Journal of Wine Economics Volume 9 | 2014 | No. 2

“Listen, Virginia. I don’t want to argue with you about whether Santa Claus is alive; I’ve got a better hard-to-believe true story.”

“I know you hang out with a vinous gang so you should like this Horatio Alger all-American boy story. He drinks beer, thinks wine is for snooty people, goes to Europe with his girlfriend, they go out to dinner in Florence, a house wine is brought that is great. They happen to sit next to a young French couple, get into a friendly conversation that joins the two tables together. A fabulous evening, and our hero has finally had his first wine epiphany, a drinkable wine.”

“They go back to the States and he begins his search, finding that the ‘best’ wines come from Bordeaux, starts with some medium-priced Bordeaux wines which he hates. Wondering whether he should just pay the fantastic price of the top Bordeaux wines, his wife suggests going to a Bordeaux tasting at a local wine shop. When they learn the Bordeaux tasting was a week ago and that they will be tasting Burgundy wines tonight, he’s ready to leave but they decide to have a taste and, bingo, he has his second wine epiphany. Now he wants, not just to drink Burgundian wine, but to go to Burgundy, and make his own wine! He and his family now live in Burgundy where he’s making wine, and when he started this, he didn’t even speak French.”

This story is so incredible that, on the book’s dust cover, Anthony Bourdain, the writerly restaurant chef, calls the story “extraordinary” and “unbelievable,” and Rex Pickett, author of Sideways, remarks that it “will convince anyone that their dreams, no matter how harebrained, can be realized.” And while I accept that Ray Walker’s story is true, I must admit that I still wonder.

Ray Walker has worked for seven years in his family’s real estate business, become disenchanted, and then become a trainee at Merrill Lynch, where the money is good but the job isn’t him. After three years at Merrill, disliking the job and reading whatever he can find on Burgundy, he decides that he needs to work in a winery. Even though he admits to his wife that the pay is lousy, she supports his idea. His initial job search produces nothing, largely because he openly admits that he doesn’t drink California wines. So he pours out his heart on an Internet network from which he’s been getting wine information and gets thousands of envious visitors and people who encourage him. Ultimately, he gets a cellar rat’s part-time job cleaning tanks at a San Francisco urban winery.

Part-time work turns into full-time employment as harvest preparation gets under way. Ray develops an urge that others working in wineries and at harvest also experience: he wants to make his own wine. Where can he buy a ton of pinot noir grapes? It can’t be Chardonnay, a Burgundian white grape; it has to be a red Pinot. Nobody knows where he can buy a ton of grapes, so, finally, a co- worker suggests that he substitute Petite Sirah grapes, but even these are impossible to buy. So he talks it over with his wife who learns he wants only Pinot Noir grapes, so maybe he has to buy his grapes in Burgundy.

This starts a series of international phone calls to wine courtiers in Bourgogne asking, in his pitiful French, whether they have a ton of pinot noir grapes to sell. Most can’t understand his French and hang up; a few, who persevere, find his request ridiculous: what is he going to do with a ton of grapes in Burgundy? Back to his sensible wife, who suggests that, if he wants to make a trip to Burgundy to look for grapes, she’ll agree if they toss in Paris. Thus agreed, they plan a trip to France with their infant daughter.

Wait! This story gets better.

By the time they arrive in Paris the next winter, Ray’s French has improved considerably because he’s been studying like crazy, he knows that his grapes have to be not only Pinot Noir but also at the village level—that is, the third level of quality, for which he has sufficient money and for the level of quality for which he is willing to go. He really wants grand cru or cru grapes but knows that those are impossible for a stranger to obtain as well as being beyond his financial means. He also now knows the hierarchy of village-level grapes and can therefore aim for the best, knowing that he will probably have to sacrifice if he can obtain mid-level village grapes.

He has no contacts in Burgundy and is going in cold, but he’s determined to get the best grapes possible for his wine.
Ray really has a terrible addiction!

Within a few days, the attraction of Parisian bread and croissants and the freshness of fruits and vegetables at the markets put similar foods in San Francisco to shame. After two weeks in Paris, he, his wife, Christian, and daughter, Bella, drive two hours to Reims, capital of the Champagne district. Ray admits that Champagne wine is great, but he really isn’t interested—it has to be Burgundy. Christian loves Burgundy, even with snow on the ground.

Soon enough, they are in the land of his obsession, where the land is “alive.” After checking into a hotel, they leave immediately to drive through Burgundian villages. Wow! He loves them. The next day, after more driving around, they see a hotel in Puligny-Montrachet and then stop and run into its owner, Olivier Leflaive, who, upon hearing who they are and why they are in Burgundy, and what their budget is, adjusts his E350 high season rate in his completely empty hotel to fit the family’s budget.

