About Académie du Vin Founded in Paris in 1973 by Steven Spurrier, the Académie du Vin was the first wine school in France open to the public. It has long been associated with thoughtful, independent wine scholarship and with bringing clarity, context, and critical insight to the world’s great wine regions. About this article This article presents the introduction to Côte d’Or: The wines and winemakers of the heart of Burgundy (2nd Edition) by Raymond Blake. In it, Blake sets the scene for Burgundy’s most revered stretch of vineyard, exploring the historical, cultural and human forces that shape the Côte d’Or. The introduction offers essential context on place, tradition and the vignerons themselves—laying the groundwork for a deeper understanding of Burgundy’s wines and the people behind them. Introduction The Côte d’Or, the Golden Slope, enjoys a reputation and exerts an influence in the wine world out of all proportion to its size. It possesses none of the grandeur of the Douro Valley, for instance, nor the picture-postcard beauty of South Africa’s winelands. It is not majestic; its beauty is serene, and what strikes the observer time and again is the tiny scale. From north to south it is about 50 kilometres long, is sometimes less than a kilometre wide, and can be driven in little more than an hour. At a push it could be walked in a day. Yet for a thousand or more years this favoured slope has yielded wines that have entranced and delighted wine lovers, with a fair measure of frustration and disappointment thrown in too. Avoiding hyperbole when writing about the Côte d’Or is a problem, for it has held people in thrall for centuries, frequently prompting poetic flights of prose: ‘The Pathetic Fallacy resounds in all our praise of wine … This Burgundy seemed to me, then, serene and triumphant … it whispered faintly, but in the same lapidary phrase, the same words of hope.’ Thus wrote Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited eighty years ago. Literary critics might cavil at such prolixity, and Waugh himself tamed it severely in later editions, but it was enough to intrigue me decades ago and engender a love for the region and its wines that has never waned. Greater Burgundy is a bigger, more geographically diverse, region than might first be supposed, stretching from Chablis, south-east of Paris, to Beaujolais, north of Lyon. The subject matter of this book, however, is Burgundy’s heart, the Côte d’Or. There is no more celebrated stretch of agricultural land on earth. It has been pored over and analysed, feted and cosseted, obsessed about and sought after for centuries and today, if anything, it exerts a greater pull on wine lovers than ever before. ‘Astronomical’ does not begin to describe the prices now being paid for prized patches of grand and premier cru vineyard, and for the wines produced from them by the top domaines. Such prices hog the headlines and paint a dazzling, though severely one-dimensional, picture of the Côte d’Or today. In the early years of the twenty-first century they are part of the story but they are not the only part. This book aims to get behind the dazzle and flesh out the story, to add some nuance and extra dimension. The Côte d’Or cannot be captured in a sound bite nor, it must be admitted, in a book of this scope – but my hope is that it may add another chapter to the ever-unfolding tale, setting it in the early years of the twenty-first century, a period that may come to be considered by future historians as a golden age for Burgundy but which has brought its own challenges in the shape of those ludicrous prices, the scandal of premature oxidation in the white wines, and the increasing challenge of dealing with extreme weather events such as hail and spring frost. The Côte d’Or has been the subject of forensic scrutiny for centuries, generating a library of books, so why another one now? For the simple reason that it is ever changing. Every year sees new names added to the producers’ roster and old ones slipping away, and thanks to this ongoing evolution the infant domaine of today can be the superstar of tomorrow. The core of the book comprises about a hundred producer profiles. Many fine domaines and négociants whose wines I am happy to purchase and drink have not found a place here. It is important to stress that they have not been included, rather than excluded, simply for reasons of space. The aim was to feature a representative collection of producers, not a top-down selection of the most celebrated names in descending order of renown. As a consequence this book is not, nor was it ever intended to be, a comprehensive A to Z of producers. I write as an amateur du vin, an enthusiast whose admiration for the wines of Burgundy stretches back over four decades, and who has been visiting the region and writing about the wines for some thirty years. I do not trade in wine. I try to see beyond the wine to get something of the backstory, the story of people and place that makes the Côte d’Or so fascinating. To examine the wines in isolation is to dislocate them from that, and not knowing something of the backstory precludes a full understanding of them. A broad lens must be brought to bear on the côte. Too narrow, and the wood will never be seen for the trees. I have learned much by coming across things serendipitously rather than dashing hither and thither, seeing a lot but noticing little. Without time for assimilation and reflection, subtlety and shade are missed. Finally, no gustatory experience can match the thrill of a great Côte d’Or red drunk at its peak. The colour, crimsoned by age; the heavenly scent, perfumed with notes of sweet decay; a sauvage edge, the palate lively and tingling, managing to be so many things at once, oscillating between fruit and spice and meat and game, a merry-go-round of flavour, spiralling on the palate, refusing to be pinned down by anything so prosaic as a tasting note. All the primary components melded by age and yielding up new ones, unsignalled when the wine was young. Everything cohesive and in harmony, like a great orchestra playing at its best. Above all, vital and living, endlessly enchanting and intriguing, engaging the palate and the spirit like no other wine. Learn more about Raymond Blake's Côte d'Or (2nd edition) Shop all books from the Académie du Vin Library Visit the Académie du Vin website

Explore Burgundy with the introduction from Raymond Blake's book: Côte d'Or: The wines and winemakers of the heart of Burgundy. Blake tells the whole story of this hugely influential region, painting a complete picture of life there: the history, landscape, climate, culture and people.

