Wine and the American character
November 1, 2006
We could double our per capita national average--think of it: two glasses of wine a week!--and still be at only one-third the French consumption. No one is suggesting that Americans should drink like Luxembourgers but, if we did, our national wine industry would be eight times bigger: not today's 274 million cases, but 2.2 billion cases a year. American wine culture has what is known idiomatically as a "tremendous upside," an expression basketball people use to describe players with untapped potential, or very tall players who simply have not realized it yet.
Instead, our wine history begins and almost ends with America's first failed celebrity wine maker, patriot and president Thomas Jefferson. Hard as it is to believe, there is a straight line connecting the author of the Declaration of Independence to the Smothers Brothers (also celebrity wine makers, also political), Pat Paulsen (comedian, owned a winery, ran for president a few times), and Raymond Burr, the actor who played super-lawyer Perry Mason on television (vineyard owner and wine maker, once brandished the Declaration of Independence in court, if I remember right).
Jefferson was a huge wine lover, especially of red Bordeaux, which puts him about a half-century ahead of his time: Bordeaux would not experience its famous classification until 1857, by which time Jefferson had been dead more than thirty years. It is no surprise to find him ahead of the power curve on this--all wine lovers want to be tasting the next great wine--but Jefferson went further and decided to make the next great wine. In 1807, he embarked on an ambitious planting at Monticello of almost 300 vines from 24 different European grapevine cuttings that he selected and imported. He imagined that like so many other crops, grapes were going to flourish in fertile, verdant Virginia. Not only did he anticipate that his vineyards would be at least as successful as anything else, he actually thought he has going to get super grapes and make super wine to first equal, then surpass Europe. Jefferson's vineyard experiment failed spectacularly, the first time and each of the six times it was subsequently replanted. He was discovering that as counter-intuitive as it seems, wine grapes do not automatically flourish in rich soils. Virginia piedmont soils are rich in other things too, like bugs and bacteria, molds and mildews that grapes are highly susceptible to. Jefferson never learned what was killing his vines--technically, it was something called black rot and a root louse named phylloxera--but the irony was not lost on him. Native North American grapes that did grow made freakishly bad wine; any grapes worth drinking would not even take root.
Luckily, Jefferson was wealthy and well-connected enough to own a couple of extensive wine cellars and import all the red Bordeaux he wanted--a bottle of 1787 Chateau Lafite from his cellar went for $160,000 at auction in 1985--and that may have helped take the edge off his disappointment in the short term. Overall, it was a disheartening, bad first attempt at growing European wine grapes in the new world, and it was difficult not to take the vines' emphatic reaction as a rejection of the whole idea. Jefferson's transformative vision of making great wine in America would persist, but it would take centuries to realize.
In the Bible, an angry, vengeful God punishes the evil by giving them "water of gall to drink," something anti-alcohol activists have been trying to do practically since the country was founded. Wine's commercial place in American life today as a specially controlled, locally regulated, highly taxed product goes back to Prohibition, when an honest-to-goodness constitutional amendment made wine (and all other alcohol) illegal in 1920. Movement toward national Prohibition started much earlier, of course. President Andrew Jackson's drunken shenanigans during his presidency (1829-1837) first galvanized public anti-alcohol sentiment by giving it a big easy target. The Reverend Howard Hyde Russell founded the Anti-Saloon League of Ohio in 1893 and the Anti-Saloon League of America followed in 1895. Twenty-five years later, the axe had fallen, and America's relationship to wine and food was altered forever.
Prohibition's most potent and enduring symbol was a pinched, violent, disagreeable woman named Carry A. Nation who was famous for attacking saloons armed only with a hatchet and her firm belief (insane notion?) that she was striking out at what Jesus "doesn't like" (her words, not mine). Nation's mother had actual verifiable psychotic delusions and believed long and actively that she was Queen Victoria. Nation may never have thought she was a member of the royal family, but she did believe her name was an assignment from God and that it was appropriate to attack people and property in the name of temperance with a hatchet, still awfully delusional in my book.She and her followers chopped up a lot of bars and barrels and broke a lot of bottles with their hatchets of righteousness--these attacks were called "hatchetations" at the time--but better even than all that, she got tons of publicity doing it. After one flamboyant arrest in Wichita, Kansas, the photograph of Nation kneeling and praying in her jail cell looks like a well-styled studio shot: her face is softly illuminated from above (by the light of what: sobriety, morality, bail?) and the backlighting of the prison bars is almost Oscar-worthy. You cannot buy publicity like that, but you can sell official Carry A. Nation brand saloon-busting hatchets, which is exactly what she did, in addition to hiring a manager and traveling the country on a speaking tour as "The Famous And Original Bar Room Smasher." Her name was a registered trademark in the state of Kansas.
