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00:00:00 Wine is so deeply fascinating.
00:00:18 I love that every bottle of wine is a piece of art made by an artist who had to count
00:00:23 on the weather.
00:00:26 And much as we might revere a painter, like Caravaggio for example, his work is famously
00:00:32 hard to drink.
00:00:34 When done right, wine is also a giving art.
00:00:38 It's an industry where the most learned people assist folks like me, who know almost nothing.
00:00:46 Why would anybody devote their lives to something like that?
00:00:48 It's amazing.
00:00:49 So, I made a documentary about it.
00:00:51 As anyone would.
00:00:52 I made this title sequence in my garage.
00:00:59 It's amazing.
00:01:17 It's amazing.
00:01:37 Ok, first question.
00:01:55 Why grapes?
00:01:57 Because they're the best.
00:01:59 You can make wine out of tons of other stuff.
00:02:02 It's just that thanks to sugar content and acidity, no other fruit can match grapes.
00:02:08 So all of those things mean that, you know, if you went to the engineers at MIT and said,
00:02:14 we want you to design a fruit that would be perfect for making wine, they would come up
00:02:18 with the grape.
00:02:20 Grapes are so good for fermentation that they do most of the work themselves, which is probably
00:02:25 how early people figured out how to make what we now call wine.
00:02:29 Now this moment happened long ago.
00:02:32 So long before writing.
00:02:33 We don't know exactly when or where, but the earliest evidence suggests that wine was being
00:02:38 made as long ago as 6000 BCE in what is now the country of Georgia.
00:02:46 They might only have intended to keep grape juice from spoiling, but by keeping fermented
00:02:51 grape juice away from oxygen, they made wine, which is drinkable, rather than vinegar, which
00:02:57 is less so.
00:02:59 The most iconic feature of the Georgian winemaking process is, well, it's the wine, but the
00:03:05 second most iconic is the kvevri.
00:03:22 The kvevri is a magnificent piece of pottery made for fermenting wine.
00:03:28 Like people, each has their own character.
00:03:31 To make wine in a kvevri, you just pick your grapes, smash them a bit, and then plop the
00:03:36 whole affair, pips and all, into the kvevri and seal it up for six months.
00:03:42 That's old school.
00:03:43 That's like Republic of Georgia style of making wine, which they still use to this day.
00:03:48 But it helps control temperature when you have something underground, it can be covered.
00:03:53 But you see the clay pots used above and underground now.
00:03:57 There's a story about how people will sit and sit with their kvevris underground and
00:04:05 listen to the wine, and the wine's going to tell you when it's ready to be consumed.
00:04:10 And then it goes around from person to person, whoever's making that wine, let me fill my
00:04:16 jug up.
00:04:17 You know, it's like a communal thing too, which is cool.
00:04:20 You gotta understand that wine's history is as pretty much as 8,000 years old.
00:04:29 I mean, that's 6,000 BC.
00:04:32 We've been making wines as humans.
00:04:34 Okay, but what did it taste like?
00:04:37 Yeah, I think the answer to that question is, well, terrible is one thing, but I think
00:04:41 it probably was concentrated and it wasn't filtered or fined, so it was probably pretty
00:04:45 chunky, you know, and I'm sure it was dense.
00:04:50 And that's why I think it's interesting with wine-making techniques that have been adapted
00:04:56 throughout time, having bubbles remain in it.
00:05:00 You know, for sparkling wine, probably made shitty wine taste better because it's got
00:05:04 bubbles in it, you know?
00:05:06 A lot of mistakes happening, probably.
00:05:09 The situation of finding fruit and putting it somewhere and forgetting about it.
00:05:14 There's been trial and error, I guess, within the history of the world, and so someone took
00:05:19 the trial and they drank it.
00:05:21 Though we can only guess what early wine tasted like, signs do point to gross.
00:05:27 I don't think anybody would dispute that.
00:05:28 I think you're selling wine short.
00:05:31 Well, at least we can agree that Neolithic people did not have a strong grasp of the
00:05:37 spread of contaminants, unlike modern people.
00:05:43 Never mind, let's go to Egypt.
00:05:53 Grape growing hit Egypt in about 3000 BCE, and the Egyptians immediately decided that
00:05:59 wine was something they should be buried with, which is just about the worst excuse I ever
00:06:05 heard for not opening the last bottle in the house.
00:06:09 To friendship.
00:06:10 To friendship.
00:06:11 Cheers.
00:06:12 Oh, that's delightful.
00:06:13 It is.
00:06:14 Fantastic, though.
00:06:15 Thank you.
00:06:16 Yeah, it's hard to count how quickly one bottle goes when you've got five.
00:06:17 I know.
00:06:18 Yes, yes, but the memories will last forever.
00:06:19 Yeah.
00:06:20 Well, I thought you'd be more generous than a three-ounce pour, but, you know.
00:06:21 Oh.
00:06:22 I mean, like, you know, we've been drinking her out of house and home.
00:06:23 We don't want to be poor guests, but she gave us every bottle except that one over there.
00:06:24 Oh, that's great.
00:06:25 I mean, I'm not sure I'd be that generous.
00:06:26 I mean, I'm not sure I'd be that generous.
00:06:27 I mean, I'm not sure I'd be that generous.
00:06:28 I mean, I'm not sure I'd be that generous.
00:06:29 I mean, I'm not sure I'd be that generous.
00:06:30 than a three ounce pour, but you know.
00:06:32 - Oh. - Oh.
00:06:34 - I mean, like, you know,
00:06:35 we've been drinking her out of house and home.
00:06:37 We don't wanna be poor guests,
00:06:38 but she gave us every bottle except that one over there.
00:06:42 - Oh, I see. Yeah. - That's good.
00:06:43 - I mean, I could have another, no lying.
00:06:45 - I mean, I could.
00:06:46 - I will drink unlimited wine.
00:06:48 - Yeah.
00:06:49 - That wine, it's terrible.
00:06:52 - Yeah. - Yeah.
00:06:52 - We should totally crack that open, like right now.
00:06:54 - No, no. - Yeah, that's,
00:06:55 I always wanna drink that.
00:06:56 - I think you should leave that alone.
00:06:56 It looks just perfect where it is.
00:06:59 Right next to my golf clubs
00:07:01 and a picture of me in the first grade.
00:07:04 - Well, I mean, like it looks a little lonely
00:07:05 on your wine rack when there's no other bottles there.
00:07:07 It's just a little, you know.
00:07:09 - I think it'd look better in my glass.
00:07:10 - Yeah. - Yeah.
00:07:11 (laughing)
00:07:12 - We're leaving it there.
00:07:13 - Oh. - Oh.
00:07:14 - Oh. - Oh.
00:07:15 - Oh. - Oh.
00:07:16 - Oh. - Oh.
00:07:17 - Oh. - Oh.
00:07:18 - Well, my glass looks a little empty.
00:07:19 - Last sip.
00:07:20 - I took all of mine already, so.
00:07:22 - Listen, what's the big deal about that bottle of wine?
00:07:26 - Exactly. - Like.
00:07:27 - What's the big deal? - What's the big deal?
00:07:28 - What is the big deal? - What is the big deal?
00:07:30 - Come on, Jess, what's the deal with the bottle?
00:07:31 - What's the deal?
00:07:32 - What is it?
00:07:33 - Tell us.
00:07:34 - I,
00:07:35 I can't have that wine until I'm dead.
00:07:39 - Couldn't we just replace it?
00:07:41 - No, no, no.
00:07:42 I bought that wine for my death.
00:07:46 - Around the same time, 3000 BCE,
00:07:50 vines were being cultivated in Greece as well.
00:07:52 Though, wine didn't really hit it big there
00:07:55 until 1000 BCE.
00:07:58 That happened because of the advent
00:08:00 of something called a city.
00:08:02 - I think when I think of Greeks, that's what I think of.
00:08:05 It's like this, like, what's painted on the vases,
00:08:08 you know, people laying around with being fed grapes
00:08:11 and jugs and cherubs carrying them around.
00:08:13 You know, that's what I think of
00:08:14 when I think of the Greeks.
00:08:15 - Much like today, early urbanites discovered
00:08:17 that their lives were too busy to allow them
00:08:19 to ferment their own wine, so they bought it from vintners.
00:08:23 And it soon became popular with all strata
00:08:26 of Grecian society, including, and most importantly,
00:08:29 sailors who took it with them
00:08:31 all over the Mediterranean and beyond.
