Wines of the Wind Surf, with a Shipboard Tasting

An Adriatic cruise beleaguered by rain, however disappointing in many respects, is certainly fine for exploring your vessel’s wines and bars. Diane and I undertook a lot of such investigations during our soggy week aboard the MSY Wind Surf.
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The ship’s basic wine list leaned heavily on young wines, many of them from California or the Pacific Northwest (the company, Windstar, is American-owned). We nevertheless managed to find a few bottles pleasing to our more Europe-oriented palates – a good Fèvre Chablis, for instance, and a really elegant Batasiolo Barolo, as well as a nicely maturing Pouilly Fuissé – so there was no danger of our dying of dehydration.

Wind Surf’s dining rooms were staffed by several wine stewards: Eleonora, the ship’s young senior sommelier; Noel, who served us our first evening on board; and Jaerve, who poured for us our last and talked to us passionately about wine.
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Tom and Jearve

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One particularly grey afternoon Eleonora organized a tasting of some of Wind Surf’s higher-shelf bottles, which my vinous curiosity prompted me to try, even though I have happily abandoned most large-scale tastings.
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Eleonora

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This tasting was a totally different creature. Professional tastings tend to be like marathons; this one was more like a stroll in the park. Professional tastings will confront you with anywhere from 10 to 30 wines, chosen to show an audience of journalists, importers, and buyers the spectrum of a producer, a region, a variety, or a consortium; and meant to be sampled and spat more or less in silence.

Eleonora’s tasting was quite appropriately aimed for those of the ship’s clientele who were interested in wine but not necessarily very knowledgeable about it, and it consisted of only five wines chosen from among the most exotic or most interesting or most expensive of Wind Surf’s stock.
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This audience was exactly the kind of consumer we journalists, back in the day, used to call civilians, and who – we constantly had to remind ourselves – were the people we were writing for, not for each other, as was an ever-present temptation. (I have long believed that the reason so much wine writing becomes so recherché is because writers keep trying to impress each other rather than enlighten a consumer.)

Another major difference between this tasting and the ones I had grown accustomed to: no spitting. You were encouraged not just to taste the wines but to drink them: instead of an austere plate of dry crackers or bread slices, an attractive little tray of snacks accompanied each set of glasses. Very appropriate to the audience and the occasion, I thought, although a bit of a shock to me: What’s sauce for many geese isn’t sauce for every gander.
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The five wines formed a nicely mixed group, well chosen for showing the range available on shipboard: two whites and three reds, Pouilly Fumé and Vouvray, a Supertuscan, a Châteauneuf du Pape, and a Spanish Supertuscan type.
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The Pouilly Fumé, a 2021 Les Deux Cailloux by Fournier Père et Fils, opened the tasting. It smelled quite classically of grass and smoke, with a distinct sub-aroma of wet leaves. Those elements were not as emphatic in the mouth: The wine was smoother and rounder than its nose. A little taste of dried apple came up as it opened in the glass. I found this a pleasant enough wine, even though Sauvignon blanc is probably my least favorite of the French noble varieties.
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The Vouvray, a 2021 by Alban de Saint-Pré, had a fine earthy, chalky nose and showed good body and balance. It tasted a little sweet in the finish – a bit of dried apricot – but, just opened, it was clean and refreshing. Unfortunately, from my point of view, the longer it sat in the glass the sweeter it got, but it was one of the favorite wines for many other tasters. In the Loire, Chenin Blanc yields everything from superb dry dinner wines (such as Savennières) to incredibly age-worthy sweet dessert wines, so this was a fair representative of the breed and a good introduction to it for this audience.
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Then Eleonora moved to red wines, starting with 2016 Lucente, a Supertuscan created on one of Frescobaldi’s Montalcino estates, in what was originally a joint project with Robert Mondavi. This was a wine of deep color and deep aroma, the latter still very grapey – lots of Sangiovese – because of the wine’s youth. The Sangiovese was also evident on the palate, along with other grape flavors (turned out to be Merlot) and plenty of tannin to restrain Sangiovese’s abundant acidity. This was a winemaker’s wine, not a grape farmer’s, and still very young. The blend, by the way, was 60% Merlot and 40% Sangiovese, but the Sangiovese made a fight of it.

