A Hedonist in the Cellar (12 page)

I usually start yawning when wine people talk about stuff like yeast and sulfur, but Willy Frank gets my attention when he explains, “Sulfur gives wild yeast a headache so they don’t go into an orgy.”

Like most voices in the wilderness, Willy Frank’s is colorful and more than a little strident. “I can prove every word I say” is one of his favorite sentences. His father proved that fine wines can be made in New York State’s Finger Lakes region, but the message hasn’t really gone wide yet, in spite of periodic encomiums to Dr. Konstantin Frank Vinifera Wine Cellars in the wine press. Nevertheless, the parking lot of the ramshackle winery and tasting-room complex, overlooking riverine Keuka Lake, is jammed with tourists—bikers with antlers mounted on their helmets and parents in matching polo shirts loading up the minivan with cases of wine.

“This region is much better for classic Champagne varieties than Champagne,” the highly caffeinated Willy declares within moments of meeting me in the jam-packed tasting room one Saturday afternoon in July. The spry, birdlike seventy-eight-year-old looks like a cheery version of Junior Soprano. “What Champagnes do you like … Krug? Bollinger? We can beat them. The grapes never ripen in Champagne.” As someone
whose parents used to serve Great Western “Champagne,” formerly the best-known product of this region, I am skeptical, but Willy never stops talking long enough for me to demur. He reels off a list of gold medals and awards. And the 1997 Chateau Frank Blanc de Blancs he thrusts upon me is a subtle and toasty sparkler, if not necessarily cause for utter despair at the house of Krug. His seriousness in pursuit of sparkling-wine quality is attested to by the permanent blood blisters on his hands, caused by riddling—the
champenoise
process of hand-turning the racked bottles to work the sediment down into the neck. But it is nonbubbly whites, particularly Rieslings, that put Dr. Konstantin Frank Vinifera Wine Cellars—to some extent—on the map.

The Frank family originally hailed from Alsace, migrating to Ukraine some three hundred years ago at the invitation of Catherine the Great, who wished to repopulate the region after a scorched-earth Turkish invasion. Willy’s father, Konstantin, a botanist, brought his family to America in 1951 and was drawn to the Finger Lakes region, which was already producing vast quantities of sweet plonk—remember Taylor?— from hybrid French-American grapes.

The area was thought to be too cold for the noble
Vitis vinifera
grape varieties from which the world’s great dry wines are made. But Frank realized that the great depth of the glacially carved Finger Lakes moderated temperatures on the hillsides above them, and he eventually planted sixty varieties of
vinifera
above Keuka Lake, making wines that astonished critics and connoisseurs. Nelson Rockefeller regularly sent a plane to pick up cases of late-harvest Riesling, and
Frank’s wines triumphed in international competitions. A young Robert Mondavi made the pilgrimage to Hammond-sport before starting his own winery in Napa. When Konstantin died, in 1985, his son Willy, a manufacturer’s rep based in Manhattan, inherited a run-down and financially precarious estate.

Willy, who often refers to himself in the third person, explains how he turned his father’s experimental winery into a commercially viable enterprise: “Willy rips up fifty of the varieties and keeps ten. He replants the vineyards. He busts his chops seven days a week.” Switching to first and second person without seeming to pause for breath, he says, “I took a lesson from the theater: I stayed away from New York City till I was ready. You try out in Boston and Philly before you open on Broadway.” Frank’s wines are now ready for the big time. Le Cirque pours his dry Riesling by the glass, and in 2000 the
New York Times
chose it as best American Riesling—and this is a wine that retails for thirteen bucks.

