Judgment of Paris

by George M. Taber

  About four times a year, Spurrier and Gallagher staged a special promotional event to raise the public profile of both the wine shop and the school. In the spring of 1975, Spurrier invited the vintners of Bordeaux’s elite First Growth red wines—Haut-Brion, Lafite, Latour, Margaux, and Mouton—to a comparative tasting of the 1970 vintage in Paris. All but Haut-Brion came. No one in France had ever staged such a face-off of the great wines, and the event attracted attention and numerous press stories.

  Spurrier and Gallagher began thinking about holding an event around California wines because they were hearing from a wide range of people about the exciting new things being done in northern California. At a Paris dinner party in 1973 or 1974, Alex Bespaloff, an American wine writer, first tried to convince Spurrier that some California wines were actually pretty good. Bespaloff took umbrage when Spurrier said he thought California wines were “rather cooked,” meaning they were high in alcohol and had a burnt taste. California winemakers visiting Paris soon began stopping at the Caves de la Madeleine and dropping off bottles of their wares. Spurrier found some of them interesting. Robert Finigan, the publisher of the influential wine newsletterRobert Finigan’s Private Guide to Wines, and Frank Prial, the wine reporter for theNew York Times, were frequent visitors to Cité Berryer when they came to Paris and became evangelists for the new California wine pioneers. They explained to Spurrier and Gallagher that the Americans held France up as their model of excellence and were trying to emulate the very best Bordeaux and Burgundy wines. Finigan and Prial said the California wines were surprisingly good—not up to French standards, but nonetheless interesting.

  Gallagher heard similar enthusiasm for California wines from her husband-to-be, Gérard Gastaud, an electronics engineer who worked for the French telephone company and had recently spent a year in Las Vegas, where his company was installing a telephone system. During that time he made a foray to the Napa Valley and reported back that some California wines were pleasantly surprising. On his return to Paris in December 1974, Gastaud brought Gallagher a goodie bag of California viticulture: a bottle of unfiltered Robert Mondavi wine; a technical book on winemaking by Professor Maynard Amerine of the University of California, Davis; and a guide to the new wineries titledThe Treasury of American Wines by Nathan Chroman.

  Glenda Cudaback, a friend of Gallagher’s who worked at theHerald Tribune, was also telling her about California wine. Cudaback and her husband were both from the city of Napa, where his father had a landscaping business that did work for new wineries being built in the valley.

  The new smaller wineries, everyone explained, were producing far better California wine than could be bought in Paris. At the time, the only California wine easily available in Paris was Paul Masson, which was sold in screw-top bottles at fancy gourmet shops like Fauchon that carried products for expatriate Americans.

  One day in early 1975, Gallagher told Spurrier that Americans were planning all sorts of special events the next year around the bicentennial of American independence and suggested that they put together something on California wines as part of that year-long celebration. Gallagher traced her family roots back to 1630 in Massachusetts and had a great interest in colonial America. The French, she noted, had played a major role in American independence thanks to Lafayette and all that. Why not have a tasting of California wines in Paris? As his earlier publicity events had demonstrated, Spurrier liked to be what the French called anagent provocateur . Above all, Spurrier thought it would be good fun, and in those days around the Caves de la Madeleine and the Académie du Vin, fun was all that really mattered.

  Chapter Two

  France Ruled the World

  The effervescence of French wine reveals the true brilliance of the French people.

  —VOLTAIRE

  Alexis Lichine, a part owner and manager of Château Lascombes, a prized Second Growth under the historic 1855 classification of Bordeaux wines, opened his 1951Wines of France with the categorical statement, “The greatest wines on earth come from France.” For centuries no one would have seriously challenged that assertion. While grapes have been grown in Western Europe for generations, French wines were always in a league by themselves. In the world of wines, there was France—and then there was everybody else.

  Archaeologists believe that wine was first developed in the late Stone Age, probably by someone who accidentally left some grapes in a jar where fermentation occurred with the help of some wandering yeast—to the person’s delighted surprise. According to the Bible, Noah planted the first vineyard, but after getting drunk on his new product, he lay “naked inside his tent” (Genesis 9:20). Wine wasn’t off to a good start.

