Judgment of Paris

by George M. Taber

  While in the army in the early 1960s, Luper had learned Czech at the Army Language School in Monterey, California, before being stationed in West Germany. So in 1993 he moved his family to the Slovak Republic, where the post-Communism era was blooming and he thought he could do some consulting and exporting of wines back to the U.S. That project fell apart in less than a year, and Luper left for a job in Portugal, consulting with a winery based in Lisbon.

  In 1996, he joined Real Companhia Velha in Porto. The company was founded in 1756 by royal decree and had long been a major producer of Port, but the market for that fortified wine was growing very slowly. Under the strict rules of the Douro region, whoseappellation system dates back to the mid-eighteenth century, nearly two hundred years before the French one, about half of all grapes grown there have to go into making Port. The rest have traditionally been made into jug wine, which rarely found its way out of Portugal. After a market study of Portuguese wines done for the government by Harvard’s Michael Porter, Real Companhia Velha decided to start production of quality table wines. Luper was brought in to lead the project. He also oversees the Port production, but his focus is more on table wines.

  For Luper making wine in Portugal was like his first days back in the Napa Valley working for the Louis M. Martini Winery and Freemark Abbey. Everything was again new and interesting. Real Companhia Velha owns 1,360 acres of prime Douro Valley vineyards and was ready to make the investments necessary for the upgrading project to succeed.

  Luper, though, was shocked by what he found in both the winery and the vineyards. The winemaking was primitive. White wines often turned bad because of oxidation, and malolactic fermentation took place by chance, rather than by design. The equipment was old, and there was little coordination between the winemakers in the cellars and the viticulturists in the fields.

  Portuguese wines were a whole new world for Luper. Although Real had started replanting some vineyards with international varietals like Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc, the vast majority of its vineyards were covered with Portuguese grapes that bore names like Touriga Nacional, Tinta Barroca, and Touriga Francesa, which were totally new to him. Some forty red-wine grapes, most of them little known outside Portugal, are authorized to be grown in the Douro. Luper quickly concluded that red wines were the Douro’s strength and would be its future.

  With management’s backing, Luper set out to remake the line of table wines. He hired two winemakers and two viticulturists, all straight out of school, so that he could, as he said, “teach them from square one the right kind of attitude and the right kind of approach to making world-class wines.” Luper also had to teach his people how to taste—how to recognize the new easy-drinking, international style in wines that emphasized rich fruit and mellow oak flavors. “If you don’t recognize it, you can’t make it,” he told his staff. Luper installed thirty-five new fermentation tanks and seventy-two new storage tanks plus small oak barrels for aging.

  While the bulk of Real Companhia Velha’s business is still in Port, with 70 percent of that being exported, table wine production has grown to more than 300,000 cases a year since Luper arrived. About 70 percent of the table wine is still consumed domestically, but the company is looking abroad for growth, primarily to Western Europe. One 370-acre vineyard has been planted with international grapes—Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Sémillon, and Cabernet Sauvignon.

  The more interesting Luper wines from Portugal, however, are those made primarily with local grapes that are grown nowhere else in the world. These are sold under six brands: Evel, Grantom, Grandjó, Quinta de Cidrô, Quinta dos Aciprestes, and Porca de Murça. All of the wines are from the Douro district. Luper thinks that two Portuguese grapes, Touriga Nacional and Touriga Francesa, have the greatest potential. All of the red wines and most of the whites are aged in oak.

  Dating back to his Napa Valley days, Luper has always been someone who holds down more than one job. He made the Diamond Creek wines for more than twenty years, while also having full-time jobs at other wineries. Now in addition to making wines for Real Companhia Velha, he also has his own small winery in Pinhão, an hour-and-a-half’s drive east of Porto in the Douro Valley area known as Trás-os-Montes or Behind the Mountains.

