A Hedonist in the Cellar

by Jay McInerney

  In place of chemicals, biodynamics relies heavily on composting and holistic teas made from nettles and horsetail. Advocates say that building soil and vine health can eliminate the need for insecticides. “We had a Chardonnay vineyard that was problematic,” says Rob Sinskey. “We had phylloxera, and we wanted to know why it was spreading so fast. We observed that the soil was dead; there were no earthworms. We started reading up on Steiner, going to Europe.” Following biodynamic viticulture slowed the spread of phylloxera, according to Sinskey, and vastly improved grape quality, to the point where the troubled vines now produce his best Chardonnay.

  Vine-munching insects are trapped on sticky paper and cremated, their ashes mixed in a solution that is sprayed in a vineyard to repel their fellows. Another preparation sometimes used, horn silica, a.k.a. quartz, is sprayed on vines between three a.m. and eight a.m. at the equinox. Steiner’s emphasis on lunar and cosmic rhythms can sound flaky to nonbelievers, but Benziger makes an intuitive case: “The moon moves the oceans, and plants are ninety-eight percent water.” Sinskey says that “Steiner refers to the silica spraying as focusing life forces. I see it as refracting light. I don’t know how it works. Using silica spray, we’ve seen sugars leap within twenty-four hours.”

  Perhaps the most arcane practice of biodynamic viticulture involves the aforementioned burying of manure in cow horns—which Steiner believed are infused with the life force— during the fall equinox. They are dug up in the spring and mixed into a homeopathic spray. Personally, I’d rather drink a wine nurtured with cow horn and nettles than one raised on phosphates and insecticides. The theory, if correct, suggests that biodynamic wines should taste better, and more site specific, in the long run, in addition to being safer, a conclusion that seems to be borne out by the recent wines of growers like Leroy, Leflaive, Zind-Humbrecht, and Chapoutier. But not all biodynamic wines are excellent: Nicolas Joly, of Coulée de Serrant, seems indifferent to the winemaking, as opposed to the winegrowing, process; his recent wines have often been oxidized and downright weird.

  Master of Wine Jancis Robinsion, who recently compared the biodynamic and conventional cuvées of Leflaive’s wines, says, “I do think that successful biodynamically grown wines do taste different—wilder, more intense, and dangerous— hunting dogs rather than lapdogs, if you like.”

  “I’m doing it because I think it produces great wines,” says Benziger, whose Sonoma Mountain estate wines are well worth seeking out. “I don’t want people to buy it because it’s biodynamic. I’m also hoping this property will be taken over by my kids, and I want to be able to hand them over a piece of property that’s increasing in health, not dying.”

  NEW ZEALAND’S SECOND ACT

  Not too long ago, in a faraway place now best known as Middle Earth, a wine was born. New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc appeared suddenly, as if it had sprung fully formed from Zeus’s head, and in the past decade it has taken its place alongside Barossa Shiraz and Napa Cabernet as a kind of instant classic. It was as though the Kiwis figured out how to bottle Kiri Te Kanawa’s voice. From this distance it appears that those few of her compatriots who weren’t employed as extras on Lord of the Rings were busy planting vines. That was Act One. Act Two is still getting under way.

  For those of you who missed Act One, here is a précis: in 1985 David Hohnen, owner of Cape Mentelle Vineyards in the Margaret River region of Western Australia, flew to New Zealand, convinced that the cool climate of the South Island could produce great Sauvignon Blanc. In fact, Montana, a big company based on the North Island, had already ventured south to plant Sauvignon in Marlborough in ′76, and its early bottlings were promising. Hohnen met winemaker Kevin Judd, hired him on the spot, and bought land in the Marlborough district, on the northeast corner of the island. Within a year the first vintage of Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc, made from locally purchased grapes, was creating a buzz and winning prizes in Australia and the United Kingdom.

  Within a decade Cloudy Bay had spawned numerous imitators and had helped create a new style of wine. For some reason, Sauvignon Blanc grown in cool, sunny Marlborough tastes like nothing else—certainly not like the lean, stony, lemony Sauvignons from Sancerre and Pouilly-Fumé. These Marlborough Sauvignons are fruit cocktails suggestive of lime, mango, grapefruit, and, especially, for those who have encountered them, gooseberries. Nearly everything on Carmen Miranda’s hat—along with a few renegade vegetables, like asparagus and bell pepper. What holds it all together is a wire-mesh foundation of acidity that comes from the long, cool growing season in this marginal climate.

