(my old wine blog, now at cellarbook.wordpress.com)

New Site

2010-11-28T23:57:00.002-05:00

Still here? Thanks for staying tuned. After a bit of an unplanned hiatus from this site, I've gotten the itch to do some more wine writing again, but I grew a little tired of this format. So I put together a new site with a somewhat different concept and look. If you're still curious to read my ramblings, please follow me there: cellarbook.wordpress.com. Thank you!

As Easy As 1-2-3

2009-12-24T15:27:00.002-05:00

The Drinks Committee of the Editorial Board of the fine food blog What’s She Eating Now recently asked me if I might be interested in submitting a few guest blog posts on the subject of wine. So if you’re curious to read my thoughts on wine from a somewhat more introductory perspective than the inside-baseball stuff I post to this blog, here are the three posts I put together, on Germany, France, and Italy.

You Can’t Take the Seine from Me

2009-11-24T01:01:00.000-05:00

“So, four or five hundred years ago,” wrote the late Frank Schoonmaker in a piece anthologized in History in a Glass: Sixty Years of Wine Writing from Gourmet, “they celebrated the excellence of Burgundy in the taverns and cabarets of Paris: ‘If I had a gullet five hundred ells wide, and the Seine ran this good wine of Beaune, I would go down under the bridge, stretch myself out, and I would let the Seine run down into my belly.’” I’ve seen those words before:

I photographed those verses in the Musée du Vin in Beaune awhile back, planning to attempt a translation (with help from Babelfish) when I got home. Here is what I came up with, taking a bit more poetic license than Schoonmaker.

If only my lips were a mile from side to side
And the Seine were a river of Burgundy wine;
I would stretch athwart its banks,
Descending to the coast to drink
All the Seine’s five hundred miles,
And hold it all inside awhile;

If the King should grow displeased and summon men
To wrest me from that bridge across the Seine,
I’d concede the King’s domain
And quietly proclaim,
I grant you Paris, great Henri,
But please don’t take the Seine from me.

The Taste of Gold

2009-11-05T21:31:00.011-05:00

I finally got around to reading The Billionaire’s Vinegar, Benjamin Wallace’s account of how high-end wine collector Hardy Rodenstock apparently hoodwinked a slew of his fellow megacollectors with fake wine. The most notorious of these wines were a cache of filthy hand-blown bottles inscribed with the initials “Th.J.,” which he attributed to America’s third President and first oenophile, Thomas Jefferson. Rodenstock sold several of those bottles for extravagant sums at Christie’s auctions and opened them for numerous V.I.P.’s with whom he wished to curry favor.

Wallace’s book is one of the most engaging wine books I’ve read in a long while, mostly because it has all the mystery, plot twists, and eccentric personalities of a suspense novel. But since it’s not a novel, it leaves some of its central mysteries unsolved. Now, everyone knows the Jefferson connection was a hoax—attempts to authenticate the “Th.J.” inscription showed it to have been made with a modern dental drill—but radiation tests of the wine in some of the bottles established that they may well have dated from Jefferson’s time. We may never know what they were, but they were certainly more valuable than vinegar.

Michael Broadbent, the Christie’s auctioneer who sold the wines for Rodenstock and drank many of them with him, was so irate with the way he was portrayed in the book that he sued Wallace for libel. Indeed, it’s easy to imagine readers of the book getting the impression that Broadbent was woefully negligent in the way he went about authenticating the provenance of the bottles. But in my reading of the book he came across as a sympathetic character. If he didn’t investigate their provenance as diligently as a more skeptical man might have, it was only because he was a wine lover to the core, and his real fault was not negligence but the sentiment of that iconic poster hung above Fox Mulder’s desk in the X-Files: “I Want to Believe.”

Broadbent was not the only one who wanted to believe. It seems every person who crossed paths with one of the Jefferson bottles became so entranced with the founding father that they immersed themselves in Jefferson lore. Believing in the bottles gave them a connection to something even more profound than what the wine inside promised.

But the wonderful thing about Jefferson is that he can still be relevant for us in many ways even if you do not own a bottle of wine from his collection—in matters of civil society, or of wine. As I write this post, I’m sipping from a Grand Cru-quality bottle of Meursault La Goutte d’Or 2005, from the Domaine Bernard Millot. Nobody writes much about Goutte d’Or anymore; Perrières is the trendy Meursault vineyard of choice these days. But Jefferson had a special fondness for La Goutte d’Or. According to James Gabler’s book about Jefferson’s wine and travels, he consumed at least 250 bottles of the 1784 vintage while he lived in Paris, advised a Philadelphia wine merchant in 1791 that it was the “best quality” wine of Meursault, and remarked on its value relative to the three-times-more-expensive Montrachet. Today most people take the word of journalists for such information, but Jefferson came by that knowledge the old-fashioned way—by drinking. If you’re ever inclined to pursue the exercise of drinking what Jefferson drank, include a bottle of La Goutte d’Or. (In addition to Bernard Millot’s, permit me also to recommend Domaine Buisson-Charles’s stunning bottling, a bargain from Oregon’s Vinopolis Wine Shop.) The most valuable thing Jefferson bequeathed to future generations of wine drinkers wasn’t a stash of bottles to occupy the trophy case in a billionaire’s cellar, but rather the connoisseurship with which he turned a pastime into a passion.

Goodwill & Bad Wine

2009-09-15T00:36:00.000-05:00

Everybody knows a high point score from a famous wine critic can move a lot of wine, but very rarely do you see an actual demonstration of its precise cash value. Would you have guessed $40 million? That’s the price just paid for a controlling interest in Kosta-Browne, a California pinot noir maker with no vineyards, no winery, and no other assets to speak of besides a mailing list and a brand that had gotten 18 scores of 95 points or higher from James Laube of the Wine Spectator since the 2003 vintage. In fact, Laube is the only major wine critic who’d ever taken a fancy to K-B—even Robert Parker panned the stuff—making the purchase price a jawdropping demonstration not just of the value of scores in the abstract but of the Spectator’s scores in particular. I almost feel sorry for Laube, watching other people cash in to the tune of $40 million after he did all the work.

Changes

2009-08-14T11:44:00.008-05:00

Is there a more depressing sentence in the English language than “Times change, and we have to change with them”? Those were the words spoken to me last night when I asked the folks at Chanterelle whether the rumors were true that they were revamping the restaurant to add a bar, tear up the carpeting, and start serving small plates. It’s true. Tonight, August 15, is the last night Chanterelle will exist in its current format, which is just as I remember it from my first visit a decade ago, before New Yorkers became obsessed with “small plates.”

Chanterelle does real French cuisine, but not the stale variety that doomed creaky East Side institutions like La Côte Basque and Lespinasse. Roger Dagorn kept the wine list focused on Bordeaux and Burgundy standbys and a few French country wines, but delighted in curveballs like the occasional sake pairing. It’s fashionable these days for restaurants to tout fresh, seasonal ingredients, and that’s been the theme at Chanterelle forever, without descending into ingredient-worship of the sort where the waiter gives you the name, town, diet, and hobbies of the animal you are about to eat. Dishes are finished with rich, complex sauces. Meals are a civilized four or five courses, not marathon tasting menus that cause you to lose your appetite by the time the kitchen is done showing off.

The cheese course is essential—done the proper way by pointing to the cheeses you want on the board, rather than getting a few tiny slivers pre-selected by the kitchen with pointless fixings. And they’re stunning. Von Trapp Oma is Vermont’s answer to Reblechon or Abbaye de Citeaux, and I can’t wait to buy some for myself at Murray’s. But I have bought Tomme Crayeuse at Murray’s dozens of times, and none compared to the runny raw-milk one on Chanterelle’s board.

With Chanterelle abandoning this format, it’s probable that no one else in New York is doing it—and it’s certain that no one else in New York is doing it as well. And I feel terrible about it. I wouldn’t have been there yesterday if I didn’t know it was my last chance. The last time I got this maudlin about a restaurant I committed the following bit of sappiness, but it sums up even better how I feel today:

I think much of the appeal of these kinds of restaurants lies in their ability to become time capsules, impervious to changing trends and as comfortable as an old beloved sofa. We forgive the consequent quirks and take the rest for granted, putting off visiting when we know we should, like they’re old relatives, banking on the certainty that they’ll still be there for us, unchanged, when we find the time.

But I don’t go to restaurants all that much anymore, so I couldn’t have saved the place even if I’d tried. With a dog we can’t bear to leave home alone and a baby due in the fall, at the end of a long day it’s the comforts of home and my own kitchen I tend to crave more than a meal at a restaurant, even a great one. Times change, and we change with them; fortunately that’s not always a sad thing.

Deconstructing Pollan

2009-08-03T19:51:00.002-05:00

A Missouri farmer notices that The Omnivore’s Dilemma has made all sorts of people feel qualified to have an opinion about what he does for a living, and fights back. The opening salvo, against one clueless culprit:

[H]e expects me to farm like my grandfather, and not incidentally, I suppose, to live like him as well. He thinks farmers are too stupid to farm sustainably, too cruel to treat their animals well, and too careless to worry about their communities, their health, and their families. I would not presume to criticize his car, or the size of his house, or the way he runs his business. But he is an expert about me, on the strength of one book, and is sharing that expertise with captive audiences every time he gets the chance. Enough, enough, enough.

Nota Bene, Redux

2009-07-06T18:22:00.002-05:00

A New York Times column arguing that wine tasting notes are pretentious and prolix calls attention to a little essay titled “On Wine Bullshit,” by Princeton economist Richard Quandt, as “[t]he canonical work in the wine-adjective field.” Quandt’s point that wine writing has its share of bullshit artists is well-taken, but I fear the essay represents another false arrest by the bullshit police. Quandt catalogs dozens of adjectival phrases favored by wine critics and singles out a few for snarky derision, like “scorched earth,” “crushed rocks,” or “olive-tinged black currant.” But the truth is, these things only sound like bullshit until the first time you experience them yourself, and then they make perfect sense. I once thought the notion of “lead pencils” in wine was bullshit, until I drank a 1995 Lynch-Bages from Pauillac (ground zero for lead pencils) which reeked of them. Quandt complains, “I have never been near scorched earth, perhaps because Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan were a bit before my time,” but if he’d ever sniffed a burnt-out campfire he would instantly recognize the scent in a wine like 1970 Haut-Brion.

The objection to excessive adjective use is not that they’re bullshit, but that they’re usually besides the point. It’s appropriate to deploy the “scorched earth” cliché to describe a wine like Haut-Brion that really is powerfully evocative of scorched earth, but when it’s just one of a dozen descriptive phrases it loses its relevance. The essence of the wine’s character usually lies in something else.

Excellent Choice, Sir

2009-07-03T15:26:00.004-05:00

Sometimes a bout of envy can ruin your whole day!

Via Instapundit, here’s a melodramatic story about a woman at the Chicago restaurant Alinea, who had just finished the eighth course of a twenty-five course meal when she noticed a diner at the next table getting the same dish—but in a grander presentation, personally sculpted at her table by the chef de cuisine. The woman’s heart sank. Specifically, “She began to cry, got up from the table, and briskly walked to the bathroom. They cut their meal short and left soon thereafter.”

Instapundit calls the story “from the ‘get a life’ department.” It’s true that the woman’s tears and departure come across as both pitiable and petty, but her gripe was a fair one. As I had occasion to note once before, if you’re going to treat someone as second-class, use some discretion and make sure they don’t find out!

Compare the Alinea story to an episode discussed by the philosopher Alain de Botton in his insightful little book on the phenomenon of Status Anxiety:

On a foggy evening in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century, the bourgeois narrator of Marcel Proust’s [Remembrance of Things Past] travels to an expensive restaurant to have dinner with an aristocratic friend, the Marquis de Saint-Loup. He arrives early, Saint-Loup is late and the staff, judging their client on the basis of a shabby coat and an unfamiliar name, assume that a nobody has entered their establishment. They therefore patronize him, take him to a table around which an arctic draught is blowing and are slow to offer him anything to drink or eat.
But, a quarter of an hour later, the marquis arrives, identifies his friend and at a stroke transforms the narrator’s value in the eyes of the staff. The manager bows deeply before him, draws out the menu, recites the specials of the day with evocative flourishes, compliments him on his clothes and, so as to prevent him thinking that these courtesies are in any way dependent on his link to an aristocrat, occasionally gives him a surreptitious little smile that seems to indicate a wholly personal affection. When the narrator asks him for some bread the manager clicks his heels and exclaims:
“Certainly, Monsieur le baron!” “I am not a baron,” I told him in a tone of mock sadness. “Oh, I beg your pardon, Monsieur le comte!” I had no time to lodge a second protest, which would no doubt have promoted me to the rank of marquis.
However satisfactory the volte-face, the underlying dynamic is bleak, for the manager has not of course amended his snobbish value system in any way. He has merely rewarded someone differently within its brutal confines—and only rarely do we have the opportunity to find a Marquis de Saint-Loup or a Prince Charming who will speak on our behalf to convince the world of the nobility of our souls. More commonly, we are made to finish our dinner in the arctic draught.

What rankles isn’t the stratification per se but the insult, the insinuation that it’s who you are that makes the difference and the implied glass ceiling if you’re not among the elite or the otherwise well-favored. To its credit, Alinea has come up with an egalitarian remedy:

I suggested that we make that “VIP” experience available to everyone who was interested in it. The Tour menu was created. It was the entire repertoire of the kitchen. Twenty to 30 courses in length, it was the “kitchen sink.”
By making it available to everyone we had covered our own butts. If a table noticed a neighboring table receiving a course they did not, it was for the simple reason they elected to not order the menu that the course was on. But more importantly, we now made our “best possible” experience available to everyone.

Capitalism is a wonderful equalizer. Everyone’s dollar is as good as everyone else’s.

Hype

2009-06-06T00:07:00.001-05:00

Sports Illustrated features a fascinating conversation between baseball sabermetrician Bill James and Joe Posnanski, working towards an understanding of the nature of hype.

James: “I wonder if this is a definition of Hype: that hype celebrates potential before the potential is realized, in an effort to profit from it when it is realized.”

James again: “Here’s the difference, I think, between hype and scouting. A scout looks carefully at the player himself . . . and asks whether he can succeed as a major leaguer. Hype starts on the other end. Hype starts with the question ‘Who can be a superstar?’ and attempts to project each player several levels ahead of where he is . . . not only each player but all the players, to figure out which one is going to be the big star.”

Posnanski: “I think Hype also is the product of human nature. The birthday present gift-wrapped up will more often than not be better than the gift once you open it. The recruiting class usually looks better before anyone plays a game. The excitement of what’s behind door No. 3 will make people give back the perfectly good prize they found behind door No. 2.”

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go buy some 2008 Bordeaux futures and figure out which California mailing list is going to be the next Screaming Eagle.

Thread-Skipper #2: The Decline and Fall of the Parker Empire

2009-05-30T13:32:00.010-05:00

Thread: Too many to list, including “Letter to the Editor of the Wall Street Journal,” eRobertparker.com; “VERY interesting article on Parker in today's Wall Street Journal,” UK Wine Forum; “Robert Parker and the End of the Road,” Wine Berserkers; “What bothers me about wine blogs,” eRobertParker.com; and assorted other threads and blog posts all over the Internet, except on Wine Disorder, where nobody really knows or cares much who Robert Parker is, and on eRobertParker.com itself, where the most popcorn-worthy threads tend to get locked or purged just when they’re getting good.

Background: Old-fashioned investigative journalism on the Dr. Vino blog confirms long-suspected rumors that world-renowned wine critic Robert M. Parker, Jr., for whatever reason, tends to surround himself with jerks. Further investigation reveals that the inner circle consists of both jerks and parasites, the latter of whom apparently approach their association with Parker the way former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich approaches vacant U.S. Senate seats. The gist of the accusations is that Parker’s writers have been taking industry-sponsored junkets to taste the wine they report on rather than paying their own way like the big man himself. In addition, the logically and epistemologically challenged Jay Miller is apparently best buddies with the guys responsible for most of the undrinkably disgusting Australian and Spanish wines that get ecstatic reviews in the Wine Advocate.

The coverup: Parker’s business partner Joe James circles the wagons in pathetic I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I fashion by attacking the integrity of “bloggers” as if each one were part of some sort of secret society engaged in an ancient shadowy conspiracy like in a Dan Brown novel, except that the alleged object of the conspiracy was to get subsidized hotel breakfasts rather than to assassinate the Pope. Parker, rather than disclose his business partnership with James, responds how he always does to shameless, incoherent brown-nosing—with a pat on the back and more tinfoil-hat ranting against his ever-expanding enemies list, which now includes “bloggers,” “or should I say blobbers since they are the source of much of the misinformation,distortion,and egegious [sic] falsehoods spread with reckless abandon on the internet.” Parker touts his pure-as-the-driven-snow independence while complaining that “bloggers can’t continue to exist without wine-related advertising.” Hey, where’s my check? Parker continues the tirade in published comments in his journal wherein he rails against “blogs authored by anybody who can string a noun and verb together, and by many who can’t,” an odd slinging of stones from the glass house of someone whose own online postings are notoriously rambling and who still hasn’t grasped such basic rules of form as using a space after punctuation.