Frank’s other whites are all worth checking out; his barrel-fermented Chardonnay, made from forty-year-old vines planted by his father, could pass for a village Burgundy from Chassagne. And I’m hoping others will follow his lead and plant Rkatsitelli (pronounced ar-kat-si-TELL-lee), a grape from Mount Ararat, which produces a powerful, spicy white suggestive of a dry, more dignified Gewürztraminer. One wine writer has argued that the area’s future resides in Gewürztraminer, but Frank points out that aside from being cold-sensitive (and not exactly
hot
in the marketplace), this highly aromatic late-ripening grape is the hands-down favorite of the
wild turkeys that outnumber the humans hereabouts. “It’s like they have the latest up-to-the-minute cell phones,” Willy complains. “They call their friends from miles around to come and eat the Gewürz.”

What astonished me on my visit was the quality of the Pinot Noirs, from his fruity twelve-dollar Salmon Run to the herbal and backward forty-dollar reserve, made from forty-year-old vines. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this region could have a great future with this most temperamental, sublime—and lately fashionable—red grape. (Cabernet seems less suited to the climate—although this year Frank’s 2001 Cab won the gold medal at the San Francisco International Wine Competition.)

While a lot of his neighbors are still turning out fermented Kool-Aid from hybrid grapes, the Franks’ example is having an effect. Herman Weimer, a German immigrant who arrived in the area in 1968, produces beautiful Rieslings on the western side of Seneca Lake. The deep-pocketed Fox Run Vineyards, also on Seneca Lake, is turning out some good whites and reds—including a fine Pinot—which can only improve as the vines mature. Other up-and-comers: Glenora, Leidenfrost, and Chateau Lafayete Reneau. Dr. Konstantin Frank Vinifera Wine Cellars should continue to flourish under Fred Frank, Willy’s son, who may eventually find that he doesn’t have to talk quite so fast as his father to convince a skeptical wine world about the virtues of the Finger Lakes.

When they shoved
a
metal tray with his dinner through a slot in the door of his room, Benjamin Hammerschlag was beginning to think that he’d probably made a big mistake and that he’d be going back to his day job in a Seattle grocery store. He was staying in what passed for a hotel in the Franklin River region of Western Australia, “a pub full of misshapen humanity, pretty much the end of the earth,” as he describes it, while seeking out premium wines to import into the States. A week later, with only two prospects in his sights, he woke toward dawn in yet another crummy hotel room, this one in the Barossa Valley, to find the walls literally seething with millipedes. “By this time I was pretty depressed,” he says. Fortunately, winemaking in both regions was more advanced than the hospitality industry, and Hammerschlag is a persistent and highly competitive son of a bitch with a very good palate. Over the past five years he has assembled a portfolio, Epicurean Wines, that represents something of a new wave in the Australian invasion.

At the time of his unpromising first visit, Hammerschlag was working as a wine buyer for the QFC supermarket chain in Bellevue, a wealthy suburb of Seattle. In a few years he almost doubled QFC’s wine business, deciding in the process
that he had a “popular palate.” Among the most crowd-pleasing wines he discovered for his clients were old-vine Shi-razes from Australia’s Barossa Valley, which had just begun to trickle into this country, thanks to a few boutique importers like John Larchet’s Australian Premium Wine Collection and Dan Philips’s Grateful Palate. “It was a style of wine that Americans loved,” Hammerschlag says, “rich and powerful and generous and all about instant gratification.” Some Aussies, according to Hammerschlag, refer to these big Barossa Shirazes as “leg spreaders” or, when they are feeling more politically correct, as “T & A” wines. However, given the sheer size and power of these behemoths, stereotypically masculine metaphors seem more appropriate to me; high-octane reds like Kaesler’s Old Bastard Shiraz remind me more of a muscle car like a Dodge Charger or a Viper than of a starlet, more of Russell Crowe than Naomi Watts.

The only problem with these South Australian reds, it seemed to Hammerschlag, was that they were pretty hard to find. Potions like Elderton’s Command Shiraz or Clarendon Hills’ Astralis were made in small quantities from vines, including Shiraz and Grenache, planted in the early twentieth century. (Old vines, it’s generally conceded, make more intense and powerful wines than younger ones.)

