One of the more intriguing elements of wine is that it can appeal to a wide range of people. In wide range, I mean it has appeal on so many different levels; a novice can just enjoy their favorite wines from the supermarket and delve into the history when inclined; a collector can peel each wine back and learn of its origin and take it a step deeper, the wine enthusiast that wants to put their toe in the water of wine knowledge can enroll in one the wine certification organizations and earn a certification and then there's a couple of levels of wine knowledge until you basically stop at Charles Ludington. With two bachelor degrees, one masters and a Phd. One might say he has reached a level few, if any, other academians have reached.
And because of his time in front of students in a class room, Charles can articulate this knowledge in an understandable and intriguing way.
If you think the world of wine is all swirling glasses and sniffing bouquets, wait until you’ve heard Charles Ludington—Chad, to his friends—uncork a few bottles of historical truth. Armed with not just one, but four degrees in history (and a résumé that includes playing basketball in Paris and working on the New York wine retail frontlines), Chad isn’t your typical wine academic; he’s something of a one-man bridge between eras, cultures, and even social classes. Dive into this episode, and you’ll learn how wine is far more than a drink—it is a lens onto everything from class warfare to international politics, from covert Irish merchants shaping Bordeaux’s legacy to NBA stars dueling over Grand Crus in LA bistros. Chad traces the surprising paths that led Bordeaux’s cellars to be filled by Irish hands and explores why today’s elite collectors find meaning in a dusty bottle—sometimes as a symbol of status, sometimes a sensory revelation, but always as a marker of time and place. You’ll unpeel the layered tales of how wine moved from scandalous blends—once the height of fashion—to the hyper-strict appellations, and discover the very modern decline in wine’s appeal among young people, who instead find excitement in natural wines or, oddly enough, craft beer and cocktails. Along the way, you’ll reconsider the meaning of terroir, discovering just how blurred the boundaries of authenticity, tradition, and marketing really are. By the end, not only will you be able to spot the politics in your glass and the shifting gender codes of rosé, you’ll also taste the romantic—and sometimes subversive—human stories that echo through every sip. This episode braids together centuries of intrigue, innovation, and, yes, a fair bit of competitive one-upmanship—pulling back the curtain on how wine tells the story of us all.
#WineHistory #WineCulture #Bordeaux #NBAWine #WinePolitics #Terroir #WineEducation #WinePodcast
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
I think we are in a more serious wine moment. But as you know, wine
consumption among the new generation of young people in
America as well as in France is declining. 21 to 35
crowd is not drinking as much wine as my crowd did and your crowd did.
Why that is, it's not quite clear. Wine seems a little staid
to them. Of course, natural wines, which kind of fall into that category of young
(00:22):
creatives, are also doing fairly well in that crowd. But that's
such a small percentage of overall wine production. Sit back and
grab a glass. It's Wine Talks with Paul
K. Welcome to Wine Talks with Paul
Kay. And we are in studio today in beautiful Southern California, about to have a
conversation with Charles Luddings. It out in New York. Introductions in just a moment.
(00:44):
Hey, have a listen to a show that's coming out with Florence
Cathiard, and she owns the Chateau Smith aux Lafitte in the
Pas Sac Leon district of Grave, as well
as one of Lou, one of the historical properties in the Napa
Valley under the Cathiard vineyard designation, once owned
by Louis Martini. It's an incredible conversation. What an elegant,
(01:06):
driven, athletic woman at that. But now, while we're here
to have a conversation with Charles Ludington. You know, Charles, I keep putting down
Chad. What do you go by? Charles? Please call me Chad. Since we're,
we're not, we're not good friends here, Paul. So we're all good friends now. Chad
has a BA in history, a master's in history, a master's of philosophy
in history, and a PhD in history. And you
(01:28):
know that. All from Ivy League
schools. But your passion, you know, you, it's. I was
reading your, your bio a little bit. It was talking about how you
switched into the history of wine, which is really a fascinating subject because there aren't
too many of you around that actually have this deep understanding of the
value of the history of wine. How did that happen?
(01:50):
Oh, that's a great question, Paul. I was
after, after college, I played basketball for a year in
France. And for better or for worse, I was in Paris and I fell in
love with Paris and more so than, than, than
basketball. So it was. And part of that
was the wine, the food,
(02:14):
and just the. Yeah. The whole
Parisian life. And so
I, I was hooked at that point. And
then when I was treated to a team in Spain, I said, you know, I
really want to stay here in France. And I found a way of doing that.
And so I was. Went on to write a biography
(02:35):
of this Franco Irish family who ended up in
America, but that allowed me to stay doing research in Paris. And
then eventually I went off to grad school and I was looking for
a way to combine my interest in Irish history
and French history. And I was working at a wine store in New
York to kind of pay for my habit, as it were.
(02:57):
Make the wine cheaper for a grad student by working on Saturdays at
Aster. Sorry, not Astor. I was just thinking. Just
thinking about after the. About Union Square wines and spirits, which
is no longer where it used to be in any event. And then I
was encouraged by one of my professors, a guy named Simon Shama, who was
a cultural historian, to try to combine my interest in
(03:21):
Irish and British history and wine. And next thing you
know, I was off to the races with a. With a PhD on
the politics of wine in Britain in the period 1649
to 1860, when wine was a very politicized
commodity because it was a highly taxed
commodity and a source of revenue for the government, very important source.
(03:44):
And it had all sorts of cultural and social and
political meanings, what wine you consumed. And so I just found wine with this
amazing lens onto British history.
And you've expanded that into. Back into Irish history and French
history. And I've just published a book on the Irish and Bordeaux,
and I'm working on another version of that. And
(04:07):
now I'm also. I'm going to back you all the way up to playing basketball
in Paris. Sure, sure. Because that's fascinating stuff. And we're going to peel
back some of that. We're not going to have enough time to do all the
things that I want to talk about. We'll have to do this again. But we're
going to Paris in a week. I'll go there as often as I can,
stay as long as I can. If I can just get a layover for one
(04:27):
night, I'll go to Paris and I'll go into town and I'll just hang out.
I am with you on this. I'm in love with the city, and I can't
wait to get there, and I can't wait to come back when I'm gone. And
in fact, yesterday morning I had this aberration. I said, you know, we're supposed to
stop in Paris on the way home from Sicily. So I think. Think we're just
going to extend that. And I called American Express and got the flight moved a
(04:47):
few days so that we could spend a few nights on the way out, you
know, just. Just hanging. And so I get that, you know, it's Interesting about the.
You played basketball. I know you played in college and you,
you went to France. Isn't it interesting now? Because
there's a huge interest in wine in the
NBA. Huge. To the extent that they have wineries,
(05:09):
not just brands, you know, there's. As you and I know, the celebrity endorsed brand
is different than sort of the person that's involved with it. Like Dwyane
Wade has a winery and I, I just find it
culturally interesting that this has become such an important part. In fact,
there's a restaurant here in LA that the Lakers call after a
game. We're on our way over. Don't close the kitchen. Pull out a couple
(05:31):
of Burgundies and some Grand Cruise and let's. We're coming to
town. Yeah, it's amazing. Wine has,
has really entered the NBA in, in, in a major way, as you just
said. You know, I, I won. Of French
players in the NBA has had on that. That's certainly
possible. Tony Parker, who had an American dad who had
(05:55):
gone over to play basketball in France just as I did, he married
a French woman. Obviously, Tony Parker becomes this
fantastic player, but he was very interested in, you know, having
grown up in France, he was very interested in wine. And in fact he
has a chateau down in a domain down in, in Provence now which
mostly makes rose, which of course was having a moment, but I think he's, he's
(06:17):
a pretty serious wine guy, him myself. And you
know, there have been other Boris Diaw and other
French players back, you know, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, and of
course there are far more now. And as we saw in last
summer's Olympics back in Paris with, you know,
Wimby and quite a few others, the. France is
(06:39):
perhaps the second best basketball country in the world at this, you
know, currently. And all those players bring their
Frenchness to the league. But you know, I don't know how much that had an
impact on people like JJ Redick or LeBron James or
Dwyane Wade and others who have professed this incredible interest
in wine and have, you know, have serious collections, some
(07:01):
of them. And I think it's become a thing among them to
both to sort of to share wine with each other, but also to kind
of there's one upmanship, there's competitive, you know, oh, I opened a, you
know, Lafitte 82
last night. What did you guys have? Yeah, it goes around and around
and so it's, you know, it's. Yeah, it's an amazing, it's an amazing
(07:24):
aspect of contemporary wine culture. And basketball
culture. That's funny story, because I think I told you briefly, but we were at
Cheval Blanc, we're having lunch in the vineyard with Monsieur Clay,
and this big black dude comes down, and he's introduced himself
as Mike Pietras. And we started talking.
And then before I knew it, after I got home, I was on a Zoom
(07:45):
call with him and Boris, talking about the lifestyle of Bordeaux and
wine. But the way that happened was very bizarre.
One of my guests on this trip was up on the roof of Cheval Blanc,
and Mike was up there. They started talking, and my
guest had been the cameraman at a Clippers game, and Mike had
taken him out as he was shooting a basket and had, you
(08:08):
know, lay up and fell on him. And he goes, you know, he
goes, Mr. Patriots, do you remember me? You knocked me. You knocked me
over. And he goes, I do remember that. And then
he says, you got to come down and say hi to our group. And so
he came down and I. And that's what started this sort of interest. And then
I had a conversation with Dwayne Wade's number two guy, George Walker, up. Up in
Napa. You think that's. And this is going to
(08:31):
lead into this conversation about the lifestyle, wine, the history of wine, you know,
developing this lifestyle. That, that. That I don't think
is an opulent. It's not these. They're not chasing
this opulent lifestyle that shows you've
arrived in life. It's just. It's just the idea of
wine and its complexities and its nuances and
(08:53):
what it does at the dinner table. Is that. Would that be
accurate? Yeah, you know,
that's a fantastic question, because I suppose, you know,
the. The academic in me and say you probably can't separate either
one from the other, but. But, you know, to me, there are
these inherent joys, and obviously there are to you, too, and to many of your
(09:15):
listeners, just, you know, in wine. And once you discover
those, you know, especially when you come
from a background where maybe that just wasn't at all a part of what you
grew up with, and you discover that and you think, oh, my Lord, you know,
this. This wine is. Could be so complex
and. And when you, you know, combine it with food
(09:37):
and if you love both those things, athletes certainly love eating
and, you know, some physical pleasures, after all the
stress they're putting their body under, it makes perfect sense that people are just saying,
look, this is great. I didn't know about this necessarily, growing
up. Just like most basketball players, most Americans don't grow
up in sort of fine wine families. Certainly
(09:59):
my parents were just giving an example,
were beer and
Matuse and.
Lancers. You know, my dad had a martini, his beer
Matuse and, you know, occasional martini, and then
spent a year in Lyon. He was a
(10:22):
professor also and discovered
Beaujolais because he played on a. He played on the local basketball team.
And a lot of the games were around the city of Lyon,
and some of them were up in the Beaujolais region. And, you know,
after the games, you know, sometimes on outdoor mud courts. I'm not making this
up, you know, where the ball wouldn't actually bounce, would
(10:44):
you know, that there would be this big feast with
the village that maybe you just defeated in hoops,
and you'd sit down to the wine that came from the
fields that surround the court. That's amazing.
So there's, you know, so there's that discovery of wine. That's an amazing thing. Now,
to the other point, you know, I think it's very hard to separate
(11:08):
the. The historical aspect of wine too. Especially really
fine wines have often meant
to the consumers themselves. You know, I
have, I've arrived. You know, I can afford this. And it's. So
it's both a statement to oneself and of course, it's a way. It's, it's, it's.
