The test vintage of 1996 was considered a success. The wine was not yet on a par with Mouton, but the taste ofterroir that French winemakers always look for was clearly present. The wine had great potential, and in the right hands both sides thought it could be outstanding. A joint-venture deal was signed in 1997. As at Opus One, it would be a 50-50 partnership. The winery’s name would be Almaviva after a character inThe Marriage of Figaro by Pierre de Beaumarchais, a play that Mozart later made into an opera. A descendent of Beaumarchais was a close friend of Philippine de Rothschild. Concha y Toro brought to the joint venture ninety-nine acres of Puente Alto vineyards, and Rothschild brought its name as well as its knowledge of winemaking and connections in the wine trade. Thanks to the Rothschild pull, the new wine would be distributed through the Bordeauxnégociant system, the first non-French wine ever to be accepted into that very private club.
With the exception of themaître de chai, Philippe Bujard, who had previously worked for Mouton Rothschild in France, everything at Almaviva is shared in the spirit of the joint venture. There are co–general managers, one from Concha y Toro and one from Rothschild, and co-winemakers, one from each side. Rothschild had one specific request of its partners. It wanted someone from one of the two families that have controlling interest in Concha y Toro, the Guiliasastis and Larraíns, to have a prominent role in the new venture to assure harmony at the top. Thus Filipe Larraín is the Chilean co–general manager. Even the label for the new wine is 50-50. The names of both partners appear on it. The brand name is written in a style imitating the handwriting of Beaumarchais, and the label contains several examples of pre-Hispanic native art.
Bujard says his goal is to “make a Mouton in Chile”—a Médoc-style red wine but on the basis of Chileanterroir . The ninety-nine acres of vineyard that Concha y Toro gave Almaviva were eighteen years old at the time and contained nongrafted vines planted at a density of about 800 vines per acre, far less than the 3,200 vines per acre at Mouton. It was impractical to pull that vineyard out and start all over, but slowly Bujard is making changes. Almaviva has since bought 111 additional acres and has been planting grafted vines on the new property. Eventually Almaviva will have only grafted vines. Bujard thinks the quality of the grapes from such vines is better and will protect the vineyard against any future outbreak of phylloxera. Even though Chile avoided the nineteenth-century epidemic, it will likely hit the country someday since modern transportation makes the country less isolated than before. The new vineyards are also being planted at the Mouton density.
Harvests in the Southern Hemisphere, of course, are in April, rather than October as they are in the Northern Hemisphere, but Bujard says the biggest difference between winemaking in Bordeaux and in Puente Alto is the climate. Almaviva enjoys steady sunshine from September to May, with less than an inch of rain during the entire growing season. Bordeaux winemakers dread rain during harvest because it can bloat grapes and dilute the natural flavors, but in arid Puente Alto rain during harvest is never a problem. Bujard irrigates the vines about twice a week from November to March, but never in the last month before picking when the grapes are ripening in the sun. Given the warm, dry climate the wine reaches a 13.5 to 14 percent level of alcohol very quickly.
The heritage of Almaviva may be ancient, but the winery is the epitome of modernity. Designed by a Chilean architect and encompassing myriad examples of native culture, the large wooden structure is packed with the latest European-made equipment. The stainless-steel tanks are from the same French producer that makes them for Mouton and Opus One. The press is of Swiss-French construction, and the five hundred aging barrels come from the same eight French producers that supply them to Mouton. During my visit to Almaviva, red lights flashed the temperatures from each tank in the fermentation room, and the spotless stainless-steel scene reminded me more of a hospital operating room than a French country winery.
The winemaking process at Almaviva is almost a carbon copy of that at Mouton, with only a few minor changes because of differing climatic conditions. Grapes are handpicked and placed in twenty-two-pound plastic boxes that are exactly like the ones used at Mouton. Just as with all classic Bordeaux red wines, Almaviva is a blend of several varietals. The amounts vary slightly from year to year depending on the weather, but the blend is generally about 75 percent Cabernet Sauvignon, 20 percent Carmenère, and 5 percent Cabernet Franc. The wine is aged in 100 percent new barrels for sixteen to eighteen months before bottling and then released two years after the vintage.
Almaviva currently produces thirteen thousand cases annually, and the wine has its largest following in France, Switzerland, Germany, Japan, and the United States. When the winery’s new property is in full production in about a decade, Bujard expects it to be producing thirty thousand cases a year.
