From humble beginnings in Beaujolais in the 1980s, the natural wine movement has become a global force. But what influence has it had just north in Burgundy’s long-established, terroir-focused appellations? Simon J Woolf explores the blurred line between classical and natural winegrowing

From Beaujolais to Burgundy, how has the natural wine movement shaped a terroir-driven region? For FONDATA Simon J Woolf explores the changing landscape.

Natural Wine’s Influence on Burgundy

Nature vs. Nurture: The quest for Burgundy’s true identity

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

“Meet my girlfriends,” calls Telmo Rodríguez down the phone, laughing as he flips his camera to show two enormous shaggy-haired mutts. The skies are crisp and blue on the other side of the screen, the sun beating down on Remelluri, his family estate in Rioja Alavesa. The camera swings across the horizon as he introduces me to one of his team before rushing indoors to sit down for our call. There’s an almost frenetic energy to Rodríguez – and that energy is what in many ways defines the maverick winemaker, who has been one of the transformational forces in Spanish wine.  His parents purchased La Granja Nuestra Señora de Remelluri – a farm that has been home to vines since at least the 14th century – in 1967. Growing up on this special property, young Rodríguez went off to study winemaking in Bordeaux, then trained at properties including Cos d’Estournel, Domaine de Trévallon, Chave and more. He returned home inspired and excited to use his new-found knowledge on the family property in the early 1990s. But his father didn’t welcome Telmo’s ambition: the market didn’t want great or even good Rioja, he told his son – the market wanted cheap Rioja. Although he wasn’t allowed to make changes to the red, Rodríguez was given free rein to create the property’s first white wine. And that wine rocketed him to fame. White Rioja has always been niche (today just 9% of the vineyard area is planted to white grapes), but in the 1990s its future was looking uncertain – with the traditional, oxidised style of wines such as López de Heredia’s Tondonia Blanco fallen from grace, and many producers had given up on making these wines (as with CVNE’s Monopole Clásico, which has since been revived). Rodríguez wanted to create a wine of place, rather than a wine of style, and used complex field blends planted at higher altitudes to do so. Fermented and aged in a combination of tank and oak, Remelluri Blanco was unlike any other wine in the region. Robert Parker wrote of the 1996 vintage that it was “the finest white wine [he had] ever tasted from Spain”. The multi-variety blend doesn’t include the region’s trademark white, Viura, and is technically illegal – a fact that perhaps has only increased its appeal.  But Rodríguez was frustrated by his father, by the limitations put on him and his wines. Restless and with a rift in the family forming, he flew the coop to focus on his own project. In Bordeaux he had become friends with a fellow Spaniard, Pablo Eguzkiza, who had been working at Pétrus, and together they had already started making wine – beginning with an old-vine Garnacha from Navarra in 1994. With that wine, Compañía de Vinos Telmo Rodríguez was born.  Their vision was to make real Spanish wine – the wines that had been made before, as they saw it, France started to sway the industry. When the deadly louse phylloxera had swept through France in the late 19th century, killing its vineyards, the nation looked south, across the Pyrenees to Spain. Producers travelled there to make wine and feed demand, and Rioja in particular saw an influx of business and money – but this uplift also came with French influence. In Rodríguez’s view, this was the ruining of the trade – Rioja, which had once been a wine of site, became a wine of oak. And soon, across Spain, the variety that once defined its many regions was being over-written with international varieties. Spain became known for cheap wine – and producers were racing to the bottom.  “The worst are the British,” says Rodríguez. “They say they know Rioja and they know Sherry, but, in a certain way, the British market killed Sherry and killed Rioja because they are very happy to have a cheap Reserva for a few pounds.” The dominance of what he describes as “industrial brands”, the larger houses that buy in fruit from across the region, aged in American oak for “traditional” styles, and French for “modern”, is abhorrent to him.  “I’m sorry, you don’t know anything about Rioja. Tell me one village. Tell me one taste. Tell me one landscape. Tell me one mountain. Nobody knew anything,” he says. He explains how Labastida – a village neighbouring Remelluri – was once the Vosne-Romanée of Rioja, home to 330 different wine producers in 1680. But over the years, that history has been blended away.  Together, Rodríguez and Eguzkiza set out to uncover and reveal the Spain of yesteryear, working with old vines, native varieties and traditional methods to champion what they saw as the true Spanish wines. From their beginnings in Navarra, they looked to Arribes del Duero, to Rueda, to Málaga, to Aragon and back to Rioja, then Ribera, Toro and Sierra de Gredos.   “Now we are showing what is real,” Rodríguez tells me, with a sense of satisfaction. In Rioja, for example, they created Bodegas Lanzaga in 1998, looking to focus on the terroir around the town of Lanziego. The Consejo (regulatory body), however, didn’t allow them to use the name of a village on the label until 2017. For almost two decades they protested this rule, featuring the name on the label, but redacted (inspired in part by the art of Jenny Holzer). Today, there is a clear, and growing, movement of producers looking to focus on single-site expressions of Rioja’s best vineyards, shifting away from cross-regional blends and the dominance of oak. This echoes what is happening elsewhere in Spain, as producers focus on indigenous grapes and identifying what makes each of its varied regions unique. It’s a revolution – one that Rodríguez has been at the forefront of. It's easy to think of this rockstar duo as flying winemakers – having so many projects scattered around the country, only touching down briefly to sign off on blends before they’re off to their next event. While inevitably their schedule is intense, their focus is firmly in the vineyard and on reflecting each individual place and site – rather than crafting a range that speaks of their influence. “It’s a very honest approach to a place,” Rodríguez says. The references throughout our conversation only emphasise this: Burgundy, the ultimate “terroir” wine, is where he finds his inspiration; while the Super Tuscans are repeatedly scorned for their internationality.  