A Hedonist in the Cellar (13 page)

So far as I know, none of the online wine chat rooms has ever hosted a spirited debate about whether Michael Broadbent is a babe. That’s just one of the ways in which he differs from his fellow Master of Wine Jancis Robinson, although they are both extremely snappy dressers: Broadbent favors Savile Row tailoring, while Robinson is a devotee of Issey Miyake. If there is an English, as opposed to an American, palate, these are its two avatars, representing the traditional and the new wave of British wine writing, respectively.

Now that the second great American Revolution—the one in which Robert Parker played George Washington—has become the new wine orthodoxy, it can be curiously refreshing to check in on the old country. At New York’s Veritas, a holy site for American wine drinkers, Broadbent’s entrance causes a stir. Even those diners who don’t recognize him pause to take in the tall, stately figure who somewhat resembles the late Ralph Richardson, with the addition of a full head of silver hair. After a few minutes, Broadbent pierces the churchly hush with a loud declaration. “You Americans bloody well should drink more,” he says. “There’s too much talking and writing and sniffing and tasting. Drink!”

As, since 1966, the head and later the executive director of
Christie’s wine department in London, Broadbent has tasted more old bottles than almost anyone on earth, and has kept notes on all of them—137 identical red notebooks full of scrawled commentary, transcribed by his wife, Daphne. His
Vintage Wine
is an incomparable record of fifty years of tasting that covers some three centuries. At one point in the evening we found ourselves discussing the ′67 Yquem. I thought we were talking about the 1967, whereas Broadbent was referring to the 1867.

Broadbent is one of the last representatives of a great tradition of Bordeaux-centric British oenophiles. Above all else he loves the slightly austere, Cabernet-based wines of the Médoc, which have been the backbone of the English wine trade for centuries. His was a generation, as Jancis Robinson told me recently, “who thought even Pomerol slightly vulgar.” When I ask him about this he concurs, saying that the wines of Pomerol and Saint-Émilion “are too easy. Even Pétrus, it’s a little like Gewürztraminer: after a few sips, I’m tired.” This sounds shocking in 2004. For the past two decades the small-production, Merlot-based wines of the right bank, like Pétrus and Le Pin, have become more fashionable and expensive than Latour and Lafite. He is similarly skeptical about many of the “garage wines” of Saint-Émilion and the cult Cabernets of California, although he is open-minded enough to judge them individually. (He loves Screaming Eagle.) Here’s his note on the ′97 vintage of the superfashionable Le Tertre Roteboeuf: “One of those modern, chocolaty, very sweet, very fleshy, over-the-top wines. Frankly awful.” (I agree with the first sentence and disagree with the second.)

Although
a
Robert Parker blurb graces the back of
Vintage Wine
, and Broadbent says of Parker, “I admire his honesty and thoroughness,” Broadbent is, for all intents and purposes, the anti-Parker. At Veritas he tells me, “Parker doesn’t understand the difference between fruit and wine.” Most of the wine that Broadbent admires has long since lost its youthful fruit. The new international style of wine, he claims, tastes like the product of “two machines, one with black currant and one with vanilla.”

Jancis Robinson was the first wine professional I ever met—at the table of novelist Julian Barnes some fifteen years ago. Although I found her dauntingly attractive, I was relieved that she was modest and unpedantic; in the end we almost had to beg her for some comments on the wine. Besides being entertaining, her remarks somehow made me feel smarter. That evening helped demystify wine appreciation for me. I suspect Robinson has done the same for many readers over the years. Robinson passed the grueling Master of Wine exam in 1984, back when the MW was largely a badge of the hyper masculine Brit wine trade. In the past two decades she has become a major star in the dowdy world of wine. The wine columnist for the
Financial Times
, she is best known to American oenophiles as the editor of
The Oxford Companion to Wine
and for her former column in the
Wine Spectator.

