American Wine

A Coming-of-Age Story

Tom Acitelli

• Publisher: Chicago Review Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781569761670
• eBook ISBN: 9781569761755
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Culinary Arts

The story of how the United States came to dominate fine wine
 
In 1976, the bicentennial year of American Independence, the nation's wine was an international afterthought—stylistically and commercially. Within a generation, however, the United States would stand unquestionably at the world vanguard of wine, reversing centuries of Euro-centrism and dominating the fruit of the vine so thoroughly that Europeans were forced to adopt American words to describe their own creations. In the process, it spawned a wine culture and became intertwined with a kind of aspirational living: American fine wine became a foundational element of gourmet food, reality TV, a myriad of print publications and blogs, expensive vacation packages, gift catalogues, and even the plot of an Oscar-winning movie. Using primary sources, including interviews with the major figures in the rise of American fine wine, the book traces the controversial personalities and seismic events that led to American commercial and stylistic dominance of the world's most celebrated alcoholic beverage—a dominance that shows no signs of waning.

PART I

FRENCH CONNECTIONS

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1948 | Rouen

“Wine at lunch?” Julia Child’s cheerful, chirpy incredulity rended the restaurant’s silence.

It was November 3, 1948, a Wednesday, and she and her husband of nearly two years, Paul Child, had stopped for lunch in Rouen, the town in northern France infamous as the site where the English burned Joan of Arc at the stake in the fifteenth century. The motoring couple—who were traveling from the North Atlantic ferry dock at Le Havre to Paris so Paul could take up a new position in the US Foreign Service—stopped en route at a restaurant recommended by the Guide Michelin called La Couronne, off Rouen’s Place du Vieux Marché. The restaurant was warm, with a brown-and-white dining room that struck Julia Child as charmingly old-fashioned, if a little too cozy. A waiter was talking to other diners. Paul, fluent in French, whispered a translation: “The waiter is telling them about the chicken they ordered—how it was raised, how it will be cooked, what side dishes they can have with it, and which wines would go best.”

Julia was amazed at the prospect. Wine for lunch? Even an American of her upbringing and opportunity could be forgiven for thinking it wholly inappropriate, scandalous even, to tipple the fruit of the vine in the early afternoon (in this particular case, a crisp, white Pouilly Fumé from the Loire region). Not so in France: wine made from higher-end grapes such as Chardonnay, Merlot, and Cabernet Sauvignon had been a staple of the afternoon table for decades, even centuries, by the time Paul and Julia drove their way into the heart of Gaul. The France they drove through still very much showed the shocks of World War II, which had traversed it for nearly five years, from the quick German invasion in May 1940 to the Allied liberation that began with D-day in June 1944. Bombed-out buildings shadowed the roads they passed, and desperate, economically decimated towns welcomed whatever business travelers might bestow. Americans in general were hailed as heroes, the US military and its attendant groups, including the foreign service, very much a presence in a France still dazed by cataclysm in 1948.

The Childs could not have known this—for the story had yet to be told—but World War II had also damaged the French wine industry, an integral part not only of the nation’s economy but of its very identity as well. France for ages had been the world’s leading wine producer and arbiter of taste; no one alive in 1948 could remember a time when France was not the global beacon of enology, the study of wine, and the producer of its most sought-after styles and vintages (vintages refer to the years the grapes were harvested). The Germans knew this. The Nazis looted what they wanted from French cellars and châteaus upon their conquest. Though Adolf Hitler was said to have declared French wine “nothing but vulgar vinegar,” his top deputies were fans. Hermann Göring, the Third Reich’s air chief, preferred wines from France’s famed Bordeaux area, and the especially odious propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, was partial to ones from Bourgogne. They and others amassed vast collections of French wines throughout the war, spiriting them to their own cellars in Germany or inhaling them nightly in France.

Postwar efforts to recover wine that the Nazis purloined took years and sometimes proved fruitless. In one of the Nazis’ last acts of barbarism toward France, as French resistance leader Charles de Gaulle made his triumphant entry into Paris on August 26, 1944, the Germans bombed the city’s nearly four-hundred-year-old wholesale wine center, the Halle aux Vins. The attack destroyed thousands of valuable bottles and “sent shivers down the spines of wine merchants” in other parts of France, including Bordeaux and Bourgogne, the nation’s two most highly regarded wine regions. As it turned out, heavy fighting largely spared the vineyards in both of those prime wine-making locales. Enough expertise survived as well to allow perhaps France’s most spirited industry to toddle forth from the war and quickly assume its place once again at the pinnacle of world wine. As we will see in our story of the rise of American fine wine, that position was due almost as much to French expertise and effort after World War II as to the reactions of consumers, including Julia Child, to French wine.

