Recently, these thoughts popped into my head after I stuck my nose into a glass of Valpolicella from Giuseppe Quintarelli, a gift from my friend Boris. Quintarelli happens to be a gnarled traditionalist and a classic, embracing both the laudatory and unfashionable connotations of the word. For decades, wine mavens have considered him to be among the top makers of Italian reds, a particularly notable distinction when you consider that Don Beppi works not in Alba or Montalcino, but in the hamlet of Ceré in the lowly appellation of Valpolicella, near Verona. He’s best known for his Amarones, made in top years from partially dried grapes; at 16.5 percent alcohol, the ‘98 (another boon from Boris, an Amarone fanatic) turned out to be nearly black and viscous as espresso, yet poised and already generous, shifting kaleidoscopically from earth to a tarry bitterness to a tawny-port-like richness. Beppi’s “strong bitter one” proved as statuesque as a Bernini fountain, and retailing at around $350 a bottle, I suppose it should have.

In Italy, Valpolicella ranks only behind Chianti in total wine production; aside from Amarone, a viticultural oddity, the region has been known as a source of cheap, occasionally pleasant reds, a fraternal twin to nearby Soave. In the early 80s, Masi began to label their Valpolicella “ripasso,” indicating that the wine had been macerated on skins and seeds from grapes used in the production of Amarone. Local vintners had done this for years, but the term caught on in an attempt to market their wares to drinkers, many in the US, looking for bigger and darker reds. At roughly the same time, Romano Dal Forno emerged as a field marshal of the new-wave producers and a challenger to Quintarelli; working outside the Valpolicella Classico production zone, he pushed alcohol and extraction into fortified-wine territory and priced his Amarones as high as first-growth Bordeaux. Boris and I opened Dal Forno’s ‘98 Valpolicella a few months ago; we mumbled at each other politely, swirling until our wrists ached: even decanted, the stuff in the glass was black as pitch and a facsimile of grape concentrate, the kind of object made by an architect from Dubai. If the Dal Forno had something to tell us, we couldn’t decipher it; like the enormous beached fish at the end of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, it functioned best as a metaphor.

If Quintarelli’s human-scaled Amarone is a counterpoint to Veneto’s maximalists, the ‘95 Valpolicella I happened to taste was a rebuke. It came off delicate, barely medium-bodied, with not much perceptible tannin, and aromatic in a wistful way—drinking it felt like putting on a favorite old shirt. It showed off the fresh bitterness of the Corvina grape and—a trademark of Beppi’s wines—a knit-together depth and complexity of flavor. (The effect is partly due to Quintarelli holding back the wines for about a decade before release—the new Valpolicella on the US market is the ‘01.) It isn’t easy to recommend at around $75 because that sum will buy more obviously pleasing bottles: a good Chambolle, grand-cru Chablis, older Rioja, a cabernet from Ridge. Quintarelli’s Valpolicella isn’t as flamboyant as those wines and that’s part of its appeal—the quality it embodies most is humility, an utter lack of ostentation, which makes it the opposite of something like a Meursault. To borrow a cliché, you could call it a “winemaker’s wine,” and in its subtlety Quintarelli’s red reminds me of Russell Edson’s poems or the nonfiction of Ian Frazier. I will be thinking about it long after memories of finer bottles have have begun to ebb.

It’s tempting to attribute these properties to the land, though I suspect Quintarelli’s wines draw more from the man’s personality. Beppi is well past 80 and famously reclusive; he claims to make wine exactly as his father had done since 1924, and personally I doubt he’s ever lain awake worrying whether his wines are being talked about in Napa or Tokyo. Last year he handed off winemaking to his eldest daughter and grandson, who say they’re striving to “maintain the Quintarelli style.” Can wine be said to have a style? If so, where does it reside? Beppi hasn’t opined on the subject, but here’s what he has said: “The fundamental problem in wine today is that too many producers hurry to make their wines: they hurry the fruit in the vineyard and they hurry the vinification and rush to bottle. They rush to sell their product without allowing it the proper time to age. Patience – this is the most important attribute in winemaking. Patience in growing, patience in selection, and patience in vinification.”

photo by chubbyhubby

The post The Hemingway of Valpolicella appeared first on The Faster Times.

It can be difficult not to feel a little like the porcine Edward when you spend several months draining champagne bottles, as I did this winter. Yet once an obsessive begins the long descent down the rabbit hole of secondary fermentation, questions begin to outnumber answers. Besides being expensive, champagne turns out to be uncommonly complex; the importer Peter Wasserman once compared it to a chess game. No wine has more moving parts—none is more difficult or time-consuming to produce and requires more decisions on the part of the maker. This is particularly the case with vintage champagnes, when those decisions—blending, dosage, lees aging and scores of others—are complicated by the vagaries of a single season’s climate. The whole thing sounds like a complete pain in the ass.

At least some in Champagne think so, too. “Although it’s hard to get any champagne-maker to say as much or, at any rate, to say it for quotation,” Cyril Ray wrote, “I believe many of the finest houses would be glad to devote all their skill and all their resources to producing the best non-vintage wines they are capable of producing; to have the fine wine of vintage years in reserve to blend with and to better the non-vintage; and to be judged by them.” He goes on to claim that most makers put out the vintage-dated stuff because of the press attention each release brings them, and, mostly, because all of their competitors produce it and no one wants to be left out. So make it they do, with the best grapes and methods at their disposal, and price the stuff correspondingly.

After a spirituous winter, I’ve discovered that while vintage champagnes are often more interesting than non-vintage ones, they are not always “better.” Consider red burgundies—generally they start out deliciously fruity before a fraction begin to close down, and some admirers prefer to always drink them “on the fruit.” Champagne, on the other hand, is rarely at its best upon release. “Personally, I believe that all champagnes do improve with at least a year of post-disgorgement aging,” champagne sage Peter Liem wrote me. “The components integrate better with one another and acquire better harmony, and the fruit has a chance to settle down and feel more complex. Many people think that non-vintage champagne should be drunk as soon as possible, but last year I tasted a Larmandier-Bernier blanc de blancs based on the 1985 harvest, and it was still lively and delicious.” Non-vintage blends, at least, are calibrated to drink well soon after release, but vintage wines can stay disagreeable for ages, particularly those made in the most acclaimed years. So time spent in bottle turns out be at least as important as the year of the harvest, a predicament complicated by the fact that most champagne makers continue to keep disgorgement dates to themselves.

And the vintages? (First, an aside about the wines discussed below: all came from champagne houses. The growers’ broader stylistic range would have made comparisons that much more challenging, and many don’t release a vintage wine. Most bottles were provided by importers. Increasingly I find marathon sit-down tastings to be close to pointless, so the wines were poured at a series of smaller events, where four to six tasters sampled them with food over the course of several hours.)

A vintage chart won’t tell you much about what it’s like to drink these champagnes today; in practice, the years turn out to be as varied in their personalities as a bus of kindergarteners. The oldest current-release champagnes you’re liable to find in stores are the ’98s. With a couple of exceptions: though Lanson has put a 2000 on the market, its US importer is still offering the ’97 as a current vintage. Whatever the reason, it’s a gift to the consumer, as the wine has had plenty of time in bottle and the vintage is begging to be drunk. Last winter it was my favorite among the champagnes we tasted; a year later it wasn’t quite as impeccably balanced, and even more secondary, with rich nutty, meaty flavors overtaking the fruit, but it was still full-on delicious, and a bargain at around $55. (The vintage “Gold Label” is a favorite among Lanson’s wines; the more expensive Noble Cuvée, from ’98, struck me as savagely austere and a touch sweet.)