  While he was still consulting in Lisbon, Luper started looking to buy land in Portugal for a winery. Like so many other Napa Valley winemakers, Luper and his wife had always dreamed of having their own place. For two years, he visited Portuguese vineyards and became better acquainted with local grapes. Finally in 1995, he returned from a trip and told Carolee that he thought the Douro was “the place where we can spend the rest of our lives.” Finally they found the right property in the village of Pinhão. The vineyard was located high above the Douro River on a north-facing slope, where he believes growing conditions are ideal for his grapes.

  On the ten-acre property was a rundown house that hadn’t been occupied for several years but had a rudimentary winery in the basement. The property also included 6.4 acres planted with a hodgepodge of Portuguese grapes and 264 olive trees. Luper later found a 1758 map that showed that the property received an “A” rating under the ancient Douro system, which meant that the grapes from there received the highest prices. Luper named the winery Quinta da Carolina in honor of his wife.

  Production at the winery had to be limited because of the Douro regulations requiring that half the grapes be used for Port. Luper had to sell off those grapes to Port producers. Only with the rest could he make his wine. At the beginning, Luper couldn’t make more than 400 cases annually, but he reminded himself that at Diamond Creek the first vintage had been only 175 cases and that some of the prized Burgundy wines have similarly low production.

  “One family, one vineyard, one wine” was Luper’s motto for this new passion. His goal, he said, was to make a “superpremium wine from the old vines planted with the traditional Douro varietals.” Quinta da Carolina is a handcrafted wine. Grapes have to be picked manually because the vineyard is too steep for any equipment to be used. His first vintage in 1999 was made with ten grape varieties, and each grape, according to Luper, brought something to the final product. The 25 percent Tinta Barroca, for example, provided good body and mild tannins. The 20 percent Touriga Francesa gave floral and slightly herbaceous aromas. After picking, the grapes were crushed in a basket press, fermented in shallow, open, epoxy-lined tanks, and then aged for seventeen months in French, American, and Portuguese oak. The wine had a relatively high 13.9 percent alcohol. The entire 1999 harvest produced 350 cases, which he bottled on September 10, 2001, and released in late 2002.

  As a blend of ten varieties of grapes, Quinta da Carolina is different from most other ultrapremium wine on the market. Its French, American, or Australian competitors are made from perhaps three or four of the same noble international grapes. Luper, though, says that the flavor profile for the Quinta da Carolina has been “tested and proven in centuries of making vintage Port.” It is indeed a unique wine whose intense and complex, but different, flavors stand out in the crowded world of First Growth wannabes. Steven Spurrier, writing in the British wine magazineDecanter, gave Luper’s first vintage high praise: “The berry fruit flavors come bursting through and the finish is long and succulent.” The 1999 Quinta da Carolina was marketed in Europe and the U.S. mainly through the contacts Luper had built up from his decades in the wine business. It quickly sold out for about $50 a bottle on the U.S. East Coast.

  Since that initial vintage, Luper has slowly been building a market for the first wine in a long career to carry his name. “You have to prove yourself and produce consistently high quality for several years before your wine can be called an ultrapremium and get 97 points from one of the prestigious wine magazines.” He is already receiving 90-plus scores.

  Puente Alto, Chile

  The Rothschild clan, the first family of international finance, has always been a global enterprise. Its banking business was started in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1750 and soon developed both an Engl
ish and a French wing in addition to operations in other major financial centers around the world. So it is not surprising that the family has also embraced the globalization of wine.

  Château Mouton Rothschild came in second at the Spurrier tasting. A Rothschild isn’t used to coming in second in anything, and soon after the event Baron Philippe de Rothschild began seriously exploring the possibility of doing a joint venture in the newly respected Napa Valley. In 1978, he invited Robert Mondavi to visit him at his château in Bordeaux. The baron gave Mondavi and his daughter Marcia the royal treatment during a tour of his winery and wine museum. The baron left nothing to chance, and the wines served at dinner in the family library included a century-old Mouton plus a bottle of the fabled 1945 Château d’Yquem.

