A Tale of Two Bottles

Over the course of many, many meals at home during this long siege of Covid, I’ve been winnowing down my collection of older wines. Over the years, I’ve tried to keep some sort of track of what wines I have, but I am not really a very orderly type, and some things just got away from me. Occasionally this has produced a nasty shock, when I’d discover that a wine I really wanted to drink now had apparently been drunk long ago by an unremembering me.

Very occasionally, the shock has been a pleasant one, as when, recently, looking for a wine for a belated holiday dinner with friends, at the bottom of a nearly depleted bin I discovered two dusty bottles of Bonneau du Martray Grand Cru Corton 2000 – perfect accompaniments for the boned and rolled fresh ham Diane was roasting for that fête. Serendipity!
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Some of my regular readers may recall that back in September 2021 I opened a bottle of 2001 Bonneau du Martray Corton for that month’s cellar selection. Really attentive readers may even recall there was a bit of drama about the condition of the cork and whether the wine would be sound. (It was.)

Well, those who don’t learn from history are bound to repeat it, so I once again had my bit of drama. After I wiped a healthy layer of dust from the two bottles, I began carefully drawing the corks. The first bottle cooperated beautifully: the cork came out smoothly, and the wine smelled wonderfully fresh, still fruity and live. The second bottle, which had lain in identical conditions by the first one’s side for all these years, was a very different story. Its cork looked sound, but when I began to try to ease it out, the top quarter-inch pulled away from the rest of the cork, which proceeded to crumble to pieces. What I could sniff of the wine in the bottle was no more reassuring than the condition of the cork. No serendipity this time.

A combination of curiosity and parsimony made me not discard that bottle but set it aside, lightly covered. I also kept a decanter and filtering wine funnel handy, though I selected a backup bottle should that second Corton prove as dead as I feared it was. I would leave it up to our guests whether, for science (science is a stern mistress) they wanted to try a taste of it or not.

Well, dinnertime came, and we six started with a pureed cauliflower-and-leek soup – a nice wintry dish – accompanied by an absolutely gorgeous bottle of 2013 Zind Humbrecht Clos Windsbuhl Hunawhir Pinot Gris. I really must do a post about Alsace Pinot Gris sometime soon: the characteristically rich aroma and the complex, deep fruit of this wine set a very high bar for my 21-year-old Corton to match.

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Well, the first bottle of Corton cleared that hurdle easily. It was wonderfully smooth and elegant in the mouth, with delightful fresh berryish scents, and a palate of similar fresh fruit flavors, mingled with more mature meaty sweetnesses and foresty notes. Just a fine wine, which was very quickly consumed by the assembled multitude.

This of course led to the question of Bottle #2, which, given how fine #1 had been, was no question at all: Curiosity prevailed. I filtered and decanted it, poured it around, and awaited judgment as we all judiciously swirled, sniffed, and sipped. No one spat.

It wasn’t dead. It wasn’t corked. Weakened, yes. Paler in color, much lighter in aroma, and more delicate in taste than the first Corton, but definitely still alive. To me, it tasted at least ten years older than its sibling, but if we had drunk it first we wouldn’t have been disappointed. We would probably have called it charming – not overwhelming, but in no way bad.

This was a very, very illuminating demonstration of just how much difference a cork can make in a potentially superb wine. How long the world’s supply of first-rate cork will last is yet one more environmental problem. Worry, worry, worry.

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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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September Cellar Selection: 2001 Bonneau du Martray Corton Grand Cru

Wine lovers are obsessed with places, and no place is more renowned than the hill of Corton, in Burgundy’s Côte de Nuits.

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Geography, geology, and microclimate are only the start of its near-legendary status. Add in over 1400 years of continuous viniculture, started by the direct intervention of Charlemagne and followed by centuries of labor by laymen and monks, to culminate in secular fame in the 19th Century and an explosion of celebrity in the 20th. Bottles of this hill’s best wines now sell for prices that probably would have purchased an entire hamlet in the 19th century.

From the beginning, Corton was famous for red wines, which still account for the bulk of its production. Its one great white is only a small part of the AOC, and a surprisingly late addition: Chardonnay doesn’t seem to have arrived there until the middle of the 19th century. Almost all the white comes to the market bearing the name of Corton’s great progenitor: hence Corton Charlemagne, grown on the western slope of the hill (an unusual siting in Burgundy).

These days, a huge percentage of that single contiguous vineyard is farmed, vinified, and bottled by Bonneau du Martray, the family that has owned the vineyards for more than 150 years. Its Corton Charlemagne is a benchmark for white Burgundy, but it does also farm a small amount – about one hectare – of Pinot noir to make red Corton Grand Cru, the wine I am celebrating today. Its 2001 edition, now a ripe 20 years old, is my September Cellar Selection.
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Most Burgundy buffs will think this more than a little perverse, since Bonneau du Martray’s red wine is usually regarded as considerably inferior to its white. But, as my wife and many friends will probably happily testify, I am nothing if not perverse.

Besides, whether or not Bonneau du Martray’s red is in fact inferior to its white, the red is still a Grand Cru from a site famous for red wine and a bargain compared to its white sibling; and – perhaps most important – I’ve been cellaring this 2001 bottle for a long time and I really wanted to find out just how good it is. I may be perverse, but I am neither patient nor immortal, and this inquiring mind wants to know.

I don’t drink Burgundy Grand Cru every day – nor every year, for that matter – so I asked Diane to prepare a meal that would give it a real chance to show its best. She opted to make an elaborate steak au poivre with a creamy mustard sauce, gratin dauphinois potatoes, and peas braised with shallots and butter: a complex set of dishes that should put any red wine on its mettle.
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First course would be simple, a few tortellini in brodo, and after the steak we would finish with some cheese – a slab of young Brebis, a nice sheep milk cheese, and a round of a good, ripe, stinky Camembert. That, I thought with real anticipation, is a fine test-your-red-wine dinner.

Well, then reality raised its ugly head, as it always does. When I nonchalantly started to pull the cork, it crumbled to pieces. I would have to strain and decant the wine. And the condition of that cork was worrisome: Would the wine be sound?  Keen anticipation gave way to anxious worrying. I hate reality.

I needn’t have worried. The wine was wonderful, and it performed equally gracefully with every dish of the meal. In retrospect, I would say that the condition of the wine was directly inverse to the condition of the cork. That Corton was plain and simply great. It didn’t send me into the kind of lengthy-catalog-of-fruit-flavors-and-multiple-strained-metaphors rhapsody that I have heard and read far too often from passionate Burgundy buffs, but I loved it from the first sniff of the glass to the last sip of the nectar.

The nose was rich and elegant, redolent of forest floor and mushrooms: a fully mature aroma, I would call it. On the palate, it was graceful, mouth-filling without being heavy, and long, with flavors of dried plum and cherries, mushrooms and leather, and overall great polish. The fine finish lingered long in the mouth.

This was not a powerful wine but a wine of supreme . . . sophistication, in its best sense, is almost the only word. It was together, it was complete, it was serene. It has been a very long while since I’ve drunk a Corton Charlemagne, but I find it hard to believe this red Corton could have been very far inferior to it, no matter what the conventional opinion holds.

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Three White Wines for Bruno

The protagonist of Martin Walker’s mystery series, chief of police in a small Périgord town, is known to me as “Bruno, Chef de Cuisine,” because he spends as much time cooking as he does detecting. My beloved spouse, who consumes mystery novels the way other people eat candy, has needless to say noted this aspect of the stories and has in fact re-created for her blog several of Bruno’s feasts.

