The Juice (25 page)

Not long after Franco died in 1975, Miguel senior dispatched his son to the New World. “There were strikes all over Spain and my father remembered the war. He said, ‘I don’t want to go through that again.’ ” The younger Torres, after touring California, eventually decided that Chile’s Central Valley was a viticultural paradise, a conclusion that has been validated many times over in the succeeding years, though it was far from obvious at the time. In Chile as well as in Spain, they were the first to introduce new technology like temperature-controlled stainless steel fermentation tanks, at a time when locals were still stomping grapes with their feet. In 1984, some years before the area would become renowned for Pinot and Chardonnay, the family bought land in Sonoma’s Russian River Valley, even as they continued to acquire vineyards in Spain, buying in emerging regions like Toro, Jumilla, and Priorat.

In the fine-wine world, of course, bigger is hardly better. Most wine geeks would say the reverse is true. Like teenage music fans who drop their favorite band at the first sign of popular acceptance, connoisseurs and critics—myself included—tend to seek out the newest and the rarest bottlings from boutique producers. I reflexively winced when I heard the production numbers—forty-four million bottles a year, 200 million euros in sales. But unlike his friend Robert Mondavi, who started out as a producer of premium wines and eventually moved down market in a way that many believed compromised the value of the brand, Torres has gone in almost the opposite direction, using the success of mass-market wines to finance the production of luxury single-vineyard cuvées. In 1984 he began a project to reclaim indigenous Spanish varietals, planting them in a beautiful walled vineyard called Grans Muralles, eventually producing one of the most intriguing new wines in Spain. The family’s purchase of 250 acres in Priorat ten years later helped to seal the reputation of that area, and the early vintages are excellent—the 2007 Perpetual, for instance, made from old-vine Carignan and Grenache, is very lusty juice. Their Mas La Plana bottling, from the vineyard that produced that prizewinning Cabernet in 1970, has become a reference point for that varietal in Spain. And if you were to slip it into a blind tasting of cult Napa Cabernets, I suspect that their top Chilean Cabernet, Manso de Velasco, might upset expectations and slay some giants, just as their first Cabernet did back in the era when punk was trying to slay disco.

Besides a little vineyard near Montmartre, in the heart of Paris, Moraga Bel Air may qualify as the unlikeliest patch of vines in the world. “A grapevine doesn’t know its address,” says Tom Jones, the former CEO of Northrop Aviation and current proprietor of Moraga. Which is a good thing, because vines need a hell of a lot of discipline, and if Jones’s Cabernet Sauvignon and Sauvignon Blanc vines knew their address, there would probably be no dealing with them—they’d be getting agents. I almost hate to mention Moraga’s location, because the wines speak for themselves—in very refined tones—and bear comparison with some of the best of Bordeaux. But the fact is these grapes are grown within sight of the Getty Museum on some of Los Angeles’s most desirable real estate, which is, obviously, hugely expensive.

“I’m sick of that Hollywood and Vine stuff,” says Jones, a handsome nonagenarian who would rather talk about his soils than his zip code. Moraga’s wines show a subtle, complex Old World style; he himself has a quiet, patrician demeanor, and his bond with the land is palpable. “My wife and I are California born and raised,” he says, standing at the base of his steep vineyard. Chickens are pecking at the dirt. It’s hard to believe Rodeo Drive is fifteen minutes away. If not for the tennis court cantilevered out over the hillside on a neighboring property, or the Getty Museum across the canyon, you could easily imagine you were in an older, wilder California.

“I was born and raised in Pomona, where it was just agriculture, including vines,” Jones says. “We bought this place because
it was a piece of old California, and I saw it disappearing.” It was formerly a horse ranch owned by Victor Fleming, the director of
Gone With the Wind
and
The Wizard of Oz
. The hard-boiled director Howard Hawks lived next door. “There used to be a lot of small horse ranches in the canyons. When we bought the property, it had chaparral and a lot of oak trees.”

Jones and his wife are longtime Francophiles; as head of Northrop he regularly attended the Paris Air Show, and he used these occasions to visit some of the great vineyards of France, including Château Margaux, where he had lunch with the legendary French oenologist Émile Peynaud. “We noticed a similarity between our own soils and those of Bordeaux,” he says. “We have calcareous sandstone from ancient ocean floors. The Los Angeles basin was under the ocean for millions of years.” Jones scoops up a chalky fossilized snail shell to illustrate the point. Research also revealed that the canyon enjoyed a unique, grape-friendly microclimate with an average of nine inches more annual rainfall than arid downtown Los Angeles as well as cooler nighttime temperatures than in other parts of the city.