The other ’98s were as easy to like as a Norman Rockwell and, for the most part, proved delightful. The Henriot ($80), which tasted as a bit showy a year ago, has firmed up and taken on the autumnal flavors of Pinot, and came across as altogether compelling and serious; I suspect it will get even better with time. (If you search, the even tastier ’96—all lovely salinity, beautifully knit-together—is still around in stores.) I wasn’t overly familiar with champagnes from Mumm, but the ’98 Cuvée R. Lalou ($140), the firm’s “luxury” bottling, turned out to be orchestral: kaleidoscopic yet precise, imbued with the uncanny focus that comes with age and a long, layered finish. Culled from a handful of grand-cru parcels, so far it has only been released once; it costs as much as Dom Pérignon and less than Cristal, yet its maturity makes it more approachable today than the current-release versions of those more famous wines. Savvy Escalade owners take note. And though it isn’t dated, the underpriced Mumm de Cramant ($50), one of the most distinctive champagnes around, comes from a single vintage. Once taken around by a liveried driver to friends of the house, it comes from two parcels in the classic Chardonnay village of Cramant and is bottled at lower-than-usual pressure, to soften the mousse. After 15 minutes of air, it filled out into a chalky, delicate blanc de blancs that would be a perfect start to a long, boozy A.J.-Liebling-style dinner.

As hard as I tried to warm up to the ’99s, I couldn’t find much to like about them. When I bellyached about the warm-weather vintage to Liem, he demurred. “The ’99s show much better today than they did in their youth,” he wrote. “Everyone thought that the ’99s, with their low acidities and high alcohols, ought to be drunk up as quickly as possible, yet the fruit has stayed primary for much longer than anybody expected, and today many are fresher than their 2000 counterparts.” It’s true that the ’99s drink fresh and surprisingly fruity, yet what irks is the character of that fruit: cloyingly sweetish, recessed in the middle, with neither enough structure nor acidity. I’m a fan of the always-well-considered champagnes from Bruno Paillard and Delamotte, yet I’d choose to drink the non-vintage wines over their ’99s (particularly in the case of Delamotte’s pretty saignée-method NV rosé). Even the usually stellar blanc de blancs from Pol Roger came off a bit simple and lackluster. The tastiest was probably the ’99 from Alfred Gratien, but for me even the barrel-aging and the firm British style couldn’t completely overcome the Bazooka-Joe fruitiness of the vintage.

Mildew, caterpillars and hailstones the size of eggs conspired to make 2000 difficult. Another low-acid year, it produced uneven champagnes that I preferred vastly to those from the preceding vintage. One thing everyone seems to agree on is that they’re drinking as well as they ever will. My favorite was the stupendous ’00 from Pol Roger ($100); “magisterial” may be an odd adjective to apply to a wine, but imagine Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire distilled into a champagne bottle. Bollinger’s even fuller ’00 Grand Année ($90) was nearly as good; shut tight at a tasting last summer, it has since thrown open the hatch to leesy, almost eggy goodness. Laurent-Perrier’s Bardot-like ‘00 brut ($50) was bosomy with fruit yet firmly-packed; dense and youthful, as well as a deal, it was miles better than L-P’s innocuous ’99. Jacquesson’s ‘00 ($100, the last vintage blend the firm will make) would likely have appealed to Edward’s taste for its appetizing dryness and backbone—his shooting-party drink was Ayala Extra-Dry 1865—but tasted like it was still a few years away from showing its cards. Gosset’s millennial brut, on the other hand, smelled like a bowl of freshly-picked raspberries; though I know some love it, for me the house’s distinct style is disconcertingly fruity, though perhaps with age the wines may become extraordinary. And the ultra-delicate ’00 Perrier-Jouët blanc de blancs, sourced from Cramant Chardonnay, was interesting in a sparkly, gossamer kind of way, but I’m not sure what to say about the spray-paint-huffing price of $375.

Written up by many as the most profound vintage in a decade—since ’90, maybe even ’88—’02 produced champagnes that should come with an FDA warning label. One day they’ll no doubt prove orgasmic, but that day isn’t coming anytime soon. For the moment, like red burgundy and Bordeaux from ’05, they’re more impressive than pleasurable. “Your comments about the ['02] wines being austere and hollow at the moment are indicative of a vintage that’s in a closed state at the moment,” Peter Liem writes. “There’s no reason that a nine-year-old champagne from a top vintage should be anything but painfully youthful.” Excellent as they are, Pol Roger’s rosé ($100), Perrier-Jouët’s brut ($125) and rosé ($300), even Bollinger’s already-delicious Grand Année rosé ($130)—’02s all—only hint at what they may become. Another house I hadn’t been familiar with, Joseph Perrier, located in Châlon-en-Champagne, bottled probably my favorite among the ’02s—their top-of-the-line Cuvée Josephine ($200). Tightly coiled at the moment, it showed excellent balance and length plus an exuberance I attributed to Perrier’s fondness for Meunier from the Marne Valley. I was just as impressed with the value of its rich NV blend, and was surprised to learn that currently the house has no distribution on the East Coast. Someone please dial their digits.

Happily, I’m of one mind with Peter Liem on the excellent ’04s. “[It’s] a vintage that has never shut down, which is curious,” he wrote. “The wines are simply delicious, and they should remain that way for quite a while.” My experience with the vintage is still limited, but Roederer’s ’04 rosé and blanc de blancs (both around $68), more classic than the zaftig ’03s, are already showing off their richness and finesse. And Deutz’ ’04 blanc de blancs ($65), charmless and turgid last winter, has sprung into elegant, Technicolor life.

Interestingly, the tête-de-cuvée luxury bottlings that houses advertise as being akin to liquid cocaine, and price accordingly, don’t always offer better drinking than the straight vintage wines. Many are blended for longevity and as a result take longer to fill out. The reductive Dom Pérignon is a well-known example. Jean-Baptiste Lecaillon, the winemaker at Roederer, readily acknowledges that Cristal, too, needs the most time among his champagnes to come into its own. I was happy to taste the delicious ’04 ($200), yet Roederer’s vintages, at a third of the price, are more complete and satisfying today. Likewise, Henriot’s Cuvée des Enchanteleurs ’96 ($200), just born after 13 years on the lees, isn’t as expressive and mature as the firm’s crazy-good brut from the same year; being a King-Kong-sized baby, it may take ten years or more to find itself.

One champagne I met this winter stands out for its mystery. In the past I’ve struggled with Taittinger’s vintage bubblies, finding some to be hard and impenetrable in their youth; what I can’t figure out is why the firm’s top wine, the all-Chardonnay Comtes de Champagne ($120), works so differently. I wasn’t expecting much from the ’99, having mostly disliked the vintage, but drinking the elegant, rosemary-scented Comtes felt like being put into a headlock by a goon in a cashmere sweater. Unctuously rich but not burly in the Krug mold, and generously open, the wine overpowered but didn’t oppress; it was easily the finest ’99 I’ve come across. As for the ’98 ($130), imagine the aroma of Bâtard-Montrachet and then amp it up until it becomes as rich as pork—the Comtes literally smelled like pancetta cooking in a skillet, the richest Chardonnay I’ve tasted. According to champagne frequent-flyers, Comtes is known both for being able to age for decades and for maturing early. I’m stumped as to why this should be so—no aspect of the winemaking appears too far out of the ordinary, and though I’ve asked, Pierre-Emmanuel Taittinger remains mum.

Nothing in the drinking life promises as much joy as champagne. For all its serious drawbacks—the haggling over vintages, the waiting, the palm-sweating expense—the best of these, to quote Richard E. Grant from Withnail and I, happen to be among “the finest wines available to humanity.” They are also hideously habit-forming. Recently I called a friend, a seasoned expert who helped me taste through nearly all these bottles. “My reintroduction to cava is going poorly,” he told me.

The post Serious Boys: Decoding Vintage Champagne appeared first on The Faster Times.

