Drink (68 page)

In addition to providing such home comforts as were feasible to combat troops, the authorities gave them local leave—in Vietnam, in other Asian countries, in Australia—and in every place, whether feted as heroes, fleeced as tourists, or hated as invaders, they won a reputation as hard drinkers with their thirsts. Asian children lined up to sell them liquor in the streets, Australians welcomed them into their veterans’ halls and plied them with beer. However, when many of the same men got back to the United States, they were denied entry to bars on account of their youth. The minimum drinking age in America remained at its post-Prohibition high of twenty-one, as, indeed, did the age at which its citizens could vote.

These discrepancies became important political issues in the United States. It was wrong to require people to fight, without giving them a say in whether their country went to war. In 1971 the franchise was extended to eighteen-year-olds by the Twenty-sixth Amendment to the Constitution. A similar line of reasoning was applied to drinking. If you could trust a nineteen-year-old with an M16 or a fighter jet, then why not with a can of beer when he got home? Moreover, some of the men then in power could remember coming back from World War I to Prohibition. Why inflict the same letdown on your own grandchildren? If they were old enough to fight, they were old enough to drink. In the early 1970s, thirty states decided to correct the anomaly and lowered their minimum drinking ages to eighteen.

In the same decade that grunts in Vietnam were sipping on their beer rations and the hippies of the Hashbury were eschewing alcohol for acid, a quiet revolution took place in the vineyards around the San Francisco Bay. California wine production had been growing steadily since repeal. In 1946, it had passed a hundred million gallons for the first time and in 1971 broke the two-hundred-million-gallon barrier. Most of this growth had come from fewer, larger wineries—America’s vintners, like its brewers, had consolidated. However, a counterculture emerged in the late sixties in the form of small boutique wineries, dedicated to excellence rather than volume. The prophet of quality was Andre Tchelistcheff, who came from France to the Beaulieu Winery, one of the few class vineyards to survive Prohibition, in 1937. He was horrified at the crude production methods then current—people grew port grapes next to Riesling vines, they flung sackloads of sulphur and chunks of ice into the must as it fermented, and pumped the resulting mess into concrete tanks to mature. Little by little over the following decades, Tchelistcheff succeeded in sorting out his vineyards, brought the concept of temperature control into the process of fermentation, and introduced oak barrels in which the improved juice might settle and become an attractive wine.

His apostles were assisted in their quest for excellence by the research of Dr. Albert Winkler at UC Davis, who invented a
heat summation
system to determine what type of grape would be best suited to a particular area of California. Heat summation quantified the number of “degree days” of sunshine the area received, matched these against European equivalents, and recommended appropriate grapes and methods of cultivation. Bordeaux, for instance, had two thousand five hundred degree days per annum, the same as Napa, suggesting that the valley and nearby Sonoma could be perfect for Cabernet Sauvignon vines and claret-style reds, while the flanks of their enclosing hills had a similar profile to those in Burgundy, where Chardonnay was planted to make white wines.

A few veterans of Prohibition, including Inglenook, Krug, and Mondavi, were quick to follow the trail blazed by Tchelistcheff and Winkler. They were joined in the 1960s by a fresh generation of American winemakers who were intent on creating spectacular vintages. The newcomers extended the hippy mantra then current across San Francisco Bay into something positive—tune in, turn on, drop out, make wine. There was also something of the frontier spirit at work among them. Hugh Johnston, writing of a visit made to the vineyards of northern California in 1963, declared himself to be “enthralled . . . with what I had tasted” but “appalled at the lack of interest and recognition by the public, or facilities for them to visit the Napa Valley with the slightest degree of comfort.”

The facilities may have been primitive, but the New Age winemakers were not. Following Winkler’s data, they ranged up and down the Pacific Coast. In the late 1950s, a UC Davis graduate, Richard Sommer, scouted north, making wine in Oregon and Washington, before setting up the Hillcrest Vineyard in the Umpqua Valley. In 1965, David Lett planted Pinot Noir at his Eyrie Vineyard in Oregon. Meanwhile, in Sunnyside, Washington, a group of wine-loving professors at the state university planted a handful of acres with vines with the aim of producing what they termed
varietals,
i.e., wines made from a single type of grape and intended to exhibit its ideal characteristics. The Sunnysiders crafted their first vintages in a garage in Seattle and soon had enough fans to turn their hobby into a business—the Columbia Winery.

