American Rhone: How Maverick Winemakers Changed the Way Americans Drink
352
American Rhone: How Maverick Winemakers Changed the Way Americans Drink
352eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
"This is the most important wine book of the year, perhaps in many years."—The Seattle Times "Crisply written, impeccably researched, balanced if fundamentally enthusiastic, scholarly but accessible, and full of unexpected details and characters."—The World of Fine Wine No wine category has seen more dramatic growth in recent years than American Rhône–variety wines. Winemakers are devoting more energy, more acreage, and more bottlings to Rhône varieties than ever before. The flagship Rhône red, Syrah, is routinely touted as one of California’s most promising varieties, capable of tremendous adaptability as a vine, wonderfully variable in style, and highly expressive of place. There has never been a better time for American Rhône wine producers.
American Rhône is the untold history of the American Rhône wine movement. The popularity of these wines has been hard fought; this is a story of fringe players, unknown varieties, and longshot efforts finding their way to the mainstream. It’s the story of winemakers gathering sufficient strength in numbers to forge a triumph of the obscure and the brash. But, more than this, it is the story of the maturation of the American palate and a new republic of wine lovers whose restless tastes and curiosity led them to Rhône wines just as those wines were reaching a critical mass in the marketplace. Patrick J. Comiskey’s history of the American Rhône wine movement is both a compelling underdog success story and an essential reference for the wine professional.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520965140 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 10/11/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 9 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
American Rhône
How Maverick Winemakers Changed the Way Americans Drink
By Patrick J. Comiskey
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Patrick J. ComiskeyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-96514-0
CHAPTER 1
THE SIXTIES, HEADWATERS OF THE AMERICAN RHÔNE
In a sense, it all begins with the sixties. The sixties give us all permission.
Before the decade of the sixties, American culture is narrowly defined, restricted by social convention, a fairly rigid Judeo-Christian moral framework, a troubled economic history. Personal expression has been underdeveloped or effectively suppressed for close to forty years, laid low by the Great Depression and by the obligations of the Second World War, after which the country clings to safe cultural models for a decade — notwithstanding incursions of fear brought on by a new nuclear reality. Americans do nurse a Bohemian culture, but it is largely a nocturnal phenomenon, limited to coffeehouses and basement stages.
In the sixties, the doors are pried open, American culture embraces possibility. Conformist models are debunked and devalued. Young people get restless, and demands for freedom of expression push into the mainstream, spurred on by student activism, opposition to the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement, the environmental movement, the human potential movement, feminism, and free love sentiments — all contributing to a new spirit of permissiveness, the sense that anything is possible. Psychedelic drugs and marijuana send shock waves through the population, and whether or not you partake of such substances, you can hardly avoid their influence on the culture at large. Indeed much of what was once considered deviant, subversive, or dangerous is now actively embraced.
With the seventies, alternative lifestyles beget alternative livelihoods. By the end of the decade an entire subeconomy supporting the counterculture has emerged, and as the counterculture expands, so do businesses to support it. A generation of young laborers questions the wisdom of following their fathers into conventional commerce. They have no interest in a professional life that involves suits and ties or stultifying commutes to drab suburban centers. They want something else.
It is the era where college professors walk away from tenured positions to start organic farms, where careers in medicine are abandoned to pursue vineyard planting, where big fortunes are made selling high fidelity stereo equipment, and small ones selling handmade purses — parlayed into the business of importing wine.
As American culture opens up to new possibilities, so do the things one can do in it. In California, one of those things is to make wine.
If there ever was a hotbed for American counterculture, it was California, particularly the communities of San Francisco and Berkeley. San Francisco might be seen as the source of many of the social changes in the state, but Berkeley provided the intellectual framework. Berkeley was home to a flagship university, home to the brightest young people in the country's most progressive state. If the sixties fomented change in this country, California was its engine, and Berkeley was its brain trust.
