Writer, Importer, Gentleman Spy
The 2007 Burgundies didn’t generate as much advance excitement as the 2002 or 2005 vintages, which benefited from more favorable weather. But in the spring of 2009 a tasting of a very select group of 2007 reds and whites had many New York wine professionals buzzing with admiration—perhaps proving the axiom that in Burgundy, the maker is more important than the year. Included were some of the top names in Burgundy—a group selected more than fifty years ago by Frank Schoonmaker, a writer, importer, and gentleman spy who did as much to educate American wine drinkers as anyone before or since.
The son of a Columbia classics professor and a prominent feminist, he arrived at Princeton in 1923, not long after Scott Fitzgerald departed, and dropped out after two years. He then roamed Europe for several years, eventually distilling his travels into guidebooks including Through Europe on Two Dollars a Day and Come with Me Through France. Schoonmaker’s passion for wine was fueled by his friendship with Raymond Baudoin, editor of La Revue du Vin de France, then, as now, the most influential wine publication in the country. The young American traveled the principal regions with Baudoin, tasting and learning, making contacts that would ultimately serve him well as an importer when Prohibition ended in 1933. Burgundy became his special passion.
Unlike Bordeaux, a region of vast estates owned by wealthy families and corporations, the typical Burgundian domaine, then as now, consisted of only a few acres of vines. A family’s holdings were generally scattered, thanks to inheritance issues, among different vineyards. Most growers sold their young wine in casks to big negotiants in the town of Beaune, who would blend and bottle them under their own labels. Au contraire, said Baudoin and Schoonmaker, encouraging their favorite growers to bottle their own wines, a relatively radical concept at the time.
After the Volstead Act was finally repealed, the seasoned Francophile moved to New York and launched Frank Schoonmaker Selections. The glitch in his business plan was that after fourteen years of Prohibition, few Americans knew anything about French or any other wines. To help rectify this situation, he published a book called The Complete Wine Book, based in part on a series of articles he’d written for The New Yorker.
Early on, Schoonmaker hired a loquacious young Russian émigré named Alexis Lichine, who’d recently dropped out of Penn, as his national sales manager. Together they traveled to California to scout domestic wines for their portfolio. At the time it was the practice in California to slap French regional names like Chablis and Burgundy on the local bottlings, but they convinced several California estates to label their wines according to grape variety, a practice that has become universal in California and the New World in the years since. Their first success was with Wente Vineyards, which changed the name of its white wine from Graves (a region of Bordeaux) to Sauvignon Blanc—the name of the grape from which it was made—and watched sales soar.
World War II interrupted their partnership; after Pearl Harbor, Schoonmaker joined the OSS, the CIA precursor created by Wild Bill Donovan that drew its ranks from the Ivy League and the Social Register, while Lichine joined army intelligence. Using his wine business as a cover, Schoonmaker went to Madrid. “It was a source of some pride to him,” according to his obit in the Daytona Beach Morning Journal, “that the then United States Ambassador to Spain complained about how vigorously he pursued some of his underground activities in that country.” He made frequent forays into France to aid the resistance, until, according to his friend Frank E. Johnson, “the Spanish police caught on to what was happening. Schoonmaker was arrested, brought back to Madrid and had his head shaved to identify him as a marked man.” He subsequently slipped out of Spain and attached himself to the U.S. Seventh Army, which invaded southern France in August 1944. Not far from Lyon, he was hospitalized after his jeep hit a land mine, but he later managed to visit some of his growers in Burgundy and the Rhône. He was ultimately discharged with the rank of colonel, and to this day he is still referred to as Le Colonel by Burgundian old-timers.
Lichine had also distinguished himself in the war and retired as a major, but when he demanded full partnership in the business, he and Schoonmaker parted ways. Lichine made a name for himself as a wine writer and the owner of Château Prieuré-Lichine and Château Lascombes in Bordeaux. In the years after the war, Schoonmaker continued to educate the American drinker with a series of lively and erudite articles about wine in Gourmet magazine (you can find them in the archives at Gourmet.com) and eventually published the Encyclopedia of Wine, for many years a definitive reference.
In a 1947 Gourmet piece about red Burgundy, he makes clear his preference for the wines of that region over Bordeaux. “Heartwarming and joyeux, heady, big of body, magnificent and Rabelaisian, this is Burgundy,” he writes. (I might question “big of body,” but this is his story.) “The most celebrated poet of Bordeaux, Biarnez, wrote of the chateaux and the wines so dear to his heart in cool and measured Alexandrines reminiscent of Racine. Burgundy is celebrated in bawdy tavern songs.” No doubt where the man’s heart lies. In fact he seems to be saying that Bordeaux has no heart, that it’s all head, but of course he was selling Burgundy. He then goes on to give us a detailed tour of the region that remains useful to this day while referencing Thackeray, Alexandre Dumas, Petrarch, Philip the Bold, and many others.
Schoonmaker seems to have had more taste than business acumen. At the age of sixty-seven he sold his business to Pillsbury, staying on as part of a new wine division. The union was not a happy one. After his death in 1976, Seagram took over Schoonmaker’s Burgundy portfolio, which was then purchased in 2001 by Diageo. Some seventy-five years after Schoonmaker started his company, the domaines represented at Diageo’s 2009 Manhattan tasting are still among the most revered in Burgundy. Ramonet, Niellon, Matrot, d’Angerville, de Courcel, Grivot, and Roumier are among its most consistently excellent producers, as they proved yet again with their 2007 wines. Several growers admitted it was a challenging vintage, given the cool summer, but many of these wines, especially the reds, were surprisingly accessible and attractive at this early stage, unlike, say, the big but backward 2005s, which will require cellar time to mellow out. Though it was probably a stronger year for the whites, the reds are more precocious, providing great drinking from five to ten years of age. The words “pretty” and “charming” kept coming up among growers and tasters with regard to the reds. For those unfamiliar with the fleshy, earthy pleasure of good Burgundy, the relatively inexpensive 2007s could be a good place to start. Tell your wine merchant, or sommelier, that Frank sent you.
The Salesman with the Golden Palate
Even in a life as eventful as Alexis Lichine’s, 1951 would count as a very big year. He published Wines of France, which would go through many editions and influence several generations of Americans. That same year he realized a lifelong dream and purchased Château Prieuré-Cantenac, a classified Bordeaux château that soon was officially rechristened Château Prieuré-Lichine. His genius as a salesman was inseparable from his gift for self-promotion, and for many years his name was one of the most successful brands in the world of fine wine. Along the way he married a countess and then a movie star, won a Bronze Star and a Croix de Guerre for his service in World War II, bought a vast apartment on Fifth Avenue, and intrepidly barnstormed the heartland, spreading the gospel of fine wine.
Lichine’s father, a wealthy businessman, managed to escape Moscow with his family in 1917 shortly after the Bolshevik revolution. After a brief stay in New York, they settled in Paris, where Alexis attended a lycée. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, he returned to Paris and landed a job at the Herald Tribune. Shortly after the repeal of Prohibition, the paper commissioned Lichine to write a series about French wines for the benefit of newly liberated American palates. He honed his own palate while researching the articles, touring the great wine regions of France.
Though he would continue to write about wine throughout his life, Lichine was a salesman at hea
rt, and in 1934, with Prohibition ending, he moved to New York. After working for several retailers, he teamed up with Frank Schoonmaker, a connoisseur and the author of The Complete Wine Book who had established a successful importing business in the wake of repeal. Schoonmaker and Lichine were a potent team, an odd couple who shared the same passion for wine. Together, and then separately, as rivals, they virtually created the American market for French wine.
Their association was highly successful, despite, or perhaps because of, temperamental differences. “Although he respected his palate, Schoonmaker evidently considered Lichine something of an upstart,” according to the importer Frank E. Johnson, “and Lichine never had much faith in Schoonmaker’s salesmanship.” There was also romantic competition, Schoonmaker eventually marrying one of Lichine’s girlfriends. The differences might ultimately be summed up by acknowledging that in the end, Schoonmaker was a partisan of Burgundy and Lichine was a Bordeaux man—sort of like the dichotomy between breast men and leg men, or between Mets and Yankees fans. (The first chapter of Lichine’s Wines of France is titled “Bordeaux: The Greatest Wine District.”)
