The Juice (24 page)

Faced with the choice of the Rhône model or the Bordeaux model, the intrepid interloper Stephan Asseo chose both. He now produces a Châteauneuf-style blend, Côte à Côte, that he calls “my prostitute wine,” presumably because of its floozy sex appeal, as well as a straight Cabernet Sauvignon, which he frankly calls “a marketing concession.” Cabernet being California’s most recognizable varietal, he feels he needs one in the portfolio, but is far more proud of the estate cuvée, his most iconoclastic wine, a blend of Cabernet, Syrah, and Petit Verdot, which he considers the best representation of his
terroir
and his philosophy. Outside of Australia, Cab and Syrah, like crows and owls, are rarely seen together,
although in fact there is a sub-rosa historical precedent: in the eighteenth century, weak vintages of Bordeaux were sometimes illegally beefed up with Syrah from the northern Rhône. Asseo thinks this combination is “pure Paso” and views the blend as his signature wine. Critics seem to agree. Robert Parker called the 2006 “a thrilling, nearly perfect effort.” Other wineries, including the Cab specialists Justin Vineyards, are also producing Cab-Syrah blends.

Matt Trevisan, of Linne Calodo, is garnering praise with his quirky blends, bearing wacky names like Problem Child, Cherry Red, and Nemesis, as is his former partner, Justin Smith, with whom he parted ways. Smith has become a cult star at Saxum, where he specializes in small-production, Syrah-heavy blends, and helped to boost the profile of Paso Robles when Saxum’s 2007 James Berry Vineyard was named
Wine Spectator’s
Wine of the Year in 2010. This wine is a blend of Grenache, Syrah, and Mourvèdre from a vineyard named after Smith’s father. Blending seems to be the trend on both the drier west side and the east side of Paso Robles, with its proximity to the Salinas River. By contrast, in the Santa Barbara region to the south, single-varietal wines, especially Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, hold sway.

But Paso Robles is not so easily pigeonholed as a visitor might wish. Napa is inextricably identified with Cabernet, while
Sideways
has made Santa Ynez, an hour to the south, almost synonymous with Pinot Noir. When I comment on the lack of Pinot Noir in Paso Robles, Asseo tells me about his friend and neighbor Marc Goldberg, of Windward Vineyard, who makes “a great Pinot, very Burgundian, you must visit him. I give you his number.”

By the time I leave Asseo’s L’Aventure Winery, raising a cloud of dust along Live Oak Road in my borrowed Shelby, it’s after six, and the Windward tasting room is closed, but I take a chance and bang on the door of the house beside it. The diminutive, goateed guy who eventually opens it, amid a pack of barking dogs, has all
the signs of having been awakened from a nap and seems none too pleased, but he warms up when I tell him Stephan sent me and leads me over to his tasting room. Marc Goldberg pours me a glass of his 2005 Windward Pinot Noir, and when I express enthusiasm, he breaks out his 2005 Gold Barrel Select, which has the delicate complexity and earthy undertones of a Nuits St. Georges, although it finishes a little sweeter than a classic Burgundy, as do most New World Pinots.

Like many of the area’s finest wineries, Windward produces a limited amount (two thousand cases) and is tough to find outside the region, although many, including L’Aventure, sell much of their wine via mailing list. The best and most enjoyable way to learn about the area’s wines, and to acquire them, is to visit. If you do, be sure to bring a cigar for Stephan.

New Zealand is still best known for Sauvignon Blanc, but I predict we’ll be hearing more and more about Kiwi reds in the near future. The Pinots, particularly those from the Otago region in the far south, are starting to attract international attention, and if Steve Smith has anything to say about it, New Zealand Syrahs and Merlots will, too.

For those of you who may have missed the first couple of chapters of Kiwi wine history, here’s a short summary: in 1985 the Australian David Hohnen flew to New Zealand, convinced that the cool climate of that country’s South Island could produce great Sauvignon Blanc. In fact Montana, a big wine company based on the North Island, had already planted Sauvignon in the Marlborough area, and the results were promising. Hohnen hired the winemaker Kevin Judd and bought land in Marlborough while producing his first vintage of Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc from locally purchased grapes. The wine was soon creating a buzz and winning prizes in Australia and the United Kingdom. Within a decade Cloudy Bay had spawned numerous imitators and helped to create a new style of wine. For some reason, Sauvignon Blanc grown in cool, sunny Marlborough tastes like nothing else, certainly not the lean, grassy Sauvignons from Sancerre and Pouilly Fumé. They are brash fruit cocktails that put you in mind of grapefruit, lime, mango—just about everything you might find on Carmen Miranda’s hat. The success of Sauvignon Blanc opened the door for Chardonnay, with almost twice as much acreage now devoted to the latter.

Craggy Range, founded in 1997 by Terry Peabody, yet another Aussie with deep pockets, staked out a stunningly beautiful patch of the southern part of the North Island, initially making its mark with a single-vineyard Sauvignon Blanc. For years now its Te Muna Road Vineyard has been my favorite Kiwi Sauvignon Blanc. But the winery has increasingly wagered its future on reds. While they are based in Hawkes Bay, the Craggy Range team has scoured both islands to find ideal vineyard sites for varietals we don’t normally associate with New Zealand, including Syrah, Cabernet Franc, and Merlot.

The winemaker Steve Smith, a founding partner in the venture, recently visited New York and shook up my perceptions with some blind tasting over a dinner at Jean Georges, the flagship of the eponymous Vongerichten’s international empire. I’ve known the towering and gregarious Smith for years, and he has pretty much single-handedly convinced me that New Zealand is capable of producing superb red wines. But that evening was the clincher, when he mixed his own wines in with some of the best from America, Australia, and France in a blind tasting. What was most surprising to me was that while I was usually able to identify the American and Aussie wines as New World and the French wines as Old World, I sometimes mistook the Craggy Range wines for their French counterparts. Which might have been the point. Smith certainly seemed rather pleased when I made this mistake.

We warmed up with the 2009 Te Muna Road Vineyard Sauvignon Blanc—as usual more restrained and nuanced than the typical Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc, the more extreme examples of which can taste like grapefruit juice filtered through a bed of fresh-mown grass—and moved on to a flight of Pinots. We were tasting blind, so I wasn’t sure if the 2008 Craggy Range Te Muna Pinot was New or Old World, but I really liked it, much more so than I liked what turned out to be the 2006 Armand Rousseau Gevrey-Chambertin Lavaux St. Jacques, which was very lean, austere,
and, at $170, expensive. Granted, it takes time for Burgundy to come around, and Rousseau is a great domaine, so I’ll reserve judgment for the moment. If I’d been told which wines were in the lineup, I would have guessed that the 2005 Au Bon Climat Isabelle Pinot Noir was the Rousseau. Given that Au Bon Climat’s Jim Clendenen likes to pick earlier than his California cronies, in part to achieve a Burgundian edge, maybe this wasn’t so surprising. Meanwhile, Craggy Range’s top bottling, the 2006 Aroha, was still young and closed up, but unlike the Rousseau it had masses of fruit in reserve. I picked this one as a Kiwi but was nevertheless surprised by how much structure, acid, and even tannin it had. This was no easy-drinking floozy by any means.

Smith is a firm believer that certain
terroirs
in New Zealand are ideal for Bordeaux varietals, with which he has been fascinated since he backpacked through that region in 1991. The experience of tasting 1990 Latour out of barrel was more or less his road-to-Damascus moment. The next flight pitted his 2007 Sophia, a blend of Merlot and Cab Franc from the right bank of the Ngaruroro River, against the 2007 Vieux Château Certan, from the right bank (what a coincidence!) of the Gironde, and the 2006 Duckhorn Three Palms Merlot. Not surprisingly, the latter, one of California’s best Merlots, was the most open and opulent, being all Merlot and having an extra year of age. Merlot is generally less tannic and more flirtatious in its youth than Cabernet. The Sophia was much more restrained, yet still powerful and approachable, and I couldn’t make up my mind whether it was Old or New World, whereas the Vieux Château Certan, which was wound up tighter than the inside of a golf ball, was definitely Old World.

The last flight, of Syrah/Shiraz (the former being the French nomenclature, the latter the Australian), presented a real challenge. All the wines were superb, but it was tough to make the New World/Old World calls, in part because the Rhône representative, the 2007 Chave Hermitage, came from a hot vintage
and was uncharacteristically forward in style. Chave is generally acknowledged to be the greatest maker of Hermitage, though his wines usually take more than a decade to come around. The 2006 Torbreck RunRig is a New World classic—much more balanced and refined than the big jam bombs; it’s one of Australia’s greatest Shirazes, respected even by certain wine snobs who denigrate the Barossa Shiraz category in general. Suffice it to say that the 2007 Craggy Range Le Sol Syrah was very much at home in this company, and it was tough to pick a winner.

