Of course, these early wines were nothing like the Champagne we enjoy today. The beverage’s characteristic bubbles, produced by carbon dioxide released during the fermentation process, were considered undesirable until the early eighteenth century, when Philippe, the duke of Orléans, started a fashion for sparkling wine. The nobility of France followed Philippe’s lead, and effervescent Champagne became a popular beverage, especially on festive occasions.7 By the time Jefferson toured the region, the famous houses of Moët et Chandon, Taittinger, and Veuve Clicquot were already flourishing.
Map of France, ca. 1780. The Jefferson party’s journey took them southeast through the wine-producing regions of Champagne, Burgundy, Rhône-Alpes, Languedoc-Roussillon, and Provence before detouring into northern Italy.
Naturally, Jefferson sampled the renowned wines of Champagne but initially found them not to his taste, leaving this terse assessment in his travel notebook: “wine not good.”8 Given that sparkling wines were then unknown in the United States, his initial prejudice against the bubbles may be forgiven. His aversion did not last long, however. If sparkling wine is an acquired taste, he acquired it pretty quickly, for in April he sampled a Nebbiolo wine, which he praised as being “as brisk as Champagne.” As he sampled more and more types, Jefferson came to some astute conclusions about the wine and its production. First, he decided that white pinot grapes made a finer Champagne than did red pinot grapes. Second, contrary to popular opinion at the time, he believed that Champagne was not at its best when consumed young; on the contrary, he felt that cellaring improved its taste. He was fortunate to try some very fine aged Champagnes as revealed in his notes: “1766 was the best year ever known … 1755 and 1776 next to that. 1783 is the last good year, and that not to be compared with those.”9
But the trip was not entirely spent imbibing wines. Jefferson had been serious when he told William Short of his intention to study the living conditions of the country’s working poor. In a letter to the Marquis de Lafayette, he described his investigation. “You must ferret the people out of their hovels as I have done,” he wrote, “look into their kettles, eat their bread, loll on their beds under pretence of resting yourself, but in fact to find if they are soft.”10 Often what he found did not please him. “I observe the women and children carrying heavy burdens.… This is an unequivocal indication of extreme poverty. Men, in a civilized country, never expose their wives and children to labor above their force and sex, as long as their own labor can protect them from it.”11
After leaving Champagne, the group traveled south to Burgundy, where Jefferson toured some of France’s best and most renowned vineyards. He started with Chambertin and then moved on to “Vougeot, Romanee, Vosne, Nuits, Beaune, Pommard, Volnay, Meursault, and end at Montrachet.” (These vineyards still produce some of the finest and most sought-after and expensive wines in the world. In 2011, for example, dealers priced a single bottle of 2005 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti at $19,250.12) After hiring a pony and a local peasant to serve as his guide, Jefferson explored the region’s great wine-producing estates. He had hopes of establishing a vineyard of his own at Monticello, so he expressed interest in every facet of winemaking. Out among the vines he climbed off his pony and dug into the soil to understand the terroir of Burgundy. He found that the soil was reddish, mixed with small stones. About a foot below the surface he hit bedrock.
An examination of the soil is important to any winemaker, but terroir is more than just dirt. To truly study a vineyard’s terroir, as Jefferson did, is to examine a complex set of variables and their effects on the vines: the type of soil, its drainage properties, the altitude of the vineyard, the amount of sunlight the vines get each day, and the typical weather conditions of the region. In discussions with vineyard owners and winemakers, Jefferson learned that it took five or six years before a newly planted vine produced enough grapes to make wine. In Jefferson’s day, vintners used the same vines for a hundred or, in some cases, one hundred fifty years. By contrast, vines today are torn up when they reach forty or fifty years old.13
In Burgundy, Jefferson’s favorite wine was Chambertin. He savored its flavor but also its strength. With the stocking of his own wine cellar at Monticello in mind, he wrote in his notebook that it “will bear transportation.” Made from the pinot noir grape, Chambertin is one of the grand cru wines of France. (Grand cru means “great growth” and denotes the highest level of classification of wines from Burgundy.) It is a full-bodied, deeply colored red, with intense flavor of fruit and a rich aroma that some aficionados describe as a medley of cherries, licorice, and musk.
