Clive Coates, MW, A Life In Wine pt. 1
Ξ June 23rd, 2009 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Uncategorized |
Clive Coates lives a very good life in a small village, Saint-Bonnet-de-Villes-Vignes, in the Bourgogne region of France. After writing a series of standard texts, texts that belong in all wine lover’s libraries, Grand Vins: The finest Chateaux of Bordeaux and Their Wine, An Encyclopedia of the Wines and Domaines of France, The Wines of Bordeaux, The Côte D’Or and its monumental sequel, The Wines of Burgundy, after years writing The Vine, these and a multitude of occasional pieces, perhaps he is entitled to semi-retirement. But what semi-retired means is far from clear. He remains intellectually active, continuing to explore the wines of his beloved Burgundy. Indeed, when I spoke with him last Thursday morning from California, he was preparing for his annual 10 year tasting at the Bouilland farmhouse of celebrated wine exporter Becky Wasserman and her husband Russell Hone. In part 2, due this Friday (6/26) I shall provide his tasting notes from that gathering. They are extensive. Whereas I thought he might write something more in keeping with a man slowing down, I was quite surprised to read a dozen pages dedicated to the 1999 vintage. It begins,
“Nineteen ninety-nine was a gift from the Gods: a vintage both plentiful and successful: not only of high quality but consistent geographically and hierarchically; delicious from the Mâconnais (not to mention the Beaujolais) to Marsannay, and fine, within its context, from generic up to grand cru. The wines have volume as well as concentration, richness and balance, intensity and class. And the whites are as splendid as the reds.”
The passage below, from Mr. Coates’ recent The Wines of Burgundy, is instructive for two reasons. The first is the patent meaning of the thing; the second reason is more subtle, beneath the polemic. It is a plea for patience, difference, for the birth of a generation of drinkers sensitive to cultural and aesthetic dimensions the noisy marketplace hawkers drown out. For such a plea is inconvenient. For those of us not in ‘the business’, we are use to being labeled ‘consumers’, trained to occupy the passive tense. Mr. Coates insists, in my view, on an active role.
“Wine Critics are often misinformed or just plain pig-ignorant. They are prejudiced. They set about doing the job of sampling Burgundy in the wrong way and at the wrong time. They try to imply that there is only one way to judge a wine (i.e., according to the personal taste of that critic), forgetting how subjective and temperamental taste can be, and also ignoring the fact that most wine is made to be consumed and judged mature with food and friends, not immature alongside numerous other bottles.”
“The bad critics look at Pinot through Cabernet-tinted spectacles and so criticise it for being what it never set out to be. Generally, they cause anger in the Cote d’Or and confusion at home. Moreover — and this is a situation which is almost universal in the United States, though thankfully largely absent in Britain — the trade has allowed itself to be emasculated. Instead of continuing to buy and sell based on their own professional judgement, they have consigned themselves to the role of mere purveyors. They buy what the Wine Spectator and the Wine Advocate score highly and then sell their wares by proclaiming the magazine’s marks. It is totally crazy.“
Admin Good morning, or good evening, Mr. Coates.
Clive Coates Let me just turn down the radio…. Right. What can I do for you?
It is absolutely delightful to speak with you. I’ve been an enthusiast of yours for quite some time. And may I record the conversation?
CC Absolutely.
First of all, I very much enjoy the line from your book, The Wines of Burgundy, “The only way to become a competent judge of young Burgundy is to spend many years at the coal-face”. I find it rather fascinating that bloggers today have a very difficult time with Burgundy generally largely because of the absence of those ‘years at the coal-face’. Could you speak to that?
CC There is really not much more to add. The only way you are going to understand wine is to taste it and taste it and taste it, watch wines evolve from infancy to maturity, learn by your mistakes, and so on and so forth. Experience cannot be gainsaid.