00:08:34 Now, while the Greeks caught on a little bit earlier,
00:08:37 in terms of spreading wine, we have the Romans to thank.
00:08:41 The Romans were to wine what we Americans are
00:08:45 to cargo shorts.
00:08:46 Like the Greeks, the Romans viewed wine
00:08:49 as being for everyone, from all strata of society,
00:08:53 from the lowest of the low to Caesar Augustus himself.
00:08:57 Water at the time was often disgusting,
00:09:00 but mixing a little wine in made it slightly more palatable
00:09:03 and killed off a few nasty things
00:09:05 living in the water as well.
00:09:06 You can just imagine what city water was like in 1000 BCE.
00:09:12 That's over 2,500 years before this, the Trevi Fountain.
00:09:16 In early Rome, your best bet for drinkable water was wine.
00:09:21 As a result, the Romans took wine with them
00:09:23 everywhere they went.
00:09:25 They planted vineyards all over the place,
00:09:27 and many of those original Roman vineyards
00:09:29 still produce wine to this day.
00:09:31 The only reason we know about a lot of this stuff
00:09:37 is due to the efforts of Pliny the Elder,
00:09:40 a Roman military commander.
00:09:42 Pliny spent his days working faithfully for the empire,
00:09:46 but every minute he had to himself,
00:09:48 he was either studying or writing.
00:09:51 It is said that Pliny ignored his need for sleep
00:09:54 because that time could be used for writing.
00:09:56 He hated walking because he couldn't walk and write
00:10:00 at the same time, and that he only made love
00:10:03 if his partner agreed to be scrawled on
00:10:05 like a piece of parchment.
00:10:06 Granted, I made that last part up, but since I wrote it,
00:10:10 I think Pliny might have begrudgingly approved.
00:10:13 Pliny wrote a lot, but his only work to survive
00:10:20 through the ages is his natural history,
00:10:22 in which he attempted to describe the entire natural world.
00:10:27 Though he was not the world's most assiduous fact checker,
00:10:31 I think we can forgive him,
00:10:32 given that it's tough to cross-reference sources
00:10:35 when only one person has ever written about something.
00:10:38 Regardless, Pliny had a lot to say about wines,
00:10:41 good wines, bad wines, wine play.
00:10:44 Wine thoughts with Pliny the Elder.
00:10:49 It is the property of wine, when drunk,
00:10:53 to cause a feeling of warmth in the interior of the viscera,
00:10:57 and when poured upon the exterior of the body,
00:11:00 to be cool and refreshing.
00:11:03 Pliny also wrote about Falernian wine,
00:11:08 which was a wine supposedly so strong that it was flammable,
00:11:12 meaning it would have been more than three times
00:11:14 as alcoholic as today's wine.
00:11:16 The Romans were absolutely bonkers for Falernian wine.
00:11:20 As the legend goes, a humble farmer, Falernus,
00:11:24 had a meet-cute with the Roman god of viticulture, Liber.
00:11:28 The result was Falernian wine.
00:11:30 Now we'll probably never know what it tasted like,
00:11:33 but we can enjoy it as a great early example of overhype.
00:11:38 Some people loved Falernian wine, or at least claimed to.
00:11:41 Some people said it wasn't everything
00:11:42 it was built up to be.
00:11:45 Pliny was an expert on Falernian wine
00:11:48 and was able to taste, whether he said so out loud or not,
00:11:51 when his friends served him fake Falernian.
00:11:55 A century later, the physician Galen would doubt
00:11:58 that all the Falernian wine could possibly be real
00:12:02 just based on quantity.
00:12:03 Real or fake, Falernian wine later dwindled and disappeared.
00:12:09 But I think it's a great example to keep in mind
00:12:11 because it's a story about human beings
00:12:13 focusing on the aspects of something
00:12:15 that don't matter that much.
00:12:17 Lots of people today buy things because of the brand name
00:12:19 without really knowing why.
00:12:22 I would love to be able to afford to do that
00:12:23 because I want people to think I'm cool.
00:12:25 But what really matters is being more like Pliny the Elder,
00:12:28 writing more, pouring wine on yourself,
00:12:31 and maybe writing on people if they're okay with it.
00:12:34 How do we get from early wine to the point where,
00:12:38 you know, a little bit later on Romans are dictating
00:12:40 that if you come across a south-facing slope,
00:12:42 you need to plant some grapes?
00:12:44 - Okay, yeah.
00:12:45 I like the fact that you ask questions
00:12:47 with three-hour answers.
00:12:49 - I apologize.
00:12:49 - So first of all, wine and health.
00:12:53 And by the way, current research basically says
00:12:57 that wine probably isn't good for you.
00:13:01 It does some things that are good for you,
00:13:03 but the risk of liver damage and/or alcoholism
00:13:08 outweigh those to the point where if you were to take someone
00:13:11 and just say on a pure, pure health basis,
00:13:14 should you start drinking wine at age 30?
00:13:16 I think most doctors at this point would say probably not.
00:13:20 That said, in the ancient world,
00:13:23 the old rule was that water would kill you.
00:13:26 And, you know, one of the questions I ask my students is,
00:13:31 you've got all the microclimates and soil types
00:13:35 in the world in Asia,
00:13:36 why didn't they ever develop a big wine industry?
00:13:40 And the answer is they drank tea.
00:13:42 And the first step in drinking tea is boiling the water.
00:13:48 In Europe, we didn't do that so much.
00:13:51 We made beer that way,
00:13:52 which is why beer has always been considered a healthy drink.
00:13:56 So going back to that ancient medical advice,
00:14:00 first do no harm, at the very least,
00:14:04 if you're giving people soup or wine,
00:14:06 you're not introducing new pathogens to them.
00:14:08 You're not making them worse.
00:14:10 At least before Louis Pasteur,
00:14:12 it was a key part of a healthy lifestyle.
00:14:15 And I'm still gonna argue that a glass a day
00:14:17 is probably not gonna do you much damage
00:14:19 and may help you in a couple of ways.
00:14:22 Though they were still producing wine
00:14:24 in much the same way that the Georgians had,
00:14:26 6,000 years previous,
00:14:28 the Romans invented something wholly new, the wine barrel,
00:14:33 or as kids today call it, a rollie boy.
00:14:37 Well, as far as what we were talking about earlier
00:14:39 with transportation,
00:14:41 barrel is much easier to move than a pot
00:14:42 that doesn't have a proper bottom, right?
00:14:44 And it breaks really easily.
00:14:46 It's heavier, but it's more like user-friendly.
00:14:49 Barrel does a couple things for wine.
00:14:50 One, it's a vessel that allows for
00:14:55 just enough oxygen transfer to age a wine within it,
00:14:58 but also doesn't make the wine oxidize.
00:15:01 For me, first thing I think of is adding a flavor,
00:15:05 whether it be a heavy toast or cinnamon or vanilla.
00:15:10 It also is a vessel to help mellow your wine as well,
00:15:17 to soften the tannins that would come from the grape skins.
00:15:22 They last, you can use them for a long time.
00:15:23 So it's an economical way of doing it too,
00:15:26 when you have neutral barrel,
00:15:28 'cause you can use it for years and years.
00:15:29 I mean, there are people who have their giant
00:15:32 fermenting tanks that are made of wood
00:15:34 that they've used since the 1750s
00:15:36 that are still being used.
00:15:38 That's crazy, right?
00:15:39 That it's held up like that.
00:15:40 But I think of aging first before travel,
00:15:43 'cause I guess I live in a modern world where,
00:15:45 you can put it in a tanker now.
00:15:49 Put your juice in a tanker and ship it somewhere else.
00:15:52 - Wine had a fantastic few hundred years
00:15:56 under the Roman Empire, but with Rome's fall,
00:15:59 wine returned to being a primarily local endeavor.
00:16:04 But for wine, this wasn't twilight, merely a passing cloud.
00:16:09 (upbeat music)
00:16:13 Benedict of Nursia was born to Roman nobility,
00:16:17 but when he was 14, he became disgusted with Rome
00:16:20 and he left to found a monastery.
00:16:22 Before he died, he wrote out a set of rules
00:16:25 for monks to follow, including that each monk
00:16:27 should be allowed one hemia, or about 270 milliliters,
00:16:32 or two stingy glasses per day.
00:16:34 This helped further democratize wine in the medieval world.
00:16:39 The only problem was it was still gross.
