Some wine regions dance to the beat of their own drum. From the sweeter reds of Ethiopia’s Rift Valley to the soft-styled fizz of Altos de Pinto Bandeira, Arnica Rowan explores far-flung regions with distinctive approaches to growing vines and making wine – almost exclusively for their own people

Arnica Rowan explores wines that don’t make it to the international market – with distinctive styles from Ethiopia, Brazil, Thailand and beyond

Discover the wines of Ethiopia, Brazil and beyond

Not for export

It is little wonder there has been a veritable tequila gold rush, after celebrity-backed brands have sold in excess of $1bn, and the category continued to report double-digit growth during a global pandemic. This growth wasn’t just at the entry level – as some might expect – as online sales of reposado, añejo and extra añejo soared in tequila’s biggest market, the US. The thirst for premium-and-above tequila falls to 163 certified tequila-producing companies and 8,000 agave producers, which is not as easily sated as some might think when your agricultural product takes years to mature in the ground and in barrel. While category growth is undeniably cause for celebration, artisanal producers like Clase Azul are struggling to meet demand. Production is so time and labour-intensive that, with increasing popularity, Clase Azul is considering an allocation model in the UK, as already employed in other markets. The brand’s distinctive hand-painted decanters take two weeks to produce, made by local artisans from the Mazahuas, in the town of Santa María Canchesdá. Before bottling, the organic, non-genetically modified Blue Weber agave takes nine years before it can be harvested, 72 hours to cook, and the Reposado and Añejo are both aged in ex-Bourbon casks for eight months and 25 months, respectively. Clase Azul Ultra – their top tequila – is aged between five and seven years in ex-Sherry casks, making it a popular choice for whisky lovers. Founder Arturo Lomeli is adamant he doesn’t want to streamline any of this process and compromise on quality. “In terms of the quality," Chantal Serrano (Prestige Account Manager for Spirit Cartel, the company's UK distributor) explains, "if you really want to have real agave quality with all the certifications – organic, non-genetically modified – there’s going to be a point when you are limited.” Clase Azul already has a Mezcal offering that is made from wild, 12-to -15-year-old Cenizo agave which can only be harvested once a year. The Cenizo is slowly roasted using firewood and volcanic rock, then milled by hand using an axe. Next it is fermented using stone piles with red oak and double-distilled using an alembic copper still known as El Viejo.   Premium-and-above tequila has been reporting double-digit growth for the past five years, but some still do not afford it the respect it’s due, according to Serrano. “I think if you told some of the biggest producers of Cognac that you were going to shot it, then I think they will be scandalised. Tequila might not have been aged in a barrel for as long as some whiskies, but the plant had to mature at least on average for five to seven years and, for some producers, like Clase Azul, it is nine years, so appreciate that.”  It is increasingly difficult for producers to have this conversation with consumers when some companies are being forced to cut corners to meet the seemingly unquenchable thirst for all things agave. The use of diffusers to process, in many cases raw, agave piñas so the sugars can be fermented and distilled more quickly has become a popular way of circumventing the challenges. While diffusers are undeniably effective in extracting the potential fermentable sugars – 99% to the traditional brick oven and tahona method’s 70% – the change in flavour profile is not always a favourable one.   “The only objective is to extract as much sugar as they can from the agave,” Serrano laments. “And I can sort of understand why they do it because there is such a huge demand… but you then sacrifice quality.   “Unmatured agave or very young agave is being used in the production of these diffusers. Even some chemicals will be used sometimes. Because of the whole process, certain bitter flavours will be there that ideally need to be removed so you potentially even add some flavours to make it feel like it was a real product.”  For Serrano, the two products are like day and night. “You cannot compare [diffuser products] to a product that has been aged for many years. The producer took the financial risk of having that capital sitting there and waiting for it. It takes a lot of time to create a good product, but that is also the beauty about it.”   The involvement of celebrities in the industry has done wonders, shining a light on the category – but it can also confuse consumers, according to Serrano. “Because Clase Azul is a luxury product, a lot of people think we are just focused on the marketing and the image,” she says. But the company is focused on much more than branding, with a clear commitment to its community.  Clase Azul was set up by Guadalajara-native Arturo Lomeli after he identified a gap in the market for a higher-end tequila to be sipped and savoured, much like a whisky or Cognac. Lomeli favoured the fruitier, sweeter and floral notes a Highland tequila imparts versus the typically peppery, spicy and vegetal notes from the valley (Lowlands). As such, he set up shop in Jésus María, a small town near Arandas – one of the highest points in the Jalisco highlands.  Clase Azul is in esteemed company with a Positive Luxury Butterfly Mark for its sustainable efforts. Glenmorangie, Macallan, Château d'Yquem and other luxury drinks brands boast the same. In addition to reducing its plastic and water use, the decanter can be upcycled, and Clase Azul tries to work with fair labour providers and sub-contractors. “Clase Azul try and implement all these measures with the same aim of giving something back and being a bit more responsible as a brand,” Serrano adds.   Sustainability has become increasingly important as drinkers increasingly consider a brand’s environmental impact as part of their buying decision. While this is something that is encouraged by many producers, it can lead to some slightly less robust claims in the industry, according to Serrano.   “It can be frustrating because some brands might say, ‘Oh we do give back to our community or a charity, or we do one specific action and they think look at us we do a lot of sustainability,’” Serrano says. “Whereas, for me, Clase Azul really embodies these values. Arturo Lomeli, from the start, wanted to give something and be sustainable. It was not just a trend and he thought ‘let me do it’. He’s been doing it almost from the beginning with the brand.”  The demand for aged, sustainable tequila is clear and Clase Azul is well positioned to go toe-to-toe with anybody in a battle of style versus substance.   Discover more about Clase Azul or read more Editorial 

In a world filled with big brands, Clase Azul is a tequila producer looking to do things differently. Holly Motion finds out why the artisan brand is determined for tradition to trump trends

Exploring how the highly collectable artisan tequila Clase Azul is doing things differently by honouring tradition rather than following trends.

