The Juice (19 page)

Ravenswood’s founder, Joel Peterson, was a cancer immunologist at San Francisco’s Mount Zion Hospital before he lost funding for his research. His interest in wine had been passed along by his father, Walter, a physical chemist and charter member of the San Francisco Wine Sampling Club. In 1972, Joel started working with Joseph Swan, one of the pioneers in the rediscovery of Zinfandel,
which had been widely planted around California in the nineteenth century by Italian immigrants. (It was finally genetically identified as being identical to Primitivo, a southern Italian varietal.) Many of these vineyards survived, partly out of neglect and partly because of the popularity of white Zinfandel, a cloyingly sweet blush wine created at Sutter Home vineyard in 1975. To increase the concentration of its red Zinfandel, its winemaker Bob Trinchero had bled off some of the just-pressed juice before fermentation. A thousand gallons of this pinkish wine was fermented separately, but the fermentation stopped before the sugar was converted to alcohol, resulting in a sweet beverage that soon became the most popular wine in America.

A lot of old-vine Zin also went into Gallo’s so-called Hearty Burgundy, the first dry red wine that many of us future enthusiasts ever tasted—I well remember my first jug, consumed along with some Thai stick on the shore of Onota Lake in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. But winemakers like Peterson and Paul Draper of Ridge Vineyards believed that Zinfandel had a higher calling and that great red wines could be crafted from the old vines, which, as they age, yield fewer grapes but deliver more intense flavor. In 1976, Peterson launched Ravenswood using Swan’s winery and four tons of old-vine Zinfandel bought from local growers. Pictures of him at this time show him with elbow-length blond hair, looking like a lost member of the Eagles. Peterson didn’t have the money to buy his own vineyard and cultivated relationships with growers, particularly those with old vines, some of which dated back to the nineteenth century.

The Ravenswood slogan came about when his business partner of the time insisted at one point that they needed to make a white Zinfandel in order to get profitable. Peterson refused. “I told him I’d never make a wimpy wine,” he says. Instead, he came up with Vintners Blend, an inexpensive red Zinfandel crafted from dozens of vineyard sources, which has become an international
best seller with an annual production of around 500,000 cases. At about eight bucks retail, it’s a great value and a great introduction to the easy pleasure of Zinfandel.

When I was getting married in 2006, I chose to pour a crowd-pleasing red complex enough to intrigue the oenophiles in the group: a Zin, the 2003 Ridge Geyserville. Until fairly recently, if you wanted a good Zinfandel, you simply had to look for one that started with the letter
R
. Kent Rosenblum, a veterinarian from Minnesota who’d fallen in love with Zinfandel after moving to Alameda, launched Rosenblum Cellars in 1978. Ridge, Ravenswood, and Rosenblum are still the big three of Zin, though they have helped to inspire several new waves of Zinophilia.

Larry Turley was an emergency-room physician when he launched Turley Wine Cellars in the early nineties. (I have no useful hypothesis as to why so many Zinfanatics have medical backgrounds.) A courtly, gentle giant who originally hails from Kentucky, Turley and his wine-making sister, Helen, rocked the wine world with their first vintages, which seemed to crank up the volume and power (and alcohol) in a category that was already known for being over the top. Turley later turned over the wine-making duties to Ehren Jordan, one of the few men in Napa tall enough to look him in the eye. Although the Turley style was once synonymous with excess—and helped spawn an arms race in which everyone seemed to be going for riper, fruitier, fatter wines—most Zinophiles agree that Jordan has in recent years refined the style, which isn’t so surprising given the fact that he crafts some extremely elegant Pinot Noirs for his own Failla label. But make no mistake, these are still big, bad reds that almost require a spoon.

More recently, the mailing list that Zin freaks have been oversubscribing is that of Carlisle, which launched its first commercial vintage in 1998, although its founder, Mike Officer, had been making wine in his garage for many years before he launched a winery under his wife’s maiden name. (Officer sounded a bit forbidding.)
He was a software designer who first caught the wine bug at eighteen when his older sister, a restaurateur in San Francisco, poured him some choice California classics from Trefethen, Chateau St. Jean, and Freemark Abbey. Throughout his twenties, his hobby became all consuming, his garage more and more crowded with barrels, until, he says, “it was time to fish or cut bait.”

