The Juice (7 page)

Only traces of Liebling’s Paris remain, but his favorite wine,
from the sunny southern Rhône Valley at the edge of Provence, is little changed, although its fame has been diluted by the proliferation of pink wines from other regions. Tavel remains the archetypal rosé, a wine that pairs well with almost anything you might be eating in the summer, from shellfish all the way to grilled lamb. Don’t let the color fool you—it’s a dry wine, although the Grenache gives a slight impression of sweetness, offset by that mid-palate bitterness that Liebling found so appealing. Like all the wines of the southern Rhône, it’s easy to understand and to enjoy, more rock and roll than jazz. “ ‘Subtlety,’ that hackneyed wine word, is a cliché seldom employed in writing about Rhone wines,” Liebling aptly observed. “Their appeal is totally unambiguous.”

The Château d’Aquéria has been making Tavel for more than four hundred years in the southern corner of the appellation. My favorite producer, the Domaine de la Mordorée, is based in nearby Lirac, also a source of fine rosés. It makes three cuvées of Tavel rosé, including the rich and complex Cuvée de la Reine des Bois, which makes the similarly expensive Domaines Ott Château de Selle, from the Côtes de Provence, seem like pinkish plonk by comparison. I like to imagine that it resembles Liebling’s beloved Tavel
supérieure
. I recommend drinking it, or any other Tavel you can lay your hands on, while reading
Between Meals
.

“Life is much more successfully looked at through a single window, after all,” says that famous voyeur Nick Carraway in
The Great Gatsby
, a line decanted by John Hailman in his introduction to
Thomas Jefferson on Wine
. Then again, perhaps viewing a life as multifaceted and eventful as Jefferson’s through the narrow lens of oenophilia is like training an electron microscope on an orgy; one is apt to miss some of the major events, or to see them from a bizarre perspective (as in the section on the American Revolution, titled: “The Revolutionary War: Gross Inflation in the Wine Market”). And yet, that said, for some of us the question of whether or not Jefferson sired children with Sally Hemings is less urgent than whether he preferred Bordeaux or Burgundy.

In addition to being an architect, archaeologist, astronomer, jurist, musician, natural philosopher, slaveholder, statesman, the author of the Declaration of Independence, and the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson was the country’s first wine geek. Most of the founding fathers were deeply fond of good claret and Madeira, but none were as passionate or systematic in their appreciation of the grape as Jefferson, who was utterly compulsive on the subject.

Both a connoisseur and a proselytizer, he planted dozens of grape varieties at Monticello and predicted that someday America would compete with France and Italy as a wine-producing nation. Believing that wine was much healthier than the whiskey and brandy that was being consumed in such vast quantities in our young nation, he pushed for lower import duties. “No nation is
drunken where wine is cheap,” he declared, “and none sober where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage. It is, in truth, the only antidote to the bane of whiskey.”

In 1784, Jefferson joined Franklin and Adams as a commissioner in Paris, a position he had long coveted. Though his interest in wine seems to have developed during his student days at William and Mary, it was only after the Revolution, when he went to France, that his oenophilia really metastasized.

“The first thing to be done in Paris,” Adams advised, “is always to send for a tailor, a perukemaker and a shoemaker, for this nation has established such a domination over fashion that neither clothes, wigs nor shoes made in any other place will do in Paris.” Jefferson seems to have followed this advice. The 1786 Mather Brown portrait, painted in Paris, shows him looking fairly dandy in a powdered wig. Practically the next thing he did was to order twelve cases of Haut-Brion, the great first-growth Bordeaux, which was the first brand-name wine to appear in English literature: Samuel Pepys had mentioned it as having “a good and most perticular taste.”

In 1787, after inheriting the title of American minister to the king of France from the ailing Franklin, Jefferson made a trip through France and Italy that he described to Lafayette as “combining public service with private gratification.” Officially, he was checking out prospects for American trade, but his itinerary took him through most of the great wine regions of Europe, starting in Burgundy and moving on to the Rhône Valley, making his way down into Italy’s Piedmont before looping north again to Bordeaux. Most of Jefferson’s widely quoted writing about wine comes from his journal of this journey and a subsequent one to Germany’s Rhine and Mosel regions as well as Champagne. He was a keen observer. While in Burgundy he notes that in Volnay they eat “good wheat bread” whereas in nearby Meursault it’s rye. “I asked the reason of the difference. They told me that the white
wines fail in quality much oftener than the red.… The farmer therefore cannot afford to feed his labourers so well.”

