The Wine Savant: A Guide to the New Wine Culture Read online

  But those same winemakers will also tell you that they’ve been handed a poisoned chalice. Yes, climate change is benefiting them now, but in the long run it threatens to be a disaster for their regions. The weather could become too warm for the grapes they use, and they will either have to change the style of the wines they make or change grapes. Already we are seeing developments that hint at the way climate change might scramble the global wine map. In Germany, an entire category of wines has been subverted by the warmer weather. Kabinetts were once light, exquisitely filigreed, zippy Rieslings, and as such were also the most versatile wines on the German Prädikat scale. But the grapes are now coming into the cellar with such high sugar levels (a function of ripeness) that many wines labeled as Kabinetts are really, in fact, Spätleses or Ausleses masquerading as Kabinetts. Another sign of the times: In recent years Champagne producers have been scouting for land in southern England. There you find the same chalky soil that you find in the Champagne region of France, and because southern England is just a little farther north, some Champenois are eyeing it as a bolt hole of sorts—a place where they can continue to make exemplary sparkling wines if climate change undermines the quality of the sparkling wines that they produce at home.

  Thanks to climate change, it is possible that a century or two from now, some of the world’s most celebrated wine regions might no longer be capable of producing great wines or will have been forced to change grapes on account of global warming. The greatness of Burgundy rests in no small part on its cool northerly climate; the Pinot Noir and Chardonnay grapes ripen, but it is often a struggle to reach that point, and the fruit never gets so ripe that the terroir is obscured in the resulting wines. But this delicate balance is now threatened, as it is in Champagne, the Mosel Valley, the Piedmont region of Italy, and other cool-climate zones. And while it will be of no concern to any of us—we won’t be around to see it—it is possible that two hundred years from now, the wines of these regions might no longer be the benchmarks that they are today, that climate change will have diminished the quality of these wines while raising the profile of other wine regions.

  The only reason I’ve been able to taste wines like the ’ 47 Cheval Blanc is that I am a wine writer; it’s one of the perks of the job. But thirty or forty years ago I would have been able to taste most of them on my own dime; they were not inexpensive, but they were still affordable even for plebes like me. That is no longer the case. Over the past fifteen years or so, legendary wines such as these have exploded in value; the ’ 47 Cheval Blanc, for instance, now sells for around $10,000 a bottle. With the kind of wealth that has been created worldwide over the past few decades, it was surely inevitable that prices for the rarest and most coveted wines would soar, but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating. It frustrates me as a wine enthusiast, but it also frustrates me as a wine writer. I would love to see more people have an opportunity to taste these wines, and I find it very unfortunate that too often such gems end up in the hands of people who are more interested in showing them off than in actually consuming them (that’s the problem with wealth—it is so often wasted on the wealthy).

  So short of becoming a wine writer or making, inheriting, or stealing a fortune, what is a wine enthusiast who is eager to taste the most acclaimed wines to do? There are a few possibilities.

  1. Attend a tasting of rare wines. In New York, for instance, Acker Merrall & Condit, a retailer and auction house, holds lots of tastings throughout the year, and these typically feature special wines. A company called Executive Wine Seminars also puts on some fantastic tastings in New York. If you want to experience amazing Burgundies, New York sommelier extraordinaire Daniel Johnnes organizes an annual event called La Paulée; it alternates between New York and San Francisco and is attended by many of Burgundy’s finest producers. A number of events are held as part of the Paulée, and while the Paulée is not cheap, it is a great opportunity to experience rare Burgundies. A lot of fine Pinots, Burgundies and otherwise, are likewise uncorked at the International Pinot Noir Celebration (IPNC), which is held each summer in Oregon.

  2. Organize a tasting of your own. If you have a tasting group, pool your money and buy a special bottle—a Bordeaux first growth from a good year, or a grand cru Burgundy with some age on it. If you don’t have a tasting group per se but have some wine-besotted friends who are game to take part, you can pool resources with them to buy a rare bottle.

  3. Visit an acclaimed winery. While some venerated wineries aren’t open to visitors or are very sparing with appointments, others do welcome the general public. California’s Ridge Vineyards, for instance, has two tasting rooms, one in the Santa Cruz Mountains and one in Sonoma, and both are open weekdays and weekends. While you may not get to taste any really old wines during such visits (though you could get lucky), you will get to taste current releases, and that’s a treat in its own right.

