The Wine Savant: A Guide to the New Wine Culture

by Michael Steinberger

  Also, the problems of the appellation system in France these days ought to serve as a cautionary tale. The Appellations d’Origine Contrôlée (AOC for short) system was established in 1935. The goal was to map out the boundaries in which certain wines, such as Hermitage, could be made, and to prevent those names from being used elsewhere. But the AOC setup was also meant to serve as a quality control mechanism: AOC status was supposed to be granted only to France’s finest vineyards and, by extension, its finest wines.

  However, starting in the 1970s, largely in response to political pressure—winemakers whose vineyards were not AOC-designated pushed to be included because they wanted to be able to claim greater prestige for their wines and charge higher prices for them—the number of appellations exploded. These days, more than 50 percent of France’s vineyards enjoy AOC status. This has seriously undermined the credibility of the appellation system, as has the way that appellations are governed. Individual wine appellations are basically administered by the winemakers themselves, and this arrangement, plainly fraught with conflicts of interest, has had terrible consequences. In numerous appellations, the mediocre majority rules, and quality has consequently suffered. For a wine to be labeled AOC, for instance, it must pass a taste test, but in many appellations the taste test is a joke—almost every wine gets waved through.

  Even crazier, though, is what has happened in places like the Loire Valley and Beaujolais, where some of the finest producers—Jean-Paul Brun, Jean Thévenet, Marcel Richaud—have had their wines rejected. While it can’t be proven, it is widely assumed that these winemakers have been targeted by neighbors jealous of their success—a wine version of Gulliver and the Lilliputians. These are areas in which many vintners are struggling economically, and there is resentment of those who are prospering, resentment that appears to have found expression in the form of failed taste tests. I’m not suggesting that the codification of California wines would necessarily result in the same sort of problems that are found in France, but the French example is another reason I think we can get along just fine without having an official hierarchy of vineyards or wineries.

  HOW DID THE FRENCH GET TO BE

  SO GOOD AT WINE?

  Having spent several paragraphs talking about the problems of the French appellation system, let me now shower some praise on the French. Why, historically, have the French been so good at wine? One reason is that they’ve been making it a lot longer than the rest of us. But like many oenophiles, I’m convinced that it’s also a function of the philosophy that guides their efforts. At the heart of the French viticultural system is the concept of terroir: the idea that wine is chiefly a product of the physical environment (the soil, the microclimate) in which the grapes are grown, that matching the right grape to the right soil is the essential first step to making fine wine, and that a wine should not just taste good but exude a sense of place. This notion took root in France during the Middle Ages and remains the organizing principle of French winemaking. But many New World producers, explicitly and implicitly, have shown contempt for it. They have allowed commercial considerations to dictate which grapes they plant, paying little regard to whether those grapes are really suited to the sites in question, and they have demonstrated a proclivity to make wines that emphasize fruit, alcohol, and new oak over any expression of terroir. Their wines exude an unmistakable sense of place, but it’s the wrong place—the cellar rather than the vineyard.

  Not surprisingly, these wines often seem indistinguishable from one another, and I think this sameness goes a long way to explaining why so many oenophiles are ultimately drawn to France.Terroir is a somewhat elusive concept, and the extent to which the vineyard really influences the taste of a wine is something we may never know. But the finest vintners in places such as Burgundy and the Loire continue to produce wines that convey a sense of “somewhereness,” to use Matt Kramer’s felicitous phrase, and that on balance show more nuance and individuality than most of what emerges from Napa or Barossa. When it comes to crafting interesting, multidimensional wines that will improve with age, France still leads the way. But California has exceptional terroir, too, and with the advent of this movement toward greater balance and site expression, it is slowly catching up. I think we are on the cusp of a very special era for California winemaking, a truly great leap forward, and as big a blow as the Judgment of Paris was for the French, it was nothing compared to what’s probably coming.