Exploring artisan tequila producer Clase Azul  

Authentic agave: Clase Azul

I am too disorganised to call myself a collector, but I often find myself thinking about the multiple meanings of collecting. I have a room full of books left unread from one year to the next, whose mute reproach I feel every time I am in their presence. I have half a dozen radios, from Marco Zanuso and Richard Sapper’s folding Brionvega TS502 to a Danish-made Beolit 707 from Bang & Olufsen, with its slide rule tuning device. I have a manual typewriter.  Most of us accumulate such random clutter. These were never possessions that were primarily about being useful – the Brionvega and the Beolit have long since been supplanted by a bluetooth speaker and a smartphone. They represent my membership of the design tribe.  The books carry other layers of meaning. My five years at university are on one shelf. The traces of the eight years I have spent writing a just-completed biography of Boris Iofan – Josef Stalin’s preferred architect – are spelled out in the titles of the books on another shelf. The typewriter was inherited from my father and it serves to remind me of childhood. The closest that I come to having a collection that a serious collector might acknowledge is in my chairs: a Rover chair that Ron Arad salvaged from a car, a Gio Ponti Superlegera, an Eames Lounger, a Harry Bertoia, George Sowden’s Palace chair from the 1983 Memphis collection and a deconstructed armchair designed by Rei Kawakubo. On a larger or smaller scale, humans develop complex relationships with their possessions that can go from the professionalism of full-blown collecting, to the casual significance of a row of junk shop finds on a mantlepiece. They can tell us a lot about ourselves. Marina Warner’s guide to the house in Hampstead, now run as a museum, in which Sigmund Freud spent the last year of his life, offers an arresting insight into the significance that collecting had for him. She describes the ranks of ancient bronze, ceramic and marble figures parading across the desk that Freud brought with him to London from Vienna where he no longer felt safe due to Nazi occupation in 1938. Certainly, they are beautiful, and mostly they are precious. Thanks to their association with Freud, even the few that have been established as 20th-century forgeries will have become valuable. Some are almost 4,000 years old and reflect the religious and political practices of the distant past. Others, such as Freud’s art deco cigar case, come less freighted with history. But as Warner says, “they were also tools of thought, the kitchen utensils of his imagination”.   The batterie de cuisine of psychoanalysis included Egyptian coffin masks from the Roman period, Chinese jade and gold brooches, Roman glass, a 2,500-year-old sphinx, sarcophagus lids, Babylonian cylinder seals and Egyptian heart scarabs, as well as a 19th-century neck rest from New Guinea, modern metal porcupines, and Balinese figures. The pieces in pride of place on his desk, placed in apparently random order, were his special favourites, a tiny fraction of his collection that had become permanent fixtures. From time to time, Freud made space for a few new acquisitions to get a look in. “A collection to which there are no new additions is really dead,” he told his biographer Ernest Jones. After a short interval, most of the new things would be moved into the glass-fronted cabinets positioned around his study, where they were placed in more organised groups than those standing on his desk. Greek sculptures went on a shelf together. A cluster of representations of the Egyptian god Horus were grouped on another.  In Freud’s lifetime, the collection was continually changing. Before his move to London, he toured Vienna’s antiquities dealers almost every week on the look-out for new finds. He was ready to exchange pieces for items he could not afford to buy, and was generous in gifting pieces to friends and pupils he thought would appreciate them. Freud also had no qualms about buying items that came on the market in questionable circumstances, in particular, from the unofficial excavations (sometime after 1906) at a Roman fort in Hungary.   Despite the important part it played in his life, Freud wrote very little about collecting. The nearest that he came to spelling out what drove his interest in fragments of ancient sculpture, was when he compared his own exploration of the unconscious minds of his patients to an archaeological excavation of an ancient city. “The psychoanalyst, like the archaeologist, must uncover layer after layer of the patient’s psyche before coming to the deepest, most valuable treasures.”  Freud was known to share his dining table with choice specimens to act as companions during a meal. “I must always have an object to love”, he confessed to his colleague and rival Carl Jung. When he was writing his book The Interpretation of Dreams in 1895, Freud spent the summer at Schloss Bellevue outside Vienna. He took a selection of what he called “my old grubby gods who take part in the works as paperweights for the manuscripts” with him.  Before Freud left Austria for England in 1938, his desk, his consulting room, and his study at Berggasse 19 were photographed by Edmund Engelman. Engelman’s 150 images helped Freud’s architect son Ernst to transpose the desk and its contents from a dark back room in a Viennese apartment to a sunlit Hampstead villa.  Like most collectors, Freud could never limit himself to a single field. Ronald Lauder the former MoMA chairman, for example, is known for the collection of Viennese modernism that forms the basis for his own museum, the Neue Galerie in New York. He also collects (in depth) in 15 other fields with little apparent connection between them. Lauder is fascinated by the work of the Japanese designer Shiro Kuramata. He has a collection of arms and armour going back to The Crusades, and another of World War Two memorabilia. He owns some of Egon Schiele’s finest works, as well as various 18th-century French artworks. Fellow collector Rolf Fehlbaum (head of Vitra) has one of the largest collections of modern chairs in the world, and gave Frank Gehry his first European commission to design a gallery for it, but he is equally fascinated by toy robots manufactured in Japan since 1937. He calls them tiny kinetic sculptures. Where possible, he acquires their original packaging too. Perhaps the best way to understand the psychology of collecting is to see it as a spectrum. At one end, it is about order and control. In a messy and uncontrollable universe, a collection offers at least a semblance of certainty. A collection of this kind is based on provenance, completeness and authenticity. An over-restored vintage Bugatti is less desirable to a collector than one in original condition.  Every previous owner, every detail of its making forms part of its record. A red Olivetti typewriter designed by Ettore Sottsass that once belonged to David Bowie was sold at Sotheby’s for US$65,000. You can buy one (that hasn’t been owned by Bowie) for US$750, which is still a lot of money for a piece of obsolete technology. Some collectors attempt to make patterns from the things that they acquire or, like jigsaw puzzlers, set out to complete a picture by locating every piece of a set. Some try to document the evolution of a species whether the subject of their interest is biscuit tins or the eggs of a particular type of bird. Some forms of collecting require the active engagement of the collector. Wildflowers need to be picked and dried quickly before they are pressed into a book. Butterfly collectors used macabre methods such as poison jars, or squeezing the thorax, to dispatch their prey without causing so much distress that they risk damaging delicate wings. At the other end of the spectrum, the accumulation of stuff by people who die alone in homes overwhelmed by stacks of ancient newspapers and tins of cat food, is a kind of sickness. It’s a condition that can overwhelm even the most celebrated of artists. In the last 17 years of his life, Andy Warhol filled a succession of cardboard boxes with a seemingly random accumulation of objects: taxi receipts, a vinyl Ramones single signed by Joey Ramone, a piece of an ancient, mummified foot, pastel-coloured corsets and a selection of metal dentures. Every time he had a full box, it was sealed and shipped off to storage in a warehouse in New Jersey. A typical box has 400 objects in it, some have as many as 1,200. Items in them include a piece of Caroline Kennedy’s wedding cake – Warhol seems to have been a regular guest at Kennedy weddings. He showed up 20 minutes after the wedding ceremony for Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger had started, in the company of Grace Jones. He was in black leather, and wearing two wigs; she had on a huge green fur hat.   