Sipping Western History: Schloss Vollrads

As well as being one of the most prestigious vineyards in Germany – one of three that have their own appellation – Schloss Vollrads may be the oldest identifiable vineyard on earth. At least, it’s the one with the longest verifiable history as a producing vineyard. The Greiffenclau family took possession of the property in 1097; the earliest surviving record of wine sales dates from 1211, over 800 years ago. Just for perspective: That’s four years before the Magna Carta.

The once-fortified tower for which the estate is named was built in 1330 on the foundations of a Roman fort dating from before the fourth century. The whole German system of wine appellations has its roots at Schloss Vollrads, which was the first to designate a wine suitable for aging as “Kabinett.” Only Pompeii can boast identifiable vineyards pre-dating Schloss Vollrads’s, and their producing history was dramatically interrupted for 1900 years.

Being a sort of history nut as well as a wine nut, I happily accepted the offer to taste some of Schloss Vollrads’s recent wines over a lunch at Shun Lee Palace, near Lincoln Center. The Schloss produces nothing but Riesling, in all its German gradations of dryness and sweetness, and I’ve always found that Riesling of almost any kind matches well with Chinese cuisine. So this was a Trifecta for me, and I looked forward to the lunch with what the pulp writers call “keen anticipation.” The wines didn’t disappoint.

Rowald Hepp

Rowald Hepp, the general manager and winemaker, represented Schloss Vollrads. Charming and knowledgeable, he has been running the estate since 1999.

For centuries, the Schloss had been the heritage of the Greiffenclau family, whose last scion was Count Erwein Matuschka Greiffenclau. He was an imposing man – 6’5’ tall, gracious, and a notoriously fast driver – who loved the vineyards and their wine, but apparently was not so skilled at handling finances. When the estate was forced into bankruptcy in 1997, Matuschka walked out into the vineyards and shot himself, a gesture that in these hard (headed) financial times seems both stirringly romantic and decidedly unhelpful.

The Schloss Vollrads vineyards consist of 81 hectares of south-facing slopes along the banks of the Rhine, west of Frankfurt, in the Rheingau. They usually enjoy a long growing season, with relatively mild winters and relatively hot summers, ideal for Riesling. Field work is rigorous and precise, to control yields and maximize ripeness: removing lower portions of clusters to control molds, green harvesting, multiple hand pickings, manual sorting of individual grapes and clusters after harvest – all are routine procedures at Vollrads. Since 2003, the estate has used no cork: bottles are sealed with glass, which, Hepp says, allows the wine to mature properly without any risk of cork taint.

The wines tasted at the luncheon were all from the 2011 vintage. As Hepp described it, this was not an easy one for German winemakers. A very cold early winter preceded an unusually mild January and February, spring-like conditions in March, and summer-like ones in April, all of which resulted in very early budding in April and blossoming in late May. Actual summer then was hot and rainy, causing a season-long struggle against rot, but also inducing quick ripening. Harvest started on September 14, the earliest ever for the Rheingau, and an Indian summer prolonged the harvest to mid-October, when the strongly shriveled grapes for auslese, beerenauslesle, and trockenbeerenauslese were gathered. Hepp was very happy with the quality of the harvest, describing the grapes as “richly aromatic and spicy, with perfectly balanced acidity.”

Here are my tasting notes on the day’s wines (with my usual caveat about all tasting notes: They were accurate for me at that one particular time and place – they may not be at all true for you, and even for me they are not engraved in stone).

Riesling QbA* dry: intriguing lemon and acacia blossom aroma; great fruit and acidity; lovely long citric finish. Hepp estimates 3 to 5 years aging potential. Quite good, especially for an estate’s base wine.

Riesling Kabinett medium-dry (sometimes designated “halb-trocken”): again, intense acacia blossom and lemon aromas precede an intensely floral and mineral palate with lively acidity. A trace of sweetness shows only in the slightly hazelnutty finish. Very fine.

Riesling QbA: lemon/lime nose; bright and sprightly, almost frizzante, on the palate. Slightly sweet lemon in finish. Lovely Riesling character throughout. Very good.

Riesling Kabinett: Small mushroom-and-earth scents mixed with flowers; floral and apricot in the mouth; great minerality in the finish. Again, excellent varietal character throughout. I would guess this wine would cellar quite well for up to ten years. Very fine.

Riesling Spätlese: Fermented at very low temperatures for up to 14 weeks in stainless steel. Hepp’s technical notes are, for my palate, very accurate: “Incredible fruit complexity. Stunning floral aromas of peach, raspberry, and honeysuckle, with hints of apple blossoms and traces of ginger.” I would add that the low alcohol and the striking acidity, which easily supports the residual sugar, keep the wine light and agile on the palate, right into and through its luscious finish. Should cellar well for more than a decade.

Riesling Auslese: Hepp calls this “an amazing wine”; I found it lush, rich and complex with a whole spectrum of sweet fruit flavors, all sustained by terrific acidity. I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, but I loved sipping this wine as dessert. Very fine.

Over all, these 2011s all displayed that rich floral and mineral character that is the hallmark of the finest Rieslings. Their lower alcohol and varying degrees of sweetness defined them as classic German wines – wines perhaps not always easy to match with foods (but I kept thinking how much any of these wines would love a smoked trout!), but exquisite in themselves, and when you do find their right partner, absolutely incomparable.

* QbA is the basic classification of German table wines, technically a niche below Kabinett and all the rarefied levels of sweetness that ascend from there: Spätlese, Auslese, Beerenauslese (BA), and Trockenbeerenauslese (TBA).

Once More Into the Breach, Dear Winos

Wine season in New York began right after Labor Day with the proverbial bang, conglomerating more wine lunches, portfolio tastings, verticals, and horizontals in the past few weeks than any single liver could deal with. Here are a highly selected few of the season’s stand-out new release wines from a few of those events.

Champagne is always a good opener. Two beauties here: Ayala, which deserves to be as well known here as it is in Europe, is brought in by the small import firm Cognac One. Pol Roger, which is well known everywhere, is imported by the large firm Frederick Wildman.