  THE NEW CALIFORNIA—

  NAMES WORTH KNOWING

  • Rhys Vineyards (Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Syrah)

  • Copain Wines (Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Syrah)

  • Wind Gap Wines (Syrah, Pinot Noir, Chardonnay)

  • Dashe Cellars (Zinfandel, Riesling)

  • Lioco Winery (Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, blends)

  • Sandhi Wines (Pinot Noir, Chardonnay)

  • Tyler Winery (Pinot Noir, Chardonnay)

  • Kutch Wines (Pinot Noir)

  • Arnot-Roberts (Syrah, Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay)

  • Donkey and Goat Winery (Syrah, Grenache, Grenache Blanc, Chardonnay, blends)

  • Failla Wines (Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Syrah)

  THE BEST OF CALIFORNIA’S OLD GUARD

  • Ridge Vineyards (Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Zinfandel)

  • Chateau Montelena (Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Riesling, Zinfandel)

  • Mayacamas Vineyards (Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay)

  • Dominus (Cabernet Sauvignon)

  • Stony Hill Vineyard (Chardonnay)

  • Nalle Winery (Zinfandel)

  • Smith-Madrone Vineyards (Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Riesling)

  • Hanzell Vineyards (Chardonnay)

  • Au Bon Climat Winery (Pinot Noir, Chardonnay)

  • Calera Wine (Pinot Noir, Chardonnay)

  7

  The Beaune Supremacy:

  The Triumph of Burgundy

  LOOKING FOR a quick means of establishing your wine-geek bona fides? Here’s one easy and surefire way: declare your passion for Burgundy and simultaneously announce that you have sworn off Bordeaux, and you will instantaneously acquire all the street cred you could possibly want. Burgundy ascendant, Bordeaux passé? Yep, and it’s arguably the biggest wine story of the past decade. For the better part of two centuries, Bordeaux was the most important and influential wine region and source of the most coveted wines. Now, though, its longtime rival to the north, Burgundy, has largely supplanted Bordeaux as the wine world’s lodestar. What accounts for this historic change? I think it speaks to a growing preference for Pinot Noir, Burgundy’s red grape, over Cabernet Sauvignon, which is Bordeaux’s mainstay. But more than that, I believe it reflects a certain romanticism on the part of wine enthusiasts—a preference for the artisanal over the industrial, an emotional disposition that small is indeed beautiful.

  Burgundy is a relatively tiny region located in east-central France. Almost all its wines are made from a single grape—Pinot Noir for the reds, Chardonnay for the whites (there is another white grape, Aligoté, but it is made in minute quantities). Bordeaux, located in southwestern France, specializes in blended wines. Bordeaux is divided into two parts, known as the left bank and the right bank (they are divided by the Gironde River). Cabernet Sauvignon is king on the left bank, Merlot on the right, but neither grape is used exclusively. A typical left bank wine is a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, with Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot possibly thrown in. A typical right bank wine is predominately Merlot, with Cabernet Franc and possibly also Cabernet Sauvignon added. In Burgundy, the vineyard is king; the region’s wines are classified by vineyard (grand cru, premier cru, villages, and so on), and a winery’s standing is wholly dependent on the vineyards that it owns. In Bordeaux, by contrast, the château is king; wines are classified by château (first growth, second growth, and the like), and if Château Lafite, a first growth, acquires a vineyard that previously belonged to a third growth, that vineyard will, by dint of asso
ciation, suddenly be producing first-growth fruit.

  Burgundy has always had its loyalists, of course, and they’ve tended to be fanatically partisan. Indeed, among a small, well-heeled segment of the wine-drinking public, Burgundy has long enjoyed cultish devotion; like surfers roaming the globe in search of the perfect wave, Burgundy devotees spend countless hours and jaw-dropping amounts of cash chasing the elusive, infatuating “Burgundy high.” While usually not obnoxious about it, these Burgundy aficionados believe that they possess particularly refined palates and have found a “higher truth” in wine.

  And just as there are Burg fanatics, so there are equally impassioned Burg-phobes. These are drinkers who have no patience for Burgundy’s Byzantine complexity and who find the wines too light, too dainty for their taste. They generally view the Burgundy crowd as masochists and cranks. The leading Burgundy basher has always been Robert Parker. Over the years he has lavished high scores on many Burgundies, but they are not his preferred style, and he was never Burgundy’s preferred critic. Indeed, he eventually became persona non grata there and had to hire an assistant to cover the region. The experience left him nursing a grudge: he seems to go out of his way to bait the Burgundy faithful. If a Burgundy vintage falls short in his view, he tends to dismiss it in sweeping, contemptuous terms, something he almost never does with feebler years in, say, Bordeaux or the Rhône.