The glamorous, scholarly Robinson has helped shape a more wide-ranging, global thirst in Britain; it might be said that she has an international palate. (Which is not to say that she can’t identify a ′61 Cheval-Blanc blind, as I once watched
her do, although she is the first to admit that her husband, restaurateur and food writer Nick Lander, is the champion blind taster in the family.) She was one of the first non-Aussies to take Australian wines seriously, making her initial visit there in 1981. She was also an early champion of the Langue-doc, and she recently traveled to China to explore the vineyards there.

She believes that the new wave of British wine enthusiasts is more adventurous than its American counterpart: “The Brits fall all over themselves to view the vinously newfangled in a favorable light. Ecuadoran Viognier, yes please! Just so long as it doesn’t cost more than £4.99.” Americans can keep abreast of these kinds of insights through her excellent Web site,
jancisrobinson.com
. On the other hand, if you should ever find yourself considering the purchase of, say, an 1899 Lafite and wondering how it compares with the 1898 or the 1900, or if you just want to indulge in some literate wishful thinking along these lines, her friend and colleague Michael Broadbent is your man.

Randall Grahm’s plans for world domination have suffered numerous setbacks at the hands of litigious wine barons, the hegemonic California Cab/Chard axis, and glassy-winged sharpshooters, but he doesn’t seem remotely discouraged. At forty-nine, he has the youthful appearance of an underfed grad student, ponytailed late-1960s University of California at Santa Cruz edition, and exudes an enthusiasm only slightly tempered by wry wit and skeptical intelligence. When we met for lunch recently at the Union Square Cafe in New York, he was greeted like a rock star, not only by the staff but by fellow diners, who repeatedly interrupted us to kiss his ring. (Not that it bothered me. Really. Even though New York is supposed to be
my
turf. I was totally fine with that.)

Grahm is one of the eccentric visionaries of the wine world, in the same unclubbable club as Didier Dagueneau, Sean Thackrey, and Stanko Radikon. He is the founder and proprietor of Bonny Doon Vineyards, godfather of California’s Rhône Rangers, the Bizarro Universe’s evil twin of Robert Mondavi. Readers of his newsletter may suspect that Grahm got into the wine business in order to indulge his literary bent, marked by a taste for outrageous puns (“carneros knowledge,” “mail freud,” “entre noose”) and abstruse references
to literature, philosophy, and Chinese medicine. A recent issue includes a Salinger parody entitled “A Perfect Day for Barberafish.” Grahm also penned a parody of
The Bridges of Madison County
back in the heyday of that tear-jerker, with übercritic Robert Parker cast as the romantic lead.

Grahm’s wine jones kicked in when he was studying philosophy at USC and took a job at a wine store in Beverly Hills. “It seemed like a good way to meet girls,” he says. At the store, Grahm tasted some of the great French wines. “I realized that the only way I was ever going to be able to afford wines like those was to make them myself,” he says. Pinot Noir was his first love, but he discovered the wines of the Rhône Valley through his friend Kermit Lynch. Grahm decided that Rhône grape varietals were better suited to California, and the rest is wine-geek history. He wasn’t the first California Rhônephile—he credits David Bruce—but he was probably the Elvis Presley of the so-called Rhône Rangers.

While Napa was becoming famous for its Cabernets and Chardonnays, Grahm sought out old vineyards of Grenache and Mourvèdre, and planted his own grapes near Santa Cruz. Among his first successes were two New World versions of Châteauneuf-du-Pape that, besides impressing the critics, demonstrated his talent for outrageously clever names. His Old Telegram is an homage to Vieux Télégraphe; Le Cigare Volant is a reference to an ordinance passed by the town council of Châteauneuf-du-Pape banning alien spacecraft, known in France as flying cigars, from landing within the town limits. Grahm’s dessert wines, particularly his sweet Muscat, have received outstanding scores from Robert Parker.

Grahm’s airship of a career seemed to lose altitude in the ′90s. His vineyards were among the first to be wiped out by Pierce’s disease, spread by a nasty insect called the glassy-winged sharpshooter. (I was clever enough to purchase the last vintage, a case of his 1994 Bonny Doon Syrah, one of the best New World Syrahs I’ve tasted.) Parker stopped reviewing Grahm’s wines for many years—either through lack of interest or because of the
Bridges of Madison County
parody. The movement Grahm had begun made it harder for him to purchase grapes.

