Another World Waugh

By C. Steven Tomashefsky

A Paper Read to the Chicago Literary Club

March 22, 2010

©2010 C. Steven Tomashefsky

You already know the first world Waugh: Evelyn, the internationally known author of Brideshead Revisited, Vile Bodies, The Loved One, and almost 20 other novels. Then there is the second world Waugh: Evelyn’s brother Alec, an author even more prolific than his younger sibling. But the Waugh story doesn’t end there. Other authors in the family include Evelyn’s son Auberon, Auberon’s son Alexander, and Alexander’s great-grandfather Arthur. Alexander has a son who, as far as I know, has yet to publish anything. I suppose he is an undeclared Waugh.

This paper has little to do with those Waughs. But I hesitate to jump right in to my real topic, which is wine, a subject of great interest to Evelyn, Alec, and Auberon Waugh, who all wrote books about it. Indeed, the first book on wine I ever read, the book that taught me much of what I know, was Alec Waugh’s Wines and Spirits, published in 1968 as a volume in the great Time-Life Foods of the World series. Auberon Waugh wrote on wine for several English periodicals and, in 1986, published Waugh on Wine, a collection of his somewhat quirky columns, which novelist Jay McInerney calls “some of the most pungent wine writing of the century” – by which he means the most sarcastic. And Evelyn Waugh, it may surprise you to know, wrote a lovely slim book titled Wine in Peace and War, privately published around 1947 by the London wine-selling firm of Saccone & Speed, whose history the book chronicles.

Wine is a subject that inspires strong reactions. People who know little about wine feel the danger of being looked down on. People who know a lot feel the danger of being labeled snobs. There seems to be no socially acceptable right amount of knowledge to have. In his little book, Evelyn Waugh put his finger on the essential dilemma:

[T]he first and essential thing to be borne in mind about wine is that it is something made to be enjoyed. The pleasure it gives is the only ultimate test of any vintage. The corollary of this is that like all good works of man, its pleasure is enormously enhanced by knowledge and experience. We cannot all be connoisseurs. For that special gifts and opportunities are required. Moreover it is quite possible to be a connoisseur and to lack at the same time all sense of enjoyment. Many literary critics have this sorry gift.

Today’s most widely followed wine critic, who freely describes himself as a hedonist, is Robert M. Parker, Jr., whose books and bi-monthly publication, The Wine Advocate, are alleged to have the power to make or break a wine and whose opinions on wine-growing and wine-making techniques have gained an astonishing world-wide following.

Parker’s influence over what people buy cannot be denied. Matt Kramer, a thoughtful writer who has a regular column in The Wine Spectator, Parker’s main competitor, claims that the great Bordeaux châteaux do not even set their prices (which vary annually) until they read his ratings of samples tasted before the wine is bottled.

Parker rates wines on a 100-point scale, which is really a 50-point scale, since the worst swill rates at least 50. He has said he likes the 100-point scale because Americans are used to grading things that way. And he seems to be right: it’s somehow easier – at least for most Americans – to view a 100-rated wine as perfect than, say, a 20-point wine or a five-star wine (to use scales other critics have adopted).

Another source of Parker’s power is his apparent freedom from conflicts of interest. His publication, The Wine Advocate, runs no advertising, and though he accepts some freebies from winemakers, he buys a significant portion of the wines he reviews. The relationship between critics and their subjects is often ambiguous and confused. Most critics convince themselves – rightly or not – that they can be objective despite friendships, feuds, favors, funding, and family. Parker, however, seems to try hard to reduce their impact.

We are of course awash in critics of all sorts. Just open the newspaper and you can find movie critics, book critics, music critics, theater critics, restaurant critics, architecture critics, and fashion critics. Consumer Reports compares and rates cars, computers, cameras, credit cards, tires, treadmills, tools, televisions, and even trans-fat-free doughnuts. Way back in 1962, the Consumers Union published a small book titled Wines & Spirits, describing wines rated by a panel of unnamed “expert tasters” who had “no commercial ties to producers.” The book is uncharacteristically mealy-mouthed in its conclusions. After touting its tasting panel’s expertise and independence, it says:

It must be borne in mind that, although the judgments offered have been made by experts, the experience of taste is a highly individual and personal matter. Your own preferences may not agree with those of CU’s experts. In fact CU’s experts did not always agree with each other; and it is quite possible that some other group of experts might have arrived at somewhat different conclusions.

Well, all right, taste is individual and personal, but even to Consumers Union, only “somewhat.”

Nevertheless, consumer criticism serves useful purposes. If you’re on the market for, say, a snow blower or an SUV, you have several options at various prices. How should you decide which to buy? Or if you’re in a strange city and you want to know where to eat, you might find it helpful to open a Zagat Guide and see how the local restaurants are rated – in Zagat’s case, on a 30-point scale. Most of us lack sufficient information to make those choices with confidence.

Deciding what wine to buy can be particularly difficult for several reasons. First, there are so thousands of choices. For example, on the web site of the local retailer Binny’s Beverage Depot, I recently found 2,443 wines listed at under $15.00 a bottle, 1,663 wines at $15.00 to $30.00, and 746 at $30.00 to $50.00. Are there 746 snow blowers on the market?

