The Juice (26 page)

In 1959, four Stanford scientists bought the property as a retreat and made wine for their own consumption from the surviving vineyards. By 1969, seven years after their first commercial release, the original partners decided they needed a full-time winemaker and turned to the thirty-three-year-old Paul Draper, a Stanford grad who’d been making wine in Chile as a Peace Corps volunteer. (Don’t ask.) Although he grew up on a farm in Illinois, by the time he arrived at Ridge, Draper was a multilingual epicurean. He’d attended Choate, the Connecticut prep school, before moving on to Stanford, where he majored in philosophy. After graduating, he joined the army and had the good fortune to be sent to Italy, where he spent all of his leaves touring the countryside on a motorcycle and becoming increasingly interested in food and wine. After he left the army, he went to Paris and studied at the Sorbonne. Not exactly a standard winemaker’s résumé, and one can’t help but wonder why the founders of Ridge chose him, but their judgment has been more than vindicated. He’s become a dean of American wine making without sacrificing his broad portfolio of intellectual
interests, a sophisticate who retains a youthful enthusiasm and curiosity and seems way more interested in
The New York Review of Books
than
Wine Spectator
.

While the north-coast California wine pioneers looked to UC Davis and high technology to reinvent the California wine-making tradition broken by Prohibition, Draper, who’d spent time in Bordeaux, was interested in traditional artisanal techniques, like fermenting with the natural yeasts found on the grape skins and avoiding flavor-stripping filtration in order to express the special character of the Monte Bello vineyard—what the French call
terroir
. The distance from the more established wine regions north of San Francisco probably helped to foster an independent vision. Forty years later, his peers in Napa and elsewhere have pretty much come around to his way of thinking. His trademark goatee, that Beat-era accessory, likewise made a comeback in recent years. Indeed, Eric Baugher, his wine-making colleague at Ridge, has one that’s almost identical.

Draper’s ambition for Monte Bello, he’s often announced, was to make one of the greatest red wines in the world—in more emphatic moments he says
the
greatest—and it still is. On the basis of a 1984 and a 1991 tasted at the winery, I’ve concluded that he’s succeeded. But along the way he and his partners realized this goal required cash flow, and they started making Zinfandel from old vines down the road and eventually, all over the state. Ridge almost single-handedly rehabilitated the reputation of that grape, creating spicy, accessible reds. While some of the early bottlings were blockbusters, the prevailing house style aims for balance over power, which has sometimes resulted in Ridge’s getting overshadowed in the numbers game of wine scores.

Though Draper remains the boss—the house palate, as it were—he runs a fairly democratic operation; I sat in on a blending committee session for the 2006 Geyserville, one of their benchmark Zinfandels, where Draper presided over a lively debate about
the merits of different vineyard lots and their worthiness to be included in the final blend. One lot Draper judged to be a little too hot, that is, overly alcoholic. “With Zin you want to be in the 14 to 15 percent alcohol range,” he says, even though many of his peers are deliberately crafting fire-breathing dragons with as much as 17 percent alcohol.

His ideal Monte Bello, Draper says, is around 13 percent, a level far lower than today’s average in Napa, if slightly higher than the classic pre-1982 Bordeaux. And in this quest he is aided by his relatively cool, high-altitude site. “I’m not trying to make a Bordeaux here,” he says, although Monte Bello, like Latour and other top Bordeaux, takes years to reveal its greatness, which might be yet another reason he loves Zinfandel. Although they can last for decades—the 1985 Lytton Springs, tasted in 2010, was like a terrific twenty-five-year-old St. Émilion—these reds provide something close to instant gratification. The 2009 Lytton Springs was popping on its release in August 2011.

The 2003 Ridge Geyserville was the red wine I chose for my wedding dinner in 2006—and I doubt the judges of the Judgment of Paris rematch thought any longer or harder than I did before making a decision.

I’ll never forget my first encounter with 1991 Clos Erasmus, which was pressed on me by the restaurant Daniel’s sommelier Jean-Luc Le Dû in 1996. It was a curious and wonderful hippogriff of a wine with, it seemed to me, a New World body and an Old World head—a sort of thinking man’s fruit bomb with lots of structure and a deep mineral undertone. It was a big wine with nuances. The next day I tried—to no avail—to track down a case or five. These wines were, and are, made in minuscule quantities; the hills are steep, the soils are poor and rocky, and the vines are stingy.

Even today the area feels isolated, though it’s just ninety miles from Barcelona, the landscape primitive and almost lunar. In the twelfth century Carthusian monks planted the first grapes here, but by the middle of the last century many of these hard-to-work vineyards had been abandoned. Stately, plump René Barbier Sr., descendant of a wine-making family from France’s Rhône Valley, was the guiding spirit for a band of five friends who resurrected the old terraced vineyards, planted new vines, and released their first wines in 1989. These five shared the same primitive winery until 1993. Within a few years of the first release, Priorat had become a destination for wine wonks (Gratallops, with a population of 224, now has at least five serious restaurants), and those five wines—Clos Mogador, Clos Martinet, Clos de l’Obac, Clos Erasmus, and L’Ermita—had become as sought after as almost any Grand Cru Burgundy or first-growth Bordeaux.

The lanky and garrulous Carles Pastrana was a childhood friend of Barbier’s in the seaside town of Tarragona. Pastrana followed
Barbier into these hills and made the first vintage of Clos de l’Obac in consultation with his friend. Pastrana waxes lyrical when he speaks of those early days, of restoring tumbledown Romanera terraces by day and talking wine and poetry into the night. “When you’re young,” he says, “you have time to lose. Your capital is your time.” They resuscitated the old Grenache and Carignan vineyards—which are still, especially the former, the heart and soul of the best Priorats—and planted French varietals like Syrah and Cabernet. They quoted Ortega y Gasset (“I am myself and my circumstances”). The harsh landscape and the isolation made them dependent on each other. This idyllic era culminated in the spring of 1992 when the French publisher Gault Millau touted Clos Mogador and Clos de l’Obac in a guidebook to the Catalonia area for the Barcelona Olympics, giving both wines 18 points out of 20. Robert Parker was close behind. Perhaps it’s a mark of the success of their joint venture that Barbier and Pastrana no longer speak, although their wineries are literally next door to each other.

Alvaro Palacios, the fifth of nine brothers from a wine-making family in Rioja, was the last of the founding five to buy in. It wasn’t until 1993 that he released what is arguably the most celebrated Priorat. Palacios’s L’Ermita is made from centenarian Grenache vines in an insanely steep northeastern-facing amphitheater, which if it were a ski slope would be a Double Black Diamond. (Northeast exposure is ideal, southern exposure being apparently too much of a good thing in this torrid area.)

Scruffily good-looking and laid-back, René Barbier Jr. and his wife, Sara Pérez, both in their thirties, look as if they might be the proprietors of a surf shop in Laguna or a record store in Williamsburg, though in fact they are wine-world aristocrats, heirs to an unlikely success story. As he shows me around the cellars of Clos Mogador, René junior explains that he spent a good part of his youth living with “my hippie parents” in a trailer here near
the tiny hilltop town of Gratallops while his father pursued his quixotic dream of reclaiming the moribund wine-making traditions of this rugged backwater of Catalonia.

What makes Priorat special, most local winemakers believe, is the soft blue slate and schist that underlie the vineyards. Though the degree to which decomposed minerals are absorbed by roots is a matter of some dispute, most experienced tasters would agree that the best Priorats, like the best Mosel Rieslings, exhibit a stony character that sets them apart. An earlier generation believed that the source of Priorat’s distinction was divine; in the twelfth century a local man reported seeing angels carrying grapes up a stairway to heaven, after which a Carthusian monastery was established here. Priorat’s wines enjoyed increasing renown until phylloxera wiped out the vineyards at the end of the nineteenth century. When Barbier and friends arrived in the eighties, the growers that remained sold their grapes to village cooperatives that produced inconsistent and often indifferent wine.

Now several of the cooperatives have been inspired by the success of the interlopers and are producing wines of character, notably Vinícola del Priorat (Ònix) and Cims de Porrera. And a second wave of ambitious outsiders is investing in the region, led by the Catalonian wine giant Torres, whose purchase of 250 acres in 1994 helped to confirm Priorat’s reputation. The native son and former folksinger Lluís Llach launched his label Vall Llach in 1999.

Among the most promising of the newer estates is Mas d’en Gil, a starkly beautiful property with more than sixty acres of gnarled and wizened old vines that was purchased in 1998 by the wine broker Pere Rovira Rovira and that is managed by his daughters Marta and Pilar. The early vintages of their Clos Fontà are worthy of comparison with first-generation Priorats—and that’s saying a lot.

