{"id":105439,"date":"2026-10-21T05:00:52","date_gmt":"2026-10-21T09:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=105439"},"modified":"2026-10-20T19:26:49","modified_gmt":"2026-10-20T23:26:49","slug":"the-first-modern-wine-critic-philip-the-bold-of-burgundy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/the-first-modern-wine-critic-philip-the-bold-of-burgundy\/","title":{"rendered":"The first modern wine critic: Philip the Bold of Burgundy"},"content":{"rendered":"

In The Critic<\/em>, Henry Jeffreys<\/a> identifies the first post-Roman Empire wine critic in the noble person of Philip II, Duke of Burgundy, who, in 1395 …<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Philip the Bold (Philip II, Duke of Burgundy), 1342-1404.
Unknown painter of the Flemish School via Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n

… banished the Gamay grape from his lands, describing it as an “evil and disloyal” plant. The only grape for Philip was Noiriens<\/em>, known today as Pinot Noir. <\/p>\n

Peasants loved Gamay because it ripened early and produced lots of grapes but Philip wanted small quantities of high quality wine which Pinot Noir is better suited for. <\/p>\n

And that’s how it’s been ever since: Gamay has been shunned in Burgundy, going only into the cheapest wines, whereas Pinot Noir is lionised around the world. <\/p>\n

Wine 101<\/em> says that some grapes are better than others. It’s common for wine-lovers to have a favourite and often a least favourite grape. Philip the Bold was way ahead of his time here. Most wine drinkers didn’t catch up with grape varieties until much later. <\/p>\n

We have an American, Frank Schoonmaker, to thank for this. In the 1940s he came up with the idea of labelling California wines by variety rather than giving them fake French names like Hearty Burgundy or Mountain Chablis.<\/p>\n

It took a while, but this is now the established way of classifying wines. For Schoonmaker there was a hierarchy of varieties with the great French ones, naturally, at the top. He wrote in his book American Wines<\/em>: “There are only about 30 or 40 superior grape varieties in the world and only about a dozen are capable of producing great wine. No really distinguished wine has ever been made from an inferior grape.” <\/p>\n

Some grapes were good and some were bad. In the 1980s and 1990s the French government encouraged growers in the Languedoc to pull up their Carignan and Cinsault vines and replace them with so-called c\u00e9pages am\u00e9liorateurs<\/em>, improving varieties, like Syrah or Cabernet Sauvignon. You can understand the logic. Syrah sells, whereas the traditional grapes have a Gamay-like tendency to produce lots of grapes of mediocre quality if overfertilised and not pruned severely. <\/p>\n

In Chile, Cinsault is known as “cargadora” meaning the loaded one. Home gardeners will know exactly this tendency. When growing tomatoes, some strains produce massive quantities of fruit with very little flavour. In contrast, we had a plant last year that produced only one piece of fruit the whole summer \u2014 but it was exceptionally tasty. I am sure Philip the Bold would have approved.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the 1970s, Canadian winemakers were selling beverages labelled as “Burgundy” and “Claret”, but after the French government and then the EU started getting pushy about wines named for the great French wine traditions, they eventually got onto the same naming pattern pioneered by Schoonmaker and other Californian winemakers. If “truth in advertising” laws had applied to wine, those 1970s Canadian wines would have had consumer-deterring names like “oversweetened alcoholic grape juice” and “made from randomly selected grapes of unknown provenance”.<\/p>\n

Can you tell I don’t miss any of the Canadian wines I sampled in the 1970s?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In The Critic, Henry Jeffreys identifies the first post-Roman Empire wine critic in the noble person of Philip II, Duke of Burgundy, who, in 1395 … … banished the Gamay grape from his lands, describing it as an “evil and disloyal” plant. The only grape for Philip was Noiriens, known today as Pinot Noir. Peasants […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[62,1117,7,13,131],"tags":[1024,35,86,924,703],"class_list":["post-105439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-france","category-history","category-usa","category-wine","tag-burgundy","tag-california","tag-criticism","tag-farming","tag-middleages"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-rqD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105439"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":105442,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105439\/revisions\/105442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}