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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The Final 2021 Cellar Selection: Quintarelli Amarone 1981

This is my final post for 2021. It presents the last of my 12 special cellar selections for the year, Quintarelli’s 1981 Amarone. What a spectacular series it turned out to be!

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When I got this Amarone, somewhere back in the middle ‘80s, I remember thinking that I would have to put it away for a while. I’m pretty sure that I was thinking that the “while” in question would be about 5 years, or maybe, since this was a Quintarelli, 10. I’m sure I had nothing like 40 years in mind. That just happened, as year after year I considered tasting the wine and decided to give it a little time yet, until this particular Amarone got pushed back into the Do Not Disturb portion of my brain, and there it stayed for a few decades.

At last its moment came round, and I was worried alternatively that I had waited too long and that I was still rushing it.

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That’s a legitimate worry when Amarone is concerned. These are notoriously long-lived wines, and in some vintages they can be very slow maturing. 1981 is, I suspect, one of those vintages. In the Veneto that year, the grapes matured very slowly on the vines, so in some spots the harvest was late, and required several passes through the vineyards to bring in the grapes as they came ready. Fermentation was also long and slow. So ‘81 showed itself early as a wine that would demand patience.

You wouldn’t be faulted for thinking 40 years was enough, but I couldn’t be absolutely certain. I’ve opened 20- and 25-year-old Amarones only to find they were years, perhaps decades, away from full maturity: drinkable, of course, because of their intense fruit, but still tasting and feeling like young wines, and lacking the mature, complex flavor I hoped for, as well as the balance, depth, and, above all, the velvet mouth-feel of fully mature Amarone.

To this point, the oldest Amarone I’d drunk was a 47-or 48-year-old Bertani that celebrated my 75th birthday, and I remember it vividly as one of the most profound wines I’ve ever tasted, with flavors and aromas so deep and concentrated they seemed endless. The empty bottle still smelled wonderful two days later: I could hardly bring myself to throw it out.

Quintarelli doesn’t have the history with Amarone that Bertani does, but Giuseppe Quintarelli in his lifetime became an acknowledged master of the wine: A colleague once quipped that Quintarelli was a black belt in Amarone. Some knowledgeable critics still regard him as the greatest winemaker in the history of Amarone, and I find it hard to argue with that. The “lesser” wines of his that I’ve tasted — Valpolicella and a handful of IGT wines – have always been impressive, big and rich and deep, with a thoroughly craftsmanlike character: superbly made wines.

That latter characteristic is crucial, I think, because Amarone, like Champagne, is an oddity in the universe of wine: It is a wine that owes more to technique than to terroir, more to art than to nature. You start with the late harvest and the number of passes through the vines the winemaker chooses to make. Compound that with the degree of noble rot the winemaker encourages/discourages/prohibits. Then add in the timing of drying and pressing the grapes, and the choice of vehicle in which fermentation occurs. Then whether he does or doesn’t permit malolactic fermentation, plus all the subsequent decisions about handling and aging the wine.

All these craftsmanly decisions affect the wine in more profound ways than its terroir does. All are the techniques of an artist whose chosen medium is the juice of grapes and the wood of barrels. Those appassionati who pursue Amarone are winemakers in the most profound sense, and the resulting wine reflects their skill and artistry more significantly than it does the character of the grapes that go into it. Champagne is the only other wine I know of which you can say that.

Well, the moment of truth arrived, the cork was pulled, the wine was poured, swirled, sniffed, and tasted. The immediate results: two simultaneous, totally unrehearsed “Wow!”s. No kidding: off the scale.

Here are my first five words about its aroma: honey; raisins; prunes; chocolate; chestnut. Here is my first tasting note: “all of the above in velvet!”  This was simply an amazing wine, of elegant power, depth, and duration. It rolled right over foie gras and barely noticed a rich, fruity, pan-roasted duck. I find it hard to imagine a dish that would challenge it – perhaps high-mountain game, like chamois?  This wine was wonderful, still fresh and rich, and simultaneously complex and deep. It is unlike any other Italian or French wine I know, and made a powerhouse conclusion to my 12 cellar selections for the year.

For those who may be curious, here the other 11, in the order tasted, each name linked to my post about it. There is a lot of fine drinking here. In all honesty, I’m not sure what I learned from the whole endeavor, except confirmation that I love mature wine, and that it is well worth the effort of putting some bottles away for your own and their old age.

