How wine has changed since 1976
A reminiscence à la Jancis Robinson
Special thanks to all my readers who have stuck with me through thick and thin. In this article I make mention of sommeliers, most of whom I admire for being almost frightfully wine-savvy—certainly more knowledgeable, in many ways, than I ever was. One thing I can offer, though, is perspective. 47 years of it, starting from the days when selling wine, even in white tablecloth restaurants, was like pulling teeth. To enjoy this article in its entirety, please consider (if you have not already done so) signing on as a paid subscriber. Best as always, RC.
I recently found an article I had squirreled away in my computer files ten years ago. It was entitled “How wine has changed since 1985,” dated May 23, 2015, written by the famous Jancis Robinson and posted on her jancisrobinson.com page.
I distinctly remember keeping the piece because I thought that there is great value in looking back at the past to understand what is going on in the present. Robinson, for instance, recalls the growing media and consumer obsession over well oaked Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon in the mid-1980s, writing:
Chardonnay was retained because, of all white wine grapes, it had the greatest affinity with the winemaker’s accoutrement du jour, the new, small, French (to be smart in wine then was to be French) oak barrel. The totems for seriousness of intent for wine producers in the 1980s and early 1990s were their attempts to mimic white Burgundy via Chardonnay, red Bordeaux via Cabernet, and the number of small oak barrels they bought each year. The more the merrier, and wines tasted oakier and oakier.
New World v Old World was a big preoccupation then, with California the first successful representative of the former, thanks to the seminal Judgment of Paris tastings, then a novel phenomenon.
In her bio Robinson says she began her wine writing career in 1975, “virtually pre-history as far as far as modern wine is concerned.” I am entitling my own piece here “How wine has changed since 1976,” because ’76 was the year I could probably be described as a hopelessly hooked, full blown wine nut. 1976, of course, was also the year of the “Judgement of Paris,” considered a watershed moment for the American wine industry, and for eager-beaver wine nerds like me. Two years later I took on my first full-time job as a sommelier, at the tender age of 21.
Well before becoming a sommelier, though, I had cobbled together a group of aficionados of like mind and multiple ages and occupations. We got together, 12 to 18 of us at a time, once or twice a month for blind tastings which followed numerous formats. One tasting might be a mix of six Mosel-Saar-Ruwer QbA Rieslings which we would compare to six QbAs from the Rheingau and Pfalz. Or all Gewürztraminers (American and Alsatian), or comparisons of California Sauvignon and Fumé Blancs with Sancerre and Pouilly-Fumé.
I well remember a tasting in which we put together all the 1970 California Cabernet Sauvignons we could find, and another one in which we gathered Zinfandels from as many wine regions as possible in the vain attempt to discover terroir-related distinctions (we failed because, in those days, Zinfandels were made according to styles of individual brands and their wood aging regimes, rather than places—something still largely true today).
The most insightful tastings, no doubt, were those in which we did our own California vs. France “taste-offs,” following Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon as well as Pinot Noir themes. In retrospect, here is what we found in those formative days...
In the late ‘70s the handcrafted brands of California Chardonnay were most definitely intense, but they were almost always big, fat, tropical fruited and incredibly oaky (excessive vanilla, toast and bitter wood tannin). We knew then, as I know now, that they were not that good, despite all the hullabaloo made about them at the time.
White Burgundies tasted like, well, white Burgundy—lots of minerality, and invariably good, lemony acidity—but the funny thing about crus Côte de Beaune at the time (primarily, in our tastings, Meursaults, Chassagne-Montrachets, Puligny-Montrachets, all the way up to Le Montrachet), was that they were also typically over-oaked. After a few blind tastings, in fact, we could easily pick white Burgundies out because they were the ones that were toasty to the point of smelling like what I used to call “hot dog water.” They could be disappointing, in other words, although we certainly appreciated their lightness and crispness in contrast to big, fat, fruity California Chardonnays.
1970s-era California Cabernet Sauvignon could also be very good, but absolutely no one ever confused fruit-focused Cabernets with Bordeaux crus in blind tastings; the latter always coming across as lighter in body, more subtle in layering and oak, more acid driven, earthier and classically “finesseful.” We put them all in blind tastings—Beaulieu Private Reserve, Heitz Martha’s Vineyard, Silver Oak, Ridge Monte Bello, Lafite, Margaux, Mouton, Pichon-Lalande, Lynch-Bages, you name it. Over and over, it was always the same—California Cabernets tasted ripe and full, Bordeaux crus lighter and finer, even if occasionally underripe. How anyone (like the French judges in Paris) could ever confuse the two different worlds was beyond us. If you chose a Mondavi Reserve “first” in a blind tasting, it was because you were acknowledging that the California style is just as valid for you as a Bordeaux. If a Lafite was your top pick, obviously you prefer the subtle French style. Simple as that.
I have never minded methoxypyrazine (i.e., herby, bell pepper or minty notes) in Cabernet based reds from either Bordeaux or California. In fact, I love it, and wines in the ‘70s had that in spades (more a byproduct of farming practices than chosen styles). But the more shockingly disappointing attribute of many Bordeaux crus was their penchant for Brettanomyces. Many, sometimes most, of the Bordelais in line-ups (top growths such as Lafite or Margaux being among the major exceptions) were rife with barnyard aromas. We used to regularly throw around words like “rubber boot” and “Band-Aid!” whenever we came across these rank smells; so, in a way, this was also a “tell” in blind tastings. The sad part was when we started noticing California wines finished with Brettanomyces—as if imitating the worst aspects of Bordeaux was a way of making wine “better.” A few short years later when we began seeing widely followed wine critics lauding high-Brett wines, giving the stinkiest of them scores of “95” or “98,” we had no choice but to truly question the sanity, or intelligence, of much of the wine media. I still do.
Mid-to-late ‘70s California Pinot Noirs were very weak—seemingly distant expressions of the grape; most certainly a far cry from red Burgundies of those times, and the many amazing American Pinot Noirs of today. Red Burgundies, though, were invariably earthy; more often than not, either rustic, pointedly tart, sometimes scrawny, or like white Burgundies, excessively oaked. Thank god, within a few years Burgundies began steering away from the latter issue. Thinking back, it was a funny time for French wine. It was as if they were still finding their way, just like Californians (who were more like lost in the dark). Oregon Pinot Noirs of the time, incidentally, still looked and tasted more like rosés—promising in terms of acid balance, lightness and sense of place (one could argue that lightness and acidity are the true calling of well heeled Willamette Valley Pinots), but without much stuffing at all. Ironically, rosé-like reds are now in the vogue, but that’s another topic. In the ‘70s, it was more a matter of “can you make a Pinot Noir that captures even a semblance of varietal character?” Terroir should not be something you can claim until you at least get to first base, and even leading California producers of the time (such as Sanford & Benedict, Chalone, Hoffman Mountain Ranch, Carneros Creek or Robert Mondavi) were barely there.
I stopped organizing my own blind tastings long ago (at least 30 years) for the simple reason that I just don’t think the finest or most interesting wines of the world should be evaluated on the basis of arbitrary perceptions, such as “varietal character,” or even broad regional typicité (one of the greatest joys in life is appreciating individuality of vineyards, not to mention the talents and originality of individualistic winemakers), and blind tastings force you to fall back on preconceptions rather than accepting wines for what they are. I can’t remember who first made the allusion, but blind tastings, to me, are like judging women in beauty contests on the basis on who has the biggest or most shapely breasts. This is not how good wine is appreciated.
Up until about ten years ago I was still doing four to six professional wine judgings a year, but I stopped that altogether for the same reasons. While some of my favorite industry colleagues remain serial wine judges, I just can’t agree with the concept. It is always a shame that wines into which vintners put in thousands of hours in the field and wineries are “judged” on a table within a few short seconds; then given a “pass” only when they kowtow to (again) someone’s arbitrary opinions on quality. Sure, award winning wines usually end up being very good wines. The process, though, is unseemly; certainly not fit for wines defined primarily by place-driven identity, or the creativity of vintners endeavoring to achieve something different.
The most interesting wines do not “perform” in blind tastings or wine judgings, nor should they.
I’d like to quote an even bigger chunk of Robinson’s 2015 reminiscence because it contains more terrific food for thought on how far along wine has come over the past 40 or so years. Re her thoughts from ten years ago, on the progress made since the 1980s...
New World wine producers had three attributes that were seen as particularly attractive then. Their extra sunshine resulted in wines that seemed riper, friendlier and readier to drink than Europe’s more reticent offerings. The New World way of naming wine after the grape rather than with a complicated, highly regulated, geographical appellation made life much easier for consumers. And New World winemakers had been scientifically trained, and knew how to use an armoury of inputs and techniques in order to produce dependably clean, fruity (though sometimes too oaky) wines. So-called flying winemakers, hard workers typically from the southern hemisphere, swept through the less favoured wine regions of Europe preaching the gospel of cleanliness and technological efficiency so that technically faulty wine had become a thing of the past throughout most of the world by the early to mid-1990s.
The top end of the wine business was undergoing revolution, too. In 1986 in the Sunday Times magazine I wrote the first UK profile of an up-and-coming American wine writer, an ex-lawyer called Robert Parker who devoted his days to tasting up to 100 fine wines, and introduced the concept of scoring these wines out of 100. Bordeaux, his first love, was at the beginning of a new era in which, thanks to the work of an inspiring oenologist Professor Émile Peynaud, stringy, tart, underripe red Bordeaux was becoming a thing of the past.
