Wine Tasting

By Michael Broadbent

Michael Broadbent, wine critic, writer, auctioneer and much-admired expert revolutionised the wine trade with his first edition of Wine Tasting in 1968 and has continued to capture the magic of wine for over 50 years, bringing it to the page and to the public in compelling detail, always tinged with his uniquely wry sense of humour.

Michael’s original text (from the 1975 edition) updated with the latest vintages and footnotes revealing Michael’s reactions to the changing wine scene.

Personal tributes to Michael from Hugh Johnson OBE, Jancis Robinson OBE MW, Steven Spurrier, the late Gerard Basset OBE MW MS, and international wine auctioneers Paul Bowker and Fritz Hatton.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Académie du Vin Library
• Release date: Sep 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781913141080

Michael Broadbent

Mike Broadbent was born in Oxford in 1954 to an ill-fated couple who were not able to bring him up. He was swiftly adopted by a loving and caring Yorkshire family. From then on Mike's family life, schooling and university education were entirely appropriate for a middle class child of the time, although always shaped on his part by an incredible drive and work ethic. This trait was accentuated and focused by Sedbergh School, which had a formative influence on him including instilling a fierce sense of competition. There he acquired a love of rugby and English literature both of which were lifelong passions. He thrived at Cambridge University reading English. He coupled academic brilliance with a colossal appetite for work, which resulted in a Double First and the highest awards for his achievements. He was the best that Cambridge could produce, but even he discovered the difficulties of 'What next?' He found the answer in Hong Kong with a career-defining role as head of public relations at HSBC. It was a time of massive flux for HSBC and Hong Kong. He helped transition the bank to London and communicate the changes in business that the 1997 handover to China would bring. He rose to every professional challenge and opportunity again harnessing his Herculean capacity for work. However he still found time, somehow, to travel and see the world, and meet the love of his life - Joyce Chiu. He was a victim of his own success and was asked by HSBC to return to London. Although desperately sad to leave his beloved Hong Kong, he prepared to take on an exciting new chapter as head of the HSBC Group Corporate Affairs Department, a massive global responsibility. However, all future plans were catastrophically upended by a diagnosis of early onset Parkinson's Disease. He now faced the biggest challenge of his life. Described as incurable, but not terminal, PD, as he and Joyce came to call it, dominated the last chapters of his life, but could not prevent his determination to exercise his independence, discover the truth about his birth, participate in difficult medical trials and to write this book. In the last five years of his life, he found it a challenge to make himself understood because his speech was so slurred, and he had to type with one finger. His life had shaped him to rise above every difficulty and nowhere was this better demonstrated than by the way he took on the last years of his life. He never once lapsed into self-pity, but met PD with every strength he had, aided by Joyce who was at his side throughout and a constant source of care, concern and comfort. Throughout all his suffering, his unquenchable and supreme sense of wit and humour shone through. Mike's book was first published privately for friends and family in 2018. In the same year Joyce published her companion book of poetry, From The Heart. Both books sat under the Christmas tree that year, the third Christmas they shared since doctors had told them to expect no more. Mike Broadbent died on February 21st, 2019.

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Studying the complexity of wine tasting has been a long and fruitful learning curve that has opened my eyes to the delights of a huge variety of wines. I hope that, 50 years on, this ‘little’ book will continue to encourage and inspire.

Michael Broadbent, London, March 2019

Commemorative Edition published 2019 by

Académie Du Vin Library Ltd.

www.academieduvinlibrary.com

Publisher: Simon McMurtrie

Editor and footnotes: Susan Keevil

Designers: Anna Carson, Martin Preston

Digital Edition: Martin Preston

Cover photography by Lucy Pope

Acknowledgements

The publishers would like to extend their gratitude to the many others who have given of their time freely to make this Commemorative Edition possible: Hugh Johnson OBE, Jancis Robinson OBE MW, the late Gerard Basset OBE MW MS, Steven Spurrier, Paul Bowker, Fritz Hatton, Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, Charles Marsden-Smedley, and last but not least, the Broadbent family.

