CHOW: Tasting Notes

Cold, Heartless, Sensational Winemaker

Thu, 15 May 2008 15:25:00 -0700

Neil Robb doesn’t like the word “artisan.” Neither does he like to talk about winemaking in terms of love, either. Or art. Or mystery.

“I’m a tradesman,” he says, in a way meant to dismiss hype. “I’m just a professional winemaker, and that’s all. It’s not about passion. It’s about making the absolute best wine I can. People don’t want to hear that. They think I’m a cold, heartless bastard, and I am a cold, heartless bastard when I make wine.”

Small and compact of build, with an intensely ruddy complexion, Robb is being modest; he’s apparently been making sensationally delicious wines since he first opened his Redbank Winery, in Victoria, Australia, in the early 1970s. I haven’t tasted his past vintages, but his current releases impress me a great deal. More importantly, though, I love his way of talking and his no-BS lack of pretension.

Robb grew up in the Australian wine industry, following around a viticulturist father. The moment of truth came when he was in his early twenties. “I had no money and a pregnant wife, so I did the only intelligent thing I could do: I resigned from my job. I was pretty much unemployable, anyway. I was too angry,” he says. “Decided to go out on my own, borrowed some money to buy property.”

The land he bought, in the Australian Pyrenees region, was largely overgrown with red ironbark eucalyptus trees. “Hard as hell that wood, ruin all your tools,” Robb tells me. He knows what he’s talking about, too; he built himself a house with that wood. He also built himself a winery, planting his first vines in 1973. He’s got 45 acres of grapes now, and he produces 8,000 cases a year, both for an export label he calls Hundred Tree Hill, and for the 1,000 annual cases of a bottling called Sally’s Paddock. Named for his wife, it’s a single four-acre block where he dry-farms the entire blend of Shiraz, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Merlot.

I ask about the joys of his life. “Wake up in the morning and I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he tells me. “I do what I feel like. It’s a pretty free life.”

And then we begin to drink.

2005 Hundred Tree Hill Chardonnay, Redbank Winery
Grapes: 100 percent Chardonnay
Aging: 40 percent of it spends four months in 1- to 2-year-old French oak, so the oak flavor is very subtle, strictly background.
Alcohol: NA
Price: $24.99 online
My Tasting Notes: I thought this was very balanced and accomplished, a take-me-home-and-love-me kind of wine.

2004 Hundred Tree Hill Cabernet
Grapes: Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc
Aging: NA
Alcohol: NA
Price: $24.99 online
My Tasting Notes: This one had a big, herbaceous nose, and when I asked Neil about it, and if that came from the Cab Franc in the blend, he said something funny. “Yeah, I used to use the term forest floor, until I tasted a forest floor,” he said. “I find a lot black cherry—sour cherry—character in this wine. There’s thyme in here, spice. It’s fully mature fruit as opposed to ripe fruit.”

2005 Sally’s Paddock
Grapes: Robb reckoned it was 35–40 percent Cabernet Sauvignon, 35–40 percent Shiraz, 15 percent Cabernet Franc, 5 percent Merlot, and some Malbec.
Aging: NA
Alcohol: NA
Price: AUS$49.99 online
My Tasting Notes: I liked this wine so much it made me want to shake the guy’s hand, so I did. It’s flat-out terrific, mouth-filling and complex and full of character, but also very specific. Not at all a big, generic international red.

A Place for Wine

Mon, 12 May 2008 15:49:00 -0700

I dropped by the San Francisco Wine Center the other day—happened to be in the neighborhood, around the block from the great wine shop K&L, near the Giants’ stadium. I parked by a desperate and destitute crowd outside the St. Vincent de Paul Society—madmen, loners, abused orphans, all crazy in that alternate America—and then I jogged across a wide and sunbaked street and walked up a block of narrow sidewalks and fast traffic and odd little quasi-industrial businesses. Not a boutique shopping strip, by any means; just the hardscrabble backside of San Francisco’s downtown, a place for mechanics and porn shops and printing presses, except that our world is changing and even this real estate is still priceless and so it’s all in flux, all growing, evolving, hemmed in by new live-work lofts and speculative dreams of the still-more-glamorous San Francisco to come.

Nothing fancy on the outside: just a sign, a loading dock, an office. But inside, the San Francisco Wine Center is somebody’s dream made real, a testament to the power of capital, and to our changing economy. It’s a friendly, low-key self-storage facility for wine—but with wine pick-up-and-delivery service, so you don’t have to drive down there all the time, and a line of wines for sale, and a schedule of food-and-wine events. This place has been built to encourage community and social life, with a couple of nice lounges you can rent.

The hope, apparently, is that you’ll get yourself a little (or big) locker, to ensure that your collection doesn’t spoil in the warmth of your closet back home, and then you’ll drop by so regularly in pursuit of your bottles that you’ll meet other collectors in the corridors, and perhaps pop a few corks and share memories and discuss vintages and varietals and the like. In other words, you’ll make friends through a shared interest in wine. It’s nicely done, all of it, and if I lived nearby and didn’t have a cool basement, I would very seriously consider joining up; perhaps I’d find someone to share a locker with, to bring down the price.

But it’s also provocative, because of the courage it took to build: two entrepreneurs (Brian McGonigle, Paolo Mancini), with a long background in wine, looking around at the explosion of wine-storage facilities and wine-inventory software, and deciding there’s another way these businesses can work, another need nobody has filled. A trend, you might say, that isn’t yet trendy. And so they bet the farm, and they work hard in the way of young men building a life, and they make it a reality, and then they wait to see what happens. Takes guts.

Selling Wine, Writing About Wine

Fri, 09 May 2008 15:33:00 -0700

If you cruise wine websites much, or look at wine books on Amazon, you’ve probably noticed one or more lists of must-read wine books. You’ve probably also noticed how very short these lists are. What’s in even shorter supply, within those lists, is books that are truly worth reading—for their literary value, I mean, not just for their informative value. For some reason, wine does not inspire great books of literary nonfiction at anything like the pace and regularity of food. Adventures on the Wine Route, by Kermit Lynch, is a perennial presence on these lists, and I’ve written before about how curious a document I find it to be—starting with but by no means limited to the fact that it includes no adventures and no wine route. It is, rather, a fairly random collection of highly opinionated reminiscences from Lynch’s years as a wine importer. But it’s a terrific read nonetheless, and it’s a terrific read because Lynch has an authentic literary gift: He can write truly accomplished sentences, and his physical descriptions of places and people are first rate. It’s also a terrific read because Lynch’s writing is much like the wines he loves: utterly idiosyncratic.

For this reason, I picked up another commonplace Lynch title on lists of wine books, Inspiring Thirst. At one level, this book is an act of almost breathtaking vanity: Page after page includes nothing more interesting than Lynch’s little bottle-by-bottle write-ups from years past. He’s a good writer, but I can’t imagine anybody capable of making bottle write-ups work as a literary form, or at least not anybody short of an early-20th-century modernist in the Gertrude Stein or James Joyce mode. At another level, this book is absolutely worth having, and here’s why: Peppered among the arcana lie odd essays and rants and raves that show a great wine-loving mind thinking aloud, over many decades. The very best of these concern a man I wish I had known: Richard Olney. There are several essays about Olney here, including one by the great novelist Jim Harrison, whom I consider the greatest living food writer (by a very long country mile), and one by Lulu Peyraud. But others are simple musings on the loneliness of dining alone, and first-rate evocations of small, curious villages.

