Clive Coates, MW A Life In Wine pt. 2
Ξ June 28th, 2009 | → 0 Comments | ∇ A Day at a Time, International Terroirs, Interviews, Technology, Wine News |
In this second and final part of my interview with Clive Coates we learn a great many things about the gentleman, both practical and abstract, about some of the ideas that spark his imagination and of the comfortable rhythms of his everyday life. As I trust you read in part 1, his oeuvre includes among the most important works on Burgundy and Bordeaux. Yet I will stress that should you have limited funds or find room for only one of his volumes then let it be the Wines of Burgundy. I purchased mine the moment it became available and I refer to it constantly. It has a disciplined elegance throughout that is quite rare. Like the man.
All of his titles may be purchased through the UC Press
His 1999 ‘Ten Years On’ Burgundy tasting notes may be read here.
Admin Unusual for many wine books, you make specific mention in The Wines of Burgundy to climate change and it’s obvious effects in Burgundy. Could you expand on that?
Clive Coates Well, I think if you take both Burgundy and Bordeaux and you just look decade by decade since the war, and you just look at the average date they start the harvest, you’ll see that it’s moved by three or four days earlier, three or four days every decade. So we’re now getting to the stage where we’re picking almost three weeks before they used to pick.
Now, there may well be other reasons for this. Even if you look at the statistics of production you’ll see that the production is much higher than it was in the 1940s. But then that was because there was a lot of holes in the ground rather than vines. And also the vines themselves… they didn’t have the techniques to control the depredation of the crop to insects, bad weather, diseases, and all the rest of it. And so one of the other explanations of this earlier harvest, which on the face of it looks paradoxical when you look at the quantity produced, is that, in fact, the grapes are now picked riper than they used to be. And they’re picked, if you like, in a shorter space of time. You have more harvesters. You only have to look at Bordeaux. Instead of having 50 harvesters, they’ll have 200. So they’ll pick a Bordeaux property in a week rather than three weeks. So they can afford to delay, on the one hand, and to finish early, on the other hand, and to pick all their crop at the ideal time.
But still, nevertheless, we are picking earlier than we used to. I don’t have to hand, because basically the earlier dates are missing at this end, comparisons of average sun hours, average temperatures between now and let’s say the 40s and 50s. They just didn’t publish them in the 1950s, which they do now. So I don’t have much other concrete evidence. I think that despite the fact that vintages seem to be just as average as they used to be, the wine is better made in these average vintages today than they used to be. I still feel that there is… one can see signs of climatic change, of global warming. But I think it is going to get, quite obviously it’s going to get, worse and worse over the next 50 years than it has changed over the last 50 years. It’s going to be a geometric curve, if you see what I mean.
I’ve read some rather startling information about the possible fate of the Australian wine industry. Some climate scientists predict it may no longer be viable as a quality wine growing region by 2050. Other scientists are slightly less gloomy.
CC This brings in another factor we’ve seen in Australia. It’s not just the average temperatures that are rising, but that rainfall is less. They are suffering a lack of rain, of moisture.
Andrew Jefford I know has taken his family there to live for a time, a year, I think. I am certainly looking forward to reading his dispatches on this matter I’m sure he’ll address.
CC Yup. A good man.
About Mr. Jefford, he’s done a few documentary episodes on tea, and the importance of tea for the training of a palate, certainly in learning of subtleties of flavor. Are you a tea drinker?
CC No, but the disciplines can’t be that different. Tea or coffee, or, indeed, if you’re blending whiskey or blending brandy, or perfumes, I don’t think people realize quite how acute their sense of taste and smell can be if you really do concentrate, it’s not a question of training yourself, but of shutting everything out and concentrating on the thing in question. Most of us, even with great wine, we sort of knock it back as if it was Budweiser. (laughs)
Yes. The cultivation of an individual relation to wine or tea is, of course, important. But here in America there is a tendency to rely on the cult of the palate, of a singular palate, which would seem to undercut that individual relation.
CC Yup. One of the problems of the position we are in at the moment, and this is not to criticize the man himself, is the power of one individual in your country to make or break a wine or, indeed, to almost impose his own particular taste on the entire production of wine. Happily not in Burgundy. They are an independent bunch of buggers and they couldn’t care less. But elsewhere we can see that wines are being made in a different way than they use to be. It’s made to meet a certain person’s taste to get good Parker points. I think that irrespective of whether one agrees with his taste or not, I think that is a deleterious thing. We ought to live in a polytheistic world, not a monotheistic world in that respect. But this is something that you Americans have gotten yourselves into, a trough, over the last thirty years or so.