Discover Raymond Blake's Côte d'Or (2nd Edition): a deep dive into Burgundy's wines, winemakers, history, culture and the people behind this iconic region.

Raymond Blake on the Côte d'Or

Barolo Chinato. Utter these words and you’re likely to receive one of two responses – “I absolutely adore it” or “Come again?” For the unacquainted, Barolo Chinato is an aromatised, fortified wine from the Piedmont region. It is made by infusing up to three dozen herbs and spices, the principal one being quinine, in grape neutral alcohol. The infusion is then used to fortify Barolo DOGC wine made from 100% Nebbiolo grapes. The blend is then matured in oak barrels for up to 12 months. Prior to bottling, a small amount of sugar is added. At around 16% alcohol, it is the same strength as most red vermouths. Its name comes from the Italian “China”, for quinine.   Two men are credited with the invention of Barolo Chinato: Giuseppe Cappellano and Giulio Cocchi. It is thought Italian pharmacist Cappellano created the recipe in Serralunga d’Alba in the 1800s and Cocchi created a new formula in 1891.  “I first tasted Barolo Chinato 10-15 years ago, when I was forging my path in the world of vintage spirits, and still remember being struck by the complexity of the drink,” purveyor of antique and unusual spirits, Edgar Harden, tells me. “The soft, viscous mouthfeel, the fruit flavour compounded with herbs and spices and a bittersweet finish lingered until the next sip,” the Old Spirits Company director adds.   Harden is an expert in rare and vintage cocktail ingredients – for want of a better word – often from defunct or discontinued producers. He says we are “blessed” to live in a time where there is such a range of antique vermouths, amari and Barolo Chinatos available. If you know where to look, he says, there are “hundreds of brands from every little town in Italy” to be found, and interest in these liquids is at an “all-time high”.   Barolo Chinato was originally meant to be consumed any time after bottling. But, because of the additional alcohol and small dose of sugar, it can be left for decades, even a century, if it has been stored correctly – “in its brown glass bottle in proper, dark, humid, subterranean environment,” Harden explains.   “Although Barolo Chinato is only slightly stronger than a Barolo wine, the introduction of a grape-spirit-based liqueur into the blend provides it with significant fuel for longevity,” he continues. “The inevitable oxidisation that occurs in a product on the lower part of the alcohol spectrum, the different rates of decay of the 30-plus herbs and spices and the recombination of those receding and advancing flavours at rates not originally intended provide for magical and harmonious combinations for the palate.”  He says, while traditionally it would be served neat, room temperature, in a small glass after a meal with dark chocolate, it is increasingly being used as a stand-in for many vermouths and Amari in classic and modern cocktail recipes.  Cocchi owner and Managing Director Roberto Bava says this idea to promote Barolo Chinato as the perfect companion to dark chocolate (“Like the French had with Pineau de Charentes,” he explains) saved the drink from extinction in the 1970s.   To many people’s surprise, the idea worked and the number of producers steadily increased. “It was a very simple detail but it was the lifesaver of the whole category,” Bava says, “I am very proud of this”.   Bava acknowledges Barolo Chinato is and will likely remain a “boutique” product, in part because of its price – “of course it is more expensive than amaro – you have to use a DOGC Barolo to make Barolo Chinato”, he says – but he believes its heritage and quality will continue to recruit fans.  With these credentials, and an ever-growing appreciation for rare and intriguing liquids, we think this lesser-known export from the prestigious wine region is going to struggle to remain a secret for much longer. Explore more Editorial

It is fair to say Barolo Chinato is a niche category. While some may know it well, others might have never heard of it. We explore the history of Barolo Chinato and why it’s firmly got a place in our hearts and drinks cabinet

A look at the Piedmont region’s lesser-known, fortified export

What is Barolo Chinato?

