Searching for the Sound of Terroir
In an effort to find the intuitive connection between music and wine, winemaker Franz Weninger assembled an orchestra of instruments fashioned from wine tools. What he ended up with is proof that the essence of a wine, like emotion in music, can be understood innately.
In the years directly following WWII, the Hungarian essayist Béla Hamvas wrote The Philosophy of Wine, a passionate argument positioning the intoxication that comes from drinking a glass of wine as a pathway for relearning how to embrace life, live in the present and experience joy.
He communicated this belief system without a trace of jargon, describing wines the way one might an old friend. For Hamvas a wine could be flirtatious and talkative, even tragic. They were never full-bodied, overtly fruity or concentrated. Wine, after all, had helped knit him into the fabric of life—to discuss or judge it in a vacuum where the only context is other wines would be nothing short of heretical.
Fast-forward 60 years. Fine wine is being made and consumed in almost every corner of the world, and sommeliers and other industry pros have been tasked with differentiating between regions and explaining the type of experience a particular wine will offer. With this, a highly specialized language has emerged to convey the flavor and structure of what’s in the glass. What might have been flirtatious to Hamvas is, in contemporary parlance, fruit forward, high-acid and floral. It’s true that these descriptors can be helpful in certain contexts, but are they the most natural way to communicate about wine? Does wine act on more than just our sense of taste?
When Franz Weninger, the winemaker at Austria’s Weingut Weninger, encountered a study by the neuroscientist Gordon M. Shepherd positing that the part of the brain that registers taste and the part that processes language are located on opposite sides, he experienced a eureka moment. Franz thought of his hero, Béla Hamvas, and how the philosopher’s exuberance for wine did not depend upon being able to nail the flavor profile of a particular vintage. All that mattered was paying attention to what one felt when they sipped. Then he thought about music—he’s Austrian, after all—and how people intuitively understand the emotion of music. A wistful melody played on the French horn inexplicably brings you to tears. A salsa rhythm causes you to throw up your arms and tumble onto the dance floor. He suspected that most people understand wine in the same way, but lack the language to express their thoughts.
“We listen to different music for different moods, it is the same with wine,” he says. “Sometimes we are melancholy and want a wine we can cry on. Sometimes we feel light and want a wine that makes us feel as if we could fly.” He wondered whether or not someone with little or no wine knowledge could match wines to the emotions evoked by a piece of music. He obsessed over the question for months. Finally, he devised an experiment.
It began with wines he knows intimately, his three single-vineyard Blaufränkisch: Dürrau, Steiner and Saybritz. He described the feelings he associates with these wines to his friend, the conductor Michael Glatter Götz, and asked him to choose a piece of music to match each one.
The Dürrau is deep, round and worthy of cellaring. It comes from old vines planted in loamy clay-rich soil in eastern Burgenland near the Hungarian border. Franz called it, “pensive, like a well-read aristocrat ensconced in a cold castle,” and the conductor suggested a melancholic musical pairing with “The Moldau” by the 19th-century Czech composer Bedřich Smetana describing the river that runs through Prague.
The Steiner is lean with exceptionally fine tannins, flavors of dried cherries, herbs and spice. It comes from a vineyard with stony soil in Balf, Hungary near Lake Neusiedl, which, for four centuries, has been identified as one of the region’s prime sites. When Franz compared the Steiner’s power and precision to that of an endurance runner, the conductor recommended an electronic drum piece with a fast beat by the Belgian group, Safri Duo.
The Saybritz, which hails from southern Burgenland, combines the more accessible qualities of its two siblings. Franz dubbed it, “a crowd pleaser that is at once light and full-bodied,” and conductor chose the iconic theme song to television series Hawaii Five-O.
Conductor Götz scored the three pieces—one melancholy, one rhythmic, one a pop anthem—for an orchestra of homemade instruments fashioned from materials found in wine production. Bottles filled with water became flutes. Hoses attached to funnels were converted into trumpets. Barrels sawed in half were drums. And those strung with training wire became harps. Arranging music for these instruments posed a unique set of challenges. The instruments didn’t play at the same volume. In fact, they were not even calibrated to the same scale. And recording the orchestra in the cellar proved equally difficult given the colossal echo.
With each test, the project grew in scope. Ultimately, a concert hall was secured in Raiding, Austria, birthplace of the celebrated 19th-century pianist and composer Franz Liszt, for the orchestra to record a 30-second audio and video clip of each of the three songs. The goal was to make true vineyard music. While the performance is clever and visually arresting, it makes one wonder whether or not the genuine emotion of the music would have been conveyed more effectively through the original recordings.
Franz put his question to the test. He asked friends who knew little about wine to blind taste his three single-vineyard Blaufränkisch, then listen to the three clips of music and match the feelings stirred by the wines to the emotional content of the musical scores. All of his friends matched the Saybritz with the theme to Hawaii Five-O and he estimates an 80 percent success rate regarding their finding a correspondence between the melancholic Dürrau Blaufränkisch with Smetana’s “The Moldau.” The same goes for their sensing a relationship between the Steiner and Safri Duo’s drumming.
In other words, the answer to his question, “Is wine something that can be understood intuitively?” was a resounding yes. But why go to such lengths to prove that the essence of wine can be communicated through feelings and moods? It seems like a herculean effort if it its sole purpose is to disprove the efficacy of the tasting note, especially since most people who have mastered the technical language of wine, as Franz calls it, learned the language to be able to speak in more detail about the wines they love.
Franz believes that to know empirically that even people with little or no wine knowledge can match the emotion of a wine with that of a musical score is to appreciate that the experience of drinking wine has emotional value. This means reducing wine to a tasting note limits the potential of the interaction.
If his experiment linking music and Blaufränkisch reminds us of the expansive state of mind wine can evoke when we are not reducing it to adjectives and trying to peg down what’s in our glass, it will have been a great success. Franz is asking us to be patient with wine. Let it act on our senses and our nervous system. Don’t be so quick to understand it. Listen to it, the way you might a favorite piece of music. Get lost in it, the way you might a novel.
Bud Burst in Santorini
Bud burst comes to Santorini, a Greek island in the southern Aegean Sea, in the early spring as it does in most of the northern hemisphere, but it is unlike bud burst anywhere else on earth. With the use of kouloura pruning, new shoots are woven into basket shaped vines, which protect delicate young fruit from sand blowing in punishing wind and the burning effect of the island sun on black lava.
Vineyards have been continuously cultivated in this inhospitable environment for three thousands years. This is in no small part due to the resilience of assyrtiko, the island’s high-quality indigenous grape variety. Assyrtiko thrives in the mix of pumice stone and lava rock that have blanketed Santorini since it was devastated by a volcanic eruption in 1650 BC. The grapes are small and densely flavored, much like the prized white eggplants, cherry tomatoes, capers and yellow fava beans grown on the island.
A singular feature of assyrtiko is that approximately every seventy-five years vines are pruned to the root and allowed to regrow. A new vine could spur from a root system that is up to five hundred years old. The ancient roots burrow deep in the soil, making it possible for assyrtiko to thrive in an environment with scarce water.
Assyrtiko is prized for its capacity to retain high acidity and sugar levels simultaneously. Even in a hot arid climate, it yields fresh citrus and mineral driven wines capable of maturing in the cellar. It is the kind of muscular white wine that can be enjoyed with grilled lamb as easily as it could with fresh fish. Assyrtiko from Sigalas, Hatzidakis and Gaia Thalassitis are among the finest examples available in the U.S., and an ideal place to begin exploring the wines of Santorini short of a vacation in Greece.
Gaia Gaja on Barbaresco
Gaia Gaja may be the world’s greatest ambassador for Barbaresco, Italy, the Piedmontese region renowned for its elegant wines made from one hundred percent nebbiolo grapes. Born and raised in the region, she is the fifth generation of her family to work at Gaja, the family’s celebrated estate. Tasting Barbaresco with her opened our eyes to what makes the wines so beguiling.
“For people who love Barbaresco, a lot of the enjoyment comes from forming a relationship with the wine while it is still in the glass. Nebbiolo (from Barbaresco) possesses ethereal perfumes. You can swirl the wine it and make it talk,” Gaia explains.
“When it is young, you can smell aromas of citrus zest -- oranges, tangerines, and bergamot. You can also detect aromas of plant roots. You will find hints of rhubarb, quinine and bitter herbs.”
Gaia emphasizes the special quality of the wine’s texture. “On the palate, Barbaresco is discreet in taste and bigger in texture,” she says. “There is this dryness that sweeps across your tongue and cleans everything up. It is best to pair Barbaresco with fatty foods. Most of the time we serve it with meat, but my favorite dinner when I go home and don't want to cook is Barbaresco and a cheese platter. In Japan, I like Barbaresco with sushi. The wine is delicate and does not overpower the fish, especially toro (fatty tuna belly), which is almost like raw meat.”
A Seder Wine Worthy of Four Cups
The Passover Seder is structured around drinking four cups of wine. For decades this meant the ceremonial meal was punctuated by sips of the syrupy concord grape based Manischewitz, a wine that seemed to live in the refrigerator from one holiday to the next without ever being emptied or replaced. Fortunately, as Israeli winemaking has matured, the source for Seder wine has shifted from the shores of Lake Erie in New York State to the high-altitude vineyards of the Upper Galilee, where wineries such as Recanati are making quality kosher for Passover wines with international varieties.
Basic Recanati wines are reasonably priced crowd-pleasers: cabernet sauvignon, chardonnay, and merlot that could hail from good producer anywhere in the New World. The Reserve label wines offer a more distinctive experience. For Recanati winemaker Gil Shatsberg, who also founded the much-admired Amphorae Winery along Israel’s border with Lebanon, they represent his effort to make wines that speak of their origins in the Middle East near the Mediterranean Sea. Thus the Petite Syrah-Zinfandel Reserve 2011 from the Galilee is silky and bright with aromas of violets and fresh plums and the old-vine Wild Carignan Reserve 2010, Judean Hills tastes of bramble, smoke and chocolate.
Winemaking in Israel comes with particular challenges. Vineyards have to be leased because the government owns all agricultural land. Plus, for a wine to be Kosher (as all Israeli wine must), the vineyard must be left fallow every seven years. This is accomplished symbolically through a national ban on exports after every seventh harvest, even if the vintage yielded the best wine a winery has ever produced.
Guide to the Language of Organic, Biodynamic & Sustainable Wine
Organic wine is different from wine made with organic grapes—and that’s just the start of the sometimes legal, sometimes regulated, sometimes self-defined phrases on wine labels. Here, I’ve gathered the most important ones are, complete with either their legal definition (when they have one) or an assessment their good faith meaning, and how it all relates to what you might be drinking.
Organic wine
In the United States, the label ‘Organic Wine’ means a wine was made with USDA National Organic Program (NOP) certified organic grapes and no added sulfites. Broadly speaking this affirms that no chemical herbicides or fungicides were used in the vineyard, the wine did not come into contact with genetically modified organisms, and the winemaker abstained from adding sulfur dioxide as a preservative to the finished wine. Trusted third-party accreditations like NOP are essential to setting and maintaining industry standards, still, many meticulous wineries, particularly smaller operations, refrain from the certification process because of the time and cost involved with maintaining the accreditation. Some also have questions about best practices, including the right to use additives such as acacia gum to soften a wine’s mouthfeel, oak chips for flavor, and pectolytic enzymes to enhanced color extraction under NOP’s National List of Allowed and Prohibited Substances.
Made with organic grapes
The label ‘Made with Organic Grapes’ is self-explanatory to the extent that all wines in this category are made with grapes that are certified organic under the USDA National Organic Program (NOP). What distinguishes ‘Made with Organic Grapes’ from ‘Organic Wine’ in the United States is that the winemaker is permitted to add sulfites, up to 100 parts per million. ‘Made with Organic Grapes’ is a particularly important category because in Europe and Canada the addition of a small amounts sulfur dioxide is permitted in organic wines. In other words, wines labeled ‘Made with Organic Grapes’ in the United States, would be considered ‘Organic Wine’ in Canada and Europe.
Organic vineyard practices
This category is for wineries that tend their vineyards in keeping with the core standards of the organic movement, abstaining from the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides, but are not certified by the USDA or any other third-party. Some may exceed USDA NOP standards – think arugula grown by an exacting farmer and sold at the greenmarket versus prewashed organic arugula sold in plastic containers at the supermarket – but you have to ask questions or do independent research to know.
Certified biodynamic vineyards
Biodynamics, as laid out by the Austrian philosopher Dr. Rudolf Steiner in his seminal lecture, “The Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture” advocates for a holistic agricultural system that brings plants and animals together to support biological diversity. The practice was first introduced in the late nineteenth century as a reaction to the industrialization of farming, as the identification of nitrogen as essential to plant growth laid the groundwork for synthetic pesticides. Steiner believed that instead of resembling factories, farms should be modeled after living organisms; they should be holistic systems capable of creating and maintaining their own health and vitality. Biodynamic farms the world over are certified by DEMETER.
Biodynamic vineyard practices
This category is for vintners who subscribe to the overriding philosophy of biodynamics, a vineyard is a wholistic organism in which all the elements are interconnected, and adopt its practices without being DEMETER certified. These could include, but are not limited to: avoiding the addition of commercial preparations to their wine, such as commercial yeasts; the spray application of teas made from yarrow, chamomile, stinging nettle, oak bark, or dandelion; the application of compost made from horn manure or horn silica; the use of livestock for weed control and increased biodiversity; or adherence to the Biodynamic calendar, which is divided into fruit, flower, root, and leaf days, based on the cycles of the moon.
No sulfur added
All wines contain trace amounts of sulfur dioxide, SO2, as it is a byproduct of fermentation by yeast, in other words, winemaking. Any additional SO2 added to the wine acts as a preservative. Sulfur dioxide stabilizes a wine by preventing oxidation and eliminating bacteria with the potential to create spoilage. Making wine without adding a little SO2 before bottling is the viticulture equivalent of walking a tightrope. The winemaker has scant room for error. He or she must maintain extremely high standards of hygiene throughout the winemaking process to ensure their wine remains in good condition until it is served. Advocates of wines with no added sulfur believe that, when successful, the wines show remarkable depth, sense of place, and purity of fruit.
Low sulfur
Sulfur dioxide is measured in parts per million (ppm). Wines in the category ‘Made with Organic Grapes’ are permitted up to 100 ppm SO2, while conventional wines are permitted up to 350 ppm SO2. Any wine with less than 100 ppm would be considered a low sulfur wine. A less technical way to look at this is, low sulfur wines reflect a choice on the part of the winemaker to add a minimal amount of SO2 before bottling to preserve the wine’s freshness and stability.
Vegan
To achieve maximum clarity, remove byproducts of fermentation, and increase stability, wines are often filtered or fined. Fining agents are like ushers that attach themselves to leftover particles floating in the wine and hasten their removal. Most traditional fining agents would not be welcome in a vegan diet. They include egg whites, milk protein, gelatin, and fish bladders. However, there are effective vegan options winemakers could choose, such as bentonite and carbon. These options are increasingly popular in the EU, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, where the presence of an animal-based fining agent must be called out as a potential allergen on the label.
Unfiltered
An unfiltered wine eschews the speed and convenience of fining for old-fashioned patience. After fermentation, the wine is allowed to rest in the cask or tank. With time and good conditions, gravity slowly settles the residual yeast, pectin, proteins, tannins, and other particles suspended in the wine, to the bottom of the container where they become sediment. Clear wine is siphoned off from the top of the container leaving the sediment behind.
Carbon neutral
To be truly carbon neutral, beyond offsetting carbon emissions from the operation of a winery, vintners must also offset the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere as a byproduct of fermentation. This could be accomplished through renewable energy practices, eco-friendly packaging, planting trees, or setting aside vineyard land as a nature preserve or biodiversity zone.
Native yeast
For wines in this category, fermentation is carried out by yeasts naturally at hand in the grape must, either having come from the grape skins or the ambient atmosphere of the winery. These ‘wild ferments’ tend to be slower, gentler, less linear, and less predictable than fermentation with commercial yeast strains, in part because different types of yeast are active at different times during the fermentation. As a result, the wines tend to be more aromatic and complex with a fuller more nuanced expression in the mouth.
Hand-harvested
The advantages of a hand harvest include more exacting fruit selection, gentler handling of the grapes and vines, and less impact on the soil, which heavy machinery can compact.
Renewable energy
The Natural Resources Defense Council defines renewable energy, or clean energy, as energy that comes from natural sources or processes that are constantly replenished. They offer examples of sunlight or wind, which keep shining and blowing even if their availability depends on time and weather.
The Art of Natural Wine
A discussion with Jonathan Nossiter and Jenny Lefcourt
Early in Jonathan Nossiter’s book, Cultural Insurrection: A Manifesto for the Arts, Agriculture, and Natural Wine, the writer and prize-winning director describes an interview with a journalist for the conservative French newspaper La Figaro, Sébastien Lapaque. The occasion was the release of Mondo Vino (2004), Nossitter’s documentary on the dual forces of homogenization and globalization in the wine world. When Lapaque opens their discussion with a disapproving tone, Nossiter expects to be called out for having gone too far in his critique of Robert Parker, Michel Rolland, and other champions of the voluptuous international-style that dominated wine at that moment. Instead, Lapaque accuses him of not having gone far enough. An early champion of natural wine, particularly the work of Marcel Lapierre in Morgon, Lapaque wanted to know why Nossiter hadn’t even mentioned the movement.
Until then, Nossiter had been agnostic on the topic. “I had already been serially experimenting with natural wine,” he recalls, “but I had yet to fully determine my feelings on the subject. I was convinced long before by organic and above all biodynamic farming. But the natural wine movement, which was even more rigorous in its pursuit of chemical-free purity, remained, like many of its wines, a little cloudy.”
After the interview, Nossiter began frequenting Verre Volé, a natural wine bar off the Canal St. Martin close to where he lived at the time. With steady immersion, he became a fan of the wines, their vitality, the way they refused to coddle consumers expectations. Their styles varied. The wines could be as elegant and traditional as the Chiantis of Giovanna Tiezzi at Pacina in Colli Senesi or as experimental and groundbreaking as the alpine wines of La Garagista in Barnard, Vermont. Still, he sensed that each of these taut reds and deeply-colored aromatic whites, “were renewing, in a contemporary idiom, a tradition stretching back at least eight thousand years, a tradition sundered only after WWII with the global imposition of chemical agriculture.”
He also noted the passion of Verre Volé’s youthful clientele, how they shared their discoveries and opinions about natural wine with the full-throated enthusiasm he recalled bibliophiles and cinephiles possessing decades earlier. If you’ve been to a Raw Wine Fair, or to wines bars like The Ten Bells in New York or The Drifters Wife in Portland, you can imagine the politically-engaged bohemia—though Nossiter might argue that the interest is more widespread and egalitarian in Europe where the wines are more accessibly priced.
With Cultural Insurrection, he touches lightly on the aesthetic merits of natural wines to focus on their importance as a cultural gesture. We listen as he shares his thoughts about why these wines speak to young people the way auteur-driven cinema did in his youth. Positioning himself as one of the children of the WWII generation who, “were marked by the profound moral and political issues faced by their fathers without ever having to face them themselves,” he looks at a world where soils have been impoverished and the menace of global warming looms ever larger and extols the utopian fringe that animates the natural wine world through the very personal lens of his experiences as a director, art student, historian, and critic of contemporary culture.
Listen in as he discusses his new work with Jenny Lefcourt, the owner and founder of Jenny & Francois Selections, who has pioneered natural wine in American markets for almost twenty years.
Menin: Have you two met?
Nossiter: Sort of. I’m a fan.
Lefcourt: You know the first time I met you, Jonathan, was at Romy’s restaurant Cendrillion in Soho.
Nossiter: Wow. That was a while ago.
Lefcourt: I was still lugging my own bag of wine around town and he always fed me lunch. You were having lunch there soon after it came out.
Menin: One of the reasons I hoped to bring you two together was that before importing natural wine, Jenny studied French theory and philosophy with Derrida. You reference him in the book as you offer examples from post-modernism, conceptual art, linguistics, and derivative markets to argue that urban culture has become disassociated from any concrete sense of reality. I would love to hear you two address how the natural wine movement speaks to this sense of abstraction.
Nossiter: To me, it’s quite simple. In another generation, people like Jenny would not be doing what she is doing now. In fact, there are many extremely well-educated people in natural wine who in another generation would have engaged in other activities. We’re all starving in a virtual world. Starving for something tangible, something deeply reflective. The natural wine world offers engagement in things which are carnal, physical, tactile, concrete, and of practical value, and with it comes as much cultural and intellectual stimulation as you could possibly desire. Jenny, do you agree?
Lefcourt: Yes, absolutely. I was in a French library studying when I went out into the street and talked to somebody who said, “Are you looking at our poster? You should come in and try some wine.” He invited me into a Natural Wine Fair, and I talked to people from different regions of France who spoke the language in different ways and discussed the harvest and their love for where they come from. There was an incredible sense of community and I thought, “I have to be a part of this life.”
I started importing in the early years of La Dive Bouteille an incredible moment for the natural wine movement, really the epicenter of where it all started. In the early 2000s, a man working in the French Ministry of Agriculture came and spoke to the winemakers. He started by saying, “Are there any journalists in the room? We need to keep this a secret.” Then he said, “We have to figure this out because you’re all being rejected from the AOC system, and the AOC system is supposed to be here to protect what you guys are doing. You are the best of the best. How is it possible that you’re being shunned because you’re no longer typical of your appellations? There are machine harvests, chemicals, overcropping, and manipulation of wine, and here you are making wines that speak of the terroir where you’re from and you’re being pushed out of our system. We have to do something to show that you’re the winemakers of excellence.” It was an incredible moment.
So, it’s always been a political act for me to sell these wines. It’s always been about defending the culture and the history of these people who are making the wines, and hoping I can help them stay where they are and do what they do. It is all the things that you talk about, so thank you for your book.
Nossiter: One of the key things that makes this movement so interesting is that it is completely transgressive in an entirely productive way. It’s not the transgression of an adolescent with an identity crisis who just wants to say, “I’m different.” These are serious farmers offering profound reflections on the history of their land, not as something fixed, but as something progressive. Whether they’re an old peasant family, an old aristocratic family, or a recently arrived Jewish photographer, they’re thinking about the fundamentally unethical nature of most contemporary wine legislation and have figured out a way to push the law. When the Loire winemaker Olivier Cousin deliberately gets himself arrested for labeling his wines Anjou (in response to regional rules he believed would lead to lower quality wine and increased pollution) it’s an act of civil disobedience. He wanted to direct attention to the fundamentally unjust AOC system, and this has a ripple effect.
Menin: In the book you propose re-imagining all aesthetic and political and cultural questions as ecological ones. What do you see as the role of the natural winemaker in what you call this ‘ecological existential’ moment?
Nossiter: I believe conventional urban cultural activity seems doomed to irrelevance in the world that we live in. People engaged in cultural activities as we understand them—painting, film, writing, journalism—no longer have any substantial impact. But if you go around in Paris or Berlin or London or Rome, you see a much wider demographic of young people drinking natural wine in a way that they might have gone to the cinema thirty years ago to see the new Hertzog or Fellini film. Even for people who aren’t necessarily interested in other aspects of culture, there is something about the natural wine movement that touches them, they see its vitality. What’s the purpose of culture anyway? It’s to nourish, right? Whether it’s agriculture or urban culture, the idea is to nourish body and soul.
Lefcourt: Jonathan, my main reaction to your book was, I can’t believe what a kindred spirit you are. This is how I think about what I do. I’m an academic and I come from a very political, activist family. My mom defended the Black Panthers, and so I sat there and thought, “After years of study, am I going to go be a professor at a university.” Then I came upon this incredible world, I thought, “This is so much more relevant to my life.”
Nossiter: What’s interesting about the natural wine phenomenon is that it wouldn’t be enough for there to be a Thierry Puzelat in Touraine, if there wasn’t a Jenny Lefcourt in New York and a Doug Wregg in London. The farmer’s rural gesture has found relevance in urban life. There’s a whole chain of people that unite countryside with city life in a way that is very exciting. It shows that there is a way of circumventing a system without having to directly do battle. I’m working on a film now that’s been five years worth of effort, and –
Menin: What’s the film about?
Nossiter: It’s an ecological fable set in 2086 about the last people on Earth, with Nick Nolte and Charlotte Rampling and Stellan Skarsgard. The most pressing issue of our day is whether biological life on this earth has a chance of survival. What we can say about the natural wine movement is that it is a functioning metaphor for all the most urgent questions. Unless we radically change the way we farm, the world’s soils will be devastated, global warming will continue, and there will be species extinction. Probably our own among the first.
Menin: This is a question for both of you. Do you think natural wine has the ability to scale? Or is it, by its nature, not scalable but a radical example that could shift the general conversation?
Lefcourt: Natural wine started out as a French movement and has become an international movement. More and more people are drawn to making these kinds of wines and I think there’s room for more growth. Many natural wine producers have become certified organic or biodynamic. That’s really important as things scale. Otherwise, there’s room for big companies to be dishonest and the last thing we want is confusion. At the same time, as Jonathan said, there’s a recognizable purity to these wines that you cannot imitate. The taste is there. A big vineyard cannot imitate it, but if there’s more organic viticulture, it’s only a good thing.
Nossiter: I think what Jenny says is right. The pioneering work of these tiny artisans, these artists making little paintings, can and should have an effect on larger industries. As with any cultural, artistic, or political movement, you want the pioneers to open up new discussions, new ways of seeing things. Then it’s up to other people, each one in their own activity, to take the lesson and apply it to themselves. Jenny, don’t you think that we’ve already seen that in the wine world? So-called conventional wine is greener and less processed than it was 15, 20 years ago.
Lefcourt: Yes, but what the natural wine producers are revealing – and what the industry leaders creating mythologies around wine want us to remain ignorant about – is that wineries are some of the biggest polluters out there. That’s why landscapes filled only with vines are not beautiful to me. What’s beautiful is biodiversity, keeping the fruit trees, and growing many different things, not wineries pouring Roundup on their land and destroying everything to produce more grapes.
In the US, thanks to Michael Pollan and others, people want to know the story behind their food production. The same awareness is not there for wine. The natural wine movement says, “There’s a problem with the way wine is labeled. We’re not told how it’s produced. We’re not told that wineries are huge polluters, and that needs to change.” We can’t forget there are huge battles to be waged. One of those battles is requiring wineries to write the additives they use on their back labels. I think if wineries had to list each of the 300 legal additives they use on their back labels, they wouldn’t use so many!
Nossiter: There has always been a mythology attached to wine. Throughout history, you can see its mythological power and function. You see it in the Bible and in ancient Greece. For me, wine is the pioneering mythological tip of the iceberg, but I’m interested in the iceberg. I’m interested in the entire gesture of farming and the culture of farming as a response to urban culture. Because of global warming, because of the devastation that we’re wreaking on the earth, because we’re in the countdown to the extinction of ice on the planet, anything that gets people to think, and to experience, literally internally, “What is the countryside to me?” is of huge value, and we can thank these joyously transgressive pioneer farmers for starting this conversation.
Want to try natural wine? Check out 10 Natural Wines We Love to get started.
A Tale of Two Aquifers: From east to west, vineyard health depends upon a complex system of rivers, streams, and oceans
At first glance, Napa Valley and the North Fork of Long Island could not be more different. Napa is warm, dry, and Mediterranean—prone to droughts and wildfires, the North Fork is bright, cool, and Maritime with wet springs and a hurricane season that overlaps with the harvest. Napa’s winemaking tradition dates back approximately 150 years, and though it was twice disrupted, first by phylloxera in the 1870s and fifty years later by Prohibition, it remains a benchmark for American winemaking. The first vineyards on the North Fork were planted in 1973 and are being watched carefully as they fulfill their promise. What the two regions share, beyond being situated a stone’s throw from major metropolises, is a core group of winemakers with a profound understanding that the health of their vineyards is interconnected with a complex system of rivers, streams, oceans, and aquifers. In each region, these forward-thinking vintners banded together to find and implement solutions tailored to the specific needs of their local ecosystem.
Both ground and sea matter on an island
“For us, sustainability has to do with water,” says Richard Olsen-Harbich the winemaker at Bedell Cellars and a founding member of Long Island Sustainable Winegrowing, referring to both groundwater and the surrounding waters of the Peconic Bay and Long Island Sound.
The health of the groundwater is always in the foreground for local winemakers because there is only one aquifer on the entire North Fork, stretching from the town of Riverhead out to Orient Point, and it’s used for agriculture and for drinking water. Through the third-party certification program Long Island Sustainable Winegrowing, local vintners have carved two primary paths for protecting the water source.
