The Juice (12 page)

“You see, by burying the cow horn with the manure in it,” Steiner wrote, “we preserve in the horn the etheric and astral force that the horn was accustomed to reflect when it was on the cow. Because the cow horn is now outwardly surrounded by the Earth, all the Earth’s etherizing and astralizing rays stream into its inner cavity. The manure inside the horn attracts these forces and is inwardly enlivened by them. If the horn is buried for the entire winter—the season when the Earth is most inwardly alive—all this life will be preserved in the manure, turning the contents of the horn into an extremely concentrated, enlivening and fertilizing force.” To which many oenophiles might well respond, “What the fuck?”

In my experience, Smith is correct that most biodynamic proponents would rather talk about results than quote Steiner (with the notable exception of the voluble and erudite Nicolas Joly of Coulée de Serrant). Robert Sinskey of Sinskey Vineyards in Carneros is a case in point. In 1990, he told me recently, he and his winemaker, Jeff Virnig, went to look at one of their Carneros vineyards that was in decline. “One look at the soil told us that life was out of balance,” he said. They couldn’t penetrate the surface with a shovel, so they broke it up with a pick. They couldn’t find any earthworms in the ground, and there was little humus
(organic soil matter such as decomposed leaves and other plant material). Until then, they’d tried to kill off anything in the soil that might compete with their vines and to add back anything the vines needed by applying fertilizers. “We had, in essence, sterilized the soil,” he said.

They applied BD 500 prep to that vineyard the following year. “The microbe-rich concoction jump-started life,” Sinskey concluded. “Within a few years, the soil rebounded with microbial activity, earthworms, and mycorrhizal fungi. The original vineyard that motivated this journey turned around to become one of our favorite sites and produced one of our most distinctive wines.”

The obvious question for biodynamic producers is whether organic farming, which eschews herbicides and pesticides without reference to Steiner or to cosmic forces, would yield similar results. A research paper titled “Soil and Winegrape Quality in Biodynamically and Organically Managed Vineyards,” published in the
American Journal of Enology and Viticulture
in 2005, compared the two approaches and found few differences. But most of the certified biodynamicists I’ve spoken to over the years, none of whom were obviously certifiable, started with organic farming before moving on to Steiner’s methods, which all of them claim to have given them superior results and healthier vineyards.

Jeff Dawson, who works as a biodynamic consultant with Araujo and Quintessa vineyards in Napa, considers the fact that Araujo’s Cabernet has ripened well ahead of its neighbors in recent years “a tribute to biodynamics.” (A skeptical neighbor insists this is because the site is warmer than most.) Dawson became interested after working at a biodynamic garden at Fetzer Vineyards in Mendocino and marveling at the quality of the produce. After studying Steiner’s teachings, he created a biodynamic garden for Steve Jobs. “He was a raw-food vegan, and he loves sweet fruits and vegetables,” he says of Apple’s founder, and quotes his former boss, whom I presume to have had a scientific cast of mind, as saying,
“Steiner knew what he was talking about.” Stu Smith would be rolling his eyes by this point and declaring there’s no scientific basis for the claims of biodynamics. And he’s right. There isn’t.

Dawson paraphrases Steiner when addressing such skepticism. “Science has cast its net on the world of nature,” he tells me. “That net is not fine enough to catch all the aspects of creation.” Many proponents seem to believe that science will eventually catch up with the tenets of biodynamics, particularly with regard to the influence of the solar and the stellar systems on plant and animal behavior.

The minimal claim to be made for biodynamics, it seems to me, is that it fosters a more intimate approach to the land and that its products are less likely to contain the toxins that have for many decades been commonly employed in conventional agriculture. Then there’s the question of the quality of the congregation. Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and Domaine Leroy, to name just two examples, are widely acknowledged to be among the greatest wineries on the planet. Many people want to belong to the same church, even though critics like Stuart Smith would argue that these properties were already great
before
they made the switch. Biodynamics certainly dovetails with the now inescapable green consciousness. Whether it is a manifestation of an original holistic approach to nature or a crock of BD 500, wine lovers will be hearing about it more often in the years to come.

