Hugh Johnson on Wine: Good Bits from 55 Years of Scribbling

by Hugh Johnson

To say it has the essential qualities of water sounds a pretty back-handed compliment, too, but just as the cool volume of water when you swallow leaves nothing to be desired, so the stony freshness, the flinty, faintly sour fluidity of good Chablis has an elemental completeness. Sweeter?

Chablis, I sometimes think, was sent down to earth as a model for all winemakers to imitate.

In Provence I drink rosé and Provençal reds, warm with Grenache and spicy with Syrah. In Tuscany I drink Chianti, and wish there was better local white wine – but Fiano and Greco di Tufo come from just down the coast. In Portugal I drink Vinho Verde and love the hard and earthy wines of Bairrada. In Catalonia or the Basque country I drink beautiful local wines; in Greece, Greek; in Morocco, Moroccan. When I am travelling I lose sight entirely of international comparisons, let alone scores. Wine is place.

You clearly don’t become a great winemaker just by having a Gironde address.

Le Musigny produces wine of ineffable (another flexible friend) finesse, achieving by sweet suggestion and eloquent persuasion more than Chambertin can do with power, or the greatest Romanées with exoticism.

You can’t interest the Rhône in the Loire, or Touraine in Anjou, or even, I dare say, Sancerre in Pouilly. Give one the other to drink, and I guarantee the first remark to come will begin with ‘Quand même ...’ – which signifies, ‘Making all allowances I can for an inherently inferior pedigree, and not understanding in the least what you are trying to achieve, I will do my best to enjoy what you have kindly offered me.’

The rarest thing in wine is something simple: it is authenticity.

This is terroir at its truest: where it makes a difference in the glass. It may be scientifically unprovable as yet, and it’s right to be sceptical; but if you can taste the difference in the glass, then there is a difference.

I always wonder which farmer and which burgher were able to forget taxes, tithes, cold, hunger and plague, all the unpleasantness that we picture making up medieval life for the vast majority, to select the Cabernet Franc as the best prospect for St-Émilion or Chinon. Or bring the Melon from Burgundy to improve the sour wine of Muscadet. When life was nasty, brutish and short, you have to admire the men who perfected cathedral masonry, and the men (often, but not always, monks) who sipped and savoured, adjusted their pruning and their fermentation, trawled through the vineyard for the most promising plants, and generally upped the ante. They were inventing pleasures for future generations that still set the pace for the rest of the world.

There is a lot of discussion today about growers’-own and single-vineyard Champagnes, with the suggestion that a blanc de blancs or a blanc de noirs is somehow purer and more virtuous than a classic cuvée with all the components playing their parts. Certainly these soloist wines teach you something about terroir, and plenty about obsessive individualism. They also teach you, or at least me, that isolating one of the ingredients of a great dish just leaves you yearning for the others.

A good blend is far more than the sum of its parts.

Of the pleasures that wine gives you, what proportion is simply sensual, finding a delicious drink no matter what its name may be, and what proportion is related to its identity?

I am aware (who isn’t?) that a fashionable school of wine writing disdains context, despises culture, disregards history, tradition, sympathy and all that gives wine dimensions beyond a mere drink. I despair of it. It does an immense disservice to enjoyment and appreciation by distracting attention from everything but the senses. It’s like asking only one question about a person: is he or she good in bed?

I need to taste it again – something I almost recognize is just eluding me. That’s the sign of a good wine: moreishness.

that is the very reason wine has kept me interested for half a century. Infinite variety. Women, funnily enough, have exactly the same allure. The difference is that women are always surprising, which is something I don’t normally want wine to be.

one-glass wonder has no serious future; you must make the world want the same again.

Recognition is a pleasure in itself, of course – whether of faces at a party, composers on the radio, or roses in a garden. We claim objects, or people, as part of ourselves by being able to name them.

I am convinced the varietal movement, if I can call it that, was the biggest single step in popularising wine, or perhaps popularising interest in wine, in its whole history.

At first, of course, it encompassed only half a dozen varieties, which were then reproduc...

we are reaching lesson two, testing our taste-memories with a second batch. If we can manage Cabernet and Merlot, Pinot Noir and Syrah, how about Sangiovese and Tempranillo? There are enough grape varieties for this to become quite a long course.

The college-level stuff is spotting the birthplace. Cabernet, yes, but French or American? Shiraz, yes, but Rhône or Barossa, or perhaps Hawke’s Bay? This is about where most of us are, most of the time. Left Bank or Right Bank is hardly postgraduate level, but if you can do Margaux/St-Julien, let alone Oakville/St Helena, you may have an MW7 in sight.

I know I’m notorious for adding sentimental value to the score (not that I do scores) of any wine. But I’m sure I’m not alone. What cold fish could say ‘I adore this wine. It reminds me of the happiest days of my life, but it’s rubbish’?

Grands Crus be blowed. A peasant girl can kiss like a princess. When it comes to coups de coeur, I have as many moments of sheer delight among wines of yeoman stock (if not actual peasants) as I do among the aristocracy.

but why do cheeses – each in its maker’s eyes a work of art – get shoved together on a plate, creamy with tangy, soft with hard with crunchy and granular? What does Reblochon have to do with Gouda, or Maroilles with Roquefort? They don’t even come from the same animals. Would you serve your Nuits-St-Georges with a dash of Barbera and a splash of Frontignan? Surely better to find a great farmhouse Cheddar, melting Brie or a drum of Stilton and serve it alone in glory with bread, biscuits, celery and a dish of butter. And with it, a wine to illuminate the cheese.

I’m learning from such lessons a golden rule of reading a wine list: look for what it offers, not for what you think you want. Or, better, glance at the list to check the prices are not absurd, then ask the sommelier what he or she would drink.

only that our current practice of filling a large glass barely a third full and swirling the wine to release its vapours, with the bowl to concentrate them for our noses, had never happened. Wine-tasting as we know it, then, is a 20th-century phenomenon. And with the equipment has come a very different, far more detailed and intense, scrutiny of what different wines have to offer.

the poet Henri Murger’s line: ‘the first duty of wine is to be red’;

To me what I drink is too important to adopt vegan attitudes. It’s an old game, winemaking. Fashion has a part to play, but seasoned drinkers don’t get carried away.