While much of Bordeaux is relatively flat, the steep hillside of Moraga Canyon is reminiscent of the best vineyards in Côte Rôtie or Chianti. In 1979, Jones succumbed to the temptation to plant grapes and eventually found that the lower-elevation canyon gravels were better suited to Sauvignon Blanc than to Cabernet Sauvignon. Early vintages were trucked up to Carneros and vinified by Tony Soter, the presiding genius of Etude (since replaced by Scott Rich). From the beginning, Jones was determined to make a world-class wine. “We knew we couldn’t compete on price,” he says. “We had to compete on quality. But some of the best wines in the world are made in small quantities. Look at Romanée-Conti, which is 4.3 acres.”

His early vintages were praised by Jancis Robinson and Robert Parker, and Moraga became one of the first California wines featured
on the list of Alain Ducasse’s three-star restaurant in Paris. The former Ducasse sommelier Stéphane Colling calls Moraga his favorite California label. “The wines have so much more depth and character than most California wines,” he says. “For me the white is incredibly refreshing, and the red is like a cross between Latour and Margaux.” And they age well, like Bordeaux: The oldest I’ve tasted, from the early nineties, are wonderfully complex.

Despite his initial success, Jones knew that to get the best out of his grapes, he needed an on-site winery. Before he approached local authorities, he and his wife canvassed some two hundred neighbors to explain their plan. Construction was completed just in time for the 2005 harvest, when Moraga became the first commercial winery to be bonded in the city of Los Angeles since Prohibition.

As ambitious as he is about the quality of his wines, Jones is surprisingly demure about publicizing them, in part because he sells all he can make (about seven hundred cases of the red, even fewer of the white) to a loyal mailing-list clientele and a few select restaurants. “We try to keep a low profile,” he says. When I showed up with Colling in 2006, Jones was taken aback when he learned I was a journalist and tried to discourage me from writing about the place. But after seeing the property, and tasting the 2003 red and the 2005 white, I felt compelled to share the secret. The red reminded me in some ways of a Margaux, the latter of a fine white Graves. But in the end, as with all great wines, it is the singularity of Moraga—the voice of the land, unlikely as it might seem—that makes the story so compelling.

You get the sense that Robb Talbott has always been a bit of a maverick, or perhaps “eccentric” is the right word. By the time he arrived at Colorado College, he’d already lost most of his hair, and the ascots and sport jackets he favored must have further distinguished him from his contemporaries. While his father had been a major in the air force, he registered as a conscientious objector; his federal court appeal succeeded just two weeks before he would have been sent to prison. Talbott’s notion that great wine could be produced in Monterey County seemed pretty quixotic back in 1982, when he first planted Chardonnay vines from Corton-Charlemagne on the steep hillside where he was living in a log cabin of his own design. By now, Talbott’s Chardonnays are among California’s signature success stories.

When Robb was just two years old, his parents moved to Carmel to start a luxury tie company; his mother sewed the ties, and his father drove the length of California selling them from his station wagon. Young Robb accompanied them on silk-buying trips to Europe, during which the family frequently visited the vineyards of France and Italy. He remembers tasting his first Burgundy at the age of twelve. Monterey County at that time was known for the vegetables that grew in the fertile Salinas Valley. In the seventies grapes were planted, but they were inevitably sold in bulk to big producers from other areas.

The Talbott family founded their eponymous winery in 1982 with a much loftier ambition: to make wines comparable to those they’d fallen in love with in Burgundy. In 1985, while waiting for
the vines at their Diamond T Ranch to mature, they bought grapes from the nearby Sleepy Hollow Vineyard, which had been planted in 1971 by a group of investors looking to cash in on the boom. Sleepy Hollow was planted on the Santa Lucia Highlands on steep benchland above the valley floor. Hillside land was much cheaper than the valley floor, and yet it soon became clear that the grapes it produced were superior to their low-lying neighbors’. (No big surprise to students of European viticulture, such as the Talbotts.)

