When I reached out to Geoff Kruth two years ago and asked him to name a few somms who had significant experience tasting really old wines—I was just starting work on a book about pre- and post-phylloxera wines made from ungrafted vineyards, published two months ago under the title “An Inconvenient Fruit”—the first person he pointed me towards was Guild founder Fred Dame.

Fred, I was told, had amassed a great collection of pre-phylloxera wines during his decade-plus as cellar master at The Sardine Factory in Monterey. Upon chatting with him, I discovered that Fred had recently opened one rather special bottle of wine that predated the phylloxera scourge in Bordeaux, an 1870 Château Lafite-Rothschild. And that he can spin a pretty good yarn.

Here’s the interview, edited and condensed, that ensued:



ANDREW BRAITHWAITE: So Fred, how does a guy get to spend his life tasting hundred-year-old wines as just another part of the workday?

FRED DAME: Well, I started at the Sardine Factory in Monterey when I was 17, and I took over as cellar master in 1978, I think? I was there for a decade, and during that time we started to specialize in pre-phylloxera wines.

There had recently been a change in British inheritance laws. Wealthy families needed to pay off taxes, and wine cellars were one of the first things to go in order to keep the pile. So that’s when all these incredible wines came blowing onto the market in the mid-1970s, for around five or six years, and then of course it dried up. And I lucked out because I was the somm right in the sweet spot of that five-year stretch.

I got a lot of stuff pretty reasonably because selling old bottles was a high-risk proposition. It was great publicity when you got it right, and a train wreck when you got it was wrong. I bought a lot of it, and I had some good days and I had some bad days. It was totally unpredictable—a classic story of, "You pays your money and you takes your chances."

ANDREW: And who were you selling this stuff to? Were there people coming in who knew what phylloxera was, and knew why the wines before, say, 1880 were so different than everything that came afterwards?

FRED: Well, in the 1980s—the era of Gordon Gekko and Wall Street—all these young people with a ton of dough from the big Wall Street firms were coming out to Pebble Beach and Monterey. We sold a lot of it to those guys. At one juncture, we had a couple Saudi princes who were attending the Naval Postgraduate School. All they wanted to drink was 1945 Latour. They didn’t even want us to decant it. That was the greatest nine months of my life.

But there was still a small cachet of very serious old wine collectors. And once we became known for old wines, we started to attract those people, which was sort of what I had in mind to being with. Old wine isn’t like new wine. Trying to explain a 1912 Lafite to someone who thinks that 1961 Lafite is the greatest wine of all time, you’ve got to prepare them for that. It’s a different world.

One time, I flew in a bottle of 1865 Château Kirwan for this guy, special order. I’d talked to Michael Broadbent, who’d rated it a monster score from the great twin vintages. And this bottle was a dog, dude. It was a woof-woof. That’s the problem with old wine. It looked good, the fill was good, it came direct from the château. But it just didn’t make the cut.

Don’t let me burst your bubble here. Some of my best experiences have been with pre-phylloxera wines. I got to try the twin vintages of 1864 and 1865 side-by-side. And let me tell you, they blew me away dude. Smoked me.

Another time, I bought four bottles of 1870 Jules Rennier Volnay-Santenots for, like, $40 a bottle. Nobody wanted them, and my guy in London said, "These look pretty good," and they’re in a mixed bin in the afternoon, so I bought ‘em. After I tasted the first one, I held the other three back. I sold one for $75 to Jerry D. Mead, the wine writer, just because I wanted him to try it. Every one of those bottles was a mind-blower.

ANDREW: Was there anything you remember tasting in those wines that pointed directly to, "Gee, this is the effect of growing vinifera on its own roots?"

FRED: You mean, do own roots produce a better wine? Boy, you could argue that one ‘til you’re blue in the face. And you’ll never get two people to say the same thing.

ANDREW: But if we’re going to buy into the concept of terroir, the idea that soil and sun exposure and slope and weather and altitude all matters, doesn’t it seem reasonable that the genetic species of rootstock you’re using should matter too?

FRED: I get your premise and what you’re trying to say. But I’m not totally buying into the deal.

Look, winemaking back then, as you point out, wasn’t at the technical level that it is today. Vintage in Bordeaux and Burgundy 150 years ago had a far more dramatic impact than it does today, when we have these wonderful toys to play with. If it looked like it was starting to rain, there was no, ‘We’ll get the dehydrator and we’ll just fix things up here, we’ll get out the fancy sorting tables and we’ll get people to pick things out.’ If it started to rain, you picked like a son-of-a-***.

That’s why you have the Bordeaux blend of varieties, because you have the early ripening varieties and you have the later ripening varieties. Every year you got something.