Parker’s scores were so delightfully consistent (unlike mine) and the scores themselves so easy to understand and use as a marketing tool, that they came to dominate the fine-wine market throughout the rapidly expanding world of wine consumers—even in the burgeoning markets of Asia. Although he has repeatedly denied that he favours super-ripe wines, the perception became widespread among producers that the formula for attracting a high Parker score, a shortcut to high prices and easy sales, was particularly ripe grapes, high alcohol and quite a lot of new oak. (This for red wines; white wines have, alas, played a minor role in the world of fine wine this century.) Of course, as Parker well knows, fine wine is much subtler than this, and many of the attempts to emulate a supposed Parker Platonic ideal failed miserably. But the result, particularly in California, South America, Australia and even in some quarters of Bordeaux, Italy and the Rhône, was a rash of exaggerated, highly potent wines in which winemaking technique all but obliterated their geographical origins.
But for every action there is a reaction, and Parker, by dint of his own hard work, became so powerful that a counter-movement was inevitable. Coinciding with the sale of his newsletter The Wine Advocate and website erobertparker.com, a new paradigm of wine has emerged, not just as a reaction to what was perceived as ‘Parkerised’ wines but as part of the zeitgeist that seeks less industrialisation, more geographical traceability and expression and, once again, more refreshment. In wine terms this translates into more emphasis on the vineyard than on the winery, much less new oak, more celebration of indigenous rather than international vine varieties, wines that taste lighter and fresher. So-called natural wines in which chemical inputs are reduced to a sometimes-dangerous minimum are at the extreme of this spectrum. Those made with minimal but some intervention in the winery from biodynamically or organically grown vines are increasingly common.
And that is still a good summary of where the wine world is still at, more or less. I love how Robinson can speak of influencers such as Robert Parker with some degree of affection while still commenting on some of the devastating consequences of his work. It’s not all Parker’s fault, of course, that we have now been suffering through several decades during which high alcohol, oaky, “super-ripe” qualities became standards, practically “obliterating geographical origins.” Thanks a lot, buddy. Sure, you done some good, but could you now please leave the building, and take your evil spawn with you?
The industry, I like to think, is currently in the process of course-correction. Slowly but surely, wine media is becoming more responsible, or at least a little more cognizant of not trying to screw over their poor readers’ tastes by distorted views of wine quality. Either that, or readers are getting smarter and less inclined to swallow everything hook, line and sinker.
In fact, most professional sommeliers (i.e., those who actually work in restaurants) stopped following 100-point scores a long time ago. Many of them revel in wines for their originality, deliberately eschewing sameness. Imagine that. The gall of sommeliers, forcing guests to enjoy new, different, exciting experiences. Who do they think they are, chefs?
This, of course, has been creating something of a gulf between them and other factions in the wine industry who believe that this has put sommeliers out of touch with the rest of the wine world.
I do not think sommeliers, who are practicing their trade according to what I believe to be the proper training, are out of touch. On the contrary, they are trying to drag wine appreciation back to where it originally started, which is the idea that wines come from grapes which come from vineyards that are part of wine regions. You know, like fruit of the vine growing from the ground, not as artificial concoctions springing from the brains of sales and marketing teams.
Therefore, wines—at least the most interesting wines of the world—are better appreciated for where they are grown, not by how they are manufactured once they hit the winery. Doesn’t matter what kind of wine, be it a $15 Lodi Zinfandel or $1,500 Bordeaux premier grand cru, wine is more exciting, and endlessly fascinating when appreciated as a product of Nature, science and artistry, not as just another malleable, predictable commercial product.
The wine industry around the world has come a long way. Wines are better than ever. Infinitely better than in the 1970s or ‘80s. Infinitely more varied, and far more interesting.
Yet, as we speak, wine consumption is in a downward spiral. In terms of pure revenue, the international wine industry is actually bigger than ever. It’s just that fewer people seem to be drinking wine, even while they keep insisting on spending more and more money on it. We live in a funny world.
I will say this, though: The only way we can all make sure that the wine world thrives is by making sure wines do not get any less interesting. We should support the bolder and more brazenly conceived wines, not the ones too lazy to move the needle.
We are, after all, thinking animals, and thinkers demand more variety, more quality, more sophistication—not less of anything. That’s just how things work. Besides, the older we get, the less tolerant we are of having our intelligence insulted. Or as the ever-inspiring Wendell Berry once put it...
The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it. But we will escape it only by adding something better to it.
