Molto tempo fa abbiamo strappato le viti dal loro habitat naturale. Rampicanti entusiasti, i loro tralci e viticci sono fatti per aggrapparsi a qualsiasi cosa trovino mentre crescono, avvolgendosi intorno ad alberi o altre piante in natura. Ma noi abbiamo trascinato le viti fuori dalla foresta e le abbiamo costrette in rigidi sistemi di allevamento, domando la loro crescita disordinata per ottenere un raccolto che servisse ai nostri scopi. Ora, però, c’è un movimento che mira a reintegrare alberi e piante nella viticoltura. 
 Cheval Blanc è uno dei più noti sostenitori dell’agroforestazione, che rappresenta una parte fondamentale del suo manifesto per un approccio moderno alla viticoltura. Augustin Fromageot – che oggi lavora a tempo pieno presso il Domaine Belargus in Anjou – è stato uno dei membri del team coinvolti nel progetto, durante il quale sono stati piantati oltre 4.000 alberi nella tenuta in due anni. Fino ad allora, Fromageot – geologo di formazione – aveva lavorato in Sud America, principalmente nel settore del cacao e del caffè, ma la vite lo stava chiamando. Il team trasformò la tenuta in una sorta di laboratorio – sperimentando diversi modi di integrare gli alberi: tra i filari, al posto dei filari, in boschetti, ai bordi o in qualsiasi altro modo si potesse immaginare di piantarli accanto alle viti, tutto monitorato da programmi scientifici per capire cosa funziona e cosa no. Ora fa qualcosa di simile a Belargus, gestendo la loro ampia riserva naturale e lavorando per aumentare la biodiversità della tenuta – impegnandosi a gestire il paesaggio, come lui stesso lo definisce. È un’eccessiva semplificazione suggerire che le viti siano passate direttamente da rampicanti selvatici a monocolture industriali. Storicamente, l’agricoltura era policolturale, e ogni piccola fattoria conteneva tutto ciò di cui una famiglia aveva bisogno – e spesso anche le viti ne facevano parte. Il sistema a pergola, per esempio, permetteva di piantare altre colture sotto le viti, mentre l’uso di alberi come traliccio vivente non era raro – spesso descritto come viti maritate, il metodo romano degli arbusta (prediletto, per esempio, da Plinio) – e coltivate insieme, culture en hautain, cultura mista o joualle. È quest’ultimo metodo, diffuso nel sud-ovest della Francia circa un secolo fa, che Cheval Blanc ha in parte riscoperto, sostituendo singole viti con alberi all’interno dei filari. L’aspetto è magnifico, ma comporta le sue complicazioni, limitando la meccanizzazione. È, come dice Fromageot, un modo “poetico” di integrare gli alberi. In Bolivia si trovano ancora viti allevate sugli alberi, nella Valle di Cinti (come nel progetto Jardín Oculto), anche se si tratta di esempi antichi – e oggi pochi pianterebbero viti in questo modo. È un metodo impraticabile per l’agricoltura moderna, che funzionava solo su piccola scala, ma è evidente che l’industrializzazione ha spinto le monocolture troppo oltre – e l’agroforestazione è uno dei modi con cui i produttori stanno cercando di rimediare ai danni causati. 
 Gli alberi sono straordinari sotto molti aspetti, ma possono avere un impatto enorme su un vigneto. La loro presenza fisica può influenzare il microclima – proteggendo la vigna da gelo, calore e vento, oltre a fungere da barriera fisica tra proprietà confinanti – impedendo che eventuali trattamenti indesiderati raggiungano le proprie viti. Aumentano la biodiversità – offrendo un habitat a insetti e animali, in particolare ai pipistrelli – e assorbono anidride carbonica. Riducendo l’erosione del suolo (con l’erosione dello strato superficiale che rappresenta una minaccia enorme per l’agricoltura mondiale) e aumentando la materia organica, migliorano anche la capacità del suolo di trattenere l’acqua – un vantaggio importante nelle regioni aride. Per Fromageot, gli alberi contribuiscono a creare resilienza nel vigneto, rafforzando le difese naturali delle viti e riducendo quindi il numero di trattamenti necessari. È facile guardare un elenco del genere e comprendere i principi in gioco. È chiaro che i benefici per l’ambiente sono molti – ma cosa significa tutto questo per il vino nel bicchiere? Potenzialmente, molto. Bastano cinque alberi per influenzare il microclima in un raggio di 100 metri; possono ridurre la temperatura di una parcella anche di 2-3°C, preservando l’acidità, riducendo l’alcol e mantenendo la precisione aromatica. Inoltre, proteggendo il vigneto da gelo o calore estremi e migliorando le riserve idriche del suolo, consentono una produzione più costante, tutti fattori fondamentali di fronte al cambiamento climatico – con condizioni meteorologiche più estreme e un riscaldamento globale crescente. 
 Naturalmente, non è così semplice come sembra. “Ci insegna un’immensa umiltà,” mi dice Fromageot quando inizio a parlargli del mondo dell’agroforestazione, e più specificamente della vitiforestazione. È perfettamente consapevole che l’agroforestazione sia diventata una parola di moda nel mondo del vino – improvvisamente molto trendy. Ma piantare e gestire alberi richiede molto lavoro. Innanzitutto, decidere dove e come piantarli è cruciale. La loro capacità di influenzare il microclima può essere sia positiva che negativa – con la possibilità di creare sacche di gelo, aumentare l’umidità, ridurre il flusso d’aria e quindi incrementare la pressione delle malattie. “Bisogna saper leggere il paesaggio,” spiega Fromageot. 
 Occorre anche decidere quale tipo di albero piantare, così come il portainnesto, assicurandosi che si integri con la viticoltura. La prima cosa che fa Fromageot quando avvia un progetto è visitare tutti i vivai locali per conoscere le varietà autoctone. Gli alberi da frutto sono comuni, ma – come nota – bisogna assicurarsi che abbiano un periodo di raccolta diverso da quello dell’uva per evitare conflitti; lui guarda a mele, pere e prugne in particolare, sottolineando quanto siano più impegnativi pesche e albicocche. In alternativa, aceri, frassini, gelsi, pioppi neri, carpini e tigli possono funzionare bene – essenzialmente alberi che condividono lo stesso tipo di micorrize (i microrganismi che si attaccano alle radici) delle viti. È importante evitare qualsiasi specie che possa contaminare il vino o inibire la crescita – come il noce, che produce una sostanza tossica, la juglone. Gli alberi hanno esigenze molto diverse rispetto alle viti, richiedendo attrezzature e competenze differenti per prosperare, con – per esempio – una fertilizzazione estesa per stabilirsi, poiché necessitano di terreni più ricchi. Ovunque vengano piantati, gli alberi occupano spazio che altrimenti potrebbe essere destinato alle viti, riducendo così la resa potenziale. Inoltre, è un processo lento: ci vogliono circa dieci anni perché gli alberi inizino a influenzare in modo significativo la viticoltura, afferma Fromageot. Tutto ciò richiede tempo e denaro – rendendo l’agroforestazione un lusso che non tutti i produttori possono permettersi, anche se Fromageot ritiene che gli alberi possano essere integrati in modo diverso per chi lavora su larga scala. 
 Alain Canet – agronomo e specialista in agroforestazione – sostiene che reintrodurre gli alberi sia cruciale per l’agricoltura. “Per alcuni suoli è già troppo tardi,” scrive. “Ma per la maggior parte, abbiamo ancora tempo per agire... In termini agroecologici, la transizione verso gli alberi è la transizione verso la vita.” Esistono molte ragioni scientifiche per favorire la vitiforestazione, ma per Fromageot ce n’è una più convincente: il paesaggio radica le persone in una geografia, in un luogo, e questo – sostiene – è essenziale per fare vino di qualità. La bellezza del paesaggio in cui si vive e si lavora ci aiuta a “trovare un senso nella vita”, mi dice. Romantico? Forse. Ma con la scienza a sostegno, è difficile non lasciarsi convincere che gli alberi traccino la via verso un futuro più sostenibile – nel vino, sì, ma anche nell’agricoltura in generale.

