The Juice

by Jay McInerney

  For a winemaker, Ramey seems to be an uncommonly good businessman, but his decision to make Syrah might have been a case of listening to his heart more than his head. In 2002 he planted two vineyards’ worth on the cool western side of the Sonoma Coast appellation, inspired by his love for the Syrahs of the northern Rhône. The resulting wines have been lavishly praised but aren’t, as many of his colleagues have discovered, easy to sell, and he’s scaled back production since the 2007 vintage. A local joke goes: “What’s the difference between a case of Syrah and a case of the clap? You can get rid of the clap.” I love Ramey’s Syrahs, which are much more reminiscent of Côte Rôtie than they are of jammy Barossa Shirazes, and they make the case for this grape as convincingly as any in California. My advice is to try them and buy them while they’re still unfashionable. They are great values.

  I also have a special fondness for his Chardonnays, which seem to me to strike a perfect balance between the elusive virtues of white Burgundy and the hedonistic pleasures of other California Chardonnays. Imagine if Christie Brinkley spoke French. Oh, wait, she does. Maybe David Ramey should consider hiring her as a spokesmodel.

  The Odd Couple

  Is there such a thing as the perfect match? Having been married four times, I’ve done my share of research on the subject of compatibility in the realm of eros. But the pairing of food and wine is perhaps even more bedeviling. Is there a perfect wine for oysters? For Camembert? For baked lobster with sunchoke braised in red wine and a fava sprout bergamot emulsion? Does fish always call for white wine? In your search for answers to these questions you could do worse than to go to New York’s Le Bernardin, the Michelin three-star temple of piscine cuisine. Aldo Sohm, who was named Best Sommelier in America in 2007 and Best Sommelier in the World in 2008, is masterful at matching food and wine. He has converted more than one skeptic, including my wife, to the concept of pairing. “I can make the food look good,” he says. On the other hand, the chef Eric Ripert, his boss, likes to drink red Bordeaux with pretty much everything, including oysters. This must make for some interesting discussions in the kitchen.

  Among the mentors that Ripert studied under on his way to becoming America’s best seafood chef was the great Joël Robuchon, who shares his taste in wine. “When Robuchon came to Le Bernardin,” Ripert tells me over a lunch at Ben Benson’s Steak House in midtown Manhattan, “he was offered the wine-pairing menu. He just said, ‘Bring me Bordeaux.’ I agree. I love Bordeaux. I’ll even have it with salad.” Indeed, he is sipping a 1995 La Conseillante, a Bordeaux from the Pomerol district, with his Caesar salad. This kind of thinking exasperates Sohm, an earnest and intense Austrian who came to the States in 2003 and has spent hundreds of hours working out the concepts of wine and food pairing. Watching them work together, I couldn’t help thinking that the puckish Ripert enjoys winding Sohm up and throwing him nearly impossible challenges. The French-born Ripert loves to feign indignation whenever Sohm recommends a wine from his native Austria, despite the fact that Austrian Rieslings and Grüner Veltliners are an insider’s secret, beloved among chefs and sommeliers for their food friendliness. Even when he’s not playfully tormenting Sohm, Ripert poses some pretty serious difficulties with his exotically spiced and sauced seafood, like the aforementioned baked lobster (so far, so good) with red-wine-braised sunchoke (uh-oh) and a fava sprout bergamot reduction (what the fuck?). Sohm is currently recommending a sake for this particular dish, though he could probably come up with any number of other interesting and enhancing accompaniments. Fortunately, most of us are seldom faced with this sort of thing at home, but Sohm’s insights are transferable.

  “I like to compare food and wine pairing to relationships,” Sohm says. “The food and the wine should be equal, and they should enhance each other. Some pairings are just okay, they go along without really hurting each other, but they don’t really interact. Some just suck. And then there’s the best possible matches, where the food and the wine transform and elevate each other.”

  Red wine with meat, white with fish, remains one of the most venerable rules of wine pairing, and Sohm acknowledges that it’s a good starting point. “Life is simple,” he says, “but it’s not that simple. Otherwise I’d be unemployed.” He likes to break or at least stretch the rules, though only up to a point. “I remember once when I was in school, someone asked just before a test if cheating was allowed. And the teacher said yes, but getting caught isn’t. And wine pairing is like that. If you break the rules, you have to make sure it works.”