Visit Berkeley today, and past and present mingle on practically every block. Many of the city's more iconic institutions got their start in the sixties, whose spirit still permeates the culture. It is a place where revolution took root, settled, institutionalized, and morphed into manageable expressions — where radicalism was transformed into more personal revolutions, where the impetus for changing the world found creative, entrepreneurial, and commercial expression. And of all of these transformations, few were more enduring and vital than those which involved eating and drinking. These changes too had roots in revolutionary fervor. During the early sixties the food industry had become industrialized to such an extent that conventional food was no longer recognizable as food. It was the era that gave rise to the TV dinner, to Tater Tots and Tang, to frozen pizza and Space Food Sticks. Industrial farming techniques allowed the country's productivity to skyrocket through the use of herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides, touted as "better living" through chemicals. Activists rallied people against these practices, and they got practical themselves: coops sprung up in and around campuses, supermarkets were disdained in favor of local produce markets emphasizing the fresh, wholesome, and natural. The word "organic" entered the lexicon; though as a marketing device the term suffered in the early years, with less than pristine application, the notion itself came of age in this era.
Revolutions in food and wine culture lagged slightly behind the cultural revolution, but not by much. Part of the hippie ethos included an active mythologizing of country living, a back-to-the-land appreciation at once romantic and liberating. Communes were commonplace, and many attempted to become sustainable by growing crops — organically of course. Back-to-the-land movements changed the way we looked at food.
With an expansion of cultural consciousness came an expansion of the possibilities in food and wine, so that by the time the seventies arrive, the climate is right for a series of seminal events that, taken together, become the antecedents of the American Rhône wine movement.
With protests and activism come community, and communities need to eat. One of the students on hand to feed and support the protesters in Berkeley was Alice Waters, a student of French culture who grew up in Chatham, New Jersey, and moved to Van Nuys, California with her family in 1961. After studying at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Waters completed her degree at Berkeley and immediately fell in with student activists, following or supporting protests throughout the Bay Area. In 1966 Waters moved in with a young intellectual and artist named David Goines, who was actively involved in the free-speech movement. Waters couldn't help but notice with some alarm that the revolution was being fueled on peanut butter sandwiches and canned soup — institutional, industrial, non-nutritional foods.
Alice Waters believed in food. Just after arriving in Berkeley in 1965, Waters had taken a trip to France, eating her way across the country and tasting food harvested or collected just hours, or moments, before being delivered to the table. There were several seminal meals during this trip, but Waters has consistently referred to a meal in Brittany as her epiphany. It began simply enough, a plate of melon with cured ham, followed by a course of trout amandine, and finished with a dessert of fresh raspberries. But those raspberries had come from the property, and the trout had been caught in a stream she could see from the table. "It was this immediacy," she recalled, "that made these dishes so special."
Upon her return Waters started to cook communal meals that to her were simple reflections of the lesson she'd received in France; to those eating them, they were elaborate, stunning, and evocative, worlds from even the most wholesome hippie food of the street and far simpler than the continental French style of meals enjoyed by bourgeois diners and promoted by establishment restaurants, but no less stirring or satisfying. These became the culinary starting ground for Chez Panisse.
Waters founded the restaurant in August 1971, with mismatched plates and saucers, flatware rescued from thrift stores, and an aesthetic loosely tethered to ideals of community, immediacy, and creativity; what it possessed in spirit it may have lacked in focus at the outset. But Waters immersed herself in French cuisine and culture, reading influential authors like the English food journalist Elizabeth David and the American Richard Olney; she acquainted herself with the culinary advances coming from the northern Rhône restaurant La Pyramide, in Vienne, owned by the legendary chef Fernand Point. Point's kitchen was a proving ground for some of the greatest chefs in postwar France, including Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel, and the Troisgros brothers. Inevitably a culinary bent that had been more broadly French took a distinct turn south.
Still other factors linked Waters to the south of France. One of her lovers, Thomas Luddy, was a film scholar and promoter (he eventually founded the Pacific Film Archive) who introduced Waters to a series of films authored by Marcel Pagnol known as the Fanny Trilogy. Three films, Marius, Fanny, and César, were produced in the early to mid-thirties, set on the Vieux Port of Marseilles in the heart of Provence, with stories that followed several interlinking characters from youth to middle age whose lives are centered around a café owned by César. Waters wound up naming her new restaurant Chez Panisse, after the genial, kindhearted sailmaker in the film; her only child she named Fanny.
As Waters was founding Chez Panisse, another Berkeley figure, an acknowledged ex-hippie, was developing a business that would complement Waters's culinary breakthrough.