Warhol’s boxes are a collection of the uncollectable and the uncontrollable, which, thanks to the resources of the Andy Warhol Foundation, has been tamed after six years of work by a dedicated group of archivists and cataloguers. The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh has aestheticised the cardboard boxes. They sit on back-lit shelves in the museum to suggest that this is not a random collection of trash that Warhol never looked at, but, in the view of the museum, is in fact a time-based art piece, comprising at least 500,000 objects that took 30 years to complete. It presents a considerably less impressive sight than British Regency period architect Sir John Soane’s museum. The architect of the Bank of England put as much effort into adapting his Lincoln’s Inn Fields house (and subsequently the two adjoining houses) to display his Hogarth paintings, a sarcophagus and his architectural models, as he did to accumulating the collection itself. The Nobel prize-winning Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk’s novel, The Museum of Innocence is an eloquent exploration of the hoarding end of the collecting spectrum. What initially appears to be an account of a doomed love affair, quickly reveals itself as an exploration of the meaning of collecting. The story’s main protagonist Kemal starts acquiring things when his relationship with his lover Füsun is going well. When she drops an earring, he finds it and puts it to one side. As Füsun falls out of love with him, Kemal begins an increasingly desperate accumulation of objects that record their relationship. He picks up each of the cigarettes that she smokes. When she has stopped seeing him altogether, Kemal starts hanging around at her parents’ house and stealing pieces of cutlery that she might have used.  What makes Pamuk’s book particularly remarkable is that he acquired a house in Istanbul’s Beyoğlu district that had belonged to a Greek merchant in the Ottoman era, and transformed it into a physical Museum of Innocence. It is, of course, very far from innocent; everything inside it is a lovingly created fiction. The first thing that you see once you get inside, is a wall covered with 4,213 cigarette ends, each of them carefully annotated in Pamuk’s neat handwriting, with imaginary details of the time and place they were smoked. The rest of the house is full of equally carefully fabricated objects from cosmetics to movie posters that reflect Pamuk’s vision of the modernising Turkey of the 1970s. “I think getting attached to objects happens in traumatic times and love is a trauma,” Pamuk once said. “Perhaps when they are in trouble, people hoard things.”  When Pamuk gave me a tour of his museum, he told me about meeting Warhol’s archivist, and expressed his reservations about the significance of the boxes in Pittsburgh. “Hoarding objects reaches the level of collecting only when there is a story that unites them,” he said. But that is a novelist criticising another, less narrative art form. While Freud’s desk in Hampstead was always useable, if overcrowded, the desk in fashion designer Paul Smith’s office in Covent Garden is completely overwhelmed with a snowdrift of collected objects that sweeps over an office chair, down onto the floor, and back up to the shelves that line every wall. There are stacks of books and magazines, cameras and mountains of vintage cycling jerseys. There is an i-Mac computer, a gift from Jony Ive that Smith has never used. Computers aren’t Smith’s thing. In any case, it’s too late now, short of purging half the contents of the room: there is no way to get near it. There are toy tin cars, collections of bottles from Moroccan markets, a pink bicycle and a lot of rabbits. “I once said in an interview that seeing a rabbit brings me luck, and they haven’t stopped pouring in ever since,” explains Smith. Collecting began, as did so many things in Smith’s career, with his early enthusiasm for cycling. Growing up in Nottingham in the 1950s, there was a newsagent which occasionally had a copy of L’Equipe, which would portray the heroes of the Tour de France in their yellow jerseys in colour on the cover, but in sepia inside. He bought the magazine, fascinated by the images, even if he couldn’t read it. “I can remember once saying, ‘I really like Jacques Anquetil’ to my father, which baffled him, since none of our family had ever been abroad. I saved my pocket money so that I could upgrade the gears on my bike from Simplex to Campagnolo. The box it came in was as important to me as the gear itself.”  What attracted Smith to the Campagnolo box, along with stamps and matchboxes which he has in large numbers – not just in his office but at his Nottingham HQ where he has an archivist trying to make sense of it all – is the way that designers can say so much in such a tiny space. He showed me a Japanese book of matches produced for a Tokyo nightclub in the 1970s. “It so clearly says it’s ‘contemporary’. You can hear the jazz already.”  Despite the huge assortment of assembled objects, Smith is reluctant to describe himself as a collector. “I just have a large quantity of the same things,” he says, matter of factly. “In my head, a collector is someone who selects an item or a subject. They collect them because they know a lot about them. Maybe I have a little knowledge about cycling jerseys.  In the early 1980s, on my first trips to Japan and India, I just got a bit carried away. I bought lots of Japanese furniture. In India, for some reason, I bought 15 wardrobes, and a piece of furniture that doubled as a staircase with drawers.” Smith had them all sent home on the Trans-Siberian Express.  He suggests that his is a collection that has found him. “Things collect me,” he says. “For some reason I started to be sent things, and they still keep coming.” There is an individual who regularly sends Smith artefacts that come unwrapped but covered in postage stamps. Others send him letters, toys, books and even ancient packets of razor blades. One visitor took careful photographs of his office, and later sent him a precisely detailed model of his office, complete with its chaotic contents. Smith’s London home, where he lives with his wife Pauline, is much calmer. “The house is hers. I do have one room for my stuff, but it’s mostly at the office that I get to look at things.” In 1996, patron of the arts and barrister Jill Ritblat gave the V&A Museum the largest single donation of clothes in its history, more than 1,000 items. There are ski outfits in postmodern pastel shades from the 1980s, and challenging Japanese experiments from Yohji Yamamoto and Issey Miyake, as well as couture from Dior and Saint Laurent. There is work by Alexander McQueen, Biba, Mary Quant, and Christian Lacroix, Emanuel Ungaro and Victor Edelstein, and an evening outfit produced by a dressmaker based on an idea of Ritblat’s own design.  The early days of British fashion from the 1960s are represented by Foale and Tuffin, and Zandra Rhodes, and from the 1980s by Margaret Howell and Katharine Hamnett. There is tailoring from Tommy Nutter and work by Giorgio Armani. It is by no means a complete account of contemporary fashion, but it is certainly extensive, and like the personal wardrobe that it is, combines some very special pieces made for family occasions, with more everyday wear. The connecting thread of Ritblat’s collection is Ritblat herself. These were all pieces that she had bought to wear. They were not chosen like stamps, or old masters, or celadon vases to make a self-conscious collection, but were the result of a continuing sequence of choices over time. Taken together they are a reflection of her life as an English woman of a certain background, at a particular time in the country’s history. “I never saw it as a collection, it was more like my diary, though I have never had time to write a diary. Each piece brings back memories of when I wore it,” says Ritblat. She made her first donation to the V&A at the end of 1996, but kept back the things that she wanted to be able to go on using, and they formed the core of a donation to the Design Museum of another 400 items in 2013. Ritblat is ambivalent about fashion. As a child she was somewhat self-conscious about being dressed by her mother, who had studied fashion herself. She was relieved to be able to assume the camouflage of the complex uniform rituals of an English public school for girls in the 1950s. “I loved my school uniform at Roedean; we were expected to change our clothes four times a day, as chic as anything. Scratchy afternoon dresses, regulation school loafers, very nice blazers and pleated skirts.” As a student barrister, she found herself adopting the formal uniform of the legal profession, but then as a married woman began to build a wardrobe that reflected the life that she was leading. Later, when she was making her own choices, she was early to discover Miuccia Prada. “What you pick out is based on whether it suits you and on the zeitgeist,” she explains. Smith, Heseltine and Ritblat represent three very different approaches to collecting. For Smith, the unruly mountain of things in his office, is, like the collection on Sigmund Freud’s desk, part of the tools of his imagination, a source of imagery and ideas for his work as a designer. It’s also a means of establishing his personality. Heseltine’s garden is an investment of time, resources and creativity in the remaking of a place that speaks to the future using living organisms that will outlive us all. Ritblat’s clothes are a record of the full life of an individual. All of these collections provide insights into unique people, their lives and times. In their different ways all three reflect on the nature of collecting, and its ability to be a creative activity in itself. In a world in which technology threatens to abolish the material world altogether, objects have not lost their allure. Their physical condition marks the passing of time in ways that pixels and code cannot do. Collecting is the means all of us have to create histories of our times, and even more, of ourselves. This article was originally published in FONDATA, Issue Two. 