It's a display to. To others who know the language
(11:29):
of wine that, you know, you've arrived. And you see this with, you know, going
back to some of the things I've written on that about in the
17th and 18th century in England, the
merchants and the lawyers who have as much money as the
aristocrats, in some cases more, they use wine
and their appreciation of wine as
(11:51):
a symbol to tell the aristocrats, we've arrived, we're
here, we deserve to be here. And you see the same thing
20 years ago, starting in the Chinese market,
where wine, and particularly Bordeaux, more recently, Burgundy
becomes a way of saying, you know, we. We. We've made money. You know, we're
now a Shanghai millionaire, or we,
(12:13):
and we know wine. And so wine becomes this way of telling oneself
and also others that one is arrived. And so I, you know, I'm
sure that's an. There's an aspect of that too,
no doubt, among some players that, you know,
we have, yeah, we've made it. We, We're. We've moved up a social class
or we have just sort of, you know, we're. We're success in this world. It's
(12:36):
because you mentioned earlier about the political,
not fallout but the politics of wine in
1649-1860 in Britain. And I thought
to myself, it's not a whole lot different today. I mean,
certainly the status. I had a conversation yesterday with the
representative in China of lvmh, and she just corroborated what you just said, which
(12:57):
is Bordeaux was the beginning of the Chinese awareness of wine.
And now Burgundy's crept in there and they're starting. And I, as you and I
know, all, you know, files, as Chuck Wagner said, not Chuck Wagner, but
Paul Meyer said, you know, end up in Burgundy. But
that's interesting that, that there's a. There
was a political ramification to what you drank
(13:20):
and how you were perceived by what you drank. And
isn't that true today? I mean, really, you know, that's a.
That's a good question. I don't think it's as politicized,
certainly, in if we're speaking about the United States. I think
it's more gendered, probably. Now, of course,
gender these days is also a hot political topic
(13:43):
when you look at the way people are. Men and women
have voted in the last election and what seems to be sort of a
male backlash. So certainly gendering of wine is also
a form of the politics of wine in terms of
what country you chose to drink from.
There was a little bit of that moment in 2003 when the French
(14:06):
didn't join us in our. I guess I'm going to go ahead. And I reminded
people of this very event because of the today's tariff situation. I go, wait
a minute. We politicized it. Yeah, yeah. You know, there's sort of
a. What I guess I'll call in retrospect, the folly of the
invasion. And the French didn't come along, go along. And so we had a, you
know, our moment of pouring French wine down drains and changing French fries to
(14:28):
freedom fries and all that. But I don't think I forgot
now. There's sort of an. I don't think there's. At the moment, there's an anti
French or anti Italian or anti Spanish wine bias
or still a pro American wine bias. But
that. That could change. You know, I do think the gendering of wine
is pretty clear in the way that, you
(14:51):
know, white wine for a very long time has been
gendered female, and red wine, more male,
is obviously having a moment. And back when I was working in the wine store
in New York in the mid-90s, I couldn't sell rose
de Provence to save my life. People would come
in and we maybe offered one or two bottles. And I had had some
(15:14):
wonderful experiences in the south of France where I just said, you know,
on a hot day with, you know,
grilled foods, you know, is a perfect one. A little
more body than whites. It's not to be taken too seriously. And it's only, you
know, six bucks a bottle. You know, it's. And
New Yorkers at the time would not touch the stuff. It was either, you know,
(15:35):
we didn't know is it neither fish nor foul, or they associate it with white
Zinfandel. Look, I'm not a white Zinfandel drinker. And I was like, it's not white
Zinfandel. And it's. You really gotta
try it in the summertime in particular. And, you know, now obviously,
you know, the section is often one of the largest
in a hip wine store, and people are absurdly
(15:58):
charging, you know, it's 35, 40 bucks
for. For summer. Yeah. Domain Odd, though.
I think I just bought some Etoile from Domain Auto.
They got retails at 65. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, I
mean, Domain art has always been up there for a
while. But. But yeah, I think it's the. It's the Brangelina effect,
(16:20):
too. And so. But. And rose is
largely. I guess it's. It's. What do they call
it? Hampton's Tea here in New York? I've
never heard that. That's great. And I think it's
gendered. Mostly pink, you know, is gendered. Mostly
(16:40):
female. But. But, you know, I think it's also one of those. It's. It's
not a white wine, it's not a red. So I think the men feel comfortable
crossing over. It's, you know, it's. So, yeah, wine is gendered. It's
therefore political. I don't. You know, we may get to a
moment when wine becomes highly political in terms of the, you know, whether it's American
wine or wine from the eu, if in fact the tariffs get slapped
(17:02):
on, because then it becomes a class thing too, you know, who can afford it?
And that adds a component to the politics of it that.
That, you know, only the elites. I mean, I can go in most of my
stores here in New York and Upper west side,
you know, I would say I'm probably going to find cheaper French and Italian
wines than I am American wines.
(17:23):
But, you know, you add a 200 tariff on
those wines, next thing you know, all European wines are going to be
more expensive and American wines will become the. The default wine for the.
For the middle classes. I Guess we'll call it, you know, the. As you
probably realize, there's a. There's a big difference between the wine shelves
here in Southern California than in New York. And New York is a wine shop
(17:45):
at every corner and some of them very specific
regions and styles. In California, the import
selection is considerably less in the fact.
My son in law, who's in Potsdam, who is a
devotee, you know, comes down to New York City
to, To stock his cellar because there's such a
(18:07):
variety there and stuff. He took me to a store not
too long ago. I think it was in the Hudson. The city of Hudson.
Hudson's a city too, right? Not just the river. Well, there's Hudson on
Hastings. Hastings on Hudson, sorry. And then
there's a little tiny village. With a little tiny wine shop.
And you know, I thought, look, I've been doing this for 35
(18:28):
years. I think I saw two brands that I recognized, you
know, on the shelf and There was probably 200 SKUs in this shop, maybe more.
And so I thought, wow, this is an interesting difference. But you know, let
me jump on a subject that I think is interesting that I want you to
reflect on. Our mutual friend Dr. Friedman,
who's, you know, lecturing on the servitude,
(18:50):
medieval servitude, but his passion is the evolution of cuisine
in America. And you know, it's a very interesting.
I love the subject as well. I think it's one of your passions as it's
evolved. Do you think that, that there's been that
renaissance of wine in America
that the food went through in the 80s and continues to sort of change, or
(19:12):
we're not there yet, or it happened a long time ago, like in the 70s,
during the judgment of Par. And that's. And then we're just settled in already.
Yeah, that's a great question. You know,
historians were looking for trends and, and
that certainly, you know, follows that idea
that when, when did this trend start? You know, I, I think there's a lot
(19:34):
of evidence that in, in the 70s,
partly because certain producers like Heights
were making really quality wines in California.
Mondavi stepping up their act. And
you know, you get many other examples. Ridge comes on the scene
sometimes not long after that, if I'm not mistaken. And so
(19:57):
you have better American wines. And then of course you have, you
know, 1976, you have the Judgment of Paris where, you know, Chateau
Montelena and you know,
Stagsley, you know, wins the prize. And
actually we've won in both in Chardonnay and in
Bordeaux. Belen too. So that was obviously a big
(20:19):
moment. But then you don't really. The 80s, the sort
of counter evidence there is that. Yeah. But guess What? In the
1980s, America's number one selling one was Wards Infidel.
So how much of an impact did it really have? Good
point. I think sometime in the
1990s. So there's maybe a general
(20:40):
trend, but it wasn't really clear,
maybe not a deep Trend until the 1990s when you start to
get what I'll call broadly the foodie movement.
That is people's greater interest in seasonal
food and sort of rejection of packaged food and instant
foods that had been so fashionable after World War II
(21:03):
up through the 1970s and early through the 80s is sort of the transition
year beginning in 90s. Certainly by that point among the,
I guess I'll call it cultural elites, there's this movement away
from all that previous era and the
packaged foods and processed foods. And I think with that came
a greater appreciation of wine as part of that broad foodie
(21:25):
movement. Because of course wine in most cultures, as you
know, ours may be the exception in some ways,
but wine and food grew
symbiotically. And so you're into wine,
you're into food, you're into food, you're into wine. The food go to together. You
don't just drink wine without the food, you know, you don't eat food without the
(21:46):
wine. And so I think that kind of took off in American society
as well. And I guess the question again is how far did that penetrate
down. I've got some. I edited a book few years ago called
Food Fights How History Matters to
Contemporary Food Debates. And some. One of the
authors, Margot Finn and I and I can largely concurred,
(22:09):
made the case that this was largely that the foodie movement was
largely class based
and that farmers markets may have been an attempt
to and may still be an attempt to help local economies
and sort of disrupt the dominance of big food and
all that. But fundamentally it's a way for people who
(22:31):
have cultural capital, not necessarily a lot of financial capital, but
cultural capital to play the game of
elitism. And you know, wine's caught up in that movement
too. So you'll find that too cynical a take
doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong, but, but that implicates
certainly people like me, you know, academic, growing up in a place like Chapel Hill,
(22:53):
North Carolina, where, you know, the farmer's market is a big part of the local
identity and it's a part of liberal politics. And so
that said, I think we are in a more serious wine
moment. But as you know, wine consumption among the new generation of young
people in America as well as in France is declining.
So, you know, with the 21 to 35 crowd is
(23:15):
not drinking as much wine as my crowd
did and your crowd did, which was, you know, we were increasing the amount.
So how, you know, why that is, it's not quite
clear. Wine seems a little staid to them. I think in some ways, you
know, cocktails and craft beers are
doing very well. Of course, natural wines, which kind of fall into that category of
(23:38):
young creatives, are also doing fairly well in that crowd. But
that's such a small percentage of overall wine production.
So, you know, that's a long answer to your short question, but I think. I
don't, I, I don't. I, I would love to peel that stuff back
with you, but I wanted to, I wanted to dig back into your.
The history of wine more than that. But there's certainly all that stuff. I
(23:59):
just. Actually one of the most responses I've ever gotten on a comment, hey, you
place a comment on LinkedIn or something, you know, usually it just stays
there. And some people continue to comment. But the most
replies I've ever gotten to one of my comments was one where I said, you
know, it's a lot of lip service on the Internet right now, and there's a
lot of reasons why they're not drinking. I think wine is generational. All generations
(24:21):
come to it eventually, and there's lots of peaks and valleys along
the way. And certainly you can't drink White Claw, you know, the rest of your
life. So I think that's going to change. And not only that, that
the marketplace, when the idea of, of a private
labeling became as simple and pro. Profitable
as it became, you know, 15, 20 years ago, you
(24:44):
know, the marketplace was inundated with 50 cent a liter crap from
Europe and packaged a thousand different ways. And that just
put, pun intended, sour taste in people's mouth as well. I think
that's my personal opinion. But I want to go back to. Because your, Your specialty
is a history of wine, the politics of wine. And I, and I was
reading your, Your, Your bio and you're talking about
(25:06):
this, the Irish, the Irish movement in Bordeaux.
And I started thinking, you know, it's so interesting to me, particularly
Bordeaux. Burgundy is a little more protected.
But didn't. Wasn't with Bordeaux. The rash shields
are, what, from the Netherlands or from Germany? Yeah.
And. And Napa was founded by immigrants.
(25:27):
I mean, and so here's this indigenous product that
is to reflect local everything, you know,
terroir and the history.
But so much of the popular regions of the world
were founded by immigration, by people that came to this country, that brought the idea
of wine, that brought the idea of the lifestyle of wine to those areas.
(25:49):
And I find that fascinating. And here you are talking about the Irish
in Bordeaux, which you don't, you don't hear, but that's
not the most common thing you hear about. No, it's certainly not the first thing
that comes to mind when you think of Bordeaux wine. Ireland has
spent a lot of time, certainly in the second half of the
20th century promoting the notion that it's all Guinness and
(26:11):
whiskey. Once a big wine
consuming society, and it was
also Irish merchants were very important in the
creation of modern Bordeaux. Remarkably so, in fact, they played an
integral role in, throughout the 18th
century that, you know, it speaks to your point
(26:32):
that so often it's because wine is
desired by people outside of the place it's produced.