00:16:41 And worse, the medieval poor were faced
00:16:46 with the prospect of drinking wine stored in animal hides,
00:16:50 which would have imparted all manner of flavors,
00:16:52 if not bacteria.
00:16:54 Imagine wine that's been left outside for eight months
00:16:57 and then decanted in a shoe.
00:16:59 Then again, some people I trust don't seem to mind.
00:17:03 - You're talking about like a real wine skin.
00:17:06 - It's just they cut it off the animal.
00:17:08 - Yeah.
00:17:08 - And tied the end. - Let's do it.
00:17:11 Let's do it, I'm here for that.
00:17:13 - Whether in a shoe or not, wine was ready.
00:17:17 And a big break came with the rise
00:17:19 of the medieval middle class.
00:17:21 The middle class were a new breed.
00:17:26 They formed something called guilds,
00:17:29 which were a little bit like early corporations,
00:17:32 including all the good and bad things
00:17:34 about modern corporations.
00:17:37 By joining a guild and displaying its crest,
00:17:40 you showed potential customers
00:17:42 that you weren't just any old idiot,
00:17:44 you were a professional.
00:17:45 Guilds also gave rise to a merchant class.
00:17:50 They weren't poor, and while they weren't nobility,
00:17:53 they were definitely rich, and they definitely wanted wine.
00:17:58 At the same time, population and methods
00:18:01 of transportation were growing,
00:18:03 which had a similar effect on the feudal system
00:18:05 that the internet, among other factors,
00:18:07 had on locally owned retail stores.
00:18:11 The upshot of all this though, for the wine trade,
00:18:14 was increased demand and easier transport,
00:18:17 which led to lots more business.
00:18:19 But it also meant that regions had to compete
00:18:22 on the basis of things like quality, in addition to price.
00:18:26 And because of that competition,
00:18:27 for the first time, common people had a chance
00:18:31 of sampling wine that did not taste like old shoe.
00:18:34 Around this time, there was one city
00:18:43 that had everything it needed
00:18:45 to be a wine production powerhouse,
00:18:47 except for a thriving market.
00:18:51 And that city was in a duchy called Aquitaine.
00:18:57 The big boss of Aquitaine was Duchess Eleanor,
00:19:00 who was also married to Louis VIII of France.
00:19:03 And thus, in addition to being a duchess,
00:19:05 she was queen of France.
00:19:07 But she got her marriage to Louis VIII annulled,
00:19:09 and married Henry Plantagenet instead.
00:19:12 Henry went on to become king of England.
00:19:16 Aquitaine became an English territory,
00:19:18 and all of a sudden, our hero city got itself
00:19:21 a huge new English market for its wine.
00:19:25 But Eleanor's ex-husband, Louis VIII,
00:19:28 still king of France, invaded Aquitaine,
00:19:31 intending to fight every last person there into the sea.
00:19:35 Louis was thwarted when our heroic city
00:19:38 stopped the assault of the French.
00:19:41 The English royalty were, understandably, thrilled.
00:19:45 As a result, our city became the go-to wine city
00:19:48 for England and the world.
00:19:51 What was that city that stood strong
00:19:53 against the invading French bastards
00:19:55 it was Bordeaux, which is in France,
00:19:58 because of the Hundred Years' War,
00:20:00 which was fought for over 115 years.
00:20:03 But, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but,
00:20:04 nevermind, look, around the same time,
00:20:07 just a few hundred miles away,
00:20:08 near the city of Dijon, lived an extremely devout group
00:20:12 of monks known as the Cistercians.
00:20:16 (choral music)
00:20:24 Though they lived by the same rules
00:20:26 set forth by Saint Benedict, whom we mentioned previously,
00:20:29 the Cistercians positively laughed
00:20:32 at their Benedictine contemporaries.
00:20:35 Those Benedictines, with their sinful indulgences
00:20:38 like eating and talking, ha, savages.
00:20:42 Except the Cistercians much more closely observed
00:20:45 a vow of silence than the Benedictines,
00:20:47 so they probably only laughed on the inside.
00:20:50 After the fall of the Roman Empire,
00:20:52 really the only group of people in Europe
00:20:56 who were organized, economically viable,
00:21:00 and literate was the church.
00:21:03 They had a network that allowed them to travel
00:21:05 all over Europe and stay safely in a church every night.
00:21:10 Nobody else had that.
00:21:11 In fact, if you were outside the walls
00:21:14 of most medieval cities at night,
00:21:16 you were beyond the law,
00:21:18 which is how we came up with the term outlaw.
00:21:21 So they were following the Roman recipes
00:21:24 on how to make wine.
00:21:25 Where this story gets complicated
00:21:28 is the church started to sell indulgences.
00:21:32 So you could be a sinner,
00:21:34 but if you gave a gift to the church,
00:21:36 you could be absolved of some of your sins,
00:21:39 or at least reduce the amount of time
00:21:41 you spent in purgatory before you went to heaven.
00:21:44 This seemed like a pretty good idea to many wealthy people.
00:21:48 But one of the things they would do
00:21:50 is they would give vineyards to the church
00:21:53 because A, vineyards were valuable,
00:21:56 but B, the church always had the best winemaker
00:21:59 in the region 'cause he's read the books.
00:22:01 Everybody else is making wine the way we used to make it.
00:22:04 I don't know, my grandpa used to do it this way,
00:22:07 but the church always had the books.
00:22:09 And what it meant was they were getting vineyards
00:22:12 in different parts of the region,
00:22:14 often gifts in return for indulgences.
00:22:17 And then they were making the wines,
00:22:19 and as they made the wines,
00:22:20 each wine was made exactly to the same recipe.
00:22:23 And what they discovered is, holy moly,
00:22:28 the wines taste different.
00:22:30 That wine tastes different from this wine,
00:22:31 even though we made it exactly the same way.
00:22:34 So that gave birth to this whole idea of terroir.
00:22:37 - Terroir is a bit of a nebulous thing,
00:22:40 which is probably why the term is so popular,
00:22:42 because it's hard to misapply.
00:22:44 But basically it means the way
00:22:45 that a wine represents its physical place.
00:22:48 (upbeat jazz music)
00:22:51 - You know when you are feeling
00:22:54 a little bit unsure of yourself,
00:22:57 and you wanna hide from the world?
00:23:00 That's foxy.
00:23:01 - When you look across the bar,
00:23:03 and you see someone drinking wine.
00:23:05 - It's like Squirrely, where you're like,
00:23:08 oh, I can't figure out how I feel about this person,
00:23:12 but you're a little more sassy with it.
00:23:14 - And you're like, if I drink enough wine,
00:23:16 that person will look better.
00:23:18 That's a little bit gamey.
00:23:19 Some people like it, some folks don't.
00:23:21 But they call it foxy.
00:23:22 - You know when you misspeak in a conversation,
00:23:28 and you know that everybody heard it,
00:23:29 but they're all acting like, no, no, no, nothing's wrong,
00:23:32 but you know that they're lying?
00:23:34 That's mouthfeel.
00:23:36 - Mouthfeel is like what animals use
00:23:40 to sense whether they like others or not.
00:23:45 It happens in the mouth.
00:23:47 - Mouthfeel is the texture of the liquid in your mouth,
00:23:50 the viscosity, how it feels against the tongue
00:23:53 and the cheeks.
00:23:54 - That's what happens when you're in a lab
00:23:57 and you accidentally revive dinosaurs.
00:24:00 - When you go to the dog park,
00:24:01 and you notice that it says no small dogs allowed,
00:24:05 but you have the smallest dog.
00:24:07 That's terroir.
00:24:09 - Terroir is this feeling of fear
00:24:14 that comes over you when you don't know the answer
00:24:18 to something that you should know.
00:24:20 - Occasionally when the sun shoots off radioactive energy.
00:24:24 - Tannins are that tingly sensation on the tongue
00:24:28 when you know that something is amiss.
00:24:32 The more tannins you have, the higher quality the leather.
00:24:36 - You wanna take the wristling at tannins?
00:24:40 - That's me, no.
00:24:40 I don't wanna take a wristling at tannins.
00:24:42 [laughing]
00:24:44 - It seems obvious now,
00:24:46 but at the time it was a breakthrough discovery
00:24:49 that certain grapes and certain places
00:24:51 are a natural match for one another.
00:24:54 And we have the Cistercians to thank for that.
00:24:56 [gentle music]
00:24:59 - The work of the Cistercians,
00:25:02 as well as other groups like the Benedictines,
00:25:05 concentrated wine's development
00:25:06 into the major wine growing regions we know in France today.
00:25:12 There are quite a few regions, sub-regions, and cru sites,
00:25:16 but perhaps the most famous are Champagne,
00:25:18 Burgundy, Beaujolais, the Rhone Valley,
00:25:22 Bordeaux and the Loire Valley,
00:25:24 and Alsace, and Languedoc, and Provence.
00:25:27 There are a lot.
00:25:28 The Celts might have been growing wine in France
00:25:32 before the Romans barged in,
00:25:33 but as discussed, the Romans really went ham.
00:25:37 You'll hear a lot of people mention Burgundy
00:25:40 as one of the world's fanciest wine regions,
00:25:42 whereas its southern neighbor, Beaujolais,
00:25:44 is, so they say, more approachable.
00:25:48 As we heard Janine say-
00:25:49 - I know that this wine comes from Burgundy.
00:25:51 If it's red, it's probably Pinot.
00:25:52 - This is the case, thanks to a 14th century duke
00:25:55 named Philip the Bold.
00:25:58 Philip became the Duke of Burgundy
00:26:00 because when he was 14, he helped his father,
00:26:03 King John II, or John the Good,
00:26:05 fight the English at the Battle of Poitiers,
00:26:08 which they lost.
00:26:09 But Philip, apparently, was bold about it.
00:26:13 I'm sure it was a great comfort to the common folk
00:26:15 who lost family members at the battle
00:26:17 to hear that the king's 14-year-old son was bold.
00:26:21 Philip and his dad were both captured during the battle
00:26:24 and were kept in custody
00:26:25 until their release by a treaty in 1360.
00:26:29 Philip became the Duke of Burgundy in 1363.
00:26:32 As Duke of Burgundy,
00:26:34 in addition to the usual ducal duties
00:26:37 of killing the English, or the Flemish,
00:26:39 or marrying a Flemish countess,
00:26:41 Philip took a lot of care and pride
00:26:43 in his region's wine made from Pinot Noir.
00:26:47 Pinot Noir then, as now, was hard to grow,
00:26:51 much harder than, say, Gamay.
00:26:53 I assume you've seen "Sideways"
00:26:55 and heard Paul Giamatti deliver
00:26:56 an "Alas, poor Yorick"-esque monologue on the subject,
00:26:59 so you know how Pinot Noir people can get.
00:27:02 Philip noted that many of the wine growers
00:27:05 under his ducal shadow were growing Gamay grapes
00:27:08 rather than Pinot Noir, and, we presume,
00:27:11 he feared this would hurt his wine's,
00:27:13 and by extension his duchy's, reputation.
00:27:17 There is reason to believe that farmers
00:27:19 were incentivized to plant Gamay
00:27:21 because they were struggling for manpower
00:27:22 due to the Black Plague
00:27:24 killing a third of people in the world.
00:27:27 That stands to reason,
00:27:29 but there's not really a time ever
00:27:30 when farmers don't benefit from easier, higher-yield crops.
00:27:35 Was Philip the Bold right to banish Gamay from Burgundy?
00:27:38 It's easy to imagine a grower's family
00:27:40 suffering undue hardship thanks to an out-of-touch duke
00:27:44 issuing edicts out of his back office.
00:27:47 At the same time,
00:27:48 one can also easily imagine Burgundy's competitors saying,
00:27:51 "What, Burgundy?
00:27:52 That old swill?
00:27:53 They don't make it like they used to."
00:27:55 Whatever his reasoning,
00:27:58 Duke Philip decreed that Gamay was vile
00:28:00 and demanded it be ripped from the earth.
00:28:03 If they wanted to grow Gamay south in Beaujolais, so be it.
00:28:06 They did, and they still do to this day.
00:28:09 Which should you drink?
00:28:11 Ask your local wine expert.
00:28:13 But the answer's both.
00:28:14 Responsibly, but both.
00:28:16 But it wasn't just France on the wine scene at the time.
00:28:20 The Germans were beginning to have success
00:28:22 despite their colder climate.
00:28:24 In the 15th century,
00:28:26 a little grape known as Riesling appeared.
00:28:28 (gentle music)
00:28:31 Because Riesling produced wines with relatively high acidity,
00:28:43 the wines both tasted fresher
00:28:45 and lasted longer without spoiling.
00:28:48 But while the Cistercians introduced and developed wines
00:28:51 based on a vine's location down to the foot,
00:28:54 the Germans began working on wines
00:28:56 they picked late in the harvest,
00:28:58 differentiating based on the day,
00:29:01 and sometimes even picking certain grapes from a bunch
00:29:03 and leaving others to mature.
00:29:05 - Oh!
00:29:06 - That's one of the coolest things to me in the world.
00:29:08 Like, who did that one day?
00:29:10 They're like, "Oh, damn it.
00:29:11 All of our grapes are covered in mold.
00:29:13 Let's press it and see what happens."
00:29:15 You know what I mean?
00:29:16 Like, but somebody did that.
00:29:18 And now some of those expensive wines in the world
00:29:21 are made from moldy grapes.
00:29:23 Pow!
00:29:24 Their labeling is a little,
00:29:26 is slightly different from what we know
00:29:28 as traditional old world labels,
00:29:29 because there's always like a vineyard site
00:29:31 and a town involved, a quality level.
00:29:34 So if you don't know those quality levels,
00:29:36 you don't know how much sugar you're walking into.
00:29:37 Yeah, so I would say German labels
00:29:39 are probably the most complicated labels to read.
00:29:42 And then France after that.
00:29:44 With like Germany, you got cabinet,
00:29:47 you've got Auslese, Bern Auslese.
00:29:50 You have the vineyard, you have the cru site,
00:29:52 and you're just like,
00:29:53 is this recently gonna go with my salad?
00:29:56 Like, that's all I wanna know.
00:29:59 Today, the Germans still produce delicious,
00:30:03 high quality late harvest wine,
00:30:05 as well as everyday table wine.
00:30:08 But with all that great wine around,
00:30:10 why even produce everyday table wine?
00:30:13 Simple, because Americans will drink it.
00:30:21 By the 17th century, a nobleman from Bordeaux,
00:30:25 Arnaud Trois-de-Pontac, Monsieur de Pontac,
00:30:28 if you're nasty, realized three things.
00:30:31 First, that as the Cistercians had proven,
00:30:34 some wines were better than others
00:30:36 based on their precise geographical location.
00:30:39 Second, that according to him anyway,
00:30:42 his Aubriant wines were one of those special wines.
00:30:44 And third, that taverns across Europe sold almost all wine
00:30:49 by slobbing it together in a huge barrel.
00:30:52 So no one knew if they were drinking his amazing Aubriant
00:30:56 or some rot gut pig swill made five meters away.
00:31:01 So what did de Pontac do?
00:31:02 Simple, he doubled the price of his wine
00:31:05 and then insisted it was worth it.
00:31:08 In short, he invented wine marketing.
00:31:11 How much of the wine trade is marketing?
00:31:16 - I'm gonna say that 98% of it.
00:31:21 If there is ever a story about marketing, it's champagne.
00:31:24 You grow grapes where it's too cool to get them ripe.
00:31:27 And so you add extra sugar,
00:31:28 hoping that you'll make up the difference
00:31:30 and you get bubbles and you think,
00:31:31 "Oh, okay, I've got lemons, I'm gonna make lemonade."
00:31:34 And then you make it a wine celebration.
00:31:36 They were brilliant at this and the stuff's delicious,
00:31:38 so who can complain?
00:31:40 - How much of the wine trade is marketing?
00:31:44 How much of the wine trade is marketing?
00:31:46 - I feel like this is something for me to poo-poo.
00:31:53 People come in, they're like, "I love the label of this wine."
00:31:58 And I'm like, "That's why it's on there."
00:32:01 Because it's pleasing and it makes you want to go,
00:32:03 "I like this label, I will buy this wine."
00:32:06 And that's marketing, right?
00:32:08 I don't think that necessarily means
00:32:10 that it's a bad wine at all.
00:32:12 I think that sometimes people just want a quirky head
00:32:16 on there that's exploding or whatever it is.
00:32:18 One, when you're a big company
00:32:20 and you have a recognizable label that everyone knows,
00:32:23 then you're gonna be very successful.
00:32:24 And if you screw that, if you change that around,
00:32:27 sometimes people react poorly to it.
00:32:30 When you're talking about simplistic,
00:32:32 small production wines, I think that word of mouth,
00:32:36 honestly, social media has done a lot
00:32:37 for small production wines.
00:32:41 And good websites do a lot for small production wines.
00:32:46 And that's marketing, right?
00:32:48 - Well, speaking of stories, I'm thinking of Oriang.
00:32:52 According to my research, they were kind of the first place
00:32:58 to do that, to say, "My wine is better than their wine
00:33:01 because my vineyard is a meter away from theirs."
00:33:05 - We wouldn't have First Chris
00:33:07 if it wasn't for that, right?
00:33:09 If it wasn't for people saying, "I'm the best,"
00:33:11 and then someone else was like, "Sure, under table money."
00:33:14 We wouldn't have those things, which is, I mean,
00:33:17 those wines are thousands of, Oriang,
00:33:20 thousands of dollars for a bottle of wine.
00:33:22 Is it amazing?
00:33:24 Absolutely, change your life.
00:33:26 But does it exist because 200 years
00:33:30 or 100 and something years ago,
00:33:32 someone was like, "This is the place."
00:33:34 But also, it's that whole, like,
00:33:38 I have a wall around my space.
00:33:40 This is my space.
00:33:41 It is the best space because my wall is here.
00:33:44 I know your space is connected to my wall,
00:33:47 but it sucks because you're not within my wall.
00:33:49 You know what I mean?
00:33:50 Like, that's how it works.
00:33:54 - How much of the wine trade is marketing?
00:33:56 - Ooh.
00:33:58 Hmm.
00:34:03 What seems to be a bigger number is not, really,
00:34:06 'cause I'm a big believer in,
00:34:08 if you see a commercial for it,
00:34:12 then I'm probably not drinking it.
00:34:14 And when you think about your smaller families,
00:34:16 they don't have marketing budgets,
00:34:20 and that's usually who I want.
00:34:22 So from the large perspective of the wine industry,
00:34:27 marketing is probably, God, I'd say 65% of everything,
00:34:32 you know, exposure is a big deal,
00:34:35 especially for a product that most people don't understand.
00:34:39 You know, if you're exposed to it and it's flashy
00:34:41 and you see all the colors or whatever you see,
00:34:45 then you're probably more amped to go buy it
00:34:48 and to get excited about it.
00:34:50 But everyone's different, and I get more excited
00:34:54 about the folks that don't have a budget for marketing,
00:34:58 that get their marketing from word of mouth,
00:35:01 because your product's so good
00:35:03 and made so impressively that, you know,
00:35:07 it's gonna sell out.
00:35:08 But, you know, yeah, you think about, like,
00:35:10 Madame Clico, and she's the queen of,
00:35:12 it wasn't for her, there would be no marketing, period.
00:35:15 Like, no way of knowing about the products in hand
00:35:20 and making it.
00:35:21 I guess she's the queen of celebration, really.
00:35:25 So yeah.
00:35:27 - You know, to say that something is a grocery store
00:35:31 wine is, that's an insult.
00:35:33 - It is, it is, and I understand what people mean by that.
00:35:37 You know, just because you see it in a grocery store
00:35:39 doesn't mean that it's inferior.
00:35:43 You know, there's a couple things that we've sold here
00:35:45 that, you know, just happened to get a good name
00:35:49 for itself.
00:35:50 And so, I say if you made it to the supermarket
00:35:54 and I sold your wine, then that's a good-ass wine.
00:35:56 You know, like, that's it, that wine was fantastic.
00:35:59 But once we figured that out, we're just like, okay,
00:36:02 that train has been gone now, so.
00:36:05 - As the experts have each mentioned,
00:36:08 Madame Clico was another pioneer in wine marketing.
00:36:11 When her husband, Francois, died in 1805,
00:36:14 she took over the family business
00:36:16 and invented the concept of champagne out of nothing.
00:36:21 She was not yet 30 years old at the time.
00:36:25 Now, sure, de Pontac might've been a great early marketer
00:36:28 of Haut Brion, but he didn't invent red wine.
00:36:32 Madame Clico created a business for her product
00:36:35 with nothing more than her wit
00:36:36 and the sheer force of her will.
00:36:39 When we drink champagne today,
00:36:40 we are taking part in the legacy of a serious badass.
00:36:45 Stepping back a bit from Madame Clico
00:36:50 to the 17th century, though,
00:36:52 European explorers were discovering the New World,
00:36:55 which was a surprise to the people already living there.
00:36:58 Those explorers brought grapes with them,
00:37:00 much as the Romans had done thousands of years before.
00:37:03 They planted and cultivated grapes north
00:37:05 into what is now the United States,
00:37:07 as well as south into Argentina, Chile, Mexico,
00:37:10 honestly, just about everywhere.
00:37:12 Colonists were often commanded to plant vineyards,
00:37:14 but at least in the US, there was a small problem.
00:37:18 The wine that they produced did not taste good.
00:37:21 It tasted foxy.
00:37:24 (gentle music)
00:37:27 - Yeah, well, first of all, there's even an argument
00:37:30 about what foxiness is, but it's a pretty simple concept,
00:37:34 and it goes back, let's go back to Thomas Jefferson.
00:37:37 Thomas Jefferson tried desperately
00:37:38 to grow grapes in Virginia.
00:37:40 The easiest way to explain it is that they taste
00:37:44 a little bit like Concord grape juice.
00:37:46 Concord grape juice, Concord is a Native American grape,
00:37:49 and that smell is in some, it is related
00:37:53 to the kinds of grapes that are native to the United States,
00:37:58 and some people call it foxy, and some people say,
00:38:00 well, that's not exactly what it is,
00:38:02 but it is that character
00:38:04 that makes those wines taste different,
00:38:06 and there are wines made from Native American grapes
00:38:10 that are pretty darn successful, Manischewitz.
00:38:13 That's a Concord wine, and if you wanna know
00:38:17 what early wines in America tasted like,
00:38:20 they were probably drier than that,
00:38:21 'cause it's actually pretty sophisticated
00:38:23 to make a wine that has that residual sweetness in it
00:38:26 without letting it re-ferment.
00:38:28 That's basically what they were drinking
00:38:29 in the good old days, so if you wanna drink
00:38:32 what Thomas Jefferson was drinking at Monticello,
00:38:35 grab a bottle of Manischewitz and have at it.
00:38:37 - What does a foxy wine taste like?
00:38:40 And follow-up question.
00:38:41 - Foxy.
00:38:42 - What does a fox taste like?
00:38:44 - I have a really hard time with that,
00:38:46 because I also wonder the same thing.
00:38:48 What does a mouse taste like?
00:38:49 Hairy, I don't know.
00:38:51 That's what it tastes like to me,
00:38:54 but some people like that.
00:38:56 Some people like that earthy, musty,
00:38:58 mousy, foxy, sweaty, horse-sweat kind of thing.
00:39:03 A fox, I think,
00:39:06 I think they probably taste like a,
00:39:10 I don't even know.
00:39:13 We have foxes in our neighborhood.
00:39:16 They look so cool in pictures,
00:39:17 and then you see 'em in real life,
00:39:18 you're like, "That thing's ugly.
00:39:21 "It's gross."
00:39:22 - The American colonists kept at it
00:39:24 until Downey Mildew and then the American Civil War
00:39:27 demolished the wine trade.
00:39:29 But in California, much as today, things were different.
00:39:33 Jean-Louis Vigne was making and selling wine
00:39:35 in California in the 1840s,
00:39:38 and the gold rush later that decade
00:39:40 also had a profound effect on the demand for wine,
00:39:43 since, unlike gold, the miners could actually find wine.
00:39:47 - By the end of the 19th century,
00:39:49 Californian wines were flowing like,
00:39:52 well, they were flowing, which is good.
00:39:54 They would be needed.
00:39:55 - Also in the mid-19th century,
00:40:01 a man named James Busby, along with others,
00:40:04 imported grape vines to Australia,
00:40:06 which was particularly difficult because it was Australia.
00:40:11 Australia is a gigantic island
00:40:13 made primarily of deadly spiders,
00:40:15 which is why, until recently,
00:40:18 Australian wine production has been focused
00:40:20 on stronger ports and sherries,
00:40:23 because Australians need to drink a little courage
00:40:25 just to go outside.
00:40:26 But today, Australia's wine production
00:40:29 spans all kinds of wines,
00:40:31 which is enjoyed by all kinds of deadly spiders.
00:40:39 Everything was changing in the middle 17th century.
00:40:43 Descartes was extolling the virtues of reason.