Most recently, she and her co-conspirator Hope put together one such dinner that required serious white wine accompaniment. That, of course, became my problem, and problem it was. Neither my household supply nor my local retail shops provided the sort of very localized Périgord wines that Bruno delights to serve. I had to be creative and find some that I hoped would be equivalent wines to match with Bruno’s – and Diane’s and Hope’s – dishes. You can see the details of the dinner in Diane’s blog. The wines I chose to accompany it were a Mâcon blanc, a Condrieu, and a Savennières.
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My first problem was that the author was not entirely helpful in talking about Bruno’s wines. He described only two bottles, which I can’t imagine would have been sufficient in kind or quantity for the variety of dishes and number of guests. His first wine was a Château du Rooy Bergerac blanc, a blend of to-me-unknown-percentages of Sauvignon blanc, Sémillon, and Muscadelle. Insofar as this was served as an apéritif with a splash of cassis – a kir – it presented no difficulties. All I needed for that was a good basic white wine, not too fruit-forward and with decent acidity, so almost any well-made simple white Burgundy would serve well. I had on hand a nice 2019 Mâcon-Villages from Michel Barraud that fit the bill perfectly, and made a beautifully refreshing kir to accompany a warm summer afternoon’s cooking.

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The same wine, minus the cassis, seems to have served Bruno as the first dinner wine, and this presented a bit more of a challenge. Bruno’s wine would have had a distinctive, spicy character, with – I’m guessing because he was serving it with foie gras – suggestions of sweetness without any actual sugar presence. Condrieu, with its rich Viognier character, suggested itself, and I was lucky enough to have lurking in my “cellar” a bottle of 2016 Condrieu La Chambée from Les Vins de Vienne.

Condrieu is a tiny appellation, and this wine is sourced from just two hectares of vineyards at different spots within it. It’s 100% Viognier, laboriously farmed on steep and rocky slopes above the Rhône by three devotees who make up the winery.

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The wines of Condrieu are famed for their complexity, depth, and distinctive combination of minerality and spicy fruit in the nose and on the palate. All that makes it a natural choice to accompany foie gras, exactly the sort of wine I think Bruno (or Martin Walker) would have chosen. Ours did not disappoint: Indeed, it made us aware how far short of foie gras our otherwise fine pâté de campagne fell. Memo to self: get more Condrieu, and above all, find some foie gras.

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Our third wine presented the greatest challenge of all: The only other wine mentioned at Bruno’s dinner (a gift from his guest the Baron) was from Vignobles Les Verdots, again a white Bergerac, vinified from approximately two-thirds Muscadelle and one-third Sauvignon gris. The producer’s website, not very modestly, says of it:

This wine figures among the great white wines of France. Rich, spicy, with mineral and fruit notes on the nose, a whiff of smoke and lightly toasted too. The palate is generous in aromas and flavor, with good body, minerality, well-balanced and exceptionally long. It is also elegantly packaged.

This bottle would have been served with Bruno’s main course of braised chicken in a wine, tarragon, and cream sauce. Now there’s a challenge!

I had a wine that, mutatis mutandis, might fit that description, but I’ve had it around for a while and I was beginning to worry about its soundness: a 2003 Coulée de Serrant Savennières from Nicolas Joly. I decided to give it a shot.

All Savennières wines are special: They originate only in a tight little zone of steep hills in the middle Loire, where the Chenin blanc from which they are exclusively vinified reaches heights of flavor and depths of character attainable nowhere else.
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Coulée de Serrant Vineyard

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Also, Savennières ages remarkably well, growing deeper and more profound for many years – though I was more than a little nervous, given the deficiencies of my storage, whether I might have gone too long with this particular bottle.

Another also: The winemaker, Nicolas Joly, is a bit of a wild man. The most famous grower of the zone, he was the first there to go biodynamic, and he did so with a vengeance: natural fertilizers spread by hand from cow horns on nights of the full moon – that sort of thing.

Nicolas Joly

So my bottle of Savennières was sure to be memorable: the question was whether that would be for good or for ill.

Appearances didn’t answer that: a very dark, old gold color didn’t tell us anything. The nose, however did, and the news was good: exotic aromas, of earth and mineral and woodruff and dried cranberry (yes!) indicated the wine was very much alive. The first taste confirmed it, the same elements as in the nose wrapped in a silken package, smooth on the palate, leaving an impression of great suavity and a finish that went on and on.

