In 2004, the Bordeaux native Thomas Duroux took over the wine making at Palmer after serving as the winemaker at Tuscany’s renowned Ornellaia (essentially an imitation of the domaines where he’d grown up). Describing Palmer’s singularity, he credits its terroir and its high percentage of Merlot, but also a historical element that he needs to honor. “Our wines are known for their elegance and their Burgundian style, and each team of Palmer winemakers has tried to respect that.” Unlike most of the big boys of Bordeaux, for instance, they seldom use more than 50 percent of new oak barrels for the grand vin, aging the remaining wine in casks a year or two old.
Like Pontallier, Duroux is ecstatic about the 2009 vintage, which will start appearing on these shores in the fall of 2012. It’s possible to find the spectacular 2005s here and there, and both Palmer and Margaux are brilliant, though neither is cheap or ready to drink. Less expensive is the 2006, which, according to Pontallier, “is an excellent vintage that may have been considered as a great one should it not be born after 2005.”
Fortunately, after years of underperforming, some of their neighbors in the Margaux appellation have started to produce wines worthy of the illustrious name. Château d’Issan—perhaps best known for its picturesque moated castle, allegedly where Eleanor of Aquitaine was married to Henry Plantagenet—has finally begun to live up to its third-growth ranking. Brane-Cantenac and Boyd-Cantenac have improved steadily in recent vintages, as have stablemates Giscours and du Tertre. They’re worth looking for, particularly since the great 2005 vintage, though it should be noted that these wines often take at least a decade to show their stuff. Château Margaux doesn’t reveal its full glories for twenty years in a great vintage. In the best of all possible worlds, each of us would be drinking the 1990 Margaux or the 1989 Palmer tonight. But you can experience the signature genius of both properties earlier, for much less money, via their secondary wines, Alter Ego de Palmer and Pavillon Rouge de Margaux.
Big Aussie Monsters
When they shoved a metal dinner tray through a slot in the door of his room, Benjamin Hammerschlag was beginning to think that he’d probably made a big mistake and that he’d be going back to his day job in a Seattle grocery store. He was staying in what passed for a hotel in the Frankland River region of Western Australia—“a pub full of misshapen humanity, pretty much at the end of the earth,” as he describes it—while seeking out premium wines to import to the States. A week later, with only two prospects in his sights, he woke near dawn in yet another crummy hotel room, this one in the Barossa Valley, to find the walls literally seething with millipedes: “By this time I was pretty depressed.” Fortunately, wine making in both regions was more advanced than the hospitality industry, and Hammerschlag is a persistent and highly competitive son of a bitch with a very good palate. Over the past ten years he has assembled a portfolio, Epicurean Wines, that represents something of a new wave in the Australian invasion.
At the time of his unpromising first visit, Hammerschlag was working as a wine buyer for a supermarket called QFC in Bellevue, a wealthy suburb of Seattle. (Wine would seem to run in his veins; his forebears ran a chain in Manhattan called Flegenheimer’s, the first stores to bring California wines to New York, and they eventually had thirteen branches before Prohibition.) In a few years he almost doubled QFC’s wine turnover, deciding in the process that he had a “popular palate.” Among the crowd-pleasers he discovered for his clients were old-vine Shirazes from Australia’s Barossa Valley, which had just begun to trickle into this country, thanks to a few boutique importers like John Larchet’s Australian Premium Wine Collection and Dan Philips’s Grateful Palate. “It was a style of wine that Americans loved,” Hammerschlag says, “rich and powerful and generous and all about instant gratification.” Some Aussies, according to Hammerschlag, refer to these big Barossa Shirazes as “leg spreaders.” However, given the sheer size and power of these behemoths, stereotypically masculine metaphors seem more appropriate to me; high-octane potions like Kaesler’s Old Bastard Shiraz remind me more of a muscle car like a Dodge Charger or a Viper than of a starlet, more of Russell Crowe than Naomi Watts.