A few days later, Olivier invites the family in for an inquisition: why are they in Burgundy in the wintertime? Ray tells him about his addiction, and Olivier agrees to help him find grapes, pointing out—despite his lifetime of experience in Burgundy with wine and winemakers—that he has to taste and taste if he doesn’t want to get cheated. Eventually, through a series of accidents, Ray is introduced to the son of a wine courtier, who, asking a bunch of questions, discovers that this brash American knows practically nothing, has no experience fermenting grapes, has no facilities and only a few thousand dollars to make wine in Burgundy, speaks practically no French, and wants to buy village-level grapes. Nevertheless, he agrees to look for grapes not for next summer—those grapes are already contracted for—but the following year.

Back goes the family to the United States, where he starts more seriously to learn French.

After getting a $20,000 investment as a result of a 15-minute phone conversation so that he will have adequate funds to make wine in Burgundy, he gets a phone call from the Burgundian courtier about buying grapes.

I won’t continue the details, the accidents, and contingencies that arise, but before you know it, he is making wine in Burgundy with grand cru grapes. The impossible has become possible because of all the accidents, he and wife and daughter have made a lovely family, and because he seems almost like an idiot child the community has taken to its heart, everyone who hears his story helps out, and he has only one negative experience.

While still seemingly impossible, this story is well written, remarkably engaging, and occasionally painful when he honestly presents himself as the idiot child, but he ends up fulfilling his addiction making wine with his family in Burgundy, where they
now all live.

William H. Friedland
University of California, Santa Cruz
friedla@ucsc.edu
doi:10.1017/jwe.2014.19

Charles L. Sullivan’s latest book solidifies his already firm position at the head of the California wine table (Sullivan, 1998, 2003). In Sonoma Wine and the Story of Buena Vista, Sullivan is at his colloquial best. His passion for Bay Area wine history jumps off each of the 300 + pages as the reader is showered with compelling tales and fine historical detail. What the book lacks in penetrating interpretive analysis (and there is much to quibble about in this regard), it more than makes up for in its attempt to leave no stone unturned in the complex development of Sonoma. Sullivan has indeed put together a book about Sonoma wine history—largely through the lens of its most famous estate—for many generations to come.

To be sure, this is no economic tract. In fact, while scholars of wine and California will find some sections of use, the book is better positioned to reach a leisured audience with a personal or perhaps professional connection to the subject. There is, however, an almost subconscious thread of historical economics that underpins the entire narrative. The history of Sonoma wine, from its founding to the present, was marked simultaneously by the decisions of its pioneers and entrepreneurs as well as by socioeconomic factors acting upon Sonoma’s tastemakers; immigration, rail travel, economic busts and booms, phylloxera, and the more recent transformation of California wine into a global brand. Sonoma, and Buena Vista, made history and were made by history.

The book’s twenty chapters are filled with lustrous images, newspaper reproduc- tions, maps, and antique photographs. In addition to aiding the story, these lend the book a collectable and luxurious feel. Fifteen of the twenty chronologically ordered chapters set the narrative before World War I, including eleven chapters focusing on the short period 1850–1900, a circumstance that often has the reader “running in place” (coincidentally, the title of Chapter 10). The remaining five chapters subsequently deal with post–World War II history at too brisk a pace.

Chapters 1 and 2 review the relatively well-known history of California wine before 1850, though in Sullivan’s hands the events seem to come alive. The highlights here include the secularization of Mexican/Californian missions, the rise to prominence of “General” Vallejo, and the initial wine success of California’s Southland. Something that clearly motivates Sullivan is his tireless desire to “pop a historical bubble.” In Chapter 2, Sullivan grinds away at the apparent importation of “foreign” grape varieties to California before 1860. He is adamant that many of these “foreign” varieties were simply table grapes from the East Coast, not the likes of “Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay or Pinot Noir” from Europe. Although a significant point, it is indicative of Sullivan’s somewhat nagging tendency to overprivilege setting the record straight in the area of firsts, bests, exact dates, and so on, often at the expense of deeper analysis.