Since the ban on chemical prevention came into practice across Europe in the early 2000s, vine disease has grown to epidemic proportions, including in some of the world's most prized vineyards. Marco Simonit's methodology of using non-invasive, gentle pruning techniques and shunning any chemical additives has brought him many endorsements from wineries around the world. He has advised at over 100 wineries and currently has a team of 25 international consultants working for him, including at top estates such as Domaine Leroy, Ch. d’Yquem and Champagne House Louis Roederer.  In an interview conducted just weeks before the Coronavirus lockdown began, Simonit outlines the philosophy behind the L’Età Più Bella (With Age Comes Beauty) range of wines. L’Età Più Bella (With Age Comes Beauty) is a collection of wines produced entirely from old vines from Marco Simonit’s home region of Friuli – arguably Italy’s top region for white wine. Simonit states “the idea of the project is to identify the distinct character one gets from wines made exclusively from old vines. It also provides a true terroir blueprint of that vine. More than that and what is the key impetus behind the project was to produce something that would come to be a physical embodiment of the Simonit&Sirch philosophy.”  This project has been a dream for Simonit for the past 20 years. “By having a bottle of wine on the table I hope it will create conversation about the world we live in, the environmental issues that surround food and wine production and the efforts made to make such production sustainable,” he says. The importance of protecting old vines is multifaceted. Simonit states, “First and foremost it promotes sustainable viticulture without an over-reliance on water and chemicals. Old vines with deeper roots are effectively dry-grown – with the deep roots feeding from water locked into the soils. Young vines (depending on the climate) rely on irrigation in their early years and continual replanting of young vines leads to a huge increase in water requirements.” “Fundamentally the project is to provide sustainable viticulture under the threats of global warming,” he says. Being organic/biodynamic, according to Simonit, is not enough in light of current threats to the environment. "Vines have to be stronger and self-sufficient if they are to survive the increasing climatic pressures. The current volume of fertilisers and water is not sustainable in the long-term future," he adds. Old vines are also more sustainable in terms of water requirements and self-sufficient when it comes to nutrients not needing to rely on chemical fertilisers to keep the plants operational. Simonit explains: “A healthy vine (free of pathogens) has much more live wood on the vine which means much healthier capillaries and is therefore much more resistant to the stress and strains of the growing season – whether that be pathogenic fungal disease, hydric stress or other diseases typically found in a vineyard.” Educating the vigneron and the wine lover For Simonit, this project is a plea for wine lovers to understand the fragility of future production in many fine wine regions of the world. “In the world, there are old vineyards at risk of being uprooted, or not valued," he says. "In this case, it is their uniqueness that makes the difference and I want the L’Età Più Bella range of wines to become a means of talking about the importance of vines reaching advanced age (an approach completely at odds with many producers in Italy currently). "I want to make people understand through a product how important these ancient vineyards are, and how through tasting the wines one can go deep into the territory, the vineyard, and the single plant and its conditions of health.”  Vine-by-vine assessment “There is no mass approach when dealing with vines like these,"Simonit explains. "All plants are different, just like men and animals. The extraordinary work is to understand plant-by-plant how many bunches, how many leaves to leave, whether to trim and in what way.  "Soils are analysed, which is fundamental for maintaining the radical system. It takes a lot of energy, willpower and time because the individual plants are treated within the vineyard, and then you have to be severe. The grapes entice you, but you have to respect the plants as individuals.” Vine pruners as a skilled workforce More than that, Simonit wants the project to be an opportunity to bring focus on the regions where the wines originate, as well as the growers who produce the grapes. “It is important for me to have consistent relations with growers who share the old-vine philosophy and values and have detailed knowledge and approaches to their vines.  "But the project also brings the philosophy to the growers. By producing the wine, the growers themselves become further involved, recognising the benefits of the preservation of the old vines and how these wines would further promote their region.” An additional benefit that has stemmed from the old-vine project and the adoption of Marco Simonit’s gentle pruning techniques is that it has reawakened the craft skills of traditional vine pruning that have been lost due to the introduction of chemical and machine farming during the latter half of the 20th century.  Marco Simonit’s pruning school and one-to-one consultancy with vignerons and their workers all over the world have introduced new skills to individuals that have been underappreciated as part of a low-paid, unskilled workforce, often working in poor conditions and with minimal social support as is the case with many seasonal workers. “Training up pruners has become part of a social responsibility," explains Simonit, “not only improving the health of the vines but also creating a skilled workforce that through vine protection and a reduction in chemical use has been a financial benefit to both wineries and their workforce”. Marco states “the social impact of training vineyard workers has been recognised by government initiatives in Europe who have worked with us to help increase the skillset and employability of immigrants in parts of Italy with the end result having a beneficial effect on their individual lives and the communities involved.” “Where better than to start” he states, "than in my home region of Friuli in Northern Italy". A region whose reputation continues to grow and is now widely recognised as the country’s finest for top white wine which competes with some of the finest in the world. They make pretty good red wines there too. Born and raised in Friuli, Simonit couldn’t think of a better place where he could bring the philosophy to life: “Friuli needs a project that speaks about Friuli.” 30 years is an old vine (for Sauvignon Blanc) A common issue in vineyards around the world today is vines dying at just 20 years of age, requiring them to be pulled out and replanted. The vine is not even operational in terms of production for at least three years of growth. The longer the life of the vine can be extended, means a huge reduction in both economic as well as environmental pressures. At 15-20 years old, the vine will have good adaptation to its soil, consistency in its production and will be much more self-sufficient. "The Sauvignon comes from a 30-year-old vineyard, but 30 years may seem young in an 'old vines' context but 30 years for Sauvignon is a lot. For example, Sancerre vines have a maximum lifespan of 25 years. And it is very rare to find it older than this, it is one of the most sensitive varieties to diseases.  Speaking of the pandemic, since we are on the subject, there were the pandemics of Sauvignon and Cabernet Sauvignon: they are the most sensitive varieties to diseases, there were international experts who have tried to investigate this theme. In France for example the producers that lost their plants to disease, planted younger plants, and they made wine from old and young plants together, but the wine was no longer the same. Because the difference is made by the wine that is obtained only from the original plants, without the 'interference' of the new plants. "Sauvignon gets sick from pruning wounds, fungi enter that destroy the plants and kills them. It is very difficult to find single original Sauvignon plants. That is why the Simonit&Sirch method performs pruning cuts that do not ruin the path of the lifeblood of the plant. "Ultimately we want to tell these things through wines. With a point of view that no one has ever taken into consideration, because we invest in people and because we respect the plants over time. "It is no longer enough to say that you are 'bio' to guarantee a good job, you need to do a lot more to be sustainable. And our job is to tell everybody this.” True terroir relies on old vines An additional and worthy benefit at the premium end of production lies in an old vine's ability to produce grapes with a true blueprint of its terroir. Simonit agrees with Lalou Bize-Leroy’s philosophy that a true terroir of a particular site requires a vine that is at least 15 years old, since a well-established vine produces a wine that is more about the soil than the individual characteristics of the sun. Old vines with deeper roots are also much less affected by vintage variation. These are wines made from their roots rather than wines made from the sun. For Simonit, the importance of the project lies in “the increase of education, sensibilities and sustainability. The importance of my pruning technique is understanding that, left alone, vines will survive very well. The problem lies in when the vine is domesticated and such domestication, if done badly, can weaken the vine, increase the pathological stress to the plant, leading to an early death.”  Browse more Editorial 

