Drinking with the Valkyries: Writings on Wine

Drinking

With the

Valkyries

Writings

on wine

Drinking

With the

Valkyries

Writings

on wine

Andrew

Jefford

ACADEMIE DU VIN LIBRARY

Published 2022 by Académie du Vin Library Ltd

academieduvinlibrary.com

Founders: Steven Spurrier and Simon McMurtrie

Publishers: Simon McMurtrie and Hermione Ireland

Editorial Director: Susan Keevil

Art Director: Tim Foster

Index: Hilary Bird

ISBN: 978-1-913141-32-5

Articles published with kind permission and

agreement of Decanter, The World of Fine Wine

and Noble Rot. Text © remains with the copyright

holders.

All articles fully edited and revised by the author who

retains copyright on these revisions. The moral right

of the author has been asserted and the intellectual

property remains that of the author.

© 2022 Académie du Vin Library Ltd

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Contents

Foreword

Preface: Why Wine?

Chapter One: Origins

Homo Imbibens: The Work of Patrick McGovern

Chapter Two: Some Soils, Some Skies

The Blue Corruptor

Earth’s Cream, Skimmed

Nuance from Disdain

Downhill All the Way

Time’s Engine Room: 2010 Langhorne Creek, Reserve Shiraz, Noon

Terroir, Tasting and Tonewood

Happy Birthday, Breaky Bottom

A Sea Interlude: 2015 Picpoul de Pinet, Cuvée Anniversaire, Beauvignac

Angela’s Lemon

Washed Up on the Shores of Illyria: 2015 Teran, Santa Elisabetta, Benvenuti

Dr Mistral

Liquid Rags in Your Mouth: 2013 Barbaresco, Produttori del Barbaresco

A Honeycomb of Light: 2010 Mas del Serral, Pepe Raventós

Touchdown in Wine Central

Chapter Three: Taste and Tasting

Bags, Butter and Biscuits

Through the Mangrove Swamp

Taste First, Then Look

Tonic Bitterness

Tannin and the University of the Vat

Yeast: Call Me Dad

Journey into Forbidden Territory

Freshness Young and Old

Old, Big and Quiet

The School of Hard Wines

Behind Vinous Eyes

Wine Versus Food

Palate Fitness

Chapter Four: Some Beautiful Wines

Jewelled Absence: 2016 Petit Chablis, Les Crioux, William Fèvre

Not Quite the White Queen: 1999 Corton-Charlemagne, Bonneau du Martray

Bathing Without Washing: 2005 Châteauneuf du Pape Blanc, Réservé, Château Rayas

Very Like the Cuckoo’s Call: 2005 Rioja, Gran Riserva, La Granja Remelluri

Forest Whispers: 2011 Château-Chalon, Vin Jaune, André and Mireille Tissot

The Antidote: 2010 Madiran, Cuvée du Couvent, Domaine Capmartin

Some Useless Notes

The Two-Pin Dinner

A Rosary of Reasons: 1882 Colheita Port, Ne Oublie, Graham’s

Chapter Five: A Tea Break

The Cup that Consoles

Chapter Six: Interrogations and Impieties

The Illuminati of the Bottle

Disarming the Mafia

Hot and Bothered

Drinking with the Valkyries

Of Jellyfish and Guardsmen

Wine’s Drab Roses

Beyond Best

Nature in All Her Glory

Auction Fever

The Party’s Over

Call in the Plumbers

In Praise of Young Wine

Wine Is Also a Dream

Chapter Seven: Wine Shadows

The Crazed Giant

Only Endure

Burning Vines

Wine’s Transactional Flaw

The Curse of the Vertical

Scored Rigid

Chapter Eight: Wine In A Life

Lucky Us

It’s a Tough Job

Hill Sages

An Evening with the Lilac-Berried Mutant: 2008 Gewurztraminer, Herrenweg de Turckheim Vieilles Vignes, Zind-Humbrecht