The second complicating factor for wine is its variability. Wine is a product of both nature and nurture, produced in annual growing cycles. A wine’s taste is greatly influenced by the weather during the growing season, the farming and winemaking techniques used in a given year, and the length of time the wine has been in the bottle. So brand loyalty means little. If you tasted and liked the 2003 Château Lafite, that is no guaranty you’ll also like the 2004. Some wines are produced and blended to taste the same year in and year out. That consistency accounts, in part, for the success of such wines as the famous “Two Buck Chuck.” But most better wines are not so consistent.

Finally, wines change over time, occasionally for the better, often for the worse. Some wines, unattractively acidic and mouth-puckeringly tannic when young, in due course become perfumed and harmonious. That process can take a few years or, in some cases several decades. So how do you know whether they’re worth buying and holding – and if you hold them, how do you know when to pop the cork?

Those and other problems can make buying wine a daunting task, making a Consumer Reports approach very useful. And that’s exactly what Robert Parker set out to provide. Each issue of The Wine Advocate reviews several hundred wines, providing brief descriptions, a numerical rating, and, where applicable, a prediction of when the wine will be at its best to drink.

Parker’s 100-point marking system is controversial. He acknowledges that on the cover of every issue, where he states:

While some have suggested that scoring is not well suited to a beverage that has been romantically extolled for centuries, wine is no different from any consumer product. There are specific standards of quality that full-time wine professionals recognize, and there are benchmark wines against which others can be judged. . . . Scoring wines is simply taking a professional’s opinion and applying some sort of numerical system to it on a consistent basis.

Perhaps Parker’s most powerful detractor is the English wine writer Hugh Johnson, these days the dean of Britain’s wine press. Johnson’s critique illustrates the divide between Parker and writers of the older school:

[Parker] thinks the wine industry needs its Ralph Nader. . . . “Wine,” wrote Parker, “is no different from any other consumer product.” Oh yes it is, I thought. . . . But this was America. There is no need to recount where Parker’s scores took him. He had invented a system, that supposedly took the mystery, the guesswork out of choosing wine. This guy will not only tell you if it’s good, but exactly how good.

Johnson himself uses a four star rating system. The different approaches, it seems to me, reflect two philosophical premises. First, Parker believes that he can make – and that consumers want him to make – fairly fine quality distinctions. Johnson apparently prefers to group wines in broader categories, with a four-star wine probably encompassing everything within Parker’s range of, say 95 to 100. Is that because he is less sure of being able to distinguish a 95 from a 96-point wine? Or because he doesn’t believe the distinction exists? He doesn’t say.

Second, Parker’s system assumes that consumers will always want to buy the best available wine in a given price range. Johnson – and here is where he takes issue with the notion that wine is like any other consumer product – believes that the concept of “best” is misleading and that wines can differ widely in character without differing in quality. In a sense, the two approaches reflect their authors’ backgrounds. Parker trained as a lawyer, and lawyers find and articulate fine distinctions. Johnson studied English literature, and although literary critics should be able to say that some of Shakespeare’s plays are more successful than others, most would hesitate to say “Macbeth” is a 100 but “Julius Caesar” only a 97.

Another prominent member of the anti-Parker party is Michael Broadbent, who once worked at Saccone & Speed and for over forty years headed the wine department at Christie’s auction house. “Parker doesn’t understand the difference between fruit and wine,” Broadbent has said, reflecting a view that great wines in their maturity – say a Bordeaux wine with twenty or more years of bottle age – tend to lose their overt fruitiness and develop a more complex set of flavors. So while Broadbent might find aromas of cedar or mushrooms in a properly matured bottle, Parker’s highest praise is often reserved for wines he somewhat inelegantly describes as “fruit bombs.”

Parker’s verbal descriptions are also controversial. He employs an original (though by now widely imitated) vocabulary almost bewildering in its specificity. For example in a recent issue he offers this description of a wine rated 98-100 points:

. . . an extraordinary blockbuster aromatic profile of lead pencil shavings, forest floor, black fruits, and a hint of unsmoked, high-class cigar tobacco.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t know what pencil shavings, forest floors, and unsmoked, high-class cigar tobacco taste like, and I’m fairly sure I don’t want to know. An economist at Princeton has compiled a list of some 123 adjectives Parker has used to describe wine, including many terms one might recognize, such as “anise,” “blackcurrant,” “nutmeg,” “prune,” and “violets.” Other terms – such as “angular,” “scorched earth,” “spicy earth,” “refined fruit,” “sweaty fruit,” “zesty mineral,” “crushed rocks,” and “underbrush” – seem far less obvious, and not necessarily attractive, though I don’t believe Parker uses those terms pejoratively. Above all, they comprise a highly personal taste vocabulary that very likely helps Parker to fix a wine’s taste in his mind but is of little use to others.

Parker’s writing style has had broad influence. Here, for example, is a tasting note I saw the other day on the wine-fan web site Snooth.com:

This has classic notes of tobacco, leather and limestone on the nose, with a nuance of vanilla and lovely grace notes of smoke and slightly herbaceous/herbal sod. Displaying a wonderfully feminine and firmly mid-bodied mouthfeel, with fine acidity and rich flavors of leather, red currants, and just a touch of rust.

