A Perpetual Journey

If you are a member of the English nobility and your castle or country estate comes equipped with a cavernous underground wine cellar naturally cooled by the earth to a year-round fifty degrees, there is—I imagine—a wonderful kind of pleasure that can be had in tossing all manner of wines into the cellar without any concern for how to make them fit. If you are a member of the caste of Americans who actually works for a living and therefore needs to live in a city where storing your wine costs in the neighborhood of two or three dollars per bottle per year, there comes a time when a metastasizing wine collection is no longer in your best interest. If this time coincides with the time when you find yourself asking, “What the hell was I thinking when I bought that?” you may find yourself electing to send a portion of your stash to auction.

If the answer to the question “What the hell was I thinking when I bought that?” is “It had a ton of points from a publication identified in auction listings by its initials,” then this has the potential to be a profitable endeavor, especially if the wine is popular in China (more about that later). Unfortunately, if your collection is anything like mine, you are as likely to answer the question with something like, “It seemed interesting at the time,” in which case dispossessing yourself of the wine will almost certainly bring no pecuniary gain other than sparing you the annual two-to-three-dollar storage liability. Note to self: seeming interesting is a perfectly good justification for purchasing a bottle of wine, but you don’t always need to go for the six-pack.

Anyway, I found myself in the position of re-living several chapters of wine purchases past when I recalled a number of cases from storage with an eye towards selling them. The wines in question fit into a several different categories. Some were definitively bound for exile with no chance whatsoever of executive clemency; their very presence in my cellar stood as an affront to my pride and aspirations to good taste. These included two cases of 2003 Bordeaux, a vintage which got everybody excited at the time as its unprecedentedly hot weather fueled speculation that the wines would end up super-ripe, rich, and exotic, but in fact the opposite proved true as it was so hot—“How hot was it?”—it was so hot that the grapevines threw their hands up in exasperation at the labor of having to ripen at all, and the wines ended up green, hard, and tannic. It is 90 degrees in New York as I write this, which is so hot that nobody is talking about anything except to bitch about how awfully hot it is and young women are walking the streets dressed like strippers halfway through their act; add 15 degrees to that and you get the Bordeaux heat record set in August 2003. Amazingly, I was actually able to sell these wines for a bit more than I paid for them. The wines may have turned into asparagus but their high-90s point scores will remain with them forever.

There were also a handful of Bordeaux in category two, which consisted of wines I wish I could hold onto but which have sadly increased in value to the point where I can no longer justify drinking a bottle instead of selling it, and will likely never be able to afford again. This included my one and only bottle of Château Lafite-Rothschild, which as an emblem of luxury in a fashion similar to a Louis Vuitton bag has become a status symbol among social-climbers in China, where it is apparently a popular item to give as a gift to broadcast that you are a man of wealth and taste or to bribe a Communist Party official to shower your business with official favors. Things were so much better when the wines used for this purpose were California cabernets in the Napa Valley “cult” wine genre that I had no interest in drinking. I actually liked Lafite, but not as much as I liked the $500 I was paid for my off-vintage 2002. Hopefully this craziness will come to an end soon. In the meanwhile, if you are a Chinese Communist Party bureaucrat in possession of my lovingly stored Lafite, I hope it’s corked.

Finally, there is category three, which included wines that I liked on release but didn’t have the foggiest idea how they might age as well as a number of wines I suspected might not be developing so well but which I nevertheless wanted to taste before wishing any of them good-bye. I spent the last several weeks going through them and the experience led me to do quite a lot of thinking about what we are hoping to accomplish when we cellar wine. For example, every now and then you taste a wine that is so transcendentally amazing that it’s like a novel you don’t want to end; you want to share it with everyone you know and to have a bottle at your disposal whenever you want to relive the experience. When we put a wine like this in the cellar it is often more about the satisfaction of ownership than the anticipation of what the future holds. Perhaps manifesting the accumulative habits of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, there is a certain personality (and if as a kid you kept your baseball cards meticulously organized in plastic pages in D-ring binders, you have that personality) that finds comfort in collecting things, as if they could offer the reassurance that everything meaningful to us could be stored away somewhere safe to be retrieved, unchanged, whenever the desire strikes.

But those transcendentally amazing experiences are not always reproducible results. Sometimes the thrill of that very first experience is the result of exactly that—the very first experience—and the wine that meant so much to you the first time around doesn’t hold up in reruns. (In other words, some wines are like ABC’s Lost, which would make you feel like a giant sucker if you were to watch any of its story arcs a second time around, and other wines are like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which you can watch in reruns hundreds of times—at least I can—and still experience the same emotional resonance as the original airing.) Henry James wrote that “there are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.” Some wines offer more satisfaction in the surprise department than the recognition department. It’s like a lot of tourist attractions. Once is enough.

There is also the fact that wine changes. It gets old and frail and sometimes just dies.

We live in an era in which professional wine critics condition consumers to think that aging wine is a science. They set forth anticipated drinking windows closing decades hence to the exactitude of a particular year not even rounded off to the nearest five or ten. And they do this despite having a track record of wrongheaded predictions that should have clued us in to the folly of the exercise ages ago. There is a great little book Questions of Taste: The Philosophy of Wine which includes an essay by one Ophelia Deroy exploring the epistemological limits of our ability to make projections about a wine’s future. For example, of the phenomenon of a wine we characterize as “closed,” she writes, “It seems (at least to me) a sort of prophetic judgment, reserved to sibylline viewers of wine, to be able to know (or guess) that ‘there is something here that isn’t here yet. . . . In these cases, we do not simply say something about the way things actually are, but we claim to sense now how they will or could be in the future. Many will agree here that we overstep the boundaries of prudence here and go beyond what we can legitimately claim to know.” She then hypothesizes of a tasting of a St.-Émilion which both “Jane” and “Paul” agree tastes dull but disagree as to whether the dullness reflects poor quality or a closed state. Deroy reasons that for Jane’s “closed” assessment to have an informed basis, it must be true that she tasted an older vintage of the same wine which seemed similarly closed at a similar age but ultimately improved and that she is capable of remembering that initial sensation with sufficient clarity to draw comparisons between that memory and the glass in front of her. Deroy is skeptical that anyone can engage in this “complex relational judgment” when experiments have shown that “people have difficulties in distinguishing not only between many vintages but between only three glasses, not even memorized but all present and available for tasting.”

The thought exercise most people seem to be performing when they purport to project a wine’s ageability does not reflect the experiential basis of Jane’s thinking. Rather, most people seem to have a dogmatic belief that wine ages “on” one or another characteristic (such as “balance,” or “structure”) and then draw the conclusion that a wine will age in close proportion to the degree to which it exemplifies that characteristic. The best way to refute that theory is to taste through a few wines at age five or ten that all tasted pretty much the same when they came out, which describes a lot of wines in my category three. Many of these were rieslings from Germany, about which there is even more confusion and misinformation when it comes to aging than any other category of wine. There is no question that riesling has the potential to be among the most long-lived of wine-grape varieties. But that does not mean that every riesling that tastes impressive on release will benefit from age. This is a difficult truth to come to terms with because they can be so phantasmagoriously delicious on release that it seems incomprehensible that anything that can burst with such psychedelic beauty can turn into a can of stale Mott’s apple juice after as little as eight years, but that is occasionally what happens. What’s worse, because young riesling is so viscerally delicious, the wines destined for Mott’s apple juice decrepitude don’t necessarily taste any different on release from the wines that will maintain their glory. In other words, if you want to make a prediction about their future—whether explicitly in the form of a tasting note’s “anticipated drinking window” or implicitly in the decision to put the wine in your cellar—it is not an intellectual exercise wherein you can arrive at the proper conclusion by making deductions about the characteristics of the wine in front of you. Instead it is essentially an exercise in faith. If you are not inclined towards blind faith, the best evidence at your disposal is history. It’s a safe—although far from certain—bet that the wines that have aged well in the past will age well in the future. Absent that track record, it’s just guesswork and bullshit.

Fortunately, my tastings of category-three wines left me with a number of wines that validated my faith and which will continue to be points of pride in my cellar. I am very happy to be one of the only people around who will be able to pour aged versions of wines like Meinhard Forstreiter’s Tabor grüner veltliner or Domaine Karydas xinomavro, both of which more than rewarded the four years they spent hibernating in their cardboard boxes and still tasted fresh enough to justify holding on to the rest awhile longer. But all in all I ended up sending about a dozen cases away for sale and could probably be just as content sending away a dozen more.

When the poet Langston Hughes quit school to go out to sea he took all his books with him and then, to leave his old life behind, threw them all overboard. All of them except one—Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Apropos of nothing, my favorite verse from that book is this one:

I know I have the best of time and space, and was never measured and never will be measured.
I tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!)
My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods,
No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,
I have no chair, no church, no philosophy,
I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange,
But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,
My left hand hooking you round the waist,
My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road.
Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,
You must travel it for yourself.
It is not far, it is within reach,
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know,
Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land.
Shoulder your duds dear son, and I will mine, and let us hasten forth,
Wonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go.

If you’re looking for a toast tonight, you could do worse. May all of the wines in your cellar be Leaves of Grass!

For further reading:

• Bordeaux negoçiant Bill Blatch’s report on the 2003 Bordeaux vintage.
• Slate wine columnist Mike Steinberger’s blog on the Lafite-flipping phenomenon.
• Questions of Taste: The Philosophy of Wine on Amazon.com.
• Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” from Leaves of Grass.

Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door

“Producer, producer, producer” is the advice of many experts when it comes to buying Burgundy, on the theory that lesser vineyards in the hands of a top producer will perform better than Grand Cru vineyards in the hands of a producer less gifted. You can drink pretty well following this advice, but the Burgundians themselves would be the first to protest that it is contrary to the whole idea of Burgundy. Their mantra is not “producer” but “terroir,” reflecting the belief that the vineyard is paramount in determining the quality and personality of their wines.

And that’s of course how Burgundy has been sold for most of its history, with the vineyard’s name more prominent on the label than the producer’s. For quite some time it was a canard of wine writers to remark on the outrageousness of mediocre wines selling for exhorbitant prices due to the prestige of the vineyard name on the label, when the prized character the appellation was intended to connote had been denuded by indifferent winemaking or outright adulteration. Anthony Hanson’s remark in his 1982 tome Burgundy is a typical lament: “But not everything sold as Burgundy is Burgundy. . . . The good old, bad old days when any rosé can call itself Clos de Vougeot, Chambertin or Corton so long as it comes from the right soil and vines and fulfills a few conditions are still with us.” Matt Kramer similarly complained in 1990′s Making Sense of Burgundy that “any Burgundy sporting a famous name—Chambertin, Clos de Vougeot, Puligny-Montrachet, and so on—commands a high price regardless of quality.” Under such circumstances it makes sense to fixate on the most reputable producers.

Lately, however, it seems the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. The ascendancy of “producer, producer, producer” as a buying (and marketing) strategy has resulted in three-digit asking prices for all sorts of vineyards that are normally on the bargain beat solely on account of the grower’s prestige. Domaine Leroy’s $300-$700 (!) Savigny-lès-Beaune is surely the most obnoxious example. Then there are wines like Georges Roumier’s Chambolle-Musigny which used to deliver premier-cru quality at village-wine prices (I remember buying the 1998 and 1999 for $30), but now that it runs $80 in normal vintages and almost twice that in great years, “producer, producer, producer” doesn’t seem as much of a smart-money strategy.

So it behooves the savvy Burgundy buyer to experiment with other tactics for finding diamonds in the rough. One such tactic which has yielded impressive results for me over the years has probably occurred to anyone who has ever studied any maps of Burgundy, which reveal a number of affordable or even downright obscure vineyards nestled up against some of the most illustrious grand crus. Some of them clearly have some of the character of their neighbors and have even been shown to be continuations of the same geology. Others remind you why they built the wall between them in the first place. But to me the excitement of capturing the spark of an elite vineyard from a bargain-priced plot next door outweighs the periodic disappointments.

Whenever I am in Burgundy I find myself drawn to the village of Vosne-Romanée and feel a strange compulsion to walk the vineyards. I can’t explain why Vosne in particular should have this effect when there are other villages whose wines I find equally compelling, but there is something religious which seems to radiate from Romanée-Conti (and which has nothing to do with the stone cross marking its border). If one starts walking from the cross up the road past Romanée-Conti, La Romanée, and the premier cru vineyard Aux Reignots, the whole distance to the top of the slope can be traversed in just a few minutes. The road continues on the left above La Grande Rue and La Tâche, from which one can follow a tractor path downhill through Aux Malconsorts to Les Chaumes and back to the village. That short distance encompasses vineyards whose prices can differ from one another by several orders of magnitude.

Aux Reignots‘ proximity to La Romanée and Romanée-Conti just below on the slope is the most immediately striking thing. Unfortunately the single glass of Romanée-Conti I’ve had the opportunity to enjoy in my lifetime is a woefully insufficient basis to speculate on any family resemblance Reignots may share with it, but I have rather more experience with La Romanée and Richebourg (diagonally below Reignots, to the north of La Romanée) and certainly see a similarity there. The best examples of Reignots, which in my experience have originated from Domaine Robert Arnoux, Dominique Laurent, and Bouchard Père et Fils (before Bouchard’s rights reverted back to the Liger-Belair family—whose rendition in theory should also rank among the best but thus far has struck me as too primary to judge), have a powerful inner density to them in the fashion of Richebourg which I often find myself describing, for lack of any better word, as sheer torque. It is a muscular density, better described in terms of strength than in terms of concentration. But in other respects the physical presence of the two is different. Reignots cuts a more slender, streamlined figure with a veneer that seems to smooth out some of the underlying muscle. Aromatically, Reignots is dominated by the same Middle Eastern spice bazaar scents that characterize most of the vineyards in the vicinity. The best Reignots are certainly Grand Cru–quality. But Grand Cru status in Burgundy has at least as much to do with consistency as with the high watermark a vineyard can reach, and Reignots’ premier cru classification makes sense in that light. Even in the best producers’ hands, Reignots doesn’t reach that high watermark as often as one wishes.

Unlike Romanée-Conti and La Romanée, La Tâche covers a large enough land mass that it manages to abut several neighbors that have benefited from the hope there might be a poor man’s La Tâche, relatively speaking of course, among them. The most obvious candidate is the premier cru Les Gaudichots, or more accurately those portions of Les Gaudichots which still remain premier cru, as the majority of the vineyard was reclassified as La Tâche as the result of an epic court battle between the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and the Liger-Belair family which owned La Tâche proper at the time. The condensed version of the story, as related in greater detail in Allen Meadows’ book on Vosne-Romanée, The Pearl of the Côte, is that DRC won the right to sell its Gaudichots as La Tâche in 1932, which resulted in its holdings given the official appellation of La Tâche ou Les Gaudichots when the appellations were codified under the official Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée law of 1936. Meanwhile other parcels of Les Gaudichots remained Les Gaudichots and received a premier cru designation. When DRC acquired La Tâche proper, it elected to bottle a single cuvée of both vineyards.

Meadows, one of the few people on the planet in a position to opine on the differences between pure Gaudichots and pure La Tâche based on bottles pre-dating the DRC acquisition, postulated that Les Gaudichots “appeared to bring the power, richness, muscle and fantastic depth” while La Tâche was characterized by “dazzling aromatics, silken mouth feel and the classic satin and velvet finish.” That doesn’t exactly sound like the strongest endorsement for Les Gaudichots standing alone inasmuch as it’s the latter array of attributes more likely to whet the appetite of any Burgundy nut. Indeed, today’s premier cru Les Gaudichots are firmly structured wines and I can’t recall any examples—even a bottle this year from the weak 1992 vintage at age 19—that didn’t put up a barrier of burly tannin seeming to need more time to resolve. Yet when a Gaudichots does offer a peek at what’s underneath, the exotic spiciness for which La Tâche may be the Ground Zero is evident. It’s enough to inspire hope that a La Tâche–like experience may be in store given the requisite cellar time, which could easily amount to twenty-five or thirty years. Unfortunately one can’t do more than speculate, because none of the producers commercializing Gaudichots today, at least in the U.S. market, bottled any that far back. And prices have jumped to the point where many collectors will no longer find it an attractive bet.

One of the side effects of Domaine de Montille and Domaine Dujac’s acquisition of plots in Aux Malconsorts in 2005, however, may be to impose a de facto price ceiling on how expensive Les Gaudichots can get, because the Malconsorts from both domaines delivers exactly what Les Gaudichots is supposed to deliver, and so far does it better. It certainly doesn’t hurt that Dujac and, to a lesser extent, Montille are making the wines in a style reminiscent of DRC’s, with the grapes fermented in whole bunches. Most of the attention so far has focused on Montille’s special cuvée “Christiane” which comes from a parcel cradled by the original boundaries of La Tâche. The 2005, with its roomfilling spicecake aromatics, left me almost speechless except to blurt out, “We’re drinking Domaine de Montille La Tâche.” But none of the three vintages to follow came close to that level, leading me to suppose that the wine may succeed the most when the generosity of a naturally ripe vintage tempers the structured austerity towards which the Montille house style is traditionally inclined. Dujac, whose wines are always rich and expansive, has knocked the ball out of the park with its Malconsorts every year, and if it doesn’t taste like a hypothetical Dujac-made La Tâche, it at least manages to taste very much like a hypothetical DRC-made Malconsorts, which is pretty impressive indeed.

One last premier cru vineyard in the area which has never gotten nearly the attention nor the esteem of any of its neighbors is Les Chaumes, situated just below Aux Malconsorts and La Tâche on the slope. It’s true that Les Chaumes rarely performs at the level of the village’s elite premier crus, as a comparison of Arnoux’s Chaumes with its Reignots and Suchots can demonstrate. Carel Voorhuis, who makes a small quantity of Les Chaumes at Domaine d’Ardhuy, once told me that the vineyard requires more fussing with the vines to achieve even ripening than any of the other vineyards he works with, of which there are plenty, which may explain why many producers just can’t seem to get Les Chaumes right. But there is one producer that consistently manages to achieve Grand Cru–quality Les Chaumes: Domaine Méo-Camuzet. Many examples of Les Chaumes can be coarsely tannic, no doubt due to the ripening challenges, but Méo’s is always silky and finessed, with beautiful cinnamon-and-spice aromatics. A fully mature 1985 was a monumental Burgundy with a personality and level of sophistication that brought La Tâche to mind on every sip. That may have something to do with the legendary Henri Jayer’s rumored involvement making the Méo wines of that vintage, but I see many of the same ingredients in recent vintages as well.

Outside Vosne-Romanée, the vineyard that cries out the loudest for some affordable alternative is surely Musigny, to the point where its most famous neighbor, Les Amoureuses, has been nearly as expensive for as long as I can remember due to its reputation for “baby Musigny” character and quality. But ironically enough, Les Amoureuses is not the vineyard in that cluster around Musigny that strikes me as most similar in character to Musigny itself. That honor might rightfully belong to the somewhat more obscure premier cru La Combe d’Orveau and the vastly more obscure premier cru Les Borniques.

La Combe d’Orveau extends from the southern end of Musigny and its peculiar gerrymandered shape actually has it spooning a piece of Musigny. A parcel of La Combe d’Orveau owned by the Domaine Jacques Prieur was actually reclassified as Musigny while other plots remained premier cru. (Another portion with a village classification is not actually contiguous and should be thought of as a different vineyard altogether.) In his new book Inside Burgundy, Jasper Morris reports that “Bruno Clavelier, who has the lion’s share of the premier cru sector [of La Combe d'Orveau], feels that this vineyard could have been classified grand cru Musigny as the geology is the same as for Les Petits Musigny next door—but that his grandfather did not push for it when the decisions were being made because grand cru status would have entailed higher taxes.” My experiences with Bruno Clavelier’s La Combe d’Orveau bear that out. Although often sweet with primary fruit when young, a 1996 recently astonished me with knockout aromatics and a mouthfeel that was suave and streamlined while still oozing with sappy, savory flavors. I have also had impressive Combe d’Orveaus from Domaine Taupenot-Merme and Domaine Faiveley, the former fruity but energetic and the latter showing a textural finesse right out of the gate unusal for the domaine’s house style which I hope will not be compromised by the recent changes there aimed at making the wines less ornery in their youth. The Combe d’Orveau, at least, never needed any such “improvement.” Finally, and fortuitously, the most expensive Combe d’Orveau by far, from the Domaine Perrot-Minot, is also the only one not worth drinking. The only thing you can taste is the oak.