Thanks, too, to Sarah Kemp, Jane MacQuitty and Justin Howard-Sneyd MW for their invaluable help; to Pedro Ballesteros Torres MW, Ian D’Agata, Anne Krebiehl MW, Fiona Morrison MW, Vasily Raskov, Mineo Tachibana, Poh Tiong and Dirceu Vianna Junior MW for updating Michael’s original Tasting Terms; and to Jane Anson, Ian D’Agata, Ben Howkins, Anne Krebiehl MW, John Livingstone-Learmonth, Séverine Schlumberger, James Simpson MW and Charles Taylor MW for updating the Vintage information.

Original edition first published 1968

Second edition 1970

Revised edition 1973

Further revised and enlarged edition 1975

Republished 1982, 1983, 1988, 1991, 1992, 1995, 1998, 2000, 2003

Digital edition 2020

ISBN: 978-1-913141-08-0

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

© 1975 Edition Michael Broadbent

© 2019 Commemorative Edition Académie du Vin Library Ltd. All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Wine Tasting

COMMEMORATIVE EDITION

Michael Broadbent

Contents

Preface: Ian Harris

I Forewords

Hugh Johnson

Jancis Robinson

Gerard Basset

Steven Spurrier

Paul Bowker

Fritz Hatton

Auction Scrapbook

II Wine Tasting

Foreword to the 1968 Edition

Foreword to the 1970 Edition

Preface to the 1975 edition

Introduction

I: The approach

II: Why taste?

III: When to taste: some basic points

IV: The senses of sight, smell and taste

V: How to taste

VI: Origin of taste characteristics

VII: Main regional characteristics

VIII: On tasting expertise

IX: Appreciation, recognition and deduction

X: How to organize a tasting

XI: How to record tasting notes

Appendix I: Full glossary of tasting terms

Appendix II: French tasting terms

Appendix III: Italian tasting terms

Appendix IV: German tasting terms

Appendix V: Spanish tasting terms

Appendix VI: Portuguese tasting terms

Appendix VII: Russian tasting terms

Appendix VIII: Japanese tasting terms

Appendix IX: Chinese tasting terms

Appendix X: Books on wine and wine tasting

III Renaissance Man

Michael and Wine Writing

Writers Scrapbook

Michael the Musician

Michael the Artist

Gallery

Michael the Father

Michael the Grandfather

Family Scrapbook

career, honours and awards

Preface: Ian Harris

A Must Read

I was brought up in an environment where wine hardly featured – there was the occasional bottle of Mateus Rosé with Sunday lunch but that was all. When we started going on family ‘package’ holidays to Spain, wine became an integral part of every meal, but the wines we had then were hardly special.

Despite the dubious quality of the wines I tasted in my early years, a year spent in France soon convinced me that the wine trade was the career I should follow. While studying modern languages at London University, I had the opportunity to spend a year in France as an assistant teacher, and because of my keenness to carry on playing rugby, my tutor suggested I should apply for a placement at a school in the southwest of France – where most of the rugby was played.

I lived in a small town called Bazas, a few kilometres south of the Sauternes area, and my ‘lightbulb’ moment came just a few weeks after I started teaching at the Lycée de Bazas when I was invited to dinner by a family who owned a vineyard near the village of Preignac – the owners being friends of one of my fellow teachers. The following day, I wrote a postcard to my mother with graphic gastronomic details of the previous evening (this was before the days of internet and email), explaining that I wasn’t so sure about pursuing a career in the teaching profession, and that the wine trade seemed a good idea! The dinner had started with the customary ‘apéro’ at 7pm, and the main course consisted of the best piece of beef I had thus far tasted, which was cooked on a fire made from vine cuttings, and eaten outside on a warm autumn evening accompanied by a wine from St-Emilion – a place of which I had only heard as one of my fellow students had been placed at a school there. Of course, the dinner finished with a glass of Château des Arrieux – not a particularly spectacular example of Sauternes, but sufficiently mind-blowing to open the eyes of this particular English guest. When I had got home to my apartment at one in the morning, my mind was made up – the wine trade seemed far more fun than teaching, and the next eight months found me (even as an impoverished student) trying different wines with my ‘prix fixe’ dinners at the local restaurants.

