The Juice (17 page)

In Italy, Barolo has long been known as the king of wines, in part because of its association with the house of Savoy and the family of Vittorio Emanuele II, the first king of a unified Italy, in part because of its unquestioned preeminence. Most commentators agree that the wine as we know it, a dry 100 percent Nebbiolo, was probably conjured into being in the early nineteenth century by the French oenologist Louis Oudart, who was working for the
Marchioness of Barolo. Generally speaking, the Barolo denomination, situated south and west of Alba, produces bigger, longer-lived wines than Barbaresco, to the north and east of the town, though the similarities outweigh the differences.

Angelo Gaja, who is to the Nebbiolo grape what Yo-Yo Ma is to the cello, has a favorite analogy to describe its discreet charms. “Cabernet is like John Wayne,” he told me over dinner at Guido da Castiglione, a hillside restaurant not far from his home in the little town of Barbaresco. “When he walks into a room, no one else exists. All the men want to be him, and the women want to sleep with him. Nebbiolo is like Marcello Mastroianni. He walks into the room with a woman on his arm, and he makes the woman look more beautiful.” His point is that Nebbiolo will never be as powerful or as self-sufficient as Cab; it requires food in order to present itself at its best.

“Cab is like a guy who’s a show-off; Nebbiolo is shy and seductive,” says Angelo’s twenty-eight-year-old daughter, Gaia Gaja, who joined him in the business in 2001. With a name like hers, how could she stay away? Gaia grew up in the village of Barbaresco, where wine is pretty much the only game in town. At the local grade school, she and her friends made wine and grappa with grapes they brought in from their family vineyards. Like her father, Gaia has an excess of nervous energy; she drums her fingers on the table at New York’s Insieme as she waits for my verdict on her 2003 Barolo Sperss.

“Barbaresco is a little sweeter, with notes of balsamic, violets, cumin, and spice,” Gaia says. “Barolo is deeper and has more tobacco, mushrooms, and licorice.” The timeworn descriptor for the smell of Barolo is “tar and roses.” Many devotees find the funky scent of white truffles, which are native to Piedmont, in aged examples of both, and it’s hard to think of a better accompaniment to a risotto with white truffles.

Along with Renato Ratti and Domenico Clerico, Angelo Gaja
was among the pioneers who experimented with new production methods, including the use of new French oak barrels, to make Nebbiolo more accessible. In the past, a typical Barolo, which might spend five years or more in huge casks called
botti
, would take twenty years or so to shed its formidable tannins and show the full range of its charms. Since the mid-eighties a debate—verging on a battle—has raged between the traditionalists and the so-called modernists. Producers like Aldo and Giacomo Conterno, Giuseppe Rinaldi, and Bartolo Mascarello in Barolo and Bruno Giacosa in Barbaresco upheld the traditions, including long fermentation and aging in giant chestnut
botti
. Until his death in 2005, Bartolo Mascarello led the battle against
barriques
—the smaller barrels that began showing up in the seventies—the traditionalists believing that new French oak, with its vanilla flavor, masks the true character of the Nebbiolo grape and the Piedmont
terroir
.

Aldo Conterno, looking very much the epitome of tradition in English tweeds when we met at his estate in 2005, proudly informed me that his Barolos weren’t drinkable in their first decade of life. By law, Barolo must be aged at the winery for three years before release, and some makers like Conterno hold their wine back even longer, but these traditional wines are made for the patient and for those with wine cellars.

Not long ago these fierce, old-school Barolos seemed in danger of extinction. In 1973, Robert Mondavi visited the area and met the young Angelo Gaja, among others. Mondavi was at that moment helping to usher in a new golden age of wine making in Napa, and Gaja was inspired to do something similar. “It’s
fantastic
what Mondavi did for California,” he says. “He saw the potential before anyone else. Also here he saw the potential. He says that everyone in Piedmont is sleeping. And he’s right. We were all sleeping.” In other words, tradition needed a jolt of innovation if the wines of the Piedmont were to become a force in the emerging international
marketplace, which was increasingly shaped by New World palates and the demand for bolder, fruitier, more precocious wines. Gaja and fellow modernists like Altare, Sandrone, Scavino, and Valentino believed the old, recycled
botti
were frequently tainted with bacteria and adopted new equipment and production methods such as rotary fermentors and
barriques
to soften the acid and tannin that make Nebbiolo so formidable in its youth. The small French oak barrels increase oxygen contact with the young wine, speeding its evolution, and sometimes impart those toasty vanilla flavors (which the traditionalists deplore). In 1985, according to Luca Currado, the fourth-generation winemaker at Vietti in Castiglione Falletto, the revolutionaries staged a festive “Bonfire of the Botti” in Barolo, burning a pile of the old casks to symbolize their rejection of tradition.