Les Borniques borders Musigny on the other end. I have only ever tasted the vineyard from Frédéric Magnien’s négociant label, a scarcity Morris attributes to the holdings’ being highly fragmented, so that it may not be worth the bother for most proprietors to bottle it on its own. That judgment ought to change as more people experience what Magnien accomplishes with the vineyard. Magnien has told critics that the soil is identical to the bordering plots of Musigny, and my tastings of the wine have given me no reason to doubt that claim. In its most successful years, it has a sumptuous richness as well as a lacey, finely knit texture to the tannins which I have always seen as one of the signatures of great vineyard sites: concentration can be manufactured in the winery, but tactile finesse can’t be. Sometimes Magnien’s own penchant for trying to manufacture some up-front charm in the winery results in the wine falling short in some years that should have offered the potential for greater things, but generally I have found the Borniques a purer expression than many of Magnien’s other wines—either because he understands this vineyard requires a lighter touch, or because its natural delicacy perserveres through processes that might smother a less characterful wine. Interestingly, a 2002 Borniques I drank this year was legitimately Musignyesque, while Magnien’s Amoureuses of the same vintage was an inexplicable disaster, sucked dry by aggressive oak.

It’s a traditional practice in Burgundy to serve the whites after the reds, so that’s what I’ll do in this column, too. On the hill of Montrachet, the Chassagne-Montrachet premier cru En Remilly juts out from Chevalier-Montrachet like a turtle peeking its head out of its shell, while Blanchot-Dessus sits lower on the slope in the catty corner between Montrachet and Criots-Bâtard-Montrachet. En Remilly was a longtime specialty of Domaine Colin-Deléger and is now split among the domaine’s heirs; a 2005 Remilly from Philippe Colin is the most Chevalier-like example I’ve ever tasted, with a precision and detail that always seemed blurred in the old Colin-Deléger renditions. The Blanchot-Dessus of the same year from Anglada-Deléger, another branch of the family, was not nearly as compelling and reminded me more of a California chardonnay. Unfortunately, the most reliable candidate for a Montrachet-like experience in the area is Puligny-Montrachet Les Caillerets, and it has long been priced accordingly. In his new book Grand Cru: The Great Wines of Burgundy Through the Perspective of Its Finest Vineyards, Remington Norman included Les Caillerets among the five premier crus he deemed honorary Grand Crus.

So is “terroir, terroir, terroir” a better philosophy than “producer, producer, producer”? I’ll offer one final anecdote. One of the most compelling Burgundies I’ve had the pleasure to drink recently was the basic 2008 Chambolle-Musigny village wine from Domaine Dujac, a producer whose wines have long enjoyed trophy status. I expected it to be a high-quality Chambolle but was not prepared for the breathtaking experience that followed after about an hour’s decanting time. It was packed with rich, succulent fruit that eventually became mellowed by a stony mineral base that made the wine feel like a mouthful of liquified limestone. Then this week I had the occasion to drink a dozen Grand Cru Musignys at a very special wine dinner and I am convinced that if I had slipped the Dujac Chambolle into the lineup it would have had no trouble being voted one of the top wines on the table. Here’s the interesting thing. According to David Schildknecht’s review of the wine, Dujac’s Chambolle-Musigny blends plots on the northern side of the village nearer Morey-St.-Denis with the Argillières vineyard, which is right next to Musigny, just above Les Borniques. So is it the terroir or the producer that makes the difference? I report, you decide.

For further reading:

• Maps of the Cote d’Or villages at Bill Nanson’s Burgundy-Report site.
• Matt Kramer’s Making Sense of Burgundy (out-of-print) on Amazon.com.
• Allen Meadows’ The Pearl of the Côte at BurghoundBooks.com.
• Jasper Morris’s Inside Burgundy at New York’s Sotheby’s Wine.
• Remington Norman’s Grand Cru: The Great Wines of Burgundy Through the Perspective of Its Finest Vineyards on Amazon.co.uk or on pre-order at Amazon.com.

I♥NY

One Sunday afternoon two summers ago, I was at a party in Brooklyn with a crew of serious riesling drinkers. If a meteor had fallen on the building when the event was in full swing, the New York City riesling market would never have recovered. All sorts of superstar riesling producers were represented in the wines poured that day, including aged bottles from the Mosel’s Joh. Jos. Prüm and Fritz Haag; bottlings from Steinertal and Steiner Hund, two of Austria’s most esteemed sites made by two of its most esteemed vintners in Alzinger and Nikolaihof, respectively; and not one but two super-cuvées from the Wachau’s F.X. Pichler, the “M” Reserve and the Unendlich. Yet the wine from that day that lingered in my memory most saliently was from the Finger Lakes region in western New York, the Ravines Wine Cellars 2007 Dry Riesling.

The wine would have been impressive enough on its own, but what made it particularly remarkable was how it performed in the context of the surrounding heavyweights. Normally, someone who wants to sneak something offbeat in such a lineup will wrap the bottle in aluminum foil and serve it blind, as if sheepishly admitting, “I know it doesn’t measure up, but give this a shot and think about it for a minute, you might be surprised.” Serving it with the label exposed is virtually asking for people to give it short shrift. The highest praise is usually something along the lines of “Not bad,” which isn’t far removed from “How cute.” Fully expecting to react in exactly that fashion, I was flabbergasted to take a sip of the Ravines and find that it not only compared favorably in quality to the Austrian rieslings that had preceeded it, but represented a seamless continuity in style. The distinctive characteristics of Austrian riesling—a bone-dry structure, acidic cut, and mineral base that make the stuff seem palpably craggy in texture—were also present in the Ravines. I’d experienced many Finger Lakes rieslings before that had managed to capture the flavors of the benchmark European riesling regions, but this was probably the first that had nailed the textural intricacy.

What I didn’t know then, but know now, thanks to Evan Dawson’s new book Summer in a Glass: The Coming of Age of Winemaking in the Finger Lakes, is that Ravines, or more specifically its proprietor Morten Hallgren, is one of a new generation of producers who—for reasons each their own—found themselves in this remote outpost of the winegrowing world as its early pioneer era was passing and, with nothing to fall back on except their passion and drive, set out to define the next stage of its evolution. The pioneers such as Dr. Konstantin Frank and Hermann J. Wiemer had proven that making high-quality wines out of classic European vitis vinifera varieties was possible in the Finger Lakes. But it fell to the current generation of winemakers like Hallgren to show the world not merely what the Finger Lakes is capable of doing, but what it is capable of doing uniquely. The subtitle of Dawson’s book is apropos (more apropos than the actual title, as is the trend in publishing these days): this is how a wine region comes of age.

There are several different ways one can approach writing about a wine region. There is the genre in which the author does as much research in the library as he does in the cellar, relating the complete history of the region since it was first planted by (usually) the Romans. There is the buyer’s-guide method, in which the author tastes through a whole lot of wine and recommends some of his favorites. But Dawson’s method is by far the most engaging to read. In his account, the story of the Finger Lakes as a winemaking region is actually the backdrop to the story of its winemakers, who each get a chapter and are rendered with all the humanistic detail and affection of the protagonists in a novel. (Think of one of those novels which is actually a collection of interconnected short stories. One of Dawson’s recurring themes is the collaborative, non-competitive culture in the Finger Lakes winemaking community—they understand that any one person’s success lifts up the whole industry—so the figure you meet in one chapter frequently turns up later in the narrative as an important player in somebody else’s story.)

The cast of characters in this book is of course driven by the same passion for wine that inspires winemakers everywhere, but what makes them spring from the page in novelistic fashion is the way Dawson dramatizes what pushes them at a basic, human level. Some have grand ambitions, such as building or honoring family legacies. Others had more modest aspirations—to work a job that doesn’t grind you to pieces and lets you be there for your children; to build something from scratch in a place where vineyard land can still be had for a few thousand dollars an acre; to put down roots. Regardless whether they started at the top or the bottom, most of them had been worn down or kicked around some before they found salvation in this place; if they weren’t underdogs in some fundamental sense, they’d be in Napa. As a reader, you cannot help but root for these people. When Dawson raves about one of their wines, you take notice not merely because you might want to buy some, but because you are cheering on his heroes, emotionally invested in their struggles and successes, and the wine in the glass is the culmination of all of that.

Understandably, Dawson succumbs to sentimentality at times, but don’t let anyone tell you that wine doesn’t go well with schmaltz. Still, I can imagine some readers wondering if these wines are really as good as he says they are, or if he’s allowed his attachment to his subjects to get the best of him. The truth is in the glass, as they say. It is impossible to get more than a chapter into this book without succumbing to the temptation to track down some of the wines. I started with Ravines.

The Ravines 2008 Dry Riesling made for a fascinating comparison with the winery’s single-vineyard bottling from the Argetsinger Vineyard as well as with my memory of the 2007. Immediately it was apparent that there was a significant difference in vintage personality vis-à-vis the 2007: this had the searing acidic cut of a samurai sword, somewhat in the fashion of the übertrocken rieslings from Germany that are so trendy as of late. It’s hard to believe from the way it tastes that it has any residual sugar at all, but the winery says it measures 0.3%. With its sharp cut and lemony, grapefruity flavors, it is a potentially polarizing style of riesling, capable of testing the limits even of people who proudly proclaim themselves acid freaks. If you have any cuts or abrasions on your gums that you don’t know about, you will find out quickly! But it is difficult to imagine a wine with more powerful refreshment value. I could imagine it  singing with oysters or ceviche, maybe because it seems capable of serving as a ceviche curing agent all by itself.

The Ravines 2008 Argetsinger Vineyard Dry Riesling is a different beast entirely. It would be impossible for me even to attempt a fair synopsis of Dawson’s account of Sam Argetsinger, the owner and grower of this site. You will just have to read the book and take my word that when you meet Sam Argetsinger in its pages, you will want to try this wine. Single-vineyard bottlings are a relatively new phenomenon in the Finger Lakes, and in other regions they are often designated as such for reasons of marketing or ego before they have demonstrated any of the site-based distinction that justifies the effort. That is emphatically not the case here. From the very first sip of the Argetsinger it is apparent that this is a bona fide terroir wine with a voice that would have been tragic to lose in a blend. It is unmistakably deeper in tone than the blended riesling, and the fruit is augmented by a layer of solid mineral underneath that feels like a mouthful of obsidian rock. Despite its deeper complexion, it features the same fierce acidic cut as its stablemate, but it’s the rockiness that lingers on the palate. This is a sui generis expression of the grape, almost more comparable at this point in its life to a wine like Domaine de la Pépière’s Muscadet Clos des Briords than any riesling in my frame of reference.

The Ravines 2008 Pinot Noir is nearly as impressive, although for different reasons. Whether because the vineyards aren’t yet old enough or the wine itself isn’t yet old enough, it doesn’t show the depths and complexities of flavor that pinot noir from the most gifted sites can show. But what it does pull off is, in a way, an even more remarkable achievement. It is absolutely perfectly composed pinot noir, seamless and slender and without a hair out of place (12.5% alcohol, for those who keep track). What’s so striking about it is how effortlessly it manages to achieve this sense of balance and proportion. Many New World pinot noirs—and I am talking about the wines I like, wines I would even call world-class or potential grand crus—achieve flavors of the highest sophistication but couldn’t possibly manage to render them in so perfect a form. If they were even to try it would be like trying to squeeze into a dress several sizes too small. Which is to say that Ravines has already achieved the absolute hardest thing for a pinot noir to achieve; the rest is just ornament. So it’s quite impressive to contemplate that this is only the beginning of the next chapter in the Finger Lakes’ story.