Marco Simonit has been at the forefront of modern viticulture techniques aimed at protecting old vines from disease and decay for the past decade. Gavin Smith speaks to him about his pioneering philosophy

Pioneering viticulturalist Marco Simonit on the philosophy behind his L’Età Più Bella wines. 

Marco Simonit on why old vines matter

“I can die happy now,” Jon Bonné chuckles to me. The writer spent almost a decade as the wine guy at The San Francisco Chronicle, and is now Managing Editor at Resy, having spent time at Punch, writing for Noble Rot, Decanter and many more in between. His latest book, The New French Wine, was released earlier this year and The New York Times wine critic Eric Asimov dedicated an entire column to singing its praises – something he almost never does.  The hefty, two-part tome has been a long time in the making – almost a decade, in fact. The idea was a frivolous suggestion, casually agreed to over one too many drinks (“unsulphured Gamay in Oakland – as one does”) with his editor in 2014, soon after the publication of his seminal The New California Wine. But what was conceived as part of his quest for “the next thing”, to build on the momentum of his first book, rapidly spiralled.  “It's very hard to see a bigger picture of French wine because it is so overwhelming,” Bonné tells me over Zoom. Initially he’d envisaged a few trips, a project that would take a couple of years – but it “kept growing and growing and growing”.  “There was this much bigger story that I was sort of stumbling into,” the writer says. He gradually realised that there was an “enormous meta transformation” taking place across France – and this is what the book wrestles with. As he writes in the book’s introduction, “I imagined the new French wine would be about the undiscovered country – the cracks between known places.” But as he soon discovered, the new French wine was everywhere – and it took him nine years to piece it all together.   The work is split into two separate books – The Narrative and The Producers, the former the story behind the reference guide that forms the latter. The Narrative is a deep dive into the face of France and its winegrowing today, broken down by region, with break-out essays on topics such as natural wine, farming and the appellation system. It’s a rich tapestry of stories, interjected with the frank and striking photography of Susannah Ireland and occasional illustrated map by Francesco Bongiorni, reminiscent of Art Deco postcards.  For Bonné, the “new France” is about postmodernism, about “wilful rejections of the b******t of the past”. It’s about a (re)focus on site, about producers seizing their destiny and hunting for a more sustainable approach – in the vineyard, winery and beyond – although it’s far from that simple. “To understand French wine and to love it, you simply have to embrace its messy, self-contradictory, and, yes, complicated postmodern reality,” he writes. He points to Muscadet and Beaujolais as two of the most exciting and representative regions of this movement – both having entirely reinvented themselves within a generation. Producers here, he tells me, are “doing the work and focusing on terroir and technique and farming”, while Champagne “has completely transformed its vision of what its wine should be”.  Change is most importantly, however, “an inclusive force” – and looking at who did (and didn’t) make it into The Producers, Bonné’s definitive gazetteer of the nation’s movers and shakers, shines a light on this. It’s not a list of the vignerons he loves, it’s a pain-staking selection of those he deems significant and meaningful in the context of the movement – encompassing both more traditional names and those on the fringes. Take the Bordeaux chapter; you’ll find Pétrus, Lafleur and Pontet-Canet, as well as many less conventional, smaller and often natural-leaning properties such as Clos 19 Bis or Ch. Julia – with “Benchmarks” and the more up-and-coming “Names to Know” highlighted.  It’s fascinating – and fun – to see these two, seemingly opposing strands of France’s wine scene woven together. When I queried the inclusion of these elder statesmen of French wine, he highlighted how, for him, Pontet-Canet perfectly exemplifies the change in France today, with the forward-thinking Tesseron family handing the keys to previous cellar master Jean-Michel Comme to do “radical, radical s**t”.  Bonné deliberately chooses to champion those who have revved the engine of broader revolution – and those who reflect that revolution’s values. When it comes to Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, for example, he describes how they “upheld the moral pillars of Burgundy and winemaking” and “use their power for good”; whereas one top Pauillac estate he vehemently tells me is “perpetuating the worst practices of the Bordeaux trade”. For him, “wine is a consumable” and, as 21st-century consumers, “people have a right to explore the values of producers”.   While Bonné certainly likes natural wine – and many of the movement’s figureheads feature in the book, he is far from an evangelist. When he first started thinking about the book, natural wine was different; “It hadn’t quite catalysed into this very specific cultural beast,” he says, a cultural beast born in Hackney, Bushwick or Paris’s 11th. He talks about the movement’s “sense of tragic fashion” and how, with its clique-y nature, it has “baked in its own expiration date”. There were, he tells me, producers that didn’t make the cut – those who act as a “cautionary tale” for natural wine. “There are wines that can be delicate to being transported. And then there are wines that are just f***ed up at the source,” he says frankly.   His outlook is broadly positive for France, the nation’s ongoing revolution and its vignerons, but the book also acts as a call to arms of sorts, for: “The enforcers of the old ways will be forced to adapt, or they will perish,” he writes.  It’s not a perfect book. With a work of this size (over 860 pages and 600,000 words), it is almost inevitably slightly out of date by the time it is printed – especially with the pace of change today. Lafleur’s entry, for example, talks of Acte but not Les Perrières. I’d also have loved to have captions for each of Susannah Ireland’s images, knowing where – and of whom – they were taken. But these are quibbles.   I can’t pretend to be unbiased. Bonné is one of my favourite wine writers. There’s a lightness to his phrasing, with dry humour and a palate that I tend to identify with – although I’d argue he’s become a little more funk-friendly over the years. His writing is intelligent without being arduous. Perhaps it’s because, like Andrew Jefford, he was and is a journalist first. What really fills his writing is a sense of joy, of almost gluttony – it’s still filled with the excitement that so many wine writers seem to lose, as they tire of bottle after bottle of exceptional wine. He’s still easily absorbed by the stories that make each one different. For me, he doesn’t fit neatly into the critic box, even though it’s a term he uses to describe himself repeatedly in our conversation. “The notion of a critic has devolved to a place where you are simply handing out numbers,” he explains, but to him his work is about “criticism at a deeper level”. It’s about “being able to dive into the culture and come away with the insights and interpretation, and explain why certain wines really do matter”.  And it is this that makes The New French Wine stand apart. It isn’t just a wine book; wine is the lens through which Bonné observes a broader cultural shift. Whether you agree with everything he says or not, it’s a joy to read, hold and look at. It’s a book that will prompt conversation, prompt you to uncork bottles, prompt you to consider quite how complicated – and endlessly fascinating – France’s wine scene is. And is there anything more French than that?  The New French Wine: Redefining the World’s Greatest Wine Culture (Ten Speed Press) is out now.  Read more Editorial 

Ten years after The New California Wine was published, Jon Bonné has published a new book – an epic tale of France’s revolution. Sophie Thorpe caught up with the author to talk about his ambitious project to capture The New French Wine

We sit down with Jon Bonne, the wine writer and author of The New French Wine, to find out more about his second book