The martyr: New York retailer Dan Posner asks some innocent questions about the double standard, for which he is eventually purged.

The sideshow: Kevin Zraly used to be the wine director at Windows on the World until it was blown up by the Religion of Peace. Afterwards, he continued to run the Windows on the World wine education program, which attempts to teach grownups about wine in much the same way that Mr. Rogers teaches children how to tie their shoes. He was hired to moderate a similarly conceived wine education forum on eRobertParker.com a few years ago, which suffered the Internet equivalent of tumbleweeds and when he resigned from eRobertParker.com, it took months before anyone noticed. In case anyone was still wondering what he’s been up to, it turns out that he has been posting bizarre non-sequiturs about wine on Twitter, which are even funnier when you read them in the voice of Norm MacDonald impersonating Larry King. In a related discussion, blogger Arthur Przebinda links to a fascinating report on wine and social media, the thrust of which is that the future of wine commentary is infinitely more interesting than Robert Parker sitting in his throne and telling everybody else what to think. Further evidence that Parker does not understand where the value in online content comes from appears in his pleas for the most active contributors to his site to give him money, rather than the other way around.

The shit hits the fan: The Dr. Vino story goes mainstream in the Wall Street Journal, prompting Parker to complain that the Journal didn’t tell his side of the story, prompting the New York Times’s Eric Asimov to query how the Journal was supposed to know his side of the story after he refused their interview request. The most interesting reactions get deleted but are preserved elsewhere.

Damage control: Miller, who has apparently been friends with Parker for thirty years, gets thrown under the bus and “disciplined”! The Wine Advocate’s writers lose most of their free trips, but the double standard nevertheless receives official codification.

Aftermath: It’s impossible not to feel shitty about yourself after wasting hours of your life following the Parker-vs.-the-Internet and the Parker-vs.-his-own-staff conflagrations.

The truth is, no matter how much of Parker’s brand identity is invested in the illusion that he actually, say, writes the Rothschild family a check to cover the barrel sample he spit out and rated 1,000 points, nobody really follows Parker for his purported impartiality. Parker gained his influence by championing a new standard for what wine should be, a standard which is just as bankrupt in aesthetic merit as the modern standards in virtually everything else but has its fans for the same reason people go see Jerry Bruckheimer movies. To complain that praises of such wines are tainted by friendships or free travel is besides the point. I’m reminded of the rhyme, attributed to one Humbert Wolfe:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist
(Thank God!) the British journalist,
But seeing what the man will do
Unbribed, there’s no occasion to.

Along similar lines, an old joke about New York Times reporters had it that if they weren’t on Stalin’s payroll, they were getting ripped off. But the New York Times didn’t need the incentive of bribery to spread Communist propaganda any more than Parker’s posse needs further incentive to push the Mollydookers and Monbousquets of the world. There is so much criticism of Parker to be made on substance that any criticism on process seems, and probably is, pretextual. It’s almost surreal that after all the bad advice Parker has dispensed, it’s Jay Miller’s feeding from the trough that prompts people to raise questions whether the sun is finally setting on Parker’s power. But I think Max has it right in that analysis. Parker’s influence won’t wane until more people feel like they’ve gotten burnt following his advice, and it’s fitting that the most spoofulated vintage in the history of Bordeaux may serve as the tipping point.

Update: Parker finally takes notice of “the number of communications I’ve gotten from once dynamic and valuable posters that this board has taken on a mob mentality riddled with demeaning and unsavory comments,” but delusionally thinks the nastiness originates solely with his detractors rather than his enforcers. Even curiouser, he continues to view the world as divided between honest, independent people like himself and people “driven by a hidden agenda” “exploit[ing] [their] own self-interests.” He has it exactly backwards. It’s only Parker and his staff who have a financial interest in pushing their opinions. Everyone else is in it just for the love of it.

Circle of Life

2009-05-03T12:32:00.001-05:00

Peanuts & Crackerjacks &c.

2009-04-26T16:25:00.010-05:00

It’s not too soon to name the Most Valuable Player of the 2009 New York Mets: Danny Meyer. (Well, it sure won’t be anyone in the Baseball Department.) Thanks to Mr. Meyer, proprietor of the new Citi Field outposts of Blue Smoke and my beloved Shake Shack, the quality of the food available to Mets fans is no longer as atrocious as the quality of the baseball being played on the diamond.

It takes more than 45 minutes to reach the front of the line at the Shake Shack, but it’s at least as worthwhile a way to pass the time as watching Oliver Perez surrender another home run, Daniel Murphy mishandle another routine hop, and David Wright whiff for another third out stranding men in scoring position. The food is just as good as the Madison Square Park original, albeit with an abridged menu. The fans should rise up to demand chocolate shakes (and a decent clutch hitter). For whatever reason, the barbecue at Blue Smoke isn’t quite up to the level of 27th Street, although it has the distinction of offering by far the best of the five different kinds of french fries available at Citi Field. They’re better than the crinkle-cut fries at the Shake Shack, which admittedly somehow taste better than any crinkle-cut fries have a right to taste.

(The less said about the “fries” at the standard Nathan’s Famous concessions throughout the park, the better. By far the worst abuse of the potato it has ever been my displeasure to experience, Nathan’s soggy “fries” have the texture of a baked potato splattered in grease even when they’re fresh out of the cooker. Compared to the grub at Nathan’s, the 1962 or 1993 Mets could have held their heads high. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Art Howe was the chef. Prison food probably tastes like this.)

My favorite culinary option at Citi Field might be Catch of the Day, situated in relation to the centerfield food court somewhat analogously to the cookie stand in Kevin Smith’s magnum opus, Mallrats. The Old Bay–seasoned skin-on fries are nice and crispy and the $17 “never frozen” lobster roll is a quality critter in a perfect summer sandwich (which it should be, for $17, but then, so should the Mets, for $138 million). Removed as it is from the crowd-control nightmare within the bounds of the food court proper, the lines here are shorter and more manageable, minimizing the amount of time one must spend listening to faux nostalgiacs wax about the good old days when the food was junk and everyone just came to watch the game. (I have as much patience for these people as the people who complain about Giuliani winning the war on crime on the ground that New York just isn’t the same without the graffiti and the omnipresent stench of urine. Can somebody give these people a mugging and a concussion, just for old-times’ sake?)

The Shake Shack line dwindles by the late innings, enabling fans patient enough to resist the middle-innings Carvel temptation to fetch a vastly superior custard or black-and-white shake just in time to watch the Mets go down one-two-three in the bottom of the ninth. By the time the home team goes sulking back to the dugout, one is too well-fed to care.

Asset-Bubble Autopsy

2009-04-04T21:36:00.004-05:00

The Vintage Wine Fund is a hedge fund that seeks “[h]igh capital appreciation by investing in fine wines from regions including Bordeaux, Burgundy, the Rhone Valley, Tuscany, Piedmont, Champagne and Portugal.” The minimum investment is €250,000, so these people are serious. In both 2006 and 2007, fueled by the unprecedented bubble in wine pricing, the Fund achieved an impressive 23.97% ROI.

The Fund’s monthly reports, available on its web site back to January 2004, provide a fascinating glimpse into the mentality that inflates asset bubbles. Since the biggest inflation occurred in the wake of the offerings of the 2005 Bordeaux and Burgundy vintages, that's where we will begin our story.

The first mention of the 2005 vintage occurs in the Fund’s April 2006 report, which stated: “Prices will seem high, but one must not forget how much the market has moved up over the last two years. The 2005 first growths are truly great young wines and so it is only reasonable for release prices to take into account the current price of other great wines—both young and old. Those who think release prices should somehow be related to previous years’ release prices are literally stuck in the past.”

What were the “current” prices of those wines that would serve as the benchmark for the 2005 vintage? Wine-Searcher Pro's index of historical prices indicates that in the first half of 2006, Chateau Lafite-Rothschild 1996 could be purchased from a number of retailers in the $300-$400 range. Numerous offerings of the 2003 Lafite were posted at just under $400. This is significant because both vintages had been widely acclaimed following Robert Parker’s 100-point rating of those wines and thus represented the absolute price ceiling for a young vintage of a Left Bank first growth at that time. “This is one first-growth worth mortgaging the house for,” Parker wrote of the 2003 Lafite in an ironic example of the irresponsibility that would come to poison the market. By the same time next year, only one “futures” offering of Lafite’s 2005 was available for less than $600—in other words, over a 50% premium to the last two vintages of comparable quality (one of which had a 9-year head start on aging).

In response to such audacious price hikes, some consumers, worried they would never again be able to afford some high-end wines that they had acquired a taste for, started bidding up the price of the back vintages. Those $300-$400 ’96 Lafites disappeared from the market. Within a year, the typical retail offering for the ’96 Lafite started around $800 and went up from there (with the notoriously overcharging Sokolin asking, and maybe even getting, $1,495). In June 2006, the Vintage Wine Fund reported that “many 2005 prices make more mature wines look incredibly good value,” naming some that “look fantastically cheap when compared to the price at which their 2005 versions have sold out." The Fund did not consider it odd that “we have the latest vintage just released at prices well above comparable wines from other recent vintages but selling easily; this leaves just about every other good vintage in between looking significantly under-priced.” One could also have concluded that it made the new vintage look significantly overpriced, and it’s curious that the market did not make this judgment.

In hindsight it seems clear that the wine bubble was just one manifestation of a bubble in everything that led people to believe they were wealthier than they actually were. But irrational exuberance still ruled in March 2007:

So, how far can prices go? The price per bottle of a first growth Bordeaux hardly looks expensive when one looks at the money which is spent by the well-heeled every day on their other passions. It might be cars, clothing, jewellery, travel, boxes at the opera/sporting venues etc or perhaps the slightly less edifying pleasures of Las Vegas or Macau where the cost of the Lafite, Krug or DRC is insignificant compared with what is being spent on the main entertainments. The message is clear: the demand for fine wines is growing at an accelerating pace and supplies can never increase. Prices are set to rise rapidly and who knows, this year could be remembered as the one in which fine wine prices doubled.

In September 2007, something interesting happened. The Vintage Wine Fund posted its first loss in 32 months. The monthly report blamed “private investors [who] felt the impressive gains they had built up over the last few years were worth locking in.” In other words, those “investors” took a look at the state of the market and decided it had hit its ceiling.

The Vintage Wine Fund, however, remained bullish. The next month, it reported:

This equilibrium may persist for a little longer but one thing is sure—the supply of wines from investors taking profits will dry up long before consumers stop desiring the world’s best wines. Ultimately we will find ourselves in precisely the same set of circumstances which started the bull run in the first place: low levels of stock held for resale (i.e. by merchants and investors) coupled with strong global demand. As that imbalance reestablishes itself, prices will continue their climb upwards.

They didn’t. The fund lost more money in November and pleaded for “patience”: “It is only natural that with the uncertain economic outlook that some investors feel it is prudent to leave the market. While that is keeping a cap on prices at the moment, it does not mean that the underlying imbalance between demand and supply has permanently altered. . . . [T]he upward pressure on prices will naturally return.”

Sure, the market still looked healthy. But what if a global recession happened? Wouldn’t that diminish some of the exuberance? No, the Fund explained in its January 2008 report:

As one might expect, a lot of people have been asking us how a global recession would affect our market. It is our belief that although it may be at a steadier rate than we have enjoyed in the recent past, price appreciation will continue. Gains may also be a little more erratic on a month by month basis but demand would need to fall a long way before it was anywhere near being outweighed by the overall level of (rather than momentary blips up in) supply. We firmly believe that we can continue to provide investors with very respectable returns even if the worst fears of some economists prove accurate.

In July 2008, when the worst fears of some economists were about to prove accurate, the Fund announced that “it seems clearer than ever that with global demand robust and continuing to grow the outlook for the coming months is very positive.”

The economic shit hit the fan in September 2008 when 300 million Americans, who had until then assumed we were merely in the middle of a routine economic correction, woke up to the news that the President of the United States was insisting he had to nationalize the entire banking industry to prevent the next Great Depression. In times like this, the notion of a $1,500 bottle of wine that won’t taste very good until the year 2030 begins to seem absurd, so it’s hard to blame anyone who decided to trade liquid for liquidity.

The stampede to the auction block led the Vintage Wine Fund to complain that “in the last week we saw a handful of sellers who were in such a rush to liquidate their holdings that they started selling at whatever price was offered to them. . . . From the behaviour of the sellers you would think that fine wine had been found to contain some lethal poison.” In its comment that “[w]hen too many people run for the door in any market, they just end up hurting each other and themselves,” one can almost sense the Fund whining that if everyone would just cooperate, they could keep the bubble going. Its prediction the next month of a “quick and full recovery” seemed nearly as desperate. In the most recent report posted online, a graph shows the Fund’s value back near 2006 levels, but the managers remain upbeat, concluding that “it is perhaps some sort of consolation that the greater the pain becomes, the shorter it will probably last.”

In “The Gods of the Copybook Headings,” Rudyard Kipling wrote:

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man—
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:—
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire.

There’s No Place Like Home

2009-03-12T21:02:00.011-05:00

One of the trendy virtues these days is authenticity. The proliferation of the artificial everywhere we look seems to have awakened a craving to cherish what’s real. But there is another sense in which the cult of authenticity is not so much a backlash to the cultural degradation of the modern age but another manifestation of it. Part of the reason the virtue of authenticity has become such a trendy substitute for the classic virtues, I think, is because it so easily compatible with relativism. If the virtue lies in being the truest exponent of whatever you are, then being an authentic representation of something great carries the same weight as being an authentic representation of something mediocre. The most memorable line in William A. Henry III’s In Defense of Elitism was, “It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose.” But if putting a bone in one’s nose is as authentic an expression of savage culture as putting a man on the moon is of Western culture, then by that standard they’re the same thing after all.

Eric Asimov’s New York Times column this week criticizes a common apologia for lousy California pinot noir, that it is somehow a more authentic expression of California’s terroir than the wines produced by those who have aspirations to something finer:

It’s fashionable among the makers of bigger, heavier pinot noirs to reject any comparison with Burgundy. We don’t make Gevrey-Chambertin, they will say. We make wines representative of the Russian River Valley, Santa Rita Hills or Santa Lucia Highlands—take your pick. This stance implies that California conditions dictate wines of extravagance and power.

It also dodges the question whether there is as much value to being representative of the Santa Rita Hills as there is to being representative of Gevrey-Chambertin. If there isn’t, then these producers are guilty of exactly what many of them contemptuously accuse Old World producers of doing: promoting their wines on the basis of typicity to disguise the fact that they can’t compete on the basis of quality. Moreover, while convenient for growers with unremarkable vineyard sites, such rationalizations are insulting to producers that make wines fully capable of expressing the virtues characteristic of great Burgundy. Using the term Burgundian to describe one of those wines doesn’t mean they are trying to imitate Burgundy. Rather, the best examples are distinctive and individual expressions of the sites they come from while featuring the harmonious composition and silky, weightless finesse that make Burgundy so captivating.

A case in point is the Copain 2006 Kiser Vineyard En Haut. Copain used to make big wines that got big ratings from the critics. Proprietor Wells Guthrie told Asimov, “In 2006, I made the decision to pick earlier to retain freshness and vibrancy rather than play the game of picking ripe and adding water and acidity later on. It was the first year I made pinot where I didn’t have to add acid or water, and it felt good.” The Kiser En Haut is only 13.3% alcohol. Robert Parker decided to punish the effort with a lukewarm 85 points. He never understood Burgundy, either.

And in fact Burgundy was the first thing I thought of with my first sniff and sip of the Kiser. But what Burgundy, in particular, did it taste like? None of ’em. It was as though someone had transplanted an entirely new village smack in the middle of Burgundy that shared the proportions common to all of them but plenty of other characteristics that you can’t find in any of them—specifically the vivid crushed-pebble minerality front and center in the aroma and flavor. The rocks come steeped in a cool red-fruit profile that contributes to its easy drinkability but otherwise has completely transcended its fruit. It performed at a bona fide Grand Cru level.

Outrage du Jour

2009-02-21T13:46:00.005-05:00

Here’s a story about a “food co-op” in Brooklyn “considering a ban on Israeli products because of the conflict in the Mideast.” For those who haven’t read the papers lately, the “conflict in the Mideast” has been going on roughly since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Presently it pits several dozen Muslim countries and one or two Muslim non-countries, who want to slaughter all Jews everywhere, against one country of Jews, who occasionally assert their desire not to be slaughtered. The new President of the United States is strongly in favor of finding a compromise between these two positions.

The parties involved, however, have been unable to come to a workable compromise so far. It turns out the Muslim countries and non-countries are not satisfied slaughtering only some Jews, while Jews are not happy sometimes getting slaughtered. Several wars and a few smaller skirmishes have been fought over this, most recently in the Gaza Strip, a small Muslim non-country that other people might find desirable for its attractive beachfront exposures but whose inhabitants prefer to use for burrowing tunnels to Egyptian weapons stockpiles.