  MADEIRA: THE CAUTIONARY TALE

  Two hundred years ago, the most prestigious wine on the American market was Madeira, the fortified wine produced on the Portuguese island of the same name. Madeira was a favorite tipple of Thomas Jefferson and his fellow founders; it was supposedly even used to toast the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It was a wine that traveled unusually well. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the island of Madeira was a popular port of call for ships traveling to Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Before leaving, the boats were loaded with casks of the local wine, which was usually a blend of several grapes: Verdelho, Sercial, Bual, Malvasia (also known as Malmsey), and Terrantez. So that the wines could better withstand the long journeys, they were topped up with sugarcane brandy or a grape spirit, a step known as fortification. It turned out, though, that being stored in the warm hulls of ships and bounced around on the waves actually benefited the wines, producing smoother, more refined flavors. For a time, barrels of Madeira were sent out on round-trip journeys solely for that purpose. However, most Madeiras were ushered to maturity either by artificially heating the casks or by storing them in warm rooms. Among its many virtues, Madeira is surely the world’s most durable wine, which explains why bottles from the nineteenth and even eighteenth century are still drinking beautifully. A few years ago I tasted a 1795 Terrantez, which was glorious; the fact that it was produced when George Washington was president was mind-boggling, and humbling.

  But Madeira wasn’t resilient enough to withstand the series of blows that it suffered starting in the late nineteenth century, when a combination of natural disasters (disease in the vineyards) and man-made disasters (the Russian Revolution, Prohibition in the United States) conspired to diminish both supply and demand. What had been a king among wines became a complete obscurity—it was the Joe Piscopo of wines, you could say. In the past few years there has been a revival of interest in Madeira (and rightly so—the good ones are superb), but it will surely never regain the luster that it once had.

  Reflecting on Madeira’s sad fate, one can’t help but wonder if any of the prestigious wines of our era might suffer a similar reversal. For reasons I have discussed, it may already be happening with Bordeaux. In the United States, at least, retailers, sommeliers, and consumers have all soured on Bordeaux in recent years, turned off by the extortionate prices and a feeling that Bordeaux has lost its soul. This may be only a temporary backlash, but here’s the danger for Bordeaux: because the prices are generally so high, a new generation of wine drinkers is coming of age with little exposure to Bordeaux. To these twentysomethings and thirtysomethings, Bordeaux is a wine for old rich guys, and they are finding their tasting pleasures—and their Holy Grail wines—elsewhere. Among collectors, Burgundy has already eclipsed Bordeaux, and if enough people simply write off Bordeaux, it will lose its standing as the wine world’s touchstone. Top Bordeaux now sell for $1,000 or more per bottle in good vintages; could they one day sell for as little as $30 or $40? That might seem far-fetched, but if you told someone in the late eighteenth century that Madeira would fall into complete o
bscurity, that would have seemed far-fetched, too.

  FIFTY SUGGESTIONS FOR YOUR BUCKET LIST

  • Louis Roederer Cristal Rosé (Champagne)

  • Salon Clos du Mesnil (Champagne)

  • Jacques Selosse Initial (Champagne)

  • Bollinger Vieilles Vignes Françaises (Champagne)

  • Château Haut-Brion (Bordeaux—red)

  • Château La Mission Haut-Brion (Bordeaux—red)

  • Château Margaux (Bordeaux—red)

  • Château Lafite (Bordeaux—red)

  • Château Latour (Bordeaux—red)

  • Château Pétrus (Bordeaux—red)

  • Château Lafleur (Bordeaux—red)

  • Château Cheval Blanc (Bordeaux—red)

  • Château Climens (Bordeaux—white)

  • Château d’Yquem (Bordeaux—white)

  • Domaine de la Romanée-Conti La Tâche (Burgundy—red)

  • Domaine de la Romanée-Conti Montrachet (Burgundy—white)

  • Domaine Dujac Clos de la Roche (Burgundy—red)

  • Domaine Georges Roumier Musigny (Burgundy—red)

