Preface to the Commemorative Edition: Ian Harris

HUGH JOHNSON ON MICHAEL BROADBENT

“A Dealer of Genius”

Hugh Johnson, world renowned author of The World Atlas of Wine, The Story of Wine, Hugh Johnson’s Wine Companion and Hugh Johnson’s Pocket Wine Book has sold nearly 20 million in his six decades as a wine writer. He is equally passionate about gardening, and for 44 years has kept his much-loved Trad’s Diary (now online) as well as penning The Principles of Gardening and Trees. The vibe of the 1960s was not limited to pot, the Beatles and rock n’ roll. Even in the somnolent wine trade something stirred. 1966 in particular was a banner year: Robert Mondavi opened his Napa winery, signalling the relaunch of California wine, and Michael Broadbent restarted Christie’s Wine Auctions, dormant for decades. Contrast and complement: the future and the history of great wines taking on new life. Coin- cidentally, in the same month as Michael picked up his gavel, my own first wine book came out. There was something in the air.

Michael brought a certain rigour to a trade not famous for self-examination. He had joined – at Harvey’s of Bristol – a team of benign enthusiasts for wine led by England’s arch wine taster, Harry Waugh. Harry’s palate was famous; his judgements impeccable, but his utterances, shall we say, left a lot to the imagination. I tasted with him over a decade on the board of Château Latour. ‘Good colour,’ he would say: ‘Distinct nose; typical. Full body. A nice wine.’ And Harry was not unique: since the days of Saintsbury’s Notes on a Cellarbook almost any attempt to describe a wine, however guarded, obtuse or plain boring, was seen as daring.

There was a treasury of experience and expertise in different branches of the trade: legendary tasters of port or claret; salesmen with a miraculous capacity for champagne, but no real teaching or training. In 1908 a naturalized Frenchman, André L Simon, inaug- urated the first wine trade lectures. Half a century later the Vintners’ Company initiated the Institute of Masters of Wine, another seed that bore fruit in the 1960s. By 1970 the first woman, Sarah Morphew, passed its challenging exam.

Michael must have noticed the lack of urgency, or indeed order, in his new calling. He was trained as an architect, and is a pianist and the most precise of draftsmen. The result was his drafting, he claims at one sitting, of a business-like primer on wine tasting that has set a widely accepted standard for over 50 years.

In a sense it is a period piece; it has its archaic moments. More importantly though, it sets out the classical, logical (and one might say inevitable) method of forming an intelligent opinion of a wine, a method that is now simply routine. Above all it is practical: how to set about it; tasting for two people or 200. What do you need? How much? And don’t forget pencils and paper. At the heart of it is Michael’s firm belief and constant practice: you must take notes – which he has been doing for 66 years…

Michael’s little red notebooks are a legend. Over 150 of them, each page ruled to record wine, occasion, appearance, nose and palate, and his conclusion. He is nothing if not disciplined and precise. It must have been a real effort at times, with Bacchus reigning all around, to lay out notebook and pen, even sometimes his wristwatch to record time since decanting, or from first sniff to final caudalie. They have been, of course, the source

Michael in deep contemplation of a mystery wine. One of his little red notebooks sits to the right of his table, and would be with him at all times. He filled over 150 of them (identical format) with neat, hand-written tasting notes, all readily accessed from the shelves of his office. for his monumental Vintage Wine of 2002, which greatly expands on the notes, adds context, anecdote and the fun which is an inescapable part of his character. Broadbents (Michael, Daphne his late wife, and children Emma and Bartholomew) are incapable of taking life seriously.

Wine Tasting emerged as a slim but stylish volume with a jacket drawn by our mutual friend Charles Mozley, a charming, chaotic, prolific artist who found many patrons in the wine trade, which in Michael’s time included Christie’s. For a while the firm’s small tasting room in King Street, St James’s, was a focus for the fine wine world. Ancient wines that had slept in castle cellars for generations were winkled out by Michael and saw their first daylight there, among tasters (and buyers) who could hardly believe their luck. (The downside of Michael’s gift for such winkling was the drying-up of bargain supplies of old wines for the needy connoisseurs – I was one – who had patronized Restell’s auctions of what were thought of as trade remnants. When Christie’s bought Restells it was goodbye to un- noticed cases of mature classed growths. No more 25-shilling Lafite.) Michael developed a public persona, elegant and apparently dignified, that suggested senior surgeon or QC – or indeed the very serious antique dealer he became. Pretty women seemed to form a queue behind his trim figure, his bicycle and his battered hat. Like a great bibliophile he (and often Daphne) would reverently take each volume (or bottle) from its shelf, respecting the dust of ages, and note its position and condition as evidence of its provenance: the very stuff of art dealers, or least auction houses with high rollers in their sights.

We became close friends, and collaborated on various memorable occasions. I once asked him where he changed into the dinner jacket he seemed to wear every evening. We were just crossing St James’s Street. ‘In a flat up there,’ he said, pointing to a window above Prunier’s famous restaurant. I went on to buy the flat, at a price that seems unreal today; it was our pied à terre for 30 years. When Christie’s started auctions in the Far East I was a consultant to Jardines in Hong Kong and Tokyo. Jardines facilitated the shipping of rare wines for Christie’s, the logistics and interpretation of what at first seemed a pretty rum idea; second-hand liquor. Rum until you heard the prices. The wine trade was becoming more and more international. America gradually authorized wine auctions. The sleepy old world of fine wine discovered glamour; from being the domain of the dedicated and worthy it became another catwalk for the wealthy. Much of the credit – or blame – goes to Michael. He had added what the wine trade had lacked; a veneer of scholarship, and a dealer of genius.

HUGH JOHNSON OBE

Tasting – broad concept

Need to taste?