Writer Jon Bonne on The New French Wine

Facing up to The New French Wine: Jon Bonné

I am too disorganised to call myself a collector, but I often find myself thinking about the multiple meanings of collecting. I have a room full of books left unread from one year to the next, whose mute reproach I feel every time I am in their presence. I have half a dozen radios, from Marco Zanuso and Richard Sapper’s folding Brionvega TS502 to a Danish-made Beolit 707 from Bang & Olufsen, with its slide rule tuning device. I have a manual typewriter.  Most of us accumulate such random clutter. These were never possessions that were primarily about being useful – the Brionvega and the Beolit have long since been supplanted by a bluetooth speaker and a smartphone. They represent my membership of the design tribe.  The books carry other layers of meaning. My five years at university are on one shelf. The traces of the eight years I have spent writing a just-completed biography of Boris Iofan – Josef Stalin’s preferred architect – are spelled out in the titles of the books on another shelf. The typewriter was inherited from my father and it serves to remind me of childhood. The closest that I come to having a collection that a serious collector might acknowledge is in my chairs: a Rover chair that Ron Arad salvaged from a car, a Gio Ponti Superlegera, an Eames Lounger, a Harry Bertoia, George Sowden’s Palace chair from the 1983 Memphis collection and a deconstructed armchair designed by Rei Kawakubo. On a larger or smaller scale, humans develop complex relationships with their possessions that can go from the professionalism of full-blown collecting, to the casual significance of a row of junk shop finds on a mantlepiece. They can tell us a lot about ourselves. Marina Warner’s guide to the house in Hampstead, now run as a museum, in which Sigmund Freud spent the last year of his life, offers an arresting insight into the significance that collecting had for him. She describes the ranks of ancient bronze, ceramic and marble figures parading across the desk that Freud brought with him to London from Vienna where he no longer felt safe due to Nazi occupation in 1938. Certainly, they are beautiful, and mostly they are precious. Thanks to their association with Freud, even the few that have been established as 20th-century forgeries will have become valuable. Some are almost 4,000 years old and reflect the religious and political practices of the distant past. Others, such as Freud’s art deco cigar case, come less freighted with history. But as Warner says, “they were also tools of thought, the kitchen utensils of his imagination”.   The batterie de cuisine of psychoanalysis included Egyptian coffin masks from the Roman period, Chinese jade and gold brooches, Roman glass, a 2,500-year-old sphinx, sarcophagus lids, Babylonian cylinder seals and Egyptian heart scarabs, as well as a 19th-century neck rest from New Guinea, modern metal porcupines, and Balinese figures. The pieces in pride of place on his desk, placed in apparently random order, were his special favourites, a tiny fraction of his collection that had become permanent fixtures. From time to time, Freud made space for a few new acquisitions to get a look in. “A collection to which there are no new additions is really dead,” he told his biographer Ernest Jones. After a short interval, most of the new things would be moved into the glass-fronted cabinets positioned around his study, where they were placed in more organised groups than those standing on his desk. Greek sculptures went on a shelf together. A cluster of representations of the Egyptian god Horus were grouped on another.  In Freud’s lifetime, the collection was continually changing. Before his move to London, he toured Vienna’s antiquities dealers almost every week on the look-out for new finds. He was ready to exchange pieces for items he could not afford to buy, and was generous in gifting pieces to friends and pupils he thought would appreciate them. Freud also had no qualms about buying items that came on the market in questionable circumstances, in particular, from the unofficial excavations (sometime after 1906) at a Roman fort in Hungary.   Despite the important part it played in his life, Freud wrote very little about collecting. The nearest that he came to spelling out what drove his interest in fragments of ancient sculpture, was when he compared his own exploration of the unconscious minds of his patients to an archaeological excavation of an ancient city. “The psychoanalyst, like the archaeologist, must uncover layer after layer of the patient’s psyche before coming to the deepest, most valuable treasures.”  Freud was known to share his dining table with choice specimens to act as companions during a meal. “I must always have an object to love”, he confessed to his colleague and rival Carl Jung. When he was writing his book The Interpretation of Dreams in 1895, Freud spent the summer at Schloss Bellevue outside Vienna. He took a selection of what he called “my old grubby gods who take part in the works as paperweights for the manuscripts” with him.  Before Freud left Austria for England in 1938, his desk, his consulting room, and his study at Berggasse 19 were photographed by Edmund Engelman. Engelman’s 150 images helped Freud’s architect son Ernst to transpose the desk and its contents from a dark back room in a Viennese apartment to a sunlit Hampstead villa.  Like most collectors, Freud could never limit himself to a single field. Ronald Lauder the former MoMA chairman, for example, is known for the collection of Viennese modernism that forms the basis for his own museum, the Neue Galerie in New York. He also collects (in depth) in 15 other fields with little apparent connection between them. Lauder is fascinated by the work of the Japanese designer Shiro Kuramata. He has a collection of arms and armour going back to The Crusades, and another of World War Two memorabilia. He owns some of Egon Schiele’s finest works, as well as various 18th-century French artworks. Fellow collector Rolf Fehlbaum (head of Vitra) has one of the largest collections of modern chairs in the world, and gave Frank Gehry his first European commission to design a gallery for it, but he is equally fascinated by toy robots manufactured in Japan since 1937. He calls them tiny kinetic sculptures. Where possible, he acquires their original packaging too. Perhaps the best way to understand the psychology of collecting is to see it as a spectrum. At one end, it is about order and control. In a messy and uncontrollable universe, a collection offers at least a semblance of certainty. A collection of this kind is based on provenance, completeness and authenticity. An over-restored vintage Bugatti is less desirable to a collector than one in original condition.  