From Demon to Darling: A Legal History of Wine in America

Introduction

Introduction Two weeks after I arrived at Oxford in September 1975, I rambled down a corner staircase in the main quadrangle of Magdalen College to a nondescript door marked "Wine Steward." Little did I know that it was the entrance to the college's massive underground cellarsand my future career. Over the next two years those cellars served as my introduction to the world of wine and led me to France and then America in pursuit of fine wines and their accompaniments—food, art, history, and culture.Lawwould come later. As a native Floridian, I had never drunk or heard about any of the wines on the college's wine list, and I could hardly pronounce their names— Chambertin, Pouilly-Fuisse, Graacher Himmelreich, and the like. Magdalen offers its wines to students at cost plus a small markup. Access to the cellar 's stock depends on the length of your gown; undergraduates have the most limited access and dons the most extensive. I was a graduate student with a thigh-high gown, so the steward handed me the fifteen-page wine list, full of offerings from around the world, including old vintages, and all at reasonable prices. I committed to drinking my way through that list during my two-year stay. Before Oxford, the only wines I had drunk were jug wines swilled at college parties and Manishewitz drunk with the family at Passover. Mostly my friends and I drank beer and punch laced with grain alcohol. The Old World changed all of that. T I was captivated by the wonderful array of aromas and flavors, by the wine labels and bottles ranging from classic to exotic, and by the foreign names. The British, without serious domestic wines of their own, fancy themselves the world swine cognoscenti. I attended the wine auctions sponsored by Christies and the social tastings of the Oxford University Wine and Food Society. My friend Kingsley Liu ran the Oxford University Wine Circle, training its members for blind tasting competitions, including the main event against rival Cambridge. And I took wine education courses offered by the London Wine and Spirit Education Trust and cooking classes at Cordon Bleu in London. For each wine that I sampled or drank, I recorded tasting notes in a black book, next to the label that I had carefully soaked off the bottle. My introduction to winemaking came after my two-year stint at Oxford, when I landed a job in Beaune at the negotiant house of Bouchard Aine et Fils. For a year I drove our customers around the Burgundy vineyards, from Gevrey Chambertin to Mercurey. After our visits I would conduct tastings of wines from each of the areas we had visited. I met my wife, Marilyn, over a double blind tasting of Cotes de Nuits wines. Through these tastings I came to appreciate the concept of terroir, which posits that a wine's character and flavors reflect the unique features of the site where the grapes are grown. In Burgundy I saw the inner workings of the cellars and the occasional shenanigans. I already had learned the ins and outs of wine labeling in England . We used to hunt down cheap Burgundy appellation wines from the vintages of the early 19705 that were the same as those labeled under more exclusive appellations selling at far more expensive prices. In those days, France imposed strict yield limits for the smallest and most prestigious appellations. But many winegrowers did not limit the size of their crop. Instead , they called the same grapes by different appellation names. For example , two tons of the crop would be called Clos de Beze, and the remaining tonnage from the same vineyard would be "declassified" as Gevrey Chambertin , Cotes de Nuits, or simply Burgundy. But allthe wines were the same, made from grapes harvested at the same place and at the same time. Unfortunately , France changed this system before I could locate and lay down a good stock of the declassified wines. By the time I returned to America, I had a good palate, a command of French, and an understanding of how Burgundy wines are made and sold around the world. I knew about the splash that California wine was making , especially in Europe following the Paris tasting of 1976, so Marilyn and 2. I N T R O D U C T I O N I headed to Napa Valley, America...