Tears and Threats: 2003 Tokaji Aszú, 6 Puttonyos, Disznókő

Knowing and Loving

The Ethnologist in the Cellar

Up the Steep Hill

Mille Fois Morte, Mille Fois Revécue: 2008 Chateau Musar Blanc

All Quiet: 2016 Bouzeron, de Villaine

Lessons from the Laureate

Meanings that Nourish: 2003 Château Meyney, Saint-Estèphe, half-bottle

Chapter Nine: Against Wine Worldliness

Wine and Astonishment

Chapter Ten: Three Last Wines

The Startled Hind: 2012 Pouilly-Fumé, Haute Densité, Château de Tracy

Unsettled: 2014 Cannonau di Sardegna, Mamuthone, Giuseppe Sedilesu

Restoration: 2018 Saint-Mont, La Madeleine de Saint-Mont, Producteurs Plaimont

Glossary

Chronology

Acknowledgements

Index

Foreword

Jay McInerney

In 1996, when I was asked by a close friend who’d just taken over the editorial reins of a venerable Condé Nast title if I would consider writing a wine column, I was reluctant. I told her that while I was passionate about wine, I was not necessarily knowledgeable enough to undertake the task. I wasn’t even entirely sure about the meaning of the phrase ‘malolactic fermentation’. She urged me on by saying that my skills as a novelist would fill a yawning gap in the field; in her opinion most wine writing of the time was boring and technical, not addressed to readers such as herself who weren’t wine geeks, or, for that matter, masochists. And I had to agree. As far as I could see there were the technicians who described Brix and pH levels and there was the fuzzy impressionist school – scent of hawthorn blossom – so cunningly parodied by Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited. And so, not without trepidation, I accepted my friend’s offer. If I’d been aware of Andrew Jefford’s budding career I might have demurred.

When I did discover Jefford a few years later I was impressed with his writing, his general erudition and his passion as much as I was with his wine knowledge. He had all the skills that had seemed to me to be in short supply in the field of wine criticism. As he has said himself in an interview: ‘What Roland Barthes called the pleasure of the text doesn’t often emerge in wine writing, yet that pleasure is an essential requirement if a text is to endure.’ I have been enjoying his work for the last two decades. Like many other wine lovers, I was deeply impressed and edified by his landmark book, The New France, published in 2002, at a time when the French wine industry was undergoing a bit of an identity crisis while Spain and Italy were reinventing themselves – and many drinkers were turning their attention to the latest danceable hits from the New World. Jefford’s book reminded us that France remains the motherland of fine wine, and that many of its 14 major regions besides Bordeaux and Burgundy were blossoming with a new generation of talent. And it was, like all of his work, a pleasure to read.

This book showcases Jefford’s shorter essays for magazines such as Decanter and The World of Fine Wine over the last 20 years. And because they all demonstrate ‘the pleasure of the text’, their myriad satisfactions have endured. I can’t think of any other writer who would elucidate the concept of terroir in wine with an exploration of the idea of ‘tonewoods’ in the production of violins. ‘For at least six centuries, European luthiers have considered spruce grown in cold Alpine conditions the best, thanks to its fine growth rings and even grain. In Italy’s Parco Naturale Paneveggio Pale di San Martino in Trento, you’ll find la foresta dei violini – the violin forest – so called because its spruce tonewood is of unequalled density, hence musical quality. It is cut during a waning moon between October and November, to minimize the quantity of sap it contains. Even musical sound, thus, has a terroir dimension.’ (Echoes of biodynamie.)