00:40:46 Isaac Newton published his "Principia,"
00:40:49 including the laws of motion,
00:40:51 and that verve for deliberation came also to winemaking,
00:40:55 and with it, some new techniques for storing wine
00:40:58 with corks and bottles and a creepy old man.
00:41:01 As all this was happening,
00:41:04 a man named Antoine Lavoisier
00:41:06 did something absolutely brilliant.
00:41:08 He married his wife, Marianne Lavoisier.
00:41:11 Together, they went on an unbelievable tear through science,
00:41:15 shaping the way that we look at the world to this day.
00:41:19 Most importantly for our story though,
00:41:21 the Lavoisiers brought science to wine.
00:41:25 Their contributions would be built on
00:41:27 by people like Adamo Fabbroni and later Louis Pasteur.
00:41:31 Pasteur showed that whatever is wrong or right with a wine,
00:41:35 the reasons are likely down to living things called germs.
00:41:40 Fermentation, germs.
00:41:44 Wine going sour, germs.
00:41:46 That weird smell in the parlor, parlor germs.
00:41:50 - Pasteur loved germs.
00:41:53 He loved them so much, he named his son germs.
00:41:55 Okay, that's not true,
00:41:59 but he did realize that germs were responsible
00:42:02 for a lot of disease and decay,
00:42:05 which led him to try heating liquids
00:42:07 above a temperature that the germs could tolerate,
00:42:10 thus killing them off.
00:42:12 This process is known today as heating stuff up,
00:42:16 but it's also known as pasteurization.
00:42:18 And you've probably seen the word pasteurized
00:42:20 if you've ever seen milk.
00:42:22 - Though wine isn't typically pasteurized,
00:42:25 Pasteur's work explained the fermentation process
00:42:28 and helped make better wine that lasted longer.
00:42:31 And with the use of more modern bottles and corks
00:42:33 by the middle 19th century, wine really took off.
00:42:38 - I mean, it was only 400 years ago
00:42:39 that we figured out how to use, how to manufacture corks
00:42:44 and how to actually, it's not just manufacturing corks
00:42:46 and doing it consistently,
00:42:48 because they did know how to,
00:42:50 the properties of cork and it was good properties,
00:42:53 but actually manufacturing the bottles,
00:42:56 the same shape every time,
00:42:58 because you have to have standard corks
00:43:01 and standard bottles.
00:43:02 That was a huge technological leap forward back then.
00:43:06 - But also because of these advances,
00:43:08 it became possible to age wine.
00:43:11 - It allows, I think, for a wine to show its true potential
00:43:16 or fall apart and be destroyed very easily.
00:43:19 I think it's a delicate balance with aging.
00:43:22 - But trouble was fermenting.
00:43:24 A shitty insect called Phylloxera
00:43:26 was destroying European vine roots.
00:43:29 Thankfully though, American vine roots
00:43:31 were resistant to pests.
00:43:33 Grafting a vine of one grape onto the root of another
00:43:39 grows the top of the vine's grapes, not the roots' grapes.
00:43:43 The dying European roots were dug up,
00:43:46 American ones planted, European vines grafted onto them,
00:43:49 European wine was saved.
00:43:51 Easy.
00:43:52 (crowd cheering)
00:43:53 Except, of course, it wasn't nearly that easy.
00:43:56 It took decades of research and development
00:44:01 to match roots to soil, and in many cases,
00:44:03 the solution was as bad as the problem.
00:44:06 But European wineries survived, just in time,
00:44:09 for many of them to be destroyed during World War I.
00:44:12 After World War I and World War II,
00:44:16 lots of things were different.
00:44:17 In parts of the world, water was cleaner.
00:44:20 It was no longer necessary to drink wine or beer
00:44:23 merely because they were the safest beverages.
00:44:26 The popularity of spirits and cocktails
00:44:28 also affected wine's popularity.
00:44:30 But at the same time,
00:44:32 wine was experiencing a big uptick in quality.
00:44:36 People valued it more.
00:44:37 New laws and regulations emerged
00:44:39 to categorize and classify wine.
00:44:41 The only problem is that in order to classify something,
00:44:45 you need to come up with some guiding principles.
00:44:48 But what happens if nobody can agree what those are?
00:44:52 In Italy, the Denominazione di Origine Controlata, or DOC,
00:44:57 decided to freeze the development of Italian wine
00:45:00 as it was at the time,
00:45:01 rather than letting wine producers continue to employ
00:45:05 new techniques coming to the fore.
00:45:07 To which some of those Italian wine producers responded,
00:45:11 and I quote, "Va funculo."
00:45:13 (gentle music)
00:45:29 Some winemakers, particularly the Tuscan region,
00:45:32 struck out on their own outside the classifications
00:45:35 and made outstanding wines, which are legendary today.
00:45:39 That's great for them,
00:45:40 but it made the DOC look a little bit dumb.
00:45:43 The battle between the DOC and the rogue winemakers
00:45:46 got sorted out to some degree
00:45:47 with an expansion of Italian wine classification
00:45:50 in the 1990s.
00:45:52 But the result,
00:45:53 and this is true of nearly all classification systems,
00:45:55 is pretty confusing.
00:45:58 A guy could spend a lifetime
00:46:00 laboriously purchasing one wine after another,
00:46:03 opening it, sharing it with friends,
00:46:06 left to his own devices to decide whether he likes it or not.
00:46:10 Oof.
00:46:11 Well, if I must.
00:46:13 To be fair to the classification systems,
00:46:15 even if the early days were rocky,
00:46:17 and even if the resulting system is confusing,
00:46:20 someone's gotta keep their eye on things.
00:46:22 You know, if I grew grapes and I sold them for a profit,
00:46:25 I'd be trying to think of ways I could grow more grapes
00:46:27 for more profit.
00:46:29 Anyone would.
00:46:30 The problem is that maximizing production
00:46:33 doesn't necessarily maximize quality.
00:46:36 If quality were to slip,
00:46:37 overall interest in wine would too.
00:46:40 Everyone could suffer.
00:46:41 This conflict goes on today,
00:46:43 and presumably will forever,
00:46:45 and is getting weirder all the time.
00:46:47 - Is wine too complicated?
00:46:48 - No.
00:46:50 For me?
00:46:51 Or for that guy?
00:46:53 I think we try to make it too complicated.
00:46:56 It doesn't have to be complicated.
00:46:57 It is complicated, and it can be.
00:46:59 There's a rabbit holes,
00:47:00 there's stacks and stacks and stacks of books
00:47:02 that you can read about it.
00:47:04 But I think at the end of the day, do you like it?
00:47:06 The end.
00:47:09 - You know, we've taken the time to educate ourselves,
00:47:12 not because it's our duty, but because I want to learn more.
00:47:16 So if I'm gonna learn more,
00:47:17 I'm gonna make sure that I share it more.
00:47:20 And that's the great part about wine,
00:47:22 is there's still so much learning that can happen.
00:47:25 Nobody says, when Lady Gaga releases her new song,
00:47:30 nobody says, "You know,
00:47:32 if you took a class in music appreciation,
00:47:34 you would get so much more out of this song."
00:47:37 It's just not what happens.
00:47:39 But somehow we think people need to get educated.
00:47:42 And the truth is, they don't.
00:47:43 They need to have fun with wine.
00:47:44 And once you start having fun with wine, you'll be fine.
00:47:47 - You know, wine is stigmatized,
00:47:49 and it has been for, well, a long time.
00:47:52 It certainly is now.
00:47:53 And I think there's room to take it a little less seriously.
00:47:58 - Okay.
00:48:03 Okay, just, if you could just maybe a little bit more relaxed.
00:48:09 Like if you, it's just like the end of the day,
00:48:11 you're taking your shoes off.
00:48:13 - Yeah, cuddled up with my robe and cats.
00:48:16 I'm so relaxed.
00:48:18 - Reese, what's going on with your eye there?
00:48:20 - My eye?
00:48:22 Oh, is it?
00:48:23 I'm sorry.
00:48:24 I'm relaxed.
00:48:27 So relaxed.
00:48:30 So yeah, relaxed.
00:48:32 - Shake it.
00:48:35 - Yep.
00:48:36 - Maybe a little more.
00:48:37 - I'm good.
00:48:37 Oh, sorry, sorry.
00:48:40 It's a nervous.
00:48:43 - Aha!
00:48:44 - Oh, you got me.