For further reading:

• Evan Dawson’s Summer in a Glass: The Coming of Age of Winemaking in the Finger Lakes on amazon.com, and its YouTube trailer.
• Web site of Ravines Wine Cellars. The Ravines wines covered here are also sold by Marketview Liquor and Garnet, among other retailers.

Something Mistaken in the State of Denmark

You always hear that Jerry Lewis is big in France, and Germans love David Hasselhoff. Well, it turns out that I am big in Denmark. Or at least I was. I had my fifteen minutes. Now, my moment is over, and the Danes will have to find another wine commentator to follow.

It all goes back to the autumn of 2008. Gideon Bienstock, the winemaker at Renaissance Winery in California’s Sierra Foothills, was visiting New York to show some of the wines from Renaissance as well as his personal estate, Clos Saron. Renaissance, in my opinion, is a national treasure, making cabernet-based wines with a singular goût de terroir unlike anything I’ve ever tasted from California and often rivaling Bordeaux first growths. (With their earthy, tarry minerality, they remind me of a sort-of cross between Haut-Brion and traditional Barolo.) I first became acquainted with them after reading a Matt Kramer column about an older Renaissance “Vin de Terroir” he had found in a corner of his cellar, which of course turned out to be glorious stuff. For years, Renaissance had divided its production into a number of different cuvées, including the Vin de Terroir, a single-varietal bottling selected to highlight particularly expressive sections of the vineyard; the Premiere Cuvée, which shared flagship honors with the Vin de Terroir but aimed to show off the vintage’s best lots in a Bordeaux-style blend; and the Claret Prestige, which with its restrained profile always seemed to me to be modeled on old-style, British-palate Bordeaux, as the “claret” moniker would indicate. There was also a basic Cabernet Sauvignon, which I had never paid much attention to because the higher-end bottlings were already plenty affordable.

Anyway, one of the wines Gideon brought to New York that autumn of 2008 was the basic Renaissance 1999 Cabernet Sauvignon. It was a stunner. In Bordeaux, the second wines are often decent-enough quality but seldom showing much of the personality of their grand vin brethren, and I suppose that’s what I had expected out of Renaissance’s basic cabernet. I was wrong. It exhibited all of the unmistakable earth-based flavors I’d associated with the higher-end bottlings but was less structured and, consequently, ready to drink much sooner. The 1995 Cabernet Sauvignon Vin de Terroir poured beside it was still tough and austere and was not nearly as compelling in comparison. I felt ashamed I had always ignored the basic cabernet in favor of the higher-end bottlings, having deprived myself of perfect drinking experiences in favor of academic excursions into wines that needed more time in the cellar. I wrote up some tasting notes on the dinner, posted them on CellarTracker and on Mark Squires’ no-longer-public bulletin board at erobertparker.com, and gave the 1999 cabernet my highest rating of the group, a score of 95/100.

So what does any of this have to do with Denmark? It happened that some 1999 Renaissance cabernet got exported to Denmark last fall. Renaissance is obscure enough in the United States, even in California; the Danes certainly wouldn’t have known anything about it. Evidently the importer scoured the Internet for some favorable press and stumbled upon my notes. The wine proceeded to be advertised throughout Denmark as “95 points! Keith Levenberg, erobertparker.com.” Suddenly my humble little bulletin board post had acquired the imprimatur of the Emperor of Wine! You can probably guess what happened next. The wine sold like hotcakes.

Meanwhile, I hadn’t the slightest inkling any of this was going on. Then someone forwarded me a thread on Parker’s board about the mysterious rating being attributed to his publication of a wine he had never, to anyone’s knowledge, consumed, which concluded with someone’s putting two and two together and tracing the reference back to my old post. Suddenly all those puzzling emails I had been getting from Danish email addresses with non-sequitur queries about the drinking windows and other arcana about Renaissance’s wines made sense. Especially the one from a guy whose name sounded like a Viking explorer asking me if I could confirm my dates of employment with Robert Parker.

Parker never would’ve hired me. We see things rather differently. He gives his highest California ratings to wines in the so-called “cult” genre which he praises primarily for their inky concentration, while I favor the lighter but more characterful touch of a Renaissance. Responding to the post on his bulletin board asking if he’d ever reviewed Renaissance’s wines, Parker was less than charitable. He said (ellipses in original):

It has been some time ago but I found at least 2-3 vintages of the cabernets excessively tannic—with rustic,jagged,and bitterly astringent tannins….wine like that never comes into balance….one of the fundamentals of wine-tasting you can never forget if you are to survive in this profession…and it is the exact quote from the late Henri Jayer who said it to me in 1984…”if a wine tastes too tannic,it is too tannic”….profound and simple…. moreover,if they had magically discovered great terroir for Bordeaux grape varieties….wouldn’t the region have received more recognition for high quality wines?

I can’t let that one slide without comment. The thing is, the reason I had recommended the 1999 Renaissance cabernet so highly in the first place was precisely due to its lack of noticeable tannin: unlike the Vin de Terroir and Premiere Cuvée which required more time in the cellar for the tannin to melt away, the basic cabernet was already harmonious, suave, and ready to drink. What’s more, Henri Jayer’s comment might have been true about Burgundy and pinot noir, but certainly nobody ever thought it true of cabernet sauvignon. After all, Parker himself gave a barrel sample of the 2009 Château Latour a provisional 98-100 rating despite its having “the highest level of tannin ever measured at the estate” (and if you know Latour, you know that’s going to be very tannic indeed). Château Mouton-Rothschild 2009 garnered a nearly-as-impressive 96-98+ score from Parker despite his noting that “the index of tannins, the highest ever measured, [is] a whopping 20% higher than the next highest vintage.” This is not a new phenomenon. Parker described the 1986 Château Margaux as “frightfully tannic” and “the most powerful, tannic, and muscular Margaux made in decades,” yet went on to rate the wine 96 points. Plainly, a young cabernet’s tasting tannic has never been treated as a disqualifier. The fact is, different types of wines consume their tannin in different ways, at different rates. A level of tannin that would be alarmingly high in a young Burgundy might seem alarmingly low in a young Barolo and just right in a young Bordeaux.

I recently had the pleasure of drinking Renaissance’s 1995 Premiere Cuvée. The last time I had that wine was about five years ago, and it was interesting but the tannin was rough. The most recent bottle had totally resolved the tannin and was entering a prime drinking zone. And it wasn’t merely drinkable, but a poster-child for its terroir, as Renaissance’s unique gravelly minerality was plastered all over it. The phrase “soil-to-glass transfer” coined by Rhône wine writer John Livingstone-Learmonth was apropos. So if I were to taste a young Renaissance and find it too tannic, it would behoove me to reflect on the evolution of the 1995 Premiere Cuvée before writing off the wine as fundamentally imbalanced. I’m not a professional wine critic, despite what a few thousand Danes might think, but I do know enough not to disparage a wine as too tannic without having experienced how its similarly built predecessors have developed. I definitely know enough not to disparage a wine as too tannic without even having tasted the wine in question.

For further reading:

• The web sites of Renaissance Vineyard & Winery and Renaissance winemaker Gideon Bienstock’s personal estate, Clos Saron.
• Matt Kramer on Renaissance in the sadly defunct New York Sun.
• Blog posts on Renaissance at Vinography and Bigger Than Your Head.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff.

Paris, Naturally

The Emmanuel Houillon/Maison Pierre Overnoy 2009 Arbois Pupillon poulsard recently hit the streets in Paris, which means it was a lucky time for me to be there. It’s been a long time since I saw any bottles of Overnoy on a New York retail shelf, which is funny because I used to see them gathering dust on the racks of Chambers Street Wines all the time. Not many people had discovered this unique red wine from the Jura in those days. I enjoyed a bottle from time to time but never had the foresight to cellar any. At some point a Japanese magazine made an Overnoy poulsard its wine of the year, and that event seemed to mark the end of its easy availability at retail. Its following is probably still small, but in that rabidly devoted fashion that makes the wine something of a secret handshake.

Here’s what I mean. It’s late January and I’m standing in Caves Augé, a microscopic little wine shop near the Place de la Madeleine stocked floor-to-high-ceiling with bottles like an old library. You could drink well for years if you were limited to what you could grab off the shelves, but most of the interesting stuff is in the cellar, fetched via a contraption that’s not exactly a dumbwaiter but not quite an elevator, either, and you have to know the wine to ask for it. I manage to irritate one of the cellarmen by inquiring about the possibility of purchasing some Clos Rougeard Le Bourg. If there’s one thing a wine merchant hates, it’s a cherry-picker, the infrequent customer who only comes in to capture the most precious bottles in the store. But then I ask about a few other things and when the name Overnoy crosses my lips it’s like I’ve made a new friend. He disappears to the cellar to fetch a quartet of 2009 Overnoys for me, and we talk about some of the other interesting bottles in the shop long enough for me to secure a cornucopia of cherries like Thierry Allemand’s 2007 Cornas Reynard and Yvon Métras’s 2009 Fleurie L’Ultime. There is even some Rougeard available too, he allows, if I want it.

A few days later I’m with some colleagues trying to get a table for dinner at Le Comptoir. We’re turned away in the traditional frosty Parisian fashion, as if the mere request were an imposition. But I make it back another time and manage to score a table by agreeing to sit outside at the very end just barely within reach of the winter heat lamps. The wine list at Le Comptoir is a catalog of the same familiar natural-wine producers one would find at Augé or Chambers, and, as luck would have it, the 2009 Overnoy is there, too. I order a bottle and the waitress beams with delight and for the next two weeks I don’t experience any more frosty receptions or trouble securing a table for dinner there. As for the Overnoy, it was already a compelling wine, but a bit awkward on account of the carbonic gas intended to protect it from oxidation in lieu of sulfur. It wasn’t until I got the chance to enjoy a second bottle with sufficient time in a decanter that I really began to grok it. The style is pale and featherweight somewhat in the fashion of the much-missed Burgundies of Jacky Truchot, but with an earthiness more stony than funky.

I had learned of Le Comptoir by means of the invaluable “Natural Wine Map of Paris” on the website morethanorganic.com. In the U.S. lately there is a controversy, or a pseudo-controversy, over the propriety of the term “natural wine.” Essentially it describes producers who farm organically and avoid certain kinds of manipulations in the cellar. Occasionally a sophist comes along to complain that the criteria are arbitrary, which misses the point. If you are the type of person trying to find a place to eat or shop by consulting something like the Natural Wine Map of Paris, you are not doing so because you enforce a flowchart of litmus tests dictating how the wines you drink are made. You are doing so because you love wines like Overnoy or Rougeard or Allemand, and you want to find them or something else similarly inspired—and drink with others who share the same passion. There’s no harm in a catchy shorthand for that. Indeed, it struck me several times what a deeply comforting feeling it is, when you’re away from your family and thousands of miles from home, to walk into a restaurant and see every table adorned with a bottle you’d be thrilled to have in your cellar. It doesn’t quite cure the homesickness, but it can make you forget it for an evening.

Anyway, I have the map to thank for leading me to a few other Parisian treasures. One of the best meals I had in Paris was at Le Baratin. Some reviews of the place seem to knock it for its creaky decor, but I actually found the look of the place immensely comfortable, radiating a classic Parisian neighborhood charm without being kitschy about it. Photographs taken there somehow look more appropriate in sepia-tone. The owner posts a menu of the day and a few recommended wines on a blackboard above the bar. There is no actual wine list. Instead, the blackboard instructs: “Nous consultez.” (Consult us.) The consultation can be brief if you just want something nice and easy to go with your food or extensive if you are really in the mood to talk wine. It will be especially extensive if a fondness for natural wine is detected, and an interesting bottle is sure to result. I enjoyed a simply stunning Vouette & Sorbée Champagne Blanc d’Argile there, which happened to be on the blackboard, and some Burgundies from Philippe Pacalet, which were not.

I’ve long resisted getting on the bandwagon for Pacalet; there are plenty of vignerons in Burgundy who work just as “naturally” but only Pacalet seems to have been anointed by the clique. Yet I have to admit the Pacalets offered at Le Baratin made me a convert. I’ve simply never had a Chambolle-Musigny village wine that tasted more typically Chambolle, nor a Gevrey-Chambertin village wine that tasted more typically Gevrey, than the 2007 Pacalets served at Le Baratin, which is to say that the Chambolle was alluringly feminine and sumptuous, the Gevrey rich and earthy. In my experience, the differences in personality between the villages in Burgundy are subtle enough that you can really only apprehend them cumulatively: you don’t get a sense of what Gevrey tastes like from any one bottle but from an ideal image that comes to mind from the accumulated memories of countless Gevreys over time. Pacalet might be the exception. These wines were so terroir-transparent that they told the story of their villages in a single bottle. An all-Pacalet lineup could be a fascinating way to take a whirlwind terroir tour of Burgundy. Needless to say, the overall quality level was well above the norm for village-appellation Burgundy.

The map also led me to Le Severo, and its sister restaurant Le Bis du Severo around the corner, which serves mostly the same cuisine but doesn’t require as much premeditation to get a table. The main attraction at both restaurants is the steak frites, but to put them in the same bucket as any other steak-frites joint in France would be a grave injustice. The owner was a butcher and takes his meat seriously. The steaks are dry-aged for six weeks or more, cut thick, and seared perfectly black-and-blue. With their intense dry-aged taste they reminded me of Peter Luger’s steaks—even better, actually, because the cooking at Luger doesn’t remotely compare, and the wine list at Luger is an unsubtle encouragement to order beer. The wine list at Le Bis du Severo is supplied by Augé and includes names like Breton, Dard & Ribo, Foillard, Métras, and Overnoy. The main branch supplements those standbys with a blackboard listing of higher-end selections, mostly Burgundies.

But on my first visit, I couldn’t resist the Overnoy. It was the 2003 rouge. At first it was nearly indistinguishable from the 2009, nicely refuting the theory that unsulfured wines are destined to croak in the bottle. It had even retained some carbonic spritz. With air it began to flesh out and didn’t show its bones as much as the 2009 did, but didn’t taste noticeably older, either—certainly not in the sense of tasting any less fresh. Perhaps what the extra bottle age had done was to turn the fruit flavors more floral: the taste was essentially equal parts crushed stone and rose petals. It made me glad that I’d used the trip as an opportunity to remedy the lack of Overnoy in my cellar. In addition to the 2009s from Augé, I have a horizontal of the 2004s (a poulsard, chardonnay, and savignin) to look forward to, acquired from Mi Fugue, Mi Raisin, the only store I know of in the world to sell both natural wine and classical music. Some of the wines there were familiar to me; most weren’t. But once I pointed to the Overnoy, the secret handshake did its thing.

For further reading:

• Morethanorganic.com and its Natural Wine Map of Paris.
• A post about a visit to the Houillon/Overnoy estate at Cory Cartwright’s Saignée blog.

Red, White, and Bubble-Free

If you follow Brooklynguy’s blog, you’ve seen his notes on a recent tasting we put together of an unusual group of wines from Champagne. Our group gathered at the East Village restaurant Prune and opened ten bottles. Nine of them were red. None of them had bubbles. As I commented there, we may not do the glitziest Champagne tastings, but we definitely do the geekiest. The group included Peter Liem of ChampagneGuide.net, Joe Salamone of Crush Wine & Spirits, Dan Melia of Mosel Wine Merchant, and assorted other industry insiders in addition to the two of us amateur scribes.

The official appellation for these wines is Côteaux Champenois, or “Slopes of Champagne.” Any still wine from the various Champagne zones made from the approved Champagne grapes is entitled to the appellation, whether it’s red, white, or rosé. But we were most interested in the reds.

What makes red Côteaux Champenois interesting is that it is, in a sense, the original Vin de Champagne. Sparkling Champagne is a more recent creation. In their book Champagne: How the World’s Most Glamorous Wine Triumphed Over War and Hard Times, Don and Petie Kladstrup cite a cellar inventory conducted at Champagne’s Abbey de Hautvillers in 1713, which “listed several hundred barrels of red wine, a smaller number of barrels of white wine, but absolutely no sparkling wine.” The cellar-master of Hautvilliers at that time—he died two years later—was (no points for guessing) the monk Dom Pierre Pérignon.

In fact a rivalry had been fomenting since the 1600s between Champagne and Burgundy over which region made the greatest wine. The Sun King Louis XIV (a contemporary of Pérignon) drank Champagne most of his life on the advice of his royal doctor. But when a new doctor assumed the role he blamed Champagne for the king’s constant health problems and decreed that only Burgundy would be served at the royal table. A bitter debate ensued in which doctors from Champagne and Burgundy set out to prove the superior medical benefits of the wines from their respective regions. The dean of the medical school in Beaune, one Jean-Baptiste de Salins, said of Champagne: “Those wines have no strength, none of the vigor people used to call generosity. They are weak, half-hearted and watery; their color is changeable and unreliable, and they cannot withstand transport.”

The man was biased but he wasn’t crazy. Replace de Salins’s pejoratives with similar-meaning words of more favorable connotations and you wind up with a fairly good description of the Côteaux Champenois we tasted in 2011. You most certainly do not drink Côteaux Champenois if you are craving “strength” or “vigor.” These are pinot noirs of feminine waifishness, utterly weightless on the palate by virtue of their gentle fruit concentration and alcohol levels barely exceeding 12 percent (and in many cases likely to have been chaptalized to get that far). People who don’t like that sort of thing might call them watery. But people who prize these qualities will find a graceful touch that even the most elegant red Burgundies would strive in vain to achieve.

Interestingly, it was probably my least favorite wine of the tasting that illustrated these qualities most clearly. According to Peter, the Egly-Ouriet 2008 Ambonnay Rouge is made with a deliberate effort to express rich, ripe fruit. The vineyard is a south-facing amphitheater, which ensures a sun-drenched exposure, and the wine is aged in new oak barrels bought from the Burgundy producer whose name is virtually synonymous with new oak barrels, Dominique Laurent. The wine smelled like sweet cherry sucking candies and tasted just like it smelled, along with a heavy slap of cedar courtesy of Monsieur Laurent. The flavors reminded me of an overdone California pinot noir. But here’s the thing. Even with its overdone, tooty-frooty flavors, it still had a textural elegance and suppleness to it that would make many Burgundy vignerons envious. It had all the fruit of a ripe New World pinot with none of the fat, treacly glycerine, or the alcoholic sting.

One other Ambonnay wine was represented in the tasting, Marie-Noelle Ledru’s 2001 Ambonnay Rouge. It had started to develop some interesting gamey flavors, but for whatever reason seemed to me the least pinor noir-like of any of the wines in the lineup and too reminiscent of generic, ordinary red wine. I had it next-to-last on my scorecard. But Ledru’s wines seem deliberately designed to give a chilly reception in their adolescence. When I had her 2002 Blanc de Noirs Ambonnay Champagne recently it struck me as the single most bare-bones and austere Champagne I’ve had in my life. Maybe what you see is what you get, but sometimes with these things you have to account for the possibility of a chrysalis stage.

Fortunately, most of the wines did not tax the imagination. It was difficult for me to choose a favorite among the David Leclapart 2008 Trépail, René Geoffroy 2004 Cumières, and Larmandier-Bernier 2002 Vertus. The Jean Vesselle 2000 Bouzy followed close behind and a Paul Bara 2002 Bouzy might have contended if it had not been corked. The Leclapart and Geoffroy in particular exemplified for me the ideal qualities of red Côteaux Champenois: elegant and supple but loaded with a crushed-stone minerality. “Picture a mix of Pommard earth and Chambolle texture,” I wrote in my notes. It had plenty of fruit, too, but it was sappy, sticky fruit, a terrific ying to the mineral yang. The Geoffroy managed to ratchet up the stoniness—practically spackling the mouth with the stuff—on a frame that was even more graceful and evanescent. It didn’t finish so much as melt away, rendering almost as much flavor on the back end as the front. A similar sense of evanescence characterized the Vesselle, the oldest wine in the lineup and consequently one of the most amalgamated in terms of both flavor and texture.

The Larmandier-Bernier was probably the most atypical. I’ve had the wine once before, and while its proportions were consistent with Côteaux Champenois it showed so peppery that I remarked that it tasted like Puzelat had made a syrah. The bottle at this event was lighter on the pepper but intensely smoky; the flavor seemed to combine cigar tobacco and savory barbecue smoke.