  Patrick McGovern, an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, traced the history of the beverage back eight thousand years in his 2003 bookAncient Wine . McGovern’s more recent research shows that the Chinese made a fermented beverage out of rice, honey, and grapes about nine thousand years ago, but that had no influence on the development of western wine. Excavations in the Near East show that wine was probably first made in the western world somewhere in a broad area stretching from eastern Turkey through the Taurus, Caucasus, and Zagros mountains to northern Iran. From there, wine followed the leading intellectual and military powers of the day, moving on to Egypt, Greece, and Rome and then to the distant parts of their empires. Greek settlers brought the first wine to France in about 600 BC to Massalia, present day Marseilles, and Plato set out rules governing the use of wine in the fifth century BC.

  Greek and Roman traders noted that grapes grew well relatively close to shore and also in the same place as olives did, so that’s where their settlers planted vineyards. In the Old World the historic area of wine production reached from southern England in the north to northern Africa in the south, and from Portugal in the west to western Russia in the east.

  Even though wine has been made in all of those places, outstanding wine has always been considered rare. British author Alec Waugh in his 1959 bookIn Praise of Wine expressed the then conventional wisdom among both wine professionals and serious amateurs when he wrote “For the real magic and mystery of wine lies in this: that though wine be grown in innumerable areas, great wines can only be produced in special places and in minute quantities.”

  For Waugh and many others that special place was France. Something made France unique. Soil, climate, topography, elevation, drainage, height of the sun, and a dozen other things seemed to come together best in France.

  French wines were also steeped in history. A Frenchman was usually a winemaker—and until very recently they were all men—because his father and his father’s father back as far as the family remembers were winemakers. In such a society tradition naturally ruled. The French winemaker had a hallowed respect for tradition. You didn’t play around with success. No experiments! Thanks to centuries of trial and error going back to the Greeks and Romans, the French were certain that they had discovered the very best places to produce the very best wines. Winemakers learned from literally hundreds of vintages which types of grapes reached their highest potential and where exactly to grow them. They determined over time, for example, that Cabernet Sauvignon grapes did best in Bordeaux and Pinot Noir grapes performed well in Burgundy, so no one had to waste time trying to grow Pinot Noir in Bordeaux or Cabernet Sauvignon in Burgundy. The lessons of history had already been learned. As Émile Peynaud, a University of Bordeaux professor and the leading French wine guru of the twentieth century, said, “Tradition is an experiment that has worked.”

  Climatology, geology, and history all fuse in the French concept ofterroir . There’s no exact English translation for the word that combines all the factors that go into making outstanding wine.Terroir is founded on the conviction that there is a perfect place for making wine, where the soil and the weather and the knowledge of the ages combine to produce truly great vintages. Of the factors making upterroir the most important are the soil and the minerals it contains, and the French maintain th
at a specificterroir —be it Burgundy or even a particular vineyard in Burgundy—cannot be totally replicated anywhere else in the world.

  In France winemaking was not just an occupation or a business. Vintners were highly respected for living close to the land and mastering the mystique of turning simple grapes into the nectar of the gods. The winemakingpaysan, with his wine-stained hands and face weathered by too many hours in the sun, had cachet in a cachet-conscious country. Families like the Rothschilds, who had made their fortunes in other fields, got into wine as a way of raising their social stature. As the French have said for centuries,le vin anoblit —wine makes one an aristocrat.

  The vast majority of French wine until the mid-nineteenth century was either shipped abroad by sea or drunk locally. Little made its way even to Paris, which for most of history had its own vineyards. In Bordeaux people drank Bordeaux, in Burgundy they drank Burgundy, and in the Rhône Valley they drank Rhône wines. The arrival of the railroad made overland transportation both easier and less expensive. Later roads built to serve auto-mobiles and trucks also made it economical to ship wines to distant markets. France then became the maker of fine wine for the world.

