The Juice (2 page)

But Syracuse was leading me in far more rewarding directions, in large part thanks to Ray and Tobias Wolff demonstrating how to advance from apprenticeship into actual
writing
. To supplement my fellowship—tuition plus four grand a year—I worked as a clerk in the Westcott Cordial Shop, whose Princeton-educated proprietor had an extensive wine library and high hopes for the scabrous neighborhood’s eventual gentrification. Here I could oscillate between the stories of Isaac Babel and Hugh Johnson’s
World Atlas of Wine
, dip into the stock after finishing my shift, and gradually refine my rudimentary palate.

This is also where I got the call, some two years on, that my novel had been bought by Random House, and a subsequent one from a guy who kept calling me “babe” and wanted to fly me out to Hollywood to meet with his fellow executives at Paramount. “We’ll put you up at the Chateau Marmont,” he said. “Is that good?” I asked. “It’s better than good,” he assured me. “John Belushi
died
there.” Clearly he’d read
Bright Lights, Big City
, or at least the coverage of the book, and formed an opinion of my bad habits.

A decade later, I was able to merge these double-barreled habits of wine and writing. My friend Dominique Browning, in charge of resurrecting Condé Nast’s
House & Garden
, knew of my developing vinous passion, invited me to do a monthly column, and proceeded to send me pretty much any place in the world where I thought there was a good wine story—a master-class education I am profoundly grateful for, and one that would be hard to imagine in this era of editorial budget slashing and what’s beginning to look like the mass extinction of general-interest publications. Indeed, somewhat ahead of the curve,
House & Garden
was shut down in 2007. Sad as I was about its demise and my friend’s misfortune,
I reasoned that it had been a hell of a good run. I’d never intended to write about wine for more than a year or two, and it was time to turn all my energies back to fiction. And so I did until, a couple of years later,
The Wall Street Journal
came calling. A few of the following essays, much revised here, date back to Dominique’s magazine, and most from my current gig. One of them, a review of Robert Mondavi’s autobiography published in
The New Yorker
, seemed very much worth reprinting here in the wake of his passing. The world of wine would likely look—and taste—very different if not for Mondavi, whom I was fortunate enough to spend time with on several occasions.

Heraclitus tells us you can never step into the same river twice, “for other waters are ever flowing on to you.” And likewise, it seems to me, you can never really drink the same wine twice. The appreciation of wine, for all that we might try to quantify it, is in the end a subjective experience. More than a poem or a painting or a concerto, which is problematic enough for the aesthetician, the 1982 La Mission, say, or the 1999 Beaucastel is a moving target. Good wine continues to grow and develop in the glass and in the bottle, to change from one day to the next in response to barometric pressures and other variables; moreover, any given wine—from the same maker, the same vintage, even the same barrel—is subject to our own quirks of receptivity, to the place and the company in which we drink it, to the knowledge we bring with us, and to the food with which we pair it. Even so, in order to develop our appreciation, we agree to a fictional objectivity and attempt to isolate wine from these contextual variables, to treat each and every glass in front of us as if it contained a stable and quantifiable substance. We Americans are often scolded for adhering to this view, and one critic in particular has been accused of reducing wine’s infinite variety and complexity to a vulgar game of numbers. On the other hand, the felon in question, Robert Parker, has helped to
democratize and demystify something that until very recently was stuffy, arcane, and elitist. His core belief—that wine can be evaluated and graded like any other consumer product—was hugely liberating for those of us on both sides of the Atlantic who wanted to penetrate the mysteries of the great French growths. And it took this middle-class lawyer, who’d grown up drinking
soft drinks
with meals, to begin to clear away the musty, upper-class stench of oenophilia.

I’ve learned quite a bit in the last fifteen years, and my tastes have shifted accordingly (if sometimes mystifyingly). Burgundy has become something of an obsession, and there are more than a few essays—an entire section, actually—devoted to the fickle, intermittently exhilarating, and heartbreaking wines of that region. But I still love Bordeaux, not only the famous wines, but also the Crus Bourgeois from relatively obscure corners like Fronsac and Lalande-de-Pomerol, which represent tremendous value in the face of the madly escalating prices of the classed growths from the 2009 and 2010 vintages. Just when I think my interest in California is flagging, I taste a new wine like Steve Matthiasson’s white blend or an old one like Araujo’s 1995 Eisele Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon and get excited all over again. Italy now accounts for about a third of American wine imports and for me remains a continuing source of wonder and pleasure. Spain might well be the new Italy, a country with a long history of wine making that’s finally waking up to its potential. Something similar is happening in South Africa, which has a wine-making tradition extending back to the seventeenth century.