Back then, the tradition in England was, you drank your grandpa’s wine and you bought for your grandchildren. Stylistically, winemakers could make wines with longevity. You could be higher acid, you could be higher tannin. I’m sure you can make the argument that the ungrafted fruit helps longevity. I’ve never looked into that.

Here’s the reality of things—since, oh gosh, 1977? When’s the last time we had a total train-wreck vintage? You don’t see the days of ‘No wine produced, No wine produced, No wine produced.’ Not anymore.

ANDREW: So when you’re dealing with so many wild cards with these 19th-century wines, how do you decide what’s worth buying and what’s not?

FRED: At Sardine we were driven by pedigree and provenance. Who made the wine? Who bought it? Who stored it? Just like in the art world, provenance became the critical factor on whether I bought something or not.

ANDREW: And do you still get to taste some of those rare bottles that you snatched up thirty years ago? From time to time, I hope?

FRED: Well, I tasted an 1870 Lafite-Rothschild pretty recently. That was actually the bottle that I opened for Leon Panetta when he was the Secretary of Defense. The one that was in the paper.

ANDREW: OK, I’ll bite. How did you end up opening a bottle of 1870 Lafite for Leon Panetta?

FRED: Look, I’m a Monterey guy, and so is Leon. I’ve known Leon most of my life. He’s a pretty serious wine guy. My old boss at the Sardine Factory, Ted Balestreri, was the one who made the bet with him at their annual New Year’s Eve dinner. Leon and his wife are having dinner with Ted in the restaurant’s wine cellar. And Leon, he’s always looking at that bottle of 1870 Lafite, every year. So he says, "Hey, when are you going to open that thing?"

And he says, "I tell you what Leon, if you get Osama bin Laden, we’ll open it."

About four months go by, and Silvia, Leon’s wife, calls Ted one evening and she goes, "You’d better be watching the six-o’clock news, Ted. You’re going to need to get your corkscrew out."

ANDREW: I can see now why that story made the newspaper. So Leon saved you a taste?

FRED: Here’s how it went down. I can’t tell you everything because the Secret Service won’t let me. But suffice to say that I opened it during a very special dinner party, and I decanted it with my newfound friends in the federal government watching me.

This bottle of 1870 Lafite came from the Heublein auction. I had it recorked in 1984. It was in flat-out gorgeous condition, absolutely spectacular. There was very little sediment—not at the level I would have expected.

I took a pipette, and I piped it into a bunch of CIA shot glasses. I gave a presentation on the bottle, what it was. People weren’t there to listen to me—they were there for the Secretary of Defense! It was a pretty special evening.

But I saved four glasses: one for Ted, and one for Leon. And I saved two small ones that I tasted—one before dinner and one after dinner, just to see how it held up over a four-hour period. And the second taste was still gorgeous.

ANDREW: So it’s safe to say that wine made 150 years ago from own-rooted vineyards is a finite entity that declines every time somebody cracks a bottle—eventually, it will be gone. What about modern winemakers who are planting own-rooted? Do those wines hold some of the same allure of the rare, or the offbeat?

FRED: Sure, it’s intriguing to do ungrafted today. Go to Chile, knock yourself out! Barossa? Knock yourself out man! But it’s risky, and when you get burned you get burned. Is leaving the vine on its natural rootstock better? Common sense would tell you it would be. There are varieties like Carmenère that don’t graft. So it’s a great proposition.

If you took two chunks side-by-side, with similar exposure and soil, and one was grafted and one was ungrafted, that would tell you whether own roots matter or not.

The folks you’re talking about who are making those wines? Let’s be realistic, they’re making them in miniscule lots, where there’s a tremendous amount of fine oak and wonderful fermenting equipment, and you can hand-train every vine and hand-sort every cluster. I get it, and I love it.

In a certain way, though, it’s not fair. Those guys 150 years ago like Lafite, growing on ungrafted vines, they were making 20,000 cases. Now that’s a different story.

But in general, if you and I want to go out and make some killer Pinot Noir, and we’re going to get one of those mini egg fermenters, and we’ve got micro-ox and every cool toy in the world to fool around with? And we’re picking a small patch where we can basically hand-train it? And we’re only going to make 3,000 cases? Do we go grafted or ungrafted? Either way, you and I could make some cool stuff, dude.



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Andrew Braithwaite is a wine journalist based in San Francisco. He’s also Certified-level with the Court of Master Sommeliers. His new eBook is “An Inconvenient Fruit: One winemaking family’s pursuit of an intoxicating, doomed grape.”

www.andrewbraithwaite.com/an-inconvenient-fruit