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Then came a 2019 Châteauneuf du Pape from Maison Castel. That is about ten years younger than I like to drink Châteauneuf, but this was a good specimen, more forward and ready than I’d expected. It showed a great earthy, underbrushy nose, and on the palate dark cherry/berry fruit. It finished dark as well, with earthy, black fruit flavors persisting nicely  Despite being so young that it was almost purple, it drank quite pleasantly.
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The final wine was the oldest of the group, a 2012 Campo Eliseo Toro: Toro is the denomination, Campo Eliseo the estate. This was, in effect, a Spanish version of a Supertuscan wine: 100% Tinto de Toro, a variety of Tempranillo (a grape that is in Spain traditionally blended with others in wines like Rioja), and evidently aged long in abundant new oak. The palate was dominated by dark, dried cherry flavors and by forceful acidity and tannins. It’s a wine that needs beef and old cheeses. I thought it should have been showing better for its ten years of aging, but then I am not enamored of what all that wood does to and for a wine.
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This tasting was a very interesting experience for me. I was particularly curious to hear people’s reactions to the individual wines and to hear the questions they asked – some very shrewd, some quite naïve. As a wine journalist, I know how easy it is to get caught up with the shrewd questions and to forget that the naïve ones are just as worthy, and certainly more needing, of attention. Eleonora did a nice job of attending to both, with respect and enthusiasm. This was for Diane and me a very pleasant way to spend a rainy afternoon at sea.

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A Preposterous Wine List

I’m sure that everyone reading this post has encountered their share of simply impossible wine lists. The only surprise about them is that they are so numerous: I would have hoped that in these days of much expanded wine consciousness, simple, decent, appropriate wine lists would be everywhere. But no: bad lists are multiplying like Orcs in the Misty Mountains.

Some, of course, are preposterous because of price: We all know the scandal of American restaurant wine markups. Maybe even worse are those impossibly large, multinational lists that would require an hour to read through and would leave casual wine drinkers reeling in confusion and indecision. Maybe this flatters the restaurateur’s ego, but it’s one sure way to convince a lot of restaurant diners that wine just isn’t for them.

There is also the annoying list that never changes, and seems well adapted to the particular restaurant – except for the fact that the wines you would most want with its food are never available, although they are always listed. That really irks me. But of all the ways of screwing up a wine list,  the ones that bother me most are those that make the fundamental, unforgivable mistake of being inappropriate to the menu they are supposed to complement.

I encountered such a list during a recent flight from the city for some fresh air and quiet birding at Cape May, along the Jersey Shore. It jumpstarted this tirade.

One of the additional pleasures of Cape May is its abundance of fresh seafood, always a welcome closing to a day of walking in the fresh air and stalking the wily whimbrel. The biggest and best seafood restaurant in town always has a nice assortment of oysters, clams, and mussels; shrimp, scallops, and lobsters; and whatever fin fish are in season – as well as the rarely encountered snapper soup – good eating on fresh, local seafood simply prepared.
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Oysters, soft-shell crabs, sea scallops

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This establishment does a thriving business all year round, so you would quite reasonably expect it to have a strong white wine list, wouldn’t you? Ha! To borrow an ancient Sid Caesar line, I laugh on your nose.

The guilty party sports an extensive seafood menu, with a mere two steaks and two chicken dishes as its only regular non-seafood items. Nevertheless, its red wine list (mostly California Cabernet) is fully as long as its white list, which is just plain silly. That white wine list, in its entirety, consists of:

• 4 California Sauvignon blancs
• 6 (or is it 8? I’m working from memory) California Chardonnays
• 1 sweet German Riesling
• 1 Cavit Pinot grigio.

That comes to, in fact, just four white wine choices, two of which are not well suited to anything on the menu. Not a Chablis or a white Burgundy or even a simple Muscadet in sight. No Alsace or Rhône whites, no Bordeaux whites.

I won’t even mention the array of Italian white wines that are terrific companions to seafood that not only do not appear on the list but whose very names seem to be totally unknown to the staff. I know because I’ve asked. And the house will not allow you to bring your own bottle. This goes beyond silly and into uncivilized.

This is a lazy list – probably the wines of one distributor, or even of one glib salesperson. This simplifies the restaurateur’s life but does nothing for his clients. It’s not as if a restaurateur had to invest a fortune to create a competent list, especially for a seafood house, where the primary emphasis ought always to be white wines.

Here, for example, is a very concise list from Cull & Pistol, an unpretentious (especially for NYC) seafood restaurant attached to the fish store inside the Chelsea Market:

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Now, that is not a thrilling list, but it is a well chosen one in that it covers the bases. The wines are all appropriate to accompany seafood, and they offer genuine geographic and varietal diversity. A California version of Muscadet, which is a classic companion to shellfish. A Loire Sauvignon blanc, which matches well with all sorts of fin fish. A crisp Spanish Albariño, which will do well with any seafood. A New York State dry Riesling, almost as versatile. An interesting Italian choice, a Sicilian Carricante, which should love lobster and crab. A good Chenin blanc, fine for fin fish. And to top the list, a Premier cru Chablis, which will match well with almost anything on the menu.

The most exigent wine bibber – me, for instance – can find several drinkable bottles here to complement his oysters and crab. Even if I were perverse enough to want a red wine, the modest pair that Cull & Pistol offers will work: a decent Beaujolais, and a New Zealand Pinot noir carry enough acidity to make them compatible with many seafood dishes. And these wines are all being offered at – for NYC – quite reasonable prices: most are $60 a bottle or less. Only the Burgundy tops that: The Chablis costs $84.

As I said, these selections aren’t thrilling, but they work, and they offer nice variety in a short list. Somebody gave some thought to putting this list together. In a wine-conscious town like New York, diners will notice that, and be grateful. I think they would on the Jersey Shore too.

 

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Heartfelt Thoughts on Brandy

Brandy is its own multiverse, many wonderful drinks hiding under one collective noun – and I love most of them. Many people, I think, use “brandy” as a catch-all term to signify no more than some kind of alcoholic drink, just as many country and western tunes warble about “wine” for the simple reason that they can’t work “whisky” into the rhyme scheme.

I suspect some older people may avoid brandy because of unfortunate childhood experiences with cheap blackberry brandy, which in my and Diane’s parental homes was the inevitable nostrum for any stomach ailment or incipient cold. I remember it was even forced on our dog, because the poor springer spaniel was subject to painful cramps. It did relieve his cramps, but he sure didn’t like it. Nor did we children.

I’d guess that for most actual wine drinkers brandy usually means primarily or exclusively Cognac or Armagnac. This is far from a bad pair of choices, but brandy is a much richer field than that. Cognac and Armagnac are collective nouns too, covering distillates from differing zones – Ténarèze or Bas Armagnac, Fins Bois or Grand Champagne Cognacs, just as for instances – and differing ages of blends, as well as single-vintage bottlings. These can make mighty differences, differences I have come to relish.
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I remember, decades back Diane and I metro-ing out to the wilds of the Parisian slaughterhouse district to feast at Au Cochon d’Or and finish the meal with – the real reason we had ventured so far – very old Cognacs: a Borderies and a Grand Fine Champagne. The latter was an 1893, and was so ethereal it almost evaporated on the tongue.

In slightly later days, Diane and I visited the distinguished French Senator Abel Sempé for a tour of his Armagnac distillery and cellar. This included – lucky us! – a taste of his 1875, right from the cask in which it still reposed. Velvet fire, that warmed without burning, and felt weightless on the tongue, making absolutely clear why these drinks are called “spirits.” These are flavors you never forget, and they are what make “brandy” so much a richer trove than casual drinkers suspect.
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I won’t here go into all the pleasures of grappa – I’ve done enough of that in other posts – but I can’t not mention marc. (I guess I’m in a Francophile phase.) Almost every wine region in France has its own marc, distilled either from the pomace of local grapes, like grappa, or from regional wines. These are often very fine, though even in France they can be hard to find outside their home range. Such is the prestige of the two -ac brandies that everything else has become unfashionable. But Diane and I – confirmed spirits lovers as we are – have with just a little hunting enjoyed fine marcs from the Loire, from Champagne, from Hermitage and Châteauneuf du Pape, and especially from Burgundy, where the tradition of distilling and consuming marc seems to be still quite robust. We thank whatever gods may be for such small blessings.
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One final thought: I don’t want to ignore brandies made from fruits other than grapes. Some of those distillates are exquisite. Many respond beautifully to being chilled and served in an icy glass. As with some grappas, that treatment makes their aroma blossom, and also makes them an ideal digestif on a hot summer evening. Best known of the fruit distillates is the Norman and Breton specialty, Calvados (which, despite what I just said, is best served at room temperature). But Alsace in particular produces a wonderful array of fruit brandies – poire, framboise and framboise sauvage, and mirabelle, to name the most widely available ones. In Paris, once, far too many years ago, we acquired a bottle of eau de vie de pomme verte – green apple – that was an amazing summer digestif. Alas, we’ve never seen it since.
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My favorite of the ones we can get is framboise, whose heady raspberry aroma can be intoxicating before you even sip it. Diane’s is mirabelle, a rounder, softer distillate that captures perfectly the essence of the small golden plums that make it.

What more can I say? Brandy really is a multiverse, and this year it has ended many a dismal winter day for me on a much warmer, happier note than I could have ever expected from the grey skies that preceded it. New York may have had very little snow this year, but that didn’t prevent winter from being damp and chilly and depressing – the very kind of weather that propels me to the snifter I use to explore the multiverse.
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More Bottles In and Of Bordeaux

In my last post, I wrote about the light, wine-themed lunches Diane and I enjoyed at Bordeaux’s Bar à Vin during our recent trip to France. This time, I’d like to talk about our dinners of classic Bordeaux dishes at the Brasserie Bordelaise.

These were emphatically not light – traditional Bordeaux cooking is rich – but they were delicious, and we left every evening happily stuffed and well protected against any evening chill. (None materialized: the weather in Bordeaux was unusually, almost unnaturally, warm.) Diane’s post about these meals will tell you all about the pleasures of lamprey à la bordelaise and wine-braised beef cheeks. I’ll confine myself to the wines.

We began with a contretemps. We had asked for a bottle of Lafon-Rochet, an estimable Saint-Estèphe, which our very fine – and as it turned out very knowledgeable – waiter Frank opened and of which he poured a small amount for us to smell and taste. Diane thought she detected a whiff of corking: her sense of this is very acute. Frank swirled and sniffed and made a face, and swirled and sniffed again before announcing that it was slight but the bottle was definitely corked. He opened another, and we all sniffed together – and to his extreme dismay, this bottle was worse, even more emphatically corked.
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Frank was aghast: This had never happened to him before. We actually spent a few minutes calming him, assuring him that we understood that such things happened, that we didn’t hold it against the house, and so forth, before we decided not to try a third Saint-Estèphe but instead to go with a bottle of a Pessac-Léognan, Domaine de la Solitude. That wine was absolutely lovely, a classic cedar-accented red Graves, and it partnered beautifully with the whole spectrum of rich flavors our lamprey presented.
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The house made totally superfluous amends for the initial wine problem by presenting us, at the end of meal, with small snifters of a 25- and a 20- year-old Armagnac – both marvelous, and a totally appreciated generous gesture.

Our second night at Brasserie Bordelaise, our last in Bordeaux, went off without hitch. Diane feasted on her beloved roast chicken and I on an ambrosial braised beef cheek. To accompany these dishes, we again tried our luck with Saint-Estèphe, this time an old favorite of ours, Château de Pez.
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This wine was, to everyone’s relief, totally sound and made a perfect partner to our meal, characteristically blending some of the elegance of Saint-Julien (the neighboring commune to its south) with the intriguing little touch of rusticity that is the hallmark of Saint-Estèphe. Chicken and beef couldn’t have asked for a better partner.

I would say that elegance with a little touch of rusticity describes not just the wines of Saint-Estèphe but also the meals we enjoyed in Bordeaux. We dined and drank as well there as we have in all but the most exalted Parisian restaurants, and for me at least the availability of fine cellars of excellent Bordeaux wines was a special treat.

Nostalgia played a great part in my enjoyment, no doubt: It’s been decades since I was last in Bordeaux, but I learned wine – centuries ago now – mostly on bottles of Bordeaux. Even though my palate has gone in many different directions since then, in our few days in Bordeaux, it re-encountered its old teachers with great pleasure. Maybe sometimes you can go home again.

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Some Bottles In and Of Bordeaux

Diane and I are just back from a long week of vacating in Bordeaux, most of it a cruise on the Garonne and Gironde plus a few days in the city of Bordeaux at the end. The cruise was a bit disappointing – iffy weather, long bus excursions, and an uninspired chef on board. But Bordeaux itself was wonderful – a beautiful city, with abundant pedestrianized areas in the historic center and some very fine food, not to mention an abundance of excellent Bordeaux wines (what else?).

At strolling distance from our hotel we found the Maison du Vin, a wine school whose wine bar – the succinctly named Bar à Vin – provided us exactly the kind of amply lubricated light lunch we enjoy.
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And only a short distance further on was the Brasserie Bordelaise, an establishment with a lengthy local wine list and a devotion to traditional Bordelaise cuisine. We had arranged for two dinners there, and wound up taking two lunches at the wine bar, so we had two splendid days in Bordeaux, with casual walking and sightseeing and a little shopping, regularly punctuated by a generous intake of red wine. Not only is red wine Bordeaux’s best production, but the shipboard menu had leaned heavily towards whites, so we had to reset the balance. Which, I assure you, we did.