Ayala is probably the smallest of the Grandes Marques, even though it was a founding member (1882) of that association. Owned since 2005 by Bollinger, Ayala has had the same cellar master (Nicolas Klym) for 25 years. Ayala regards itself as an artisan house, working with highly selected vineyards and grapes: There is quite a lot of grand cru Pinot noir in its basic Brut Majeur and Vintage Brut. I thought the Brut Majeur NV quite stylish and enjoyable, with the merest trace of sweetness in the finish. Drinkers less sensitive to sugar than I will not notice it at all. For total sugar-phobes, Ayala’s Brut Nature NV is the wine of choice: Sound, clean, and fully dry, with a lovely wheaty/toasty palatal presence, this wine would serve both as aperitif and dinner companion.

The Blanc de Blancs 2004 is vinified entirely from grand cru Chardonnay to make a lean and muscular wine, with ample fruit for enjoyable drinking. Cuvée Perle d’Ayala Nature 2002 is composed of 80% Chardonnay and 20% Pinot noir from grand and premier cru villages. It has a fine wheaty nose, excellent body and full, mouth-filling flavor, with a very long finish. Ayala’s top-of-the-line Brut Millesimé 1999 reverses the blend – 80% Pinot noir and 20% Chardonnay – to make a lovely wine, elegant and balanced, deep and long-lasting. Very fine indeed.

Pol Roger is one of the best-known names in Champagne. The house is justly famous for quality throughout its line and for its maintenance of the distinctive fresh and full style that made it Winston Churchill’s favorite. Pol Roger “Pure” Brut Nature NV, Brut Réserve “White Foil” NV, Blanc de Blancs 2002, Vintage Brut 2002, and Brut Rosé 2004 are all cut from the same fine cloth: biggish wines that manage to be rich and austere at the same time, so that you don’t know whether to admire more the depth of their flavor or the restraint of their style. The Cuvée Sir Winston Churchill 1999, named after the house’s most famous and most loyal client, is simply gorgeous – as usual. Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the Grands Marques houses is the way they preserve such a very high level of quality year in and year out. They make it look routine, but there is nothing easy about it.

I was also impressed by multiple wines from another Wildman producer, Paul Jaboulet Ainé. This Rhône master makes the whole gamut of northern and southern Rhône wines well, from its basic Parallèle 45 red and white up to some very rarified heights. I found its two red Hermitages, 2009 La Petite Chapelle and 2005 La Chapelle, very striking, the former very floral and – at this stage of its development – a bit rustic, the latter still half-closed but elegant and polished and structured for the ages. I loved Jaboulet’s Cornas Domaine Saint Pierre (2009), which was huge and utterly characteristic of Cornas – the northernmost outpost of Syrah in the Rhône, and an appellation that rarely gets the respect it deserves. Its wines are typically forceful, even aggressive in their youth, but mellow as they age into deep and polished, always identifiably southern, wines. They can age as long as any other Rhône appellation.

Much as I liked the Jaboulet reds, however, the two wines that really enchanted me were the firm’s 2010 Châteauneuf du Pape Les Cèdres blanc and 2007 Hermitage Chevalier de Sterimberg, the latter already an extremely lovely white wine, but one that will live and slowly improve for decades. Should I live so long, I would drink this wine when it’s 20 years old.

Back at the Cognac One tasting, another Rhône producer caught my attention: Cave de Tain. This is a co-op, and an excellent one. Headquartered right at Hermitage, Cave de Tain draws upon growers who produce more than half of all the northern Rhône AOC wines made. Its basic 2010 Syrah is a beautifully restrained example of the variety, while its red 2009 Crozes Hermitage, also 100% Syrah, shows the same restraint coupled with an excellent acidity and minerality, with fine potential for intermediate aging.

Cave de Tain Crozes Hermitages vineyard

2006 Saint-Joseph and 2005 Cornas, both, again, 100% Syrah, are already deep and showing complexity despite their relative youth. Both will age well for at least ten years. Neither appellation, it seems to me, gets sufficient attention from serious wine lovers.

The top of Cave de Tain’s range contains a lovely 2005 Hermitage rouge (nose of chestnuts and earth, deep palate, smooth and fresh), a 2010 Esprit de Granit Saint-Joseph (mineral and black pepper nose, deep peppery Syrah finish: needs years), and an absolutely gorgeous 2005 Gambert de Loche Hermitage (already deep and velvety; still evolving and deepening). These are all first-rate examples of Northern Rhône character.

Finally, one Italian producer (you knew I couldn’t resist): Aurelio Settimo of La Morra, one of the key communes of the Barolo zone. Tiziana Settimo, daughter of the eponymous founder and guiding spirit of the small estate for a decade now, hosted a lovely dinner at Porter House restaurant to celebrate her wines’ re-entry into the US market. Her new importer for New York and New Jersey is Verity Wine Partners. She showed the first four wines to arrive here: Dolcetto d’Alba 2010, Langhe Nebbiolo 2006, Barolo 2007, and Barolo Rocche dell’Annunziata 2007.

All four wines showed the characteristic Aurelio Settimo elegance and restraint, coupled with – especially in the case of the two Barolos – intensity of flavor and the absolutely classic spectrum of Nebbiolo components. The Nebbiolo d’Alba, although slightly lighter-bodied than the two Barolos, showed the same purity of Nebbiolo character. This is a totally pleasurable wine, ready to drink now (it loved a porcini and black truffle risotto) and likely to hold at a fine level for at least five years yet. At about half the price of the Barolos, it represents the closest you’re going to come to a steal in Alba wines these days. The commune of La Morra has been pretty much setting the pace for Barolo for a few years now, and meticulous, painstaking winemakers like Tiziana are the reason why.

That’s all for now: there will be more reports on outstanding wines as the season wears on. Coraggio!

Umani Ronchi: The Marches March On

The restaurant Del Posto is so far on the West Side that it’s practically in the Hudson River, but it’s one of the better places in Manhattan to taste wine, I thought, as I seated myself behind an impressive array of glasses and listened to Mario Belardino, President of Bedford Imports and for decades the US importer of Umani Ronchi wines, introduce the winery’s third-generation owner, Michele Bernetti.

Mario Belardino at the tasting

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The occasion was a luncheon to mark Michele’s visit to the US and to introduce Umani Ronchi’s new releases, including the Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi Classico Superiore Vecchie Vigne 2009 – Vecchie Vigne for short – which had the enviable distinction this year of being designated not just Tre Bicchieri – honor enough for a white wine from the central Italy’s Adriatic coast – but also being named White Wine of the Year by Gambero Rosso.

Such a huge award – there is an abundance of prestigious white wines in Italy, after all – will no doubt come as a surprise to most American wine lovers. We are more used to thinking of Verdicchio (if we think of it at all) as a light quaffing wine, to drink at the seashore with a plate of clams on the half shell. Reputations for good or for ill die hard in the wine world, and many wine lovers no doubt still recall the heyday of Verdicchio, almost 30 years past now, when the fish-shaped bottle (Fazi-Battaglia’s specialty) was a ubiquitous sight in Italian restaurants. Verdicchio in those days established itself here as a light-bodied, crisp, and acidic white, perfect, served icy cold, for aperitifs and alongside those raw clams or fried calamari. That peak of popularity passed – they are not long, the days of wine and clams – and Verdicchio-as-aperitif was replaced by other wines, notably Pinot grigio, which became in its turn just as popular.

In the meanwhile, in Le Marche, Verdicchio was evolving. The vineyards were getting older, for one thing (vecchie vigne, for instance, means old vines), and delivering richer grapes that were in turn yielding a rounder, fuller wine. And producers were experimenting with aging the wine, in large wood and small, with and without lees. Verdicchio riservas began appearing more and more often. It was a riserva bottle of Umani Ronchi’s Verdicchio Casal di Serra, for instance, that ten or so years ago first impressed me that Verdicchio could be a serious, more full-bodied dinner wine.

Casal di Serra bottles at the tasting

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Michele Bernetti

This intensification or expansion of the wine occurred with no loss of acidity: As the wines got plumper, they still remained lively and supple, which is what good acidity does for a wine. “We practice quite minimal winemaking,” Michele said; “we try to avoid inducing malolactic fermentation in order to preserve all of the grape’s natural acidity and flavors. Verdicchio really shows minerality better than any grape in Italy.”

Indeed, the play of acidity and minerality in the 2009 Vecchie Vigne was quite evident and thoroughly pleasurable both in the bare tasting and at lunch. Combined with Verdicchio’s distinctive fruitiness – an improbable combination of pear and banana flavors (please take that as an approximation, not an exact description) – it made a medium-bodied white wine that could, at a stretch, serve as an aperitif, but really wanted food of a substantial sort alongside it. Del Posto accompanied it – delightfully, for my palate – with a brilliantly spicy Lobster Fra Diavolo. The interplay of the lushness of lobster, the spicy bite of the sauce, and the acid bite of the wine made a perfect combination.

And the Vecchie Vigne behaved equally well with the next course, Garganelli Verdi with Ragù Bolognese. This pasta was intended to accompany Umani Ronchi’s red wines, Rosso Conero and Montepulciano d’Abruzzo (good wines both: perhaps more about them in a later post), but I found that the delicacy of the thinly rolled pasta and the succulence of its meat sauce played as well if not better with the parallel richness and leanness of the Vecchie Vigne.

In short, the Gambero Rosso people made no mistake: This ’09 Vecchie Vigne is a versatile dinner wine of a complex and highly adaptable character. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that this wine (and a few other Verdicchios I have tasted, notably Bucci’s) makes a real case for Verdicchio’s admission to the exalted category of “noble grape.” It’s a variety that makes a wine of pleasurable complexity and depth, showing a great capacity for aging gracefully and interestingly. It would be worth laying down a dozen bottles of this 2009 and tasting one a year just to see how they develop. A few years down the road, the results could be sensational.

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P.S.  In response to innumerable inquiries (well, one: from my wife), I’ll explain that the name Umani Ronchi does not mean “raunchy humans” but is the family name of the founder of the winery, Gino Umani Ronchi, whom Michele Bernetti’s father joined originally as a partner. The Bernetti family, now sole owners of the firm, have kept the name to honor his work and because he had successfully established a brand identity in the Italian market.

Old White Wines

Last week Diane and I cooked up a big lobster. They have been less expensive than usual this summer, and a simple boiled lobster with drawn butter sounded very attractive for a summer evening’s dinner. So in honor of the rare-for-us crustacean, I pulled out an old Chablis Grand Cru – 2001 Les Clos, the smallest of the Grands Crus zones, from Voceret.

I got quite worried when I poured it. It was very deeply golden, looking considerably older than its eleven years. And the first taste was worrisome too: The wine didn’t show much of anything – it was simply blah. I know my storage isn’t the best (by a wide margin), and I began to fear I had kept this wine too long for the conditions. But there was a chance it just didn’t much like the Irish smoked salmon we’d chosen for a first course, so I suspended judgment until we could taste the wine with the lobster it was intended for.

Maybe you can guess the outcome of this story. By the time the lobster was cooked, drained, cracked open, served, and tasted, the wine had changed. Alongside the lobster, it immediately tasted better than it had with the salmon, then – as it sat and opened – it got better and better, richer and richer, showing more and more of the classic Chablis minerality and an enjoyable edgy Chardonnay character. Not buttery – the lobster’s dressing took care of that – but the sharper, more white-fruit character of Chardonnay, which is too often submerged in young wines or heavily barriqued wines. The wine was at its intriguing best as we finished it, making me wish I had treated it as I would a ten- or eleven-year-old red wine, and pulled its cork an hour or two beforehand.

By that point – too late to profit by it, of course – I remembered that I had had similar experiences before with older white wines, both from France and from Italy. That is, on several occasions over the past few years, I had come across wines deeply golden with age, some of them even initially smelling oxidized to such an extent that some of the tasters I was with didn’t bother to try them. Just like my Chablis, several of these wines simply got better and better as they opened, until, after an hour or two, they had transformed themselves into classic mature examples of their type.

