Judgment of Paris

by George M. Taber

  Growing grapes and making wine near the mountaintop at Mayacamas was far different than doing it on the valley floor. As far back as the first flowering of wine in the Napa Valley in the late nineteenth century, mountain grapes sold at a premium because their yield was lower and they were believed to produce better wine. And while Travers was still getting most of the grapes from other growers, he bought mountain ones so that his wines, from the beginning, would have the intensely flavorful mountain character. About three-quarters of the Cabernet Sauvignon grapes Travers used in the early years were bought, largely from the Draper Ranch on nearby Spring Mountain.

  Travers called his Cabernet “aggressive” because of its heavy tannins. In view of that, he held it back from the market longer than other winemakers did in order to give the tannins time to mellow. Most vintners begin selling their Cabernet about two years after the harvest, having aged it about a year in oak and then another year in the bottle. Mayacamas wines were released after five years—aging a year and a half in large oak tanks, another year in small oak barrels, and finally two-and-a-half years in the bottle.

  When he visited the Mayacamas winery, Steven Spurrier was very impressed with its Cabernet and wanted to include the 1970 vintage in his tasting. Travers, though, was sold out of it, and Spurrier left thinking it would not be part of the tasting. Upon further reflection, though, he decided he really wanted Mayacamas in the contest and called Travers back to see if he could find a solution. This time Travers offered him the still unreleased 1971 wine, even though he did not consider it ready to drink. So Spurrier made a long trip back up to Mayacamas and bought three bottles of the 1971 wine.

  Ridge Vineyards Monte Bello, 1971

  Wine has been made in the Santa Cruz Mountains south of San Francisco since the early days of California vineyards, and some of the new ambitious amateur winemakers started returning there in the late 1950s. In 1959, four scientists from the Stanford Research Institute with Ph.D. degrees in engineering, Hewitt Crane, Charles Rosen, David Bennion, and Howard Zeidler, bought a winery in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It dated back to the 1890s and was located at 2,300 feet on Monte Bello Ridge.

  An elderly theologian who lived there alone surrounded by his books and dogs owned the property, and his only requirement of the new owners was that they take care of the grapevines. The scientists paid six hundred dollars an acre for eighty acres, although only twenty-five acres were planted with grapes. Most of the vines were Cabernet Sauvignon, with only a little Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, and an obscure Ruby Cabernet that had been developed by a professor at UC Davis.

  Only because they had agreed to keep up the vineyard, the scientists soon became weekend farmers and vintners. David Bennion was designated winemaker, even though he had never tasted wine before leaving his Mormon family in Utah to move to California. The engineers figured that since he had grown up on a farm, he knew at least something about growing things. Bennion made a few gallons of wine from the first crop in 1959, crushing the grapes by foot. Most of the six tons of grapes harvested, though, were sold to the nearby Gemello Winery. The scientists delivered the grapes in three station wagons.

  Although at their regular jobs the four were doing research on the outer edges of science on topics like magnetic-logic computers, on the weekend they had a simple, totally natural approach to winemaking. They didn’t filter their wines or use many chemicals, making the most of the quality grapes already planted. The early Ridge wines were simple, big, and very tannic. The men’s natural winemaking philosophy was strongly influenced by Martin Ray, who had vineyards and a winery nearby. In an obvious allusion to the famous Côte d’Or region of Burgundy, Ray told Bennion that the land above the Santa Clara Valley was the Chaîne d’Or (Golden Chain).

  The winery was bonded in 1962, so the operation was now legal, but they were still only making small amounts of wine, just 187 cases in 1963. Once they began selling it, they needed a name and a label. They named the winery Ridge Vineyards, and a commercial artist designed the label, taking his payment in wine. In 1967, Bennion left the Stanford Research Institute to work full time at Ridge, whose wines were developing a strong and loyal following, especially among the academic community at Stanford University.

  At a Palo Alto wine tasting in the late summer of 1968, Bennion met Paul Draper, a man with an eclectic wine background to match his own. Draper had grown up on a forty-acre farm in Illinois, graduated from the Choate prep school in Connecticut, and then picked up a degree in philosophy from Stanford. Following graduation in 1959, Draper went into the army and was stationed in Italy, working in intelligence. He rode around the country on a motorcycle just like the hero in his favorite movieLa Strada and fell in love with the Italian lifestyle, especially the wine. As he said years later, “Wine in a sense is a sacrament of nature and takes the meal to another level.”