For all the honours he has received, and all the admiration of his fellow scribes and critics, Jefford remains a bit of an iconoclast in the world of wine writing. He calls into question some of the standard practices of his peers; although he praises Robert Parker’s contributions to the field – a bit of iconoclasm in itself at this point – he is deeply sceptical of the 100-point scale system that Parker popularized. And he is sceptical, ultimately of the idea of hierarchy, which numerical ratings promote, railing against the search for the ‘best’. Jefford calls for a horizontal rather than a vertical appreciation of wine; that is, he believes in the ideal of diversity and difference among wines – an appreciation of the way different wines express their places of origin and the winemaker’s signature – more than he does in a quest for the best. ‘No other alcoholic drink matches wine’s multitudes,’ he writes in ‘The Curse of the Vertical’ (page 180). ‘It’s a kind of sensual barometer for difference itself, reflecting the ever-changing places and climates in which vines are grown, and the variety of cultures and talents of the craftswomen and craftsmen who vinify it. If I taste wine, I taste difference.’

He’s dubious about the virtues of blind tastings and about the conditions in which professional critics generally assess wine – en masse, sans food and out of context. In ‘Wine Is Also a Dream’ (page 164), he references a visit to Philippe Guigal in Côte Rôtie. Jefford’s party barraged him with technical questions about pH and acidification, which Guigal smilingly parried. ‘And then he said this: Wine is also a dream.’ Jefford seizes on this idea of the dream in a bottle of wine, the dream of the maker and of the drinker. ‘Wine drunk under true blind-test conditions, or wine reduced to its existential, dream-stripped residuum, couldn’t be enjoyed. We need (and have paid for) the dream, too. The dream is always part of the pleasure. It may, indeed, be most of the pleasure.’

Jefford likewise has reservations about tasting notes, about the reduction of a wine to a list of alleged flavour and scent components, although in fact he is certainly more than capable of (or guilty of ) virtuoso riffs in this vein, as in this description of an 1882 Symington Colheita: ‘The wine was salty, deep, profoundly aromatic, sweet and acidic, too. Despite prodigious wealth of flavour, it was seamlessly harmonious, thick yet almost silky, its spirit smoothed into the wine to the point of invisibility. Apples and cinders, burnt raisins, thyme and pomegranate, creosote and apricot skins, liquorice and treacle, chocolate and toasted almond: off it went again, ceaselessly murmuring its rosary of sensual reasons as to why staying alive might be a good idea. It was almost as if the wine had been out and about for all this time, wandering the hills and the plains and the entrepôts, gathering sackfuls of scent and flavour as it travelled.’ The description of the wine, the catalogue of flavours and scents, is certainly dazzling as an example of wine writing. But the last sentence is pure Jefford. It’s not wine writing. It’s writing.

Andrew Jefford

Andrew Jefford was born in Gloucestershire, but grew up beneath the wide skies of Norfolk. Having discovered the pleasures of wine in his early teens, he learned more about it by making it – from carrots, apples, nettles, elderflowers ... and grape-juice concentrate. The quiet plop-plop-plop of fermenting wine in air-locked demi-johns tissued the night silence of the family home, while the finished wines (swallowed with a grimace) contributed to mealtime merriment.

After study at the Universities of Reading and East Anglia, Andrew Jefford worked first in publishing as an editor and then, from 1988, as a wine writer, taster, educator, tour guide and occasional radio presenter (on BBC Radio 4). He has written for many British newspapers, notably The Evening Standard and The Financial Times, and continues to contribute columns to Decanter and The World of Fine Wine; he also acts a co-chair for the Decanter World Wine Awards and as academic advisor to The Wine Scholar Guild.

His books include The New France (2002), Andrew Jefford’s Wine Course (2008, revised and updated edition 2016) and Whisky Island (2019; first published as Peat Smoke and Spirit in 2004), a book about the Hebridean island of Islay. He has also published poems in The Spectator and The Independent.

Andrew Jefford and his family moved to Australia in 2009 and to France in 2010, where they still live. He enjoys music and walking, but no longer makes his own wine.

Preface

Why Wine?

I was once asked to give a five-hour masterclass and tasting in Spain. Marriages have been contracted and ceasefires brokered more swiftly than that, so I decided – having been offered the fullness of time – to begin with a little perspective and context. Imagine being asked on your deathbed (those attending looked alarmed) why you pursued your chosen profession. Some, for example, are born to wine, and simply choose not to opt out; I chose to opt in. Why pick wine for a half-century of labour? Is wine good enough?

