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Presidents salute the red, white and blush |
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Written by asap
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Monday, 19 February 2007 |
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If you’re inclined to raise a glass of wine in honor of presidents this President’s Day, you might as well drink like the men you’re toasting.
To follow Thomas Jefferson’s example, rack up a staggering bill for the best from France, down four glasses over dinner and declare yourself “perfectly sober.” Or if you’d rather match the sneaky ways of Richard Nixon: Uncork a $300 Chateau Margaux for yourself, hide the label with a napkin and serve your unknowing guests something far more ordinary.
Drinking habits of the presidents have been something of a window into the lives of Americans as well as the character of those in office, we discovered when we rifled through history texts and archival papers in search of juicy tales. It’s a story written most vividly in wine —the convivial lubricant of power, diplomacy and high society.
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WINE WITH DINNER?
Wine in the White House has been a sign of the times, as has been its absence.
When the hard-drinking early 1800s gave way to moderation later in the century, Rutherford B. Hayes (1877-81) and his teetotaler wife “Lemonade Lucy” not only banned hard liquor from the White House but also shocked the diplomatic set by purging wine from state dinners. After a dry party at the Executive Mansion, Secretary of State William M. Evarts cracked: “The water flowed like champagne.”
Hayes was convinced Americans and liquor didn’t mix. “In our climate and with the excitable nervous temperament of our people,” he concluded, “the habitual use of intoxicating drinks was not safe.”
In the White House, to be sure, wine has been in fashion a lot more than it has been out.
The finest wine fueled the glamour years of Camelot, with the selections of Jackie Kennedy putting the plebeian choices of the Eisenhowers to shame, says Peter D. Meltzer, whose new wine-collection book, “Keys to the Cellar: Strategies and Secrets of Wine Collecting,” offers a taste of presidential wine history. The up-with-America Ronald Reagan was bold (or shameless) enough to serve California wine to a French delegation years before the vineyards of his home state earned their current respect.
Yet while a number of presidents liked to get looped, few were sufficiently discerning to involve themselves directly in wine selection, Meltzer says.
Certainly, no one measures up to the third president in that department.
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THE WINE KING OF WASHINGTON
Thomas Jefferson (1801-09) spent a breathtaking $10,855.90 on wine during his two terms in office. That’s somewhere between $190,000 and $380,000 in today’s dollars.
Jefferson developed his passion for wine as emissary to France and brought it to full flower in the White House, where he designed a 16-foot-deep cellar packed with ice and sawdust for his purchases of “the finest old wines ready for use.”
He ordered his wine shipped in bottles instead of casks to reduce the chances of fraud, Meltzer said. This was more than 100 years before château-bottled wines became the norm in Bordeaux or Burgundy.
And he might have been in a bit of denial about his consumption. “I am not a bouveur,” or drinker, he wrote. “My measure is a perfectly sober three to four glasses at dinner and not a drop at other times.” Based on the size of glasses then in use, that’s nine to 12 ounces daily, Meltzer calculates.
Jefferson tried repeatedly to establish a vineyard at his Monticello estate and launch a Virginia wine industry, an effort thwarted by the demands of the Revolution and the disease and heat that consumed his delicate French vines. But today, those lands are home to 21 Monticello-appellation vineyards.
In 1989, New York wine merchant William Sokolin was showing off Jefferson’s bottle of Chateau Margaux 1787 at the Four Seasons when he hit a tray and felt liquid run down his leg. “I thought someone had spilled coffee,” he said.
No such luck.
An insurance company paid out $225,000 for the broken bottle, ranking it as the most expensive spilled wine in history.
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LINCOLN AND BEYOND
By Abraham Lincoln’s time in office (1861-65), six wines were customarily served with dinner, sometimes followed by liqueurs in the Red Room, historian William Seale says in his 1986 book, “The President’s House.” Costs were getting prohibitive, and were borne by presidents, not taxpayers, at all but the most formal functions.
Ulysses S. Grant (1869-77) served wine at smaller receptions early in his tenure, but switched to fruit punch.
Grant’s presidential papers detail the arrival in New York harbor of 200 dozen quarts and 10 dozen pints of champagne, bound for the White House. All very highbrow. But perhaps the most poignant tale, on the eve of an era of increased sobriety, is told in a letter that a desperate citizen wrote to Grant about her soused husband.
With passion and poor grammar, Esther S. Collard of Michigan wrote on Dec. 17, 1874:
“I take my Pen in hand to right to you to see if thair can’t be somethn Don in be half of myself. My husband Drinks up Every sent he git from the government. He gets 24 dols a month. He don’t drow a Sober Breth as long as it last.”
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DRINKS ON THE SLY
Wine and everything else with alcohol took a nosedive at the White House during Prohibition, although Herbert Hoover was known to drop by the Belgian Embassy —a spot of foreign territory immune to the liquor ban —for 6 o’clock cocktails.
When happy days were here again, Franklin D. Roosevelt went to great lengths to ascertain the preferences of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth for their 1939 visit. He discovered their majesties’ preferences “did not go much beyond Veuve Clicquot and Pommery Greno Champagne from the best years.” Roosevelt ordered 100 bottles from the 1928 vintage.
Years later, the composer and pianist Leonard Bernstein compared the wines served by the Eisenhowers and Kennedys, after having played for both first families. “Inferior,” he said of the Eisenhower wines. But under JFK, who loved Château Pétrus, “it’s all like having dinner with friends. The food is marvelous, the wines are delicious. People are laughing out loud, telling stories, jokes, enjoying themselves, glad to be there.”
Enter the big sneak.
In “The Final Days,” the account by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the agonizing (and sometimes liquor-fueled) collapse of Nixon’s presidency from the Watergate scandal in 1974, they tell of a cruise aboard the presidential yacht Sequoia. Nixon is served a $60 Chateau Margaux (about $300 in today’s dollars) and has the wine steward hide the label with a napkin while serving the lawmakers on board a far less fancy brand costing $6 a bottle.
Jimmy Carter served California and New York wines at the White House while banning hard liquor from the place. He’s been an amateur winemaker back home in Plains, Ga., in his busy post-presidency, using an ancient wine press and five-gallon jugs passed down from his father.
The most recent presidents have other tastes. Bill Clinton is allergic to wine, and President Bush gave up drinking altogether after years of drinking too much.
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THE WINE OF PRESIDENTS?
Tastes over the centuries may have been too varied to pick out one label as the historical favorite. But Chateau Margaux was on Jefferson’s table, and again on Nixon’s yacht. (You can pick up a 2003 Chateau Margaux online for $550 or the lower-rent 2003 Pavillon Rouge du Chateau Margaux for a mere $70.)
So if you want to consider Chateau Margaux the wine of presidents, raise a glass of that this President’s Day. Share it with your friends, as the Founding Father did. Or sneak a slug of it for yourself, in the style of Tricky Dick.
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WINING AND DINING: A CRITIQUE
Wondering what vintages and vittles have been paired up at recent big-time White House meals? For a few examples, and a critique from Meltzer, go here: http://asap.ap.org/stories/1236073.s
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asap contributor Calvin Woodward is an AP reporter based in Washington. | Only registered users can write comments.
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