By 1948 thirty-six-year-old Julia Child (née McWilliams) was what was commonly called a housewife, though by then she had already lived a peripatetic life that would have been the envy of most adventurous men. The oldest child of well-to-do parents in Pasadena, California, she was courted by the heir to the Los Angeles Times, but she eschewed a life of prominent leisure as the spouse of the most influential newspaper publisher in the Golden State, as well as the position of advertising manager for a Beverly Hills furniture store, for more stirring fare. This included stints in Ceylon, present-day Sri Lanka, and China while serving in the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency, during World War II.

It was in Ceylon that Julia McWilliams met Paul Child. The pair circled each other for a while, caught up in clandestine work amid the wartime tumult, with neither sure about the other’s intentions. Julia undoubtedly had a crush on Paul, while Paul, a worldly New Jersey native ten years her senior, saw Julia as a “grown-up little girl” for whom he felt sorry and wanted to guide. The two married shortly after the war’s end, and Julia Child spent the next fifteen years traveling with her husband to Paul’s different posts in the foreign service: Marseille, Bonn, Oslo, and, for five years starting in 1948, Paris. It was during this time that Paul, in a move momentous for the American fine wine movement, introduced Julia to French cuisine. Within four years of that pleasant shock in Rouen, Julia Child would start putting her thoughts on the subject down on paper.

THE MAN WHO DREW A LINE IN FRENCH WINE

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1945–1960 | Bordeaux

Around the time Julia Child was enjoying her revelation in Rouen, Émile Peynaud was ramping up a career as a winemaker and consultant that would change wine-making globally and forever. Born in 1912 in a town several miles south of the port city of Bordeaux in the region of the same name, Peynaud got his first job in the wine business at age fifteen, as a cellar worker. Captured by the Germans early during World War II, he spent much of the war in a prison camp, emerging to continue his training with persistent gusto. He was the proverbial young man in a hurry, brimming with fixes for the flaws he saw in the way his countrymen made wine.

Starting in the late 1940s, Peynaud served as a consultant to several wineries, a business that would flourish in the coming decades. It was his research, however, including while as a faculty member at the University of Bordeaux, that made Peynaud a legend. “There was really one world for winemakers before Émile Peynaud, and another world after,” the managing director of the French First Growth Château Margaux told the New York Times after Peynaud’s death in 2004. In the same article, the newspaper’s chief wine critic, Eric Asimov, put it this way: “More than any other individual, Dr. Peynaud helped to bring winemakers into the modern world.”

Peynaud’s reputation grew so formidable that it was said that if his white Citroën simply slowed in front of a particular winery, that winery’s standing would rise, as people in the industry understood it had hired Peynaud as a consultant. His ideas and techniques were exported to the United States in the century’s latter decades, sometimes by his university students but often enough simply through imitation—winemakers the world over, and their customers, wanted the lusher, heavier wines he and his clientele ended up producing. By the time he retired in 1990, the genial winemaker with a wide face dominated by a prominent Gallic nose and bushy eyebrows had consulted for hundreds of wineries, including in the United States.

Peynaud’s efforts to improve wine-making ran in tandem with his approach to enjoying wine. By all accounts unpretentious in a business noted for asseverations on the subject of wine-making, Peynaud, ever the Frenchman, saw wine as a natural accoutrement to food, to living itself; he rejected the notion that a fine wine could only be appreciated after cellaring for years. He wholeheartedly ascribed to the notion that wines could be enjoyed sooner after bottling, provided they were made and bottled correctly. This belief in the viability of younger fine wines made them all the more appealing to consumers not intent on shelling out money only to wait years to enjoy the product.

What were his earth-rattling innovations? In particular, Peynaud convinced French wineries, those in Bordeaux especially, to pick their higher-end grapes—in Bordeaux, principally the red ones: Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, and Merlot—later in the year and to keep their cellars cleaner, not to mention replace their superannuated, often irreversibly dirty oak aging barrels more regularly. He also convinced winemakers to use the finest-quality grapes they could find or grow, a triumphant effort he would deem “the crowning achievement” of his long career. Crucially, Peynaud was able to marry the sound science behind his beliefs about wine-making with a clear, concise way of explaining them.

The practices he championed, the cellar hygiene in particular, seem obvious in hindsight, but they were startling in the 1940s and 1950s. Part of this was the novelty of Peynaud’s advice; the other was the legacy of history. The French wine industry that Peynaud preached to had very little reason to fret its norms, no matter the often uneven, even vinegary results. “The greatest wines on earth come from France,” declared Alexis Lichine, a famed vintner and critic from Bordeaux, in his 1951 guide, Wines of France. No one argued. Even a generation later, Hugh Johnson, then the greatest chronicler of wine in the British Isles, and perhaps the world, expended 30 percent of his groundbreaking 247-page The World Atlas of Wine on French wines. American fine wine, by contrast, took up 3 percent of the tome, a little more than Australian wine and less than Spanish.