For this post, I’ll talk only about the lunch wines. These pleasing light meals featured several glasses of wines from most of the left-bank appellations, from Pessac-Léognan (formerly Graves) in the south up through St. Estèphe, and on to the Médoc. The entire list offered 30 wines, all Bordeaux, and all by the glass. On the first day we started simply, with a charcuterie plate and two glasses of Les Hautes de Smith Pessac-Léognan.
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We noticed several patrons giving themselves tasting lessons – two glasses of wine, side by side, carefully tasted and noted. I was on vacation and so refused to take a single note, but we did give ourselves a comparative tasting of two cru bourgeois wines. A glass of Château La Cardonne Médoc and one of Château Larose Perganson Haut Médoc accompanied a plate of foie gras quite pleasurably, and with no perceptible difference in quality: both tasted classically Bordeaux, with dominant Cabernet Sauvignon fruit and nicely rounded tannins.
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For our second lunch, we started with a white Pessac-Léognan, Château Olivier, to accompany our opening dish of trout rillettes. Then we moved on to cheeses and charcuterie, which we matched with a St. Estèphe, Chateau Tour des Termes, and a St. Emilion, Pavillon du Haut Rocher, a very satisfactory pairing after our brief white wine divagation.
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All the wines we tasted were excellent of their kind, and I can safely urge anyone visiting Bordeaux and curious about the range of its wines to spend a little time at the Bar à Vin. You’ll learn a lot, and you’ll enjoy it. Just as a for-instance: It had been a long while since I’d drunk a red Graves (that first Pessac-Léognan), and it was a real pleasure to rediscover the cedary accent that so delightfully distinguishes the wines of that region from the more northerly appellations (Margaux, St. Julien – you know, that bunch).

My next post will be about our dinner wines at the Brasserie Bordelaise.

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“Why Do We Have 37 Brandies?”

Back during the annual ritual known as spring cleaning – misnamed, I think: It should more properly be called spring messing – Diane asked me that question. I was momentarily dumbfounded, and all I managed to say was a lame “37?”

Many years ago, when she asked me a similar question – “Why do we have 44 bottles of grappa?” – I was able to confidently and truthfully say “Because I’m working on a big article on grappa for Decanter.”

That wasn’t the whole truth, as anyone who knows my fondness for grappa understands, but it was at least a plausible cover for my shameless indulgence. Back then, I could honestly claim to be the most important proponent of grappa in the US: I had published the first North American article about grappa back in the 80s, in Attenzione, and written about it in several other magazines as well – so I could, with a straight face, say I had a professional interest in that distillate.

But now that I am no longer an active wine journalist (except for this blog), how could I explain needing so many brandies?

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Had I not been taken by surprise, the answer was easy, really: They all have different uses, different niches that they fill. Just as I am passionate about matching a wine with food that will show it at its best (and vice versa), so am I interested in choosing the digestivo that will best complement the dinner I’ve just enjoyed.

That’s the real key for me: Call them brandies or digestivi or after-dinner drinks, whether it’s grappa or cognac or armagnac or marc, malt whiskies or curaçao or chartreuse, whatever their name, their function for me is to complete my meal, to round off the whole culinary experience. That may sound pompous, but it tends to be delicious – and figuring it all out is sheer fun.

So: Shameless self-indulgence once again, with a slight admixture of self-education. As Brillat-Savarin so well understood, a true gastronaut’s work is never done.

You can be forgiven for wondering what all those bottles are, and what niches I think they fill. A fair enough question, so here’s a broad rundown. For simplicity’s sake, let’s divide them, as those in the liquor trades often do, into “white goods” and “brown goods.”

White goods consist primarily of my beloved grappas, of which I like to keep a goodly selection on hand – grappas of Barbera and Dolcetto and Nebbiolo, Tuscan grappas, even southern Italian grappas, from Campania and Calabria and Sicily, all regions where this originally northern drink has gotten a firm hold.
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Each of these grappas differs from the others in basic ways, having the aromas and characters of the very different grapes from which they are made, and so meshing with very different meals. I take almost as much pleasure in making the right match as I do in actually drinking the grappa.

This category also includes tequilas, a class of drinks that I have been late in coming to appreciate, as well as eaux de vie of mirabelle, poire, and/or framboise, all offering a small explosion of fruit aromas and flavors. Served ice-cold, they can be by themselves a perfect summer dessert.
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Then we come to the brown goods, which will be more familiar to most people than the white. These may include barrel-aged grappas, but mostly they are cognac, armagnac, and an occasional marc. Burgundy and various appellations of the Rhône are my usual sources for marc.

I like to keep on hand a basic cognac and armagnac, as well as better bottle or two – a good vintage of armagnac, and for cognac a reliable producer’s more rarefied selection of vintages or areas of growth, such as Grand Champagne or Borderies. And not to forget Spanish brandies, which are very different in character from their French counterparts.
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Finally, I always need to have a few single malt scotches on hand, and Diane is occasionally fond of an herbal liqueur or plum brandy.
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Those bottles arm me for most contingencies and pretty much any sort of cooking my fair bride may wish to do; and that gives me a great sense of security and comfort, a very desirable condition for the aging wino. Also – I confess to a bit of showmanship – at the end of a dinner party, I like to set out 4 to 6 different bottles for our guests (and ourselves) to sniff and choose from. And that’s why we have 37 – or whatever the number may be now – bottles of brandy.

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P.S. from Diane, who has just counted them: It’s only 29 now. Poor baby!

P.P.S. from Tom: I must do something about that!

 

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W(h)ining on the Seine

When I think about shipboard dining, I tend to time-warp fantasize about a first-class table – and wine list – on a transatlantic crossing on the old Normandie or Île de France. Glamor and great bottles!  Alas, those days are gone forever, and the kind of shipboard dining I actually do is far more quotidian, aboard river boats cruising French rivers. The wines there amount to sort of a cross between the wine list of a decent resort hotel and what’s available on the Jersey Shore – long on utility, but very short on glamor.

All this is prologue to telling you about the casual imbibings of Diane’s and my recent stint in France – three days in Paris, plus a week cruising on the Seine. Very relaxing, even charming, but in no way glamorous.
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The dining room on the MS Seine Princess

 

Of course we drank wine every day: Being in France, and on vacation, twice a day, lunch and dinner, which is something we almost never do at home. A lot of the wine was quite enjoyable, simple stuff for easy drinking, which, when you think about it, is what a river cruise line ought to offer. Certainly none of the other 136 passengers on the Seine Princess seemed at all unhappy with any of it. Me, I’m a crank, a wine snob, and/or a fussbudget, as most of my readers already know, so I kept looking around for more or better. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The Croisieurope line, with which we were sailing, routinely offers a short list of wines at lunch, dinner, and the ship’s bar, from which it pours generously and at no charge. It has a reserve list of somewhat better wines at low fees for the special occasion or the more demanding client. That was us: We hit the reserve list almost every dinner. We hadn’t gone on vacation to save money.

Given the chef’s heavy leanings toward fish, fowl, and white meats, with most lunches we drank the basic list’s decent unoaked Languedoc Chardonnay, which made a pleasant lubricant for most of the kitchen’s fare.
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Dinner was not quite as white-wine exclusive, but even there, whites were often called for. The reserve list accommodated: There too, white wines – some nice older ones included – preponderated. The most interesting of those wines for us was a very nicely aged 2010 Alsace Riesling from Roland Petterman, which showed a good structure and still-interesting fruit – a nice, mature white wine.
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Not as old but still quite interesting – and red! – were two 2016 wines from Chapoutier: a Crôzes Hermitage, Petite Ruche, and a St. Joseph, Deschants.
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Both were very fine and representative of their kinds, even though I would have liked them just a few years older. I’ve always been fond of Rhône wines, white and red, and I find that most of them age exceptionally well. These two fit that bill very nicely and were certainly the most enjoyable wines we drank onboard.

I should add that for our three dinners in Paris, we most happily drank red: a very nice 2020 Chinon from Marc Brédif at Père Louis (see Diane’s post), a fine but young 2014 Brane Cantenac at Benôit, and a very nice 2008 Domaine de la Chevalerie Bourgueil, Busardières at our beloved Au Petit Riche. I’ve always loved those Loire reds also, and Au Petit Riche has a Loire-based kitchen and cellar.
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See?  It doesn’t take a lot to make me happy.

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Wines for Dinner Parties: Luck and Cunning

Sometimes the success of a dinner party depends not just on your planning and execution but also on your good luck. In the case I have in mind, a quite nice dinner was kicked up to another dimension of pleasure by the wines we served with it – wines from a mixed case that we had lost track of and had brought home from storage just a week or so before this occasion.

The dinner, arranged on necessarily short notice, was for two visiting out-of-town friends. We wanted to give them a good meal, of course, but one with familiar dishes that we could put together within the time and culinary resources we had available. We settled on a first course of pasta alla carbonara, which prepares and cooks easily; a main course of osso buco, which we could make up entirely in advance; a cheese course, which requires no work at all; and for dessert a simple apple tart, which Diane is always happy to toss together. A nice meal, but not extraordinary.

What made this dinner distinctive was its wine and food pairings. The first of these was made possible by Champagne originally bought for long-past holidays and the rest by that mixed case of wines that had luckily wended its way home just a week before.

Of course, I can and will claim that it wasn’t just luck that I had long ago purchased those wines. But I have to admit that their meshing so perfectly with the courses of this dinner was serendipity, far beyond the reach of cunning. From the 12 available wines, I’d chosen the 3 that I thought would work best with our dishes, but I couldn’t know how perfectly they would match up. I don’t have a super palate, and we all need a little luck sometimes.

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Our first piece of good luck: For aperitifs, a fine grower Champagne, an NV “Élégance” from Vincent Couche. This mouth-filling, aptly named wine was biodynamically grown:  84% Pinot noir, 16% Chardonnay, with 3 years on the lees. It started our evening off on a properly savory and substantial note that relaxed all four of us from the week’s busy pace. Memo to self: Keep some of this around.

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To give our first course a little distinction, we made the pasta alla carbonara with some duck bacon we had on hand (luck again) instead of the usual pancetta. This made for a richer but less assertively flavored dish that paired beautifully with a bottle of 2008 Castello di Volpaia Chianti Classico Riserva. Volpaia’s high-altitude vineyards characteristically yield wines of great elegance and restraint, and this bottle proved to be a perfect, almost interlocking match with this more restrained version of carbonara.
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Osso buco is always richly flavored: long-cooked veal shank on the bone creates a wonderful sauce around itself. But this is still veal, so it’s not an aggressive flavor but a mild, insinuating one. To my mind, this dish wants the gentle suaveness of Barbaresco, so I opted to match it with a 2004 Marchesi di Gresy Barbaresco Martinenga, a beautiful wine from one of the greatest crus of the appellation, just – at 17 years – reaching its peak of mature, woodsy flavors.
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With the cheeses, I went a different direction, with a slightly more assertive wine: a 2004 Château Lafon-Rochet, still from that case. Equally as old as the Barbaresco, this Saint Estèphe (55% Cabernet sauvignon, 5% Cabernet franc, 40% Merlot) had also evolved to a perfectly balanced state of maturity, which played splendidly with the somewhat battered-looking but still delicious remnants of goat, cow, and sheep cheeses we had on hand. Lafon-Rochet covers 100 acres in a single plot that lies between Lafite Rothschild and Cos d’Estournel. That’s a very nice neighborhood, as the excellent evolution of this wine amply showed.
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The result of not-too-demanding cookery and wonderfully compatible wines was a dinner both guests and hosts loved. Because the interplay between the wines and the dishes brought out the best of both, the whole meal stood out as something special and memorable, making us very happy indeed. As Italian winemakers and chefs have drilled into my head, abbinamento – the matching of the food and the wine you serve with it – is everything. And if you love mature wines as much as I do, you need the luck or cleverness to have squirrelled a batch of them away years ago.

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To Know It Is to Love It: Cornas

Cornas is probably the least known of all the Rhône wines. Yes, you pronounce the final S. Its zone is tiny, close to the smallest in France – 155 hectares, I think. There are single Bordeaux estates larger than that; Margaux, for instance, has 250 hectares. But if you love Rhône wines, and especially if you love the wines of the northern Rhône, you know – or should know – Cornas. The 100% Syrah wines made there stand among the great red wines of France. And this tiny appellation has a roster containing an extraordinarily high percentage of top-flight producers.
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Despite that, Cornas is a classic case of “no one’s paying attention.” André Dominé’s authoritative tome Wine scarcely mentions Cornas. Jancis Robinson’s Wine Grapes (while tying itself into ampelographical and etymological knots over the ancestry of Syrah and the origin of the grape’s name), in its almost exhaustive roster of where the variety is grown, doesn’t mention Cornas at all.

Conspiracy theorists can undoubtably discover a deep, dark plot here, but I don’t think it’s anything more sinister than the overwhelming reputation of Cornas’s nearest neighbors and rivals in Syrah: Hermitage and Cote Rôtie. Even Crôzes-Hermitage, sharing as it does the magic name, gets much more attention than Cornas. Those appellations simply use up all the space that writers and critics can allot to the northern Rhône.

(Most readers would be shocked to know how much the tyranny of page count and column inches affects the information that gets to them. I won’t go into the misinformation conveyed by fresh-out-of-college editors who know more about everything than writers who have many years of specialized expertise. Good editors are a treasure, bad ones a disaster, for both writers and readers.) But my focus here is the wines of Cornas, not the tribulations of wine writing.

The vineyards of Cornas are all steep and rocky. There’s nothing but granite on those slopes, and nothing but Syrah in the vineyards. This is a grape that can in other places make very peppery, very aggressive, sometimes even coarse wines. But here along the Rhône river, on the hillsides just south of the town of Vienne, Syrah often shows its best, giving wines with their fruit moderated into suavity and complexity, with a capacity for great bottle age and concomitant evolution.
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A Clape Cornas Vineyard

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I had the good fortune, many years ago, to make my first serious acquaintance with Cornas on a wine trip to the Rhône sponsored by Sopexa. We happy few journalists visited the then-already-legendary Auguste Clape. His wines were the pace-setters for Cornas quality, a position they continue to hold under his son and grandson, who now manage the vineyards and cellar with the same passion and precision he did. I have loved the wines of Cornas ever since that visit.

The major change that has occurred in Cornas in the decades since – besides the fact that I can no longer afford Clape’s wines – is that his example has stirred emulation in many other producers, so that now there is a whole cadre of excellent winemakers in this small appellation. That includes not only negociants like Jaboulet but also small producers such as Allemand, Verset, Balthazar, and of course Clape.