Happy New Year to all my readers, and many of them to come!

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January
2011 Sabbie di Sopra Il Bosco, Terre del Volturno IGT, Nanni Copé

February
2001 Costa Russi, Langhe DOC, Angelo Gaja

March
2001 Hermitage AOC, E. Guigal

April
2004 Monprivato Barolo DOCG, Giuseppe Mascarello e Figlio

May
2009 Campi Raudii, Vino Rosso, Antonio Vallana 

June
1975 Gruaud Larose, Grand Cru Classé Saint-Julien, Cordier (then)

July
2007 Vintage Tunina, Venezia Giulia IGT, Silvio Jermann

August
2003 Montevetrano, Colli di Salerno IGT, Silvia Imparato

September
2001 Corton Grand Cru AOC, Bonneau de Martray

October
1989 Cuvée Frédéric Émile Vendanges Tardives Riesling, Alsace AOC, Trimbach 

November
1996 Barolo Riserva DOCG, Giacomo Borgogno & Figli

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Trimbach Riesling Cuvée Frédéric Émile 1989 Vendange Tardive

This, the antepenultimate bottle of my 12 cellar selections for 2021, Trimbach Riesling Cuvée Frédéric Émile 1989 Vendange Tardive, qualifies as a rarity for me: a late-harvest wine with more than 30 years of age.

You can think of vendange tardive as a rough French equivalent of German Auslese or even Beerenauslese wines. These are often exquisite nectars of lovely sweetness enlivened by good acidity – at their best among the world’s finest dessert wines. I’m not a great fan of dessert wines but I was hoping that Alsace’s reliably assertive acidity would balance out the wine’s residual sugar to create an intense and rarified dinner wine.

The Trimbach family has been making wine in Alsace for nearly five centuries, so they are obviously doing many things right. Chief among them is their Riesling expertise, shown most conspicuously in their single-vineyard Clos Sainte Hune, probably Alsace’s most esteemed wine. But all Trimbach’s Rieslings are excellent, and I am especially fond of its Cuvée Frédéric Émile, a fully dry wine that – at a very fair price for its quality – always balances intense minerality with fine Riesling fruit and typical Alsace acidity. Those are the qualities I was hoping to enjoy in my 30-year-old bottle of the Vendange Tardive.

Trimbach makes vendanges tardives only in exceptional years, using Gewurztraminer, Pinot Gris, Riesling or Muscat grapes, generally affected by noble rot, from its best vineyards. It characterizes the wines as intense and with exceptional finish: suited to foie gras, rich creamy dishes, blue cheeses, washed-rind cheeses, and velvety desserts. It calls its Cuvée Frédéric Émile Riesling, rare even among Trimbach’s vendanges tardives, “the treasure that Riesling lovers dream of having in their cellars.”

Well, with this 1989 bottle, this Riesling lover hit the jackpot.

Initially, I had been a bit worried about the condition of the wine. The bottle showed some ullage, the capsule was domed, and the foil showed some staining, as if it might have leaked. I feared I might have a dead wine on my hands. But the cork came out clean, and a quick sniff of the bottle was very reassuring: an intense and remarkably fresh whiff of classic Riesling.

In the glass, the wine showed the dark amber color that one expects of a long-aged white wine, and it still smelled and tasted fresh, despite its 32 years of age. I even tasted hints of that “diesel” flavor that Riesling appassionati speak of, which they consider a signal of highly desirable varietal typicity.

There were the merest hints of sweetness on the palate, all beautifully balanced by enlivening acidity and fine minerality; with a smooth, mouth-filling medium-to-full body: in all, a truly impressive and totally distinctive wine. It harmoniously accompanied a bloc of mi-cuit foie gras, which further emphasized its sapidity – a word I know sounds pretentious, but is the only adequate one for this remarkable wine.

Vendages tardives are not wines for every day, but they can make any day special indeed. I am very happy this bottle survived my far-less-than-perfect storage conditions so well.

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The Shape of Wines to Come

This is my first post of the new year, and it’s really not so much a post as a preview of posts to come. Late in 2020 (a year that will live in infamy), Diane asked a provocative question: “If you could only ever drink a dozen of all the wines we have in storage, which would you choose?” She followed with an even more provocative statement: “After all, we’re not kids any more; it could come to that.”