L'agroforestazione è l'ultima tendenza che sta conquistando il mondo del vino pregiato, ma perché? Abbiamo incontrato Augustin Fromageot di Domaine Belargus per scoprire perché gli alberi potrebbero essere la chiave per una viticoltura sostenibile.

Agroforestry is the latest trend to take over the world of fine wine – but why? We sat down with Domaine Belargus’s Augustin Fromageot to find out more

Trees and wine: exploring the world of vitiforestry

Mettere radici: il mondo della viticoltura

It is hard to write the history of the future, but I hope that I am on safe ground when I say that the global pandemic of 2020 will be the defining event of the early 21st century. I say ‘hope’ because God help the human race if there is anything more defining waiting around the corner. By saying as much, I do not in any way diminish the other spectres that have haunted the dawning decades of the third millennium: among them mankind’s age-old companions, intolerance, religious fundamentalism and greed. Nevertheless, the pandemic has humbled humanity in a new and special way, combining our oldest foe, disease, with swift, easy, international travel – until recently one of the most central aspects of our technical and cultural advancement. Death and destruction, like everything else in life, are neither evenly nor democratically apportioned. Nevertheless, there can be few, if any, people on the planet whose lives have been untouched. Maybe there is a tribe of rainforest-dwelling Pygmies, cut off from what we hubristically call civilisation and which continues to exist in a state of prelapsarian Stone-Age ignorance. But the rest of us have been simultaneously confronted by our mortality, the fragility of our lives and, in many cases, the vacuity of our dreams. We reacted in different ways, retreating into what we found comforting. Some (yes, you, David Geffen) used social media to let the world know that they were safe on their yachts. Others explored the restorative powers of one of the most fundamental and symbolically domestic of rituals: baking bread. My own reaction was somewhere between these two poles. Within just a few days of the pandemic being declared in the UK, I had taken to the virtual airwaves with films – exquisitely directed by my younger son – of me smoking cigars with my elder son and dilating on the joys of the fragrant blue smoke of Havana cigars. Trivial perhaps, superfluous almost definitely, but to me immensely significant. It is hard to express the emotional impact of this activity without resorting to cliché, but then clichés tend to be clichés because there is an element of truth in them. And while the term ‘intergenerational male bonding’ is an arid form of words that traduces the emotional value of the experience, it also begins to explain its worth. But more than just finding a new way of communicating with my children, I like to feel that I am passing on something from which they can derive satisfaction; I was first inculcated into the world of the cigar by my stepfather-in-law – who splendidly encapsulated the appeal as being “the feeling of well-being” derived from learning how to wield this refined instrument of pleasure. Pleasure and well-being are the inspirations of these broadcasts (as I rather self-consciously, antediluvially, call them), and to my surprise they established a moderate but relatively enthusiastic following. Given that I am old enough to have children in their 20s, I am also old enough to regard the idea of using a telephone to make a home movie that has no actual physical presence, and that can be viewed via another intangible medium, as being pretty close to witchcraft. I find it remarkable that as many as 15,000 people – most of whom I have never met, living I know not where – tuned in to watch two men in slightly extravagant clothes (we wore safari suits, cowboy outfits, boating blazers, dinner jackets, business suits and tweeds) set fire to tubes of tobacco and try and convey a sense of the flavours they were tasting. But more than a degustatory sensation to be relayed, it was, in its way, an act of cultural transmission that in its essence is not very different to the role of say, indigent troubadours that wandered the courts of 12th and 13th century Provence, or the griots of the Mali empire of the 14th century, telling stories of noble exploits of the past. As we sat amongst its fragrant swirling wisps and gossamer tendrils; the sacred smoke of the cigar would unlock the past and liberate fragments of memory from wherever it is that memories are imprisoned and presumed forgotten. As we shared the flavour and the experience, recollections of my visits to Havana over the last quarter-century would be summoned unbidden – oxymoronic though that may sound. I remembered names of rollers, long conversations with factory directors and days spent in the fields of the plantations. I recalled meeting an ancient torcedor who had started work as a child and he remembered rolling cigars for Winston Churchill. I was reminded of a long afternoon spent on the terrace of the simple home of the late Alejandro Robaina, the Cuban tobacco farmer, whose time-furrowed face would give the pachydermic features of W.H. Auden stiff competition. He sat in his rocking chair and retrieved his own memories of how the climate had changed over the course of a generation, and of the taste of his first cigar, enjoyed before the age of 10 during the 1920s. However imperfectly, I was able to transmit these memories to my children in a setting and an atmosphere that made those memories theirs too. It is the associative power of the cigar to stimulate memory that raises it beyond the mere intake of nicotine, and instead elevates it to the level of a cultural activity. Proust had his madeleine and I have my cigar. I pick the cigar because it has been a personal comfort during a difficult time, but the same can be said to be true of any skill-laden and ritual-rich activity that is passed from generation to generation. I enjoy traditionally made clothes and I find the idea appealing that many hands contribute to the making of a single garment. It may be better-made than its ready-to-wear counterpart, it is likely to last longer and fit better – but these are only the tangible aspects. At the risk of sounding pretentious, there is what one might call a spiritual element to having clothes made. There is something uniquely appealing about clothes that have been made only for you and it is an appeal to which I succumbed almost 40 years ago. I first got into having clothes made for me long before I could afford it, when, as an undergraduate at Oxford, I fell under the spell of a charming old tailor called Stamp, Mr Stamp to his friends. He was a fabulous old boy with a shop on Broad Street, or The Broad as I believe we were encouraged to call it at the time, just down from Castell where he had started as an apprentice half a century earlier during the 1930s. He made me a pair of trousers, a blazer and few other items including several remarkable waistcoats. One of the best moments came when I took in a 50-year-old, double-breasted waistcoat for him to copy. He looked at it, examined a label sewn into the underside of the backstrap, peered at the stitching around the buttonholes, and then told me that the garment had been made for a well-known Spitfire test pilot, gave me the price of the fabric per yard in 1936 and – most impressive of all – informed me of the name of the man who had stitched the buttonholes.  My first shoemaker Eric Cook also beguiled me when he took a look at a pair of Lobb correspondent shoes, turned them over and was able to identify the man who had finished them because of the slightly elliptical curvature of the heel and the spacing of the nails.  For me, such knowledge is just as impressive as that of the connoisseur who can identify a long-lost masterpiece by examining the brushstrokes and the state of the canvas or wooden panel on which the paint was laid. But, unlike the admiration of an acknowledged masterpiece by a globally renowned artistic genius, the quality of such pleasures is more personal and, arguably, more meaningful. It was Franz Liszt who said, “A good Cuban cigar closes the door to the vulgarities of life,” but the same is true of the contemplation of a well-sewn buttonhole, or the anglage of a well-finished watch movement. Such pleasures may be only fleetingly experienced, but I would argue they are all the more precious for their intimacy: watches and clothes are worn on the body, the cigar is consumed – becoming in some way part of the body and stimulating the mind. These are things that ornament life, that raise the quotidian to the memorable and that transcend the disagreeable nature of too much of life today. I suppose that this is what is meant by ‘luxury’. I had been hoping to get to Paris to catch an exhibition, at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, devoted to the controversial subject of luxury, mounted under the aegis of my friend Pierre-Alexis Dumas, creative director of Hermès, who understands the field better than most. “While the luxury object resists definition by any single concept, drawing instead on shifting, eclectic visions, we might nonetheless agree that it possesses one distinctive characteristic above all others,” he told me. It is, he believes, “an object we keep, respect and cherish, one that archaeological discoveries across the globe reveal as speaking timelessly to us, its human power undimmed, resonant with distant emotions. Today, at a time when luxury seems to hold omnipresent status, in the media and in social networks, it is perhaps pertinent to recall that the luxury object is precisely one that is preserved and passed on – a magnificent, enduring conduit of culture and knowledge, bearing witness to human ingenuity.” The overuse of the word ‘luxury’ has led to its trivialisation, but there is a sense in which the pandemic has helped me transmit to my children something of my view of its true meaning. In a world of ever abbreviated communication, the chance to spend time in contemplation of what I love with those I love has been a gift – and the suspension of the ceaseless restless turmoil that we regard as normality, has shorn many so-called luxury items of their status-conferring function, allowing us to see them for what they are, to winnow the impostor from the authentic. I hope that I have conveyed, however clumsily, what it is that I appreciate, and uncovered something of the culture and values that make them important to me. My sons are fascinating people, their company is genuinely instructive for me, I see things anew through their eyes and this in turn has added further richness to life’s pleasures: not just appreciating the intrinsic qualities of, say a cigar or a suit, but in enhancing that appreciation by seeing it reflected in my children. It is a powerful combination of culture, emotion and enjoyment. Whether a vessel of personal memory, a conduit for the great values of humanity, or a bulwark against the deadening combination of fear and tedium of recent months: the superfluous, to misquote Voltaire ever so slightly, has seldom been so necessary. This article was originally published in FONDATA, Issue One

Writer and author Nicholas Foulkes considers the notion of transmitting cultural knowledge and enthusiasms from one generation to the next – and how finding joy in the seemingly trivial details of the objects he values has brought him closer to his sons. 

Photography by Julian Broad.

Nicholas Foulkes considers the notion of transmitting cultural knowledge and enthusiasms from one generation to the next.

FONDATA: Foulkes & Sons 

Foulkes & Sons  

“I can die happy now,” Jon Bonné chuckles to me. The writer spent almost a decade as the wine guy at The San Francisco Chronicle, and is now Managing Editor at Resy, having spent time at Punch, writing for Noble Rot, Decanter and many more in between. His latest book, The New French Wine, was released earlier this year and The New York Times wine critic Eric Asimov dedicated an entire column to singing its praises – something he almost never does.  The hefty, two-part tome has been a long time in the making – almost a decade, in fact. The idea was a frivolous suggestion, casually agreed to over one too many drinks (“unsulphured Gamay in Oakland – as one does”) with his editor in 2014, soon after the publication of his seminal The New California Wine. But what was conceived as part of his quest for “the next thing”, to build on the momentum of his first book, rapidly spiralled.  “It's very hard to see a bigger picture of French wine because it is so overwhelming,” Bonné tells me over Zoom. Initially he’d envisaged a few trips, a project that would take a couple of years – but it “kept growing and growing and growing”.  “There was this much bigger story that I was sort of stumbling into,” the writer says. He gradually realised that there was an “enormous meta transformation” taking place across France – and this is what the book wrestles with. As he writes in the book’s introduction, “I imagined the new French wine would be about the undiscovered country – the cracks between known places.” But as he soon discovered, the new French wine was everywhere – and it took him nine years to piece it all together.   The work is split into two separate books – The Narrative and The Producers, the former the story behind the reference guide that forms the latter. The Narrative is a deep dive into the face of France and its winegrowing today, broken down by region, with break-out essays on topics such as natural wine, farming and the appellation system. It’s a rich tapestry of stories, interjected with the frank and striking photography of Susannah Ireland and occasional illustrated map by Francesco Bongiorni, reminiscent of Art Deco postcards.  For Bonné, the “new France” is about postmodernism, about “wilful rejections of the b******t of the past”. It’s about a (re)focus on site, about producers seizing their destiny and hunting for a more sustainable approach – in the vineyard, winery and beyond – although it’s far from that simple. “To understand French wine and to love it, you simply have to embrace its messy, self-contradictory, and, yes, complicated postmodern reality,” he writes. He points to Muscadet and Beaujolais as two of the most exciting and representative regions of this movement – both having entirely reinvented themselves within a generation. Producers here, he tells me, are “doing the work and focusing on terroir and technique and farming”, while Champagne “has completely transformed its vision of what its wine should be”.  Change is most importantly, however, “an inclusive force” – and looking at who did (and didn’t) make it into The Producers, Bonné’s definitive gazetteer of the nation’s movers and shakers, shines a light on this. It’s not a list of the vignerons he loves, it’s a pain-staking selection of those he deems significant and meaningful in the context of the movement – encompassing both more traditional names and those on the fringes. Take the Bordeaux chapter; you’ll find Pétrus, Lafleur and Pontet-Canet, as well as many less conventional, smaller and often natural-leaning properties such as Clos 19 Bis or Ch. Julia – with “Benchmarks” and the more up-and-coming “Names to Know” highlighted.  It’s fascinating – and fun – to see these two, seemingly opposing strands of France’s wine scene woven together. When I queried the inclusion of these elder statesmen of French wine, he highlighted how, for him, Pontet-Canet perfectly exemplifies the change in France today, with the forward-thinking Tesseron family handing the keys to previous cellar master Jean-Michel Comme to do “radical, radical s**t”.  Bonné deliberately chooses to champion those who have revved the engine of broader revolution – and those who reflect that revolution’s values. When it comes to Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, for example, he describes how they “upheld the moral pillars of Burgundy and winemaking” and “use their power for good”; whereas one top Pauillac estate he vehemently tells me is “perpetuating the worst practices of the Bordeaux trade”. For him, “wine is a consumable” and, as 21st-century consumers, “people have a right to explore the values of producers”.   While Bonné certainly likes natural wine – and many of the movement’s figureheads feature in the book, he is far from an evangelist. When he first started thinking about the book, natural wine was different; “It hadn’t quite catalysed into this very specific cultural beast,” he says, a cultural beast born in Hackney, Bushwick or Paris’s 11th. He talks about the movement’s “sense of tragic fashion” and how, with its clique-y nature, it has “baked in its own expiration date”. There were, he tells me, producers that didn’t make the cut – those who act as a “cautionary tale” for natural wine. “There are wines that can be delicate to being transported. And then there are wines that are just f***ed up at the source,” he says frankly.   His outlook is broadly positive for France, the nation’s ongoing revolution and its vignerons, but the book also acts as a call to arms of sorts, for: “The enforcers of the old ways will be forced to adapt, or they will perish,” he writes.  It’s not a perfect book. With a work of this size (over 860 pages and 600,000 words), it is almost inevitably slightly out of date by the time it is printed – especially with the pace of change today. Lafleur’s entry, for example, talks of Acte but not Les Perrières. I’d also have loved to have captions for each of Susannah Ireland’s images, knowing where – and of whom – they were taken. But these are quibbles.   I can’t pretend to be unbiased. Bonné is one of my favourite wine writers. There’s a lightness to his phrasing, with dry humour and a palate that I tend to identify with – although I’d argue he’s become a little more funk-friendly over the years. His writing is intelligent without being arduous. Perhaps it’s because, like Andrew Jefford, he was and is a journalist first. What really fills his writing is a sense of joy, of almost gluttony – it’s still filled with the excitement that so many wine writers seem to lose, as they tire of bottle after bottle of exceptional wine. He’s still easily absorbed by the stories that make each one different. For me, he doesn’t fit neatly into the critic box, even though it’s a term he uses to describe himself repeatedly in our conversation. “The notion of a critic has devolved to a place where you are simply handing out numbers,” he explains, but to him his work is about “criticism at a deeper level”. It’s about “being able to dive into the culture and come away with the insights and interpretation, and explain why certain wines really do matter”.  And it is this that makes The New French Wine stand apart. It isn’t just a wine book; wine is the lens through which Bonné observes a broader cultural shift. Whether you agree with everything he says or not, it’s a joy to read, hold and look at. It’s a book that will prompt conversation, prompt you to uncork bottles, prompt you to consider quite how complicated – and endlessly fascinating – France’s wine scene is. And is there anything more French than that?  The New French Wine: Redefining the World’s Greatest Wine Culture (Ten Speed Press) is out now.  Read more Editorial 