The first is conservation. “There’s definitely a concern that if the aquifer gets overdrawn and sea levels rise, salt water could intrude, so everyone regulates their water consumption for irrigation and processing,” explains Alice Wise, the Viticulturalist and Education Specialist for the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Suffolk County. Though she’s quick to point out that irrigation is fairly uncommon on the North Fork since there is plenty of rain and the soils tend to hold enough water to carry the vineyards through all but the very driest parts of the year, and that wineries only use significant amounts of water directly after the harvest.
The second crucial way they are protecting the aquifer is with a focused effort to prevent the use of leachable materials. Long Island’s winemaking history may be comparatively brief but its agricultural history dates back more than a century and there’s still material in the water from decades and decades of conventional farming. “We are being very careful when making decisions about what we’re applying and focusing on regulating materials that travel quickly through the ground and into the water table,” emphasizes Wise.
Minimizing nitrogen levels is central to Long Island Sustainable Winegrowing’s strategy. Nitrogen is fertilizer and managing its use is crucial to both surface water and groundwater. In surface water, it causes algae blooms, which are damaging to all types of marine life. The North Fork’s historic oyster and scallop industries are dependent on healthy aquatic life, and healthy aquatic life supports the osprey and other local birds. Consequently, any kind of nitrogen can only be applied to the soil when the vines are active and it is certain to be taken up by the roots. Even nitrogen-rich compost piles need to be moved regularly to protect the soil and aquifer.
River management reigns in a valley
The health of Napa’s main aquifer is the direct result of conservation efforts dating back a half-century. It began with the Napa Agricultural Preserve in 1968, which established a minimum parcel size of 20 acres for vineyards and homes on the valley floor. In 1979, this was increased to 40 acres. The impetus was to protect the region’s historic agrarian character from urban and suburban sprawl. It’s difficult to imagine the level of resistance the ordinance faced, today it seems prescient, but five decades ago the battle was so heated it became source material for James Conaway’s bestseller Napa: The Story of an American Eden.
“Water conservation started just by dint of the fact that we had minimum parcel sizes and grapes became their dominant use. Vineyards have a much lower water use level than other agricultural products such as hay or fruit trees, even housing,” explains Tom Gamble, a third-generation Napa farmer and the owner of Gamble Family Vineyards.
That said, water conservation was clearly the intent of the 1994 ordinance mandating parcels be at least 160 acres in the mountain AVAs and surrounding open spaces. Its purpose was to protect the forests and the hillsides where rainwater percolates its way into the ground and recharges the basin. As a result, today in Napa County, 9% of the land is planted with vineyards, 1% houses cities, and 90% of the terrain acts as a watershed to replenish the aquifer.
Conservation was also the focal point in 1999 when a groundwater ordinance prioritized groundwater for agricultural, limited the amount of water each vineyard could draw based on fair use and prohibited vintners or farmers of any kind from selling their water rights.
Today, efforts to strengthen the watershed are led by the sustainability certification programs Napa Green and Fish Friendly Farming, along with the Napa River Flood Project. Much of the effort is directed at restoring local rivers and streams. “There is no question that if you go back to the first aerial photos and the earliest maps, you would see that we have straightened and narrowed streams and rivers, especially in the second half of the 20th century. That caused a lot of the issues we have with eroding creek banks, loss of habitat, and devastating floods. Then we built levees that weren’t very good. When the levees started to breach, they cause horrendous damage because the floods were no longer broad and shallow, but narrow, deep, and concentrated – they scoured lands and ripped out vineyards,” Gamble recalls.
The primary changes were threefold. First, purchasing marshlands near Carneros, which had been converted to hay fields, and restoring the land to its original use to protect the surrounding area from floods and tidal surges. Second, redesigning the levees to cause less erosion and downcutting in the stream beds. Downcutting deepens the stream bed, causing the levees to become unstable and eventually collapse. When a levee fails, the stream bank breaks down, and the stream bed no longer has gravel or shade to create a healthy habitat for the kinds of insects and birds that keep the local ecosystem in balance. At the same time, fine sediment pollutes the stream, choking off the oxygen necessary for fish to breathe.
The third change was taking a focused look at what was being planted at the edge of vineyards, then removing invasive species such as eucalyptus trees, Himalayan blackberry, and the various ivies that are planted around houses. These non-native species force native vegetation out their natural habitat, leading to narrower animal and bird populations. “You can change your habitat and improve the health of your vineyard through what most people call Integrated Pest Management, but I call Farming by Henry Kissinger. You’re looking for a balance of good and evil forces, a détente,” Gamble laughs.
An anecdotal sign of success is that as the river grows cooler and more robust, beavers are returning and building small dams of their own. This is leading to even higher water levels in the stream during the summer, which creates static pressure, encouraging more water to enter the ground and find its way to the aquifer.
Both Tom Gamble and Rich Olsen-Harbich attribute the success of their respective efforts to the projects being generated from the communities themselves. “These are independent-minded people so it’s not always easy to get them all to sit down at the same table and agree on stuff. That takes a little bit of relationship building and getting everybody on the same page,” says Olsen-Harbich.
“When it’s voluntary and there’s an incentive behind it, versus a strict regulatory approach that’s always punitive, you’re going to get a lot more done. We have the science, we have the way of balancing the needs of farmers and the environment, we have to cooperate and learn to work with each other,” says Gamble.“As long as there’s this creativity in the industry and communal support, we will keep going, and it has to be an evolution, not a revolution because people tend to get hurt in revolutions, either economically or otherwise.”
Sustainable winemaking is guided by the notion that a vineyard’s ecosystem doesn’t end at its borders; it is interconnected with the health of the soil, the groundwater, the local wildlife, and forests. Communal and individual interest begin to work in tandem when viticulture becomes not only about tending to the health of a specific vineyard, but also to the health of the surrounding environs, and is informed by an awareness that preventing a creek from flooding or being thoughtful about where compost is kept can preserve an entire water system.
Building a Better Cork
The future may be in grape-based corks
Most of us don’t put too much thought into corks. We may debate the relative benefits of natural corks verses screw tops, but generally, we only notice corks when something goes wrong. The cork crumbles when pulled from the bottle or appears to have absorbed liquid up to its midpoint, clues that potentially ruinous levels of oxygen or TCA, better known as cork taint, have penetrated the closure. Cork is a remarkable material for bunging a bottle of wine. Porous, spongy, and compressible, it squeezes into the neck of a bottle to form a protective barrier then returns to its original form once the bottle is opened. Viewed through the lens of sustainability, cork is equally impressive. A natural material harvested from the bark of Quercus trees, it is fully biodegradable, recycles without releasing toxins, and harvesting it triples a Quercus tree’s capacity for carbon dioxide absorption.
At the same time, cork is a natural material and possesses all the vulnerabilities of a material exposed to the vagaries of the environment. TCA is a prime example; it develops when the mold or fungus that grows within the porous Quercus bark comes into contact with chlorophenols, an ingredient found in pesticides and wood preservatives. It is not a small issue. Each year four-hundred million bottles of wine are rendered undrinkable by compromised corks. It takes two-hundred billion liters of water to produce those four-hundred million bottles, representing a significant waste of resources.
Hardy Wallace, the co-founder and winemaker at Dirty & Rowdy Family Winery, describes the problem like this: “If the industry TCA rate is approximately five percent of all bottles sealed with natural cork, the bottles that comprise that five percent become one-hundred percent waste. Very few people will drink a corked wine because it’s spoiled. You dump it out. The waste isn’t just that bottle of wine. It’s the energy put into the vineyard, the energy put into the winery, the bottle, the label, the closure, the cardboard box, and the transportation. It’s putting the bottle in a store with the lights on. It’s someone driving the bottle home.”
From a consumer standpoint, opening a faulty bottle of wine is always a disappointment. It is also extra work and often a source of embarrassment or money lost. It requires going back to the wine store to inform them that your bottle was corked. Sometimes you are taken at your word, sometimes you are put in the awkward position of having your assessment reviewed by whoever is manning the shop. Sometimes a corked bottle has been sitting in your cellar for several years and you’re left with no recourse at all.
The first high-performance cork
On November 17, 2016, the CEO of Vinventions stood behind a podium at the Ritz Hotel in Paris to announce a seminal new product. It was a wine bottle closure called SÜBR, a high-tech sustainable micro-agglomerate composed of ground natural cork and a plant-based biodegradable adhesive. The launch of this forward-thinking green technology marked a significant moment for a company whose early success stood on the shoulders of the Nomacorc, the wildly-successful petroleum-based closure it had introduced seventeen years earlier.
The Nomacorc revolutionized the wine bottle closure sector by offering significant technical advantages over natural cork, namely flawless oxygen management and the elimination of TCA, all while preserving the traditional aesthetic and ceremony of opening a bottle. It was developed by Marc Noël and his father Gert Noël, the Belgian industrialist who founded NMC, a leader in transforming synthetic materials into extruded products. Marc established NMC’s American base in 1979, calling it Nomaco. Initially, his core businesses were manufacturing pipe insulation and a construction product for applying sealant to concrete panels.
Extrusion is the manufacturing equivalent to traditional pasta making, where dough is fed into a machine and shaped-pasta comes out continually from the other end. Here, instead of dough, it is synthetic materials that are being transformed. By the early 1990’s, Marc began applying Nomaco’s extrusion expertise to the leisure and wellness sectors, expanding its portfolio to include pool noodles, exercise rollers, mattress components, and in 1999, as a direct result of his father’s passion for wine and frustration with bottles ruined by cork taint, the synthetic wine closure, Nomacorc.
“My father was opening bottles from his wine cellar and finding more and more were tainted or contaminated. Finally, he said, ‘I’ve had it! We need to develop a product that will solve this.’ The frustration was not just my father’s, but one that permeated the entire marketplace. At the time, twelve to fifteen percent of the sixteen billion bottles of wine bottled each year had some degree of TCA contamination,” Marc recalls.
To say the product was well received is an understatement. By 2005, Nomacorc was in twenty-five countries. “I had a meeting with a number of wineries in Napa and a member of the Gallo family told me, ‘Marc, you have a great product, but have you ever thought about what your company’s biggest strength is, really?’ I said, ‘The technology.’ And he said, ‘No, it’s your presence in the marketplace. You have one of the best global distribution systems in the wine industry. You’re certainly not the biggest, but you have phenomenal distribution. Why don’t you do more than just Nomacorc?’”
In 2007, Marc engaged a private equity partner, Summit Partners, to implement the strategy, but held off when the recession hit and it seemed prudent to wait to see how the economy would evolve. Eight years later, in January 2015, with an investment from Bespoke Capital Partners that Dow Jones reported being $200 million, he was able to buy out his equity partners and finally follow through on the Gallo family’s advice. Nomacorc changed its name to Vinventions, hired Heino Freudenberg to be its CEO, and went on a buying spree. The company acquired the Ohlinger Group, producers of premium natural corks; Vintop, the screw cap makers; and Syntek, a company that makes closures out of polyethylene, the material used for Cling Wrap. They added two service divisions, one in oxygen management and another in marketing. For a time, the company also became the exclusive representatives of Vinolok, leaders in glass closures. When they were through, they dubbed Vinventions the “House of 7 Brands” offering complete closure solutions. With their full line of closures and services, the new company protected one in every eight wine bottles worldwide, one in every two in the United States.
Questions about food safety and glue
The month after Nomacorc and Bespoke Capital Partners joined forces, February 2015, Lewis Perdue, the editor and publisher of Wine Industry Insight published an article with the alarming headline, “Micro-Agglomerates: 350 Million Illegal Corks Per Year?” In the piece, Lewis reported that producers and importers of micro-agglomerated corks were facing scrutiny from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a result of their use of toluene diisocyanate polyurethane (TDI) as a binding agent. The genesis of the story was a letter sent to the FDA a few months earlier by the Italian trade association Grupo Tappi Sintetic Espansi, which represents producers of synthetic bottle closures in Italy, including the Nomacorc. The letter queried whether the use of the polyurethane binder TDI was permitted in wine corks in the U.S.
Like Nomacorc, micro-agglomerated corks are TCA-free and offer reliable oxygen management. They’re made by grinding and thoroughly cleaning natural cork, mixing the ground cork with a binding agent, molding the mixture into the desired shape, and applying extreme heat, which essentially fuses the cork and binder into one big molecule. When polyurethane is used as a bonding agent or glue, it represents fifty percent of the material in the bottle closure, meaning it comes into direct contact with the wine in the bottle. According to the Wine Industry Insight article, this was troubling because the EPA’s TDI action plan says that TDI is a well-known dermal and inhalation sensitizer in the workplace and that it has been documented to cause asthma and lung damage. The story includes photographs of micro-agglomerated corks taken from bottles Lewis purchased; the captions beneath these images allege that they show signs of wine penetrating the closures.
The FDA responded to the Italian trade group with a letter dated December 8, 2014, telling them they were correct: there was no U.S. regulation of TDI in agglomerated wine corks without a functional barrier separating it from the wine. It continued, “If there is a reasonable expectation that components of the TDI PU binder will migrate to, or otherwise affect, the wine under the intended conditions of use, we believe there is no legal basis for the sale of agglomerated wine corks containing TDI PU in the United States.”
However, it also clearly state that, “If migration of components of the TDI PU is determined not to be expected, either based on the existence of a barrier or that there are no component substances in the binder that are expected to migrate into the wine, then authorization for this use under FDA regulations would not be required for the legal marketing of the corks.”
To be sure, no regulatory action was taken. Instead, leading manufacturers of TDI-based micro-agglomerated corks, including DIAM and Amorim & Irmãos S.A, provided extensive data to the FDA and, by January 2017, the agency determined that no migration of TDI occurred and officially permitted the use of polyurethane resin in wine bottle closures.
This did not satisfy Lewis Perdue, who believes part of the problem is that FDA regulators are toxicologists, not endocrinologists, meaning they only measure direct damage to living organisms and don’t take into account indirect damage, such as TDI’s potential hormone disruption effects. “Just because something is only present in a few parts per billion doesn’t mean it’s harmless,” he says, noting, “We don’t know if TDI is potentially harmful in small amounts. No study’s been done to determine this.”
Sugar cane closures
Later that year, Nomacorc introduced a new line called Select Bio. No longer a petroleum-based closure, Select Bio was made from sugar cane harvested from sustainable plantations in northern Brazil. The product offered all the technological advantages of the original Nomacorc—no cork taint, controlled oxygen ingress, and wine preservation guarantees of up to twenty-five years—but now it was one hundred percent recyclable and used plant-based polymers that made the closure carbon-neutral. Avalon Winery in California was the first producer to adopt the Select Bio closure, but the most fortuitous early adopter may have been Dirty & Rowdy Family Winery.
Dirty & Rowdy winemaker Hardy Wallace is a master communicator, seemingly born to traverse the ethos of the natural wine movement and the vernacular of social media. His wine career began in 2009 when he won a contest sponsored by the winery Murphy-Goode. It landed him a six-month contract as a wine writer and brand promoter as well as housing in coveted Healdsburg. “After the contest-supplied employment and housing ended, he worked with winemakers revered for their technical skills and ethical approach, Kevin Kelly, Erhen Jordan, and Cathy Corison, while starting his own label, Dirty & Rowdy with his friend Matt Richardson and their respective spouses.
“We started using the Select Bio in 2014, our fifth vintage. We’re always looking to make sure that everything we do is not only super high-quality but also fits our ethos—not just the farming and wine-making style, but our packaging too,” says Hardy. “What attracted us to alternative closures was being able to have credible consistency while being able to dial in what they call the OTR, the Oxygen Transmission Rate. All corks breathe a little bit. With the traditional cork, it’s really hard to dial in a level of breathability because each one is kind of a unique critter, but with the Nomacorc we could choose the breathability that we wanted from bottle to bottle.”
By mid-2017, Nomacorc Green Line was the fastest growing sustainable plant-based closure on the market, adding more than 300 million units to the previous year’s Nomacorc sales worldwide. Vinventions renamed the closure PlantCorc and progressively replaced the petroleum-based Nomacorc Classic with the new product.
A better micro-agglomerate
Of course, not everyone is open to change. Hardy Wallace tells the story of receiving a nasty message from a new client who bought a case of wine after tasting it at an event and was aghast when the wine arrived without a traditional foil capsule and with a PlantCorc. Hardy returned the man’s call and took him through the winery’s packaging ethos. Now, any time a new customer orders off the mailing list, he emails the customer a link to a short video. Standing in front of the bookshelves in his office he explains, “Here’s the cork, here’s the closure, here’s why we use lighter glass produced within 150 miles from us…”
Vinventions received similar feedback and took it to their development department with the goal of becoming a game changer in the field of micro-agglomerates. This led to the November 2016 introduction of SUBR at the Ritz in Paris. With SUBR, Vinventions believed they had cracked the code. The high-end micro-agglomerated cork was bonded with polymers made from seeds harvested from a natural fruit tree. It possessed all the technical advantages of the PlantCorc, including being recyclable and long-term biodegradable, plus, it had what their CEO called, “the magic optic of natural cork,” preferred by traditional wine consumers.
The following March, DIAM launched the Origine, a new micro-agglomerated cork bonded with a beeswax emulsion. A race seemed to be on, a wine world moonshot for high-performance closures made from sustainable sources.
The future is circular
Last June, Vinventions announced that sustainability would no longer be just a guiding principle for the company, but also a strategic priority. They framed the move in both practical and aspirational terms, saying, “In the future, there will be no high-performance without sustainability, and sustainability without high performance will no longer make sense.”
The company’s founder and board chair, Marc Noël fashions this vision in terms of a closed circular system, language reminiscent of biodynamic agriculture. He says, “When you think about circular sustainability, imagine if instead of using sugarcane to create polymers, we used the waste created by grape skins. There are mountains of waste from grapes in the winemaking process, literally tens of thousands of tons. What if we polymerized this waste and made closures and other products out of it? What if we turned a wine by-product into a very consistent and high-quality wine closure? Just imagine that. I mean, this is not rocket science. It’s difficult to do, but it’s possible and it will come. It’s only a question of time.”
The time may come sooner than we think. At the 2018 World Economic Forum in Davos, Vinventions announced that the company will pilot the world’s first truly circular wine closure recycling initiative in collaboration with the industry partners SABIC and Unilever, among others.
When you think about the implications of these high-tech closures with negligible carbon footprints and reliable oxygen ingress, it’s not hard to imagine that they may not only make wines safer but healthier, too. Being both high performance and ecologically sound, they have the potential to encourage more and more winemakers to feel confident using fewer preservatives, knowing that they can depend on the ‘cork’ to protect their wine from the time it is bottled to the moment it is served.
Rosé and a Garden Bench
You can drink rosé any time of the year, but part of its appeal is an association with the months when warmth and light are abundant, colors more saturated, and oceans become swimmable instead of foreboding. The brevity of the season brings with it an intensity and awareness that it is not to be squandered or missed. This connotes something different to everyone - for me, it's dinners in our city garden.
When our building needed a new roof, we had to pull our garden up. It was a timeworn treasure of sea grass, lavender and roses hauled from the greenmarket, a place where we eked out extra seasons from aging cedar planters with wood planks and metal brackets. The new garden is a different species entirely. It’s up to code, approved by engineers, and it can be dissembled and reassembled at will. It’s exquisite, although we miss the well-worn character of the improvised.
While we were rebuilding, I read a book by the Belgian designer and antiquarian Axel Vervoordt called Wabi Inspirations, about the influence of Wabi aesthetics on his work. Wabi philosophy comes from Zen monks who sought solace and contentment in simplicity and restraint, monks who valued the beauty of imperfect objects in their most austere and natural state. Moved by the tranquility of Vervoordt’s spare reflective residential spaces, I contacted the gallery about a Wabi garden bench. The images they sent suggested the aesthetic of the humble and decaying was not limited to objects from the East. It could also be found in a Spanish wedding bench, a French pew, or the 18th century Piedmontese farmhouse bench that now resides in our garden. The garden’s porcelain tiles and the bench are precisely the same color, but that is where their similarities end. One is the result of talented engineers replicating the look of aged cedar; the other exudes the kind of gravitas that comes from centuries of weathering the elements, evidenced in its irregular veins and raw edges. The difference in the materials brought to mind how we measure quality and character in rosé wines, a category where color is often the only common denominator.
As with Wabi objects, the best rosés convey simplicity and refinement. They are unpretentious, yet have a story to tell, one with a beginning, middle and end. It might open with aromas of citrus and red berries, then offer a whisper of an impression of fruit on the palate, followed by a wave of refreshing acidity, and a long finish that speaks of either sea or stones, depending on where the vineyard is located. The wines will reflect their fruit source. A rosé made from pinot noir grown in Sancerre might be delicate, while one made with mouvèdre from Bandol is likely to be full of interior architecture.
Daniel Ravier, the winemaker at the iconic Bandol estate Domaine Tempier once told me that making rosé is easy, but making good rosé is very difficult. This is because what distinguishes a rosé is not the region, grape variety, or price, but the scores of small decisions made in the vineyard and the cellar long before the bottle is opened. Even though certain coastal enclaves have burnished the image of rosé as essential to summer idle, there are pockets of excellence the world over: Domaine Bernard Baudry in Chinon, Chateau de Trinqueverde in Tavel, Finca Torremilanos in Ribera del Duero, Robert Sinskey Vineyards and Matthiasson in the Napa Valley, to name a few standouts.
In Provence, exceptional examples abound from jewel box wineries such as Clos Cibonne along the coast, Domaine de l’Ile on the island Porquerolle, Saint Ser at the foot of Mount Sainte Victoire, and Domaine Tempier. Beware of popular brands that have increased production exponentially rendering the wine you fell for a decade ago less than delicious. Exports from the region to the U.S. have experienced annual double-digit growth for more than twelve years. Some producers have cashed in on the strong trend at the expense of quality. Also, if a rosé smells of marshmallow, candy, pineapple or banana, or if after the first sip you perceive a chemical taste or hollowness where the flavor should be, throw it out. It’s either made from inferior fruit or has been manipulated in the cellar. Once you do find a rosé that pleases you, stock up early. The coveted ones disappear quicker than June roses.
When it's warm outside, I pair rosés with simple no-cook dinners, such as beef carpaccio inspired by the Roman chef Sandro Fioriti. Ask your butcher to slice beef tenderloin into carpaccio. Arrange the carpaccio in a single layer on individual plates or a large platter. Top the beef with generous portions of shaved parmesan, shaved celery, and finely sliced cremini mushrooms. Finish the dish with salt, pepper and a drizzle of olive oil , and serve it with your favorite market salad and crusty bread.
Wishing you a peaceful summer.
10 Rosés
The Pirate of Dogliani
The San Fereolo Vineyards in Dogliani. (Photo by Joanie Bonfiglio)
Sometimes a wine refuses to play to type. Take Dolcetto. Conventional wisdom has it that this classic Piedmont grape makes soft, round and fruity wines meant to be consumed young, while your Nebbiolo is in the cellar maturing. Even the best examples are measured against these modest expectations. Yet after tasting San Fereolo Dogliani, a Dolcetto of structure, aroma, texture, earth and dark austere fruit, this paradigm no longer rings true. Unmistakably a wine of Piedmont, it had little in common with the easy drinking wines normally associated with the variety. It demanded a broader view of the grape’s potential.
The manager at Eataly Vino told me that the San Fereolo needs to be appreciated in context of wines from the town of Dogliani, a DOCG just south of Barolo at the foot of the Alps, where Dolcetto vines are awarded pride of place alongside hazelnuts trees and untamed forests. As I tasted other bottles from Dogliani, it was clear that Dolcetto di Dogliani is a darker, deeper and more structured creature than Dolcetto from its neighbors to the north. Still, the San Fereolo stood out. There was something beyond a sense of place that informed its remarkable depth. So I wrote a fan letter to the estate’s importer, Rosenthal Wine Merchants, and arranged to speak with the owner, the passionate iconoclast and accidental winemaker Nicoletta Bocca.
Twenty-five years ago, Nicoletta was living in Milan and working in fashion and industrial design when her friend Alessandro Fantino, the owner and winemaker of the Barolo estate A&G Fantino, said, ‘I want to take you to one of the best places I have ever seen to live.’ He drove Nicoletta and her husband to Dogliani where at the crest of a hill covered with overgrown vineyards they saw a fantastic house in complete disrepair next to an octagonal church. ‘It was a dream place for people from Milano,’ she recalls.
Nicoletta's connection to the region ran deeper than agrarian fantasy. During WWII, her father fought as a partisan alongside the esteemed Barolo producer Bartolo Mascarello. The men stayed close and twice a year throughout her childhood she and her father would visit Bartolo to stock up on wine and food. For much of that time Alessandro Fantino was the Mascarello estate’s oenologist and vineyard manager, and the circle of friendship grew.
‘Promise me you won’t clear the Dolcetto vines,’ some of which dated back to 1936, Alessandro told her when she purchased the house. ‘We’ll take care of them the first year and then you can make a choice.’
Life in the vineyard changed Nicoletta. Viticulture became a kind of Zen discipline. ‘In Milano, if you want to work late into the night, you turn on the light and you work,’ she observes. ‘Here you are not your own master. You are part of nature. You have understand what is around you and work only when the light and the weather permits, on the timetable dictated by the vineyard.’
In 2004, she studied biodynamics to deepen her knowledge of grape cultivation and the vicissitudes of nature, and she now maintains her vineyards according to its strict principles. The practice is essential to her, but also only a starting point, a means to pristine raw materials. ‘If you are working organically or biodynamically and think that is the goal, you are on the wrong path,’ she stresses. ‘Biodynamics help you take character from your terroir. It is a tool for having a wine that speaks about the place, grape and vintage.’
When you ask Nicoletta what sets the San Fereolo apart from other Dogliani, she launches into a description of her winemaking practices. Picking the grapes when the tannins in the seeds ripen; fermenting in large wooden vats using ambient yeast; macerating the juice on the skins for at least twenty days; leaving the wine in barrel on its lees for two years; and then cellaring the individual bottles for another four years before releasing the wine to market, ready to drink.
The regime is grounded in the dual nature of the Dolcetto grape. Translated literally, Dolcetto means ‘little sweet one,’ but it has two faces: one is the fruity side you taste when you bite into it, the other is the polyphenols and tannins that come from the seeds when they ripen. Nicoletta's winemaking practices are dedicated to harvesting the spicy earthy aromas that come from the seeds when the grapes are ready to be picked.
‘You have a choice,’ she says. ‘You can have a short maceration and a fruity wine that tastes like everyone else’s, or you can behave like Dolcetto is a serous wine and focus on extraction. For me, it’s like being in the ocean. You can’t run away from the big wave, you have to dive through it. I dive into the wine and accept all of its characteristics, then I find a new balance.’ The long maceration is the deep dive. The new balance is achieved through the extended time the wine spends in the barrel and the cellar before release, this gives the tannins and polyphenols the opportunity to soften and integrate leading to an elegant wine with restrained dark fruit, structure and persistence.
'My colleagues complain that nobody understands Dolcetto,’ she elaborates. ‘But nobody is making the effort to show people that the wine can really be interesting. It’s like being in love with a woman you fear doesn’t know you exist and giving up instead of fighting to get her attention.’
Nonetheless, Nicoletta’s uncompromising vision for Dolcetto is not fully rewarded in the market. Most consumers will pay more for a mediocre bottle of Nebbiolo fermented in stainless steel than the wine she dotes on, and will question why they should purchase her Dolcetto when examples from Alba can be had at at third of the price. Meanwhile, leading Barolo producers often sell fresh and fruity Dolcetto as entry-level offerings, at the same time they are buying prime Dogliani vineyards to make Langhe Nebbiolo, which is also more profitable that Dolcetto made under the Dogliani DOCG label.
‘Nobody in Barolo said, we are going to say that Dogliani is not an important wine so that the farmers will be so poor that we can come and buy their land,’ Nicoletta reflects. ‘But that is what happened. Whenever I can get in the car and turn my back to Barolo I feel relieved. When I can no longer see Monforte d’Alba, I am like a pirate in the Caribbean with my ship!’
That's not to say Nicoletta has limited her efforts to Dogliani. Last winter, she attended a conference in Rocca Ciglié, a town in the Piedmont’s Cuneo province near Liguria. Set at a higher elevation and closer to the sea than Dogliani, Rocca Ciglié has been touted as prime vineyard land for Dolcetto since the eighteen fifties. The event’s purpose was to begin to revive life in the village and to find people to lease the town’s ancient vineyards, because its population is aging and its young people are moving away. 'I bought land,’ Nicoletta admits. ‘I arrived just in time. One year later and the vineyard would not have been there anymore. The man who was farming it couldn't go on being old and without help.’
‘Old vineyards are treasures full of the wisdom of plants. Losing them is painful,’ she adds. ‘I hope to do my best for this place and for the people who worked there long before I was born.’
In the fall Nicoletta harvested the grapes for her debut Dolcetto di Rocca Ciglié. Given the high altitude and fresher temperatures, the tannins in the seeds were greener than she is accustomed to. Still, she made a long maceration after which she tasted the wine. The Rocca Ciglié had lower alcohol and more aromatics than her Dolcetto from Dogliani, yet showed no signs of bitterness. Beyond the local climate, she attributes the difference to the region's ancient soils coming from a place deeper down in the ocean.
