Is This Bottle Corked__ The Secret Life of Wine - Kathleen Burk [32]
In short, Prohibition came very close to destroying the California wine industry. It drove away a half generation of young winemakers, who had to make a living in other ways. It took a generation or more to grub up the inferior vines and replace them with new plantings of classic wine grapes. It destroyed a growing American taste for good wine, replacing it with a taste for bad, often sweet, wine: most Americans who drank wine at all during Prohibition drank only homemade wine of, at best, indifferent quality. The requirements of religious observation did indeed help to save enough of the industry to enable it to live and fight another day, but considering that organized religion had been a strong force behind the success of Prohibition in the first place, it seems only fair. The fact that religious observance appeared to require, or at least to accept, distinctly inferior sweet wine can only be regretted.
Why does Château Palmer have an English name?
THE SHORT ANSWER to this question is, because an Englishman named it after himself. Before this is condemned as unwarranted self-aggrandizement, however, it should be remembered that from the end of the seventeenth century, it became something of a habit to add one’s own name to an estate that produced very good wine—the renaming of Branne-Mouton as Mouton-Rothschild in 1853 is but one example. Major-General Charles Palmer was born in the city of Bath Spa in 1777 and was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford. When he was nineteen, his father purchased a commission for him in the 10th Hussars, the Prince of Wales’s Own, which was a light cavalry regiment. He served throughout the Peninsular War from 1807 to 1814, and fought at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. In February 1811, he became aide-de-camp to the Prince of Wales, the Prince Regent, the future King George IV. In 1813 he became lieutenant colonel of the 23rd Dragoons (heavy infantry), colonel in 1814, and major general in 1825. In 1814, after Napoleon’s first surrender, Palmer arrived in France with the British commander in the Peninsula, the future Duke of Wellington. Parliament had voted Palmer £100,000 “as the representative of his father,” John Palmer, who had invented the system of mail coaches, thereby providing a safer and more regular method of delivering the post. Palmer was to use this to buy property in France.
Palmer was known in London as a ladies’ man. In France, he was dazzled by a beautiful young widow, Mme. Marie de Gascq, who wished to sell her late husband’s estate in the Médoc, Château de Gascq. This was primarily a fine vineyard—it had no château as such. The story goes that during a three-day coach ride with her from Lyon to Paris—which has been referred to as “turbulent”—she convinced Palmer to purchase it. He did so, for the attractive price of 100,000 francs, and immediately renamed it Château Palmer. (David Peppercorn takes a more austere view, suggesting that Palmer’s attention was directed to the property by one of the courtiers—brokers—of Bordeaux.) He threw himself into developing and extending his property, buying over the following seventeen years land and buildings in the communes of Cantenac, Issan, and Margaux. Indeed, by the time he sold it, it had grown from a small property to become one of the larger estates of the Médoc.
According to Captain H. R. Gronow in his Reminiscences and Reflections, published in parts from 1862 to 1866, Palmer supplied samples of his wine at a dinner for the Prince Regent to taste, in the hope that he would make it fashionable. Unfortunately, this did not work: the Prince preferred his usual version of claret fortified with some Hermitage, and he advised Palmer to experiment and