The Juice (28 page)

Considering the age of these wines, it’s amazing that most of them were brilliantly preserved, even as they acted their age. Poor storage can result in duds, Champagnes that have turned to sherry and red Burgs that have turned to vinegar. Then there are the fakes. No one likes to talk about them, any more than swingers like to talk about STDs. But just as hot art markets breed forgeries, the inexorable rise of the wine market has inevitably created a demand for counterfeit bottles. No one really knows how widespread the problem is, although anyone who has tasted enough will have come up against it. The first time I was aware of it was in 2002 when I tasted a suspiciously fruity magnum of the extremely rare and prized 1947 Petrus while dining at the home of Jancis Robinson, one of the world’s leading wine critics. After the wealthy friend who’d brought the bottle went home, I asked Jancis if she really thought the wine, which tasted remarkably young and fresh to me, was either a 1947 or a Petrus. “It certainly didn’t seem to be,” she said diplomatically. I’ve since heard of a lot of dubious mags of 1947 Petrus, and in fact, given the tiny production of the vineyard and the unusual nature of the magnum format, there shouldn’t be more than a couple floating around these days. Needless to say, it’s generally the most legendary wines that are being faked. During my marathon with Jeff Levy in Los Angeles we encountered at least one bottle that was obviously an impostor. (Sent to our table by another collector.) One reason that Rosania’s Champagne auction attracted such interest was its aura of authenticity: Big Boy had purchased most of the stuff from the original buyers in Europe, and the market for vintage Champagne is a relatively new one that
hasn’t really attracted the counterfeiters yet, although reports of suspicious bottles of Dom Pérignon are starting to circulate. As for Bordeaux and Burgundy, no one knows how many fake bottles are residing in multimillion-dollar cellars around the world, though sometimes we get a clue.

The billionaire collector William Koch has filed a string of lawsuits against dealers and vendors who sold him bottles that were allegedly fakes (see
The Billionaire’s Vinegar
, by Benjamin Wallace), including Eric Greenberg, an Internet consulting billionaire, who allegedly sold some seventeen thousand bottles in an October 2005 Zachys auction. According to the suit, Koch alleges that before he went to Zachys, Greenberg’s collection was first rejected by Sotheby’s Serena Sutcliffe on the grounds that too many bottles were fakes. Acker Merrall subsequently held a major auction from the so-called Golden Cellar (as opposed to Kurniawan’s, which is referred to as “The Cellar”). For the Golden Cellar auction Kapon rejected lots that he found suspect and attached an unprecedented eighty pages of documentation to the catalog for this auction. “All the great collections in this country have lemons,” he says. “You’ve got to navigate around them.”

Kapon’s navigational skills seem to have temporarily deserted him when he accepted twenty-two lots of alleged Domaine Ponsot Burgundy from Rudy Kurniawan for the Rosania sale. When Laurent Ponsot saw the catalog, he immediately called Kapon to express his doubts about the authenticity of the lots and later attended the auction in order to make sure that the disputed wines had indeen been withdrawn. Seeing photographs of the purported Ponsots in the Acker catalog, Laurent found problems with all of them, including the alleged 1929 Clos de la Roche; his grandfather didn’t start estate bottling until 1934, a fact that was clearly stated in the catalog. Also problematic, the 1945, 1949, 1959, 1962, 1966, and 1971 Clos St. Denis. All great vintages, but Laurent’s father produced his first vintage of this wine in 1982.

——

A few weeks after the Big Boy auction, Kapon agrees to meet me at Veritas, the Flatiron District restaurant that vies with Cru for the title of Wine Geek Central. (Veritas was opened in 1998 by the collectors Park B. Smith and Steve Verlin in part because of the surpluses in their massive cellars.) Although Cru is his headquarters, he’s clearly a regular here and treated as a visiting dignitary. He arrived with his girlfriend, Dasha Vlasenko, a statuesque, Estonian-born former model. (They married in 2009.) They met at a party, and she took a while to warm up to him. “He was incredibly persistent,” she says.

Kapon looks a little ragged tonight, pale and puffy faced, with a three-day growth. He quickly orders a 1996 Drouhin Marquis de Laguiche Montrachet, a Grand Cru white Burgundy, then fills me in on his schedule. Less than three weeks after the Rosania auction he’s busy preparing for three more to take place within the month. Fans of his wine porn have bemoaned the fact that he’s weeks behind posting his tasting notes, but it doesn’t seem as if he’ll catch up anytime soon. Not with a trip to Hong Kong and a barrage of dinners, at one of which he will be inducted into the Commanderie de Bordeaux, and others devoted to the wines of Pichon Lalande and Romanée-Conti, all of which sounds daunting, particularly for his liver.