Savvy merchants and people, you know, who want to drink themselves but also see an
opportunity, a market opportunity, go there, produce it and ship it off.
So, yeah, the Irish did that in the 18th century, starting in the
1690s. But they settle
(26:55):
in Bordeaux, which was accommodating both to
Irish Catholics because of course, France at that point had decided it was a
uniquely Catholic kingdom. And Irish Catholics were in
the 1690s being placed in second class status in their own
society. So they go from an anti
Catholic society to a very pro Catholic one. Meanwhile, Irish
(27:17):
Protestants who are on top
in Ireland go to France where you'd think they would be
personae non grata because they are Protestant and Protestants had just been kicked out
of France. But French tax collectors
were too clever to kick out all their
Huguenots on the grounds that we would reduce, you know, we'll
(27:39):
reduce our tax base. So they. So that Protestant
foreign merchants were actually found a small
community of Protestants. They weren't, you know, as long as they paid their
taxes, they were tolerated. But in the case of the Irish, what's fascinating is
Protestant and Catholic, they all got along famously and went to the same, you
know, cafe and
(28:01):
hotel in Bordeaux. They had balls together, they went into
business together, they hired each other's children and servants.
Very rarely did they intermarry, but they were very much a
community who worked together, slaughtered together and were friends.
And in hard situations, they loaned, you know, they were loaning money. So it was
really, they were Irish. The French didn't really draw a distinction between whether
(28:23):
they were Catholic or Protestant. But there's
about 65, 35. You know, money talks is what you're trying to
say. But it was actually sort
of a, sort of a marvel when you think about what's happening back in
Ireland or in some ways in France itself, with this religious intolerance. But the
key thing is really their role in wine production, which is that they were buying
(28:45):
up all of the, what we
now call first growth wines. I mean, when I say all, I mean literally
all. And shipping them off
to the two most lucrative markets that wanted those wines, and
that was England and Ireland itself now.
And no one else was buying Lafitte, Latour, Margaux, bouillon, et
(29:08):
cetera. It was just for that market. It's also important to say that they weren't
just buying and shipping. They were buying in what we would call sort of Emprimeur
or even earlier, often in December, following the harvest. So the wines
were super yellow. And then they would, they were the ones who would
raise the wines sometimes up to five, seven years, kind of like
a Rioja. They would have them in barrel that long and then ship them. But
(29:30):
they would also blend them for the market, for the taste of the
elite British and Irish markets who wanted them to
taste somewhat differently than they would have without
the addition of Syrah from the R
Valley or Alicante, sorry,
Grenache from up by, you know, just south of
(29:53):
Barcelona and then
morved from down by. From
down by Alicante. So that reminds
me of a word I haven't heard in a long time. Negociant. Right. That's
exactly what they were. They were. I have not heard that in
a long time. So what, so what Was this? The 18th century?
(30:16):
You're talking about 19. This is the 18th century. And well, as you know, it
wasn't until. Well, actually, let me back up here.
Starting around in the, in the 1850s with the whole,
as you know, there was a whole series of, of diseases that came
from North America. In fact, with
Odium, then Floxera and then downy
(30:38):
mildew that hit France, 1850s, 60s,
70s, one after the other. Phylloxera was the worst. But the two different types of
mildew, powdery mildew and downy mildew, are also
disastrous in some ways. Ultimately
these were overcome. The phylloxer, certainly with American rootstock,
(30:58):
but. And then you learn copper sulfate. It seems like that on the vines help
to keep away the mildew and the
rot. But all that to say what then
happens is in the period 1850 to roughly
1930s, you get this change in the
perspective of the consumer. Whereas
(31:20):
previously they wanted the elite consumers in London
and Dublin and in Hamburg and in New York, they
wanted. And in Paris, they wanted wines that
were blended, that is, wines that had about
15%, depending on the year. You know, GSM,
Grenache, Syrah, Morvedre. And
(31:42):
then what then happens with all of the
fraud? They didn't think of that as fraud, actually. But then what
happens with all these diseases is you get wines coming
in from elsewhere, from, in particular, from Algeria, France's
colony, that is then being sent off
as Bordeaux or later Burgundy.
(32:05):
And you get all this. You get things that are labeled. So
when in the period in the 18th century, when you had
your Chateau Lafitte, it may have been 80% Chateau
Lafitte, 20%, something else. And people were fine with that. They didn't think of that
as fraud. You weren't putting anything besides wine in there, and you were making a
better product. But starting in the 1850s, up until about
(32:28):
1930, you get this notion that it's a process,
that you're now selling me something that really isn't even
close to what you say it is.
And so, along with
industrialization, awareness of microbes, because Pasteur
comes along, he identifies microbes and germs, and everybody starts
(32:50):
to panic. And then you have the fact that it's Algerian wine,
which, frankly, there are prejudices, obviously, racial prejudice, against things that came
from Africa. And
now this idea of blending wines from
two different places doesn't work anymore. So by the 1930s,
what was done in the 18th century and demanded by
(33:12):
elite customers in the 18th century, by the 1930s, that's a
criminal act. And so you get the AOC laws in the
1930s that say if you blend this one with that one,
you are going to jail, and that those are still the laws in place.
So it's a fascinating history of. It's a mental shift in the mind of the
consumer as well as a shift in production in which
(33:35):
you don't consider doing that now unless you're an unscrupulous
winemaker, whereas the very best winemakers were doing that in the 18th
century because that's what their customers wanted. Let me stop you. That's fascinating
because. Not that I made a career of it, but the stuff we used to
taste over the 35 years, every Tuesday, I mean, we saw everybody's
attempt at trying to do something that they thought was innovative in this industry.
(33:56):
And one of them was a great Wine. And the poor
guy, it was called.
Oh man. Anyway, he had two blends and he thought that he
was going to set the world on fire by blending Sonoma juice with Napa juice.
It was on the label that way, which you can do in the new world
anyway. In California you can do that all you want. But this was
(34:17):
stated on the label, we're going to do this. And I just, it just hits
me as this, it just seems to repeat itself. Look at
Joe Franzia, the Franzia brothers, you know, getting busted for
making bottling white Zinfandel. But it was really Grenache
and they, they faked the leaves in the truck so that the winemaker would think
that was Zinfandel. And you know, they, they should have gone to jail for that.
(34:39):
Actually. It was about to just got fined. But you
know, it's just so interesting because this industry seems to
have the attraction of that kind of thing that
to, to do something that may not seem so kosher on the
surface and then it changes, the rules change
and now it's not a lot. It just seems what other product in the
(35:01):
world has this not
ambition but this allure to do that,
to try something like this? I just think that's amazing. It's consumers
who drive these changes in many ways. So again in the
18th century, consumers, when you read the letters from merchants who
are speaking on behalf of their customers, who
(35:24):
are writing to their producers, to the Irish
in Bordeaux who are really in many ways the producers of the wine,
you know, it's please don't send me any of that stuff that hasn't been
blended with a little bit of Hermitage. I want the
Hermitage, I want the Grenache, I want the Mourvedre from
Spain, what they call the Alicante and the Benny Carlo.
(35:46):
And I want the Hermitage. And it's too thin
otherwise and the customers won't like it.
Likewise, when Hugh Barton, who
was a member of the illustrious Barton family from
County Forbana in Ireland, in fact, it was 300 years ago this
year that Tom Barton arrived in Bordeaux. But his
(36:08):
grandson Hugh, who was running the firm in Bordeaux
during the 1780s and 90s when the French Revolution broke
out, he was imprisoned. He was got out of
jail because his French born Irish wife, Anna
Johnston, the Johnstons are also still very much in
Bordeaux. She was able to spring him from jail because he was
(36:29):
French. But then they quickly got out of
Dodge. But before going, he went into
partnership with a French guy named Gastier and that became part
of Gastier. You're Certainly familiar with that. But one of the things that
he then tried to implore the French authorities saying,
my stocks of wine that I have, they're
(36:51):
no good to you because they're blended.
They're, you know, the Chateau Lafitte is Chateau Lafitte, but
it's much too rich and full bodied for the French market. So please
let me get it out of here and ship it off to the one market
that wants this stuff. Wow. Which is the British
Isles. That's amazing story. I did a lot of business with
(37:13):
Barney Gastier over the years early on.
So let's. I don't know if it was your conversation or with
Tim Hani about the definition of terroir
having changed from was, I
think I say despicable, but it was not a positive
term in the world of wine. And now, of course, it's
(37:36):
used, as aficionados like to say, it's the
terroir. And it's driven by terroir and maybe even one of those
air aristocratic terms that people don't understand what you're talking
about. But I wanted to apply it to list the current
definition, which is what the vines have gone through
to get to where they're at when they make the wine. And I have
(37:58):
this opinion and I think you'd be the perfect person
to reflect on that is all the history
of. Let's just talk about the Irish who came to Bordeaux and all the things
you're talking about right now and the blending and the unblending and then the illegal
part of that. No longer an appellation allows that
blending. Doesn't that all roll up
(38:19):
eventually as terroir to
that particular bottle. You're not going to taste the
fact that some negociant Irish, negociant back in the day was
blending, you know, Grenache and the wine. But wouldn't
the mentality, the thought process, the education of the winemakers, the
storytelling to the winemakers reflect
(38:41):
in a bottle of wine like that. Well, that's
another excellent and maybe very difficult question
to answer because terroir, I mean, without, if
you, you know, if you accept the blending of
even, you know, 5%, 10%, 15% of wines from elsewhere
(39:01):
into, you know, again
and marketed as such, then fundamentally you're rejecting the idea
of terroir or, you know, I don't just point out
Bordeaux at this point in, in Burgundy, at the same time,
their big wine to, to, to blend in the
(39:22):
early modern era in the 18th century was Chateauneuf du
Pape. So just as in Some ways, the, the, the
chickens had come home to roost. Because in
the, the late Middle ages, in the 14th century, in
particular, 1309-1377, the Papacy
was not in Rome, it was in Avignon.
(39:45):
That's right. And all the popes were
French, not surprisingly,
all the Avignon popes, and
they presumably were following the fashion of the court
in Paris and of wealthy Northern Europeans who had taken
to Burgundy wine. And what they
(40:06):
called Vende Beaune was sort of. That was the. They didn't have any
particular conception of a specific terroir. But Beaune was obviously being the
market town there. It was all called Vende Beaune. And that.
That was the really fashionable wine in, at the
court, both in Paris as well
as at the papal court in Avignon.
(40:29):
But those popes obviously also had a little
weekend house just to the north of the town of Avignon, which became
the pope's new castle. Hence Chateau Neuf du Pape,
which was planted with very different grapes. We know there are, I guess,
what, 17 different types, or 13 or 17
of grapes that you can use. And now mostly
(40:52):
Grenache and Mourvedre and Syrah and Sausso and counoise, whatever.
But. But that wasn't the wine they were
drinking at the court at the time. They were drinking wine that had come down
from Burgundy, but those much riper
wines, those much riper wines produced for much riper grapes because
it's much hotter. And they also have those very large
(41:14):
stones, of course, that reflect the heat even at night in the
summertime, and really ripen. The Grenache and the Movedo,
those were later desired back in Burgundy as a way to
thicken up, give some greater body
to Burgundy wines, which by the 18th century were
considered in some ways too thin, without the addition
(41:36):
of a little touch of Chef Neuf du Pape. So by no means was this
just a Bordeaux thing. This was very. You know, it's going on
all over the place. And again, it was not considered fraud. What
was considered fraud was when you added something besides wine,
grape juice. If you were to add elderberry juice or beets, that would
be fraud. But, you know, you can blend your
(41:58):
wines as you wanted, but the very idea of blending wines
takes away. So if you do that now in France, you have a Vin de
France, right? So
Chateau Palmer makes a 19th century,
what they call a Bordeaux, 19th century blend. And
(42:19):
it's basically, it adds. They get some wine from Hermitage, so some
Syrah, and they put it in, and it's quite an expensive Wine,
and it's, it's wonderful. But it's sold as a Vin
de France, the lowest level, because there's some wine from the Rhone
Valley, very high quality Amitage, but it goes in
to. So what do you think? That. That's an interesting point. At least stop it
(42:42):
there. They change it from vin de table because that, you know, that
sounds much more generic. And now we have Vin de France. At least the word
France is in there. But. Okay, so if the history of wine
was to blend, and I guess the, the logic is the
whole is greater than the sum of its parts and that's what was
happening. Like, I, I don't think I've ever tasted an Algerian wine. I have to
(43:04):
go check my database, but I would. I'm guessing this is earthy,
heavy duty, you know, thick, thick
skinned, extracted wine. But let's just. The idea
of blending wines is now
very appellated. I mean, it's very controlled by the appellation. Right.