Agoston Haraszthy, wine pioneer and founder of Buena Vista vineyards, along with his children, form the core of the first half of the book. Sullivan is justifiably moved by the native Hungarian’s adventurous life yet disappointed by his inconsistent biographical treatment (there are several misunderstandings that Sullivan is bent on setting straight). Of course, Sullivan is no stranger to Haraszthy, having covered him in previous works. But here, with the assistance of the work of Bryan McGinty, Haraszthy is brought to life perhaps as never before. While certainly giving Haraszthy the respect he deserves, Sullivan is no blind devotee to the “great man” theory of history, and it is refreshing to read the Hungarian’s biography contextualized into the era’s socioeconomic milieu.

One of the challenges for readers is following the book’s dual threads—Sonoma history and Buena Vista history. Sometimes, especially because ownership of the Buena Vista cellar, winery, and vineyards changed hands quite frequently, this proves difficult to do. In fact, the purchase of Buena Vista in 1879 by Robert Johnson effectively put wine production in a kind of dormancy (grapes were still grown but were sold to other manufacturers) until the 1940s. Thus, Chapters 11–16 carry the story of Sonoma, with Buena Vista garnering only an occasional mention. Nevertheless, this era of Sonoma history is fascinating, and Sullivan eruditely narrates the county’s booms, busts, encounters with phylloxera, immigration, and viticultural disputes. There is much that will have a familiar ring here, but Sullivan knows the major players—De Turk, Hilgard, Husmann—and the significant places —Italian Swiss Colony, Fountaingrove, the University of California—better than anybody. I was particularly delighted by Sullivan’s description of pre-earthquake San Francisco as an authentic wine town, replete with manufacturers, cellars, barrel stores, depots, and so forth.

The final four chapters return Buena Vista to the forefront of the narrative but also do an effective job of bringing Sonoma into the present. A surprise for many readers will be the relative lateness of the county’s post-repeal rise to the forefront of the American fine wine trade. Although the war years witnessed an impressive jump in the price of grapes and finished wine, it was not until the 1970s that Sonoma embarked on a stable path that included the expansion of quality land under vine and a relative rise in grape and wine prices (and then not-so-relative beginning in the 1990s). Buena Vista during this period was rehabilitated by a number of investors and wine men, including the legendary André Tchelistcheff. Sullivan also smartly identifies the impact of the consumer side of the trade in this section with brief discussions of influential critics, including Leon D. Adams. Of course, Buena Vista’s fate is intimately tied to the globalization of commerce. Following stints in the hands of Southern California’s Young’s Market Company and A. Racke Co., a German wine and spirits distributor, Buena Vista was ruthlessly tossed back and forth between a number of international conglomerates (Allied Domecq, Pernot, Fortune Brands, Constellation, Ascentia) before coming to rest, in 2011, with its current owner, Boisset Family Estates, a French-American wine company.

There is plenty for the casual reader to glean beyond the major narratives of Sonoma and Buena Vista history. Something that Sullivan is passionately interested in is the history of grape varieties and varietal wine selection. Though it never materializes as a major argument in the book, the reader frequently encounters wonderful statistical and anecdotal material on Sonoma grapes since the inception of the county. What emerges is a remarkable back-and-forth struggle between green and red grapes, dry and sweet wines, and “native” and “foreign” varietals, all of which is sure to please the wine lover. Another theme of which Sullivan makes much use but never in an argumentative way is the long tradition of medals handed out at wine competitions. Although something that many wine writers would treat circumspectly, here they somehow contribute to another underlying theme; that of California boosterism, wine marketing, and entrepreneurialism.

Sonoma Wine and the Story of Buena Vista, for all the aforementioned assets, is plagued by what was an apparently dreadful final edit. It seems as if every other page contains some sort of typographical error, misplaced punctuation, or chopped sentence. This is a major distraction even for a reader with an extremely high tolerance for these kinds of mistakes. In addition, Sullivan’s style is detail oriented but yet often not analytical enough. A discussion of Chinese labor (“coolies”) in Sonoma correctly credits their massive contribution but also fails to examine it critically in the context of race relations, labor rights, or American-Chinese politics. Similarly, in referring to the transition of the American palate to dry table wine in the 1970s, Sullivan’s assertion that “I believe this revolution in American wine consumption would have taken place even if the typical bottle of California wine had remained mediocre” (p. 306) is entirely unfounded. This rather bold claim is supported by nothing more than an interesting personal anecdote and evidence about improved variety selection and winery modernization projects that seem to work against Sullivan’s claim! Despite these and other flaws, Sullivan has given us another timeless book, and along with Thomas Pinney, Sullivan remains a go-to resource for all things California wine (Pinney, 1989, 2005).