My friend and colleague Charles Scicolone confirms my experience. He was part of several of these tasting groups, so we shared some of the “aha!” moments, and he has had similar experiences on his own – so I know I’m neither delusional nor making a silk purse out of sow’s ear of a wine. The fact is that some seemingly moribund older white wines aren’t dead, catatonic, or even sleeping: They’re just closed, and need time to breathe and open.

Obviously, most white wines aren’t capable of this kind of long aging: They’re built for consumption within at most five years of bottling, in many cases even less than that. But the right grapes in the right hands in the right places can yield wines that will age and mature into the same sort of depth and complexity that we usually associate exclusively with red wines.

I’ve had remarkably enjoyable older bottles of many kinds. From France, Premier and Grand Cru Chablis and Burgundy; Alsace Riesling and especially Pinot Gris; Chateauneuf blanc and Hermitage blanc.

From Italy, I’ve had wonderful older bottles of an array of great wines: Jermann’s Vintage Tunina and Capo Martino; Mastroberardino’s Fiano di Avellino; Villa Bucci Riserva from Le Marche; Valentino’s Trebbiano d’Abruzzo; Frescobaldi’s Pomino bianco; Antinori’s Cervaro della Sala are just some of them.

I’m very curious about other people’s perhaps parallel experiences. If you have opened any bottles of white wine, initially thought them gone, and then discovered later on that they were quite fine, I’d like to hear about it – especially if you made any notes about the amount of time it took for your wine to come around. Tell me what sorts of white wine you have enjoyed as antiques, and whether you think they survived because of the quality of the vintage, the treatment in the cellar, or the character of the grapes. Most wines of any color are drunk too young, and whites are not often deliberately given long cellaring, so there’s a lot to be learned here, and I’d like to start amassing some accurate information for my own use and to share with any interested parties.

Wine Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

Richard Elia, founder and publisher of The Quarterly Review of Wines, has posted on its website an eloquent explanation of his magazine’s closure as a print publication late last year, after 35 years. A sad occasion, but a sign of the times, perhaps: The Wine News had preceded it into oblivion a few years before, and wine articles had disappeared from general-interest magazines before that. Newspaper circulations are down, and internet wine information (soi-disant) is proliferating. All that leaves not much room for a journal that aimed at sophisticated wine drinkers of passion and discrimination, already a seriously self-limiting audience. (Does that sound snobbish? I think of it as factual.)

The last issue of QRW

Elia’s online essay is called “Wine’s Decline: The Romance of Wine Is Spent,” and it laments the replacement of wine’s formerly colorful cast of characters – Elia cites André Tchelistcheff, Alexis Lichine, André Simon – by faceless and characterless corporate types. Even more distressingly, he deplores the submersion of the passion and drive to make great, personal wines in a flood of market research and numerical ratings. (Read his essay here. And see also the commentary of Tom Hyland.)

Elia makes a strong case, and a moving one: Much indeed has been lost. There are no more Luigi Veronellis or Giorgio Grais, no Edoardo Valentinos, and all too soon there will be no more Franco Biondi-Santis. Pioneers like Renato Ratti and Giacomo Bologna are long gone, as are retailers as passionate and devoted as the still-lamented Lou Iacucci – that is now a rare breed indeed. I could give you similar doleful litanies for France and California, but the easiest way to see what has passed is to look to Bordeaux and see how many estates are now owned by corporations or insurance companies or banks or have been conglomerated under a single ownership. What used to be proudly idiosyncratic is now the province of suits. As Kurt Vonnegut would say, So it goes.

And yet, and yet …. It ain’t all bad. I’m certain I qualify as an old fart, and I know I’m as much given as anyone to lamenting the passing of the good old days. I agree emphatically with most of what Elia says. Particularly I deplore, as he does, the noise levels in restaurants that make conversation impossible and paying attention to what you’re eating and drinking difficult at best. That’s why Diane and I seldom dine out any more (actually, that and restaurant wine markups), unless we can find a restaurant that still believes its primary purpose is to feed its clients rather than deafen them.

But for those of us who love wine, as Elia surely does, it has to be admitted that we are in fact living in a golden age of wine. There is more good wine being made today, by more people, in more places, than ever before.

Yes, there are oceans of grape swill being made as well, and they will continue to be made and marketed as long as there are people foolish enough to buy them. We’ve all encountered people who drink wine – why, I’ve never understood – that they purchase by price alone. I am not exaggerating when I tell you I’ve met a publisher of a small newspaper who told me that he doesn’t believe in spending more than $3 for a bottle of wine.

But, but …. There is an up-side to all these downs. Because of that technology we too often complain of, because of those crass commercial incentives, because even of global warming (think of the string of great vintages in Burgundy and in Piedmont), but most of all because there still are winemakers out there who care passionately about what they’re doing, people who would probably still work their hearts out to make great wine even if they couldn’t command the kind of prices for it that the market now allows – for all those reasons, I think this is not the time to give up on the wine world.

I don’t think it will ever again be the kind of clubby little knot of connoisseurs it once (supposedly) was. But the passion that I see in winemakers in France and Italy (the areas I know best), the curiosity to explore neglected varieties and to preserve local traditions – those are things that tell me that the romance is still alive. Yes, I’ll admit that one man’s romance can be another man’s hype. I can even accept that the same thing can be both; there’s a market too for folklore and traditions. But that doesn’t alter the fundamental fact: A person willing to take the trouble to learn a little bit can easily find fine wines to reward the effort.

The rub, perhaps, is “taking the trouble to learn a little bit.” As Elia observes, nobody seems to want to do that anymore. Nothing – nothing of any sort – teaches you about wine like the drinking of it, tasting a wine by itself, with different foods, in different vintages, in comparison with other similar and dissimilar wines. But that takes time and effort and a willingness to pay attention, take notes, and remember. Apparently – and Elia is surely right about this – most people can’t be bothered to do that, when they can call up a numerical score on their iPad and place any wine exactly in its predestined place in the wine universe and be assured thereby of their own exquisite taste. If you can buy expertise and knowledge the same way you buy a pair of shoes or a new app, who needs experience?

