Prüm’s roots in the region go deep; he says his family has been in the Mosel for eight hundred years. His roots are also tall—his grandfather, who served in Kaiser Wilhelm’s Dragoon Mounted Bodyguard, stood over six feet nine. Prüm himself tops out at a mere six four and is crowned with unruly flaming-red hair that has earned him the nickname der Specht—the woodpecker. Appropriately, he bobs his head as he gets excited talking about his wines, which can be pretty damn thrilling at the higher end (the wines, not his head bobbing). Every wine lover should eventually taste a great Eiswein (ice wine) like his 1998 from the Graacher Himmelreich vineyard, the frozen grapes of which were picked the morning of November 26. The grapes are pressed while still frozen and yield precious little juice—but that juice is incredibly concentrated. Freezing concentrates not only the sugar but also the acid and the extract, and the resulting wine is nectar worthy of the Wagnerian gods.
The affable, puckish Raimund has a slew of relatives in the area who are also making Riesling under various, somewhat confusing Prüm-inflected labels, including the great Joh. Jos. Prüm and Dr. F. Weins-Prüm. (They take their doctorates seriously in Germany, and every other winemaker seems to use the title.) Another great Mosel producer is Dr. Ernst Loosen, Decanter magazine’s 2005 Man of the Year. His Wehlener Sonnenuhrs (he, too, has vines in that vineyard) are brilliant, long-lived wines, but he also bottles another under the name Doctor L. that’s made from several vineyards, a good value, and a great, not too serious, summertime quaff. Loosen also produces a very fine Riesling in Washington State in collaboration with Chateau Ste. Michelle called Eroica. Simplified labeling is, of course, no guarantee of quality. It was Blue Nun, after all, that created the stereotype of German whites as the vinous equivalent of Dunkin’ Donuts. The most important element on these labels is the maker’s name, and in order to experience the transcendent pleasures of these wines, you need to memorize a few. Lingenfelder’s Bird label and Selbach’s (of Selbach-Oster) Fish label are two entry-level Rieslings from serious makers, and both offer good value at about twelve bucks.
At a slightly more ambitious level are Dragonstone, from Leitz; Erben Riesling, from Joh. Jos. Christoffel; and Jean-Baptiste, from Gunderloch. Robert Weil’s top Rieslings from the Rheingau are among the most sought after and expensive in Germany, but he bottles a Kabinett and a wine called simply Riesling that should be approached with caution, lest you find yourself developing a serious habit. It’s a little like reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Next thing you know, you’re neck deep in Ulysses or, God forbid, Finnegans Wake, which is, come to think of it, the literary equivalent of Trockenbeerenauslese—the highest rung of the German qualitative ranking system, the richest and rarest wines produced from voluptuously ripe grapes afflicted with noble rot. And yes, they’re sweet. If that scares you, stick with the Kabinetts. No Ph.D. required.
Finally Fashionable:
Rosé from Provence to Long Island
Dining on Shelter Island one recent summer evening, I noticed that many of the wine buckets in the room were filled with bottles of rosé. Sunset Beach is the Hamptons’ answer to the beachside restaurants of the Côte d’Azur, and perhaps not so coincidentally more than a few of the tables were occupied by French speakers. Rosé has long been the summer beverage of choice for fashionable diners in Cannes and St. Tropez, but Americans have yet to fully embrace it. Even in the towns on Long Island’s South Fork, known collectively as the Hamptons, which serve as summer headquarters for some of America’s best-traveled and most trend-conscious consumers, rosé is just starting to get its due. But there are encouraging indications that it’s becoming fashionable, and Long Island is beginning to distinguish itself as a source of excellent dry rosé.
Among the unmistakable signs of a rising tide of rosé consciousness is the fact that the hotelier André Balazs, the proprietor of Sunset Beach as well as the Mercer hotel in Manhattan and the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, has lent his name to a rosé that is available in his hotels from South Beach to L.A. “I spent summers in St. Tropez growing up, and I associate rosé with long summer lunches on the beach. When we started Sunset Beach fifteen years ago, it was with the desire to bring the warmth and richness of life there to the Hamptons. It was pretty clear then that not many Americans knew what rosé was. Now more than half the wine we sell there is rosé.” André Balazs rosé is made from grapes grown in the heart of the Hamptons by Roman Roth, the German-born winemaker for the Wölffer Estate Vineyard, who produced what probably was Long Island’s first dry rosé in 1992, the year he arrived on the South Fork.
“It was a terrible year, cold and wet,” he says of his first vintage. “We couldn’t really get the grapes ripe enough to make great red wines. So I said, let’s make a rosé.” Founded by the bon vivant and equestrian entrepreneur Christian Wölffer in 1987, the Wölffer Estate Vineyard comprises fifty-five acres of some of the most expensive real estate in America. (He died in 2008 at the age of seventy after being hit by a powerboat while swimming off the coast of Rio de Janeiro.) Since Roth’s first vintage, rosé’s share of the production has grown larger and larger each year and is now a specialty of the estate. “At first we had to force people to taste it,” Roth says. (I can’t help imagining Roth and Wölffer, with their German accents, cornering visitors at the vineyard. “Ve must insist you try our rosé.”)
“To me,” Balazs says, “rosé isn’t just a wine but almost a lifestyle, something which involves friendship and leisure and a specific way to enjoy a meal. It’s totally casual but supremely sexy. It’s just more robust and fun than white wine.” Michael Cinque, the proprietor of Amagansett Wine and Spirits, describes its appeal rather more prosaically. “Most white wines have too much acidity on hot days to reveal much fruit. Rosés have acidity but also berry flavors and cassis.” Cinque recently hosted an informal tasting of ten rosés, including bottles from Provence and Long Island, and was pleasantly surprised to discover that the 2009 Channing Daughters Cabernet Franc rosé, also from Long Island, took second place, with the Wölffer Estate in third.
The Wölffer rosé is leaner and racier than those from Provence, which may in part reflect the cooler climate of eastern Long Island. Southern France has a longer, hotter growing season, and the rosés typically have a heavy dose of Grenache, a fleshy, low-acid red grape. For Balazs, who loves the French style, Roth picks the grapes later, creating a riper and more voluptuous wine than the Wölffer rosé, something a little more like Château Minuty or Domaines Ott. The latter is widely regarded as the gold standard of rosé, the rich coppery nectar in the vaguely amphora-shaped bottle that costs as much as a good bottle of Bordeaux. Ott was my introduction to dry rosé. I first recall encountering it at a beachside restaurant in the Côte d’Azur and downing several bottles with my friends over the course of a very long lunch to wash down the amazing fish soup and langoustines. Our table hung over the beach and extraordinarily good-looking, half-naked people kept walking past, and it’s quite possible that I would have appreciated a jar of Night Train in that context, but I can honestly say I have seldom enjoyed a wine more. Domaines Ott has long been the gateway to drinking pink for many visitors to southern France or St. Barts, and for many remains the rosé (although in fact it’s actually three rosés, made at three different properties). Whether it’s worth more than twice the average price—about $40—is an open question, though for some buyers that’s part of its appeal. Recently, an even more expensive rosé has appeared on the market, from Château d’Esclans, a relatively new venture created by Sacha Lichine, son of the legendary Alexis Lichine, along with Patrick Leon, the longtime winemaker at Château Mouton Rothschild. Like Balazs, Sacha drank rosé on the Côte d’Or as a young man while vacationing with his father. After Alexis died in 1989, his son began looking for a project of his own. “I saw an opportunity in rosé,” he says. “I spent eight years and visited thirty properties. Everybody thought I was crazy to want to leave Bordeaux for Provence.” (Not me, I’d much rather live in t
he south.) Lichine and Leon decided to treat this wine with the respect of a Burgundy or a Bordeaux—by fermenting in barrels, for instance. Today they make five cuvées of rosé, including a small-production wine called Garrus that retails for a hundred bucks. I’ve never tasted it, so I can’t render a verdict, but I can highly recommend Whispering Angel, their entry-level offering that retails for around twenty.