Ten years after The New California Wine was published, Jon Bonné has published a new book – an epic tale of France’s revolution. Sophie Thorpe caught up with the author to talk about his ambitious project to capture The New French Wine

We sit down with Jon Bonne, the wine writer and author of The New French Wine, to find out more about his second book

Writer Jon Bonne on The New French Wine

Facing up to The New French Wine: Jon Bonné

I. Distractions In 1987, when I was 18 and a dollar was worth more than twice as much as it is today, I started reading magazines: M, Esquire, GQ. Nearby, in our somewhat cultured Texas town, a new bookstore opened in a cavernous space that had formerly housed the shag-carpeted roller skating rink of our childhood. Through the front windows, which had before been darkly tinted to give the place an alluring den-of-prepubescent-iniquity vibe, now streamed bright, clean light, showcasing a look and layout that would become the interior design gestalt of today’s national-chain, big-box book superstore. The rows upon rows of open, dustless shelving bearing a veritable warehouse of volumes; the ceiling hung with its industrial innards on display; the enfilade of check-out cubicles; and the wall – the great wall – that displayed a preposterous-to-behold assortment of glossies, quarterlies, journals, newsweeklies, fanzines, tabloids, almanacs, and all other flora and fauna of magazines arrayed upon a rack perhaps 50 feet long.  I went in there to look for a book. I liked books, and, one day, I was sure I wanted to write one. But I got distracted and bought a magazine instead – that August’s issue of GQ, which still stands out in my mind as a thing of formative significance. At that time, the zeitgeist was defined by a Walkman-wearing version of the American Renaissance Man – the highly-ambitious, status-obsessed, money-motivated, health-nut known as a Yuppie. No magazine positioned itself more authoritatively in defining this new sociological creature’s lifestyle than GQ, and it did it with whiter teeth, snappier suspenders, better accessories, bigger polka dots and more caffeine in the ink of its display copy.  I remember that issue less for the photos by Richard Avedon or Steven Meisel, the words of Martin Amis or Frederick Exley, than for this: Erzeugerabfüllung. It was one of the longest, strangest strings of letters from the Roman alphabet I had ever seen. Neither did it seem designed to come out of someone’s mouth. But there it was in Alan Richman’s Wine & Spirits column, accompanied by a lovely still-life photograph of his topic: two bottles of Riesling Kabinetts on a white, sun-dappled tablecloth. Richman’s main point – made almost 35 years ago – still holds true: estate-bottled, table-quality German wines remain some of the least expensive, most delicious wines in the world, chiefly because – then as now – the labels, as he wrote, “cannot be understood by anyone who is not a part-time oenophile, linguist and cartographer”. One US dollar in Richman’s pocket, as I have already said, bought what roughly two-dollars-and-fifty-cents does today; what he was on the hunt for was a good dry white in a range that would now cost somewhere between 12 and 30 bucks, and he easily accomplished that by finding a dealer in New York City who carried a good selection of wines from the Mosel and Rheingau. At the time, I didn’t know the meaning or significance of any of this, but it staked a claim in my brain. The only wine I had ever tasted was the one served at our Episcopal church during Eucharist on Sundays. The flavour it had was of a strange, super-concentrated jam that somehow warmed your upper body. Even as a young kid, I liked it. But the adjectives these German bottles were squeezing out of Richman – “citrus-like”, “honeyed”, “tart-sweet” – weren’t close to describing what was in that chalice, even if you believed in transubstantiation. Was it because Richman’s wine was white, and the parish’s was red? Perhaps, but both colours of grape juice bottled by Welch’s tasted pretty much the same to me. No, I sensed there was something – a lot – I had to learn, and, along with the romance and beauty of the labels, and the contextual air of well-bred taste and cultural with-it-ness featured on the other pages, this, I feel sure, was the decisive moment, the true origin point, when I came to believe that among the many extraordinary things that make life worth living, not just words but wine reigns at the top.  I warned you about distractions, didn’t I? Because that would be my excuse for now informing you, as a quite apropos footnote, that, yes, there was something unusual about our church’s Communion wine. It was, as I have confirmed with the church, actually port (Taylor’s Tawny, to be more accurate), cut, according to tradition, with water. There is a good and fascinating reason for this. In 1701, when the War of the Spanish Succession kicked off, France also became an enemy of England, and its wines, as a result, were no longer made available for import. The Anglican Church searched for and found a replacement, the fortified wines of its new ally, Portugal, and port continues to be an acceptable option to pair with the Host.  II. Distillations A satisfying story, not unlike a satisfying life, is one that surprises you with the mystery of its unfolding. A thing pulls in a certain direction long enough to reach the proximity of something else which then turns toward a new destination. I had actually gone into that bookstore, as I said, to look at books. But I came out, even though I didn’t yet know it, with a different compass point. Within a few years, shortly after graduating from college, in 1992, I got hired by The New Yorker, where I stayed for almost nine years. I then met my future wife, who wisely laughed at the thought we might be able to survive in New York City on my meagre salary, so I went to Vogue, and soon after became the founding editor of Men’s Vogue. After 23 issues, and four years, the financial crisis laid an axe to many magazines, including that one. Eventually, I took on the editorship of Town & Country. Then, finally, in 2016, I moved up to Esquire, the magazine, as it happens, that didn’t offer me a job when The New Yorker did, and became that storied magazine’s editor in chief, until – well, you best read about that in The New York Times.  As far as distractions go, magazines were a good one. They made me who I am, gave me a tremendously worldly education, honed my taste, introduced me to all manner of accomplished people, required me to build quite a wardrobe, and paid me pretty well to do all of this, often with a glass of wine not far out of the picture. There was really no other way I would have ever got to taste all the bottles I have (a lot of the big names people whisper about from Burgundy and Bordeaux, Champagne and also Piedmont, Tuscany and Napa). I built a modest cave à vin of my own by buying the Smith Haut Lafittes of the world way before hedge-fund hoi polloi ran up the prices, and by having access to rare offerings, like 12 bottles of Fiorano, the legendary white wine Alberico Boncompagni Ludovisi, prince of Venosa, made before ripping out all his vines. I smelled the musty perfume of Margaux in the cellar as I watched the workers rack the wine by candlelight. I lured Jay McInerney away from the Wall Street Journal to become my wine columnist; and I once stood in Bordeaux’s town square, tight on 2002 Pétrus, trying with great focus to commune with the statue of Michel de Montaigne while my French friend, a true oenophile, extolled the majesty of the Big Mac’s special sauce.  As the editor of a magazine, curiosity is your profession, even to the point of distraction. Editors – writers, too – are prone to it. It’s a hazard of the gift, and having a jumble of ideas, if you’re any good, is key to making a magazine of any real intellectual or creative daring. Now as a husband and father of three, working from home and trying to be ‘present’, and a still youngish former editor and occasional micro-influencer trying to stave off the solitude to fathom and plot the next phase of a fruitful future, this skill of mine, the strength of which became even more magnified over two decades, is something of a family project.  The way I most often hear the word ‘distraction’ now, for instance, is when it’s being hurled at me in verb form by my wife or daughters accusing me of being more of a phone-enslaved screen vegetable than they are. (I respectfully disagree.) But it’s a sore point for two reasons. One, what I did as an editor is, in a nutshell, now what a smartphone essentially does. Not very imaginatively, of course, and not with taste or charm or originality, but with a bloody, money-grubbing ruthlessness that stalks every step of our digital peregrinations and doesn’t give a twist if the algorithms that are its brain make us its slave by retrofitting our attention spans for kindergarten.  