  At this point, Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc is a category unto itself, so successful that it is inspiring emulation in South Africa and South America. It’s hard to go wrong buying a bottle, most of which fall in the ten- to twenty-dollar range. Brancott, Seresin, Villa Maria, and Thornbury are some of the more reliable producers. Chardonnay also does well in Marlborough, producing lean, racy versions. The most exotic Chardonnay seems to come from the warmer North Island, around Auckland. The Chards from Kumeu River Wines, founded in 1944, have developed a cult following in Great Britain and Australia over the years and are well worth seeking out, as are the big Chardonnays of nearby Matua.

  Pinot Noir is supposed to be the great red hope of this cool country. For years we’ve been hearing the buzz about the imminence of great Pinot, particularly from the Martinborough region. More recently, Central Otago has emerged as the great new terroir for Pinot. I have tasted some good ones from both regions—Martinborough Vineyard and Felton Road are worth seeking out—but for now the vines are young and Pinot Noir is, let’s face it, a bitch.

  One of the more promising developments in Act Two is taking shape in Hawke’s Bay, under the auspices of a new winery called Craggy Range, founded in 1999, which is producing single-vineyard bottlings of Sauvignon Blanc as well as red grape varietals—a new approach in New Zealand. American-born, Australian-based mogul Terry Peabody traveled the globe for seven years looking for the perfect spot to convert a fortune based on waste management into a world-class wine estate. Peabody settled on Hawke’s Bay, where vines have been grown since the nineteenth century, and hooked up with New Zealand viticulturalist Steve Smith, a cheerful polar bear of a man who, for all his antipodean mateyness, is a Master of Wine and a rabid Francophile.

  The first act of the New Zealand wine story relied heavily on technology, but Smith is a terroir freak, obsessed with expressing the individual characters of specific vineyard sites. Craggy Range’s first offering was a single-vineyard Sauvignon that was more polished and subtle than the typical Marlborough SB, if still recognizably New Zealand. This past year the winery released a stunning Puligny-like single-vineyard Chardonnay called Les Beaux Cailloux.

  Hawke’s Bay’s Bordeaux-like maritime climate had inspired earlier growers to plant Cabernet and Merlot. A warm and rocky district called the Gimblett Gravels winegrowing district is beginning to look ideal for Bordeaux grapes; a ′98 Merlot from the area, from C. J. Pask, won the gold medal in the Bordeaux red class at the 2000 International Wine Challenge. Craggy Range is about to release several small-production reds from this area, including a rich, silky Cabernet Franc– Merlot blend called Sophia and a blockbuster Syrah. If these wines are any indication, some of the protagonists of New Zealand’s second act will be red.

  Talking to some New Zealand winemakers one picks up a certain impatience, even embarrassment, about the spectacular success of Sauvignon Blanc. For some reason I’m reminded of John Grisham’s recent attempt to go upmarket with his “literary” novel, A Painted House, and of Paul McCartney’s symphony. I only hope that Kiwi winemakers, as they explore and develop new styles and new grapes, keep playing to their strengths, and our thirst. The late Auberon Waugh, who was pretty stingy with his compliments, once said, “It’s very difficult to be best in the world at anything, but New Zealand has achieved that distinction with Sauvignon Blanc.”

  NUMBER TWO AND BITCHING LOUDER

  Armagnac

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nbsp; I’m not a big drinker of spirits these days. Wine provides more nuance and interest at the expense of fewer brain cells. But I happened to acquire an interest in Armagnac during trips to Bordeaux, where it’s often served after dinner at the great châteaux, and at the renowned bistro La Tupina, where wine merchants and châteaux owners savor old Armagnac vintages after washing down a roast chicken with a bottle of Pauillac. Over time I came to appreciate the complexity and variety of France’s No. 2 brandy, as well as the sense of completion and contemplation inspired by an after-dinner snifter. “At its best,” claims British spirits expert Nicholas Faith, “Armagnac offers the drinker a depth, a natural sweetness, and a fullness unmatched by even the finest cognac.”