Now I happen to enjoy both Billecart’s and Theise’s champagnes—I can still taste the magnum of the incredible Vilmart Coeur de Cuvée ‘93 that a generous friend opened last New Year’s Eve. And in practice, I’ve found claims about deep qualitative and philosophical rifts between the two camps to be overblown, and largely pointless. In my admittedly limited conversations with Champenois on both sides of the trade, I’ve heard thoughtful and occasionally provocative comments about those differences, but rarely encountered partisan hostility. The houses, after all, depend on the growers for conscientious care of the vines and the ultimate quality of their product, while many growers depend on the houses for a livelihood and heavy expenditures on global marketing. And there’s at least some mutual admiration. “My brother and I have been working very hard over the past 20 years to transform Jacquesson…to an almost grower-like operation,” Jean-Hervé Chiquet, director of the excellent small house, told me about his decision to discontinue its non-vintage blend. And over dinner not long ago, I overheard several champagne growers, loquacious after polishing off a few bottles, rhapsodize about the glories of Clos des Goisses, made by the grand marque Philipponnat.

Yet any committed champagne drinker living in the US today has to admit that the growers, thanks in part to importers like Theise and Joe Dressner, have taken the upper hand in the war of narrative. Here in New York, I can’t think of a genuinely hip retailer or restaurant that offers much space to big-house bottles. Sure, they may bend to the inimitable charms of Krug, but mostly what you will find is a list of farmers. Underlying the vogue for growers is a hunger for authenticity; for incurable champagne geeks like me, the growers offer an opportunity for a close-up with a single grape variety or a particular village—you won’t find an all-Meunier champagne or a wine drawn entirely from Verzenay Pinot Noir from the grandes marques. And therein lies the allure of the growers. The facility for blending boasted about by the houses is a function of mere skill and sophistication. But the growers’ promise of terroir—the timeless signature of a particular plot of land—is irresistible to anyone with imagination and a love of a good story. So, a few weeks ago, I gathered a dozen friends for an immersion course in terroir. With bubbles.

For our hardly-comprehensive experiment we settled on 22 grower wines, the largest number I could conceive of sampling in a single night. To impose some boundaries on the undertaking, most bottles came courtesy of the two largest and most widely available grower champagne portfolios I know of—Terry Theise’s and Becky Wasserman’s—with a couple more from Savio Soares; my request was for wines that showcased a sense of place. To keep things on an even keel, we limited ourselves to champagnes made in a more-or-less traditional style, with no contenders from the sugarless brut-zero camp or the oxidative Selosse school. Joining me were a sommelier/GM, a Master of Wine, a brewmaster/author, an author/blogger, as well as folks working for wine retailers, importers and distributors around the city. We sniffed, swirled, spat, mumbled and took notes. What some of us learned had as much to do with the limitations of the tasting format as with the wines, but more on that later. Below are the champagnes in the order tasted (with what information was made available by the importers. Dollar values are actual retail prices from established shops.)

Jean Lallement Brut Tradition NV (Verzenay, Montagne de Reims, 80% PN 20% C, Terry Theise/Michael Skurnik Wines, $45): Muscular, with a tightly coiled core of bready, smoky Pinot Noir. Muted on the nose, with excellent balance and persistence, medium-bodied, briny, drinkable. Craggy and raffish, like Avedon’s late portrait of Auden. Key-West-era Hemingway would have enjoyed this, too. The most stylish wine here and one of my favorites.

Le Brun Servenay Blanc de Blancs Brut Selection NV (Avize, Côte de Blancs, 100% C, dosage 8.5 gr., Becky Wasserman Selection/Willette Wines, $46): Shy, charming, smelling of bruised apple and chalk, with a fine mousse and plenty of yeast. Classic Avize, and drinking wonderfully. Became fuller and more honeyed as it took on air. Everything in place. A favorite among many tasters.

Gérard Loriot Brut Tradition NV (Festigny, Vallée de la Marne, 100% PM, dosage 10 gr., Becky Wasserman Selection/Pas Mal Selections, $50): All Meunier from the Marne, the Loriot was rich and spicy, with an aggressive mousse and an abrupt finish. Several tasters wrote “ketchup.” Fascinating, but felt like it needed time in bottle and more air to sort itself out.

Pehu Simonet Brut Blanc de Blancs NV (Mesnil, Côte de Blancs, 100% C, Terry Theise/Michael Skurnik Wines, $54): Chardonnay champagne in the daintiest mold, full of bright lemon and green apple flavors, light in body, finely delicate and mineral, almost reminiscent of rain, though not particularly layered. One taster got all Prousty on this one, saying the whiff of latex paint up front—it quickly blew off—reminded him of his parents painting the house before Christmas.

Demilly de Baere Carte D’Or NV (Bligny, Montagne de Reims, PN+PM= 70% C+Pinot Blanc=30%, dosage 10 gr., Savio Soares Selections, $32): Though not the ultimate in refinement, and a touch sweet for some, this had pinpoint balance and wafted out of the glass; floral yet rich, creamy, chewy, with a hazelnut nose. Serious and yet immediately likable, like a great Buck Owens song. A bargain—more big-house non-vintage blends should be this good.

Henri Billiot Brut Rosé NV (Ambonnay, Montagne de Reims, nearly all PN, Terry Theise/Michael Skurnik Wines, $46): Lauded as one of the region’s top growers by writers like Michael Edwards, Billiot adds taille (juice from the second pressing) to lend fruitiness. Most tasters complained of a confected quality to the wine—sweet cherries giving way to a tart, coarse acidity—writing notes like “candy” and “Schweppes Raspberry Ginger Ale.”

A. Margaine “Special Club” Brut 2004 (Villers-Marmery, Montagne de Reims, nearly 100% C, 22% in oak, dosage 9 gr., Terry Theise/Michael Skurnik Wines, $73): The clear favorite of the tasting. Creamy, refined champagne, with some oak richness adding to a layer of chalk and lemon and terrific length. A little muddled at first, and the dosage seemed a touch too high or too low, but there was a sense of complexity and mystery that suggested a long, interesting life. Would have loved to have spent another hour drinking it.

Godme Rosé Brut NV (Verzenay, Montagne de Reims, 85% PN 15% C, barrel fermented, dosage 7.5 gr., Becky Wasserman Selection/Willette Wines, $55): A 50s Cadillac of a wine. Light salmon in color, vinified in a mellow, slightly oxidized style—like Bollinger’s—that makes it compulsively drinkable and delicious. A pleasure wine, long, with expressive fruit. Laid back, the opposite of sententious. After the hard-boiled Lallement, a different yet equally compelling take on Verzenay Pinot.

Jean Milan “Sélection Terres de Noël Vielle Vignes” Brut 2004 (Oger, Côte de Blancs, 100% C, Terry Theise/Michael Skurnik Wines, $86): A cult single-vineyard Chardonnay that slept through the tasting. Most noted a whiff of sea air or oysters, but the champagne from “Christmas Earth” came across as so massive and backwards that tasters wrote down everything from “buttered bagel” to “Flintstones vitamins.” Great potential. Needed another two hours, if not a year. A hibernating grizzly.

Christian Etienne Brut Tradition NV (Meurville, Aube, 80% PN, 20% C, dosage 8 gr, Savio Soares Selections, $32): Etienne has lowered the dosage from 12 to 8 grams, and the wine tasted drier, and better, than I remembered. Good balance and richness, if a little coarse and short. Workmanlike and enjoyable despite its flaws. Like the annoyingly loud friend who still gives you the digits of the best pot dealer.

Henri Billiot Brut 2004 (Ambonnay, Montagne de Reims, 90% PN 10% C, Terry Theise/Michael Skurnik Wines): Rich, the vintage Billiot had plenty of stuffing and fruit but seemed out of balance, the sweetness and borderline-volatile acidity fighting each other, the mid-palate empty as a drum. Hmm.

Demière-Ansiot Blancs de Blancs Brut NV (Oger, Côte de Blancs, 100% C, dosage 7.5 gr., Becky Wasserman Selection/Pas Mal Selections, $57): Vibrantly aromatic, almost tropical upon opening, but then some odd touches of mushroom, cider, and potato peel. The last may or may not be a result of a problem reported by some with the ‘05 harvest, as 60% of the blend comes from that year. A second bottle confirmed a quite elegant champagne marked by a dirty potato-peel flavor. Strange.

Camille Saves Brut Carte Blanche NV (Bouzy, Montagne de Reims, 75% PN 25% C, dosage 7.5 gr., Becky Wasserman Selection/Polaner Selections, $46): Liked by nearly every taster, the Saves did everything well—it was ripe, long, elegant, drinkable. It tasted sweet without being sweet, with firm pinot structure and elegance, too. Terrifically easy to like, like a good Emmylou Harris record from the 70s.

Varnier-Fannière “Cuvée Saint-Denis” Brut NV (Avize, Côte de Blancs, 100% C, Terry Theise/Michael Skurnik Wines, $57): From a vineyard with the poetic name Clos de Grand Père in Avize, the Varnier reminded everyone what the whole terroir deal is about. With pretty aromas of chamomile tea and pencils (I swear), this wine uncoiled a long tail of minerality that smelled of chalk and earth, while the nice balance and a leesy fullness made it delicious rather than excessively austere. One taster wrote: “unvarnished, transparent exposition of place.” Ditto. Another consensus favorite, and a bargain.

Henri Billiot “Cuvée Julie” Brut NV (Ambonnay, Montagne de Reims, mostly PN, oak-aged, Terry Theise/Michael Skurnik Wines, $72): A luxury bottling from Billiot, this tasted disconcertingly oaky; a little bacon and game poked through, some coarse acidity, but the wood wouldn’t relent, strangling the fruit.

Jacques Picard Brut NV (Berru, Montagne de Reims, 5% PN 35% PM 60% C, dosage 7 gr., Becky Wasserman Selection/Willette Wines, $50): Pretty nose, some spice and fruit, nicely judged acidity, but difficult to coax out much personality. Elicited no strong reactions or emphatic notes from anyone. Show your face, Jacques Picard.

A. Margaine “Cuvée Traditionelle” Brut NV (Villers-Marmery, Montagne de Reims, nearly 100% C, Terry Theise/Michael Skurnik Wines, $35): From a patch of Chardonnay in grand-cru Pinot country, this champagne showed loads of competence and finesse, but perhaps at the expense of ultimate pleasure. Impressive, filigreed but a little soulless, at least upon opening. “Technical,” one taster wrote.

Jean Lallement Brut Rosé NV (Verzenay, Montagne de Reims, 100% PN, Terry Theise/Michael Skurnik Wines, $58): The Lallement esthetic, menacing as a 1970 Plymouth Barracuda, is apparent, and the wine is rather firm and tannic for a rosé, but it comes off a little reticent and dilute on the palate. Pretty cherry aromas, with a pleasant austerity.

Guy de Chassey Brut NV (Louvois, Montagne de Reims, 70% PN 30% C, dosage 9 gr., Becky Wasserman Selection/Pas Mal Selections, $53): A really fine champagne that improved considerably with air. Soft mousse, with toast and brioche, classic Pinot warmth and firmness, long finish. Like an underrated leading man from Classical Hollywood—maybe Van Heflin?

Henri Billiot Brut Réserve NV (Ambonnay, Montagne de Reims, 90% PN 10% C, Terry Theise/Michael Skurnik Wines, $42): A nice mousse and a pleasant texture, but nearly everyone complained of a volatile acidity and some chemical-smelling funk. It had the sweet blueberry thing in common with the other wines from the producer, so “confected” made a comeback.

Vazart-Coquart Blancs de Blancs Brut NV (Chouilly, Côte de Blancs, 100% C, dosage 9 gr., Becky Wasserman Selection/Pas Mal Selections, $58): “Elegant, uncomplicated, pleasant,” one taster wrote, and most seemed to agree. A tasty blanc de blancs that perhaps lacked the interest of the more substantial Chardonnays from Servenay and Varnier, but was a distinct pleasure to drink. That chic woman at the dinner party who hasn’t much to say but cheers everyone with her presence.

Jean Lallement Brut Reserve NV (Verzenay, Montagne de Reims, 80% PN 20% C, Terry Theise/Michael Skurnik Wines, $52): Same disgorgement date and blend as the Brut Tradition, but comes from harder-working 30+-year-old vines. Promises more, with the same savage touch, but comes off as diffuse and reductive. Difficult to find the thread. On the second day there was little improvement, just a leaner mouthfeel. Like all wine, a mystery.

Tasting 22 champagnes, with their soaring sugars and acids, turned out surprisingly to resemble work, especially since some of the wines didn’t thrill us as much as we had hoped. A big reason for this is the format of the tasting itself: more than most still wines, champagnes broaden and fill out considerably with some exposure to air in a glass, often as little as ten or fifteen minutes, and unfold even more as their temperature goes up. With a dozen tasters and nearly twice that many champagnes to get through, most got sniffed and swirled before they could open and some of the bottle funk could blow off. In instances when I had an opportunity to retaste a bottle in a less hurried, more casual setting, the impressions of the champagnes improved in nearly every case. In a larger sense, I’m discovering that, for me, marathon tastings are simply not an enjoyable or a particularly meaningful way of relating to a wine. It’s like selecting new friends by having strangers march into your living room, speak to you for 30 seconds, and walk out. I shared this frustration with my Master of Wine friend, who’s sat through and led hundreds of tastings. “Tastings such as these have some utility, but limited utility,” she told me. “Truth be told, sometimes the real test of the wine is at the end of the night, when you see which ones were finished (and presumably gave the greatest pleasure). But it all depends on what it is you’re trying to test.”

Speaking of which, did we learn anything about growers? And terroir? After tasting through nearly as many big-house blends last December, I can offer that the grower champagnes, despite obvious similarities, strike me as a different animal with a different purpose. If big house champagnes focus on—and sometimes excel at—certain classical notions of grace and poise, those of the growers tend to be more emphatic and sometimes savage. At best, these full-throttle wines are a testament to a particular place and the pleasures and experiences it offers, a banquet for terroir-freaks and other adventurous tasters. In this way, they are more like still wines. The color palette of grower champagnes is broader. As a “guardian of tradition,” a negociant may aim for an unchanging house style, while a grower’s champagne embodies the woman or man who made it just as much as a great red burgundy does. To drink, say, Jean Lallement’s champagnes is to feel that you know the man. What I can say with complete certainty is that I look forward to enjoying both types of champagne, all that I can get my hands on, and so should you. Haters be damned.

I asked Champagne expert and resident Peter Liem—of the great, late Besotted Ramblings blog and the Champagneguide.net website—to opine on the alleged rift between growers and houses and on the unique pleasures that grower champagnes bring to the region. Here’s part of what he said: “The best growers are exploring champagne in ways that nobody has before, and this is part of what makes them exciting. The best houses, though, can still do things in terms of blending and style that no grower would ever be able to do, and their technical capability and skill in the cellar is unrivaled. As time goes on, the divergence in style between the traditional houses and the most avant-garde growers is becoming increasingly more pronounced, and I don’t see that I have to choose between the two. I enjoy drinking Krug and I enjoy drinking Jacques Selosse, and I don’t understand why I should have to eliminate either one from my life.”

Happy holidays!

photo by AtlantaWineGuy

The post Savage Pleasures: A Night of Grower Champagne appeared first on The Faster Times.