Much of what he wrote about the character of the countries and wines he encountered could have been written last week, spelling eccentricities aside. “Chambertin, Voujeau, and Veaune are strongest,” he says of the red wines of Burgundy’s Côte de Nuits; he declares “Diquem” (Château d’Yquem) the best Sauternes—observations that wouldn’t seem terribly out of place in the current issue of
Wine Spectator
.

It’s hard to imagine any aspect of contemporary life that Jefferson would recognize if he were to suddenly reappear among us, with one exception: he would be very comfortable navigating the wine list of a three-star restaurant in Paris. It is a testament partly to his connoisseurship and partly to the durability and conservatism of European wine traditions that many of the wines Jefferson drank and collected are the same ones that excite the interest of today’s grape nuts. Almost a century before the official classification of the great growths of Bordeaux, Jefferson recorded a hierarchy remarkably similar to the present classification. In addition to Haut-Brion, he ordered multiple cases of Lafite, Margaux, and Château d’Yquem for the cellar of his new residence, the Hotel de Langeac on the Champs-Élysées. He also sent many of these wines to President George Washington, who was happy to be the beneficiary of Jefferson’s growing expertise. When Jefferson occupied the White House himself, he raised the standard of hospitality considerably, spending lavishly on food and wine—one factor in his later bankruptcy. Afterward, at Monticello, he became a budget drinker, substituting the wines of southern France and Tuscany for the great growths of Bordeaux and Burgundy.

Jefferson is usually assumed to be a Bordeaux man, because he wrote the most about it and perhaps because it seems like the wine that best reflects his character; claret, as the English call it, is an Apollonian wine, a beverage for intellectuals, for men of patience
and reason. Austere in its youth, it predictably develops great complexity over the years. There are few surprises in Bordeaux. Burgundy, on the other hand, engages the emotions more than the intellect—a wine for the lunatic, the lover, and the poet. So it comes as a bit of a shock to learn here that during his years in Paris, when he had access to all the great growths of France, the sober sage of Monticello stocked his cellar with more Burgundy than Bordeaux, and his taste in it seems to have been impeccable: he was partial to the reds of Volnay, still a connoisseur’s wine; among the whites he liked Montrachet, which remains the most coveted white wine on the planet, though he sometimes chose the less expensive Meursault Goutte d’Or, a robust white Burgundy from a slightly less exalted slope just down the road.

Perhaps Jefferson’s apparent preference for Burgundy will eventually lead to one of those reassessments of his character that seem to arrive every decade or two; having presented the evidence, Hailman—who certainly knows his wines—doesn’t make much of it, perhaps because he is so engrossed in the commercial and bookkeeping minutiae of Jefferson’s correspondence with wine merchants and customs agents, which take up many pages of this volume. True, it was hard work to be a wine lover in those days. “To order wine, Jefferson had to specify in each letter the ship, the captain, the ports of exit and entry, how the wines should be packaged, and how he would get payment across the ocean and determine and pay the customs duties.” As someone who can order his Meursault Goutte d’Or online, I feel for the guy, but dozens of pages of this kind of trivia could drive many readers to hard liquor, which is the last thing the father of American oenophilia would have desired.

The 2007 Burgundies didn’t generate as much advance excitement as the 2002 or 2005 vintages, which benefited from more favorable weather. But in the spring of 2009 a tasting of a very select group of 2007 reds and whites had many New York wine professionals buzzing with admiration—perhaps proving the axiom that in Burgundy, the maker is more important than the year. Included were some of the top names in Burgundy—a group selected more than fifty years ago by Frank Schoonmaker, a writer, importer, and gentleman spy who did as much to educate American wine drinkers as anyone before or since.