In order to explore the mindset of the collector, Deyan Sudjic shines a light on the collected objects of Sigmund Freud and Andy Warhol, and speaks to three British collectors to better understand what it is that makes collecting such a vital part of the human experience.

Exploring the mindset of the collector and why the act is a vital part of the human experience, with a focus on Sigmund Freud and Andy Warhol

FONDATA: Exploring the art of collecting 

 I Collect, Therefore I Am

Unlike many wine-lovers, I came across Occidental before Kistler. I worked for a company that imported some of its early vintages – and they were like nothing I’d ever tasted. These translucent Pinot Noirs glimmered, but their pastel-pale shade was nothing but a nudge and wink at the Burgundies that inspired them. Aromatics leapt from the glass – floral and febrile, but it was the vivid, intense, crystalline purity of the palate that I found so beguiling. Seeing where these wines are made – on the brink of the Pacific, where ocean breezes lash at the vines, and thick fog grasps the dramatic, undulating landscape – only made them all the more enchanting. Even today, 18 years after Steve Kistler first put down vines here, the region is sparsely planted – with Occidental one of a handful of pioneers of the outer reaches of the Sonoma Coast. The area was long deemed too cold to ripen fruit, with dairy the main industry – and fields of grazing cattle and sheep are still interspersed with plots of vines. Occidental’s vineyards – now 85 acres in total – now neighbour those of Platt, Littorai and Joseph Phelps’s Quarter Moon site, sitting at 500 feet above sea level – a modest altitude when you consider some of Napa’s mountain districts have parcels above 2,000 feet. But it’s their proximity to the ocean (which is just five miles away) that makes the climate here so cool – and damp. Leaf-pulling and spraying are key to managing disease pressure – unfortunately making organic farming almost impossible. “We want the purity of fruit to shine,” Catherine (Cate) Kistler says. She joined her father, Steve, six years ago, working as his Assistant Winemaker – just one element that makes the venture a true family business. Not in the way that Walmart or Ford are a family business, but in the hand-to-mouth, everyone-mucks-in, this-is-both-their-livelihood-and-legacy kind of way. It’s a “tight little universe” where they work, live and farm, Cate explains. This is one reason that Steve stepped away from the iconic winery that he’d created in 1978 – Kistler had shifted and grown, becoming something larger than he’d ever anticipated, or necessarily wanted.  Kistler had humble beginnings – with Steve making the wines in what was essentially a wooden shack, and living upstairs. That building – up in the Mayacamas – was consumed by the fires in 2020, and today Kistler works with around 300 acres (including their own vines and those farmed by growers for them). The investment of Bill Price (a man whose first major move in the wine industry was buying, and later selling, Beringer) has added further gloss to a winery that has become one of California’s cult names. If that makes it sound like there’s been wholesale change, that’s far from the truth – a clear succession plan has ensured only the gentlest of evolutions at Kistler, and ensured the producer maintains its position at the top. Jason Kesner – who describes himself as a “vine and yeast shepherd” – is the man at the helm today. He joined the team in 2008 (aged 40), working alongside Steve for close to a decade before taking the reins.  Although born on the East Coast, Kesner grew up around wine. He moved out to California aged eight, where his mother had taken a job as Head Microbiologist at Robert Mondavi, and his soon-to-be stepfather worked as VP of Vineyard Operations – the smells and sounds of a working winery firmly familiar. Despite his early initiation to the industry, he studied cultural anthropology and left both the area and industry. He was eventually lured back, working first for Francis Ford Coppola (the man behind Inglenook’s revival), but in a non-wine role – managing his special projects. Via Coppola’s poker games, Kesner connected with Pat Kuleto and ended up planting vineyards for him, before finding himself at Hudson (his “graduate school for Chardonnay production”). This prestigious name features on bottles from the likes of Aubert, Kongsgaard, Cakebread, Failla and Ramey – and Kesner got to work with all of them, growing top-tier fruit for 34 clients, including Steve Kistler. And Steve was different. He was, Kesner says, “very, very focused”, “hyper-intelligent, borderline genius” and – along with his business partner, the late Mark Bixler – thought about things on a different level. When the duo started Kistler in the 1970s, working with a single clone and single sites, no one else was doing it – with his unparalleled energy and intent, Steve created something profound. Although Kesner had already worked closely with Steve at Hudson, it was only when he arrived at Kistler in 2008 that he realised how differently Steve operated. “I had jumped into a different timeline and a different pace,” Kesner tells me. “Steve and I had conversations that, quite literally, spanned years.” These conversations would be picked up each vintage, just a handful of sentences on a topic expressed until the next season. For Kesner, this long-term vision was what set Kistler apart: “It’s not about the people who are doing it at the moment. It’s about everything that’s come before and it’s about everything that will come after.” The Kistler evolution has been slow, but it has happened – past their phase of “embracing the cocaine ’90s” (“If you weren’t, you weren’t paying attention,” Kesner says), with a shift toward earlier picking, native ferments and reduction in new oak (from 50% down to around 38% across the range today) – but without sacrificing the seductive, silken style that defines their Chardonnay. “Our job is to polish the jewel,” Kesner says. “The diamond doesn’t need to be re-cut.” The vines are also gradually gaining in age (currently averaging a spritely 35 years), which is only improving the wines further. Kesner is continuing Steve’s work and the philosophy remains true to the original concept. “The best and highest use of a given site is when you're guiding it, not driving it,” he says, pointing to Mother Nature (rather than Bill Price) as the ultimate boss. He loathes the title “winemaker” – fully aware that it’s an entire team behind Kistler. “There are 56 people who are dedicated to the production of these wines. They’re out there pruning in January and then they’re going to be out there picking for this year in October. And it’s because of that really powerful group of people that we’re able to do what we do.” Meanwhile, out on the coast, Steve is continuing his own quest for terroir. Occidental, Cate tells me, is all about exploring “what this ridge means”. The yields at Occidental, overlooking the Pacific, are tiny, maxing out at around two tons/acre. The work is painstaking, with careful canopy management and spraying to avoid mildews, and steep slopes that need to be hand-hoed to manage the weeds. And, as at Kistler, the Pinot Noirs here are all made identically – so it is the site, rather than hand of the maker, that shines through. Be that though it may, it takes exceptional talent to make wines like this. “[Steve] is yet again 30 years ahead of everybody in California,” Kesner says. “It might take the American palate a while to catch up with them, but I firmly believe those will be recognised as some of the best Pinot Noirs in the world. Hands down.” Steve’s an elusive character – and seems happiest tucked away in his remote corner of the Sonoma Coast, away from the limelight. “He’s not a man of many words,” Kesner says, although suggests that working with Cate has drawn him out of his shell a little. Cate talks about him unsurprisingly lovingly, but doesn’t shy away from admitting there are challenges to the “weird and wonderful world” of family business. Harvard-educated, she’s quick-witted and sharp, and has clearly inherited her father’s passion for wine. Not only is he clearly deeply embedded in everything Occidental, but his interest goes beyond vine-growing, with what I suspect is an enviable collection of his own, from the alluring line-ups of Grand Cru Burgundy that I’ve glimpsed on Cate’s Instagram. It takes something rather extraordinary to be willing to give up your name, to start from scratch, all over again, with a new winery and new vineyards. But there’s a reason that his longtime vineyard manager (Ruben Molinar) and cellar master (Raymundo Abarca) left Kistler with Steve in 2017; and it’s a tribute to the man. Now Molinar and Abarca’s children are working alongside Steve’s – and the family is growing. But Cate and Steve don’t want to create Kistler 2.0. They’re developing another ranch, but they don’t want the project to become so big that they’re no longer doing most of the work themselves (“We’ve seen that movie,” Cate jests). The first vintage of Occidental was only 2011, but the wines are already making their mark. Steve’s legacy at Kistler lives on, safely being shepherded by Kesner and his team, but it’s also being re-born at Occidental, and set to be carried forward by Cate. “Wine is my dad’s world,” Cate tells me. And it’s quite a world – one that anyone tasting his wines is fortunate to be part of. Browse all Occidental and Kistler listings, or read more about California

Kistler’s Chardonnays are the stuff of legend – but now Steve Kistler has a new project, Occidental, crafting Pinot Noir on the outer reaches of the Sonoma Coast. Sophie Thorpe explores the winemaker’s legacy and these two very special estates

Kistler Chardonnay is the stuff of legend – but now Steve has a new project, Occidental. We explore his legacy and the two special Sonoma wine estates today

