Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

The Pour

Hugh Johnson’s Lifelong Journey Among the Trees

The wine writer Hugh Johnson in Central Park, where he admired one of the last stands of American elms in North America.Credit...Andrew White for The New York Times

Hugh Johnson, the venerable English wine writer, had just arrived in New York City on a trip he tries to make every year, especially in the fall when “the elms start to fire up.”

As is his custom, he visited old friends, took in a few restaurants — Le Coucou, the new Rouge Tomate Chelsea and an old favorite, Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s JoJo. He stopped at a few museums and strolled through Central Park, where he indulged another passion that is as dear to his heart as wine — trees.

Wine lovers who know Mr. Johnson through his essential books, like “The World Atlas of Wine” (in its seventh edition and now written with Jancis Robinson), may be surprised to learn that he is also a fervent student of trees and gardening. He is that rare expert who has achieved international authority on more than one subject. Beyond wine, his books include “The World of Trees” and “Principles of Gardening.”

This year’s visit held a particular resonance for Mr. Johnson. He has just published the 2017 “Pocket Wine Book,” its 40th edition. The handy annual guide has documented the state of the wine world through decades of tumultuous growth.

Mitchell Beazley, its publisher, put sales of the guides at 12 million copies worldwide, many of them no doubt well thumbed and dog-eared. Mr. Johnson’s trip included a few appearances to promote it. He would also play host at a reception at the British consul’s residence for the British Bottle Company, founded by his son, Red Johnson, to export British alcoholic beverages, including some fine sparkling wines, around the world.

The elder Mr. Johnson has always held a hallowed place for me among modern wine writers. He is the rare writer who likes to think about wine as much as drink it. With erudition, imagination and flair, he conveys scholarship while winking at the contradictions so often revealed when trying to articulate fleeting sensations with concrete language.

At least once or twice a year, I find myself going back to “A Life Uncorked,” his 2005 memoir of the bottles he’s opened and the people with whom he consumed them. It’s full of wisdom and small gems that convey more about the soul of wine than reams of tasting notes and bottle scores ever will.

With stolid determination, most wine writers fixate on telling readers what to do: buy this bottle, drink by 2020. For Mr. Johnson, wine is never so simple or so certain. It’s the questions wine raises that fascinate him and inform his conversation with what’s in the glass.

“The appellations of Burgundy are a work of art in their own right: never were so many shades of rank and meaning packed into so few words,” he writes of three young white grand cru Burgundies he’s tasting. “‘Silky, sulky, sour,’ is what I wrote in my notes, inebriated with words I fear. What are ‘crosscurrents of energy’? A switchboard? Energy, though, is the point: the quality that all good wines possess, and a few to an electrical degree.”

I visited with Mr. Johnson on a crisp fall morning, one of the first cool days of October. The leaves, sadly, would not turn for a few weeks more. We met at the Frick Collection, his favorite New York museum. Like a good bottle of cru bourgeois Bordeaux, the midrange wine that is a staple of his drinking life these days, the Frick offers a refreshing dip into greatness without demanding undivided attention or concentration.

Mr. Johnson is drawn to paintings as if they were old acquaintances, displaying the relentless curiosity and darts of observation that infuse his writings on wine. A portrait of Sir Thomas More by Hans Holbein the Younger captured his attention.

“Devastating, really,” he said of the subject. “An uncompromising saint.”

He stopped to stare at Rembrandt’s “The Polish Rider,” in which a young archer is perched atop a white horse in midtrot.

“Now, why did Rembrandt do that?” Mr. Johnson asked. “It’s so different from everything else he did.”

We looked at Turners, Titians, El Greco’s “Purification of the Temple,” and then it was off to Central Park to walk among his beloved elms on the Mall.

“We don’t have elms anymore in Europe,” he lamented. Dutch elm disease has devastated the trees all over the world, and the Central Park grove is one of the last remaining American elm stands in North America. “I don’t know how they’ve kept them going.”

Even at 77, Mr. Johnson cuts a dashing figure. His hearing is receding a bit, but his eyes are bright and eyebrows vigorous. On our visit, he wore red pants, a black patterned tie, a sport coat and a soft black fedora. Although he carried a cane, he scrambled nimbly among the rocks under the trees.

“It’s not strictly necessary,” he said of the cane. “But it does help get a seat on the subway.”

