came with the growing use of glass bottles. Glass bottles prior to the eighteenth century were made in wood-fired furnaces and were thin and fragile, used only for carrying wine from the barrel to
the table. But with the introduction of the coal-fired furnace, which could produce sufficient heat to melt sand (1,760 degrees Celsius or 3,200 degrees Fahrenheit); glass bottles became thicker and stronger and suitable for long-term transport and storage. At the same time, the use of corks as bottle stoppers was introduced, and the combination of the glass bottles and cork stoppers resulted in wines which could not only age but actually improve with aging. Unfortunately, it was illegal to sell wine in bottles until 1860, partly for political reasons, but mainly because there were no standard bottle sizes. Wine was therefore shipped in barrels, and then the wine merchant or the tavern owner would sell it by the jug. Customers were expected to provide their own jugs or bottles. The aristocracy, of course, could afford to purchase wine by the barrel and then have it bottled by the butler and stored in the cellar—which is what they increasingly did from the eighteenth century onwards.

  Bordeaux Branding: Another improvement which had begun in the seventeenth century was the branding of certain vineyards. Rather than sell his wine to a wine merchant who might blend it with other, more mediocre wines, a Bordeaux aristocrat named Arnaud de Pontac insisted on marketing his own wines with the name of his country estate, Haut-Brion. A few years after inheriting the estate from his father, de Pontac began shipping the wines from Haut-Brion directly to London where King Charles II became a keen customer.

  In a 1647 Bordeaux merchant’s listing, wine was only classified as coming from large generic sources such as Medoc or Graves, and even on a listing in 1740, wine was still only classified by individual parish. Under this old system in which wines from various estates were blended together, there was no incentive for the individual producers to care much about quality. By putting his family name and the name of his château on his wines, de Pontac was making a statement about the quality of the wine which quickly resulted in name recognition, consistent quality, increased demand, and, of course, higher prices and profits.

  In his diary, Samuel Pepys wrote in 1663 that while visiting Royal Oak Tavern, he “drank a sort of French wine called Ho Bryan that hath a good and most particular taste I never met with.” Pepys was soon followed by the writer Jonathan Swift and the philosopher John Locke. One hundred years later, the American Ambassador to France, Thomas Jefferson, visited the Haut-Brion estate, analyzed the soil, and purchased six cases of the wine.

  Other large Bordeaux estates, especially the major vineyards on the left bank of the Gironde river, north of the city, quickly followed de Pontac’s lead, and wines from Château Margaux, Château La Tour, and Château La Fitte, soon became recognized and much sought after, especially by the English aristocracy and rapidly growing middle class. In the early eighteenth century, the Marquis de Ségur owned Château La Tour, Château Lafite, and Château Mouton, all of which he successfully marketed in London. Château Lafite in particular became a cult wine in London, and the British Prime Minister, Walpole, bought a new barrel of Lafite every three months. Even today, many of the billionaire wine buyers in China refuse to drink anything except Château Lafite. This emphasis on specific individual vineyards, promoted by men like de Pontac and Ségur, did much to improve the quality and thus the reputation of red wines in the market. A listing from 1745 not only matches individual vineyards to prices, but has also begun classifying them into first, second, and third “crus.”

  By the time Thomas Jefferson visited the region in 1787, just before the French Revolution, individual châteaux were marketing their wine under their own names and competing for market share. Already wines were being classified in different categories based on market price and demand, which obviously reflected quality. It is interesting that Jefferson’s own evaluation of the Bordeaux wines in 1787 was almost the same as the official classification made sixty-eight years later in 1855, and which is still in use today. Jefferson’s four top-rated wines were Margaux, de La Fit, La Tour and Haut-Brion, which are all still Premier Crus in the twenty-first century. The growing wealth of the English mercantile class, along with the aristocracy, created a demand for top-growth Bordeaux wines which remains unabated to this day. It became the mark of a true gentleman to purchase barrels direct from one of the Bordeaux vineyards (or via a reputable merchant such as Berry Bros. & Rudd), and have it bottled and stored in his own cellars. It was this dramatic improvement in the way Bordeaux wines were marketed, as well as stored, that began to increase the perceived value of dry red wines in comparison with sweet white wines, which had always been more highly valued.