The son of a Columbia classics professor and a prominent feminist, he arrived at Princeton in 1923, not long after Scott Fitzgerald departed, and dropped out after two years. He then roamed Europe for several years, eventually distilling his travels into guidebooks including
Through Europe on Two Dollars a Day
and
Come with Me Through France
. Schoonmaker’s passion for wine was fueled by his friendship with Raymond Baudoin, editor of
La Revue du Vin de France
, then, as now, the most influential wine publication in the country. The young American traveled the principal regions with Baudoin, tasting and learning, making contacts that would ultimately serve him well as an importer when Prohibition ended in 1933. Burgundy became his special passion.

Unlike Bordeaux, a region of vast estates owned by wealthy families and corporations, the typical Burgundian domaine, then as now, consisted of only a few acres of vines. A family’s holdings were generally scattered, thanks to inheritance issues, among
different vineyards. Most growers sold their young wine in casks to big negotiants in the town of Beaune, who would blend and bottle them under their own labels.
Au contraire
, said Baudoin and Schoonmaker, encouraging their favorite growers to bottle their own wines, a relatively radical concept at the time.

After the Volstead Act was finally repealed, the seasoned Francophile moved to New York and launched Frank Schoonmaker Selections. The glitch in his business plan was that after fourteen years of Prohibition, few Americans knew anything about French or any other wines. To help rectify this situation, he published a book called
The Complete Wine Book
, based in part on a series of articles he’d written for
The New Yorker
.

Early on, Schoonmaker hired a loquacious young Russian émigré named Alexis Lichine, who’d recently dropped out of Penn, as his national sales manager. Together they traveled to California to scout domestic wines for their portfolio. At the time it was the practice in California to slap French regional names like Chablis and Burgundy on the local bottlings, but they convinced several California estates to label their wines according to grape variety, a practice that has become universal in California and the New World in the years since. Their first success was with Wente Vineyards, which changed the name of its white wine from Graves (a region of Bordeaux) to Sauvignon Blanc—the name of the grape from which it was made—and watched sales soar.

World War II interrupted their partnership; after Pearl Harbor, Schoonmaker joined the OSS, the CIA precursor created by Wild Bill Donovan that drew its ranks from the Ivy League and the Social Register, while Lichine joined army intelligence. Using his wine business as a cover, Schoonmaker went to Madrid. “It was a source of some pride to him,” according to his obit in the
Daytona Beach Morning Journal
, “that the then United States Ambassador to Spain complained about how vigorously he pursued some of his
underground activities in that country.” He made frequent forays into France to aid the resistance, until, according to his friend Frank E. Johnson, “the Spanish police caught on to what was happening. Schoonmaker was arrested, brought back to Madrid and had his head shaved to identify him as a marked man.” He subsequently slipped out of Spain and attached himself to the U.S. Seventh Army, which invaded southern France in August 1944. Not far from Lyon, he was hospitalized after his jeep hit a land mine, but he later managed to visit some of his growers in Burgundy and the Rhône. He was ultimately discharged with the rank of colonel, and to this day he is still referred to as Le Colonel by Burgundian old-timers.

Lichine had also distinguished himself in the war and retired as a major, but when he demanded full partnership in the business, he and Schoonmaker parted ways. Lichine made a name for himself as a wine writer and the owner of Château Prieuré-Lichine and Château Lascombes in Bordeaux. In the years after the war, Schoonmaker continued to educate the American drinker with a series of lively and erudite articles about wine in
Gourmet
magazine (you can find them in the archives at
Gourmet.com
) and eventually published the
Encyclopedia of Wine
, for many years a definitive reference.

In a 1947
Gourmet
piece about red Burgundy, he makes clear his preference for the wines of that region over Bordeaux. “Heartwarming and
joyeux
, heady, big of body, magnificent and Rabelaisian, this is Burgundy,” he writes. (I might question “big of body,” but this is his story.) “The most celebrated poet of Bordeaux, Biarnez, wrote of the chateaux and the wines so dear to his heart in cool and measured Alexandrines reminiscent of Racine. Burgundy is celebrated in bawdy tavern songs.” No doubt where the man’s heart lies. In fact he seems to be saying that Bordeaux has no heart, that it’s all head, but of course he was selling Burgundy. He
then goes on to give us a detailed tour of the region that remains useful to this day while referencing Thackeray, Alexandre Dumas, Petrarch, Philip the Bold, and many others.