A book deal in 1905 brought us The Use And Need Of The Life Of Carry A. Nation, an autobiography in which she spelled out her quaint views on family, morality, race relations, food, alcohol, pseudo-science, and, strangely, Masons. Nation believed there was an underground cabal of Euro-centric Masons encouraging wine and alcohol consumption in the US to further their unspecified but nefarious goals. "I believe the masons were a great curse to Dr. Gloyd," she wrote, referring to her first husband who died a raging alcoholic. Nation made no distinction between her diverse enemies. Beer, wine, whiskey, and Masons were not only equal in her eyes, but equally bad. She rarely limited her enforced self-improvement to one vice. Nation opposed cigarettes and she railed against foreign foods of all kinds, wine being a special target, both foreign and alcohol.She devoted substantial space in her only book to debunking the myth that wine is food, one of the core principles of great European cuisine. The science behind her assertion is an almost medieval vision of two "classes" of food: "flesh formers" and "body warmers," a rhyming distinction we find both creepy and vague these days. By her frontier science, alcohol is neither a flesh former nor a body warmer (according to whom? the Flesh Forming and Body Warming Foods Association?) so it is not a food, and if it is not a food, it is a toxin. Simple as pie, which of course is a food.
Nation did not live to see national prohibition. By the time she died in 1911, Maine had enacted state prohibition long before in 1851, Kansas in 1880, and five more states in the 20th century. Her epitaph--"She Hath Done What She Could"--captures the prunish personality she must have had. It leaves me feeling that ultimately we made Carry Nation give up on us; she set a very low bar and we still could not manage to get over it.
Thirteen years and yet another constitutional amendment after Prohibition was enacted, wine was legal again. The compromise that made repeal possible was that alcoholic beverage control would devolve to the lowest municipality, which is why today, decades later, we still have dry counties and dry towns scattered across the country. On a larger level, state governments clutched to their bosoms the right to regulate and tax alcohol sales within and across their borders. Individual states are still run almost like independent nations in regards to wine. For instance, to sell your Washington state wine in Rhode Island today, by law you must contract with a distributor--essentially an importer between states--and your wine has to enter the destination state through that relationship, financially and physically. Industry-wide prices are set and published, quantities and discounts are delimited, and the result is our still-sluggish wine world where everyone has more or less the same licensed wine as everyone else for about the same price.
After more than a decade of legal banishment, America's vineyards and wineries were devastated. Before Prohibition, the wine industry in Ohio was bigger than the wine industry in California today. After Prohibition, the predictable profitability of soybeans, corn, and wheat never gave an inch, and wine grapes never re-emerged as a viable crop even in formerly wine-rich states. There were 256 wineries in Sonoma in 1920, only 58 by 1969, and 254 in 2005 -- close, but still not even where we were 85 years ago.
Thanks in large part to the apparent cultural imperative to make wine everywhere they go (the ancient Romans planted both France and Spain thick with wine grapes), Italian families in California kept wine making alive during Prohibition. Today's top tier of California wine makers is testament to this persistence: Mondavi, Sebastiani, Martini, Trentadue, Simi, Gallo, Indelicato, Parducci, Seghesio, Foppiano, the list of Prohibition survivors could go on and on. The Pedroncelli family survived in Sonoma and even profited by selling something called "wine brick," a compacted brick of dried grapes. Since it would have been a little too shameless to put directions for home made wine right on the label, the package instead featured a famous warning: never dissolve in cool water, add yeast, nor allow to ferment two weeks. The final unspoken step in the process: do not put in mouth.
She Hath Done What She Could, not wipe out wine completely perhaps, but the next best thing: make it difficult commercially to get and drink wine, sever the ancient bond between wine and food, and shatter American wine life into so many broken, unworkable, governmentally controlled parts that it would take wine lovers a hundred years to glue it all back together.
Freedom From Wine
Artists, as the would-be creators of emotion, also find themselves sometimes on the receiving end, eliciting it as well. In the case of Norman Rockwell, American sentimentalist painter from the mid-20th century, these reactions range from derision--for the book The Underside Of Innocence where author Richard Halpern discerns dirty psycho-sexual motivations in his paintings, exactly the kind of thing a person could also discern in a book with the words "innocence" and "underside" in its title--to authentic respect for the paintings and the occasional sincere teardrop.
Rockwell was an iconist, a painter of American life scenes that were at first pungently familiar to one great semi-midwestern Anglophile swath of the public and eventually grew to represent quintessential hometown America to everyone else who gazed upon them, the 321 Saturday Evening Post covers especially. Rockwell explored slightly too intimate private moments in Crackers In Bed. Watershed events were a favorite theme: Prom Dress and Breaking Home Ties capture authentic lives at turning points. The good-natured aw-shucks civil disobedience of Happy Birthday Miss Jones is leavened considerably by the realization that the well-behaved third graders who scrawled "Happy Birthday Jonesy" on the blackboard in 1956 were Summer Of Love hippies-in-waiting, at least some of them.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrapped up his state of the union address in January 1941 with a powerful rhetorical flourish, a passionate expression of his vision of a world organized around freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Although we were not technically fighting World War Two yet, this freedom quatrain was used within the year to explain why we fought, once we were in it. In 1943, Rockwell published a series of paintings called The Four Freedoms, his most focused, affecting, and thoughtful work yet.I am no art critic, but I have a problem with painting number three, Freedom From Want. Rockwell rendered a Thanksgiving archetype so powerful that to this day, people who can't cook a chicken leg take it upon themselves to roast an entire turkey. Yet there is not a single glass of wine within a hundred miles of his Thanksgiving table. Instead, everyone's glass is full of fresh, clear, clean American water, probably tap water. There are eight of them: exactly what you are supposed to drink every day. Crazy Uncle Nut in the lower right corner, staring right into the camera as it were, looks like he might have been into something a little stronger before the dinner bell rang. Little Sister on the left flashes an impish grin down the table as if to ask, "Wonder what Granny left in the turkey this year?" Besides the mammoth bird, you can see pickles, a plate of celery, a Jello mold, even a bunch of grapes tauntingly in the foreground, but the family is otherwise wine free and apparently loving it.
Imagine, pointlessly, what Rockwell would have done for Thanksgiving--and wine--if Freedom From Want had pictured two water glasses and five glasses of wine, two white and three red (Uncle Nut's tequila shot glass optional). Thanksgiving is our national ceremonial meal, after all, and wine would benefit immensely if even part of the energy and enthusiasm that people put into special ordering and deep-frying turkeys also went into special-ordering Thanksgiving wine. Rockwell's art is still a substantial commercial business today (Homecoming Soldier sold for $9.2 million in 2006) so maybe it would be worthwhile to insert wine digitally into the image.
One of my persistent complaints concerning the image of wine--both literally and figuratively--is how wine and wine lovers are portrayed in the media. Most of the time, they are completely ignored, and elaborate cinematic meals that call for a special wine end up served with nothing. On the other end of the spectrum, in the 1995 Sandra Bullock vehicle While You Were Sleeping, a hard-working bottle of Sterling Cabernet Sauvignon turns up in scene after scene: first in his apartment, then hers, then at dinner at the parents' house. Each time, the bottle is angled ever-so-slightly away from the camera so the audience cannot see the label head-on. But if you are a wine lover, you want to see what other people are drinking, and in this cinematic world, they are all unrealistically drinking the same wine.
Sideways, the 2004 Oscar-winning buddy film starring Paul Giamatti as the Wine Guy and Thomas Haden Church as the Ladies' Man, fleshes out the two sides of our stereotypic ambivalence about wine with real accuracy, affection, and frivolity. On the one hand, the intellectual Miles is simultaneously immersed yet removed, tasting wine from a fourth dimension no one else inhabits, something you see at wine tastings a lot. His buddy just wants to know when he can drink the wine. They spend the rest of the movie trying to bridge this gap while they drink a lot of fantastic wine, eat a lot of excellent food, and score like Wilt Chamberlain with wine-hotties Sandra Oh and Virginia Madsen.
The boys surrender the high ground early on when they not only drink and drive, but drink while driving. Their first sips take place in the Winemobile as they speed away from the despicable in-laws' house. In five seconds, they break more laws than you can count. Like so many great wine experiences, this movie begins with the best of intentions but ultimately goes down the drain. Refined, civilized, appreciative tasting surrenders to gluttonous drinking and eventually ends with a naked fat man chasing our protagonists down the street. By this time, the movie's no longer about wine but about how far astray people's appetites can lead them. Women who love wine come out of the film looking best of all. Madsen and Oh portray their characters as smart, funny and sensual, an irresistible combination. Of the two guys, however, one is worse than the other. At one point, Giamatti fails to kiss Madsen after she takes his hand, so maybe they were both just really drunk. My favorite thing about Sideways--and the bit of writing that literally won best screenplay Oscar--is the beautiful soliloquy Madsen delivers as she explains why she loves wine. My least favorite thing was how many times the pompous Wine Guy reminded me of myself.
Pinot noir sales in the US--already rising and at record levels--were up almost 16% in the year after Sideways came out. The film has created a frenzy for pinot noir as if the grape itself had won an award at Sundance. Even more compelling is the increase in repeat buyers of pinot by 40%, which is the sign of a new generation of pinot noir lovers being born in the film's aftermath. In comparison, repeat buyers of Miles' least-favorite wine merlot decreased 3% nationally, suggesting there just might be such a thing as bad publicity. Overall, this boost only pushes pinot noir from 1.1% of the market to 1.4% of the market. There's a long way for pinot to go, but it is also a very big market.
Jonathan Nossiter's 2004 documentary Mondovino looks through a wineglass darkly and sees nothing but bad behavior in the present and total ruin in the future for wine. He warns against increasing internationalization and homogenization while citing three chief villains: a winemaking technique called "micro-oxygenation," a French wine consultant named Michel Rolland (who appears to recommend and practice micro-oxygenation on a macro scale), and the Mondavi family from California. In a nutshell, micro-oxygenation and very ripe grapes are what makes Australian shiraz taste so fantastic and has helped it become a world wine phenomenon. On the international market today, wines with the Aussie shiraz flavor profile are killing everyone, especially set-in-their-ways ancient French wine producers, from whom we hear plenty in this movie. Rolland's only apparent sins are smoking like a chimney and making wines that people think taste really good. Twenty-five years ago, no one thought either of those things would ever be considered bad.
After Mondovino, the Mondavi family will never do another interview again, probably for generations, and for very good reason. The way they were portrayed visually was just repellant, and seemed to want to express overtly something, but what? At first, the Mondavi family comes off a little like the well-meaning Lennie in Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men as they try making wine in southern France, love it a little too much, and squeeze a little too hard for local tastes. Kicked out of bed by the French, they fall into the arms of the Italians, and Michael Mondavi is captured entertaining notions of making wine on Mars. In the end, it was just a bad interview, proving only that spooky lighting can make even the Easter bunny look demonic. During a following interview with super-critic Robert Parker, the camera wanders off, seemingly unmotivated, to give us a tight close-up of his dog's rump. Later, critic James Suckling essentially confesses (jokingly, I would say, in his defense) that he went easy reviewing his landlord's wine because of their relationship. Either way, it only confirms everything everyone thinks already: that the game is rigged and somewhere the same huge tank of wine is being used to fill up bottles of Two-Buck Chuck out of one end and $1,000 a bottle Chateau Petrus out of the other.
In the end, these two movies together have an almost macrobiotic effect: pinot noir is summarily elevated by Sideways, yet the overall good will is only a memory once Mondovino gets done making us feel guilty for having the bad taste to like what we like. These are two problem movies; though their problems are little ones, they show us in ways simultaneously charming, clumsy, and misguided a larger wine life than we currently live in America. Still, at the end of Sideways, wine does not seem to be wholly part of even the hardcore wine lover's life. The vehement merlot-hating Miles retreats to a burger joint with an extra-special bottle of wine, the legendary 1961 Chateau Cheval Blanc. Here he over-reaches even his own pomposity: his beloved Cheval Blanc is mainly merlot.
My Old Kentucky Wine
Americans like to say that we enjoy a distinction among industrial nations of the world in that we have never been militarily conquered nor occupied. This is not completely true: just ask anyone with deep roots in the old south, and memories of vanquish, humiliation, and Reconstruction lie just below the surface. In spite of the fact that Washington, D.C. is a southern city by almost all standards, it is not its capital. The south itself stands apart from the northeast naturally, but from the rural rest of the country too, older and richer in ghosts, newer in architecture, infrastructure, and scorched earth. After all, Boston and New York have not been occupied and sacked since at least the late 18th century, and there are still many Colonial buildings intact. In the south, perhaps Charleston can say the same thing. Western cities like Wichita were not even incorporated until the 1870s.
Wine began its return to the south in the early 1980s when the commonwealth of Virginia, among other things, enacted a set of laws making it administratively much easier to open and run a winery. Who knew so many aspirant wine makers were waiting in the wings for paperwork and licensing reform? Twenty years later, Virginia has 80-plus wineries, many of which equal Europe in quality, and a few even raise the bar, restoring and redeeming Jefferson's original vision after only two centuries of on-and-off trying. Wine's expansion into the south in the 21st century has been fueled in part by the defeat of big tobacco in court and the resulting monies from the various cases. In North Carolina, for instance, a national master settlement in the mid-1990s earmarked a delightfully multi-zeroed sum of money to help people in the tobacco industry transition into something else, and farmers specifically, to find new crops. Wine is one of the crops farmers are finding so attractive these days that the home page of the North Carolina Tobacco Trust Fund Commission has an article titled "Living With Pierce's Disease," a bacterial infection that literally slays grape vines. When I saw it, and right on page one as it were, I had to laugh: normally, an article on Pierce's Disease is the kind of thing you'd see only in a technical slightly wine-geeky vineyard industry management magazine. At first, I thought I was going to have to ferret out the subtle connection between old school tobacco and new world wine, but here it is. Caring about Pierce's Disease is real love: it just screams, the problem of my friend is my problem too.