In sum, a book absolutely worth owning and reading, but not to be approached without an understanding of what it is: far closer to the peculiar notes and scrapbooks of a brilliant oenophile than a coherent work, and perhaps more interesting for that reason.

Over the Hill

Wed, 07 May 2008 15:40:00 -0700

The first true wine collector I knew was my father’s best friend, Denis. He had been to France many times as a young man—back in the 1960s, when both the currency markets and the adjusted prices of wine were profoundly different. French wine was, in those days, relatively cheap; Denis began buying by the case, stashing his collection in the basement of another friend of his and my father’s.

I was always aware of this collection, even in high school, because I knew the son of the man with the basement. We were pals, and he was always joking about sneaking down and stealing a bottle of Denis’s French wine, for us to get drunk. In truth, I can’t remember if he ever did. If so, it can’t have been often.

Anyway, that was ages ago—20-plus years. And just recently, I overheard Denis lamenting that he’d held onto some of those wines far too long, that many were over the hill. His great love had always been grand cru Chablis—at some point in my 20s, I tasted some with him and got my first sense of the word steely as it pertains to wine. But his Chablis, he said, had begun to fall apart. To make matters worse, in his opinion, Chablis is no longer made in that old steely style.

“Well, don’t pour it out,” I told him. “Give the stuff to me and I’ll make vinegar with it and give it back to you. You can make the salad dressing of a lifetime.” I keep vinegar crocks of both white and red wine, and I told him how it worked.

Denis takes notes in daily conversation, writing down small thoughts he wants not to forget; pulling out his little paper pad and pencil, he scrawled a reminder to himself.

A few weeks later, while I was visiting my parents, my father said that Denis had left something for me.

It was a big paper grocery bag holding two bottles of grand cru Chablis from the 1980s, two Sauternes from the same period, and a Mouton Rothschild red Bordeaux from 1970 with a Chagall painting on the label. Curiously, the ullage—that little air gap below the cork—looked normal on every bottle. I’m not an expert in the aging of wine, but I have come to understand that this can be a promising sign. For that reason, I decided to open the bottles with company and let them breathe and taste them before I submitted them to the vinegar crock.

Last night was the big moment, as I invited two of my best friends over for our semiregular “meat night,” a gathering in which I make lots of steak, and we eat it. In my next post, I’ll tell you what happened.

Napa's Lush Pregnancy

Mon, 05 May 2008 15:28:00 -0700

I’ve been posting these Napa Valley photographs—part of an upcoming show by Bruce Fleming, to run this summer at Mumm Napa—in part because my own Napa season begins soon. My wife’s parents spend their summer weekends in the valley, and we often join them. Our girls love swimming in a nearby pool, and the baking heat is a great break from San Francisco’s wind and fog. I like this particular photograph—it’s called Green Valley Summer Vines—for the sense of lush pregnancy: a vintage well on its way, deep into its growing season, but not yet nearing the anxious time of harvest.

Soaring Expectations

Fri, 02 May 2008 16:17:00 -0700

One of the great pleasures of writing about wine is opening a bottle without expectation, with no real advance understanding of the winery, and being knocked out. I had that experience the other night with a bottle of the 2006 Freeman Russian River Valley Pinot Noir. This is not a cheap wine—$44 a bottle—and I got it as a sample, or I wouldn’t have popped it for an impromptu family meal with my wife and kids. But I did, interested in checking it out, figuring it might go nicely with a simple chicken dish I’d made. I was so thrilled by what was in my glass that I got way too drunk. That’s what great wine does to me: makes me drink and drink and drink, with every sip taking me further into elation about the flavors, and then I’m hammered. (Yeah, right, the wine made me do it …)

Anyway, I got a chance to have dinner last night with Ken Freeman himself. We met at Delfina, a San Francisco restaurant that makes me happy for two reasons: First, it’s terrific; and second, my wife and I met and fell in love in that neighborhood, at about the time Delfina opened. So it’s a sentimental thing.

Ken is a kind, reserved fellow; I very much enjoyed his company and his story, about how he and his wife had worked international business jobs, started drinking and enjoying Burgundy, relocated to the Bay Area, discovered Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir and its beautiful, restrained elegance, and set out to buy a small winery of their own.

While we talked, he opened their Sonoma Coast bottling from their very first vintage, 2002—the one called Akiko’s Cuvée, after his wife, who helps with the winemaking. (“I think these wines embody my wife; it’s a woman’s touch,” he said.) She must be something, because the wine was astonishingly beautiful, with the most soft and pure fruit, and delicate tannins integrated perfectly. These are such good food wines it’s ridiculous.

Good wine, of course, warms up a conversation. Ken told me about how his wife hailed from 20 generations of Japanese women who have never worked, making her 80-hour weeks at the winery a big change. Their property, when they bought it, had a run-down house, six acres, and an old defunct winery with a 2,000-case permit. They were able to rent out part of their winery—and therefore part of their permit—to Kosta Browne, maker of another beautiful Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir. The Freemans didn’t have any vines at the time, so they sourced from tiny vineyards around the town of Occidental, which is awfully close to my vision of paradise (and looks not at all like wine country, by the way). I remember one detail in particular: The Freemans have finally bought their own vineyard land and are planting 14 acres of it and putting the other 16—which are all redwood forest—into the Sonoma Land Trust. As Ken told me about this, he mentioned that anywhere you’ve got redwoods, you can grow good wine—redwood terroir, in essence, is Pinot Noir terroir. I love that notion, and I love it in a sentimental way.

What I remember most, of course, is the wine itself, both the bottle I opened at home (described below) and the one that kept broadening and opening as our meal went on.

2006 Freeman Russian River Valley Pinot Noir
Grapes: 100 percent Pinot Noir
Wood: 10 months in 100 percent French oak—34 percent new, 25 percent one year old, 41 percent two- and three-year-old barrels
Alcohol: 14.2 percent
Price: $44
My Tasting Notes: These wines are such an unusual experience, as California wines go. They’re not at all big, and they don’t hit your mouth hard at the start. This one in particular opens like a cool flower on the tongue, revealing blue and red fruit so clear and balanced it’s hypnotic.

Cooking and Drinking Through Southern Italy

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 15:32:00 -0700

A16, the terrific southern Italian restaurant in San Francisco’s Marina District, is about to publish its first cookbook, called A16: Food + Wine ($35), and my advance copy looks terrific, especially for wine-lovers. There’s so much noise these days about wine pairing—Gewürztraminer with Asian food, say, or Champagne with pizza—that a core principle occasionally gets lost in the shuffle. I’m talking about the fact that wines and cuisines grow up together, and that pairing regional cuisine with its local wine isn’t just an act of cultural fidelity; it’s also a good way to get the flavors right. Drink a Provençal rosé with garlic-intensive aioli, and you’ll see exactly what I mean.

Buy this book, which is billed as “A cookbook and wine guide celebrating the traditions of southern Italy, from the country’s top southern Italian restaurant,” and you’ll get a few dozen ways to experience the same thing. That’s because wines from southern Italy have so completely taken over A16’s wine list as to make the place a rare kind of specialized wine bar. I’ve never been in a restaurant where I recognized so few varietals, and could order so many by the glass. The food is largely from the same part of the world, so every meal has the potential to be an adventure.

Best of all, the book—which includes delectable-looking recipes for tuna conserva four ways; octopus and ceci bean zuppa with escarole, garlic, and chiles; and roasted sardines with breadcrumbs, green garlic, and mint—appears to have been a genuine labor of love, as you can feel in these opening lines: “A glass of crisp Bombino Bianco paired with a slice of creamy mozzarella burrata. Ruby-red Nero d’Avola served with a blistered pizza margherita. Juicy Casavecchia beside a plate of roasted or grilled rabbit … we don’t just offer these wines to our guests for the sake of discovery, though; the wines simply belong with the gutsy country cooking of Campania.”

