From the Magazine
February 2018 Issue

“Welch’s Grape Jelly with Alcohol”: How Trump’s Horrific Wine Became the Ultimate Metaphor for His Presidency

After the deadly Charlottesville riots, Donald Trump responded by . . . plugging his family winery in Virginia. Aided by an expert oenophile, the author takes the bait—and tastes the pain.
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‘I thought you needed something good to drink,” the server said, slipping two glasses of deep-ruby-red wine in front of me and my guest. My guest was a nationally known wine expert. The server wanted to apologize for the wines I had made my guest taste for the previous 90 minutes, which the server had brought to the table with mystified, foot-dragging reluctance.

We had come to the main restaurant of the Trump International Hotel, in Washington, D.C., to taste as many of the 11 wines bearing the Trump Winery label as we could. A few weeks later I again sampled Trump wines, this time at the suburban-mall-style Trump Grill—open only for lunch—in the basement of Trump Tower, in New York City. The red-marble and cheap-looking-dark-wood restaurant features views of busloads of Japanese and middle-American tourists trooping past the open-plan tables to the bathrooms. On the way they are obliged to pass by a shop, visible from the tables, featuring Trump T-shirts and baseball caps. The otherwise very nice servers at the Grill tend to run from the table if you ask questions about the few Trump wines on the menu. When I ate there recently, one server did promise to get me some information; after a while, he returned bearing postcards of wine bottles and scenes of Trump Winery, in Charlottesville, Virginia. Trump wines are in fact hard to find except online; the winery’s Web site charges $18 to $54 a bottle for most of what it sells. Several calls I made to the Charlottesville office to find places to buy Trump wines yielded only the two restaurants I’ve mentioned and a chain called Total Wine, which claims to be “the country’s largest independent retailer of fine wine” and has 173 stores in 21 states, most of them in suburbs. (A representative of Trump Winery says the wines are distributed to retailers and restaurants in approximately 25 states.)

This is not what you might expect from “one of the largest wineries in the United States,” as Donald Trump called it in a bizarre aside during a press conference following the deadly Charlottesville riots, in mid-August. Trump Winery isn’t even the largest winery in Virginia, going by the standard industry measurement of cases produced per year: at about 45,000, it is behind two other Virginia wineries that each produce 60,000 cases. Trump Winery’s claim, on its Web site, that it has the most acres planted in Vitis vinifera, the classic species of wine grape, of any East Coast vineyard, is also way off, according to the fact-checkers at PolitiFact. (Trump has 210 acres; Pindar, on Long Island—Long Island!—has 500, and produces almost double the number of cases.) In his press conference after Charlottesville, the president also called himself the owner of the Charlottesville winery. He certainly was the man who initially bought it, years ago, when he acquired it on the cheap from a bankrupt friend. But the owner today is his son Eric.

The Trump Winery grounds, in Charlottesville, Virginia. Below, offerings from the Trump label.

Photographs: Top, by Lynne Sladky/A.P. Images; Bottom, by Chet Strange/The New York Times/Redux.

In using the family winery to deflect questions about white supremacy after the deadly riots, the president did manage to plug yet another Trump product. A surprised nation wondered: How’s the wine?

Thus my invitation to the visiting wine expert, who is known for his bloodhound nose and encyclopedic knowledge of the world’s wines, and who actually likes Virginia wines. The Trump International, hard by the White House, occupies the Old Post Office building, with a glorious, soaring, sumptuously restored Romanesque-revival interior. Before the hotel became the reason people can now pronounce the word “emoluments,” its restaurant was a prime spot for power lunches. The renowned José Andrés was in the process of designing a new restaurant to go into the space when the not-yet-Republican-nominee referred to Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers, and Andrés, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Spain, pulled out of the deal. The Trump Organization sued him for breach of contract, and the case got as far as a pre-inauguration deposition of the president-elect before it was settled out of court. Andrés has been conspicuously quiet about the president even as he showed up the administration by efficiently serving thousands of meals to Puerto Ricans without power or water in the wake of Hurricane Maria.

Now the restaurant is operated by David Burke, a New York chef and restaurateur, as a standard steak house. It serves stubbornly cold and hard popovers as a giveaway and large, overpriced portions of bland tuna tartare; Maryland crab cakes that taste of nothing other than pepper; and dull steaks. In contrast to the cheesy Trump Grill, in Manhattan, the fittings seem opulent, the service is professional, and the restaurant is fully staffed and overseen by a director of food and beverages who has the bluff heartiness of Sydney Greenstreet. The place brings to mind the grim bonhomie of Maxim’s in occupied Paris.

I certainly surprised and probably irritated the server by asking for each of the three Trump wines on the menu and also to see if there were any more kinds in the cellar. We drank through as many as we could get. With an anything-to-oblige-a-visiting-fireman shrug, the server turned up Trump wines not on the menu, and also analogous non-Trump wines for fair-comparison purposes, with my expert guest commenting on each one.