A totally distinctive wine, that not only went beautifully with our version of Bruno’s chicken dish but also made me wonder how it would taste with good bloc foie gras. Must get some foie gras! Bruno is a very lucky man, with his seemingly endless local supply.

 

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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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Two Celebratory Wines

Readers of Diane’s blog will already know that we recently had two important-to-us occasions to celebrate under Covid-19 restrictions. Indomitably, we rose to the occasions and celebrated quite satisfactorily, with both foods and wines.

1990 Faiveley Gevrey Chambertin

Since Diane had originally planned to cook French for her birthday dinner – she had to cook, since dining out was impossible under Covid 19 conditions – I opted for an old Burgundy to celebrate the feast and the cook, and I stuck with that choice even as her dinner plans evolved.

My 1990 Faiveley Gevrey Chambertin wasn’t a really antique wine, alas, just 30 years, but then this also wasn’t one of those landmark birthdays. Nevertheless, at our ages no birthday is insignificant, and I had high hopes for this relatively humble village wine. Not a premier or grand cru, but from an esteemed commune – some people think Gevrey Chambertin the best of the Côte d’Or – of a fine vintage, from a négociant-éleveur who at that time was at the top of his game. Some people considered Faiveley the best large producer in the Côte d’Or.

Well, Monsieur Faiveley delivered beautifully with this wine: It was velvet, it was harmonious, it was deep and delicate simultaneously. Mature Pinot noir – great mature Pinot noir – has the ability to be many things at once, as this one was, and which is why we cellar it in the first place.

Young wines, no matter how great, just can’t bring the battery of complex flavor elements that make a wine like the 1990 Chambertin so memorable. With a light, savory cheese custard it was all restraint, with the assertive flavors of a well-spiced casserole-roasted chicken, it showed that it could play that game too, throwing up a shower of notes that picked up on all the nuances of the bird and its sauce. Chef and sommelier traded compliments all evening.

2006 Ridge Montebello

While the birthday dinner was elegant, as befitted its celebrant, our anniversary dinner was earthy, as suited our years together, and the 2006 Ridge Montebello wine on which Diane had long had an eye for it proved a perfect match for both the literal earthiness of morels à la crème in puff pastry cases and the heartiness of a rib of beef.

Ridge Montebello is one of California’s greatest wines, if not flat-out its greatest. It combines the complexity of Bordeaux, which is its great model, with the incredible lushness of California fruit, which the terroir of the Montebello Ridge provides in abundance.

Together, the two create a wine bigger, richer, and more balanced than most of its models. It is based on the classic Bordeaux blend of about 60-65% Cabernet sauvignon, with the remainder made of Merlot, Cabernet franc, and Petit verdot. For my palate, Montebello stands right up there in heft and beauty with the biggest Pauillacs, and perhaps can exceed them in longevity.

In style, this Ridge was the complete opposite of our twice-as-old Chambertin. This bottle of ’06 was only slightly evolved. Its flavors – the whole great wonderful rush of them – were still primarily youthful flavors, a congeries of lightly dried cherries and peaches, pears and figs and plums – plums, not prunes – all sustained by abundant, softening tannins, brisk acidity, and that characteristic Montebello underlying minerality.

This wine clearly had years of life before it, but it was so thoroughly enjoyable that any regrets we had about the infanticide we were committing were shallowly felt at best.

These two dinners were not at all bad for sheltering-in-place celebrations. In fact, their only downside was that, after all the fun was over, we still had to do the clean-up!

 

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More Wines of Yesteryear: French Edition

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In this post I’m toasting some marvelous vins perdus, bygone French wines, stirred to reminiscence by Covid-sheltering time. This usually happens after a leisurely dinner, when I’m sitting at the table and sipping the last of the day’s wine. When that wine happens to be French, so, usually, are the memories. Remember, I’m a geezer, and like almost all of my generation, the wines I learned on almost all spoke French.