On returning to the UK to finish my degree, I had no idea how to make a start in the wine trade. Fortunately, a good cricketing friend of mine knew something about wine, and his father had accounts at several London wine merchants. The following Saturday, he gave me a price list from Christopher & Company, and so it was that I wrote a letter asking if there were any vacancies for a young, keen languages student – soon to become a graduate. I received a letter inviting me to an interview, so I went out and bought a suit, and duly turned up at the office behind Jermyn Street.

One hour later, I walked out with a smile on my face – one letter had resulted in one interview, resulting in one job.

In my first week my new boss put me onto my first WSET (Wine & Spirit Education Trust) course – the Certificate course. This was 1977, and my first contact with the organization which was to become my life from 2002 onwards.

I passed the Certificate, then the Higher Certificate in 1978 and the Diploma in 1980, and it was during the Diploma that I first became acquainted with the name of Michael Broadbent, and his publication Wine Tasting – although it would be many years before I had the privilege to meet him in person.

Since the mid-1980s, WSET courses have been based on the Systematic Approach to Tasting which was developed to enable students at all levels to assess the quality, provenance and characteristics of different wines using a very structured approach. But prior to the introduction of the ‘SAT’, Michael’s book was a ‘must read’ for anybody starting out in the wine business, and certainly required for Diploma students.

When I first met Michael formally in 2007, it was to ask him if he would accept the honour of becoming WSET’s first Honorary President, and I suggested taking him out for lunch to explain what was involved. I remember that the first date I suggested was 2nd May, but he explained that this was his birthday, and therefore not possible as he had family commitments. I explained that 2nd May was also my birthday – so we had something in common! On the day when Michael did come to the WSET office prior to me taking him out for lunch, I proudly showed him round the premises which had been purchased two years previously. On passing one of the classrooms, Michael looked through the small window and was spotted by a student who came running out of her class, closely followed by the rest of her classmates. Without hesitating, Michael followed the student into the classroom and a glass of red wine was thrust into his hand by the ringleader, who asked the simple question: ‘Mr Broadbent – what do you think of this wine?’

By now the designated WSET teacher was taking a back seat, leaving the master to give his opinion of the wine. The subject of the class was Burgundy, and Michael correctly assessed the provenance and quality of the wine (and the vintage), much to the delight of the assembled class. Michael had long been an icon to me, and to see the look on the faces of those students years later was a moment which will stay in my memory forever.

I am delighted to have been asked to write the introduction to the relaunch of Michael’s seminal opus Wine Tasting. I hope that it will inspire many others to pursue a career in an industry which has been my life for 42 years.

IAN HARRIS MBE, DipWSET is CEO of the Wine & Spirit Education Trust (WSET), which runs a network of more than 800 Approved Programme Providers offering wine and spirit courses and qualifications in over 70 countries and in 15 languages.

I Forewords

Hugh Johnson OBE • Jancis Robinson OBE MW • Gerard Basset OBE MW MS • Steven Spurrier • Paul Bowker • Fritz Hatton

Hugh Johnson

A Dealer of Genius

The vibe of the 1960s was not limited to pot, the Beatles and rock n’ roll. Even in the somnolent wine trade something stirred. 1966 in particular was a banner year: Robert Mondavi opened his Napa winery, signalling the relaunch of California wine, and Michael Broadbent restarted Christie’s Wine Auctions, dormant for decades. Contrast and complement: the future and the history of great wines taking on new life. Coincidentally, in the same month as Michael picked up his gavel, my own first wine book came out. There was something in the air.

Michael brought a certain rigour to a trade not famous for self-examination. He had joined – at Harvey’s of Bristol – a team of benign enthusiasts for wine led by England’s arch wine taster, Harry Waugh. Harry’s palate was famous; his judgements impeccable, but his utterances, shall we say, left a lot to the imagination. I tasted with him over a decade on the board of Château Latour. ‘Good colour,’ he would say: ‘Distinct nose; typical. Full body. A nice wine.’ And Harry was not unique: since the days of Saintsbury’s Notes on a Cellarbook almost any attempt to describe a wine, however guarded, obtuse or plain boring, was seen as daring.