The only problem with these South Australian reds, it seemed to Hammerschlag, was that they were pretty hard to find. Elderton’s Command Shiraz or Clarendon Hills’ Astralis, for example, were made in small quantities from vines, including Shiraz and Grenache, planted in the early twentieth century. (Old vines, it’s generally conceded, make more intense and powerful wines than younger ones.) Although Grange, Penfolds’s prototype for premium Australian Shiraz, dates back to 1951, when its chief winemaker, Max Schubert, came home from a visit to Bordeaux determined to make a world-class wine, it remained something of a one-off until the eighties, when others began making big, rich Barossa Shirazes. In just a couple of decades, Australia became a wine-making superpower, and Australian winemakers started circumnavigating the globe spreading their fruity high-tech gospel.
Much as Hammerschlag loved the big badasses, he was presumptuous enough to believe there was room for some finesse and a more specific sense of place (Grange uses grapes from all over South Australia) and that he could coax even better wines from the country if he could find the right talent. “I consider myself a talent agent,” he says. Upon arriving in Adelaide in 1999, he made the rounds of the wine stores and accumulated thirty-six bottles of local reds he then tasted in his bug-infested hotel room and finally started working the phone. He was lucky enough, and early enough, to find a core of extremely talented young winemakers, including Dan Standish, the winemaker at Torbreck; Ben Glaetzer, who was involved with his family’s estate; Ben Riggs, a six-foot-five winemaker who worked in Napa, Bordeaux, and Italy before focusing on making Shiraz on his home turf of McLaren Vale. In the years since he signed them, Hammerschlag has become more and more intimately involved in the wine-making process, a commitment that has nearly ruined his teeth—the result of tasting through thousands of barrels of tannic young reds.
“I go for that tightrope quality,” he said, through his dingy choppers one spring evening in 2006 at the Soho Grand Hotel, as we slurped the 2002 Kaesler Avignon Proprietary Red, which would make a really good Châteauneuf-du-Pape. “Pushing the limits, but still maintaining balance and harmony.” To put it another way, Hammerschlag’s Fruit Loops have fiber, and his muscle cars have precise handling and even, sometimes, luxurious interiors. (A car buff, Ben in fact drives a 1968 Dodge Charger around the high-altitude vineyard he purchased in the McLaren Vale.) They have the big ripe flavors and good-day-mate charm that have made Aussie wines so popular. Dan Standish’s 2001 The Standish, for instance, was at that point the most satisfying young Aussie red I’d ever tasted—an old-vine Shiraz that has complex leather and coffee aromatics, an unbelievably voluptuous and viscous texture, and a long, lingering finish that left me alternately giddy and awestruck. Ben Glaetzer’s two old-vine Shirazes, Amon-Ra and Mitolo’s GAM, were already legends in their second vintage, having racked up exceptional ratings in The Wine Advocate and elsewhere, although like many of Epicurean’s wines they are made in tiny quantities. All in all, it was an exhilarating tasting, and when we finally parted late that night and I staggered home to my apartment in the Village, I was as wildly enthusiastic about South Australian reds as everybody else (drunk or not) seemed to be.
I didn’t imagine it would take five years, but when we finally met again at Manhattan’s Gotham Bar and Grill in 2011, the balance of power in the wine world had shifted significantly.
Somehow this boom had gone bust in the last few years, at least in terms of imports to the States. Despite the success of Yellow Tail, or perhaps because of it, Oz lost its mojo. Overall imports dropped by 15 percent in 2010, and the cognoscenti seemed to snub the category, partly out of a shift in fashion toward (buzzword alert!) finesse and elegance, away from sheer power and alcoholic punch. Whatever the reality, Australian wines were perceived as being fruit bombs, unsubtle and overripe. Pinot was suddenly king, and sommeliers—a powerful new
force in the wine world over the past decade—were railing against high alcohol. It certainly didn’t help when Robert Parker, previously a big champion of premium South Australian Shiraz, stopped visiting and handed responsibility for the country to a subordinate.
When I met Hammerschlag at the Gotham Bar and Grill, he admitted that his chosen turf was “a category that’s out of fashion right now.” He attributed this fact partly to the strength of the Australian dollar and partly to the shifting tastes of “the gatekeepers,” namely the critics and sommeliers. “Customers still like this stuff,” he claimed, while acknowledging it’s harder to sell Australian wines now than it was five years before. When I asked if his winemakers had modified their practices at all in response to changes in the market, he shrugged. “They’re trying to make wines reflective of their regions, just like they always have.” And the fact is that South Australia is conducive to “rich, dark voluptuous wines.” They ain’t dainty, and they’re not meant to be.