The home of Schubert and Freud boasts two oenological claims to fame. First, it forms a borderland between the regions of Riesling and Grüner Veltliner—cooled by the climatic influence of the Alps—and the warm, dry vineyards on the Pannonian Plain, known for reds, especially Blaufränkisch and Zweigelt, and white Burgundian varietals. The Danube, too, mediates Vienna’s unusually varied microclimates, some of which—particularly on the hillsides of the Nussberg and the Bisamberg—have been renowned for centuries. Secondly, the city is one of a handful of wine regions known primarily for field blends; the best versions of Vienna’s Gemischter Satz, which can include a dozen varietals or more, tend to be remarkably complex and stylistically varied.

So why has it taken Vienna so long to shed its reputation for underwhelming wines? I posed the question to the unfailingly generous Austrian and German wine expert David Schildknecht. Somewhat tongue-in-cheek (at least I think so), he blamed Schlamperei (a word meaning something akin to “laxity” or “not giving a crap”); a native concept, in Austria it is considered a quintessentially Viennese trait. “If you live in the capital of a very thirsty country, a capital that’s huge in a country that’s small, and a capital visited by and known to folks from around the world, it’s easy to see how the temptation toward mediocrity in wine growing would be huge,” Schildknecht told me.

Until quite recently, the winemaking region Vienna resembled most was the the vast Weinviertel to the city’s north, where vintners either sold their juice to one of several large merchants or poured it for visitors at their Heurigen (wine inns). Up north, no one but Roman and Adelheid Pfaffl was recognized for making world-class wines; Vienna, too, slept under a cloud of Schlamperei until the arrival of Fritz Wieninger. In the 80s, when he took over his parents’ century-old winery, Wieninger began to experiment with temperature-controlled fermentation, barrique-aging and vinifying unusual varietals. For two decades, he was alone in extracting perfectionist wines from Vienna’s soils; in the meantime, mostly by example, he managed to convince a group of younger, ambitious growers of the city’s potential. Today, few would dispute that Wieninger has been the seminal figure in Vienna’s transformation.

His wines continue to be benchmarks. The style is classically Austrian: his ‘08 Wiener Gemischter Satz is deeply flavored, balanced, with a long, crunchy mineral finish and that uniquely Viennese kaleidoscope of flavors—clover, anise, god knows what else. Better yet, the ‘08 Gemischter Satz Nussberg Alte Reben tastes as gnarly as the parcel of fifty-year-old vines from which it was made—intensely concentrated yet light in body, interestingly austere, with an insistent, cleansing bitterness that lingers in the mouth. The Grüners and the reds are just as snappy and elegant, thought I preferred the richer ‘08s to the ‘09s. (They are imported to the US by Winebow).

I owe my discovery of Vienna’s liquid evolution to importers Paul Darcy and Carlo Huber, who specialize in the city’s growers. To be honest, at first I wasn’t particularly excited to taste their wines, yet ten minutes into sampling the portfolio, it became clear that Wieninger was no longer alone in doing superlative work in Vienna. While I plotzed over the delicious Gelber Muskateller and Weissburgunder from Rainer Christ, it was Stefan Hajszan’s biodynamic whites that opened my eyes. They have an altogether more upbeat disposition than Wieninger’s and, like some others in the Rudolf Steiner camp, can be almost electric in their intensity. Made from eleven different grapes (ever hear of Frühroter Veltliner?), Hajszan’s ‘08 Gemischter Satz Weissleiten smells and tastes nearly tropical, with the thickness of a white from Friuli, but maintains a dainty 12.5% of alcohol and plenty of complexity. The ‘07 Riesling Pfaffenberg is nearly as ripe but ultra-dry, with perfect balance and a quartz-like stoniness. Hajszan also makes the city’s most delicious reds—the medium-bodied ‘08 Zweigelt-Blaufränkisch is ideally judged, as juicy as a good Morgon while tasting nothing like Gamay or, for that matter, any other French grape. For all their complexity and stuffing, Hajszan’s wines are built on a human scale, as easy-to-drink and joyous as Austrian wine gets. Better yet, unlike so many neighbors in the more famous regions of Wachau and Kamptal, nearly all of these Viennese wines retail for under thirty bucks.

Two of the most remarkable bottles I’ve opened this year came courtesy of a thirty-something graphic-designer-turned-natural-winemaker with a delightfully gnomic name—Jutta Ambositsch, who goes by Jutta Kalchbrenner. Here’s what I gleaned from our not-quite-idiomatic email correspondence: she began to tinker with vines in her parents’ plot in Burgenland. In 2001, Fritz Wieninger sealed her fate when he “donated” a vineyard in Vienna to her care (a shout-out to her friend is printed on each of her labels), and she has since expanded her holdings. I haven’t had a chance to taste her blends, only two Rieslings. The ‘08 Oberer Reisenberg comes from a steep 18-year-old plot covered with chunks of limestone and pebbles, cooled by a westerly wind from the Vienna Woods. It’s lightly off-dry, long as a river, stony, complete, and almost Mosel-like in its lusciousness. The ‘08 Ried Preussen (“Prussian Marsh”), from a biodynamically-cultivated vineyard on the Nussberg that contains only 415 vines, is the Reisenberg’s mirror image, the Nico to its Joni Mitchell. There’s a touch of sweet-tart fruit, earth, a saltiness, and then a geyser of gravelly bitterness and funk that vibrates on the tongue for minutes. Carlo Huber called it “intellectual.” For some reason, it made me think of a small, austere Gothic chapel. I hadn’t tasted anything like them—to me, these Rieslings stand up to anything from F.X. Pichler, Hirtzberger or Knoll while coming across as utterly original.

What’s Ambrositsch-Kalchbrenner’s deal? “I am not esoteric, but I believe in a better treatment by one person,” she wrote me. ”This is hard when I don’t feel very good, because the vibes are between the vineyard and me. I touch them, nobody else. Just at harvest. And harvesting is a party: there are about 20-30 friends who help me. They pick up the grapes very softly, cutting out bad grapes. You can’t compare our harvest to another harvest with paid workers. They just harvest the grapes and have no responsibility for the product, the wine, the friendship.” (A look at her German-language website will tell you something about her charmingly loopy approach.) Ambositsch works in Stefan Hajszan’s winery, ages in steel, designs the stark labels, and prices the wines higher than her neighbors do, though still fairly, considering the quality. Here in New York, they are already on wine lists at haute gastro-palaces like Eleven Madison Park, so I’m not alone in being smitten. Someone should come up with a new adjective to describe the best wines of Vienna—Falco-licious? Wittgenstein-derful? While they do, be sure to open a few of these strange and memorable bottles.

The post The Rise and Fall and Rise of Vienna’s Wine appeared first on The Faster Times.

* Four Saudi men arrived early at a table for six, quickly ordered a $2000 bottle of Bordeaux, and asked the sommelier to pour it into highball glasses. When two elderly Saudis joined them, the younger men told them they were drinking Coke, so the older guys wouldn’t know that they were consuming alcohol. When the older Saudis stepped out for a smoke, the four men discreetly ordered another bottle.

* A mid-thirties Westchester investment banker wearing a bespoke pinstriped suit and a gaudy, complicated watch asked for a four-figure bottle of burgundy, a ‘90 Rousseau Chambertin. Within seconds of taking the first sip he declared it terribly flawed and rudely demanded another bottle. I tasted the wine; it was perfect. So I showed him another bottle, but instead of opening it, I filled his glass with the wine he’d sent back. He tasted it and announced to everyone at the table that it was the best burgundy he’d ever had.

* Two businessmen from Hong Kong wanted to order a red from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti; the least expensive bottle on the list was $4K. “So much money!” one of them exclaimed. “Is that for a shot or a glass?”

* A gray-haired wine collector, a regular, arrived with his date—a brunette in her early twenties wearing a rabbit-fur jacket and knee-high, patent-leather boots. She asked for a Sprite; he ordered a $1900 bottle of Coche-Dury Corton-Charlemagne. After downing her soda, the date poured the Coche over the ice cubes.