Although Grange, Penfolds’s prototype for premium Australian Shiraz, dates back to 1951, when Penfolds’s chief wine-maker, Max Schubert, came home from a visit to Bordeaux determined to make a world-class wine, it remained something of a one-off until the 1980s, when others began making big, rich Barossa Shirazes. In just a couple of decades, Australia
has become a winemaking superpower, and Australian winemakers circumnavigate the globe spreading their fruity, high-tech gospel.

Much as Hammerschlag loved the big, badass Barossa Shi-razes, he was presumptuous enough to believe that there was room for some finesse and more of a specific sense of place in the wines (Grange uses grapes from all over South Australia) and that he could coax even better wines from the country if he could find the right talent. “I consider myself a talent agent,” he says. Upon his arrival in Adelaide in ′99, he made the rounds of the wine stores and accumulated thirty-six bottles of the local red, which he tasted in his millipede-infested hotel room. Then he started working the phone. He was lucky enough, and early enough, to find a core of extremely talented young winemakers, including Dan Standish, the wine-maker at Torbreck; Ben Glaetzer, who was involved with his family’s estate; Ben Riggs; and Reid Bosward. In the years since he signed them, Hammerschlag has become more and more involved in the winemaking process, a commitment that has nearly ruined his teeth—the result of tasting through thousands of barrels of tannic young reds.

“I go for that tightrope quality,” he says through his dingy choppers one spring evening at the SoHo Grand Hotel, as we slurp the ′02 Kaesler Avignon Proprietary Red, which would make a really good Châteauneuf-du-Pape. “Pushing the limits, but still maintaining balance and harmony.” To put it another way, Ben’s Froot Loops have fiber, and his muscle cars have precise handling and even, sometimes, luxurious interiors. Dan Standish’s ′01 The Standish, for instance, is the
most satisfying young Aussie red I’ve ever tasted—an old-vine Shiraz that has complex leather and coffee aromatics, an unbelievably voluptuous and viscous texture, and a long, lingering finish that left me alternately giddy and awestruck.

After just two vintages, Ben Glaetzer’s Amon-Ra and Mitolo’s G.A.M., two old-vine Shirazes, have become instant legends, earning exceptional ratings in the
Wine Advocate
, although like many of Epicurean’s wines they are made in tiny quantities. Mitolo also bottles an Amarone-style Cabernet called Serpico that will drive your tasting group into raptures. Fortunately, Hammerschlag has been just as energetic in finding wines for budget-minded hedonists—seriously fun reds like the Black Chook and the aptly named Woop Woop Shiraz. Competitive as he is, Hammerschlag will be furious with me for mentioning that there are some other fine importers, like Appellation Imports, Click Wine Group, Old Bridge Cellars, Old Vines Australia, and Weygandt-Metzler, but nobody is bringing in more consistently thrilling Australian wines than Epicurean.

The temperature plummets as I make the steep ascent of Spring Mountain in my rented Explorer; the redwood forest becomes thicker, damper, and more verdant, threatening to overrun the narrow switchbacks of the road. It’s hard to believe I’m just a couple of miles from the arid valley floor and the chic boutiquey hamlet of St. Helena. By the time I reach the top of the Mayacamas Ridge and follow a rutted dirt road down to the Smith-Madrone property, I feel I’ve traveled back in time to a prelapsarian Napa, a wild paradise with an alley of giant unkempt olive trees and islands of vines—an impression that is only reinforced by the sight of the bearded mountain man on an ancient tractor who looks at me askance, as if I’ve just beamed down from another planet, and then chugs away without comment.

I’d decided to come here after being knocked sideways by a bottle of the spectacular ′97 Smith-Madrone Riesling. I’d never heard of the estate and I was frankly amazed that any American Riesling, let alone one from the warm Napa Valley, could taste this complex—like a great Austrian Riesling from the Wachau. Standing at the top of Spring Mountain in early October freezing my ass off, I felt the Riesling concept (it’s a cool-climate grape) beginning to make sense. I’d learned that
the estate also made Cabernet and Chardonnay—at prices that hadn’t been seen in Napa since the Reagan era. Smith-Madrone is an anachronism in several regards, and I fervently hope it never joins the avant-garde.