As with wine, Mr. Johnson came by his fascination with trees early on. He was born in London in 1939, and, apart from three years in Scotland, where he was exiled with other children during the war, he grew up in London and in Kent, England, in the rural southeast. His father kept an acre in Kent, which he leased to farmers to graze their animals. Young Hugh begged his father to be allowed to plant the acre, only to be refused. After his father died, Mr. Johnson said, he planted it as a memorial.

Since then, he’s planted many acres. He bought a property in France on the edge of the Tronçais forest, where the oaks are prized by coopers.

“Believe it or not, I planted more oaks,” he said. In north Wales, he restored an old oak woodlands, and he is designing a garden for his daughter Kitty in a clearing in an old oak forest in Hampshire. “What am I planting? Oaks.”

Not surprisingly, the oak is his favorite tree, the English oak in particular.

“It’s sturdy, but very rarely elegant, like Nelson’s warships,” he said.

Trees are just part of it. He’s planted gardens, most notably the garden of Saling Hall, the 17th-century manor in Essex he and his wife, Judy, bought in 1970. He planted a vineyard in the Auvergne in central France, an area better known for hiking and skiing than for wine.

“Everybody said, ‘You’re completely crazy,’” he said. “But what’s the difference? It’s horticulture.” For the record, he said, the sauvignon gris and chardonnay it yielded made “a quite substantial, very mildly spicy wine.”

In 2013, after nurturing Saling Hall and its garden for more than 40 years, he sold the place (and most of the contents of its wine cellar), consolidating to a small house in London with a tiny yard.

“From 12 acres to a tablecloth, but I love it just as much,” he said.

What draws Mr. Johnson to trees and gardening, as with wine, he said, is an urge to classify and to collect.

“It’s all about the variety and beauty of nature,” he said. “I see the identity of a wine as quite parallel to the identity of a flower. God didn’t create 1,000 roses. We selected them. It’s an interaction of nature and our aesthetic sense.”

Later, at lunch at Vaucluse, a French restaurant near our exit from the park, Mr. Johnson reflected on the 40 years between the slim, narrow first edition of the “Pocket Wine Book” and the 40th, which requires a generous pouch to contain it.

Wonderful bottles now come from places that were little known or not considered a likely source, whether New Zealand, Sicily, England or Hungary, where Mr. Johnson and some partners founded Royal Tokaji after the Iron Curtain fell, hoping to revive the country’s traditional practices.

Science and technology have revealed far more about grapes and wine than was known in the 1960s, when he was first drawn to the subject. But it’s the cultural meaning of wine that interests him the most.

“I didn’t think much about history in my early days, but it’s history and culture that determine the results,” he said. “In the Burgundy tradition, you’re born with an idea in your head of a certain kind of wine, and you want the wine and a piece of land to express that model.”

He particularly noted what he called “the flow and ebb in influence” of Robert M. Parker Jr., the powerful American wine critic, whose system of a 100-point scale to rate wines, introduced in the late 1970s, now dominates consumer magazines around the world.

Mr. Johnson has never scored wines and says he deplores the practice.

“I like to get away from good, better, best,” he said. “It’s inescapable, but if you become fixated, you don’t follow your own judgment and your own ideas.”

Scoring has contributed to the evolution of benchmark wines into expensive luxury objects, well out of the reach of most people.

“Fine wine used to be for the worthy; now it’s for the wealthy,” he said, quoting a friend.

These days, Mr. Johnson said that while he still enjoys longtime favorite wines, he remains driven by curiosity.

“The scope of what I appreciate has widened enormously,” he said. “I’m sure I’m more open-minded than I ever was.”

He adores Champagne but finds himself increasingly attracted to “the orchard freshness” of English sparkling wine. He still drinks plenty of Bordeaux, but he said he is drinking more whites nowadays.

White Burgundy and white Bordeaux, of course, but also whites from the Rhône and the Loire, and he loves the “savory, textured” chenin blancs from Swartland in South Africa.

“A lot of spritzers in the summer,” he said. “A bit of Perrier creeps into my wine.”

Sacrilege? Hardly. Too many dictates about wine interfere with the pleasures it brings.

“If we’re free to discriminate for ourselves,” he said, “it allows us to enjoy more things.”

EMAIL: asimov@nytimes.com.

And follow Eric Asimov on Twitter: @EricAsimov.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section D, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: A Writer’s Branching Path. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT