Even before the box arrived at my Los Angeles hotel room, I knew its contents would not alter my opinion of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate. What it did do, however, was shatter my preconceptions about Trump as a winery investor. The two bottles within convinced me that the mogul may know more about real estate than simply where to build hotels and golf courses; he also would seem to have an eye for terroir. I'm impressed with Trump wine.
If you haven't heard, there is an establishment in Virginia called Trump Winery, formerly known as Kluge Estate. It was shrewdly purchased by the billionaire at a resale price in 2011 after local socialite Patricia Kluge allowed the business to fall on hard times.
It's located in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, not far from Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's iconic plantation home, where the wine-thirsty Founding Father dabbled unsuccessfully with grape growing in the early 1800s. There are now more than 250 wineries in the state giving life to Jefferson's dream.
During a recent extended stay in California, I arranged for Trump's people to send me two samples. (Full disclosure: It was at their expense.) The wines have been exported to Canada but were not recently available on store shelves in Ontario, so it was bureaucratically less onerous for the company to ship across state lines rather than dealing with Canadian customs.
For the record, my favourite of the two bottles was a $26 (U.S.) 2009 Blanc de Blanc brut sparkling wine crafted in the méthode champenoise style, with its creamy texture, orchard-fruit richness and doughy-brioche depth, the latter owing to 36 months of maturation on spent yeast cells, or lees. It took home a coveted double-gold medal at the 2015 San Francisco International Wine Competition and would not be out of place at a White House state dinner, I think. Also good, though, was the 2014 Meritage, a $20 Bordeaux-style red blend of merlot, cabernet franc, cabernet sauvignon, malbec and petit verdot, that tasted of cassis, dark chocolate and tobacco, with disciplined oak and ripe tannins. I suspect Jefferson, who had honed his formidable palate as U.S. minister to France before becoming president, would have been pleased to have a few bottles for his vast cellar.
So much for the tasting notes. Like many things associated with Trump, the winery is no stranger to controversy and allegations of fiction. There is, for example, the matter of ownership. Last March, with the braggadocio that has marked many of his campaign speeches, Trump said, "I own it 100 per cent. No mortgage. No debt." Yet, according to a legal disclaimer on the winery's own website, "Trump Winery is a registered trade name of Eric Trump Wine Manufacturing LLC, which is not owned, managed or affiliated with Donald J. Trump, The Trump Organization or any of their affiliates." Critics have made much of the apparent contradiction, yet Kerry Woolard, the winery's general manager, assures me that the elder Trump does indeed solely and wholly own the 1,300-acre property, while son Eric is the president who oversees operations, including winemaking and sales.
The Republican nominee has also boasted, "we make the finest wine, as good a wine as you can get anywhere in the world." It's an understandable exaggeration for a proud owner, but he must have been reading from a cue card because Trump has not tasted his own product, according to Woolard. He is, after all, a famous abstainer who claims to never have touched a drop of alcohol in his life (at least not outside of Presbyterian church service). "At the opening, as an example, of course we served our Blanc de Blanc as a celebration and, no, he's not drinking it, he's drinking a Diet Coke," Woolard says.
But there's a bigger controversy fermenting in the cellars of Trump Winery. Fine though some of the cuvées may be, they are leaving a sour taste in the mouths of many in the U.S. wine industry. As reported in The Daily Beast, a news website, the winery applied to hire 19 foreign guest labourers to perform seasonal agricultural work on the property in 2016 under a special visa program. The H-2A application, a copy of which I obtained, cites the positions as "farmworkers and labourers, crop, nursery, and greenhouse" to be paid at a rate of $10.72 per hour.
In itself, the request is not surprising for a winery. Foreign nationals, mostly experienced vineyard hands from Mexico and Central America, are critical to the U.S. wine industry, performing jobs at low pay that only a limited number of American citizens seek out. But Trump's hard-line position on immigration, not to mention his infamous remarks about Mexican "rapists" bringing "drugs" and "crime" over the border, now bristles with special irony. WineAmerica, a non–profit trade association with more than 600 members, states on its website that nearly 70 per cent of farm workers in the United States lack legal employment documentation. And "only 2 per cent of wine-grape growers and winery operators are able to use the [H2-A guest-worker] program." One reason for that limited access is that the visa criteria require that growers provide housing on winery property to non-immigrant foreign employees, says Michael Kaiser, WineAmerica's director of public affairs. While bunkhouses and kitchens may be a laudable idea, some vineyard owners are simply too small to erect special residential buildings on-site that would sit empty most of the year.
Kaiser stresses that WineAmerica officially maintains a non-partisan stance on political parties and candidates. "However, saying that, we are in support of what the Democratic Party is putting forth in terms of immigration reform," he adds. "And obviously the Republican candidate has said some things that are not really beneficial to getting some sort of real reform accomplished." If certain Republicans had their way on immigration policy, he said, "the cost per bottle would definitely go up."
There's a well-worn Latin phrase: in vino veritas – in wine, truth. Where Donald Trump is involved, there's also a splash of inconsistency in the drink.