  Wines of the New World: As the European nations expanded their colonies into the New World, they took with them their thirst for wine. As we have seen, the English and French were unsuccessful in their attempts to establish vineyards on the East Coast of North America, but the Dutch were successful in South Africa as early as the mid-seventeenth century and by the early eighteenth century, the English were successfully growing wine in Australia. Although dry red wines were grown in these distant colonies for local consumption, the only wines that were considered worth exporting back to Europe were the sweet white wines, like Constantia from South Africa.

  Unlike the English, the Spanish were successful in their attempts to grow wine in America, and were soon planting vineyards besides the Missions which they erected all along the coast of what is now California. Since most of the ships left Spain from the port of Cadiz, the missionaries probably took the local Palomino vines with them on the voyage, so the “Mission Grape” of the New World is the same grape that the Spanish today use for making Sherry.

  Vineyards were successfully planted in Mexico, Peru, Chile, and Argentina—even as close to the equator as Bolivia. However, the rapacious Spanish monarchy saw this as a threat to their treasury, despite all the gold and silver they were importing. They did not want their colonies to be self-sufficient in wine; they wanted to continue exporting Spanish wine to South America. Wine production was therefore banned, and the colonists were obliged to purchase thin Spanish wine, which had become almost undrinkable after the long ocean crossing. Until they finally achieved independence from Spain, the colonists distilled their grapes to produce Pisco and Aguardiente, South American brandies.

  Nineteenth Century

  Classification of French Wine: By the middle of the nineteenth century, the importance of wine to the French economy had become obvious not only to the growers and landowners, but also to the government in Paris. In 1855, by order of Emperor Napoleon III, who wanted to promote French wines at the Exposition Universelle, the sixty-one major wines of Bordeaux were classified in rank based upon market prices for the previous one hundred years. There were five top ranks followed by various lower”Bourgeois” rankings (see Appendix B). The top rank, Premier Cru (First Growth), had only four wines: Châteaux Lafite, Latour, Margaux and Haut-Brion (the four wines favored by Jefferson). What is amazing is that despite further revolutions, foreign invasions, the scourge of Phylloxera, and two world wars—to say nothing of changes in ownership, dynastic upheavals, swings in public taste and dramatic shifts in the world economy—the Bordeaux ranking of 1855 remains unchanged to this day. The only change in the ranking over the past 160 years has been the elevation, in 1973, of Château Mouton from second to first growth status. It is interesting that Jefferson had judged Château Mouton as a third growth—not even a second.

  Six years later in Burgundy, the Comité d’Agriculture de Beaune, introduced its own classification system based on an informal listing by Jules Lavalle, a French wine writer, who had divided the major vineyards into three classes, or crus, based on the climate or terroir of the different communes.

  Where the Bordeaux classification is rigid and hierarchical (unchanged for 160 years), the Burgundian system is more democratic and fluid—and consequently more complex and difficult to understand. The 1861 Beaune classification (formalized in 1935) divided the region into different communes so that winemakers could market themselves by the name of their commune—some communes obviously bein
g better known and valued than others. Within each commune, following the 1935 update, certain vineyards were classified as “Premier Crus,” and their labels could show the name of the vineyard as well as the name of the commune. Out of these, usually no more than two or three per commune were classified as “Grand Crus,” and these wines were allowed to show the name of the vineyard alone, with no reference to the commune. The Beaune classification is more fluid and democratic because it’s in a constant state of re-evaluation. Almost like a restaurant fighting to maintain its Michelin four star status, so too the vineyards of Burgundy must constantly strive to maintain standards or risk losing their Premier or Grand Cru status (see Appendix B).

  Louis Pasteur: By the middle of the nineteenth century, wine was France’s second biggest export (after textiles), one-third of the population was employed in its production, and it represented almost a quarter of the nation’s revenues. However, during the late 1840s, the industry had been almost destroyed by a disease called oïdium, which attacked most of the country’s vineyards until it was eradicated by the widespread and determined application of sulphur. So important had wine become to the French economy that the government commissioned its most eminent scientist, Louis Pasteur, to study the scientific basis of wine and show how to improve and protect the industry. Pasteur’s study, Etudes sur le Vin, was published in 1866 and had an immediate effect upon the scientific understanding of winemaking. It was Pasteur who first discovered the existence of yeast and its role in converting sugar to alcohol, but perhaps his most important legacy is his emphasis on sterilization and cleanliness in the winemaking process to avoid contamination and spoilage, which had previously been a major problem. But, if the correct procedures were followed, he concluded: “Wine is the most healthful and most hygienic of beverages.”