When war broke out in Europe and they were cut off from their French sources, they went to California to seek domestic wines. Eventually, both men enlisted, Lichine with army intelligence and Schoonmaker in the OSS. Although Lichine rose to the rank of major and was decorated for bravery, his wartime service was an extension of his civilian profession. “I was an aide to a very wine-minded general stationed in Corsica,” he told an interviewer some thirty years later. He seems to have brought his gift for the good life to war. Landing on Elba, he managed to spend a night in Napoleon’s bed. By his own account, he endeared himself to his comrades by slipping through enemy lines in the South of France and returning with several bottles of drinkable rosé. He was subsequently charged with contacting Cognac producers and arranging shipments to troops on leave in southern France. Eventually, he ended up as an aide-de-camp to General Eisenhower, in which capacity he met Winston Churchill. “The prime minister talked war for a while,” he recalled, “then started telling me about wines over his claret. I politely intervened, and he finally sat down and said, ‘You do the talking and I’ll do the listening, young man.’ ” It’s a great story, whether or not it’s true; all of these anecdotes of his service were provided by Lichine himself, a true master of self-promotion.
What is indisputable is that on his return to New York, he married the countess Renée de Villeneuve, whom he’d met in Marseilles, though the marriage lasted only a year. Lichine went back to France in 1948, trying to persuade growers to sell their wines in America exclusively through him. These buying trips also formed the basis for his Wines of France, which in turn helped to create a market in the States for his wines. Within a few years he’d made enough to purchase the run-down Prieuré-Cantenac—ranked as a fourth growth in the 1855 classification—not that the initial purchase price was high; his son, Sacha, told me he paid about $16,000 for the former priory and some twenty-five neglected acres of vines. Within a year, with a consortium of banker friends, he bought the nearby Château Lascombes, a second growth. He restored and managed both properties in between sales trips to the United States.
Lichine’s proselytizing was indefatigable. According to Sacha, “He’d hop on a Greyhound bus, go to Buffalo and Syracuse and Chicago, drop 150, 200 cases.” It’s difficult to imagine the dashing and impeccably tailored Lichine on a bus, yet he seems to have been able to summon the common touch, speaking to ladies’ clubs, going on radio shows, conducting wine tastings. Dining at Galatoire’s in New Orleans, he ordered six wines at once, declared three of them undrinkable, and promptly revamped the wine list with the stunned acquiescence of the proprietor. He brought American-style salesmanship to Bordeaux, where the great châteaus had always been closed to the public, by opening a tasting room at the Prieuré and posting billboards on the main road. He gave Georges Duboeuf, the king of Beaujolais, his first job, and at one point owned 25 percent of his company. He also had a flourishing career as a ladies’ man, from which he took a brief hiatus when the actress Arlene Dahl became his third wife. (His second wife, Sacha’s mother, was Frankfurt-born Giselle Strauss.)
As successful as he was, Lichine was always undercapitalized, according to Sacha, and he had lavish tastes. In the sixties he sold his company to get access to working capital, staying on as president until business disagreements prompted him to walk out after three years. Unfortunately, under the terms of the contract, he was banned from using the name Alexis Lichine Selections. Like Halston, the fashion designer, he’d sold his own name (in fact to the same company, Norton Simon). This clouded his later years, according to Sacha, although he continued to run Prieuré-Lichine and to write about wine, publishing and revising the influential Alexis Lichine’s New Encyclopedia of Wines & Spirits and Alexis Lichine’s Guide to the Wines and Vineyards of France, his son serving as designated driver on the research expeditions for the latter. “The image I retain is of him tasting, of us tasting together. He disliked mediocrity, which made him a difficult father, but he taught me how to taste.
“I don’t think the American wine market would be nearly as evolved as it is without him,” says Sacha, who sold Prieuré in 1999 and is the proprietor of a premium provencal rosé estate called Château d’Esclans. By the time his father died at his beloved Prieuré in 1989, his adoptive country was in the grip of a wine boom that shows no signs of abating to this day. And his inevitable advice, when asked how one learns about wine, remains invaluable: “Buy a corkscrew, and use it.”