Hammerschlag and others are pinning their hopes on the 2010 vintage, which will soon be heading to these shores, to raise awareness and help turn the tide. “It was spectacular across the board,” he told me, sipping an amaro at the bar at Gotham. “The best in twenty years.” It will be interesting to see if the vintage can help revive the country’s image. Other areas have recovered their mojo after losing credibility. Red Burgundy was rightfully slumping in the marketplace in the late seventies and early eighties thanks to high yields, lazy wine making, and an overreliance on chemical fertilizers. In 1985 some Austrian vintners decided to beef up their wines with antifreeze, and the resulting scandal nearly destroyed that market. But both regions have come back stronger than ever internationally. And it’s not as if the Australians have done anything wrong, unless it’s a sin to make ripe, rich, high-test reds—the vinous equivalent of a 1966 Pontiac GTO. Presumably, there are still millions of consumers who don’t have any beef against power and opulence. If Hammerschlag has anything to say about it, Aussie reds will soon regain their place at the American table.
Is Cornas Finally Having Its Moment?
When I’m at a restaurant with a sommelier I trust, I often ask him to pick something for me. After all, sommeliers are on the front lines, tasting every day, seeking out treasures, and they certainly know their own lists better than I do. Unlike my collector friends, who tend to search out the classics—the known commodities—the somms have their palates primed for what’s new. They are looking for the next great region, the next great maker. Recently, two of my favorites have picked a Cornas—both of which I liked very much. Moreover, I’ve heard several young winemakers express their admiration for Thierry Allemand, the rising star of Cornas. Is this appellation finally having its moment?
Some ten years ago I found myself clinging to the base of a vine in the Les Ruchets vineyard, high above the town of Cornas, with the serpentine Rhône River just beyond, trying not to slide downhill. My luggage had been lost somewhere between New York and Marseilles; for the third day in a row I was wearing Gucci loafers, which didn’t provide much purchase on the steep, rocky hillside as I attempted to assist Jean-Luc Colombo and his crew harvesting Syrah grapes. I could well understand why many of these granitic vineyards, too steep for a tractor, had been abandoned in the early part of the twentieth century.
As far as I can tell, Cornas hasn’t really been fashionable since the era of Charlemagne. Ten years ago, Jancis Robinson wrote a piece describing her failure to fall in love, or even in like, with this wine. “ ‘Virile’ is a favourite description of Cornas with Frenchmen,” Robinson wrote. “ ‘Obdurate,’ I would suggest is nearer the mark.” She described one wine as having “all the charm of the Reverend Ian Paisley.” I know what she means. Cornas has always been a rustic wine, with formidable tannins and, sometimes, a barnyard funk that suggested a lack of hygiene in the cellar. The first few examples I tasted made me wonder if the grapes had been stomped by someone with very stinky socks.
If it was ever beloved, its reputation was long ago eclipsed by Hermitage and Côte Rôtie to the north. All three appellations make powerful red wines exclusively from the Syrah grape, which has grown here at least since Roman times. The steep granitic vineyards were hard to farm, and many were abandoned, even as Côte Rôtie and Hermitage were gaining international renown and Syrah was being planted everywhere from Stellenbosch in South Africa to the Santa Rita Hills in California. A few hardy growers like Auguste Clape and Noël Verset carried the torch of the appellation, making traditional, earthy Cornas for the faithful. A good Cornas is like the Delta blues, soulful and earthy, though not for everyone.