Sod, rust – perhaps such prose would persuade you to buy a wine. Perhaps it just confuses you, as it does me. On the other hand, Auberon Waugh (the “pungent” one, you’ll recall) has written that our critics aren’t half wild enough in their descriptions:

[A]lthough there is a well-worn vocabulary of praise to describe good wine – it can be muscular, well-knit, complex, fragrant, etc. – there is no equivalent glossary to describe what is bad. My own feeling, despite several unhappy experiences, is that wine-writing should be camped up . . . . Bizarre and improbable side-tastes should be proclaimed: mushrooms, rotting wood, black treacle, burned pencils, condensed milk, sewage, the smell of French railway stations or ladies’ underwear – anything to get away from the accepted list of fruit and flowers. As I say, I am not sure it helps much, but it is more amusing to read.

And so it is. But what Auberon Waugh had proposed in jest has, it appears, become more or less the serious norm

Writing about wine is an ancient profession. Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, describes many grape varieties and the locations where they produced the best wines. But the first half of the twentieth century saw a remarkable output of British books on wine, many of which remain classics of their genre. Most were written by amateurs – English professors, barristers, architects, essayists, and art critics. Otherwise, they tended to be in the “wine trade,” gentlemen who sold wine for a living. Their books provided little guidance to the wine purchaser. Perhaps that was because their readers never wandered into wine “superstores” wondering what to bring home for dinner. Typically, they formed a relationship with a gentleman wine merchant and placed themselves in his hands.

Among that great outpouring of books was George Saintsbury’s Notes on a Cellar Book, published in 1920. Saintsbury was a literary essayist and professor of English literature at the University of Edinburgh. He wrote the book in his retirement, when gout had ended his active drinking career, so it is necessarily a memoir of past glories. Other than to call a wine “good,” “bad,” “sound,” or “excellent,” Saintsbury rarely described what he had drunk.

P. Morton Shand, an English architect and architectural critic, published A Book of French Wines in 1928 and, the next year, A Book of Other Wines -- Than French. Shand provided a firm grounding in the geography and history of wine making, but he does not describe specific wines. Incidentally, Shand was the grandfather of Camilla Parker-Bowles, Prince Charles’ current wife.

In 1931, H. Warner Allen, an Oxford scholar, essayist, and sometime mystery novelist, published The Romance of Wine, a book that was part technical – describing in detail how wine is made – and, like Saintsbury’s book, part reminiscence of great wines drunk in years past. Here he is on Château Latour (a leading Bordeaux vineyard of which I will have more to say) of the 1869 vintage:

Beautiful to the eye, this great wine breathed forth a perfume worthy of the gods. . . . The palate recognized a heroic wine, such a drink as might refresh the warring archangels, and the perfection of its beauty called up the noble phrase “terrible as an army with banners”. The full organ swell of a triumphal march might express its appeal in terms of music.

I suppose I’d really want to drink that wine if I could have found it, but even to Allen’s readers in 1931, it was a historical curiosity.

The last of the great pre-war British wine books was Maurice Healy’s Stay Me with Flagons, published in 1940. Healy was a barrister, and it seems he drank a great deal. His book is a methodical review of the various French wine types and his experience of them, focusing on the most famous but including many of the less-well-known. Healy was fairly free of snobbery and was prepared to recognize quality in obscure wines that were more affordable than the so-called “first growths” like Château Lafite and Château Latour. Notably, Healy avoided almost any description of the wines he had drunk.

Alec Waugh’s beautifully illustrated introductory guide in the Time-Life Foods of the World series was the beginning of my own wine education. As a teenager, I took it off my mother’s cook- book shelf and read it again and again, though I was too young to buy wine and only occasionally tasted it. My father’s approach to buying wine tended to follow a brand-loyalty approach. He bought a lot of Mateus and Lancers, two heavily marketed Portuguese rosé wines known for their consistency, slight sweetness, and in Lancers’ case, a bit of fizz. At some point my father found he liked a French white burgundy called Pouilly-Fuissé and a French red wine called Beaujolais – at least in part because he liked saying the names. Till the end of his life he bought little else.

One other wine briefly caught my father’s fancy. Near our house was a winery called High Tor Vineyards, located on a promontory over the Hudson River. High Tor was an experiment conducted by a former radio scriptwriter named Everett Crosby, who in 1952 harvested his first vintage. My father liked the idea that we had a local winery, and when he learned about it he drove over and bought one mixed case of their red and their white. Unfortunately, the wine was not even half-way decent. When the case of High Tor wine ran out, my father went back to Pouilly-Fuissé and Beaujolais.

It wasn’t until I had married and moved to Chicago that I began seriously to consider buying good wine. In those days, Gallo wine was what we could afford, though for an occasional splurge we bought Almadén, which was really not much better.

Then one day at the public library I came across a book called Diary of a Winetaster, by Harry Waugh, published in 1972. This author, later described by Auberon Waugh – probably in jest – as a “distant kinsman,” quickly became my tutor in all things vinous, as he was for a generation of wine drinkers around the world. He was widely regarded as being the most gifted wine taster of the post-World War II generation, even by many in France. He was the single most important influence in making California wine – particularly Napa Valley wine – respectable outside California. He was a major force in gaining commercial and consumer acceptance for the lesser-known wines of Bordeaux that were still affordable, and he championed Beaujolais (endearing him to my father) when most British wine critics paid it no serious attention. At the same time, he relentlessly promoted the first-growth Bordeaux wine Château Latour and, in doing so, appears to have influenced California wine-making styles in the direction Robert Parker was later to champion.