Rosés are typically made from red grapes, which are removed immediately after pressing from their pigment-bearing skins, although there are as many variations on this basic recipe as there are for bouillabaisse. Roth uses about one-third Chardonnay along with Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon. And he ferments the wine dry, waiting until all the sugar has been converted to alcohol. One reason rosé has a dubious reputation might be that many drinkers remember the sweet blush wines and so-called white Zinfandels that were so popular in the seventies and eighties. Remember Sutter Home White Zinfandel? Technically a rosé, it was kind of sickly sweet—thanks to residual sugar from an incomplete fermentation—unlike the pink wines of southern France, which are the models most Long Island makers emulate.
Lately, others are following Wölffer’s lead, including the Channing Daughters Winery in Bridgehampton, which makes four excellent single-vineyard rosés from single varietals: Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, and even Refosco (a red grape from Friuli). “This is a great place for rosé,” says Christopher Tracy, a former actor and chef who’s now the winemaker there. “We can make great rosé here every year even in a vintage when the red grapes don’t get ripe enough to make great reds.”
Nearby on the North Fork of Long Island, Paula and Michael Croteau operate what might be the only vineyard in the United States devoted entirely to rosé, creating some six different cuvées from different clones of Merlot. The Manhattan refugees bought their eighteenth-century farm in Southold in the early nineties. “We’d have people coming by our place and saying it feels like Provence,” Michael says. “And when we thought about planting vines, rosé seemed like a great fit based on the lifestyle out here on the East End. Culturally, rosé seemed like a great fit.”
Fortunately, you don’t have to travel to the Hamptons or Provence to experience the incomparable pleasure of a cold rosé on a hot summer day.
Lean and Fleshy:
The Paradox of Santa Rita Hills Chardonnay
The first time I tasted a Chardonnay from the Santa Rita Hills I was baffled; on the one hand it was very ripe and fleshy, and on the other it had a bracing acidic slap that I associated with cool-climate whites and even a mineral note you seldom find in New World wines. It was a little like meeting Jessica Simpson, only to have her start speaking perfect French in Carla Bruni’s voice. To say I was disoriented would be an understatement. That was just before the movie Sideways made a star out of Santa Barbara Pinot Noir, not to mention Paul Giamatti. (You may remember Merlot in the role of villain.) This region—specifically the Santa Ynez and Santa Maria Valleys—is by now renowned as a source of fine Pinot Noirs. What’s less well-known is that it’s producing some of California’s most compelling Chardonnays.
The hottest area for Chardonnay, the Santa Rita Hills, is an appellation that only came into existence in 2001. (On bottles you will see this abbreviated as Sta. Rita Hills thanks to a legal dispute with the Chilean wine producer Viña Santa Rita.) Actually, it’s not so much hot as it is cool, which is what gives these Chards a crispness that’s missing from so many California Chards. The wine that impressed and confused me was a 2003 Brewer-Clifton Sweeney Canyon Chardonnay, crafted by the ex-surfer and rock guitarist Steve Clifton and the former French professor Greg Brewer in a prefab metal shed located in an industrial park not far from the Lompoc prison. After tasting their Chards, I knew I had to meet these guys. It’s sort of amusing to imagine that their odd-couple chemistry has something to do with the contradictory lean-versus-fleshy quality of their wines: Brewer is a lean, hyperactive ex–competitive cyclist; the Laguna-bred Clifton looks like a younger version of the former CSI star William Petersen and still seems much more like a surfer than an oenologist, brawnier and far more laid-back. But both are quick to credit the unique geography of their chosen turf. (They also make excellent Pinot, but it’s the whites that first caught my attention.) “This is such an extreme region,” Brewer says. “It gives us the material for these really radical Chards.”
The cool Alaska current hits the California coast at Point Conception just west of here, and the mountain ranges that frame the Santa Ynez Valley run from west to east, funneling this bracing marine air up the valley. As the temperature in the interior rises over the course of the day, the cold air is drawn inland; a blanket of fog covers much of the valley almost every night. This cooling effect is what makes the Chardonnays so crisp, preserving their natural acidity. Even in summer, the temperature in the Santa Rita Hills rarely tops seventy and in the evening can fall as low as forty-five.