  One of the downsides of greater trade, however, was an increase in wine fraud, and inferior wines soon were passed off as higher quality ones, or good and bad wines were blended and sold under the more prestigious name at the higher price. The final series of laws to fight cheating were passed on July 30, 1935, establishing the Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée system, which was ruled by an oversight board with extensive powers. Literally translated, the term means “Naming According to Controlled Place of Origin,” and the law picked up on the concept ofterroir: a wine gets its unique character from the unique place where it is grown, and that should determine its unique name. The 1935 legislation divided France into hundreds ofappellations or areas, and more specific regions have since been added. Today there are 450 wineappellations .

  Although they have been modified through the years, the 1935 rules still govern French wine. Today all wines are divided into four categories: Vins de Table (Table Wines), Vins de Pays (Regional Wines), Vins Delimités (Delimited Wines), and Vins d’Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (Appellation Wines). Very detailed regulations govern each group, with the rules getting tougher as products work their way up the quality scale toappellation . At that level the regulations are extremely rigid and cover such things as the type of grapes that can be used, the acceptable yields per hectare, the minimum ripeness of the fruit as determined by the percentage of sugar, and the alcoholic content of the wine. In some areas laws require that grapes be picked by hand, rather than by machine. Such stipulations determine whether a wine is a Chablis Grand Cru, which brings a high price in the market, rather than a Petit Chablis, which comes from a parcel of land only a little further up the hill in a cooler area but is worth much less. A winemaker might be able to make great Chardonnay in Bordeaux, but under theappellation system he is not allowed to grow that grape there. The restrictive French wine laws certainly stifle winemaker creativity.

  The system did not totally eliminate wine doctoring, but it helped safeguard the quality of French wines by keeping such practices in check. French winemakers love their system or hate it—or have both feelings at the same time.

  Wine is produced in many parts of France—from the sparkling wines of Champagne in the north to the sweet Banyuls in the south on the Spanish border, but the two towering regions are Bordeaux in the west and Burgundy in the east.

  Bordeaux’s wine trade is centered around the city of the same name located some sixty miles up the Gironde River from the Atlantic Ocean. Its vineyards extend sixty-five miles from north to south and eighty miles from east to west, covering some 260,000 acres. Vines grow along both sides of the Gironde River and the Gironde Estuary, which is formed by the Garonne and Dordogne rivers, and also northeastward beyond the Dordogne. Bordeaux’s wine-growing area is nearly five times the size of Burgundy and eight times bigger than California’s Napa Valley.

  The Bordeaux region has more than nine thousand wine-producing châteaux and thirteen thousand grape growers. The annual output averages about 700 million bottles, but in bountiful years can approach 900 million. Approximately 85 percent is red wine. Most of the wineries call themselveschâteaux, although they lack the palatial residences that name implies. The properties are spread out over regions such as Médoc, Entre-Deux-Mers and St.-Émilion—and fifty-sevenappellations . These give Bordeaux wines both their delightful subtlety and their maddening complexity. Talented connoisseurs can taste, and appreciate, the difference between a 2000 Château Lafite Rothschild from theappellation of Pauillac and a no-name Bordeaux of unknown vintage. That is why the first wine sells for $400, while the latter costs perhaps $5. Less discerning drinkers, on the other hand, might be unable to appreciate the differences between the two and wonder what the fuss is all about.

  Warm Gulf Stream currents and prevailing westerly winds blowing over the Atlantic Ocean play crucial roles in the development of Bordeaux wines. The city of Bordeaux is located at the 45 degree parallel, at the same latitude as Minneapolis and St. Paul, but its weather is much milder than in the Twin Cities. Since Bordeaux vineyards are near the sea, an estuary, and two rivers, the weather is generally moderate and relatively stable, although there can be great variations from year to year. An old Bordeaux saying holds that the best wines come from vines that can see the rivers that lead out to the ocean.

  Bordeaux soil is generally sandy or gravelly, but well drained. Much of it is alluvial, rich with the remnants of marine life from an earlier age when the area frequently flooded. Some of the land is of surprisingly low quality, and visitors for centuries have wondered how such good wines could come from such poor soil. The answer to the apparent paradox is that in those areas vines have to reach deeper into the earth to seek out nutrients and minerals that help produce superior products.