So what was the movement that, that
(43:26):
created this, I'm going to say, chasm between the old world, which is what
we consider today's world of wine, and Burgundy is only Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, et
cetera. In the new world, which you can do whatever you want, you still.
Right. That's the attraction of the French to America.
Yeah. You can still mostly do what you
want to, depending on where you are in Languedoc and where you are in Loire
(43:48):
Valley. There are some rules here and there, but there are also places in Loire
Valley and certainly in Languedoc, where you can do, you know, you can plant
whatever the heck you want. What was the historical movement from the time that
you could put Syrah in Burgundy?
To do that and you go to jail? Well, this gets. So I'm going
to try to tie these things together, but this gets back to your question about
(44:09):
terroir. So my point was simply you can't really have this notion
of terroir specifically in the way that you do now when
you're allowed to bring in wines that come from a different terroir.
So, you know, when you have two terroir together, it's
no longer a terroir driven wine. That's right.
(44:29):
And I would also argue that there was a sense terroir developed as a
concept even while they were still blending, because most of the wine
in what was labeled, you know, Vin de Bone, or, you know, Vin
Deux de Grave or Poyac, it was
mostly still from there, but it
was. But not all from there. So, you know,
(44:52):
we have these sort of binary clean cut categories that they didn't necessarily have.
So terroir as a concept existed even when wines
were still being blended, but
from different, different parts of the of France or from different vineyards, you
know, 10 miles, 15 miles apart in a different.
But so a couple things happen in the. To go back
(45:15):
to the Burgundy case, it's really in the 17th
century when land ownership moves from
the church to private
individuals, many of whom are
ennobled. So it goes from the lords
of the church, you might say, to the lords of the secular lords, who now
(45:37):
own most of the land and therefore most of the wine production in
Burgundy. And what happens
is that they are trying to sort of sacralize
their. They're trying to make a product for the market, obviously, because, you know, land
ownership is only worth something if you can make money from the products of your
land. So to sort of secularize their
(45:59):
wine. It's at that time that they
begin to emphasize
what we think of as this medieval concept, which wasn't,
but that of the Klima in Burgundy. That is, this
is my specific wine. And since
by circumscribing
(46:22):
comes from a very specific area, and it comes from, with my noble pedigree
and my noble care, you're ennobling the
wine and therefore increasing the chances, you might say, of
sale. Because then it becomes something that another fellow consumer might
say, by drinking this wine, I'm drinking this noble product.
And of course, the better the wine is, and the better its reputation
(46:45):
is, the greater the profit margin for sale. So
it's a way to subtly.
Be. A businessman, despite being an aristocrat, by having this
product. So it's really, you see that as part of
the land change from church to secular authorities in
Burgundy, the notion of Klima. And from Klima, you know, things
(47:08):
get ever smaller, down to this idea that the Klima is the
tailwalk, and this really matters. But, you know, one of the things that sort of
shows just how invented this concept is, is if
you look at the Clos de Vougeau, you know, the most famous Clos in all
of Burgundy, it's
also the largest, but it was put together from
(47:30):
the 11th century to the 14th century by Cistercian monks who
lived right around the corner at Seitou, and they
had about a 13 kilometer walk over to the vineyard. Of course,
they had lay brothers and lay sisters doing a lot of the labor for them.
But, you know, we think of the idea of this close, this unified
vineyard, where the Terroir is fundamentally the
(47:51):
same. Done these intense studies of the
Clos de Vougeot to show that it's an incredible mosaic, that the
monks saying, this is just the right. This
is clay and limestone here and nowhere. And outside of this wall, it's not clay
and limestone. Within the coat of Ugeau, you get all of these different
soil types. So what was really going on, it had very little to
(48:13):
do with this notion of a distinct terroir, had much more to do with
the wall was there purpose of wind protection,
erosion protection. Because when the soil drops down to the bottom of the hill,
it's contained by a wall. And you can take it back up to the top
of the hill and put it there and let it go down again. It's to
keep grazing animals out and it's to define the
(48:35):
workspace. Because you have to pay people in cash or in kind
or something to work this space. So it's a way
before payments were all cash banks, but they're often in kind.
Like, this is how much work you have to do. What do you mean, like
10 hours or $100? No, no, no. It's
the space that's. It defines work.
(48:56):
But it's in the 17th century that you begin to see the
emergence of. It's this terroir that really matters. And the same thing happens in
Bordeaux in the 1660, when Arnaud de Pontac
gives a name to his specific
property, Aubrion. And that's it. So
I found a document that I guess helped
(49:18):
put me on the map as a wine historian. Very small group of people, by
the way, wine historians. But it was the first mention of
Aubrion. And it came from King Charles II
Cellarbrook, a month after he was returned to the throne, restored to the
throne in June of 1660. And there it is. Arnaud
de Pontac is shipping this wine. He wants to go right to that
(49:38):
elite market. But he's not calling it Vin de Grave, he's calling it
it O O. And so it's
this. I mean, I think we see the same thing now with
this specification of. In the
delimiting of the area and the quantity, which
heightens the prestige of the product. So when you get a, you know,
(50:01):
you can get your Macallan single malt, but then when
you get a MA that is aged 15 years,
it's finished in two different kinds of barrels and it's a special
edition and they only make thousand bottles.
Well, now you've got a product that, look, not everybody can get.
There are only a thousand Bottles out there. Right. So terroir
(50:23):
helps to, in a sense,
make land ownership and quality
production into a more lucrative effort because you're
limiting the amount that's being produced and you're
delimiting the space from which it can be produced. And of course,
very often you really are making a product that people find
(50:45):
discernibly superior. But it's also. I mean,
so it's also a marketing thing. So the notion that
for the anti terroir group saying, oh, it's this sort of French idea, that there's
really a bunch of bs. No, you tell me that you can
make merceau anywhere in the world. No,
look, Merceau makes a pretty special chardonnay that's really hard to reproduce
(51:06):
anywhere else. At the same time, there is some
truth to the idea that, that, you know, terroir
is also and can be manipulated as a.
As a way to market and as a way to limit competition. Wow,
that is. That is a. It's right on. And this
history. We're. We're already at an hour, if you can believe this. But
(51:29):
because we haven't even touched on. And I wanted to get into this. I mean,
I think we'll just say it for the next time, which is when you teach
these things, when you do what you do as a wine historian, when you
put on a tasting, when you have these conversations, I want to hear in the
next episode how it's received and what people
ask. But while we're on this subject of terroir,
(51:51):
because I always thought, and this will be the final thought, that
for instance, when the Nazis invaded Bordeaux and the stories
about, you know, the. The local people stealing
from the Nazis, the copper and then making copper sulfate, and then that guy
disappeared. All these amazing stories have been handed down, not the least of
which which you've probably read the book Wine and War having. I'm
(52:13):
having dinner with the cladstrup in two weeks
about Monsieur Hue and how
that glass of wine that 1940 Vouvray kept him alive in
the concentration camps. And the point I'm making is if
you were to take the definition terroir, which you've just. You
haven't diffused it, but you certainly have expanded the definition into this
(52:36):
marketing angle, as. Whereas there is certain validity to the
fact that it thrown in one place. I think you're wrong. I'm not saying
terroir isn't real. Right. I'm saying I expressed that last night. I opened a
bottle of Merceau and I also put a bottle of. Of A
domestic Chardonnay. And it was radically different. So you can't argue that.
Right. But it seems to me that if, for instance, Monsieur
(52:58):
Hue, I went through that experience and his
lifestyle change and his outlook on life change, all the
steel de Vi, you know, if it all changed, that that
becomes part of
what they do and how they think and what their lifestyle is. When
they make that next bottle of wine, the things that have rolled up into
(53:21):
his life becomes part of that expression.
That's the romantic part of what I think terroir might
be. No, and I think it's a way of marking.
Terroir is a way of marking
time and space, particularly space.
But I should say terroir is a way of marking space, and
(53:42):
vintage is a way of marking time. And, you know,
human beings. That's a great way to put it. We like to do many things,
but one of the things we really want to do, it seems to make
meaning of our lives or give meaning to our lives, is to map out time
and space. That really helps us, you know, just be human, I
think. And so that.
(54:05):
That terroir gives us a sense of, you
know, I understand space a little bit because it's not just from
wine. It doesn't come from, you know, from everywhere. It comes from this particular place.
And then when you add to that vintage, which
isn't really a thing, believe it or not, until
the 18th century, because up to that point,
(54:27):
almost all wine, as you know, was consumed within the year. So the
next of, you know, what vintage is it? What do you mean, what vintage is?
It's. Here's one that doesn't. It's
only when you age wine beyond a year that you start to,
you know. So which year? Yeah, this. This tastes like it was last
year's. Yeah. So. So when. When you start to
(54:48):
get into these wines that
are more carefully made from a circumscribed
space, they actually can last longer. And then that
allows us to map time by saying, ah, which year? And then
that becomes sort of a fascinating way to also.
Well, becomes one of the fascinating things about wine because not only does wine
(55:10):
allow us to see, ah, there is a difference between,
you know, Meursault and Puligny
Montracher, which is right next door. But the wine can be slightly
different, often are slightly different. So there's both. There's the. There's the
terroir that makes the difference, there's the producer that makes the difference, and there's the
year that makes the difference. And all this becomes part
(55:33):
of what makes wine magical? Because there are all these
variables that that are, are, are both
on the pallet, but in our mind too. And that's when, you know, that's why
wine is endlessly fascinating to people like the two of us and
obviously a couple, you know, a few hundred million other
people on the planet, it just to find that aspect of it.
(55:55):
But I guess what I'm trying to do is understand why is it so fascinating
to us. And I think it's the fact that it helps us map time and
space. That's an interesting thought. I had a woman on
last week and she is a
PhD. She has two masters in theology and a PhD in
theology. And she's
making that same connection through the Bible and
(56:18):
wine as expression of, of God's will
to our soul. And so that's a whole different level of
conversation in regards to that. But it was really, really interesting.
But that's a really important question because there's no other beverage that
does that, that asks those questions. You know, it seems to be
sort of unique that way. And of course, you know, that's one of the reasons
(56:40):
it's been so important to so many religions. I mean,
certainly within the broad Judeo Christian tradition,
but even before that with, with, you know, Greek and Roman
and the Mesopotamian, you know, I'm leaving out some cultures there too. But
you know, within all these traditions, wine was
this a
(57:02):
distinctly spiritual beverage in a way
that say, beer didn't become that, or other
narcotics didn't become, become that
said that. It, you know, it remains, I think, sort of
unique in that sense. My dad, we were in Armenia and we
were talking about wine shows and we'll talk about that next time
(57:24):
we're off camera. But we were talking about wine shows together. But how do
we take some of these concepts and put them into film, put them into
reels so that people would pay attention more than 30 seconds depending on, you
know, what we're talking about. And one of the, one of
the subjects I wanted to peel back, and you'll probably be
helping me with this when the time comes because we are in Armenia. We are
(57:46):
sitting with the Pope of Armenia, the. They call him in Eshm.
And I just was noticing that throughout his residence
and throughout Armenia history and throughout Armenian
icons, grapes are there. I mean, it's everywhere. I'm sure
like most civilizations, the, the concept of
wine and grape is there. And so my, my, my
(58:09):
thought was how do we, how do I, how can I peel back
the importance of wine in the cult?
The, the religious culture of Armenia. You know, where can I
go? Where can I find. Why are grapes represented everywhere you
go? Grapes and pomegranates and that's. And I don't like pomegranate wine, so
I'm not going to do that. And so I'll leave it at
(58:31):
that. And, and we have a lot more to talk about next time and
I hope we can do this soon. I look forward to our next, next discussion.
I, I didn't even touch on half the stuff here, but this stuff was really,
really, really fun, Chad, to hear. What you have to say and
well, my, my pleasure. And, and again, I hope we can add more of
these because I'm having as much fun as you are. So we will thank
(58:53):
you again for this, this, this morning and we will
reconvene if I, I'll be in Paris for a week and Sicily. I'll be back
and I think when we come back sometime in April, we'll get back on and
we'll, we'll talk more about the consumerism and, and how
you approach it and, and to promote
this. Great. I look forward to that. Look forward to it.
(59:15):
Paul, safe trip and enjoy your wine
drinking in Paris and Sicily and all those other places. Thank you. Cheers.
I think we are in a more serious wine moment. But as you know, wine
consumption among the new generation of young people in
America as well as in France is declining. 21 to 35
crowd is not drinking as much wine as my crowd did and your crowd did.
Why that is, it's not quite clear. Wine seems a little staid
to them. Of course, natural wines, which kind of fall into that category of young
(00:22):
creatives, are also doing fairly well in that crowd. But that's
such a small percentage of overall wine production. Sit back and
grab a glass. It's Wine Talks with Paul
K. Welcome to Wine Talks with Paul
Kay. And we are in studio today in beautiful Southern California, about to have a
conversation with Charles Luddings. It out in New York. Introductions in just a moment.
(00:44):
Hey, have a listen to a show that's coming out with Florence
Cathiard, and she owns the Chateau Smith aux Lafitte in the
Pas Sac Leon district of Grave, as well
as one of Lou, one of the historical properties in the Napa
Valley under the Cathiard vineyard designation, once owned
by Louis Martini. It's an incredible conversation. What an elegant,
(01:06):
driven, athletic woman at that. But now, while we're here
to have a conversation with Charles Ludington. You know, Charles, I keep putting down
Chad. What do you go by? Charles? Please call me Chad. Since we're,
we're not, we're not good friends here, Paul. So we're all good friends now. Chad
has a BA in history, a master's in history, a master's of philosophy
in history, and a PhD in history. And you
(01:28):
know that. All from Ivy League
schools. But your passion, you know, you, it's. I was
reading your, your bio a little bit. It was talking about how you
switched into the history of wine, which is really a fascinating subject because there aren't
too many of you around that actually have this deep understanding of the
value of the history of wine. How did that happen?
(01:50):
Oh, that's a great question, Paul. I was
after, after college, I played basketball for a year in
France. And for better or for worse, I was in Paris and I fell in
love with Paris and more so than, than, than
basketball. So it was. And part of that
was the wine, the food,
(02:14):
and just the. Yeah. The whole
Parisian life. And so
I, I was hooked at that point. And
then when I was treated to a team in Spain, I said, you know, I
really want to stay here in France. And I found a way of doing that.
And so I was. Went on to write a biography
(02:35):
of this Franco Irish family who ended up in
America, but that allowed me to stay doing research in Paris. And
then eventually I went off to grad school and I was looking for
a way to combine my interest in Irish history
and French history. And I was working at a wine store in New
York to kind of pay for my habit, as it were.
(02:57):
Make the wine cheaper for a grad student by working on Saturdays at
Aster. Sorry, not Astor. I was just thinking. Just
thinking about after the. About Union Square wines and spirits, which
is no longer where it used to be in any event. And then I
was encouraged by one of my professors, a guy named Simon Shama, who was
a cultural historian, to try to combine my interest in
(03:21):
Irish and British history and wine. And next thing you
know, I was off to the races with a. With a PhD on
the politics of wine in Britain in the period 1649
to 1860, when wine was a very politicized
commodity because it was a highly taxed
commodity and a source of revenue for the government, very important source.
(03:44):
And it had all sorts of cultural and social and
political meanings, what wine you consumed. And so I just found wine with this
amazing lens onto British history.
And you've expanded that into. Back into Irish history and French
history. And I've just published a book on the Irish and Bordeaux,
and I'm working on another version of that. And
(04:07):
now I'm also. I'm going to back you all the way up to playing basketball
in Paris. Sure, sure. Because that's fascinating stuff. And we're going to peel
back some of that. We're not going to have enough time to do all the
things that I want to talk about. We'll have to do this again. But we're
going to Paris in a week. I'll go there as often as I can,
stay as long as I can. If I can just get a layover for one
(04:27):
night, I'll go to Paris and I'll go into town and I'll just hang out.
I am with you on this. I'm in love with the city, and I can't
wait to get there, and I can't wait to come back when I'm gone. And
in fact, yesterday morning I had this aberration. I said, you know, we're supposed to
stop in Paris on the way home from Sicily. So I think. Think we're just
going to extend that. And I called American Express and got the flight moved a
(04:47):
few days so that we could spend a few nights on the way out, you
know, just. Just hanging. And so I get that, you know, it's Interesting about the.
You played basketball. I know you played in college and you,
you went to France. Isn't it interesting now? Because
there's a huge interest in wine in the
NBA. Huge. To the extent that they have wineries,
(05:09):
not just brands, you know, there's. As you and I know, the celebrity endorsed brand
is different than sort of the person that's involved with it. Like Dwyane
Wade has a winery and I, I just find it
culturally interesting that this has become such an important part. In fact,
there's a restaurant here in LA that the Lakers call after a
game. We're on our way over. Don't close the kitchen. Pull out a couple
(05:31):
of Burgundies and some Grand Cruise and let's. We're coming to
town. Yeah, it's amazing. Wine has,
has really entered the NBA in, in, in a major way, as you just
said. You know, I, I won. Of French
players in the NBA has had on that. That's certainly
possible. Tony Parker, who had an American dad who had
(05:55):
gone over to play basketball in France just as I did, he married
a French woman. Obviously, Tony Parker becomes this
fantastic player, but he was very interested in, you know, having
grown up in France, he was very interested in wine. And in fact he
has a chateau down in a domain down in, in Provence now which
mostly makes rose, which of course was having a moment, but I think he's, he's
(06:17):
a pretty serious wine guy, him myself. And you
know, there have been other Boris Diaw and other
French players back, you know, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, and of
course there are far more now. And as we saw in last
summer's Olympics back in Paris with, you know,
Wimby and quite a few others, the. France is
(06:39):
perhaps the second best basketball country in the world at this, you
know, currently. And all those players bring their
Frenchness to the league. But you know, I don't know how much that had an
impact on people like JJ Redick or LeBron James or
Dwyane Wade and others who have professed this incredible interest
in wine and have, you know, have serious collections, some
(07:01):
of them. And I think it's become a thing among them to
both to sort of to share wine with each other, but also to kind
of there's one upmanship, there's competitive, you know, oh, I opened a, you
know, Lafitte 82
last night. What did you guys have? Yeah, it goes around and around
and so it's, you know, it's. Yeah, it's an amazing, it's an amazing
(07:24):
aspect of contemporary wine culture. And basketball
culture. That's funny story, because I think I told you briefly, but we were at
Cheval Blanc, we're having lunch in the vineyard with Monsieur Clay,
and this big black dude comes down, and he's introduced himself
as Mike Pietras. And we started talking.
And then before I knew it, after I got home, I was on a Zoom
(07:45):
call with him and Boris, talking about the lifestyle of Bordeaux and
wine. But the way that happened was very bizarre.
One of my guests on this trip was up on the roof of Cheval Blanc,
and Mike was up there. They started talking, and my
guest had been the cameraman at a Clippers game, and Mike had
taken him out as he was shooting a basket and had, you
(08:08):
know, lay up and fell on him. And he goes, you know, he
goes, Mr. Patriots, do you remember me? You knocked me. You knocked me
over. And he goes, I do remember that. And then
he says, you got to come down and say hi to our group. And so
he came down and I. And that's what started this sort of interest. And then
I had a conversation with Dwayne Wade's number two guy, George Walker, up. Up in
Napa. You think that's. And this is going to
(08:31):
lead into this conversation about the lifestyle, wine, the history of wine, you know,
developing this lifestyle. That, that. That I don't think
is an opulent. It's not these. They're not chasing
this opulent lifestyle that shows you've
arrived in life. It's just. It's just the idea of
wine and its complexities and its nuances and
(08:53):
what it does at the dinner table. Is that. Would that be
accurate? Yeah, you know,
that's a fantastic question, because I suppose, you know,
the. The academic in me and say you probably can't separate either
one from the other, but. But, you know, to me, there are
these inherent joys, and obviously there are to you, too, and to many of your
(09:15):
listeners, just, you know, in wine. And once you discover
those, you know, especially when you come
from a background where maybe that just wasn't at all a part of what you
grew up with, and you discover that and you think, oh, my Lord, you know,
this. This wine is. Could be so complex
and. And when you, you know, combine it with food
(09:37):
and if you love both those things, athletes certainly love eating
and, you know, some physical pleasures, after all the
stress they're putting their body under, it makes perfect sense that people are just saying,
look, this is great. I didn't know about this necessarily, growing
up. Just like most basketball players, most Americans don't grow
up in sort of fine wine families. Certainly
(09:59):
my parents were just giving an example,
were beer and
Matuse and.
Lancers. You know, my dad had a martini, his beer
Matuse and, you know, occasional martini, and then
spent a year in Lyon. He was a
(10:22):
professor also and discovered
Beaujolais because he played on a. He played on the local basketball team.
And a lot of the games were around the city of Lyon,
and some of them were up in the Beaujolais region. And, you know,
after the games, you know, sometimes on outdoor mud courts. I'm not making this
up, you know, where the ball wouldn't actually bounce, would
(10:44):
you know, that there would be this big feast with
the village that maybe you just defeated in hoops,
and you'd sit down to the wine that came from the
fields that surround the court. That's amazing.
So there's, you know, so there's that discovery of wine. That's an amazing thing. Now,
to the other point, you know, I think it's very hard to separate
(11:08):
the. The historical aspect of wine too. Especially really
fine wines have often meant
to the consumers themselves. You know, I
have, I've arrived. You know, I can afford this. And it's. So
it's both a statement to oneself and of course, it's a way. It's, it's, it's.
It's a display to. To others who know the language
(11:29):
of wine that, you know, you've arrived. And you see this with, you know, going
back to some of the things I've written on that about in the
17th and 18th century in England, the
merchants and the lawyers who have as much money as the
aristocrats, in some cases more, they use wine
and their appreciation of wine as
(11:51):
a symbol to tell the aristocrats, we've arrived, we're
here, we deserve to be here. And you see the same thing
20 years ago, starting in the Chinese market,
where wine, and particularly Bordeaux, more recently, Burgundy
becomes a way of saying, you know, we. We. We've made money. You know, we're
now a Shanghai millionaire, or we,
(12:13):
and we know wine. And so wine becomes this way of telling oneself
and also others that one is arrived. And so I, you know, I'm
sure that's an. There's an aspect of that too,
no doubt, among some players that, you know,
we have, yeah, we've made it. We, We're. We've moved up a social class
or we have just sort of, you know, we're. We're success in this world. It's
(12:36):
because you mentioned earlier about the political,
not fallout but the politics of wine in
1649-1860 in Britain. And I thought
to myself, it's not a whole lot different today. I mean,
certainly the status. I had a conversation yesterday with the
representative in China of lvmh, and she just corroborated what you just said, which
(12:57):
is Bordeaux was the beginning of the Chinese awareness of wine.
And now Burgundy's crept in there and they're starting. And I, as you and I
know, all, you know, files, as Chuck Wagner said, not Chuck Wagner, but
Paul Meyer said, you know, end up in Burgundy. But
that's interesting that, that there's a. There
was a political ramification to what you drank
(13:20):
and how you were perceived by what you drank. And
isn't that true today? I mean, really, you know, that's a.
That's a good question. I don't think it's as politicized,
certainly, in if we're speaking about the United States. I think
it's more gendered, probably. Now, of course,
gender these days is also a hot political topic
(13:43):
when you look at the way people are. Men and women
have voted in the last election and what seems to be sort of a
male backlash. So certainly gendering of wine is also
a form of the politics of wine in terms of
what country you chose to drink from.
There was a little bit of that moment in 2003 when the French
(14:06):
didn't join us in our. I guess I'm going to go ahead. And I reminded
people of this very event because of the today's tariff situation. I go, wait
a minute. We politicized it. Yeah, yeah. You know, there's sort of
a. What I guess I'll call in retrospect, the folly of the
invasion. And the French didn't come along, go along. And so we had a, you
know, our moment of pouring French wine down drains and changing French fries to
(14:28):
freedom fries and all that. But I don't think I forgot
now. There's sort of an. I don't think there's. At the moment, there's an anti
French or anti Italian or anti Spanish wine bias
or still a pro American wine bias. But
that. That could change. You know, I do think the gendering of wine
is pretty clear in the way that, you
(14:51):
know, white wine for a very long time has been
gendered female, and red wine, more male,
is obviously having a moment. And back when I was working in the wine store
in New York in the mid-90s, I couldn't sell rose
de Provence to save my life. People would come
in and we maybe offered one or two bottles. And I had had some
(15:14):
wonderful experiences in the south of France where I just said, you know,
on a hot day with, you know,
grilled foods, you know, is a perfect one. A little
more body than whites. It's not to be taken too seriously. And it's only, you
know, six bucks a bottle. You know, it's. And
New Yorkers at the time would not touch the stuff. It was either, you know,
(15:35):
we didn't know is it neither fish nor foul, or they associate it with white
Zinfandel. Look, I'm not a white Zinfandel drinker. And I was like, it's not white
Zinfandel. And it's. You really gotta
try it in the summertime in particular. And, you know, now obviously,
you know, the section is often one of the largest
in a hip wine store, and people are absurdly
(15:58):
charging, you know, it's 35, 40 bucks
for. For summer. Yeah. Domain Odd, though.
I think I just bought some Etoile from Domain Auto.
They got retails at 65. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, I
mean, Domain art has always been up there for a
while. But. But yeah, I think it's the. It's the Brangelina effect,
(16:20):
too. And so. But. And rose is
largely. I guess it's. It's. What do they call
it? Hampton's Tea here in New York? I've
never heard that. That's great. And I think it's
gendered. Mostly pink, you know, is gendered. Mostly
(16:40):
female. But. But, you know, I think it's also one of those. It's. It's
not a white wine, it's not a red. So I think the men feel comfortable
crossing over. It's, you know, it's. So, yeah, wine is gendered. It's
therefore political. I don't. You know, we may get to a
moment when wine becomes highly political in terms of the, you know, whether it's American
wine or wine from the eu, if in fact the tariffs get slapped
(17:02):
on, because then it becomes a class thing too, you know, who can afford it?
And that adds a component to the politics of it that.
That, you know, only the elites. I mean, I can go in most of my
stores here in New York and Upper west side,
you know, I would say I'm probably going to find cheaper French and Italian
wines than I am American wines.
(17:23):
But, you know, you add a 200 tariff on
those wines, next thing you know, all European wines are going to be
more expensive and American wines will become the. The default wine for the.
For the middle classes. I Guess we'll call it, you know, the. As you
probably realize, there's a. There's a big difference between the wine shelves
here in Southern California than in New York. And New York is a wine shop
(17:45):
at every corner and some of them very specific
regions and styles. In California, the import
selection is considerably less in the fact.
My son in law, who's in Potsdam, who is a
devotee, you know, comes down to New York City
to, To stock his cellar because there's such a
(18:07):
variety there and stuff. He took me to a store not
too long ago. I think it was in the Hudson. The city of Hudson.
Hudson's a city too, right? Not just the river. Well, there's Hudson on
Hastings. Hastings on Hudson, sorry. And then
there's a little tiny village. With a little tiny wine shop.
And you know, I thought, look, I've been doing this for 35
(18:28):
years. I think I saw two brands that I recognized, you
know, on the shelf and There was probably 200 SKUs in this shop, maybe more.
And so I thought, wow, this is an interesting difference. But you know, let
me jump on a subject that I think is interesting that I want you to
reflect on. Our mutual friend Dr. Friedman,
who's, you know, lecturing on the servitude,
(18:50):
medieval servitude, but his passion is the evolution of cuisine
in America. And you know, it's a very interesting.
I love the subject as well. I think it's one of your passions as it's
evolved. Do you think that, that there's been that
renaissance of wine in America
that the food went through in the 80s and continues to sort of change, or
(19:12):
we're not there yet, or it happened a long time ago, like in the 70s,
during the judgment of Par. And that's. And then we're just settled in already.
Yeah, that's a great question. You know,
historians were looking for trends and, and
that certainly, you know, follows that idea
that when, when did this trend start? You know, I, I think there's a lot
(19:34):
of evidence that in, in the 70s,
partly because certain producers like Heights
were making really quality wines in California.
Mondavi stepping up their act. And
you know, you get many other examples. Ridge comes on the scene
sometimes not long after that, if I'm not mistaken. And so
(19:57):
you have better American wines. And then of course you have, you
know, 1976, you have the Judgment of Paris where, you know, Chateau
Montelena and you know,
Stagsley, you know, wins the prize. And
actually we've won in both in Chardonnay and in
Bordeaux. Belen too. So that was obviously a big
(20:19):
moment. But then you don't really. The 80s, the sort
of counter evidence there is that. Yeah. But guess What? In the
1980s, America's number one selling one was Wards Infidel.
So how much of an impact did it really have? Good
point. I think sometime in the
1990s. So there's maybe a general
(20:40):
trend, but it wasn't really clear,
maybe not a deep Trend until the 1990s when you start to
get what I'll call broadly the foodie movement.
That is people's greater interest in seasonal
food and sort of rejection of packaged food and instant
foods that had been so fashionable after World War II
(21:03):
up through the 1970s and early through the 80s is sort of the transition
year beginning in 90s. Certainly by that point among the,
I guess I'll call it cultural elites, there's this movement away
from all that previous era and the
packaged foods and processed foods. And I think with that came
a greater appreciation of wine as part of that broad foodie
(21:25):
movement. Because of course wine in most cultures, as you
know, ours may be the exception in some ways,
but wine and food grew
symbiotically. And so you're into wine,
you're into food, you're into food, you're into wine. The food go to together. You
don't just drink wine without the food, you know, you don't eat food without the
(21:46):
wine. And so I think that kind of took off in American society
as well. And I guess the question again is how far did that penetrate
down. I've got some. I edited a book few years ago called
Food Fights How History Matters to
Contemporary Food Debates. And some. One of the
authors, Margot Finn and I and I can largely concurred,
(22:09):
made the case that this was largely that the foodie movement was
largely class based
and that farmers markets may have been an attempt
to and may still be an attempt to help local economies
and sort of disrupt the dominance of big food and
all that. But fundamentally it's a way for people who
(22:31):
have cultural capital, not necessarily a lot of financial capital, but
cultural capital to play the game of
elitism. And you know, wine's caught up in that movement
too. So you'll find that too cynical a take
doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong, but, but that implicates
certainly people like me, you know, academic, growing up in a place like Chapel Hill,
(22:53):
North Carolina, where, you know, the farmer's market is a big part of the local
identity and it's a part of liberal politics. And so
that said, I think we are in a more serious wine
moment. But as you know, wine consumption among the new generation of young
people in America as well as in France is declining.
So, you know, with the 21 to 35 crowd is
(23:15):
not drinking as much wine as my crowd
did and your crowd did, which was, you know, we were increasing the amount.
So how, you know, why that is, it's not quite
clear. Wine seems a little staid to them. I think in some ways, you
know, cocktails and craft beers are
doing very well. Of course, natural wines, which kind of fall into that category of
(23:38):
young creatives, are also doing fairly well in that crowd. But
that's such a small percentage of overall wine production.
So, you know, that's a long answer to your short question, but I think. I
don't, I, I don't. I, I would love to peel that stuff back
with you, but I wanted to, I wanted to dig back into your.
The history of wine more than that. But there's certainly all that stuff. I
(23:59):
just. Actually one of the most responses I've ever gotten on a comment, hey, you
place a comment on LinkedIn or something, you know, usually it just stays
there. And some people continue to comment. But the most
replies I've ever gotten to one of my comments was one where I said, you
know, it's a lot of lip service on the Internet right now, and there's a
lot of reasons why they're not drinking. I think wine is generational. All generations
(24:21):
come to it eventually, and there's lots of peaks and valleys along
the way. And certainly you can't drink White Claw, you know, the rest of your
life. So I think that's going to change. And not only that, that
the marketplace, when the idea of, of a private
labeling became as simple and pro. Profitable
as it became, you know, 15, 20 years ago, you
(24:44):
know, the marketplace was inundated with 50 cent a liter crap from
Europe and packaged a thousand different ways. And that just
put, pun intended, sour taste in people's mouth as well. I think
that's my personal opinion. But I want to go back to. Because your, Your specialty
is a history of wine, the politics of wine. And I, and I was
reading your, Your, Your bio and you're talking about
(25:06):
this, the Irish, the Irish movement in Bordeaux.
And I started thinking, you know, it's so interesting to me, particularly
Bordeaux. Burgundy is a little more protected.
But didn't. Wasn't with Bordeaux. The rash shields
are, what, from the Netherlands or from Germany? Yeah.
And. And Napa was founded by immigrants.
(25:27):
I mean, and so here's this indigenous product that
is to reflect local everything, you know,
terroir and the history.
But so much of the popular regions of the world
were founded by immigration, by people that came to this country, that brought the idea
of wine, that brought the idea of the lifestyle of wine to those areas.
(25:49):
And I find that fascinating. And here you are talking about the Irish
in Bordeaux, which you don't, you don't hear, but that's
not the most common thing you hear about. No, it's certainly not the first thing
that comes to mind when you think of Bordeaux wine. Ireland has
spent a lot of time, certainly in the second half of the
20th century promoting the notion that it's all Guinness and
(26:11):
whiskey. Once a big wine
consuming society, and it was
also Irish merchants were very important in the
creation of modern Bordeaux. Remarkably so, in fact, they played an
integral role in, throughout the 18th
century that, you know, it speaks to your point
(26:32):
that so often it's because wine is
desired by people outside of the place it's produced.
Savvy merchants and people, you know, who want to drink themselves but also see an
opportunity, a market opportunity, go there, produce it and ship it off.
So, yeah, the Irish did that in the 18th century, starting in the
1690s. But they settle
(26:55):
in Bordeaux, which was accommodating both to
Irish Catholics because of course, France at that point had decided it was a
uniquely Catholic kingdom. And Irish Catholics were in
the 1690s being placed in second class status in their own
society. So they go from an anti
Catholic society to a very pro Catholic one. Meanwhile, Irish
(27:17):
Protestants who are on top
in Ireland go to France where you'd think they would be
personae non grata because they are Protestant and Protestants had just been kicked out
of France. But French tax collectors
were too clever to kick out all their
Huguenots on the grounds that we would reduce, you know, we'll
(27:39):
reduce our tax base. So they. So that Protestant
foreign merchants were actually found a small
community of Protestants. They weren't, you know, as long as they paid their
taxes, they were tolerated. But in the case of the Irish, what's fascinating is
Protestant and Catholic, they all got along famously and went to the same, you
know, cafe and
(28:01):
hotel in Bordeaux. They had balls together, they went into
business together, they hired each other's children and servants.