On the other hand, he started Ca’ del Solo, a line of Cal-Ital wines made from Nebbiolo, Barbera, and Pinot Grigio. He planted more than eighty acres of grapes in Soledad, illuminated at night by the prison’s spotlights. And he was the first American winemaker to experiment with microoxygenization, a method of oxygenating wine to soften its tannins and (theoretically) extend its life.

The most innovative move for this inveterate innovator was the creation of his wine club—called DEWN (get it?), for Distinctive Esoteric Wine Network—a new paradigm for marketing wine and a new winemaking concept of one-off creations. The DEWN wines are single-performance tours de force, sometimes made in collaboration with European winemakers. To create his ′99 Fish out of Water Ripasso, Grahm passed Nebbiolo juice over raisiny dried Barbera skins. “Why?” he asks. “Because we could.” The massive, black curranty 2000 Le Monstre was made in the Languedoc in collaboration with a French winemaker, while the voluptuous ′99 My Favorite Marsanne nearly earned its title for this
taster. The good news is that anyone can join the club, and the wines are ridiculously reasonably priced. The weird news is that they are made only once—wine as performance art. “Traditionally, winemaking is about tradition and continuity,” Grahm acknowledges. But he seems to believe that life is too short to exhaust all of his winemaking concepts, not to mention his store of wacky names. The labels, by artists such as Ralph Steadman, are just as—how you say?—inventive. As a philosophy major—and a Riesling lover—I can’t resist a wine called Critique of Pure Riesling. But Grahm’s wit has cost him points in snottier corners of the wine world. Show-offs don’t break out a wine called Macho Nacho for client dinners.

For all of his iconoclasm, Grahm is ultimately a wine conservative. He rails against the overuse of new oak barrels and oenological “Viagrafication.” “Both Parker and the
Wine Spectator
have oversimplified wine,” he says. “It’s all about intensity and power. Valuing a wine for intensity is like judging music on how loud it is. Strangely,” says the posthippie, who regularly gets his chi adjusted, “I’m kind of a Tory about wine.”

Kind of.

Platonic absolutism ultimately seems foolish in the ecstatic realm of Bacchus. There’s an ineradicable, subjective component to the appreciation of wine. That said, no wines in the world command quite the respect of Bordeaux’s Big Eight. And, speaking strictly subjectively, I can say that no wine has given me more pleasure than Cheval-Blanc.

Lafite, Latour, Margaux, and Haut-Brion were the original first growths in the 1855 classification of Bordeaux; by the time Mouton-Rothschild was added to the list, more than a hundred years later, three other properties—Pétrus, Ausone, and Cheval-Blanc—enjoyed unofficial first-growth status. These three mavericks came from the right bank of the Gironde River—from the communes of Pomerol and Saint-Émilion. Before the Second World War, the right bank was essentially Burbank to the left bank’s Beverly Hills, Brooklyn to the Médoc’s Manhattan.

Although Cheval-Blanc steadily gained recognition after its purchase by the Fourcaud-Laussac family in the mid-nineteenth century, the real fame of the château was established with the 1947 vintage—probably the most coveted wine of the century. Despite a string of brilliant incarnations since,
Cheval was somewhat overshadowed by neighboring Pétrus, which became the most expensive wine of Bordeaux, and by the left bank aristocrats who, through the ′80s and early ′90s, duked it out for 100-point Parker scores. In the mid-′90s, Saint-Émilion—like Brooklyn—became fashionable, thanks in part to ambitious winemaking, clement weather, and the accessibility of its Merlot-based wines. In 1998—one of the greatest right bank vintages of recent years—Cheval-Blanc was purchased by luxury-mad Bernard Arnault, of LVMH, and Baron Albert Frère, a Belgian tycoon. As of 2006, no wine property is hotter than Saint-Émilion’s premier château, although Cheval-Blanc is in some ways a republic unto itself, resembling no other wine in the world.