The smartphone – not the former me or any of my fellow kind still in the media biz – is now the true croupier of culture, dealing out a targeted shuffle of Pavlovian temptations to the point of daily mental exhaustion. And, though this thing is in many ways my personal nemesis, I am, against every fibre of my being, too often its obedient servant. Aiming not to live according to the famous line by T.S. Eliot – “distracted from distraction by distraction” – I recently decided to at least take a serious inventory of my favourite ones, both those of the pre-digital sort (tennis, The Walking Dead, checking the mailbox, my sock collection) and those of the post-digital sort (the any and everything I do because my phone wants me to). Then I caught myself watching tennis on my phone and realised this might be harder than I thought. It’s enough to drive a person to drink, thank god! With that in mind, I like to keep a special something for the occasion around, in this case – what else? – two bottles of Riesling Kabinett, for it had struck me as more than a little weird that I’ve probably tasted fewer than a handful of German wines in my entire life. Part of the reason is that those I had were bad, and, like a lot of other simpletons about this great wine region of the world, I’d come to think of Riesling as a cloying elixir equal parts green Jolly Rancher, apple cider vinegar, and hairspray. This, I knew, was wrong, not true and, in terms of wine equity and inclusion, on the wrong side of history. But, if you happen to live in a place like I do – a bourgie swathe of Connecticut bordering New York City where the shops cater heavily to Cali-Fran-Taly banker’s tastes – it might take you a few stops to find what Richman recommended, an erzeugerabfüllung (estate-bottled) Kabinett (wine made from grapes with a minimum must weight/sugar content) Riesling, and when you do it will probably be coated in a fine sift of years-old dust. I bought a green (Mosel) bottle for US$16 and a brown (Rhine) bottle for US$20, both handsomely labelled. I opened them a few minutes ago and took several investigative swigs. The words bright, invigorating and snappy came to mind. One is indeed sweeter, and, though not my usual jam, it is tamped by a pleasing peachy tartness, and the classic overtone of honey isn’t making my palate feel doused with syrup. The other example is, as Richman said so long ago, a very finely layered creature with mineral clarity and an echo of baked bread, something a gluten-free person like me finds particularly appealing. A rather obvious thought: why haven’t I been buying this instead of throwing a ton of endless money at affordably bad white Burgundy, which is mostly a product aimed at fulfilling a desired outcome, like White Claw hard seltzer? III. Words But don’t let me get distracted, again. A writer really has to be careful about such things. Just think about it. Unlike, say, a painter or musician or actor or photographer, the process of writing requires zero physical exertion, no chance to score an endorphin release while sitting staring anxiously at a blank page. Of the many things in life that vie against the counter intuitive impulse to be glued to a desk, Cyril Connolly, in Enemies of Promise, his classic study of the things that distracted him (and others) from becoming a great writer, names the temptations but does not say much about why they’re so deeply tempting to someone who would otherwise be sitting alone in an empty room. Praise, money, fame, social prominence, affairs and journalism are the most common boltholes, according to Connolly, who, as a famously late sleeper that married three times, might have also added the bliss of unconsciousness and excessive alimony. In 1938, the year the book was published, he would never have imagined how hard the task might get without a cigarette. Smoking is a death wish, I know, but when you want to off yourself for still having a hundred pages to go, being able to snap open a nice lighter, flick some ash, stub a butt and inhale some lungfuls of focus-enhancing nicotine must have been kind of helpful. Connolly also doesn’t have much to say about drink except that artists who drink to excess do so “out of the consciousness of wasted ability”. According to that, the 20th century’s most famous literary alcoholics – Dorothy Parker, Truman Capote, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Styron, Elizabeth Bishop, James Joyce, Raymond Chandler, William Faulkner – might have left behind even greater treasures than they did. Because Ernest Hemingway did almost everything with more gusto than any of his peers, including running up his bar tab, as a drinker he belongs in his own sentence. He is the novelist who most romanced a good drink or nice bottle of wine as one of life’s great pleasures. Who didn’t want to have a vermouth with Jake when reading The Sun Also Rises? (Don’t, it’s gross, at least if you order it at one of those kiosks in Montmartre where the bottles are hung upside down with spring-loaded dispensers.) Or, track down a bottle of Valdepeñas, Hemingway’s favourite variety of Spanish wine. Or, get a drink at the bar named after him at the Ritz, in Paris, and then go somewhere on the Left Bank to order “a dozen portugaises and a half-carafe of the dry white wine”.  In the early work, he is not boastful about drinking so much as he is the possessor of an unusual appetite for a good buzz. He is also, like Connolly, aware of the need to keep writing separate from drinking, and drinking within his control. It is hard to read the first paragraph of A Moveable Feast, in which he describes an “evilly run café where the drunkards of the quarter crowded together and I kept away from it because of the smell of dirty bodies and the sour smell of drunkenness”, except as a kind of terrifying admonition to himself. It is tragic that he didn’t heed his own advice. Late in his life, Hemingway became fond of rum daiquiris at the Floridita, his favourite bar in Havana, which might explain his taste for a prose style that soon became too often cloying self-parody. In one of the most extraordinary drinking sessions ever committed to words, in the roman à clef Across the River and Into the Trees, a 50-year-old Hemingway, who was smitten with a teenage Italian countess from Venice, fictionalises his infatuation with a last muse. In one stretch (that covers an evening-to-dawn crawl from Harry’s Bar, the grill at the Gritti Palace, a gondola and a hotel room), one half or another of the couple imbibes: one scotch whisky and soda; six Montgomery Martinis (15 parts gin; 1 part vermouth), two of which are described in size as ‘super’; a bottle of Capri Bianco; two bottles of Valpolicella; two bottles of Roederer Brut ’42; and two bottles of Perrier-Jouët. That is, I suppose, one extreme, and, clearly, not one to be tried at home.  The other might have been espoused by Dr. Samuel Johnson, the great critic and lexicographer. As a young man, he’d drained “many a bottle of wine” but loved port especially. (Perhaps Johnson, a devout Anglican who was born in 1709, in the midst of England’s 14-year war with Spain, also first encountered port as a boy at the Communion altar.) He describes himself to friend and biographer James Boswell as having been “apt to go to excess in it”, adding that, “therefore, after having been for some time without it, on account of illness, I thought it better not to return to it”.  Boswell, who worried about his own dependence on alcohol, even keeping a journal of his intake in an attempt to enforce moderation, argued for a third way, which some of the Romantics later adopted. Wine, he claimed, “produces truth; in vino veritas”. Hoping to persuade Johnson of his point, Boswell once convinced the critic to come down off the wagon for just one glass of claret, so Johnson “might judge, not from recollection, which might be dim, but from immediate sensation”. Boswell reports what happened after the glass was emptied: “Johnson shook his head, and said, ‘Poor stuff! No, Sir, claret is the liquor for boys; port, for men,’” adding, “‘A man would be drowned by it before it made him drunk.’”  That actually reminds me of something I think I forgot to mention about Riesling Kabinetts – they’re also highly admired for their low percentage of alcohol. On that note, I think I’ll have another glass.  This article was originally published in FONDATA, Issue Two.

Jay Fielden, former editor of Men’s Vogue, Town & Country and Esquire, recalls how a magazine column on wine, read in a Texas bookstore, shifted his ambitions beyond journalism and set him on the path to becoming a writer of books.