Waugh’s introduction to Diary of a Winetaster set his agenda:

There are two ways of writing about wine. The first, the usual one, is to narrate the history, the facts and figures of the various districts, which after all do not change much and, in a general sense, describe the wine. Far too many books have already been written in this category, especially on the wines of France, for this really means dressing up old material in a fresh guise. The second is to endeavour to write about the wines themselves, with the express object of assisting would-be purchasers as much as possible to make their selection.

Waugh’s book took the second path. His consumer-oriented approach was novel at the time, and the man himself was an entirely original figure on the wine scene.

Waugh was born in 1904. His father, a veterinarian, died four years later, leaving his family in a precarious financial position. Waugh attended a public school but dropped out at age 16 when his family could no longer afford the tuition. As he relates:

Being the third son of an impoverished widow, I had to leave school long before I had the opportunity of passing any exams . . . (whether given the chance I could have done so is another matter). Succeeding generations have no idea whatsoever how difficult conditions were at that time culminating in the desperate economic depression of 1929/31. Unless you had some qualification or other, it was almost impossible to get a job, and I had none.

He held and lost various jobs for almost fifteen years. Then, as he tells us, “at the age of 30, I struggled into the wine trade in the humble guise of a day-book clerk in an ancient City firm, long since defunct, called H.B. Fearon & Sons.”

Fearons had an affiliate called Block, Grey & Block in Mayfair, which catered to the carriage trade. After several years on the Fearons side of the business, Waugh was called to Mayfair to interview for a sales job. “I remember thinking that perhaps the road to success was within my grasp,” he wrote. “Alas, because I had not been to Eton or Oxford, nor was I distinguished at any kind of sport such as a blue for cricket, away I was sent with my tail between my legs.” Eventually, however, he was posted to the Mayfair branch, where he achieved success despite his lack of pedigree.

At his own expense, Waugh visited the French vineyards during his vacations to broaden his experience. Apparently that wasn’t done much by wine merchants in those days, and it enabled Waugh to build relationships and train his tasting skills beyond those of his coworkers. His career at Block, Grey & Block was cut short by the war, but after serving six years he returned to the wine trade, joining John Harvey & Sons, distributors of Harvey’s Bristol Cream sherry and other branded wines. Waugh took over Harveys’ table-wine program, significantly expanding its presence in that market. He regularly traveled to France and Germany to taste new wine and buy it for Harveys to sell, frequently coming across unknown or lesser-known wines of high quality that could be sold inexpensively. He also spearheaded Harveys’ sales efforts, convincing buyers that these wines they’d never heard of were worth their serious attention.

In 1962, Harveys became part-owners of Château Latour, and at the age of 58 Waugh was given a seat on Latour’s board of directors. He never explains exactly what his duties were. Seemingly his main job was to visit the Château frequently and drink as many of the old wines in its cellar as he could. But the position was an enormous source of pride, and for the rest of his life he rarely missed an opportunity to promote the wine. His connection to Latour was not exactly hidden in his books, though it wasn’t always obvious either. But that gets a bit ahead of the story.

During his trips to French and German vineyards, and during his sales tours to the United States and elsewhere, Waugh picked up the habit of making notes on the wines he had tasted. When he returned to the home office, he had the notes typed up and circulated them to his junior colleagues (among whom was Michael Broadbent in his pre-Christie’s days) for their education. Several of his friends, including the Cambridge historian J.H. Plumb, urged him to put the notes in book form, and in 1966, he published a slim volume called Bacchus on the Wing. As Professor Plumb’s introduction rightly observes, Waugh’s descriptions were “artfully artless – the elegant, casual, conversational style imparting, so effortlessly, great detail and deep understanding.”

Bacchus begins with a 1964 trip to Bordeaux arranged by Harveys to promote American sales. Waugh was accompanied by Poppy Cannon, an American cook-book author who had published the authoritative Can Opener Cook Book. Their two-day drive from London to Bordeaux was punctuated by visits to several Michelin-starred restaurants, presumably on Harveys’ expense account. On reaching Bordeaux, they visited several châteaux to taste the 1963 vintage, still in barrels. Unfortunately, 1963 was a terrible year. Nevertheless, Waugh found quality in the Latour:

A reasonably dark colour and a deeper bouquet than the others of this year [he writes], and it has much more fruit and body. Some people are saying that it is almost the only good Bordeaux made in 1963 – I agree, but then I’m prejudiced!

Poppy Cannon was a friend of Josephine Baker, the expatriate dancer who lived nearby. So they stopped in to visit her and stayed the night. That caused some confusion, as Waugh explains:

Having lived in France for so many years, she took it for granted that I was Poppy’s lover, and so had put us into a suite with adjoining rooms. She could not believe that ours was just an exceptionally nice but purely platonic friendship!

I should mention that Waugh had been married before the war but was long divorced. His roving eye was barely concealed in his notes, though it was never directed at Ms. Cannon, who incidentally was married to Walter White of the NAACP.

The trip continued to Burgundy, where, in one grower’s cellar, Waugh sounded a note that seems to preview today’s Parker-versus-Broadbent debate:

I liked his [wine] better than the one I had tasted just before, because it is bigger and has more fruit. I say I liked, but it is really what the English public likes; the very distinguished, very elegant wines that the French prefer are not so much appreciated at home. The burgundy that is wanted for England has to have plenty of guts and body, and that’s not easy to find . . . .