* An oil executive, in town for his daughter’s wedding, ordered a dozen bottles of ‘90 Krug Clos de Mesnil champagne (at $4K a pop) during the rehearsal dinner. When we ran out, he asked that two magnums of Krug Collection ‘79—these were $12K each—be left waiting for him, on ice, in his hotel room upstairs. When he checked out, he added a fifty-percent tip to the bill.

* After two gangsterish Russians downed several thousand-dollar bottles of champagne, they switched to ‘89 Mouton Rothschild, just under $2K per bottle. They emptied one bottle, then another; when I opened a third I realized it was corked. I had more of the wine downstairs and when I headed there one of the men barked at me, demanding to taste from the bottle I was taking away. I explained that it was corked, but either he didn’t follow my English or didn’t know what “corked” meant. He sipped the wine and smiled. “The best one yet,” he declared. “The others were too fruity.”

* I was hired to cater a wedding reception with my boss, whose specialty was opening large-format champagne bottles with a saber. For a champagne toast, just prior to the main course, he sabered open a 6-liter bottle of Moët. He hit it in the wrong place and the bottle exploded. The bride was cut under the eye by flying glass, the entire room had to be reset, and three guests who’d been standing nearby required medical attention. The groom was a lawyer.

photo by VinoFamily

The post War Stories From Manhattan Sommeliers appeared first on The Faster Times.

To be sure, to drink devastatingly well on the cheap requires greater cunning than merely putting away your wallet. It demands a paradigm shift. But first, let’s define cheap. If you happen to work, or loiter, in a wine shop, you already know that a solid third of the customers arrive intending to spend precisely ten US dollars plus tax. These aren’t simply bargain seekers. Raise the possibility that their life might be transformed by a $14 Muscadet and they will fix you with a watery look; it’s as though they came in looking for an IKEA throw pillow and you suggested that they spruce up their living room with an original Daumier. Of course, everyone has a right not to care about their wine, just as they have the right not to care about very old Gouda or the East Timorese struggle for independence, and trying to convince people otherwise only elicits suspicions of snobbery. Still, while it may be a cliché to claim that ten dollars is simply not enough these days to buy an interesting bottle, it happens to be largely true. The reasons? Economic realities dictate that here in the US we make almost no truly cheap wine worth drinking. For overseas product, we usually depend on a three-tiered mark-up (importer-distributor-retailer) for our fix; a bottle that sells at a German or Italian winery for, say, nine Euros will likely show up on a New York store shelf at $42. Using the same arithmetic, a wine priced at ten dollars stateside begins it’s life at a Euro or two. So to partake of the most useful part of the cheap potables, we need to bump up our retail budget to $15.

So what’s so difficult about finding a workable inexpensive wine? Basically, the challenge is to find a drink that the mind won’t immediately purge from memory, like the plastic cup of Michelob you might have downed before your flight out of LaGuardia. In all likelihood, a wine that leaves its maker at a Euro-fifty will involve no prestigious vineyards or varietals, no microscopic yields, no ancient vines, no brand new Tronçais barrels, and no extended aging. Many cheap wines contain no sense of place or complexity, a fact we should accept with grace. Problem is, even the one dominant flavor that some offer can be cloying, vapid or even downright unpleasant. Think of the way many inexpensive reds—Shirazes, Barberas, and mass-market Beaujolais in particular—tend to taste basically plummy, a flavor about as exciting as a Loverboy cassingle. A lot of basic Bordeaux exits the mouth with green, drying tannin. And too many cheap whites tend to taste vaguely of pears, with too little flavor or acidity, one reason that Pinot Grigio has become the Corona Light of wine.

As for the paradigm shift—one key to drinking well on the cheap is to keep the value of things in mind. You probably wouldn’t fly in a $1500 plane or submit yourself to an $85 angioplasty, so why look for an eleven-dollar Barolo? I’ve learned not to trust wines that perform best at $20 and above, but sell for less. They hardly ever do what I want. Far better are those that don’t aspire to imitate more expensive relations but revel in being themselves. With $15 to spend, it’s more satisfying to come home with the world’s tastiest Lambrusco than a tedious burgundy. When shopping on the cheap, try to forget about Rioja, Ribera, Bordeaux, Alsace, Chablis, Champagne, the Jura, Chianti, Brunello, Sicily, anything Austrian, American, Swiss or Piedmontese, white burgundies of any stripe, and absolutely any wine made from Pinot Noir.

Fortunately, that leaves plenty of bottles that manage to excel at this seemingly hard-pressed price. Effervescent wines, for one, scrub the palate and make any meal more kinetic, and none are as reliably adaptable and delicious as Lambruscos from Emilia-Romagna; the dry, firm, dusty red version from Lini is the favorite, but in a pinch I’ll happily drink the more common Solo from Medici Ermete. For the least money—sometimes as little as $6 or $7—a chilled Vinho Verde is unbeatable. Kermit Lynch’s more serious, and drier, take comes from Piedmont—the Elvio Tintero “Grangia” is a perfect foil for fish tacos. No grape offers more for less than German Riesling; no other wine is so immediately likable and bracing—even the most modest feels like Ritalin for the tongue. Last month I brought two liter-bottles of the gentle, fine-grained dry Mosel Riesling from Günther Steinmetz—my current favorite—to Congee Palace on the Bowery to share over their indelible fried chicken. No one offers as many cheap choices as the producer and negociant Selbach, and there are worthy examples from Knebel, Schloss Mühlenhoff, Ehrhard, Leitz, von Schubert, Dr. Loosen, and St. Urbans-Hof. (While browsing the German section, don’t forget to take a look at varietals like Scheurebe, Müller-Thurgau and Silvaner.) Good Muscadet tastes like Meyer lemon juice infused with granite dust and it costs next to nothing; try the ones from Pépière, Noelle, Luneau-Papin and Brégeon. Farther east in the Loire Valley, winemakers mix Cabernet Franc, Gamay, and Cot (Malbec) into some of the lightest, freshest reds anywhere; these overachievers include Thierry Puzelat (who also bottles under Tue-Boeuf), Guion, Plouzeau, and Familie Laurent. Some tasty handmade Beaujolais fits here too—from Pierre-Marie Chermette, Jean-Paul Brun, Coquelet, Coudert, and Doucroux; the declassified Morgon fruit in Marcel Lapierre’s Raisin Gaulois is also delicious. Fuller reds are the toughest category to do well on the cheap, as they are at any price. Stores are full of $12 Cotes-du-Rhônes and other stylistic offenders from farther south; for the most part I avoid them, since most tend to be overextracted and clumsy. In this price range, I find little to like from Argentina and Chile as well. I trawl, instead, in weirder waters—Odoardi’s Savuto from Calabria, Georgia’s Nato Vachnadze Saperavi, Cono 4 from Valencia’s Primitivo Quiles.

Trying to mention every cheap highlight would require a book—there are magnificent Fino and Manzanilla sherries, Verdicchio from Matelica and Castelli di Jesi, good Soave from the likes of Anselmi and Pieropan, Joe Bastianich’s Friulano (there’s a multitude of delicious and underpriced Italian whites), the white wines of Gascony…. The point I’m trying to make is that cheap wine isn’t simply a budgetary concession but forms a phenomenologically discrete branch of drinking: one that’s possibly less intellectual but usually more joyous. It accomplishes things that more expensive wines can’t. Sure, a Chambolle-Musigny can be head-spinning, but you wouldn’t open one with takeout shawarma or pad thai any more than you’d wear a bespoke Harris tweed suit to a barbecue. And, at that wedding festival in Galilee, I’m fairly sure Jesus didn’t turn water into blanc-de-blancs champagne. “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven,” the King James version tells us, and so it is with wine.