Needless to say, in the middle of a Covid pandemic and in the face of the approaching new year – hell, new decade, which it is extremely unlikely that I’ll see the end of – this set me to thinking about which of my wines I would absolutely want to be sure of tasting. It also got me brooding about how long it would take, with regular consumption, to drink my cellar dry, but that is an entirely separate problem for me and my liver to work out. The immediate question was which 12 would I choose – and, of course, why those?

Let me cut to the chase. Here are the dozen bottles I selected. They are in no particular order, because there was none to their choosing.

2001 Costa Russi, Langhe DOC, Angelo Gaja
2011 Sabbie di Sopra Il Bosco, Terre del Volturno IGT, Nanni Copé
2004 Monprivato Barolo DOCG, Giuseppe Mascarello e Figlio
2007 Vintage Tunina, Venezia Giulia IGT, Silvio Jermann
2001 Hermitage AOC, E. Guigal
2009 Campi Raudii, Vino Rosso, Antonio Vallana
2003 Montevetrano, Colli di Salerno IGT, Silvia Imparato
1996 Barolo Riserva DOCG, Giacomo Borgogno & Figli
2001 Corton Grand Cru AOC, Bonneau de Martray
1975 Gruaud Larose, Grand Cru Classé Saint-Julien, Cordier (then)
1981 Recioto della Valpolicella Amarone Classico DOC, Giuseppe Quintarelli
1989 Cuvée Frédéric Émile Vendanges Tardives Riesling, Alsace AOC, Trimbach
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Eight Italian wines, four French, one of each nation white, the rest all red. I wonder what that says about me? Or does it say anything at all? I’ll leave that for you to answer as you will: Just keep in mind what your answer will say about you.

Well after the fact, I realized that the principle of selection behind these 12 wines was simple, even obvious. There was an aspect of each one that I wanted to check on: the vintage, or the grape(s), or the maker, or some unusual viticultural element, or simply how well the wine was aging. Maybe a little personal projection and concern behind that last bit of curiosity, but nevertheless a subject of genuine interest. I’ve got a lot of ’01 Barolo and Barbaresco squirreled away, and it’s now almost 20 years since that vintage was harvested — though, truth to tell, I keep thinking of it as still a young, recent vintage, so all the more reason for a reality check.

Anyhow, there they are. It’s my intention to taste and write up one of them a month as a sort of continuing thread through whatever else 2021 may bring. I hope it will sustain your interest as much as it already piques mine.

And – lest I forget – Happy (I hope truly happy, prosperous, and healthy) New Year to you all!

 

 

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Some Good Everyday Wines

Everybody needs everyday wines, especially at this time of year. But make no mistake: My emphasis is on good everyday wines, not just anything because it’s cheap. Obviously, inexpensiveness is an added attraction, but goodness comes first. I long ago decided that life is too short to ever drink mediocre wine, so even though I could never afford those legendary, crème de la crème bottles that headline so many ads, I’ve worked hard to ensure that the wines that accompany my daily bread are pleasurable, respectably made, and honorable examples of their breed.

What I’m going to talk about now are some wines that I can pretty reliably find in my vicinity. Let me offer a caveat about that: With the vagaries of importation and distribution, the variations of harvests, both qualitatively and quantitatively, compounded by the impact that Covid has had all around the world, none of us can ever be sure that the wine that is in shops this week will be available anywhere next month. That said, here are some wines that I have been enjoying for a few months now and hope to continue drinking for a good while yet.

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Whites

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A staple white wine that I can almost always get because it’s from close to home is Paumanok Vineyards’ Festival Chardonnay. If worse comes to worst, I can drive out to Long Island’s North Fork and carry some home from the vineyard. This wine is everything that basic, unoaked Chardonnay ought to be. Fresh and vigorous, with lovely, clean fruit and a sound structure, it will serve as an aperitif wine as pleasantly as it accompanies dinner. True to its Long Island heritage, it especially loves fish and shellfish.

Another equally versatile white wine is Pra’s beautiful Soave Classico Otto. Many people underestimate Soave. This wine shines with an intense minerality that will remind those drinkers of a really nice Chablis. The ones who already know Soave’s many virtues will appreciate the fruit and life and balance of this fine example of the breed. It may be my favorite Soave of them all, and I don’t exclude Pieropan from that consideration. Certainly, for everyday drinking, and in its price range, it’s matchless.

One more Italian white wine has recently become available in my area: the charmingly and appropriately named Il Gentiluomo, a 100% Cortese wine from Paolo Pizzorni, in the Monferrato zone of the Piedmont. I’m hoping this one stays in the market for a while, because it is a lovely, simple wine, medium-bodied and deliciously fruity, with excellent balance. It works with all sorts of light dishes from meat antipasti to roasted chicken. It particularly loves veal in all forms, from scallops to roasts.

We used to keep a lot of basic white Burgundies around for everyday use: They have a combination of fuller body and terroir character that makes them quite distinctive and intriguing. But Burgundy prices have begun another of their periodic ascents into the stratosphere. While there are still a good number of wines suitable for everyday use, their price now makes that inadvisable for most people. Your best hope, if you must have a Burgundy (and who, occasionally, does not?), will be to look for wines from Mâcon or Mâcon-Villages, but you will have to shop sharply.

You would be better advised to shift your attention northward to Alsace, where almost every producer offers a basic blended wine at an attractive price. Hugel’s Gentil is an excellent example of the breed, enjoyable in itself and extremely versatile with food.

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Reds

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Red wines offer more questions and more choices. After all, the wines range from light and understated to formidable, and the foods they’re asked to accompany are similarly varied in intensity and spicing. Especially in warm weather, I like to keep some Beaujolais on hand. The crus are my favorites – Fleurie, Juliénas, Chiroubles, Morgon, Chénas – but I also have a fondness for Jean-Paul Brun’s Terre Dorée basic Beaujolais, L’Ancien, which has plenty of character to pair with its charm and vivacity. His cru wines are also fine, but there are now many good producers of those available, so it is worth trying several to see whose style pleases you.

Still in the French range, Côtes du Rhône wines are always useful. The named villages are best, though they can get pricy – but careful shopping will almost always net you a Gigondas or Vacqueyras at a decent price. There are many makers, some quite small operations, so it’s impossible to predict what will be in any particular market, but IMO they’re all worth a try.

We drink a lot of Italian reds at casa Maresca, and it’s a frequently changing cast of characters, depending on what’s available. Distributors seem to have synchronized cycles: One season the shops will be filled with Tuscan wines, another it will be Piedmonts, with other regions’ reds getting whatever shelf space is left. That’s a shame, because there are fine, inexpensive red wines pouring out of every part of Italy, and a high percentage of them are well worth a taste.

I like to keep a lot of basic Chianti Classico around because of Sangiovese’s versatility with food, and there are many good ones available at quite decent prices, particularly the best wines of the best co-ops, which lack the prestige and therefore the market clout of the best estate wines. Lately I’ve been drinking with great pleasure a lot of Clemente VII and Panzano, both produced by Castelli del Grevepesa.

Equally adaptable with a whole range of foods is Barbera. This is a grape that, because of its naturally high acidity, can happily match with almost anything. For my palate, the greater body and more restrained acidity of Barbera d’Alba works best, but Barbera d’Asti, often accurately described as “racy,” has many partisans. There are many makers of both kinds, ranging from some of the most famous names in the zone (Ceretto, Gaja, Vietti) to some of the smaller growers (Oddero, Barale), and prices can consequently be all over the place, but patient shopping can usually reward with a really pretty wine at an attractive price.

When it comes to softer, less acidic everyday reds, you’ve got good choices from all over Italy. Here are my current favorites.
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• Dolcetto, from the same zones as Barbera and from many of the same makers – but look for Dogliani, a subzone so distinguished that it has won the right to use its own name rather than Dolcetto.
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• Valpolicella Classico, not Superiore, and definitely not Ripasso. The Classico has rediscovered the simple charm that once made Valpolicella one of Italy’s most popular wines. Brigaldara makes a nice one.
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• Lacryma Christi, from the slopes of Vesuvius, a soft-bodied, round, and mineral-inflected wine that matches wonderfully with pasta and pizza and sauced or braised meats. There are now a fair number of producers intermittently available in the US, but you will never go wrong with a bottle from Mastroberardino, the once – and maybe future – king of Campanian wines.
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Let us hope that the new year brings us whole tides of enjoyable, affordable wines like these. Covid and its consequences aside – this too shall pass – we are blessed to live in a golden age of winemaking, and there is no reason not to enjoy this abundance while it and we last.

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Do You Riesel?

I’m sure you know the old groaner: “Do you like Riesling?” “I don’t know: I’ve never Rieseled.” Unfortunately, that seems to be true of many wine lovers. While most wine experts rank the Riesling grape right up with Chardonnay for quality and versatility (putting aside for a moment the claims of more southerly white varieties), you would never know that from its sales in these United States: They amount at best to a slight fraction of Chardonnay’s.
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Zind-Humbrecht Riesling Clos Saint Urbain

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Nobody knows for sure why that is. Wine professionals regularly sing the praises of Riesling, but the wine-buying public just doesn’t seem interested. I myself for many years didn’t Riesel, but I know why that was. And now that I do Riesel, I have a theory about why many wine drinkers don’t. But one thing at a time.

For a long time, I avoided Riesling because very cheap, very simple, and quite sweet German Riesling had been one of the earliest wines I tasted when I was young (probably too young to drink legally, but we won’t go there). I pretty quickly found that there were ‘better – better for my developing palate, at least — wines available that accompanied food more sympathetically and were not much more expensive. As my palate moved more markedly in the direction of drier and drier wines, the memory of Riesling’s sugars – coupled with German Riesling’s reputation, then as now, as one of the world’s great sweet wines – effectively ended any interest I might have developed in the variety.

It was only many years later, when I began seriously exploring the white wines of Alsace, that I started to appreciate Riesling. It was a slow process, with a lot of preconceptions and prejudices to overcome, but the producers of Alsace have a deft hand with aromatic white grapes, vinifying them into substantial, fully dry, and still wonderfully scented wines. Those characterful white wines gradually wore down my resistance, and I began paying attention to Riesling.
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Muré Riesling Clos Saint-Landelin

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Over the years, I came to admire a great many of Alsace’s fine large and small producers, all of whom share the goal of vinifying dry white wines that show both varietal intensity and the character of individual terroirs. Here are some of the ones I’ve most enjoyed. All these producers make good-to-fine basic Rieslings, and all produce superb Grand Cru wines.

• Beyer: A small but highly reputed producer. Top of the line: Riesling Comtes d’Eguisheim.
• Boxler: Basic Riesling Vieilles Vignes, Grands Crus Riesling Sommerberg and Brand.
• Deiss: Riesling Altenberg and Riesling Schoenenbourg.
• Hugel: A centuries-old firm, one of the stalwarts of Alsace, Riesling Jubilee. (Hugel no longer names its vineyards, though they are some of the best in Alsace)
• Josmeyer: Riesling Hengst, Riesling Le Kottabe.
• Muré: Riesling Clos Saint-Landelin.
• Trimbach: Another Alsace stalwart, Riesling Frédéric Emile, The Riesling Clos Sainte Hune is probably the most highly reputed – and most expensive of Alsace wines.
• Zind-Humbrecht:  By Alsace terms, a brash newcomer making superb wines, Riesling Clos Saint-Urbain, Riesling Clos Windsbuhl, Riesling Herrenweg.

Now, here’s where my theory enters: I have come to believe that Riesling is what I would call a geezer’s wine. That has become an honorific in my vocabulary. To enjoy such a wine fully, to realize its greatness, you need to know a fair amount about wine and about your own palate. A dry Riesling demands that you pay attention to it – sip it slowly, roll it around on your tongue, think about what you’re tasting and feeling there – and that’s probably the greatest deterrent to its popularity in this country. As a people, we pay very little attention to what we put in our mouths. Even wine drinkers eat the majority of their meals mindlessly. In an environment like ours, a grape that requires you to think seriously about what’s in your mouth – not its calories but its flavors — just doesn’t have a chance.
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Riesling Clos Hengst

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Riesling is worth the effort. The floral aromas, the variety of vegetal and mineral flavors it presents, the way it translates the different terroirs and climates in which it grows, its remarkable ability to broaden and deepen with age — in all these ways it far surpasses its chief rival Chardonnay. Make no mistake: I love the great white Burgundies and drink them happily when I can afford them, But I can afford a great Riesling more often, so that’s a no-brainer.

In a purely selfish way, I’m glad more Americans don’t share my enthusiasm. If a few millions of us started seriously to Riesel – well, you know what will happen to its price: bye bye, bargain greatness.
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Riesling Clos Windsbuhl

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Cruising Down the River

We’re back from France and readjusted to reality. While our hoped-for sunny journey down the Rhône and ancillary vineyard visits didn’t work out as we wished – the weather was cold and grey, and the hours at anchor just didn’t permit the kind of excursions we wanted – we nevertheless had an enjoyable time. There was plenty of quite drinkable wine on board, though none of what a visit to Chapoutier or Jaboulet or Chave might have yielded, and the MS Camargue’s kitchen provided meals of a quite decent French hotel standard, so our sufferings were all of the imaginative, what-might-have-been sort.

