A Hedonist in the Cellar

by Jay McInerney

  France and the Napa Valley are increasingly sharing the wine lists of major restaurants and the hearts of wine lovers with other regions. Stellenbosch, Solvang, Mendoza, Priorat, and Alba are among my recent destinations. When I started the column Argentina was a joke and Spain was still emerging from the shadows of the Franco era; now Argentinian Malbec, grown in the high foothills of the Andes, is a hot commodity and Spain has probably overtaken Italy as a fashionable food-and-wine destination among grape nuts and foodies. Fruit-bombastic Barossa Valley Shiraz and grapefruity New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc from Marlborough have become two of the world’s great wine types, even as other regions in both countries produce increasingly noteworthy juice. And South Africa, a country that has been under vine since the seventeenth century, seems to be well on its way to becoming the new Australia. My friend Anthony Hamilton Russell is making incredible Burgundian Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays at the southernmost tip of Africa, in vineyards from which he regularly excavates half-million-year-old hand axes and other artifacts of our earliest ancestors.

  In all of these places, advances in viticulture have inevitably been accompanied by the evolution of gastronomy. And in fact my own wine education has brought me gradually into a greater appreciation of food, as has my association with Lora Zarubin, the food editor of House & Garden, who almost inevitably accompanies me on these trips. Lora was, for all too brief a period, the owner and chef of Lora’s, one of my favorite New York restaurants of the eighties. At the time downtown restaurants were divided into those places where you went to see and be seen and those you went to for the food. Lora’s had a surfeit of celebrity patrons, but the food was the real draw; it was a homey place with a refreshingly simple menu at a time when chefs were competing to see how many diverse and incompatible ingredients they could cram into one dish, when every meal seemed to be topped with something along the lines of raspberry chili cilantro vinaigrette with green-tea anchovy sorbet. Ah, yes, the eighties. Who can remember them? Strangely enough, I do remember a sublime grilled chicken I had upstairs at Lora’s. When I first saw the menu I didn’t know what to make of it—so devoid of frills and flourishes. Where the hell was the chipotle mango pesto? When I later learned she was from San Francisco and a friend of Alice (Chez Panisse) Waters’s, her endeavor started to make a lot more sense.

  Lora was later recruited by Dominque Browning for House & Garden, and it was she who suggested that the magazine should have a wine column, although she was initially highly skeptical when Dominique proposed my name. Ten years later we’ve spent hundreds of pleasurable hours together—and a few unpleasant ones when we were lost and exhausted and sick of each other on some back road in Provence or Piedmont. (We once spent the better part of a night in a French police station, but that’s another story.) Lora’s passionate belief that food and wine are inseparable companions has resulted in our working and traveling together. (I suspect she has also convinced upper management at House & Garden that I am far too scatterbrained to travel by myself, which is at least half true.) She’s organized where I’m improvisational; she is the superego to my id. She drives because my driving makes her nervous. Much of what follows is the result of our travels, racing from winery to trattoria, pilgrims of the palate, devout hedonists in search of the next ecstatic revelation.

  It’s my ambition to share some of those epiphanies in this book and to encourage readers to seek out their own.

  Let’s be honest: there’s only one activity more satisfying than drinking good wine with good food; and if you’re drinking wine in the right company, the one pleasure, more often than not, will lead to the other.

  MY FAVORITE WHITE

  I hate when I’m asked to pick a favorite anything: a book, movie, or song. Sure, I love “Norwegian Wood,” but do I like it more than “Angie” or “Alison”? How am I supposed to choose between Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and Fellini’s 8½? But I think I can actually say with some certainty that Condrieu is my favorite white wine. I really shouldn’t be telling you this, because there’s not very much of it made and there never will be: the steep hillsides above the Rhône River on which it’s grown are extremely hard to work and the appellation is tiny and nowhere else in the world, not even on similar slopes half a mile north or south of Condrieu, does the Viognier grape produce such sublime juice. Viognier has shown some promise in certain sites in California and elsewhere, but drinking these non-Condrieus is kind of like watching The Magnificent Seven; fun, perhaps, but it makes you long for the original.

  Why do I like it so much? you may ask. Parsing out the pleasures of Condrieu is a little bit like trying to explicate a haiku. But I can tell you that I love it because white peaches are my favorite fruit and Condrieu frequently tastes like white peaches, though it sometimes verges on apricot. I like its texture, which is fleshy, viscous, and round in the mouth. I like the floral bouquet, which often reminds me of honeysuckle. Certain English tasters equate the aroma with May blossoms, but for me, nonhorticulturalist that I am, it simply reminds me of certain gardens in springtime. I like it because it evokes Gauguin’s Tahitian paintings. And finally, perversely, I like it because it lacks two qualities that great wines are supposed to possess; namely, acid and the ability to improve with age. High-acid Riesling is much food-friendlier, and white Burgundy from Meursault or Puligny will last much longer and gain complexity over time. But so what? Love isn’t based on practical considerations. Condrieu is a wine for romantics.

  Like Côte-Rôtie, the red wine appellation that borders it on the north, Condrieu was nearly moribund after the Second World War, its steep vineyards largely abandoned and its exotic wine on the verge on extinction, until Georges Vernay took over his family domain in the early fifties and became chairman of the appellation, encouraging other landowners to replant the old vineyards even as he lobbied to tighten regulations. Less than twenty acres of Viognier remained on the hills of Condrieu at the time. In 1988 the boundaries of the appellation were limited to the steep hillsides. By the time Vernay’s daughter Christine took over the domain in 1997, Condrieu was back in business, the object of a devoted cult of discriminating hedonists.

  Based in nearby Ampuis, the Guigal family also deserves credit for resurrecting the great wine of Condrieu. While best known for its Côte-Rôties, the domain founded by Étienne Guigal in 1946 and raised to eminence by son Marcel, who appears to have been born with a beret on his head and a glass wine thief in his hand, is now the largest producer of Condrieu. (Marcel’s son Philippe is now working full-time at the domain.) It was a bottle of Guigal Condrieu accompanying a smoked haddock, at the home of novelist Julian Barnes, that initiated my love affair some twenty years ago. In addition to the regular bottling, Guigal produces a luxury cuvée, La Doriane, a rich, decadent bottle of wine that’s perfect with foie gras. Certain labels for me are strangely mimetic and inextricably bound up with my sense memories of the wine: Guigal’s exotic and wildly floral La Doriane is to my mind perfectly conjured forth by the label, with its intricately detailed and colorful faux–Art Nouveau floral design based on a painting by the Italian painter Moretti.

  Another contender for most luxurious Condrieu is André Perret’s Coteau de Chéry, from a single vineyard on the Condrieu hillside. The modest and affable Perret has only been making wine since 1983, but the vines for this top cuvée are more than sixty years old. Perret’s neighbor Yves Cuilleron produces four separate Condrieux, which ascend the scale from delicate to decadent. His La Petite Côte is a lighter wine that gets an old-fashioned upbringing in tanks and old barrels, while his full-throttle Vertige, which he suggests is perfect for fish in heavier cream sauces (it’s also great with many Cantonese dishes) gets the full new-oak treatment. Cuilleron also makes a late-picked Condrieu called Les Ayguets, all honey and hazelnuts, which is essentially a dessert wine, though personally I prefer it on its own or alongside stronger cheeses.

  Last May, after a morning tasting in his new winery, the forty-something Cuilleron took me to see one of the vi
ne-yards, Les Chaillets, a steep southeast-facing slope looking down over the steely Rhône that was spangled with bright orange poppies. A series of ancient stone terraces seemed to be precariously holding the sandy, granitic soil of the hillside in place. At ten-thirty the sun was just beginning to cut through the morning chill. “They say the Romans built these terraces,” Cuilleron said. Perhaps, I said, but I doubt the Romans ever tasted anything quite as honeyed and peachlike and delicate as Cuilleron’s ′04 Les Chaillets, the memory of which was still vivid an hour after I’d tasted it. It’s possible they might not have really appreciated it, Condrieu being decidedly a wine for lovers rather than for fighters.

  FRIULI’S FAVORITE SON

  Tocai Friulano

  Hidden away in the northeastern corner of Italy between the Alps and the Adriatic, bordered by Austria and Slovenia, Friuli is an anomaly. Part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918, it has a culture and cuisine that seem more Slavic than Latin. Local pasta tends toward dumplinghood; butter and lard are at least as common as olive oil. Friuli’s prosperity is based in part on the manufacture of chairs and, increasingly, wine. So far there’s no monument to the latter, but you can see the world’s largest chair on the road between Cormons and Udine—an unnerving and surreal sight if you first encounter it at one in the morning after a festive night at La Frasca, the taverna owned by winemaker Valter Scarbolo and his wife. Although some interesting reds are made here, Friuli is best known to wine lovers as the source of Italy’s finest white wines, the most distinctive of which is Tocai Friulano.

  Friulian wines, unlike most of the wines of Europe, are usually named for their grape varietals. Because of its complicated history and vine-friendly climate, Friuli is home to many French and German varietals, such as Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, and Chardonnay, as well as to local grapes like Ribolla, Picolit, and Malvasia. Most Friulian wineries turn out varietals as well as blended “super-whites.” With the exception of the Loire Valley, Friuli may be the best place in Europe for Sauvignon Blanc; but for most wineries, Tocai is the benchmark—the hometown favorite. The locals often start the day with a glass of Tocai, calling out in the local dialect for a tai di vin—but it’s not just for breakfast anymore.

  The history of Tocai is obscure, and its name seems to come from the Hungarian region that produces dessert wines from the Furmint grape, but the Friulians consider Tocai their signature local grape, an indispensable accompaniment to the salami and prosciutto that start every meal here. Indeed, prosciutto and Tocai seem to be one of those magical marriages made in the soil, like Sancerre and chèvre, or Chablis and oysters. Sipping a Zamo Tocai at the tiny Enoteca Lavaroni in the village of Manzano, with a platter of Lorenzo d’Osvaldo artisanal prosciutto, I experienced one of those moments of sensual satori that gourmands live for. The Friulians insist on the superiority of the local Prosciutto San Daniele over Prosciutto di Parma, but Tocai works very nicely with both, as it does with speck, Spanish ham, Virginia ham, and most things fatty, smoky, and salty. And that’s just for starters. Appropriately, for a grape born so close to the Adriatic, Tocai is also a dream date for seafood.

  “Tocai is crisp, but it also has weight on the palate,” says Morgan Rich, the wine director at Del Posto in New York, which generally features a dozen or so Tocais from Friuli on its list. Tocai’s pearlike fruit is balanced by a refreshing lemony acidity and mineral highlights. It can resemble a blend of Riesling and Sauvignon Blanc. Friuli made its reputation with bright, refreshing, stainless-steel-fermented whites, and most winemakers think Tocai is best kept away from wood, although Borgo San Daniele and Miani both make compelling barrel-aged examples.

  “Tocai is absolutely one of the great food wines,” claims Joseph Bastianich, a first-generation American whose family hails from Friuli. “It’s versatile and flexible—you can make young, fruity, early-drinking wine or a bigger wine that ages.” The burly baron of a food-and-wine empire that encompasses some of New York’s most acclaimed Italian restaurants, including Babbo and Felidia, Bastianich has an eponymous wine estate in the hills of the Colli Orientali region of Friuli, where he makes an old-vine Tocai that he turbocharges with a healthy dose of late-harvest, botrytis-infected grapes. Bastianich’s Tocai Plus, grown on steep hillsides in the town of Buttrio, is a prime example of the fatter style of Tocai—a Botero of a wine—which can stand up to dishes like stinco di vitello (roasted veal shank) and which Bastianich likes to drink with full-flavored cheeses. His young winemaker, Emilio Del Medico, makes a similarly rich and powerful Tocai called Tocai Vigne Cinquant’Anni, at the nearby property Zamo, as well as the more typical, lighter-style Tocai Friulano. The Zamo family made their fortune manufacturing chairs, and they seem to have spent a fair chunk of it on a new, computerized, underground winery just down the hill from the thirteenth-century Abbey of Rosazzo.

  The most complex Tocais come from the hillside vineyards of Collio and Colli Orientali, a kind of meteorological inter-section of the cool Alpine climate and the warm Adriatic. The other prime area is the Isonzo Valley, which is naturally air-conditioned by an Alpine breeze called the bora that funnels through a gap in the foothills. Some other names to seek out: Ronco del Gelso, Villa Russiz, Edi Keber, Polencic, Scubla, and Marco Felluga.

  The best way to get acquainted with Tocai is to sit down with a bottle alongside a plate of salami or prosciutto. But almost any grilled fish would be happy to make the acquaintance of this versatile grape.

  THIN IS IN

  The New Wave of California Chardonnays

  My very first wine column was about California Chardon-nay, a genre about which I was somewhat skeptical. In the mid-1990s, the typical premium Napa or Sonoma Chardon-nay had much in common with a vanilla milk shake or, figuratively speaking, with the then reigning queen of Baywatch, Pamela Anderson. Such superpremium winemakers as Marcassin, Kistler, Peter Michael, and Talbott transcended the genre—creating a new standard of richness, power, and concentration through the application of Burgundian methods to superripe California grapes—with uniquely opulent results. Too many of their neighbors, however, were making whites that were merely fat, loud, and sunburned.

  It may be a coincidence that I started noticing a new generation of Chardonnays at about the same time that Pamela Anderson announced her plans for a breast reduction. (I know, Pam reaugmented. I can live with that.) But in tastings and in talking with some of the makers of newly minted Chardonnay labels, I am finding a refreshing emphasis on finesse and subtlety. The wine world, like any other, has its trends and fashions, and in the realm of high-end Cal Chard, thin is in. Words like elegant and racy and lean are now being held up as ideals. Even nervous is good. It means—I think— acidic, and acidity is no longer a bad word. (Acid is essentially the skeleton on which the sugary flesh of the grape is draped.)

  California Chardonnay makers have always talked about Burgundy as a model; it is, after all, the homeland of Chardonnay, and of such great Chardonnay wines as Montrachet and Meursault. But even the cooler areas of California, like Carneros, the Russian River Valley, and the Santa Ynez Valley, are warmer than Burgundy—and of course the soils are different. Applying the same techniques will yield different results. Seldom does California achieve the crisp sculptural definition or the mineral notes of white Burgundy; nor does Burgundy often achieve the tropical-fruit decadence of California Chard. “You can’t make Montrachet in much of California—it’s just too warm,” says David Ramey, who started making Chardonnay under his own name in 1996. “But you can still aim for a balance between richness and finesse.”

  Ramey’s recent Chardonnays exemplify the new, crisp, elegant style, although he likes to call it “retro,” since his methods are traditional and minimalist. With his wire-rim specs and salt-and-pepper hair, Ramey is pretty elegant and crisp himself, dressing with a certain minimalist, expensively casual flair, which is unusual in Napa wine cellars. He developed his winemaking chops at Chalk Hill, Simi, Matanzas Creek, and Dominus. Until recently he was a consultant
at Rudd, which he propelled into the spotlight, but he parted to concentrate on the Ramey label. Although Ramey’s Chards have plenty of ripe fruit, they also have a vibrant wire of acidity, which distinguishes them from many California Chards. Tasted against a Kistler Durell Vineyard, Ramey’s Hyde Vine-yard Chardonnay seems like a Modigliani displayed beside a Botero.

  Another rising Chardonnay star is Robert Sinskey, who first made his name with Pinot and Merlot. The wine from his biodynamically farmed Three Amigos Vineyard in Carneros has a Puligny-Montrachet-like steeliness, sort of like a Ginsu blade concealed in a pineapple. Sinskey gets his zingy acidity in part by skipping malolactic, the secondary fermentation that softens the malic acid. “In California,” he says, “our challenge is maintaining acidity. It doesn’t make sense to soften the acid only to add it back artificially”—which is what many California makers do (the addition of tartaric acid being SOP in California). Sinskey’s style is more food-friendly—almost the raison d’être for acid in a wine. “You don’t want a milk shake with your fish,” Sinskey says. “It used to be about competition, about creating blockbusters. Now it’s about consumption and cuisine.” Sinskey attributes the new subtlety of many California Chards in part to a new appreciation for the vineyard itself, and a de-emphasis on high-tech interventionist techniques.

  Ted Lemon at Littorai is as qualified as anyone to toss the word Burgundian around, having been the winemaker for Domaine Guy Roulot in Meursault from 1982 to 1984. In cool Meursault he tried to pick as late as possible, but in Littorai’s western Sonoma vineyards he picks earlier than many of his neighbors, in order to keep the wines from getting too flabby. Like Sinskey, Lemon tries to avoid the blockbuster style—the big, fat, oaky, buttery fruit bomb. However impressive, these buxom Chardonnays overwhelm everything but lobster with butter. “There’s a disconnect,” Lemon says, “between the elegance and finesse in our cuisine and in our wine.”