  But when it comes to Burgundy—and this is perhaps the most telling sign of his waning influence—Parker is spitting into the wind these days. That’s because Burgundy has lately become the touchstone for many wine enthusiasts. It is often said in wine circles that all roads lead to Burgundy, and never has that been truer than now, when more and more wine enthusiasts seem to be falling under Burgundy’s spell. One reason is the growing popularity of Pinot Noir. While fine Pinots are being produced in California, Oregon, and New Zealand, the finest ones still come from Burgundy, and it is fair to say that once turned on to the pleasures of Chambolle-Musigny and Volnay, most Pinot enthusiasts never turn back. And there are a lot of Pinot enthusiasts these days. In 1986 the acclaimed British wine writer Jancis Robinson published a book called Vines, Grapes, and Wines in which she observed that “to the great majority of conscious wine-drinking palates in the world today, top quality red wine is Cabernet Sauvignon.” I don’t think she could make the same claim today, or at least such an unequivocal one. Even before the Great Recession, many American collectors were turning away from Bordeaux and Napa and embracing Burgundy, a development that was part of the broader Pinot Noir boom—a boom that has endured even through the downturn. Does anyone care these days if some hot new Cabernet project is launched in Napa? Not as far as I can tell. An exciting new source of Pinot, however, is sure to generate buzz. For many consumers, Pinot, and especially Pinot in its Burgundian incarnation, is now the gold standard of red wine grapes, and this is surely one big reason that Burgundy has eclipsed Bordeaux.

  But Burgundy wouldn’t be basking in so much affection these days were it not for the fact that the region has been in the throes of a quality revolution over the past two decades. Parker’s attitude toward Burgundy was formed in the 1970s and ’80s (and one could argue that it has remained firmly anchored in the past); back then, the quality was spotty, and you’d have to wade through a number of thin, acidic, ungenerous wines to get to that one gem. That is emphatically no longer the case; sensational wines are literally falling off the vines these days in Burgundy.

  One reason for the turn in fortune is the improved weather. Climate change poses a long-term threat to Burgundy, but for now it is a boon. In the past twenty years, there has really been only one truly bad vintage, 1994. Every other year has produced at least good wines, and a number of years—1996, 1999, 2001, 2002, 2005, 2009, 2010—have yielded outstanding ones. But the weather is just one factor; better farming is another. The best producers in Burgundy these days—and there are a number of superb ones—are fanatically meticulous farmers. The axiom that great wines are made in the vineyard, not the cellar? Those are truly the words that Burgundy now lives by, and the combination of high-quality fruit and skilled winemaking is yielding consistently excellent wines. It is truly a golden age of Burgundian winemaking, and this is another reason so many people are gravitating toward Burgundy.

  But there’s a third reason, too, and I think it goes some way to explaining why Burgundy has eclipsed Bordeaux in the hearts and minds of so many: the cultural differences between Burgundy and Bordeaux. Burgundy, with its unpretentious farming culture, represents what we want wine to be; Bordeaux, ever more corporatized and commodified, represents what we don’t want it to become. True, Bordeaux has always been the most commercial of wine regions, with a brisk international trade in its wines for centuries. However, the commercialism has been ratcheted up dramatically in recent years. Lots of modest family-run wineries exist on the periphery of Bordeaux, but the limelight belongs to the big-name châteaus. The global wealth boom of the 1990s and early 2000s helped send demand and prices for the most sought-after wines spiraling and also brought an influx of new investors. In his aptly titled book What Price Bordeaux?, Benjamin Lewin notes that over the past two decades, wealthy industrialists and big companies have been the fastest-growing category of château owner and today account for roughly one-third of all the classified growths. Lewin says these individuals and entities generally view wine less as a beverage than as a brand, less a source of pleasure than a source of revenue or long-term capital gains.