I’m not really a cruise person, especially not on one of those floating apartment buildings I see lumbering up and down the Hudson, so the 104-passenger Camargue was quite big enough for me.

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I thought its beverage policy enlightened: The cost of all basic wines and spirits, available all day long, were covered by the basic trip fee. A slightly better selection was offered at modest extra charge, and that seemed more than ample for the week of our cruise.
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Indeed, as the choices of our tablemates, a charming and well-travelled New Zealand couple, showed, it was more than enough for everybody except us winos. Living as Diane and I do among wine-and-food fanatics, we tend to forget that not everyone judges the quality of their day by the caliber of their dinner wine. A sobering reminder it was.

That’s enough scene setting: Here’s what we drank. (For what we ate, see this post on Diane’s blog.)

With lunch, we drank one or another of the ship’s basic offerings. These were a nice white blend from Alsace, the sort of wine they used to call Gentil (in this case a Saveur d’Alsace from Maison Pettermann); a Pays d’Oc Chardonnay from St. Anian; a Syrah rosé from Pays d’Oc called La Jasse Neuve; a red St. Anian (a Carignane-Merlot blend); and a 2018 Côtes du Rhône Domaine de Lascamp – the latter especially pleasing.
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As you can see, nothing startling, but good basic wines from a variety of interesting regions.

At dinners, we tended to choose our wine from the boat’s larger and more interesting supplemental (quite reasonable) fee list. This was organized loosely by broad regions, and we chose wines from areas we were sailing through or near enough to consider local. So: We especially enjoyed a very fine Beaujolais Morgon, Les Vieux Cèdres, at six years old full of fresh, round, black-hued fruit; a 2016 Crozes-Hermitage Petite Ruche from Chapoutier; and a quite intense, deeply aromatic 2012 Cahors, Chateau Eugénie Tradition.
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For after dinner, the bar offered a nice battery of digestifs – Hennessy Cognac, an eau-de-vie Poire, a sound marc, as well as, for those so inclined, Port. On more than one evening we would have wished to take a marc or cognac up to the open top deck of the boat to enjoy the evening breezes. Alas, they were whistling down at about 25 miles an hour from the north: The Mistral was making the outdoors very uncomfortable, so it was seats at the bar most nights, just as in my misspent youth. What a tough trip.

More next post about our extra days in Lyon and wines ashore.

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Enjoyable Everyday Wines I

If you’re a committed wine lover and need your fix every day, it’s a great advantage to live in New York City. The variety of fine wine available is unmatched anywhere in the world, and shopping is a snap. Let it sleet and storm outside: You can sit at your desk – perhaps sipping a glass of wine – and let your search engine (Wine-Searcher is a good one) investigate for you. That’s especially handy if you know more or less the kind of wine you’re seeking.

Even handier is the search service provided by several of the larger retail shops in New York, which allows you to rummage through their entire inventory by any of several different criteria.
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I’m especially fond of one that Astor Wine and Spirits offers: searching by price range. That’s useful for any number of reasons, but I especially like that it offers me things I might not have thought of, wines outside my usual Italian and French go-to categories. We all get into ruts: This helps push me out of them. Twenty minutes of online browsing and I can put together a case of 12 different whites and another of 12 different reds at prices I like – say between $10 and $20 for everyday wines – and they will probably be delivered within 24 hours. For an aging wino, it doesn’t get much easier.
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Let me be clear: When I say everyday wines, I mean every day. Diane and I have wine with dinner every night. All right, maybe once or twice a year we have beer, but 99 times out of 100 we opt for wine – and like most people in this galaxy, we can’t afford to drink great wine every time. Not that I haven’t done my best to raise the level of our daily bottle by, for decades now, buying wines young and unready but at reasonable prices and squirreling them away for as long as I could.

Besides, it’s not just wine we care about: It’s also and especially what Italians call the abbinamento – coordinating the wine with the food it accompanies. That’s crucial to making an everyday dinner something to relish. You have to pay attention to the way the wine and the food mesh. Much as I love mature Barolo and Barbaresco, I don’t want to drink them with a dish of frankfurters and beans. It’s disproportionate – and besides, good franks and beans are estimable in their own right and deserve a decent wine that works well with them. Don’t send a Brunello to do what a Bardolino can do better, don’t open a Beaune Premier Cru where a Beaujolais Villages is what’s needed.

(Incidentally, the above examples illustrate the first principle I laid out centuries ago in The Right Wine, my book about wine and food matching: Scale is crucial. I feel even more strongly about the second principle declared in that book: Acidity is what makes a wine food-friendly. But that’s a topic for a different post. End of digression.)

Now, just what sort of everyday wines am I talking about? Well, here’s the case of white wines, all under $20, that I recently purchased, most of which I tasted first as an aperitif (we all need to keep up our strength while cooking) and then with dinner.

 

Alsace Auxerrois Leon Manbach 2017 – Very pleasant, light, but substantial enough to handle a choucroute. Nice white-flower and mineral nose, round, but with enough acidity to work with food. Quite decent.

Alvarinho Couto de Mazedo 2016 (Vinho Verde) – Very nice Albariño, crisp, fresh, aromatic: Good aperitif, fine with fish.

Alvarinho Regueiro 2016 (Vinho Verde) – quite fine: rounder and fuller than the preceding wine, more dinner wine than aperitif. Excellent with a roasted orata (sea bream).

Jean-Paul Brun Beaujolais Blanc 2017 – excellent Beaujolais producer. Nice unwooded Chardonnay, with round fruit and great freshness. Very enjoyable.

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Classic Domaine de l’Ecu Muscadet 2016 – This is a Muscadet producer I normally like very much, but this bottle was a bit of a disappointment. Drunk by itself, it tasted too much of oak. Food wiped that out to some extent, but it never rose to the level of crispness and sharpness I had hoped for.

De Cranne Bordeaux Sec 2016 – Should have been really interesting (the blend is 40% Sauvignon gris, 25% Muscadelle, and 35% Semillon), but turned out to be somewhat coarse and disappointing.

Gavi di Gavi Podere Merlina 2017 – Not a big, round Gavi, but a lighter-bodied, mineral-inflected example, with a marked and enjoyable citrus bite. Fine as aperitif and with lighter fare.

Meyer-Fonné Alsace Gentil 2016 – A lovely Alsace wine, so floral that the initial taste seemed German, but it rounded beautifully with a pheasant pâté and roasted chicken thighs.

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Ribolla Gialla Ronchi di Cialla 2017 (Friuli Colli Orientali) – quite fine and characteristic. Stood up beautifully to a choucroute garnie, and I don’t know how much more you can ask of a white wine.

Rioja Blanca Real Rubio 2017 – A bit disappointing: old-fashioned, slightly oxidized white, not unpleasant but with no charm.

Timorasso Colli del Timorasso Ricci 2014 – A lovely light Timorasso, soft-bodied but with sufficient acid; floral aroma and delicate palate of dry pear and apricot. Very enjoyable.

Weszeli Grüner Veltliner Langenlois 2017 – Very good and characteristic Grüner, with nice balance, body, and minerality. Partnered quite nicely with Chinese dumplings and home-made egg foo young. Bright, light on palate.

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I grant you that this is not an earthshakingly exotic list of wines: Had I wished, I could have cast a much wider net. But these are the kind of wines I like, so this time around I stuck with them. Others, of course are free to be as experimental as they wish: There were 88 other wines on the list I was choosing from. Have fun!

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One Fine Wine: Deiss Alsace Pinot Gris 2011

“One Fine Wine” is an occasional series of short posts about wines I’ve enjoyed recently.

Among Alsace white wines, Riesling seems to get the lion’s share of attention from the press and the public. That’s understandable: there are many great ones. But if any grape variety deserves to be Alsace’s poster child, in my opinion it should be Pinot gris, for its uniqueness, its intensity, and its outstanding quality. Nowhere but Alsace does the grey Pinot give wines of such power and grace and, at the same time, such extraordinary versatility with food.

Alsace vineyards do very well with several varieties that elsewhere get only secondary interest from growers and consumers – Pinot blanc, Pinot gris, Gewürztraminer to name a few. All, in Alsace, yield wines of greater interest and surprising adaptability with food of all sorts. My usual go-to wine with Indian dishes, for instance, is Gewürztraminer, whose combination of dryness and spicy fruit answers well to the intricate spicings of Indian cooking. So, when Diane decided to make us an Indian dinner, I went into my stash looking for a Gewürz – and came up empty-handed. Necessity is the mother of invention, so I decided to try a bottle of 2011 Deiss Pinot gris. It was not as old as I really like my Pinot gris, but it’s well known by now that I’m a nut on the subject of mature wines. In any event, with Indian flavors, all the usual rules are off, so I thought I’d take a flier with that barely-seven-year-old.