Former Esquire editor-in-chief Jay Fielden reflects on magazines, writing, Riesling Kabinett and the distractions that shaped a life in words and wine.

Jay Fielden on Wine, Words and Distraction

How one became another  

 When the UK entered the first coronavirus lockdown in March 2020, there was a sense that the end of long, thoughtful, funny and serious conversations was dangerously close. Over a Zoom call, sat at our respective kitchen tables, F+R’s Patrick O’Connor, creative director Alan Aboud and myself, a journalist and editor, started to wonder if we could work together in some way to explore topics usually explored at the communal tables that were sadly empty.  The first project we worked on together marked the 90th birthday of iconic Lebanese winemaker Chateau Musar and the simultaneous publishing of a book celebrating the winery by Académie du Vin Library. Working together with music consultant Leo Walton, we conceived a package of content for FINE+RARE’s website to coincide with F+R’s exclusive release of various mixed cases of Chateau Musar vintages going back to the 1960s.  As part of the content package, I wrote three articles for the F+R website, and worked with Leo to create four Spotify playlists featuring Lebanese music from the relevant decades of the Musar vintages being released: the 1960s, 1970s, 2000s and 2010s. Leo and I also suggested the potential to add more cultural context to both the wine and our selection of music by producing a podcast in which we interviewed a Lebanese musician about musical culture and heritage in the region. We explored various ideas before interviewing two members of the Beirut Groove Collective – a group of DJs with a reputation for unearthing records from the 1960s, 70s and 80s and giving them a new audience. We asked the DJs to give us the low down on their legendary all-night vinyl-only parties in Lebanon’s capital, and about Beirut’s surprisingly vibrant music scene throughout the Civil War (1975-1990). We also asked Ernesto about his new reissue project with BBE Records and the first release in the series: Ihsan Al-Munzer’s 1979 synth-led Belly Dance Disco album.  This idea – of creating original editorial content that proactively ventured into topics in and adjacent to the worlds of fine wine and spirits in order to enrich the FINE+RARE experience – immediately appealed to all involved. Between us, we started to flesh out the idea for a new content platform that could explore and commission stories that took advantage of our combined knowledge, skillsets and networks, plus FINE+RARE’s access to the best producers and most interesting personalities driving quality in the worlds of fine wine and exceptional spirits.  While the concept was always for FONDATA to be a multi-media platform whereby we would produce content in whatever medium seemed most relevant to a given subject matter – podcast, video, blog or print – we focused our initial efforts on producing a large-format, print journal. It would provide a brilliant canvas for us to commission the best writers, photographers and illustrators, and it would also be the perfect format to function as a physical mission statement, something we could send to F+R customers. Doing this in 2020, when we were in lockdown, seemed like a great way to maintain connection and morale in an unprecedented moment in living memory. We formed a small ‘bubble’ to sit, appropriately distanced, in Patrick’s back garden in Hackney to brainstorm the idea and start mapping out what stories we could potentially commission for our first FONDATA journal. For the inaugural issue, one story in particular was pivotal to realising our ambition: commissioning American essayist, author and regular contributor to The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik to write a piece for us. In his book, Paris to the Moon (Quercus, 2000), Gopnik likens Jean-Philippe Derenne’s L’Amateur de Cuisine book (Éditions Stock, 1996) to “a medieval almanac, offering a timeless, secure, benevolent universe of food.” In our initial conversations, we’d identified Wine Grapes, A complete guide to 1,368 vine varieties, including their origins and flavours (Allen Lane, 2012) – the weighty 1,240-page tome authored by Jancis Robinson MW, Julia Harding MW and Dr José Vouillamoz – as a book we’d love to celebrate in some way. We wondered if Gopnik would be as enamoured with the book as much as Derenne’s and if he’d write something for us about it and its value to wine lovers and gastronomes alike. We duly sent him a copy of Wine Grapes (clothbound and slipcased) and a note introducing ourselves and outlining FONDATA’s ambition. He loved the book and the idea for the piece, so we contacted Jancis to ask if she would be happy to be interviewed by Adam. It turned out they were both fans of each other’s work. Our first feature was underway. But how would we present the piece? What would FONDATA look like? Alan asked Jancis if she would agree to be our cover star for our first issue. When she agreed, we had to work out how to bring the inaugural cover to life. “Gavin Bond popped into my head,” Alan, recalls, of the task at hand, “as he has become the ‘go-to’ photographer for celebrity portraits, especially in the film and fashion business. I felt Jancis deserved that status and reverence. Of course, the wine world reveres her, but no wine journal seems to be able to look beyond a shoot involving wine bottles and grapes.”   With Gavin Bond on board, the next step was to think about the shoot itself. “We enlisted the help of a wonderful floral design company, Studio Lupine,” Alan explains of his art direction. “We briefed Raggie Furuseth, the designer, to create a wildly original space in which Jancis could be photographed. The resulting portrait is a stunning and sensitive study of one of the world’s most learned and charming wine writers in her prime.” Another crucial part of our first issue planning was around design concepting and setting out our production values. As a kind of guiding light, Alan and I had adopted a mantra: “This isn’t a magazine”, as FONDATA would have none of the concerns of a regular magazine. We didn’t want to print on flimsy paper. We didn’t want to create something predictable or ephemeral, but rather an object that felt it had more permanence, more lasting value. FONDATA, we were all very clear, would strive from the outset to be a joyous, opulent celebration of cerebral, long-form editorial content.  Alan began working with his studio designer, Haley Austin, exploring different oversized formats, experimenting with page layouts and type treatments to realise his vision for how FONDATA would look. At the same time, he commissioned Rick Banks of Foundry 37 to create a bespoke logotype for FONDATA’s masthead based on his F37 Caslon typeface. We also adopted F37 as our core typeface for body copy, and to use at large scale for feature headlines and beautiful, full-page pull quotes.  In terms of our editorial direction, we were keen from the offset to commission editorial that explored evergreen (and ever-fascinating) topics. What does it mean to collect? How has the pandemic affected our lifestyles, and how much of that is positive? How do ideas germinate, and how does genius emerge? How important is history and tradition to innovation and revolution? What are the most significant drivers and the biggest hurdles for excellence? Once the Gopnik feature was in the proverbial bag, we set to work commissioning an issue full of features that we hoped would appeal to a wine-loving audience but not feel like we were trying to sell them something.  We approached Jancis Robinson’s co-authors of Wine Grapes, Julia Harding MW and Dr José Vouillamoz, to call out five relatively obscure grape varieties from around the world to champion them and the producers making remarkable wines with them. We also commissioned botanical artist Sarah Jane Humphrey to illustrate each variety.  We asked the former director of London’s Design Museum, Deyan Sudjic OBE, to contemplate the history of social spaces. To accompany his feature, we asked him to approach a number of highly regarded architects and interior designers to illustrate their visions of social spaces of the near future. As a result, we soon added John Pawson, AB Rogers, Paloma Strelitz, and Jon Marshall to our list of contributors. We tasked journalist and author Dylan Jones OBE with critiquing wine’s critical landscape, connecting him with some of the world’s leading wine writers and critics to discover how the pandemic had reshaped their work lives and lifestyles.  Author and historian (and one of the most elegantly dressed gentlemen about town) Nicholas Foulkes very literally wrote the book on cigars. His son, Max, is a Master of Havana and works at Davidoff in Mayfair. And it was Nicholas’ father-in-law who first introduced him to the pleasures of cigar smoking. Especially for our first issue, Nicholas pondered the joy of his relationship with his sons and the idea of passing cultural knowledge and enthusiasms from one generation to the next. We commissioned Julian Broad to shoot a portrait of Nicholas with his sons.  I spent time talking with restaurateur-turned winegrower Alex Xu and wrote a piece about how he’d come to completely reshape his future by planting three hectares of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay vines in the foothills of the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain in China’s most idyllic province. I also interviewed Waterford distillery owner Mark Reynier to find out how (and why) he’s bringing notions of terroir, traceability and transparency to the fore in the world of single malt whisky.   Meanwhile, British chef and food writer Thom Eagle contemplated the value of spending more, rather than less, time in the kitchen, and artist Stewart Walton illustrated the piece.  We commissioned educator and business guru Germana Di Falco to interview fashion designer Brunello Cucinelli about his philosophy to business and life itself, and we engaged British-born, LA-based writer and critic Geoff Dyer to chart the slow journey towards appreciation of and reverence for well-chosen wine. The issue signs off with a Letter from California penned by winemaker Maya Dalla Valle, who reflects on her 11-year journey to become the winemaker at her family’s celebrated vineyard in Napa. The resulting inaugural issue is everything we hoped it would be. As Patrick says in his publisher’s letter on its very first page, it is a celebration. One that delivers rich, engaging editorial content in a format that feels lavish and collectable in and of itself. “It is also a collective,” he continues. “The best minds brought together to tackle the subjects that captivate, so arresting in their absence – experience, space, people and family. [This issue] became a journey into the sound of the things that matter to the soul of the collector, the reasons things exist, the FONDATA.”