Kistler & Occidental – site expression in Sonoma

In pursuit of Sonoma’s true identity: Kistler and Occidental

Bordeaux has seen a plethora of good to great vintages over the last 10-15 years most notably 2009, 2010, 2015, 2016, 2018... and now 2019. Speaking with some of Bordeaux's top winemakers in the build-up towards the eventual release of the 2019 vintage, has only further cemented the change in tone in Bordeaux in regard to the expectations of a vintage. No one today talks about a great vintage with surprise.  No vigneron in Bordeaux can say “it’s another vintage of the century” without a smirk. The discourse on vintage overviews has been forced to change. Looking at statistics from analytical data on climate, grape ripeness levels through to critics' approvals, wines in Bordeaux are much more regularly the result of almost perfect vintage conditions. Has global warming helped push Bordeaux into a modern-day golden era? What has been the knock-on effects of more regular vintages in Bordeaux? How long will this last and how will it change and shape the Bordeaux of the future?  Bordeaux is no longer a region whose Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot run the gauntlet to reach sugar ripeness. If anything, it is rising alcohol levels, hail, drought, sunburn and vine shutdown that keeps the vigneron up at night.  But these concerns are increasingly becoming better managed thanks to huge investment by many of the top estates using both technology and ever more advanced scientific data to better cope with the issues at hand. Even within this trend of excellent vintages, vignerons in Bordeaux have only got better at dealing with the new norm of warmer vintages. Arguably the wines of the warm 2018 vintage were better handled than the similarly warm 2009.  The bi-polarisation of the Bordeaux wine market Whilst the picture at the entry level end of the scale within Bordeaux is a lot more gloomy, with many vignerons facing real sustainability issues, no doubt further enhanced by the effects of the current global pandemic, the prestigious classified growths and other top estates are currently benefiting from a perfect storm.  More consistent vintages have led to an increased income flowing into the estates which has seen increased reinvestment into the property’s infrastructure to offset tax on profits. The benefit being huge scientific and technological investments into many of these châteaux with precision viticulture and vinification becoming standard practice in many of the top estates. From a region in which heritage and tradition exude from the grandeur of turrets and towers, it is behind the castle walls that you find futurism and innovation. Precision and transparency Whilst the weather remains the most important factor that the vigneron can’t control, the Bordeaux châteaux who can afford to, have made great strides in off-setting poor weather conditions with a shift in attention towards viticultural practices. Whilst the battle between Mother Nature and machine is still very much one-sided, innovations in the field, as well as the winery, have seen good to excellent results as standard in Bordeaux’s modern era.  Also the earlier start to the vine's growing cycles is pushing the key veraison period earlier (where there are longer hours of sunlight) resulting in being able to bring in the harvest earlier if necessary, to avoid the risk of the heavy rains at the end of the season ruining the vintage. Whilst similar developments are happening throughout the fine wine regions of the world, the sheer volume of premium fine wine produced from the top estates in Bordeaux means the regularity of good to excellent vintages at this scale is unmatched anywhere else in the world, giving them a huge advantage when it comes to reinvestment.  Behind these traditional, historic château walls is some of the most cutting-edge technology in operation in global wine production. From optical sorting machines to UV light technology managing micro-bacterial issues in the winery, these innovative techniques are producing some of the most precise wines ever to come out of Bordeaux.  In the not-too-distant past Bordeaux had been particularly susceptible to wine faults such as brettanomyces due to high pH, rising alcohol levels and extensive barrel ageing, but amongst the top estates today, potential faults remain tightly controlled. But the investment in technology is not the only reason behind the modern success stories of Bordeaux, but an investment in people too, with full-time viticulturalists operating in the vineyard throughout the year as standard.  An increase in experimentation has also led to more variety in both viticulture and vinification practices leading to more variety in structure and style in wines from across the Médoc and beyond. Experiments with different-sized vessels and trialling materials for élevage, whole bunch fermentations, intra-plot picking and vinification as well as investments in heritage projects such as the recovery of original Bordeaux clones that were practically wiped out prior to the devastating effects of the great frost of 1956 are all adding breadth and scope to the innovative side of today’s Bordeaux.  Tradition and terroir With an ever-expanding fine wine market in terms of both consumers buying fine wine as well as more regions producing fine wine, Bordeaux has never had more competition within the region itself as well as further afield. With this additional pressure, there is a strong ambition for each château to further distinguish itself. One clear advantage is their history; few winemaking regions in the world have the prestige and the back catalogue found at the top estates today.  Chateau Lafite Rothschild serving vintages back to 1881 at their 150-anniversary birthday party last year to a hall full of guests on five consecutive nights is something no other region could come close to pulling off. Despite this, the growing competition from other emerging fine wine regions around the world has forced Bordeaux onto its toes and lit the fire under many top estates to better communicate what makes the wines of Bordeaux unique. The Bordelais openly admit that they have had to look outside of the Bordeaux bubble and take note of developments in fine wine regions further afield. With Bordeaux wines almost always blends of varieties encompassing a collection of scattered vineyards, the discourse surrounding terroir was largely glossed over in favour of more generic phrases such as Pauillac‘s graphite minerality.  The seemingly flatlands of the Médoc are "flat" no longer, the top châteaux emphasising their “hauts”, their “grand-puy’s” and “moutons” justifying their classified status comes from distinct terroir, whether that be the raised grounds of gunzian gravel or the outcrops of blue clay or crasse de fer soils of Pomerol or the various distinct types of limestone found in different parts of Saint-Emilon. The breakdown of single vineyards and their influence on the blend is now regularly part of the estates' patter when describing their terroir and this more exhaustive investigation into its vineyards has helped better communicate what is special and distinct about each château.  Bordelais are quick to admit, that for a region whose historic importance is unmatched in fine wine production, they have in the past been guilty of following fashion. Perhaps because of their global impact, their fashion faux pas only became more obvious. Not just in Bordeaux but throughout the world of fine wine there has never been such a heightened sense of self awareness and an emphasis on transparency in wines.  Bordeaux too has adapted to this and while being naturally powerful, intense, long-lived wines thanks to the varieties used and unique climate, there is also a strong emphasis on the Bordeaux wines of today retaining a sense of purity and elegance too. The ability to be both powerful and elegant is surely Bordeaux’s greatest calling card. When interviewing Andrew Jefford last autumn, I asked what he thought was the most exciting emerging region in the fine wine world today, I was pleasantly surprised to hear him state Bordeaux, saying “I’m in awe of the progress made there over the last 20 years, particularly in terms of the understanding of tannins. Tannins are the key to quality in fine red wine. Nothing would help southern hemisphere regions making ambitious red wines more than a breakthrough in the extraction and expression of tannins in their wines – the hallmark of all great European reds. Red winemakers in general need to stop stressing about acidity and become obsessed by tannin. To learn about tannin, go to Bordeaux.”  The future of Bordeaux Despite the top châteaux of Bordeaux today enjoying a bout of legendary vintages, there are real dangers posed to the longevity of Bordeaux’s current success (along with many other fine wine regions of the world). How long will it be before global warming pushes the region to the points where heat and drought no longer make growing wine grapes viable? No doubt early signs are there.  If Bordeaux becomes too hot and too dry, vines will shut down completely and tannins will not ripen as sugars go through the roof. Merlot is already a concern for many and considering its dominance in much of the vineyards of the Right Bank and in a significant part of blends on the Left Bank, there is no way things will remain as they are. Whether clonal development, irrigation or winemaking techniques can rescue it seems at odds with the current emphasis on natural winemaking.  Either way, things will eventually have to change. At least for today Bordeaux classified estates are unquestionably enjoying a golden era of vintages where their wines have never been so transparent. In such uncertain times, it is not clear how long this golden era will last, particularly with the typical Bordeaux varieties we know and love today, but those who think Bordeaux is passé are failing to look in the right places. Explore more Editorial 

Has global warming helped push Bordeaux into a golden modern era? What have been the knock-on effects of more regular vintages in Bordeaux? How long will this last and how will it change and shape the future of Bordeaux? 

We explore whether global warming helped push Bordeaux into a golden modern era. 

