The First Great California Wine Writer

One afternoon a couple of years ago, I was going through some boxes of my late parents' papers and came upon a small handwritten menu for a birthday dinner given for my mother in 1949 at Falcon's Lair, a famous mansion in the Hollywood Hills. The house had been the home of Rudolph Valentino briefly in the mid-1920s, and later became the abode of the eccentric tobacco heiress Doris Duke, who bought the place in 1953 and kept it until her death 40 years later. One of its owners in the interim, the man who sold it to Duke, was the host — and cook — for my mother's dinner: a one-time aspiring actor, Air Force pilot, specialty grocer, Buddhist monk, and budding wine writer named Robert Lawrence Balzer.

I had first met Balzer myself when I was a kid — "I used to bounce you on my knee," he liked to say, with his unmistakable theatrical drawl, in later years, to my chagrin — and on a whim, upon finding that menu, I tracked down his phone number and, though I hadn't spoken to him in probably 20 years, gave him a call. When he answered, I said, without identifying myself, "Do you know where you were on August 13, 1949?" Without a second's hesitation, he replied, "Well, Colman, I suppose I must have been cooking dinner for your mother at Falcon's Lair." He was 96 years old at the time.

Balzer led a kind of fairy-tale life, or rather a whole series of lives. He was born in Des Moines, Iowa, but migrated to Southern California with his family when he was a boy, later going off to Stanford University as an English major. After graduation, he tried his hand at acting, studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, where he met and married a Scarsdale-born actress named Emily Abel. The marriage lasted about a decade, and after its demise, he never remarried — though he had many close women friends, among them glamorous movie stars like Greta Garbo, Rosalind Russell, Olivia de Havilland, and Gloria Swanson (it was she who had first brought Doris Duke to Falcoln's Lair), and was much in demand as an escort at society bashes around Los Angeles. (He was, among other things, an excellent dancer.)

Balzer's father owned a specialty grocery store, catering to an illustrious Hollywood crowd (Alfred Hitchcock, Marlon Brando, and Ingrid Bergman were among the regular customers) and to the Hancock Park elite, and Balzer went to work there, running the wine department. Prohibition had ended only a few years earlier, and both the domestic wine business and the import trade were reinventing themselves at the time. Balzer didn't know much about the subject when he started, he was always quick to admit, but he was a quick study. Soon he knew enough to start writing a weekly wine column, one of the first in the country, for the Beverly Hills Citizen.

After serving in World War II as a pilot and flight instructor for what was then the U.S. Army Air Force, Balzer returned to the wine business. He realized long before many of his contemporaries that California was producing wines that could stand up to much of what was being imported from France, Italy, and Germany at the time, and in 1948 he published what was to be the first of about a dozen books, California's Best Wines.

Balzer had other interests, though, and in the early 1960s, he became a correspondent and photographer for United Press International — through his friendship with UPI president Frank Bartholomew, who also happened to own Buena Vista Vineyards in Sonoma County. The press syndicate sent him to Southeast Asia as the Vietnam War was brewing. He fell in love with Cambodia, befriending the country's Prince Norodom Sihanouk and converting to Buddhism. He was even "ordained" as a Buddhist monk (he puts the word in quotes in Beyond Conflict, the book he subsequently wrote about his experiences).

Back in the States, Balzer acquired a restaurant called Tirol in Idyllwild, in the San Jacinto Mountains above Palm Springs, and around the same time started writing a weekly wine column for the Los Angeles Times. Subsequently, while continuing the column, he launched Robert Lawrence Balzer's Private Guide to Food and Wine, probably America's first independent wine newsletter.

Witty and articulate, Balzer wrote about wine in a lively, readable style, never condescending to his audience or garbling up his prose with jargon. Though he embraced the whole world of wine, he was most enthusiastic over the years about the vintages of California, championing standbys like Buena Vista, Beaulieu, Charles Krug, and Inglenook, and reporting with glee about the appearance of newcomers like Robert Mondavi and Sterling. Marvin Shanken, editor and publisher of Wine Spectator, recently called Balzer "clearly California's first truly great wine writer." He was also a tireless educator, teaching classes in local colleges and on cruise ships — still appearing in front of groups thirsty for wine knowledge until the age of about 95.

There were those who criticized Balzer over the years for being too close to the wine industry. Writing in the L.A. Times itself, media reporter David Shaw noted in 1987 that Balzer over the years had done a number of things that seemed "contrary to today's journalistic ethics — taking junkets paid for by wine industry interests, writing a book (in 1966) subsidized by wine maker Paul Masson, writing a column this year about a wine futures venture in which his closest friend of 27 years is involved." I took Balzer to task myself, in my wine column for Los Angeles Magazine, for favorably reviewing a line of Italian wines that carried neck labels with his name and image on them (presumably in return for some kind of financial consideration) — a fact he didn't bother to mention. But as Shaw also wrote, many observers believed that Balzer should be exempt from ethical considerations, "'grandfathered in,' as it were, both because of his long years of service to the wine industry and because he started writing about wine at a time when ethical standards in journalism were far looser than they are today."

When I knew Balzer best, in the 1970s and '80s, he was a genuine celebrity in wine circles, and he knew it. He was also a real character. He liked being the center of attention and would often issue unequivocal pronouncements about what he was drinking. (I can still hear him, at a Martin Ray tasting and lunch one day in Hollywood, exclaiming, "That last pinot noir was an effrontery, just an effrontery!") His mannerisms grew more flamboyant the more he drank. On special occasions, he used to dress like a cross between a matador and a Spanish grandee in tight-fitting black trousers, a short black jacket ornamented with silver, and a flat black hat. "It's my gay cabellero suit!" he'd announce. He actually looked quite elegant in it.

Today, the high quality of California wines is a given, and wine columns, wine newsletters, wine books, and wine classes are commonplace. The wine world was a very different place when Balzer found his way into it, and whatever his eccentricities or ethical lapses may have been, he helped make the California wine business what it is today and brought the joy of wine to hundreds of thousands of people in various ways, for something like seven decades. He also lived a hell of a life.

Robert Lawrence Balzer died at his home in Orange, Calif., on Dec. 2, at the age of 99.