Regard that question as rhetorical: We all need experience. There is – ask any wine professional – a huge difference between theory and practice. Just knowing the number that the Wine Advocate or the Wine Spectator assigned a wine tells you exactly zero about the wine, and less than zero about how much or little you will enjoy it. Only your own experience will tell you that – and people who are now starting to foray into the world of wine are blessed beyond measure by the bounty of splendid wines available for them to learn from.

Despite that, some no doubt will settle for plonk. Some will become the kind of wine poseurs we all hate. But some surely will catch the passion and carry on the tradition of discrimination and refined enjoyment whose passing Richard Elia – prematurely, I hope – laments.

Postscript:  I received this e-mail from Burton Anderson. I’m posting it here so that I can provide a link to his book excerpt.

Dear Tom:  Just read your new post and, of course, found myself in total agreement, not only with your words but also those of Richard Elia. For what it’s worth, I’ve attached an excerpt from a chapter of a book I’m working on.

Best, Burton

Why I Get Excited About Italian Wine

Last night I opened 12-year-old bottle of Palari, one of the best, if not the best wine made in Sicily. Many wine lovers have never heard of it, and I’d bet that most of those who recognize its name couldn’t tell you its DOC. Stop guessing: It’s Faro, a zone around Messina. The DOC appellation comes from Messina’s lighthouse, faro in Italian, and there aren’t many wines that bear it.

I didn’t buy that wine as a 12-year-old: I got it years ago as a new release, and held it. Some people think I hold wines too long, but by the evidence of this bottle I don’t keep them long enough. Drinking this Palari was an exercise in highly pleasurable infanticide. It had a very velvety, Burgundian mouth feel, but it was much bigger than most Burgundies and utterly unlike Burgundy in its flavor spectrum – this despite Luigi Veronelli’s hailing it, many years ago, as the Clos de Vougeot of Italy.

Try to taste on your mind’s palate a big, balanced red wine, with dark, dark flavors sustained by an exciting but totally unobtrusive acidity. It went beyond blackberry into meat-sweetness (like excellent sirloin) and positively anthracite minerality, finishing with black walnut, almost liqueur-like in texture at that point. And with all that, the wine still evidently had years of life and development ahead of it, because at its huge and generous heart there lay still a little core of knotted flavors that wanted more time to mature (don’t we all?).

The story of Palari is both highly unusual and typically Italian. Back in the 90s, the Faro DOC was on the verge of being wiped from the charts, for the very good reason that no one was making any wine within its prescript. (How such a wine was ever awarded the DOC in the first place is one of those mysteries wrapped in bureaucratic mumbo jumbo that we mere mortals will never be able to penetrate.) The wine would soon have become extinct, and hardly anyone would have noticed. But one person did. Luigi Veronelli, the pioneering Italian wine and food critic, noticed and cared. Caring was Veronelli’s greatest virtue. Food mattered to him. His guide books gave not just numerical ratings, but suns and stars and hearts to restaurants that affected him. Wine mattered to him too, and the passing away of an ages-old wine mattered to him very deeply.

So he got in touch with Salvatore Geraci, a Sicilian-born architect resident in Reggio Calabria who had inherited an estate in the heart of the Faro zone, and persuaded him that he must revive his grandfather’s vineyards and save the DOC.

Salvatore Geraci

Geraci listened and in turn persuaded the Piedmontese enologist Donato Lanati to direct the project.

From the outset, everybody concerned agreed that the wine had to be top quality, or there was no point doing it at all. And – most crucially to my mind – they agreed that it had to be made with native grapes exclusively. If it wasn’t quintessentially Sicilian, there was no point doing it.

And so it began. Working with Geraci’s agronomist brother Giampiero, they tended 7 hectares – a little more than 17 acres – of primarily Nerello Mascalese and Nerello Cappucchio, with small percentages of such internationally famous varieties as Acitana, Cor’e Palumba, Galatena, Nocera, and Tignolino.

Steep slopes and head-trained vines in the Palari vineyards

1994 was the first commercial vintage, and it began the series of critical successes that have distinguished Palari ever since. I have no idea how many times Palari has won Tre Bicchieri awards since then, but I do know that the wine has gotten one for every release between 2000 and 2009, the most recent. That’s a track record approached only by some of the greatest Piedmontese wines, and – whatever one thinks of wine awards – it speaks volumes for the perceived quality of Palari.

Palari now has a sibling, Rosso del Soprano, vinified from exactly the same grapes in an almost identical manner (it’s an IGT wine rather a DOC, but this makes no difference to its quality). Total production of both wines runs about 50,000 bottles a year – not large, by any yardstick of quantity, but enormous in terms of quality.

The aging cellar at Palari. This is about half of it.

And enormous in its implications for Italian wine. Until Geraci made a success of it and growers on Etna began taking it seriously, Nerello Mascalese languished, just another old-fashioned grape that the benighted contadini liked. Now connoisseurs speak of it respectfully as one of the bright lights of Sicilian viniculture.

Italy is a treasure house of such unknown and unesteemed varieties. The just-beginning-to-be-appreciated Susumaniello in Puglia, Rucché in Piedmont, Pugnitello in Tuscany are just examples of the riches yet to be explored. And not just red grapes: Twenty years ago, who had heard of Falanghina? Who knows how many more varieties are out there, just waiting for the winemaker who cares enough to put in the time and effort to coax them to show what they’ve got?

That’s why I still get excited about Italian wine, and why I’ll continue to do so for the foreseeable future. I suspect I’ll give out before Italy’s surprises do.

Châteauneuf du Pape: Remembrance of Things Past

If you listed France’s great red wines in order of prestige, Châteauneuf du Pape would probably come in last. It is unquestionably a great wine, and it’s long been one of my favorites, but it just doesn’t get much respect. From the canny consumer’s point of view, that’s great: It keeps the prices from soaring into the stratosphere with Bordeaux and Burgundy and the two darlings of the south, Hermitage and Côte Rôtie. But from the point of view of justice, it’s irksome: Châteauneuf deserves better.