Global warming and Bordeaux's Golden Age 

Bordeaux's modern day Golden Age

Few wine regions have seen a transformation as significant as Tuscany has over the last 15 years. These days the region regularly produces some of the finest wines found anywhere on the planet, while retaining a distinct sense of place.  Tuscany is the only region in the world to have truly tamed Sangiovese, with nowhere else able to grow this fussy grape variety and produce wines of the same level. At the same time, Tuscany has managed to produce some of the world’s finest renditions of the better-travelled international varieties such as Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot; even Pinot Noir and Chardonnay are finding a foothold in this magical enclave of central Italy. Few have been as influential in this transformative journey than San Guisto a Rentennano’s Luca Martini di Cigala, who has managed to produce not one but two of the region’s most iconic wines – Percarlo (100% Sangiovese) and La Ricolma (100% Merlot). In his typically modest manner, however, he does not believe great wines are made by great winemakers – but by understanding where a vigneron must focus their attention in the vineyard. According to Martini di Cigala, winemaking can improve the quality of a wine by no more than 10%. “Great wine, however, is made with great fruit,” he says. So what is it about Tuscany that has resulted in the region’s recent renaissance? For Martini di Cigala, it has been understanding how the region’s unique soils and climate, if allowed, can produce wines where the character of the terroir prevales, rather than the varietal. “When it is the opposite and the varietal character is more evident than the character of the place, of the area, of the soil,” says Cigale, “to me it doesn’t make much sense.” It is the vineyard that must do the talking, not the grape variety, nor the winemaking. While the Tuscan wine renaissance began in the late 1970s and early ’80s, the meteoric rise of the region was far from linear. Among the new wave of pioneers, there was naivety too and, understandably, external influences started to impact how wine was being made. Back then, San Giusto A Rentennano didn’t have their own personal brand, and were selling wine to the big wineries like Antinori and Ruffino.  Following in the footsteps of the likes of Fontodi, Isole e Elena and Montevertini they decided to focus on improving the quality of their Sangiovese – which began, fundamentally, by reducing the yields in the vineyard. “Before that, we used to produce a good Chianti,” says Martini di Cigala, “a simple wine.” But, with these changes, “The stye completely changed and we began to focus on making wines for long ageing.” As the movement progressed, however, he began to sense a period of self-doubt looming. “Compared to today, where there is a big improvement in the culture of tasting wines and recognising the character of the different varieties,” he says, “people were used to drinking rounder, softer wines. And Sangiovese [made at lower yields] can be so aggressive, so hard with the tannins – especially when young. It was a problem.” At the time, many of the vignerons felt that in order to increase the wine’s ageing potential, the wines needed to be darker and more concentrated, while also exposing the wine to plenty of new oak and more oxygen – opting for smaller 225-litre barrels (barriques) rather than the region’s traditional larger casks. You could see the commercial attraction too, since this approach softened Sangiovese’s tannins. Emerging regions like Tuscany were all looking towards more established fine wine regions for inspiration. The use of new barriques was fashionable around the world but, most notably, part of the Bordeaux recipe of the time. Twenty years ago, Martini di Cigala believes, they wrongly followed these trends, producing intense, overripe, over-oaked wines. “It was a mistake because many wineries didn’t keep the character of the Sangiovese – either due to excessive use of wood, which does not integrate well with Sangiovese, or because it was blended with other varieties to build the wine’s intensity, while softening its aggressive nature.” For Martini di Cigala, even his Merlot plantings weren’t performing well – despite being a variety better suited to the current trends, with better resistance to new oak’s influence. The current recipe was not working for him – or for Tuscany. Early in its renaissance, the region began to stumble. Martini di Cigala’s success came when he realised that, despite sharing the same vineyards, his Merlot and Sangiovese had very little in common. To produce anything better than ordinary, he had to start treating the two varieties completely differently and let the vines do the talking. Sangiovese is a frustratingly fickle variety. It has the potential to produce wines as ethereal as the finest Pinot Noir and as rich and elegant as fine Bordeaux. Yet it has failed to make any real imprint outside Italy and, even today in Tuscany, it remains maddeningly inconsistent. “Compared to other varieties like Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon and Syrah,” he says, “these varieties can produce wine everywhere. With Sangiovese it is hard because it needs calcareous soil in order to produce the right balance of tannins. In any other kinds of soil, it either increases acidity too much or the opposite, making the wine very flat. To produce a wine with a precise character with a lot of tannin but at the same time integrated with the fruit, Sangiovese needs calcareous soil.” But, he stresses, it is not only the soil but the climate that is important too. “It is difficult to have great Sangiovese that is very, very light, low in alcohol and low in polyphenols [tannins]. The wine must be rich,” he says. The region must be hot. The elegance and the precision, however, come from another distinct attribute of the hillsides of Tuscany: cool night-time temperatures. This, Martini di Cigala believes, is vital for the elegance of the wines – and something that can be lost in warmer vintages. “Sangiovese is very delicate, if there is too much concentration, the level of tannins risk damaging the wine’s natural elegance and the balance,” says Cigala. For me it is a great wine when the wine doesn’t need to show muscle. It is not important to be extremely concentrated or to have a lot of colour for a great vintage. It is more about the balance of the different factors.” He notes that some of the most celebrated vintages aren’t necessarily the longest-lived, highlighting that the cooler 2013 and 2014 vintages will outlive the much applauded, warmer 2015s – although he insists 2016 has proved to be spectacular. Percarlo evolved as Martini di Cigala gradually understood Sangiovese’s sensitivities. Up until 2008, Percarlo was aged 100% in barriques. First produced in 1983, the amount of new wood has been reduced over the years. Today he doesn’t use any barriques at all for Percarlo, or for any of his other Sangiovese wines (Chianti Classico and Riserva). He believes Sangiovese is too sensitive to oxygen to age in smaller barriques. Today it is matured 50/50 in large 5,000-litre and 3,000-litre barrels. Martini di Cigala didn’t start producing Merlot until 1993, but for the first 10 years, he managed the vines similarly to his Sangiovese – with mixed results. “Sometimes the vintage would be very Tuscan in style and then the opposite in other vintages – the aromas were more like Merlot from north Italy with more pepper on the nose. I was never convinced with the results,” he says. The Merlot in Chianti Classico is also very different to the Merlot grown on the Tuscan coast of Bolgheri. The bigger diurnal temperature shifts in the Tuscan hills produce Merlot with more acidity. The wines are, in Martini di Cigala’s words, “more vertical”. The real success of both Percarlo and La Ricolma, Martini di Cigala believes, lies in the bespoke adaptations he started to make in the vineyard for each variety. Sangiovese really benefits from an early green harvest in July – reducing the natural yield. Merlot, on the other hand, proves to be a disaster if you do the same thing and limit your yields so early in the growing season – causing a spike in sugar production at the expense of tannin development.  Martini di Cigala also painstakingly picks the Sangiovese destined for his Percarlo bunch by bunch, assessing each vine individually. Picking Merlot bunch by bunch, in contrast, makes no sense – “it is far too irregular”. While Sangiovese yields can be manipulated throughout véraison to its benefit, Merlot needs to be left alone. “The key for Merlot”, he says, “is to try to slow down its ripening. If the variety doesn’t have a long growing cycle, the wine remains short.” Over the years Martini di Cigala has moved his Merlot vines to the coolest parts of his vineyards. He admits his original La Ricolma Merlot plot is his worst, its west-facing exposition making it too warm. He much prefers his plots closer to the river where temperatures are lower. But the key viticultural work for both his Merlot and Sangiovese starts earlier – he is keen to point out that there is no recipe each year, the cultivation has to be very precise depending on the vines’ needs. “You have to be a good interpreter of the season. Often you don’t notice the stress in the vineyard until July, by which time it is too late. You have to follow the trends of the weather earlier – this is the most difficult point of our job and has become especially true in the last few hotter years.” Each viticultural step has to follow the trend of the season. That, for him, is the key. Over nearly 40 years Martini di Cigala has continued to make tweaks in the vineyards, further improving the wines. Up until 2004 he used to select the Percarlo grapes only from certain parts of the vineyard, but now the fruit is picked bunch by bunch – another fundamental reason, he believes, the wines’ quality has escalated. Martini di Cigala has proven that wines made from Sangiovese and Merlot can be both bold and beautiful, aligning the Tuscan hills’ unique climate with precision viticulture. The hot summers and cool night-time temperatures matched with the calcareous soils are the perfect combination for Sangiovese and are testament to Merlot’s adaptability. After a period of self-doubt and mixed results for the region, the Tuscan renaissance today has well and truly found its foothold and is on an extraordinary run. And it is Percarlo and La Ricolma leading the pack. “If you asked me to name 15 great wineries in Chianti Classico 20 years ago, I would be in trouble,” says Martini di Cigala. “Today I could arrive at 50 or 60.” What has changed most today, according to the winemaker, is a paradigm shift in focus from winery to vineyard. While he is a little disappointed more of them haven’t turned to organic farming (of which he is a longstanding proponent), he believes the change has been very positive. A noble name, a castle, or a famous winemaker today no longer makes the headlines in Tuscany. It is precision viticulture that has taken these distinct wines from the Tuscan hills to the top of many collectors’ wish lists. Keep an eye out for the latest releases from San Giusto a Rentennano, coming soon. Browse all current listings of San Giusto a Rentennano or read more Editorial

Luca Martini di Cigala, the man behind Percarlo and La Ricolma, is one of Tuscany’s viticultural pioneers. We spoke to the San Giusto a Rentennano winemaker about his role in the region’s renaissance and how he turned to the vineyard to reveal his wines’ true potential

Exploring how San Giusto a Rentennano’s Luca Martini di Cigala discovered Tuscany’s true wine potential with his iconic Percarlo and La Ricolma wines.