Like Peterson before him, Officer relied on the friendships he’d developed as an amateur winemaker to secure access to fruit from old Zinfandel vineyards, most of them in Sonoma’s Russian River Valley. Along the way he became president of the Historic Vineyard Society, a nonprofit organization founded to preserve the heritage of old, mostly pre-Prohibition vineyards that constitute an amazing resource for California winemakers. “Every time someone buys an old-vine vineyard and rips it out,” he says, “we lose a piece of our history.”

Eventually, he was able to purchase a vineyard planted in 1927, which he renamed Carlisle. Although the majority of vines are Zinfandel, recent research has uncovered other varietals as well. So far, thirty-one black varietals have been identified in the Carlisle Vineyard, including of course Petite Syrah and also Syrah, Peloursin, Alicante Bouschet, Grand Noir, Petit Bouschet, Carignan, Tempranillo, and Merlot. Officer thinks there’s another ten or twelve in there. Many of these old “Zinfandel” vineyards have a similar diversity. “I do a lot of walking, and all of a sudden I look at a vine and go, ‘Whoa, what’s that?’ We take tissue samples and send them to UC Davis, where they have a database of fifteen thousand cultivars. Once they run DNA on our samples, they can tell us what we’ve got.” This genetic resource might someday be the basis for reviving certain varietals, and in the meantime it makes wines like Ridge’s Geyserville or Lytton Springs and Carlisle’s Carlisle Vineyard more complex and nuanced.

Officer’s friend Morgan Twain-Peterson is one of the newest stars on the Zinfandel scene. As Joel Peterson’s son, he would seem
to have wine in his veins—he made a bit of a name for himself with a Pinot Noir called Vino Bambino, which he first produced when he was five years old and continued to make until he went to college at Vassar. After graduate studies at Columbia he went back to Ravenswood, then refined his wine making with stints at Australia’s McLaren Vale and at Lynch Bages in Bordeaux. Returning to California, he founded Bedrock Wine Co. and, in partnership with his father, bought a vineyard planted in 1886 (which he informed me was owned at that time by my wife’s great-grandfather George Hearst). The ancient Zin was interplanted with more than twenty other varietals; because only about 60 percent of the grapes are Zinfandel, he doesn’t designate the wine as such.

“I didn’t make a straight Zin my first two years at Bedrock,” he says. “I have a more classically trained palate and thought it lacked the requisite balance.” Zinfandel fans will be grateful that he overcame his scruples—and possibly Oedipal issues—and now makes two vineyard-designated Zinfandels as well as the sublime Heirloom, a blend of Zin (about half) and more than twenty other varietals, that is, in my opinion, an instant California classic. “The Rock in a velvet smoking jacket,” reads my tasting note on the 2009. Those who prefer their wrestlers turned actors shirtless—and this would include many hard-core Zinophiles—will find plenty of Zins out there that fit the bill.

In March 2010 a group of American investors assembled by the former sommelier Robert Bohr purchased some twenty acres of prime Meursault vineyards for some 13 million euros, sealing a trend whereby wealthy American oenophiles buy into the fabled vineyards of Burgundy. In 2002, long before the Goldman Sachs Conspiracy Theory became a major interdisciplinary body of knowledge, a band of rich Americans led by Joe Wender and his wife, Ann Colgin, bought Camille Giroud, a small but venerable Burgundian negotiant. In wine circles, the headliner in this transaction was Colgin, the founder of Colgin Cellars, renowned for its small-production, big-ticket Cabernet Sauvignons from the Napa Valley. However, most of the ten original investors were, like Wender, partners in Goldman Sachs. Was this just a friendly confederation of well-heeled Burghounds looking for bragging rights and first crack at some old bottles for their personal cellars? Was it part of an incredibly intricate scheme for wine-world domination, possibly some sort of prescient countermove against the nascent Chinese interest in the rival region of Bordeaux? Or was it yet another example of the influence of Becky Wasserman, the American-born Earth Mother of Burgundy, who acted as the matchmaker in this particular Franco-American union? I say the last.

Wasserman grew up on East Seventy-Seventh Street, the daughter of a Wall Street broker she describes as “an elegant alcoholic” and a Hungarian ex–prima ballerina. She attended the Rudolf Steiner School on East Seventy-Ninth: conspiracy theorists should
note that Steiner is the father of biodynamic agriculture, an approach embraced by many of the domaines she imports to the United States. Coincidence? At Hunter College High School her teacher Madame Brody introduced her to the French existentialists, and she associated “with terrible girls with pretensions peering at Dylan Thomas drinking at the White Horse Tavern.” After a year at Bryn Mawr, she married “a Harvard fellow” and moved to Cambridge. Her memories of Harvard at that time: “Leary and Alpert, Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg auditing an Auden course. A friend had spent a year in France at Les Baux and introduced us all to good wines, wonderful cookbooks (Charles Baker), and soufflé au Grand Marnier. If it was French, it was good—the whole shebang, the art, literature, food, wine, the Revolution, the clothes.” It would take a divorce and several years before she finally sailed for France with her second husband, “who had left Merrill Lynch to go to art school.”

They found a crumbling barn in the town of Bouilland and restored it, in part with cast-off materials from neighbors who were replacing their ancient flagstone floors with linoleum. The couple had two children, Peter and Paul. Peter, who now works with his mother in sales, reports that his childhood was idyllic in many ways, growing up on a more or less self-sustaining farm, complete with ponies, “although there were some drawbacks to growing up in the family of an artist in the sixties,” he says. “My parents didn’t cut my hair, and in rural Burgundy they didn’t get that. I was subject to some serious bullying, but my parents were oblivious.”

Her husband, Becky says, “collected Burgundies and au pair girls.” Foreseeing the end of her marriage, Becky took a job as a broker for a barrel maker, selling French oak barrels to California winemakers, including Robert Mondavi. By the time her marriage was over, she’d fallen in love with the wines of Burgundy and was
desperate to make a living and keep the house in Bouilland. “I had to become rapidly self-supporting as I had no trust fund, no alimony, no amour propre.” After working for Kermit Lynch and the Troisgros brothers, she started her own company, which specialized in the export of small-domaine wines from the Côte d’Or and a few other regions of France. Her third husband, Russell Hone, a veteran of the English wine trade, joined the company in 1985; he holds the titles “company father” and “chef.” He’s a formidable cook, having collaborated on a series of Time-Life cookbooks with the late Richard Olney.

When I arrived unannounced one March afternoon at their office in the former chancellery of the Dukes of Burgundy, on a cobbled street in the town of Beaune, the couple were just sitting down with their staff for lunch, a lamb and kidney stew cooked by Russell. Becky promptly invited me and my companion, Beaver Truax, a veteran New York wine merchant who’s known the couple for years, to join them. “Beaver,” she said, “do I look like Aubrey Beardsley?” She cupped her halo of curly gray hair between her hands. “Russell says I look like Aubrey Beardsley.”

“I thought I said you looked like Oscar Wilde,” Hone said, as he poured me a glass of 2009 Michaud Morgon, a Cru Beaujolais from their portfolio.

Truax assured her she looked like neither, and as a polite guest I concurred, though I did think she looked as if she’d been drawn by Edward Koren for
The New Yorker
, one of his hirsute sophisticate-eccentrics. I was as impressed by the level of marital banter as I was with the meal. The staff lunch is a daily ritual that serves as a tasting forum and often draws guests who just happen to show up around twelve thirty. “We see these heads in the window,” says Becky, “which is terrific, because Russell is incapable of cooking for less than twelve.” Clearly a man of large appetites and enthusiasms, he can take no credit for his towering height,
but his Falstaffian girth is presumably his own accomplishment. He is also widely reputed to have both an excellent palate and an extraordinary memory for older vintages.

The couple began hosting Burgundy symposia for passionate amateurs in 1997, welcoming a dozen guests to Bouilland for an intensive week of tasting and touring, enlisting the help of such experts as Clive Coates and Allen Meadows. An early guest was Joe Wender, who returned the following year with his wife, Ann Colgin. Wender asked Wasserman to let him know if she ever spotted an investment opportunity, and not long afterward she enlisted him to help rescue the foundering negotiant firm of Camille Giroud, with whom she’d worked for years. In addition to its venerable name, the firm had significant stores of older Burgundy vintages. Through her contacts, Wasserman then found David Croix, a twenty-three-year-old fresh out of oenology school, who has since become one of the most respected winemakers in the region, though his hiring had to have been something of an act of faith. At Camille Giroud’s winery in an unpretentious nineteenth-century warehouse in the center of Beaune, Croix is now turning out thirty cuvées from Burgundy’s humblest appellations to its grandest.