The Retro Dudes of Napa
Are we still in the Napa Valley? Certainly not the Napa I’m familiar with. We have turned off Highway 29 into a dense housing development, a maze of nearly identical, recently constructed single-family residences. I’ve spent the day at some of the valley’s iconic wineries, touring cellars gleaming with stainless steel tanks, fragrant with new oak barrels, admiring houses featured in Architectural Digest and Wine Spectator. My driver, Dan Petroski, works by day at Larkmead, one of Napa’s premier producers, but he’s off duty now. Petroski, who studied wine making in Sicily before moving to Napa, has a personal wine-making project, Massican, named after a mountain range in the southern Italian region of Campania, and produces crisp, intensely flavored white wines from Sauvignon Blanc, Ribolla Gialla, and Viognier. And he has a band of brothers engaged in similarly arcane wine-making ventures.
It seems as if we have been driving past the same houses for ten minutes when we finally spot the number we’re looking for and turn in to a driveway that leads us through backyards behind the housing development. Finally we emerge, as if through a time warp, into a sprawling vista of vineyards and orchards stretching all the way to the Mayacamas range to the west, foregrounded by a bright yellow nineteenth-century Queen Anne–style bungalow and an unpainted barn that looks as if it’s about to fall over. It’s a real through-the-looking-glass transition, and not a bad metaphor for the new world I’m about to discover. I’m about to meet the Retro Dudes of Napa.
Napa is known for big Cabernets bred from big fortunes chasing big scores, but there’s another school of wine making here, composed in part of those who work at the big wineries by day and in their spare time pursue their passion for quirky, individualistic, artisanal wines. They produce a few hundred cases, using purchased grapes. And while they have different approaches, they seem to share a common goal of creating wines that express the character of the vineyards of origin and a relative distrust of high technology. The 1903 farmhouse owned by Steve Matthiasson and his wife, Jill Klein Matthiasson, seems like the perfect setting for a gathering of this tribe.
Matthiasson works as a vineyard consultant for top Cabernet producers such as Araujo and Spottswoode. He seems, in alternating sentences, both intensely earnest and offhandedly wry, a combination that makes a little more sense when I learn he was born in Canada. Under his own name he makes a few hundred cases of one of the most interestin
g California white wines I’ve ever tasted, a blend of Sauvignon, Sémillon, Tocai Friulano, and Ribolla Gialla, an ancient grape variety from Friuli, as well as a superb red blend. Matthiasson calls his white “our New World conception of a mythical ideal Old World wine.” Some of the grapes come from the vineyards that surround the house, although more are purchased from carefully chosen sites that he’s found over the years working up and down the Napa Valley. And if the Old World forms part of his inspiration, so does pre-Prohibition-era Napa and the farmers who preceded him here.
Gradually, as the sun declines and cars pull in, I meet the tribe.
Abe Schoener, fifty-two, originally from Kansas, pulls up in a chauffeured town car, a stylish but also sensible strategy. This does not have the hallmarks of a dry evening. Earlier, when I asked Matthiasson how he got into wine making, he cited a “longtime close personal relationship with alcohol” before urging me to try the pâté he made from a wild boar he shot in the Dry Creek Valley last week. Meantime, the aluminum washtub full of ice is also filling with bottles from winemaker guests. It’s going to be that kind of night.
A former professor of Greek philosophy, Schoener is the proprietor of the Scholium Project, a winery that makes deeply eccentric (mostly white) wines beloved by sommeliers and geeks. He looks a little alien here in his sharp black suit and his tinted Utopia L.A. glasses, but it’s clear that he’s part of the gang. He exchanges affectionate greetings with Duncan Arnot Meyers and Nathan Lee Roberts, who grew up together here in Napa. With their similar athletic builds and closely shaved skulls, they are initially hard to tell apart. Together they own Arnot-Roberts, a tiny artisanal winery based in Forestville. In recent years Nathan has worked at top wineries like Acacia, Groth, Caymus, and Pax. Duncan is a second-generation cooper who makes the barrels used in the wine making; he goes to France to choose the wood. The childhood friends don’t own a single vineyard acre; they scour Napa and Sonoma looking for hillside vineyards with “intense character,” buying fruit from the owners, generally producing no more than a few hundred cases of each wine.
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