Wine grapes and tobacco share a certain affinity for well-drained soils, plenty of sun, and windy hillsides, but so do a lot of crops. The cynic inside (or is that the voice of my teetotaling southern grandmother?) cannot help but ask if all this is not just trading one sin-dustry for another as they meet on the stairway of success, one going up, the other down. Now Kentucky--a commonwealth of 120 counties, thirty or which are dry and another thirty semi-dry--has hired the first state enologist in its history to help expand beyond today's 44 wineries and 75-plus grape growers. Next on the proposed legislative agenda is gaining recognition for an official AVA (American Viticultural Area), the Bluegrass Appellation.
When NASCAR team owner Richard Childress opened a vineyard and winery five miles from his racing headquarters in Lexington, North Carolina in 2004, it marked the return of the first true celebrity wine maker in the south since Jefferson. Wine snobs around the world shook their disbelieving heads at the realization that now even NASCAR was into wine (what next: Cuvée Britney Spears?). But NASCAR is more than a race: it is a market that can be sold things. Bennett Lane Winery in California has been a sponsor since 2003. Indianapolis 500 legend Mario Andretti has his own Napa winery. His neighbor in Napa and fellow racer Randy Lewis is pretty much sold out of everything but the chardonnay these days. And according to a press release I received in 2006, driver Jeff Gordon is now selling a $50 Carneros chardonnay to his fans.Childress Vineyards is a large anchor destination that benefits some if not all of the other 37 wineries in North Carolina, a state lots of people would be surprised to discover had even one winery in it. Thirty years from now, Childress will be like Mondavi, famous for what he himself did, but important for what he did for the wineries around him. NASCAR has its roots in apocryphal high-speed moonshining adventures from Prohibition days, so Childress Vineyards can also represent a certain closing of the book, if you want it to. In the end, it looks like my people--on the crazy-driving Southern moonshiner side of my family, that is--won in the form of a North Carolina claret.
My grandmother, a brittle, indomitable Southern woman of Faulknerian proportions and vocabulary, was anything but a moonshiner. One main lightning rod for her relentless moral inflexibility was alcohol, and she opposed it in all its forms with her version of constructive nonviolence, church-going methods that more than once led her and others' husbands to put down the bottle (for a while at least) and fill up a pew. They were never reformed completely of course. Opposing liquor from the very heart of Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee bourbon country must have appealed to my grandmother's essentially contrarian nature, but she was swimming against two or three centuries of traditional sourmash making and drinking, a too-swift current that in her opinion was sweeping everyone else off to a drunken hell.
When I was about two years old, my mother--barely twenty years older--left me, for the first time in my short life, with my Uncle Johnny Ray at his house while she went to a doctor's appointment. I do not remember a lot from that day, but what I do remember, and vividly, is my mother's emotional arrival back on the scene after her appointment to discover me, my uncle, and my uncle's friend--a police officer, in uniform--in the attached garage bottling up a mess of home made beer. I was right in the middle of topping up another Squirt bottle with home brew from a small hose when my mother walked in, her face a suspended-in-time stereotypic silent scream. She did not understand the police officer was a partner in the home brew, not making an arrest, until I said, "Look Mommy, I'm helping."
My mother bolted with me. Had my grandmother found out where I had been and what I had done, her volcanic wrath would have reduced everything around it to cinders. That was the first and last time my mother left me with my uncle or anyone else for a good long while. To me, the message was clear: to be among the women of my family was to move in sobriety, safety, and organization; among the men was an unpredictable world of tobacco and alcohol, cars, appetites, and freedom. It was the first of many encounters over the years with my family's widely ambivalent, flagrantly contradictory teetotaling, hard drinking, homebrew-making, Prohibitionist ways. Like the other men in my family, I quickly found myself hooked on the dichotomy. Two decades of wine writing have brought me only slightly closer to understanding this tension, but the historical root of it is widespread and particularly American. This pathological ambivalence--secretly attracted, on paper abstaining, yet in reality consuming enthusiastically--extends to our whole culture. It illuminates a facet of our conflicted national character in which America in the 21st century is still more famous for Prohibition than for its most famous wines.
© 1988-2010 by Jonathon Alsop
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