One recent dinner of not-quite boeuf bourguignon featured a lovely bottle of Bouchard Côte de Beaune 1er cru, a blend of wines from several of Bouchard’s vineyards. Bouchard is one of the great négociant houses, and in my youth was internationally famed as a prime source for fine Burgundies. So back then I didn’t hesitate for a second when I was invited to join a group of journalists to visit Bouchard’s cellars and vineyards in celebration of – if my memory is accurate – Bouchard’s 175th harvest or year of bottling or something significant like that. Senior moment: I can recall the wines, but not the reason.

This was a stellar trip, kicked off by a spectacular dinner and equally fine brandy in a soigné rooftop restaurant overlooking the panorama of Paris. I have no idea how the neophyte journalist I then was got invited to join that small group of otherwise distinguished wine writers, but I knew I was happy.

And I continued so for the rest of the trip. It rapidly became clear to me that this junket was not the usual fare for wine journalists. As we meandered around Burgundy, visiting and tasting in cellar after cellar, talking to growers and wine makers, and dining extremely well night after night, we noticed that at each dinner, among the many good wines that were poured, there was always one very special one, either an older bottle, or a special vintage, or a particularly prized cru. No one grew blasé, and we looked forward with real eagerness to each night’s revelation.

At our farewell dinner, the pièce de resistance turned out to be a forty-year-old bottle of Bouchard’s Vigne de l’Enfant Jésus, a monopole and one of Bouchard’s most esteemed wines. You can guess our anticipation as the wine was poured and we swirled and sniffed – heaven! – and finally sipped. The entire table, until then babbling noisily, was awed to silence for a few moments. Until one of my colleagues, with characteristsic New York irreverence, broke the silence with “I’m drinking the baby Jesus’s velvet pants!” Crude, but in its way quite accurate, and much appreciated by our French hosts.

Back in the present, that dinner table conversation about Burgundy led Diane and me to talk about our favorite Burgundy firm, Drouhin. Drouhin, I think, doesn’t get enough respect: Its wines are so consistently good that many critics just take them for granted. Drouhin is still a family-owned concern, and the whole family works single-mindedly to achieve the elegance that has become the hallmark of their wines.

About ten years ago, I was invited to spend a long weekend in Beaune visiting their cellars and vineyards. This was a very different experience from the Bouchard trip, much more en famille. I was the only guest, for one thing, and each day a different Drouhin ferried me around to vineyards and through cellars and answered, with great patience, my endless supply of questions.

I remember particularly a conversation with Veronique Drouhin, who is in charge of most of the winemaking in Burgundy and in Oregon as well. There she works with many young interns, mostly students from UC Davis, and when I asked her about the differences between working in Oregon and in France, she provided a book’s worth of information, which I still wish she would write up and publish. What I remember most strongly of that long conversation was her account of the greatest difficulty she had encountered in working with young American winemakers.

“The hardest thing,” she said, “is teaching them to do nothing. Whenever an instrument says that something – sugar, acidity, alcohol – is a little abnormal, they want to intervene, to do something to correct the reading. I try to teach them to be a little patient, to wait a bit and whatever it is will probably correct itself, whereas whatever correction you make can only be corrected by another correction.

“They are all very strongly technologically trained, and it is very difficult to persuade them to trust the wine. But you must trust the wine!” That remark, for me, summed up in a nutshell the whole difference between Old World and New World approaches to winemaking.

My last dinner on this trip was literally en famille, with the patriarch Robert Drouhin and the whole family. Now, this was a great honor, and when I realized the wine that was being poured with no fuss was a 1966 Bonnes Mares, I was flabbergasted! I had mentioned casually to Veronique that Musigny was for me the sweet spot of all the Côte d’Or, and now the family was giving me one of France’s ne plus ultra wines. I have never forgotten its depth and savor and elegance: a wine and an experience of a lifetime. With no fuss made.