FONDATA Editor Gavin Lucas on the content platform’s journey from ideation to realisation

Exploring how the FINE+RARE Group created FONDATA, a unique wine and spirits content platform

The FONDATA genesis story

FONDATA: The genesis story

Every now and then, the word ‘singularity’ is used to describe a particular wine that stands apart, for whatever reason, from other wines of its type. But just what is singularity, and how can wine express it? Wine writer Tamlyn Currin investigates.

What makes a wine truly singular? Tamlyn Currin explores the rare bottles that defy convention and challenge the rules of the wine world.

Searching for Singularity in wine

Searching for Singularity

Lebanon's lost legacy: viticulture Despite being more southerly than the great wine regions of Europe, the Beka'a’s elevated altitude on average around 1000m above sea level – means that it’s a full 10ºC cooler than Lebanon’s Mediterranean coastline. The climate is positively European with wet, often snowy winters and warm, dry summers. It’s very well suited to winemaking, a local craft that dates back millennia. Lebanon itself is geographically situated in the cradle of civilisation. It was here, even before
the Greeks and Romans emerged as dominant cultures in the Mediterranean, and the Canaanites (later known as Phoenicians), peace-loving traders from the Levant, established some of the earliest known well-organised cities: the trading ports of Byblos, Sidon and Tyre. Phoenician culture was at its peak between 1500 and 300BC – a period that saw them explore and dominate the Mediterranean, developing trade routes, setting up outposts and cities as far afield as North Africa (Carthage, now Tunis, Tunisia) and the Iberian peninsula (Gadir, now Cádiz, Spain). The word ‘Phoenician’ directly connects the people of the Levant with both an impressive entrepreneurial spirit and an awe-inspiring work ethic. More precisely, it is an exonym originating from ancient Greek that describes Tyrian purple. This highly prized dye was a major export of the Canaanite port towns, in particular Tyre, hence the name. The labour-intensive production of the colour involved collecting the mucous secretions of thousands of sea snails. 12,000 snails yield a paltry 1.5 grams of dye – which is why it was so highly prized and the clothes it coloured were reserved for royalty. Tyrian purple was not the only ingenious product that the Phoenicians exported. Their legacy also includes the invention of glass-blowing techniques, and the development of the very first abstract (non-figurative) writing system (from which the Greek alphabet was derived) is credited to the Phoenicians and their Canaanite ancestors. It was almost certainly developed primarily to keep records of sales and ultimately function as an essential accounting tool. We also have the Phoenicians to thank for the word ‘Europe’ – which comes from their word ‘Erob’ meaning ‘where the sun sets’. While it is thought that the world’s first-ever wine was made over 8,000 years ago in the Caucasus Mountains between the Black and Caspian Seas to the northeast of the Levant, it was the Phoenicians that produced, exported and made famous the ‘fragrant wines of Lebanon’ mentioned in the Bible’s old testament (Hosea 14:7). And with their grip on Mediterranean trade, they marketed it and exported it along with, crucially, the knowledge of how to make it. The agricultural treatises of Carthaginian writer Mago, (thought to be writing around 350 BC) were among the most important early texts in the history of wine to record ancient knowledge of winemaking and viticulture. It’s important to remember the function of wine in society in Phoenician times. It wasn’t just a drink. It was, rather like the Tyrian purple dye, complicated and labour intensive to make, exceptionally highly prized and valuable and not just because of how it tasted – but because of its effect and function.  Biomolecular Archaeologist Professor Pat McGovern at the University of Pennsylvania Museum is a specialist in fermented beverages and his research reveals more about wine in Phoenician life. “The wines of ancient Lebanon and Syria,” he says, “were much more than a technological marvel. They were the social lubricants to break down barriers, stimulate music and the arts and bring people together. They were the supreme religious symbol for prosperity and well-being, in life as well as death. And they were the medicines for dissolving and dispensing botanicals, to rest the weary, relieve pain and cure disease.” Taking their wine to the Pharoahs of Egypt and further west to Portugal to trade it for local silver and tin, Phoenician winemaking equipment has been discovered in Valepeñas in Spain. As Phoenicians established Cádiz (Spain) as early as 1100BC, it is most likely that Phoenician wines – not Roman wines – were the forerunners to sherry. Perhaps the most enduring legacy of these seafaring traders was, in fact, the propagation of ancestral grapevines from the Levant that ampelographers believe gave rise to several modern grape varieties in Europe. According to research published by the University of California-Davis on the Integrated Viticulture Online Database, the French wine grape Mourvèrde may have first been introduced to the wine region of Catalonia around 500BC. By 64BC, Seleucid Syria and Lebanon had been annexed to the Roman empire by emperor Pompey. Peace and prosperity followed as the people of Byblos, Tyre and Sidon were granted Roman citizenship. Trade boomed and new wealth generated from exports of cedar, pottery, jewellery, perfume, purple dye and wine to Rome, enabled an era of widespread construction and urban development. One of the building projects the Romans invested in at this time was the enhancement of the already millennia-old temple complex at Baalbek in the Beka'a Valley. At a site which the Greeks and the Romans referred to as Heliopolis 'the City of the Sun' (where Phoenician god Ba’al had once been worshipped), the Romans rebuilt and reconsecrated the temples to their gods Jupiter, Venus and Bacchus, gods of wine, fertility, ritual madness, festivity, dance and theatre. The 700-acre site remains, to this day, the largest and best preserved Roman temple complex anywhere in the Empire. How the ancients moved the 800-ton quarried stone blocks that form the base of the temples still baffles the world’s brightest engineers. The temple to Bacchus at Baalbek is a monument to the importance of wine in the region, and the site became a symbol of Lebanon itself in the 1960s, thanks to the cultural impact of the Baalbek International Festival. Established in the mid-1950s, the festival brought celebration, theatre, music and dance back to the site through performances by international music stars and, crucially, nurtured and celebrated home-grown talent, perhaps most famously Fairouz and the Rahbani Brothers who became huge stars in Lebanon and right across the Arab world. Lebanon’s potent winemaking heritage is not lost on the makers of Chateau Musar. Far from it. As well as its vineyards in the Beka'a, the winery also grows vines near Byblos and the Hochar family’s charismatic winemaker, Tarek Sakr, is as passionate about the history of the land as he is about the grapes he grows there. “Byblos has been known since Phoenician times as an exporter of cedar wood and wine,” he enthuses. “Vines were cultivated in the hills surrounding Byblos, fermented in stone vats dug into the landscape. Then, the wine was put in Canaanite jars (these were the predecessor of the Greek amphora – yes, Phoenicians invented these too), sealed with resin to stop oxidation, and taken to the harbour for export.” Tarek also tells of a recently discovered archaeological site in the village of Edde a few kilometres from Byblos. “The site suggests that most of the hills near the city have been growing vines for thousands of years. This makes sense as the place where our nearby vineyards are located, on a hill overlooking Byblos, is called Vines Passage. You can smell the history of winemaking here. This is undoubtedly the birthplace of viticulture.” While he has spent many years planting and tending to its vines as an integral part of the Musar winemaking process, Tarek’s knowledge of and connection to the land and its ancient traditions run even deeper than his many years of experience. The result of a DNA test found that he is genuinely of Phoenician descent. It would seem that when it comes to Lebanon’s unrivalled contribution to the world of wine, we still have much to thank the Phoenicians for. Explore more Editorial 