  Although Le Bernardin’s menu is devoted almost exclusively to seafood, the wine list is about equally divided between reds and whites. The chef wouldn’t have it any other way, of course, and Sohm often matches white fish with red wine. First of all, he points out, the sauce is at least as important as the base, and if a fish is served with a red wine sauce like a red wine béarnaise, then the white wine rule is suspended. Cooking methods can also influence the match. Poached fish, he says, with its delicate taste, usually calls for white. “I had a customer recently who wanted to drink Shafer Hillside Select with a poached halibut.” This is one of Napa’s finest Cabernets, a powerful red loaded with fruit and tannin—a great wine, but not for all purposes. “In this case, the wine isn’t as good as it should be, and neither is the food.” (Chef Eric, of course, might beg to differ, but I’ve got to go with Aldo on this one.) Generally speaking, tannic, hard-rock reds don’t dance well with light fish dishes.

  “If fish is pan roasted or grilled, you get those roasted, richer flavors, and then you can move more in the direction of red wine.” Sohm often recommends Pinot Noirs or red Burgundies (made from Pinot) for such dishes. One pairing featured halibut casserole with morel mushrooms and a 2007 Flowers Pinot Noir from the Sonoma Coast. The earthiness of the morels and the chicken stock in the casserole helped to make this a stellar combination, even though conventional wisdom would have called for a white. Sohm has even been known to match white wines with red meat; he points out that Tafelspitz, the boiled beef specialty of his native Austria, is traditionally served with Riesling or Grüner Veltliner, a match that is mediated by the bouillon in which it’s served. (Cue chef Ripert rolling his eyes and reaching for a Pauillac.)

  When in doubt, Sohm says, Champagne is probably the most versatile food wine in the world and particularly well suited to Le Bernardin’s complicated cuisine, a point that he emphasized recently when he matched an eight-course tasting menu with eight different Champagnes for the benefit of my wife, who drinks only bubbly. As the meal progressed from lighter, uncooked dishes to heavier fare, the wines likewise progressed from light and citrusy Blanc de Blancs to heavier vintage Champagnes based on Pinot Noir. He explained the rationale throughout, and by the end of the meal Anne was a convert. “I used to think you guys were full of it when you talked about these perfect wine and food combinations,” she said, “but I can see there’s something to it.”

  There is, indeed. Oysters and Chablis, like Troilus and Cressida, or Taylor and Burton, have an undeniable chemistry, as do grilled steak and Cabernet Sauvignon. Certain flavors tend to enhance each other, as Eric is the first to concede. On the other hand, even Aldo would be willing to admit that love is mysterious, and taste is a matter of taste. If you love California Chardonnay and you want to drink it with a grilled rib eye, go for it. If red Bordeaux’s your thing and you want to drink it with Dover sole, don’t let a sommelier or a wine snob make you feel self-conscious. Tell him that’s how Eric Ripert rolls, as does his pal Joël Robuchon. My own footnote: if someone else is paying for a bottle of Petrus, or Yquem or La Tâche, don’t worry about the food. If it clashes, give it to the dog.

  Mondavi on Mondavi

  1998

  Not so long ago the phrase “California wine” belonged in the same book of oxymorons as, say, “living poet” and “Dutch cuisine.” You knew, on some level, that such things existed, but you didn’t necessarily want any of them at your dinner table. Today, thirty-two years after Robert Mondav
i founded his eponymous winery in the Napa Valley, wine has become California’s second-most-glamorous export, and Napa has become one of the world’s celebrated wine regions. (Just ask Mondavi’s neighbor the winemaker Francis Ford Coppola.) Wine buffs and collectors from around the world put their names on waiting lists in the hope of acquiring a few bottles of the latest boutique Cabernet from Colgin or Screaming Eagle. A personalized Napa Valley winery has become a popular trophy for American plutocrats, and the formerly rustic town of St. Helena brims with the kinds of polo-shirted tourists who also seek out Aspen and Santa Fe. Meanwhile, nearly all their fellow citizens have learned how to pronounce “Cabernet Sauvignon.” In his boosterish memoir, Harvests of Joy, Robert Mondavi doesn’t take any less credit for these developments than he deserves.