Bartolo Mascarello, fiercely traditionalist about wine making but a progressive in his politics, emblazoned “No Barrique, No Berlusconi” on the label of his 1999 Barolo; the slogan quickly became a rallying cry for the old school. When I first visited the Piedmont around this time, tensions were running high. When I met Giuseppe Rinaldi, a close friend of Mascarello’s, he was lying in the driveway in front of his Beaux Arts villa in Barolo, poking a wrench into the innards of his Yamaha dirt bike. Clearly, dinner was going to be late. A wry, modest former veterinarian who inherited his father’s estate, Rinaldi doesn’t speak English—his wife translated—but when we finally sat down at a nearby restaurant, he made his point emphatically as he dumped some 1997 Barolo into his risotto. He railed against new oak and what he saw as the pandering to the global market. “If you have a particular wine with a particular smell and taste, it’s silly to waste it, to make a standard wine for international taste.” Later, we were joined by his neighbor Chiara Boschis, a chic, petite young woman in a Prada sport ensemble, who holds a doctorate in economics and speaks fluent English. Boschis comes from an old wine-making
family, but since she purchased an estate called Pira, she’s been turning out an “international” sexy beast of a Barolo that had recently copped 96 points from Robert Parker. With her arrival the talk veered from wine to the less contentious area of politics. They were united, at least, in their disdain for Berlusconi.

By the mid-nineties it seemed the modernists had won the battle, promoting a richer, darker, and yet softer style of Nebbiolo that could be enjoyed much sooner than the old-school juice. I like to call them wines of cleavage, hey-there-big-boy reds that seem designed to grab the attention of critics looking for the wow factor. These wines were making stars of their makers even as they revitalized the moribund local agricultural economy. But a few loyalists, myself included, couldn’t help noticing that some of the new-school wines from the eighties weren’t aging all that well, that they were either cracking up or failing to evolve over time into something more interesting, which is the mark of truly great wine and one of the particular glories of Barolo. Far from achieving greatness after thirty or forty years, like, say, the 1964 Giacomo Conterno Monfortino or the 1982 Bruno Giacosa Santo Stefano, they were washing out before they hit their teens.

“The only way we can survive,” says Luca Currado, the cosmopolitan proprietor of Vietti, “is to make a wine that reflects the region.” Currado stands somewhere in the middle of the debate, which seems like a good place to be.

Over the past twenty years many of the brash upstarts have quietly revised and refined their techniques, sometimes reducing the amount of new wood they use, while some of the traditionalists have quietly adopted newfangled tools; the battle lines are not so sharply drawn as before. But even the most modern styles are slow bloomers by New World standards. Powerful structured vintages like 2004 and 2006 will benefit from a decade of aging, in most
instances, and will continue to develop long afterward. The very good 2007 vintage is more approachable and seductive; many of the wines were drinking brilliantly on release in 2011, although they will certainly benefit from age.

One way to become enamored of Nebbiolo is to start with Barbaresco, the precocious sister of Barolo. Barbaresco regulations require only two years of aging, which means that the wines are released into the marketplace earlier. The local cooperative, the Produttori del Barbaresco, might just be the world’s best wine-producing co-op and is a great source of high-quality, accessible, but age-worthy Barbarescos in the $30 to $50 dollar range. They usually shine within a few years and also age extremely well: I was blown away by a bottle of 1982 Barbaresco from the Produttori that a friend opened for me in 2011.

Caveat emptor: as with Burgundian Pinot Noir, inconsistency and mystery are part of what draws some of us to this region and this grape. If you are looking for something utterly unique, a wine that in the same breath can smell like flowers and the dirt and compost they spring from, a wine that could hardly be mistaken for a wine from any other part of the globe, you need to visit the Piedmont, if only in the glass.

The sun has yet to clear the peaks of the Palisades above the vineyard, and the grapes are still cool to the touch as the pickers, along with a groggy journalist visiting from New York, move up the manicured rows of Sauvignon Blanc, slicing the clusters and dropping them into small plastic bins that are emptied into larger collection bins at the end of each row, where Bart and Daphne Araujo go through the grapes, picking out leaves and discarding sunburned grapes. “I love the first day of harvest,” says the elegant, silver-haired Daphne as she plucks out a shriveled grape.

