Hugh Johnson: Wine wisdom of, and for, the ages
Highlights from a Wine Writers Symposium keynote talk by the prolific and fantabulous writer Hugh Johnson:
• His career started earning “12 pounds sterling a week working for Vogue” a half-century or so ago and quickly embraced wine writing. “I was very happy in that trade because some of the people gave away their supplies for free.”
• Then he fell in love with the work. “You find wonderful wines, a cultured atmosphere, beautiful scenery, so why not?”
• Accurate wine labeling in the 1950s “was a pliable, flexible concept. It was really when the U.S. came into it that that changed.” That started when “the 1959 Bordeaux vintage made it onto the front page of the NYTimes. That’s when people started thinking we need authentication on the import label.
• Serious wine writing “started with a chap named Cyrus Redding. ‘Modern Wines’ was a forward-looking book.” He loves Redding’s description of wines from Margaux: “great fineness, a rich colour, and a soft bouquet, balmy to the palate.”
• Johnson quoted some non-wine figures, like Michelangelo (left) on vernaccia di San Gimignano: ““A wine that kisses, licks, bites, thrusts and stings.” And Shakespeare’s Mistress Quickly on Canary wine in “Henry IV, Part Two”: “a marvellous searching wine, and it perfumes the blood ere one can say: What’s this?” Johnson added that he loved the concept of searching: “Madeira searches, good German riesling searches, Tokaji searches.”
• He discussed the influence of French writer extraordinaire Andre Simon on a group of London wine merchants: “A lot of them took to the pen when they should have stayed with the corkscrew.”
• He allowed that “I must mention the tension between Robert Parker [left] and myself.” The first time Johnson saw Parker wine reviews with descriptions and a number, “I thought ‘You must be joking. What else does he score? His friends, his family?’ ”
• On how to assess/review wines: “How people rate a wine on the basis of one sip is beyond me. I need to drink a glass, preferably with food.” And he delineated a different way to “rate” wines: “The bottom score is one sniff, because you can’t do more, then two sniffs, the second because you can’t believe how bad it is. Then you move on up to one sip, two sips. Then a glass, two glasses. The wine has triumphed when you order a second bottle, and it really peaks when you say ‘give me the name of the chateau. I want to buy it.’ ”
• In today’s wine world, especially at the spender end, Johnson said, “There’s an awful lot of gouging going on, sort of a ‘more is more’ mentality. You see the same thing in restaurants. You ask for scrambled eggs, and they add scallions and all this other stuff to it.”
• Finally he passed along an excellent zinger for those who find themselves with a drab soul who eschews wine: Tell them “you don’t have enough personality to not drink.”
• Counterintuitive “wine is good for you” news of the month: 
consumers (not enough, but some) have discovered the versions from Cahors. I can’t think of a better entree than the 
level wine
• It’s that time of year. What time? Time to 
hour @ gym.”
some serious Burghounds, had trouble determining whether a few of the wines were from Oregon or France. The most confounding of the bunch turned out to be from a winery none of us had ever even heard of, 
that of the USA; given that most Chinese drinkers regard wine as health-bringing; given that meals are a focal point of Chinese life and that the Chinese gastronomic tradition is unsurpassed; given that there are almost no religious proscriptions on alcohol in China; given that China’s tea culture makes the concept of terroir easy to understand; and given that China’s greatest poets celebrated the drinking of ‘wine’ to the point of intoxication well over a millennium ago, during the T’ang dynasty, and that getting mildly sozzled with your friends on almost any beautiful pretext has been a matter of cultural aspiration ever since.”
Mendocino Chardonnay
out of California year in and year out. But for a lot less money, the 2012 
• Turns out 
• As my Wines of the Week listings indicate, I don’t need any convincing that music can enhance our enhancement of wine. Decanter takes 
For now, I’m happy to settle for perusing their wonderful, warm, engaging and downright hilarious vinous videos. I reviewed their France series 
The longtime wine guru and the “Top Gear” star motor around the state in an outlandish RV, the “Wine-ebego,” and hold evening bacchanals therein, often concocting morning cures for their self-overserving. The ginormous vehicle encounters a few literal scrapes along the way, and a priceless scene shows them emptying the toilet residue into “the gates of Hades” at an RV camp.
icons Jim Clendenen (left, on the right), Josh Jensen and Paul Draper, and could-they-be-more-different? Gina Gallo and Sean Thackrey in the same episode.