What a Lost Wine Book From 1978 Can Tell Us About Our Current Moment
On William E. Massee's peculiar, quirky "Joyous Anarchy."
A bite from the wine bug is exactly the type of infection that will drive an otherwise normal person to spend hours scouring the dusty, creaking old shelves of an eight-story used book store, hoping she might discover a new wine book. That’s where I was when I spotted Joyous Anarchy: The Search for Great American Wines, by William E. Massee. Joyous Anarchy, published in 1978, is a peculiar example of 20th-century wine writing that comes at a very particular time in American wine history. It might offer us an interesting perspective on our own cultural moment.
Massee’s writing veers toward the quirky and oversaturated, depicting lots of dialogue between the author as his industry colleagues. He loves long lists for a variety of occasions: An American Wine Sampler; America’s Ten Best Wines; Top American Jug Wines; Good Wines, Good Buys. “A list plunges you right into the middle of things, but when there are a dozen Chardonnays on the shelf, a score of Rieslings, where do you begin?” he asks. “Be sure that when you have tried one you have not tried them all. Variety in excellence is the joy of wine.”
My favorite chapter is on Salad Wines. “It was a great leap to freedom when Californians decided wine was fine with salad,” Massee writes. “Salad wines help to loosen us up about eating and drinking.” His list of American salad wines feels fairly esoteric, even for today: Chasselas? Colombard? Sauvignon Vert? Sylvaner? Pinot St. George?
Above all, Joyous Anarchy takes on the American wine scene as it was in the late seventies. Massee depicts a Europhile world that is totally skeptical of American wine, and Joyous Anarchy is his attempt to debunk these anti-American-wine biases. Many Americans like to believe that, after the Judgement of Paris in 1976, everyone just suddenly fell in love with California wine. But Massee’s book shows that wasn’t true; there was still work to be done.
Massee quotes fellow wine lovers asking, “Are there really any good wines in California?” Oregon and Washington were promising but not major players yet. Eastern regions that would soon slide into obscurity—such as Pennsylvania and the Midwest—were, in Massee’s telling, simply part of the country’s wine geography. Massee explores wine places we might now consider strange, such as Ohio, New Hampshire, the Ozarks, and Egg Harbor, New Jersey.
Massee’s friends and colleagues in the world of wine play the role of skeptics. In a chapter called “The Best Bottles: High, Sloping and Slender,” he recounts a meeting with a retailer at a small wine shop who’s despondent because he can’t sell American wine:
“Nobody knows anything about American wines and nobody wants to admit it,” said the retailer. “A few read about a wine, usually a six-dollar bottle and when they say that’s too much and I suggest another, they think it’s a con. The kids don’t trust me because I’m gray; women don’t trust me because I’m male; and men don’t trust me because they don’t trust anybody.”
In his chapter on California wines, Massee recounts a conversation with his seatmate on an airplane. After he’s ordered a glass of California wine, she asks, suspiciously, “Why are you so hot on American wines?” Massee responds:
Because they are exciting; there are new wines coming on the market all the time; there’s experiment everywhere, and change. Besides, I’m going to write about them. “I see,” she said, snuffing out her cigarette in my armrest. She leaned back and closed her eyes. Obviously, I had to get my axe well ground before we landed and she was leaving me to do it. “Didn’t you like your wine?” asked the stewardess as she took my tray. It was fine, fine, I answered. Seatmate smiled. But she didn’t open her eyes.”
Massee begins the third chapter, “America’s Ten Best Wines,” in dialogue with someone he calls The Professional Wine Buyer. Over a snifter of Cognac, the buyer vents his frustration with American wine. First, he compares California to Burgundy in the “old days when Frank Schoonmaker used to bustle around the peasants,” adding: “Burgundy was easy. All you had to know was French, and how to select the right piece, and how to talk a peasant out of his wine.” When the wine buyer continues ranting against California wine, Massee tries and fails to intervene:
“But they make lots of good wines, it was necessary to interject. This was a mistake. The wine buyer thumped his snifter. ‘So what? It’s anarchy up there. People making all kinds of wines, all different ways. I can’t buy just Chardonnay. They want me to buy Cabernet, too, and Zinfandel, maybe the whole line. And they keep changing the way they make the wines—one year full, the next year light, one year lots of wood, the next year none. They drive you crazy.’”
“Joyous anarchy,” is Massee’s response. “Wine lovers will find the wines, somehow. They’ll get marketed, somehow.”
Let’s just say that Joyous Anarchy is a strange, obscure book to discover. But it made me curious about exactly who Willam E. Massee was. Though he’s mostly forgotten, it turns out that Massee was one of wine’s most important mid-20th century figures. He is remembered as “one of the first American wine writers in the post-World War II era,” according to his 2006 obituary in the New York Times. “Massee was a prolific writer, and much of his work in the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s coincided with the beginning of America’s postwar preoccupation with good living. His books championed American wines at a time when connoisseurs dismissed them as inconsequential.” The author of other books such as The Art of Comfort, Wines of France, Pasta Pronto, and Eating and Drinking in Europe, Massee was one of mid-century America’s professional bon vivants (a man after my own heart). We can see him as an influencer of his era.