In other words, the preference for big, fruit-driven wines over “elegant” wines is not a new phenomenon created by Parker or even by American tastes. But Waugh goes back and forth on that issue, as we shall see.

Waugh himself can easily be described as a hedonist. He describes many meals on the trip in great detail, enthusing over oysters whenever they were available. At a lunch stop in Burgundy, he and Poppy Cannon enjoyed grives en brochette. “In England I know we disapprove of shooting thrushes,” he writes, “and so do I, but golly they are good to eat!”

The book next chronicles an April 1965 trip to America, beginning in New York, where Waugh made several sales calls on Harveys’ behalf. With a sort of wide-eyed naiveté that marks much of his writing, he describes a visit to Harlem:

This has been a day of particular interest because most of it has been spent in Harlem, my first visit there. On the way, the site where one of the scenes of ‘West Side Story’ was shot was pointed out to me. . . . After lunch we called on Roy Campanella, the proprietor of the leading Harlem liquor store at the corner of 134^th Street and 7^th Avenue. . . . He was a legendary sports hero of the Dodgers of Brooklyn before they moved to Los Angeles in 1958. . . . Roy told me of the growing interest among the negro population in table wines, whereas up to only a year or so ago, there was no interest at all. He tastes all his new wines himself and then tries them out on his family in order that he can gauge the public taste and later advise his customers. Hitherto, I have not come across this close attention during my visits to the smaller liquor stores in America.

Journeying on to California, Waugh relates an event that, in retrospect, must be seen as one of the most important moments in the history of modern American wine. A year or two earlier, he had written a magazine article describing his tastings of many old vintages of Château Latour. In response, an American wine collector, William Dickerson, had organized a tasting of the same wines in San Francisco and had published an article comparing the results. With characteristic curiosity and bonhomie, Waugh wrote Dickerson, a Marin County psychiatrist, and suggested they meet when Waugh was in California.

On May 22, 1965, Dickerson picked him and drove him to the Napa Valley for dinner at the home of Joe and Alice Heitz, owners of a small winery.

Toward the end [Waugh writes], one or two 1962 Pinot Chardonnays were produced. One of these bore Joe Heitz’s label and was quite outstanding. It was so good in fact that I asked for a case to be sent to me in London.

That may have been the first case of California wine ever purchased by an English connoisseur. And the dinner was the beginning of a long and close friendship with Joe Heitz, whose wines Waugh came to love and promote almost as much as Latour.

Later that week, Waugh made another acquaintance that became, if anything, even more significant. On May 26, 1965, Dickerson’s friends, Bernard and Belle Rhodes, picked him up and drove him to Dickerson’s house for dinner. Bernard Rhodes, known as Barney, was a dermatologist who had become one of the Bay Area’s leading wine collectors. Like Dickerson, he and Belle owned a vineyard in Napa and were close friends of Joe Heitz. Waugh and the Rhodeses quickly bonded, and almost every year for the next thirty Waugh was a guest in their home. Barney Rhodes eventually became chief operating officer of the Kaiser Heath System, but it seems he never lost an opportunity to interest people in California wine. Two generations of winemakers, restaurateurs, and wine writers knew him as a friend and supporter. Though Waugh maintained close friendships with many Californians over the years, meeting Barney and Belle Rhodes sealed Waugh’s commitment to the California vineyards.

The 1965 trip to California included tastings at several other wineries, most of which are now gone or would not be considered particularly important today. Waugh was definitely impressed. As he wrote:

From this all too brief experience, and sticking my neck out rather dangerously, I would say the best Pinot Chardonnay of California compares favourably with a good estate-bottled Pouilly Fuissé [my father’s favorite white wine] and the best Cabernet Sauvignon with a good Bourgeois Supérieur growth from Bordeaux, but the California wines in this class are relatively more expensive.

Waugh’s account of his trip to California ends on a more baroque note, again reflecting his almost child-like wonder at new things and his penchant for saying what was on his mind regardless of the context:

There is plenty of night life in San Francisco and the rage at the moment is what they call the “topless deal,” in fact toplessness began at a night club in San Francisco called the Condor. One of the waitresses wanted to get on in life and now Carol Doda is such a big attraction that people queue up in the street to see her. It appears she assists nature by injections of silicone and this is naturally a big topic of conversation!

Waugh’s next stop was Chicago, where he was equally wide-eyed, if not quite so racy:

Just imagine, opposite the Continental Plaza a new building has just been started, and when it is finished it will have 100 floors; what a country this is!

Of course he meant the John Hancock building.

His expense account no doubt exhausted, Waugh returned home. Change was afoot. In 1966, Harveys was acquired in a hostile takeover by the Showerings Group, which had made lorries-full of money selling Babycham, a sparkling pear cider tasting somewhere along the continuum between Boone’s Farm and Lancers. At 62, Waugh decided to retire. He was especially gratified, however, that Showerings asked him to continue as their representative on the Latour board. If promoting Latour was one of his jobs, he never let them down.