Picturing Carneros

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:47:00 -0700

I drank far, far too much last night—a 2005 Schramsberg blanc de blancs, a 2005 Super Tuscan that shall remain nameless (because it was extremely expensive and terrible), and an after-dinner sip or three or five of Averna, the Italian liquor made with bitter herbs.

I’m suffering for it, though not too much; it was a wonderful night, and one I’ll describe in detail in my next post, along with descriptions of the wines and a plan that hatched at the night’s end for buying a whole pig from a local farmer.

In the meantime, though, here’s another image from the Bruce Fleming collection “Napa Valley Paradise,” to be shown this summer at Mumm Napa, in Rutherford (I’ve written about it a bit already). This particular image is called Carneros Mustard Field, and what captures me is how very Carneros the photograph is. I like the mustard, too—I like how fully bloomed it is, showing this part of California in the full flush of spring, when the rains have been followed by hot sun and the wild mustard is tall and thick, but before the howling April winds have turned it all bone dry again. The image is so representative of Carneros, though, a swath of vineyards arcing over the low southerly toe of the Mayacamas Range, which separates Napa and Sonoma. What makes the terroir special is the exposure it gets to marine breezes, and you feel it everywhere, when you visit: sea winds coming across the coastal range from the Pacific, local cold air off the northern reaches of the San Francisco Bay. The views are usually wonderful, and unusual—vast wetlands, a few highways, distant mountains. I’ve always liked Carneros wines, and the landscape pleases me even more.

Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Noir, and Zinfandel

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 15:17:00 -0700

If you cook repeatedly from the same cookbooks, the way I do, checking off recipes as you work your way through, you gradually come to feel the chef’s personality in his or her recipes. Paul Bertolli’s Chez Panisse Cooking, for example, expresses a kind of musky, earthy, poetic sensuality, rooted in the soil; Thomas Keller’s Bouchon, by contrast, carries the man’s fiercely perfectionist classicism, his reverence for high culture, and his commitment to excellence. And then there’s the late, great Richard Olney, and his Simple French Food. It’s not an easy book to engage with: There are no pictures, and recipes like larded pork liver in aspic don’t really entice the contemporary palate. But I’m finally far enough inside that I’m acquiring a feel for a culture, and for Olney’s very personal relationship to that culture. The mood is quietly delicious, never ostentatious: family meals in a French-comfort-food style, and yet devastatingly tasty. Many of them carry lessons about spontaneity and thrift, too—like Olney’s “bread omelet.” It’s hard to imagine anything sounding more humble, working less hard to sell itself. But once you’ve made it, you realize that it’s a demonstration of how two eggs, a big chunk of dried-out old bread, and a little cheese, cream, and butter can be transformed into a divine light meal for two.

Wines, by necessity, have to carry the same mood in order to pair, so last night I tried an experiment, opening three very different ones to go with a family meal of rolled chicken breasts, turnip gratin, and garlicky salad. The breasts, incidentally, were another Olney miracle: so not fancy, so not dazzling on the face of it. Just a couple of flattened breasts marinated for an hour in herbs and oil and lemon juice, and then rolled up, pinned closed, and grilled. And the turnip gratin: What’s more homely than that? And yet it was so divine that even my little girls ate their fill.

Anyway, pour yourself three small glasses, rather than one, and taste around between bites, and you learn something. Here’s what:

2007 Hess Allomi Vineyard Sauvignon Blanc
Grapes: 100 percent Sauvignon Blanc
Wood: 10 percent new French oak (which isn’t much, right? Just a touch of oak flavor?)
Alcohol: 14.5 percent (whoa!)
Price: $18
Other Info I Like Knowing: These grapes were harvested from a relatively high-altitude Napa vineyard, at 770 to 950 feet, and were raised according to the Wine Institute’s Code of Sustainable Winegrowing Practices. The former leads me to wonder if the cooler air at higher altitudes might have something to do with the wine’s nice acidity, and with a bright, crisp quality I don’t personally associate with Napa Sauvignon Blanc. The latter just makes me feel good.
My Tasting Notes: This was my wife’s preferred wine with the chicken mentioned above; it’s a very, very good Sauvignon Blanc, with quite a combination of interesting fruit and firm acid.

Wingnut Zinfandel
Grapes: 100 percent Zinfandel
Wood: “That’s not something we talk about in the tasting notes,” I was told Alcohol: 13.9 percent (downright restrained by the standards of hot-weather California Zin)
Price: $12.99
Other Things I Like Knowing: The chief winemaker on this bottling was Joel Gott, of Joel Gott Wines. He’s a partner in Three Thieves, and he’s got a gift for sourcing good grapes and making quality wines at a good price. This wine reflects that. Also, this wine is essentially a branding experiment: The Wingnut label was the winning entry in a label contest run by the winery, and was created by a 23-year-old design student. It’s a pretty clever one, I think.
My Tasting Notes: A great wine at the price, with nice, soft fruit, mellow tannins, a plummy richness, and plenty of acid. It would go great with the usual Zinfandel foods, like barbecue, but it’s not a hot, monster red like some, and would therefore be more versatile and less likely to overpower food.

2006 Robert Skalli South of France Pinot Noir
Grapes: 100 percent Pinot Noir
Wood: N/A
Alcohol: N/A
Suggested Retail Price: $19.99
Other Things I Like Knowing: The grapes for this wine were grown on Corsica, as part of Skalli’s project of making new-world wines on old-world land (I wrote about the Skallis earlier this week). So instead of growing the old Corsican varietals—which he does also, through his Clos Poggiale AOC Corse line—he replants old Corsican vineyards with grapes he can sell in the Californian and Australian way, labeled according to one of the major international varietals.
My Tasting Notes: This was my favorite pairing with the chicken; it’s not a wildly complex wine, but it is restrained and balanced, verging on peaceful.

Châteauneuf-du-Pape, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Building of a Dynasty

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 12:49:00 -0700

I was in a rush that day, hurrying from work to a wine company dinner, tasting as many bottlings as I could before scooting home to read bedtime books with my daughters. Parking in front of a McDonald’s, on a dirty urban street in one of the few rough neighborhoods of San Francisco, I hurried down the windy sidewalk and into an unlikely wine-tasting venue: Yoshi’s, a Japanese restaurant and jazz club.

In a private room, Robert Skalli and his son David waited with their local publicity people. They’d already opened a number of bottles from the new Robert Skalli line of French wines aimed at the international market—eschewing the conventional French labeling regime, in other words, Skalli offers a “South of France Pinot Noir” and a “South of France Chardonnay.” Because “South of France” is not an official French winemaking region, Skalli has enormous latitude, including the freedom to bottle and label wines in the new-world varietal-focused way. He has even been converting old vineyard properties to this sort of modernized production—all while he acquires and preserves more traditional winemaking properties, like one in Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

But every person has a story; every gathering of humans has something curious hidden somewhere, behind somebody’s eyes. In this case, it came in answer to the simple question of how the Skalli family got into wine. I was talking to David Skalli when I asked this; David is a nice-looking Frenchman with dark hair and eyes and olive skin and the conventional outgoing charm of a successful financier, which he is. In fact, David doesn’t work for the family wineries; he runs his own mergers and acquisitions consulting group, helping with the purchase and sale of wine and spirits companies. But his answer began with one of those statements that no American can ever give you:

Well, you see, our name is really Cohen-Skalli, and the Cohenim were originally based in Andalusia, in the 15th century, but my family had to flee the Inquisition—we are Jewish—in 1490. So we moved to Sicily. That’s what Skalli is: It’s an old way of saying Sicily. So, really, we are the Cohenim of Sicily. But we only stayed there two generations and then moved in maybe 1530 or so to Morocco, because it was a Spanish-speaking colony at the time and we helped with other Sephardic families to develop trade between the Arabic and Christian worlds. We were mostly trading wheat in the 1800s when the French colonized Algeria in a war, and so we moved to Algeria and began trading wheat and wine to the French.