The Trump version of Chardonnay? “Oaked up,” my friend said. “Sweet. Too much residual sugar. Harvested too ripe. Flabby. Really clumsy. Goes with the cuisine.” Expensive too: $68 a bottle at the restaurant for the 2015, $22 on the Web site for the 2016.

What about the 2015 Trump Meritage, a blend of red grapes that are “sourced,” meaning trucked in from the West Coast. The label calls it “American red wine”; it sells for $30 on the Web site. My guest tasted the Meritage: “Welch’s grape jelly with alcohol. A terrible, fumy, alcoholic nose. If I served you that on an airline you’d be mad.” (A buyer at a well-known Washington wine shop I later asked to evaluate the wines—he once sold Trump vodka, produced from 2005 to 2011, because he liked it—took one sip of the Meritage, wanted no more, and said, “Grocery-store wine.”) My guest went on, “They’re lying about the alcohol on the label.” He knew this, he explained, by a strange method of marching his two front fingers down his chest after he swallowed, saying that when he could feel the alcohol down to his belly button he knew it was 14 percent alcohol, which is what the label said. But this wine pushed his fingers below the belt. He knew the Meritage was 15 percent—and a 1 percent variance, oddly, is permitted on labels. “This’ll rip you,” he said.

We tried Trump Winery’s far more expensive New World Reserve, made from a similar blend of red grapes but all grown in Charlottesville. The bottle has the words “estate bottled” and “Monticello” on the front and sells for $54 on the Web site. It was better than the Meritage. A server also brought us a glass of Trump Winery’s sparkling blanc de blanc, a calling card of any Virginia winery. “It’s fine,” my friend said. “No reserve, by which I mean flavors that keep unwinding like an onion skin. It doesn’t offend. I’d get drunk on it at a wedding.” He paused. “Let’s be honest. I’d get drunk on anything at a wedding.”

I managed to engage my friend and one server in a discussion of Virginia wines, which both admitted could be decent or, in the case of a few wine-makers, much better than decent. But the server did everything possible in the course of a long meal to steer us away from Trump wines. The idea had been to impress a famous guest, and serving him products from Trump Winery was not the way to do it. “We sell these,” the server said with a theatrical eye-roll, taking in the collection of glasses that by then were crowding our table, “because we have to.”

Illustration of Donald Trump.Illustration by Barry Blitt.

Why wine—and why Charlottesville? Not because Donald Trump likes wine: he is a teetotaler. The official answer is that he was helping out an old friend in her moment of financial duress, giving new life to a dream project that had tanked just a decade after she poured into it much of her estimated $100 million divorce settlement. Patricia Kluge, raised in Iraq, the daughter of a British father and a mother who was half Chaldean and half Scottish, had married John Kluge, a self-made billionaire, in 1981, when she was 33 and he was 67. They bought up land in horsey Charlottesville, a short drive from Jefferson’s Monticello, and built a 45-room, 23,500-square-foot Georgian-style mansion where they entertained lavishly, using the golf course, the five lakes they constructed, and the game preserve they stocked. In 1990 they divorced, and nine years later, with her third husband, Patricia Kluge established a winery bearing her name. Her ambitions were simple: to make the best wine in the world.

Gabriele Rausse, the affable, Italian-born director of gardens and grounds at Monticello, worked as the Kluge wine-maker for the first 10 years, 1999 to 2009, and then consulted unpaid for an additional year and a half after Patricia Kluge went broke in the wake of the mortgage crisis. He recently recalled that when, at the outset, Kluge said she wanted to charge a stupendous $450 a bottle, “I told her, ‘If you put my name on it, you can charge $4.50. If you hire the best wine-maker in France as a consultant, you can try to charge $450.’ ” So he put her in touch with a famous wine-making friend from Champagne, and, Rausse recalls, she paid him “a crazy amount of money.” Word got out in the nascent local wine industry, which Rausse had helped build after arriving in Charlottesville, in 1976. That was a time when local wines left a lot to be desired. The first bottles he made, in 1978, he couldn’t give away: friends kept passing them along to other friends, fruitcake-style. The millions Kluge poured into her vineyard, Rausse said, made other wine-makers step up their game.

Now 72, Rausse is both frank and philosophical. “She was shooting for quality,” he says. “Her main mistake was that she wanted the best Cabernet Sauvignon in the world, but it needs four to five years to take off. She sold it right away, because she was short of money. It was a constant contradiction.” (A source close to Kluge says financial considerations played a part only after the financial crisis.) Even so, the wines, particularly the sparkling blanc de blanc, had some success, including being served at Chelsea Clinton’s wedding.