  Like his dowdier peers Ernest and Julio Gallo, Mondavi is the son of Italian immigrants. His father, Cesare, arrived in Minnesota in 1906 and, after a stint in the iron mines, opened a grocery store in a mining town called Virginia, where Robert and his younger brother, Peter, were born. Robert’s description of their childhood might best be characterized as polenta pone: “Family; hard work; high spirits; healthy, hearty meals—my childhood was a daily infusion of all four.” With the passage of the Volstead Act, in 1919, Mondavi senior became involved in the grape business. Under the terms of Prohibition, any family was permitted to make two hundred gallons of wine for home consumption, and the Italian residents of Virginia, Minnesota, elected to do just that, appointing Cesare Mondavi as their representative to travel to California and buy grapes to be shipped north. When Robert was ten, Cesare moved the family to Lodi, California (“the grape capital of the United States”). There he became a wholesaler of grapes and, shortly after repeal, the co-owner of a Napa Valley winery called Sunnyhill, now Sunny St. Helena. Upon graduating from Stanford in 1937, Robert decided to join the family business. Sunny St. Helena didn’t grow its own grapes—using only purchased fruit—but it did everything else: pressing, fermenting, and shipping the stuff out in railroad tank cars.

  When Robert joined the family business, viticulture in the Napa Valley was a marginal enterprise. Fifty years earlier, however, Napa had seemed well on its way to oenological prominence. The vineyards of France had been devastated by phylloxera, a tiny root louse, and the resulting wine drought presented an opportunity to California viticulture. In the late eighteen seventies, state-of-the-art wineries were established by two German immigrants, Jacob and Frederick Beringer, and a Finnish fur trader named Gustave Niebaum. Beringer Brothers and Niebaum’s Inglenook were among the pioneers of a frenzied Napa grape rush; by 1887, more than sixteen thousand acres of Napa were under the vine, at which point the dread phylloxera struck the valley. Then, thirty years later, just when the root louse was being brought under control, along came the tambourines of the temperance movement. The dark ages of Prohibition and the Depression crippled the fledgling industry. Some of the wineries that had survived by selling grapes and altar wine damaged the reputation of California after repeal by shipping spoiled wine that they had been holding during the dry years. In those days, most winemakers barely understood the chemistry of fermentation, according to the historian James T. Lapsley, “and they lacked the technology to control it even if they did.” Most wineries were undercapitalized; there was no national network for wine sales and distribution. And there were few consumers. Immigrants who considered wine a staple of daily life often made their own. Most of the wine that came out of California—the product of high-yielding, inferior grape varietals—was a sweet beverage of the type that is now most commonly associated with brown paper sacks. And the shortcomings of these wines were only highlighted by the propensity of their manufacturers to adorn them with French names like Chablis and Burgundy.

  Only a few visionaries recognized the great potential of the Napa Valley. One of them was the agronomist André Tchelistcheff, a former Russian aristocrat who, fleeing the revolution, ended up in France, where he studied wine microbiology at the Pasteur Institute while holding down a series of jobs in the French wine industry. In 1937, he was hired as a winemaker by Georges de Latour, a native of Bordeaux who had become wealthy selling French rootstock to California grape growers and at the turn of the century had bought a Napa estate, Beaulieu Vineyard. Tchelistcheff brought French wine-making expertise and a sense of high purpose to the Napa Valley. Centuries of grape growing had allowed the French to parse the viticultural landscape into hundreds of regions and subregions based on nuances of soil type and microclimate. Tchelistcheff attempted to do something similar in Napa, identifying at least three climatic regions in the valley and replanting the Beaulieu Vineyard with grapes he deemed most suitable. From the end of the thirties until the seventies, his Georges de Latour Private Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon was a benchmark, and Robert Mondavi was among a number of winemakers whom he inspired.

  ——

  In 1943, when the Mondavi family moved upmarket by acquiring the Charles Krug Winery, Robert hired Tchelistcheff as a consultant. (He would turn to him again, a couple of decades later, when he went off on his own.) Despite plenty of wine-making experience, Mondavi has never really been the man in the cellar, though he has been very smart, and fortunate, in hiring wine-making talent. At Krug, it was his brother, Peter, who assumed the wine-making responsibilities. Robert was the public face of the Krug Winery and a tireless promoter of his own product and of the Napa Valley in general. In 1952, Krug was among the first wineries to establish a tasting room for visitors, and when Mondavi wasn’t entertaining visitors at the estate, he was traveling the country glad-handing restaurant owners and distributors.