Tasted side by side, anyone would easily note differences between a Mouton Rothschild and an Almaviva, although both are excellent examples of a winemaker’s artistry. A Mouton is more tannic and the flavors more intense than an Almaviva of the same vintage. To be appreciated at its fullestlevel of perfection, the Mouton is best enjoyed at least five years after its vintage, and perhaps even longer. The Almaviva wine, on the other hand, reaches its peak more quickly and can be enjoyed earlier.
Willamette Valley, Oregon
A Beaune Clos des Mouches from Maison Joseph Drouhin, one of the leading wineries in Burgundy, placed fifth in the Chardonnay part of the Spurrier tasting. Three years later at the Wine Olympics staged in Paris byGaultMillau, Drouhin got another shock from the New World. A 1975 Eyrie Vineyards Reserve Pinot Noir from Oregon caught the attention of French winemakers, although it came in only tenth in its category. By now they were familiar with wine from California, but most French winemakers were not even aware that wine was being produced in Oregon, and almost no one had ever heard of Eyrie Vineyards.
Robert Drouhin, who ran the family firm Maison Joseph Drouhin, was not as surprised as many others and took the Oregon challenge seriously. He had already been introduced to the state in 1961, when he was on a promotional tour of the West Coast to market his wines. One day his local sales representative suggested that he take a day off and visit the Willamette Valley, an area about an hour’s drive southwest of Portland. Drouhin was struck by the similarity between the Red Hills region near the small town of Dundee and the area outside Beaune, where Drouhin is located. Both had gently rolling hills, and both are surrounded by two mountain ranges. In Burgundy they are the Alps and the Jura, while in Oregon they are the Cascade and Coast ranges. The amount of annual rainfall in the two places was about the same, although in Burgundy the rain is spread throughout the year while in Oregon it is largely concentrated in the winter months.
The most significant difference between the two regions, Drouhin concluded, was the soil, which to a French winemaker steeped interroir was crucially important. The soil in Burgundy, for the most part, is limestone. In Oregon it is a mixture of ancient volcanic and alluvial soils left from the giant Missoula floods that swept through the area some fifteen thousand years ago during the last Ice Age. So Drouhin noted the similarities of the two places, but never thought at the time of making wine there, perhaps because no one was then doing that in Oregon.
Drouhin’s interest in Oregon, though, deepened after the Wine Olympics, and he staged an informal blind tasting for some of his employees and friends between his own best Pinot Noirs and several of the new Oregon wines. The company’s 1959 Grand Cru Joseph Drouhin Chambertin won first place, but only a few tenths of a point ahead of a 1975 Eyrie South Block Pinot Noir.
What was Eyrie Vineyards? The story by now had a familiar ring. Its owner David Lett, who had grown up on a farm near Salt Lake City, had studied enology at the University of California, Davis, worked for Lee Stewart at Souverain Cellars, and then spent a year in France learning more about his passion: Pinot Noir. After returning to the U.S., Lett concluded that the temperatures in California’s wine country were too hot for Burgundy-style wine
s, so he headed north to the cooler Willamette Valley, where he started his winery in 1966. A year later he planted the first Pinot Noir in the valley. Lett seemed to have discovered something that overcame the differences in soil that bothered Drouhin during his 1961 visit.
At the time of Drouhin’s Pinot Noir tasting, his daughter Véronique was studying enology at the University of Dijon. When she graduated in 1986, Véronique asked her father if he could arrange to get her an internship in California. She knew Burgundy well, having grown up there, and had already had an internship in Bordeaux, so she was interested in going to a New World winery. Her father said that he could easily get her a summer job at the Robert Mondavi Winery or Beringer Vineyards in the Napa Valley, but suggested that she go to Oregon, where he thought the best Pinot Noir outside Burgundy might someday be made. Drouhin’s local distributor arranged for Véronique to spend the 1986 harvest at three top Oregon wineries—Eyrie, Adelsheim, and Bethel Heights.