00:48:46 - I think we can understand why our experts would say
00:48:49 that wine isn't too complicated.
00:48:52 And they're right.
00:48:52 That the only thing that matters is if you like it.
00:48:55 But if you're someone who wants to get into it
00:48:56 a little bit more, it can be frustrating.
00:49:00 Think of it like getting into a new band.
00:49:02 How do you do that?
00:49:03 Well, you hear one song that you like,
00:49:05 and then you spread out through that artist's catalog.
00:49:08 And then you look for other similar artists.
00:49:11 And then your feed fills up with songs
00:49:13 you can't bear to listen to
00:49:14 because the algorithm is a disease.
00:49:17 Now imagine if your city, state, and federal governments
00:49:20 all put controls on what bands were available at what time
00:49:24 with overlapping and conflicting laws all over the place.
00:49:27 As soon as you found one song you like,
00:49:29 you'd never see it again.
00:49:30 That's how wine feels to me sometimes.
00:49:33 - Hello.
00:49:35 - Hi, I'm the owner of this fine wine shop.
00:49:37 Can I help you find anything?
00:49:38 - I love a good cab.
00:49:40 - Oh, of course.
00:49:40 Was there anything specific that you're looking for?
00:49:42 - Yeah, as long as it's a Cabernet and drinkable,
00:49:44 I'll have it.
00:49:45 - Oh, no, no, no.
00:49:46 I really-
00:49:47 - I'm just gonna rip this band-aid right off.
00:49:49 - What?
00:49:50 - A Cabernet doesn't exist.
00:49:51 - And the whole grape?
00:49:53 - I'm telling you, I will be honest with you.
00:49:55 I assure you, Cabernets are not a real thing.
00:49:59 - You know what?
00:50:00 I heard rumors of that on Reddit.
00:50:01 - What?
00:50:02 - How did I not know?
00:50:04 I mean, I always thought-
00:50:04 - Big wine doesn't want you to know.
00:50:06 (thudding)
00:50:07 - Well, what about this?
00:50:09 It's empty.
00:50:10 - So that's more of our air wine.
00:50:14 (thudding)
00:50:16 How did it get this way?
00:50:18 Well, my friends, let me tell you
00:50:19 about a little thing called prohibition.
00:50:22 In 1920, after passing the 18th Amendment
00:50:29 and the Volstead Act, the US went completely dry.
00:50:33 To this day, the debate rages over whether it was
00:50:35 a good idea and whether the effects were positive,
00:50:39 but it wasn't, and they weren't.
00:50:41 Now, given that I'm neither a physician nor an economist,
00:50:46 I am not qualified to make the following two assertions.
00:50:50 But since I'm a comedy writer,
00:50:52 if health is your primary concern,
00:50:55 you should avoid alcohol and sugar and sitting down.
00:51:00 (thudding)
00:51:04 Now, having said that, please know,
00:51:06 if you're currently sitting down, enjoying sugar and alcohol,
00:51:09 you are my people and I love you.
00:51:11 Banning something for which there is still supply
00:51:14 and demand will probably go wrong.
00:51:16 Because booze is relatively easily made,
00:51:19 the US had a very hard time controlling the supply
00:51:23 of alcohol during prohibition.
00:51:26 Imagine if they tried to ban something, a plant, for example,
00:51:29 that grows right out of the ground, almost anywhere,
00:51:32 and requires very little post-processing.
00:51:35 I mean, if you can, imagine.
00:51:37 (gun firing)
00:51:38 Yay!
00:51:39 The 21st Amendment repealed the 18th Amendment
00:51:43 and ended prohibition.
00:51:44 Before prohibition, there was such a thing as Tide Houses,
00:51:48 which were bars owned and operated by the big US brewers.
00:51:52 Imagine the way the US suburbs are carpeted today
00:51:55 with fast food restaurants all clustered together,
00:51:58 and you'll have some idea of how common
00:52:00 and huddled together the Tide Houses used to be.
00:52:03 We didn't want to go back to the Tide Houses system,
00:52:06 so after prohibition, we came up with something else,
00:52:09 the three-tier system, importers/producers,
00:52:13 distributors, and retailers.
00:52:15 In some states, the state government operates
00:52:19 as some of the tiers, and counties can also have
00:52:21 their own sale and distribution laws.
00:52:24 Distributors' territories sometimes include
00:52:27 multiple counties or parts of counties.
00:52:29 On the other hand, to be fair to the folks
00:52:31 who came up with this system almost 100 years ago,
00:52:34 well, it was almost 100 years ago.
00:52:36 Things are different now.
00:52:39 A great problem that we have today
00:52:42 is that all wine is pretty good.
00:52:45 Because of food safety standards and equipment advances,
00:52:49 the most modestly priced wines year-round
00:52:52 are on par with the best anyone ever drank
00:52:54 just a few generations ago.
00:52:56 I had a hard time getting a handle
00:52:58 on what aging wine did for the taste.
00:53:01 Of course, as always, your local wine expert
00:53:06 can help you here, but there's also a wine region
00:53:09 that has made it very simple, Rioja.
00:53:12 Rioja's four color-coded classification levels
00:53:16 make it easy to put together a group of bottles
00:53:20 by the same maker, from the same region,
00:53:23 using roughly the same techniques.
00:53:25 So the effect of aging becomes more clear.
00:53:28 I think that one of the benefits of understanding
00:53:31 the Spanish system, and even at its most basic level,
00:53:34 the Rioja system, is that it's very easy,
00:53:37 if you know those three levels,
00:53:39 to know that your wine has been aged in oak
00:53:43 and has also been required to have been aged
00:53:46 in the bottle for a period of time.
00:53:47 So if you, like me, often taste red wine and think,
00:53:51 "Yes, that's red wine,"
00:53:53 lining up a few bottles like this is a great way
00:53:56 to get a foothold in being able to taste aging.
00:53:59 Let's dig a little bit deeper into Rioja's history.
00:54:02 We've mentioned the early Mediterranean peoples,
00:54:05 like the Greeks and the Romans,
00:54:07 and Rioja's earliest wine-growing history
00:54:09 can be traced back to them as well.
00:54:11 Rioja has been producing wine
00:54:13 since the Phoenicians were there.
00:54:14 Around the middle of the 18th century,
00:54:16 you had a guy who actually went to Bordeaux,
00:54:19 and he saw that they were using barrels there.
00:54:24 He came back to Rioja, and because there were restrictions
00:54:32 on how much they could charge for wine at the time,
00:54:35 it became too cost-prohibitive
00:54:37 for them to actually be able
00:54:38 to incorporate the use of barrels,
00:54:40 because barrels are very expensive,
00:54:41 and they are today, but even back then, even more so.
00:54:44 And so that never happened.
00:54:46 So Rioja's first flirtation with oak barrels
00:54:49 didn't work out long-term,
00:54:50 but it would by no means be the last.
00:54:53 About 50 years later,
00:54:54 there was a small disagreement in Spain.
00:54:57 It was about who should ascend to the throne
00:54:59 when King Ferdinand VII died.
00:55:02 Ferdinand left instructions on how he should be succeeded,
00:55:06 but his brother, Don Carlos,
00:55:08 said those instructions were invalid,
00:55:11 because Ferdinand's proposed heir was female.
00:55:14 Ferdinand's daughter, Isabella II,
00:55:17 did indeed rise to the throne,
00:55:19 but since she was just three years old at the time,
00:55:22 the affairs of state were handled by a regent.
00:55:26 One of those was Baldomaro Espartero.
00:55:29 Espartero defended Isabella's claim to the throne vigorously
00:55:33 against her enemies, the Carlists.
00:55:36 He was so vigorous, in fact,
00:55:38 that when Isabella was of age
00:55:39 to take full control of her throne,
00:55:41 Espartero decamped to London to cool off for a few years.
00:55:46 He took his aide, Murrieta, with him.
00:55:48 While in London, Espartero and Murrieta
00:55:51 saw how much wine Bordeaux was selling in England.
00:55:54 As landowners and winemakers themselves,
00:55:56 they saw opportunity.
00:55:58 So Murrieta went to Bordeaux to learn
00:56:00 and bring that knowledge back to Rioja.
00:56:03 The result was a big jump in quality.
00:56:05 - And then they were learning winemaking techniques
00:56:09 from the Bordeleys, and when they came back,
00:56:12 that's when they really instituted
00:56:14 and really started to see more of the usage of oak.