Kermit Lynch was born into a teetotaling family in 1941, in San Luis Obispo, California. At the time this was a region better known for pastures than vineyards, and was still decades way from becoming the wine region it is today. He attended the University of California, Berkeley, and as a student, musician, and blues aficionado, Lynch developed a taste for wine that he casually cultivated as he pursued a career in music, all the while operating a small crafts business called The Berkeley Bag, wherein he transformed Asian rug scraps and bolts of fabric into women's purses. It was hardly something he saw himself doing forever, however, and in 1971, when an entrepreneur offered to buy the business, he cashed out and booked a trip to Europe to find out more about his avocation, wine.
The following year Lynch borrowed a small sum from his girlfriend and opened a wine shop in Albany, just north of Berkeley. Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant kept patrician hours, so as not to interfere with his music career. It was simple, crowded, fusty, and unkempt, "cool and dark inside," wrote Ruth Reichl in her memoir, Tender at the Bone, "and smelled like spilled wine. Cartons were stacked on the floor, hundreds of them, and way in the back a slight man with curly brown hair and a scruffy beard stood by a makeshift desk, watching me. I could feel his eyes on my back as I went up and down the aisles looking at the wine in the cartons and repeating the names to myself. The words were beautiful. I reached for a bottle, picked it up, and stroked the label.
"'It's not fruit,' said the man. 'You can't tell anything by squeezing it.'"
In the beginning, Lynch sold whatever was available to him — and at that moment, this was a lot. A recession had made a great many great wines available on the cheap, including the portfolio of Frank Schoonmaker, whose extraordinary stock of Grand Cru Burgundy and First Growth Bordeaux Lynch was able to purchase for as little as 20 cents on the dollar. Soon after he started making trips to France, hardly knowing the language, with only the vaguest sense of what he was after, and where to get it. Lynch's clientele grew rapidly, and within a few short years he was selling to many of the best restaurants of the day, including Narsai David's eponymous restaurant in Kensington, founded the same year (it would soon be known for having one of the finest wine lists in the country), Michael Wild's Bay Wolf, and not least, Alice Waters's Chez Panisse.
Since the inception of his business, Lynch has imported wine from all over France — he continues to carry superb Burgundies and fine-boutique Champagnes, iconic Beaujolais, as well as a stellar collection of producers he's brought to fame from the Loire, Alsace, and Languedoc.
But within a few short years of opening Lynch's reputation rested on wines from the south of France. The wines of the Rhône Valley and Provence have remained the soul of his portfolio; it was in these regions that he was able to find producers that no one had tapped; he imported wines from domaines like Gentaz, Chave, Vieux Télégraphe, Simone, Trinquevedel, Gripa, Clape, Tardieu-Laurent, Jasmin, Chateau Grillet, and Verset, brands which had never been in the U.S. market or only spottily. By the end of his first decade as an importer, Lynch had adopted no less than two dozen producers from the south of France, including many from the Rhône Valley, Provence, and the Languedoc, importing more than a hundred wines from these regions and effectively exploding a heretofore underappreciated category.
As fledgling businesses in Berkeley's nascent food scene in the seventies, Kermit Lynch and Alice Waters were destined to meet, of course, and to do a brisk business together; Waters needed good wine for her restaurant, and Lynch needed a customer who could appreciate his unique palate.
But the synergies between Chez Panisse and Kermit Lynch Wine Merchants go well beyond a commercial relationship, even a friendly one. It's rare for two innovators of such intense conviction to find each other in the same place at the same time and have so much in common politically, philosophically, and aesthetically. Waters's ebullient menus and Lynch's ebullient wines seemed so ideally suited to one another that the connection almost bordered on myth — and that myth linked them and Berkeley to the south of France. No one who dined at Chez Panisse could fail to be influenced, not least a would-be winemaker or two.
The figure that fused their aesthetic vision was Richard Olney, the expatriate American writer living in the south of France, with whom both Lynch and Waters would develop an intimate relationship.
Olney was a painter and writer who emigrated to France as a young man, where he got to know several of the country's most talented winemakers and chefs. In the early sixties he landed a job writing about French food and wine for the influential magazine Cuisine et Vins de France. By 1970 he was living full time in Provence, where he'd purchased an old house in Solliès-Toucas, which he slowly refurbished, planting an elaborate garden and resurrecting a simple yet functional kitchen. Increasingly his daily life there informed his writings, and his home became a pilgrimage spot for American cooks, journalists, and restaurateurs, all of whom came away with an indelible image of a simple life, lived well, punctuated by memorable meals.