Another great vineyard Jefferson visited was Clos de Vougeot, established by Cistercian monks in the twelfth century. When Jefferson visited the monastery, the monks tended one hundred twenty-four acres of vineyards and produced about fifty thousand bottles a year. Making wine at the monastery was more than a tradition, it was the monks’ vocation, and their dedication to it was so complete that by the eighteenth century connoisseurs considered Clos de Vougeot the best wine in Burgundy. Just a few years later, during the French Revolution, the government expelled the monks and sold the vineyard at public auction. Ultimately, eighty individuals owned a parcel of the monks’ original vineyard, and all of them tried to make wine. Unfortunately, they lacked the monks’ skill, experience, and dedication, and the quality of Clos de Vougeot subsequently plummeted.14
Eventually, Jefferson made his way to Beaune, the region’s winemaking center, where he made the acquaintance of Étienne Parent, a barrelmaker turned wine merchant. On the subject of fine Burgundies, Parent had no peer. He educated Jefferson on the region’s wines and helped the American select the best ones for his cellars in Paris and, later, Monticello. A man like Parent was indispensable in the eighteenth century. At a time before governments had stepped in to establish standards of quality control or connoisseurs had begun publishing guides and dissecting vintages, it was extremely difficult, not to mention confusing, for a nonprofessional to stock a wine cellar. Parent had a discerning palate and years of expertise, which he placed at the service of an eager and appreciative clientele, Thomas Jefferson among them.15
From Beaune, Jefferson traveled the short distance to the little town of Meursault, still surrounded by its medieval stone walls. There he met Jean-Joseph Bachet, who operated a thirteen-acre vineyard named La Goutte d’Or (The Drop of Gold). Bachet’s wine became Jefferson’s favorite Meursault, and he kept a supply on hand for the last two and a half years he spent in France; indeed, Bachet’s Meursault became the house white wine at the Hôtel de Langeac.16
Next on the itinerary was the province of Beaujolais. On March 9, amid a fierce rainstorm, Jefferson’s carriage drew up before the door of the Château de Laye-Epinaye. Jefferson and the Comtesse de Laye-Epinaye had two friends in common, the Abbé Chalut and the Abbé Arnoux. The clergymen had written a letter of introduction for Jefferson so that he would be received by the countess as a guest (her husband, the count, was in residence at Versailles).17
Jefferson stayed at the château for three days, during which time he explored the fifteen-thousand-acre estate. Although the storm prevented him from venturing out on his first day, the two days that followed were clear. Of his experiences, Jefferson wrote: “This is the richest country I ever beheld.” Everywhere he rode, he saw well-tended farmhouses covered with slate roofs rather than thatch, and healthy, well-dressed peasants. He examined vineyards, orchards, and wheat fields, all of which pleased him, as well as herds of white cattle, which he thought were “indifferent” compared to the breeds found in America. But, as he had set out to do initially, Jefferson returned to the condition of the peasants, which he found to be entwined with the politics of France. “The people of Burgundy and Beaujolais are well clothed, and have the appearance of being well fed,” he wrote. “But they experience all the oppressions which result from the nature of the general government.… What a cruel reflection that a rich country cannot be a free one.”18
Afte
r full days exploring the estate, Jefferson spent evenings at the château. His hostess was suffering from a heavy cold, but she did her utmost to entertain her guest. Jefferson noted that the countess treated him “with a goodness and ease which was charming.” While inside the castle, he came upon a statue of Diana and Endymion by Michelangelo Slodtz, one of the finest French sculptors of the Rococo period. (Another of his works, a statue of St. Bruno, can be found in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.) Jefferson praised the countess’s example of Slodtz’s art as “a very superior morsel of sculpture.”19