Located on the border of Saint-Émilion and Pomerol, Cheval-Blanc has qualities of both—and of neither. Its combination of earthiness and sophistication reminds me (note earlier comment re subjectivity) of Turgenev, who had one foot in Russia and one on the Continent—and who has probably never been
a Jeopardy!
answer, like Tolstoy (Lafite? Pétrus?) or Dostoyevsky (Mouton-Rothschild?). The pretty, modest nineteenth-century manor house and the modern winery next door probably won’t show up on the cover of a design magazine. The real beauty is underground: the estate encompasses three different soil types; 40 percent of its subsoil is the same clay that pops up a few hundred yards away at Pétrus. But Cheval-Blanc is unique among the wines of Bordeaux in part because of its high percentage of Cabernet Franc—usually more than 50 percent of the blend. The wines of the left bank are predominantly from Cabernet
Sauvignon; those of Pomerol and Saint-Émilion are mostly Merlot.

Unlike the other big Bordeaux, which take half a lifetime to get sexy, Cheval-Blanc is approachable and even delicious in its youth, and yet it continues to develop over the decades. Imagine a child star who remains a top box-office draw into her sixties. I can’t explain the chemistry, but I know from experience that the tannins in the typical Cheval-Blanc are like cashmere compared with the scratchy Harris tweed tannins of Latour or Mouton-Rothschild (and even Pétrus), which take twenty years or so to mellow and drape correctly. Which is not to say you should guzzle Cheval soon after it is bottled. The aromatic complexity of a forty-year-old Cheval-Blanc in a great vintage such as ′64 or ′55 is like a catalog of minor vices: tobacco, menthol, coffee, truffles, and chocolate, to name a few.

Many tasters claim that the ′49 is at least as great as the ′47—a freakish hot-vintage wine that stopped fermenting before all the sugar was converted to alcohol, leaving some three parts per thousand residual sugar, which makes it resemble nothing so much as a great port. It was clearly a one-off, a spectacular wine that lingers on the palate for minutes and in the mind forever. Generally, Cheval-Blanc is more lyric than epic, more Andrew Marvell than Milton. I love the ′55, my birth year. The ′61, gorgeous as it is, is not as profound as the ′64, one of my top three wines of all time; I have tasted it several times, thanks to Julian Barnes, who loves it beyond all other Bordeaux and has a stash in his cellar.

The ′75 is one of the few wines of that vintage that has lived
up to expectations. Parker gives 100 points to the ′82 Cheval, but I find it less rich and concentrated than the ′83, the ′89, or the ′90. (The latter appears to be evolving very rapidly, in my recent tasting experience, seeming far more mature than most vintages of the ′80s.) Pierre Lurton, the dynamic young director of the estate and scion of a famous Bordelais family, told me at a recent tasting at New York’s Veritas that he too feels the ′82 may be slightly less than perfect. Nineteen eighty, he points out, was a monstrously prolific vintage, and it was the last one at Cheval-Blanc in which no green harvest or barrel selection was made. Since then the château has lowered its yields in the vineyard and been more selective in the cellar.

After years of being a connoisseur’s wine, Cheval seized the spotlight with the 1998 and 2000 vintage. There have been, alongside the kudos, grumblings that the new regime is determined to become the Pétrus of Saint-Émilion, in terms of price as well as quality. Thanks to Parker and others, the 1998 was a legend almost before it had been pressed, and the 2000 looks like the star of that great vintage. “You can’t make the price stick if nobody wants to buy it,” says Todd Hess, wine director of Sam’s in Chicago, who can’t satisfy the demand from customers who want to pay six thousand dollars for a case of the 2000 vintage.

Unfortunately for those of us who have to ask about the price of things, the days of Cheval-Blanc as the sleeper star of Bordeaux are over. But for those who aren’t hung up on famous vintages, the ′99 is a great claret and a great Cheval for less than half the price of its famous siblings, and the 2001
appears to be another sleeping beauty. Other great vintages can be purchased at auction for far less than the cost of the 2000. Any Cheval-Blanc that you can afford will reward your investment lavishly, and its pleasures will probably outlast your capacity to enjoy them.