Some of the wines I write about here are costly and hard to find, but I believe it’s one of the wine writer’s duties, however arduous it might sound, to bring back news of the best and the rarest, just as it’s the travel writer’s duty to explore exotic and remote destinations. Most readers of automotive magazines won’t ever drive a Lamborghini or a Ferrari, and most wine drinkers will never hold
a glass of Château Latour, but as an avid reader of
Car and Driver
I’d hate to see it limit its coverage to sensible, affordable rides. No, I want a knowledgeable, badass driver to tell me what it’s like to power the new Gallardo Superleggera through the Alps. So, yes, there’s some wine porn here. That said, some of the most surprising and exciting moments involve obscure and undervalued wines like the 2007 Movia Pinot Grigio from Slovenia or overachievers like the 2007 Château Jean Faux Bordeaux, which at $25 retail is $1,200 cheaper than the 2010 Latour.

Much as I have ostensibly learned since I started writing about wine, and as lucky as I have been to have tasted some of the renowned vintages, I’m not sure that I’ve ever enjoyed a bottle of wine more than I did that Mateus rosé back in the Berkshires in 1972. I’d lately acquired my driver’s license and was in the company of my first love, with the night and the entire summer stretched out ahead of me like a river full of fat, silvery, pink-fleshed rainbow trout. The wine tasted like summer, and it was about to become the taste of my first real kiss.

Is it possible to taste minerals in fermented grape juice? Can the roots of the grapevine somehow transmit the unique characteristics of soil and bedrock to the grape itself? Is it a gross abuse of poetic license to detect marine elements in a wine grown on limestone that was once a Jurassic seabed? You might never have asked these questions, but they go to the heart of the French notion of
terroir
—the idea that a wine’s qualities are determined by its place of origin. Nowhere do these questions seem more relevant than in Chablis.

“Chablis, oh yeah, that’s the stuff my mom used to drink out of a box,” a friend told me when I ordered a glass before dinner. “Yeah, right,” I said. “And that watch I bought on the street for twenty bucks when I moved to New York was a genuine Rolex.”

Like Vuitton or Chanel, Chablis is a world-famous brand that has inspired countless knockoffs and counterfeits over the years. Some of my own earliest encounters with fermented grapes involved something called Almaden California Mountain Chablis, a product that’s still on the market. But
le vrai
Chablis, which comes from the northernmost vineyards of Burgundy, is less understood than almost any other major wine type, even though it’s made from Chardonnay, the world’s favorite white grape. With several terrific vintages currently available on our shores, this is a very good time to come to terms with Chablis.

For hundreds of years tasters have invoked the sea when talking about Chablis, and just as frequently limestone and even flint. Actually, there’s a geological basis for these seemingly fanciful
associations. The bedrock underlying the region of Chablis is part of what the geologist James Wilson, in his book
Terroir
, calls the Kimmeridgian chain—a huge Cretaceous/Jurassic deposit of chalky marl and limestone riddled with fossil seashells, notably
Exogyra virgule
, a small, comma-shaped oyster. The White Cliffs of Dover are part of this vast formation, which rises and falls beneath north-central France. It crops up in the Loire regions of Sancerre and Pouilly, and then farther west in Chablis. It could be a coincidence that Sancerre and Chablis, though the former is made from the Sauvignon Blanc grape, are traditionally considered perfect wines to accompany oysters. On the other hand, romantics, and certain geologists, think it may have something to do with the prehistoric oyster shells underneath the vineyards. I can’t necessarily explain the chemistry of flavor, but I can say if you have never had oysters with Chablis, you should try to rectify this failure immediately.

Chablis is a great food wine, although some true believers seem to hate to mix it up with solids. According to the Beastie Boy Mike Diamond, a serious fan, “It pairs so well with so many foods, yet it’s almost an injustice to share a really good Dauvissat or Raveneau with food. I kind of prefer to hog it all to myself, savoring every sip.”