It appears that the world of premium Dolcetto is about to have an important new reference point from Nicoletta Bocca, the Pirate of Dogliani.
10 Wines Dogliani
Pot Roasted Leg of Lamb with Garlic & Olives
The dark earthy fruit and integrated tannins of the San Fereolo Dogliani complement this fork-tender lamb with a rich savory sauce of olives and herbs.
Ingredients for 6-8 servings
- ¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil
- 1 whole leg of lamb, bone in and trimmed, 6-8 lb.
- salt and freshly ground black pepper
- 1 large yellow onion, diced
- 1 cup tomatoes, peeled seeded and chopped
- 1 head garlic, cloves individually peeled and crushed
- 1 bunch thyme, tied with kitchen twine
- 2 cups dry white wine
- 1 cup niçois olives, pitted
- 1 cup chicken or vegetable stock, preferably homemade*
Place a large heavy-gauge roasting pan on the stovetop so that it stretches across two burners. Warm the pan over medium heat. Add the olive oil. Season the entire lamb with salt and pepper. Once the oil is warm, add the lamb to the pan and slowly sear the exterior, turning occasionally until the roast is golden brown on all sides, about 30 minutes.
Add the onions and cook, stirring occasionally, until they begin to take on a straw color, about 20 minutes. Reduce the heat to low and add the tomatoes, garlic, thyme and ¼ cup of white wine. Cover with a lid or heavy gauge aluminum foil and braise the lamb for 30 minutes, then turn the lamb, add another ¼ cup of wine, cover and continue cooking for another 30 minutes. Repeat this for two hours, until all the wine has been used. Add the olives, cover and braise for another 30 minutes.
Transfer the lamb to a cutting board tented with aluminum foil and let it rest for 10 minutes. Meanwhile, over a low flame, whisk t1/4 cup of chicken or vegetable stock at a time into the sauce that has accumulated at the bottom of the roasting pan, until it has the consistency of a thick gravy. Season to taste with salt and pepper and transfer to a small bowl.
Slice the lamb against the grain. Arrange on a warm platter. Ladle just enough of the garlic and olive sauce over the lamb to keep the meat moist, and then pass the remainder of the gravy around the table for guests to help themselves.
*If you don’t have homemade chicken stock on hand, while the lamb is cooking combine 3 cups of water, a peeled carrot, a celery stalk and one leek, onion or shallot. Bring the mixture to a boil, reduce the heat and let it simmer for 30 minutes. This stock will be far more flavorful then prepackaged chicken stock, unless you have access to fresh made stock from a specialty market.
A Buyer's Guide to Sustainable Caviar & Blanc de Blancs Champagne
A decade ago, buying the black pearls was straightforward. Whether Russian or Iranian, almost all sturgeon eggs came from the Caspian Sea, and it was common knowledge that beluga was the best, followed by osetra and sevruga. In January 2006, this knowledge became as useful as an eight-track tape. A toxic mix of pollution, poaching, and overfishing had put 85% of the global sturgeon population at risk, and the worldwide trade of wild caviar was finally banned. Nonetheless, the global appetite for the coveted delicacy did not disappear, and that demand has since created a dynamic market for sustainably farmed sturgeon. Today, anyone can legally purchase, via the Internet, caviar of exceptional quality from well-run caviar farms.
You just have to know how to shop.
As before, caviar should be evaluated by three criteria: taste, texture, and tone. The taste should be fresh, nutty, and creamy. There should be no fishy aroma or aftertaste. The texture of the eggs should be firm, smooth, and a little moist to the touch, never sticky or wet. Upon taking a spoonful, you should be able to use your tongue to separate the grains on the roof of your mouth. Tone simply means color. Some people prize golden caviar; others prefer silver hues or shiny black pearls.
You also need to know your producer. Like heirloom peaches and grass-fed beef, caviar has entered the age of the celebrity farmer. The key to buying high-quality cured sturgeon roe is to know its origins, which does not mean fine-food purveyors like Petrossian and Zabar’s, which repackage caviar under their own labels. It means knowing the farms from which they source their product. It is a geographically diverse group that includes—but is by no means limited to—Caviar Giaveri in Italy, Galilee Caviar in Israel, Mottra Caviar in Latvia, Kaluga Queen on China’s Russian border, Royal Belgian Caviar, and Fish Breeders of Idaho. Prices vary from $53 to $394 for a 30-gram tin.
Pristine water is why these particular farms are sought out. The best fish farms have a superb water source and use recirculating aquaculture to cleanse and re-oxygenate the water in their pools. Many of these pools are also temperature controlled to mimic the sturgeon’s natural spawning cycle. Latvia’s Mottra Caviar, whose farm has earned a seal of approval from the official Slow Food organization, takes the purity of their environment to the extreme. To ensure a fresh product with no muddy aftertaste, the sturgeon are raised in temperature-controlled pools with water pumped from artesian wells 500 feet below the earth. Hangers equipped with air-filtration systems protect the pools from pollutants and local birds.
Some fine-caviar purveyors, such as Browne Trading, have started cobranding with premium sturgeon farms in order to create more transparency in the market. “This way, the consumer knows everything about their caviar, from the sturgeon’s species, to its diet, to its country of origin and how it was raised,” says Rod Browne Mitchell, Browne’s president. Whether your local caviar purveyors cobrand or not, they should be able to tell you exactly where their caviar was sourced and how it was cultivated.
Species matter, as well. Beluga caviar has been banned in the U.S. since October 2008, though China’s Kaluga Queen exports a beluga hybrid that is a true indulgence. Sevruga is nearly impossible to raise in captivity and has mostly disappeared from the marketplace. Of the traditional caviars, only osetra remains available, and it has become the connoisseurs’ caviar of choice. Keep in mind that osetra comes exclusively from Russian sturgeon.
Be careful: “Siberian Osetra” is a misnomer used to confuse consumers. Osetra simply means sturgeon in Russian, and Siberian sturgeon is a separate species that is far easier to breed. The white-sturgeon transmontanus is, in contrast, increasingly considered a premium-quality caviar. Native to our West Coast, it has a fine grain and nutty flavor similar to osetra.
Finally, be sure to check the “sell by” date. Caviar is a cured product whose flavor evolves and matures in the months directly following the harvest, but it does not stay fresh forever. Most experts recommend consuming caviar within six months of packaging. If you open a jar of caviar and it smells fishy, return it to the store. Most retailers won’t balk at making you whole.
This article was originally published in PENTA/Barron's
The Harmony of Caviar with Blanc de Blancs Champagnes
When serving caviar, I prefer to pour Champagne that is either one hundred percent chardonnay, known as a Blanc de Blancs, or one with a base wine dominated by the grape variety. Chardonnay lends Champagne its elegance. It brings freshness, structure and aromas of white flowers. What's more, the alchemy of Champagne production (second fermentation in the bottle and years in the cellar resting on sediment), encourages chardonnay-based Champagnes to develop the same characteristics we associate with fine caviar and its accoutrements. The wines become creamy on the palate, tasting of almonds and hazelnuts. They take on a suggestion of the sea, reflecting the chalky soil the vines are grown on. There are even hints of brioche, evocative of lightly buttered toast points. Of course, Blanc de Blancs Champagnes don't taste like caviar, instead they suggests the same notes. The flavors are complementary and this creates a sense of harmony when the two are served together.
10 Champagnes for Caviar
A Tribute to Wineries that Sell Mature Wines
British couple sitting on high stools at ice bar outdoors at Grand Hotel St. Moritz . (Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt)
Over Christmas break, after not skiing for fifteen years, we ventured to northern Vermont to a small family mountain to see if we still liked the sport. We obeyed all the rites and rituals of such trips: luggage, equipment, provisions and gifts filled our car so that our rear vision was blocked, and if you opened a door too quickly a bag or a child might come tumbling out.
With plenty of fresh powder and not-too-frigid temperatures, we rediscovered that skiing is a great way to spend a winter day outdoors. But the food on the mountain was strictly from hunger. To call it institutional would be an insult to some of the fine food now being served at schools. Within twenty-four hours, we vowed to take all our meals in the condo.
Which brings me to lunch on the second day in Vermont, the spread of charcuterie and artisanal cheeses our traveling companions had brought from Connecticut and the magnum of 2001 Domaine Savoye Morgon we’d found a few months earlier on the shelf of our neighborhood wine store, Flatiron Wines.
You can eat with a certain kind of abandon after a day of skiing. As we sat at the dining table surrounded by mountain views, reaching our knives across one another for a slice of country pâté or aged cheddar, and refilling our glasses from a seemingly endless bottle tasting of dark berries and anisette, we may as well have been in St. Moritz. The improvised lunch is among my favorite meals of 2016. The lusty deliciousness of the charcuterie was elevated by the Morgon, not because it was an important bottle in the classic sense, but because it was a beautiful example of its type that had reached full maturity. Of the ten Cru Beaujolais appellations, the wines of Morgon are the most structured and long lived and the granite soils of the Côte du Py, where the Savoye family has been tending vineyards since the eighteen fifties, yield the appellation’s most complex offerings.
The bottle must have come from a private collection, because fifteen-year-old magnums of Savoye are not often spotted on a shop’s bottom shelf. They are the kind of wine you might find rummaging around the cellar of a friend with good taste, ample storage and a healthy dose of restraint. I’ve purchased the current vintage as a grab-and-go wine more than a dozen times, but until that lunch I had not known its potential for depth and elegance, the touch of truffle and fine drying tannins in a rich wine that was still lively enough to be refreshing. The bonus was that with only 12.5 percent alcohol, the wine eased, instead of kicked, us into après-ski naps.
When I think about building a personal collection, these are the kind of bottles I covet. Affordable wines of exceptional quality, the result of rigorous and ethical viticulture, which are too humble for the auction circuit, yet often take on remarkable depth, complexity and charm with bottle age. The effects of time on these wines are profound. It’s akin to the difference between listening to an accomplished vocalist site read and hearing a performance of a song they’ve sung forever. You don’t need musical expertise to notice the smoothed edges, increased fluidity and more nuanced presentation.
Until this fantasy collection bears fruit, I’m grateful for the handful of exacting wineries that make a point of not releasing their wines until they are showing maturity. There is a great distinction between this and manipulating wines with an eye toward engineering approachability in their youth. This is the application of patience, vision, and financial resources to ensure wines have the opportunity to evolve.
Summer: Fog fills the Napa Valley, and warms in the morning sun, rising into the Cain Vineyard. The winery reserves a portion of each vintage of Cain 5 to be released a decade after the harvest.. (Platinum Print Copyright © 2010 Olaf Beckmann)
The Rioja producer, R. Lopez de Heredia, holds their red and white reservas in barrel for six years and then in bottle for another decade before releasing them to market at a stage of development they identify as reminiscent of “gentlemen who have nobly grown old, while still maintaining some of their youthful characteristics.”
The northern Piedmont producer Vallana works according to the same principle. Their Gattinara sees two years in barrel and then another eight years in bottle before it is available for purchase. I marvel at this wine every time I open a bottle. What a pleasure it is to find mature traditional nebbiolo for less than thirty dollars.
Christopher Howell, the winemaker at Cain, the Napa winery on the crest of Spring Mountain known for its Bordeaux-style blends, recalls having a conversation about the benefits of bottle aging with Cain’s owner, Jim Meadlock. Afterwards, Jim queried, “If these wines develop with age and evolve slowly, why are you willing to release them too soon? Why don’t you hold some so people can experience what they’re like with time?” The winery now reserves a portion of each vintage of Cain 5 to be released a decade after the harvest to select shops and restaurants. The wines are also available directly from the winery.
Of course, in Champagne, aged wine is an integral part of the culture. Reserve wines, wines from previous years, ensure consistency in house blends. The Champagne house Henriot took this practice to an extreme with its limited edition Cuve 38, a Champagne in which the base wine is an ever evolving blend of Grand Cru chardonnay from the Côtes des Blancs dating back to 1990. Vintage Champagnes, declared after an outstanding growing season, rest in the cellar on their lees for at least three years and usually far longer. For example, the Charles Heisieck 2005 Brut Millésime is just now being released. It is this extended time in contact with the sediment from the second in-bottle fermentation that gives all Champagne its rich and savory character.
Thinking about the transformative power of time, I grew fixed on the image of finely sliced onions warming over a low flame, slowly evolving from something sharp and tart into the rich confiture atop a Provencal pissaladière, as in the recipe below. Over the course of an hour, you can see the changes in the onion’s texture, smell the evolution of its sugars, and taste how these elements come together. The trick is not to rush the process, to resist raising the flame and browning the onions, or adding sugar to bring sweetness to the onions faster than slow cooking permits. The dish rewards patience. As the pissaladière's shortbread crust crisps in the oven, it begs to be served with a glass of the beguiling 2004 R. Lopez de Heredia Rioja Blanca Reserva, which to our good fortune is the current release and can be had by walking to the wine store while the tart cools.
10 Wines with Bottle Age
Pissaladière, Provencal Onion Tart
Serves 6
This recipe is adapted from Lulu’s Provencal Table, by Richard Olney. Instead of using whole anchovies as the original recipe suggests, here they are finely chopped and cooked in olive oil, then drizzled over the onion mixture.
Ingredients:
- 1 cup flour
- Salt
- 10 tablespoons cold butter, diced
- About 4 tablespoons of cold water
- 5 tablespoons olive oil
- 2 pounds of sweet onions, finely sliced
- Salt and pepper
- 8 anchovy fillets, chopped fine
- ½ cup (2 ounces) niçois olives
Sift the flour and salt into a mixing bowl, add the diced butter, and crumble the flour and butter together, lightly and rapidly, picking up portions and rubbing loosely between thumb and fingertips. Above all don’t overwork the pastry. Gather it together with a fork and a little cold water, wrap it in plastic, and refrigerate for at least 1 hour before rolling it out.
Warm 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a large earthenware poêlon or heavy sauté pan, add the onions and salt and cook, covered, over very low heat, stirring occasionally with a wooden spoon, for an hour or more, or until they are so soft as to form a semi-purée. Remove the lid and continue to cook until much of the liquid has evaporated; the onions should remain absolutely uncolored. Season with pepper.
Meanwhile, heat 3 tablespoons of olive oil in a medium sauté pan over low heat. Add the chopped anchovies and cook, stirring occasionally until they dissolve into the oil. Remove the pan from the heat and let the mixture cool.