The real reason Trump helped out his old friend was the chance to buy the estate for a predatory price, so laughably low that the bank which had seized the house kept refusing his offers. So he went around them, buying 217 acres that surrounded the mansion—in effect, the front lawn—from the trustees for Kluge’s adopted son; then the 776-acre vineyard for $6.2 million, plus $1.7 million in equipment and leftover wine; then the mansion itself, for $6.5 million. Kluge had initially put the mansion alone on the market for $100 million. At the time of the sale, Rausse recalls, “she said, ‘Gabriele, don’t worry—he’s my friend.’ ” And, indeed, Trump hired Kluge as director of the winery. A year later, he fired her. Kluge, who now sells jewelry, called Town & Country’s Sam Dangremond last August to dis the wines after Trump made his preposterous claim about the winery’s size. “The wine is not good anymore,” she told Dangremond. “I have had several people in Palm Beach lament that it’s the only wine they have on the menu at Mar-a-Lago.” She did credit the official owner and current president of the winery for keeping up the grounds: Eric “is doing a great job at maintenance,” she said.

Rausse is still friends with the wine-makers and managers at Trump Winery, who include Monticello veterans. And he acknowledges the increased demand for the wine, even if it means buying grapes from other parts of the country to make it. “All my wine is made in Virginia,” mostly from grapes he grows himself, he says. (He produces 2,000 cases a year under his own name and consults for other Virginia wineries in addition to holding down his Monticello day job.) Rausse long ago bought land for a house just half a mile from the Trump Winery, and recounted a story of a tanker truck recently pulling into his driveway to ask directions. “The driver said, ‘I have 15,000 gallons of wine I need to bring to Trump, and I’m lost,’ ” Rausse recalled. His son pointed the driver down the road. It’s easier to “source” finished wine than it is to source grapes, especially when the truck has to come cross-country. Rausse, too, is careful to give credit to Eric Trump. “I’ve met the son three or four times,” he told me. “He is a person in control of himself. The father is not, in my opinion.”

A month after the Charlottesville riots, I spent a day at Monticello moderating panels on race and food—a theme I had chosen months before, as honorary chair of an annual event called the Heritage Harvest Festival. During a brief break I decided to sneak over to the Trump Winery, whose gates I had passed on previous trips, a short 20-minute drive away. Would my Park Slope-dwelling stepdaughter like to accompany me beyond the gates? “With a sledgehammer, maybe,” she replied. I instead took a young woman from Monticello who was a frequent drinker of Virginia wines and had happily visited the winery under the previous regime.

Eric Trump is certainly doing a good job of keeping up appearances: the rolling hills are emerald and manicured. As you drive in you can see three mansions in the far distance—but you can’t stroll beyond the patio outside the tasting room itself unless you rent the houses for catered affairs. No tours of the winery, either, though a young woman working there mentioned various events throughout the year that would include them. You can, however, stay in the 45-room main house, which has been converted into a hotel, where rooms range from $250 to $650 a night, depending on the season.

At the winery, two long bars, one on an enclosed patio where lunch is also served, offer tastings of four or five Trump wines, with the single wineglass you’re allowed to use presented to you at the end as a souvenir. We opted for the deluxe tasting, which a young woman led us through by rote. It ends with a wine called Cru, a Chardonnay fortified with brandy, which is “unique to Trump Winery” and, according to Rausse, started when he salvaged defective Chardonnay that had been stored in a faulty tank, and that Patricia Kluge refused to throw out, by distilling it and then adding grape juice at the next harvest. (Sources close to Kluge dispute the origin story; a Trump Winery representative says the current method is to mix fresh grape juice and Chardonnay brandy and age it in wooden barrels.) Cru sells for $34 a bottle as an aperitif to sip before dinner, when apparently buyers mistake the mud I tasted for depth. The young woman and an associate behind the counter radiated the freckled freshness of the sorority sisters they may have been—a common look in Charlottesville, and my similarly enthusiastic young guest talked with them about the fact that they had all visited and enjoyed the same tasteful tasting room back when it was Kluge Estates. The women who conducted the tastings had the forced cheer of cult members who never meant to sign up.

The cheer finally cracked when my guest asked them how business changed before and after the election. “Last summer was crazy,” one young woman said, meaning 2016. “Not now. Suddenly it’s political.” So customers want to talk politics? “Sometimes,” she said carefully. Her friend practically poked her in the ribs. “Constantly,” she said. “She’s sugarcoating. They want to talk at you, not to you.” The friend surveyed the predictably white, very casually dressed customers. “They’re tourists now,” she said. “They don’t want to drink. They want to say they were here.”

Even in the still-stunning setting, the wines suffer in isolation. The Viognier, the Virginia state specialty, was clean but tasteless; the rosé was water, the Chardonnay, the Cabernet, and the Meritage, alcoholic and sweet. At best the wines, such as the sparkling blanc de blanc and the Viognier, are, as my expert friend said, inoffensive; at worst, like the Cru, they demand to be spat out. “At the end of the day Trump wines suck,” my visiting friend said as our Washington dinner came to a close. “But they give a lot of good and loyal people paychecks.”

As we left, the young woman who’d guided us through the tasting handed me my glass, with a surprisingly discreet white decal of the winery’s name and logo—just a capital T. I’ll use it to toast this jobs program, but find something else to swallow.