There might be reasons for considering wine a poor choice of the only working life you’ll ever have. It’s an alcoholic drink, after all: addictive for some; damaging for all if mis-used; necessary for none. Wine brings pleasure, but you can’t call it art; wine softens life’s edges, but it’s not first aid, nor does it constitute primary care. You don’t make the world a better place, nor society more just, with wine; it cannot replace the force of arms in overcoming tyranny. Harvest dates are an excellent way to measure climate change, but wine itself – much travelled, heavy, and bottled in cumbersome, absurdly shaped containers made of melted sand – contributes more to the problem than the solution. ‘Well then,’ I could see the Reaper grimly concluding, as he scythed through my 50 years of efforts, ‘what was the point in all this?’

My starting point for a career in wine was wonder at the world, in all its diversity. This topic is beyond full comprehension, but many working lifetimes – from the tight focus of research science to the struggles of poet or painter – constitute a kind of investigation into the world’s intricacy and beauty, both inanimate and animate. For all we know, ours may be the sole living world in our galaxy: 100 billion stars, surrounded by a detritus of planets, and all of them a dead mixture of toxic gases, rock and dust, burning or freezing at vast distances one from another. To have taken part in the adventure of earthly life is astonishing, a chance of inconceivable rarity.

How do we communicate that astonishment, and use it to foster the reverence and respect which might sustain biodiversity for the future? We can’t all be wildlife camera operators, climate scientists or astrophysicists. Wine, I quickly felt as I first began to explore it, was a unique way to apprehend the world’s variousness. Every bottle of wine was a bottle of somewhere or other; the difference between wines was, at least in part, the difference between those places. Drinking wine was a kind of surrogate journeying: Italy’s Valtellina Inferno one night, South Africa’s Darling Hills the next. On your kitchen table.

Moreover, this was a difference that you didn’t just read about in a magazine or watch on television. You smelled and tasted wine; you then took it into your body. Wine was a most intimate way to know the world. This sensual engagement with place and with difference was a supplementary astonishment, a doubling of wonder, and it was one to which wine’s perfectly calibrated alcohol content lent emotional force. The engagement with place through wine was, thus, not only educational and inspiring, but consoling, too. If, of course, used wisely.

This, perhaps, was a message worth spreading, which was all (I shall tell the Reaper) I felt able to do. But would it not be better to make wine, and thereby bring a place into sensual being for those who may find themselves thousands of miles away? That, I think, must be uniquely exciting: a bond with place which it is possible to have in no other way, as well as the best route to understanding wine itself. But there is much chance in life. I didn’t have the chance to make it but to write about it; you might have the chance to sell it, to see it safely across the oceans, or simply to drink it and appreciate it after your own day’s work is done. What matters, in the end, is that we value wine as one of the most beautiful of human artifacts, and one whose being reflects, with shocking fidelity, the unconformities and irregularities of our earthly home.

Andrew Jefford

March 2022

Homo Imbibens:

The Work of Patrick McGovern

A glass of wine poured at the end of the day, quietly surrendering its scents and stories: we know no moment quite like this. Daylight is going or gone, and with it the obligation to work, to act and to analyse; that glass guides us towards ease, imagination and emotion, all of them proper to darkness, and a fitting prelude to sleep. The wine nuances our lived experience, bringing both perspective and chiaroscuro. At times, indeed, it can seem to furnish a kind of spiritual nourishment. Our involvement with it triggers a cascade of sensual delight, and sometimes more than that, too. Chosen with care, stored for some years, a bottle may come both laden with memories and pregnant with expectation; those expectations will then be dashed, matched or exceeded by its performance in nose and mouth. This sensual delight, in other words, is richly invested. No moment like it, but no substance like it, either.

Our enjoyment of that glass of wine, though, is also the individual successor to countless acts of drinking. We no longer fashion arrowheads, using them to kill our dinner; we no longer dry the skin and fur our dinner was ripped from, and use it to stitch clothes and craft shoes. Our ancestors, by contrast, never spent the day online, sat in traffic jams, or felt existentially superfluous. The consumption of an alcoholic beverage by candlelight or firelight is one of the few intimate daily acts we share with those who have gone before us; it may be the most culturally rich of these. But how far before? Shakespeare’s Falstaff, alone in the forest, hymning sack; the Chinese T’ang poet Li Bai, watching snowflakes melt into his wine; Homer’s Odysseus and his sailors, fortifying themselves with the ‘plentiful supply of meat, and sparkling ruddy wine’ provided by Circe before braving Scylla and Charybdis: literature provides us with a few delicious fragments... but then we lose the trace.

Traces have furnished a life’s work for Patrick McGovern, scientific director of the Biomolecular Archaeology Laboratory for Cuisine, Fermented Beverages, and Health at the University of Pennsylvania Museum; his project is to piece together the ‘before’. ‘What do you do?’ I asked him (in October 2017). ‘I am a combination chemist and archaeologist,’ he replied. ‘The general idea is to recover the ancient organics that were contained within certain vessels, and find out what they were.’ But as his books (notably Uncorking The Past: The quest for wine, beer, and other alcoholic beverages (2009) hereafter UP, and Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture (2019)) make clear, in synthesizing both his own work and that of others, he suggests something more startling: that man is Homo imbibens, driven by biological, social and religious imperatives to consume alcohol, and that this relationship with alcohol is a key to ‘understanding the development of our species and its cultures’.

From murex to mead

A talented pianist who considered a career in music, McGovern opted to study undergraduate chemistry at Cornell, taking a minor in English literature, and soon after became fascinated by ancient history: you can see the rangy mind. He switched to Near Eastern archaeology and history for his doctoral research, and began work studying pottery and glass fragments before specializing in the ‘royal purple’ of the Canaanites and the Phoenicians (extracted from the Mediterranean murex mollusc, and once the most expensive dye in the world). This in turn led him to specialize more generally in ancient organic materials, and in particular the residues left inside the pottery fragments of jars and other vessel forms.

It seems hard to believe today, but standard archaeological practice in the past was to clean away these residues with acid to remove carbonates, the better to see and understand the pottery itself. ‘We were always curious as to what was inside these vessels,’ he points out. ‘If you could identify the organic components, you could actually say something about the contents. Then you could say more about what it meant to humans – who are organic creatures.’ The great breakthrough came with liquid and gas chromatography, and in particular mass spectrometry. By looking for specific chemical markers of natural products (biomarkers, or fingerprint compounds), you could then say what the jar or other vessel was likely to have contained.

Alcohol is entirely unrecoverable: it simply evaporates. But McGovern and his collegues developed a series of tests for the other constituents of different alcoholic beverages. For Middle Eastern and European wines, for example, they test for tartaric acid, found in large quantity only in the Eurasian grape, together with other organic acids (lactic, citric and succinic acid) common to this grape; background amounts produced by microorganisms are also checked. Grape pips and other remains, if they are preserved and recovered, help confirm the analysis. For mead, the analysts search for beeswax compounds, which are difficult to filter out, especially using ancient techniques. Beer is a more complex challenge, since few biomarkers exist for the different cereals (principally barley, wheat, rice, millet, sorghum and maize). The fermentation of beer from barley, though, produces calcium oxalate – traditionally known as ‘beerstone’ – so that is what the team searches for in residues. Other archaeological criteria must be applied for substantiation, because this compound is widespread in nature (it is, for example, the most common constituent of human kidney stones).

Setting the clock

Humans are one of four extant hominid genera (Pongo, Gorilla, Pan and Homo). The most recent common ancestor of all four lived around 14 million years ago, so we might choose to set our ancestral clock at that point. Alcohol (ethanol) itself is much older: ‘sugar fermentation (or glycolysis) is thought to be the earliest form of energy production used by life on Earth,’ writes McGovern (UP, p2), suggesting a date of about four billion years ago for microbial transformation of sugar to ethanol and carbon dioxide on planet earth. Clouds of ethanol and other alcohols billions of kilometres across, by the way, exist in star-forming regions elsewhere at the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way, and throughout the much larger universe.