This counts as a down night for Kapon. After we polish off the Montrachet, he orders a 1998 JF Mugnier Musigny, a rare bottle from another legendary Burgundy vineyard that we both liked a great deal, and that should have been the wine of the night except that by the time our second course arrived, we’d finished it. So John ordered a 1971 Roumier Morey St. Denis Clos de la Bussière, which, as a Premier Cru, is lower in the hierarchy than the Grand Cru Musigny. But it blew the youngster away. John later observed of the wine, “Autumnal aromas were inviting like football season, and meat dripped from its bones like parking lot cookouts.”

Halfway through the bottle John spotted Danny DeVito across the room and asked the sommelier to send him a glass. We could see that he was drinking a Colgin Cabernet, very serious juice, if not quite Burgundy. “I don’t know if he’s a Burgundy man,” I said.

“Hey, just open up and say ah,” John said. “You don’t have to know it to love it.” And sure enough, a few minutes later DeVito hoisted the glass aloft and waved Kapon over to his table. They were still talking twenty minutes later.

Most Champagne is consumed soon after its release; until fairly recently, the belief that it could improve and develop with age was a heresy restricted to the English upper classes and the Champenois themselves. But in fact its high acidity acts as a natural preservative, and certain years are particularly conducive to making long-lived bubblies. Like the great reds of Bordeaux and Burgundy, Champagne can develop tremendous complexity as it ages. The rise of aged Champagne as a collectible category is a recent phenomenon, and it really gained momentum with the 1996 vintage.

The year was being hailed, even as the grapes were being picked, as one of the greatest ever, and its reputation has only grown ever since. What was remarkable was that the almost unprecedented level of ripeness was accompanied by very high acidity. Ripeness without acidity is a recipe for flabby, short-lived Champagne; the 1996s on the other hand seemed destined for a long and happy life, although the high acidity meant that they would take a long time to really integrate and show their true colors.

I decided to revisit them on the occasion of their fifteenth birthday to see how they were coming along and to that end invited some of New York’s best sommeliers to join me in a tasting of the top cuvées, most of which I’d bought on release. The restaurateur Ken Friedman offered to host us at the Monkey Bar; he’s been hired to sex up the food and beverages at Graydon Carter’s celebrity watering hole and has engaged the services of the super sommelier Belinda Chang, who in 2011 won the James Beard Foundation Award for wine service.

Under the eyes of the Edward Sorel caricatures on the walls—Zelda and Scott, Dorothy Parker, and others—we started off with four Blanc de Blancs: 100 percent Chardonnay Champagnes, most from the prosperous, Mercedes-infested Grand Cru village of Mesnil: the Pol Roger Blanc de Chardonnay, the Guy Charlemagne Mesnillésime, the Taittinger Comtes de Champagne, and Salon, the holy grail of B de B. The Pol was delicious and toasty but a little advanced—probably not a perfect bottle. The Guy Charlemagne, a small-grower Champagne, was a surprise hit, lively, fresh, and dry. Most controversial was the Taittinger. Bernard Sun of the Jean Georges group called it “lively and opulent,” and Belinda liked “the brioche on the nose,” whereas Raj Vaidya of Daniel, serving as the class clown, thought it smelled “like the air coming out of the subway on a hot day” or “a decaying dishrag.” The Salon, we decided reluctantly, was slightly corked. Aldo Sohm of Le Bernardin, named Best Sommelier in the World in 2008, and probably our most technical taster, was the first to identify the problem.

From there we moved on to Pinot Noir–dominated wines, starting with the sensational Pol Roger Cuvée Sir Winston Churchill, which the former prime minister’s favorite Champagne house created in his honor after his death. The soms were shouting their approval, drowning one another out with praise. It was more like a wine than a Champagne, so complete it was hard to dissect. The Dom Ruinart that followed didn’t stand a chance. Aldo felt it was too sweet, and Raj pretty much spoiled it for everyone when he detected petroleum jelly on the nose. The Bollinger Grande Année on the other hand was wonderfully austere and dry, beloved by all, though Carla “Downtown” Rzeszewski of the Breslin claimed she’d had a better bottle this past Christmas, to which John Slover of Ciano retorted, “Yeah—it was
Christmas
.” These tastings can get feisty.

The next flight was a clash of the titans—Cristal, Dom Pérignon,
and Dom Pérignon Oenothèque, the latter from Raj’s cellar. The Cristal was extremely ripe and rich, a little sweet for some tastes, including Aldo’s; our youngest som, Jerusha Frost of the Lion, who looks as if she were painted by Dante Rossetti, admitted that she was prejudiced against Cristal on principle, but said she really loved the wine. Belinda was also a fan. The Dom Pérignon, which we have all loved in the past, wasn’t showing well, but the Oenothèque, a late release that was disgorged in 2008, some four years after the regular bottling, was absolutely stellar, though it was a bit out of context, seeming both fresher and younger than the earlier-disgorged wines.

Everyone loved the 1996 Philipponnat Clos des Goisses. Never heard of it? Clos des Goisses has always been an insider’s fave—as opposed to the kind of Champagne a Russian oligarch would order to impress his young date. Raj felt it was basically a red wine in character. Carla Rzeszewski, whose dark hair was frosted with white highlights that night, said, “This wine makes me want to flip the table over it’s so beautiful.” (That’s my kind of wine note, though my thought was to leave the table upright and ravish someone on top of it.) Keri Levens of Aquavit said she loved the “sexy roasted-pineapple notes. I just can’t stop drinking this.” We also loved the next one, the Billecart-Salmon Clos St. Hilaire, a single-vineyard, 100 percent Pinot Noir Champers that was very powerful, rich, and complete—though it didn’t inspire any acrobatic feats. Bernie, who provided a steady note of decorum, said it was “like a great Burgundy.” (This was a theme—when the soms really love a Champagne, they always compare it to a great still wine.) Raj said it was one of the greatest he’d ever had. The 1996 Krug, often heralded as the wine of the vintage, was searingly tart and acidic. John said he’d had a similar bottle in the past month, with Raj, so caveat emptor. (The 1995 we threw in for comparison was terrific.) If it develops like the 1990 and the 1988, all will be well in the end.

The final flight was composed of rosés. Foolishly, someone had decided to pour the Dom Pérignon first, which was hardly fair because it was so regal, pure and precise and dense, that it was an almost impossible act to follow. Incredibly young and tight, though. By contrast, the Dom Ruinart, provided by Jerusha, was very showy and friendly, as was the Comtes de Champagne rosé, but both ultimately seemed a little floozy compared with the DP.

I asked everyone to rank their top three wines, and the Clos des Goisses was the clear winner. Damon Wise, the Monkey Bar’s new head chef, claimed to be a wine novice but ranked it number one, as did five of the sommeliers, including Shin Tseng of Lupa, the least voluble member of a fairly noisy group. The Cuvée Sir Winston Churchill ranked just slightly ahead of the Bollinger Grande Année and the Billecart-Salmon Clos St. Hilaire. Two of the soms chose the DP rosé as their champion, while Belinda broke ranks by choosing the Cristal as number one.

We were blown away by many of these 1996s and disappointed in a few. Of course, bottle variation and cork problems are facts of the wine lover’s life. Bernie considered the results reflective of a “very good but not great year.” John thought the 1996s lived up to their billing, with “firm structure, complexity, and great longevity.” Richard Geoffroy, the winemaker of Dom Pérignon, told me later that it was “a puzzling vintage, made of the winds” (September winds dehydrated some later-picked grapes). He thinks some Pinot-based wines may disappoint in the long run.

I’d like to repeat this tasting a few years down the road. Two things we all agreed on: that many of these wines were truly great and are just barely coming into their maturity; and that mature-vintage Champagne is a treat worthy of a much wider audience. Well, at least most of us agreed on this—Raj at one point suggesting that we keep the secret to ourselves.

When Frédéric Engerer was a university student in Paris, he would drive once a month to Burgundy. “For a young man in his twenties, Burgundy was less intimidating,” he told me, “and you can get appointments more easily.” Bordeaux, with its grand châteaus and wealthy absentee owners, is much more formal and daunting. The first time Engerer ever set foot on the hallowed ground of Bordeaux’s first-growth Château Latour was after François Pinault had offered him the job of managing the place. “Latour had always been a mystical estate for me, but I honestly didn’t dare ask for an appointment at Latour in those days.”

The appointment of Engerer to run this fabled domaine caused almost as much comment as Pinault’s purchase of the property in 1993. One of Europe’s most successful and wealthy businessmen, he acquired Latour from Allied Lyons. At the time he was hired, Engerer was working as a management consultant in Paris, after a previous stint in advertising; the Bordelais were understandably baffled by the appointment, which had been recommended by Pinault’s son François-Henri, who’d gone to university with Engerer, who, in fact, grew up in a family of wine merchants from the Languedoc Roussillon and spent his summers working in his grandfather’s cellar. Even as his business career flourished, most of his free time revolved around his love of wine. He visited Burgundy on weekends and opened a wine bar in Paris. Getting the call from Pinault was basically the equivalent of an aspiring rapper getting tapped to record a track with Jay-Z. Latour is, by anyone’s reckoning, one of the greatest domaines on the planet.