  Burgundy has always been a world apart from Bordeaux. While the Bordelais classified their wines by price, the Burgundians did it on the basis of terroir—on what they believed to be the intrinsic quality of each vineyard, as revealed over the centuries. Burgundy’s grand cru and premier cru designations, which were formally introduced in the 1930s, are aesthetic judgments, not commercial benchmarks. Bordeaux has historically been quite affluent and cosmopolitan, a magnet for rich outsiders, foreigners as well as people from other parts of France. In Burgundy, prosperity is a recent phenomenon; up until the 1980s, it was a fairly hardscrabble place (which could explain the lack of rapacious pricing: growers who remember the lean times would rather forgo a few extra euros than risk losing customers—a depression mentality, you could say). It has traditionally been a very insular one, too, composed almost entirely of small, multigenerational family farms. In his book Bordeaux/Burgundy: A Vintage Rivalry, Jean-Robert Pitte nicely summarized the atmospheric distinctions:

  Exaggerating only slightly, it is fair to say that in Bordeaux they have university degrees, speak English (and sometimes another foreign language), read the daily financial news, travel frequently to Paris and abroad, dress in the style of English gentlemen farmers, and play tennis or even polo; in short, their manners are sophisticated. Most of their counterparts in Burgundy, by contrast, have no higher education, dress in a rustic or sporty way, in any case without any concern for fashion or affectation, and proudly display their peasant manners. The former spend their time mainly in the office and rely on employees to do the work of the vineyard and the cellar; the latter, even when they have assistance or hired staff, take pleasure in getting out of the office and rolling up their sleeves.

  These differences seem more pronounced of late. While Bordeaux is increasingly corporate, its proprietors further removed than ever from the winemaking process, the overwhelming majority of Burgundian estates are still mom-and-pop operations, and the region’s agrarian way of life has become even more entrenched. In fact, over the past forty years or so, Burgundy has moved in the direction of greater artisanship. Up until the early 1970s, more than 90 percent of all Burgundies on the market were négociant bottlings. Négociants are large merchant houses, such as Louis Jadot and Louis Latour, that buy unfinished wines or grapes from growers throughout Burgundy and bottle the finished products under their own labels (some of them also have vineyards of their own). Some of Burgundy’s most venerated names—Romanée-Conti, Rousseau, d’Angerville—started bottl
ing their own wines in the early twentieth century, but they were a very distinct minority. For the overwhelming majority of winemakers and vineyard owners in Burgundy, it made much more sense to sell their grapes or unfinished wines to the négociants, as their wines wouldn’t have sold for enough money to justify the added costs associated with bottling or the added risk of having to sell their wines directly to consumers. That equation began to change in the early 1970s, and it has now changed completely. While the négociants are still around and are actually thriving these days, estate bottling is now the norm among quality producers in Burgundy and is really a prerequisite to being taken seriously as a producer.

  CHAMPAGNE: THE SMALL FRY ASCENDANT

  This same phenomenon is playing out in the Champagne region of France, with similar results. The Champagne market has traditionally been dominated by large houses like Moët & Chandon, Taittinger, and Veuve Clicquot. These grandes marques, as they are known, are négociants. Like the négociants of Burgundy, they may own a few vineyards of their own, but for the most part they buy grapes from vineyards throughout the vast Champagne region and use them to make their wines. In general, these are not wines that reflect the particular attributes of the vineyards from which they came; instead, the grapes are blended together to create a Champagne that reflects the so-called house style.

  But some vineyard owners in Champagne choose not to sell their grapes; instead they make their own Champagnes, and some of them do a really good job. In recent years, the “grower Champagne” movement has turned the chalky hillsides northeast of Paris into arguably the most dynamic wine region on the planet. Indeed, it is quite literally redefining what Champagne is all about. The grower producers work on a much smaller scale than the majors, often using fruit from one village or even a lone vineyard, and often using just one grape variety (Champagne is customarily a blend of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Pinot Meunier). Their goal is not to produce a “house style” but to turn out Champagnes that bear the imprint of the sites from which they emanated—that have a strong goût de terroir.