Most of Chateau Musar’s vines are grown in Lebanon’s Beka'a Valley, a fertile plain about 30km east of Beirut, situated between Mount Lebanon on the west and the Anti-Lebanon mountains to the east. 

Most of Chateau Musar’s vines are grown in Lebanon’s Beka'a Valley. We look into the viticultural legacy of the region and the impact of the cultural heritage

The wines of Lebanon

The wines of Lebanon: a phoenician phenomenon

About Académie du Vin Founded in Paris in 1973 by Steven Spurrier, the Académie du Vin grew out of a love of wine and a desire to share it with clarity and intelligence. What began as informal wine appreciation courses in 1970s Paris evolved into a publishing house dedicated to the finest wine writing of the past, present, and future. Today, the Académie du Vin Library maintains a deliberately small and carefully curated list, selecting books for their readability, authority and enduring insight into the world’s great wine regions – guided by the belief that fine wine writing, like wine itself, deepens with time. About this article This article presents the introduction to Côte d’Or: The wines and winemakers of the heart of Burgundy (2nd Edition) by Raymond Blake. In it, Blake sets the scene for Burgundy’s most revered stretch of vineyard, exploring the historical, cultural and human forces that shape the Côte d’Or. The introduction offers essential context on place, tradition and the vignerons themselves—laying the groundwork for a deeper understanding of Burgundy’s wines and the people behind them. Introduction The Côte d’Or, the Golden Slope, enjoys a reputation and exerts an influence in the wine world out of all proportion to its size. It possesses none of the grandeur of the Douro Valley, for instance, nor the picture-postcard beauty of South Africa’s winelands. It is not majestic; its beauty is serene, and what strikes the observer time and again is the tiny scale. From north to south it is about 50 kilometres long, is sometimes less than a kilometre wide, and can be driven in little more than an hour. At a push it could be walked in a day. Yet for a thousand or more years this favoured slope has yielded wines that have entranced and delighted wine lovers, with a fair measure of frustration and disappointment thrown in too. Avoiding hyperbole when writing about the Côte d’Or is a problem, for it has held people in thrall for centuries, frequently prompting poetic flights of prose: ‘The Pathetic Fallacy resounds in all our praise of wine … This Burgundy seemed to me, then, serene and triumphant … it whispered faintly, but in the same lapidary phrase, the same words of hope.’ Thus wrote Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited eighty years ago. Literary critics might cavil at such prolixity, and Waugh himself tamed it severely in later editions, but it was enough to intrigue me decades ago and engender a love for the region and its wines that has never waned. Greater Burgundy is a bigger, more geographically diverse, region than might first be supposed, stretching from Chablis, south-east of Paris, to Beaujolais, north of Lyon. The subject matter of this book, however, is Burgundy’s heart, the Côte d’Or. There is no more celebrated stretch of agricultural land on earth. It has been pored over and analysed, feted and cosseted, obsessed about and sought after for centuries and today, if anything, it exerts a greater pull on wine lovers than ever before. ‘Astronomical’ does not begin to describe the prices now being paid for prized patches of grand and premier cru vineyard, and for the wines produced from them by the top domaines. Such prices hog the headlines and paint a dazzling, though severely one-dimensional, picture of the Côte d’Or today. In the early years of the twenty-first century they are part of the story but they are not the only part. This book aims to get behind the dazzle and flesh out the story, to add some nuance and extra dimension. The Côte d’Or cannot be captured in a sound bite nor, it must be admitted, in a book of this scope – but my hope is that it may add another chapter to the ever-unfolding tale, setting it in the early years of the twenty-first century, a period that may come to be considered by future historians as a golden age for Burgundy but which has brought its own challenges in the shape of those ludicrous prices, the scandal of premature oxidation in the white wines, and the increasing challenge of dealing with extreme weather events such as hail and spring frost. The Côte d’Or has been the subject of forensic scrutiny for centuries, generating a library of books, so why another one now? For the simple reason that it is ever changing. Every year sees new names added to the producers’ roster and old ones slipping away, and thanks to this ongoing evolution the infant domaine of today can be the superstar of tomorrow. The core of the book comprises about a hundred producer profiles. Many fine domaines and négociants whose wines I am happy to purchase and drink have not found a place here. It is important to stress that they have not been included, rather than excluded, simply for reasons of space. The aim was to feature a representative collection of producers, not a top-down selection of the most celebrated names in descending order of renown. As a consequence this book is not, nor was it ever intended to be, a comprehensive A to Z of producers. I write as an amateur du vin, an enthusiast whose admiration for the wines of Burgundy stretches back over four decades, and who has been visiting the region and writing about the wines for some thirty years. I do not trade in wine. I try to see beyond the wine to get something of the backstory, the story of people and place that makes the Côte d’Or so fascinating. To examine the wines in isolation is to dislocate them from that, and not knowing something of the backstory precludes a full understanding of them. A broad lens must be brought to bear on the côte. Too narrow, and the wood will never be seen for the trees. I have learned much by coming across things serendipitously rather than dashing hither and thither, seeing a lot but noticing little. Without time for assimilation and reflection, subtlety and shade are missed. Finally, no gustatory experience can match the thrill of a great Côte d’Or red drunk at its peak. The colour, crimsoned by age; the heavenly scent, perfumed with notes of sweet decay; a sauvage edge, the palate lively and tingling, managing to be so many things at once, oscillating between fruit and spice and meat and game, a merry-go-round of flavour, spiralling on the palate, refusing to be pinned down by anything so prosaic as a tasting note. All the primary components melded by age and yielding up new ones, unsignalled when the wine was young. Everything cohesive and in harmony, like a great orchestra playing at its best. Above all, vital and living, endlessly enchanting and intriguing, engaging the palate and the spirit like no other wine. Learn more about Raymond Blake's Côte d'Or (2nd edition) Shop all books from the Académie du Vin Library Visit the Académie du Vin website Upcoming Event FINE+RARE & Académie du Vin Present: The Impossible Tasting FINE+RARE and Académie du Vin are delighted to present a rare and intimate exploration of the finest wines ever made. Wines of historical legend. Wines that are rarely seen, much less opened. Wines that should be impossible to bring together at one time. Lunch (April 29): River Restaurant, The Savoy Hotel Dinner (April 30): St James’s Room, 67 Pall Mall Club Learn more about the event here

Explore Burgundy with the introduction from Raymond Blake's book: Côte d'Or: The wines and winemakers of the heart of Burgundy. Blake tells the whole story of this hugely influential region, painting a complete picture of life there: the history, landscape, climate, culture and people.

Discover Raymond Blake's Côte d'Or (2nd Edition): a deep dive into Burgundy's wines, winemakers, history, culture and the people behind this iconic region.

Raymond Blake on the Côte d'Or

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