Every previous owner, every detail of its making forms part of its record. A red Olivetti typewriter designed by Ettore Sottsass that once belonged to David Bowie was sold at Sotheby’s for US$65,000. You can buy one (that hasn’t been owned by Bowie) for US$750, which is still a lot of money for a piece of obsolete technology. Some collectors attempt to make patterns from the things that they acquire or, like jigsaw puzzlers, set out to complete a picture by locating every piece of a set. Some try to document the evolution of a species whether the subject of their interest is biscuit tins or the eggs of a particular type of bird. Some forms of collecting require the active engagement of the collector. Wildflowers need to be picked and dried quickly before they are pressed into a book. Butterfly collectors used macabre methods such as poison jars, or squeezing the thorax, to dispatch their prey without causing so much distress that they risk damaging delicate wings. At the other end of the spectrum, the accumulation of stuff by people who die alone in homes overwhelmed by stacks of ancient newspapers and tins of cat food, is a kind of sickness. It’s a condition that can overwhelm even the most celebrated of artists. In the last 17 years of his life, Andy Warhol filled a succession of cardboard boxes with a seemingly random accumulation of objects: taxi receipts, a vinyl Ramones single signed by Joey Ramone, a piece of an ancient, mummified foot, pastel-coloured corsets and a selection of metal dentures. Every time he had a full box, it was sealed and shipped off to storage in a warehouse in New Jersey. A typical box has 400 objects in it, some have as many as 1,200. Items in them include a piece of Caroline Kennedy’s wedding cake – Warhol seems to have been a regular guest at Kennedy weddings. He showed up 20 minutes after the wedding ceremony for Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger had started, in the company of Grace Jones. He was in black leather, and wearing two wigs; she had on a huge green fur hat.   Warhol’s boxes are a collection of the uncollectable and the uncontrollable, which, thanks to the resources of the Andy Warhol Foundation, has been tamed after six years of work by a dedicated group of archivists and cataloguers. The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh has aestheticised the cardboard boxes. They sit on back-lit shelves in the museum to suggest that this is not a random collection of trash that Warhol never looked at, but, in the view of the museum, is in fact a time-based art piece, comprising at least 500,000 objects that took 30 years to complete. It presents a considerably less impressive sight than British Regency period architect Sir John Soane’s museum. The architect of the Bank of England put as much effort into adapting his Lincoln’s Inn Fields house (and subsequently the two adjoining houses) to display his Hogarth paintings, a sarcophagus and his architectural models, as he did to accumulating the collection itself. The Nobel prize-winning Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk’s novel, The Museum of Innocence is an eloquent exploration of the hoarding end of the collecting spectrum. What initially appears to be an account of a doomed love affair, quickly reveals itself as an exploration of the meaning of collecting. The story’s main protagonist Kemal starts acquiring things when his relationship with his lover Füsun is going well. When she drops an earring, he finds it and puts it to one side. As Füsun falls out of love with him, Kemal begins an increasingly desperate accumulation of objects that record their relationship. He picks up each of the cigarettes that she smokes. When she has stopped seeing him altogether, Kemal starts hanging around at her parents’ house and stealing pieces of cutlery that she might have used.  What makes Pamuk’s book particularly remarkable is that he acquired a house in Istanbul’s Beyoğlu district that had belonged to a Greek merchant in the Ottoman era, and transformed it into a physical Museum of Innocence. It is, of course, very far from innocent; everything inside it is a lovingly created fiction. The first thing that you see once you get inside, is a wall covered with 4,213 cigarette ends, each of them carefully annotated in Pamuk’s neat handwriting, with imaginary details of the time and place they were smoked. The rest of the house is full of equally carefully fabricated objects from cosmetics to movie posters that reflect Pamuk’s vision of the modernising Turkey of the 1970s. “I think getting attached to objects happens in traumatic times and love is a trauma,” Pamuk once said. “Perhaps when they are in trouble, people hoard things.”  When Pamuk gave me a tour of his museum, he told me about meeting Warhol’s archivist, and expressed his reservations about the significance of the boxes in Pittsburgh. “Hoarding objects reaches the level of collecting only when there is a story that unites them,” he said. But that is a novelist criticising another, less narrative art form. While Freud’s desk in Hampstead was always useable, if overcrowded, the desk in fashion designer Paul Smith’s office in Covent Garden is completely overwhelmed with a snowdrift of collected objects that sweeps over an office chair, down onto the floor, and back up to the shelves that line every wall. There are stacks of books and magazines, cameras and mountains of vintage cycling jerseys. There is an i-Mac computer, a gift from Jony Ive that Smith has never used. Computers aren’t Smith’s thing. In any case, it’s too late now, short of purging half the contents of the room: there is no way to get near it. There are toy tin cars, collections of bottles from Moroccan markets, a pink bicycle and a lot of rabbits. “I once said in an interview that seeing a rabbit brings me luck, and they haven’t stopped pouring in ever since,” explains Smith. Collecting began, as did so many things in Smith’s career, with his early enthusiasm for cycling. Growing up in Nottingham in the 1950s, there was a newsagent which occasionally had a copy of L’Equipe, which would portray the heroes of the Tour de France in their yellow jerseys in colour on the cover, but in sepia inside. He bought the magazine, fascinated by the images, even if he couldn’t read it. “I can remember once saying, ‘I really like Jacques Anquetil’ to my father, which baffled him, since none of our family had ever been abroad. I saved my pocket money so that I could upgrade the gears on my bike from Simplex to Campagnolo. The box it came in was as important to me as the gear itself.”  