Very rarely did they intermarry, but they were very much a
community who worked together, slaughtered together and were friends.
And in hard situations, they loaned, you know, they were loaning money. So it was
really, they were Irish. The French didn't really draw a distinction between whether
(28:23):
they were Catholic or Protestant. But there's
about 65, 35. You know, money talks is what you're trying to
say. But it was actually sort
of a, sort of a marvel when you think about what's happening back in
Ireland or in some ways in France itself, with this religious intolerance. But the
key thing is really their role in wine production, which is that they were buying
(28:45):
up all of the, what we
now call first growth wines. I mean, when I say all, I mean literally
all. And shipping them off
to the two most lucrative markets that wanted those wines, and
that was England and Ireland itself now.
And no one else was buying Lafitte, Latour, Margaux, bouillon, et
(29:08):
cetera. It was just for that market. It's also important to say that they weren't
just buying and shipping. They were buying in what we would call sort of Emprimeur
or even earlier, often in December, following the harvest. So the wines
were super yellow. And then they would, they were the ones who would
raise the wines sometimes up to five, seven years, kind of like
a Rioja. They would have them in barrel that long and then ship them. But
(29:30):
they would also blend them for the market, for the taste of the
elite British and Irish markets who wanted them to
taste somewhat differently than they would have without
the addition of Syrah from the R
Valley or Alicante, sorry,
Grenache from up by, you know, just south of
(29:53):
Barcelona and then
morved from down by. From
down by Alicante. So that reminds
me of a word I haven't heard in a long time. Negociant. Right. That's
exactly what they were. They were. I have not heard that in
a long time. So what, so what Was this? The 18th century?
(30:16):
You're talking about 19. This is the 18th century. And well, as you know, it
wasn't until. Well, actually, let me back up here.
Starting around in the, in the 1850s with the whole,
as you know, there was a whole series of, of diseases that came
from North America. In fact, with
Odium, then Floxera and then downy
(30:38):
mildew that hit France, 1850s, 60s,
70s, one after the other. Phylloxera was the worst. But the two different types of
mildew, powdery mildew and downy mildew, are also
disastrous in some ways. Ultimately
these were overcome. The phylloxer, certainly with American rootstock,
(30:58):
but. And then you learn copper sulfate. It seems like that on the vines help
to keep away the mildew and the
rot. But all that to say what then
happens is in the period 1850 to roughly
1930s, you get this change in the
perspective of the consumer. Whereas
(31:20):
previously they wanted the elite consumers in London
and Dublin and in Hamburg and in New York, they
wanted. And in Paris, they wanted wines that
were blended, that is, wines that had about
15%, depending on the year. You know, GSM,
Grenache, Syrah, Morvedre. And
(31:42):
then what then happens with all of the
fraud? They didn't think of that as fraud, actually. But then what
happens with all these diseases is you get wines coming
in from elsewhere, from, in particular, from Algeria, France's
colony, that is then being sent off
as Bordeaux or later Burgundy.
(32:05):
And you get all this. You get things that are labeled. So
when in the period in the 18th century, when you had
your Chateau Lafitte, it may have been 80% Chateau
Lafitte, 20%, something else. And people were fine with that. They didn't think of that
as fraud. You weren't putting anything besides wine in there, and you were making a
better product. But starting in the 1850s, up until about
(32:28):
1930, you get this notion that it's a process,
that you're now selling me something that really isn't even
close to what you say it is.
And so, along with
industrialization, awareness of microbes, because Pasteur
comes along, he identifies microbes and germs, and everybody starts
(32:50):
to panic. And then you have the fact that it's Algerian wine,
which, frankly, there are prejudices, obviously, racial prejudice, against things that came
from Africa. And
now this idea of blending wines from
two different places doesn't work anymore. So by the 1930s,
what was done in the 18th century and demanded by
(33:12):
elite customers in the 18th century, by the 1930s, that's a
criminal act. And so you get the AOC laws in the
1930s that say if you blend this one with that one,
you are going to jail, and that those are still the laws in place.
So it's a fascinating history of. It's a mental shift in the mind of the
consumer as well as a shift in production in which
(33:35):
you don't consider doing that now unless you're an unscrupulous
winemaker, whereas the very best winemakers were doing that in the 18th
century because that's what their customers wanted. Let me stop you. That's fascinating
because. Not that I made a career of it, but the stuff we used to
taste over the 35 years, every Tuesday, I mean, we saw everybody's
attempt at trying to do something that they thought was innovative in this industry.
(33:56):
And one of them was a great Wine. And the poor
guy, it was called.
Oh man. Anyway, he had two blends and he thought that he
was going to set the world on fire by blending Sonoma juice with Napa juice.
It was on the label that way, which you can do in the new world
anyway. In California you can do that all you want. But this was
(34:17):
stated on the label, we're going to do this. And I just, it just hits
me as this, it just seems to repeat itself. Look at
Joe Franzia, the Franzia brothers, you know, getting busted for
making bottling white Zinfandel. But it was really Grenache
and they, they faked the leaves in the truck so that the winemaker would think
that was Zinfandel. And you know, they, they should have gone to jail for that.
(34:39):
Actually. It was about to just got fined. But you
know, it's just so interesting because this industry seems to
have the attraction of that kind of thing that
to, to do something that may not seem so kosher on the
surface and then it changes, the rules change
and now it's not a lot. It just seems what other product in the
(35:01):
world has this not
ambition but this allure to do that,
to try something like this? I just think that's amazing. It's consumers
who drive these changes in many ways. So again in the
18th century, consumers, when you read the letters from merchants who
are speaking on behalf of their customers, who
(35:24):
are writing to their producers, to the Irish
in Bordeaux who are really in many ways the producers of the wine,
you know, it's please don't send me any of that stuff that hasn't been
blended with a little bit of Hermitage. I want the
Hermitage, I want the Grenache, I want the Mourvedre from
Spain, what they call the Alicante and the Benny Carlo.
(35:46):
And I want the Hermitage. And it's too thin
otherwise and the customers won't like it.
Likewise, when Hugh Barton, who
was a member of the illustrious Barton family from
County Forbana in Ireland, in fact, it was 300 years ago this
year that Tom Barton arrived in Bordeaux. But his
(36:08):
grandson Hugh, who was running the firm in Bordeaux
during the 1780s and 90s when the French Revolution broke
out, he was imprisoned. He was got out of
jail because his French born Irish wife, Anna
Johnston, the Johnstons are also still very much in
Bordeaux. She was able to spring him from jail because he was
(36:29):
French. But then they quickly got out of
Dodge. But before going, he went into
partnership with a French guy named Gastier and that became part
of Gastier. You're Certainly familiar with that. But one of the things that
he then tried to implore the French authorities saying,
my stocks of wine that I have, they're
(36:51):
no good to you because they're blended.
They're, you know, the Chateau Lafitte is Chateau Lafitte, but
it's much too rich and full bodied for the French market. So please
let me get it out of here and ship it off to the one market
that wants this stuff. Wow. Which is the British
Isles. That's amazing story. I did a lot of business with
(37:13):
Barney Gastier over the years early on.
So let's. I don't know if it was your conversation or with
Tim Hani about the definition of terroir
having changed from was, I
think I say despicable, but it was not a positive
term in the world of wine. And now, of course, it's
(37:36):
used, as aficionados like to say, it's the
terroir. And it's driven by terroir and maybe even one of those
air aristocratic terms that people don't understand what you're talking
about. But I wanted to apply it to list the current
definition, which is what the vines have gone through
to get to where they're at when they make the wine. And I have
(37:58):
this opinion and I think you'd be the perfect person
to reflect on that is all the history
of. Let's just talk about the Irish who came to Bordeaux and all the things
you're talking about right now and the blending and the unblending and then the illegal
part of that. No longer an appellation allows that
blending. Doesn't that all roll up
(38:19):
eventually as terroir to
that particular bottle. You're not going to taste the
fact that some negociant Irish, negociant back in the day was
blending, you know, Grenache and the wine. But wouldn't
the mentality, the thought process, the education of the winemakers, the
storytelling to the winemakers reflect
(38:41):
in a bottle of wine like that. Well, that's
another excellent and maybe very difficult question
to answer because terroir, I mean, without, if
you, you know, if you accept the blending of
even, you know, 5%, 10%, 15% of wines from elsewhere
(39:01):
into, you know, again
and marketed as such, then fundamentally you're rejecting the idea
of terroir or, you know, I don't just point out
Bordeaux at this point in, in Burgundy, at the same time,
their big wine to, to, to blend in the
(39:22):
early modern era in the 18th century was Chateauneuf du
Pape. So just as in Some ways, the, the, the
chickens had come home to roost. Because in
the, the late Middle ages, in the 14th century, in
particular, 1309-1377, the Papacy
was not in Rome, it was in Avignon.
(39:45):
That's right. And all the popes were
French, not surprisingly,
all the Avignon popes, and
they presumably were following the fashion of the court
in Paris and of wealthy Northern Europeans who had taken
to Burgundy wine. And what they
(40:06):
called Vende Beaune was sort of. That was the. They didn't have any
particular conception of a specific terroir. But Beaune was obviously being the
market town there. It was all called Vende Beaune. And that.
That was the really fashionable wine in, at the
court, both in Paris as well
as at the papal court in Avignon.
(40:29):
But those popes obviously also had a little
weekend house just to the north of the town of Avignon, which became
the pope's new castle. Hence Chateau Neuf du Pape,
which was planted with very different grapes. We know there are, I guess,
what, 17 different types, or 13 or 17
of grapes that you can use. And now mostly
(40:52):
Grenache and Mourvedre and Syrah and Sausso and counoise, whatever.
But. But that wasn't the wine they were
drinking at the court at the time. They were drinking wine that had come down
from Burgundy, but those much riper
wines, those much riper wines produced for much riper grapes because
it's much hotter. And they also have those very large
(41:14):
stones, of course, that reflect the heat even at night in the
summertime, and really ripen. The Grenache and the Movedo,
those were later desired back in Burgundy as a way to
thicken up, give some greater body
to Burgundy wines, which by the 18th century were
considered in some ways too thin, without the addition
(41:36):
of a little touch of Chef Neuf du Pape. So by no means was this
just a Bordeaux thing. This was very. You know, it's going on
all over the place. And again, it was not considered fraud. What
was considered fraud was when you added something besides wine,
grape juice. If you were to add elderberry juice or beets, that would
be fraud. But, you know, you can blend your
(41:58):
wines as you wanted, but the very idea of blending wines
takes away. So if you do that now in France, you have a Vin de
France, right? So
Chateau Palmer makes a 19th century,
what they call a Bordeaux, 19th century blend. And
(42:19):
it's basically, it adds. They get some wine from Hermitage, so some
Syrah, and they put it in, and it's quite an expensive Wine,
and it's, it's wonderful. But it's sold as a Vin
de France, the lowest level, because there's some wine from the Rhone
Valley, very high quality Amitage, but it goes in
to. So what do you think? That. That's an interesting point. At least stop it
(42:42):
there. They change it from vin de table because that, you know, that
sounds much more generic. And now we have Vin de France. At least the word
France is in there. But. Okay, so if the history of wine
was to blend, and I guess the, the logic is the
whole is greater than the sum of its parts and that's what was
happening. Like, I, I don't think I've ever tasted an Algerian wine. I have to
(43:04):
go check my database, but I would. I'm guessing this is earthy,
heavy duty, you know, thick, thick
skinned, extracted wine. But let's just. The idea
of blending wines is now
very appellated. I mean, it's very controlled by the appellation. Right.
So what was the movement that, that
(43:26):
created this, I'm going to say, chasm between the old world, which is what
we consider today's world of wine, and Burgundy is only Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, et
cetera. In the new world, which you can do whatever you want, you still.
Right. That's the attraction of the French to America.
