Vintners' Tales revisited

Looking back at a portrait of the British wine trade made in the early ‘90s by Jancis Robinson. How things have changed!

In the 1990s Jancis Robinson made a series of short films called Vintners’ Tales which a reader who goes under the nom de plume Curate’s Egg reminded me to look at more closely. The ‘80s and ‘90s were something of a golden age for wine on television. Robinson or should I call her Jancis, she’s one of those people like Beyoncé or Boris who is instantly recognisable by her first name, though I am not sure she would like the latter comparison. Jancis would go on to make the Wine Course series for BBC 2, Oz Clarke, now there’s another one who only needs one name, was rarely off Britain’s screens since his debut on Food and Drink in 1980s, there was his partner in crime Jilly Goolden, and finally Hugh Johnson’s magisterial Vintage: A History of Wine a co-production between Channel 4 in Britain and PBS in the US was first aired in 1989. What riches!

Vintners’ Tales is a very different beast. The first series was made in 1991 before Wine Course, each episode lasts about ten minutes. There are no big budget tracking shots of the Mosel valley. Once you get past the slightly bizarre Blackadder-esque opening titles, it’s just Jancis interviewing some luminaries from the British wine trade on their home turf. There was a second series made in 1998 which I don’t think it’s up on Youtube. Each programme relies heavily on Jancis’s skills as an interviewer and presenter, and the charisma of her featured vintners. Luckily both are present in spades. 

One of the reasons it works so well is that Jancis is both an outsider and an insider; a Master of Wine but also a no-nonsense Northerner from Carlisle who treats public school patricians with a certain amount of scepticism. There’s a bit where the magnificently conceited Michael Broadbent from Christie’s auction house talks about how the only accidents he’s ever had on his bike was from “careless ladies opening car doors without looking…” Jancis comments “unlike a careless gentleman riding the wrong way up a one way street.”  She also has a bit of fun with Adam Brett-Smith’s full name: Adam de la Falaise Brett Brett-Smith, “yes, really.”

Everyone is terribly well dressed, no branded gilets or jeans here. With Michael Broadbent and an incredibly youthful-looking Adam Brett-Smith from Corney & Barrow representing the little seen today double-breasted blue pinstripe, and Bill Baker cuts an imposing figure in his enormous Pappy O’ Daniel-esque corduroys. But Jancis outshines them all in a series of outfits that while fashionable (and not doubt expensive) for the time, don’t look a bit dated. There’s real style for you.

It’s not just the clothes that have a very ‘80s feel.  Representing the energy of Thatcher’s Britain there's the thrusting young bucks at Farr Vintners and the reek of testosterone in Corney & Barrow’s wine bars. Everyone seems shocked, shocked! by the prices that wines are going for. Michael Broadbent says that there’s “an air of fantasy about the prices”, but things had barely got going. On screen the Farr Vintners lads value a six litre imperial bottle of Chateau Latour 1961 at £4,200. In 2018 a similar one sold for £54,000 and I think you’d probably pay a lot more than that today. 

It’s a very male heavy series as befits the trade at the time. The only woman in the first series is an ambitious American lady who is trying to make high quality wine in England. Sadly not Sandy Moss who when the series was made would have been gearing up for her first experimental vintage at Nyetimber. Instead she spoke to Carla Carlisle who was making some rather ho-hum sounding wines at Wyken vineyard in Suffolk which Jancis did her best to sound enthusiastic about. “You don’t have to be certifiable mad to make wine in England but on days like this you can’t help wondering,” she says while standing in the pouring rain. It’s hard to imagine that in 30 years time, California wineries will be investing in Essex chardonnay.

The programmes are a portrait of the wine trade on the verge of momentous change. Broadbent, Harry Waugh, and Edmund Penning-Rowsell are no longer with us. Most poignantly, Bill Baker died in 2008 at just 53, barely older than I am now, all that good living took its toll. John Avery died in 2012 and the business is now part of the Laithwaite’s empire. Adam Brett-Smith and Corney & Barrow, incontrast, are still going strong, still in the same building though they got rid of their testosterone-scented wine bars a few years back. 

There’s a relaxed confidence, one might even say complacency, about the people she interviews. It’s hard to imagine any of the interviewees saying that they are “committed to shaping change.” The series, which was produced by Jancis’s husband Nick Lander, a restaurateur and now food critic for the Financial Times where his wife does the wine, has a confidence about it too. There’s no particular angle or agenda, there’s no urge to disrupt or demystify, though there is the unspoken implication that many of these people are the last of their types, or perhaps that’s just how it feels in retrospect. It’s hard to imagine anyone in the wine trade today driving around West Country shouting ‘bloody socialists’ at dawdling motorists. In fact, judging by my Twitter feed they’re more likely to be shouting ‘bloody Brexiteers’ while fuming in the queue at Bordeaux airport. 

I was going to finish with something about how the wine trade doesn’t produce people like this anymore. And in some ways it doesn’t. People are generally slicker and soberer, and the business more corporate. Very few people dress like Adam Brett-Smith today, sadly. But from my own experience writing about wine, there’s no shortage of opinionated, charismatic figures who would make a modern take on Vintners’ Tales well worth watching. It’s the sort of thing that Channel 4 or BBC certainly wouldn’t make anymore, too white and middle class, but nowadays one doesn’t really need the legacy media to make such things anymore. There’s an idea!

Jancis Robinson has begun tidying up and reposting episodes on her website and Youtube.