Back on the road, Jefferson began following the route that runs along the eastern bank of the Rhône River. The weather was often terrible—the travelers were plagued by heavy rain, freezing temperatures, hail, and even snow. But between Lyon and Nîmes Jefferson found something to distract him from the inclement climate: ancient Roman ruins. At Vienne he visited the former Temple of Augustus and Livia, which had survived virtually intact since the first century, in part because, in the fourth century, it had been converted into a Christian church. Jefferson didn’t see it that way. First, he didn’t realize the structure had originally served as a pagan temple; he thought it was “the Praetorian Palace.” Second, it didn’t occur to him that, had the building not been converted to another use, it probably would have been destroyed, either by being mined for its marble or burned to produce lime (such had been the fate of many ancient structures in the Roman Forum). From Jefferson’s point of view, this classical monument had been “totally defaced” by the “Barbarians” of the Middle Ages. He lamented the “beautiful, fluted, Corinthian columns cut out in part to make space for Gothic windows.” But as he encountered more architectural ruins, his spirits lifted. He later confessed that he was “nourished with the remains of Roman grandeur” and “immersed in antiquities from morning to night.”20
As the group approached Nîmes, in southern France, Jefferson stopped his carriage and alighted so that he could inspect the spectacular Roman aqueduct known as the Pont du Gard. Once in the town proper, he visited the ruined Temple of Diana and the Roman amphitheater. But by far the chief local attraction for antiquarians was the Maison Carrée, one of the best-preserved Roman temples in Europe. Construction of the building had begun in 16 B.C., and, in about A.D. 2, the temple was dedicated to Caesar Augustus’s two adopted sons, Gaius and Lucius. The structure enchanted Jefferson. In a letter to his friend Madame de Tesse, he wrote: “Here I am, madam, gazing whole hours at the Maison quarrée, like a lover at his mistress.”21 Years later, when he was back in Virginia and designing the new state capitol, he would use the long, rectangular shape and classical facade of the Maison Carrée as his model.
But Roman ruins were not the only things admired by Jefferson as he traveled south. Nature, too, inspired him. In spite of the bad weather, the almond trees were beginning to blossom, a spectacular sight. Outside the town of Orange, on the way to Nîmes, he exclaimed, “Here begins the country of olives!” He also noted details of the flora and fauna he came across: “Thyme growing wild here on the hills. Asses very small.”22
The lure of the vine was never far, however, especially in this viticultural region. As he traveled through the Côtes du Rhône, Jefferson grew fond of the Côte Rôtie wines, made from syrah grapes. He made a note to order bottles for his house in Paris, a significant detail because selling wine by the bottle was a relatively new innovation, only forty or fifty years old. The first wine bottles were not bottles at all but decanters, which were carried down to the cellar and filled straight from the barrel. At the time of Jefferson’s journey, wines by the cask were still available, and many consumers preferred to have it delivered that way. Glass containers were liable to break, and the cost of bottling and shipping increased the price by two-thirds. In addition, the bottles were sealed with a piece of cork, and to remove it required a new tool: the corkscrew. Jefferson carried one with him, in the same little case that held his toothbrush.23
At the village of Tain-l’Hermitage, north of Nîmes, Jefferson stopped to sample the local wines. According to legend, in 1225 a crusader named Gaspard de Sterimberg returned from the Holy Land with some cuttings of syrah grapevines. After years of warfare, he longed for the quiet life of a hermit, and so he built his hermitage above the village and settled into days divided between saying his prayers and cultivating his vines. Other hermits joined him, forming a loose community of solitaries. The community drew recruits for more than five hundred years, until the last hermit died in 1751. The Hermitage wines delighted Jefferson, particularly the white ones, which tasted a bit like flint with a touch of sugar. He never forgot them. Decades later, when he became president of the United States, Jefferson ordered five hundred bottles of Hermitage white for the White House wine cellar.