Yeah. You can still mostly do what you
want to, depending on where you are in Languedoc and where you are in Loire
(43:48):
Valley. There are some rules here and there, but there are also places in Loire
Valley and certainly in Languedoc, where you can do, you know, you can plant
whatever the heck you want. What was the historical movement from the time that
you could put Syrah in Burgundy?
To do that and you go to jail? Well, this gets. So I'm going
to try to tie these things together, but this gets back to your question about
(44:09):
terroir. So my point was simply you can't really have this notion
of terroir specifically in the way that you do now when
you're allowed to bring in wines that come from a different terroir.
So, you know, when you have two terroir together, it's
no longer a terroir driven wine. That's right.
(44:29):
And I would also argue that there was a sense terroir developed as a
concept even while they were still blending, because most of the wine
in what was labeled, you know, Vin de Bone, or, you know, Vin
Deux de Grave or Poyac, it was
mostly still from there, but it
was. But not all from there. So, you know,
(44:52):
we have these sort of binary clean cut categories that they didn't necessarily have.
So terroir as a concept existed even when wines
were still being blended, but
from different, different parts of the of France or from different vineyards, you
know, 10 miles, 15 miles apart in a different.
But so a couple things happen in the. To go back
(45:15):
to the Burgundy case, it's really in the 17th
century when land ownership moves from
the church to private
individuals, many of whom are
ennobled. So it goes from the lords
of the church, you might say, to the lords of the secular lords, who now
(45:37):
own most of the land and therefore most of the wine production in
Burgundy. And what happens
is that they are trying to sort of sacralize
their. They're trying to make a product for the market, obviously, because, you know, land
ownership is only worth something if you can make money from the products of your
land. So to sort of secularize their
(45:59):
wine. It's at that time that they
begin to emphasize
what we think of as this medieval concept, which wasn't,
but that of the Klima in Burgundy. That is, this
is my specific wine. And since
by circumscribing
(46:22):
comes from a very specific area, and it comes from, with my noble pedigree
and my noble care, you're ennobling the
wine and therefore increasing the chances, you might say, of
sale. Because then it becomes something that another fellow consumer might
say, by drinking this wine, I'm drinking this noble product.
And of course, the better the wine is, and the better its reputation
(46:45):
is, the greater the profit margin for sale. So
it's a way to subtly.
Be. A businessman, despite being an aristocrat, by having this
product. So it's really, you see that as part of
the land change from church to secular authorities in
Burgundy, the notion of Klima. And from Klima, you know, things
(47:08):
get ever smaller, down to this idea that the Klima is the
tailwalk, and this really matters. But, you know, one of the things that sort of
shows just how invented this concept is, is if
you look at the Clos de Vougeau, you know, the most famous Clos in all
of Burgundy, it's
also the largest, but it was put together from
(47:30):
the 11th century to the 14th century by Cistercian monks who
lived right around the corner at Seitou, and they
had about a 13 kilometer walk over to the vineyard. Of course,
they had lay brothers and lay sisters doing a lot of the labor for them.
But, you know, we think of the idea of this close, this unified
vineyard, where the Terroir is fundamentally the
(47:51):
same. Done these intense studies of the
Clos de Vougeot to show that it's an incredible mosaic, that the
monks saying, this is just the right. This
is clay and limestone here and nowhere. And outside of this wall, it's not clay
and limestone. Within the coat of Ugeau, you get all of these different
soil types. So what was really going on, it had very little to
(48:13):
do with this notion of a distinct terroir, had much more to do with
the wall was there purpose of wind protection,
erosion protection. Because when the soil drops down to the bottom of the hill,
it's contained by a wall. And you can take it back up to the top
of the hill and put it there and let it go down again. It's to
keep grazing animals out and it's to define the
(48:35):
workspace. Because you have to pay people in cash or in kind
or something to work this space. So it's a way
before payments were all cash banks, but they're often in kind.
Like, this is how much work you have to do. What do you mean, like
10 hours or $100? No, no, no. It's
the space that's. It defines work.
(48:56):
But it's in the 17th century that you begin to see the
emergence of. It's this terroir that really matters. And the same thing happens in
Bordeaux in the 1660, when Arnaud de Pontac
gives a name to his specific
property, Aubrion. And that's it. So
I found a document that I guess helped
(49:18):
put me on the map as a wine historian. Very small group of people, by
the way, wine historians. But it was the first mention of
Aubrion. And it came from King Charles II
Cellarbrook, a month after he was returned to the throne, restored to the
throne in June of 1660. And there it is. Arnaud
de Pontac is shipping this wine. He wants to go right to that
(49:38):
elite market. But he's not calling it Vin de Grave, he's calling it
it O O. And so it's
this. I mean, I think we see the same thing now with
this specification of. In the
delimiting of the area and the quantity, which
heightens the prestige of the product. So when you get a, you know,
(50:01):
you can get your Macallan single malt, but then when
you get a MA that is aged 15 years,
it's finished in two different kinds of barrels and it's a special
edition and they only make thousand bottles.
Well, now you've got a product that, look, not everybody can get.
There are only a thousand Bottles out there. Right. So terroir
(50:23):
helps to, in a sense,
make land ownership and quality
production into a more lucrative effort because you're
limiting the amount that's being produced and you're
delimiting the space from which it can be produced. And of course,
very often you really are making a product that people find
(50:45):
discernibly superior. But it's also. I mean,
so it's also a marketing thing. So the notion that
for the anti terroir group saying, oh, it's this sort of French idea, that there's
really a bunch of bs. No, you tell me that you can
make merceau anywhere in the world. No,
look, Merceau makes a pretty special chardonnay that's really hard to reproduce
(51:06):
anywhere else. At the same time, there is some
truth to the idea that, that, you know, terroir
is also and can be manipulated as a.
As a way to market and as a way to limit competition. Wow,
that is. That is a. It's right on. And this
history. We're. We're already at an hour, if you can believe this. But
(51:29):
because we haven't even touched on. And I wanted to get into this. I mean,
I think we'll just say it for the next time, which is when you teach
these things, when you do what you do as a wine historian, when you
put on a tasting, when you have these conversations, I want to hear in the
next episode how it's received and what people
ask. But while we're on this subject of terroir,
(51:51):
because I always thought, and this will be the final thought, that
for instance, when the Nazis invaded Bordeaux and the stories
about, you know, the. The local people stealing
from the Nazis, the copper and then making copper sulfate, and then that guy
disappeared. All these amazing stories have been handed down, not the least of
which which you've probably read the book Wine and War having. I'm
(52:13):
having dinner with the cladstrup in two weeks
about Monsieur Hue and how
that glass of wine that 1940 Vouvray kept him alive in
the concentration camps. And the point I'm making is if
you were to take the definition terroir, which you've just. You
haven't diffused it, but you certainly have expanded the definition into this
(52:36):
marketing angle, as. Whereas there is certain validity to the
fact that it thrown in one place. I think you're wrong. I'm not saying
terroir isn't real. Right. I'm saying I expressed that last night. I opened a
bottle of Merceau and I also put a bottle of. Of A
domestic Chardonnay. And it was radically different. So you can't argue that.
Right. But it seems to me that if, for instance, Monsieur
(52:58):
Hue, I went through that experience and his
lifestyle change and his outlook on life change, all the
steel de Vi, you know, if it all changed, that that
becomes part of
what they do and how they think and what their lifestyle is. When
they make that next bottle of wine, the things that have rolled up into
(53:21):
his life becomes part of that expression.
That's the romantic part of what I think terroir might
be. No, and I think it's a way of marking.
Terroir is a way of marking
time and space, particularly space.
But I should say terroir is a way of marking space, and
(53:42):
vintage is a way of marking time. And, you know,
human beings. That's a great way to put it. We like to do many things,
but one of the things we really want to do, it seems to make
meaning of our lives or give meaning to our lives, is to map out time
and space. That really helps us, you know, just be human, I
think. And so that.
(54:05):
That terroir gives us a sense of, you
know, I understand space a little bit because it's not just from
wine. It doesn't come from, you know, from everywhere. It comes from this particular place.
And then when you add to that vintage, which
isn't really a thing, believe it or not, until
the 18th century, because up to that point,
(54:27):
almost all wine, as you know, was consumed within the year. So the
next of, you know, what vintage is it? What do you mean, what vintage is?
It's. Here's one that doesn't. It's
only when you age wine beyond a year that you start to,
you know. So which year? Yeah, this. This tastes like it was last
year's. Yeah. So. So when. When you start to
(54:48):
get into these wines that
are more carefully made from a circumscribed
space, they actually can last longer. And then that
allows us to map time by saying, ah, which year? And then
that becomes sort of a fascinating way to also.
Well, becomes one of the fascinating things about wine because not only does wine
(55:10):
allow us to see, ah, there is a difference between,
you know, Meursault and Puligny
Montracher, which is right next door. But the wine can be slightly
different, often are slightly different. So there's both. There's the. There's the
terroir that makes the difference, there's the producer that makes the difference, and there's the
year that makes the difference. And all this becomes part
(55:33):
of what makes wine magical? Because there are all these
variables that that are, are, are both
on the pallet, but in our mind too. And that's when, you know, that's why
wine is endlessly fascinating to people like the two of us and
obviously a couple, you know, a few hundred million other
people on the planet, it just to find that aspect of it.
(55:55):
But I guess what I'm trying to do is understand why is it so fascinating
to us. And I think it's the fact that it helps us map time and
space. That's an interesting thought. I had a woman on
last week and she is a
PhD. She has two masters in theology and a PhD in
theology. And she's
making that same connection through the Bible and
(56:18):
wine as expression of, of God's will
to our soul. And so that's a whole different level of
conversation in regards to that. But it was really, really interesting.
But that's a really important question because there's no other beverage that
does that, that asks those questions. You know, it seems to be
sort of unique that way. And of course, you know, that's one of the reasons
(56:40):
it's been so important to so many religions. I mean,
certainly within the broad Judeo Christian tradition,
but even before that with, with, you know, Greek and Roman
and the Mesopotamian, you know, I'm leaving out some cultures there too. But
you know, within all these traditions, wine was
this a
(57:02):
distinctly spiritual beverage in a way
that say, beer didn't become that, or other
narcotics didn't become, become that
said that. It, you know, it remains, I think, sort of
unique in that sense. My dad, we were in Armenia and we
were talking about wine shows and we'll talk about that next time
(57:24):
we're off camera. But we were talking about wine shows together. But how do
we take some of these concepts and put them into film, put them into
reels so that people would pay attention more than 30 seconds depending on, you
know, what we're talking about. And one of the, one of
the subjects I wanted to peel back, and you'll probably be
helping me with this when the time comes because we are in Armenia. We are
(57:46):
sitting with the Pope of Armenia, the. They call him in Eshm.
And I just was noticing that throughout his residence
and throughout Armenia history and throughout Armenian
icons, grapes are there. I mean, it's everywhere. I'm sure
like most civilizations, the, the concept of
wine and grape is there. And so my, my, my
(58:09):
thought was how do we, how do I, how can I peel back
the importance of wine in the cult?
The, the religious culture of Armenia. You know, where can I
go? Where can I find. Why are grapes represented everywhere you
go? Grapes and pomegranates and that's. And I don't like pomegranate wine, so
I'm not going to do that. And so I'll leave it at
(58:31):
that. And, and we have a lot more to talk about next time and
I hope we can do this soon. I look forward to our next, next discussion.
I, I didn't even touch on half the stuff here, but this stuff was really,
really, really fun, Chad, to hear. What you have to say and
well, my, my pleasure. And, and again, I hope we can add more of
these because I'm having as much fun as you are. So we will thank
(58:53):
you again for this, this, this morning and we will
reconvene if I, I'll be in Paris for a week and Sicily. I'll be back
and I think when we come back sometime in April, we'll get back on and
we'll, we'll talk more about the consumerism and, and how
you approach it and, and to promote
this. Great. I look forward to that. Look forward to it.
(59:15):
Paul, safe trip and enjoy your wine
drinking in Paris and Sicily and all those other places. Thank you. Cheers.
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