Wine virtuoso Jancis Robinson is like the very best produced by the industry on which she is an expert — perfectly balanced. She is unpretentious and informal in person, but as a professional she is frank and demanding, both of herself and of those who produce wine — about and on which she is both passionate and authoritative.
It is this fine mix that makes the British-born and internationally renowned wine writer and commentator the popular figure she is, both with the wine drinking public through her web site (www.jancisrobinson.com), video series, many books and regular columns, and within the industry, be it the wine trade, or the scientific community.
This is no mean accomplishment. The drinking public wants its wine writers and broadcasters to make wine lore accessible, but doesn’t want to see the liquid robbed of the mystique that makes it the attractive status symbol that it is. The wine industry holds a similar position. It wants consumers to feel comfortable buying wine, and indeed lots of it, but it recognises that a public willing to pay the significant prices that have to be asked for by first growth chateaux in Bordeaux requires that the magic surrounding wine remains intact.
It is Robinson’s magic that she is able to deliver on all counts. She is able to draw one into a discussion about wine that makes one feel on equal terms, but at the same time leaves one not only knowing far more about wine, but also more enthralled with the pleasures of its drinking and joyous at having been engaged in open-handed communication.
She revealed this knack on a recent visit to Vancouver, her first. The British Columbia Wine Institute had organised a private tasting of the best that B.C. has to offer at the Beach Side Cafe in West Vancouver, at which one is able to look out over the Burrard Inlet as well as at the art of Graham Gillmore, the internationally recognised Emily Carr graduate, who now lives for part of the time in New York. At a specially prepared lunch for an intimate nine following her tasting of 35 difficult-to-obtain B.C. wines which had been brought in especially for Robinson, B.C. wine doyen Chris Coletta told the story of how her young daughter, who knew only one wine by variety and estate, would refer to it whenever asked what wine she thought she was drinking. “I suppose we all do that, don’t we?” was Robinson’s response, immediately putting the gathering at ease and leaving us feeling that perhaps our reference bank of wines was not that much different from that of the internationally regarded wine expert with whom we were lunching. But we left the lunch, presided over by wine educator and Beach Side sommelier Mark Davidson, in no doubt as to how much we had learned about wine and its enjoyment from Robinson, one of just some 200 people in the world to hold a Master of Wine (MW) qualification.
This same absence of affectation is evident in her autobiography, "Tasting Pleasure: Confessions of a Wine Lover." She finds the word connoisseur an unattractive one, smacking of exclusivity, preciousness and elitism, but nevertheless argues the merits of some of the practices of those thus designated. She is, she says, “a wine connoisseur some nights (and most days) and a wine lover every night, sometimes an excessively ardent lover. “Like ‘wine expert,’ ‘wine connoisseur’ is an appellation I would never insist on for myself. It sounds horribly off-putting. In fact, I would find it hard to like someone who described himself or herself as a connoisseur.” She knows, with the French who use the less off-putting term amateur (which Cassell’s translates as amateur, devotee, votary or connoisseur), that wine defies complete mastery.
Like the very best wines she, too, has improved with age, maintaining both her edge and her enthusiasm over her quarter century in the wine industry. Tasting an average of 200 wines a week and writing regular wine columns for publications in 11 countries has left not the smallest dent in her passion for the liquid found when, while still a student at Oxford studying mathematics and philosophy, she tasted her first love — Chambolle-Musigny, Les Amoureuses 1959.
So began the romance.
She applied for a job as an assistant editor with a then “glossy but dangerously thin monthly” Wine & Spirit, a job she started in December 1975.
I, like Robinson, had been brought up largely wine-deprived. My British non-wine culture, which was also her experience, and one she writes about in Tasting Pleasure, involved growing up as a British citizen at the end of empire, living near the Belgian Congo border in the British protectorate, now known as Zambia in the early 1960s, surrounded by expatriate adults who quaffed mostly gin and tonic and local who drank mostly beer. My drink then was ginger beer, supplemented by the odd gin and tonic from an eccentric family friend.
It was during the time I was working in the wine industry that I first met Robinson very briefly. She was then on her first trip to South Africa in 1977 to attend SFW’s Nederburg wine auction, the gala event of the South African wine industry, established in 1975 and continuing in post-apartheid South Africa. The visit was just two years after she had taken her first job in the wine industry, and thus before she was to become the wine icon she is today, but the qualities that make her popular now were clearly evident then as well.
I was lucky to meet up with her again in 1985 when I was working as a journalist for British news organisation Reuters in London, where she lives with her husband, Nick Lander, and their three children Julia, Will and Rose. They also have a home and spend time in southern France. This meeting, however, was personal rather than professional, and happily far less brief. Her brother-in-law, Richard, was a friend and Reuters colleague of mine, and he was to introduce me to the whole family — Nick (a food writer and food consultant), his parents (who had previously owned a wine business), sister, and Robinson’s two, then very young, children, Julia and Will.
I was lucky, too, to dine at the restaurant Robinson and her husband owned in Soho in the 1980s. The decor at L’Escargot was green (before the colour was popular), the food superb and the wine list innovative. If you were lucky, you would spot people like writer Julian Barnes, a friend of Robinson and her husband’s, also dining at the trendy restaurant.
I was able to spend time with Robinson — sipping along with her those hard-to-get B.C wines — when she came to Vancouver, one of her North American stops, after Seattle, on a gruelling tour to promote the recently released The Oxford Companion to the Wines of North America, for which she was a consulting editor. She is also editor of The Oxford Companion to Wine.
While a tasting of Ontario wines in 1976 was her first in a professional capacity and she is a frequent visitor to California, the visit to Vancouver in late 2000 was the first she had made to B.C. It was a whistle-stop of just two days, but certainly long enough to make the favourable impression the elegant and slightly structured Robinson is wont to make — even on those who were not happy that the B.C. wine industry had received scant mention in the Companion — and to taste many of B.C’s wines, a good number of which impressed her, Burrowing Owl’s Cabernet Franc 1998 and Sumac Ridge’s white Meritage 1999 being among them.
She was pleased with some B.C. wines, liking, as she put it, their “refreshing streak of acidity.” After this exposure B.C.’s wines will join other North West wines and surely have a greater place in future editions of The Oxford Companion to the Wines of North America, now in its second edition and a complement to the larger The Oxford Companion to Wine, also in its second edition and edited by Robinson.
Robinson thought B.C. should look to the wine varieties that have been successful in New Zealand, such as sauvignon blanc, given the similarity in climate. She advised the local industry to look to riesling (her favourite grape variety) and pinot blanc, rather than relying so heavily on the now fashionable but ubiquitous chardonnay wines, to which local conditions are not generally suited. With reds, she thought B.C should look to pinot noir.
Robinson wants to find time in her very busy schedule to return to B.C. B.C. — increasingly important as a wine region — for a longer visit that will include the Okanagan, and this time also her husband.
Products of that busy schedule are three new publications — Jancis Robinson’s Concise Wine Companion (the meatiest bits of the second edition to the Oxford Companion to Wine), How to Taste and, with fellow wine writer and compatriot Hugh Johnson, The World Atlas of Wine, now in its fifth edition.
As one would expect, many in B.C. are eager for a return visit by Robinson and are currently plotting just that.
© S Fuller 2000