  A power struggle developed between the two Mondavi brothers and led to Robert’s departure from the Charles Krug Winery: the valley’s version of the Cain and Abel legend. As Robert tells the story, it all began when he first visited the great wine regions of Europe, in 1962, and experienced an oenological epiphany. After he toured the Old World châteaus and tasted the great wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy, “a great business and creative venture took shape before my eyes,” he recalls. “I wanted to take American technology, management techniques, and marketing savvy and fuse them together with Old World tradition and elegance in the art of making fine wine.” He returned to Napa all fired up: “I wanted my family and our company to commit ourselves to a true quest for excellence in our vineyards, in our wine making, and in our marketing and sales.” But, he says, his vision did not interest the rest of the family—which is really to say his brother, for their father had died in 1959.

  According to Robert, it was a mink coat that started the war. In 1963, Robert and his wife, Marge, received an invitation from President John F. Kennedy to attend a state dinner at the White House. “Flattered though we were, Marge and I were very nervous,” he recounts. “We were just small-town people running a small family business.… How in the world would we fare at the Kennedy White House, with the charismatic president and his famous wife, surrounded by all the glamour of Camelot? Marge also had a more specific worry: What in the dickens should she wear to a White House dinner? What dress? What shoes? What bag? What jewelry? What coat?” Mondavi’s admirers and his detractors alike will probably be astonished at this self-portrait of the king of the Napa Valley as a shy, charisma-challenged bumpkin. About the shoes and the dress we learn nothing, but the couple eventually settled on a mink coat from I. Magnin, in San Francisco. “When he heard about that mink, my brother, Peter, couldn’t understand it,” Robert says. A snit became a sulk that simmered until it became, two years later, a fistfight. At one of those big family gatherings that are so conducive to the airing of grievances, Peter accused Robert of spending too much money on travel and promotion. Then he accused his older brother of taking money from the winery. How else, he demanded, could Robert have afforded to buy the mink coat? “Say that again and I’ll hit you,” Robert warned Peter. He said it again. “Then I gave him a third chance: ‘Take it back.’ ‘No.’ So I smacked him, hard. Twice.”r />
  The rift never healed. Many years later, the older brother triumphed in an acrimonious lawsuit. In the meantime, since their mother had sided with Peter, Robert, at the age of fifty-two, was on the street. He decided to start from scratch in pursuing his vision of producing world-class Napa Valley wines. It was a daunting mission, quite aside from the question of capital; in 1965, there was still no significant American market for the kind of wine Mondavi hoped to produce. Julia Child was still trying to wean Americans away from tuna casseroles and chipped beef. On the other hand, as everyone had long observed, the climate in Napa was practically perfect for ripening grapes, whereas the temperamental Gallic weather in Bordeaux and Burgundy resulted in vintages of wildly uneven quality.

  After buying a piece of a well-situated old vineyard called To Kalon, Mondavi turned his attention to designing a winery that would make a statement. His architect, Cliff May, wanted to place the mission-style winery with its faux campanile far back against the hills, but Mondavi chose a spot within sight of Highway 29, where its yawning archway could attract visitors and serve as a kind of billboard for the enterprise. Its silhouette, which appears on the labels of Robert Mondavi estate wines, has since become iconic—at least as recognizable among wine lovers as that of the tower at Château Latour. Inside the winery, Mondavi presided over a series of technological innovations. He had been among the first winemakers in this country to use new French oak casks, in order to impart complexity and structure to Cabernet Sauvignon—a practice he had observed at the great châteaus of Bordeaux. But Mondavi also embraced American-style technology wherever he could, cheerfully calling his “the test-tube winery.” Not surprisingly, America’s first great wine region tended to rely heavily on science in the form of fertilizers, filters, and additives. The results weren’t always happy, however. In the past, the California wine industry had been plagued by spoilage; in the attempt to make a clean, stable product, Mondavi and those who followed him went too far down the road of sanitation, filtering and sterilizing the living beverage almost to death. “Only later did we discover that this rigorous cleaning—part of what we call the suppression of fault—stripped the wine of vital essences, flavor, and character,” he writes. Still, unlike many who adhered to the high-tech gospel of the Department of Viticulture and Enology at the University of California at Davis—which became a combination think tank and training ground for the industry during the seventies and eighties—Mondavi was always willing to reconsider and subsequently curbed his technological excesses.