Waugh then embarked on the career that lasted the rest of his life: lecturer, traveler, consultant, and bon vivant. Waugh’s second book, The Changing Face of Wine, published in 1968, was largely a set of tasting notes. With his third book, Pick of the Bunch (1970), his routine was more or less set. As the book explains, Waugh’s friends Barney and Belle Rhodes, together with San Francisco wine merchant Karl Petrowsky, had organized a series of lectures for him on the west coast. According to Waugh, that had never before been attempted.

The trip became Waugh’s model for the future: a series of dinner parties, lectures, and marathon comparative tastings, combined with visits to winemakers and tours of his hosts’ enormous wine cellars. Part of his method was to reinforce his welcome by keeping up a constant stream of flattery, mentioning everyone he met by name and ceaselessly praising their discernment, their wine collections, their cooking skills, and the beauty of their homes. Of his Bay Area friends, he wrote:

Without exaggeration, it is safe to say that this is the most knowledgeable circle on vinous subjects that I have ever encountered, either amateur or professional. With fabulous collections of wine (one of them consists of 11,300 bottle and all good stuff!) their orbit encompasses not only the finest wine from Europe but also, and most comprehensively, the produce of their own native vineyards of California; in fact, many of the members are vineyard owners themselves.

And so he went, from house to house, where all the cooking was perfect and the hosts freely allowed him to select wines of his choice from their cellars. Clearly they enjoyed his company as much as he did theirs. He had a gift for making friends and, for a man considered to be one of the world’s greatest wine tasters, he was remarkably humble.

Waugh’s humility comes through in his accounts of the many wine tastings over which he presided. The tastings usually involved comparisons of five to twenty wines, sometimes even more. Each taster would rate the wine in order of preference. Waugh then published the group ranking as well as his personal ranking, accompanied by a descriptive comment and a score on a twenty-point scale. He often conceded that the group ranking may have been more accurate than his own. For example, of a tasting of eleven vintages of Louis Martini cabernet sauvignon, he says, “As may be seen from the results, I was wildly off target with some of them.” His note on the 1963 vintage is even more explicit: “My placing 4, group placing 10. (Clearly I boobed here!).”

Nevertheless, Waugh was clearly taken with the possibilities for wine in California. “Comparisons are odious,” he wrote, “ but [Beaulieu Vineyards cabernet sauvignon private reserve] could well be described as the Latour or Lafite of the Napa Valley.” And again, “Comparisons are odious but I often compare [Heitz] Martha’s Vineyard [cabernet sauvignon] of the Napa Valley with Latour of Pauillac, because both of them are such powerful, masculine wines.”

Recognizing that the best wines are often expensive and rare, Waugh’s lack of pretension and – it is fair to say – his consumer orientation are nowhere better shown than in his willingness to take even California jug wines seriously. He recounts a tasting of gallon bottles by such mass producers as Gallo, Italian Swiss Colony, Almadén, Paul Masson, and Franzia, finding many of them quite agreeable and, in a word he often employed, “useful.”

After his first lecture-tour success in California, Waugh had the good fortune to meet several wine merchants from Washington, DC who had started a wine-of-the-month club called Les Amis du Vin to promote wine education and increase their customer base. By the early 1970s, Waugh was coming regularly to the U.S. for lecture and tasting tours sponsored by LADV and its growing number of chapters across the country. The usual routine was for him to fly to a city and be met at the airport by his hosts, who would put him up for the night, inevitably providing him with a perfectly cooked meal and an interesting bottle or two of wine. The lecture and tasting would follow, sometimes attended by several hundred people.

The schedule could be punishing. A typical tour included stops in Washington, DC, Memphis, Buffalo, Tampa, Ft. Lauderdale, New Orleans, Jackson, MS, Birmingham, AL, Oklahoma City, San Francisco, Portland, OR, Los Angeles, San Diego, Newport Beach, Rock Island, Detroit, Logansport, IN, Chicago, Rochester, NY, Saddle River, NJ, Staunton, VA, Williamsburg, VA, Washington, DC, and New York City. In the early 1970s, Robert Parker, who lived near Baltimore, began attending LADV tastings in Washington to learn more about wine. Alas, neither he nor Waugh has recorded whether Parker ever attended one of Waugh’s lectures.

Waugh’s routine usually involved a few weeks’ stay in California after his LADV duties ended. Nearly every day featured a mammoth tasting of rare wines provided from his friends’ cellars, accompanied by a perfect meal. Everything he ate was wonderful, even, on one case, “the splendid cookies for which Ray Dickerson is so rightly famed.” It seems virtually all of his California friends were famous or noted for something as far as Waugh was concerned, most of all Barney Rhodes as one of the most discerning wine tasters he had ever met, a point he makes again and again in his books.

Earlier I made the claim that Waugh was almost singlehandedly responsible for putting California wine on the world scene. Some of you may know of the famous 1976 Paris wine tasting at which California wines were rated first over French wines by experienced French tasters. As a public relations coup, that certainly grabbed headlines. But Waugh was conducting and writing about similar comparative tastings for years before that, pushing open the door that made the 1976 tasting possible. Indeed, Robert Mondavi, probably the Napa Valley’s best-known wine maker, once called Waugh’s arrival in the Napa Valley “almost like the second coming of Christ” for California wine.