  Everyone in the heavily forested Gascony region, a hundred miles south of Bordeaux, will tell you that Armagnac is France’s oldest spirit, first distilled as early as 1411. Cognac got off to a much later start, but that town’s position on the Charente River allowed for easy transport and eventual international renown. The brandy of Armagnac remained something of a local cult, and it was often credited for the great longevity of the inhabitants. While Cognac production is concentrated in a handful of wealthy firms, Armagnac is still largely an artisanal product crafted by feisty individuals like Martine Lafitte of Domaine Boingnères.

  With her jet-black helmet of hair, her big Valentino tortoiseshell glasses, and her tiger-striped sweater and tight white pants, Lafitte might be the proprietress of a beauty salon or travel agency. Here in the homeland of d’Artagnan and foie gras, I was expecting someone a little more … rustic. One is tempted to say that she is not the typical Armagnac producer, except that the more people you talk to here, the more you realize that this is a region of Gallic individualists who passionately disagree about how to make le vrai Armagnac. In this regard, the region is more like Burgundy than Bordeaux—a place of small plots and contentious peasants going their own way, squabbling among themselves about le vrai Armagnac even as they insult the integrity of that other French brandy that fills duty-free shops around the globe.

  The Boingnères estate, in the Bas-Armagnac region, which has been in Lafitte’s family since 1807, comprises about fifty acres—not much when you consider that her Armagnac is in demand from Tokyo to New York. Half of that acreage is planted with the Folle Blanche grape, which is Lafitte’s particular passion. Folle Blanche is more difficult to raise than Ugni Blanc and Colombard, two more common grape varieties, and hence is on the decline, but to her mind it produces the richest and most aromatic Armagnac. Lafitte’s father was one of the great champions of Folle Blanche, but many of his neighbors disagreed with his strident advocacy of it as the true grape of Armagnac, preferring the more forgiving varieties. One day he arrived at his chai to find a cross of flowers from the cemetery in front of the cellar door. “It’s a tough region,” Martine Lafitte says proudly, getting a last drag on her Craven A before she takes me in to the cellar. “We fight for our beliefs.”

  Lafitte shows me the old-style alembic—twin copper towers wherein the wine is heated and evaporated in the winter, following the harvest. She distills to about 49 percent alcohol, producing a more flavorful spirit than the 70 percent typical in Cognac. The spirit gains additional flavor and mellowness in the oak casks, where it may develop for decades. Unlike some makers, Lafitte doesn’t water it down to 40 percent when it’s bottled.

  Regulations for the region allow Armagnac to be sold in as little as two years, but these young brandies are to be avoided at all costs. Five-year-old Armagnac can be labeled VO, VSOP, or réserve. But the best Armagnacs are the older vintages, which are seldom bottled before ten years of age. Laubade, one of the larger domaines in Armagnac, has thousands of barrels of old Armagnacs mellowing (and evaporating) in a series of cellars on the slope below its tiled 1850 manor house. At Laubade they believe the wood is just as important as the grape, and they get much of their oak from a nearby forest and then stack it and dry it for several years before cooperage. Laubade’s Armagnacs are produced largely from the Baco grape, which many believe has greater aging potential than Folle Blanche. (Even Mme. Lafitte grants Baco the virtue of longevity.) In their first twenty years of life, these don’t show the complexity of Folle Blanche–based Armagnacs, but they really start to sing when they hit the age of majority.

  Tasting through vintages back to 1934, I was impressed by the increasing complexity and depth of the older spirits, although, as with fine wines, some vintages are notably superior to others—the 1947, in this case, being my hands-down favorite.

  The practice of vintage dating, which is not followed in Cognac, has made Armagnac increasingly popular, especially on our own vintage-conscious shores. Laubade is one of the few makers that have sufficient stocks of old vintages to make them widely available in the United States, but there are many small makers who are worth seeking out. Most of the best are concentrated in the westernmost Bas-Armagnac region and include some of my favorites: Château de Briat, Laberdolive, Château de Lacquy, and Château du Tariquet. Part of what makes Armagnac so engaging is that there are dozens of makers producing rich and complex brandies that turn up in our restaurants and liquor stores, and any number of these spirits will provide a memorable and contemplative coda to a meal.