This little effusion was prompted by a lovely bottle of ’98 Vieux Télégraphe La Crau that Diane and I broke out a few nights ago to accompany a broiled butterflied leg of lamb and some fresh chanterelles. Yes, it’s that time of year: The summer-fruiting chanterelles are in, the temperature is high, and the cooking is simple. But simple cooking doesn’t mean you have to drink lesser wines; a grilled leg of lamb will partner happily with the best reds in whatever passes for your cellar. Ergo, the Vieux Télégraphe. As fine wines will, this one prompted not just that fit of indignation on its behalf but also a bit of nostalgia that led in turn to reminiscences of its kin and to memories of my long involvement with Châteauneuf du Pape.

Like almost everyone of my generation, I learned wine on French wine – and for too long a time, that meant Bordeaux and Burgundy almost exclusively. There was so much to know there, and so much to enjoy, that I was slow to move out to other parts of France and the world. At about the same time I was learning that there’s more to Italy than simple Chianti and Soave Bolla, I began to discover the south of France, and especially Châteauneuf du Pape, which in those dark days was one of the few wines from anywhere along the Rhône that found its way to the US.

It was probably a Château Fortia that started my love affair with Châteauneuf. Memory tells me that Fortia was one of the most readily available Châteauneufs then, and one of the most important estates in France because of its proprietor’s major role in the creation of the whole French wine appellation system.

The Baron

Baron Le Roy Boiseaumairié, a Norman and a WWI fighter pilot who married into the Rhône estate, led the local fight against fraudulent wine (some things are always with us) and formed a consortium that formulated the basic rules for what goes into Châteauneuf and how it’s vinified. Later, he led the national commission that established similar regulations for France’s other wine zones. And all the while, he continued to make excellent wine at Château Fortia.

Forty or more years ago, that wine tasted of summer to me – sunbaked, in a totally attractive, travel-poster way: dark and vinous, with a hint of raisins and a deep plums-turning-into-prunes flavor that seemed to demand strong meats and stinky cheeses – which, I quickly found out, Châteauneuf responded to as to long-lost friends. How could you not like this wine? Everything about it was redolent of where it came from. Just smelling it conjured up images of tanned, gnarled farmers under a brilliant clear sky tending equally gnarled vines on rocky, arid fields. So strong was the impression that I resolved to go as soon as possible and see for myself.

I don’t know now whether I really envisaged all that before I actually got to the Rhône valley, or whether the rocks and sun that I saw when I arrived seemed so right that I persuaded myself I had foreseen it. It really doesn’t matter. The sun-dazzling, almost cobbled vineyards of Châteauneuf du Pape looked to my mind exactly like what the wine tasted like: Here was gout de terroir as concentrated and true as any wine lover could wish.

Photo by Philipp Herzog

In those days of yore, there was, alas, a large downside to that wonderful sunscape. Very few hotels in southern France had air conditioning, and the few that did were very reluctant to turn it on (“It is not yet the season, M’sieur”). I remember a ghastly night in Avignon when, forced to leave the windows open because of the heat, our room was invaded by the vampires of the Rhône, mosquitoes as big as WWII fighter planes and guided, I firmly believed, by the vengeful souls of downed Luftwaffe pilots. I grew up near the New Jersey meadows (not then The Meadowlands), and I know from mosquitoes. When Diane and I went down to breakfast next morning, having donated as much blood as the insect hordes could carry, we looked like plague victims, dotted with buboes and swellings. We had to drink a lot of Châteauneuf that week to rebuild our blood supply.

Happily, the mosquitoes were not the only ones who dined well in Avignon. There were several very fine restaurants there, and the cuisine was still classique. One in particular, Hiély Lucullus, stands out in memory both for superb food and for allowing me to say one of the few clever things I’ve ever managed in French. If the cuisine was still classique, and so were the attitudes. Consequently, not a person in France could be persuaded to understand a single syllable that came from my mouth. And since no one then would deign to understand English, Diane, whose French is good, usually spoke for us. But at Hiély, I attempted to order for myself, and what I ordered was Pieds et Paquets, a lamb knuckle accompanied by a neat little package of lamb tripes.

A representative dish of pieds et paquets

The waitress was extremely dubious, and asked me – in French of course – if I knew what I had asked for. I replied, in the very best French I could muster, that although I spoke French very badly, I ate French very well. She was dumbfounded – clearly, this possibility had never occurred to her (nor, to be just, to anyone else in France at that time). She gave us very attentive service for the rest of the evening – which by way, contained another fine bottle of Châteauneuf.

Much has changed in France since then: cuisine, attitudes, and wines. There are now more producers of fine Châteauneuf than ever, and most of the wine is better made – more consistent from harvest to harvest, more elegant, less rustic: more modern I guess you’d say (though that’s not always a good thing). Except for one or two superstar producers (you won’t find their names here), Châteauneuf is still reasonably priced, still rewards aging, and still tastes deeply of the South. Maybe it’s not as raisiny anymore, but it still sincerely loves strong meats (especially long-stewed ones) and stinky cheeses, and its generous bosom happily makes room too for a nice piece of broiled lamb. Just don’t forget the chanterelles, if you can get them. Nostalgia is all well and good, but mushrooms are of the moment.

Piedmont Panorama 3: Barbaresco

The Nebbiolo Prima event, held in Alba every May, begins with a handful of Roero Nebbiolos and proceeds to Barbaresco before moving on to three days of Barolos, which usually by their sheer numbers wind up slightly overshadowing Barbaresco and completely screening Roero. This year was typical: The new releases consisted of 224 examples of 2008 Barolo and 2006 Barolo Riserva (my take on these will be coming out in Decanter) and only 90 Barbarescos, mostly of the 2009 vintage plus a few 2007 Riservas.

Despite the numerical preponderance of Barolo, the Barbaresco wines on offer definitely commanded attention. The commune of Treiso and especially the Barbaresco commune itself showed very well indeed, though many of the wines from the third commune – Neive – were seriously marred by over-oaking.

It’s a serious mistake to think of Barbaresco as only Barolo’s kid brother. Granted, Barbaresco receives one year less of aging before release than Barolo does – but in every other respect the wines are practically identical. Both consist of 100% Nebbiolo. Their producers work with the same clones on similar soils and in similar microclimates, only a few miles apart. In some cases, the same people produce both wines. It is more historical accident than any profound distinction that has made them two separate appellations. Both are DOCG and marvelous, age-worthy wines of the highest caliber.