Both the quality of the wines she found in Oregon and the openness of the local winemakers impressed her, as they did her father when he visited during her stay. Oregon winemakers quickly realized that their credibility would be greatly increased if a Burgundy winemaker with the renown of Drouhin were to begin making wine there. For his part, Robert Drouhin was open to the idea of starting a winery in Oregon because of the limited possibilities he had for expansion in Burgundy, where good vineyard land rarely comes up for sale and when it does the price is usually astronomical. If he wanted to expand, he would have to do it outside France, and the wine potential of Oregon since that initial visit in 1961 had always intrigued him. Before leaving Oregon that summer of 1986, Drouhin told some local winemakers to let him know if any good property came on the market.
Things began to move quickly. In the early summer of 1987, Drouhin received a phone call from David Adelsheim of the Adelsheim Vineyard, telling him that some interesting property was indeed now on the market. It was located near David Lett’s vineyards and perhaps had great potential for making Burgundy style wines. Lett already had enough property and wasn’t interested in buying it.
A month later, Drouhin went to Oregon to attend the second annual International Pinot Noir Celebration and to inspect the property. He liked what he saw. The land was located on a gently rolling hill facing southeast—just as in Burgundy. The difference in soil, though, was still an issue. Drouhin was intimately familiar with Burgundy’s limestone, but this was entirely newterroir to him. Drouhin walked the land, looked over all the vegetation, and had soil samples analyzed. Finally, in late 1987, he wrote the check to buy 225 acres that had previously been covered with Christmas trees, hazelnut trees, and wheat.
At the conclusion of her studies, Véronique arrived in the Willamette Valley as the winemaker for the new Domaine Drouhin Oregon. Realizing it would take several years to get their own vineyards into production, she bought Pinot Noir grapes in 1988 and produced a first vintage at a nearby winery.
At the same time, the Drouhin family began to design and build a winery and vineyard from scratch. In contrast to Burgundy, where land is at a premium, the new Oregon property stretched out as well as down into the ground. A decade earlier Drouhin had built a new winery in Burgundy, and he used what had been learned there for the new four-floor, gravity-flow structure in Oregon.
Véronique’s older brother, Philippe, who oversees the vineyards for all the family company’s properties, directed the planting, which soon totaled seventy-eight acres of Pinot Noir. The viticulture department at the University of Burgundy in Dijon had been developing the so-called Dijon clones from the best Burgundy vineyards, and in 1990 those were brought into the U.S. through Oregon State University at Corvallis. Until that point French clones had always been brought into the U.S. via the University of California at Davis, but the Drouhins were anxious to show their support for the Oregon university. They eventually imported a total of eight Pinot Noir clones and three Chardonnay ones.
The vineyard is very much Burgundian in style, with a much higher acreage density than other Oregon wineries. The Drouhin vineyard has 3,100 plants to the acre, about twice that of other local wineries although still not as dense as in Burgundy. The goal is to force plants to drive their roots deep into the soil, where they can capture the most minerals and produce the best wines. The vines are also pruned lower to the ground than is the custom in American vineyards. Drip irrigation was installed in the vineyard and was used for the first three years to get the new vines started. But since then, there has been no irrigation. Watering vines is outlawed in Burgundy, and Drouhin believes dry farming will also eventually produce better wines in Oregon.
The original business plan was to grow only Pinot Noir at Domaine Drouhin Oregon, but in view of the popularity in the United States of Burgundy’s other great grape, the company planted twelve acres of Chardonnay. Oregon vintners had faced problems with the widely used Davis 108 clone, which was developed for California’s warm weather and produces fruit that ripens late in the season but was inappropriate for Oregon’s climate. The University of Dijon clones, however, have worked much better in Oregon than the Davis one.
The biggest challenge facing Véronique Drouhin is to discover which sections of the Oregon property can produce the best wine, a process ofterroir study, she says, that could easily take another thirty years. To help speed the research along, small blocks of grapes are picked and fermented separately. The vineyard has been divided into thirty-two blocks, and each has its own fermenting tank, so there is no mixing of grapes or wines. Other wineries would have far fewer fermenting tanks, but Drouhin says the extra equipment is necessary so that the staff can study the product from each block of land more closely.
While American winemakers embraced the use of French oak in the 1960s, Drouhin Oregon uses oak modestly. Barrels are used for six years, meaning that only about 16 percent of the wine is aged each year in new barrels. Chardonnay is aged about nine months in barrels, while Pinot Noir is aged one year. The cellar is kept at a constant temperature of 55 degrees and 85 percent humidity. The Chardonnay is stored in a separate section of the cellar, where the temperature is slightly higher.