  After the army, Draper continued his European experience with a year in Paris, where he studied at the Sorbonne. It was while working with Fritz Maytag, a member of the appliance family and a Stanford friend, in a venture in Latin America that promoted family planning, better nutrition, and other social changes that Draper first thought about getting into wine. The two were looking into for-profit ventures that could provide money to let them do their not-for-profit work. Before opening a wine business, however, Draper realized he needed to learn more about winemaking. So for two months in the summer of 1967, he worked at Souverain Cellars in the Napa Valley. The following summer he went to France, where he stayed with a friend whose family owned a winery in Bordeaux and picked up still more knowledge watching the harvest and wine crush. Draper produced two vintages of Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon, but growing economic chaos in the country and the political struggle between right and left forced him to abandon his work in Latin America to return to the U.S.

  After they had first met in Palo Alto, Bennion contacted Draper to see if he might be interested in joining him at Ridge, since he needed some help. The Ridge partners had expanded their operations by buying the abandoned Monte Bello winery, located one mile farther up the mountain on a single-lane, winding dirt road. An Italian-born doctor had founded Monte Bello in 1886, and its first commercial vintage was in 1892.

  Draper came aboard in August 1969, a time when the winery was a counterculture outpost on the West Coast. David Darlington described the scene in his bookZin : “On spectacular, supernal Monte Bello Ridge, psychoactive drugs proved quite popular; one Ridge acolyte—a full-bearded red-headed individual named Jerry—reportedly ate LSD sixty-four days in a row, and bottling was frequently performed by someone who held a 750-ml glass vessel with one hand and a joint of primo sinsemilla with the other. Though Bennion himself was not a druggie, the winery’s operations had to conform to this altered state of reality.”

  Ridge was best known for its Zinfandel wines, but Paul Draper’s pride was the Ridge Monte Bello, a blend of primarily Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, plus, in some years, a small amount of Petit Verdot and Cabernet Franc. Ridge labels carry long descriptions of their wines, and on the bottle of the 1971 Monte Bello wine that went to Paris, Draper wrote, “Our Cabernet grapes reached their balance in 1971 at slightly lower sugar than usual and produced a wine with more elegance and finesse than we have yet seen. The wine was fermented dry on the skins and from completion of its malolactic [fermentation] in November, was aged in small cooperage until bottled. Softer than the 1970, but with the same fine Cabernet character, the 1971 will need at least six years in bottle to approach its plateau of maturity.”

  Steven Spurrier had his pre-tasting favorites among the American wines. He expected that the Chalone Chardonnay would do best among the California whites and that the Ridge Monte Bello would score highest among the California reds.

  THE FRENCH WINERIES

  Chapter Eighteen

  French Wines at the Tasting

  The flavor of wine is like delicate poetry.

  —LOUIS PASTEUR

  Steven Spurrier selected French win
es that he thought would easily outshine the American ones at his event. The objective was first to get some publicity for the Caves de la Madeleine and the Académie du Vin and second to make the French aware of the interesting developments in California. Spurrier was certainly not out to humiliate the French wine business. After all, he was a wine merchant in Paris and wanted to continue working there. He had no plans to import and sell the California wines. His business was selling French wines—the ones in the competition and others. All of the French wines came from the stock of Spurrier’s shop.

  He selected four French red Bordeaux wines to be tasted with six California Cabernet Sauvignons, and four white Burgundies to be tasted with six California Chardonnays. Since this was to be just an interesting afternoon tasting and not an event that experts would be arguing about three decades later, Spurrier didn’t think anything about the fact that having six California wines in each part of the competition but only four French ones would give the Americans a statistical advantage. Since he wanted to make the French aware of the unknown California wineries, why not add an extra two to the mix?

  As he went about picking the French wines to face off with the California ones, Spurrier looked for close French matches. The French wines should be from vintages approximately the same as the American ones, and the reds had to be two or three years older than the whites since they take longer to develop. The new California winemakers since Hanzell Vineyards had been slavishly modeling their Chardonnays after Burgundy’s best, so he chose wines that any expert would name as top-rated white Burgundies. The four whites included one Grand Cru (Great Growth) and three of the very best Premiers Crus (First Growths) from three differentappellations .