  WHITE ON WHITE

  Blanc de Blancs Champagne

  The unspoiled little town of Le Mesnil-sur-Oger sits almost smugly in the center of the rolling hills of Champagne’s Côte des Blancs. BMWs and Mercedeses race through the narrow streets, driven by some of the world’s most prosperous small farmers. These happy Frenchmen grow Chardonnay grapes in grand cru –designated plots on the chalky hillside, their fruit destined for some of the world’s greatest Champagnes. Hidden in the center of town, behind eighteenth-century houses, is the fossil-strewn Clos du Mesnil vineyard, probably the most hallowed piece of ground in Champagne, owned by the house of Krug.

  Blanc de Blancs, literally “white of whites,” is made from Chardonnay grapes. Don’t groan. “A lot of my customers say, ‘But I hate Chardonnay,’” says Charles Stanfield, the tattooed, Sub-Zero-sized chief of sparkling wines at Sam’s Wines in Chicago. “I tell ′em, ‘Hey, get over it, there’s Chardonnay and there’s Chardonnay. Blanc de Blancs is the Chablis of Champagne—very crisp, very dry.’” Stanfield’s customers never disagree with him, at least not to his face. And neither should you. For one thing, he’s a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Côteaux de Champagne. He’s also the Mr. T of wine retailing. He loves Blanc de Blancs. So should you.

  The typical Champagne is made from a blend of Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier, and Chardonnay. Not a bad recipe. But if you ever taste a mature Clos du Mesnil or a Taittinger Comtes de Champagne, you will realize that there is something magical about the Chardonnay grapes of this northerly region. Many hard-core Champagne drinkers believe that 100 percent Chardonnay Champagne can achieve greater vinous intensity and longevity than Pinot-heavy blends. Sipping a 1982 Salon or a 1988 Dom Ruinart Blanc de Blancs could forever destroy your preconceptions about white wine being light in body or delicate in flavor. Imagine hearing Beethoven’s Ninth blasted through a stack of Marshall amps. These are wines; they are meant to be aged, and to be sipped with food. Big food. That said, there are lighter, leaner styles of Blanc de Blancs that make the ideal aperitif—for instance, the Blanc de Blancs of Michel Turgy, a small grower in Mesnil, which truly remind me of Chablis, with its chalky minerality. (The Côte des Blancs’ Kimmeridgian chalk is part of the same geological formation that surfaces in Chablis.)

  While most of us look to the big, famous Champagne houses for our bubbly, an increasing number of smaller makers have begun to appear in recent years, and American importers have begun to seek them out. Many of the best Blanc de Blancs come from small proprietors like Larmandier-Bernier, Jacques Selosse, A. R. Lenoble, De Sousa & Fils, J. Lassalle, and P. Lancelot-Royer. Most of these wines are made in small quantities, from villages like Avize and Cramant, which are rated grand cru, the highest designation in Champagn
e’s grading system. (If you see that term on the label, it tells you the wine is 100 percent grand cru.) While the styles vary, the quality is impeccable, and even wine snobs can appreciate the reverse snobbery of a relatively unknown label. I suspect that boutique Champagnes like these are the wave of the future in Champagne—the bubbly equivalent of cult Cabs.

  Midsized producers like Delamotte, Deutz, and Jacquesson also make very good Blanc de Blancs. Delamotte gets first refusal on the grapes rejected by Salon—makers of perhaps the most exotic Champagne in the world. It is produced only in exceptional years from severely pruned, grandfatherly old vines on the midslope of grand cru vineyards in Mesnil. (I can’t confirm if the grapes are harvested one at a time by blond virgins dressed in gossamer, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised.) In the ′20s, Salon achieved renown as the house wine at Maxim’s, and has since become a password among true Champagne freaks.

  One hundred percent sparkling Chardonnay is made elsewhere, including California. Schramsberg’s Blanc de Blancs has always been the most interesting and Champagne-like example to me. Mumm’s Cuvée Napa makes a pleasant, affordable Blanc de Blancs, but most American versions are too fruity for my palate. Francis Ford Coppola has just put out a Hawaiian Punch of a Blanc de Blancs, named after his daughter Sofia—a nice little quaff for a summer picnic, but a long way from Mesnil.