  The next morning the two men agreed to form a 50-50 partnership. The winery would be located in California and would draw on the technology and experience of both parent companies. Mondavi wrote in his memoirs that the goal was “to create a wine like no other, a great wine with its own style, character, and breeding.” Rothschild and Mondavi named the winery Opus One, and the label carried the silhouette of both men, back to back. The inaugural vintage was in 1979, and the first case sold to the public went for $24,000 at the 1981 Napa Valley Wine Auction, a charity event. The wine was released to the general public in 1984 at $50 a bottle.

  After Baron Philippe’s death in 1988, his daughter, the Baroness Philippine de Rothschild, took over the family business and began looking abroad to where she too could launch another joint venture and produce another wine that would gain international recognition. Her attention soon centered on Chile, a country with old ties to French winemaking and one that was beginning to produce quality wines.

  As in other parts of the New World, wine followed the flag and the Roman Catholic Church to Chile. Missionaries accompanying the conquistadors encouraged grape planting to make wine for religious purposes, and the first Chilean vintage was in 1551. Early in the nineteenth century Chile won its independence from Spain and soon after, a close relationship in wine production developed between France and Chile. Vine cuttings of the great Bordeaux grapes—Cabernet Sauvignon, Carmenère, Merlot, Sauvignon Blanc, and Sémillon—were brought to Chile, where they prospered. Many of today’s leading Chilean wineries were started in the second half of the nineteenth century with French cuttings.

  Chile’s geographical isolation in the mid-nineteenth century turned out to be its salvation. The phylloxera epidemic never reached its distant plants, and even today most of its vineyards do not have grafted vines like those prevalent in almost all the rest of the world. The old French grape Carmenère, which was widely used in Bordeaux blends in the nineteenth century to smooth out the harshness of Cabernet Sauvignon, disappeared in France after phylloxera because it did not successfully graft. Carmenère, though, survived in Chile and is still widely grown today.

  Despite Chile’s French connection and old vineyards, the country’s wine business remained a backwater until the last two decades. A few of its better wines were exported to Europe, but most were mediocre and consumed locally or in neighboring Latin American countries. Chile’s warm and dry climate favored wine production, but the country gets little grape season rainfall and had only a primitive irrigation system that relied on snow runoff from the Andes Mountains, which form the country’s long eastern border. In the international wine trade Chile was known as a producer of cheap wines with little finesse.

  In addition to being isolated geographically, Chile was a political and economic outcast after the 1973coup d’etat led by General Augusto Pinochet that toppled the elected leftist president Salvador Allende. After that no politically correct person in Europe or the U.S. would drink Chilean wines, no matter how attractive the price. The Pinochet government, though, introduced free-market economic reforms that removed government restrictions on business and encouraged Chilean companies to look abroad for their future expansion after identifying wine as a product with great export potential.

  A renaissance started in Chilean wine in the mid-1980s and gathered force after Pinochet’s rule ended in 1990 when drinking Chilean wines again became politically correct abroad. No country in the world has ever gone through such a rapid transformation of its wine sector. In the fifteen years between 1985 and 2000, Chile’s vineyards and wine companies moved from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century. With the help of foreign investment and the encouragement of the government, Chilean wineries threw away ancient equipment and imported state-of-the-art grape crushers, stainless-steel fermentation tanks, and oak barrels from Europe. For five years in a row in the 1990s, Chile was the biggest importer of European winemaking equipment. Farmers undertook a massive planting of new vineyards, pulling out low-quality grapes like País, the Chilean version of the old Mission grapes once grown widely in California, and developing new areas like the Casablanca Valley. Viticulturists put in the popular international varietals such as Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, and Merlot. Between 1985 and 1997 the area of Cabernet Sauvignon planting increased from 20,122 acres to 39,525 acres, while Chardonnay went from 605 acres to 13,747 acres and Merlot/Carmenère jumped from 2,471 acres to 14,187 acres.