Although Chablis is officially part of Burgundy, its unique geology, combined with the fact that it lies almost fifty miles from the northernmost vineyards of the Côte d’Or, makes its whites quite different from those of Meursault or Puligny. According to
The Oxford Companion to Wine:
“There is a unique streak of steely acidity, a firm flintiness, and a mineral quality that is not found elsewhere in Burgundy.” And if they’re distinct from their Burgundian cousins, they are light-years removed from New World Chardonnays. If you are accustomed to the ripe, tropical-fruit style of old-school Sonoma Chardonnays, like Kistler or Sonoma-Cutrer or Kendall-Jackson Vintner’s Reserve, you may have a hard
time detecting the family resemblance of Chardonnay grown in chilly Chablis. This is Chardonnay unplugged and stripped down to its essence, like Eric Clapton’s acoustic version of “Layla.”

Whenever I think about comparing Chablis with Cali Chardonnay, I think of Audrey Hepburn in
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
. Truman Capote wanted Marilyn Monroe to play the part; she could have been great, but it would have been a very different movie. And Chardonnay grown in Chablis’s Serein River Valley as opposed to the Napa Valley comes out very different indeed. Young Chablis is lean and racy, although with age the best Chablis takes on a dazzling richness.

One of the best things about Chablis is that it’s possible to experience its unique character even in the less expensive bottlings. When you spend even $20 on a Village wine from a quality-oriented producer, there is no mistaking where it is from. Chablis shares Burgundy’s system of vineyard hierarchy—Grand Cru being the highest designation followed by Premier Cru and finally Village wine, labeled simply “Chablis.” The seven Grands Crus all occupy a single contiguous southwest-facing hillside across the valley from town. The Premiers Crus occupy various well-exposed slopes, while the flatter and cooler sites are home to Village Chablis.

The top Grands Crus from the various Montrachet vineyards can cost $400 or $500, while the Grands Crus of Chablis are usually priced in the double digits. Even generic Chablis can be a fine drink, with a citric snap and a touch of minerality, particularly in vintages like 2007 and 2008. The 2009 vintage is a little richer and fleshier, which might make it a good introductory Chablis for those with New World palates. When I first wrote about Chablis, one had to be very choosy with makers, some of whom were lazy and others over-infatuated with new oak barrels, but the level of wine making overall has greatly improved in recent years.

Raveneau and Dauvissat have long been acknowledged as the
top producers, but William Fèvre, under the management of the brilliant Joseph Henriot, has now joined their ranks. Top wines from these domaines develop incredible complexity with age. Domaine Drouhin Vaudon, owned by the Beaune-based negotiant Joseph Drouhin, has made particularly impressive 2008s. (Not to be confused with Droin, which has also made its best wines yet with this vintage.) The local cooperative La Chablisienne turns out surprisingly good Chablis at all levels. Some other favorites: Billaud-Simon, Louis Michel, Christian Moreau, Pinson, Daniel Dampt, Laroche, and Barat.

These and other makers may convince you that it’s possible to taste rocks, or even fossils, in your glass. At the very least you will discover the best of all possible matches for an oyster.

Making a name for oneself as a winemaker with a grape that almost no one has ever heard of is a bit like writing pop songs for the cello. “Eleanor Rigby” aside, you’re probably starting with a handicap. But Morgan Clendenen had her reasons for choosing Viognier as the focus of her aspirations when she started Cold Heaven in 1996. For one thing, her then husband, Jim Clendenen, cast a long shadow as the godfather of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay in the Santa Barbara region. Starting his winery, Au Bon Climat, in 1982, he’d been instrumental in showing the potential these Burgundian varietals had, which influenced his wife’s decision to try something different. That and the fact that she loved Viognier, a passion I happen to share.

Although it seems to be a descendant of the northern Italian Nebbiolo, this grape found a home on the steep slopes of the Rhône River just south of Côte Rôtie in a small appellation called Condrieu. It appeared to be headed for extinction just a few decades ago; in the French agricultural census of 1968 only thirty-five acres remained here and in the tiny adjacent appellation of Château-Grillet. Fortunately, Condrieu was rediscovered in part thanks to the enthusiasm of Robert Parker and to the efforts of Etienne Guigal, the renowned Côte Rôtie winery, which has become the largest producer of Condrieu. Indeed, there was a moment when Condrieu was almost fashionable, at least among wine wonks.