Faced with the choice between destroying such weapons stockpiles and the people who use them or plucking the shrapnel of nail bombs out of Israeli schoolchildren, Israel occasionally chooses the former, at least when Labor is not in power. This is always and invariably followed by denunciations of its actions by European Jew-haters, American college professors, their brainwashed students, and the type of people who buy their groceries at a “co-op.”

But in fact killing terrorists is not exclusively an Israeli policy. Other countries do this, too, such as the United States. In fact, the new President of the United States, who—I’m just guessing—won a healthy majority of the votes of the members of the Park Slope Food Co-op, just announced he was sending 17,000 more American troops to Afghanistan. Yet the Park Slope Food Co-op has not seen fit to consider a boycott of American-made food products. This is very confusing. Why boycott one country for bombing terrorists but not another? What is there unique about Israel that would explain why someone might single them out?

Joe the Peeler

2009-02-14T14:13:00.007-05:00

Joe Ades, a.k.a. the Potato Peeler Guy of the Union Square Greenmarket, died this month. The Daily News, on the occasion of Valentine’s Day, tells the story of his life and loves, which could be the stuff of an epic novel.

His sales pitch made for irresistable street theatre, mostly because of the unapologetic kitsch of it. “Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession,” wrote Milan Kundera. “The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.” New Yorkers, even those that had seen Joe at work many times before, loved being moved by gathering around the guy with a suit and a sales pitch that seemed plucked out of another time. The local papers loved doing stories about him for the same reason.

I first saw him working the greenmarket almost ten years ago. Of course, I bought a peeler. R.I.P.

Nota Bene, Ctd.

2009-02-05T19:24:00.003-05:00

There is at least one publication leading the way to a post–tasting note form of wine criticism. Last year, Edward Behr’s Art of Eating inaugurated a new wine column called “Why This Bottle, Really?” The column’s rotating authors each write a page’s worth of copy on a single wine, aiming to describe not only its character but its history, cultural milieu, and what Behr calls “the essentials of consumption.” Those essentials include, most obviously, the customary advice on food pairing, but go beyond that to address what moods and personalities each wine is suited for. “An enologist would likely see Musar as a catalog of wine faults,” writes Jamie Goode in the inaugural column about Chateau Musar’s 1999. In the current issue, Alice Feiring writes of Clos Roche Blanche’s 2006 Cuvée Cot, “When I return from fruit-driven California, this is the wine I crave.” The stated purpose of the column, as Behr quoted one future reviewer in his introductory editorial, is to be “a review of a wine that was not just tasted and found worthy, but rather a wine the reviewer actually drunk.”

This approach is long overdue. Indeed, in every other field of criticism, it’s the norm. A book reviewer doesn’t write three-sentence reviews of a few hundred different books after reading a random chapter of each. He focuses on one book at a time and tries to say something intelligent about it. Consequently, a good book review is rewarding to read even if you are not using it for consumer advice on whether or not to buy the book. It has long puzzled me why wine criticism should be practiced so differently.

Edward Behr gets it. His editorial in the current Art of Eating announces a new approach to restaurant reviews. The old paradigm “assume[s] a more or less adversarial stance, aiming at consumer protection.” Behr prefers to “go beyond an opinion about something someone ate . . . and provide insights that will help you get the most out of the food in question no matter where you eat.” There ought to be a place in the world for thoughtful wine writing that does the same.

Nota Bene

2009-02-04T23:54:00.003-05:00

Rational Denial remarks on the uselessness of the dominant form of wine “tasting notes,” a peculiar genre that’s somehow become the primary vehicle for critical commentary about wine. No equivalent exists in any other field of criticism. Nobody would find any use in a similarly styled music “listening note” (“notes of piano, drums, and guitar, with a finish that lasts at least four minutes”) or an art “looking note” (“notions of yellow and red on a deep orange background”).

I’ve written before on the limitations of this exercise, what Joe Dressner called “the Heinz Variety Tasting method.” One insidious effect of it is that the genre comes bundled with a normative ideal of what a wine should be. If wine is supposed to be evaluated with a laundry list of so-called “descriptors,” the multiplicity of such “descriptors” becomes synonymous with quality. Wines that don’t lend themselves to such commentary—perhaps because they are so harmonious that nothing protrudes conspicuously enough to register as its own “descriptor”—are penalized in the evaluation, then penalized in the marketplace. “At bottom,” wrote C.S. Lewis, “every ideal of style dictates not only how we should say things but what sort of things we may say.” Few people bother to think about the ideal of style subconsciously embedded in the medium of the tasting note.

In addition to carrying aesthetic bias, most tasting notes tend to be quite useless, a point dramatized by the contrast between the following three notes:

1. “layers of cedar and raspberry strike a sharp upfront note, while clove and creamy notes add body while contributing an exotic, sumptuous character that conveys luxury in its essence. Might there also be a trace of rubber, though?”
2. “aroma of underripe bananas . . . the fruitiness opens up on my tongue with a flick of bitterness that quickly fades to reveal lush, grassy tones”
3. “fruity (with a high-profile role for the deliciously garbagey, overripe smell of guava) plus floral (powdery rosy) plus green (neroli and oakmoss)”

As the article from which I plucked those notes reveals, none is a wine; they describe, “respectively, a chocolate, an olive oil, and a perfume.” But the fact that each one of them could have described a wine implies that the essence of vinosity lies in some facet or facets of the wine that have nothing to do with the assorted scents and flavors catalogued in most notes.

All Your Bottles Are Belong to Us

2009-01-20T09:43:00.003-05:00

Via Wine Disorder, an English translation and live-action version of the Japanese manga wine adventure Drops of God have been discovered!

Dreams From My Cellar

2009-01-16T23:27:00.005-05:00

At Slate, Mike Steinberger expresses his hope that Barack Obama will change the White House’s dreadful wine list. The problem is that the wines the White House serves to foreign dignitaries are not just bad, but a specific type of bad that reinforces condescending Euro stereotypes about Americans (brash, uncouth, graceless, fat, etc.). No wonder they leave hating us (cf. those Barcelona hamburgers). The White House even served Newton Unfiltered Chardonnay to Queen Elizabeth. Were they trying to kill her?

Alas, the President-Elect’s tastes in wine are not exactly an upgrade from the outgoing administration’s. And since the rise of the oceans will slow and our planet will begin to heal Any Day Now, I don’t see the President-Elect cottoning to the so-called “carbon footprint” associated with Steinberger’s proposal to lift the de facto White House ban on imported wine. I would advise visiting dignitaries to inquire about corkage.

Bubblenomics

2008-12-12T00:18:00.007-05:00

Last year in this space, I wrote that the bubble in wine prices was unsustainable. An article in Prospect magazine covers similar ground this month. “The bubble . . . is about to pop,” authors Ben Lewis and Jonathan Ford write, pointing to the book Manias, Panics, and Crashes for the following diagnosis of a bubble market:

[M]anias typically start with a “displacement” that excites speculative interest. It may come from a new object of investment or from the increased profitability of existing investments. It is followed by positive feedback as rising prices encourage less experienced investors to enter the market. Then, as the mania gets a grip, speculation becomes more diffuse and spreads to other types of asset. Fresh assets are created at an ever faster rate to take advantage of the euphoria and investors try to increase their gains by borrowing to buy assets or using derivatives. Credit ultimately becomes overextended, swindling and fraud proliferate, and the mania ends in panic as investors seek to liquidate their positions.

“The moment of ‘displacement,’” write Lewis and Ford, “was driven by the emergence of a global class of the new rich.” The number of billionaires worldwide more than doubled over the last five years, which included the usual stock characters: brash Wall Streeters, Asian CEOs, shady Russians. They bought into the market heavily and ran prices up while the “[r]ising prices,” in turn, “were sucking in new investors.” In one of many mind-boggling sales, a consignment from the personal collection of the owner of Château Pétrus sold at a Sotheby’s auction for $86 million. And it began to seem that if you couldn’t play at this level, you couldn’t play at all: “Established collectors dropped out or were nudged sideways towards lesser known [wines] by the activities of the new rich.” Some producers let their greed get the best of them and abandoned their traditional distribution channels to place their new releases “straight into auction.” But “it is a condition of a speculative mania that new ‘assets’ be manufactured to meet raging demand.” As a result, even some producers that had been immune to the hysteria experienced “tenfold” increases in their auction prices in as little as two years—and speculators lacked the connoisseurship to notice that many of the auction purchases they’d spent millions chasing were, quite simply, meritless crap.

This is probably the best autopsy of the wine market of the last three years I’ve read so far. But Lewis and Ford actually weren’t writing about wine. The subject of their article was the bubble in the market for modern art. The meritless crap was not wannabe California “cult” wines but fashion art by the likes of Damien Hirst. The record-setting $86 million consignment did indeed come from Château Pétrus owner Jean-Pierre Moueix, but it was a triptych by Francis Bacon. The “new ‘assets’” that had to be “manufactured to meet raging demand” weren’t 2005 Burgundies and counterfeit DRCs, but rather the works of newly trendy artists like Hirst who in better days would have been deemed to lack the requisite vindication of history to justify the prices they asked. (Actually, in better days it would have been regarded as completely ridiculous that Damien Hirst could make a living as an “artist” at all.)

As I write this post I am finishing a bottle of Château Latour 1995, purchased recently for just slightly more than it cost when it first hit the shelves ten years ago. Those of us who didn’t have the thrill of riding this bubble on the way up will enjoy the consolation prizes on the way down.

Don’t Forget the Lyrical

2008-11-26T12:06:00.007-05:00

“C.K.” of Sacramento, California writes to the Smart Set’s “Ask a Poet” column, “Can you suggest some wine pairings for specific poems?” Unfortunately, C.K. got some boring wine advice, so I’ll offer my own suggestions.

“To Autumn” by John Keats.—Many wines are praised as “bottled sunshine.” R. López de Heredia’s Rioja Viña Bosconia is the more pastoral alternative—bottled autumn. Keats writes of the autumn’s “[c]onspiring with [the sun] how to load and bless / With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; / To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, / And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core.” It’s the ripeness of those apples that Bosconia evokes, when it feels a need to evoke ripeness at all; instead of the scorch of the sun that characterizes the prevailing aesthetic of wine today, Bosconian fruit resembles Keats’s “mellow fruitfulness” in the dusk of “the soft-dying day.” Stanley Plumly called “To Autumn” a “symbolist masterpiece realized independently—it seems—of its implied author, as if it were an object, self-created,” which could just as easily describe Bosconia, a wine so seamless and purely bereft of the fingerprints of the winemaking process that it feels like it came into form organically.

“Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold.—Two Victorian lovers standing on the coast of the Channel to admire the moonlit French coast in the distance can only be drinking Champagne—ideally a deep and weathered one like Selosse Substance—and the “tremulous cadence slow” of the bubbles in the glass is the thing to contemplate while experiencing the “grating roar” of Dover Beach’s waves. No wine is a better chameleon to its context than Champagne, inspiring a toast to “be true / To one another” when you’re with your love on the cliffs of Dover, summoning “[t]he eternal note of sadness” and a “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” when you drink it alone. If the lovers overcame their “confused alarms of struggle and flight,” one can imagine them toasting Dover over many bubbles in the future, but the poem is too ominous to allow faith that it will end well. To “be addressed / As sort of a mournful cosmic last resort / Is really tough on a girl,” responded Anthony Hecht in “The Dover Bitch: A Criticism of Life,” but even if she gave up on love she probably didn’t give up on Champagne—unless the “bottle of Nuit d’Amour” in the last line was a stand-in for Nuits-St.-Georges.

“To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell.—“Had we but world enough, and time / This coyness, lady, were no crime,” writes Andrew Marvell, or, in other words, “Life’s too short for this shit, babe.” The appropriate wine is sexy but a constant tease that it won’t be ready to drink until one hears “[t]ime’s winged chariot hurrying near,” turning “into ashes all my lust.” I vote for Huët Vouvray Demi-Sec.

“My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning.—The duke in Robert Browning’s monologue is a shallow cretin, constantly name-dropping the artists he commissioned to create the ostentatious junk adorning his manor. And, oh, by the way, he killed his wife. One can imagine the duke enjoying many of the Top Ten Tackiest Wines of All Time. Pour yourself an expensive glass of trophy wine and shed a tear for the last duchess, and the next one.

“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” by Walt Whitman.—There are two characters here, the learn’d astronomer with his “proofs” and “figures” and “charts” and “diagrams,” and Whitman, who “wander’d off by [him]self” and “[l]ook’d up in perfect silence at the stars.” The poem therefore demands two wines—one of spotless technical perfection and the other characterful but contemplative. Compare a Bordeaux engineered by Michel Rolland to Lebanon’s Chateau Musar, or a U.C. Davis-style California pinot noir to an old-school Burgundy with the stench of the barnyard. Plenty of Learn’d Winemakers can point to the “proofs” and “figures” and “charts” and “diagrams” to show, as a matter of scientific fact, that each of the latter wines is flawed—but the Learn’d Winemakers are powerless to explain their beauty.

“The Gods of the Copybook Headings” by Rudyard Kipling.—The copybook headings are the eternal truths which persist in undermining the best-laid plans of mankind whenever we come to deem ourselves too sophisticated for the copybook’s trite wisdom. The appropriate wine must be so simple and straightforward it’s almost a cliché—but eternal nonetheless. The answer is obvious: merlot! Merlot instantly fell out of fashion as soon as the American public took the variety’s disparagement in the movie Sideways as the new consensus of wine cognoscenti. In the movie, misanthrope Miles famously rants, “If anybody orders merlot, I’m leaving. I am not drinking any fucking merlot,” whereupon his party proceeds to guzzle spoofulated pinot noir from the likes of Kistler and Sea Smoke, which have a cellar shelf-life only slightly longer than milk. If Miles had heeded the Gods of the Copybook Headings and cellared some traditionally made Pomerol and St.-Emilion instead—say, from the Moueix stable—he might have been happier.

“Medlars and Sorb-Apples” by D.H. Lawrence.—“I love you, rotten, / Delicious rottenness. . . . / What a rare, powerful, reminiscent flavor / Comes out of your falling through the stages of decay.” When it comes to choosing a wine here, Lawrence doesn’t leave much to the imagination: “Something of the same flavour as Syracusan muscat wine / Or vulgar Marsala.” But the poem deserves a better wine than Marsala, and I wouldn’t know where to shop for Syracusan muscat. Any botrytized wine will do, to savor the taste here of the “grape turning raisin,” the “brown morbidity,” “[a]utumnal excrementa.” Yum! Delicious rottenness. Some other time, open a bottle that will summon remembrances of the first wine that ever entranced you, and read Lawrence’s “Piano.”

Consider the Turkey

2008-11-22T00:02:00.001-05:00

While Barack Obama was eating corned beef, Sarah Palin (be still, my heart!) was performing the annual civic ritual of pardoning a Thanksgiving turkey. Somewhat darkening the festive mood of the occasion was her decision to take reporters' questions with farmers draining the blood of not-so-lucky Thanksgiving turkeys in the background.

MSNBC and the New York Times predictably have their panties all in a bunch. National Review Online readers react to the hissyfits of the media primadonnas, who must hitherto have believed that turkey meat is harvested like soybeans, here and here. One reader makes an important point about modern alienation from the means of (food) production: “City people think that farms are ‘where life happens.’ Nonsense. Farming is about killing stuff. . . . [A]n increasingly large cohort of America in the lower 48 (and probably Hawaii) are pussies. They have no clue where their food comes from, they don’t hunt, they don’t fish, so they get to act all high and mighty about scenes like this.” Another reader retorts, “She should tell the media that she apologizes and she’ll do her next interview inside an abortion clinic.” Mark Steyn, whose very existence constitutes a hate crime in Canada and on most American university campuses, adds, “After she’s sworn in in 2013, I hope President Palin arranges for a ritual turkey slaughter to be going on behind her at every press conference, if only during David Shuster’s questions.” Last word, Baseball Crank: if you think that’s bad, “you should see the machine they put the moose in. . . .” Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

American Splendor

2008-10-31T21:57:00.006-05:00

Château Mouton-Rothschild 1982 is a legendary wine. But Baroness Philippine de Rothschild wasn’t in New York to talk about the wine—she came to talk about the label. The occasion was a vertical tasting of all the Mouton vintages for which the Rothschilds had selected a work by an American artist for the label, from the 2001 (tacky) back to 1959 (ugly, but what a wine!).

A vertical tasting is one of the few exceptions to my conviction that wine is better experienced by the bottle than by the “taste.” It’s true that you don’t get the full experience of any of the individual wines, but what you do get is at least as illuminating. Each vintage is a different variation on the same theme. Bringing them together makes it easy to discern which characteristics reflect the theme and which reflect the variations, sketching out the Platonic ideal form of the wine.

The signature theme of Mouton-Rothschild? There isn’t much of one. Mouton doesn’t have the screaming personality of some of its peers, such as Haut-Brion or Cheval-Blanc. If it deserves its official classification among the first growths of Bordeaux at all, it’s mainly because it feels luxurious—but anonymously so. The tannins are fine-grained and sophisticated, even in years that tend towards coarseness like 1988, but the underlying material doesn’t show much personality.

Even the 1982. It was decades too young to drink, but was oohed and aahed at by many participants in the tasting on the basis of its reputation. (It was clear that the reputation rather than the wine in the glass sealed the deal for these tasters, because at least half of them were drinking samples from a magnum that was corked.)

But at least the label was full of life. I’m convinced the legendary stature of this wine owes a lot to John Huston’s bold watercolor of a prancing ram on the label, which seems to embody both a howl-at-the-moon triumphalism as well as carefree dolce vita. Philippine said she calls it her “Nureyev lamb, because it dances like Nureyev.” Judge for yourself.

The Vintner as Artist

2008-10-14T17:45:00.004-05:00

Matt Kramer has an important column in the October 15 issue of Wine Spectator on the cliché that “wine is art.” Wine isn’t art, Kramer argues, because what it expresses is the product of nature, not the product of the winemaker’s imagination. “The big difference between an artist and a winemaker,” Kramer writes, “is that an artist starts with a blank sheet while a winemaker works with the exact opposite. A grape arrives at the winery with all the parts included, a piñata stuffed with goodies, just waiting to be cracked open.”

Kramer is right so long as you agree with his terroir-based vision of what wine is (or should be). But many people don’t, as Kramer well knows. In his 1992 book Making Sense of California Wine, Kramer criticized “[w]hat became the transforming vision of California winegrowing—agriculture shaped by the machine.” This governing metaphor of the machine reflected, in Kramer’s view, “the American urge to transform landscape into something more to one’s liking.” As this worldview took hold, techniques developed for industrial wine production migrated to producers with fine-wine ambitions, and techniques that originated in necessity expanded their domain first to serve the whims of the marketplace and eventually to serve “the profound cultural need of our time, to put our signature on our achievements.” Farmers don’t ordinarily sign their work; artists do.

The real objection to characterizing wine as art, then, isn’t that it’s an inaccurate description of what wine is, but that it’s an all-too-accurate description of what some wines are—and these wines belong to a vulgar genre that’s done a lot to erode our powers of discernment when it comes to classically modeled wines. One doesn’t have to think hard to recite a list of modern wineries (mostly in California, of course) that rely so heavily on the artistic vision of the winemaker in promoting their wines that the replacement of the winemaker would yield as fundamental a change in the final product as if a Burgundy producer had announced it was replacing its vineyards.

That these winemakers can do this in spite of the fact that they make wine from grapes that already come packed with information simply points to the dramatic differences in the function those grapes are expected to perform. The winemaker/artiste views his grape sources as “colors to paint with,” but the subject matter of the art comes not from the vineyard but from the mind of the artist. The genre is therefore inherently, and literally, egotistical. In service of one’s artistic vision, if the “colors” the grapes give you aren’t compatible with the composition you want to paint, you can add Mega Purple, designer yeast, enzymes, gelatin, and even water.

Whether one should oppose these manipulations dogmatically isn’t the point, though most would agree you should draw a line somewhere. The point is to understand the role the vision of the winemaker as artist plays in where to draw such lines or in other judgments pertinent to the winemaking process. If the winemaker is an artist, all techniques that serve his artistic vision are fair game. If the winemaker has a quasi-moral obligation to respect terroir, the things he can do to his wine are constrained to techniques that serve the expression of terroir. And it seems the worldview he adopts depends to a large extent on whether he believes in the nobility of his terroir or in the nobility of himself.

The Lobster Considered

2008-09-24T09:01:00.003-05:00

After Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace, who died last week, might have been most famous for “Consider the Lobster,” nominally a report for Gourmet magazine on the Maine Lobster Festival, but actually a thoughtful piece of moral philosophy on the history and ethics of lobster-eating. Like many omnivores, Wallace wasn’t willing to go vegetarian, but was happier not thinking about the gruesome realities of how our dinners are dispatched. Wallace points to the unsettling behavior of the lobster when it’s plunged into the pot—the occasional hooking of its claws over the rim in an apparent attempt to resist the plunge, the clanking in the pot as it seems to be trying to escape. “The lobster, in other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water (with the obvious exception of screaming). . . . Standing at the stove, it is hard to deny in any meaningful way that this is a living creature experiencing pain and wishing to avoid/escape the painful experience. To my lay mind, the lobster’s behavior in the kettle appears to be the expression of a preference; and it may well be that an ability to form preferences is the decisive criterion for real suffering.”

Wallace proceeds to review some of the science probative of what lobsters might or might not “feel”; the material conclusions are that it is, to a large extent, fundamentally unknowable,1 but that the lobster’s apparatus for experiencing pain in any sense that we might care about seems considerably less convincing than, for example, a cow’s. In fact, I feel occasional moral pangs about eating beef but never feel similar compassion for the lobster. All of the behavior Wallace associates with the lobster’s wanting not to be boiled—the clanking in the pot, the hooking of the claws—is plausibly the most knee-jerk responses to basic stimuli; it no more evidences a desire of the lobster not to be cooked (borne of a consciousness of what it means to be alive or dead, in pain or in pleasure) than the clanking behavior of a broken hard drive evidences a desire not to read data.2

But the relevant question from a moral perspective isn’t whether the lobster desires life; it’s whether that “desire” for life (whatever “desire” means from a crustacean perspective) is entitled to any moral weight. A fly evading a flyswatter evinces the same desire to stay alive as the lobster, but only crazy people feel moral compunctions about swatting the fly. It seems likely this is because merely wanting to live is not a state of consciousness sufficiently advanced to trigger our moral empathy. Perhaps even the experience of pain itself is insufficient. The pain the cow experiences in the slaughter is not thought by most people to trigger a moral duty not to eat them.3 On the other hand, the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick made the case for eschewing meat from the following analogy:

Suppose then that I enjoy swinging a baseball bat. It happens that in front of the only place to swing it stands a cow. Swinging the bat unfortunately would involve smashing the cow’s head. But I wouldn’t get fun from doing that: the pleasure comes from exercising my muscles, swinging well, and so on. It’s unfortunate that as a side effect (not a means) of my doing this, the animal’s skull gets smashed. To be sure, I could forego swinging the bat, and instead bend down and touch my toes or do some other exercise. But this wouldn’t be as enjoyable as swinging the bat: I won’t get as much fun, pleasure, or delight out of it. So the question is: would it be all right for me to swing the bat in order to get the extra pleasure of swinging it as compared to the best available alternative activity that does not involve harming the animal? Suppose that it is not merely a question of foregoing today’s special pleasures of bat swinging: suppose that each day the same situation arises with a different animal. Is there some principle that would allow killing and eating animals for the additional pleasure this brings, yet would not allow swinging the bat for the extra pleasure it brings? What could that principle be like?

Nozick concluded that “in my view the extra benefits Americans today can gain from eating animals do not justify doing it” and became a vegetarian. But this reasoning,4 while neat and crisp, as Nozick’s philosophy always is, raises two important concerns. First, it is presumed that the pain the cow experiences merits some moral weight, but nevertheless weighs far less than the claims of humans, because Nozick is not according animals a general right not to be killed (such as we accord to humans)—only a right not to be killed by humans. Obviously, an animal’s mauling in the wild by a predator would not, under even the most insane animal-rights activist’s worldview, require the human criminal-justice system to punish the predator. Second, Nozick isn’t even according the cow a general right not to be killed by humans—only a right not to be killed in human societies that have achieved the comfort and prosperity of the modern West. In this view, moral rights are a luxury good. That doesn’t necessarily provide an escape hatch for taking them any less seriously, but it does imply that on the sliding scale of human interests between avoiding death by starvation and achieving gustatory pleasure, the moral claims of animals are trumped somewhere in the middle.

CONSIDER MY FAVORITE LOBSTER RECIPE
Ingredients:
1½-2 pound live Maine lobster
4 ounces of prepared lobster meat or crab meat
1 small onion
a stack of Ritz crackers (about half a row)
50 milliliters of white wine
butter and olive oil
1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. 2. Dispatch the lobster by plunging a knife through the forehead and butterflying the whole creature down the middle; the squeamish can steam it for two minutes first. 3. Spoon out the guts, and run each half under cold water to clear out remaining gook. 4. Chop the onion and sweat in olive oil. 5. Crumble Ritz crackers by hand and toss with onion. 6. Add prepared lobster or crab meat, butter, and white wine. 7. Pack stuffing densely into the lobster’s excavated chest cavity. Extra stuffing can be placed in a ramekin. 8. Bake 20-30 minutes.

—————
1 This is also the conclusion of the philosopher Thomas Nagel in his famous essay, “What is it Like to Be a Bat?” Nagel chooses the bat as the subject because it is, more than most members of the animal kingdom with which we’re acquainted, “a fundamentally alien form of life,” and trying to understand the experiential reality of bat-ness is rather like a person blind from birth trying to understand the meaning of color. Nagel rejects the idea that the experiential reality of being human provides any basis for extrapolating what it is like to be a bat. “Even if I could by gradual degrees be transformed into a bat,” he reasons, “nothing in my present constitution enables me to imagine what the experiences of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would be like. . . . So if extrapolation from our own case is involved in the idea of what it is like to be a bat, the extrapolation must be incompletable.”

2 Admittedly, I’m taking a cheap shortcut here, presuming that characterizing the lobster’s behavior as mechanistic is determinative of the question whether it evidences consciousness or genuine preferences. There is a solid philosophical basis for the conclusion that human consciousness is itself mechanistic. In Daniel Dennett’s definition of consciousness, “consciousness is not some extra glow or aura or ‘quale’ caused by the activities made possible by the functional organization of the mature cortex; consciousness is those various activities.” Suppose a person “contracts a terrible progressive brain disease that destroys his nervous system from the outside in—he starts going numb and then deaf and blind and unable to control his muscles. But then neuroscience comes to the rescue, replacing each portion of his nervous system as it disintegrates with a suitably interfaced prosthesis made of silicon and wire.” Assuming the technology is sophisticated enough to duplicate every function of the brain, do we then conclude that the person’s behavior does not evidence consciousness but only a simulacrum of consciousness? If we so conclude, do we have any basis for that conclusion other than that consciousness derives from a “soul” created by God and implanted in human flesh in much the same way that a ghost resides in a haunted house? If we resist that conclusion, have we “defined consciousness down” in a way that makes it plausible to consider computer software conscious? Is computer software conscious? Stephen Hawking might think so.

3 But it remains at least a part of the moral calculus of meat eaters, as demonstrated by the religious traditions that impose an obligation to mitigate pain in the slaughter.

4 One potential problem with Nozick’s analogy is its premise that the added pleasure in swinging a bat as opposed to other forms of leisure is entitled to the same weight as the added pleasure in eating meat as opposed to other forms of dining. Even if the quantum of pleasure is equivalent, it does not follow the pleasures are entitled to the same moral weight. John Stuart Mill, realizing that any system of morality based on tallying pleasure is really just a fancy apparatus for hedonism, drew a distinction between “higher” and “lower” pleasures:

Of two pleasures, if there be one to which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure. If one of the two is, by those who are competently acquainted with both, placed so far above the other that they prefer it, even though knowing it to be attended with a greater amount of discontent, and would not resign it for any quantity of the other pleasure which their nature is capable of, we are justified in ascribing to the preferred enjoyment a superiority in quality, so far outweighing quantity as to render it, in comparison, of small account.

Thus the pleasure the food connoisseur experiences eating meat outweighs the pleasure the psychopath experiences abusing animals just for the thrill of it. Is that pleasure a compelling enough interest to justify foie gras? Ribeye steaks? Steamed lobsters? Foie gras is a hard case. Lobster seems an easy one.

Ceci n’est pas un Brunello

2008-08-29T23:21:00.007-05:00

Matt Groening created the Simpsons—nominally—but the person more responsible than anyone else for the sensibility that has made the show so sharp and witty over the last two decades was George Meyer. A 2000 New Yorker profile of Meyer (worth reading in full) portrays him as an eccentric hippie with a twisted sense of humor, notorious for leaving his fellow writers aching from laughter. One particularly sidesplitting example happened “on a day when the staff was working on a subplot in which Homer, at a police auction, buys an impounded muscle car that formerly belonged to the town’s resident criminal, Snake”:

Snake wants the car back, so he escapes from jail and contrives a recovery scheme worthy of Wile E. Coyote: he stretches a wire across a road in the hope of decapitating Homer as he drives by. The wire misses Homer, but his car is followed closely by another.
“The driver of the second car is holding a sandwich at a ridiculous angle high up over his head and saying, ‘I told that idiot to slice my sandwich,’” [Mike] Scully explained. “That’s where we were going with the joke. But then George suddenly said, ‘What if the wire cuts off his arm?’”

Meyer was also the writer responsible for a lot of the show’s send-ups of commercial culture:

He hates advertising, which he views as a global force of destruction. (“I hate it because it irresponsibly induces discontent in people for one myopic goal, and then it leaves the debris of that process out there in the culture. An advertiser will happily make you feel bad about yourself if that will make you buy, say, a Bic pen.”) This antipathy has made Meyer a connoisseur of brazen marketing; he is especially interested in examples of ad copy in which the word-to-falsehood ratio approaches one. He once showed me a magazine advertisement for a butter substitute called Country Crock. “It’s not from the country; there is no crock,” he said. “Two words, two lies.”

That’s what I thought of when I read about a proposal by Angelo Gaja to re-define the rules of the Brunello di Montalcino appellation. Brunello is the local name for the sangiovese grosso clone of the grape that makes Chianti, as grown in favored exposures on the slopes around the medieval hilltop town of Montalcino. Brunello di Montalcino is a sophisticated wine—this description of the differences between Brunello and Chianti sums it up as beautifully as I’ve ever seen wine described. Brunello is also pricey in the United States, which led to a scandal in which some producers were caught adulterating their brunello with merlot. Gaja’s proposal is to go ahead and let them, and permit producers using grapes other than sangiovese from sites without the “pedoclimatic conditions” suitable for brunello to call their wine Brunello di Montalcino nonetheless. I think they should call it Country Crock.

Up From Modernism

2008-08-25T22:02:00.009-05:00

“No Barrique, No Berlusconi,” reads the label of the late Bartolo Mascarello’s 1996 Barolo, and on T-shirts in tribute to the man sold at the New York wine bar Terroir. Mascarello styled himself “the Last of the Mohicans” making traditional Barolo, casting the barrique as the Yankee invader (even if it’s French). But what does this have to do with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi? I would never buy a barriqued Barolo, but Berlusconi sits just fine with me. I’ve found it impossible not to like the man ever since he got in trouble after the September 11th attacks for remarking, “We should be conscious of the superiority of our civilization, which consists of a value system that has given people widespread prosperity in those countries that embrace it, and guarantees respect for human rights and religion. This respect certainly does not exist in Islamic countries.” The statement was so obviously and incontrovertibly true that of course Berlusconi had to be vilified for the thoughtcrime.

“In an election, Gaja is Bush and I am Gore,” Mascarello told Alice Feiring while grousing about a “capitalist” neighbor. But Mascarello’s dedication to defending traditional Barolo is a conservative one, in both the layman’s sense and the Burkean sense of the term. So it’s unclear why Mascarello should choose to align himself with the left or Berlusconi with the barriques. The essence of conservatism since at least the French Revolution has been to “stand[] athwart history, yelling Stop,” in the words of William F. Buckley, Jr., which is pretty much the same thing Bartolo Mascarello has been doing in Piedmont. Conservatives believe that traditions tend to reflect fundamental wisdom and therefore deserve some deference, even when you think you’re clever enough to know better.

Edmund Burke opposed the French Revolution, and its aspiration to reinvent civil society from a condition of revolutionary anarchy, on the ground that “[t]he science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori.” Echoing Burke two centuries later, Russell Kirk argued that civil society cannot exist independently of the “practical experience of human beings over many centuries” and drew an analogy to the gasoline engine. Nobody alive today could build a gasoline engine, or anything else so complex, with nothing to guide him but his own ingenuity and the materials one can find in nature. Thus, Kirk argued for treating “mankind’s experience as evidence of some soundness,” which is equally good advice whether you are debating the pros and cons of overthrowing your government or determining how to make Barolo.

The leftist instinct is precisely the opposite. Left-wing politicians promise “change.” The substance of the change itself is seldom thought relevant, and therefore seldom explicated in much detail, because any change at all from the status quo is desirable if you have a “progressive” view of history informed by a doctrine such as Karl Marx’s dialectical materialism, which postulated that history progresses according to scientific principles that steer it inevitably to socialism. Someone who believes such things regards all change as progress (even change for the worse) and thus never feels compelled to reflect whether there might be some part of the status quo ante worth conserving. If there is a guiding force for change in wine, it’s towards technology and homogeneity rather than communism, but to stand athwart those forces yelling Stop remains a conservative instinct.

As his comment to Feiring indicates, though, maybe it’s not the traditionalism of conservatism Mascarello found disquieting, but the capitalism. Here, too, Mascarello might be better off siding with the right, since men who own expensive agricultural real estate tend to be the first ones sent to the guillotine or the gulag when the revolution comes. Moreover, capitalism has actually been very kind to Mascarello and his fellow-travelers on the traditionalist wing of Piedmontese winegrowing. The success of Mascarello and other traditionalists in marketing true Barolo against the "modernist insurgency" is even the subject of a Stanford Business School case study. The research paper suggests that the emergence of competitors promoting themselves as innovators “induces those who do not innovate to make rival claims of authenticity based on their adherence to the conventions of the genre.” The result is that “the size of the insurgent movement actually reduces the abandonment of tradition, and the identity of the countermovement strengthens with the increasing number of insurgents.”

Robert Conquest’s First Law of Politics was, “Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.” Barolo is what Mascarello knew best.

Thought for the Day

2008-08-14T09:03:00.001-05:00

“To me making wine is not essentially a technical issue. Making wine is more aesthetical. It should be seen not with the eyes of an engineer but with the eyes of somebody who likes beauty. Beauty is what’s important in wine.” —Chambolle grower and former engineer Jacques-Frédéric Mugnier, speaking at the 2008 World of Pinot Noir, as recorded by GrapeRadio (from 20:36).

Thought for the Day

2008-07-30T20:35:00.003-05:00

“Once, the governing human metaphor was pastoral or agricultural, and it clarified, and so preserved in human care, the natural cycles of birth, growth, death, and decay. But modern humanity’s governing metaphor is that of the machine. Having placed ourselves in charge of Creation, we began to mechanize both the Creation itself and our conception of it. We began to see the whole Creation merely as raw material, to be transformed by machines into a manufactured Paradise.

“And so the machine did away with mystery on the one hand and multiplicity on the other. The Modern World would respect the Creation only insofar as it could be used by humans. Henceforth, by definition, by principle, we would be unable to leave anything as it was. The usable would be used; the useless would be sacrified in the use of something else. By means of the machine metaphor we have eliminated any fear or awe or reverence or humility or delight or joy that might have restrained us in our use of the world.” —Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture.

Thread-Skipper #1: Turning Water Into Wine

2008-07-28T18:12:00.010-05:00

Inspired by Kausfiles’ hugely successful Series-Skipper service, which provides CliffsNotes summaries of those laborious, multi-part, Pulitzer-fishing news analyses so you don’t actually have to read them, I herewith inaugurate a new feature of this blog, the Thread-Skipper. Each Thread-Skipper will dissect a busy, multi-page thread from one of the wine-and-dining boards, discard all the trolling, bickering, sarcasm, name-calling, misinformation, inside jokes, etc., and lead you directly to the good parts.

Thread: “Are all California reds watered these days?”, Mark Squires’ Bulletin Board on eRobertParker.com

Innocent premise: “I knew that some winemakers who like very ripe wines pick late and then water back their wines to get the alcohol levels down to acceptable levels. . . . Is virtually all California red wine watered back these days?” —John Morris

The awful truth: Brian Loring of Loring Wine Co. admits to adding water to about three quarters of his fermentations, generally 5% by volume but as much as 20% in a vat of 2004 “since we had some fruit come in over 30 brix.” These sugar levels result from letting his grapes hang longer “to get the flavor profile we want,” which turns out to cause “slight dehydration of the grapes” and a consequent “15 percent decrease in the[ir] volume. When we add water to the fermentor, we’re simply replacing the water that was lost” by the deliberate decision to let them hang. Thomas Pellechia’s question, “Why start out to purposely produce a wine that has to be diluted in order to be balanced,” is never answered.

Churchhill award: “Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on,” said Churchhill. In the thread, Siduri proprietor Adam Lee asks, “For those of you who find adding H20 to be a problem—do you have problems with a vineyard irrigating their vines near harvest with an approaching heat spike?” as if irrigation is self-evidently kosher, then illustrates exactly why it isn’t, by remarking that “irrigated vines tend to put the vast majority of their roots in the first 18 inches of soil where non-irrigated vines go much deeper.”

Buried lede: It turns out that adding water is actually illegal in the vast majority of cases where it’s practiced, but nobody seems to care.

Ray of light: California winemaker I. Brand points out, “If I am consistently having to water back and acidulate fermentations from a particular vineyard, it’s time to get grapes elsewhere.” “In my mind,” he writes, “there are two basic levels of winemaking, one that is beverage production and can involve any variety of manipulations in producing what can be a very alluring final product, and a second that is more a kind of storytelling in a bottle. In creating a wine that is as faithful a reflection of that particular year in that particular place from those particular grapes through the eyes of that winemaker, intervention should be kept to a bare minimum. The more prominent intervention, the more the winemaker impresses his idea of story upon the grapes and the less poignant the narrative becomes (and the closer on the spectrum to a ‘beverage’ the wine moves).” Thank you!

Strange Brew

2008-07-23T22:35:00.004-05:00

In the movie Demolition Man, by the year 2032 there are no restaurants left in the United States besides Taco Bell. In Edward McClelland’s Salon.com account of the rise and fall of Anheuser-Busch, a similar future was envisioned for the self-proclaimed King of Beers, but then something funny happened on the way to world domination:

Traditional-beer sales have been stagnant since the 1990s. The baby boomers graduated from their prime drinking years, and new local beers arose to replace the hometown lagers Bud had helped pour down the drain. In 1980, America had eight craft breweries. A quarter-century later, there are over 1,300. In some cases, they've recaptured regional loyalties.

Going from eight craft breweries to 1,300 is a remarkable statistic in an era when nearly everything else is consolidating. (The same period saw an average of over 400 bank mergers per year.) So there must be something that’s true about beer but isn’t true about banks or much else. It turns out to be something Anheuser-Busch’s acquirer, Belgian-based Inbev, understood very well, but Anheuser-Busch never grasped, even as its market began to evaporate.

Anheuser-Busch’s business model was always to sell one beer to a shitload of people. Inbev’s is the opposite; it sells a shitload of different beers to much smaller markets for each. Most of its customers don’t even realize they're patronizing a giant multinational. I always liked Hoegaarden, for example, an Inbev brand since 1985. (Tastes great, less filling . . . with terroir! “The village of Hoegaarden had been known for its witbieren (white beers) since the Middle Ages,” says Wikipedia.) Inbev calls itself “The World's Local Brewer.”

Marketing schtick doesn’t always reflect reality, but the fact that Inbev finds it so profitable to market itself this way says something important about what consumers look for when they buy beer. There are consumers for whom taste is more important than getting drunk, who value that taste as much for its cultural connections to a place as for its physical sensations. Anheuser-Busch doesn’t sell those things. To sell beer in Budweiser quantities, you need an unoffensive, undistinctive recipe that satisfies the lowest common denominator of the wider market. If it summons images of a place, it’s not the place the beer is brewed, but where it’s consumed indiscriminately. Fraternity parties. Football games. Dive bars. Budweiser does best in venues with captive audiences, which is why its distributors notoriously give kickbacks to bars for excluding its competition. Simply put, people who bother to think about their choice of what to drink don’t choose to drink Budweiser.

Which makes the Inbev / Anheuser Busch marriage an unusual one. It’s as if Cos d’Estournel’s owner, instead of buying Chateau Montelena, had instead decided to buy Gallo. It will be interesting to watch whether Inbev intends to fashion Anheuser-Busch more like itself, or itself more like Anheuser-Busch. Fortunately, the answer is much more important to Inbev than to its American consumers, who now have 1,300 local competitors to choose from.

In Vino Veritas

2008-07-10T08:34:00.005-05:00

Another problem in the area of wine and philosophy arises at Ben Sherwin’s blog, where Ben responds to a challenge to prove that Lafite-Rothschild is better than plonk. What the challenge really is, of course, is a challenge to prove that it is intelligible to talk about wine (or anything aesthetic, as opposed to scientific) in objective terms at all, the type of debate whose temptations I haven’t succumbed to since I was an undergraduate philosophy major and convinced that the cause of human wisdom could really be advanced by such debates. In truth, it doesn’t matter at all. Nobody who understands wine will attach any value to your opinions about it if you prefer plonk to Lafite, nobody who understands music will attach any value to your opinions about it if you prefer the Beastie Boys to Beethoven, and these statements are true regardless of whether it is inscribed in the constitutional laws of the universe that Beethoven is better than the Beasties the same way it is inscribed that pi equals 3.14159265358979323846 . . . (etc.).

But maybe the truth of those statements says something objective about aesthetics, after all.

“Chacun à son goût has won out, and many people are not even aware that the argument has another side,” wrote Charles Murray, defending the other side in his book Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950. Murray begins with two basic premises—that “people vary in their knowledge of any given field,” and that “the nature of a person's appreciation of a thing or event varies with the level of knowledge that a person brings to it.” For example,

If you know a lot about baseball, for example, you and an ignorant friend who accompanies you to the ballpark are watching different games when there is one out, runners on first and third, and the batter is ahead in the count. The things you are thinking about and looking for as the pitcher delivers the next pitch never cross your ignorant companion’s mind. Is your friend as excited by the game as you? Having as much fun? Maybe or maybe not, but that’s not the point. Your appreciation of what is happening is objectively greater. You are better able to apprehend an underlying reality inhering in the object, and it has nothing to do with your sentiments.

Interestingly, Terry Theise prints an essay on the same subject each year in his Germany catalog, and uses exactly the same example:

One evening at the ballgame I had the good fortune to sit next to one of the advance scouts who attend every game, gathering intel on the players. It was a slow night, and I asked if he could “think out loud” for me, tell me what he saw. And what he saw was an entirely different ballgame from the one I saw. I sat in admiration of his trained eye.

From those facts follows Murray’s third proposition: that “the relationship of expertise to judgment forms a basis for treating excellence in the arts as a measurable trait”:

The logic is that, by and large, the reason people who know a lot about a subject prefer A to B is because A is better than B—better in a sense that is intrinsic to the nature of the excellence in the field in question. Those who know the most about music devote so much attention to Bach because understanding Bach calls upon every bit of fine discrimination and knowledge that the expert can bring to the table. The prolonged study of Bach does not become boring, because Bach keeps presenting new facets for examination. A lesser composer does not pose the same challenges. His mysteries can be deciphered more quickly. He does not reward study as Bach does. Or to go back to my original example, the person who knows a lot about art can look at Titian’s Venus of Urbino for a long time and the looking alone—not the social context of Titian’s era, not the meaning of the female nude in the construction of gender, not what sort of person Titian was, but just the looking—absorbs the full attention of the art expert. Titian offers a lot to look at—to contemplate—for someone who knows about art. That same knowledgeable person cannot contemplate the nude painted on black velvet. He can think about its social context. He can wonder about what sort of person the artist was. But there’s not much to get out of the looking.
The argument is that people who know the most about an artistic field are drawn to certain works. The qualities that draw their attention are those that offer the biggest payoff in the aesthetics of the art, and this payoff is based on qualities distinct from subjective sentiments.

The usual counter-argument to this is to point out that experts disagree all the time, which is true, but irrelevant. Statistical outliers are a fact of life; what’s important is the depth of the consensus. Murray points out that one well-reputed musicologist dislikes Bach. So what? The arts critic Terry Teachout supplies the only appropriate response:

When I was an undergraduate, studying music criticism with the late John Haskins, who was then the music critic of the Kansas City Star, I brought in a paper for his perusal in which I declared that I didn’t like Schumann. He said, mildly, “You know, Terry, that says more about you than it does about Schumann.” As I pulled the arrow out of my forehead, I realized that I’d just learned a priceless lesson: if you’re going to express a personal prejudice in a review, one that causes you to dissent decisively from a long-standing verdict of posterity, do it ruefully, in full awareness that your inability to appreciate an obviously great artist is a failure of taste that separates you from the communion of truth.

Such dissents, it’s true, occur within the framework of general agreement on the standards for excellence in the field. An argument over whether Schumann is in the same league as Bach is a parlor game for people who understand classical music, a highbrow version of debates like who wins in a race between Superman and the Flash. They might disagree on the conclusion but don't fundamentally disagree on the standards to be applied.

Some disagreements, however, are fundamental. There are people well-schooled in their fields who think Warhol’s garish fashion statements are as important as the Sistine Chapel, that noise by John Cage is equivalent to Bach, that Spinal Tap wines like Sine Qua Non are better than La Tâche. One can either take them seriously, or ignore them as intellectual fads that will soon be consigned to the ash-heap of history by the inexorable march forward of human wisdom. That’s Murray’s approach. There is, of course, the alternative possibility.

Attack of the DYKWIAs, Part II

2008-06-29T18:10:00.000-05:00

One notable exception to the rule that insulting your customers is an ineffective way to earn their loyalty is when social stratification is not merely ancillary to your business, but the very essence of it, such as the establishments profiled in a New York Post Page Six Magazine report on the pathetic phenomenon of “clubs within clubs to which only the coolest are given access.” The Post credits a semi-famous fashion-magazine editor for devising the guiding theory: “By his logic, there are seven consecutive rooms in New York City, each one more exclusive than the one before. And as it is in the corporate jungle, just when you think you’ve arrived at the beating heart of New York nightlife, you realize you’re still in the first room.” It’s almost enough to make you wear an I Hate New York t-shirt. But there’s more: “According to the seven rooms theory, entry to these places must be not only highly exclusive, but highly visible as well. It’s not enough to be admitted: You must be seen entering, so that other people wonder what special mojo got you in.”

Because it’s Page Six, the article is peppered with name droppings and photos of the celebrities who frequent these holiest of holies, such as this surreal line: “The co-owners [of The Spotted Pig, including Mario Batali, Michael Stipe, Bono, Fatboy Slim and Jay-Z] use it as a clubhouse for themselves and their famous friends, including Bill Clinton, Josh Hartnett, chefs Anthony Bourdain and Marco Pierre White, and, of course, Jay-Z’s wife, Beyoncé.” Bill Clinton? I suppose it makes sense that Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain can enjoy a drink together, but what does Bill Clinton have to discuss with any of these people? “Hey, Bono, Beyoncé, whatever your last names are—did you see how the Republican attack machine is misrepresenting my administration’s deficit-reduction record? Also, what’s the best way to get a dead hooker’s body of your hotel room?”

One almost feels a twinge of pity for the scenesters lining up for entry to the parent establishment on the basis of its association with celebrity, seven rooms removed.

Cult Wine Kool-Aid

2008-06-26T00:01:00.002-05:00

Someone passed me a taste of a syrah the other day, figuring I'd hate it in dramatic fashion, which I did. It was so gloppy and woody I spat it out in disgust, then somehow felt the searing alcohol assaulting my nasal passages from the back anyway. It was almost as if the wine were a deliberate parody, trying to do to Parkerized wine what Spinal Tap did to heavy metal.

The wine turned out to be from Sine Qua Non, a famous California winery whose stellar Parker reviews and savvy marketing (velvet-rope mailing list, trendy packaging) spawned a disturbingly worshipful fan base. Out of curiosity, I looked up Parker's review of the syrah I tried. He rated it 95-97 points and added, “This terrific effort should turn out to be one of the most French-styled Syrahs Krankl has yet produced.”

French-styled? It wasn’t so long ago that Parker brewed controversy by panning the syrahs of Edmunds St. John with the comment, “What Steve is doing appears to be a deliberate attempt to make French-styled wines. Of course California is not France and therein may suggest the problem. If you want to make French wine, do it in France.”

“The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them,” is how Orwell defined doublethink, a recurring problem at the Wine Advocate. Or maybe all French-styled wines are equal but some are more equal than others.

Spectator Effect

2008-06-25T08:16:00.001-05:00

A principle of physics holds that it is impossible to make a completely accurate measurement of anything, because one can’t perform the act of measuring without subtly affecting the thing being measured. This is interestingly apropos to the study I discussed yesterday attempting to prove that wine for the “average” consumer has gotten better and cheaper over the last 20 years. The study used Wine Spectator ratings, specifically its annual Top 100 list, as its data set. For the sake of discussion, let’s grant the premise that it’s meaningful to rate wines on a point-scale like the Spectator’s, that there is an objectively measurable quantum of quality in every wine and that a point score, accurately assigned, reflects that quantum.

Understanding wine ratings as such, they are as vulnerable to the observer effect as any other measurement. Wine Spectator has several hundred thousand subscribers; hundreds of thousands more will encounter its ratings on shelf talkers in wine shops. The ratings affect the market, increasing the commercial viability of highly rated wines and decreasing the commercial viability of poorly rated wines. Winegrowers are not immune to commercial pressure, so the combined effect over time will be to increase the number of wines in the marketplace of the type rated highly by Wine Spectator, and perhaps to decrease the manufacture of the type of wines rated poorly. Unless the scoring system is recalibrated, a practice most critics deny, one would see a gradual and continuous rise in the average point scores of wines reviewed.