At one early tasting in 1972, Waugh presented several American wines to some of England’s leading experts, among them Michael Broadbent and Hugh Johnson. Included were a California chardonnay, an upstate New York chardonnay, and a white burgundy from a respected producer, also made from the chardonnay grape. As Waugh reports, “everyone without exception chose the [California] Chardonnay as the best of the three. . . . It was comforting to have my own opinion so amply confirmed.” If the event was a eureka moment for Hugh Johnson, he neglects to mention it in his autobiography. More interesting to me was Waugh’s decision to include the upstate New York chardonnay, which was evidently light-years ahead of the High Tor White my father had bought just a few years earlier.

In May 1974, on a trip to the Napa Valley, Waugh visited a new winery called Chateau Montelena and tasted its 1973 chardonnay, which was still in barrels. His tasting note: “One of the best I have so far come across.” Two years later, that wine placed first in the Paris tasting. Though Waugh barely mentions the Paris tasting in his books, he does take credit for having discovered the 1973 Montelena chardonnay: “[B]efore that tasting I had been the only person who had recognised its special quality.”

Waugh’s sojourns among well-heeled West Coast wine collectors gave him the opportunity to taste many spectacular wines that he couldn’t afford himself. At one such tasting, he drank the 1961 Château Petrus, a wine from the Pomerol region of Bordeaux. Waugh notes that, in the early 1950s, Petrus and Pomerol wines in general were not well known in England. He was instrumental in popularizing them and – because Petrus is very small, in bidding up the price to the point where it is now Bordeaux’s most expensive wine (one internet auction site currently lists the 1961 at $1,900 for a half-bottle, with the bidding not yet over). Waugh’s note of the tasting is short but gushing:

Very deep color, tremendously rich bouquet, round and rich, and a whole cornucopia of flavours – well nigh perfection. Still some tannin to lose. 20+/20”

For comparison, here is Robert Parker’s opinion on the same wine:

100. A perfect wine, the 1961 Petrus has an unforgettable bouquet of ripe blackcurrants, warm-melted buttery caramel, and toasty vanillin oak. Massively proportioned, yet so impeccably balanced, this wine has exotic, opulent, astonishingly concentrated flavors. Extremely dense, with a port-like viscosity, this staggering wine is just entering [in 1985] a period of maturity that will take it well into the next century. It is an awesome wine.

And here is Michael Broadbent’s review:

Colour “black as Egypt’s night”, opulent, “rich, rich, rich”, spicy, even peppery (alcohol), chunky yet velvety, with soft ripe mulberry-like fruit, fleshy, “almost cloying”, a “railroad chairman’s wine” -- which sounded a rather old-fashioned expression: well, an oil-rich potentate or tycoon’s wine, for the reason that you do not have to be an expert to appreciate the wine, you wallow in it; and you have to have that sort of wealth to have it in your cellar, let alone to order it in a restaurant. But I must stop being condescending. It is a superb, almost unbeatable mouthful. . . . ***** and no end in sight.

Well might you ask what Parker’s or Broadbent’s ornate descriptions – very different but equally over-the-top – add that Waugh hasn’t already said.

Moreover, let us remember that Broadbent has positioned himself as the anti-Parker, so it is odd that they both gave this particular wine the highest rating possible. Broadbent has written that Château Petrus – clearly one of Waugh’s favorites, perhaps even more than Latour – represents all that is wrong with modern, Parker-influenced winemaking:

[T]he North American palate, with notable exceptions like Dr. Bernard Rhodes, has a built-in preference for the obvious, which accounts for the appeal of . . . Latour of almost any vintage, and leaving aside supply and price, that arch flesh-pot Petrus. All the foregoing have a readily noticeable depth of colour, a positive – sometimes overwhelming – bouquet, loads of fruit, and fairly blatant component parts . . . . It is much for the same reason that at comparative tastings, much to the irritation of the Bordelaise, California Cabernet Sauvignons do so well.

So it might be said that the lush style that Parker is said to favor, and that winemakers across the world are now said to imitate in hope of receiving his high rating, is not far off from the Latour-Petrus style Waugh himself ardently championed and urged on his California friends.

Waugh did not surrender entirely to California, at least in red wines. At a blind tasting of eleven 1971 Bordeaux châteaux in San Francisco, the organizers included one highly regarded California cabernet as a ringer. Waugh placed it eleventh, while the group placed it first. This time, instead of suggesting he had “boobed,” Waugh saw something significant in the disparity:

This raises for me a truly riveting point: the difference which appears to be arising between the experienced California palates (there can be little doubt that with all their experience the members of this club have developed highly trained palates) and those of some of us from Europe. . . . [T]here is a definite difference of style and flavour between the cabernets of Bordeaux and those of California; and so it seems to me that the experienced California taster has become accustomed to, shall I say, the special style of his own wine that . . . he has come to prefer it. . . . From my admittedly somewhat limited experience I will not concede that as yet, the cabernets of California have reached the same standard of finesse and elegance as the great wines of Bordeaux. But this, again, is a matter of opinion. The hackneyed cliché vive la difference could possibly be apposite here.

A certain humility – or perhaps an unwillingness to offend his California friends, on whom he had come to rely for part of his income – softens his assessment. In any event Waugh lacks the certitude that both Parker and Broadbent share.