That leaves two other wines, Benoît Lahaye’s 2003 Bouzy and the Bollinger 2002 Côteaux des Enfants. A few people had the Lahaye down as their favorite, but I found it a little puzzling and I kept coming back to my glass just wondering what to make of it. Like the Egly, it smelled candied and had a lot of up-front fruit, but tasted juicier and fresher. The Bollinger also gushed with fruit while remaining fairly lightweight and elegant with the requisite minerality, but at $120—by far the most expensive wine on the table—it was difficult to think of any good reason for buying it. Some people even found the wine generic and liked it less than I did, but it should be noted that even though it comes from a big Champagne house (and comes packaged in a tacky wood box with gold clasps), it is, like the grower wines, a terroir wine, from the same designated vineyard year after year.

Our sample size was too small for a serious terroir tour, however. For now, if you’re intensely curious about the difference between Ambonnay and Bouzy or Vertus and Cumières, you might be better off consuming the stuff with bubbles. But if the pendulum of fashion swings just a little bit the other way and people make room for virtues other than “strength” and “vigor,” then you’re likely to find more Côteaux Champenois in the market and you’ll see a side of these Champagne villages that the bubbles don’t express.

For further reading:

• Brooklynguy on the Côteaux Champenois tasting.
• Peter Liem’s ChampagneGuide.net (subscription required).
• Don and Petie Kladstrup’s Champagne: How the World’s Most Glamorous Wine Triumphed Over War and Hard Times on Amazon.com.

Nfr-Nfr-Land

The identity of the world’s first wine critic is lost to history, but we do know it was the ancient Egyptians who were the first to engage in the practice that defines modern wine criticism: rating wines on a scale of points. The Egyptians inscribed hieroglyphics on the seals of their wine jugs noting the origin and occasionally even the vintage of their wines. In these hieroglyphics they used the word nfr to signify the better wines. Particularly good wines were labeled nfr-nfr. Apparently the scale went up to nfr-nfr-nfr. It was likely the world’s first wine-rating system. Call it a four-point scale.

There followed a period of some millennia in which people seemed mostly content to drink wine without formally ranking it. Then came the Enlightenment and its concomitant obsession with the classification of absolutely everything. The prevailing intellectual fashion of the day was the conviction that all facts about the universe were knowable through the faculty of reason and the practice of the natural sciences. One of the emblematic documents of that era was Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie, which sought to aggregate all facts about everything in one place and even included a taxonomic classification of knowledge itself. The Enlightenment-era obsession with classification spread to the sphere of wine appreciation and culminated most famously in the Bordeaux classification of 1855, when 79 estates were ranked on a scale of premier to cinquième cru. The 1855 classification closely tracked a number of earlier such classifications, including a 1787 classification by Thomas Jefferson, the all-American Enlightenment figure, who prophetically anointed “Margau,” “La Tour de Ségur,” “la Fite,” and “Hautbrion” as growths “of the first quality.” Jefferson’s classification went down to third growths; the 1855 classification to fifths. Take into account the estates not deemed worthy of classification at all and you can call those projects a four-point scale or a six-point scale, respectively.

The enterprise of rankings has of course refined itself to ridiculous levels of pseudo-precision today, and most critics eschew the four-point scales of old for a hundred-point scale (which is technically a 51-point scale since it starts at 50, but lately has become more like a 17-point scale by virtue of the contagious editorial decision not to publish any review below 85 points). Robert Parker is sometimes falsely credited with inventing the scale. When the British wine writer Hugh Johnson reviewed the galleys of Parker’s first book, he claimed to be so puzzled by the numbers in the margins that he mistook them for printer’s marks. But he shouldn’t have been confused, since all Parker did was take the 20-point system used by European writers based on European school grades and adapt it to the 100-point scale used in American schools. The system of course proved massively successful and acquired a power over wine collectors that one could fairly call hypnotic. None of the other scales that have been devised from time to time―such as the 20-point scale, Gambero Rosso’s (four-point) “Tre Bicchieri” scale, or the (six-point) “Yech” to “Delicious!” scale used by the Wall Street Journal‘s ex‒wine columnists―has ever had nearly the psychological pull.

I’ve always thought that the system’s correlation to school grades was the main reason for this. While there are many occasions to prefer a simpler wine to a more serious wine, there is simply no situation in life in which it is better to receive an A- than an A+. In addition, Parker likes to cast himself as a champion of hedonism in wine appreciation (in contrast to a nameless roster of enemies he dubs “the pleasure police” who, he imagines, cast aspersions on the wines he recommends because they’re  just too gosh-darned enjoyable). If his point ratings are a proxy for hedonistic enjoyment, then the functional difference between a 95-point wine and a 90-point wine seems an insufficient basis for preferring the latter to the former; why deprive oneself of five points worth of pleasure?

The system’s incognizance of functional and other qualitative differences among wines leads many people to condemn the scales as misleadingly univariate and to oppose the use of points altogether. But I can’t quite embrace their side of the argument, either. The fact of the matter is that point ratings, for all their flaws, do express something, and it isn’t something that can be expressed in prose.

Consider the way numbers are used in a somewhat different field: baseball statistics. The master statistician Bill James once observed that baseball statistics were peculiarly interesting, as distinct from statistics in other fields, because they “have acquired the power of language.” He called them “imagenumbers,” explaining:

Let us start with the number 191 in the hit column, and with the assertion that it is not possible for a flake . . . to get 191 hits in a season. It is possible for a bastard to do this. It is possible for a warthog to do this. It is possible for many people whom you would not want to marry your sister to do this. But to get 191 hits in a season demands (or seems to demand, which is as good for the drama) a consistency, day-in, day-out devotion, a self-discipline, a willingness to play with pain and (to some degree) a predisposition to the team game which is wholly inconsistent with flakiness. It is entirely possible, on the other hand, for a flake to hit 48 homers.

Wine ratings seem to me to have a similar illustrative power. And the scale isn’t really univariate, because it tells you three things: the point rating, the person giving the points, and the identity and type of wine. Sometimes that tells you all you need to know. You do not need to read the tasting note of a California Rhône blend rated 98 points by Parker to know that it will have fruit concentration reminiscent of a reduction sauce, an intense new-oak infusion, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 15.5% alcohol. In fact, the number tells you more than Parker himself will tell you, because the accompanying tasting note will invariably make the wine sound as exciting and engaging as any number of uncontroversially classic wines; it’s only the obscenely high rating and the track record of the man bestowing it that signals that this is a wine to be avoided by all people of good taste. And obviously it’s at least as useful for those who don’t treat it as a reverse indicator. If a little number can communicate so much, that’s a good argument against abandoning the tool.

Which isn’t to say that the effect of the numbers on the enterprise of wine appreciation has been wholly positive. The most obviously destructive effect of the points regime has been in the number of abhorrent wines elevated to fame by high ratings and the corresponding number of respectable-to-exquisite efforts consigned to commercial purgatory by low or indifferent ratings. But this isn’t an argument against points per se, only against the governing philosophies of the people who have been dispensing them. My main objection to the 100-point scale derives from the very thing that accounts for its hypnotic power, its correlation to school grades. It encourages people to approach a wine like a student submitting his work for the teacher’s approval, and part of the system’s appeal doubtlessly lies in the ego boost of playing teacher and purporting to issue an authoritative pronouncement on the value of somebody else’s labor. But this has it exactly backwards. It’s the wine that has something to teach us, not the other way around. If we take it seriously, we should see what we can learn from it before we presume to grade it.

For further reading:

• William Younger’s Gods, Men, and Wine, as comprehensive a history of winemaking as there exists and the source of the anecdote about the Egyptian wine-ranking system.
• Wikipedia entries on Diderot’s Encyclopédie, the 1855 Bordeaux classification, and Thomas Jefferson’s classification of the wines of Bordeaux. The Jefferson classification is also discussed in any of the three (!) books published to date on the third President’s wine hobby: James M. Gabler’s Passions: The Wines and Travels of Thomas Jefferson, the R. de Treville Lawrence III‒edited anthology Jefferson and Wine: Model of Moderation, and John Hailman’s more recent and more popularly oriented Thomas Jefferson on Wine.
• Hugh Johnson’s autobiography A Life Uncorked.
• Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, from which I pulled the Bill James quotations here. A Search-Inside-the-Book on Amazon for the word language points you to the relevant passages.
• A fascinating blog post this week, “Why All Wine Lovers Just Don’t Get Along,” by W. Blake Gray. Gray discusses some market research dividing wine drinkers into six groups, two of which account for the kind of serious wine drinker who might have a cellar and actually read about wine: “Quality Seekers” and “Enthusiasts.” “Quality Seekers,” he explains, “want the best wines available.” They’re the group one might pejoratively call the point-chasers. “Enthusiasts” care more about drinking something “interesting” than something “great.” Unsurprisingly, most Enthusiasts “don’t like numerical ratings.” More to the point, Quality Seekers and Enthusiasts don’t much like each other. They will argue until they’re breathless and still fail to convince the other side to think about wine on their terms. So Gray offers a suggestion: “You want to get people on the other side to pay attention to you? You have to speak their language.” I agree. Perhaps part of the reason the points system has had the effect of marginalizing classically made wines and popularizing trash is because people who see things differently don’t use it, giving the “Quality Seekers” nowhere else to turn.

Beaujolais 2009 Est Arrivée

Everybody is talking about 2009 Beaujolais. Producers are on record comparing the vintage to the all-time greats. My friends in retail tell me they are positively amazed by how fast the 2009s are selling and how many people are trying them for the first time, then stocking up (or stocking up without even trying them, such is the lure of hype). But from what I have tasted of the vintage so far, it really is something special, one of those years like 2001 in the Mosel or 2005 in the Côte d’Or that has the power to make converts by showcasing the wines’ usual assets with such focus and intensity that it trains the palate to recognize their virtues even in years where they are less obvious.

Whenever a vintage like this comes along, there is inevitably a contrarian or two sniffing that the wines are atypical and pining for the subtler charms of a more ordinary year. The lovely and habitually contrary Alice Feiring is the first I’ve seen to register this dissent on the 2009 Beaujolais, calling the year a “freak.” But the question of what is typical when it comes to Beaujolais may be more difficult to resolve than we might imagine.