I was reading about Harry Waugh recently. I find him to be a very important precursor to many of the wine critics of today, although the simplicity of his tasting notes is perhaps to be admired. I’m thinking of some of the more florid prose written about wines today. It is unfortunate that memory of Mr. Waugh, at least in the United States, has largely been obscured. How would you understand Robert Parker, for example, as an inheritor of Mr. Waugh’s innovative approach?
CC Well, I think his approach is completely different. Harry Waugh was speaking as a wine merchant of the long-term wine buyer. And he was much less inclined to, although, obviously, he was one of the first people to sort of give marks to wines. For him the very act of a strictly accurate sort of pecking order was of very much less importance. If you compare the assessments, let’s say, of Michael Broadbent, it’s much more broad brush. It’s sort of good, very good, fine, and excellent without going in to the intricacies of one percentage point, or in my case, 1/2 a point out of twenty, something like that.
What is your take on California? Have you recently visited? Have you had many California Pinots?
CC Not really anymore. I used to in a small way, but most of the boutique wineries weren’t interested, it seems, in exporting to England. And so these really didn’t come one’s way. Now, I’m semi-retired and I really only write about Burgundy.
I see. I very much enjoy your concept of ‘marking within context’. And that, of course, is very much missing in American wine writing…
CC That’s why putting numbers to things is really a mistake. If I felt I could get away with it I wouldn’t have ever put a mark to anything. But the trouble is the Americans insist on it. And the vast majority of my subscribers when I did The Vine, and, indeed, the people who bought my books, are Americans.
Do you think it might be useful to add another parameter to the marking in context, price point, for example? If you rated wines under $15 differently than you rated them at $30, perhaps that might also shed some light on this otherwise confusing ‘absolute’ scale of 100 points.
CC In a sense that’s the context. If you’re marking Beaujolais everybody knows, roughly speaking, what the price of Beaujolais is, and if you’re marking first growths or you’re marking bourgeois equally. The point is that no marks out of whatever are going to pick out the fantastically good Beaujolais of bourgeois. There is nothing to stop one saying that such-and-such a chateau is out-performing at its price. And that is a comment that I have made. I’m thinking of wines like Pontet-Cantet and Talbot, that sort of thing, Grand-Puy-Lacoste, which compared with the so-called super seconds, are an amazing value. Only the words/context will do. Read the words – far more informative than the marks. That sort of thing needs to be said, and has been said.
Could you explain, certainly for my American readers less familiar with this, what it was that brought Burgundy to its knees in the ’60s and the ’70s?
CC Well, in short, a number of factors. Firstly, they over-fertilized the vineyard. Secondly, there were a run of poor vintages. The merchants were in charge. The domaines hadn’t really started domaine bottling until the mid-1980s. Nobody was making any money. It was a vicious spiral. 
Markedly that was broken by a group of people who where then the young tigers, now the middle-age tigers. I’m thinking of people like Etienne Grivot, Christophe Roumier, and Dominique Lafon. They’ve all just turned 50. They all took over in about 1982 or so. They were the first people to realize that the only way forward was to produce the very best that was possible, the best they could. They were the first of their generation to automatically go to wine school and to university. They were the first to go abroad and do internships, and see how the other half lived. And most important, perhaps, they were not the slightest bit chauvinistic or jealous of their neighbors. And they would encourage all the people, all the next lot of young men and women who’d started domaine bottling, and they’d give them every single helping hand and advice that they could.
That then was followed, coincidentally or not, by a series of rather better vintages, from 1985 onwards. People stopped cutting corners. Everybody started cutting the crop down, they stopped fertilizing, obviously, they stopped herbiciding. We had the rise of biodynamism and generally biological [biologique], or lutte raisonnée, if you like. Quality improved by leaps and bounds. And I had the good luck to be in the middle of it and see it coming, and help say hurray, hurray! (laughs)
What portion of the winegrowers in Burgundy actually make a full living off of their work?