Commerce and mediocrity

II: Why taste?

Although there is a marked difference between what is insipid and what pleases our taste, the interval is certainly not wide between what is acknowledged to be good and what is excellent. BRILLAT-SAVARIN The Physiology of Taste, 1825

Wine is a beverage of enormous agricultural and commercial importance. Every drop of the millions of gallons made annually has one final objective: to be consumed. And, in passing the lips, crossing the tongue and descending the throat, wine is ‘tasted’, whether or not a conscious comment or judgement is made. However, the word ‘tasting’ in relation to wine refers to a deliberate, conscious and subjective act, the aim of which is to assess the qualities of the wine under review. Incidentally, the word ‘tasting’ is used here in the conventional and universally accepted sense which I prefer to the more pedantically accurate but somewhat academic terms ‘sensory’ and ‘organoleptic’ examinations.

Does all wine need to be tasted in this sense? The answer is: no. For of the millions of gallons produced and marketed, by far the largest proportion is the plainest of ordinary beverage wine, made to be consumed as an adequate accompaniment to a meal or merely as a refreshing and restorative drink. This sort of wine is not made to be sipped reverently; nor is it meant to provide the basis of intellectual discussion. (The fact that one of the end products of its consumption may be the mellowing of the drinkers and the loosening of their tongues to discuss other subjects with new enlightenment is immaterial – but they won’t, if they retain their sense of proportion, talk much about the wine itself.)

Before finally dismissing the plain, honest-to-goodness (one hopes) vin de table, a word about mass-produced wines may not come amiss.

We are living in a world where, whether we like it or not, standards are concertina-ing. Thanks to new pesticides, new methods of controlling fermentation and other new techniques, less is now left to chance. Although fine vintages cannot be created artificially, certainly poor vintages are less disastrous than they used to be. This is a mixed blessing. If more sound wine is made, more is to be marketed, for the production of wine is as subject to the laws of supply and demand as any other commodity. Wine to be sold on a large scale has to be blended and, to be universally acceptable, has to be innocuous – which is a fortunate situation for the marketing man.

It is no coincidence that we live in the era of the ‘light’ and ‘mild’, subjected to a relatively new set of standards which apply to nearly all consumer products from ‘mild-flavoured’ cornflakes to ‘light’ whiskies. Unhappily, commercial necessity forces this pace, taking character and stuffing out of the raw material, reducing the awareness of the consumer to any elements of positive taste. What is not sufficiently realized is that mixing individual flavours has a similar effect to mixing colours: the more you mix, the greyer the result. Mass-marketed wines must be blended. Blended wines, of necessity, and by design, lose much of their individuality and character and a ‘grey’ neutral wine often results. Neutral wines are inoffensive and therefore will not displease the majority. Which, sadly, is just one more example of how commercial necessity can become a marketing virtue.

Vital critical standards

Reasons for tasting

It is in this context: to maintain interest and positive standards, that critical tasting must be kept alive. It would be a pity to allow man’s finer perceptions of tasting experience (and resultant range of pleasures) to atrophy.

Well, after all that, what are the main reasons for tasting? The important thing to realize is that wine will be tasted throughout its life in different places, by different people and for a variety of practical reasons. Here are some of them:

• In the chai (quinta, cantina, whatever local name is given to the grower’s cellar), the maître de chai or the proprietor will be acting as nurse and midwife. He[10] will taste from the moment the must is fermented into wine, until it is sold or bottled, watching its condition, balance and development.

• The broker and the merchant will also taste from the grower’s cask during this period prior to making a purchase. For the lay amateur, tasting young wine from a cask in a chai – such a romantic-sounding occupation – can be sadly disappointing. Few things can be so starkly raw and scouring as a mouthful of purple new wine. Much better to leave it at this stage to the professionals!

• Samples may have to be submitted by the grower to an official body for a seal of approval. For example new regulations issued in 1974 by the French Government introduce analysis and tasting for all appellation controlée wines.*

• In the cellars of the negotiant or shipper, the selected wine may be nursed a little further up to the stage of shipment en barrique or bottling. During this period, it is tasted by professional buyers with a keen eye on price, style and potential development.

• Competitive tastings at wine fairs and conventions. These are fairly common in wine- producing countries, particularly in California, Australia and behind the ‘Iron Curtain’.

• After shipment in cask it will rest in the cellar of the shipper or merchant until it is ready for bottling. The firm’s tasters – and the analyst, if there is a laboratory – will examine its condition prior to bottling. Thereafter, from time to time, ‘quality-control’ personnel will keep an eye on the behaviour and development of the wine in bottle.

• The next category of tasting is the trade tasting where the merchant wholesaler or institutional buyer selects wine for re-sale. This sort of function may be of the headline-hitting variety in a vast candle-lit cellar, or may take the form of a quiet, down-to-earth tasting in a somewhat clinical-looking tasting room. In either case, the buyer is on the lookout for wines either to lay down or to offer for laying down and, of course, for immediate consumption.

• Lastly, the keen amateur, with a good cellar, will always taste his own wines to see how they are progressing and to choose wines that are suitable for a particular occasion, guest or type of

* The main provisions of Decree 74-871 are (and remain in 2019) as follow: Article 1: the wines for which an AC is claimed cannot be put into circulation without a ‘certificate of agreement’ issued by the Institut National des Appellations d’Origine des Vins et Eaux-de-Vie (INAO) after an examination conforming to the terms of Article II of EEC regulation No 817/70 of the Council of 28th April 1970. Article 2 : the examination, organized by INAO or local wine-growing syndicats consists of an analysis and tasting, the latter carried out by a special Commission, along officially laid-down fixed lines of procedure.