I think one of the troubles is the three-tier system that you have, which means that the ordinary retailer can never have a business that’s large enough to allow him to go abroad and taste for himself. And even if they did go and taste for themselves very often they wouldn’t be able to buy the wine because they have to buy it through the wholesaler, and it may not be available in their particular state. Largely we don’t have that in England. I don’t have to tell you, but the way wine is sold is not the man in the shop saying “I bought this wine because I liked it. And I want you to buy it because I think it is delicious.” But instead it’s “I’m a complete cypher. Here’s a Parker card with Parker 98, or Wine … whatever it’s called [Spectator], 97″. So on and so forth.
I think it’s more absurd when we go down to ordinary wine which everybody can afford. I think there’s an awful lot of wasted column inches on choosing a nice cheap rosé, or something like that. I mean, frankly, the consumer can go into his shop, he can buy four or five wines that are similar in price and style, go home and taste them, come back and say “That’s the one I like. I’ll have five cases of that.” Too often there’s almost a sort of pressure on the consumer to like what the guru says is good rather than what their palate tells is the nicest wine. There’s not enough room in all this wine writing for insisting that the individual has his or her own palate. And the most important thing is that they discover what that is. And the critic is only offering a helping hand, not imposing laws on tablets of stone. Just go and talk to your neighbouring wine merchant. They know their stock and they’d be only to happy to find out your taste and recommend a wine for you. You will access much more easily the wines you like (screw the wine guru’s comments) if you make a fruitious relationship with a competent wine merchant in your neighborhood.
Perhaps this issue has been talked to death…
CC Quite. Yup. I’m sure you’ve been told that, you probably thought. (laughs)
(laughs) Actually I was leading into another question that may also have been talked to death! And that is, with respect to the film Mondovino. Do you have anything to add?
CC I haven’t seen it. So I can only go by hearsay. From what I hear a lot of it was usefully said. A lot of it was quite unfair on the people in question, particularly Michel Rolland. I don’t think there was enough emphasis…. If I was writing about Mondovino the first place I would concentrate the most on is Burgundy because it’s in Burgundy that wines are made in the way the authors and producers of Mondovino would approve of. And yet Burgundy, as far as I understand it, is one small interview with Hubert de Montille.
Is there any particular reason you haven’t seen the film?
CC Just that I haven’t had the chance. I’m not a great cinema goer. I’ve been in the wilds of France. I’m not even sure where my nearest cinema is! And I think I’d also heard so much about it that I’ve almost seen the film anyway. There was no particular intention to boycott going. I just didn’t get round to it.
I’m trying to imagine your house in the country. Could you describe it just a bit?
CC Yes. It’s a gabled house, quite large. I have about a hectare of land. I’ve a pool. I have a vegetable garden. I have three bedrooms upstairs and five bedrooms downstairs. There is a large salon, and I have three wine cellars. A garage and that sort of thing. It’s on the side of a hill. Behind me are trees and in front of me is a view of about 50 kilometers. One of the best things I ever did was to move here.
What is grown in your garden?
CC Mainly lawn. There’s a large patch, it’s under the terrace, where I have planted basically shrubs, and there’s a sort of pergola where I’ve got Roses climbing up, and Clematis and Honeysuckle, that sort of thing. It’s basically shrubs like Azaleas, Roses, Syringa Philadelphus, (Mock orange), lots of Lavender in the corners, Hibiscuses, which will come out in August. I just plant it, let it all grow shambolically, grow into each other; and not have to do too much work.
I imagine you’re an accomplished cook. Is that fair to say?
CC Yes. I do a lot of cooking.
And is it local Farmer’s Markets that you frequent?
CC Yup. Not that they’re any good round here. If I want something special I really have to go to Beaune, Chalon or Macon, all of which are about an hour or so away. And so one has to make do with what one’s got. Every time I do get the chance I stock up as much as I can. For instance, I can’t get decent bacon; of course, you can’t get decent bacon anywhere in France. And there’s not a good fish monger. So I have to make a special journey or use the times when I am going a bit further afield to do my weekly shopping.