  Bordeaux wines are generally not made from a single grape variety, but are blends of three or even four grapes according to the choice of the winemaker. The most commonly grown varietals are Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Petit Verdot, and Malbec.

  The Roman historian Pliny the Elder recorded the earliest known reference to vineyards around the port city that was to become Bordeaux in the year 71. At that time, the local Gauls already had a profitable wine trade with England. The Gauls had been beer drinkers, but they took to the wine trade with gusto, transporting their wines in wooden beer barrels instead of the clay amphorae the Romans used. Barrels have been an integral part of winemaking ever since.

  Bordeaux rose to prominence as a wine producer starting in the late twelfth century after a royal marriage between Eleanor of Aquitaine, whose lands included Bordeaux, and the future Henry II of England brought together the French wine country and the wealthy English market. Transportation from the port of Bordeaux to England was both easier and less expensive than it was for the region’s competitors farther inland in France or in northern Spain. Eleanor’s son, King Richard the Lionhearted, made Bordeaux his court wine and soon it was a drink of choice in England.

  With exports growing rapidly, the countryside around Bordeaux was soon covered in vines. By the fourteenth century more than 75 percent of Bordeaux wine was shipped to England, where it was called claret because of its light color, which distinguished it from the darker and heavier wines produced in Spain. British wine historian Hugh Johnson has written that Bordeaux was then made like rosé is today, with the juice left in contact with the grapes for only a short time, thus giving the wine its pale color. In the early part of the fourteenth century Bordeaux exports totaled some one hundred thousand barrels annually to England. In those days wines lasted only a few months before spoiling, and the price dropped dramatically as soon as the next year’s vintage arrived.

  In the late Middle Ages, however, Bordeaux wine fell into a slump. English tastes turned away from claret in favor of heavier wines, and the Dutch
, who then controlled much of world trade and were a major market, also drank mainly heavier wines. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a host of technological changes, especially improvements in glass-making, bottling, and corking, as well as the invention of the corkscrew, returned Bordeaux wines to the forefront. Dutch merchants played a major role in the comeback of French wine, and Dutch engineers used technology originally developed to drain their lowlands to turn swampy marsh-lands in the Médoc region into prime vineyards.

  On April 10, 1663, English diarist Samuel Pepys spent a night drinking with friends at the Royall Oak Tavern on London’s Lombard Street. The next day he wrote in his diary about the experience and gave the world the first record of a named Bordeaux. Wrote Pepys: “Drank a sort of French wine, called Ho Bryan, that hath a good and most particular taste that I ever met with.” That wine is known today as Château Haut-Brion—then as now one of Bordeaux’s best.

  Bordeaux wine brokers as early as 1647 began periodically categorizing wines on the basis of the prices they brought. The list changed from time to time, although four properties (Haut-Brion, Lafite, Latour, and Margaux) were almost always at the top and demanded similarly high prices. Each year wine brokers set the price for those top four and then the lower wines fell into place as a percentage of the highest rate.

  Planners of the 1855 Great International Exhibition in Paris asked the Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce to select some of the region’s wines to exhibit at the event. The chamber, in turn, passed the job on to a trade group called the Union of Brokers Attached to the Bordeaux Market, who selected the Grands Crus (Great Growths) and put them into five categories: 4 Premiers Crus (First Growths), 15 Deuxièmes Crus (Second Growths), 14 Troisièmes Crus (Third Growths), 10 Quatrièmes Crus (Fourth Growths), and 17 Cinquièmes Crus (Fifth Growths). The classification reflected earlier ones and was based solely on recent prices. The going rate for First Growth wines at the time was 3,000 francs per tun (a storage cask that held 252 gallons), while the Second Growth ranged from 2,500 to 2,700 francs, the Third from 2,100 to 2,400, the Fourth from 1,800 to 2,100, and the Fifth from 1,400 to 1,600.