Olney published several books on French cooking, many devoted to simple country fare. His first, The French Menu Cookbook, was published by Simon & Schuster in 1970, just prior to the opening of Chez Panisse in 1971. Most likely Waters was familiar with the book at the time; certainly his second book, Simple French Food, she regarded as a bible.
Olney's books were a departure from the haute cuisine espoused by such leading resources in French culinary arts as Larousse Gastronomique or the writings of Georges Auguste Escoffier. Olney's preparations were simple, his measurements inexact, his methods ad hoc, the results invariably delicious.
Waters and Olney met in California during Olney's American book tour for Simple French Food, in 1974; the following year Waters visited Olney in Solliès-Toucas and was introduced to the Peyraud family, who produced Provencal wines from Bandol under the name Domaine Tempier. Waters knew these wines, especially the robust, vivid rosé; the domaine had been imported to the Bay Area in minute quantities by the importer and wine writer Gerald Asher, and in fact Waters carried the wine on early wine lists. But wine tasted in the context of where it's grown and made is often transformative, and there's little doubt that Alice Waters was duly transformed.
"It is impossible for me not to love the wines of Domaine Tempier," wrote Alice Waters in Kermit Lynch's newsletter in 1978. "Once you have visited the Peyrauds in their 17th-century house surrounded by perfectly tended vines, eaten Lulu's garlicky food cooked over the coals, and drunk the wines with Lucien in his cellar, it is clear that they love wine and they love people drinking wine."
More than this, however, Waters was taken with the Peyraud family and with their way of life: "I felt as if I had walked into a Marcel Pagnol film come to life," she wrote in the foreword to Olney's book Lulu's Provencal Table some fifteen years later. "Lucien and Lulu's warmhearted enthusiasm for life, their love for the pleasures of the table, their deep connection to the beautiful earth of the South of France — these were things I had seen at the movies. But this was for real. I felt immediately as if I had come home to a second family."
Kermit Lynch, meanwhile, was making more frequent trips to Europe, and as his own tastes and philosophy started to take shape, the trips became longer, devoted to small independent French growers who had broken from négociants and were trying their hand at making wine on their own. A new word was being used to describe them — artisans — and the results were revolutionary. But they were not easy to find without help. Lynch required the talents of guides who knew the lay of the land and could introduce him to producers who weren't being imported in California.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from American Rhône by Patrick J. Comiskey. Copyright © 2016 Patrick J. Comiskey. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction
PART I: PRELUDES AND ANTECEDENTS
1. The Sixties, Headwaters of the American Rhône
2. A Place and Its Progeny: A Guide to the Varieties of the Rhône Valley
3. How Rhône Varieties Got to American Soil
4. The Curious Case of American Petite Sirah
5. Rhône Varieties through Prohibition and After
PART II: PIONEERS AND PLAYERS
6. The Path to the First American Rhône
7. Syrah’s Proud Father: Gary Eberle and the Making of Modern Syrah
8. Other Pioneers: From the North Coast to Gold Country
PART III: ARTISTS AND ICONOCLASTS
9. Randall Grahm, the Movement’s Cosmic Impresario
10. Steve Edmunds, the Quiet Iconoclast
11. Sean Thackrey, the Thinking Man’s Rhônist
12. Manfred Krankl, the First Superstar
PART IV: THE MOVEMENT STARTS TO MOVE
13. Viognier, the Rhône Movement’s Flower Child
14. The Purloined Rhône: How Suitcase Clones Shaped the Movement
15. Tablas Creek, the Validator
16. The American Rhône in Washington State
PART V: BOOMTIME
17. The Birth of the Rhône Rangers, 1987–1990
18. The Academic Backup for the American Rhône Movement
19. The Bridge from California to France: The Colloquium to Bring the Rhônes Together
20. Hospice du Rhône: A Festival to Bring the Rhône World Home
PART VI: IRRATIONAL EXUBERANCE
21. The Rise and Fall of American Syrah
22. What We Talk About When We Talk about American Syrah
Notes
Index
Figures gathered after page 138.