There was a treasury of experience and expertise in different branches of the trade:legendary tasters of port or claret; salesmen with a miraculous capacity for champagne, but no real teaching or training. In 1908 a naturalized Frenchman, André L Simon, inaugurated the first wine trade lectures. Half a century later the Vintners’ Company initiated the Institute of Masters of Wine, another seed that bore fruit in the 1960s. By 1970 the first woman, Sarah Morphew, passed its challenging exam.

Michael must have noticed the lack of urgency, or indeed order, in his new calling. He was trained as an architect, and is a pianist and the most precise of draftsmen. The result was his drafting, he claims at one sitting, of a business-like primer on wine tasting that has set a widely accepted standard for over 50 years.

In a sense it is a period piece; it has its archaic moments. More importantly though, it sets out the classical, logical (and one might say inevitable) method of forming an intelligent opinion of a wine, a method that is now simply routine. Above all it is practical: how to set about it; tasting for two people or 200. What do you need? How much? And don’t forget pencils and paper. At the heart of it is Michael’s firm belief and constant practice: you must take notes – which he has been doing for 66 years…

Michael’s little red notebooks are a legend. Over 150 of them, each page ruled to record wine, occasion, appearance, nose and palate, and his conclusion. He is nothing if not disciplined and precise. It must have been a real effort at times, with Bacchus reigning all around, to lay out notebook and pen, even sometimes his wristwatch to record time since decanting, or from first sniff to final caudalie. They have been, of course, the source for his monumental Vintage Wine of 2002, which greatly expands on the notes, adds context, anecdote and the fun which is an inescapable part of his character. Broadbents (Michael, Daphne his late wife, and children Emma and Bartholomew) are incapable of taking life seriously.

Wine Tasting emerged as a slim but stylish volume with a jacket drawn by our mutual friend Charles Mozley, a charming, chaotic, prolific artist who found many patrons in the wine trade, which in Michael’s time included Christie’s. For a while the firm’s small tasting room in King Street, St James’s, was a focus for the fine wine world. Ancient wines that had slept in castle cellars for generations were winkled out by Michael and saw their first daylight there, among tasters (and buyers) who could hardly believe their luck. (The downside of Michael’s gift for such winkling was the drying-up of bargain supplies of old wines for the needy connoisseurs – I was one – who had patronized Restell’s auctions of what were thought of as trade remnants. When Christie’s bought Restells it was goodbye to unnoticed cases of mature classed growths. No more 25-shilling Lafite.) Michael developed a public persona, elegant and apparently dignified, that suggested senior surgeon or QC – or indeed the very serious antique dealer he became. Pretty women seemed to form a queue behind his trim figure, his bicycle and his battered hat. Like a great bibliophile he (and often Daphne) would reverently take each volume (or bottle) from its shelf, respecting the dust of ages, and note its position and condition as evidence of its provenance: the very stuff of art dealers, or least auction houses with high rollers in their sights.

We became close friends, and collaborated on various memorable occasions. I once asked him where he changed into the dinner jacket he seemed to wear every evening. We were just crossing St James’s Street. ‘In a flat up there,’ he said, pointing to a window above Prunier’s famous restaurant. I went on to buy the flat, at a price that seems unreal today; it was our pied à terre for 30 years. When Christie’s started auctions in the Far East I was a consultant to Jardines in Hong Kong and Tokyo. Jardines facilitated the shipping of rare wines for Christie’s, the logistics and interpretation of what at first seemed a pretty rum idea; second-hand liquor. Rum until you heard the prices. The wine trade was becoming more and more international. America gradually authorized wine auctions. The sleepy old world of fine wine discovered glamour; from being the domain of the dedicated and worthy it became another catwalk for the wealthy. Much of the credit – or blame – goes to Michael. He had added what the wine trade had lacked; a veneer of scholarship, and a dealer of genius.

