Globalisation, nature, and trade: Wine & Books

The Judgment of Paris: California vs. France and the Historic 1976 Paris Tasting that Revolutionized Wine by George M. Taber

Having watched the wildly inaccurate Bottle Shock, I had to read a more authentic and reliable account of the famous "Judgment of Paris" tasting. George Taber was the only journalist present at the legendary event, and so is ideally placed to give his take on what actually happened. The Paris Tasting was one of many such contests between Californian and French wine that took place during the 1970s, but the tasting was in Paris and featured some of France's leading members of the wine industry, including Robert Drouhin of Burgundy's leading négociant Joseph Drouhin, Aubert de Villaine of Burgundy's most exclusive winery Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, and Odette Kahn of La Revue du Vin de France. California came out on top: Chateau Montelena's 1973 Chardonnay won, by some distance, the morning's tasting of white wines, while Stag's Leap's 1973 Cabernet Sauvignon more narrowly won the tasting of Bordeauxesque reds.

Taber gives a reliable, if slightly one-sided, background to the event. A chapter each focuses on Steven Spurrier, a well-to-do young English wine merchant who organised the event, and a potted history of the wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy. Much of the spine of the book concentrates on the Californian wineries, producers, and winemakers who triumphed at the tasting: Jim Barrett, lawyer and co-owner of Montelena, Mike Grgich, their Croatian winemaker, and Warren Winiarski, owner of and winemaker at Stag's Leap, as well as the many people who laid the foundations of the Californian wine industry in the 1950s and 60s.

Taber peddles the American dream a little too relentlessly in these chapters: hard-working, honest Americans who achieved in less than twenty years what the French had spent two thousand working towards. All that knowledge the French had handed down from generation to generation was worthless: the Americans learnt it all in no time and did it even better. Grgich's European upbringing also becomes part of the fairy-tale: just look at what America allowed him to do that Croatia wouldn't have. Underneath this mythologising is the fact that the Californians looked towards and learnt much of what they knew from the French, using those thousands of years of knowledge to establish winemaking in nascent California.

Taber then awkwardly uses the Californian victory to herald the subsequent, glorious globalisation of wine. Fear not, Taber tells us, that wine made from ubiquitous grapes such as Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, and Cabernet Sauvignon all taste the same no matter where they come from "because they make outstanding wine, and consumers enjoy them." Forget fusty Old World wines, drink ultraclean New World brands like Yellow Tail. Overlook the near collapse of the Napa wine industry in the 1980s due to phylloxera because growers and UC Davis professors refused to listen to the French. Ignore the advances in grape growing and winemaking introduced by the French over the last few decades, and instead dismiss French wine as on death's door (France still produces twice as much as the USA).

Moving away from the US, in Taber's eyes all this makes Cloudy Bay the ultimate success story, whose history he swallows unquestioningly. As revolutionary a taste as New Zealand's Sauvignon Blanc was when it was launched on the world in the 1980s, it's wrong to say that, "France's Sancerre ... lacks any personality and is often too acidic." Just as it's wrong to believe that "wineshops run out of their allocation a few weeks after [Cloudy Bay] arrives each spring" - there's plenty of Cloudy Bay (now owned by France's Moët-Hennessey) out there, it's just that it's dripped into the market to create a sense of scarcity. And it's ironic that Cloudy Bay has become what Taber accuses French wine of being: priced on reputation rather than quality.

Ending the book with a sweeping, one-dimensional appraisal of the globalisation of wine feels out of place in what is supposed to be an account of a 1976 tasting and the development of Californian wine. The follow-up tastings in 1986 and 2006 are referred to only as further evidence of California's superiority, rather than delving more deeply into how the wines, their producers, and indeed the rest of the Californian wine industry has developed in that time. In the end, Taber's book had the opposite effect of the Paris tasting: to drive me back to quirky, odd French wines he believes the New World has seen the back of.

Natural Wine: An Introduction to Organic and Biodynamic Wines Made Naturally by Isabelle Legeron

Which leads to a book that details a very different development in the world of wine over the last twenty years. The book is presented even more one-sidedly than Taber's, but with the passion of someone who fervently believes in a subject she knows inside out.

Natural wine is an ill-defined movement led by French and Italian winemakers reacting against the use of chemicals and sulphites in winemaking. The purpose of natural wine is to make wine that represents the purity of the land and the grape, with as little human interference as possible.

This a beautifully presented book, which passionately argues in favour of all natural wine - not just the ethics, but its superior quality too. The latter I am yet to be convinced about (Legeron lists natural wines she recommends at the end of the book, which I will be interested to try), but her arguments for natural winemaking (and farming in general) are persuasive and even invigorating.

It's certainly a welcome antidote to Taber's espousal of the homogeneous globalisation of wine, a reaction against what one natural winegrower, Tony Coturri of Sonoma, describes as "Over-ripened, then diluted with water, acidified and 'corrected,' this is the premium Napa product, sold at 100 bucks a bottle."

As well as Legeron's passionate defence of natural wine, the book features several first-hand accounts from winemakers describing not just their approach to winemaking but also other aspects of farming: plants, herbs, bread, cider, and horses. Although highly subjective, the book has an inspirational core: making wine and growing things is something everyone of us can do if we work with nature, just as we have been doing for thousands of years. Sadly, my subsequent attempts to make bread have thus far disproved this theory.

Madeira: The Mid-Atlantic Wine by Alex Liddell

Madeira was perhaps the first "New World" wine. A small, rocky, woody island colonised by the Portuguese in the 1400s, Madeira quickly became known for the quality of its wines, particularly from the Malvazia grape (known as Malvasia elsewhere). The development of its industry was based solely on trade with Portugal's and Britain's new American colonies. It was these long distances which led to Madeira's unique taste: the wine is fortified and then aged for many years at warm temperatures to mimic transatlantic journeys.

Sadly, Madeira is too small an island to sustain its own domestic wine industry and its wine economy has been displaced over the centuries by wines from around the world. The wine too, while being one of the world's greatest, is too quirky, individual, and different to compete with wines that are released at a much younger age.

This leaves the Madeira wine industry in a sorry state: vineyards at the bottom of cliffs with unidentified varieties planted alongside bananas and vegetables; plantings are still dominated by American varieties that aren't actually allowed into the wine; there are only seven exporters; and what market there is in the UK and the US dwindles each year.

Liddell's style is as old-fashioned, determined, and sometimes difficult as the island's best wines - and like the wines I doubt this is a book that will fly off the shelves. But the book exists for a very good reason: the wines have their addicts like me, and the wine's rich history, which is such a vital part of Madeira's culture as well as the development of global trade, needs to be recorded. And unlike with Chardonnay or Cabernet Sauvignon, Californian brands are never going to successfully replicate the island's great, long-lived wines.

In two forthcoming blogs, I will be looking more closely at some Californian natural wines and California's historic and continuing use of European place names for low-quality wines.