00:56:18 - Rioja got another lucky break in the middle 19th century
00:56:21 when their vines fared well against Phylloxera,
00:56:24 compared to neighboring regions.
00:56:26 Lots of wine producers from Bordeaux,
00:56:28 where Phylloxera halted nearly everything,
00:56:31 moved to Rioja and the industry grew even further.
00:56:34 - Then you saw a lot of winemakers from France
00:56:37 that actually crossed the border,
00:56:39 a lot of Bordeleys in particular,
00:56:41 that crossed the border and brought techniques with them.
00:56:45 And of course, one of their most important techniques
00:56:47 was the use of barrel.
00:56:49 So that's why you see this really strong connection
00:56:52 between Bordeaux and Rioja.
00:56:56 - As usual in 20th century Western Europe,
00:56:59 everything was interrupted by a couple of wars,
00:57:02 but in recent decades,
00:57:03 Rioja has again clawed its way back
00:57:06 to the forefront of wine.
00:57:07 (upbeat music)
00:57:10 When we last talked about the US,
00:57:33 it was providing rootstock
00:57:35 to help keep European wines alive.
00:57:37 Under the threat of Phylloxera
00:57:39 at the end of the 19th century.
00:57:41 A few decades after that came Prohibition,
00:57:44 which was an unqualified success.
00:57:46 When Prohibition was lifted,
00:57:49 the American wine business could return to normal,
00:57:52 but it experienced a moment of existential ennui.
00:57:57 Sure, the shadow of Prohibition was gone,
00:58:02 but the long shadow of the great European wines remained
00:58:05 and the US vintners were still in it.
00:58:08 American wine at the time was a mess.
00:58:12 The work that the Cistercians had done
00:58:15 for Burgundian wine back in the 12th century
00:58:18 had never been done in California.
00:58:20 But to be fair, California is huge.
00:58:24 Way too big to traipse up and down it,
00:58:27 picking the grapes, studying the soil and the climate,
00:58:30 making hundreds, thousands of batches of wine
00:58:33 and cataloging all results.
00:58:36 But in 1935, Albert Winkler and Maynard Amerine
00:58:39 went on and did it anyway.
00:58:41 World War II had just ended
00:58:44 and while people liked to drink,
00:58:46 they were also very familiar with European doings.
00:58:49 Winkler advocated for a way
00:58:51 to break the European mold in America.
00:58:54 Why should American wine producers be producing a Bordeaux?
00:58:58 Why not find the best grape for your land,
00:59:01 then make the best wine you can from that grape?
00:59:04 Maybe instead of Loire drinkers or Tuscan drinkers,
00:59:08 people could become Chardonnay drinkers or Pinot Noir,
00:59:11 maybe even an I recommended Merlot.
00:59:15 Why should anyone who loves Oregon Pinots
00:59:19 know even where Oregon is?
00:59:22 All you gotta know is that you liked it.
00:59:26 It would be decades before the work Winkler and Amerine did
00:59:30 was emphatically proven right at the judgment of Paris
00:59:34 when two American wines were judged the winners
00:59:36 alongside the best of France.
00:59:39 Not much has been said about the event,
00:59:40 so we'll leave it alone,
00:59:42 but for sure, American wine found its voice
00:59:45 and was at last in full song.
00:59:48 So that more or less brings us up to date.
00:59:51 Now let's talk about where we're going
00:59:53 and what we've learned.
00:59:55 I'm a little bit worried about wine.
00:59:56 I don't think it's going away,
00:59:58 but I do think the industry faces big changes.
01:00:00 - Wine doesn't happen overnight.
01:00:03 You can't just like put some grapes in the ground
01:00:05 and then the next thing you know,
01:00:05 you have like a thing that you can sell
01:00:08 and we can drink it.
01:00:10 You know, it takes years and years and years
01:00:11 to build up that,
01:00:12 and that's gonna be crushed for a lot of people.
01:00:15 - The places that haven't been doing the best
01:00:20 will start to come into the forefront.
01:00:22 New areas will be, you know, kind of like your go-to's,
01:00:27 and places that we see as the classic style of wine
01:00:32 will start to kind of, not saying fall apart,
01:00:35 but they're gonna fall apart.
01:00:38 Like if we keep seeing fires and hail
01:00:42 and drought and floods,
01:00:45 like we're not gonna have these places
01:00:47 to talk about anymore.
01:00:49 The Riojas, the Bordeaux's,
01:00:52 no Rioja's not going anywhere.
01:00:53 Bordeaux, but Bordeaux, it could become too hot in Spain,
01:00:57 you know, or it could become too wet,
01:00:59 or there could be that one hail storm
01:01:02 that finally wipes out Burgundy.
01:01:04 Like, you know, you just never know what's gonna happen.
01:01:07 And I think those places that we know
01:01:08 to make fantastic wines are not gonna be,
01:01:11 they're gonna be more expensive, of course.
01:01:13 The quality is not gonna be the same,
01:01:17 and we're gonna find alternative places to go.
01:01:19 - I think from a technical perspective,
01:01:23 the answers are the same today
01:01:24 as they were for the Cistercians,
01:01:26 the Lavoisiers, the Winklers, the Pastures,
01:01:28 everybody who impacted this story.
01:01:31 You know, they surmounted their challenges,
01:01:32 and we can too.
01:01:33 Maybe we can do it in a way
01:01:35 that doesn't come off as too pretentious.
01:01:38 We turn now to the gospel of Gil Coolers.
01:01:42 Take it away, Gil.
01:01:43 - And there are folks who really are sort of haughty,
01:01:46 and they make you think that you're not good enough
01:01:51 to appreciate a wine like this.
01:01:53 Man, that really bothers me.
01:01:57 That's the thing that I really fight against,
01:02:00 because wine comes since it's 8,000 years old,
01:02:05 it's the sacrament, it's all these other things.
01:02:07 It's a big, big subject.
01:02:09 It already has its image issues.
01:02:14 It's already stigmatized.
01:02:16 And then you come along with your tie
01:02:19 and your little testament,
01:02:20 and you have that body language,
01:02:25 and you're sort of judging someone,
01:02:27 and deciding that they can't possibly enjoy
01:02:31 this type of wine.
01:02:34 I'm not allowed to curse, am I?
01:02:38 - Yeah, you're allowed to do whatever you want.
01:02:39 - You can go to heck.
01:02:41 - Is that cursing?
01:02:44 - It is when I grow up.
01:02:47 Amen.
01:02:49 Now, one thing I've learned while making this film
01:02:51 is that wine experts serve a very important role.
01:02:56 If you're listening, they'll give you a little story
01:02:59 to take with you with your wine wherever you're going.
01:03:03 So for example, when you show up to the party,
01:03:05 as you're handing the bottle to the host,
01:03:07 you can say, "Oh yeah, I thought that one
01:03:09 "was very interesting.
01:03:10 "It's biodynamic, it's a seventh generation winemaker,
01:03:14 "all female owned," whatever.
01:03:16 You didn't know that shit, man.
01:03:18 You got it from your wine expert, and that's okay.
01:03:21 Remember to take that little story with you.
01:03:24 It's the most important part of your interaction
01:03:27 with your wine expert.
01:03:28 But here's the most important thing
01:03:30 that I learned about wine while making this film,
01:03:33 and I invite you to check my math by trying this yourself.
01:03:38 I asked a lot of people about the best wine
01:03:41 that they ever had, and they all answer in a similar way.
01:03:46 They begin by describing the setting,
01:03:48 what time of year it was, what country they were in,
01:03:51 what the weather was like,
01:03:52 what friends and loved ones were around.
01:03:54 But here's the crazy thing.
01:03:56 Often, they forget to mention the nitpicky wine stuff,
01:04:00 like grape and vintage.
01:04:02 I don't think it's possible to talk about
01:04:05 the best wine you ever had without describing
01:04:07 the setting and the company.
01:04:10 So what does all this mean?
01:04:11 Well, it means that when we're looking for wine,
01:04:14 what we're looking for is not the bottle.
01:04:16 We're looking for that moment
01:04:17 when all the other stuff comes together.
01:04:20 The wine could be part of that moment,
01:04:22 but it doesn't have to be.
01:04:24 Now, all this stuff about vintages and terroir
01:04:26 is interesting, but if you really wanna enjoy wine,
01:04:30 keep good people around you, be open to new experiences,
01:04:34 and if you're having a great experience,
01:04:36 make sure to notice.
01:04:38 Oh, and make sure to invite me.
01:04:42 (upbeat music)
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