  • Domaine Mugnier Musigny (Burgundy—red)

  • Domaine Leroy Musigny (Burgundy—red)

  • Domaine Armand Rousseau Chambertin (Burgundy—red)

  • Domaine Marquis d’Angerville Volnay Clos des Ducs (Burgundy—red)

  • Domaine J. F. Coche-Dury Corton Charlemagne (Burgundy—white)

  • Domaine Leflaive Chevalier-Montrachet (Burgundy—white)

  • Domaine Guy Roulot Meursault-Perrières (Burgundy—white)

  • Domaine Vincent Dauvissat Chablis Les Preuses (Burgundy—white)

  • Domaine François Raveneau Chablis Les Clos (Burgundy—white)

  • Domaine Jean-Louis Chave Hermitage (northern Rhône—red and white)

  • Château de Beaucastel Châteauneuf-du-Pape (southern Rhône—red)

  • Château Rayas Châteauneuf-du-Pape (southern Rhône—red)

  • *Domaine Huet Vouvray (Loire Valley—white)

  • *Marcel Lapierre Morgon (Beaujolais—red)

  • Domaine Trimbach Riesling Clos Ste. Hune (Alsace—white)

  • Giuseppe Mascarello Barolo Monprivato (Piedmont—red)

  • Giacomo Conterno Barolo Monfortino (Piedmont—red)

  • Bruno Giacosa Barolo Falletto di Serralunga (Piedmont—red)

  • Montevertine Le Pergole Torte (Tuscany—red)

  • Gianfranco Soldera Brunello di Montalcino (Tuscany—red)

  • Quintarelli (Italy—red)

  • *J. J. Prüm Riesling (Germany—white)

  • *Dönnhoff Riesling (Germany—white)

  • *Keller Riesling (Germany—white)

  • Vega Sicilia (Spain—red)

  • *López de Heredia Rioja (Spain—red)

  • Bodegas Tradición Sherry (Spain—white)

  • Quinta do Noval Vintage Port (Portugal—red)

  • *Taylor Vintage Port (Portugal—red)

  • Ridge Vineyards Monte Bello Cabernet (California—red)

  • *Ridge Vineyards Geyserville (California—red)

  • Dominus (California—red)

  You will notice that my list leans heavily French. Indeed, thirty-three of the fifty recommended wines are from France. Before you accuse me of being shamelessly biased in favor of French wines, you should know that I wrote a book a few years ago about the decline of French cuisine, a book that included a chapter looking at the woes of the French wine industry. With declining consumption at home and declining market share abroad, French winemakers have had serious problems in the past fifteen years or so, and large chunks of viticultural France are in financial crisis. Nevertheless, France continues to turn out an inordinate share of the world’s finest wines. Most of the major grape varieties—Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Grenache, Syrah, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Chenin Blanc—still achieve their finest expressions on French soil. Maybe that will change at some point in the future—just as France has lost its culinary hegemony, perhaps it will lose its viticultural hegemony—but for now, the very best French wines remain the yardsticks against which most other wines are measured.

  * * *

  * Wines that can be purchased for under $100 a bottle.

  Acknowledgments

  Pity the children whose parents are working on books at the same time. While I was writing this book, my wife, Kathy Brennan, was writing a cookbook and helping to edit another. We never missed a basketball game or dance recital, but it was probably not the most enjoyable eighteen months for our kids, James and Ava. I thank them for their patience, and nervously await the payback that will surely be coming our way during their teen years, which will be arriving all too soon. I thank Kathy, too, for her encouragement and love. If a marriage can survive three books at once, it is a strong marriage, and she is a wonderful partner.

  I want to thank Maria Guarnaschelli, my editor at Norton. She is a legendary figure in the culinary world, and it was an honor and pleasure to have had the opportunity to work with her. Thanks, as well, to her assistant, Mitchell Kohles, for all his help, and to Liz Duvall, whose copyediting was not only superb but also quite entertaining (a wine snob? Moi?).

  I owe a debt of gratitude to my agent, Sloan Harris. He is a great advocate and an invaluable source of advice, and I feel very fortunate to be represented by him. My thanks, too, to the rest of the team at ICM.