David Ramey was driving on a dusty road through the land of tequila and mescal when he had what he describes as his
coup de foudre
—otherwise known as his road-to-Mexicali moment—and realized, improbably, that he wanted to make wine. “I suddenly thought, wine makes people happy,” he says. “And it’s the intersection of art and commerce.” For a California guy who’d recently graduated from Santa Cruz with a degree in American literature, there wouldn’t seem to be anything preordained about this choice, which entailed returning to school to catch up on chemistry and other courses he’d disdained as an undergraduate before enrolling in the Department of Viticulture and Enology at UC Davis, the West Point of the California wine industry. But in retrospect it was a brilliant decision.

Ramey turned out to be a natural. After a stint at Château Petrus in Bordeaux in 1979, he returned to northern California with a more nuanced vision of wine making than the technocentric version he’d been steeped in at Davis and eventually became a leader of the post-Mondavi generation who helped make the nineties a golden age for Napa and Sonoma. Unlike some of his contemporaries’, Ramey’s style always favored balance over power. His wines were never the fattest, or the ripest, or the most alcoholic—his aesthetic more Modigliani than Botero. Tasting a Ramey Chardonnay alongside a Kistler—as I did when I first visited him in the late nineties—was a fascinating study in contrast, the Ramey vibrant, chiseled, and fresh, the Kistler tropical, buttery, fleshy, and sweet. It was the difference, I thought then, between
Kate Moss and Pamela Anderson. In the nineties the super-rich style was ascendant; now balance and freshness are the new buzzwords, and even Steve Kistler is preaching the gospel of restraint and finesse. Ramey never lacked recognition, but he’s now beginning to look like a prophet. Not that he didn’t sometimes question the wisdom of his principles.

“Could I get higher scores by making riper, less acidic wines?” he says, as he sips a glass of his 2008 Russian River Chardonnay at Spoonbar in Healdsburg, the ridiculously picturesque town in Sonoma where he lives and works. “Absolutely.” Gruff tends to be his natural tone of voice. He pauses to check out the fashionable, exuberant crowd at the bar. After years as a sleepy backwater frequented by farmers and ex-hippies, Healdsburg is suddenly the kind of place where you see people in Prada eating tapas. “You can’t drink these heavy, fat wines,” he says. “On the other hand, you don’t have to go to the other extreme just because there are wines of excess.” Which is to say that his wines, for all their precision and restraint, tend to be more come-hither than their Old World counterparts, his Chardonnays just a little more voluptuous than the average Puligny-Montrachet, his Cabs less tannic than the typical Médoc. Ramey is proud to be a California winemaker, happy to be the beneficiary of the climate, and while he loves French wines, he’s not trying to imitate them.

He seems equally adept with both whites and reds. After his stage at Petrus, the mother ship of Merlot, he went to Matanzas Creek and made some of the first serious Napa Valley Merlots. Moving on to Chalk Hill, he garnered attention for his Chardonnays. He then went on to make acclaimed Cabernet-based wines at Dominus and Rudd, while founding his eponymous winery in 1996. Ramey Wine Cellars initially specialized in Chardonnay, made from grapes purchased from some of the cooler vineyards in Sonoma. I still remember the first one I tasted at the French Laundry
in Yountville, a racy, mouthwatering Hyde Vineyards Chard, having been steered to it by the sommelier.

Ramey continued to work for Rudd, receiving some stellar scores from the critics, before finally devoting himself full-time to his own wines, at a winery he built in Healdsburg. And he’s justifiably proud that he and his wife, whom he married at Petrus, own the whole operation and that they didn’t start with a large fortune derived from another industry. “You’ve got mega-millionaires buying their way in,” he says, “and you’ve got scrappy young winemakers making tiny amounts of wine that’s hard to find on the market. Then there are your big corporate conglomerates. By contrast, we’re like a chef-owned restaurant.” Fortunately, it’s a chef-owned restaurant that, though not huge, has enough seats to accommodate demand.

Ramey Wine Cellars is too big to qualify as a cult winery and too small to make the owners rich. But the conservative business model, which might have seemed a bit frumpy five or six years ago, might be the perfect one for the post-crash economy. Like his wine making, his pricing has always been restrained compared with that of his competitors, given the relative critical acclaim. Now, when wineries that once turned away customers for $200 bottles of Cab are secretly cutting deals and accumulating inventory, Ramey is more than holding his own. His delicious 2007 Napa Valley claret, a Cabernet Sauvignon–dominated Bordeaux blend, sells for around $40, and it’s ready to drink at this moment, unlike many of the big Cabs from that excellent vintage. (He makes more complex and expensive Cabs, too, the single-vineyard Pedregal from Oakville being the rarest and dearest.)

“I’ve lived through three cycles of the California wine industry,” he says. “We had recessions in ’91 and ’92 and again in ’02 and ’03.” While he admits that the recent economic meltdown briefly depressed sales, he had his best year ever in 2010. It doesn’t hurt
that the man whose name is on the bottle is on the road much of the year, meeting restaurateurs and retailers. “A lot of my colleagues,” he says, “haven’t worked hard enough to establish themselves in the market.”

For a winemaker, Ramey seems to be an uncommonly good businessman, but his decision to make Syrah might have been a case of listening to his heart more than his head. In 2002 he planted two vineyards’ worth on the cool western side of the Sonoma Coast appellation, inspired by his love for the Syrahs of the northern Rhône. The resulting wines have been lavishly praised but aren’t, as many of his colleagues have discovered, easy to sell, and he’s scaled back production since the 2007 vintage. A local joke goes: “What’s the difference between a case of Syrah and a case of the clap? You can get rid of the clap.” I love Ramey’s Syrahs, which are much more reminiscent of Côte Rôtie than they are of jammy Barossa Shirazes, and they make the case for this grape as convincingly as any in California. My advice is to try them and buy them while they’re still unfashionable. They are great values.

I also have a special fondness for his Chardonnays, which seem to me to strike a perfect balance between the elusive virtues of white Burgundy and the hedonistic pleasures of other California Chardonnays. Imagine if Christie Brinkley spoke French. Oh, wait, she does. Maybe David Ramey should consider hiring her as a spokesmodel.

Is there such a thing as the perfect match? Having been married four times, I’ve done my share of research on the subject of compatibility in the realm of eros. But the pairing of food and wine is perhaps even more bedeviling. Is there a perfect wine for oysters? For Camembert? For baked lobster with sunchoke braised in red wine and a fava sprout bergamot emulsion? Does fish always call for white wine? In your search for answers to these questions you could do worse than to go to New York’s Le Bernardin, the Michelin three-star temple of piscine cuisine. Aldo Sohm, who was named Best Sommelier in America in 2007 and Best Sommelier in the World in 2008, is masterful at matching food and wine. He has converted more than one skeptic, including my wife, to the concept of pairing. “I can make the food look good,” he says. On the other hand, the chef Eric Ripert, his boss, likes to drink red Bordeaux with pretty much everything, including oysters. This must make for some interesting discussions in the kitchen.

Among the mentors that Ripert studied under on his way to becoming America’s best seafood chef was the great Joël Robuchon, who shares his taste in wine. “When Robuchon came to Le Bernardin,” Ripert tells me over a lunch at Ben Benson’s Steak House in midtown Manhattan, “he was offered the wine-pairing menu. He just said, ‘Bring me Bordeaux.’ I agree. I love Bordeaux. I’ll even have it with salad.” Indeed, he is sipping a 1995 La Conseillante, a Bordeaux from the Pomerol district, with his Caesar salad. This kind of thinking exasperates Sohm, an earnest and intense Austrian who came to the States in 2003 and has spent
hundreds of hours working out the concepts of wine and food pairing. Watching them work together, I couldn’t help thinking that the puckish Ripert enjoys winding Sohm up and throwing him nearly impossible challenges. The French-born Ripert loves to feign indignation whenever Sohm recommends a wine from his native Austria, despite the fact that Austrian Rieslings and Grüner Veltliners are an insider’s secret, beloved among chefs and sommeliers for their food friendliness. Even when he’s not playfully tormenting Sohm, Ripert poses some pretty serious difficulties with his exotically spiced and sauced seafood, like the aforementioned baked lobster (so far, so good) with red-wine-braised sunchoke (uh-oh) and a fava sprout bergamot reduction (what the fuck?). Sohm is currently recommending a sake for this particular dish, though he could probably come up with any number of other interesting and enhancing accompaniments. Fortunately, most of us are seldom faced with this sort of thing at home, but Sohm’s insights are transferable.

“I like to compare food and wine pairing to relationships,” Sohm says. “The food and the wine should be equal, and they should enhance each other. Some pairings are just okay, they go along without really hurting each other, but they don’t really interact. Some just suck. And then there’s the best possible matches, where the food and the wine transform and elevate each other.”