It was a Jaboulet Cornas – a 2006 – that we enjoyed the other evening with a dinner of a Poulet Marengo (recipe from Robert Courtine’s classic The Hundred Glories of French Cooking). This is a dish whose simplicity belies its delicious complexity, and it elicited the best from our mature bottle. A nose of blackberry, prune, and bramble preceded a palate of similar but more mature flavors. The wine was completely smooth in the mouth – none of the pestiferous Syrah aggression – thoroughly balanced and restrained. It finished very long indeed, all leather and plum.
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Lovely as that match was, the Cornas had been even better with the warm, cheese-rich gougère that preceded the chicken. There the wine showed itself even deeper and more velvety, so pleasurable that we almost hesitated to go on to the main course. There was even a tiny taste of pepper in the finish, just to remind us that this elegant wine really was a Syrah.

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In Praise of Pinot Gris

Pinot gris is the least celebrated of France’s noble white grape varieties. It’s also the most distinctive and, for my palate, the most interesting, so I’m very glad it’s finally enjoying a bit of attention from critics and consumers.
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However, there’s a lot of confusion about what Pinot gris is. You’re right, it is exactly the same variety as the Italian Pinot grigio. But the wines it yields in the Italian northeast – the arc from the eastern Veneto through Friuli, up to the Slovenian border – are very different from the wines it produces in northeast France; in Alsace, up against the border with Germany.

Different soils and climates, different clonal selections, different cultivation and vinification, very different aims – all make for wines that can be in no way alike. Unfortunately, there is an ocean of boring Pinot grigio being produced and only a trickle of really fine bottles, from a handful of serious makers like Albino Armani (more about this in a later post).

In Alsace, for at least the last decade – and for some producers much longer than that – the choice has been to target a different market segment, to opt for less quantity and more quality. I can only wish that more winemakers would choose this direction – and I’m pretty sure that no one who has tasted a Pinot gris from a good Alsace producer – Hugel, Trimbach, Zind-Humbrecht, to name just the most prominent examples – will disagree.
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Vineyard image from internationalwinechallenge.com

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Jancis Robinson’s authoritative Wine Grapes says “Alsace Pinot Gris can be as luscious as a ripe peach or apricot, with a hint of smoke, developing biscuity, buttery flavours with age.” That’s true, but there is more to the variety than that: Bottles I’ve drunk, especially older ones, have also had a wealth of earthy, sometimes even metallic, notes: a little copper among the limestone. A few posts back I mentioned a 2013 Zind-Humbrecht Pinot Gris that was emphatically in the range Robinson describes, but also with a little of that metallic zing. It was a lovely wine, and its departures from the “orthodox” flavor pattern didn’t disturb me at all. Pinot gris is a fascinating grape, and quite variable from producer to producer and harvest to harvest – all of which is part of why I like it so much: there can be a little surprise in every bottle.

That variability is probably traceable to Pinot gris’s origins. The Pinots in general present a huge ampelographical puzzle. The whole family is noted for its inclination to mutate, which makes working with any branch of the group – but especially one like Pinot gris, itself already a mutant – a tricky business. Our grape originated centuries ago as a field mutation of Pinot noir, and it remains one of the darkest of white grapes. Robinson describes Pinot gris berries as ranging in color from “pinky purple” to “almost as dark as Pinot Noir.”  That color range mirrors the range of styles that winemakers can coax from those grapes.
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Image from joyofwine.org

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To test and taste a really mature Pinot gris, a Trimbach Reserve Personelle of the excellent 2001 vintage (yes, this is a white wine that will age 20 years), Diane and I made a small Alsace feast. Foie gras to start; then a choucroute garnie with spareribs, knackwurst, slab bacon, and kielbasa; and a sweet apple pancake as dessert. It was a long, slow dinner, and this 21-year-old bottle performed beautifully.

The wine was a lovely light amber-gold, with occasional green glints as the light changed. The aroma was just as pleasing: hay, and honey, and strawberries first, then undertones of forest and earth.

On the palate, the same flavor spectrum showed strongly, and the wine felt smooth, mellow, and deep, but not at all heavy. It was lovely, balanced and restrained, with that youthfully brash Pinot Gris fruit relaxed by age into a graceful symphony of flavors, marked on the palate and in the finish by that intriguing, almost coppery edge. It accompanied all three courses very happily, and it especially liked the choucroute, which highlighted the Pinot gris’s acidity, making absolutely clear what structures this wine and gives it its longevity.
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For me this was a great indulgence, both because I love choucroute – it’s a great winter dish – and because I also love mature wines, especially when they confirm my beliefs about their character and merit, as this gorgeous Pinot gris certainly did.

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