  I also want to thank my parents, John and Rita Steinberger, and my in-laws, Joseph and Keiko Brennan, for all their support, and my thanks, too, to the extended Steinberger and Brennan families.

  Last, I want to express my appreciation to the wine community—to the many winemakers, wine merchants, and wine enthusiasts who have answered my queries, challenged my preconceptions, and helped make me a better wine writer. Wine is an endlessly fascinating subject, and the wine world is home to some of the smartest, nicest, most engaging people that I’ve encountered in my work as a journalist. I feel privileged to be part of that world.

  Index

  Entries correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.

  ABC (anything but Chardonnay), 128, 131

  Achatz, Grant, 85

  Acker Merrall & Condit, 167

  Adrià, Ferran, 85

  Adventures on the Wine Route (Lynch), 26–27

  Aglianico, 153

  Aglianico grape, 8, 152, 153, 159–60

  Agrapart Champagne, 118

  agriculture:

  biodynamic, 68–75, 76–77, 102, 138

  industrialized, 70, 76

  management of, 71

  organic, 70–71, 74

  use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides in, 70, 72

  see also viticulture

  Alain Junguenet/Wines of France, 51

  Albariño grape, 8, 135, 152, 156, 157, 159

  alcohol, 9

  body, texture, and sweetness of, 65

  flavor of, 39–40

  legal regulation of, 43–44, 65

  politics and, 12

  preferences in, 3–4, 12

  sexual performance and, 19

  in wine, 19, 33–34, 61, 62, 65–68, 91, 96, 100, 101, 102, 133

  Aligoté grape, 111

  Alinea, 85

  alleles, 41

  Alston, Julian, 66

  Alzheimer’s disease, 19

  Angers, 71

  animal experiments, 19

  anthroposophy, 69–70

  anti-flavor wine elite (AFWE), 60, 61

  antioxidants, 19, 76

  Appellations d’Origine Contrôlée (AOC), 105–6

  appellation system, 103–6, 136–37

  Araujo Estate Wines, 69

  Argentina:

  Mendoza region of, 51

  wines of, 6

  Armand Rousseau, Domaine, 124

  Arneis grape, 153

  Arnot-Roberts Wines, 108, 131

>   aromas, 3, 28–30, 35, 63, 73

  change of, 30

  gamey, 157, 161

  maturing of, 56

  metaphors for, 22, 24, 28–29, 127, 163

  oak, 64

  rotten-egg, 57

  savory, 22, 23

  sense of place exuded by, 24

  sweet and fruity, 5, 22, 23, 24, 30

  tainted, 39, 56, 57, 154–55

  art, 16, 38

  arteries, fatty deposits in, 18–19

  Asimov, Eric, 14–16

  Assyrtiko, 153, 158

  Assyrtiko grape, 158

  Aubuisières, Domaine des, 137

  Au Bon Climat Winery, 109, 131

  Auslese, 133, 166

  Australia, 57, 158, 161

  Barossa Valley region of, 8, 65, 107

  McLaren Vale region of, 51

  wine importers of, 51, 52

  wines of, 32, 37, 51, 61, 67, 76, 91, 134, 141, 145, 159

  Australian Premium Wine Collection, 51

  Austria:

  wine importers of, 51

  wines of, 134, 135, 153

  bacteria, 79

  Bandol, 32

  Barbaresco, 5, 48, 56

  aging of, 63

  old, 55

  Barbeito Madeira Terrantez, 1795, 25

  Barbera grape, 160

  Barolo, 5, 32, 34, 48, 56

  aging of, 63

  old, 55

  Barquín, Jesús, 74

  barrels:

  aging in, 17, 62–65

  flavor imparted from, 61, 62–65

  oak, 61, 62–65, 79

  Barrett, Heidi, 99

  Barrett, Jim, 129

  Bartolo Mascarello, 55

  Bartoshuk, Linda, 39

  battonage, 120

  Baumard, Domaine des, 138

  Bear Stearns, 141

  Beaucastel, Château de, 69, 161

  Beaujolais, 6

  artisanal cru, 5, 78

  Becky Wasserman Selections, 51

  beer, 88

  blue-collar bona fides of, 15, 17

  connoisseurs of, 15

  craft, 17

  culture of, 15, 17