By the early 1970s the fruits of the American quality revolution were apparent. Boutique wineries were making spectacular varietals, some of which reflected the best properties of the European wines on which they had been modeled. Cabernet Sauvignons and Chardonnays showed especial promise. Hugh Johnston was followed by other foreign oenophiles to Napa, and California wines acquired a cult status overseas. Some were so good, it was rumored, that they eclipsed their French prototypes. The issue was put to the test in 1976 when Steven Spurrier, an English wine merchant based in Paris, organized a blind tasting of California’s best, pitting them against some of France’s grandest
crus.
He lined up six American Cabernets against such elixirs as Mouton Rothschild ’70, and a Haut-Brion of the same year, and six Chardonnays against four white Burgundies. He assembled a jury of nine French men and women, the crème de la crème of French wine tasting, including growers from Bordeaux and Burgundy and the sommelier of the Tour d’Argent Restaurant in Paris. While a number of journalists were invited, only one, George M. Taber of
Time
magazine, attended. Although his two-thousand-word report on the tasting was slimmed down to a four-paragraph article in the June 7 edition of
Time,
the event turned out to be the biggest story of the twentieth century in the world of wine. In Taber’s words, “The unthinkable happened: California defeated all Gaul.”

Taber’s account of the contest suggests that the most respected connoisseurs of wine in France were unprepared, both in mind and in palate, for the possibility that French wine could be made better somewhere else: “As they swirled, sniffed, sipped, and spat, some judges were instantly able to separate an imported upstart from an aristocrat. More often, the panel was confused. ‘Ah, back to France!’ exclaimed [a French judge] after sipping a 1972 Chardonnay from the Napa Valley. ‘That is definitely California. It has no nose,’ said another judge— after downing a Bâtard-Montrachet ’73. Other comments included such Gallic gems as ‘This is nervous and agreeable,’ and ‘This soars out of the ordinary.’” When the scores of the judges were compiled, the “top-soaring” red was a 1972 Cabernet Sauvignon from Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars. American Chardonnays, meanwhile, took four out of the first five places among the whites. Robert Louis Stevenson’s prophecy that “the smack of California earth will linger on the palate of your grandson” had been fulfilled.

The results of the Judgment of Paris were played down in France. They received little immediate coverage, and subsequently were explained away as having been rigged by pitting California’s best years against unusually weak French vintages. French producers, however, took notice, and some invested in Californian soil, following a lead established by the champagne producer Moët Hennessy, which had bought land in Napa in 1973. In the same year that the global arbitrators of taste in wine had chosen California as the best source of Bordeaux-style reds, and Burgundy-style whites, Moët released a Napa Valley Brut, which hinted at the potential of the Golden State for making outstanding fizz. It was good enough to induce Piper-Heidsieck, another French champagne house, to invest in neighboring Sonoma, and to provoke the curiosity of the Coca-Cola Company, which bought two California wineries in 1977.

International fame and an increasing domestic appetite for American wine led to rapid growth in production. In 1979 California created 314 million gallons of poetic juice—half as much again as the year in which Stag’s Leap ’72 had been born. Most of this went down American throats: Between 1969 and 1979 per capita consumption close to doubled. While Thomas Jefferson’s dream that the United States might one day become a nation of vintners and wine drinkers had yet to be fulfilled, progress toward its realization was, at last, apparent.

34 WESTERNIZATION

The spirit of curiosity that had led Americans to experiment with alternative intoxicants and to perfect their winemaking skills was also at work in Asia over the third quarter of the twentieth century. It was strongest in Japan, where it took the guise of an ardent desire to embrace all things Western. This longing extended to Western drinks, which were perceived of as being essential to the culture of the Occident—as important as wearing an English suit or adopting American business practices. Western temperance, in contrast, was not considered to be a vital part of the dynamic culture the Japanese wished to imitate. In consequence, they started drinking beer and whisky in preference to sake and their other traditional beverages.