Well, the Pinot gris worked out beautifully, starting right with the appetizer samosas and the garlic-and-lime pickle that accompanied them, and right on through a rich goat curry, butter-smothered cabbage, mung dal, and a refreshing chilled cucumber raita (all out of Julie Sahni’s Classic Indian Cooking). The wine either tasted totally dry or suggested some fruit sweetness according to the peculiarities of each dish, but its own unusual quince-and-mango fruitiness meshed very well with them all – and its typically Alsace firm structure meant that it never became flabby or in any way negligible. It was never just a liquid but became itself an important component of the flavor symphony of the meal.

Deiss is a prestigious family firm, headquartered in Bergheim, which is as close as you can get to dead center of the Alsace wine zone. Deiss biodynamically farms 26 hectares of vines, spread over several villages and including at least three Grand Cru sites. This Pinot gris is one of Deiss’s basic and least expensive bottlings, so its very high quality should tell you what you need to know about the family’s more rarified selections.

Deiss’s Grand Cru Altenberg Vineyard

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Pinot Gris Is Not Pinot Grigio

Mention Alsace to a wine aficionado, and 9 times out of 10 the next word that pops out is Riesling. There’s nothing wrong with that: Alsace makes some of the best Rieslings in the world. What is wrong is if the conversation stops there, because Alsace also produces a perhaps even more distinctive wine from another grape variety, a variety that elsewhere produces largely simpler, everyday-enjoyable wines. There’s nothing wrong with that either, except that, as Alsace demonstrates, Pinot gris (yes, same grape as Pinot grigio) can be stunning – rich, complex, fully dry and at the same time luscious – a very different creature from the vast majority of its incarnations in other parts of the world.

Because of the physical limitations forced on me by my recent hip replacement and its subsequent complications, I haven’t been able to get out and around to taste all the newly released wines that normally I write about at this time of year, the heart of the New York wine season. Confined to home, I’ve been drinking a lot of simple, pleasant wines – or, more honestly, drinking a little simple wine as my digestion repairs itself from the ravages of some massive doses of antibiotics.

Every now and then, however, I’ve had to break out, especially when my Devoted Caregiver has provided an excellent meal that calls out to be matched with a better-than-average wine. This has meant delving ever deeper into neglected corners of my wine storage, with occasionally wonderful results. In this particular case, a delicious choucroute garnie (sauerkraut is wonderful for restoring the intestinal flora) accompanied by a superlative 2004 Pinot gris, Grand Cru Brand, from Albert Boxler, a wine so distinctive, so idiosyncratic, that I simply have no comparisons for it.

Let me be upfront here. A lot of people don’t like Alsace Pinot gris. They find it too rich, too assertive, with heavy, complex fruit so lush that it still tastes sweet even when fully dry. If I were pushed, I’d say it’s the white wine equivalent of Amarone – big and full and powerful, not for every meal, but incomparable when you find its slot. I love Amarone, and I love Alsace Pinot gris, especially with about 10 years of age on it. It will take more: The variety ages very well, but for me 10 to 15 years is the real sweet spot, where in a decent vintage the wine will still show youthful freshness while it has already started fleshing out its mature flavors.

Albert Boxler has been for years one of my favorite producers. This remains a small, family firm, working only about 13 hectares of vines – but what hectares! The family home and winery in Niedermorschwihr sits right at the foot of the Sommerberg, one of the finest Riesling grands crus in all of Alsace, and other vineyards lie in Brand, another excellent grand cru site. Both sites are on granite soils, which contribute to the mighty structure of the wines they produce.

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Boxler’s Brand vineyard

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The proudly old-fashioned label on Boxler bottles tells you everything you need to know about fidelity to tradition in this great house.

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My bottle of ’04 offered all the paradoxical pleasures one hopes for in a great, complex white wine: freshness with maturity, power with finesse, austerity with lush abundance. Never mind that most people think of choucroute garnie as a simple brasserie dish: That Boxler Pinot gris made love to it, coaxing every nuance of flavor out of the meats and answering them with its own battery of flavors. In the eloquent words of the immortal Brillat-Savarin, Yum!

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