Upon leaving Tain-l’Hermitage, Jefferson continued south, passing through a series of poor villages where the laborers lived in huts made of mud and stone. He was shocked to learn that the people rarely ate meat. The villagers had “plenty of cheese, eggs, potatoes and other vegetables and walnut oil for their salad,” but most families survived the year on the meat of a single salted hog. Still enforced was the medieval decree that restricted all wild game to the local nobility. A peasant who was caught netting a pheasant, trapping a rabbit, or shooting a deer would be imprisoned for his first offense and executed if he repeated his crime.24
In Aix-en-Provence, in France’s southernmost Provençal region, Jefferson was able to fulfill one of the goals of his journey—applying the healing mineral water to his sore wrist. Faith in the restorative properties of the mineral springs of Aix dated back at least to the time of the Romans in the first century B.C. The bathhouse Jefferson visited had been built early in the eighteenth century and paved with marble. Throughout the building were brass faucets where visitors could fill their glasses to drink the water or bathe their sores or injuries. For more serious afflictions, private bathing rooms were provided. The English novelist Tobias Smollett, who visited the baths in Aix a few years before Jefferson, reported that the water cured “the gout, the gravel, scurvy, dropsy, palsy, indigestion, asthma, and consumption.”25
Jefferson bathed his wrist forty times, but “without any sensible benefit,” as he wrote to William Short. Healing required patience, as he remarked to his protégé back in America: “My wrist strengthens slowly. It is to time I look as the surest remedy, and that I believe will restore it at length.”26 Any disappointment he felt at not being healed quickly was overshadowed by the pleasure he took in the city and surrounding countryside. “I am now in the land of corn, wine, oil, and sunshine. What more can a man ask of heaven?” As for the town itself, Jefferson was overwhelmingly impressed. “This city is one of the cleanest and neatest I have ever seen in any country. The streets are straight, from 20 to 100 feet wide, and as clean as a parlor floor … [with] rows of elms from 100 to 150 years old, which make delicious walks.”27 The avenue to which all of Aix re-sorted—natives and visitors alike—was the Cours Mirabeau, considered the most beautiful thoroughfare in Europe. Along the street stood handsome seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mansions; overhead the century-old elms cast their shade over the pavement. It was an elegant setting for that aristocratic custom known as “taking the air.”28 Even in this fashionable town, Jefferson kept to his rule for this journey, declining dinner invitations and avoiding any social interaction with the upper crust. Observing and learning from the peasants and working classes was his primary task: “[I] courted the society of gardeners, vignerons, coopers, farmers, etc and have devoted every moment of every day almost, to the business of inquiry.”29
On March 20 Jefferson left Aix for Marseille, France’s greatest southern port, only twenty miles away. Marseille stood on a grand plain, with mountains at its back and the sea at its feet. Jefferson was charmed by “all the life and activity,” which reminded him of London and, perhaps a bit chauvinistically, Philadelphia. He climbed to the hilltop church and monastery of Notre-Dame de la Garde, more to enjoy
the view than to visit the sanctuary. One day he took a boat to the island fortress of the Château d’If, which would feature so prominently in Alexander Dumas’s 1844 novel The Count of Monte Cristo.
Jefferson’s friend the Marquis de Chastellux had given him a letter of introduction to Henri Bergasse, one of the foremost wine merchants in France. Bergasse increased Jefferson’s knowledge of wine, gave him a tour of his vast wine cellar, and showed him the best way to store wine in bottles: laid on their sides and covered with sand. One night the nobleman threw a dinner party, and Jefferson broke his own rule to attend, spending a happy evening enjoying hearty food, aristocratic company, and a selection of excellent wines.
As was usual throughout his trip, Jefferson continued to scour the local countryside for any produce that might thrive in America. In Marseille he found varieties of figs, seedless grapes that could be dried into raisins, capers, pistachios, and almonds, all of which he believed “may succeed on, or southward of the Chesapeake.”30 Among other things, Marseille did a thriving business exporting Italian rice. Jefferson was impressed that rice from Italy came to market with its kernels clean and whole, unlike the rice grown in America, which often had its kernels broken in the cleaning process. Due to the unattractive appearance of America’s “broken rice,” European merchants refused to purchase it, knowing that their consumers would not buy it. Jefferson wondered if Italian rice growers had a more efficient cleaning machine unknown in the United States. To satisfy his curiosity, and hopefully to find another European product that would improve life in America and open European markets to American planters, Jefferson made a detour into northern Italy.
Thomas Jefferson's Creme Brulee Page 7