As is often the case, it took an outsider to cut through the cobwebs in this ancient village. Jean-Luc Colombo, an oenologist from Marseilles, moved here with his wife, Anne, in the nineteen eighties, first establishing a consulting business and later buying vineyards. Like the Chicago players who electrified the rural sound of Charley Patton and Robert Johnson, Colombo introduced modern viticultural methods, including new oak barrel aging and destemming, and created cleaner, more modern versions of Cornas that seduced some critics while outraging some traditionalists. Colombo is the epitome of the modern flying winemaker, a compact dynamo who consults with some hundred-plus clients in the Rhône Valley and beyond. On my most recent visit he started the day with clients in Châteauneuf-du-Pape, met me some seventy miles south for lunch in Marseilles, drove half an hour up the Côte Bleue to tour some vineyards he’s leased near St. Julien les Martigues, raced two hours north to the Alpilles in Provence to taste through twenty barrels in the cellar of his client Mas de la Dame, stopped off in St. Rémy for dinner, then drove another two hours north to Cornas, where we arrived about one in the morning. “Zis day, she is fairly typical,” he tells me, as we sip Calvados in his living room.
Like his friend Michel Rolland, the famous Bordeaux winemaker and consultant, he has sometimes been criticized for allegedly making internationally styled wines that don’t speak of their place of origin. In recent years Colombo has dialed back on the use of new oak and developed a lighter touch. In the meantime, a new generation of younger winemakers has stepped in, reviving abandoned vineyards and adopting those of retiring winemakers like Noël Verset and Robert Michel. The most influential of these is Thierry Allemand, the son of a factory worker who grew up in the town of Cornas and embraced its wine-making traditions, apprenticing with Robert Michel at the age of eighteen. Allemand bought an overgrown vineyard with ruined stone terraces and gradually rehabilitated it, producing his first wines in 1982.
Duncan Arnot Meyers of Arnot-Roberts, which has gained cult status for its Sonoma Syrahs, cites Allemand as a huge influence. “I think his wines are some of the most expressive bottlings of Syrah on the planet,” he says. It’s a sentiment I’ve heard frequently in the last couple of years. Bearded and bare of pate, Allemand lives with his wife and four children in an old stone house in the town of Cornas and works his vineyards almost entirely by hand. Like many young winemakers around the world, he has looked to the past for inspiration, using whole grape clusters, including stems, and aging in neutral (that is, used) barrels, which don’t impart toasty flavor to the grapes. A leader of the natural-wine movement, he uses very little sulfur to preserve the wines, a risky strategy that seems to work for him—I have yet to taste an off bottle. His wines are very earthy and even rustic—you’d never mistake a bottle of Allemand Cornas for Australian Shiraz—but they have a freshness and lift that were lacking in most old-school examples.
In the past few years many vineyards have passed from the old guard to a new wave of young winemakers. Among the new kids on the block is Franck Balthazar, who inherited five acres of ninety-year-old vines in 2003, and Guillaume Gilles, a disciple and heir of Allemand’s mentor Robert Michel, who retired in 2006. Vincent Paris, Matthieu Barret, and Gilbert Serrette are rising stars.
Although the young generation seems to be respectful of the traditions, one is less likely to encounter a really stinky
bottle of Cornas these days. But a good one will always be more earthy and even gamy than a New World Syrah. Black licorice is part of its flavor profile, and the wines usually show an earthy bass note. Even in lighter vintages like 2006 and 2007 it’s a pretty big wine, requiring red meat or braises to balance its power. It’s not a summer red. The old-school wines often took years to shed their tannin, if indeed they ever did, and even now most Cornas needs at least five years to round out and open up. If you find an older bottle, you might be in for a treat; it will cost you far less than a similar vintage from Hermitage or Côte Rôtie. I had a 1990 Robert Michel La Geynale the other night that was really singing. The blues, of course.
Barbera: Piedmont’s Everyday Red
Just outside the walls of the turreted medieval castle that crowns this hilltop village is the gate to the Vietti winery, which clings to the steep hillside. Spreading out below the compound on all sides are vineyards that produce some of the most coveted of Barolos. Made from the difficult Nebbiolo grape in just five villages in the Piedmont region of northwest Italy, Barolo has been known since the nineteenth century as “the king of wines and the wine of kings,” thanks in part to its association with the house of Savoy. Luca Currado, whose family has grown grapes here for centuries, directs my attention to an anomaly on the hillside, an area with slightly darker, redder leaves. “That’s Barbera,” he says. “My secret Barbera vineyard.”
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