  Since the California reds were either pure Cabernet Sauvignon or Cabernet blends, Spurrier opted for the best predominately Cabernet Sauvignon Bordeaux blends. His four French reds included two First Growths and two Second Growths from the 1855 classification. He thought the First Growths, Château Mouton and Château Haut-Brion, were the best Bordeaux wines then being made, and the two Second Growths, Château Montrose and Château Léoville-Las-Cases, were his personal favorites in that category. All the French reds had the taste, structure, and finesse of classic Bordeaux.

  Vintages are more important for French wines than for California ones because year-to-year variations in weather are greater in France. All the French Chardonnays came from the 1972 and 1973. The 1973 vintage was quite good for white Burgundies, while the 1972s had a high acidity and aged well for years. Both of those vintages were better for white Burgundy than either the 1971 or the 1974, which were also readily available. In addition, Spurrier had to play the card nature dealt. Chardonnays are ready to drink three or four years after bottling, and it wouldn’t have been fair play to compare young California Chardonnays with much older French ones. The French and California Chardonnays in the tasting were all basically the same age.

  The four red Bordeaux wines came from 1970 and 1971. The quality of a red wine vintage is often not known with certitude for many years, but at the time both were considered outstanding. Alexis Lichine wrote in 1979 of the vintage 1970 Bordeaux reds: “A great vintage. Unquestionably the best since 1961, with an abundance not seen since the beginning of the century.” Three of the four reds were from 1970. The 1971 vintage was smaller in size and a modest step down in quality, but was nonetheless very good.

  French reds take longer in the bottle to reach their peak than California reds, and an ideal tasting might have been between twenty-year-olds from both places. But that couldn’t be since the new California wineries didn’t yet have that kind of history. In any case, both the French and California wines were available in stores at the time and were already being drunk.

  Chardonnay

  Bâtard-Montrachet Ramonet-Prudhon, 1973

  Montrachet in the Côte de Beaune section of Burgundy has been the reigning sovereign of white Burgundies for centuries. The name means “bald hill,” and the Montrachet vineyard straddles the two villages of Puligny-Montrachet and Chassagne-Montrachet. This is the wine that Alexandre Dumas said should be sipped only while kneeling and with head bowed.

  There are no less than five wines with the highest Grand Cru ranking that have the word Montrachet in their names, and it’s difficult even for dedicated wine amateurs to keep track of all of them. The five: Le Montrachet, Bâtard-Montrachet, Chevalier-Montrachet, Bienvenues-Bâtard-Montrachet, and Criots-Bâtard-Montrachet. Wine connoisseurs have spirited discussions about which of the five is best. The most famous is the simple Montrachet, but the other wines are sometimes better made, depending on the particular vintner. The defining factor of all is their scarcity, since they come from relatively small areas. Bâtard-Montrachet covers only twenty-nine acres. As a result, all the wines are much in demand and expensive.

  The origin of bâtard (bastard) in Bâtard-Montrachet is lost in the mists of time. According to legend, a medieval lord of Montrachet had an illegitimate child by a local maiden. After the lord’s only legitimate son was killed in the Crusades, the father adopted the other son. Many years later, the lord’s château was destroyed and a variety of names from family history were given to his vineyards. One vineyard was named for the crusading son (Chevalier-Montrachet) and another for the bastard son (Bâtard-Montrachet).

  Domaine Ramonet was founded by Pierre Ramonet, the son of Claude Ramonet, a vineyard worker in the village of Chassagne. Pierre was born in 1906 and quit school at the age of eight to help his father in the fields. He married Lucie Prudhon, the daughter of the vineyard supervisor at the nearby Domaine de l’Abbaye de Morgeot. Thus the name Ramonet-Prudhon. Pierre Ramonet was a man of the earth who rarely traveled outside his village of Chassagne-Montrachet. The year of the Paris Tasting, Fanny Deschamps, a French journalist, wrote of him: “In his vineyard, Ramonet seems as much at home as if he were planted next to a vine.” In a 1988 book entitledMontrachet, Jean-François Bazin described Ramonet in the fields wearing “a big old sweater, galoshes, black pants, a cap pulled down on his head, his hands encrusted with brown from the juice of the vine.”