This presents an epistemological problem. If you were a reviewer for Wine Spectator, or if your tastes were in general agreement with its reviewers, that rise in the ratings would appear to you to reflect an increase in average quality over time. Thus, published critics can frequently be heard touting the presumption that wine today is better than ever before, as if they were in a position to know such a thing. In fact, they are situated in the worst possible position to form that belief. Of course the Spectator’s aggregated ratings would support the conclusion that wine keeps getting better—but in fact the only conclusion it really supports is that wine keeps getting more and more like what the Spectator likes. The only way it could be otherwise would be if a critic had zero influence on the marketplace at all, and I know of no critics whose egos would reconcile themselves to that admission.

Dark Globe

2008-06-24T14:14:00.002-05:00

A study in the Journal of Wine Economics attempts to prove, “Thanks to globalization, the world of wine is filled with greater variety, the same level of quality and, at least for the wine drinker in the United States, it is also a more affordable one.” And then quickly gets debunked.

Amazingly, the data set the authors used to support this conclusion was Wine Spectator’s annual Top 100 list. This initially struck me as very poor judgment, because no serious wine consumer cares about the Wine Spectator’s Top 100 list or Wine Spectator’s ratings in general. But apparently that’s exactly why the authors chose it, to “exclude the very expensive, the very rare and boutique wines and allow[] our study to concentrate on the so-called ‘average’ American wine drinker.”

Limited that way, it’s hard to understand the study’s relevance. If one aims to study “the welfare gains” to wine consumers, measured in those magic units of happiness that economists and philosophers call “utils,” then one should focus on serious wine drinkers, not “average” wine drinkers. It stands to reason that the more seriously one is interested in wine, the more of his total welfare is derived from the pleasures of wine in comparison to the “average” consumer. Limiting one’s study to the welfare of “average” consumers therefore measures only a small proportion of the total welfare derived from the product, and a small gain in the welfare of those who don’t care much about it may disguise an enormous decline in the welfare of those who care about it a whole lot. Which, if you’ve been paying any attention to wine prices the last few years, is pretty much what happened.

Return of the Middle East Piece-by-Piece Process

2008-06-15T21:51:00.005-05:00

Newsweek reports on the threat to Israel’s nascent fine-wine industry from recent discussions about a “peace” pact with Syria, under which Israel would cede the Golan Heights and everything in it in exchange for Syria’s promise, Scout’s honor, to refrain from genocide for the time being. The Golan Heights have historically been useful for only two things, growing wine grapes and launching surprise rocket attacks at innocent Israeli civilians down below. The Syrians, being Muslim, have no interest in the former but considerable interest in the latter, so the Golan is a rather coveted piece of real estate. Newsweek notes:

The biggest blow to the Israeli wine world would be the loss of the massive Golan Heights Winery, which was founded in 1983 and singlehandedly established the region's reputation for high quality. . . . [M]uch of the original Golan winery’s buildings are modular units that could be unscrewed, loaded onto trucks and driven into Israel in the event of a deal.

A foolproof plan!—until they follow the trucks there and demand that land, too.

Attack of the DYKWIAs

2008-06-13T21:15:00.004-05:00

Mickey Kaus dissects a “new threat to social equality—the frequent-customer snob.” The mark is the New York Times’s Ron Lieber, for writing, “Rewards are nice, but recognition is better. So if I’m one of Starbucks’s best customers, I want to have elite status, as I do on American Airlines. I want shorter lines, better freebies, special seating (Aeron chairs, preferably) and electrical outlets reserved just for me and my laptop.”

Sure, it's smart business to take care of your best customers, but it requires some discretion. The airlines are wise to close the curtain so coach travelers don’t actually have to watch the Caligulan excess ladled to the first-class elite. Loyal customers in any business are not easily minted. Loyalty must be earned from the ranks of new or casual customers. Making a conspicuous show of their second-class status is seldom an effective way to earn it.

In a nice restaurant, frequent customers might be rewarded with freebie dishes or more hands-on attention from the chef, but these things are invisible to other patrons and therefore unlikely to breed resentment. Because restaurants are in the business ofoffering hospitality as well as the business of serving food, treating any patron as second-class is likely to sour them on the establishment for life. How many dinner invitations do you accept from people who’ve made it clear they’d rather be hosting somebody else?

Meal Without a Country

2008-06-07T15:36:00.004-05:00

If the Michelin guides were not such an entrenched institution, it might seem strange that the gold standard in fine dining is entrusted to the whims of a manufacturer of car tires. But there was a time when the romance of the road was uncontaminated by the ugliness of ten-lane highways, bottlenecked commutes, road rage, and all the other ills we glibly accept in parcel with the automobile. Some of that romance seems to survive in Michelin’s image of the sophisticated traveler motoring through places like Paris and the Riviera with a gentleman’s powers of discernment for the most elite cuisine and hospitality. Someone in Michelin’s past must have surmised that if the company could glamorize the continental road trip, they’d stand to sell more tires. Now Michelin is perhaps better known for its travel guides than its tires.

The red guides rate restaurants from zero to three stars. One star is “worth a stop,” two “worth a detour,” three “worth a journey.” The standard of quality—in France, at least—is rigorous enough that even some zero-star restaurants provide an experience superior to some of the most renowned restaurants in the United States. But a Michelin rating tends to connote something else besides the objective quality of the food. There is a certain genre of restaurant you could fairly describe as Michelin-star cuisine, characterized by traditional (but not excessively so) French cooking techniques, formal service, and, at the higher levels, a welcoming routine designed to convey the illusion that you haven’t merely entered a restaurant, but a different world.

Troisgros, in the city of Roanne, begins the overture even before you’ve walked through the door, with its Batcave-like underground automobile entrance. Once upstairs, Roane disappears and you are in Troisgros’ world. The windows don’t look outside to the city, but inside to a secluded garden that gives the dining room a temple-like serenity. Perhaps it’s the Japanese inspiration. Troisgros has another outpost in Tokyo, and its influence on the aesthetics and cuisine of the Roane original is profound. But also somewhat unsettling. Ingredients such as ginger and soy sauce are used. It is de rigeur in France to accompany every meal with bread to soak up the sauces, but several of Troisgros’ dishes left me craving rice instead. It’s a disorienting feeling, to glance over to where your mind subconsciously presumes a rice bowl ought to be, only to find a baguette. Even some local ingredients were internationalized. A plate of the local asparagus shoots was garnished with Parmigiano-Reggiano. Some dishes were forgettable, others spectacular. But worth a journey? When I take a journey, I prefer to taste more of the land I’ve journeyed to.

One of These Things is Not Like the Other Ones

2008-05-26T08:04:00.003-05:00

Just some of the brands of exclusive trophy wines and industrially produced mustard you can find at Beaune tourist trap Jean-Luc & Paul Aegerter.

Provignage and Les Papilles

2008-05-24T09:50:00.004-05:00

Wine researcher Claude Bourguignon is most famous for helping to inspire the biodynamic movement in France years ago with his remark that there is more life in the Sahara desert than in the grand cru soils of Burgundy. Bourguignon has two contributions in the Terroir & the Winegrower anthology I discussed the other day which raise equally profound issues for the future of winegrowing, an interview and an essay co-written with his wife Lydia titled, “What Future is There for Non-Grafted Vines and Provignage?”

Provignage is the method of vineyard planting practiced in France and especially in Burgundy before phylloxera necessitated the kludge of grafting French vines on American roots. Virtually all of the vineyards in France are now populated by vines that are really two vines taped together—French above the ground and American in the earth. Bourguignon’s research reveals an important defect inherent to this practice.

Vitis vinifera, the species of vine that produces all the noble European varieties, “is calciole, in other words lime loving. But calcareous rock represents only 7% of the world’s rock and they are concentrated around the Mediterranean basin.” The American vine species such as vitis rupestris, vitis riparia, and vitis labrusca to whose roots vinifera vines are now grafted evolved to prosper in acidic, non-limestone soils. “They tolerate a certain amount of limestone,” the Bourguignons report, “but are not well adapted to it.” As a result, “[i]n soils that are rich in active limestone, the roots of American rootstocks remain superficial.” Extremely superficial: “it is rare to find roots in French vineyards that go down further than 50 centimeters,” whereas pre-phylloxera vines commonly rooted 10 to 15 meters deep. Fifty centimeters is barely deep enough to penetrate the topsoil in many Burgundy crus, so shallow rooting diminishes the distinction of the terroir and imposes physical limitations on the vine, such as making it less drought-resistant.

At the bistro Les Papilles in Paris, I stumbled on a well-priced bottle of Bollinger 1992 Champagne Vieilles Vignes Françaises. Produced from three vineyards (now two) propagated en foule, a variety of the old provignage method, VVF is one of only two Champagnes made from ungrafted vines. The result was a Champagne of vivid character and clarity. It revealed itself slowly, like a charcoal tombstone etching taking form. For the first glass, it was difficult to see beyond the surface texture, and then it began to render the details with stunning lucidity: vibrant cherry fruit that segued from a jammy confiture to plump, fresh, juicy berries, followed by a clean finish that plastered the palate with the chalk of Champagne’s soil. It was not an especially complex wine, but remarkable for how vividly and precisely it rendered the attributes it had. It didn’t so much taste of cherries but feel as though a fully formed cherry were suspended in your mouth in a vinous version of molecular gastronomy: cherry in shape and flavor, betrayed as liquefied once you succumb to the temptation to bite into it. VVF has caught the fancy of wealthy Champagne collectors and it costs a fortune—unless you buy it at Les Papilles—but it deserves its trophy-wine status, and its price will not be a tragedy if it provides an economic incentive for other producers to roll the dice with ungrafted vines. Here (scroll down) is my incomplete list of others who have taken the gamble (some, like Teobaldo Cappellano in Piedmont, already on the verge of costly cultification).

Les Papilles was an interesting restaurant concept that we saw a few of in Paris. There is essentially just one menu for the day, and the “wine list” are the bottles shelved around the restaurant which are sold retail and available for consumption at the table for a nominal €7 corkage fee. Clos Rougeard, François Raveneau, and Jacques Selosse were some of the other elite producers represented, mostly at prices well below U.S. retail. The concept wholly undermines the claims of many American restaurateurs that they can’t stay in business without a 300% markup over retail wine prices. The food was pretty good, too.

Terroir at the Table

2008-05-20T17:54:00.006-05:00

The worlds of oenophilia and bibliophilia collide at the Athenæum de la Vigne et du Vin in Beaune, which carries the most interesting array of wine books I’ve seen under one roof. One of the gems I found this trip was Jacky Rigaux’s Terroir & the Winegrower, an anthology of essays by dozens of vignerons, mostly Burgundian, on how they view their role protecting and expressing the character of a vineyard.

Among the most thought-provoking entries is by Littorai proprietor and former Roulot winemaker Ted Lemon. Lemon begins, “There are only two kinds of wine in the world: wines of process and wines of place. Wines of process are wines whose essential character comes from the manufacturing process.” Wines of place are harder to define, because the essential characteristics of place are often subtle or incipient, and it’s sometimes controversial whether those characteristics reflect place or process. But the test Lemon proposes is a simple one. Taste “the largest sampling of a ‘cru’ (or site) possible,” and “eliminate the ten percent of samples at stylistic extremes”; alternatively, taste “across several ‘crus’ within a single winemaking house.” The commonalities or differences, respectively, and cumulatively, can only reflect the terroir. The idea is to filter place from process.

Place and process strikes me as a very useful dichotomy, and while the terms may sound loaded, they really aren’t. The obvious criticism is that every wine is one of process. Wine doesn’t make itself. (Well, it can, but the result is unlikely to be palatable.) Winemakers who say they do nothing at all are being too modest. But Lemon acknowledges this. A terroir wine cannot exist without “the intervention of a man (or woman) upon a given noble place,” he writes, and “[o]ur duty, as practitioners of place-based winemaking, is to always ask ourselves one essential question. Does the proposed innovation serve the expression of terroir or does it only serve the process, the manufacture of the wine?” Some processes do serve the expression of terroir. Fortified wines, for example, are among the most interventionist wines imaginable, and yet Port and Madeira are somehow inimitable. There, the process serves the expression of place.

It strikes me that the dichotomy is also a useful one when applied to food. Cooking can either express the essential properties of its ingredients, or it can express the stylings of the cook. Ported to this context, Lemon’s dichotomy is an interesting one because manipulation of ingredients by a cook is usually seen in a more value-neutral light than manipulation in the winemaking process. The whole point of cooking, after all, is to manipulate, sometimes radically so. There is vastly greater variety in the way chicken is made than in the way pinot noir is made.

I had Poulet de Bresse, the special AOC-protected breed of chicken raised in the Bresse region south of Burgundy, at two restaurants in Beaune. One was as non-interventionist as chicken can be. This chicken, at Bistrot de l’Hotel, an exciting new addition to the Beaune dining scene, was simply roasted on cast iron and served with no sauce other than its own juices. It was roasted perfectly, its skin crisped and golden, and served with a side dish befitting its simplicity—mashed potatoes. Most of Bistrot de l’Hotel’s dishes are along these lines—fishes filleted tableside or a Charolais bone-in ribeye sliced Peter Luger–style.

The cooking at Hostellerie de l’Ecusson is more ambitious. Chef Jean-Pierre Senelet’s signature dish is escargots cooked in beef bones between layers of marrow topped in sea salt—an innovative departure from the traditional roasting in the shell with butter, garlic, and parsley, and certainly a more sophisticated result. Senelet’s Poulet de Bresse was a dark-meat quarter poached in a milky broth, served in a creamy sauce derived from the broth with morel mushrooms and a satisfyingly crusty polenta. This was a dish of process. The similarities between this dish and the same recipe applied to any other type of chicken would probably be stronger than the similarities between Ecusson’s chicken and Bistrot de l’Hotel’s. If I wanted to highlight or study the differences between various types of chicken, I would want them prepared like Bistrot de l’Hotel’s simple roast. And it might even have been more gratifying than Ecusson’s, in the way that the most gratifying meals are often comfort foods. Sometimes, even in the kitchen, place trumps process.

Unless you’re eating snails.

Home Again

2008-05-19T12:51:00.004-05:00

If you’ve been checking the blog lately, thanks for putting up with the lack of new content while I ate and drank my way through Burgundy and Paris. If you’re willing to indulge a few “What I Did Over My Summer Vacation” posts, thanks again!

Building a Bridge to the Nineteenth Century

2008-05-01T13:36:00.006-05:00

Modern tastes and winemaking practices have it that Bordeaux is a muscular, full-bodied wine, Burgundy light and feminine in comparison. It was not always thus. Saintsbury’s Notes on a Cellar Book calls Bordeaux “the queen of natural wines” and Burgundy the “king.” His contemporary André Simon wrote that Burgundies “rarely possess quite the same light and delicate texture or body which is such an outstanding character of most fine clarets; they are as a rule more robust, more assertive, more immediately obvious.” One thing that seems to have remained constant, however, is that a big wine has a natural advantage over a puny one in commanding attention and making people impressed. The battery of manipulations employed to turn “the queen of natural wines” into something of a drag queen includes the use of ominous contraptions like the reverse-osmosis machine as well as more low-tech practices like the saignée, where juice is siphoned off to concentrate what remains.

Long before the mad scientists engineered these techniques, an even lower-tech solution proliferated: Hermitage. Saintsbury called a Hermitage “the manliest French wine I ever drank”—making it an obvious mixer to stiffen a barrel of dainty claret. John Livingstone-Learmonth’s Wines of the Northern Rhône dates the practice to as far back as 1759, when it was reported that Hermitage growers found it “hard to keep up with demand from Bordeaux,” where “the aim is to raise the degree of the Bordeaux and to preserve their wines' finesse.” One could surmise that adulterated Bordeaux actually predates the genuine article. Bordeaux became the capital of wine, after all, not because its vineyards were especially esteemed, but because it was a port city, and anything shipped through it was likely considered fair game to satisfy foreign tastes. Spanish wines and brandy were also common adulterants, but apparently Hermitage was the most prized. One merchant wrote that “[t]he Lafitte of 1795, which was made up with Hermitage, was the best liked wine of any of that year.” Livingstone-Learmonth notes the suspicous correlation “that when Hermitage suffered a bad vintage, Bordeaux, too, was recorded as having a bad vintage: the patient lacked medicine!”

Those curious what effect this medicine had should aim to taste a new release from Château Palmer, the Margaux 3rd growth, dubbed the Historical XIXth Century Blend ($150 at Zachys today; 20% less during any of their frequent sales). A large dollop of Hermitage (15%) augments the usual Palmer cabernet/merlot blend from the 2004 vintage. The influence of the Hermitage was not obvious the first time I tried the wine, but tasting it side-by-side with the standard Château Palmer 2004 illustrates the differences dramatically. The blueberry scents of the XIXth Century Blend are an octave deeper than the undoctored Palmer. In addition to the deeper complexion of fruit, the XIXth Century Blend sports a thicker cloak of both extract and glycerine, rendering a richer, more expansive palate presence. It is easy to see why Hermitage makes an agreeable partner: the wine seems amplified, but not so different in character. It has the body of Hermitage without tasting like Hermitage.