Matallana is quite possibly Telmo Rodríguez’s most ambitious project to date. He and Eguzkiza first made wine in Ribera del Duero in 1998, and have slowly built up 21.5 hectares of vines around the region.  “My dream was to do a very good Vega Sicilia. I wanted to do the Vega Sicilia that I used to drink in the past,” explains Rodríguez, talking about bottles from the 1940s, ’50s or ’60s. Back then, he says, it wasn’t an estate wine but fruit was sourced from around the region. For him, Vega Sicilia is now too “Bordeaux-style”. He argues that while in Rioja the soils are quite consistent, Ribera del Duero is incredibly varied. They have chosen to work with a range of vineyards across five villages – Sotillo de la Ribera, Roa, Fuentecén, Fuentemolinos and Pardilla – ranging from quartz-rich or pebbly soils reminiscent of Châteauneuf-du-Pape to chalky albariza and clay-heavy sites. This diversity is what helps bring complexity to the wine, with each one producing a different expression of Tinto Fino.   The work involved in each of the Compañía de Vinos Telmo Rodríguez projects is painstaking, tracking down special parcels, reviving soils and replanting or grafting where necessary, working organically and biodynamically, to achieve the quality they’re looking for. For Bodegas Lanzaga, for example, it was over a decade before they produced the first vintage of their top wine, Las Beatas, from a 1.9-hectare plot of the same name (first made in 2011).  For Matallana, they wanted to track down the region’s very best, historic vineyards in each of the five villages. But it’s not been easy. All too often they’d been abandoned, some needed re-planting entirely, or otherwise re-grafting with massal selections, and serious work to bring the soils back to life. They wanted to work with unirrigated bush-vines and field blends – vineyards farmed as they might have been in the 19th century. And then there’s the complex ownership: to buy just six of their 21.5 hectares took seven years, purchasing tiny plots from 40 different families.  Although they’ve been making wine here since the 1999 vintage, it wasn’t ready until relatively recently – and Rodríguez considers the 2014 the first “real” vintage of the project. Before that point they had made three wines, a selection of fruit from the oldest vines that went into the “Grand Vin” Matallana, a second wine M2 and the unoaked Gazur from younger plots. “They were prototypes, we were learning,” explains Rodríguez. From 2014, there is only one wine, with a change in the label to reflect the shift.  As with the older vintages from Bodegas Lanzaga, the label shows a list of redacted vineyard names – which are still not permitted to feature on the labels in Ribera del Duero. “All those vineyards are the guarantee of the purity of our wines,” says Rodríguez. In fact, the label is embossed, so beneath the censored text, you can feel the names of these terroirs. He’s moved to reduce the oak, using some foudres and tinajas (amphorae), while also acknowledging that the wine needs movement and oxygen to polymerise the tannins. The result, however, is a more delicate wine. At the end of the day, he says, “We don’t care about the winery… our wine is the landscape, is the soils.” The difference between the “new” and “old” Matallana is striking. The 2020 is pure, vibrant – a mineral wine with crystalline fruit that speaks of place.  “I don’t want to be pretentious, but we want to create another iconic wine from Ribera del Duero,” says Rodríguez. There’s no shortage of ambition here – and they’re looking to increase production to around 40,000 bottles a year (up from around 25,000 currently). “It took us 25 years… but we knew we were doing something rare, different.” The latest move has been to partner with Jean-Guillaume Prats (currently of Ch. Léoville Las Cases, previously of Ch. Lafite Rothschild and Cos d’Estournel), and start distributing the wine via La Place de Bordeaux, to bring the wine to an even bigger audience.  Rodríguez is now 61 – but there’s no sign of him slowing down. “People say that I’m too old to plant vineyards,” he says, clearly finding such a thought absurd. He’s just planting three hectares he tells me – vineyards that will be amazing, he feels, maybe in 15 years’ time. On the day we talk, he had five local youths coming to meet his team, the children of local viticulturalists in Labastida; they’d be making wines together with the best 2,000 kilos from each of their family’s plots – a project that has been going four years. There’s no looking back from this vigneron, whose eyes are firmly on the horizon, as he continues to push boundaries and forge a future for those that will follow him.  Explore all wines from Telmo Rodríguez and Matallana or read more Editorial 

Telmo Rodríguez is one of Spain’s most famous names. Since the 1990s, he has been a controversial figure, fighting for the nation’s vinous heritage. We caught up with the relentless revolutionary to talk about his journey, the real Rioja and his most challenging project to date

Telmo Rodríguez is one of Spain’s most famous winemakers. We caught up with him to talk his journey and his most challenging project to date, Matallana

Telmo Rodriguez – the eternal battle

Telmo Rodríguez: the eternal battle

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

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