And how close is you’re nearest neighbor?
CC Well, I do have one neighbor next to me, a couple of old biddies who live in Paris most of the time. They are sort of bang next door. Apart from that I suppose you’d have to walk 250 meters, something like that, to the corner, as it were, of the little road that comes up to me.
A question about what is called ‘new social media’, Facebook, Twitter, that kind of thing. Do you have a Facebook account?
CC No. I was very late to start this because up to the time when I was doing my Burgundy book, which came out last year, I continued to employ a secretary, which I used to have, obviously, when I was doing The Vine. So it wasn’t really until the book was finished and I had to say to her “I can’t afford you anymore” that I really started to use laptops and that sort of thing. I’m very much in the infancy of that. I can just about type up a piece for somebody or deal with email, that sort of thing, not really at all adept. Every now and then I have to ring up my son and say “Help”!
Twitters and Facebooks and blogs… I’m afraid I’m less interested. I have my website, as you know, every now and then something occurs to me or something I’ve written for somebody else might go on there. It might be of interest to other people. And I now get, apparently, somewhere between 60 and 100 people a day attacking my website, which is nice. But I wouldn’t know how to set up a Facebook or a blog. If your going to write me up on your blog I hope you’ll be able to send me an email (laughs) so I can read it the conventional way.
About the event this weekend, the 10 Year Burgundy Tasting you mentioned. Can you tell me about it?
CC Right. Well, I started coming to Burgundy regularly in 1983, I suppose, in the sense that, I mean obviously I came to Burgundy regularly before, every year, but it wasn’t until 1983 when I was planning The Vine that I had the freedom, if you like, to go and visit everybody. Burgundy is different from Bordeaux. Bordeaux you buy through a merchant, this year and next year; you can buy any Bordeaux wine you like, because you buy it through the merchants, and not direct from the château. You don’t have to be faithful to a particular chateau, as you have to with a particular domaine in Burgundy. Moreover in Burgundy, you have to buy every vintage. You can’t just cherry-pick the best. And with Burgundy you have your own man in Gevrey-Chambertin, your own man in Nuits-Saint-Georges; you really don’t have the excuse to go and visit everybody else. So, yes, when I was a merchant I had my own people, and perhaps I knew a few other estates, let’s say 50 max. So, from 1983 onwards I started going to see everybody, and there were less than there are now, three times as many people who bottle themselves (compared to 1983); that was all starting at that time.
Anyway, that’s by way of a preamble. I’ll move on to 1988. Having done a 10 year along tasting with professional friends in England of Bordeaux, and, indeed, a 3 year on tasting, and a 10 year on tasting if they were good vintages, and we’d been doing this since about 1975, I wanted to do a 10 year on tasting of the 1978 vintage in Burgundy. But the way we accessed the stock was to go into our cellars, our personal cellars, our companies’ cellars and bring wine out. Well, there wasn’t any Burgundy! It had all been sold. Nobody kept it.
At that time I used to stay with a very good friend of mine, a man called Russell Hone, and his wife Becky Wasserman who is an American wine broker. They live just outside Beaune. This Russell Hone, my best friend, he was my best man when I got married, all that sort of thing. I’d been staying with them when I was in Burgundy. They insisted I stayed with them rather than a hotel. It was much more pleasant as well. And she had in her premises a large converted barn. It was a very large room, as high as you can imagine, three stories high, an ideal place to have a tasting. 
And I said to her “Do you think the younger generation would be interested if I said to them let’s do a 10 year on tasting? You go to the tasting, obviously we need a few bottles of your wines.” So, between Becky and the people she dealt with and the people I’d begun to go and see, and had been seeing for 4 or 5 years, we knew just about all the movers and shakers in Burgundy. And I was pretty certain that this younger generation that I’ve been talking about, Dominique Lafons of this world, would be interested. It was the sort of thing that they did, groups in the same village get together and they’d taste wine. They’re friends with each other, and they’re no jealous of each other as they are in Bordeaux.
And, of course, everybody responded like mad. We chose a Sunday in June. I came down from England with two or three sides of smokes salmon, half a farmhouse cheddar, and three cases of Champagne. Russell, who’s a very good cook as well, made a sort of cassoulet using lentils rather than beans. Everybody came. We started at 4 o’clock so that those with young children could come and play football in the back garden. We tasted the vintage. It was just the growers and us. As they left almost everybody said to me “Clive, this is a great idea! This must become a tradition.” And they also said “Next time can you bring me a piece of that cheese?”
So we’ve done it every since.
Occasionally we have to sit down and prune out some outsiders, otherwise it gets too many. The growers want to be on their own so that they can talk to each other about their wines or other wines without feeling they are being eavesdropped by somebody. So, occasionally we have to weed out Becky Wasserman’s shareholders or other people from America or, indeed, England who feel they’ve got a right. Sometimes some of us have to rather cruel. I just had to say ‘no’ to a lady called Sarah Marsh who has a Burgundy sort of newsletter, rather like Burghound on your side of the world.
So as I say, it is literally the growers and Becky and I and Russell, and that’s about it. We do it every year. And we’ll be tasting 1999. And it will be delicious! I bought lots of 1999. I had a lot of money, I’d made lots of money from one book, so I bought a lot of ‘99. I’ve already been pillaging my cellar, tasting bottles that I know are not going to be there on Sunday. Because I go to the states every year, from the end of March to the end of April, and this year I did lots of ten year on tastings there. So I’ve already got an archive with about 100 notes on them. (laughs) And we’ll have 70 or more on Sunday. I shall spend most of next week typing it up. Then it will go onto the website.
Do you have another book in you?
CC No. I’ve been contemplating writing fiction. If it wasn’t for the fact that I’m absolutely certain I would find it practically impossible to find a publisher because nobody would be interested in publishing a first novel of somebody who’s 68, or going to be 68. And that’s rather sort of put me off. But I did work on a book and it all worked out from a to zed. I just haven’t got round to typing it up. And I always seem to have something else to do these days. The time just absolutely flashes by. I said to myself “Good God, it’s practically July!”
The answer is, books? No. Articles, yes, if any body is willing to commission me. Which means the Quarterly Review of Wines, in means occasionally Decanter magazine. And then there is the World of Fine Wine which will accept a sort of resume of the 10 year on tasting.
I very much enjoy that magazine. Well, what will you be drinking tonight?
CC Tonight? Well, if you live on your own, you find if you cook something you’ve usually got enough for two, three, if not four. Yesterday I made myself a sort of pork fillet quasi goulash. You don’t want to talk about pork tenderloin…. Do you cook?
Yes, I cook, though I’m a vegetarian.
CC Right. Well, I don’t eat much meat. In fact, I eat very little meat because I don’t like the bloody bits of it. I don’t eat red meat. But one of the bits of meat that I do eat occasionally is pork fillet because you can cook it to death and then it no longer is red. I don’t eat roasts or chops or steaks, but I do eat pork fillet. Anyway, I made this goulash yesterday and all I’ve got to do is heat it up. And I have strawberries coming out of my ears! And one of my neighbors, every three days he brings me a bucket of cherries! (laughs) Because he’s got cherries coming out of his ears. That, if you like, is the dessert; strawberries and cream and I’m between cheese at the moment because I’m waiting to pick off a hunk that is being sent down for Sunday [the 10 year tasting]. I don’t have any cheese at the moment. I don’t really eat French cheese. I much prefer English cheese.
And the wine?
CC Oh, nothing special. I don’t open up anything special when it’s just me unless there is a particular reason, like the ‘99 tasting I was talking about. So my house red is the Côtes du Rhône of Guigal, which is very good. I bought it directly from them. It costs me about 4 plus piddly shit Euros, plus the transport, five Euros and a bit, all in. And I have a similar white wine, a Bordeaux from Chateau Thieuley in the Entre-du-Mers, a non-oaky version, which also costs me about the same amount. Those are my basic house wines. I will buy some decent Macon or some Pinot Noir from around here, Côtes-du-Beaune-Villages from somebody like Jadot. Or Alsace Riesling from Trimbach.
As soon as I put the phone down I shall go and have a glass of Chateau Thieuley, and then when my goulash is warmed up I shall change to red.
Well, I won’t keep you! Thank you so very much. It’s been an honor to speak with you.
CC Don’t talk about honor. I am no more special than anybody else. But it’s very kind of you to write something about me.
Thank you.
CC You’re welcome.
Admin