Over the next few years, the Chardonnays fashioned by the winemaker Sam Balderas under the Talbott label became justly celebrated for their combination of intense tropical fruit and Burgundian minerality. I remember being knocked out by the first Talbott I encountered, in the late eighties, and the critics were equally impressed. Other producers were buying Sleepy Hollow grapes, but Talbott’s were the standouts, which might be why the investors, when they decided to sell in 1994, offered Robb the first crack at their 450-acre vineyard. “I only had forty-eight hours to make up my mind,” he says. “A major buyer was waiting in the wings.” Standing at the lower edge of the property over a decade later, looking up at the rows of vines climbing up to the rugged peaks of the Santa Lucia Range above him, Talbott still clearly recalls the exhilaration and terror of that moment.

He comes across as a man of contradictions, his thick, neatly trimmed beard providing a stark contrast to his shining pate, his solid physique belying a refinement of manner. He’s a kind of swashbuckling dandy, a motorcycle-racing aesthete. It’s difficult to resist the temptation to compare the wines to their godfather: I can’t help noting their combination of power and finesse is fairly seamless. Perhaps we should attribute that to the vineyard itself, its gravelly loam soil, its southeast-facing aspect soaking up the morning sun, dueling against the chilly influence of Monterey Bay to the west. In the end, who the hell knows?

While the Talbott Sleepy Hollow Chardonnay is undoubtedly
Talbott’s signature wine, I sometimes find myself preferring its Diamond T Ranch bottling from the original hillside vineyard planted by Robb himself in 1982. Only twenty-two acres on a very steep slope, it usually yields less than a ton of grapes per acre, but that hard-earned juice makes some intense Chardonnay.

The Talbott empire includes several second labels, including Logan, named for Robb’s son, which produces both Chardonnay and Pinot Noir from the Sleepy Hollow Vineyard. This Chard is more forward and easygoing than the Talbott Sleepy Hollow; the Pinot is often a very good value, although it doesn’t have the potency of the small-production Diamond T Pinot Noir, nor of some of the neighboring Santa Lucia Highlands cult Pinots like those from Pisoni Vineyards. The lower-priced Kali Hart label is named for Talbott’s daughter and uses grapes for its Chards and Pinots from the River Road Vineyards adjacent to Sleepy Hollow. The proliferation of names is confusing, but their labels share the same typography, the same stripped-down graphic design and coat of arms.

Other Santa Lucia Highlands producers worth seeking out include Mer Soleil, the Chardonnay estate of the Caymus producer Chuck Wagner. For bold Santa Lucia Pinots check out Morgan, Pisoni, and Roar. In the early eighties, no one believed that wines like these could come from a place best known for broccoli and lettuce, with the possible exception of the Talbott family.

I’ve been sitting here trying to figure out why it took me so long to get around to writing about Ridge, famous for its pioneering Zinfandels and for Monte Bello, widely acknowledged as one of the world’s greatest Cabernets. Honestly, I think it’s because ten or fifteen years ago my tastes ran a little more to flash and flesh. Like everyone else, I was impressed with the big ripe fruit bombs that literally exploded in your mouth—the super-concentrated cult wines that first appeared in the nineties, about the same time as Nirvana and Pearl Jam. The Ridge Zins of the nineties were more subtle than the new hypertrophied, high-octane versions, and the Monte Bello certainly wasn’t made for instant gratification, taking years and even decades to really reveal its genius.

If the story of Ridge is hardly a new one, it’s worth retelling every few years. In 2006, at the thirtieth-anniversary restaging of the famous 1976 Judgment of Paris tasting at which California wines bested some of the top French growths, judges on two continents picked the 1971 Ridge Monte Bello as the top red. (In 1976 it had placed fifth.) In a competition for new vintages at the same event, the 2000 Monte Bello also placed first. Shortly thereafter, Paul Draper, Ridge’s longtime winemaker and presiding genius, quietly turned seventy and won the 2007 James Beard Foundation Award for wine making.

To find Ridge, you drive south from San Francisco toward San Jose and the congested sprawl of Silicon Valley, then turn right toward the ocean. Civilization has almost disappeared by the time you turn right on Monte Bello Road, a series of mad switchbacks that climb some two thousand feet in less than five miles. At this point you are a long way south of Napa and Sonoma. By the time you reach the lower vineyards of Monte Bello, you’re wondering what kind of madman, or visionary, thought of planting grapes way the hell up here over a hundred years ago. In fact, several did, though it was a San Francisco physician named Oseo Perrone who planted and named the Monte Bello vineyard in the eighteen eighties. It has to be one of the most dramatically scenic vineyards on the planet, spilling down a wooded limestone ridge at the very edge of the San Andreas Fault, high above the Pacific and the fog line.