  While Chile’s own domestic wine consumption was dropping more than 50 percent in those years, going from 9.9 gallons per capita in 1984 to 4.7 gallons in 2000, Chilean wine exports exploded. They grew from $9 million in 1984 to $267 million in 2000, and the number of foreign markets during that time went from thirty-six to ninety-five. Just as Australia before it, Chile has a laser focus on exports.

  All of this would not have happened without drip irrigation, which was introduced starting in the 1980s. The country’s arid conditions and primitive irrigation system had held back the growth of quality grapes for centuries. The new irrigation system opened the way to growing not only better grapes but also in areas where grapes had never been cultivated, such as the Casablanca Valley. Water from the Andes was too far away from that valley located forty-five miles west of Santiago and twenty miles east of the port city of Valparaíso. Casablanca Valley today is dotted with vineyards producing some of the country’s best Chardonnays and Sauvignon Blancs.

  The leader of the Chilean wine revolution was the country’s largest producer, Viña Concha y Toro. Founded in 1883 by Don Melchor Concha y Toro, who imported vine cuttings from France, the company exported its first wines in 1933 and slowly became a major producer, shipping mainly to Latin American countries. Starting in the 1980s, Concha y Toro launched a program to go for both better quality wines and more exports. It began experimenting with a new top-of-the-line Cabernet Sauvignon, Don Melchor, and in 1985 sent samples to France to get the reactions of wine experts there. They were good, and the first Don Melchor was released in 1989.

  In 1991, Concha y Toro started a major investment program, buying land in both Chile and Argentina and installing new equipment and increasing storage capacity. Three years later, the company raised $50 million when it became the first foreign winery to be traded on the New York Stock Exchange. All the money was plowed back into the business, and the payoff soon followed. The company now owns more than nine thousand acres of vineyards in eighteen locations in Chile plus an additional thousand acres in Argentina. Concha y Toro exports 75 percent of its production. Its greatest market is the U.S., where it was the largest imported brand from 2000 to 2002, selling 2 million cases annually.

  Foreign winemakers had started showing interest in Chile before Pinochet left power and that movement gathered force when he stepped down. Spain’s Miguel Torres was the first of many Europeans to use his winemaking skills and new equipment in Chile. Several French wineries made investments, usually with local partners. Chile also became a stopping-off spot for the flying winemakers who consult around the world. The French, who seem more comfortable in a Latin country like Chile than in the Napa Valley, led the way. Bordeaux’s Michel Rolland was a very active consultant at Casa Lapostolle, which was founded as a joint venture between
France’s Alexandra Marnier-Lapostolle, part of the Grand Marnier family, and a Chilean partner. France’s Jacques Lurton consulted with Viña San Pedro, while his compatriot Jacques Boissenot worked for Veramonte, and Australia’s Ron Potter was instrumental in the design of the J. Bouchon winery.

  Robert Mondavi made two joint ventures with the Eduardo Chadwick family, a leader of Chilean wine. The first venture was Viña Caliterra in 1989, which in 2001 started a second label, Arboleda. The partners also launched the ultrapremium brand Seña in 1995. The Mondavis have shown particular interest in Chilean Carmenère.

  With all the wine activity going on in Chile, it was natural for the Baron Philippe de Rothschild company to look closely at that country in the mid-1990s. It was also natural that Rothschild would team up with Concha y Toro, the country’s largest producer. The precedent of its 50-50 deal with Mondavi had already been established. With its eighteen vineyards around Chile, Concha y Toro offered Rothschild the greatest choice of locations.

  Discussions began in 1995, and the next year the two companies made a test vintage to see what they could produce together. The 643-acre Concha y Toro vineyard in Puente Alto, where grapes used in the Don Melchor wine are grown, was selected for the experiment. Concha y Toro winemakers told their Rothschild counterparts that they thought that vineyard was the best place in Chile to grow Cabernet Sauvignon grapes, which would be the backbone of the new wine. The vineyard is located in the shadow of the snow-capped Andes. According to an old Bordeaux truism, poor soil makes great wine, so Puente Alto should do well. The vineyard’s soil is very rocky, with some stones the size of footballs.