Their motivations for switching to beer were reflected in the ways in which it was promoted in Japan. Beer was portrayed as cool, modern, and American—as the lifeblood of that go-getting nation, whose industrial prowess the Japanese were keen to rival. The Asahi Brewing Company introduced canned suds to Japan in 1958, and the product was a runaway success: What better symbol could there be of economic vigor than the convenient, hygienic, transportable, and disposable beer can? The importance of an American connection was apparent in Sapporo beer’s advertising campaign of the same year, built upon the slogan “Munich, Sapporo, Milwaukee.” This was a clever bridge between the pre-World War II perception of beer in Japan as a traditional Teutonic brew and the new and desirable Yankee dynamism. The urge to imitate was apparent among corporations as well as consumers. Following the introduction of a minimum-level-of-productionlaw in 1959—no brewery could make less than two million liters (528,000 gallons)—the Japanese brewing industry underwent an American-style consolidation, and the country’s brewers contracted into five: Asahi, Kirin, Sapporo, Suntory, and Orion.

Whisky was also adopted as a symbol of the West, where whisky drinking, like playing golf, was believed to be the hallmark of every successful businessman. Whisky became the darling of Japanese white-collar workers, to whom it was an aspirational drink that conferred an aura of power upon its consumer. The market, thanks to tariff barriers, was dominated by domestic brands. Suntory led the field. In 1950 it released what was to become its flagship marque, Suntory OLD. This proved so popular that by 1961 it was being exported to the United States.
⁶⁹
While OLD and its ilk were packaged to resemble scotch, their flavor profiles were different from the fluids they had been created to emulate. The Japanese drank not just for show, but also for pleasure, and their tastes were dissimilar to those of the average Pittsburgh steel magnate. The difference, according to Hideaki Kito, a master blender for Kirin whisky, was dictated by the Japanese diet. In his opinion, the taste of authentic Japanese whisky had to be based on “Japanese culture, Japanese food. We eat a lot of fish, for example, therefore we have to create a match for this with the whisky. Our research showed that clean and estery whiskies are much better suited to the Japanese palate.”

While the Japanese were happy to switch to Western beverages, their traditions as to who might drink alcohol remained unchanged. Boozing was regarded as a male prerogative. Women were permitted, indeed were expected, to serve alcohol to men but to avoid it themselves, unless they were old or sick. They were also expected to tolerate drunkenness among their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons, in particular if these were white-collar workers or
salarymen
. The salaryman, like his drinking habits, was a hybrid of East and West—modern in appearance, yet traditional in action. His employers had adopted American corporate structures with neat hierarchies, in which, according to Japanese custom, employees ascended according to age and years of service, unless they were women—in which case they did not rise beyond the typing pool. Superficially, such a chimera seemed doomed to sterility. Old men do not think outside the box. However, during the 1970s and early 1980s, the rate of Japan’s industrial growth surpassed that of any other industrialized country, and alcohol was the lubricant that enabled the Japanese business machine to run smoothly. While the gerontocracy demanded and received respect for their years when behind their desks, after work, off premises, and over a drink, they let their young Turks speak.

The Japanese divided business into two parts: “dry” relations, i.e., meetings during office hours; and
mizu shobai,
or the “water trade,” which took place at night in bars. For the dry portion of each working day, salarymen maintained the ancient ethos of seniority through age, and juniors were expected to refrain from passing an opinion. However, at postwork drinking sessions, after a single drink, the same subordinates were deemed to be “drunk” and given license to speak their minds. This convention allowed ideas to flow between different levels of staff that might otherwise have been stifled by tradition. Therefore, in order to make an impression, an aspiring salaryman was required to drink and to be theoretically, if not actually, drunk most evenings. Indeed, the wives of young executives who came home sober would worry that their spouses’ careers were faltering.