American consumers seem to have understood this: The US alone absorbs more than a quarter of all the Barbaresco produced, while, for example, our unfortunately benighted British cousins import less than half of one percent of Barbaresco’s output. So if you’re attending the Olympics, don’t go looking for Barbaresco; gold medals will be more abundant. A British colleague of mine, an admirer of Barbaresco, is convinced this is because British consumers have been misled by the name and think Barbaresco is just an expensive Barbera. That sounds unlikely, but anything is possible.

In any event, the Barbaresco zone continues to deserve gold medals for its quality, and this 2009 vintage stands among the best of them. It was by no means an easy vintage. Rather, it ran from one extreme to another, from the heaviest winter snows and the rainiest spring in years to a totally dry, searing hot summer.

Ripening was very uneven, in a way that seemed more the consequence of place and soil than grape variety: in some spots, for instance, the Barbera ripened before the Dolcetto, which just shouldn’t happen. By the time the Nebbiolo was ready for picking, being a long-season, late-ripening variety, the grapes had pretty uniformly reached full ripeness both for sugars and tannins – maybe a little low in acidity, but by and large well-structured for cellaring and still with the kind of soft tannins and lush fruit that make modern Barolo and Barbaresco ready to drink so much sooner than the formidably hard wines of the past.

In the best 2009 Barbarescos, that combination of fine structure and rich fruit indicate a wine with a long future of pleasurable drinking before it, starting in all probability in about the fall of 2013 and going on for at least 10 years, and in many cases for 20 or more. 2009 joins that now unbelievably long string of excellent vintages that Piedmont and its fans have been enjoying. I know we’re in an economic crisis – who doesn’t? – but if you’re under 50 it would be fiscally irresponsible not to acquire a case or cases of these 2009s while you can: The pleasure dividends are worth it.

Here are some of my top-rated wines:

Angelo Negro, Cascinotta: black fruits and funghi porcini, hints of espresso; very interesting.

Cà del Baio, Asili: black cherry, roses, tobacco in nose, fresh fruit and mushroom on palate, balanced and elegant.

Cà Romé, Sori Rio Sordo: a touch closed, but beautifully structured.

Cascina delle Rose, Tre Stelle: a wine at once forceful and graceful, with intriguing fruit notes throughout (e.g., dried fig in the finish).

Cascina Morassino, Morassino: lovely Nebbiolo nose, fine black cherry fruit, plenty of minerality.

Castello di Verduno, Rabajà: Dried funghi, dark Nebbiolo fruit, and earth tones in nose and finish.

Giuseppe Cortese, Rabajà: fresh fruit with underlying minerality – very nice.

La Cà Nova, Montestefano: a touch rustic, but powerfully earthy, from one of the best sites in Barbaresco.

La Spinona, Bricco Faset: very complete and round, with forward fruit, good minerality, excellent balance.

Marchesi di Gresy, Martinenga: tar and tobacco and black cherry, with perfect acidity and tannin.

Moccagatta, Bric Balin: already complex and fine.

Pertinace, Marcarini: big black fruit, soft tannins, good acid; lively on the palate.

Poderi Colla, Roncaglie: classic earth, dried roses, and tar in nose and finish; needs time, but should be superb.

Prunotto Barbaresco: not a cru, but the basic wine and beautifully put together.

Forget Pink: Think – and Drink – Rosato

I’m not normally a fan of rosé wines. I’ve been underwhelmed by some of the most famous names of rosédom – too flabby, too sweet, too characterless. But two weeks in Puglia earlier this summer changed my mind about rosato, which as the Pugliesi make it is a whole different kettle of fish – which, not coincidentally, rosato beautifully accompanies.

Puglia is in vinous terms something of a paradox: A hot, semi-arid land with miles and miles of coastline on two seas, the Adriatic and the Ionic, it should be white-wine heaven. Its heart is nevertheless in red wines, which it produces in splendid abundance and variety. (I have an article about this aspect of Puglia coming out in Decanter.)

While Puglia does make white wines, they are few in number and variety compared to the sea of reds it produces. The heat and flatness of much of Puglia militates against any large white wine production.

The hilly area around Castel del Monte, one of the northernmost and highest zones, accounts for the great bulk of the region’s white wines, probably the best known of which is Locorotondo, vinified from Verdeca – like many of Puglia’s wine grapes, an indigenous and highly localized variety.

But with all that great stretch of seacoast, Puglia has always needed something lighter than the region’s reds to enjoy with fish and to drink on the beach. It long ago found its answer with rosato, which local growers produce in great quantity – and often very high quality – from several native red grape varieties. Everything from the relatively well-known Primitivo (passable) to the utterly unknown Bombino nero (excellent) is used. For my palate, rosatos vinified from Negroamaro stand among the world’s most pleasing rosé wines – light-bodied, fresh and refreshing, with the sweet/sour berry taste that is characteristic of the Negroamaro grape. They have charm, plus a little character – or, to put it another way, they have the lightness of a white wine and the richness of a red – and that puts them miles ahead of the bulk of the world’s rosés.

Another peculiarity of Puglia winemaking is that many of its grapes are grown as alborelli – literally, little trees: free-standing vines, unwired and untrellised. Most places (except some older California Zinfandel vineyards) regard alborello as a very old-fashioned system, but it has the advantage in sunbaked places like Puglia of letting each vine shade its own grapes, all day long. And it has the disadvantage of requiring hand labor for every vineyard operation, thus making it too costly to be considered in most places, whatever its virtues.

The Puglia Best Wine Consortium estimates that some 60-70 percent of Italian rosato comes from Puglia and Abruzzo. I found it impossible to get any firm figures about what percent of Puglia’s red grapes go into rosato, but I suspect it’s quite substantial. The regional market alone for such wines is quite large, and once the rest of the world notices how good Puglian rosato is – especially the Negroamaro – Puglia may find itself asked to slake an enormous thirst.

Here are some of the rosati – and their producers – that most impressed me during my torrid two weeks among Puglia’s vineyards and olive groves.