Homo erectus appeared about two million years ago in Africa, from where the species migrated to Eurasia; it became extinct about 70,000 years ago. By then, however, Homo sapiens sapiens had evolved (around 200,000 years ago), again in Africa, from which this new species migrated 100,000–60,000 years ago. It is now the only surviving member of the genus Homo, other archaic humans (such as Homo neanderthalensis) having become extinct around 40,000 years ago. Most of us carry the genetic signatures of interbreeding between these species.

Humans began making pottery in China some 18,000 years ago. The oldest attested alcoholic beverage so far identified by McGovern’s laboratory, working with colleagues from China, Germany and the USA, is that of Jiahu in Central China’s Henan Province: it’s 9,000 years old. Authenticated human consumption of alcohol thus begins at this point, though the relative sophistication of the site strongly suggests that it was itself an heir to earlier traditions. Teams are working on residues found in natural or artificial landscape features that might pre-date the creation of pottery, especially in Anatolia, but no earlier dates have yet been established, so we can only speculate on the use of alcohol by hominids prior to that point.

And not merely hominids. Fruits naturally ferment, producing ‘wild’ alcohol, and fruit-eating animals (notably primates) gorge on this fermented fruit, becoming inebriated as a consequence. Primate lineage goes back some 65 million years, and the genetic equipment to deal effectively with the toxic by-products of ethanol digestion (notably acetaldehyde) dates from around 10 million years ago; this is the ALDH gene. ‘We’re really set up,’ summarizes McGovern, ‘to to drink an alcoholic beverage. And we have the right apparatus to pick up all the sensory aromatics.’ When, I asked McGovern, might intentionality in this process have begun? ‘I see it as being way back into the higher primate era,’ he replied, contending that our intimacy with alcohol is not only as old as we as a species are, but was a trait acquired, with varying degrees of organization, by our primate ancestors.

Flute music at dusk

Let’s return to China. Jiahu was a substantial (5.5-hectare) Neolithic settlement surrounded by a moat and settled by between 250 and 800 people between 9,000 and 7,700 years ago, when it was destroyed in a flood. So far, 45 residences have been excavated and nine pottery kilns found; analysis of the skeletal remains reveals that Jiahu inhabitants experienced improving health and longevity over the life of the settlement. They farmed millet and rice; they raised pigs, dogs, poultry and cattle; they gathered and foraged wild pears, apricots, chestnuts, broad beans and soya beans; they fished for carp, and hunted wild boar, deer and rabbits. And, come day’s end, they drank alcohol.

Made from what, and in what form? One of the insights of McGovern’s work is that the pure forms of alcoholic beverages with which we are familiar today were rare in the distant past. Analyses of the Jiahu residues revealed mixtures that included tartaric acid (derived from a native wild grape and/or hawthorn tree in China; the only seeds recovered at this site were of these fruits), fingerprint compounds of beeswax, and ferulate phytosterol esters pointing to rice. They drank, in other words, a mixed beverage made from wine produced from either native wild grapes or hawthorne fruit (probably both) mingled with mead and rice beer. The beverage was likely to have been drunk from a communal vessel of some sort using straws to avoid floating debris, or so later traditions suggest. This drink, at least for the time being, is the first ancestor of Romanée-Conti and Montrachet, of Haut-Brion and Pétrus.

That’s not all, though. Jiahu has its own symbols – possibly pictograms, since their similarity to later Chinese characters is striking; in that case they are a form of proto-writing. Nine were found on tortoise shells (used, in later Chinese culture, for divination) and two on bone. Even more movingly, Jiahu is celebrated for its 33 flutes (20 of them intact), all of them made from the wing-bones of the red-crowned crane, a presently endangered