100 cases were made of the 2004, which carries no vintage date due to French regulations. Palmer suggests it may continue the practice in other vintages lean enough to merit it, an idea I heartily endorse. If you’re going to adulterate your wine, you may as well do it the old-fashioned way.

The Mind’s Wine

2008-04-24T02:02:00.003-05:00

“When did wine become a subject of philosophical thought rather than merely the lubricant that allows philosophy to flow?” asks Thomas Pellechia.

Actually, wine has been a fertile subject for philosophers at least as far back as Plato, who considered how it affects the soul and concluded it useful “in the first place to test, and in the second place to train, the character of a man.” But he wasn’t talking about the intellectual aspects of wine, just its ability to intoxicate, and the same logic could therefore have been applied to beer. So maybe Plato only appreciated wine as a lubricant after all.

More recently, the cognitive philosopher Daniel Dennett (also, incidentally, my former professor and thesis advisor), used wine to adumbrate the tenets of what he called “origin chauvinism,” “the category of view that holds out for some mystic difference (a difference of value, typically) due simply to . . . a fact about origin”—e.g., “only wine made under the direction of the proprietors of Chateau Plonque counts as genuine Chateau Plonque; only a canvas every blotch on which was caused by the hand of Cezanne counts as a genuine Cezanne.” Prof. Dennett should probably have singled out the terroir of Chateau Plonque rather than its proprietorship, but the example is a good one, and particularly interesting as applied to wine.

In my experience, most oenophiles are very strict origin chauvinists. One of the recurring parlor games among wine enthusiasts is to imagine what would happen if a machine were to be invented that could synthesize, cheaply, the precise taste of any wine ever made, at any age, along the lines of Star Trek’s replicator. With today’s skyrocketing prices of many of the world’s great wines, you would think most oenophiles—those who truly love wine for its own sake, and not for pretention or status-seeking—would be delighted by the invention of such a machine. Yet most people I have discussed the idea with are ambivalent, thinking it would destroy something important about the pastime of wine appreciation. I tend to agree. But it’s difficult to articulate why.

The obvious reason to prefer an original composition to a copy (either of Chateau Plonque, or of Cezanne) is that in practice no copy is truly identical. Deriding the trend of “upscale” reproductions, the critic Terry Teachout had to point out, “Lest we forget, a ‘framed reproduction’ of a Rothko is different from a Rothko. It looks different. And that’s the point, at least for people who really love art.” But is it possible to defend origin chauvinism if technology negates those differences? The key fact about origin chauvinism is that the supposed “mystic difference” really does boil down “simply” to facts about origin; the physical stuff is the same. The thought exercise presupposes that the fake Chateau Plonque is not merely a competent imitation that can be distinguished from the real thing by connoisseurs; it is, effectively, an atom-for-atom duplicate of genuine Chateau Plonque.

But many things derive their value almost entirely from the mystic difference of origin. A foul ball becomes a souvenir of negligible monetary value; a record-breaking home-run ball, indistinguishable in any relevant physical sense from the foul, becomes a million-dollar collector’s item. The National Archives doesn’t keep the originals of the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution for reference, or for their aesthetic value, which can hardly be appreciated behind their protective armor. They are kept, and cherished, because there really is “a difference of value . . . due simply” to their origin. That doesn’t seem irrational for these historic artifacts. I don’t think it’s entirely irrational for wine, either.

Probably the most salient fault line when it comes to wine appreciation is between those who espouse the view “it’s what’s in the glass that counts” and those, like me, who think that what’s in the glass should please the senses, but that the value of wine goes far beyond the glass to the thoughts provoked, and the emotions stirred, by those sensations. That’s the reason, I would submit, that wine is an interesting subject of philosophical thought and not just the lubricant for it. The other reason, of course, is that beer is just as effective a social lubricant, and much cheaper.

The Top Ten Tackiest Wines of All Time

2008-04-08T15:59:00.007-05:00

My post last week about the $81 hamburger, the $1,000 pizza, and similarly inspired exercises in tackiness got me to thinking what one would drink with such a meal. Surely whatever wine one uncorks should be at least as tacky as the meal itself. I therefore present my list of the Top Ten Tackiest Wines of All Time, any one of which ought to make a suitable accompaniment.

10. Marilyn Merlot. — The velvet Elvis of wine packaged as Marilyn Merlot has actually become something of a collectible, more for Marilyn Monroe enthusiasts than for wine enthusiasts. Each vintage sports a different picture of the pinup queen on the label. A second wine from young vines is cleverly named Norma Jeane. The winery asks $3,800 for the inaugural 1985; complete verticals have sold for many times that.

9. Château Mouton-Rothschild. — Mouton clawed its way to the ranks of the Bordeaux first growths with Baron Philippe de Rothschild’s brilliant and much-imitated gimmick of decorating the label with paintings by famous artists. Some are aesthetic triumphs, such as the labels by Jean Cocteau, Georges Braque, Rufino Tamayo, even Keith Haring. Then there are the self-indulgent ones with portraits of the Rothschilds themselves—as in 1975, 1987, 2001, and 2003. (“You’re so vain / You probably think this wine is about you….”) Even those are not as tacky as the etched 2000, however.

8. Opus One. — Baron Philippe’s ego met its match in Robert Mondavi, and Opus One is their joint project—with portraits and the autographs of both men on the label. Mondavi’s memoir Harvests of Joy recounts that the name Opus One was chosen “to convey the impression that this was the first work of a master composer. That was an essential touch. It was bold and proud, as if our wine was already declaring itself a Premier Grand Cru Classé.” The master composer they had in mind was, of course, themselves.

7. Harlan Estate’s Napa Valley Reserve. — Quintessential California “cult” wine Harlan Estate could merit its own place on this list, but owner Bill Harlan outdid himself with his “Napa Valley Reserve,” a fantasy camp of sorts for rich people whose wealth has failed to buy them the good taste to eschew wines like Harlan Estate. Members of the program pay a six-figure initiation fee and then must buy a barrel’s worth of wine each year. The fee is less for the wine than the chance to play make-believe, as members spend parts of their allotted vacations at the Reserve performing the minimal amount of manual labor necessary to sustain the fantasy that the resulting wine is somehow personally crafted by them. A 2005 New York Times profile of the project followed a few members getting their hands dirty before dryly noting, “When they finished their tasks, of course, the pros took over.”

6. Hundred Acre “Gold.” — What’s tackier than a Napa cabernet with all the usual “cult” marketing and mailing-list schtick? How about a white wine from one of those wineries with actual flakes of 24-karat gold suspended in the bottle, like Goldschläger schnapps? To make the tackiness here even richer, instead of a wine label, Hundred Acre Gold sports a faux-illuminated manuscript emblazoned on the bottle in golden cursive, which begins: “In the ancient world, rulers of Kingdoms long lost and some still part of current memory made wine and mined gold. Their armies fought to keep it and ranged over the earth to obtain it. Legends stretched across the millennia, steeped in mystery and religion. Tales of kings living for generations, ancient tribal leaders speaking of the holy grail, knights templar, women wise and young, all of their non-believing friends old and gone forever.” This text is best imagined read aloud in the spooky voice from Donovan’s “Atlantis,” or as the lyrics of a hypothetical Rush song.

5. Krug Champagne “Clos d’Ambonnay.” — Since Krug’s acquisition by the evil LVMH, the prices for its Champagnes have skyrocketed, especially the only terroir-specific bottling, Clos de Mesnil. Recognizing a cash cow when they see one, the evil overlords at LVMH inaugurated Krug’s second single-vineyard Champagne, Clos d’Ambonnay, with a suggested retail price of $3,000 per bottle and got reams of free publicity from the sheer chutzpah of it.

4. Cattier Champagne “Armand de Brignac,” self-nicknamed the “Ace of Spades.” — The most popular Champagne for conspicuous consumption among gangsta rappers, and those affecting the gangsta persona, used to be Louis Roederer’s Cristal. Then Roederer executive Frédéric Rouzaud put his foot in his mouth. Asked if Cristal’s following could harm its sophisticated image, Rouzaud answered, “That’s a good question, but what can we do? We can’t forbid people from buying it. I’m sure Dom Pérignon or Krug would be delighted to have their business.” Rapper and nightclub owner Jay-Z promptly banned Cristal from his establishments and organized a boycott, opening a vacuum in the market for bling Champagne. The tension was palpable as connoisseurs everywhere prayed that Jay-Z would not think of a rhyme for “Salon” or “Clos des Goisses.” These prayers were answered when a tacky gold bottle with an ace-of-spades logo appeared in a Jay-Z video. Jay-Z and brand owner Cattier Champagne hilariously denied this was a paid product placement.

3. Perrier-Jouët Champagne “La Belle Epoque” (€50,000 version). — Those too lazy to perform perfunctory manual labor at Harlan Estate’s Napa Valley Reserve now have an easier way to buy faux-personalized wine at exorbitant prices. €50,000 buys you a case of Perrier-Jouët 2000 Belle Epoque Champagne—the same stuff that retails for $100 or so—except this version comes in a special box and gives buyers the opportunity to “come to Epernay for a one-on-one meeting with our cellar master Herve Deschamps” and “personally add a ‘liqueur’ to personalize the bottles.” The “liqueur,” described as “a combination of sugar and wines from different years,” sounds like it is just the dosage added to most Champagnes in miniscule quantities, making a bottle of this wine quite possibly the highest price ever paid for 10 to 15 grams of beet sugar, assuming Perrier-Jouët found anyone tacky enough to pay it.

2. Sherry-Lehmann’s engraved bottles of Dom Pérignon and Krug. — At least you cannot be accused of buying Dom Perignon or Krug for the label if the bottles you buy have had the label removed and replaced with etchings such as a “sensuous, captivating woman in her simple black dress with wind-blown hair giv[ing] a receptive glance over her soft, bare shoulder” or a “cherub-like caricature of a newborn baby.”

1. Ghost Horse World. — Res ipsa loquitur.

Cacophony and its Discontents

2008-03-02T16:01:00.009-05:00

A comment by Japanese chef Hiromitsu Nozaki in a Wine Spectator review of the Tokyo restaurant scene recently jumped out at me. Nozaki said, “My role is to remove—not add—to the ingredients, so that we can see the purity, the simplicity, and the essence of each dish. It is much harder to remove than to add.” It’s an unusual perspective to read in a wine magazine, since the prevailing standard of quality for wine is often assumed to be the opposite of simplicity—complexity. In wine jargon, “simple” is always a pejorative, never associated with purity or other virtues. Complex is better than simple the same way that big is better than small. Since so many people accept this so unquestioningly, it is worth considering what they mean when they call a wine complex, and what they might be undervaluing when deriding the simple.

In his new book Desert Island Wine, Miles Lambert-Gócz traces the origin of complexity’s use in winespeak to H. Warner Allen’s 1932 book The Romance of Wine. “Allen,” writes Lambert-Gócz, “made reference to complexity by name several times while discussing how grapes ought to be processed so as to maximize the multiplicity of ‘nuances.’” People use the term in a remarkably similar manner today. A wine with a “multiplicity of nuances” is presumed to be complex, even though this kind of multiplicity often results in a cacophony of disjointedness. A wine with its elements in perfect harmony is often mistaken for simple, since it is not possible to isolate every nuance and reduce it to a “descriptor” in a “tasting note.”

The “tasting note” is by now the principal medium through which people of all experience levels communicate about wine, and like any medium it dictates a message independent of its content. Specifically, the need to communicate about wine in tasting notes results in a revision of aesthetic standards to favor those characteristics easiest to express in tasting notes. “[W]ith our nose to larboard,” writes Lambert-Gócz, “we chase the fleeting nuances in our frantic effort to determine the relative complexity of the wines coming before us. As if all aromatic sensations could be named, and none would overlap, we attempt what in effect amounts to a headcount of sensations which we are ready to accept as the definitive indicator of quality: Complex, rich flavor with suggestions of plums, cherries, capers, violets, mint, raspberries, green pepper, almonds, cedar, and an undertone of chocolate.” And as a result of writing in such “tortured prose likening wine to 57 different fruits (the Heinz Variety Tasting method),” as Joe Dressner puts it, “we try to pigeonhole a wine into the confines of these external evaluators. We do not taste and drink the wine for what it is, but for what it approximates in wine tasting lexicon.”

Interestingly, one comestible which the Heinz Variety Tasting method is especially useless to describe is Heinz ketchup itself, which only distantly tastes like its primary ingredient (tomatoes) and has no other individually discernible constituent flavors. This was the subject of a long Malcolm Gladwell piece attempting to resolve the conundrum of why nobody’s been able to improve on Heinz. The article is premised on the fact that while ketchup may seem pedestrian, it is actually a very sophisticated concoction—“alone among the condiments on the table, ketchup could deliver sweet and sour and salty and bitter and umami, all at once.” But just as importantly is the way in which it delivers these things. Heinz ketchup is strong in “amplitude,” “the word sensory experts use to describe flavors that are well blended and balanced, that ‘bloom’ in the mouth”:

When something is high in amplitude, all its constituent elements converge into a single gestalt. You can’t isolate the elements of an iconic, high-amplitude flavor like Coca-Cola or Pepsi. But you can with one of those private-label colas that you get in the supermarket. “The thing about Coke and Pepsi is that they are absolutely gorgeous,” Judy Heylmun, a vice-president of Sensory Spectrum, Inc., in Chatham, New Jersey, says. “They have beautiful notes—all flavors are in balance. It’s very hard to do that well. Usually, when you taste a store cola it’s”—and here she made a series of pik! pik! pik! sounds—“all the notes are kind of spiky, and usually the citrus is the first thing to spike out. And then the cinnamon. Citrus and brown spice notes are top notes and very volatile, as opposed to vanilla, which is very dark and deep. A really cheap store brand will have a big, fat cinnamon note sitting on top of everything.” . . . Generic colas and ketchups have . . . a hook—a sensory attribute that you can single out, and ultimately tire of.

It’s that multiplicity of hooks that is often mistaken for complexity. But, as Lambert-Gócz concludes, “The great paradox of worthy complexity is that it reaches its apogee when the aromas comprising it have pulled together, e pluribus unum fashion.” The veneer of such a composition may appear simple. If there is an underlying complexity, it lies in the precarious balance necessary to render that veneer flawlessly, and the aesthetic vision to make it beautiful. If you are merely counting the multiplicity of nuances, imbalances can be drowned out by the cacophony. If instead you are striving for one sustained note of unadulterated purity and exquisite beauty, it is essential to have the courage to silence the cacophony, even if the result is, for better or worse, beyond description.

Talking California Cult Wine Blues

2008-02-27T23:37:00.003-05:00

Well, I owned this vineyard didn’t make any coin
Parker gave my wine just eighty-two points
Said to hold it til two thousand and ten
Maybe wouldn’t taste like rat poison then

Well, I couldn’t pass along my debts to my son
Or get by selling grapes at ten bucks a ton
So one day I went and phoned up my banker
Said, “Here’s the new plan, we’re movin’ to Napa”

Now, the Valley was a very different place
Where wines like mine cost three grand a case
Didn’t have much luck with vineyard land there
But I figured we’d get by on a wing and a prayer

Fin’lly found a parcel measured eight by six
I worked all night on the graveyard shift
’Cause it was in a graveyard. I’d bought one plot
Eight feet long and six feet deep. Still paid a lot

But summer came around and the vines didn’t grow
And I started to think I’d have nothing to show
When all of a sudden I had an idea
’Bout how we’d turn a profit by the end of the year

See, everybody wants what they can’t get
And nothing's any scarcer than what ain’t grown yet
And everybody says you got to lower your yields
But nobody’s yields were as low as my field
Zero
No yields
No yields at all

So I hired a buddy in the ad business
To help me put together a mailing list
When I told him the catch, there wasn’t no wine
He didn’t even give me a blink of an eye

He said, to sell your wine for a pretty penny
Here’s your new slogan: “You Can’t Have Any”
So I put up a sign tellin’ folks go away
And I got fifty calls by the end of the day

There was one fella said he’d buy all that we made
When I told him there ain't none he got in a rage
Then said he’d pay double. Friends, I’m no fool
So I took down his name and his credit cards too
Am Ex
Platinum
Two of ’em

With all of that cash it was time to invest
In some of the perks of the wine business
I hired some hands to make that old tomb
A modern immaculate wine tasting room

I forgot to buy glasses, but that was okay
On account of the fact there was nothing to taste
Then I got this strange call from a man named Riedel
Who made me an offer that made my heart swell

He had a knack for them thingamajigs
That wine-tasters use in their wine-tasting gigs
And he’d fashioned this glass made just for my stuff
Didn't exist neither but sure cost enough

And one day I heard from a wealthy collector
He loved the wine but craved something to cellar
So I bought some fat bottles whose glass was so wide
That nobody’d notice there’s nothing inside

My original plan for the name went astray
When the government said it can’t say Cabernet
Seems that they needed near eighty percent
And this one was less. I mean, zero percent
Zero
No Cabernet
No nothin’

So I figured it’s best to just say what’s inside
And ended up calling it “This Isn’t Wine”
And just so I wouldn’t seem opportunistic
I took a brush and drew something artistic

Well, lots of folks here sell lots of good wine
But now only mine was true one-of-a-kind
So I did what any smart man’s apt to do
I doubled my price—got twice the sales too

And one day the call came for which we had waited
It was Parker to tell me that we’d gotten rated
He called it all-natural, if somewhat light-bodied
And his ninety-two points made me all faint-hearted

So we wasn’t ready for what happened next
When all of our customers cancelled their checks
But we had a great time and saved just enough dough
I called up my banker, said, “Next stop, Bordeaux!”