Eventually another Grizzly Adams look-alike emerges from the ramshackle barn and introduces himself as Stuart Smith. The taciturn tractor driver, he tells me, is his brother Charlie. “We’ve been here since ′71,” Stuart says. “I graduated from Berkeley and came up here. There was a revolution going on. A food-and-wine revolution was starting, too. We wanted to join.” What little of his face isn’t covered in beard is deeply tanned; and he’s wearing a flannel shirt that doesn’t appear to have been washed in recent decades. Some of the machinery scattered about the property looks as if it was designed by Rube Goldberg. For a while I imagine that he and his brother have been hiding out here since the Vietnam era, living off the land, a fantasy that is punctured only when he refers to his family in St. Helena, at the base of the mountain. Still, there’s no question that the Smith brothers, who arrived just a few years after Mondavi set up shop on the valley floor, are pioneers, and that they have a very distinctive
terroir.

“There is no actual Spring Mountain,” Matt Kramer tells us in his
New California Wine.
“Instead it’s a colloquial term used in Napa Valley to refer to a section of the Mayacamas range at the midpoint of the valley just west and north of St. Helena. The name derives from the numerous springs and creeks on the mountainside.” Stuart says that vines were first planted here in the 1880s—they found old wooden stakes
among the redwoods and the madrone trees. California’s first great Chardonnay estate, Stony Hill, was established here in the 1950s, just below the property that is now Smith-Madrone. Nearby Pride, a relative newcomer to the ridgetop, is producing massive, high-scoring Cabs and Merlots. Meanwhile, the Smith brothers have built a loyal following with distinctive, modestly priced reds and whites without attracting a whole lot of wine media attention.

If Riesling were more fashionable, this estate would be famous. Smith-Madrone’s comes from a six-acre dry-farmed vineyard. (“If you irrigate the vines they don’t ripen as nature intended,” Stuart says.) While it is delicious on release, bursting with green apple and peach flavors, it develops tremendous depth and complexity with age. The ′97 is still youthful, stony and vibrant, while the ′93, which Stuart opened for me with his Swiss Army knife after rummaging around the ramshackle barn that serves as a winery, tastes like deep-dish apple pie with an enlivening splash of lemon juice, a dusting of sugar, and an underlying minerality. “Riesling’s for aging,” Stuart says, “and Chardonnay for drinking.” Smith-Madrone makes a fine Chardonnay as well; it has more fruit up front but is better balanced with acidity than most Napa Chardonnays.

Spring Mountain is best known for its Cabernet, and Smith-Madrone’s are fine examples, with the area’s massive depth and tannin along with a hint of dill, the signature of the American oak barrels. Stuart says they started with American oak barrels for reasons of economy, French oak being much more expensive. I point out that fans of Silver Oak Cabernet
happily pay sixty to a hundred bucks a bottle for the taste of American oak. Stuart shakes his head censoriously, dislodging a few drops of the Cabernet from the mustache covering his upper lip. “We think thirty-five bucks is a lot to pay for a bottle of wine,” he says. “Maybe we’re crazy. People were stopping my son Sam on the street in St. Helena and saying, ‘You’ve got to charge more for your wines.’ But then, after 9/11, when everyone was having trouble selling wine, we had our best year.”

When I woke up the next morning in my hotel room in Yountville I actually wondered if I had dreamed the whole Smith-Madrone experience—the grizzly brothers, the wild mountaintop, the hypertrophied olive trees, the unreal prices, the anamolous and ambrosial Riesling. I have since confirmed that it was all real and wrestled with the question of whether or not to share this information with my readers. I advise you to get on their mailing list before the Smith brothers realize it’s the twenty-first century.