In 1955, John Updike actually profiled Massee in a New Yorker Talk of the Town piece. Updike tailed him through a sherry tasting arranged by the Spanish Sherry Information Bureau, describing Massee as “a sandy gentleman whose collegiate exterior is lit from within by a devout and evangelical epicureanism.” While they taste, Massee’s pitch to Updike is refreshingly inclusive: “Anybody can be a wine expert… it’s just a matter of drinking wine.” But then he narrates three glasses of fino to Updike using descriptors like “breed,” “masculine,” “flabby, even vapid.” Updike doesn’t editorialize, but also doesn’t miss a snarky beat. He just lets Massee talk and quotes him—eleven unbroken sentences—and trusts the volume of wine talk to do the mocking. It’s a classic Talk of the Town move: fidelity as satire. Transcribe the expert at full length, with perfect courtesy, until the expertise sounds like unctuous performance. A paragraph later, Updike writes: “We whistled in our two finos, one on top of the other, and pretended to notice a difference.”
When Joyous Anarchy was published in 1978, wine culture in the United States was fraught with confusion and institutional mistrust. Something was clearly in the air, since ten major wine books were published that year. William Rice, then the Washington Post’s food editor, wrote a very critical review of these books, including Joyous Anarchy, warning readers that many of the wine writers are “boosters” of the industry. “Don’t look for harsh appraisals of wines, scandal, or criticism of the industry,” he writes. It’s unclear whether Massee ever took money from the industry. But unfairly or fairly, he was lumped in with writers who did.
The defining post-war preoccupation with “good living” and the subsequent birth of the “American Dream” meant hosting at home in the suburbs. In Joyous Anarchy, it’s clear that Massee is writing for a certain type of affluent wine drinker, one who he believed needed prescriptive directions on how to buy, enjoy, and share wine with friends. But, in 1978, Massee’s book feels backwards-looking. By the end of the 1970s, the public’s post-Vietnam, post-Watergate distrust, along with severe economic stagflation, made Massee’s epicurean, joy-of-living philosophy a hard sell. In Joyous Anarchy, Massee’s retailer friend clearly states how people saw wine: “They think it’s a con.”
Which is why it’s interesting to note the work of another wine writer in 1978—one Robert Parker, who launched his Wine Advocate newsletter the same year. By now, we’ve all internalized the negative talk about “Parkerization,” Parker’s preference for high-alcohol, heavily oaked fruit bombs, and the outsized influence that he wielded on wine culture by the end of the 20th century. But it can be shocking to remember what an outsider that Parker was in the beginning. The Wine Advocate’s (self-told) origin story is nothing if not revolutionary:
“In the early 1970s, when Parker was conceiving of writing his own wine guide, he was taken with the work of Ralph Nader, an American political activist who sought to ‘out’ corporate and political corruption by challenging compromised propaganda. Parker recognized that much of what was then being written about wine was compromised by the financial agendas of many of the famous wine writers of the day. He dreamt of a publication that could be free of financial ties to wineries and merchants, a guide that would produce wholly unbiased views on wines and that served only the interests of wine consumers. This would be a magazine that would be funded purely by subscribers—the people that buy, read and use it. And so, The Wine Advocate started and remains true to this day.”
Whatever we think, in 2026, about the bankrupt nature of the 100-point scale, when Parker first started scoring wines in 1978, wine culture desperately wanted it. Writers like Massee found themselves on the wrong side of that cultural moment.
Today, we find ourselves in a similar moment of institutional distrust, confusion, and crisis—not just in wine culture, but in society at large. Is it too simplistic to say we have come full circle? Perhaps the difference today is that both writer/influencers like Massee, as well as many of the so-called “independent” points-scoring critics, are equally compromised by industry ties. So where does that leave us? Maybe it’s time once again for a little Joyous Anarchy.
Great piece. Loved this history. When I was a teenager in the late '60s and early '70s, my father had a decent wine cellar with racks that I built. (He was the opposite of handy, while I loved saws and power tools.) Most of the wines were from Burgundy, and he always let me have a glass when he opened them. All the great wines from Côte De Nuits and Côte De Beaune were my starter wines 55 years ago, which is maybe why I became so unimpressed with them as an adult. But my father also had a passion for California wines long before the Judgment of Paris.
If serving "Champagne," it was always Schramsberg. For reds, he particularly liked Louis Martini. When I was in my 30s, he regularly bought cases from Heitz, and sometimes gave me a case or two. He became a big follower of Frank J. Prial, who championed American wines that other critics thumbed their noses at. Prial's dictum is something I firmly believe in: "Shorn of their carefully constructed mystiques, their beautiful labels and clever marketing, many expensive wines are really not that much superior to their less expensive rivals."
This is so great. I love finding old Italian wine books, especially from the 60s and 70s. The writing hasn't been sommelierfied, it's not trying to impress anyone, and I've find some real wine gems that have been forgotten about today in my own area of Lazio. They are also a good source of learning about regional food that's been lost.