A Hedonist in the Cellar

by Jay McInerney

  The staggering collection of white Burgundies (Lafon, Coche-Dury, d’Auvenay, Raveneau) provides hundreds of complementary matches to the classic pike quenelles. When I selected the pike for my first course, Ridgway hooked me up with an ′83 Drouhin Puligny-Montrachet Caillerets, all honeyed flesh around a core of limestone. The signature pressed duck, an extremely rich, ancien-cuisine concoction—the sauce is thickened with the blood of three-week-old ducklings— is probably most easily matched with one of the thousands of Bordeaux or Rhônes on the list, like a ′75 Meyney for 136 euros or an ′81 Beaucastel for 184. For a special occasion, there’s a ′47 Pétrus (14,680 euros) or ′61 Mouton (8,342 euros). You’ll definitely want Ridgway’s advice if you’re eating the duck and drinking Burgundy. This is even more true of the duck à l’orange, a tricky dish for dry reds, though the version served here is less sweet than many.

  La Tour d’Argent’s dedication to the wine drinker’s pleasure is perhaps best reflected by the number of bottles that are unavailable for immediate drinking; recent, immature vintages are listed without price, alongside the phrase en vieillissement. They are maturing. Want to drink a ′96 Bordeaux? You’ll have to wait. La Tour d’Argent is one of the few restaurants in the world that truly sells no wine before its time. Wish I could think of an American restaurant of which I could say the same.

  FISH STORIES FROM LE BERNARDIN

  What’s so exciting about eating a cow? She stands all day chewing, waiting to be led into the slaughterhouse. That’s not exciting food. But a wild thing swimming in the water—now that’s passionnant !

  —Gilbert Le Coze

  Since Brittany-born siblings Maguy and Gilbert Le Coze brought their fishy act to New York in 1986, no restaurant has done more to elevate and celebrate the role of seafood in this country than Le Bernardin, the four-star midtown temple to Poseidon, which consistently captures the top food rating in Zagat and earned Alain Ducasse’s vote as the best fish restaurant in America. Where better to ask the question, What do you drink with fish? And whom better to ask than Michel Couvreux, the diminutive, dynamic sommelier? In a puckish mood, Couvreux likes to flout conventional wisdom and pair chef Eric Ripert’s baked red snapper in a spicy-sour Puerto Rican sancocho broth with a powerful red such as Jean-Luc Colombo’s 1999 Cornas Les Méjeans. But he is the first to admit that white wine is the default setting for seafood—and to argue for the complexity of whites—or, as some of us prefer to call them, golds and silvers.

  The iconographers of the vast right-wing conspiracy have demonized white wine as the drink of the effete Martha’s Vineyard liberal elite; even self-professed wine enthusiasts like myself often regard white wine as, at best, foreplay, much the way some carnivorous gourmands have regarded fish—as mere prelude to the crimson climax of the menu. Poor misguided bastards. They’ve probably never eaten at Le Bernardin, never experienced the electric epiphany of Ripert’s meaty steamed wild striped bass with a pineapple-lime nage, paired with a racy, stony 1985 Ampeau Meursault Les Per-rières. Wimpy? I think not. Just about the only thing more exciting than experiencing this epiphany in the serene dining room of Le Bernardin—a cross between a Zen teahouse in Kyoto and a teak-lined corporate boardroom—is fighting a big striper on a fly rod while standing on the deck of a skiff in eight-foot swells.

  The simple fact is that eight out of ten sea creatures prefer white wine to red, in part because the bright acidity of white wine acts like lemon juice in highlighting the flavor, particularly of white-fleshed fish. “Some people say white wine is boring,” Couvreux marvels, a look of boyish astonishment on his face. “This is simply not true. The purity, the complexity, the minerality of great white wine…” He shrugs Gallically, rubbing what is left of his dark hair as if to say, What more can one say?

  If Couvreux, who was sommelier at three-star L’Arpège in Paris, were limited to one wine for all fish, it would undoubtedly be white Burgundy. “Puligny-Montrachet, Chassagne-Montrachet, and Mersault,” he says, “account for almost half of our sales.” For all the Asian spices, and the Spanish influence of Ripert’s childhood in Andorra, this is a French restaurant, after all. And the fact is, the complex, neurasthenic Chardonnays of the Côte d’Or, with their subtle fruit, their racy acidity, and their trilling minerality, are about as fish-friendly as any wine in the world. At Le Bernardin, you can get a 2001 Chassagne from Michel Niellon for $125, or a ′92 Montrachet from Etienne Sauzet for $1,000 (not bad for one of the greatest makers and one of the greatest vintages of the greatest white vineyard in the world). Couvreux generally reserves the big, buxom New World Chardonnays for lobster: “With its rich texture and its heavy, almost meaty flavor, lobster can stand up to the fruit and the oak of wines like Kistler Les Noisetiers or Peter Michael.”