Today, some of the most acclaimed Beaujolais are made by a quartet of producers imported by Kermit Lynch and called the Gang of Four (sometimes a Gang of Five) because they’re friends with each other and because they share the same inspiration for their winemaking, the late Jules Chauvet. Chauvet made a cameo appearance in Lynch’s classic book Adventures on the Wine Route. There, Lynch described a Chauvet wine as “pale in color, with a light, pretty perfume. There were reminders of flowers, grapes, and fruits like peach and apricot. It was all quite delicate from start to finish, but lively all the same, and the flavor was elusive; more than anything, it perfumed the palate.” Chauvet told Lynch the wine had 11 degrees alcohol and lamented that after the naturally rich 1945 and 1947 vintages, people came to assume Beaujolais should always measure thirteen to fourteen degrees. Chauvet also criticized modern consumers for insisting on their wines’ being clear in color and stripped of sediment and carbon dioxide:

“I don’t know how we got to this point, judging a wine by its limpidity. No one demands that fruit juice be clear. Why must wine be clear? I remember in 1930 with the great vintage of 1929, some Swiss clients bought some Fleurie in barrel, full of carbon dioxide gas, still on its lees. They rolled it into their restaurant in Switzerland, put it up on the counter, opened it up, stirred it up, turned the spigot, and served it like that. It was like red soup, but what a perfume! The Swiss were like that, they wanted the whole wine. Now you have to de-gas it, you know, take out the carbon dioxide, but when you do that, you also take out the wine’s perfume. I wish we could convince the consumer to accept a fizzy wine with all its perfume intact.”

Lynch joined Chauvet in excoriating the trend towards slick, modern Beaujolais chaptalized to an artificial richness. He pointed to some of the adjectives Robert Parker used to describe Beaujolais in his 1987 Wine Buyer’s Guide: “soft, lush, silky, full, fleshy, rich, supple, and so on,” noting, “Mr. Parker is correct. His adjectives perfectly describe today’s overchaptalized, overalcoholic Beaujolais.”

But if Chauvet’s typical Beaujolais was turbid, fizzy, around 11% alcohol, and lightly perfumed with aromatic yellow fruits like peach and apricot, it’s interesting that those terms don’t remotely describe any of the wines of the Gang of Four or those of the other producers inspired by Chauvet’s legacy. In 1993, when Lynch introduced the Gang of Four’s wines to his customers (the original offer is reprinted in his collection Inspiring Thirst), he praised the “explosive” scent of the Lapierre Morgan and wrote of Jean Foillard’s Morgon Cote de Py: “the color and aroma are much deeper and thicker [than Lapierre’s]. It is also a rounder, richer, more intense, more ‘serious wine.’” Of Thévenet’s Morgon: “Alcohol 13.2° without chaptalization! Deep robe…. Sappy, complex, long, chewy.” Explosive, deep, thick, round, rich, intense, serious, sappy, complex, long, and chewy: These adjectives are more in line with Parker’s than Chauvet’s.

Lynch was describing the 1991s, another historic vintage, like the 2009s, where the richness and intensity came naturally. So call them atypical, but at least they are atypical in a typical way. It’s true, however, that Beaujolais even in the leaner years―even the Gang of Four’s―does not much resemble Lynch’s description of Chauvet’s Beaujolais. But I don’t see this as any kind of a contradiction. For these vintners, following Chauvet’s philosophy was not about replicating any particular style of wine fashionable in some particular place in the ’20s and ’30s. Chauvet taught them such things as how to farm without pesticides and chemicals, how to ferment with the grapes’ indigenous yeasts, how to minimize the need for additives like sulfur in the winery. That still leaves room for quite a lot of differences in expression, based on terroir or personal style or whatever else.

Today’s Beaujolais tends to be intensely colored, a vibrant magenta in the glass and instantly identifiable among other red wines for its neon luminosity. They are of course fruity, but the fruits are the berry fruits one also finds in red Burgundy (though generally a bit more tart), not the peaches and apricots Lynch tasted in Chauvet’s wine. It’s in the structural aspects that they deviate most considerably from pinot noir. I often find myself calling them “screeching” due to their somewhat abrasive tannins and acute, high-pitched acidity, which provides the energetic lift and thirst-quenching power that the fizz may have been intended to impart in Chauvet’s era. But with age they are said to “pinoter,” as the local neologism has it, and take on the deeper, earthier personality of pinot.

And here is where I think the 2009 vintage really distinguishes itself. Even though most of them are still dominated by their primary fruit to an extent that obscures whatever underlying depths of flavor they may have, there are other respects in which they are showing a sophistication that is ordinarily the exclusive province of elite red Burgundies. And this is evident from the way they are presenting themselves right now, not merely something incipient teasing you with the hypothetical prospect of pleasure fifteen years down the line. The most compelling examples of this are Domaine du Vissoux’s Moulin-à-Vent Trois Roches and Fleurie Garants. Both wines have a satiny texture to them that almost seems to caress the palate and give the wines a buoyant presence in spite of the density of their material. This is something you expect to experience in a Romanée-St.-Vivant, not in a country wine. Even 2005, the last Beaujolais vintage of a quality extraordinary enough to attract attention outside the usual quarters, did not, in my experience, offer anything so finessed. The Jean Foillard Morgon Côte de Py has a similar suavity but more heft.

If there is any flaw to these wines it is that they are too rich and too serious to be thoughtlessly guzzled, a pleasure in which Beaujolais ordinarily excels. But there is plenty of guzzling pleasure to be had in Vissoux’s entry-level Beaujolais Vieilles Vignes Cuvée Traditionnelle, as well as in certain cru-level wines that show more detail than a basic appellation Beaujolais but retain a lighter footprint suitable for gulping. The Pavillon de Chavannes Côte de Brouilly Cuvée des Ambassades is a perennial favorite of mine in this category and is so crunchy and lightweight that it may resemble the “lively” and “elusive” Chauvet Beaujolais more than any of the other wines mentioned here. Two more of the most gulp-worthy 2009s are Daniel Bouland’s Morgon Corcelette and Côte de Brouilly Cuvée Mélanie. Both start out deceptively simple, and you keep drinking them because they are just viscerally delicious and have the juiciness to quench thirst. Somewhere about midway through the bottle comes an epiphany moment when you realize you’ve stopped paying attention to the people talking to you and are instead focused on something―it’s hard to put your finger on exactly what―in the wine. And you keep coming back for another sip, perhaps once for some serious introspection into the wine and the next time merely to wash down some french fries, and the wine is just as rewarding for the former purpose as the latter.

So I might respectfully disagree with Kermit Lynch when he says that “Beaujolais should not be a civilized society lady; it is the one-night stand of wines.” In a vintage like 2009, it can be both, even in alternate sips from the same bottle.

For further reading:

• Kermit Lynch’s Adventures on the Wine Route on Amazon.com.  (A Search-Inside-the-Book for “Chauvet” will point you directly to the passages quoted here.) Also, Lynch’s Inspiring Thirst.
• A Saveur magazine article on Beaujolais’s Gang of Four.
• An essay by Philippe Pacalet on Jules Chauvet, courtesy of Chambers Street Wines.
• Alice Feiring’s “freak” tweet.

The Man Who Knew Too Much

Matt Kramer has just released a compilation of his New York Sun and Wine Spectator columns, straightforwardly titled Matt Kramer on Wine. Right away in the preface Kramer apologizes if some of the contents seem dated. “After all,” he points out, “journalism is written for the moment and when that moment has passed, well, timing is everything.” But Kramer is one of the most thoughtful wine writers out there, and most of the pieces in the collection are timeless.

Of particular resonance today is his 1998 column, “Real Collecting vs. Phony Collecting,” inspired by the 1997 auction of the art collection of Victor and Sally Ganz. In Kramer’s account, the Ganzes were well-to-do, but not all that rich by the standards of the art-collecting world. Lacking the advantage of bottomless pockets, they built their collection on sheer connoisseurship. The Picasso painting Le Rêve—the one Steve Wynn infamously ripped with an errant swing of his elbow after agreeing to sell it for $139 million—came from the Ganz collection. Victor Ganz bought it for $7,000 in 1941.

But “when the price of Picassos rose beyond their means,” Kramer writes, “the Ganzes shifted their highly focused interest—and insights—elsewhere. Almost unerringly, it seems, whatever they bought proved over time to be enduring and enlightening.” For example, in the 1960s, Victor Ganz was at “a big-name gallery where the big-ticket work of a famous painter was being shown.” He was unimpressed and wandered around the corner to a more humble gallery, where he discovered the work of then-unknown sculptor Eva Hesse and, “after intense absorption,” bought three pieces.

What bottles would a wine collector as discerning as Victor Ganz buy today? Kramer poses the question, but doesn’t suggest any answers, except to point out that first-growth Bordeaux is not on the menu: “He knew too much.” I think I have some ideas, though:

Antoniolo Gattinara Osso San Grato, Travaglini Gattinara Riserva. — Barolo and Barbaresco are the blue-chip nebbiolo wines. Everybody knows that. But in another of his books, Making Sense of Italian Wine, Kramer points out that it was not ever thus—“there was a time, a half-century ago and more, when the district and wine called Gattinara was as prestigious and highly regarded as Barolo.” What’s more, Barolo itself is a fairly recent invention, at least compared to other blue chips like Bordeaux or Burgundy. According to the New York Times’s Frank Prial, “Once, Barolo was a sweet wine. In the 1840’s, the French wife of a local nobleman hired a French winemaker, Louis Oudinot, to transform Barolo into a dry wine in the French style. The new style soon became the only style.” Which is to say that very little in Piedmont is carved in stone, and it’s not too late for Gattinara (once again) to receive its due as a reference-standard nebbiolo.

It’s often said that the most compelling wines come from regions where the grapes ripen just barely, which certainly describes the mountain region of Gattinara relative to the sun-drenched Langhe where Barolo and Barbaresco are grown. The cooler climate renders nebbiolo with leaner, more feminine proportions reminiscent of pinot noir. The volcanic soils inflect the wines with a gravelly minerality as vivid as you’ll ever experience in a wine. Antoniolo’s Osso San Grato, from the producer’s top vineyard, is my favorite example. On release, it exhibits fine-grained tannins which make it far gentler on the palate and easier to drink than any Langhe nebbiolo of a similar age. With age, it turns sappy and savory and cranks the mineral expression up to eleven. Travaglini’s Riserva eventually showcases the same rockiness but isn’t as forgiving of being opened too early. On release, it’s a firmly structured wine capable of being mistaken for Barolo in every respect except for its surreal bottle shape (and its price tag).

Louis Jadot Moulin-à-Vent Château des Jacques Grands Clos, Coudert Fleurie Clos de la Roilette Cuvée Tardive. — Most articles about Beaujolais repeat two chestnuts. The first is that the majority of Beaujolais is junk, with the good stuff tarnished by association with the likes of Beaujolais Nouveau. The second is the story of how Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, ordered the gamay grape expelled from the Cote d’Or in the 14th century. The insinuation is that gamay makes a fundamentally less noble wine, justifying the contemporary prejudice of Beaujolais as rustic and simple. But it turns out that Philip the Bold’s gamay is not relevant to Beaujolais after all. In his Book of French Wines originally published in 1928, P. Morton Shand wrote that the gamay of Beaujolais in fact “has nothing in common” with the “infâme Gamet” that littered the Cote d’Or in Philip the Bold’s day. The latter yielded a “dark juice” presumably lacking in elegance, while the gamay strain planted in Beaujolais “is essentially a vin tendre, a wine that is above all fresh and refreshing, light, delicate and full of fruit: the antithesis of anything ‘big and booty.’”

