After 50 Years, Michael Broadbent Is Still Teaching Us How t

[AKR]

After 50 Years, Michael Broadbent Is Still Teaching Us How to Drink Wine
2019-07-12 16:00:38.692 GMT

His enduring advice: read, taste and take copious notes.

(Washington Post) -- Half a century ago, at the dawn of what could be called
the modern wine age, a prescient voice warned we were heading pell-mell toward
the mediocre.

"We are living in a world where, whether we like it or not, standards are
concertina-ing," British wine expert Michael Broadbent wrote in 1968, using a
highfalutin' expression to suggest collapse. He was worried that the
improvement in winemaking around the world would create a large number of
wines that all tasted the same.

Broadbent became famous as the head of the wine department for the Christie's
auction house in London. He specialized in finer vintages and rare wines, and
so he had a vested interest in teaching wine appreciation skills to his
clients.

"Although fine vintages cannot be created artificially, certainly poor
vintages are less disastrous than they used to be. This is a mixed blessing,"
he wrote. "Wine to be sold on a large scale . . . has to be innocuous — which
is a fortunate situation for the marketing man."

And an unfortunate situation for wine lovers eager to explore the wonders of
the grape. "It is in this context: to maintain interest and positive
standards, that critical tasting must be kept alive," Broadbent wrote. "It
would be a pity to allow man's finer perceptions of tasting experience (and
resultant range of pleasures) to atrophy."

These quotes are from "Wine Tasting," Broadbent's seminal work, first
published in 1968 and updated several times since. Abridged "pocket" versions
were published in the 1970s and 1980s. A new commemorative edition has just
been issued by the Académie du Vin Library in Britain. It includes essays by
some of Britain's top oenoscenti, including Hugh Johnson, Jancis Robinson and
Steven Spurrier, about Broadbent's influence on them and on the wine trade in
Britain.

Reading this book for the first time, I was struck by how much the wine world
has changed over the past half century, as well as by how much Broadbent, now
92 and retired, still influences the way we taste and appreciate wine today.
He wrote for the British gentry — well-heeled, affluent white males who still
purchased claret from France in cask, to be bottled in their private cellars
on demand. "Lady guests" were to be honored and respected in their own way,
though rarely, if ever, welcomed into the serious practice of tasting and
appreciating wine. (Robinson shattered that glass ceiling in the 1980s. Today
she is arguably the world's most influential wine critic, and there are many
prominent female wine experts around the world.)

Wine was exclusively focused on Western Europe — France, Italy, Germany, Spain
and Portugal — in Broadbent's time. Broadbent wrote when the wine world was
much smaller than today, before the collapse of the Soviet Union opened
Eastern Europe and the ancient wine regions of the Caucasus, and before the
Judgment of Paris inspired a wine revolution in South America, Australia and
New Zealand. He pooh-poohed California pinot noir as "not to be compared with
burgundy," because of its "stewed, earthy quality, almost totally devoid of
the classic Pinot aroma and flavour." Though he then added, "Nevertheless it
can be rich and fine and long lasting." He was somewhat kinder toward
California's Johannisburg riesling and Emerald riesling. Good luck finding any
of those today. In later editions, he updated his original assessments with
more enthusiasm.

Broadbent is a firm believer in tasting wines blind, without any hint of
knowing what they might be, as the best way to develop one's wine tasting
skills. He describes, in a delightfully brief but concise manner, the method
still taught today in wine classes around the world and used by the Institute
of Masters of Wine and the Court of Master Sommeliers in their examinations.
He describes the clues we learn from looking at, smelling and tasting a wine,
and how to deduce what it is by eliminating what it isn't. He tells us how to
manage blind tastings at home, with an admonition not to make it too
competitive: "Some people can no more guess wines in public than they can
stand on a table and sing; their minds become blank as panic sets in!"

To develop our own skills, Broadbent urges us to read voraciously, starting
with his book, and learn the classic wine regions and styles so we know what
to look for in a wine. And take copious notes. Broadbent favored index cards.
In the 2003 edition, he noted the advent of laptop computers, and huffed, "the
clattering noise some of the machines make can be off-putting in a tasting
room."

Wine history buffs will recognize the Académie du Vin as the wine school
operated in Paris in the 1970s by Steven Spurrier, who arranged the famous
Judgment of Paris tasting in 1976 that revolutionized the wine world. He used
Broadbent's book as a guide for developing his own teaching materials, and is
publishing this commemorative edition to launch his new Académie du Vin
Library. Let's hope he's found some additional timeless gems to share.

"Wine Tasting: Commemorative Edition" is available in the United States
exclusively online through Broadbent Selections, the wine import firm of
Broadbent's son, Bartholomew. The price is $39, about the cost of a bottle of
a rich, fine, long-lasting California pinot noir.

[Claret]

When I was in a NYC dinner group at 11 Madison Park an elderly but sweet man named Bob Lescher was in our group. He was the publicist for Parker and Broadbent.

Inevitably somebody would mention Parker and I can still hear Bob saying in his soft spoken tone, "But what about Michael Broadbent?!".

Fun days, I miss going into The City.

[JimHow]

Ponsot.

[Musigny 151]

I knew Michael, tasted with him in France, and always admired the way he managed to share his opinions in so concise but beguiling prose. He also had a wonderful, impish sense of humor. Once we were leaving a chateau after a long dinner catered for several hundred people. It was a beautifully organized event, with one exception; there were not enough toilets, and the lines to use them were incredibly long. Many of us decamped to the vineyards, and as we were walking away to our cars, Michael remarked that the Sauvignon Blancs of Chateau xxxx were going to have a much more pronounced “pipi du chat” this year.