Kevin Goldberg
Kennesaw State University
kgoldbe1@kennesaw.edu
doi:10.1017/jwe.2014.20

Authentic Wine is an exploration of the questions posed by today’s Natural Wine movement. (It narrowly missed having those two words as its title.) The opposite pole to authentic wine is not artificial but mass-produced wine, similar to Coca- Cola, which tastes the same whether you open a bottle in China or Abu Dhabi. I don’t find that idea so appalling (I love Coke), so I detect a slight elitist taint in the authors’ viewpoint. Their arguments are aimed at the sort of person who might buy a book like this, someone who treasures wine as an important element of his or her life and values its amazing diversity. It is a sophisticated and fascinating tome even though I take issue with one of its central themes.

OK, you say. You can have mass market wine as well as niche wine. Hasn’t that happened to beer? Not so fast. The authors argue convincingly that while Château Lafite doesn’t have to worry, the economics of the market are such that the middle level of winemakers, those who are innovating and producing the most interesting wines, will be squeezed out. There are many indications of a “homogenizing” trend even in fine wine that will ultimately limit choices.

The authors generally favor the idea of Natural Wine but argue that there are degrees of “naturalness,” and taking it to extremes may be counterproductive. The subject turns up throughout the book even though there is only one chapter specifically titled “The Natural Wine Movement,” which is largely a discussion of the use of sulfur dioxide as an additive. For example, in a fascinating chapter with the title “Grafted Vines,” the authors review the wine plagues of the nineteenth century, including the phylloxera epidemic. Phylloxera is a louse transported to Europe on American vines, which attacks the roots of European vitis vinifera. The eventual solution has been to graft European vines onto resistant American root stock, and this is the situation today for the vast majority of wine grapes planted in Europe and America. The interesting question becomes, isn’t it hypocritical to make an obsession of “naturalness” when the first thing you do is entirely unnatural,
grafting two distinctly separate species of grapevines together?

“Terroir” is a term that refers to the effects of all the factors that comprise a specific geographic location, such as soil composition, drainage qualities, heat retention, altitude, microclimate, sun exposure, microbiological flora in the soil, and nymphs and dryads in surrounding woods. Some, including the authors, allow the inclusion of some human activities in the meaning of “terroir,” but this eventually leads to the tautology that the wine tastes as it does because of everything that has happened to it. Best to stick with a clean definition minus humans.

The following things are true about terroir:

1. It is important in determining the eventual taste of the wine. Burgundy tastes like Burgundy because it is grown in Burgundy.

2. Terroir is a limiting factor in the quality of the wine. Only the best sites, used appropriately, can create great wine.

Where I run into trouble is with the notion of “sense of place,” an elusive quality in wine that could be paraphrased as “expression of terroir.” Indeed, the authors insist that without this attribute, your wine cannot be “authentic.” They point out, correctly, that it is not possible to produce identical wine in two different places. But they run into the problem that “sense of place” must have some correlate in the taste of the wine, not just that it is different from other wines. The implication is that the terroir imprints a particular flavor profile on wines made from grapes grown on that soil that is durable from one year to the next. If not, then the concept is diminished. “Sense of place” wouldn’t matter much if it changed every year.

And that is where I bridle. I cannot conceive of a mechanism by which terroir could give a consistent character to the wine from a specific vineyard each vintage. The problem is that while the physical aspects remain for the most part constant, the atmospheric ones (rainfall, temperature, sunlight, etc.) vary greatly and do so in a different time course each season. To change the proportion and nature of flavor compounds in the resulting wine involves altering the biology of the vine. This happens when circumstances such as heat or water availability cause different degrees of expression of a variety of genes in the DNA of the plant. Such influences are exquisitely sensitive to the stage of development of the plant. A stress that could cause one effect at one time might do the opposite two weeks later. It is hard to imagine how these events could be coordinated to produce a consistent result every year.

At the same time, there is abundant evidence that the ultimate flavor of the wine is due to choices made by human beings. One of the biggest is the selection of root stock and grape clones when replanting. Those are choices that can give a consistency of results over many years. And there are so many other factors.

I have tasted wine made by the same producer from two different plots in a single Burgundy commune, and they were quite similar. At the same sitting, I tasted other examples from a different winemaker who also had vines in those same two vineyards. They were also strikingly similar to one another but distinctly different from the first winemaker’s. There was absolutely no way, however, to determine which of the wines came from which vineyard. There was no “sense of place.”

It is possible to argue interminably about the nature of terroir. In my mind, these authors don’t have it right, but many more authorities probably agree with them than with me. It doesn’t detract from a very worthwhile book.

Jeffrey D. Postman
Physician, New York, NY
jpostman50@gmail.com
doi:10.1017/jwe.2014.21