The French, of course, are capable of very great fusses when the occasion warrants. One such was the restoration of their emblematic windmill at Moulin-à-Vent, an event I attended that was called to mind by a bottle of this year’s Beaujolais that we’d enjoyed recently with another dinner at home.

In 1999, the citizens of Beaujolais had been working on restoring the long-defunct mill’s machinery all winter. A fête had been scheduled for a day in normally windy March to mount the sails and operate the mill again, for the first time in decades. Journalists from all over Europe and the US had been invited.

France’s most prominent yachtsman and his racing crew had been asked to mount the sails on the mill’s great arms, and we all watched as they swarmed over the rigging and expertly spread the sails – just in time to receive, in a small Burgundian miracle, the first breath of wind in five days. A huge cheer went up from press and locals alike as the great arms began slowly to turn and the old mill came back to life.

A raucous afternoon of picnicking, eating, drinking, singing, and general jollity followed. Much fine Beaujolais was consumed that day, especially Jadot’s great Moulin-à-Vent, Château des Jacques, and along with it many slabs of jambon persillé and slices of saucisson rosette de Lyon. Nowhere near as glamorous as a Parisian restaurant, of course, but perhaps even more authentically French.

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The Pleasures of BYOB

Diane and I don’t dine out much anymore, for three key reasons. First, we can’t stand the noise levels: In most New York City restaurants, the din reaches a volume so painful that conversation is impossible. Second, the cuisine has become too californicated – too fussy, too many incompatible ingredients, too many fantasy creations. And finally, the clincher: Prices for the kind of wine we enjoy are stratospheric, so much so that I could buy a case of enjoyable wine for the cost of a single meal out.

And of course, restaurant wines are never old enough to have developed the kind of mature flavors we love, or if they have, the prices have shifted from stratospheric to astronomical.

Thus, we mostly stay home, do our own cooking, and drink our own wines. But recently some friends told us about Temple Court, Tom Colicchio’s restaurant at Manhattan’s Beekman hotel. Colicchio is a cook who respects the great culinary traditions, lightening and modernizing them, but preserving their integrity and depth. So Diane and I tried a lunch at Temple Court and loved it – all except for the wine prices, which verged on terrifying. The ambiance was lovely, very old-New Yorkish. No loud music, ambient noise at a comfortable level. And the food was excellent.
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Just recently we learned that on Sunday evenings, the restaurant allows patrons to bring their own wine, with no corkage fee. Oh frabjous day! Calloo! Callay! An expedition was rapidly organized, and five of us descended on Temple Court with five bottles in hand and palates honed. Spoiler alert:  It was all wonderful, so brace yourself for a lot of superlatives.

So compatible was this group in terms of taste that all but one of us ordered the same meal: Lobster Thermidor to start and Venison Wellington for entree. Clearly, classic palates ready to work on gently modified classic dishes.

The Thermidor was a lightened and more elegant version of the very rich traditional preparation. With it we drank two white Burgundies, a 2008 Drouhin Puligny Montrachet and a 1995 Ampeau Meursault. The older bottle still showed fresh and light on the palate, with lovely Chardonnay floral and mineral accents.
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The Drouhin wine showed those same sorts of flavors, but bigger, with more flesh – probably the result of longer time for the wine on its lees. Both were lovely wines, the Ampeau probably better as an aperitif and the Drouhin better matched with the Thermidor.
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While we rested our forks for a few minutes before the venison, we started on a bottle of 2010 Aloxe-Corton red from Michel Mallard, a small Burgundy producer who sells most of his wine locally, which one of our group bought right there at the winery. This bottle gave all the pleasures of Pinot Noir from prime Burgundian terroir and served as a beautiful modulation to the more aggressive flavors to come.
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With the arrival of the venison, our immensely helpful and attentive sommelier Lise poured us glasses of our ’03 Jaboulet Hermitage La Chapelle and 1999 Fontodi Flaccianello. Both of these were wines to which I could easily have devoted a One Fine Wine post.

The Tuscan wine was simply gorgeous, a great wine from a great vintage. Flaccianello is 100% Sangiovese, classified as an IGT wine back then and still proudly continued as such by maker Giovanni Manetti, even though it could now call itself Chianti Classico DOCG. This ’99 showed all the bright red fruit and liveliness on the palate that Sangiovese is capable of – and that’s a great deal.
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A beautiful wine, but bettered with the venison by the Hermitage, a lesser vintage from a more aggressive, less nuanced grape. This bottle showed the classic Syrah force, depth, and pepperiness — and though for my palate it lacked subtlety, its character matched better with the venison, foie gras, chestnuts, and wild mushrooms of the Wellington than did the lighter and more agile Flaccianello.
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An important lesson there, it seems to me: A lesser wine can be a better choice, depending on what you’re drinking it with. It’s not just the quality of the vintage that’s at stake, but the nature of the combination. As Italian winemakers are often acutely aware, the abbinamento – the match between the food and the wine – is crucial. The flavors of the venison Wellington preparation needed not a nuanced wine but a bold one. The lobster Thermidor, on the other hand, was all about nuance, which is why the more complex Puligny worked better with it.

After this Lucullan feast, five magnificently satisfied diners made their various ways home, blissfully smiling all the way. No dessert had been needed or desired: no wonder.

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One Fine Wine: Drouhin’s Puligny Montrachet Les Folatières 2010

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

Most Burgundian experts – I do not pretend to be one – agree that the Puligny appellation stands at the peak of Burgundy’s white wine mountain.  Clive Coates flat out calls it “the greatest white wine commune on earth,” and I’m not prepared to argue with him.  Within the confines of the Puligny commune (not a big one, by the way: 230 hectares of vineyards by Coates’s count) lie the Grands Crus Chevalier-Montrachet and Bienvenues-Bâtard-Montrachet, as well as parts of Bâtard-Montrachet and the glorious Le Montrachet, plus 23 premiers crus (all or parts thereof).  Just statistically, that’s impressive.

Tasting the wines is all the more impressive.  These wines strike the palate as big but not heavy, with the bright, mineral attack of lighter-bodied wines and the persistence and depth of more full-bodied ones: a classic Burgundian balancing act, in fact.  Coates describes the wines of the Folatières vineyards, which are my specific focus here, as “fullish, meaty, mineral wine with plenty of weight of fruit and good grip – a typical Puligny premier cru in fact.”  I’m not sure I understand or agree with all that, but I recognize it’s meant as high praise – and that I emphatically agree with.

A week or so ago, Diane indulged my nostalgia for one of the best dishes of my youth by making for us a lovely dinner centered on veal francese, a simple, succulent dish that I thought worthy of a better wine than had ever been available for it in the local restaurants of Jersey City (in those days a dying industrial town of declining prosperity and population).  Especially since we were preceding it with some lovely Scotch smoked salmon, I thought I’d follow the hint of its name and match it with a good French white.  I was lucky enough to have on hand a modestly aged single-vineyard Puligny Montrachet, a 2010 from Drouhin, one of the producer-negociants that I rely on for consistent quality and a house style that emphasizes elegance rather than brute force.  Drouhin didn’t let me down: That golden-in-the-glass Folatières just sang with every aspect of that meal, from the smoke and salt of the salmon to the delicate meat sweetness and succulence of the veal.

Most people think of the wines of Burgundy as historic, originating on sites first farmed by Medieval monks, if not before that by Celts and Romans.  But Folatières is of more recent development: The village of Puligny and the fame of Montrachet may be many centuries old, but the high-hillside, rocky vineyards of Folatières are only about a hundred years old.
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Their quality was evident from their earliest yields, and the appellation quickly assumed the importance and commanded the respect it is now routinely and deservedly given.  My 2010 Drouhin was, by the standards of great Burgundian whites, still very young, and it evidently had many more years before it than was at all likely that I could wait.  Be that as it may: By my standards, it was one fine wine.

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An Oenological Linguistic Trifecta

The recent publication of Wines and Vineyards of Burgundy (ArteVino, 2018) achieves a new high in the internationalization of wine, as well as being a serious accomplishment in wine criticism: It’s a fine English translation of a truly interesting Italian book about some wonderful French wine.

This attractive, informative volume by Camillo Favaro and Giampaolo Gravina was translated and edited by Burton Anderson in collaboration with Joanie Bonfiglio. Anderson also contributed a preface. The book has handsome photos by Maurizio Gjivovich, as well as a suite of clear and useful maps.

Italians have a different take on French wine than most Anglophone winos, a fact that made this book very interesting to me as a cultural or cross-cultural document. An inferiority complex about French wines used to color almost all my conversations with Italians about foreign wines, leading to the most preposterous overcompensations – for example, a young winemaker in Venezia-Giulia, many years ago, who had never travelled farther than Venice but who solemnly assured me that his indifferent white wine was as good as Chablis, which he had never tasted.

Fortunately, such episodes are now a thing of the rapidly receding past, and Italian winemakers these days are a lot more sophisticated. Most are much travelled, not just to their markets but also to their international colleagues and competitors. For many, that means what amounts to a pilgrimage to Burgundy, with which they often feel a deep affinity.

Most Italians even remotely professionally connected with wine – especially Piedmontese – are thinking about Burgundy when they talk about French wine. (The big exception to that gross generalization is Tuscany, where the ties to Bordeaux hold strong.)  Favaro and Gravina are typical in their passion for Burgundy, though far above average in the extent of their enthusiasm and their qualifications for writing about it.
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Camillo Favaro (left, above) runs both his family winery in the Piedmont and ArteVinoStudio, an agency devoted to creative communication and design work for wineries.

Giampaolo Gravina (right) is a professor of philosophy who has also had a long career as a wine journalist, most notably as one of the editors of L’Espresso’s annual Vini d’Italia.

Both have written books on wine, separately and in collaboration: This present work is an expansion and updating of their earlier Vini e Terre di Borgogna.

Wines and Vineyards of Burgundy has little to say about the large négociant firms. Its focus is on the smaller, largely family-owned domaines – some 200 of them. The authors know their business: Just as one example, their presentation of the Chablis of Dauvissat makes a point of praising the firm’s Petit Chablis, a lovely and often overlooked wine whose “aromatics and articulation are much superior to the appellation’s standards.”

They are similarly well informed about all the domaines they feature. I was impressed, for instance, with their discussion of the soil differences and consequent differing styles of Chambolle-Musigny, a wine that is one of my favorites and a Burgundy area I thought I knew well: I learned some new things in reading through this section – as I did also in reading about Nuits-Saint-Georges, another of my favorites.

I think that Favaro and Gravina are spot-on in their characterization of the producers they discuss: The better I know the wines in question, the more I agree with. For instance, their description of Henri Gouges’s 2015s: “despite their typical internal density, our tastings have brought to light a general fusion of fleshiness with surprisingly accessible, delicious juice.”  Absolutely right, for my palate.

The two writers often manage to convey a lot of information in a direct, no-words-wasted manner. To loop back to Chablis, they very concisely describe the near austerity of Dauvissat’s cellar regime (“fermentations in used barrels, no battonage, decantation and tartrate precipitation due to natural cold, no new barrels for the élevages”) before summarizing succinctly and gracefully the character of Dauvissat’s wines – to wit: “wines of rare transparency and expressive purity, but always vibrant and sincere, never lacking tension, and capable of aging very well while expressing with nonchalance extreme precision and stylistic self-awareness.”

Nonchalance may be a bit over the top, but by and large I wish I’d said that. The writing throughout is of that high level, beautifully conveyed by the translators. Wines and Vineyards of Burgundy was for me a very enjoyable, very informative, and very personal excursion to Burgundy, and I think it will be so for any lover of Burgundy’s wines.

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