Back in 1970, after falling in love with the wines of Burgundy, a young Vietnam veteran named Richard Sanford was scouring California for a suitable climate to grow the Burgundian varietals of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. Sanford drove up and down the Santa Ynez Valley in a pickup truck with a thermometer, taking new readings every mile. Eventually, he decided that the cool western part of the valley had exactly the right climate and with a partner bought land and planted the Sanford and Benedict Vineyard. They made Pinots and Chardonnays and also sold grapes to others, including Jim Clendenen of Au Bon Climat, the rock-and-roll Robert Mondavi of Santa Barbara, whose Sanford and Benedict bottlings helped spread the fame of the vineyard. Other vineyards were planted, and Sanford eventually lost control of his own in a legal dispute. He now makes wines under the Alma Rosa label. Clendenen’s Au Bon Climat Sanford and Benedict Chardonnay remains the benchmark for this great vineyard.
Wineries like Babcock, Foley, Ojai, and Melville gradually followed Sanford’s lead. Greg and Steve apprenticed at several of them before starting Brewer-Clifton in 1996, maxing out credit cards, borrowing from friends, and buying grapes from growers in the valley and nearby Santa Maria, eventually focusing on the Santa Rita Hills. Their Pinots and Chardonnays have achieved cult status and stellar ratings from critics.
I find the Chards particularly compelling, edgy and extreme, sometimes tasting like turbocharged Chablis, and in fact the partners share a passion for Burgundy’s northernmost white. After a 2004 visit to the area, including a quasi-religious-experience tasting in the cellar of Domaine Raveneau, Greg was inspired to start a new Chardonnay project called Diatom. “I wanted to push the limits, to make something really pure and extreme.” While most winemakers in California and Burgundy use some new oak barrels to help oxygenate and mellow their Chardonnays, and encourage a secondary fermentation to soften the malic acids, Brewer has created a minimalist Chardonnay at Melville that was fermented in stainless steel. The result, called Inox, is lean and crisp, utterly lacking the buttery quality of old-school Cali Chard.
With Diatom, Brewer pushed Santa Rita Chardonnay to a new extreme. “I think of Brewer-Clifton as skiing, Melville Inox as snowboarding and Diatom as the X Games. I wanted to push Chardonnay to an absolute extreme.” Extreme, but minimal. He lets the grapes get extremely ripe, which in a hotter area would result in a flabby wine, ferments in stainless steel, and blocks the secondary fermentation. The result is radical indeed, an extreme example of the fat/lean syndrome. “Diatom is so radical it’s deviant,” Brewer says. I agree. My tasting note on the 2009 Diatom Huber vineyard reads: “Incredible tension and precision. Great flesh and great acidity. A deconstructed margarita—lime and salt and alcohol and even agave. Wowsah!”
Brewer sees heavily oaked Chardonnays as elaborately cooked and sauced dishes. “Diatom is like a piece of toro, fatty but also pure and minimal.” He also believes the minimalist wine-making style lets the characteristics of the vineyards, and the area, shine through. It’s unique, and yet it highlights the family traits of the region. I like to pour these Chards
for friends who claim they don’t like California Chardonnay. Even those who aren’t instantly converted tend to be pleasantly surprised.
Rosé Champagne:
Not Just for Stage Door Johnnies
My first experience with a sparkling pink wine took place on a blanket on the lawn at Tanglewood in the company of a girl named Joan Coughlin. The Who were onstage performing Tommy, and the warm summer air was perfumed with incense and cannabis. The wine in question, Cold Duck, was popular with the theater crowd at Taconic High School and was, I learned much later, composed of two parts New York state sparkling wine and one part California bulk red wine. I eventually learned to turn up my nose at Cold Duck, but my fond memories of that evening must have something to do with my abiding enthusiasm for rosé Champagne.
Champagne has long been perceived as celebratory. Its pink version, it seems to me, is less declamatory, more romantic; if great Champagne is the vinous equivalent of a white diamond, then rosé is a pink diamond—rarer and yes, I’m afraid, more expensive. Though it represents just a small fraction of the production of France’s eponymous Champagne region, rosé has exploded in popularity in recent years. “It used to be for stage door Johnnies,” says Beaver Truax of Chambers Street Wines in New York City. “Rosé was fun, but it wasn’t serious Champagne. And that’s definitely changed.” A 2010 tasting with Richard Geoffroy, the winemaker of Dom Pérignon, reminded me of just how great it can be.
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