Not hard to pick the best value, though. The Torbreck and the Chave both sell in the $200 range, while the Craggy Range is $70. Still, Steve Smith may have a tough time selling a $70 New Zealand Syrah in this market. California makers have failed in recent years to create much enthusiasm for the variety, while the market for the fruit-bombastic Barossa Shirazes, so popular just a decade ago, has been in serious decline. But I love guys who attack windmills, and I love restrained, aromatic Syrahs like Smith’s Le Sol. Blind tasting, as Smith well knows, is hugely revealing, and this one suggested to me that New Zealand’s wine story is well into its third chapter. If you missed the first, or rather the second, part of the story, try the Te Muna Road Vineyard Sauvignon Blanc, still under twenty bucks most everywhere—an absolute steal.

Most American wine lovers are familiar with the Judgment of Paris, the 1976 tasting in which several Napa wines outscored the best from Bordeaux and Burgundy. The French wine establishment, including the tasters who’d participated in the blind tasting, were not amused. The spit buckets were still wet as they started to explain the results away. Patriotic French wine lovers must have been
really
pissed off three years later when a Spanish wine bested 1970 Château Latour and other top Bordeaux in another blind tasting sponsored by Gault Millau, the prestigious publisher of French food guides. The ringer was a 1970 Torres Gran Coronas, made from four-year-old Cabernet vines planted in Penedès, an area of gently rolling hills an hour west of Barcelona.

At the time of Gault Millau’s so-called Wine Olympiad, Spain was best known for sherry and for the kind of rustic plonk that Sancho Panza and Ernest Hemingway’s expats used to squirt out of wineskins. Torres itself was best known for a mass-produced red with a plastic bull attached to the neck. A few hard-core connoisseurs were aware of a winery called Vega-Sicilia, in Ribera del Duero, as a source of powerful, age-worthy reds, and Rioja produced some fine wines, but the general level of ambition and technical expertise was unimpressive. Thirty years later, Spain is the new Italy (which was, until recently, the new France, if you know what I mean). Every week, it seems, a new boutique wine from a previously obscure part of Spain lands here with a big noise. But no winery is more innovative, or emblematic of recent Spanish history, than Torres.

Soft-spoken, courtly Miguel Torres has light blue eyes and dresses in the tweedy style of the English country gentry, also favored by the chatelains of Bordeaux. At the age of sixty-eight, he seems to retain a youthful sense of curiosity; he has recently taken up Japanese and holds his own in a conversation with his Japanese importer, whose annual visit to the sprawling winery complex in Penedès coincides with my own. He drives a Prius, which seems as much a testament to his modest demeanor as to his passion for environmental issues. He stopped using pesticides in the early nineties, and he’s committed to reducing CO
₂
emissions at the winery 30 percent by 2020. He’s also bought land in the cooler highlands near the Pyrenees, in case global warming makes the lowland vineyards in Penedès too hot for viticulture in the future.

The Torres family has been in the wine business for several hundred years—although the current company dates back to 1870, when Jaime Torres returned to his homeland after making a fortune in Cuba. Miguel A. Torres (who has two sons and a daughter working with him) took over from his autocratic father, Miguel Torres Carbó, who resisted many of his son’s innovations but also managed to rescue the family business from the ashes of the Spanish Civil War. In the chaos leading up to the war, Torres Carbó was forced to flee the winery. “The anarchists took over in Catalonia,” his son explains, over lunch at the winery, “and killed a lot of factory owners and vineyard owners. My father went to Barcelona and worked as a pharmacist and a chemist producing vaccines for the Republicans. The winery was confiscated, and the ownership went to the workers.” Despite the poisonous atmosphere of class warfare, the workers apparently called the exiled boss on a regular basis to ask for advice. In January 1939, the winery was bombed and largely destroyed by Franco’s air force. “Then at the end of the war,” Torres says, “my father was taken prisoner and sent to a concentration camp. Fortunately, he had a cousin who was a colonel in Franco’s army who managed to secure his release after a few
weeks.” Not surprisingly, he decided to get the hell out of Spain, moving initially to Cuba, where Miguel junior was conceived.

Torres Carbó happened to be in New York City when the news broke that the Germans had invaded France. He immediately set about courting anxious American wine importers, assuring them that he could supply Spanish “Chablis” and Spanish “Burgundy” to fill the demand for the French juice. Torres Carbó promptly returned to Spain to expand his negotiant business, buying grapes from local farmers and shipping faux French wine to the States. Miguel junior, who grew up in Barcelona, wanted to know more about the real thing; he studied oenology in Dijon and returned to Spain with a desire to make high-quality wine at home. He experimented with French varietals on a small family plot while buying and blending grapes from the local growers. Then, in 1965, an exceptional sixty-five-acre vineyard called Mas La Plana came up for sale, and Miguel convinced his father to buy it. “I knew we had to plant Cabernet there,” he says. Just five years later, the infant vines produced the wine that would go on to win the Gault Millau tasting.