CC Oh, I think all of the important estates that you could mention, they do. You don’t have to have a huge vineyard. If you’ve got a few juicy things you can get by on 4 hectare. But, of course, you’re really doing all the work yourself. One of the nice things about Burgundy is you knock on the door and instead of some sort of gaudy bird who’s sort of employed to show you around, the man or one who appears is a the proprietor, b the winemaker, c the chef de cave, d the chef de viticulture, and indeed, in their spare time, either them or their spouse is going to be the accountant. It’s really in the hands of one person or sometimes a couple. They have very few employees, except at the very big estates. They are also local people. But the point is, for somebody like you and I, we can talk turkey to them. Whereas you go to Bordeaux and the proprietor, with one or two exceptions, really doesn’t get involved with making the wine. And you can’t say “Why isn’t this wine as good as it should be?” You certainly won’t get an answer.
Yes. In interviewing winemakers here in California, Pinot specialist in particular, certainly those from the Santa Cruz Mountains, I find that they’ve often visited Burgundy and they’ve been taken in with open arms, gone down to the caves, and there they taste through entire histories of the wineries. It is a very different approach. It is far more collegial, less competitive, shall we say.
CC Absolutely. Yup.
I don’t know whether you’ve been following the story of the EU regulations proposed with respect to nomenclature and wine labeling. There is much discussion here in the United States on possible restrictions on the use of certain words, clos and chateau, among others. Do you have a comment on the proposals?
CC No. I don’t see why somebody who’s got an imposing building shouldn’t call it a ‘chateau’ in California. Or if it really is an enclosed vineyard behind walls why they shouldn’t call it ‘clos’. The word has to be used properly. If it not used properly then it shouldn’t be allowed in a sense. I mean, thank god we don’t anymore have California Chablis or whatever. Just as they shouldn’t take the district names in vain, they shouldn’t just use, you know, fancy French just to make their wine look special.
What’s wrong with the word ‘ranch’ or something like that? Use an American word.
Yes. I find it one of the most curious things; on the one hand they will celebrated their inroads into the mystique of French wines, for example, but they still have this unusual dependence on the terminology. I’ve often wondered why they simply don’t use words readily available, the local vernacular.
CC I think there is still a very large lack of confidence. Chips on shoulders, and that sort of thing. I wish people in California would relax and make very good Californian wine; and not look over their shoulder and say this is better than Lafite or Romanée Conti. That’s why I find the attitude of somebody like Paul Draper very refreshing. He’s making bloody good American wine. Well, great!
Good. I like that. A quick question about the Master of Wine examination. Is it your understanding that they have evolved over the years? Have they become more complex because of the rise of other wine producing regions?
CC It’s about the markets. If we go back to 1950 or early 50’s, it was about being a wine merchant in England. Or perhaps even more particularly, being a wine merchant in the city of the West End of London, and dealing with the finer end of the market, given that there wasn’t very much else in those days. Then, of course, the market changed, it changed totally and completely. And so has the exam. The exam is now about being a wine merchant in a much wider context; dealing with brands, much less dependence or insistence or reliance on the finer end of the market because that’s really only a very small portion of the market today. So, gone is the idea that you should be able to identify a Lafite at twenty paces. You have a wine from Uruguay or something and how would you market it in England or in America? As you know the exam was internationalized about 20 years ago. But as I’ve said, the exam has evolved to parallel the market.
I see. Returning to ‘official’ matter for a moment. About the French government. There are some rather draconian measures that have been proposed in the last year involving restrictions on alcohol advertisement, warning labels on bottles, etc. What do think the French govt. is thinking?
CC Well, I think in general we are living more and more in a ‘nanny’ state. The government seems to take responsibility for, or they push their responsibility for health and safety to absurd limits, so that children, for instance, are not allowed to climb trees, I’m exaggerating, probably, just so they don’t fall down and might break an arm. I mean, a lot of this is sensible. A lot of it has gone too far, just as I think political correctness has gone far too far. But that’s (laughs) that’s me speaking as Clive Coates, it has nothing to do with wine.