San Giusto a Rentennano's iconic Tuscan reds

Two titans of Tuscany: Percarlo and La Ricolma

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  

Wine, though the most intimate of pleasures, lends itself to the most expansive of texts. We drink wine most often – tastings aside – in pairings of two, or in lonesome but agreeable solitude, and, its narcotic pleasure being felt internally, we feel its effects as we feel a fever: almost secretly, in shivers. Though wine is like sex in its intimacy, unlike sex, the form in which we fetishise wine – our vine erotica – is not hushed and illicit but encyclopedic. On the shelves of any wine drinker, there are likely to be catalogues, dictionaries organised by region, old Parker buying guides some 600 pages long that somehow, though dated, can’t be discarded.  Wine seems singular among human pleasures in this. We don’t, as a rule, rush from reading a poem to great anthologies of poetry, or add to the savour of seeing a play by reading a big atlas of dramatic literature – not, at least, after we graduate from school. Sports fans, it’s true, like big books of statistics, but then sports-watching is a social act in the first instance – the more people in the stands, the merrier the occasion. With wine, we like the macro with our micro: with a solitary glass in hand, we look, in print, over the next hill, or the current vintage, at the vineyard across the way, or the vintage yet to come. It’s part of the pleasure the glass provides. The reasons for this micro and macro turn are, on reflection, commercial and artisanal as much as aesthetic. The business of wine needs a big picture of its domain, its resources, and its potential market – scale sets the stage for commerce. The makers of wine like to place themselves on a broader map of where wine is and what it’s made with. The great Bordeaux classification of 1855 is not just the noblest public monument to a beverage ever attempted, but a model of market-making and even market price-fixing. Once a hierarchy of growths has been established, it is easy to slot in the price tags. But there is a truth of taste beneath the ordering of value. With wine, we know that what we are experiencing is, however singular, still an intersection of opposed forces – as the peerless wine writer Jancis Robinson MW says of her first glass of Chambolle-Musigny 1959; “I knew at once that there was something in the glass that was sensually delicious but that it was also made, produced, and therefore suggested a history of intellect and discernment.” The pleasure of wine is the crossing of a place, a grape and a people; and so, we turn to the big books to frame the small pleasures.  What distinguishes wine from even a good glass of ale or a local brew is the specificity of the pleasure set against the scale of the system that made it – one that historically embraces the planet. It’s a First Growth, or a domaine Burgundy, or a Ridge Zinfandel or a New Zealand Pinot Noir made to a Burgundy model by American wine makers … the more we know, the more we’re free to feel. Most sensory pleasures are specific to the point of being illicit – aside from the bemused fetishist, romance is a spontaneous pleasure, often aided, to be sure, by a systematic wine. Wine is premeditated; we choose a bottle, let it ripen, and break it open. Even casual table drinking has a tale to tell, a journey to trace on a map. These thoughts are brought to mind in contemplation of Wine Grapes, the monosyllabically titled but unprecedentedly expansive dictionary of grape varieties grown to be crushed and fermented on this green planet. Authored by Robinson, along with Julia Harding MW and the geneticist Dr José Vouillamoz, it marks an epoch – several epochs – in our understanding of wine, from both a professional planet-straddling and an amateur glass-in-hand perspective. A book of its time (published in 2012), it was made possible, in part, by a revolution in the DNA analysis of wine grapes to help discover their origins and histories.  The DNA profiling of wine grapes only began in 1993, and the first ‘paternity test’ successfully concluded in 1997 – a mere few days ago by historical perspective – with specialists, Dr Vouillamoz among them, drawing astonishing Darwinian lines among seemingly unrelated grapes. Zinfandel, it has been discovered in the last 40 years, is not only the Siamese twin of Primitivo, but its Croatian Siamese twin. In proper Darwinian fashion, the book tells us, “It looks increasingly as though an enormous proportion of the grapes we know today are members of a few key families.”  The leading families of wine, Pinot and Nebbiolo and the rest, like the leading houses of Westeros, jostle and engage in incestuous inter-breeding as they move towards dominance. As Jancis Robinson admits, the quest for the origins of grapes can become surprisingly emotional. “The Zin quest is so … heated. There was a Zinfandel conference in Croatia, with all the great Zin makers, even Joel ‘King of Zin’ Peterson from Ravenswood, and we all had to present our various things about Zinfandel. There was a small cohort of people from Montenegro who reckoned that their variety – whose name is unpronounceable – was the true progenitor of modern Zinfandel, not the Croatian one. It became so … Balkan! And you know what? They may be right!” Wine Grapes is of its time in another sense as well, marking the moment when we have started to think of wine not solely in terms of region, but much more in terms of variety, with the semi-mystical term ‘terroir’ acting as a kind of Holy Spirit between them. Thinking ‘grape’ more than ‘place’ releases our imaginations. The wholesome instructive pleasures of the book, to which we’ll come, shrink beside the unwholesome, guilty pleasures of turning the pages to meet the failures among grapes – the near-misses, the long-forgotten and forlorn lost toys – which please more than the patterns of primacy. The pleasure of reading about the grapes whose juice we do drink is nothing compared to reading about those we don’t. In dictionaries, oddities and parentheses fascinate us more than the major entries. No one turns to the dictionary to study ‘and’; we go to study ‘antediluvian’. So, turning these pages, flipping through the P’s on our way to encounter the great Pinot families, we come upon the lesser gods, even the little misshapen gnomes and dwarves of the wine world, and we delight in meeting them. (A fascination added to by the forthright sub-heads the editors provide.) On our way to Burgundy and Pinot Noir, we also meet Pinotin, a ‘recent obscure Swiss hybrid’ which edges into Pionnier, ‘a minor but complex, cold-hardy American hybrid used in blends in Québec’, and, of course, Pinotage ‘South Africa’s very own cross, both loved and despised’, which leads us on to Pugnitello and even Pukhliakovsky (a Russian variety ‘with erratic yields producing light wines’) and even unto Pules – ‘a minor Albanian white’. Radiating out from five pages on the major Merlot, we bump into Merseguera, ‘an uninspiring variety’ from Spain, and Merzifon Karasi, and Merzling, dismissed as a ‘very minor disease-resistant German hybrid’. Why these lost or obscure kinds of grapes bring so much delight with them is a fascinating question. It has in part to do with our general appetite for oddities and obscurities, which once produced ‘freak shows’ and still makes us fascinated with archaic musical instruments: we are curious to hear the sackbut because we want to know what led to the trombone. It is also the virtuous case that variety is the safeguard of continuity. In an age of ever-decreasing biodiversity with just a few varieties taking the place of many possibilities, one Quixotic California winemaker, driving through the fields of Cabernet and Chardonnay, dismissed them all – with a wave of the hand – as “chocolate and vanilla, chocolate and vanilla”.  The health of the planet is safeguarded by the persistence of so many kinds. It is also because the existence of these minor yet still thriving varieties gives us a satisfying picture of adaptation, the central biological act. Each of these grapes has found a home in the world. It may not be much of a home, but then neither, face the facts, is ours. We identify with the unknown grape. We are all more like a very minor disease-resistant German, or a cold-hardy Québec hybrid, than we are something noble and complicated. Few of us are bottles of Burgundy; we can all identify as minor Albanian whites. In conversation, Jancis Robinson, sheltering at home near Kings Cross in London, a home with a view of a graveyard (though a cheerful one she assures an interviewer) – talks of the wine almanac with the blunt enthusiasm that marks her writing. Robinson, in addition to her obvious honours and credentials, is a rare thing in the wine world, or any world: a writer who writes with equal parts brio and expertise. She explains the origins of Wine Grapes. “What happened was that one of the co-authors, Dr José Vouillamoz, who had been at University of California, Davis, felt that he needed to earn more of a living, and came back to Switzerland and got a job working on Alpine botanicals. But he didn’t want to lose his relationship with wine, and he came to me and said that he’d like to collaborate on a book about grape varieties. I’d already written one in 1986, based on our very fractional knowledge then.  Over lunch, I took along Julia Harding, a wine writer who works on my website. She’s extremely punctilious.” (Robinson, punctilious herself, says this with such emphasis that the listener feels that, with Harding, we must be talking about new frontiers, not to say dimensions, in punctiliousness.) “She had exactly the right sort of brain for a project like this. José suggested that we focus on the 10 or 12 most planted grape varieties to help simplify it. I thought that that book didn’t sound interesting enough. I waited until we were quite far down a bottle of Valpolicella and said, ‘I think our book should be about every single grape variety we can find.’ He gulped and said, ‘Then that’s what we shall do!’” The idea of creating a ‘perfect map’ of a subject is one of the itches that govern modern life. John James Audubon set out to describe not the major but every bird and beast in North America, and that’s what he did. Similar ‘almanacs of everything’ fill our botanical and anthropological shelves. It is an ambition so tied to modernity that in the mid-19th century, Lewis Carroll perfectly satirised it in his novel, Sylvie & Bruno, where two mad professors talk about their dream of making a map that would be on a one-to-one relation to the actual world – utterly perfect, if impossible to unroll. “I loved the scale of the thing,” Robinson says of her perfect map. “So, we carved things up: José did all the DNA stuff and history because he had good access to it, Julia, bless her, did the footwork – how much of each grape is planted where – while trying to taste as many as possible, too! And I wrote the entries on the best-known varieties, and the introduction and read every single word.  As with any dictionary, we used what came before: we went through appellation lists, with all of the varieties allowed, some of them almost extinct. A nice little detail of the book is that we persuaded the publisher that it should have some colour plates, and we were particularly keen to include the plates from the world’s first oenological book, L’Ampélographie: Traité Général de Viticulture, of 1901 … just out of copyright!” She pauses. “Of course,” she adds reflectively, “it was José, naturally, who discovered that Pinot and Syrah are related.” The offhand nature of her mention can’t conceal the significance of the remark. Of all the discoveries offered in the book, this is perhaps, for the amateur wine drinker, the most exemplary and astonishing. Painstakingly tracing the DNA heritage of the varieties, these two noble houses, Syrah and Pinot – the grapes of the Rhône Valley and those of Burgundy, the heart of Côte-Rôtie and the soul of Chambertin – are unified as cousins. This happened not through willed cultivation but in the natural evolutionary way: through variation and adaptation. Initially, the elegance of Pinot Noir was transformed through the usual evolutionary pressures of place and mutations, into the earthy pleasures of Syrah.  Chance mutation and lucky planting turned one grape into its near opposite. (‘Cross-fertilisation’, we’re told, ‘was common until the early 20th century because several grape varieties were often intermixed in the vineyards, facilitating natural crossings between distinct grape varieties’.) The phylloxera epidemic in France from the 1860s on – though it did not destroy as much as is sometimes thought – acted as a kind of sieve or filter of grape varieties, a sort of extinction event in large-scale natural history, forcing hard choices and making obscure varieties less desirable to save by root grafting with New World vines.   One virtue of the book is to propose, in effect, a new order of wines by celebrating ‘secondary’ grape varieties. “For me, among the obscure wines, something about as well-known as Cinsault stands out – it can make such lovely wines,” Robinson says. “There’s been such a sea change as the century turned. Everybody once wanted to make fruit bombs to one of three standard recipes. Then in this century, higher acidity, lighter wines are finally revaluing, and so Cinsault comes into its own. “Sometimes I come across a grape that isn’t well known but that’s so obviously superior. There’s Aglianico – the name suggests it’s Greek, though no Greek variety has ever been found and you only get it in Southern Italy. Perfect for late ripeness, and not for cool climates – and now it has travelled to Australia, where they’re desperate for hot weather varieties.  The whole array of Portuguese and Greek grape varieties are so fantastic! And so individual. And I love that after a dalliance with international varieties, both countries are now celebrating their own. There’s another white grape, an Iberian variety that’s stunning, and, again, I’m not sure it’s yet been planted much: Godello! It’s a bit crass to say it makes wines that taste like Montrachet, if a little more terroir-y and mineral … but it does. I could drink Cinsault for red and Godello for white into the next century. “There’s such a gap nowadays,” Robinson goes on, “between the Napa Cab thing, and these young people who are buying unknown grape varieties that sell for a fraction of the price, that are really good. Such a lot has happened in the field of recuperating old vines, some so obscure that they don’t even have a name. Miguel Torres, the scion of that great company in northeast Spain became very interested in grapes.  At first, he said, ‘Hey Dad, we need the posh varieties, Cabernet and Chardonnay’ – and made all these wines which did well in the Judgement of Paris. But, with time, he realised that it made more sense to concentrate on the indigenous varieties. He’s been engaged for 30 years, putting classified ads in the local press – ‘If you know of a wine grape that you can’t identify, let us know of it, and – if we think we can propagate out – we’ll do micro-vinification.’ He’s actually rescued Catalan varieties that were on the brink of disappearing; I think he found 30 varieties, and recuperated eight for micro-vinification with sufficient character to give them a new lease of life. And much the same thing has been happening all over Italy. If we published the book today, we’d be up to at least 1,500 kinds of grapes.” The great sorting question of our time, of course, is the question of climate change and its effects on wine cultivation. Robinson is cautiously hopeful about Burgundy. “I was lucky enough to go there and spend some time. The 2020 harvest is the earliest ever, at least since the 14th century. But, whereas the 2003 vintage, that legendary hot summer in France, produced wines that were pretty bizarre, the 2019s seem as fresh as a daisy, with pure fruit. I’m no plant biologist, but the vines seem to be getting used to the conditions … or the winemakers are. They’re not extracting as heavily, but, given that, there’s no sign of added acidity (it’s routinely added in the southern hemisphere), the acidity is coming from the grapes as well. Even some real old Burgundy hands, when you ask why the wines are so fresh, say, ‘I really don’t know.’” About the Southern Rhône, though, she is more pessimistic. “They’re not helping themselves in the Southern Rhône: too many are trying to make concentrated, high alcohol, 16% wines. And maybe consultants are too powerful down there – one consultant can be responsible for 20 or 30 labels, and so you’re going to have 20 or 30 wines that reflect that.” It’s here, though, that the knowledge of grapes, and our possession of this specialist dictionary, seems particularly valuable. If wine is to save itself from the vagaries of climate change, it will probably be through the introduction and new use of ‘marginal’ or forgotten ‘heirloom’ grapes. Only recently, France’s Institut National de l’Origine et de la Qualité (INAO) officially approved six new varieties: four red grapes – Arinarnoa, Castes, Marselan, and Touriga Nacional; and two whites – Alvarinho and Liliorila – all described as ‘well-adapted to alleviate hydric stress associated with temperature increases and shorter growing cycles’, potential saviours of the region against the villain of global warming. All of them, of course, are charted and explicated in Wine Grapes.

