The Juice (3 page)

What makes Condrieu irresistible to some of us is its heady aroma and flavors, both of which suggest peaches and apricots and honeysuckle, as well as its rich, viscous texture. The best smell as if they will be sweet, and even start out tasting that way, but finish
dry. They are full-bodied, voluptuous whites that stop just short of being floozy. Viognier is low in acid, and if it gets too ripe, it will remind you of the syrup at the bottom of canned fruit salad. In Condrieu, the climate and the soils, not to mention generations of experience, usually seem to keep Viognier from putting on the red light. But there will always be a hint of decadence, something fin de siècle and Oscar Wildeish, about it.

In the past two decades Condrieu fans have planted Viognier around the world, from the Languedoc to Australia, with decidedly mixed results. In California’s central coast, pioneers like John Alban and Calera’s Josh Jensen made some promising examples; more recently, Greg Brewer has produced racy Viogniers at Melville in the Santa Rita Hills appellation. Morgan Clendenen, who looks in person like a cross between Jodie Foster and Kate Hudson, grew up in rural North Carolina, where her father had a bottled-springwater company. “My dad would set up water tastings. I became attuned to slight variations in flavors and tastes.” When she got a job with a local wine importer, she noticed that the Calera Viognier always sold out in advance, and while she never got to taste it, she was intrigued. Moving west to pursue her interest in wine, she spent eighteen months at Sinskey Vineyards in Napa, where she met Jim Clendenen. For an aspiring winemaker, marrying such an icon was a mixed blessing. She needed to find her own niche. When the owner of the Sanford and Benedict Vineyard asked Jim if he had any interest in a batch of Viognier, “Jim said no, but I kicked him under the table,” she says. “I was interested.” Thus was her Cold Heaven winery born.

“I loved Condrieu but was less than impressed with most of the California Viogniers that started appearing in the nineties. In Condrieu it makes this elegant noble wine, but here in California it was sweet and cloying.” In fact, most Golden State microclimates are probably too hot for Viognier, but Clendenen believed that parts of the central coast, with its transverse valleys that funnel
cool Pacific air into the interior, could prove congenial. Cool heaven, so to speak. (The winery is actually named after a Yeats poem.) After stumbling on the grapes from Sanford and Benedict in 1996—no one could quite tell her when they were planted or by whom—she decided to plant more at the Le Bon Climat Vineyard in the Santa Ynez Valley in 1998. With her husband she traveled to Condrieu to taste Viognier at the source. She wanted to meet Yves Cuilleron, the rising star of the appellation, but he was away when she first visited, and she subsequently ran into him in her own backyard at the Hospice du Rhône in Paso Robles, an annual event celebrating Rhône Valley wine varietals.

Cuilleron’s grandfather had founded the estate, although Yves had little interest in wine when he was growing up. “I thought I would be a mechanic,” he told me when I first visited him, as we walked the steep Chaillon vineyard looking down on the silvery Rhône River below. “And then, during my military service, I was sent to Alsace, where I became interested in food and wine.” In 1987 he took over the family domaine and helped spark the renaissance of the appellation, taking his place alongside the standard-bearers like Georges Vernay and André Perret.

It’s not hard to imagine him being charmed when he met the attractive young American at the Hospice du Rhône. More important, he liked her wine. She traveled again to Condrieu, and together they hatched an improbable plan—to make a Franco-American blend using grapes from both places. In 2002, Cuilleron shipped several barrels of Condrieu to Santa Ynez, where Clendenen blended them with juice from the Sanford and Benedict Vineyard. The wine, called Deux Cs, quickly became a cult item, fought over by sommeliers on both coasts of the United States. The som who first introduced me to it leaned in close and whispered the news, as if he were offering me something illegal.
Jim Clendenen’s wife … Cuilleron … sick juice
. (“Sick juice” is sommelier speak for “great wine.”) And indeed it tasted almost criminally decadent.

The duo launched a second wine, Domaine des Deux Mondes, using Sanford and Benedict grapes vinified to Cuilleron’s recipe. Ironically, the master of Condrieu favors a richer, deeper, almost New World style, using new oak barrels, which Clendenen normally eschews, and riper grapes. Her natural style is frankly more Old World; she picks early to maintain acidity and ferments in old barrels. The Clendenen-made, Cuilleron-styled Viognier is called Saints and Sinners—“because in France Yves would be considered a sinner for performing this kind of experiment,” she explains, “but he’s a saint to us Americans.” Whatever, the result tastes more sinful than saintly to me, and I mean that as a compliment. Cuilleron recommends trying his wines with Thai and other spicy Asian cuisines; Clendenen concurs, and also suggests Mexican. I’d add lobster to the list.

The Clendenen marriage ended a few years ago, and Morgan had to scramble to find a new home for her winery, formerly housed in the sprawling Au Bon Climat and Qupé quarters Jim shares with the Syrah star Bob Lindquist in the middle of the Bien Nacido Vineyards. But her partnership with Cuilleron continues. Her own Cold Heaven Viogniers are available from the winery, and Cuilleron’s Condrieus can be found, intermittently, in most major American markets. The largest producer of Condrieu, Guigal, is easier to find and inevitably excellent, as are the more exclusive bottlings of André Perret and Georges Vernay. Alban, Calera, and Melville are among the most consistent California producers. When you find any of the above, feel free to pop the cork right away. Not particularly benefiting from age, Viognier is a wine of instant gratification. It’s a wine for hedonists, for followers of Dionysus rather than of Apollo, for those who secretly like Gauguin more than Cézanne.

Oddly enough, the first time I encountered Pinot Grigio was at Elaine’s, the legendary Manhattan restaurant, back in the eighties, when the literary lions of the silver age were roaring and preening there. This is what Norman Mailer called his era; Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner ruled the golden age, and I was a representative, he informed me cheerfully, of the bronze age. Most of the writers who frequented the place drank scotch mixed with testosterone. Mailer, George Plimpton, William Styron, Peter Maas, Gay Talese, Kurt Vonnegut—these guys were the highball generation, and they seldom bothered with anything as wimpy as white wine. Nevertheless, women were usually present, and I recall a lot of Santa Margherita Pinot Grigio on the tables. Not being much of a scotch fan, I drank gallons of it myself, though I tried not to do so when Mailer was watching. Many others, apparently, were doing the same.

Santa Margherita Pinot Grigio is one of the great marketing success stories of modern times, the reason that Pinot Grigio is virtually a brand name, the second-most-requested wine by the glass in American restaurants. It was pretty much unknown in the United States when Tony Terlato, a young importer, went to Italy in 1979 in search of the next great white varietal. The story goes that at a hotel in Milan he was charmed by a glass of something called Pinot Grigio and promptly drove to Alto Adige, in northeastern Italy, to find it. “Upon arriving,” according to the Terlato Wines Web site, “Tony sat down at a small restaurant in a local inn and ordered 18 bottles of Pinot Grigio off of the wine list.”
The winner was called Santa Margherita. He promptly set off to visit the winery and secure the rights to import the wine. Thirty years later, Santa Margherita annually exports 600,000 cases to the States, selling at around $30 a bottle retail, while brands like Cavit and Ecco Domani have taken advantage of demand with lower-priced wines. The Australian wine giant Yellow Tail is piling on with its own version. PG has become such a celebrity it has impersonators; according to one industry insider, the price of these grapes in Italy has soared to the point that much of what gets sold as Pinot Grigio is in fact composed of cheaper white grapes like Chardonnay and Garganega.

It’s doubtful whether PG would have become famous if it had been called Gray Pinot. The grape originated in France—where it’s called Pinot Gris—as a mutation of Pinot Noir, but it never got much recognition under that name. Still, the variety does well elsewhere, and it’s interesting that some New World producers call their wines Pinot Gris while others, like Steve Clifton of Palmina, use the Italian moniker. And weirdly enough, in Alsace, where it reaches perhaps its greatest heights, it’s sometimes called Tokay. Go figure.

In Oregon, where it has become something of a specialty, most producers use the French name. It was introduced here by the same man who brought Pinot Noir to the Willamette Valley, David Lett of Eyrie Vineyards, and acreage has increased steadily over the years. At its best Oregon Pinot Gris tastes like ripe pears, with smoky highlights. Some makers barrel ferment the grapes, like their counterparts in Alsace, which results in a slightly richer wine than is typical in Italy. “It has a unique spicy style that goes well with Asian and fusion cuisine,” says Mark Vlossak of St. Innocent Winery, in Salem, who makes one of the real standouts. Initially, he emulated the Italian model, but after visiting Alsace, he moved toward that region’s richer style.

In eastern Long Island, where the climate is similar to that of
Friuli, the source of the best Italian examples, Christopher Tracy of Channing Daughters uses the name Pinot Grigio. He fell in love with the crisp Friulian versions and thinks the grape deserves more respect. “Done with care with moderate to low yields, it can be amazing.” He loves the “oilier and weightier” Alsatians but feels his climate is better suited to the style of northeast Italy. “The flavor profile with luck has that elusive minerality. And also a white-flower quality and a tree-fruit character.” Tracy makes a crisp, stony tank-fermented version and also a Ramato style, fermented with the skins, which can vary in color from purple to gray. This was the traditional method in Friuli for many centuries. Ramato, which means “copper” in Italian, describes the color of the finished wine, which is much richer than the white versions. “The majority of the flavor compounds are in the first six or seven layers of cells in the skins, and as a result the Ramato is more intensively flavored.” In fact it’s a very intense, rich dry wine that behaves more like a red than a white, and it does well with anything barbecued and is also great with a cheese plate.

Pinot Grigio found a niche in part because it’s more versatile and less assertive than oaky Chardonnay. But popularity comes at a price. (Just ask the members of Coldplay.) Most serious wine drinkers shun PG the way they once shunned Soave, and not entirely without reason. One should never underestimate the power of snobbery, but the fact is, 99 percent of what’s called Pinot Grigio from Italy is dilute and flavor challenged, a refreshing, lemonade-like food lubricant and buzz-delivery system.

Like many of my peers, I turned my back on Pinot Grigio early in the nineties and remained slightly embarrassed about my early enthusiasm, much as I did about my earlier reverence for the music of the Monkees. PG seemed like the vinous equivalent of the novels of Paulo Coelho. As its popularity grew and it was planted all over Italy, far beyond its natural home in the northeast, its identity became rather nebulous. Then, about ten years ago, I visited
Friuli, and I drank some very good, in fact some really excellent, Pinot Grigio, and then wondered if a reconsideration was called for. After all, PG is a mutation of Pinot Noir, universally acknowledged to be one of the greatest grapes on the planet.

In Friuli, I had really stunning examples from Lis Neris and Vie di Romans, but of course we all know the syndrome of the little country wine that tastes unbelievably great in context, when one is on vacation, surrounded by scenic ruins and charming rustics. But a few years ago I dined at Gramercy Tavern with Alois Lageder, a fifth-generation winemaker from the Alto Adige region, and I was highly impressed by his Pinot Grigios, notably a single-vineyard bottling called Benefizium Porer. More recently on a visit to the Breslin Bar, a fashionable and calorific Manhattan hot spot, I encountered a Pinot Grigio that blew my mind and encouraged me to reopen the question, can PG possibly be serious? The wine was a 2007 Pinot Grigio from Movia, a winery founded a year before Lageder’s in 1823, adjacent to some of the best vineyards of Friuli, just across the border in Slovenia.

I had met Aleš Kristančič, Movia’s winemaker and proprietor, in Friuli and again in New York, and he impressed me as one of the most energetic, not to say manic, characters of my acquaintance. In my notes from that first encounter, I quote him as saying: “We are solar men. Our power is not money. We can find solar energy in a dark place.” I believe he was speaking about marshaling the sun’s energy in the dark recesses of a wine cellar, but who the hell knows. He also makes up a lot of words. At any rate, his wines are incredibly expressive and singular, and already, in his mid-forties, he’s legendary. Like almost everything about Aleš, his Pinot Grigio is larger than life, rich and concentrated with a host of exotic fruit and mineral flavors. Was this a one-off, or was it possible that real men could drink Pinot Grigio again? I started buying and tasting as many PGs as I could find, subjecting myself to the derision of sommeliers and wine store clerks.

I consulted Henry Davar, the wine director at the Manhattan restaurant Del Posto, who helped me to organize a tasting. Davar was enthusiastic about this project, though he informed me, somewhat ominously, “We don’t serve PG by the glass. We don’t want our guests to order something just by default.” We stuck mostly to bottles from northeast Italy, to see if we could find regional as well as varietal characteristics. And I’m sorry to say we had more misses than hits, although the latter gave us hope and a few wines to put into rotation on our drinking cards. We were hard-pressed to find any flavor at all in the 2009 Santa Margherita, maybe the merest hint of lemon drop? But flavor abounded in the 2009 Palmina, the winemaker Steve Clifton’s Cali-Itali project. Or is that Itali-Cali? Whichever—he grows Italian varietals in Santa Barbara, and his Pinot Grigio is really impressive, especially at $20 a bottle.