  In the eight years that he has been the sommelier at Le Bernardin, Couvreux has developed some rules of thumb that can be applied in the real world, for those of us who, unlike a corporate lawyer of my acquaintance, can’t manage to dine daily at Le Bernardin. Most important, what I call the lover/ fighter rule: “Sometimes you want the wine to match the food, or the sauce, and sometimes the wine must stand up to the food. Zey must challenge each ozer; zey must fight.” For example, in the latter category, Couvreux likes to offset heat with sweetness, as when he pairs Ripert’s hamachi tartare with wasabi and a ginger-coriander emulsion with a 2003 Chateau Ste. Michelle Eroica Riesling from Washington State. “With spicy dishes I like Riesling with a little residual sweetness. The sugar balances out and fights the spices.”

  When fish is served in richer sauces, Couvreux concentrates on matching the flavor and texture of the sauce, as with Ripert’s poached halibut with a lobster cardamom emulsion, which he pairs with a rich, floral-scented, almost oily Condrieu La Doriane from Guigal. Condrieu, made from the fragrant, glycerol-rich Viognier grape, is one of his secret weapons. For those who still yearn for red wines, heavier sauces involving red wine and mushrooms provide a bridge. Salmon always takes well to Pinot Noir; with Ripert’s morel truffle sauce it can handle even a big earthy Burgundy like the 1999 Leroy Gevrey-Chambertin Le Fonteny.

  If you’re a red-wine-drinking fish lover, you have a role model in chef Eric Ripert, who trained with Joel Robuchon and Jean-Louis Palladin before joining the late Gilbert Le Coze at Le Bernardin in 1991. Like many of his countrymen, Ripert drinks red Bordeaux with just about everything— much to the exasperation of Couvreux. On the other hand, Ripert did admit to me that a 1972 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti Montrachet he drank recently was the most profound wine he has ever had in his life, so there may be hope for him yet.

  WHAT TO DRINK WITH CHOCOLATE

  Not far from the spot where Romeo secretly married Juliet, in the Valpolicella hills overlooking Verona, I discovered a more fortunate and successful match. I had just finished lunch with Stefano Cesari, the dapper proprietor of Brigaldara, in the kitchen of his fourteenth-century farmhouse, and I was trying to decide if it would be incredibly uncouth to ask who made the beautiful heather-toned tweed jacket he was wearing, when he put some dark chocolates from Perugia in front of me and opened a bottle of his 1997 Recioto della Valpolicella. One hesitates to describe any marriage as perfect, but I was deeply impressed with the compatibility of his semisweet, raisiny red and the bittersweet chocolates. Cesari later took me up to the loft of the big barn and showed me the hanging trays where Corvina and Rondinella grapes are dried for several months after harvest, which concentrates the grape sugars and ultimately results in an intense, viscous wine that, like Tawny Port, Brachetto, and a few other vinous oddities, enhances the already heady and inevitably romantic experience of eating chocolate.

  The Cabernet, Merlot, or Shiraz you drank with your steak may get along well with a simple chocolate dessert, especially if the wine is young and the fruit is really ripe, but real chocoholics should check out the dried-grape wines, many of which are fortified—that is, dosed with brandy, in the manner of Port, a process that stops fermentation and leaves residual sugar. “Fortific
ation seems helpful in terms of matching chocolate,” says Robert Bohr, the wine director at Cru, in Greenwich Village, which has one of the best wine lists in the country, if not the world. Bohr likes Tawny Port with many chocolate desserts, finding Vintage Port too fruity. (McInerney does too, and advises that some of the best Tawnies come from Australia’s Barossa Valley.) But most of all Bohr likes Madeira.

  If you were to order the Hacienda Concepción chocolate parfait at Cru, Bohr would direct you to a vintage Madeira like the 1968 d’Oliveiras Boal. Madeira has become so unfashionable in the past century that many putative wine lovers have never tasted it, but I’m sensing the stirrings of a cult revival spearheaded by supergeeks like Bohr. The sweeter Malmsey style seems to be best suited to chocolate desserts. And by chocolate, I mean, of course, dark chocolate. Milk chocolate should be consumed only by day, if at all, and accompanied by milk.

  The cough-syrupy Umbrian passito wine is made in the same fashion as Recioto from the mysterious and sappy Sagrantino grape. These powerful, sweet reds seem to have originated as sacramental wines, and they continue to inspire reverence among a small cult of hedonists, myself among them. This practice of drying grapes goes back thousands of years; there are references to drying wine grapes prior to fermentation in Homer and Hesiod. (“When Orion and Sirius come into mid-heaven,” Hesiod advises in Works and Days, “cut off all the grape clusters and bring them home. Show them to the sun for ten days and ten nights.”) I like to imagine that these dried-grape wines resemble those that were drunk at Plato’s symposium or Caligula’s bashes—although chocolate wouldn’t appear in Europe until the sixteenth century, Columbus having stumbled upon a stash of cacao beans on his fourth and last voyage to the New World.

  Two of the finest wines for chocolate, Maury and Banyuls, come from remote Roussillon in France’s deep southeast. These so-called vins doux naturels are made (mostly) from late-picked Grenache grown on steep, terraced, wind-scoured hillsides near the Spanish border. The standard-bearing Banyuls estate is Domaine du Mas Blanc, one of the world’s most famous obscure domaines. I first tasted this wine at JoJo, Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s pioneering New York bistro, alongside the warm Valrhona chocolate cake, a nearly erotic experience that I try to re-create at least once a year. (And I’m a guy who doesn’t usually even bother with dessert.)

  Banyuls’s neighboring appellation Maury also produces a chocolate-loving vin doux. The village cooperative makes the classic example; I recently had, alongside Le Bernardin’s warm chocolate tart, a 1929 that was spectacular, with lots of caramel, date, coffee, and vanilla flavors, plus an oxidized Sherry note, which the French and Spanish call rancio. The finest estate in Maury is Mas Amiel (which once traded hands in a card game), producers of several cuvées of heady Maury, including one raised in the traditional manner of the region, spending a year outdoors in huge glass demijohns, exposed to the extremes of the Roussillon climate. The demand for these labor-intensive wines, like that for most sweet wines, has been static in the past few decades (Mas Amiel is increasingly focusing on the production of dry table wines), and prices remain modest when compared with Vintage Port or Sauternes.

  America’s answer to Banyuls and Recioto is late-harvest Zinfandel—a fairly rare, sweet style of Zin that is eminently delicious with chocolate, the darker and more bitter the better. This is a good general rule: chocolate with a high cocoa content and a lower milk and sugar content is the most complex, intense, and wine-friendly. As for the desserts, the more complicated they get, the harder they will be to match. Chocolate already has some five hundred flavor compounds— how many more do you need? A chocolate soufflé is a beautiful thing, but it’s hard to improve upon a simple piece of Valrhona, Bernachon, or Scharffen Berger dark chocolate, unless of course you pour a Madeira or a Maury alongside it.

  PROVENÇAL PINK

  Not the least pleasure of wine is its mnemonic quality—its madeleine-like ability to reawaken previous pleasures, to transport us back in time and place. If I fail, as seems likely, to make it physically to Provence this summer, I will revisit it often in memory—whenever I open a bottle of rosé. Rosé is made in most of the world’s wine regions, but in my mind it will always be evocative of southern France, of the fragrant villages between Avignon and Cannes, and of the food of that region.

  Several of my most memorable meals have been washed down with rosé, none more satisfying than a lunch at a tiny restaurant near the village of Apt. I’d just spent two days tasting the ′98 vintage in Châteauneuf-du-Pape—huge red tannic monsters. My mouth was still puckered with tannin as I set out with a friend that morning from Avignon for a little R & R— honest, wine tasting is work—in Peter Mayle country. Someone had recommended a stop at Mas Tourteron, but I don’t recall any great expectations when we finally disembarked in the dusty parking lot in the midst of a cherry orchard after innumerable wrong turns. (Forget about your Michelin map in Provence—it doesn’t work.) We entered the gate of a walled-in courtyard that dwarfed the farmhouse to which it was attached.

  The courtyard was hushed and deserted, a few rough farm tables scattered on the lawn among the trees. Birdcages were mounted on the walls and the trees. The fragrance from scattered flowerbeds was almost narcotic. The pleasant spell was eventually broken with the arrival of Philippe Baique, the deeply tanned, silver-haired husband of chef Elisabeth Bourgeois; he offered us our pick of the tables and returned with the menus and the wine list, which included superstars from such producers as Guigal and Krug. But we were interested in the local talent. We put ourselves in the hands of the proprietor, who brought out a bottle of rosé and advised us to arm ourselves against the sun with one of the many straw hats that were hanging in the trees around us. Hot and thirsty as I was, I found it hard to imagine that anything had ever tasted so good as that rosé. It hardly needed food, given the continuing suspense in the mouth of the sweet fruit dueling with the citrusy acidity. But it played a strong supporting role with my first course—a dish that I hesitate to call tomato soup since it was actually the Platonic essence of tomato, highlighted with basil and other herbs. The wine continued to shine with the salmon with herbs in parchment, and I was loath to give it up even with the arrival of the clafoutis, made from the cherries that had just come into season.

  Baique told us that the producer, Domaine de La Citadelle, was just a few miles away in Ménerbes, and he eventually drove us over to the castle that houses the winery to meet the proprietor, the squirish and impeccably tweeded M. Yves Riusset-Rouard, who made his pile, in part, as producer of the salacious Emmanuelle movies. In addition to rosé, M. Riusset-Rouard makes some impressive Cabernet-based reds, but his most distinctive accomplishment may be the creation of the Corkscrew Museum on the premises, which houses the world’s largest collection of these vital implements.

  A few days later, at a cliffside restaurant overlooking the Mediterranean in Marseille, I discovered the ultimate food match for Provençal rosé: bouillabaisse. Even if, especially if, you’re the kind of girl who thinks she’s too sophisticated for rosé, you will be converted by this match. Of course, the Marseillaises—included winemaker Jean-Luc Colombo, who was my dinner partner—claim that you can’t get true bouillabaisse outside of the Mediterranean. The good news is that while no wine will ever taste quite as good at home in Des Moines as it will in, say, the lavender-scented hilltop town of Corbierres, in the age of refrigerated shipping containers it should be pretty much the same beverage.

  The wine I was swilling with my bouillabaisse, Mas de La Dame, is one of many good Provençal rosés available in the States. It comes from the Les Baux appellation—the hills south of Saint-Rémy. And if the starkly beautiful landscape around the seventeenth-century farmhouse looks familiar, that may be because van Gogh painted it while he was living in Saint-Rémy. The estate employs the consulting services of Colombo, who races between estates up and down the Rhône Valley in his BMW. Like most Provençal rosés, Mas de La Dame is made from a blend of red wine grapes—in th
is case, Grenache, Cabernet, and Syrah—which are removed from their pigment-bearing skins before fermentation.

  The best-known appellation for Provençal rosés is Bandol, located on the coast between Marseille and Toulon. Domaine Tempier and Château Pradeaux are my perennial favorites. The Côtes de Provence appellation is the home of the famous Domaine Ott, which comes in that funny Greek-urn-shaped bottle and costs almost twice as much as the average Provençal rosé. But at times, with certain foods, it can seem more inspired than a first-growth Bordeaux, as I seem to recall it did over a lunch with English friends at a restaurant called Tetou on the beach at Golfe Juan. We were celebrating my friend’s Simon’s birthday. We ate fish soup and langoustines and the Domaine Ott kept coming as the waves lapped the sand and bathers wandered past a few feet from our table. I haven’t seen Simon for several years, but whenever I open a bottle of Domaine Ott, as I did recently on a cold day in New York, I think about that afternoon on the beach.

  ODD COUPLES

  What to Drink with Asian Food

  The classic European dishes have their classic wine matches: Bordeaux with rack of lamb, Sauternes with terrine of foie gras, Barolo with brasato. But most of us, I suspect, eat moo shu pork and chicken tikka masala more often than we eat beef bourguignonne. Asian cuisines were not developed with indigenous wines, so we can’t rely on tradition, but that doesn’t mean you have to drink beer—or sake—when you go Asian.

  To begin with, let me make a blanket generalization and declare that Champagne goes very well with sushi and most other Japanese food. According to Richard Geoffroy, wine-maker for Dom Pérignon, it’s a marriage based, in part, on the compatibility of the yeast in the Champagne and the yeast in the soy sauce; plus, the wine’s high acidity cuts through the saltiness—as with caviar. For similar reasons, Champagne works well with dim sum. It’s more difficult to make generalizations about other Chinese cuisines, given the many regional styles, but most of us are familiar with a hybrid of Cantonese and Szechuan cooking.