In the end, the great strange truth of wine is the truth of life: a thousand vectors press down on us at once – place, history, time, temperature, luck and breeding – and somehow in the intersection we find, or make, our pleasures. The question of type and variation was very different before Darwin who wrote, oddly (or perhaps not so oddly) almost simultaneously with the great classification of Bordeaux, publishing On the Origin of Species in 1859.  (Oddly because his theory would have been true in any other time; not so oddly because the urge to map the world, for the ‘almanac of everything’, was typical of mid-19th century confidence, as Carroll’s satire suggests.) Before Darwin, who loved wine, the fundamental view of the world was that the superintending categories, species and varieties, were the fixed things in the world. Everyone took it for granted that the ‘kind’ the ‘essence’, was the real thing and all the little variants merely particular shades away from it. A grape was a better or worse instance of its variety. Grapes, like apes, were of one fixed sort. Darwin’s great overriding insight was that only particulars exist, and that species and superintending categories are the labile and ever-changing kinds. Every kind of living thing came from somewhere weird and is on its way to somewhere weirder, with a brief stopover at being the thing it is now. The elegance of Pinot Noir is a close cousin of the earthiness of Syrah, one state is simply a moment in the life of the other, and each are moments in the life of the surging, unfixable whole. Wine, braiding through the planet and only coming to rest on a name for a moment in one place, is a bit of scientific epistemology in your glass, the truth of the particular made potable. It’s a fine destiny for a simple pleasure. This article was originally published in FONDATA, Issue One Photography by Gavin Bond; floral set design by Studio Lupine

Essayist and author Adam Gopnik takes a look at the world of wine through the lens of seminal wine-lover’s bible, Wine Grapes, and talks to one of its three co-authors, Jancis Robinson MW about the joy of discovering long-forgotten indigenous grape varieties

Adam Gopnik talks to Wine Grapes co-author Jancis Robinson MW about the joy of discovering long-forgotten indigenous grape varieties

FONDATA: Pleasure in the detail

Pleasure in the detail

Domaine du Castel

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