The Discreet Charm of Jadot

There’s a mackerel-scented grit to certain New York Chinese restaurants that speaks to wine geeks. Call it pathos, if you’d rather. Fact is, fine dining, with its mark-ups and corkage fees, is best left to foodies and the merely rich; geeks allocate resources to their bottles and prefer to be left to fuss over them in peace. That is why some of the city’s most scarce wines are downed in the company of crispy prawns in Hoisin sauce and steamed pork buns. It was in a Mott Street dim sum pavilion, this past winter, that I met a half-dozen people for a long, Rabelaisian dinner; that night we put to rest nearly two cases of wine. Some undoubtedly impressive bottles—vintage champagne, old grand-cru Chablis and Riesling—yet all of them tasted forgettably wan beside a Chambolle Musigny Amoureuses from the unexciting vintage of 2000. It was one of those glasses of wine that leaves people aphasic; for a few moments it felt as though someone had set the boisterous room around us on mute. Roses, tea, jasmine, that red-burgundy smell of the nude human body polite writers call “earthy”—sticking my nose in the Chambolle was like watching a Cinemascope western. I guess Amoureuses, like Virginia, really is for lovers. After the din in the room came back up, a friend who manages a small, very good wine shop in Brooklyn, said, “This is great—I can’t believe it’s Jadot.”

I suppose his reaction wasn’t surprising. The last time I’d seen a wine from Louis Jadot was at a Shaw’s supermarket in small-town New Hampshire, where its beige-labelled Beaujolais-Villages stood on a shelf side-by-side with Red Bicyclette and Fat Bastard. In addition to being one of the largest producers in Burgundy, Jadot lacks allure by being a negociant, or merchant, meaning the house makes some of its wines with purchased grapes. The Côte d’Or is a place that advertises itself as a haven of tweedy generational farmers who toil in the rain and fog over microscopic parcels of expensive, fickle grapes; little wonder that among some wine lovers, large merchants, like the late Rodney Dangerfield, get no respect. Of course, we live in a heyday of estate-bottled wine. The importer Neal Rosenthal told me recently about taking the Sancerre winemaker Lucien Crochet to dinner at Lutèce in 1984. “The wine list didn’t mention producers or vintages,” said Rosenthal, “and all of the burgundies came from negociants.” By which he presumably meant that they were mediocre and quite probably generic. After all, it was importers like Rosenthal, Kermit Lynch and Becky Wasserman who introduced many American drinkers to estate-bottled burgundies in the 1980s and 90s, and when people talk about great burgundy today, they usually mean wines from the likes of Lafon, Coche, Lignier, Dujac, and Lafarge. Conversely, finding a bottle from Jadot or another negociant on a hip Manhattan restaurant’s menu is, to say the least, unlikely. Besides, Burgundians themselves like to perpetuate the region’s image as La France profonde, a bucolic backwater untouched by metropolitanism and corporate integration, even while some of these same growers can afford to hitch their plows to late-model Bentleys.

Is Jadot Burgundy’s Mammon? There are good reasons to be leery of corporate wine, especially if you believe wine to be something more than a beverage—I’d wager that you prefer neither your spring lamb nor the art on your walls to come from a conglomerate. With that in mind, I set out to learn a few things about Jadot. For one, the company is American-owned; a former Macy’s liquor salesman from Queens named Rudy Kopf, who founded Jadot’s importer Kobrand and later made a fortune in gin, bought it in 1985. Nearly half of Jadot’s roughly 150 labels come from vineyards the company owns or manages. And, most interestingly, the man who oversees the winemaking—and who’s prone to mystical and sometimes inscrutable pronouncements on the subject—is 61-year-old Jacques Lardière, whom both Clive Coates and Jay McInerney have called a genius (that’s him looking bemused at the top of the page). Lardière farms the company’s 98 acres of vineyards at the Chateau des Jacques in Moulin-

Comments