I want you to picture the room, though it will not add to David’s story: bland upscale corporate, with nervous wine-industry trade-mag editors and writers, the Skallis dressed like the international businessmen they are, the wines solid and accomplished, waiters bustling around. Dirty street outside, Japanese-food smells occasionally wafting in from the kitchen, the floor carpeted. But here’s why I want you to picture it: When we think thoughts like “Wine is a business,” we don’t often get positive feelings. That room expressed everything negative we feel instead, and yet David’s story rescued it for me. David’s story, which I’ll let him finish in a moment, reminded me of the ancient and very human aspect of the international wine trade, of the degree to which business is the business of mankind.

‘The French allowed Jews to own property in Algeria,’ David told me, ‘so by the end of the 19th century we owned property, and then, in the early 20th century, a French law allowed Algerian Jews to become French citizens. So we did. My great-grandfather also started vineyards in Algeria, along the border with Tunisia. And we also began selling wheat to the biggest pasta and cereals maker in France. In the 1950s, when they could not pay off their accounts, they gave us a share in the company. Then, in the 1960s, during the terrible wars between the Arabs and the Israelis, we left Algeria and bought vineyards in Corsica and Languedoc and eventually in Châteauneuf-du-Pape. By the 1980s we owned the pasta company 100 percent. Then, four years ago, a private equity group bought it from us, at a price we could not refuse.’

My own family history has nothing like this, and I found it impressive: the continuity, the will to survive and succeed, the building of a dynasty. The wine? Well, clearly it is something the Cohens of Sicily have traded in, back and forth across the Mediterranean, for a very long time.

Here is the bottle I liked the most:

2005 Maison Bouachon Châteauneuf-du-Pape
Grapes: 60 percent Grenache, 30 percent Syrah, 7 percent Mourvèdre, 3 percent other CDP varietals (like Counoise, Terret Noir, Muscardin, and Vaccarèse)
Aging: Their literature says this wine was aged in French oak barrels and in big casks for 12 months prior to blending, with an additional few months in bottle. They don’t get more specific.
Alcohol: 14 percent
Price: I couldn’t find a retail price for the 2005; the 2003 is $32.76 at WineZap.com
My Tasting Notes: I like the weird old-world eccentricity of Châteauneuf-du-Pape wines, and this one had a kind of truffle-tobacco-herbal aspect that I found interesting and pleasing.

Elegant Evening, Casual Picnic

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 16:29:00 -0700

I’ve been thinking about the pleasure of wine and the precise moments I’m most aware of it—not just the drinking moments, but also the passing instances of reflection. For example: the minute a recent dinner party ended and it was time to take out the garbage. The guests were gone, and most (though not all) of the wine bottles were bone dry and bound for the recycling bin. Stepping onto my dark front porch, in the cold San Francisco night, I felt this terrific wave of well-being. It was the contrast: from the bright light and warmth and close air of my dining room, with all its clatter and noise and aroma, to the fresh, cool darkness on the street. Somehow it isolated the satisfaction I’d found in eating and drinking with family and friends—a Corbières red, a Sonoma Coast Pinot—drawing a frame around the feeling so that I could see it more clearly, and see, also, the peaceful beauty of yet another clear night.

Here’s another one: Sunday afternoon in a heat wave, I made a picnic of a wild nettle frittata, sautéed black chanterelles, broccoli di ciccio sautéed with garlic and red peppers and then cooled and tossed with Parmesan, as a salad. Packing all that in a big bag, along with some plates and forks and a tablecloth and some strawberries, I drove L and our little girls a half mile away to a neighborhood park. The day was waning—the shadows long and the light pale gold—but the air was still warm, and we spread everything on the green grass. The girls—3 and 5 1/2—ran and ran and laughed and then came back to eat. I’d brought some box wine that I’d received as a sample, little single-serving deals. If ever there was a moment to drink it, I’d figured, this was the one. So that’s how it went: a good meal on a big lawn, a small drunk coming on, hour after hour with my family.

The elegant evening wines:

2004 Fort Ross Sea Slopes Reserve Pinot Noir
Grapes: 100 percent Pinot Noir
Wood: 23 months in French oak, half new
Alcohol: 14 percent
Also: Unfined, unfiltered
Price: $49 from the winery
My Tasting Notes: The main thing I have to say about this wine, despite the fact that it was absolutely gorgeous, is that it was a slow reveal. It was a little tight at first, quiet, not saying much; notably more beautiful an hour out; astonishing by the next evening, when I polished off a remaining half bottle. A contemplation wine—where you sit there holding the taste in your mouth, letting it light up your mind, and marveling at the complex pleasure wine can bring.

2004 Domaine de Fontsainte “Réserve La Demoiselle” Corbières
Grapes: 70 percent Carignane (100-year-old vines), 20 percent Grenache, 10 percent Mourvèdre
Wood: 12 months in French oak barrels
Alcohol: 13 percent
Price: $15.95 at the Kermit Lynch shop in Berkeley
My Tasting Notes: This is a pretty darn rustic and interesting wine. A lot going on, fruit and leather and musk, and I thought it had a curious herbal bitterness in the finish. It’s the kind of thing I like, because it’s so distinctive, and so not Californian. But harmless and soothing it is not.

The casual picnic wines:

Bandit Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay
Grapes: Who cares, right? They’re both straight-up California varietal wines, mostly the one on the label with a little blending.
Appellation: 100 percent California
Wood: You’ve got to be kidding
Alcohol: 13 percent for the Cabernet, 13 percent for the Chardonnay
Price: $6.99/$7.99 at many liquor stores
My Tasting Notes: The wine was unpretentious, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say it was delicious. I liked it. I liked the fruitiness, the acidity, and even the packaging. I liked also the ice cream we got afterward.

Smith-Madrone Cabernet with Steak

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 15:38:00 -0700

Stu Smith was 22 years old in 1970, the year he walked through a Douglas-fir forest that had been a vineyard back in the 1880s. Abandoned during Prohibition, the land was densely wooded, but Smith could see redwood grape stakes shoved over sideways by the two-foot trunks of trees. “I imagine a bird sat on the stake, pooped out the seed, and up popped a tree,” Stu told me, on the telephone. He said he had loggers cut out all the trees, and then he and his brother dug out the rocks and roots from the soil and burned back the stumps. This was all at a time when the American wine industry was a provincial one: “I don’t think there were 35 wineries,” Stu says. “It was much slower.”

Anyway, one thing led to another and Smith-Madrone has become a venerable name in California Cabernet, and Stu’s opinions have taken on the tone I hear from a lot of the good winemakers these days: “We frankly have been making wines to our taste ever since. We don’t really make wines for judges, and we don’t make wines for wine critics. We make wines we think are relatively classically structured and have elegance and balance and complexity. We think it’s our job to get the vintage into the glass of wine, to provide something unique. I like to say that terroir is like the foundation of a house—it’s the same every year—but vintage is the house you actually build on that structure, and in some years there’s very little change, but in others it’s as different as a Frank Gehry or a Queen Anne Victorian.”

Why do I care? Because I had a sample of his 2003 Cabernet Sauvignon recently, and I drank it alone—wife and girls out that night—with a pan-fried sirloin and a good magazine and a view of some glittering city lights in the darkness. And the wine brought me immense satisfaction: Every sip was a little journey, enriching and interesting and yet well balanced and not at all challenging. I thought it was fabulous.

Here’s Stu’s take on the 2003:

“Well, it’s unfined and unfiltered, it’s still evolving, it’s got a little Cab Franc, a little Merlot. ... It’s a big wine, an interesting complex wine, not excessively tannic. Some people think it’s excessively soft, but it gets people talking about the wine. It’s also a wine that gives people a lot of pleasure. It’s what I think a wine really should be: It makes a statement, it has character, and yet it’s not over the top. My brother liked it better than I did in the beginning; it’s a wine that’s really evolved in the last couple of years being in the bottle. It’s got a good future ahead of it; I think they’ll last 15 years or more.”

2003 Smith-Madrone Cabernet Sauvignon
Grapes: 82 percent Cabernet Sauvignon, 10 percent Merlot, 8 percent Cabernet Franc
Wood: 22 months in new American oak
Alcohol: 13.8 percent
Price: $40 from the winery
My Tasting Notes: I’ve given them above, more or less. It’s a deep and lovely wine, rich and interesting and balanced, and transporting if you’re in the right mood. Everything I want out of a Cabernet.

Bright Yellow Vineyards

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 15:40:00 -0700

Mustard Filled Vineyard—that’s the name of this image by Bruce Fleming, and it’s part of his show “Napa Valley Paradise,” to be shown at Mumm Napa in Rutherford this summer (and which I’ve written about in previous posts).

Wild mustard, to my mind, is one of the great symbols of early spring in Northern California. Surfers see it up and down the coast, when the big January rains give way to February sunshine, and the grasses green up strong and suddenly the hills light up yellow. Walking back from the water, refreshed by the cold and soothed by the surf, and certain again that life is not all work without play, one feels a giddy sense of good fortune. Wading through flowers colored like the sun, over grass the very color of life, under a blue sky, with the Pacific booming behind—it’s enough, finally, a more than adequate gift. And to see those same flowers surging up below the grapevines is to feel the wild earth amid the orderly crop rows, the degree to which the land is just the land, and not entirely a wine factory.

Romance, Rosé, and Roma

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:47:00 -0700

How’s this for a well-spent youth: Aaron Pott, the winegrower for Blackbird Vineyards, fell in love with wine at age 9, during a family trip to France; studied oenology at UC Davis as an undergraduate; and then got a master’s degree in viticulture from the Université de Bourgogne, in Dijon, France. And that was just the warmup. The good part came at age 25, when he landed the job of winemaker at Château Troplong Mondot, a grand cru classé in Saint-Émilion. I’m sure the work was wonderful, but what sounds even better is this part. He says: “I fell madly in love with the owner’s sister. There were three owners, really, siblings—two of them were the sisters who lived at the château. They hadn’t spoken in years, but they lived a meter apart.”

“Did you fall in love with the good one or the bad one?” I ask.

“The good one.”

Anyway, here’s the part I like most: The migrant fruit-pickers rolled through the countryside at harvest time in their beat-up old jalopies, towing trailers to live in. Pott remembers them as flamboyant characters, and he remembers most of all that French law required him to give them each a liter of wine for every day they worked in the fields. Because the wine was very valuable, Château Troplong Mondot gave the field hands the saignée wine—the first free-run juice colored up with the lees from the prior year (and one of the ways that rosé is made). “We’d hear them all night, playing their Gypsy guitar and singing until 6 a.m.,” Pott told me, “and then it was time to start picking again.”

Blackbird Vineyards hasn’t yet released its first rosé, but it will soon, and it’ll be lovely (based on my tasting, over dinner), and I’m told it will be far less expensive than the winery’s proprietary red wine. For what it’s worth, you can think of Blackbird’s red wines like this: Michael Polenske, a successful hedge fund manager and wine-lover, has created Blackbird by researching and buying first-class vineyard land in Napa, hiring first-class talent in Aaron Pott and winemaker Sarah Gott, and producing a wine that aims at the barely existent category of the “Cult Merlot.” The wines are not cheap—$79.95 from Calwine.com—but they are a whole lot less expensive than the Cabernet Sauvignons playing at the same level of seriousness, and holy smokes are they delicious.

The Fish, the Sauce, the Wine

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 15:30:00 -0700

One often hears it said that, when pairing wine with a mild fish, the sauce is a key consideration; if you’re preparing a strongly flavored sauce for the fish, the advice is usually that you should pair the sauce rather than the fish.

So it was, the other night, that I tried pairing two reds with a plate of skate wing over potatoes lyonnaise in a red-wine jus. The dish came from Thomas Keller’s Bouchon cookbook. I don’t use the book often, but I’m always, always impressed when I do. The recipes do tend toward hidden complexity: Just to get the required quarter cup of red-wine jus, you’ve got to reduce an entire bottle with aromatic vegetables and herbs; just to get the potatoes right, you’ll first make onion confit, which in turn means simmering onions for two hours.

Not that Keller expects anyone to live this way. His explanation of bistro food (or, rather, Bouchon food), makes perfect sense of all this by explaining that flavor enhancers such as onion confit and red-wine jus would simply be part of the restaurant’s pantry, always on hand. Reaching to grab them, therefore, would take only an instant but give the dish terrific power. And it’s true: The Bouchon recipes are powerfully flavored, but in a subtle and well-integrated way. It’s perfect dinner party fare, in fact, because it’s glitzy without the appearance of great effort, and immensely delicious without calling attention to curious ingredients or preparations.

Anyway, I made this dish for L on a weeknight, and made a point of not telling her what I was doing. This is a key part of my strategy, these days: If I make a big deal about a dish, or in any way imply that I think she’ll like it, I nearly guarantee a lukewarm response. Autonomy is hugely important to most human beings; it is especially important to both of us. If I feel L pushing me to accomplish a home-improvement project, I will unconsciously dig in my heels against it. She is the same way with food: If she feels pressured to like it, she won’t, or at least she won’t admit it. So I behaved no differently than I would’ve behaved while boiling plain dry pasta: Just whipping up a little dinner, no fuss at all. Then I slipped the plate in front of her and opened two wines—a Merlot and a Sangiovese—certain one would work.

“This is amazing,” L said, with her first bite. “Oh my God, this is so delicious.”

But the wine, the wine … neither red was quite right, and I was desperate to make the right pairing while the food was still warm.

“Try a complex white,” she said.

“Really?”

“Trust me.”

So I did, pulling out a Domaine Zind Humbrecht Pinot D’Alsace, and my goodness what a dream. The rest of the meal was pure reverie, and I had yet another small data point to add to my evolving sense of how to match food and wine.

Although the potatoes were indeed drizzled with a red-wine jus, the preponderance of flavor came from that sweet, unctuous onion confit. And the skate wings themselves had been pan-fried with a great deal of butter and lemon. The red-wine jus, therefore, added a kind of bass-note depth to an overall taste experience that was dominated by citrus, butter, and rich sweetness.

The Alsatian wine was perfect because it had just enough sweetness and viscosity to harmonize. But it also had the bright Alsatian acid to pick up the dish’s high notes. Of course, the best part of all was the satisfaction this gave my wife, and the hope I entertained that it might further lure her into my nightly food-and-wine celebrations.

2005 Domaine Zind Humbrecht Pinot D’Alsace
Grapes: I haven’t been able to find the exact blend, but it is probably Pinot Blanc, Chardonnay, and Auxerrois. As one Alsatian winemaker has put it, speaking to their wild range of blends and varietals, “When you listen to Mozart, you don’t ask what percentage of violin there is, or what percentage of oboe. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that they all play harmoniously together. If I can distinguish the varieties, then it’s no longer wine. Wine is music; wine is harmony.”
Wood: I have no idea
Alcohol: 14 percent
Price: About $21
My Tasting Notes: I think this wine is a bargain at its price, a beautiful synthesis of fresh fruit and smooth, racy acidity. A terrific food wine, especially where you don’t need something austere.

California's Do-Re-Mi

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:49:00 -0700

Here’s another image from Bruce Fleming’s “Napa Valley Paradise” show—which I wrote about earlier—and I’m struck this time by the aesthetic beauty of the composition, and by how deeply it captures the democratic side of California’s beauty. Looking at gated Malibu mansions or distant wine-country chalets, it’s easy to feel locked out by this most expensive of paradises. As the old song goes, “California is a Garden of Eden … but believe it or not, you won’t find it so hot, if you ain’t got the do-re-mi.”

But California has also always offered as much free public beauty as anywhere on Earth: from the grand public seashores to the high mountains. In fact, the very essence of the California experience, for many of us, is the unmediated encounter with the natural world. And to my mind, this image, titled Oak Tree and Lupine, captures the wine-country contribution to that picture: the pure, quiet beauty of the Coast Range and its warm valleys, where the landscape is far less grand and far more soothing, almost poetic. This is not the California of Big Sur or Yosemite, where the grandeur yanks you out of yourself into a confrontation with the awesome sublime. It is the California of domestic peace, naps in the grass, and a climate that always gives more than it takes.

Sémillon and Sheep Jokes

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 15:55:00 -0700

Peter Lehmann’s Sémillon has a curious and beautiful flavor profile: dry and pretty and grassy, but a little more fruity than the French versions.

“It’s all about the fruit, that wine,” he tells me. We are sitting at dinner together, at an Australian-inspired San Francisco restaurant called South, and we’re having a few laughs despite being there in our professional capacities. “It doesn’t see any oak at all, and you see that green cast? That’s a sign it’s been well handled. It’s not oxidized at all. It’s absolutely fresh, and it’s three years old! That’s the screw cap, too. Keeps the wine alive. It’s like biting into a fresh, green apple.”

The wine isn’t expensive—about 11 bucks—and Lehmann says it’s the biggest-selling Sémillon in Australia. “Although we’re getting killed by Sauvignon Blanc.” He says he can’t grow Sauvignon Blanc in the Barossa; it just has no character there.

Picking up the bottle, I read idly on the back label that I should expect aromas of lemon flower, honey, and lanolin. “What does lanolin smell like, anyway?” I ask. “Isn’t that something you find in hand lotions?”

“Ah, you know the smell,” he says, as if it were obvious. “It’s from sheep’s wool.”

I laugh out loud, loving the cultural gulf we’ve just revealed. I haven’t the vaguest idea what sheep’s wool smells like. “That’s really very funny,” I say. “There are very few Americans who have the slightest clue what lanolin smells like, and yet sheep are common enough in Australia that you can put it on a wine label and people will know what you’re talking about.”

“Ah yeah,” Lehmann says. “Aussies definitely know. And you tell a Kiwi it smells like lanolin and he’ll butter up. It’s an aphrodisiac over there.”

To be fair, my own sense of humor is every bit as coarse, and we have gotten to this pass in the conversation by covering quite a lot of wine, equal volumes of food, and a growing sense that we understand one another. So if you’re offended, blame me: I got us here.

But I do love when these staid winemaker meals go off the rails a little, venturing into vaguely offensive territory. It’s a sign that two actual human beings are meeting one another. Lehmann is an immensely appealing guy because he’s a hard-driving winemaking businessman from way back. His wines are a great value too—and not just this Sémillon, but also the big Barossa Shiraz bottlings for which he’s so well known.

2005 Peter Lehmann Barossa Sémillon
Grapes: 100 percent Sémillon
Wood: None
Alcohol: 11.5 percent (nice and light, huh?)
Price: $10 from the Hess Collection, which imports the wine
My Tasting Notes: Good value for a large-production wine, it’s balanced and crisp and refreshing. Good as a cocktail or with a light meal.

Sensory Symphony

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 15:07:00 -0700

At the home of a client, recently, I received a gift. It went like this: I’d dropped by for a work session, and we’d spent a productive hour at her kitchen table, when suddenly it was time for lunch.

“I have nothing but eggs,” she said.

“I love eggs,” I replied, knowing that from this particular client an egg would not just be an egg. She has a stupendous food sensibility, and buys only the finest of local, sustainably raised ingredients.

“You do like eggs?” she replied. “Hmm …” This pleased her. “I’m going to have to make you an egg in a spoon. And that means I have to build a fire.”

This woman has a fireplace in her California kitchen, a country-farmhouse-style fireplace at counter height, to allow for cooking. A cast iron Tuscan grill allows her to move food around, raise and lower it, and shuffle the coals. She clearly enjoys doing this, so she built a fire with oak logs.

When they’d burned down, she began poking and scraping with various fire tools, cobbling together a bed of embers. Then she fussed around in a drawer until she’d found a large copper spoon with a deep bowl and a very long handle—made, apparently, for just this purpose. She rubbed the inside of the spoon with olive oil, then cracked a beautiful little farm egg into it.

Sprinkling the egg with sea salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes, she carefully extended it deep into the fireplace, holding it just over the embers. Very quickly, the egg puffed up like a soufflé, and then she slipped it onto a piece of sourdough toast and set in on my plate.

While I wasn’t looking, she’d apparently also pulled together a salad of tiny arugula leaves from her own backyard garden, and tossed them in a garlicky vinaigrette with her own vinegar, made from odds and ends of white wine left over in various bottles.

“Eat, eat,” she said gently. “Don’t wait.”

So I did, bringing the egg to my mouth and catching the softest scent of oak and taste of smoke as I bit into the absolute best egg experience—one of the best food experiences, period—of my life. I took bites of those perfect, just-picked greens in between, and then noticed that she had poured me a glass of rosé. So I broke my no-wine-at-lunch rule and drank deep, and it all came together in one of those rare little sensory symphonies.

2006 Domaine de Fontsainte “Gris de Gris” Corbières Rosé
Grapes: 60 percent Grenache Noir and Grenache Gris, 15 percent Syrah, 10 percent Carignan, 10 percent Mourvèdre, 5 percent Cinsault
Wood: None
Alcohol: 12.5 percent (according to the label)
Price: $13 at Kermit Lynch
Detail Worth Passing Along: Kermit Lynch has been importing this wine for almost 30 years.
My Tasting Notes: If I tried to tell you something precise about this wine, you’d have to assume I was making it up. After all, I drank only one glass, from a bottle open for who knows how long, with food, and in a state of rapture. So I will offer, instead, this memory: It was the absolute perfect wine to serve with an egg cooked over wood embers and accompanied by arugula in a garlicky dressing. It was fruity and bright and utterly fabulous. If Kermit Lynch has a few bottles the next time I visit, I will definitely buy them. I pass these “Tasting Notes from the owner of the Domaine” along, too, as gleaned from Kermit Lynch’s import office (in part because this description resonates with my memory): “A crystalline salmon color with superb amethyst tints. Wine immediately gives off notes of raspberry, cherry, and freshly picked strawberry followed by exotic aromas of pineapple and mango; on the palate, the density of fruit mingles with a vivid acidity. Very persistent.”

Rosé and Offal

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:45:00 -0700

“When the food gestapo finally kicks down our door,” I said to my wife, “and I confess under duress that I simply cannot love the flavor of pork kidney, no matter how hard I try, will you back me up?”

“I always back you up, baby. You know that.”

I do know that. It’s true. But I know also that I sometimes strain my wife’s loyalty, and that I had strained it that very night—by serving her the pork meatballs recipe from Richard Olney’s Simple French Food. The recipe called for pork variety meats, so I’d picked up a liver, heart, and kidney from Marin Sun Farms at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, here in San Francisco.

I never expected my wife to love it—the recipe fell more into the category of what we call, in our household, my “arts and crafts projects.” These are vaguely self-indulgent acts of more or less nonutilitarian creativity, as defined by my wife’s very low likelihood of wanting to eat any. Acknowledging all this, and putting a name to it, has been healthy for our marriage, because it has removed any pressure on L to eat the dishes that fall into this category (larded pork liver in aspic, anyone?), and it has likewise freed me up to make said dishes. Everyone, after all, is entitled to random creative acts.

So it wouldn’t have been a big deal, on an ordinary night. But then something unexpected happened: My in-laws agreed to come for dinner. I love my in-laws, they love food, and they’ve taken me to a lot of spectacular restaurants, so I’m always wishing I could cook for them. But it doesn’t happen.

I complain about this, periodically, to L: “Why don’t your parents ever come over, anyway? Is it our house? Is it my food?” L just laughs and smiles and ducks the question, taking the blame herself and muttering something vague about how she and her mother both prefer it this way. Because my wife is exquisitely articulate, and allergic to fuzzy thinking, I know that this is not the whole story. But I never get any further, and I usually just let it go for another few months.

Anyway, all of a sudden, they were coming. It was a gorgeous spring evening in California, cool breezes and radiant light, even some added fun: My brother-in-law’s kids were tagging along with my wife’s parents. Great little boys, they are much loved by my little girls, so we had a party on our hands.

Which brings me to the menu. Why oh why couldn’t I have been roasting a simple chicken? Or turning out some beautiful braise? Or even just making a ragoût of spring vegetables? Why did I have to be experimenting with organ meats?

Well, my mother-in-law insisted she loved the dish, which was some consolation. My father-in-law said that he liked it too. My wife took a tiny nibble and shoved the plate ever so slightly away. I ate quite a lot, trying to convince myself that I loved it like everything I’ve ever made from Olney, but the truth was that the taste of the kidney, in the mélange, was almost unbearable.

The only thing that rescued the meal, in my view, was the beautiful Fort Ross rosé we drank, a flawless accompaniment. Here’s the upshot on organ meats: I’m not done trying, not willing to give up. I have eaten and loved heart meat; I have eaten and loved a variety of liver meats. But kidney … I’ve just never liked kidney.

Anyway, the wine, which was beautiful:

2006 Fort Ross Vineyard Rosé
Grapes: 100 percent Pinot Noir
Wood: 1 month in used French oak, 3 months in stainless steel (hey, this is a rosé, so it’s not about wood)
Alcohol: 14 percent
Price: $16 from the winery
Other Winemaking Data I Think Is Worth Repeating: The 2007 vintage should be released within the next few weeks. Also, this wine is made with free-run juice bled away from the red Pinot Noir program. Fort Ross has just bottled the 2007 vintage and will probably release it in six weeks.
My Tasting Notes: To my palate, this rosé has more backbone than many. It’s a well-structured wine, in fact, with good acidity and a bright, fresh fruit quality—but quite distinct from the lighter, more fruit-forward rosés.

Picturing Perfection

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 15:54:00 -0700

Having posted a first Bruce Fleming image on Wednesday, part of the “Napa Valley Paradise” photography exhibit at Mumm Napa, and offered my initial thoughts, I’m posting a second image today. And in the time since, I’ve thought more about wine-country imagery and my own reaction to it.

I suspect now that one element is the sheer value of the real estate. In other words, the emotional impact of a landscape, at least for a Californian soul like my own, is to some degree shaped by an understanding of the economics of it. And, in the glorious images of Napa vineyards and wineries, we are indeed looking at a peaceful pastoral landscape. But we’re also looking at multimillion-dollar properties that have become the trophies of the very, very wealthy, or the investment holdings of large corporations.

Nothing wrong with either; if I had the resources, I’d be tempted to buy some myself. I would love to grow my own grapes and make my own wine and cellar it beneath my country home and press my own olive oil and maybe raise some healthy pigs in the yard, and some chickens too, and live out that dream. I’m envious of those who can.

So perhaps it’s that envy, that sense of being shut out, and of the exclusivity of California wine-country visions, that colors my aesthetic reaction. Looking at a Bordeaux or Burgundy landscape, you’re looking at much the same thing: not a pastoral idyll but a kind of Gold Coast. Many, many other wine-country landscapes, however, are not that way.

Here’s Fleming’s Quintessa Sunset.

Entering Paradise

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:05:00 -0700

What do you think of wine country photographs? Does the beauty of the vineyards lift your spirit? The sight of tasting rooms among the gentle folds of the Mayacamas Range? Put another way: Does an exquisite wine-country image transport your soul to a dream life you wish you were leading?

I ask because Mumm Napa, the big sparkling-wine house in Rutherford, has plans to host a summer-long photography exhibit titled “Napa Valley Paradise,” with large-format images by Bruce Fleming. I have PDFs of two of the images; they will both be shown as huge prints, so a digital online reproduction can only do violence to them. For that reason, I plan to see them in person, as well. But because they are so accomplished, and because they raise thoughts and feelings I can never quite shake, I’ll show one today, and one on Friday (while I take a much-needed family vacation by the Monterey Bay, drinking copious interesting wines I’m dying to sample and describe).

I’d love to hear how these visions affect others. For myself, as I’ve said in related posts, the wine-country image is often confusing to me. I find the Napa Valley to be a hauntingly beautiful place, especially in the late fall when the vines change colors and the light comes in low and golden. It’s a truly gorgeous physical environment. But I struggle with painting and photography, however accomplished. I struggle with them because the grapevines are not what makes these places beautiful to me. It is rather the soft, rolling shapes of California, the curving hills and the warm sun and even the golden yellow of dead summer grass.

I was raised out here, and so was my mother, and I grew up rambling around the state on various family road trips—summer vacations, visiting friends, that sort of thing. The romance of the California landscape runs deep in my veins, and I suppose I feel a kind of cognitive dissonance when I sense a dream of Tuscany or Provence being written across my home, regardless of how much I love drinking the wine here.

Here’s the first of the two Bruce Fleming images I’ll post. This one’s called The View to Yountville. Check back on Friday for a second.

The Model Bourgogne in Corbières

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 15:22:00 -0700

I am a regular contributor to Men’s Journal—I write mostly on nonwine topics, but occasionally on wine as well. It was partly in that capacity that I had a drink recently with Herve Gantier, part owner of Domaine Sainte-Eugénie, in Corbières.

Corbières is a region in southern France an hour or so from the Spanish border, 10 or 15 miles from the Mediterranean. The wines are mostly about Carignane, with Grenache and Syrah as blending elements. I’d enjoyed this man’s wine before, in a recommendation from a good salesman at a shop I trust. In our conversation, I hoped he could help me characterize it, give me some way to firm it up in my mind, give it an identity that would stick.

He began by saying it was all about the Carignane grape, which he considers the structure of the wine. “Grenache is the sugar and the aroma,” he added, “and the Syrah is the color and the finesse, because our Syrah is not the same as in the Rhône valley.”

Gantier lives in Puligny-Montrachet, in Burgundy. So why the interest in Corbières? “I like a lot the Corbières with the situation,” he said. “The South of France, the good weather, et J’aime beaucoup la nature. C’est tres sauvage et vierge.” Pressing further, I got the sense that he and a friend had been looking to go into business, vineyard land in Burgundy is too expensive, and Corbières struck their fancy. It’s not an ancient AOC, but that apparently appealed to Gantier. “I believe that it is a region of France where the nature is the most beautiful, la plus belle: You have the vines and the garrigues and that is it.”

I had already tried and loved his basic red wine, so he opened a rosé that had a clear, light watermelon color, much like the watermelon my daughter had eaten that very morning, at a café near our home. While I drank, Gantier laughed. He was looking at me, apparently wondering who I was and thinking about Men’s Journal; the title is commonly mistaken for Men’s Health, the magazine that often has a man with six-pack abs on every cover. I believe he was wondering how exactly he fit into the picture of my work. Then he broke into a laugh and patted his very ample stomach and said, quite happily, “I am the model Bourgogne!”

Indeed he was, and he seemed happy enough to make it look beautiful.

2004 Domaine Sainte-Eugénie Corbières Rouge
Grapes: 60 percent Carignane, 20 percent Grenache, 20 percent Syrah
Wood: 40 percent of the wine is put in smallish casks for up to a year, a move that sounds to me like a fairly light touch in terms of oak flavoring, and also in terms of expense
Alcohol: 13.5 percent
Price: $11.49 from the Wine House
My Tasting Notes: I think this wine’s a terrific value, rustic and layered and medium bodied. It’s not an overly big fruit bomb at all, but it’s got power.

Domaine Sainte-Eugénie Corbières Rosé
Grapes: 75 percent Cinsault, 15 percent Syrah, 10 percent Grenache
Wood: Nada
Alcohol: 12.5 percent (which appeals to me; I like to drink, but I don’t like to get too drunk)
Price: N/A
My Tasting Notes: See above, although the upshot is that I thought the wine was beautiful, and I’ll be scrambling to score more when it’s released, which should be in a few months.

When Roots Go Deep

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 15:41:00 -0700

I met two French winemakers recently, and one was Xavier Monnot, from Meursault, in Burgundy. I met him straight off his long international flight, looking haggard, and I could tell he was desperate to get upstairs in the hotel and get some sleep. But he was also gracious, and sat there in the empty hotel restaurant pouring wines for me to taste, including a white that I loved. A devoted and passionate winemaker, he talked with great intensity about fruit loads, pruning, and terroir.

He talked about plowing deep to bring up the minerals of the subsoils, and about how certain soils can become deadened, with no microbiological activity. Roots apparently won’t go deep in this Burgundy soil, and the vines will grow lazy and feed only in the superficial strata.

But the part that struck me most was that he represents the 11th straight generation of his family to make wine on the same property. This came up at first because he said that his father’s generation made a very big break in winemaking technique from his grandfather’s generation; in Xavier’s time, the effort has been more of a return to the past, but with better equipment. “In the end,” he said, “the goal is to have a wine that transcripts the message of the soil.”

As he talked, I began to wonder what this kind of family continuity might feel like—what sort of shared wisdom they would pass along, or shared memory. It’s so utterly alien to most Americans.

So I asked about vintages his family considered past classics. He mentioned 1959 first, saying the grapes had grown very ripe very early; then he mentioned 1919, but admitted that he had no idea what had made that postwar year so special, when the battlegrounds of France were still saturated with the blood of many millions of young men.

I asked if the family didn’t still have any truly old bottles, from way back in time, and Xavier told me that his grandfather’s brother kept that stuff. There’d been a family split, with two branches forming; the other branch got the cellar.

2005 Domaine Xavier Monnot Bourgogne Blanc
Grapes: 100 percent Chardonnay
Wood: 20 percent new oak for 12 months
Alcohol: N/A
Price: $27.49 from WineAccess
My Tasting Notes: This wine had a beautiful smell of honey and lemon, and a feel in the mouth that was astonishingly different from California Chardonnay. Very firm and clear and crisp.

Living the Life

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 15:30:00 -0700

I had lunch a few weeks back with Ivano Reali, who runs the Castello di Gabbiano wine operations in Tuscany. Two other media types were there, including a local radio journalist who spoke in the deep, booming voice of gastronomic and oenological authority—like some great French gastronome of centuries past, having eaten and savored and judged the world. His producer was there, too, a very young and svelte guy in nice clothes, and we all shared a large round table in a quiet part of Perbacco, which is itself a very large and very, very good northern Italian place in the Financial District of San Francisco.

I’d come in the hopes of learning something, although I’m not sure what. Something about the wines, sure, but also about the pleasures of Reali’s job. Every person has a story. But the conversation never quite got there. Perhaps I didn’t ask the right questions; perhaps it just wasn’t the right topic for Reali. He is, after all, head of a large operation that includes not only the winery but also an inn and a restaurant. He’s a businessman, not a wine tinkerer. And although there was a lot of talk about the sheer beauty of the Gabbiano estate and castle, and how it looks just like you dream Tuscany will look, that sort of thing is complicated for me. These are facades—corporate-owned properties hoping we might like to buy a lifestyle fantasy along with our wine. Hoping we might like to fool ourselves, in other words, and imagine some beautiful existence happening behind those old stone walls, and then project ourselves into the scene, and buy some wine.

I’m vulnerable to those facades; I love a pretty Tuscan hill town as much as the next guy, maybe more. I also love the American fantasy of Tuscany, with an imagined simpler life in simpler times, in tune with the seasons. And yet I can’t deny the odd emptiness I feel when trying to inhale the romance of any winery scene maintained by a large and distant corporation. I can’t quite shake the fact that I’m looking at the production facilities of an alcoholic beverages manufacturing concern, and not at some physical manifestation of the good life.

Anyway, the truth is that the wines were nice and Reali struck me as a good man, easygoing and genial, without pretense. He’s a former pro soccer player and the coach of his son’s team, and he’s been a corporate guy his whole life. Good jobs, good pay, not too much stress. And my musings about artifice turned to laughter when the radio journalist’s producer told a story of a trip he and his boss had taken to Burgundy. During a visit to the estate of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, the maker of the world’s most expensive and prestigious wine, they were invited to have their pictures taken “participating in the harvest.”

“They led us out to the vineyards,” this producer told me, already laughing at the memory, “and they were like, ‘OK, get your camera ready, now pick one grape. Now hand that grape over and get out of here.”

2004 Castello di Gabbiano Chianti Classico Riserva DOCG
Grapes: N/A
Wood: 18 to 20 months in oak, 50 percent of the wine in French and Slovenian casks, the other 50 percent in new and seasoned French oak barrels
Alcohol: 13.5 percent
Price: $16 from Cellar360
My Tasting Notes: I liked this wine a lot. Nothing mind-blowing, but a strong, clean, can’t-go-wrong Chianti for a good price.