  The Montrachet knoll produces such outstanding wines that scientists have long struggled to understand the factors that contribute to their greatness. Climatologists have studied the weather; geologists have analyzed the composition of the soil and subsoil, and vintners have pondered over why Chardonnay has adapted so well to that particular place. Sun is certainly part of the answer. The vineyards face east and enjoy sunlight from early in the day to dusk.

  As in all great Burgundy properties, ownership is divided among many wineries, and Ramonet owned just over an acre of the Bâtard-Montrachet vineyard, which he acquired in 1955.

  After the end of Prohibition, Ramonet-Prudhon wines became very popular in the United States when Frank Schoonmaker began importing them. World War II interrupted that trade, however, and Ramonet was not paid for the hundreds of cases Schoonmaker bought until after hostilities ended.

  When Spurrier was selecting the Burgundies for the Paris Tasting, he had trouble deciding whether to include the 1972 or the 1973. Finally he telephoned Ramonet to ask him which of his recent vintages he recommended for a tasting, but without explaining the event.

  “All my wines are wonderful,” replied Ramonet.

  “Yes, but would you recommend the 1972 or the 1973?” asked Spurrier.

  “Take any one you want. All my wines are brilliant.”

  Left to his own devices, Spurrier picked the 1973, the vintage that he thought best matched the other Chardonnays.

  Beaune Clos des Mouches Joseph Drouhin, 1973

  The Beaune wine region covers 1,023 acres west of the city of the same name. Ninety percent of the wines that come from those vineyards are red, but the Chardonnays are also highly regarded. A large portion of the vineyards located on what is called the “kidney of the slope” west of the town of Beaune, including those of the Clos des Mouches, are owned by the city’s prominentnégociants .

  Clos
des Mouches is the best known of all the subdivisions of the Beaune region. The vineyard, which produces both red and white wines and occupies sixty-two acres, is in the southernmost section of the Beaune area, along the border with Pommard. The vineyard is situated on a small hill that has a direct southern exposure. The soil is light and stony, over a layer of chalky marl.

  The wordclos means enclosure, and refers to a Burgundian tradition of building stone walls around vineyards. The wordmouches, which means flies, was also a local word for bees in the Middle Ages, and it is presumed that the fertile southern-facing slopes where flowers grew so abundantly were a good location for bee-keeping.

  The Maison Joseph Drouhin is one of the oldest and most respected wine firms in Burgundy. Based in Beaune, the company not only makes wine from its own vineyards but also buys grapes from growers that it uses to make wines sold under its label. Drouhin ages its wine in historic cellars, some of which were Gothic church vaults in the thirteenth century.

  The company was founded in Beaune in 1880, when Joseph Drouhin bought a wine-trading business established in 1756. Right after World War I, Joseph’s son Maurice took over the family business and bought the firm’s first vineyards, including part of the Clos des Mouches vineyard. After the phylloxera epidemic in the nineteenth century, the Clos des Mouches was replanted with Pinot Noir grapes and was producing only red wine when Drouhin bought it. Maurice, though, discovered some old documents showing that Clos des Mouches had once produced excellent white wine, so in 1925 he began to replant some of his land with Chardonnay.

  In 1957, Maurice’s nephew Robert Jousset-Drouhin, who was only twenty-four at the time, took over as head of the firm after his uncle was partially paralyzed by a stroke. Born in Paris in 1933, Robert was the son of Maurice’s sister Thérèse and the physician André Jousset. Both of his parents died before Robert was seven, and he and his two sisters were sent to Beaune to live with their uncle Maurice, who later adopted them. Robert was already tasting and comparing wines by the age of fourteen, and he claimed that the 1929–1947 vintages that he tasted in his youth remained among his most vivid memories and set his standard for Burgundy wines. From 1951 to 1953, he studied law in Paris, then literature in Heidelberg, Germany. In 1954 Robert Drouhin was drafted into the French army and served in North Africa with the French Foreign Legion. After being discharged, he took over the family enterprise.