And critics mattered hugely in this particular culinary realm. Wineries, then as now, often swaddled their fare in lush vocabulary and perspicacious labeling. To get their wine into the hands of distributors and consumers, especially American ones who might be averse to buying it in the first place, they needed interlocutors: critics like Johnson—who became editor of Wine & Food magazine, an organ of the International Wine & Food Society, shortly after plunging into fine wine as a Cambridge University student—and fellow Englishman Harry Waugh, the longtime export director of major liquor concern Harvey’s of Bristol, who emerged as “the man with the million-dollar palate” through books and columns starting in the 1960s. Such critics, before Peynaud and especially after, came to prefer French wine—to evangelize it, even. Waugh, for one, cofounded the Bordeaux Club in the late 1940s, its increasingly posh dinners a well-covered showcase for the wines of that French region. Around the time his World Atlas of Wine was published, Johnson crowned France “the undisputed mistress of the vine”—and as with Alexis Lichine twenty years earlier, no one argued.

Yes, French fine wine even before Peynaud could be quite good, due to fortuitous geography and an agrarian relationship with the grape stretching back to ancient times. But the French also knew how to market it, starting with a legendary classification carved out of whole cloth nearly a century before Peynaud started to build a reputation. As part of the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris, a grand industrial and agricultural showcase, Emperor Napoleon III decreed that wine merchants rank the best operations in Bordeaux. This they did, first creating a classification for red wines that started with five châteaus—Haut-Brion, Lafite, Latour, Margaux, and Mouton—called First Growths (or Premier Cru in French). After these came Second, Third, Fourth, and Fifth Growths—each, in the merchants’ estimation, less desirable than those preceding it. A similar classification broke down white wines from Bordeaux; for that, the merchants named eleven First Growths and one so-called Superior First Growth, Château d’Yquem.

The 1855 classifications helped spin an enduring mystique about French wine. The classifications also set a precedent of government involvement and protection in the labeling of wine, which proved especially fortuitous shortly after Napoleon III’s exposition. In the late nineteenth century, a tiny vineyard-devouring bug called phylloxera struck France, decimating the stocks of some of the nation’s choicest wineries. Eventually, the blight was eradicated by grafting French vines with phylloxera-resistant American ones, but not before some unscrupulous merchants began blending First and Second Growths with inferior wines—without, of course, telling consumers. The French government stepped in, laying down a revolutionary labeling system called Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (or AOC) in 1935.

To this day, French wines bear AOC designations to strictly certify that they are what they say they are and come from where they say they come from. The designations, which soon spread to other French foodstuffs, such as meat and cheese, as well as to other countries, added a fresh varnish of exclusivity to French wines, as did the widespread French practice of identifying the grape type of most wines, which was not widely adopted in the United States until the 1960s. The French cared, and showed they cared, where their wine came from; this furthered the idea of terroir, a word derived from the French word terre, for “land,” and meaning that the geography of a foodstuff—including the climate it was cultivated in and the culture that nurtured it—defined it in major ways.

Never mind that most French could care less. As much as Julia Child found the idea of wine at lunch novel in the 1940s (as most of her fellow Americans would), the average French wine consumer was perfectly happy with his or her glass of plonk. Seemingly sophisticated terms such as terroir, Premier Cru, and Haut-Brion meant little to French drinkers from Dunkirk to Marseille, Brest to Strasbourg. Wine, to the masses, was a simple accompaniment to food, no more exotic than any seasoning or a glass of water. While this relationship went a long way toward explaining the numbers behind French wine—by the mid-1900s, France supported perhaps a thousand wineries for around forty-five million citizens—it also camouflaged its waning reach domestically. Although the trend would not be all that obvious until the 1970s, the French were drinking less and less wine, less and less regularly (though those French who were drinking were drinking quite a bit). Besides, France’s centuries-old oenophile aura tended to mask what was, until Peynaud came along, an uneven product of obvious flaws and shortcomings. French wines might taste like the nectar of the gods, or they might taste like spoiled fruit juice. Consistent quality was no more a virtue than uniform cleanliness.

Peynaud’s pioneering work on grape harvesting and equipment maintenance—as well as in malolactic fermentation, which converted a tart-tasting grape by-product called malic acid into milder-tasting lactic acid—created rounder, clearer, more drinkable wines, and uniformly so. By the 1950s, Bordeaux winemakers were turning out consistently fantastic wines. Just in time, too: the industry was recovering not only from the ravages of World War II but from the aftershocks of the phylloxera blight of the late nineteenth century and the unscrupulous practices that arose to compensate for that, including blending inferior wine with First and Second Growths. More important than the consistency of French wine by the 1950s was its taste by the same period. The post-Peynaud vintages in Bordeaux in particular tended to taste heavier and richer than their tarter and thinner forebears, marked even in their infancies by a delicate though unmistakable fruitiness. Yes, a lusher, fuller, fruitier taste was a defining hallmark of all...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• CONTENTS
• Prologue: The World’s Biggest Wine Market - 2010 | Brooklyn
• PART I
• PART II
• PART III
• PART IV
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ENDNOTES
• SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX