The Wine Savant: A Guide to the New Wine Culture

by Michael Steinberger

  To Kathy, James, and Ava

  (and Patches, too)

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 Wine Without Apologies

  2 Becoming a Wine Maven

  3 How to Buy Wine

  4 Wrath of Grapes

  5 Food and Wine, or Is It Food versus Wine?

  6 Back to the Future in California

  7 The Beaune Supremacy: The Triumph of Burgundy

  8 Great White Hopes

  9 QPR

  10 Letting One Thousand Grapes Blossom

  11 Bucket List Wines

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Introduction

  IN 2004, Fox Searchlight released a low-budget movie called Sideways, about a bachelor weekend in California wine country. The main character, Miles Raymond, played by Paul Giamatti, was a struggling, chronically depressed writer who also happened to be an insufferable wine snob. Visiting one winery, Miles theatrically dipped his nose in the glass and claimed to smell the faintest “soupçon of asparagus” and a “flutter of a nutty Edam cheese.” Oenophiles in the theater cringed in embarrassment—for him, for us. Wine buffs are nothing if not self-conscious, and here was a major motion picture trafficking in the worst stereotypes about wine appreciation, presenting it as a hobby full of absurd rituals and pretentious blather, pursued mainly by pompous twits. The pessimists in our ranks feared that Sideways would set back the cause of oenophilia in America by at least a generation.

  Twenty years earlier, that probably would have been the case. Back then, the United States was still solidly shot-and-beer territory, with a deep aversion to wine. In certain parts of the country, merely ordering a glass of Cabernet was enough to raise doubts about one’s manhood and patriotism. But in the late 1990s, large numbers of Americans started to realize what the French, Italians, and Spanish had figured out centuries earlier: wine is a uniquely pleasurable libation and goes smashingly with food. By the time Sideways came out, the United States was in the midst of a wine-drinking revolution. Far from regarding Miles as an annoying alien, the audience embraced him as someone it could relate to. Sure, theatergoers laughed at his excesses and affectations, but they then ran out and took his wine advice. His famous dismissal of Merlot—“If anybody orders Merlot, I’m leaving; I’m not drinking any fucking Merlot!”—torpedoed sales of what had been America’s most popular red wine, while his love of Pinot Noir touched off a Pinot craze, known as the “Sideways effect,” which continues to this day.

  A year after Sideways was released, a Gallup poll found that for the first time ever, Americans preferred wine to beer. Here was incontrovertible evidence that we had ceased to be a nation of oenophobes and had become a land of grape nuts. And so we are. America’s wine consumption has more than doubled in the past fifteen years, and in 2011 the United States surpassed France in overall wine consumption. With the onset of the Great Recession, some observers were concerned that the interest in wine would flag—that Americans would stop drinking the fancy stuff and revert to beer or hard liquor. It didn’t happen. While people cut back on what they were spending per bottle, wine sales did not decline, even during the worst months of the economic downturn, which was testament to how deep the oenophilia now ran. It is no exaggeration to say that New York and San Francisco have better wine scenes than you find in Paris these days. Our wine shops are bursting with compelling choices from around the world, and Americans have proven themselves to be among the most curious and ecumenical wine drinkers on the planet.

  In fact, as wine goes, the United States has become the great savior, rescuing whole categories of wine from near-extinction or obsolescence. Take, for instance, traditional German Rieslings, which normally contain a certain amount of sweetness; these wines are now shunned by German consumers, who want their Rieslings bone dry. But over the past decade or so, the “fruity” style has found a very enthusiastic following in the United States; without the American market, the fruity genre would hardly exist now. A funny thing has happened: contradicting the idea that America is the death star of globalization, stamping out ancient practices wherever it finds them, the United States has become a safe harbor for all sorts of traditional wines. Along with their taste for fruity German Rieslings, American oenophiles are smitten with traditional Barolos and Barbarescos, classic Riojas, artisanal cru Beaujolais, Madeira, and Sherry—all wines that might otherwise be on the endangered species list. This speaks to the passion and sophistication of American wine drinkers. We no longer need to be sold on wine; the sale has been made, and a vibrant, self-confident wine culture has taken root in the United States.

  Today Americans have a very different relationship with wine than they did fifteen years ago; the fear has lifted, the training wheels are off, and we have become a nation of wine drinkers. A new era requires a new kind of wine guide, one that both informs and entertains, that is tailored to people who enjoy wine, who like learning about it, and who’d love to get inside dope from someone immersed in the wine profession. The Wine Savant is a guidebook for this new era. It is not a typical, A–Z wine guide. There are plenty of those already on the market; we don’t need another. Consider it instead an opinionated, highly idiosyncratic guide to parts of the wine world—parts I like, parts that interest me, parts that I enjoy writing about and that I hope you’ll enjoy reading about. Those looking for a comprehensive rundown of, say, South American wines have come to the wrong place. Certainly some good wines are being made in Chile and Argentina; if the Chileans would back off on the use of new oak, I think they could do something special with Carmenere, the so-called Lost Grape of Bordeaux (it disappeared from Bordeaux when the region was overrun by the phylloxera root louse in the late 1800s and was discovered flourishing in Chile a century later). But at the risk of insulting an entire continent—why not go big?—I can’t think of many instances in which I’ve been drinking a South American wine and didn’t wish that I were drinking something else. I’m optimistic that that will change, but in these pages I prefer to focus on regions whose wines and stories excite me the most and where I think I have the most insight to impart.

  A transplanted French grape, Carmenere, has become Chile’s signature variety, so it is perhaps only fitting that the finest wines coming out of Chile these days—some of the finest wines in all South America, in my opinion—are being made by a transplanted Frenchman. Louis-Antoine Luyt, a protégé of the late, venerated Beaujolais winemaker Marcel Lapierre, is crafting sensational wines in the Maule region of Chile. His first project there was a winery cleverly called Clos Ouvert, and it was under that label that Luyt put out a truly amazing Carmenere—earthy, elegant, redolent of black olives and leather. The devastating earthquake that hit Chile in 2010 brought Clos Ouvert to a premature end, but Luyt is now making wines in Chile under his own name. The portfolio includes a Cinsault, a Carignan, and a couple of different cuvées using País, a grape that is believed to have been brought to South America in the sixteenth century and that at one time was Chile’s main variety. These are delicious, distinctive wines that speak to both Luyt’s talent and the potential that exists in Chile.

  Consider The Wine Savant a polemical wine guide, combining practical advice with lots of opinion—it is both fish and fowl, you might say. It is above all an advice manual for how to think about wine, how to be a shrewd wine consumer, and how to maximize the pleasure that you get from wine. It opens with a spirited defense of oenophilia (despite wine’s growing popularity, the age-old perception that it is a drink for snobs persists), then moves on to discuss becoming a wine maven, becoming a savvier wine buyer, and the eternally vexing question o
f food and wine pairings. There are also chapters about value wines and bucket-list wines, with lots of recommendations in both. What’s the best wine region in California? (Hint: it’s not Napa or Sonoma.) What’s the difference between organic, biodynamic, and natural wines, and what the hell is a spoofulated wine? Which matters more, the vintage or the vintner? Are supertasters better tasters? Is the shape of a wineglass really that important? What’s the first thing you should do upon entering a wine shop? These and many other questions are answered here.

  Amid all the practical information, The Wine Savant examines all sorts of interesting and contentious issues related to wine. Are wine critics trustworthy? Why did California become a whipping boy for wine geeks, and why is it suddenly the Promised Land again? Why is Burgundy so fashionable and Bordeaux so passé? Why, contrary to expectations, has globalization proven to be a boon for obscure grapes and obscure wine regions?

  There has never been a more exciting time to be a wine enthusiast, and in recent years oenophilia has swept the planet. Hong Kong has eclipsed New York and London as the world’s richest wine auction market, and winemakers in Bordeaux, Napa, Barossa, and other places are now swooning over the Chinese market and its vast potential. India and Russia have caught the wine bug, too, as has Brazil. Suddenly collectors in Western Europe and America, who used to have the market for rare Burgundies and Bordeaux pretty much to themselves, are facing competition for prized bottles from newly minted oenophiles in Shanghai and Shenzhen. For some wines, such as Château Lafite-Rothschild, one of the five Bordeaux first growths, there is no competition: Asian buyers rule the market.

  Fortunately, being priced out of a wine, or an even an entire class of wines, is now merely an invitation to discover new wines. The past fifteen years have also seen a quality explosion in the wine world. In the not-so-distant past, a reasonably savvy oenophile could put together a respectable cellar with wines from just a handful of places—Bordeaux, Burgundy, Champagne, Napa, the Mosel, the Douro—and a handful of grapes—Cabernet, Pinot Noir, Syrah, Chardonnay, Riesling. These days, however, compelling wines are being made in all sorts of unlikely and unfamiliar places (hello, Canary Islands!), and there has been an explosion in the number of grapes represented on American retail shelves. Alongside the Cabernets and Chardonnays, you now find Albariños, Verdejos, Grüner Veltliners, Aglianicos, Lagreins, Blaufränkisches, and many others. Better farming and winemaking practices, stepped-up competition—these are the primary factors that have driven this global quality revolution, and it is safe to say that there has never been a better time to be a wine drinker.

  But there has also never been a more confusing time to be one. With so many different wines made from so many different grapes hailing from so many different regions, the choices can be overwhelming. Plus, thanks to the Internet, there’s now a cacophony of critics, professional and amateur alike, lauding wines, lambasting wines, and so on. Wine may be a simple pleasure, but it is also a complex beverage, and never more so than now. In 2012, Wine Spectator columnist Matt Kramer wrote a piece in which he talked about the democratization of wine enthusiasm—how oenophilia is today more accessible to far more people than ever before. But he added an important caveat. “The new wine democracy,” he wrote, “is not about money, but rather how much effort you’re willing to expend. Are you willing (and sufficiently interested) to read about and then hunt down all those thrilling little producers in the Loire Valley, in Spain, Portugal, Oregon, Greece, New Zealand, and the unheralded nooks and crannies of California? If you are—and you actually do it—you’re in. Welcome to the wine elite.”

  That education process is part of the pleasure of wine, too. Like all alcoholic beverages, wine has the ability to make you feel happy; what sets it apart is its ability also to make you think. No other alcoholic drink—no other beverage, period—is as deeply rooted in the human experience as wine. Indeed, it has been integral to the human experience for more than two millennia, and combines history, politics, and culture in a way unmatched by any other potable. Just think about the present moment. Wine sits at the nexus of some of the most significant stories of our time—globalization, climate change, the rise of China. It turns out that wine, in addition to offering singular pleasure, is a pretty good lens through which to view our world. Take, for instance, the issue of counterfeit wines. In recent years the fine wine market has seen a surge in counterfeit rarities. It’s a delicious story, with an international and very colorful cast of characters. It has produced one best-selling book (The Billionaire’s Vinegar) and numerous magazine and newspaper articles and may yet yield a major motion picture (full disclosure: an article that I wrote for Vanity Fair in 2012 about the rise and fall of Rudy Kurniawan, who allegedly flooded the market with fake Bordeaux and Burgundies, was optioned for film rights).

  But the onslaught of fake wines is part of a larger tale, about the global wealth boom of the past few decades and the tireless pursuit of cultural capital by the newly moneyed. Above all, what created a market for all these fake Lafites and Romanée-Contis was the desire of wealthy people to be able to say that they had experienced something unique, that their wealth had conferred on them the ability to taste the rarest of the rare—wines like the 1945 Romanée-Conti, of which just 608 bottles were produced and which has become a popular counterfeit item. A collector friend of mine once told me that with wines like the ’45 Romanée-Conti, you quickly leave the realm of fermented grape juice and enter the deepest recesses of the mind. “You’ve paid a lot of money to experience the wine, and you’re so emotionally invested in having this experience, in being able to say that you tasted the ’forty-five RC, that you can easily convince yourself that the wine is great even if it really isn’t,” he said. Those who manufactured fake rarities understood the psychology of their intended victims perfectly, and ultrawealthy collectors, so anxious to acquire that cultural capital, turned out to be shockingly easy marks.

  For me, a big part of the pleasure of writing about wine is exploring the culture of oenophilia and connecting it to these broader themes. I think the finest wine writing combines helpful tips with insights into the people, places, politics, history, and economics of wine, and that’s what I have attempted to do here. Many of my ideas are drawn from the nearly ten years I spent as the wine columnist for Slate magazine, the pioneering online journal, and some of the material is drawn from it, too. It wouldn’t be quite accurate to say that Slate gave me the freedom to write about wine in a different style from that of other publications; the editors insisted on it, which was great, because I wanted to write about wine in a different way—I wanted the column to be punchy, entertaining, and slightly irreverent. I think it was all that, but it also helped steer readers to many exciting wines from around the world. You’ll find the same combination of spirited wine talk and practical insights in these pages.

  1

  Wine Without Apologies

  IT HAPPENS without fail every election season: at some point during the campaign, a candidate will be portrayed as being the favorite of wine-sipping elites. Sometimes the description is more specific: the candidate will be described as the choice of Chardonnay-sipping elites (as if Chardonnay is somehow more froufrou than other wines). Inevitably the candidate will be a Democrat, since everyone knows that only limp-wristed lefties enjoy wine, and political commentators will expound anew on America’s wine versus beer divide. Get the impression that all this blather about wine and political allegiances drives me nuts? It does. The idea that alcohol preferences are linked to political allegiances is asinine. Worse, though, is the underlying premise—the notion that wine is something exotic and somehow alien to mainstream America, that it is a beverage that appeals only to decadent coastal elites who are more Continental than Yankee.

  Warning: A rant is coming.

  Maddeningly, this image of wine persists in American pop culture even though we have become a nation of wine enthusiasts. There is apparently no limit, for instance, to the media’s enthusiasm
for studies that cast doubt on wine connoisseurship. If a group of “experts” decides that they prefer a $10 wine to a $100 bottle, rest assured that the story will be headline news as soon as it breaks. That’s especially true if the study involves some sort of ruse—say, switching the labels on the bottles. Poseurs humiliated! It is a mystery to me why these stories continue to hold so much appeal for reporters and editors, many of whom surely enjoy a glass of Muscadet or Mencia whenever it comes their way. No doubt a certain segment of the public—a small, shrinking, very sad segment—finds pleasure in such stories. But really, these efforts to paint wine appreciation as pretentious nonsense are woefully outdated.

  So why do they persist? To a certain extent, we oenophiles invite the abuse (yes, I’m being dramatic for effect here). While a very self-confident wine culture—confident in its taste, receptive to all sorts of wines—has indeed taken root in the United States, we grape nuts don’t do a good job of projecting that confidence. Quite the opposite: we seem to apologize for our oenophilia and continuously downplay wine’s significance. I’m as guilty of this as anyone: I can’t tell you how many times I’ve trotted out lines like “Wine isn’t war and peace” or “It’s only fermented grape juice.” It’s sort of a preemptive cringe. And what are we cringing from? Accusations of snobbery. Much of the public and private discussion of wine revolves around the notion that people who are wine enthusiasts are by definition snobs—that merely possessing a keen interest in wine and some knowledge of it marks you as a snob. Not surprisingly, wine writers, who communicate with a broad audience routinely, are particularly sensitive to this charge and tend to strike an apologetic or self-deprecatory note reflexively when it comes to their own expertise, so as to not be branded with the scarlet S (as in Snob). The shelves of bookstores are stuffed with wine guides that seek either to capitalize on the presumed link between wine connoisseurship and snootiness (The Wine Snob’s Dictionary, The Official Guide to Wine Snobbery, The Great Wine Swindle) or to inoculate their authors against accusations of such (Wine for Dummies, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Wine). The prevailing wisdom seems to be that wine knowledge should be worn lightly and that the most effective means of sharing one’s knowledge is to downplay or even poke fun at it.