Another second-generation property that’s producing special wines is Gran Clos, purchased by the Irish-born, ginger-haired
entrepreneur John Hunt in 2002, after he sold a software company he’d founded. Hunt’s first big score came when he sold an English chain of coffee shops he’d founded to Starbucks, a neat trick considering that the buyer was the model he’d copied in the first place. As a child in Dublin, Hunt naturally first became interested in beer, which he started to brew when he was fourteen, but he soon turned to wine because the ingredients were cheaper. “Hops were expensive, but I discovered I could make wine out of elderflowers and oak leaves, which were free.” Later, while attending the London School of Economics, he took a summer job on the ground crew for a ballooning company in Burgundy. His great epiphany came one night when he first sipped a glass of Chambertin. He can’t remember the vintage or the maker, but from that moment forward wine became something of an obsession. “I started spending holidays visiting wine regions.” Priorat was the one that finally stole his heart and convinced him to commit. He clearly picked good
terroir
, with some vines as much as a hundred years old; in 2005, the 1995 vintage from the property won the Priorat Wine Festival’s first prize, beating out the wines of the founding five. Like their neighbors, these are wines that suggest paradoxes: rustic and sophisticated; powerful and nuanced; fruity and earthy.

Fortunately, Priorat is still far from a household word, and almost all these wines cost far less than second- or third-growth Bordeaux. You just have to look a little harder to find them.

Big Boy is standing in the middle of the dining room at Cru, a three-star restaurant in Greenwich Village, waving a saber and demanding that everyone shut up and pay attention. It’s not easy to shut this crowd up—they’ve been drinking really expensive wine for four hours and the adrenaline of big spending is in the air. But Big Boy, a.k.a. Rob Rosania, is more than capable of shouting down a roomful of buzzed alpha males. It’s his party, and his magnum is bigger than anyone else’s magnum. He didn’t build a billion-dollar real estate empire by acting like a pussy. Signature sunglasses planted in his curly, dark mane, he’s wearing a natty blue Kiton windowpane sport jacket over an open white shirt showing plenty of chest hair, and while he doesn’t actually pound his chest, he often gives the impression that he’s about to. He’s in the process of selling off $7 million worth of his wine cellar to the assembled company—plus a few absentee bidders—and even though there are forty or fifty more lots to go, he wants to celebrate. After commanding the room’s attention, Rosania hoists a jeroboam of 1945 Bollinger for all to see. Then he lowers the bottle and props it at a forty-five-degree angle as he prepares to saber it—the most dramatic and traditional method of opening Champagne, certainly no less than a $10,000 bottle deserves, and one that Rosania has perfected in the several years he’s been collecting Champagne. For some reason this particular bottle is not cooperating, and it takes Big Boy a few whacks to decapitate it, but no matter. A cheer goes up as the top of the bottle goes flying, and within minutes we’re
all drinking a glass of Champagne made from grapes that were hanging on their vines when the Allies stormed Normandy Beach.

“Shut the fuck up and let’s finish this,” says John Kapon, standing a few feet above the crowd, pounding his gavel on the podium, like a judge addressing an unruly courtroom. Kapon is the thirty-six-year-old president of Acker Merrall & Condit, which bills itself as America’s oldest wine store and under his watch has become the world’s leading auctioneer of fine wine. It’s not often that you hear an auctioneer address a roomful of well-heeled bidders this way—it’s hard to imagine Sotheby’s urbane, British-born Jamie Ritchie doing so—but Kapon knows most of these men personally, and the very few women in attendance are accustomed to the high-testosterone world of competitive oenophilia. The assembled company includes some of the most serious wine collectors on the planet, some of whom have flown from Europe and the West Coast for this particular auction. And none of them remind me of Frasier Crane. Raised pinkies and foppish horticultural analogies have been in short supply all night. Kapon tends to cheerfully mispronounce certain French names; “rock and roll” and “T and A” are among his highest vinous accolades. Unlike Rosania, Kapon doesn’t come across as an alpha dog, at least initially … more like a slacker who borrowed his dad’s suit for the occasion. Once he’s sold off a few trophy lots, though, and downed a few glasses of Champagne, he starts to seem like the man in charge of the store.