What attracted Smith to the Campagnolo box, along with stamps and matchboxes which he has in large numbers – not just in his office but at his Nottingham HQ where he has an archivist trying to make sense of it all – is the way that designers can say so much in such a tiny space. He showed me a Japanese book of matches produced for a Tokyo nightclub in the 1970s. “It so clearly says it’s ‘contemporary’. You can hear the jazz already.”  Despite the huge assortment of assembled objects, Smith is reluctant to describe himself as a collector. “I just have a large quantity of the same things,” he says, matter of factly. “In my head, a collector is someone who selects an item or a subject. They collect them because they know a lot about them. Maybe I have a little knowledge about cycling jerseys.  In the early 1980s, on my first trips to Japan and India, I just got a bit carried away. I bought lots of Japanese furniture. In India, for some reason, I bought 15 wardrobes, and a piece of furniture that doubled as a staircase with drawers.” Smith had them all sent home on the Trans-Siberian Express.  He suggests that his is a collection that has found him. “Things collect me,” he says. “For some reason I started to be sent things, and they still keep coming.” There is an individual who regularly sends Smith artefacts that come unwrapped but covered in postage stamps. Others send him letters, toys, books and even ancient packets of razor blades. One visitor took careful photographs of his office, and later sent him a precisely detailed model of his office, complete with its chaotic contents. Smith’s London home, where he lives with his wife Pauline, is much calmer. “The house is hers. I do have one room for my stuff, but it’s mostly at the office that I get to look at things.” In 1996, patron of the arts and barrister Jill Ritblat gave the V&A Museum the largest single donation of clothes in its history, more than 1,000 items. There are ski outfits in postmodern pastel shades from the 1980s, and challenging Japanese experiments from Yohji Yamamoto and Issey Miyake, as well as couture from Dior and Saint Laurent. There is work by Alexander McQueen, Biba, Mary Quant, and Christian Lacroix, Emanuel Ungaro and Victor Edelstein, and an evening outfit produced by a dressmaker based on an idea of Ritblat’s own design.  The early days of British fashion from the 1960s are represented by Foale and Tuffin, and Zandra Rhodes, and from the 1980s by Margaret Howell and Katharine Hamnett. There is tailoring from Tommy Nutter and work by Giorgio Armani. It is by no means a complete account of contemporary fashion, but it is certainly extensive, and like the personal wardrobe that it is, combines some very special pieces made for family occasions, with more everyday wear. The connecting thread of Ritblat’s collection is Ritblat herself. These were all pieces that she had bought to wear. They were not chosen like stamps, or old masters, or celadon vases to make a self-conscious collection, but were the result of a continuing sequence of choices over time. Taken together they are a reflection of her life as an English woman of a certain background, at a particular time in the country’s history. “I never saw it as a collection, it was more like my diary, though I have never had time to write a diary. Each piece brings back memories of when I wore it,” says Ritblat. She made her first donation to the V&A at the end of 1996, but kept back the things that she wanted to be able to go on using, and they formed the core of a donation to the Design Museum of another 400 items in 2013. Ritblat is ambivalent about fashion. As a child she was somewhat self-conscious about being dressed by her mother, who had studied fashion herself. She was relieved to be able to assume the camouflage of the complex uniform rituals of an English public school for girls in the 1950s. “I loved my school uniform at Roedean; we were expected to change our clothes four times a day, as chic as anything. Scratchy afternoon dresses, regulation school loafers, very nice blazers and pleated skirts.” As a student barrister, she found herself adopting the formal uniform of the legal profession, but then as a married woman began to build a wardrobe that reflected the life that she was leading. Later, when she was making her own choices, she was early to discover Miuccia Prada. “What you pick out is based on whether it suits you and on the zeitgeist,” she explains. Smith, Heseltine and Ritblat represent three very different approaches to collecting. For Smith, the unruly mountain of things in his office, is, like the collection on Sigmund Freud’s desk, part of the tools of his imagination, a source of imagery and ideas for his work as a designer. It’s also a means of establishing his personality. Heseltine’s garden is an investment of time, resources and creativity in the remaking of a place that speaks to the future using living organisms that will outlive us all. Ritblat’s clothes are a record of the full life of an individual. All of these collections provide insights into unique people, their lives and times. In their different ways all three reflect on the nature of collecting, and its ability to be a creative activity in itself. In a world in which technology threatens to abolish the material world altogether, objects have not lost their allure. Their physical condition marks the passing of time in ways that pixels and code cannot do. Collecting is the means all of us have to create histories of our times, and even more, of ourselves. This article was originally published in FONDATA, Issue Two. 

In order to explore the mindset of the collector, Deyan Sudjic shines a light on the collected objects of Sigmund Freud and Andy Warhol, and speaks to three British collectors to better understand what it is that makes collecting such a vital part of the human experience.

Exploring the mindset of the collector and why the act is a vital part of the human experience, with a focus on Sigmund Freud and Andy Warhol

FONDATA: Exploring the art of collecting 

 I Collect, Therefore I Am

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