Preheat the oven to 375°F. With the palm of your hand, flatten the ball of pastry on a generously floured marble slab or other work surface, sprinkle over plenty of flour over the ball, and roll to a thickness of approximately 1/8 inch. Roll it up onto a rolling pin and unroll it onto a large baking sheet. Fold up the edges and crimp them, either with your thumb dipped repeatedly in flour, or with the tines of a fork.
Spread the onion puree evenly over the pasty. Press the olives into the purée, spacing them equally. Dribble the anchovy oil over the surface and bake for about 30 minutes, or until the edges of the pastry are golden and crisp. Serve hot or tepid, cut into small wedges or squares with an aperitif, or in large wedges as the first course.
Sicily Between Two Moons
Courtyard of the Planeta Winery in Menfi
The first time I visited Sicily was Christmas 2010. We stayed at a seaside villa at the foot of Mt. Etna surrounded by lemon orchards for a week that ended with a blue moon on New Year's Eve. My daughter was twenty months old and she wouldn’t walk. She’d only jump. She jumped through passport control and the Rome airport and for a seven days she jumped around the property's jasmine scented Arabic gardens. I think of that spot every time I taste an Etna Bianco, wines made from carricante, a white grape that has been growing on Etna for a millennium. The property was a visual tasting note, a snapshot of the citrus, slate and saline qualities that make the wine so refreshing and memorable.
Jumping
We could not visit any of the Etna vineyards on that trip. All were closed for the holidays. Instead, we explored the mountain itself. A local volcanologist led us up to the crater’s rim. It was like walking on the moon, but with a view of the Mediterranean coast. By the time we reached the top, the wind had picked up to twenty miles per hour, the path had narrowed to two feet across, and the gradation of the drop had drawn close to vertical, at which point I fell to my knees and became intimate with Etna's gravelly soil.
As much as any winemaker talk, the trek burnished our ardor for nerello mascalese, the dominant grape in Etna Rosso. Not because the earthy, fruity, structured wines contributed immense pleasure to our post-hike picnic, and several meals before and afterward, but because we had personally experienced the brutal conditions under which these remarkable and nuanced wines flourish. Upon returning home, knowledge of Etna Rosso was a great souvenir, a gift that kept on giving. Bottles of Benanti Etna Rosso that could be had for less than twenty dollars, and once opened evolved in the glass for hours, led to the discovery of the more esoteric wines of Frank Cornelissen, and others.
Still, when it comes to viticulture, DOC Etna is an island unto itself. The grape varieties and conditions on the mountain are unique in Sicily. In fact, bottles of wine from Etna are the only Sicilian wines that are not required to say Sicilia on the label. Around the world, Etna is quite enough. To get a more global sense of island's wine, it is necessary to take a closer look at nero d'avola, the juicy black-skinned grape celebrated for its role in Cerasuolo di Vittoria, particularly by producers such as Arianna Occhipinti and COS, in which nero d'avola supplies the base notes while frappato contributes vivacity and floral aromas.
Every grape variety has a spiritual home, think nebbiolo in Piedmont. For nero d'avola it is DOC Noto in Sicily's Siracusa province. Poised on gently sloping hills in the southernmost corner of the island, a stone’s throw from where the Ionian Sea merges with the Mediterranean, light bathes Noto’s vineyards. Once the ocean floor, the soil is fossil rich, nutrient poor and adept at retaining precious rainfall. Nero d’avola vines struggle to grow in these environs as much as the nerello mascalese vines struggle on Etna. The result is elegant and distinctive wines with dark fruit, sweet tannins and aromas of jasmine and bergamot. Alessio Planeta, a seventeenth generation Sicilian and the winemaker at his family's five wineries on the island, calls nero d’avola from Noto, “the most Burgundian of Sicilian wines.”
Noto vineyards at dusk
For all the majesty of the volcano, even on that first trip, my most vivid memory of Sicily remains the few hours we spent touring Siracusa. It wasn’t the Roman amphitheater or the rare Caravaggio tucked into a small chapel. It was the unmistakable quality of the light, and how looking out from the ancient city to the place where the seas merge, you could feel Sicily’s history as a crossroad of Greek, Roman, Spanish, Catalan and Arabic cultures. There was the sense of being somewhere both deeply European and indelibly connected to continents beyond the horizon.
In the fall of 2015, I returned to Sicily to tour the Planeta's wineries in Menfi, Vittoria, Noto, Etna and Capo di Milazzo. Once again, we started in Etna, where as a safeguard against lava flow the barrel room is outfitted with a tiny window and a telescope trained on the volcano. Once again, we drove two hours south to the province of Siracusa, this time to Noto. Once again, as I got out of the van I was overcome by the beauty of the light in that corner of the world. The glow at dusk made everything look as it were lit for an art film. I picked a ripe olive from a tree and put it in my mouth knowing it hadn’t been cured, yet thought it looked so plump and round, like a plum, it had to taste good. I was terribly wrong.
In the winery, we tasted back vintages of Planeta's Santa Cecilia Nero d'Avola. The wines were silky with flavors of black cherry and smoke, they had aromas of white flowers and tension in the backbone. Over dinner we tried a lovely and slightly more delicate example from the boutique producer Terra delle Sirene. Unfortunately, Noto wines can be difficult to find in the U.S., but tracking them down is worth the effort. Planeta and Gulfi are the two most widely distributed high-quality producers. There are also a number of smaller wineries that can be found at specialty wine shops, a favorite being the Savino Nero Sichilli.
Modica in the Val di Noto
Wines are only one of Siracusa province's many draws. We stayed a day, but given the opportunity it is a region I could spend months exploring. The Late Baroque towns of the Val di Noto are UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Rebuilt after being razed by an earthquake in 1693, the majestic stone cities of Noto, Ragusa, Modica, Scicli and Ispica represent the apotheosis of the late-Baroque architecture in Europe.
Pastry chefs the world over covet Noto’s fresh almonds. In the heat of the summer, the almonds find their optimal expression at breakfast as locals begin their day with a cooling granita made from the prized nuts. The best granita comes from Caffé Sicilia on the Corso Vittorio Emanuele in Noto's historic town center.
Along the coast, the picturesque fishing village Marzamemi is home to the restaurant Taverna La Cialoma, where dishes made with local seafood embody the argument for simple preparations and the finest ingredients. If you prefer more artistry, Ragusa has six Micheline starred restaurants.
The region is also celebrated for cherry tomatoes grown in the Pachino commune. The recipe below for Penne with Pesto & Pachino Tomatoes was delicious and full of nostalgia for the summer months when taught to me by the cook at the Etna villa in the dead of winter using supermarket produce. It takes on an entirely new dimension in July and August when tomatoes and basil are fresh and plentiful.
And, of course, there is the lure of the coast....
Capo di Milazzo
We left Siracusa for Planeta's Vittoria winery, a historic walled property with mature trees and climbing bougainvillea located in the center of the island's southern coast, in a rundown area dominated by an energy plant and industrial agriculture. It was the harvest, and the winemaker Arianna Occhipinti joined us for a pizza dinner with her picking crew, a combination of artists and aspiring oenologists from across Europe who had moved in with her for the month because they admire her aesthetics and the purity of her work. As soon as she arrived, she took Alessio aside. She was worried about the rate of fermentation in the Occhipinti SP68, which was unusually slow. As they huddled, it was evident that the local winemaking community was collaborative and tight knit. After the pizza party, we tried to stay up to see the super blood moon. It seemed the perfect counterpoint to the blue moon I'd witnessed on New Year's Eve at the foot of Mt. Etna five years earlier. Moons remind us to be receptive, the special ones even more so. Both trips were far too brief, but the impressions gleaned had opened my eyes, my soul, to Sicily’s history and rhythms, the idea that it is many places and embodies a multitude of ideas and traditions, depending on where on the island you stand, and through whose prism you look. Most of all, it fostered a longing to return and a sense that once experienced, this is an island that stays with you in your bones.
10 Wines Sicily
Penne with Pachino Tomatoes & Pesto
Serves six to eight as a first course
The bite of fresh pesto, the sweet tomatoes and the nuttiness of the grated cheese take on a creamy texture when emulsified by the heat of the penne. Any high quality cherry tomato will be delicious in this recipe, but if you have access to Pachino cherry tomatoes, by all means use them.
- 2 1/2 lb cherry tomatoes, quartered
- 1 1/2 lb penne pasta
- 1/2 medium white onion, grated
- 1 clove garlic, grated
- 4 cups fresh basil leaves, loosely packed
- 1/3 cup pine nuts
- 1/2 tsp black pepper, ground
- 1/2 tsp red (chili) pepper flakes
- 1 tsp Kosher salt
- 1 cup olive oil
- 1 cup parmesan, grated
- 1/4 cup pecorino, grated
- 1/4 cup almonds, toasted and crushed
Place the quartered cherry tomatoes in a large mixing bowl. Grate the onion and garlic over the tomatoes and gently toss. To make the pesto, quickly soak the basil leaves in cool water and pat dry with a paper towel. In the bowl of the food processor with a sharp metal blade, combine the basil, pine nuts, black pepper, red pepper and salt along with half a cup of olive oil and half a cup of grated Parmesan. Pulse the mixture three to four seconds at a time to avoid blackening. Scrape the edges of the bowl with a wooden spoon. Add half remaining olive oil, pulse and repeat until you achieve a uniform creamy consistency. Pour the pesto over the tomato mixture. Add the remaining Parmesan and Pecorino. Gently toss and let stand for thirty to sixty minutes.
Bring a pot of salted water to a rolling boil and add the penne. When the pasta is al dente, remove it from the pot with a slotted spoon or pour it into a colander. Place half the pesto in the bottom of a large saucepan over medium high heat. Add the pasta and gently toss. Add the rest of the pesto to the pot and once again, gently toss. Remove the pan from the heat. Spoon the pasta onto a large shallow platter. Garnish with basil leaves and crushed almonds. Serve warm.
The Quiet Nobility of Chinon
If wines had seasons, late autumn would be the time for Chinon. Earthy, juicy, tannic, brooding, and elegant with age, these wines taste of the moment following the harvest when the work of producing fruit is done and the vines are soaking in the last of the warm autumn sun before leaves fall, wood hardens, and sap descends to their roots.
The wines are one hundred percent cabernet franc, a thin-skinned, aromatic, black grape best known for its opulent star turn further south in Saint-Émilion, particularly in the hallowed cellars of Chateau Cheval Blanc (ten percent cabernet sauvignon is permitted in Chinon, but rarely included in the blend). Cabernet franc-based wines from Chinon may not be as overtly sumptuous as those from a Grand Cru Classé Bordeaux, but the best examples can be equally noble, if quietly so.
If wines had seasons, late autumn would be the time for Chinon. Earthy, juicy, tannic, brooding, and elegant with age, these wines taste of the moment following the harvest when the work of producing fruit is done and the vines are soaking in the last of the warm autumn sun before leaves fall, wood hardens, and sap descends to their roots.
The wines are one hundred percent cabernet franc, a thin-skinned, aromatic, black grape best known for its opulent star turn further south in Saint-Émilion, particularly in the hallowed cellars of Chateau Cheval Blanc (ten percent cabernet sauvignon is permitted in Chinon, but rarely included in the blend). Cabernet franc-based wines from Chinon may not be as overtly sumptuous as those from a Grand Cru Classé Bordeaux, but the best examples can be equally noble, if quietly so.
The flavors in a Chinon run the gamut from red and black berries to plums, white pepper, bramble, smoke, flint, leather, tangerine pith, sweet spice and earth. While there are no official hierarchies, the wines, mostly red, are understood as falling into two categories: the precocious ones, charming bistro wines, best served chilled and grown in the alluvial plane along the Vienne River; and the complex, structured wines grown in the clay, gravel and chalky tuffeau soils of the cliffs leading up the Loire Valley floor.
In the hands of the right vintner both can be engaging and lovely, but their character will undoubtedly reflect where they were grown. The more complex Chinons give the impression of being full-bodied, yet tend to be full in flavor rather than weight, especially when compared to cabernet sauvignon. Over the course of ten to thirty years, they will evolve from tannic with dark fruit flavors and hints of graphite and dried leaves, to something, soft, elegant, and perfumed. The quiet nobility of a fine Chinon is a direct result of this persistent arch toward refinement.
The good news about Chinon is that it is one of the few regions where the wine world’s trophy hunters and treasure hunters dine at the same trough. Collectible bottles from its most revered producers, the likes of Domaine Baudry, Domaine Olga Raffault, Domaine Breton, Domaine Philippe Alliet and Domaine Charles Joguet, can be found for as little as thirty dollars. Examples dating back two or three decades can be found for twice that amount. I am not sure why these wines present such a stunning value - maybe because there are no grand or premier cru designations, or because Chinon has become synonymous with simple wines served by the tumbler. Regardless, when friends say they want to start a wine collection, age worthy Chinons are precisely the kind of wines I suggest they seek out. They’re delicious and compelling without being too dear, and they’ll only get better if you forget about them for a couple of years.
If basic Chinon is bistro wine, then bottles from Baudry, Raffault, Breton, Alliet and Joguet are no doubt of the haut-bistro variety. Prized vineyards, attentive farming and traditional vinification elevate these wines into the realm of treasure hiding in plain site. Pair them with your favorite steak frites or recipes from Bouchon, the classic tome celebrating the haute-bistro cuisine of Thomas Keller’s Yountville restaurant. My go-to dish with these wines is the Poulet Rôti Forestière, Roast Chicken with a Ragout of Wild Mushrooms from the Bouchon cookbook (recipe below), which is remarkable for the way it evenly seasons the entire bird and encourages the skin to crisp and turn golden. It also may be the most accessible recipe Keller has ever published. It requires little more than soaking small chickens in a fragrant brine, roasting them at high heat and sautéing the garnish. The succulent flavorful meat and earthy chewy mushrooms are the perfect foils for the Chinon. Begin the meal with a rosé from the region, preferably from one of the producers above, and know that if you are lucky enough to have leftovers, both chicken and the Chinon will be better the next night.
10 Wines Chinon
Thomas Keller's Roast Chicken with a Ragout of Wild Mushrooms
Adapted from Bouchon, by Thomas Keller
Serves 4
For the Aromatic Brine
- 1 gallon water
- 1 cup kosher salt
- ¼ cup plus 2 tablespoons honey
- 12 bay leaves
- 2 tablespoons black peppercorns
- 3 rosemary sprigs
- 1 bunch thyme
- 1 bunch Italian parsley
- Grated zest and juice of 2 large lemons
Combine all the ingredients in a large pot, cover, and bring to a boil. Boil for 1 minute, stirring to dissolve the salt. Remove from the heat and cool before using.
For the Roast Chicken
- 2 tablespoons canola oil
- Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
- Two 2 1/4 to 2 1/2-pound chickens. (you can substitute one or two 3 to 3 ½ pound chickens, each will serve three people.)
Preheat the oven to 475°F.
Rinse the chickens under cold water. Put the chickens in the pot of brine, weighting them with a plate if necessary to keep them submerged. Refrigerate for 6 hours, then remove the chickens from the brine (discard the brine), rinse them and pat them dry with paper towels. Season the insides with a light sprinkling of salt and pepper. Truss the chickens and let them sit at room temperature for 20 to 30 minutes before roasting. Meanwhile, prepare the jus (see recipe below).
Season the outside of the chickens with a light sprinkling of salt and pepper. Place one heavy ovenproof skillet, about 10 inches in diameter, for each chicken, over high heat. When the skillets are hot, add a tablespoon of canola oil to each one. When the oil is hot, put the birds breast size up in the skillets, and then into the oven with the legs facing the back of the oven. Roast for 40 minutes, checking the chickens every 15 minutes and rotating the skillets if they're roasting unevenly. After 40 minutes, check their temperature by inserting an instant-read thermometer between the leg and the thigh: the temperature should read approximately 155°F (the chicken will continue to cook as it sits, reaching a temperature of about 165°F). When the chickens are done, remove them from the oven, add the thyme leaves to the skillets and baste them several times with the pan juices and thyme leaves. Let sit in a warm spot for about 10 minutes.
For the Ragout of Wild Mushrooms
- 2 pounds assorted wild mushrooms
- 3 tablespoons canola oil
- 1 ½ teaspoons kosher salt
- 1 tablespoon unsalted butter
- 3 tablespoons minced shallots
- 1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves
- ¾ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
- ¼ cup chicken jus (recipe below)
Keeping each type of mushroom separate, trim away any tough stems and tear larger mushrooms into smaller pieces. It is important to cook each type separately, since cooking time will vary. Divide the remaining ingredients proportionately according to the amount of each type of mushroom you have.
Coat a large sauté pan with a thin film of canola oil and place it over high heat. When the oil begins to smoke, add the first batch of mushrooms, season with salt, and sauté for a about a minute. The mushrooms will absorb the oil; they should not weep any liquid at this point. Add the appropriate amount of butter, shallots, thyme and black pepper, and sauté, tossing frequently until the mushrooms are tender, 2 to 4 minutes. Transfer the mushrooms to paper towels to drain. Wipe the pan out with a paper towel and cook the remaining mushrooms in batches.
When you are ready to serve the chicken, return the mushrooms to the skillet with a ¼ cup of chicken jus and bring the liquid to a simmer over medium-high heat. The wild mushroom ragout can be served family style in a bowl, or more formally in the center of a plate beneath the carved chicken as described below.
A Quick Chicken Jus
(This is a quick substitute for the home kitchen. Thomas Keller’s preparation for a classic chicken jus can be found on page 321 of the Bouchon cookbook)
- 1 tablespoon canola oil
- 1 chicken thigh, skin removed and fat trimmed
- Necks and wing tips of roasting chickens
- 2 carrots, peeled and chopped
- 1 celery stalk, peeled and chopped
- 1 shallot, peeled and chopped
- 4 cups water
- Kosher salt and fresh ground pepper
Coat a medium sauté pan with a thin film of canola oil and heat over medium-high heat. Add the chicken thigh, necks and wing tips to the pan. Sear for three minutes on each side, until golden. Add the carrots, celery and shallot and cook until the aromatics vegetables soften, stirring occasionally, about 5 minutes. Pour the water into the sauté pan, bring the water to a boil, then lower the heat, partially cover the pan with a lid, and let the broth simmer for an hour. Strain the broth through a mesh sieve into a small saucepan. Place the saucepan over medium-high heat, bring the broth to a boil and reduce the it until you have approximately one cup of jus. Season to taste with salt and pepper.
Assembly
The dish can be served on individual plates by ladling one quarter of the remaining jus onto four plates, arranging the mushrooms in the center, then placing two pieces of chicken over the mushrooms and garnishing with a sprig of parsley and a sprinkling of sea salt. Alternatively, it can be served family style on a large wooden platter. Arrange the mushrooms in the center and place the carved chicken pieces around the mushrooms, garnish with parsley and sea salt and pass the jus around the table in a small bowl with a ladle.
Volnay & Pommard on the Holiday Table
Holiday meals, especially more intimate gatherings or holiday season dinner parties, offer a stage ripe for exploration of wines that may stretch the budget in other circumstances. The table is set. Someone, maybe you, is already cooking a multi-course seasonal meal. Instead of just pairing wines and foods, why not use the opportunity to take your guests on a journey? A couple of well-chosen bottles of Burgundy can certainly elevate a celebration.
Which brings me back to Volnay and Pommard. Perhaps no two communes illustrate terroir in Burgundy as clearly as these neighboring villages. Like Barbaresco and Barolo in Piedmont, they are unmistakably feminine and masculine expressions of the same grape variety, in this case pinot noir. Drive or bicycle south from Beaune on the Route des Grands Crus and you will arrive in Pommard, an appellation whose relatively low elevation, underground spring water, and sediment composed of a heavy mix of clay and iron yield wines of deep color, intensity and structure. These are appealing, powerful, ageworthy wines that will be especially attractive to fans of collectible cabernet sauvignon.
I am beginning this bi-weekly journal with Burgundy because it is a touchstone region that is easy to love, yet difficult to know.
A Burgundian wine does not have to be from Burgundy at all. Very often it is an ideal, a poetic model winemakers the world over use as a guidepost. It is a quality most wine lovers can identify, especially those who have had the good fortune to taste a benchmark pinot noir from the Côte de Nuits or chardonnay from the Côte de Beaune. Burgundian wines possess elegance, balance and finesse. They are neither crass, nor monolithic, nor weighed down by the artifice of high alcohol or excessive oak treatment. Most of all, Burgundian wines prepare us for the pleasure of the real thing, the aha moment when you bring a glass of Premier Cru Volnay or Pommard to your lips and realize, or remember, what all the fuss is about.
How do you move from appreciating the wide sweep of wines from Burgundy, and bottles from around the world that capture its spirit, to knowing the unique expressions of Burgundy’s individual towns, called communes or climats. Reading will only get you so far. Tasting one bottle at a time, however lovely, will not provide a reference point. Comparative or technical tastings often seem stilted in a home setting.
Holiday meals, however, especially more intimate gatherings or holiday season dinner parties, offer a stage ripe for exploration of wines that may stretch the budget in other circumstances. The table is set. Someone, maybe you, is already cooking a multi-course seasonal meal. Instead of just pairing wines and foods, why not use the opportunity to take your guests on a journey? A couple of well-chosen bottles of Burgundy can certainly elevate a celebration.
Which brings me back to Volnay and Pommard. Perhaps no two communes illustrate terroir in Burgundy as clearly as these neighboring villages. Like Barbaresco and Barolo in Piedmont, they are unmistakably feminine and masculine expressions of the same grape variety, in this case pinot noir. Drive or bicycle south from Beaune on the Route des Grands Crus and you will arrive in Pommard, an appellation whose relatively low elevation, underground spring water, and sediment composed of a heavy mix of clay and iron yield wines of deep color, intensity and structure. These are appealing, powerful, ageworthy wines that will be especially attractive to fans of collectible cabernet sauvignon.
Upon crossing Pommard, the road makes the gentle climb up the limestone and chalk hill to the village of Volnay. The appellation comprises two such hills with a valley in between and stretches on a north-south axis from Pommard to Meursault. Volnay is home to a cadre of superb producers and more than half of its vineyard land is designated Premier Cru. Its east-facing vineyards produce refined wines with silky tannins and floral bouquets. In the hands of skilled vintners, Volnays more than make up for what they lack in power with lacy complexity and a strong point of view. It is as if, upon crossing a border, the wines reflect the sky instead of the earth.
This year, we will serve Volnay and Pommard at our second Thanksgiving meal, the one we celebrate at home on Saturday evening with friends or family we missed the first time around, the one I shop for on Black Friday after the crowds have left the markets. We will begin with a Volnay from a classic producer such as d’Angerville or Lafarge served alongside a butternut squash soup infused with cardamom. It will be the Volnay’s first act. I am already dreaming about the way the wine’s red berry and violet aromas will mingle with the soup’s sweet spices of the orient. We will be sure to pour it judiciously so that enough remains for everyone to have an ample second glass later in the night.
It can't be stressed enough that in Burgundy the producer of a wine matters as much as designation or price. Be it village level, Premier or Grand Cru, the wines of the the best domaines are marked by vitality: an integration of acidity, tannins and fruit that awakens the senses. Vitality can be present in a quiet wine or one with an explosive flavor profile. It is a quality you feel in your mouth and crave once it is recognized. Some very expensive wines from Premier Cru vineyards taste good but still seem heavy and dull. These wines tend to be less interesting on the third sip than on the first. A wine with vitality will give the impression of being lifted and multidimensional. It will hold your attention over the course of the entire meal.
With the main course we will bring out a Pommard, likely a Les Fremiers from Domaine de Courcel, to go with our small turkey, a gravy made from the jus, herbed stuffing and cranberry-shallot compote. The hope is that the wine’s firm tannins and darker fruits will bring a level of sensuousness to this classic dinner without overpowering its understated flavors.
The turkey will be followed by a cheese course, at which point we will pour the remainder of the Volnay. Volnay is a wine that transforms in the glass, especially younger vintages. Once the bottle has been opened, it undergoes a kind of alchemy. After an hour or so of exposure to oxygen, the wine often seems substantially fuller and more brooding.
I asked Laurent Drouhin, the US Market Director for Joseph Drouhin, why this happens. He explained that when you open a Volnay, you get very refined and delicate fragrances. Then, as the wine integrates, those fragrances give way to deeper aromas of dark flowers and rich fruit. While the backbone of the wine and the structure of the tannins remain constant, the wine grows more harmonious, giving the impression of being a bit fuller and more intense.
My hope is that by lingering over these wines at the end of the meal and experiencing the grace and power of the Pommard alongside the increasingly complex and harmonious Volnay, the impressions gleaned from savoring these benchmark wines will be etched into the memory of everyone at our table.. That way, on a cold winter night when looking for something deep and meditative to go with a tagine, perhaps we’ll pull out that Pommard tucked in the back of the cellar. Or maybe we will turn to the ethereal perfumes of a Volnay instead of sake next time we venture out for sushi.
On the practical side, just being able to communicate our experience of these wines to a sommelier or wine merchant will help them guide us toward other wines we might enjoy from Burgundy and beyond. Within the region, the feminine qualities of Volnay are amplified in Chambolle-Musigny and the muscularity of Pommard takes on another dimension in the wines of Gevrey-Chambertin. That is the classic extension of the conversation. Once we begin to have reference points, there are so many unexpected directions it can go in.
Some outstanding Volnay producers include: Domaine Marquis d’Angerville, Domaine Michel Lafarge, Domaine des Comtes Lafon, Domaine de Montille, and Joseph Drouhin. In Pommard, exceptional wines can be found from Domaine de Courcel and Domaine Comte Armand. Keep in mind that many of the top Volnay producers make wines in Pommard and vice versa. If you are drawn to the style of a particular domaine, it’s worth trying an array of their vineyard designate wines and their wines from across the appellation's border.
10 Wines for the Holiday Table
Cardamom Infused Butternut Squash Soup
Just as a wine is only as good as the harvest, a soup is only as good as its stock. Preparing the vegetable stock for this soup couldn't be easier. Simply simmer the vegetables in a pot of water while the squash is roasting, and this recipe will yield a pure, clean, satisfying soup that will fill your home with the warming aromas of cardamom and ginger.
Serves 4
For the squash:
- 6 cups butternut squash, peeled and cut into 1-inch cubes
- 2 garlic cloves, peeled
- ½ teaspoon sea salt
- ¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil
For the stock:
- 10 cups water
- 3 carrots, peeled
- 2 celery stalks, cleaned and trimmed
- 1 leek, cleaned and trimmed
- ½ yellow onion, peeled
For the soup:
- 1 tablespoon butter
- 3 cardamom pods
- 4 peppercorns
- ¼ inch square fresh ginger, peeled
- ¼ cup dry white wine
Preheat the oven to 375° F
1. In a large bowl, combine the butternut squash, garlic, olive oil and sea salt. Using a slotted spoon, gently mix the ingredients. Pour the squash onto a sheet tray and roast for 35 minutes.
2. Meanwhile, place all the ingredients for the stock in a large pot over high heat. Once the water boils, lower the heat to medium and simmer for 30 minutes. Let the squash and the stock cool while you begin the soup.
3. Place a large pot over low heat. Add the butter. While the butter melts, use a mortar and pestle to remove the cardamom seeds from their papery shells and grind the seeds to a powder. Add the cardamom to the butter along with the fresh ginger root. Use the mortar and pestle to grind the peppercorns to a powder as well. Add the ground pepper to the pot. Raise the heat to medium. When the spices become fragrant, add the wine and turn the heat to high. Whisk constantly until the butter takes on the glistening texture of a smooth sauce. This should take about two minutes. Turn off the heat. Add the roasted butternut squash and use a slotted spoon to toss the squash until it is evenly coated with the butter and cardamom mixture.
4. Add 5 cups of stock to the squash. Bring the mixture to a boil, lower the heat and simmer for 20 minutes. Let the mixture cool before puréeing with an immersion or countertop blender.
5. Whisk in up to one cup of additional stock into the soup, to adjust the consistency to your liking. If you prefer a finer texture, strain the soup through a sieve.
6. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Serve warm.
7. The soup is exquisite on its own. If you would like to serve it as a light meal or a more substantial first course, the ginger shrimp garnish is easy to prepare and makes for a winning counterpoint.
For the ginger shrimp garnish:
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- ¼ inch square fresh ginger root
- 1 garlic clove, peeled and smashed
- 1 sprig thyme
- ½ lb rock shrimp or 8 large shrimp
- Salt and pepper to taste
1. Warm a medium-sized sauté pan over low heat. Add the olive oil, wait 30 seconds then add the ginger root, garlic, and thyme. Let the aromatics steep in the warm oil for two minutes.
2. Raise the heat to medium. Season the shrimp with salt and pepper, place them in the pan and sear each side for three minutes, until just cooked through.
3. Mound even portions of the rock shrimp in four empty soup bowls (if you are using large shrimp, cut the cooked shrimp into ½ inch pieces and do the same), then ladle a cup of warm soup around the shrimp. Serve immediately.
Wine and Meditation
What does it mean to know a fine wine? Too often we only see what we have been taught to perceive. We measure wines against established categories and personal prejudices about what defines quality. What would happen if instead of rushing to identify or critique, we put aside the reductive methods championed in most wine education classes and afforded wines the necessary time and attention to unfold and reveal themselves naturally. What if we began to value presence over mastery?
What does it mean to know a fine wine? Too often we only see what we have been taught to perceive. We measure wines against established categories and personal prejudices about what defines quality. What would happen if instead of rushing to identify or critique, we put aside the reductive methods championed in most wine education classes and afforded wines the necessary time and attention to unfold and reveal themselves naturally. What if we began to value presence over mastery?
I came around to this way of thinking after writing a profile on the Swedish rare wine merchant Peter Thustrup. Peter is a classicist who specializes in Bordeaux and Burgundy. He advises private collectors and arranges esoteric tastings of hard-to-source vintages. He is also an autodidact who learned by tasting, taking notes and studying his own responses. I first interviewed Peter on the veranda of the Maidstone Arms in East Hampton after he had sold his eponymous Paris shop and spent the five years of his non-compete curating a deep and idiosyncratic personal collection. During one of our follow up conversations, he confessed to meditating on wines. This detail did not fit into my initial story; a profile in seven hundred words is a form of haiku, fleshing out the impulse to drink alone in silence is a story unto itself.
The idea took root in my imagination. What if instead of writing a technical note using a controlled set of descriptors, you let the wine speak for itself? Not all bottles are worthy of such lavish consideration, but for a wine with something to say, silence and presence could set the stage for eloquence. I decided to give it a try. I blocked off two hours on a Tuesday afternoon and looked in my storage unit for a bottle that was up to the challenge. Many were appealing, but none were right for the job. How could I trust the results if I were to meditate on a wine I knew well, or one that fit too neatly in my comfort zone? Then I recalled the La Clarté de Haut-Brion, a sémillon-based blend from Pessac-Leognan produced with fruit from the Haut-Brion and La Mission Haut-Brion vineyards, which serves as a second white wine for both chateaux. I had only encountered it once, as part of an overview of the Haut-Brion portfolio, but the way its delicate floral aromas were contained within a structure that was at once firm and transparent, evoking a bed of wildflowers within a formal garden, had left an indelible memory.
La Clarté was not a wine I could pick up in my neighborhood shop. Only a thousand cases are made each year and most are sold through retailers that do robust business in blue-chip Bordeaux. I ordered a bottle through Sherry-Lehmann and was pleased to discover that it goes for one-tenth the price of its more celebrated cousins. When the hour of the tasting approached, I took out a Zalto Universal glass, a corkscrew and a favorite silk scarf. Freelance writers do a lot of odd things when their children go to school and their spouses go to the office, but I have never felt quite so self-conscious as when I tied the silk scarf around my forehead and pulled out the cork. I checked to make sure the wine was in good condition and etched out a preliminary technical note, which confirmed my earlier experience. Then I sat on the floor with my back to the wall, slid the blindfold over my eyes and pulled the knot tight.
I took a few breaths to relax and immediately my attention focused on the delicacy of the stemware and the weight of the wine in the glass. Lifting the bulb to my nose, I took in the the wine's warm honey tones. Over time, like the reflection in a kaleidoscope, its dominant aromas shifted from raw honey, to ripe melon to white flowers to wet stones. I took a small sip and felt the impression of saline waves crashing on the sides of my tongue. The next time I sniffed, it was as if I were inhaling sea air tinged with apricot and hints of burnt caramel. Even though this is a bone-dry wine, the aromatics were reminiscent of Sauternes, the sémillon-based sweet wine made from grapes concentrated by the noble rot botrytis in vineyards an hour south of Haut-Brion.
Finally, I took in a generous mouthful. A rush of acid declared the wine’s youth, registering in the quickening of my heartbeat. For all its grace, the 2009 La Clarté wanted me to know it was still a baby with loads of drive and freshness. I have consumed enough bottles to see down the road. In five years or so, the wine will soften and communicate in more nuance and leveled tones.
Beneath the blindfold, I closed my eyes and tried to paint a mental picture of the wine to remember it by. I saw a woman standing on the roof of a grand chateau looking over the pine forest to a melon stand alongside a honeysuckle bush near an ocean dune, perhaps the Great Dune of Pilate in Arcachon, the beach that lies directly to the west of Pessac-Leognan. The image was a reminder that terroir is not just the dirt beneath your feet, but the spirit of a locale, and that the innate formality of the finest wines in Bordeaux are balanced with a refined attunement to the natural world.
La Co(o)rniche, Pyla-sur-mer
The La Clarté is not an aperitif wine. It begged for food that is at once bright and toothsome -- roasted oysters bathed in salted butter, seafood cassoulet, rotisserie game bird. That night I served it a with lentil and sweet sausage soup, which was delicious on its own yet when paired with the La Clarté utterly masked the wine's charm: dimming what made it fresh and floral, calling attention to its weight on the palate. La Clarté means clarity, with the soup I experienced only obfuscation. I put the bottle away.
The next evening I made a dish inspired by a Norwegian schoolteacher named Gro Bygdevoll, who turns her home on the island of Myken into a restaurant called Karenstua Café for six weeks each summer to celebrate the midnight sun. There is only one item on her menu, snapper in herbed butter. It's my favorite kind of recipe, adaptable, delicious and easily understood in a paragraph, which I have included below the story. This time the meal and the wine were in balance. Each was delicate and rich, of the earth and of the sea, fragrant and satisfying, contemplative and vivacious. We call this a pairing, but really its more of a lively dialogue, two dynamic personalities drawing each other out.
This exercise may seem frivolous, but after two days with the La Clarté I grew conscious of the distinctions between knowing and observing; judging and receiving; interacting and sharing. The practice of presence removed the pressure to perform, to show what you know and put the focus squarely on the wine itself. I found myself wishing I had stayed in the reflective state a bit longer, wondering what would have happened if I had summoned more patience.
I've listed 9 more wines worthy of the blindfold below the recipe for the Red Snapper Karenstua. Most cost far less than the La Clarté. All exhibit depth, typicity, grace and interest.
Red Snapper Karenstua: On a clean plate, season both sides of two 8-ounce snapper filets with salt and pepper. Melt 2 tablespoons of butter in a cast-iron skillet or heavy nonstick sauté pan over medium-high heat. Lay the snapper skin-side down and cook for three minutes, until the skin has contracted and the fish appears to float. Using a fish spatula, gently turn the snapper fillets. Add a clove of minced garlic to the pan and cook for three more minutes, until the fish flakes when pierced with a fork. Sprinkle 3 tablespoons of mixed minced fresh herbs -- dill, oregano and parsley are a winning combination -- on the skin of the fish. Spoon the melted butter over the herbs and serve the snapper directly from the skillet.
10 Wines for Meditation
Grenache Lovers, Meet Gigondas
Mention Gigondas and devotees of this grenache-based wine from the Southern Rhône will wax poetic about the grandeur of the Dentelles de Montmirail, the dramatic limestone cliffs below which region’s vineyards are planted. They will go on about how Châteauneuf-du-Pape’s growing popularity has led to soaring prices and confide that Gigondas provides much of the interest of its famous neighbor, with perhaps a tad less finesse, for a much smaller investment. Once they’ve set the stage and given the sales pitch, hopefully they’ll open a bottle and offer you a glass.
Located in the hills on the eastern edge of the broad alluvial plain that tracks the Rhône River, Gigondas sits in the path of the blustery wind known as the mistral, making it a cool climate wine relative to its famously hot locale. At their best, Gigondas’ are more expressive and complex than their neighbors in the Côte du Rhône. Gigondas must be at least eighty percent grenache; this provides the wines with a rich base of red fruit and plum flavors. They must also be at least fifteen percent syrah and mourvèdre; these thick skinned varieties anchor grenanche’s overt fruitiness with savory aromatics, tannic structure and the capacity to age in oak.
Delicious, if rustic, in its youth, Gigondas begs for an exotically spiced lamb tagine or a hardy stew. Time is this wine’s friend. If you can forget about a bottle for a decade, its rough edges will soften and a sense of harmony between the flavors of fruit and earth will emerge. Wines from Domaine du Pesquier, Domaine du Cayron, Pierre Amadieu and Lavau are all good places to begin to explore this gem of a region in the Southern Rhône.
Denis Dubourdieu on Drinkability as an Essential Characteristic of Dry White Bordeaux
Denis Dubourdieu is the leading authority on the white wines of Bordeaux. Beyond being the Director of General Oenology at the University of Bordeaux, he manages four family estates, including Doisy-Daëne and Clos Floridéne, and consults with wineries such as Château Cheval Blanc and Château d’Yquem. Here, he guides us through Bordeaux’s distinctive white wines.
Sophie Menin: What are the hallmarks of a great dry white Bordeaux?
Denis Dubourdieu: Drinkability is the most important quality of a Bordeaux Blanc. They should be fresh and fruity without too much alcohol. A good one will quench your thirst.
SM: What distinguishes the region’s sauvignon blanc and sémillon, the two grapes that make up most white Bordeaux?
DD: Our sauvignon blanc is a wine of the Atlantic coast. It is more delicate than the intensely grassy and tropical wines you find in New Zealand and less flinty than sauvignon blanc from Sancerre and Pouilly Fumé. At its best, it exhibits flavors of grapefruit and white peach.
Bordeaux is at the northern limit of where sémillon can be cultivated and it does very well here. It is our chardonnay. The finest examples are grown on limestone. Bordeaux wines made from sémillon smell of hazelnut, almonds and brioche. After a few years, they develop aromas of fresh apricot or orange.
SM: How has dry white Bordeaux changed since you started making wine?
DD: Bordeaux Blanc as we know it did not exist thirty years ago. Our dry white wines used to smell like oxidized sweet wines. Things started to change in the mid nineteen eighties when I was directing white wine research in the enology department of the University of Bordeaux and we began to understand which molecules were involved in creating the characteristic aromas of sauvignon blanc and the role of the yeast in protecting wines from oxidation.
When we applied this knowledge to Bordeaux’s two main white grape varieties, sauvignon blanc and sémillon, we discovered their fruity taste and how well they complement each other in a dry white blend.
SM: Could you describe the sweet white Bordeaux known as Sauternes for us?
DD: Sauternes caresses the mouth. There is a quality of softness. You don’t sense any corners. No matter how long the wine has aged, you always encounter aromas of fresh fruit, not just jam and honey. Last month I opened a bottle of our 1934 Doisy-Daëne, a sweet white made next door to Sauternes in the commune of Barsac. It was a complex bomb of orange, smoke, chocolate, ginger and apricot.
SM: When do you drink Sauternes?
DD: I like young Sauternes as an aperitif and old Sauternes at the end of the meal.
What is a "Non-Dosage" or "Brut Nature" Champagne?
The terms “non-dosage” or “brut nature” on a bottle of Champagne may mean that no sugar has been sugar added at the end, but don’t be fooled, these are far from the sparkling equivalent of a SkinnyGirl drink. They are more akin to the feat of appearing gorgeous on camera without makeup. Just as it takes a great beauty to successfully forego a little foundation before submitting to the camera’s lens, it takes a truly exceptional base wine to make a compelling “non-dosage” or “brut nature” Champagne.
To understand why this is so, it helps to review the methode traditional used in Champagne production. Traditionally, Champagne is made by bottling a base wine made of chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier, then adding a liqueur de tirage (wine mixed with sugar and yeasts) to initiate a second, in-bottle fermentation, which gives carbon dioxide off as a by-product, lending the wine its distinctive effervescence.
The wine is then aged in bottle for at least fifteen months. At the end of the aging process, the sediment from the second fermentation is coaxed into the neck of the bottle by a process called riddling. The neck is then flash frozen and its contents are pulled out like a stopper. Finally, the dosage (wine mixed with cane sugar) is traditionally added before the bottle is re-corked.
The dosage is like the pat of butter or splash of sherry added to a sauce or a soup before serving. It rounds out the flavors and balances the component parts. For a winemaker, forgoing the dosage means giving up their chance to make small corrections. That’s why some wine lovers have dubbed these wines “naked Champagnes.”
A renewed focus on farming, the growing importance of grower Champagnes, a wider understanding of Champagne as wine, the preference for drier wines, and global warming have all played a roll in the growing importance of the “non-dosage” or “brut nature” category. If you have not yet tried one, the Ayala Brut Nature, Pol Roger Pure, Benoît Lahaye Brut Nature, or any of bottle from George Laval or Tarlant are an all excellent places to begin to explore Champagne stripped down to its essence.
How a Sommelier Helps
As the Gramercy Tavern Beverage Director, Juliette Pope manages every aspect of the restaurant’s wine program from selecting wines, to meeting budgets to the logistics of cellaring, all with an eye toward delighting their eclectic clientele. She chooses wines for a busy casual tavern, a more formal main dining room, locals who frequent the restaurant three times a week and tourists with no fine dining experience. Juliette knows how a list full of unfamiliar wines can make guests anxious, since Gramercy Tavern never pours your typical pinot grigio by the glass. Here she offers advice on how to make your interaction with a sommelier a success.
SM: When should you ask for the help of a sommelier?
JP: Any time you don’t see a bottle that rings a bell or fits your budget, ask for help. If the only sauvignon blanc by the bottle is $100 and you want to spend $50, you need to talk to somebody.
SM: How can a sommelier help you?
JP: A sommelier can direct you to a wine that is stylistically up your alley, even if it is unfamiliar. For example, I find people who typically drink sauvignon blanc to be good candidates for grüner veltliner from Austria. The wine may sound Germanic and unlike anything they are used to drinking, but it often lines up well with their tastes and budgets.
SM: What is the point of tasting a wine before it is poured?
JP: Technically, it is to see if the wine is flawed, but for the restaurant guest, the point of tasting a wine before it is poured is to see if you like it. Our crew is trained to taste each bottle before it goes out to ensure flawed wines don’t reach our customers. If you don’t like the wine, you can send it back. We believe this is an important part of service, because we don’t want people to sit at a meal with a bottle they are not going to enjoy.
SM: Do you have any advice for getting the most out of your interaction with a sommelier?
JP: Don’t be shy about budget. The best way to indicate your budget is to use your finger to point to a price on the wine list and say, “I am looking for something along these lines.” The number doesn’t get verbalized, but the sommelier knows where to take you based on your price requirements and the style of wine you described enjoying.
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