I like the idea of the ‘nanny’ state. We certainly face issues like that here. In America’s case it is because of trial lawyers, insurance companies, our litigious nature. Spilling coffee on yourself can become a cause of action.
CC Exactly. That woman who had a Starbucks or MacDonald’s coffee spilled on her lap, I mean, damnit, anybody who’s ever bought a coffee in a polystyrene cup knows that it’s bloody hot and it stays bloody hot!
Have you ever made wine?
CC I’ve never had any interest in making wine at all. Blending wine, yes. But not making wine. I spent a long time when I was a merchant, some of the things I feel proudest of, are blends of wine at the very bottom end of the market. As you may or may not know, I was responsible for the wines in the little bottles on the English Train Service in the 1970’s. We had our own vin rouge and that sort of thing, which really had to be as cheap as anything. I am very proud of the red that I did. The white was always a compromise in those days. They didn’t quite have the techniques in the South of France to produce fresh wine that we do today. But I was very, very proud of the red. I think I will always be proudest of that than anything else.
Fascinating. Do bottles of that wine still exist?
CC (laughs) You can go to merchants, one particular merchant, if they still exist, and you could order, you could ten years ago, inquire about the cuvée BTH. But I think now people have moved on. The man I dealt with died early, and now probably his successors have retired. So it probably wouldn’t mean anything anymore. It certainly existed, it continued to exist, after I was no longer involved, in fact, after the whole thing was privatized by Ms. Thatcher in the early 1980s.
How is it you came to that opportunity?
CC Well, when I took over we bottled the wine in England. And we bought a brand, if you like. I thought I could do better than that. So I went down to the South of France and I found somebody that I felt very sympathetic towards. And we spoke and tasted. I went back about a month later, with the new vintage around Christmas. He had his wines, and I started tasting them and blending together. I’ve never worked quite so hard in my whole life! (laughs) I was completely pissed and incapable of standing up at the end of the day! I did nothing but blend wine and taste it. But in the end we got something.
And this being in tiny bottles, we did a bottling every three months. So every three months I use go down and my supplier had sort of made something up. I would just verify and sometimes just tweak it slightly before we bottled it. I might adjust it slightly but by that time, after a few months, he knew my taste and I would basically leave the hard work to him. It was a blend of all different wines that had their origins in vin de pays, in cooperatives in Minervois and the Corbieres, that sort of thing, a Languedoc/Roussillon blend. We had a bit of this, a bit of that, then something else, an imaginative little something; the whole was better than the sum of its parts.
You have written of the Rhone. What is your general understanding of the Rhone today?
CC I haven’t done a survey of the Rhone since the 2001 vintage. I’m getting out of date. And I very, very much resent people who march in, who’ve hardly sniffed a bottle in their lives and they start pontificating. So the last thing I’m going to do is pontificate about the Rhone except to say that, like a number of other areas, we could probably say most areas, the wines are just getting better and better as people have access to better and better technology, and as their determination is to produce the best bottle of wine they can.
It is a cold, hard world out there. If you don’t produce something good nobody is going out and buy it. If you do produce something good you can make a living, indeed, quite a decent living. So you’re a fool if you don’t. And if you treat the world cynically they are only going to throw you in the rubbish heap.
I very much enjoyed your piece on the Philosophy of Wine and your guiding principles: Love, Belief, Celebration and Transmission. Was there a specific occasion for writing that piece?
CC Well, I can tell you why I wrote that piece, it’s actually in the piece itself, and that is that somebody produced a book a couple of years ago now called the Philosophy of Wine, I think. It was a series of articles by philosophers about wine. Frankly, it was a whole load of rubbish. But it made me wonder what do I think the philosophy of wine is. And that’s when I wrote my piece.
End of Part 1 Please read Part 2.
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