Broadbent was apparently unable to accept even some of Waugh’s own assessments. Several of Waugh’s later books were published by Christie’s and edited by Broadbent. In one of them Waugh reports a tasting comparing the 1968 Beaulieu cabernet with the 1970 Château Lafite:

In spite of its elegance and finesse, I have not so far found the 1970 Lafite among the greatest of its vintage, and it was completely overwhelmed by the weight and magnificence of the 1968 [Beaulieu], universally noted for its quality and a truly remarkable wine.

That comment compelled Broadbent, the editor, to append a footnote: “Frankly, this is like comparing a Rodin bronze with a delicate Meissen porcelain – interesting but a slightly misleading exercise.” I’m not sure Waugh agreed, but obviously he didn’t insist that the footnote be deleted.

And so Waugh’s life went on, following the same annual rounds of LADV chapters, massive dinners and wine tastings with his California friends, and visits to the French vineyards to taste the new wines. Only a few changes intervened. At the age of 70, after many years as a bachelor, he married his “amanuensis,” Prue Waters, who was 33 years his junior. Prue was herself a talented wine taster and, according to Waugh, a Cordon-Bleu-quality cook. She accompanied him on many trips. A year after the marriage, the couple had twins, but that did not seem to interfere with their travels. Waugh’s friends seemed rather amused by the whole thing. Robert Finigan, a California wine critic whose now-defunct wine-review newsletter predated Parker’s by a few years, visited Waugh in those days and reports:

“I only hope,” Harry said to me somewhat wistfully one afternoon at the Waugh’s home in North London, the babies crawling all over him, “that I live long enough for them to remember me.”

Waugh’s new family arrangements did have other ramifications. To raise cash, he sold his large collection of Victorian “fairings,” little porcelain figures something like Hummels. Because his apartment had become too small, he was also forced to sell much of his wine cellar at Christie’s, including irreplaceable bottles from 1928, 1929, and 1961, to finance the purchase of a new home. “Of course,” he wrote, putting the whole thing in perspective, “the exchange in happiness far exceeded anything those superb bottles could hope to offer.”

Waugh published his wine diaries more or less yearly until 1987, when he was 83. But his tasting activity was severely altered in 1983, when he had a bad car accident. His main injury was horrendous for someone in his profession, as he explains: “Owing to a hit on the head, my loss of sense of smell ever since has been total, a grievous thing to happen to someone in the wine business. However, it does seem that since then I may have been developing other faculties with my sense of taste.” Waugh mentions the accident off-handedly in the middle of his last book, never explaining how he was able to provide notes on the bouquets of wines he had been tasting. His friend, the Canadian collector Albert Givton, writes that, at some tastings, he described the wines’ aromas to Waugh, who took the assessment from there.

A combination of factors reduced Waugh’s travels in the 1990s: his accident, the collapse of Les Amis du Vin, and a stroke suffered by Barney Rhodes. In 1990, Givton, Rhodes, and several other old friends held a fundraiser in San Francisco and presented $28,000 to Harry & Prue Waugh as a fund for the education of their children. In 1993, Givton visited the Waughs in London, observing that “Harry has little wine left, as he sold most of it to finance the studies of his twin children, Harriet and Jamie. . . . Harry said that he may never come to North America again, as he has little money left.” Perhaps his last trip to California was in 1994, when his friends hosted a 90th birthday party at the Stanford Court Hotel in San Francisco and drank a dozen old burgundies.

Harry Waugh lived on another seven years. Among many honors, he was made an MBE in 1994. He died after a short illness at the age of 97 in 2001. A long-time colleague at Château Latour described him as, above all, “a man who doesn’t know how to hurt other people or make enemies.”

* * *

Reflecting back in 2003 on his first 25 years’ work, Robert Parker asserted that his reviews, and those of his American colleagues, had revolutionized wine criticism.

Prior to 1978, wine writing was dominated by the British, who rarely published a negative review – very different from today’s candid, pro-consumer writing. This is not to denigrate the enormous contributions of contemporary British writers like Hugh Johnson, Jancis Robinson, Michael Broadbent, Serena Sutcliffe, David Peppercorn, or the late Harry Waugh . . . . But none of those writers, singularly or cumulatively, have had the impact that American wine publications have.

Objectively speaking, Parker is probably right. His reviews substantially impact what large numbers of people buy and even – many people claim – the styles of wines wineries produce. But I don’t think his influence comes from his willingness to publish negative reviews. Waugh gave plenty of them too. We often think of critics as people who enjoy running things down, exposing the awful where the deluded public sees only the good. But Harry Waugh realized that people want to buy and drink wine, not find reasons to leave it on the store shelves. Apart from ceaselessly hawking Château Latour, which people already knew was good, Harry Waugh really made his critical reputation by telling his readers about worthy wines others had neglected or not yet discovered, like the wines of Pomerol, Beaujolais, and California. To be sure, as Frank Prial noted in his New York Times obituary,

[S]ome of [Waugh’s] books, particularly the later ones, were weighed down by page after page describing banal dinners with American wine collectors, inevitably highlighted by what he would lamely call “several remarkable clarets.”

That’s a fair criticism. But despite the overripe flattery of his brilliant hosts, Waugh’s diaries convey his deep love of wine and food as social lubricants that cemented friendships and made life more interesting. Waugh was, and Parker is, a consumers’ advocate. I might use Parker to assist me in choosing what to buy, though reading him is a painful exercise. But I still re-read Waugh. His books make me want to open a bottle and drink with family and friends. And that’s what wine is really for.