Domaine Drouhin Oregon now produces annually about 15,000 cases of wine. Pinot Noir makes up about 85 percent of output, of which 10,000 cases are labeled Willamette Valley Pinot Noir. As befitting a family business, Véronique has named three of her most prized wines after her children. In 1992, she produced her first vintage of Laurène Pinot Noir, named after her first daughter, which is made from a selection of the ten best vineyard blocks. Only 2,000 cases are bottled each year. Louise Pinot Noir, named after her second daughter, is even more selective, coming from the eight best barrels of the year and producing 200 cases. The first vintage of Louise was 1999, and with it Véronique is trying to create a wine that approaches the quality of Burgundy’s Chambolle-Musigny, her favorite wine. Willamette Pinot Noir is released two years after vintage, while Laurène and Louise are released after three years. Drouhin also produces 2,000 cases of Chardonnay, which is named Arthur in honor of Véronique’s only son. It is released one year after vintage.
About 80 percent of Domaine Drouhin Oregon’s production is sold in the U.S., with a large share of the rest going to Japan, Britain, and Canada. A small amount is shipped back to France, where it is sold as a novelty by the large wine chain Nicolas.
Véronique Drouhin spends about three months of the year in Oregon, with the biggest concentration of time in the fall during harvest and winemaking. Throughout that always tiring, always tense time of year, she can be seen on the first and second levels of the winery with folder in hand, carefully keeping track of the progress of the wines. She writes a large letterP on the tank’s control sheet when it’s time to punch down the cap, a hard crust of skins and seeds that forms during fermentation.
The goal of Véronique Drouhin is to produce in Oregon the same style wine that made her family famous in Burgundy. She eschews the powerful wines popular with s
ome local winemakers. Her Oregon Pinot Noir, however, has a spicier taste with more black fruit flavors—black cherry, black currant—than Drouhin’s Burgundy counterpart. The alcohol level rises more quickly in Oregon, and only once since she started making wines there—in the wet 1997—did she have to chaptalize or add sugar to the must to increase the alcohol level. Chaptalization is much more common in Burgundy. Drouhin says her Oregon wines today are closest to Burgundy’s Vosne-Romanée.
“Elegance” is a word Drouhin uses frequently when talking about her wines. When I noted after tasting her Chardonnay that the oak flavors were subtle, she replied with a sly smile, “I take that as a compliment.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
France Revisited
Wine makes every meal an occasion, every table more elegant, every day more civilized.
—ANDRÉ SIMON
At 3–5 Boulevard de la Madeleine in the heart of the right bank in Paris, and only a few hundred yards from where Steven Spurrier’s Caves de la Madeleine used to be located, is Lavinia. In the jargon of the American retail trade, it is a category-killer store like Home Depot or Toys ‘R’ Us, a place that stocks an exhaustive offering of products in the store’s particular field and thus dominates that market niche. Lavinia has everything to do with wine.
The airy shop with lots of space around product displays carries some 3,000 French wines, 2,000 wines from forty-two other countries, plus 1,000 kinds of brandies, whiskeys, and other spirits. There’s also a bookstore with volumes on wine in several languages, an exhaustive collection of corkscrews and other ways to open a wine bottle, plus glasses of every size and shape. The price of wines starts at less than $4 a bottle, and the wines come from not only all of the world’s major producers but also such unexpected places as Cuba and South Dakota. Lavinia has fifteen sommeliers on staff to help customers make their selection. In the cellar, which is precisely maintained at 57 degrees and 70 percent humidity, the most prized wines are kept behind a locked gate. There can be found a six-liter bottle of 1991 Romanée-Conti Pinot Noir selling for 36,000 ($47,000), or a standard-sized bottle of Bryant Family Vineyard Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon at 1,097.92 ($1,430). Visitors can buy a bottle of wine and then enjoy it—without any markup—in the Lavinia restaurant. The eatery also has a daily luncheon special with a recommended wine to accompany it, and the wine bar offers wine by the glass. And just as at Steven Spurrier’s old place, wine-appreciation courses are also available. Lavinia epitomizes the globalization of wine and the range of offerings available to today’s oenophile. The presence of this international wine superstore in the heart of Paris also exemplifies today’s changing French wine scene.
Judgment of Paris Page 35