Hugh Johnson OBE, world renowned author of The World Atlas of Wine, The Story of Wine, Hugh Johnson’s Wine Companion and Hugh Johnson’s Pocket Wine Book has sold nearly 20 million in his six decades as a wine writer. He is equally passionate about gardening, and for 44 years has kept his much-loved Trad’s Diary (now online) as well as penning The Principles of Gardening and Trees.

Jancis Robinson

The God of Wine Tasting

I’m not very good with wine books. Reading them seems a bit too much like work, which in my case so often involves writing them. But I always have a handful within reach for easy reference. And when I started writing about wine in the late 1970s, one of the most-consulted books on my desk was Michael Broadbent’s Wine Tasting. It was one of the first pocket books on wine, predating Hugh Johnson’s magnificent annual overviews by some margin, and was usefully slim. But it contained masses of valuable information about what was then the whole world of wine (rather smaller than it is today) and I – rightly, I’m sure – regarded it as advice from the god of wine tasting.

Michael’s and my work lives started to overlap considerably. I was editing a trade magazine and often had to report on wine auction results. Many other people in Michael’s position, head of Christie’s Wine Department, would have delegated announcing the details of a sale but not Michael. It was he who carefully spelt out the names of the less obvious châteaux (‘G-R-U-A-U-D’) and it was he who chased things up. The same attention to detail was evident in Wine Tasting. He had already been involved personally in the design of what was then regarded as the perfect tasting glass (the ISO that now seems decidedly on the small side in our more sophisticated times). And in the book he took us novices by the hand and explained every detail of the wine tasting process. This was invaluable for someone like me who was just embarking on the Wine & Spirit Education Trust exams (then simply available in Introductory, Advanced and Diploma versions), especially since, like most Britons, I had no obvious wine tasting mentor available in human form.

In the 1980s it seemed as though Michael never sat still. He was in huge demand all over the world. He seemed always to be off to Chicago or California to conduct some auction, or just coming back from a smart address in Europe or Australia where the world’s stock of fine wine had just been decimated at a grand tasting. It was no wonder he was so sought after. Not only was he regarded as the world’s most experienced taster, he looked after all the practical details too. In fact on entering any room where a tasting was due to take place, he would wrinkle his nose and ensure that anything remotely potentially distracting was removed. I saw ashes hastily removed from fireplaces, carefully-arranged flowers regretfully relocated, windows thrown open, and food summarily dismissed from sideboards.

Many years later, from the mid-1990s, Michael and I went on to work closely together as members of the then rather glorious British Airways panel of wine consultants. The two of us travelled to and from Heathrow by tube. This involved long journeys back from the tasting room, having sometimes tasted 80 wines or so, gossiping. I learnt a lot on those journeys. Overall I have learnt a great deal from Michael, not least from his magisterial compendium of tasting notes, Vintage Wine. I have also listened to some truly terrible jokes, from the man who writes to me as Janis and signs himself Mike.

Jancis Robinson OBE MW is revered across the wine world for her authoritative wine writing – on her website, JancisRobinson.com, for the Financial Times, and in her books, The Oxford Companion to Wine, The World Atlas of Wine (co-authored with Hugh Johnson), and Wine Grapes, a Complete Guide among them.

Gerard Basset

An Inspiration

When I started in the wine trade in the 1980s and was keen to learn how to taste wine with confidence, to be capable of describing any wine in front of me as precisely as possible, be able to assess the quality level and, for each glass, to attempt to identify the grape(s), the region and vintage, there wasn’t very much material available to assist. At that time, I can think of three books I found extremely helpful: The Taste of Wine, by Professor Emile Peynaud; Académie du Vin Wine Course, by Steven Spurrier and Michel Dovaz; and of course Michael Broadbent’s book, Wine Tasting.

I spent hours reading Michael’s book and going through all of the different sections. It was written in a very clear way, with extreme precision concerning wine tasting vocabulary. Each tasting word was meticulously explained and as