Apollonio. A 20-hectare family firm since 1870. 2010 Diciotto Fanali: a rosato from Negroamaro: fresh and intriguing, with the gentleness of a white and the spine of a red.

Castello Monaci. A large estate that separately vinifies different vineyards of, primarily, Negroamaro and Primitivo. 2011 Kreos: a lovely, racy rosato from Negroamaro.

Colle Petrito. 80 hectares of vines in a high, hilly part of Castel del Monte, growing many varieties, including whites. Most interesting: Ferula, a 2011 rosato from Bombino Nero (wild strawberries and mineral: delicious).

Fatalone. Fifth-generation, family-owned, certified organic estate in Gioia del Colle, where Primitivo is a specialty. 2009 Primitivo Rosato: one of the few successful aperitif versions of this grape, with beautiful acidity. Very fine.

Li Veli. A project of the Tuscan Alberto Falvo, of Vino Nobile and Vin Santo fame, this estate works almost exclusively with indigenous Pugliese varieties, head-trained, hand-tended, and planted in “septcunxes.” Its 2011 IGT Salento Rosato is entirely from Negroamaro and combines the richness of that variety with an almost-white-wine delicacy.

Tarantini. a family estate, with 12 hectares in vines, all indigenous varieties, and never in barriques. Especially nice 2011 Petrigama Rosato from 100% Bombino Nero.

Tenute Rubino. One of the most dynamic, forward-looking producers in the region. 2011 Saturnino (IGT Salento Rosato): vinified from Negroamaro, and one of the most characteristic and enjoyable of the class.

Vallone. A large, top-quality producer, with some wines from the Brindisi area but most from the Salento zone. 2011 Vigna Flaminio Brindisi Rosato (80% Negroamaro/20% Montepulciano): strawberry nose and palate, very refreshing.

Annals of Antiquity

For our 43rd anniversary, Diane and I dug out our oldest bottle of wine. Even though 43 is a high number as anniversaries go, it’s not a significant one – but there are no guarantees that we or the bottle would get any older, and almost certainly we, at least, won’t get any better. So I pulled the cork – very carefully – on my last bottle of 1962 Bertani Amarone. No point beating around the bush: The wine was spectacular.

1962 was close to Bertani’s first commercial release of Recioto di Valpolicella Amarone, as it was then known. Their very first was 1959, which may well be the first commercial release of Amarone, period. The wine was a rarity then, the result of a strain of super-heroic yeasts that could handle the high sugar levels of grapes that normally made the sweet Recioto di Valpolicella and convert them to the high alcohol levels of a fully dry Amarone – 15% in the case of our bottle of ‘62. That conversion, by the way, is where the name Amarone comes from: The wine was once thought of as a freakishly bitter version (amaro, in Italian) of the Verona area’s traditional Recioto. That sweet wine is still made, and it’s still lovely and much beloved in and around Verona – but in terms of serious wine quality and complexity, it isn’t a patch on Amarone.

In the decades since 1962, Amarone has become an important wine in volume and reputation, with the inevitable result that only a handful of the many wines now on the market that bear the Amarone label carry on the tradition of true Amarone. By the way, Bertani continues to market older vintages; some back to 1960 are still commercially available.

For my palate, the real Amarone is one of the world’s greatest wines – period, no qualifications. Vinified from carefully selected, patiently-dried-until-they-are-half-raisined bunches of the same traditional-to-Verona varieties that make Valpolicella (Corvina, Rondinella, and – less and less – Molinara), Amarone ferments on its skins slowly, slowly over the winter, the process usually only finishing around Easter. That produces a wine extraordinarily rich in extract and high in alcohol, with velvety tannins and generous acidity and mouthfuls of fruit, a wine with the structure to last for decades and the abundance of flavors to clothe that structure with alluring and steadily evolving flavors.

Enter my 1962 Bertani.

Though all of 50 years old, it had the color of a young Barolo – deep garnet shading to an orange edge – and a panoply of flavors running from youthful fruit to mature and earthy minerality. This bottle just blew away the dinner we’d built around it. We drank Veuve Clicquot brut with our first course, a truffle omelet made with some jarred black truffles I’d purchased in Alba back in May (privileged beyond belief, Alba gets black spring and summer truffles, too, in addition to its more famous white ones). For our main course we were trying Scottish grouse, a variety of game bird we’d never tasted before, and we made a classic French preparation for them out of a usually reliable Raymond Oliver cookbook. Alas, this was a total failure – not Oliver’s recipe, but the birds themselves. Grouse, it turns out, taste of heather and resin, flavors that could not be rescued even by Oliver’s interesting bread sauce. I’m not sure what you could do with grouse to make them palatable (to me, at least), so I guess in the future I’ll stick to partridge and pheasant and – if I could ever get them again – woodcock. Diane has written in greater detail about this dinner: connect here.

Despite the bizarre flavors of the grouse, the Bertani was lovely: rich, deep, and still youthful tasting, with a flavor that challenges my 30+ years of wine writing experience to describe – black cherry fruit, to be sure, and tobacco, with rich mushroomy/earthy flavors as well. But that’s far from all. Complex is the inadequate shorthand for it.

With cheese – a wonderfully runny Robiolo Bosola – the wine changed in a totally unexpected direction. Usually cheese brings up a wine’s fruit. In this case, our cheese evoked the Amarone’s mature, evolved flavors, very seriously deepening its already great complexity – and putting even more strain on my supply of adjectives. I can’t parse fruit flavors and herbal notes to the fineness that many of my wine-writing brethren and sistren can (for example, do you know what cloudberries taste like?), so I’m really up against my limitations here in trying to convey the myriad facets of this wine.

Even after the cheese, as we sipped the last of the Amarone by itself, it kept getting more intriguing and less susceptible of description. I can’t give you an approximation of it, because it was more than any of its identifiable parts: The whole was simply elegant and profound, unquestionably one of the greatest wines I have ever drunk. It was as intellectually challenging as it was sensually satisfying. The main course may have been a disappointment, but the main wine more than made up for it.

I acquired this wine about ten years ago, and it has lived since in my less-than-optimum storage conditions – but then, so have I. Gives a whole other dimension to “wine is a living thing,” doesn’t it?