Photo by Rick Audet

The post Recession Happy Hour: Celebrating Truly Cheap Wine appeared first on The Faster Times.

Admittedly this is a peculiar anecdote with which to preface some thoughts about Cristal, the very expensive and excellent champagne made by the firm of Roederer in Reims. Lest you think I’m trying to make Big Poppa sound like an outer-borough rube, I’m merely envious—I, too, would prefer to drink champagne whenever I get thirst-ay, especially if it’s Cristal. Yet probably no truly great wine is purchased by more people who know so little about it. The beverage is lodged in popular culture as a signifier of conspicuous wealth so firmly that it is difficult to talk about it without having some fun at the expense of its most voluble consumers, a lineage that begins with my countryman Tsar Alexander II, an ambivalent, Francophilic tyrant (pictured above). So for a moment let’s set aside the question of how much Cristal, by volume, ends up soaked into the carpeting of Navigators and Escalades; let’s not delve into how many liters get left on the dance floor at Les Caves du Roy in St. Tropez after navigating the swale between Tara Reid’s buttocks; let’s not mention the corks popping at Connecticut investment-banker barbecues to the sounds of Pearl Jam and Creed (thanks, TARP); and let’s not even touch the dust-up between Jay-Z and Roederer managing director Frédéric Rouzaud, who made comments that sounded, to some among the hip-hop yacht set, as being borderline racist and, worse, ungrateful.

Because Cristal is a tremendously serious wine that is worth your time and maybe even your money. I discovered this firsthand in July at the Trump Soho hotel while seated around a conference table with about a dozen besuited wine directors from big-time Manhattan restaurants, a Master of Wine, and some folks from Roederer importer Maisons Marques & Domaines—if I squinted, the room could pass for a boozy CIA briefing. Jean-Baptiste Lecaillion, the Roederer chef de caves and the man who makes Cristal and the rest of the house’s champagne, presided at the head of the table. If I expected a fussy, supercilious Frenchman, I was disappointed; Lecaillion turned out to be funny, unpretentious, and warm. He was uncommonly informative and candid as he spoke about his wines, all the while making the unlikely case that Cristal, in terms of its raw materials and construction, may actually be something of a bargain. How’s that? Well, Lecaillon makes it only in top years and sources the grapes from the oldest Pinot Noir and Chardonnay vines in grand cru villages like Verzenay, Cramant and Aÿ. Most unusually, these grapes come from mid-slope vineyards that are owned entirely by Roederer—in fact, only Roederer’s nonvintage blends include purchased fruit, most of it Pinot Meunier. After release, Cristal is known to improve for upwards of thirty years. And, lastly, the clear glass bottle looks to be exceptionally well-made, though not so sturdy as to be unsuitable for boat christenings.

It probably won’t jar your world from its axis when I tell you that the wines proved fairly spectacular. Lecaillon poured eight Cristal champagnes from seven vintages, a study in the irremediable effect of time on fermented grape juice. 2002 was a near-perfect season, the best since 1990, and the current-release ‘02 Cristal is a near-perfect wine that will reach its peak in twenty or twenty-five years. Today it tastes almost like liquid chalk, precise and electric. “You have to blend for austerity instead of immediate pleasure,” Lecaillon remarked when we tasted it, “or the wine will not age.” Conversely, Cristal from 2000, with its hot spring and hail-plagued summer, is more pleasure-giving today; it smells so opulent and buttery that you want to spoon it over pasta, and it is still findable on shelves. While I’ve never been a fan of pink champagne, finding most of it disconcertingly fruity, the ‘96 Cristal Rosé turned out to be the afternoon’s biggest surprise: nearly golden in color, with the leathery note of an aged rosé, it was so dry, lingering and complex that I sat staring at it mutely. And then there was the 1990. Already showing oxidation on the nose, with the mellow, knit-together irreducibility of a huge wine entering its prime, it offered every conceivable flavor in a kind of mysterious, Catholic-festival procession. I could compare drinking it to the moments after getting hit by a car, when time appears to slow to a crawl, or maybe to a snail-paced George Eliot novel, but instead I’ll admit that it was one of a handful of truly indelible wines I’ve tasted.

Champagne continues to have its detractors. Some argue that it’s a sugared-up cocktail made from unripe grapes; others complain that big-house product, with its large volume and multitude of parcels, is incapable of displaying a genuine sense of place. I wish some of these folks could have tasted the ‘96 Cristal; on entry it showed the figgy richness of Montrachet that gave way to the salinity and aching acidity of Chablis that works the nerves like a sad pop song. Though made from the soils of more than a half-dozen villages, it’s a wine that can come from no place other than the chalky hillsides of Champagne. And while a single-grape, single-vineyard grower champagne, like Pierre Péters’ terrific Les Chétillons from Mesnil-sur-Oger, reminds me of a trumpet solo, the Cristal is redolent of a jazz orchestra while remaining no less expressive of its origins. For me, Roederer is one of the few houses that manages consistently to pull off both delicacy and power, complexity and specificity, and do it on a large scale, a feat that makes Lecaillon as gifted a winemaker as Coche or Raveneau.

Of course a bottle of newly released Cristal still sets you back $200; a bottle with some age can cost as much as a weekend at the Ritz on Place Vendôme. It may be fairly priced, but like most of us I don’t have the means to open Cristal even on special occasions, and likely never will. Simply getting to taste these wines reminded me of what a blithely corruptible vocation wine writing can be. Luckily, at a third of the price, the vintage-dated brut and blanc de blancs are occasionally affordable and nearly as good. My favorites come from the hot, maligned ‘03 vintage; Lecaillon calls them his “new-world” champagnes. Rich, yet with good acidity and finesse, they are drinking like a dream. And that’s what I like best about champagne—drinking it, as often as possible, a pursuit I’m proud to share with R. Kelly and Sean Combs. Can’t stop, won’t stop.

The post Enter the 36 Chambers of Cristal appeared first on The Faster Times.

Even most Austrians haven’t heard of Eisenberg—an engineer friend from Vienna said he knew it only as a name of the city’s former chief rabbi, provoking unintended discomfort in my Russian Jewish brain. No matter; I had come here as part of a press trip—a minivan of journalists with the physiques of middle-aged adults devoted more to sherry than to the gym, shepherded by a stern PR Valkyrie—to learn about one of the most interesting things happening in European wine, specifically the appearance of world-class reds from Austria. Until just a few years ago, many wineries here made round, heavy, occasionally sweetish reds to compete in the domestic market with cheap imports from Chile and Australia. These wines are still abundant. During a jury tasting in the up-and-coming region of Carnuntum, we sampled nearly fifty local reds made mostly from Zweigelt; among a handful of superb wines, there were more than a few with cloying fruit flavors masking fierce green tannins, medicinal herbaceousness, heavy oak treatment and, in a couple of cases, volatile acidity. Yet a new strain of reds—mostly the work, not surprisingly, of young winemakers—demonstrates that the indigenous varieties, chiefly Zweigelt and Blaufränkisch, reveal their true character when finessed into sinewy and perfumed wines rather than teeth-staining barbells. So far, Blaufränkisch has turned out to be the more interesting and successful of the two. At its best, only Pinot Noir (among reds) exceeds it in the ability to reveal subtle differences among the sites where it’s grown. The exponent of this style who’s probably best known here in the US is Roland Velich, who bottles Blaufränkisch under the Moric label in middle Burgenland; if anything, the climate in the southern part of the region is cooler and even more conducive to the firm, elegant wines Velich has become known for.