This is the twentieth harvest since the couple bought the Eisele Vineyard, which was first planted in 1886 and has since become renowned for its Cabernet Sauvignon. Today they are harvesting a small lot of Sauvignon Blanc planted in a cooler area of the vineyard. This small patch of white grapes is less than an acre, and it’s picked in just over an hour. The journalist is tired and bleeding copiously after slicing his hand with the scimitar-shaped harvesting knife, but the Araujos seem positively exhilarated as they stride back to their house for breakfast, past meticulously pruned vines laden with knee-high clusters of purple grapes. Almost as many clusters are scattered on the ground, victims of a recent purge, sacrificed in order to concentrate the flavors of the surviving grapes, which Bart predicts will need another two to three weeks of hang time. The thirty-two acres of Bordeaux varietal vines yield an average of just sixteen hundred cases of their top Cabernet Sauvignon, one of the Napa Valley’s iconic wines.

Certain privileged sites yield great wine as a result of some
serendipitous combination of geology, topography, and microclimate. Located on an alluvial fan in the northeastern corner of Napa near the hot-springs town of Calistoga, this one was celebrated long before the Araujos bought it in 1990. Beginning in 1975, Joseph Phelps purchased grapes from the Eisele family and made a Cabernet that would become one of Napa’s defining wines, though for some reason Phelps passed when the Eiseles decided to sell the vineyard, at which point Bart Araujo pounced.

A San Francisco native, Araujo went to USC with ambitions of becoming a major-league baseball player until injuries forced him to reconsider. After Harvard Business School, he returned to California and founded a successful construction business. He met Daphne, a landscape architect, when she applied for a job. Bart then sold his firm and began prowling Napa in search of a great vineyard. “How do you make a small fortune in the wine business?” goes a joke that has a predictable punch line: “You start with a large one.” The Araujo narrative is in many ways the archetypal Napa story of a successful entrepreneur who brings his fortune and his business acumen to bear on a second career producing wine with his name on it. The birth of Araujo vineyards coincided with the creation of the so-called cult Cabernets like Harlan, Colgin, and Bryant Family, wines made in small quantities (two thousand cases or fewer) in a richer, riper style than the old-guard Napa Cabs. But Bart and Daphne’s story is unique, due to the history of the vineyard they purchased and their hands-on, fanatical devotion to every detail of grape growing and wine making; whenever I call Bart, he seems to be in the vineyard. “After we purchased the property, I sat down and tasted the wines made from these grapes over the years,” Bart told me, “including the 1971 Ridge Eisele Vineyard made by Paul Draper, the ’74 Conn Creek bottling, and the ’75 Joseph Phelps. Whoever made the wine, there was this signature earthy mineral element that seemed to come through.”

If the vineyard deserves most of the credit, the Araujos go to extraordinary lengths to help it along. In the nineties they began farming organically; later, they began to make the switch to biodynamics. After reading an article one day, Bart says, he realized that many of his favorite French estates, including Domaine Leroy, Domaine Leflaive, and Chapoutier, employed the holistic approach to agriculture based on the teachings of Rudolf Steiner. He began to explore the subject and eventually employed Jeff Dawson, who had previously worked as Steve Jobs’s gardener, to make the conversion. In 2002, Araujo was certified by Demeter, the nonprofit biodynamic organization, named after the Greek goddess of the harvest. Bart cheerfully admits that he doesn’t understand all of the intricacies of this arcane field. “But, hey,” he adds, “I’m a Catholic. I’m used to making leaps of faith.” He then notes that the vineyard is far healthier than it was before the switch, and ripens earlier.

Ripeness is all, as Edgar reminds us in
King Lear
, and this subject is one of the most controversial in the wine world. In the Napa Valley, with its clement, un-European weather, growers have the luxury of ripe fruit year in and year out. But the question remains, how ripe is ripe? In recent years the tendency has been to pick later and later, which results in much higher levels of both sugar and alcohol; the former converts to the latter. Some claim these big voluptuous fruit bombs appeal to the palates of certain influential critics and tend to win blind tastings. But in the twenty years of the Araujos’ stewardship, the Eisele Cabernets have stayed fairly consistently in the 14 percent alcohol range—on the low side by 2010 Napa standards—which might explain why the vineyard’s signature flavors come through from vintage to vintage. There is almost always an earthy component, more common in Bordeaux than in Napa, and an herbal note, which Bart speculates may have something to do with the numerous olive trees that surround the vineyard. Tasting through twenty years of Eiseles with the winemaker
Françoise Peschon, who worked at Haut-Brion before coming to Araujo, I was more than once reminded of the earthy, stony character of that great Bordeaux first growth, possibly my favorite. The 1991, the Araujos’ first vintage, was especially complex, with many years of life ahead of it. The 1995 was a Baby Huey of a wine, young and huge. When I commented that the 2005 was a real princess of a wine, Bart said, “Yes, but one with a career.” In other words, it has everything: deeply voluptuous texture with rich mocha flavors as well as the structure to improve for decades. The 2007 and the 2008 are worthy successors.