Just as modern collectors have forgotten the esteem in which Gattinara was once held, few realize that the best vineyards in Beaujolais were once as prestigious as the grands crus of Burgundy, and sold for comparable prices when they changed hands. In fact, Shand’s book relates that 32 vineyards in Moulin-à-Vent were entitled to a Grand Cru appellation under a 1919 délimitation cadastrale, which seems to have gone down the memory hole as Beaujolais appellations today only cover the name of the village. Nevertheless, four of those original Grand Cru vineyards are today in the hands of Louis Jadot’s Château des Jacques estate and given their own vineyard-designated bottlings: Clos du Grand Carquelin, Clos des Rochegres, Clos de la Roche, and Clos des Champs de Cour. They are as sophisticated as Burgundy and structured for long aging. Coudert’s Clos de la Roilette is just as pedigreed. Shand reports that the Clos de la Roilette was nicknamed “‘le Clos-Vougeot du Beaujolais’”—after the single most esteemed Burgundy vineyard of that era—for “the manifold perfections its wine embodies.” The Cuvée Tardive comes from vines over 80 years old and has the quiet intensity that’s a hallmark of very old vines: concentrated, but somehow still slender in its silhouette.

Domaine Karydas Xinomavro, Sigalas Santorini Assyrtiko. — It seems strange that a nation whose wine culture dates back to antiquity, just like Italy’s, should be so far off the radar of so many wine drinkers today. But there are no wine critics or famous importers evangelizing Greek wines, Greek cuisine doesn’t dot the landscape the way Italian restaurants do, and of course there is the inherent awkwardness of pronouncing the names of native grape varieties like “xinomavro” and “assyrtiko.” So most Americans are unlikely to encounter Greek wines without making a deliberate effort to try something eclectic. And yet even many who do make that effort often end up ignoring Greece. That’s a shame, because Greece has some priceless assets to offer. First, it’s a Mediterranean culture where wine is a fixture at the table, and the wines are therefore made to be consumed with a meal rather than to outpunch other wines in a mass side-by-side competition. Second, regions like Santorini, home of Sigalas’s thrilling assyrtiko, are among a precious few spots in Europe unaffected by the phylloxera epidemic that devastated Europe’s vineyards in the nineteenth century and where old vines still grow on their own roots. The result can be a clarity of expression that’s almost jarring to modern palates. Sigalas’s assyrtikos, with their rough, craggy texture reminiscent of some Austrian rieslings or gruner veltliners, feel like they are chiseled out of the volcanic rock on which they’re grown.

Karydas comes from the Macedonian appellation of Naoussa, whose signature red variety, xinomavro, has been compared to pinot noir and nebbiolo. In truth, it has the tough, muscular structure of the latter in its youth but shows its feminine side with bottle age. It also has the interesting distinction of being one of the few non-French varieties that can walk away from an encounter with new French oak without losing its soul, as Karydas demonstrates. The distinguishing characteristic of Karydas’s xinomavro is its veritable rock quarry of minerality. My notes on one recent vintage read: “There is oak here but the dominant flavors are so rocky the wood practically tastes petrified.” But I am especially fond of the note the wine writer Elliot Essman crafted on the same wine. Taste being a fundamentally difficult and subjective thing to put into words, one doesn’t often come across a wine tasting note that totally nails the experience of drinking a wine, but this one does, to the extent that if I’d missed the name of the wine I would have thought, “Sounds like Karydas.” He wrote: “In the mouth, the tannin speaks without timidity, though you want to enjoy it now for what it is rather than as a vector for some theoretic aging process. These are firm, drying tannins that you love for exactly what they are. . . . We know this wine has seen wood, with accents of cedar, cigar box, tobacco, cocoa, some leather, and dried mountain herb. An earthy minerality provides the bottom: gravel and crushed rock, the kind you would use to build a road you expected to last.” His verdict, in lieu of a point score: “A cultural statement.”

There are too many others to list, including some that admittedly aren’t cheap except in comparison to the offensively priced blue chips with which they can legitimately compete. For example, I have become much less depressed about Ch. Cheval-Blanc’s becoming a five-hundred-dollar wine since realizing that the cabernet franc in Clos Rougeard’s Saumur-Champigny Le Bourg can equal or exceed Cheval-Blanc’s in distinction; ditto for Pierre Peters’ Champagne Les Chetillons relative to the great Salon. In the Rhône it continues to surprise me that the trophy pricing that’s infected Chave Hermitage hasn’t yet spread to Jamet Côte-Rôtie and Allemand Cornas Reynard, which manage to epitomize their respective appellations, while at the same time towering over the rest of the wines there, in the same way that Chave does, or did. And Australian renditions of the grape that did not succumb to the Fruit Weight fashion, such as Mount Langi Ghiran’s Victoria Shiraz and Henschke’s Mount Edelstone, are as profound, individual, and ageable as their Rhône counterparts. Then there is riesling. Is there any wine collector more boring than the type who presumes that great riesling begins and ends with Trimbach’s Clos Ste. Hune? Even setting price aside and limiting myself to the dry genres, I’d sooner drink and cellar Alzinger Steinertal, Hirtzberger Singerriedel, Hirsch Heiligenstein and Gaisberg, various of the Mosels from A.J. Adam and Peter Lauer, Klaus-Peter Keller’s Grosse Gewächse, and Grosset Polish Hill.

Admittedly, it’s one thing to point to an underdog and declare that it can knock the champion off its pedestal, and it’s another thing actually to defend the claim. So, before mentioning anything here, I applied the Charles Murray “Seriously?” test. Murray wrote, in connection with his survey of the greatest human accomplishments in art and literature:

I think that the number of novels, songs, and paintings done since 1950 that anyone will still care about 200 years from now is somewhere in the vicinity of zero. Not exactly zero, but close. I find a good way to make this point is to ask anyone who disagrees with me to name a work that will survive—and then ask, “Seriously?” Very few works indeed can defend themselves against the “Seriously?” question.

The sale of the Ganz art collection yielded over $200 million. I doubt there are many wines one can buy today that will look like similarly brilliant investments from a financial perspective. But even if today’s undervalued wines never get discovered, it still pays to find room in the cellar for them. Because if they don’t escalate in price, then people who have mature bottles won’t bother to sell them, so the only way to experience them will be to cellar them yourself. And the experience just may turn out to be as profound as you can get from the fanciest Grand Cru money can buy. Seriously? Seriously.

For further reading:

• Matt Kramer on Wine on Amazon.com.
• Wikipedia entries on Victor Ganz and Picasso’s Le Rêve.
• Tom Cannavan’s report on a visit to Louis Jadot’s Château des Jacques.
• Elliot Essman’s tasting notes on Domaine Karydas 2003.
• Charles Murray interviewed by Steve Sailer on his book Human Accomplishment.

Introduction

Ceci n’est pas une pipe was Magritte’s famous caption for a painting that, quite obviously, depicted a pipe. In a similar spirit, I should explain that this is not a blog, despite outward appearances and my use of certain bloggy devices such as hyperlinks and a comments page. Instead, what I envision this site to be is something of an open-source wine column, written as deliberately as your favorite newspaper wine column but without the compromises those writers must make for their work to be accessible to a general audience.

One of my favorite wine columnists, Eric Asimov of the New York Times, started an overdue discussion on his blog last year with a post called “What Can Best Be Left Unsaid.” The post discussed how he’d managed to write a column on Châteauneuf-du-Pâpe without committing the usual wine-columnist tic of explaining that Châteauneuf comes from the Rhône Valley region of France, which is actually not one but two distinct regions, Northern and Southern, the latter of which produces red wines based on the grenache grape which, in Châteauneuf, can be and usually is blended with up to a dozen other varieties, some of them white. This is all Wine 101, the sort of thing that Eric Asimov’s regular audience doesn’t need to be told (and those who do can easily consult Google or Wikipedia). But for some reason there is an expectation that a wine columnist should assume he is writing for neophytes.

The same expectation does not hold true for any other kind of columnist. As I write this, the latest New York Times chess column makes reference to the “Kan Sicilian opening” and includes sentences like, “if Carlsen had played 47 g3, then 47 … Qd2 48 Qg2 e2 49 a7 e1/Q 50 a8/Q h4 would still be a drawn position,” secure in the knowledge that anyone bothering to read a chess column understands that stuff without needing it explained. Sure, a chess column that covered fluff topics like “Five Chess Sets That Make Great Gifts This Holiday Season” would have a much larger readership, but a paper with intellectual aspirations like the Times grasps the importance of directing its chess coverage towards those who study the game at a high level as opposed to those with a casual interest. It’s always mystified me why wine writing should be treated so differently. If chess columns were written like most wine columns, the writer would constantly be pausing to explain, every time he makes reference to (for example) a bishop, that the bishop is the piece that can move diagonally in any direction across the board.

The kind of wine writing that actually does target itself at serious enthusiasts is, if anything, in an even worse state. The current fashion is newsletters modeled on the Wine Advocate wherein a critic rattles off three-or-four sentence tasting notes on hundreds of wines to which he’s given scant attention in a mass spitting exercise, each accompanied by a point score purporting to be an ex cathedra pronouncement on the wine’s absolute (and often inchoate) quality. Some of those newsletters are reliable buying guides. Others not so much. In either case it strikes me as depressing that professed connoisseurs of something as potentially beautiful, thought-provoking, and life-affirming as wine should aspire to nothing grander than a buying guide.

There is an irritating cliché about wine which holds, “It’s what’s in the glass that counts.” That’s sometimes true of wine, but rarely is it true of wine writing; it’s not what’s on the page that counts. What counts is where it takes you, what it inspires you to think about after you put it down. The best wine writing, in my opinion, is the kind you can enjoy late on a Friday night while sunk into your easy chair, nursing the last glass of the evening’s Burgundy. Sometimes it will talk about specific wines, but usually only as an excuse for a detour somewhere else. Anyway, that will be the aspiration here. You will have to be the judge whether I can pull it off. New columns will be posted Fridays on a schedule I hope will average out to something more-or-less biweekly. Thanks for coming along on the journey.

For further reading:

• Eric Asimov on “What Can Best Be Left Unsaid.”