When I met Christoph Wachter, the winemaker at Wachter-Wiesler at his family’s restaurant in Deutsch Schützen, I took him for a busboy or possibly the village pot dealer. That he turned out to be funny and articulate while speaking to journalists double his age—Christoph is twenty one—was impressive (I recalled myself at twenty one with a twinge of embarrassment), though not nearly as impressive as the fact that he seemed to have tasted more broadly and thought about wine more critically than many writers. The bottles he opened that night—Blaufränkisch and Zweigelt made by his father in the warm ‘06 vintage—tasted well-judged but belonged decidedly to the plush-and-round school, as though painted by Botero. The wines he poured the following morning from the ‘08 vintage appeared to have come from a different winery, in part owing to the cooler year but also due to Christoph’s increasing role in the winemaking. Christoph says that he’s moving towards the elimination of noble rot from the grapes, aging the Blaufränkisch in larger and more neutral barrels, and converting the vineyards to organic viticulture. The ‘08s were less extracted, fresher, with an appetizing stoniness. The best came from the coolest site on Eisenberg, the eastern-exposed Hummergraben (pictured above; the label reads Steinweg, or “stone path,” because Hummergraben, which means “lobster ditch,” sounds quite weird). The most exciting red was a barrel sample of the Steinweg from ‘09, the first vintage made entirely by Christoph. Only once or twice had I come across a wine that smelled so unambiguously of rocks; its lightness and perfume reminded me of a red burgundy, but it was the differences—Blaufränkisch’s structure and darker personality—that made the wine so unexpected and rewarding.

Burgenland was only the first stop. Near Krems, we dropped in on the sprawling Xanadu of Sepp Moser, a viticultural pioneer in his eighties who knows just what to do with a suede vest. The winery, with its retractable roof, desert fauna, wall-mounted antlers and mini-museum of wine kitsch, lent Sepp an air of a wealthy rancher from an Anthony Mann western. His son Niki, a study in filial contrast, turned out to be as self-effacing as Sepp was louche. When Niki took over winemaking a decade ago, he began to convert the vineyards to biodynamics. Away from the oil paintings, up in a hillside vineyard called Gebling, Niki showed us the rows of hand-tended vines standing amid a cover crop of Queen Anne’s Lace and wormwood. His neighbors’ rows looked dry and barren in comparison. But his dedication and backbone showed most clearly in the wines, particularly in the unusually leesy, vibrant Grüner Veltliners, some of the most soulful examples of that sometimes pallid grape I’ve tasted. The Breiter Rain ‘08 in particular was inward, rich and complex, having spent a heroically long spell on the lees and undergone no malolactic fermentation. I tend to think of Austrian wine as rarely being about primary fruit and more about the underlying elements, and here was a wine that did both. Moser also bottles a dark-gold Grüner from the Schnabel vineyard he calls Minimal that sees no sulfur dioxide; it reminded me of the Pouilly-Fuissés of Ferret and the white Riojas of López de Heredia in it’s oxidative richness and slight loopiness. Even Niki’s Zweigelt, from a region not especially known for its reds, was pure and elegant, and I would quit kvelling here if it were not for the fact that the prices he charges are laughably low—if I’m remembering correctly, the Zweigelt sold for under eight Euros.

Not all of the wines were quite so serious. Back in Vienna, atop Nussberg hill, Gerhard Lobner makes a distinctly indigenous wine called Gemischter Satz—a field blend—for Mayer am Pfarrplatz, the city’s best-known winery, which traces its history to the Turkish Siege in 1683. The rows of trellised vines against the backdrop of downtown Vienna and the oppressively cheesy Millennium Tower is a sight not easily duplicated. After a long fallow spell, Viennese wines, the only ones grown inside a major city, have become more popular and taste better than ever (Mayer’s New York-based importer, Darcy and Huber Selections, devotes itself almost exclusively to wine from Vienna). What does it taste like? Fresh, with a little residual sweetness and a spritz of CO2, Lobner’s Gemischter Satz is the best companion I can imagine to backhendl or schnitzel; it’s a grown-up version of the cold, fizzy whites served in good Roman pizzerias. Which is a compliment. What they may lack in complexity they make up in drinkability—to paraphrase H.L. Mencken, it’s a hundred times better to be charming than to be true.

The post Red, White and Schnitzel appeared first on The Faster Times.

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-

The post The Discreet Charm of Jadot appeared first on The Faster Times.

Am I really bellyaching about getting to drink for free? And why should you care? Because to a significant extent, these types of events determine which wines end up on store shelves and restaurant lists, not to mention which receive the highest scores (from writers inclined not only to drink their wine, but to give it grades.) Buyers base at least some of their purchasing decisions on large tastings, a strategy that inevitably skews their inventories, and your choices, toward the oaky, viscous and alcoholic. “The palette gets tired easily, because it can only handle so much acid and tannin,” says Christopher Bender, wine director at Mas (Farmhouse) in downtown Manhattan. “In these setting, I find that it’s not the subtle, well-balanced wines that stand out, but those that are over-the-top and dominating—the ones that are over-extracted, over-oaked or both.” When I pour myself a wine that I enjoyed at a mega-tasting in a quieter context, I, too, am surprised at how heavy and generically oaky some of them turn out to be. Conversely, bottles that I know and love can come off tasting lackluster and thin at these events, lost among the pituitary cases.

For a look at this tendency at its most insidious, open a mainstream wine magazine and flip to the back. Recently, while waiting for my dentist to come up for air during an arduous root canal, I paged through Wine Spectator’s Top 100 Wines issue. It was nice to see an oxidative white Rioja from López de Heredia make the list, at number 90, but it nested there among industrial Columbia Valley Cabernets and Shirazes from Barossa; it was like going to an award show and watching Celine Dion and the Jonas Brothers share a stage with Ornette Coleman. While it may be fatuous to ask how professional tasters can exude enthusiasm for such antipodal beverages (seeing as it leads across the thorny terrain of esthetic subjectivity toward the perplexing question of what wine should be), at least part of the explanation has to do with the way they taste. Matt Kramer, a Spectator contributor and one of the smartest writers on wine, calls the skewing of the palate that occurs at large tastings the “low-cut dress syndrome.” He writes: “If you have the chance, over time, to taste the wines scored most highly by the mega-validators across a wide array of grape varieties and vintages, you will discover that all of the highest-scoring wines are large-scale, intense, deeply colored (if red), rich wines that almost always are noticeably oaky (which always makes a wine more accessible, as well as familiar tasting).” He adds: “I can say quite frankly that this phenomenon happens to me repeatedly when I engage in large-scale tastings. No matter how aware I am of the low-cut dress syndrome, the fact is when faced with a large array of wines at one sitting, you cannot help to impose some order, some hierarchy, upon the chaos of competing tastes.” By “mega-validators” Kramer means Robert Parker Jr. and the Wine Spectator, whose scores continue to move tankers of inventory and affect prices. The most unfortunate consequence of the low-cut dress syndrome, Kramer concludes, has been the emergence of a contemporary wine esthetic built around it: “If a winemaker wishes to achieve market success or critical acclamation (the two are, of course, intertwined), he or she will have to create some version of a low-cut dress wine.”

More and more mega-tastings are taking place in the city; this week’s calendar says there are six on Tuesday alone. So what’s a habitual drinker to do? “Be a lamp unto yourself,” the Buddha said, a piece of advice that applies almost as trenchantly to wine as it does to meditation. Siddartha was advocating distrusting experts and learning from the laboratory of your own experience; I like to think that he might have looked kindly upon drinking rather than tasting, and doing so mindfully, with intent. Only when savored does a wine give up its nuances: the way it reveals itself over time, how it interacts with a meal, whether it lingers on the palate, or in the mind. For getting to know a bottle, Judy Garland had it right when she tapped her Beaujolais-colored heels together—there’s no place like home. Everything else is vinous theater.

Photo by Savio Soares. P.S. Yep, that’s Andrea Calek in the photo, with his Viognier juice from the Ardèche. Nothing to do with this column, I just enjoy looking at him.

The post Wine Tastings Are Ruining Your Life appeared first on The Faster Times.