Thank You France

Fireworks during a Fête de La Fleur in Bordeaux light the sky at night a few years ago.

Tasting at L’Evangile a few years back with Marie. She’s always on the road with me.

It has been almost 36 years since I landed in Paris on a cold winter’s day on January 2, 1985 with one large suitcase of clothes and a brick colored nylon Jansport backpack with my French-English Dictionary, a copy of Alexis Lichine’s Wines of France, a paperback of Patricia Well’s Food Lover’s Guide to Paris, a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 portable computer, a half-dozen Reporter’s Notebooks, a micro-tape recorder, and some pens and pencils. I honestly was scared to death landing in Charles de Gaulle airport with no friends and a few words of French. The anxiety when the TWA flight landed took my breath away. I wasn’t sure how I was going to manage as the European Bureau Chief of the Wine Spectator magazine, but I knew that I had no choice. I couldn’t go back to New York on the next flight. 

France was something very special at the time to me, my father and so many other Americans. It represented the height of sophistication and culture, the cradle of modern European civilization, and most important, it had the best food and the best wine. Great Britain was amazing and most of my family’s ancestors were from there but they only sold wine and their food was mediocre. Italy had not experienced its fine wine renaissance yet. Germany had great vineyards but most of its bottles were sweet simple wines. And the rest of European fine wine production was mostly for internal consumption in the respective countries with the exception of Port and sherry. Very little was exported and made it to America. 

My father, a successful international tax attorney, explained that to me at an early age in Los Angeles over many dinners while he sipped on bottles of Bordeaux. It was a bottle of Bordeaux from his cellar that made me realize that wine was something magical and intriguing. I can still remember the taste of the first sip of 1966 Chateau Lafite-Rothschild that my father shared with me at a French restaurant in Beverly Hills in 1977, and the subtle flavors of currants, cedar and cigar box and ultra-fine, silky tannins that caressed and stimulated my palate and tastebuds. Moreover, I could see how my father and his friend savored the wine and enjoyed the conversation about the subtleties of the wine, the stories behind the label, and the places and times the bottle brought to their minds.

I also had a small group of friends in San Francisco who were obsessed with everything French, especially food. When I wasn’t working in the office of The Wine Spectator on Van Ness Avenue, my friends and I were trying to learn French and trying to pull together enough money to go to French restaurants in the city. Italian, Chinese and other restaurants were okay but the height of worldliness was French cuisine. My pal’s girlfriend, whom I had a crush on, introduced me to Patricia Well’s Food Lover’s Guide to Paris. And we all spent hours reading it together, drinking French wine and dreaming of going to the French capital.

I had always wanted to be a foreign correspondent ever since I began as a professional journalist at 17 at a tiny city newspaper in Logan, Utah, and worked my way through graduate school at the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison as a general assignment reporter. I wanted to work in a foreign bureau of one of the wire services like AP, UPI or the New York Times, but the dream after working for a short while at The Wine Spectator was to live in Paris and write about its wine and food – as well as that of the rest of Europe.

So, I keep thinking about the notification in early December from the Consul General of France in Hong Kong and Macau, Alexandre Giorgini, that French President Emmanuel Macron had bestowed on me the title and rank of Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Merite. I can see the blue ribbon and the silver medal, but I also can vividly remember so many moments in France, whether drinking a fresh Beaujolais in a bistro in Paris or walking through vineyards in Pomerol or Alsace. It’s a knighthood from France for my four decades of work covering the country as a journalist and wine critic, but it’s also more than that. It’s an amazing honor from a country I hold dear in my heart and deep in my mind and soul. 

As a wine critic and wine lover, France is my reference point for fine wine. Inevitably, those legendary bottles of Bordeaux and Burgundy from the 1920s, 1940s, 1950s and 1960s helped shape how I judge all great wines of the world. Those years of visiting vineyards in France and meeting winemakers in the 1980s were foundational to my wine knowledge.

I think too of some of the true greats from the wine trade at the time who shaped my understanding, on multiple levels, of fine wine. That understanding transcends the technical or what you learn in books. For most lovers and students of fine wine, it enters the realm of emotion and spirit. With humility and gratitude, I think of friends of those years such as Alexis Lichine and Wum Kai-Nielsen in Bordeaux to Tim Johnston and Steven Spurrier in Paris.

And it’s also the young French wines of the 1980s that I tasted from barrel and from bottle, such as the legendary 1982 vintage of Bordeaux, that influence my ideas about greatness when I rate wines today. It’s those textures, sensations and flavors and personal experiences that I refer to every day when I rate wines and write tasting notes, stories and reports for JamesSuckling.com and other media. 

I obviously more than survived my time living in Paris. I admit that it wasn’t easy. I remember I couldn’t even buy a baguette from my local bakery on Rue Sainte Dominique because the baker pretended he couldn’t understand my French. But the experience of Paris and France gave me the confidence and resilience for later times in London, Tuscany and now Hong Kong. It made me understand great wine and fantastic food. And my French is now my best second language before Italian and Spanish.

Thank you President Macron for this honor. Thank you France, for what you have taught me. More important, thank you France for what you have given the entire world in great wine and food. I look forward to seeing you soon.

– James Suckling, CEO & editor