The Rape of the List

2008-02-13T00:12:00.005-05:00

What dire offense from vinous causes springs,
What mighty contests rise from trivial Things;
I sing about Big Jay, and his band of men
Who set forth to Bern’s to make amends
For all those slings and arrows that the world,
So surly, cruel, and fallen, hath unfurled
O’er the fortunes of the just;—and none more just
There lived than our Big Jay, who wielded trust
Without compare amongst the imbibers
Of wine and all its hedonists’ desires.
When Big Jay spat, the world would listen;
When Big Jay scored, the eyes would glisten
Of vignerons from Washington to Spain
In contemplation of their lust, and pain
They aimed to wreak on buyers who collected
No wines except what Jay and friends selected.
But Big Jay was humble, and Big Jay was fair.
Big Jay dispensed his wisdom without care
Of what a cherry-picker’s apt to do
When armed with Jay’s unbending Truth.
But oh!—what cherry-picker lives so foul
To bite the hand that feeds; to read and scowl
Upon Jay’s words (and points!) with selfishness
So blunt as if Big Jay woke up on Christmas
And found a fiend absconding with his gifts
And fixed to hoard, and pour, and swirl, and sniff,
The wines that we, unanimous, reserved
For Jay, knowing we hoi polloi deserved
Those cruder, coarser wines without the scores
Of Big Jay’s cherries—crap such as Richebourg,
Bonnes Mares, Chambertin, Clos St.-Denis—
Anything to save for Jay the cherries
In the cave. Why, if we all drank Cayuse today,
Basking in the points bestowed by Jay,
Big Jay could never taste the majesty
They’re sure to reach in one more century.
So when Jay and friends descend on Bern’s,
We all forget the wines for which we yearn.
In ev’ry tavern, ev’ry highway stop,
Ev’ry home, and ev’ry sidewalk shop,
The word of Jay’s arrival fills the night,
And none suppress their childish delight
As they gather by the road to stare
At the enchanted path that Jay will travel there.
All along the way to Bern’s, assembled
In enormous crowds, awe-struck and trembled,
They cheer him on his way. Little boys and girls
Weened on tales of Jay throw candy in the air,
And Jay, from time to time, bestows his wisdom,
Devouring the candies thrown right at him,
And whether Snickers, Musketeers, or S’Mores,
Jay recites his notes and then confers his scores.
But the wines at Bern’s this year are like a dog
Without a bone, consigned to murky fog
By the whims of selfish cherry-pickers
Prone to tempting by the bargain liquors
We all know belong to Jay, and without him
To consume them, deduce them, and review them,
All those wines will die in vain, drunken
By mere plebians without the critic’s pen,
Digested unappreciated,
Unreviewed, and worst of all, unrated.

This One Goes Up to Eleven

2008-01-08T23:48:00.000-05:00

A piece in the World of Fine Wine (not online, and $45 [!] for the print edition) by David Schildknecht draws a wonderful analogy between the quest for perfection in wine and the quest for perfection in audio. The dilemma in both cases is that “the difference between a blemish and a beauty spot is often in the eye of the beholder” (think of Cindy Crawford’s mole, for instance), and that “in the process of ironing, polishing, and perfecting, the character and distinctive personality will be lost.” Schildknecht is a highbrow guy, so his examples are recordings of Beethoven, Bach, and Mahler. My own tastes in music are much more lowbrow—the kind with guitars and choruses and such—but it turns out there is an even more important analogy to be made there.

Turning from the World of Fine Wine to Rolling Stone (print edition, $5.95), Robert Levine writes about “a revolution in recording technology” brewing since the mid-1990s. You’ve noticed it if you’ve ever shuffled your CD changer from an album predating the grunge era to a recent release. The newer album sounds louder. A lot louder. There is a limit to how loud you can make a recording before the sound waveforms bust through the spectrometer, eliminating the high and low ends and distorting what remains. But engineers trying to win “the loudness war,” Levine reports, apply a technique called “dynamic range compression, which reduces the difference between the loudest and softest sounds in a song.” The result is louder music from beginning to end, but the effect is not quite the same as if you had simply turned up the volume knob: “By maintaining constant intensity, the album flattens out the emotional peaks that usually stand out in a song.” In other words, a loud volume is a cheap and easy way to make an impact, but the impact is lost when the volume is sustained. (It’s no coincidence that nobody listens to complete albums anymore.)

In wine, as in music, the modern taste emphasizes both technical flawlessness and loud volume. It is fashionable to blame U.C. Davis’s school of oenology for the former and Robert Parker for the latter. Parker insists his tastes are catholic, and it’s true he enjoys a variety of different wines, but he praises loudness in all of them. His favorite articles of praise are almost cliché. In the Wine Advocate’s archives, 67 wines are described as resembling something “on steroids”—always favorably. Even the word “painfully” is often intended to have positive connotations, as in “painfully rich” or “painfully intense.” Following suit, the highest compliment Parker’s devotees ever pay to a wine is that it “blew me away,” as though wine ought to have the same aesthetic sensibility as heavy metal.

There are many ways to achieve loudness in wine. Many of them boil down to ripeness, what Matt Kramer calls “the single most important aesthetic decision today.” It is assumed nowadays that wine should taste like fruit, hence the trend to maximize ripeness. (The idea is intuitively appealing, since wine is made from fruit—yet nobody thinks that cheese should taste like milk.) Ripe grapes make fruity wine, and overripe grapes—when properly manipulated—amplify the fruit. This is useful if you are designing your wine to compete against dozens of others in taste-sized portions in a mass spit-and-score. It is less desirable if you would prefer your wine to reward continued sipping over a few hours. Similarly, dynamic range compression is useful if you are engineering your record to be heard above the din of a noisy bar or survive mutilation by MP3. If you prefer to listen to music on serious equipment in the comfort of your armchair, you might long for better days when audio production emphasized clarity and buoyancy.

Who Wants to Live Forever?

2007-11-24T00:47:00.000-05:00

It’s taken me some time to muster up anything to say about an exceptional dinner I attended based around the classic Vouvrays of Gaston Huët, with vintages spanning from 1971 back to 1933. It isn’t often that the Madeira nightcap is one of the youngest wines of the evening. It also isn’t often that a 36-year-old wine, the 1971 Le Haut-Lieu demi-sec, gets criticized for being way too young. I disagreed, finding it stunning and seamless. Complexity isn’t an attribute you need to find in a wine so beautifully composed. But the criticism underscored the reason why I don’t drink or cellar as much Vouvray as the quality warrants. It simply takes forever to come around. Ten- and even twenty-year-old vintages can taste very much like the current release. Alfred Hitchcock once remarked that “The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.” Similarly, shouldn’t the maturity curve of a wine should bear at least some resemblance to the human lifespan? Why cellar a wine that won’t be at its best until I’m dead? And if I need to think about that at the age of 30, what’s the draw for the majority of collectors older than me? The compromise I’ve come to is this: Buy the secs, the dry wines. They will mature faster, and are just as good. One of the most interesting wines of our dinner was a sec. Alas!—it was the 1946.

Blind Justice

2007-11-13T22:39:00.000-05:00

Mike Steinberger of Slate offers a measured critique of the practice of blind tasting, prompted in part by a recent 2001 Bordeaux horizontal in London where the controversial Château Pavie reportedly silenced some of its critics. This was a predictable result. Pavie, Steinberger points out, has “an uncanny knack for performing well in blind tastings of young Bordeauxs. Naturally, Pavie fans do cartwheels every time this happens.” Lost in the middle of all their cartwheeling is any reflection on whether it makes sense to treat such performances as the dispositive and final word on the merits of wines like Pavie.

Most people do not drink their wines in blinded two-ounce rations among dozens of similar wines. They will drink one bottle over a few hours at home or in a restaurant, or perhaps a few glasses of various wines each poured with a different course of their meal. It remains a mystery to me why wine critics insist on tasting and analyzing wine in a context so different from the context in which their audience consumes it. In no other field is this acceptable, much less standard practice. Book critics don’t write reviews based on one chapter each from fifty different books. Music critics watch the same performance in the same theatre as the rest of the audience. But wine critics operate from the premise that the wine that pleases them in small doses in a tasting, then spat in a bucket, will also please consumers laboring over the whole bottle. I have never heard any critic even attempt to explain why we should accept that premise, and, it turns out, science offers some convincing reasons why we should reject it.

I wrote recently on the thought-provoking anthology Questions of Taste: The Philosophy of Wine. The best piece in the book is by wine researcher Jamie Goode, of Wine Anorak, who reports on experiments by University of Oxford Prof. Edmund Rolls in which it was shown:

[I]n humans the response in the orbitofrontal cortex to the odour of a food eaten to satiety decreases, but the response to another odour that has not been eaten doesn't change. The subjects’ perception of the intensity of the smell of the consumed food doesn't change, but their perception of its pleasantness (hedonic valence) does. In another study, he showed that swallowing is not necessary for sensory-specific satiety to occur. When I quizzed him about this, Rolls was cautious about speculating (as many scientists rightly are), but agreed that this could have some effect during a wine tasting where a taster is repeatedly encountering the same sort of taste or smell. At a large trade tasting it is quite common to taste as many as 100 wines in a session. If these results of sensory-specific satiety are extrapolated to this sort of setting, then it’s likely that the brain will be processing the last wine you taste differently from that of the first, assuming that there are some components to the taste or smell in common—for example, tannins, fruit or oak.

This has several implications for the practice of mass tastings, like the one in London, whether they are blinded or not.

First, serving food and wine together may delay the onset of sensory-specific satiety, allowing for fairer evaluations of the wines. Combining wine and food is often spoken about in terms of “pairing” specific complementary flavors, but perhaps complementariness is less important than simply disrupting the uniformity of taste of a series of similar wines.

Second, any tasting of a lot of wines of the same general type will cause participants to succumb to sensory-specific satiety sooner or later. Thus, someone who tastes a series of pleasant but similar wines will derive progressively less pleasure from them. Moreover, in a flight of wines sharing some of the same general characteristics, the wine that deviates from those characteristics most radically—such as Pavie—has an advantage in registering hedonic valence. This is not because it’s a better wine, but because it presents tasters with a substance different from what they’ve already consumed to satiety.

An “uncanny knack,” indeed.

Outlook Not So Good—Part II

2007-11-06T19:36:00.000-05:00

A promising new anthology called Questions of Taste: The Philosophy of Wine includes an essay by one Ophelia Deroy containing this nugget about the epistemological crystal ball necessary to diagnose a “closed” wine:

The term “closed” is perhaps one of the most puzzling ones we use about wine. . . . It seems (at least to me) a sort of prophetic judgment, reserved to sibylline viewers of wine, to be able to know (or guess) that “there is something here that isn’t here yet.” This is also the kind of adjective which it seems easy to mock. It is more polite to our hosts to say of a renowned wine that it is closed instead of disappointingly flat. People kindly engage in such prophecies: “things will be better tomorrow,” “Oh, I am sure that your daughter will be pretty when she grows up.” In these cases, we do not simply say something about the way things actually are, but we claim to sense now how they will or could be in the future. Many will agree that we overstep the boundaries of prudence here and go beyond what we can legitimately claim to know.

I wrote in this space not long ago on the bull market for uninformed predictions about wine, specifically in the context of drinking windows. The Wine Advocate’s Jay Miller was an easy target for that post, having just bestowed “classic” point ratings and drinking windows out to the year 2045 (!) on a Washington State winery he admitted he had previously “never even heard of . . . , never mind tasted any prior vintages.”

In her essay, Deroy hypothesizes a tasting of a 2002 St.-Emilion which “Jane” and “Paul” agree tastes dull but disagree whether the dullness reflects poor quality or a closed state. Deroy figures that for Jane’s “closed” assessment to have an informed basis, the following must be true:

Jane previously tasted an older vintage (say, the 1996) at various stages, and “might remember tha[t] the 1996 was better after seven years than after four,”
“she remembers the taste of the 1996 Saint Emilion, as it was in 2000 when she first tasted it,”
“this memory was vivid enough in 2003 when she tasted it a second time,”
and, finally, “that this memory is still the same one she remembers today when she tastes the 2002.”

Deroy is skeptical of the exercise: “This is a complex relational judgment, difficult to engage in. . . . Experiments have shown that our comparisons about wine are highly unreliable: most people have difficulties in distinguishing not only between many vintages but between only three glasses, not even memorized but all present and available for tasting.” Certainly, professionals should do better, even experienced amateurs. But that’s because they’re presumed to have the requisite baseline of experience, not because they’re seers gifted with a tasting acumen not bestowed on us hoi polloi. Maybe Holly Golightly said it better: “Everybody has to feel superior to somebody,” she said. “But it’s customary to present a little proof before you take the privilege.”

I Want to Believe

2007-09-27T20:44:00.000-05:00

Is this the greatest wine glass ever made?

Ever since Wine Erotica (not a porn site) began offering the Impitoyable #4 for the (believe it or not) bargain price of $45.95 per stem, the wine world has been abuzz with hype over its borderline-alchemical properties with a fanaticism unprecedented since caravans of ecstatic vintners would parade into Paris proclaiming “Beaujolais Noveau est Arrivée.” The #4 is certainly one of the most eye-catching drinking vessels ever made, with the bowl’s geodesic tessellation reminiscent of an M.C. Escher pattern, if Escher had worked in Art Nouveau. Not since Champagne drinkers fantasized of sipping out of Marie Antoinette’s breast has stemware seemed so invigorating.

The concept behind the design is that the acute pit at the bottom spawns a fine cascade of bubbles which nestle into the nooks and crannies of the bowl like an exoskeletal circulatory system disseminating the bead and amplifying the aroma of the wine, like the scene in the movie Twister where the computer suddenly lights up with data tracking the position and vector of the hundreds of golf-ball sensors released into the funnel of a tornado. As if this were not enough, the sleek tubular container each glass comes packed in bears a blueprint eerily evocative of Da Vinci’s Proportions of Man boasting of the glass’s perfection in design, its every angle and plane of positive or negative space containing an infinite fractalization of perfect geometric forms.

But does it work? Well, let’s first make allowance for the speculation that the glass, like a cast-iron pan, might require the “seasoning” of a few throwaway bubblies and cleaning cycles before kicking into gear, the residue of which theoretically adds micro–nooks-and-crannies to the macro–nooks already molded into the bowl. Yes, my citation of M.C. Escher was more than superficial—the very folklore of this glass suggests the isomorphism of Douglas Hofstadter’s “eternal golden braid.” But even without the elevation of a week’s seasoning, the Jose Dhondt 2002 Oger Champagne “Mes Vielles Vignes” I poured into both the Impitoyable and a pedestrian Spiegelau vintage Champagne flute showed dramatically more expressive aromatics (albeit a less aggressive mousse) in the #4. Yet I must be honest. I was so seduced by the form that the function is just a bonus. You know a glass is a success when its curves are even more thrilling than Marie Antoinette’s.

Thought for the Day

2007-09-07T23:11:00.000-05:00

“Much of what American wine-drinkers drink with their meals has flashy young fruit in it.... most of what wine journals recommend is jerry-rigged with ‘fruit bombs’ ... In my experience, however, fruit in general only serves to make wine glossier, to make it more capable of standing out at a wine judging.... It does not make wine any better with food. In fact, I contend, the presence of fruit in a wine is, generally speaking... a burden to food!” —David Rosengarten, introducing the auction of a portion of his cellar in the Zachys fall auction.

Outlook Not So Good

2007-09-04T01:09:00.000-05:00

Crystal balls are cheap. Anyone can pretend to have one. Steve Sailer nicely observes that there isn’t much of an audience for informed predictions, since predictions founded on bullshit are so much more interesting. It seems to me that this theory goes a long way towards explaining the relatively recent phenomenon of the wine critic, with their reams of “tasting notes” each followed by a pseudoscientific “drinking window” purporting to pinpoint the precise calendar date decades hence that your wine will turn into a pumpkin. Most of these guys make their living selling such tasting notes directly to subscribers, so they’d better offer some news you can use. If you’re buying wines from classic European regions with track records for aging well, you don’t really need wine critics to tell you what to buy or when to drink it. But if you’re a wine critic who needs to generate a name for yourself, you must eschew obvious truths for non-obvious bullshit. The savvy critic therefore presents his ratings as the secret decoder ring to the great chain of being and keeps readers on their toes (and renewing their subscriptions) by throwing big scores to wines you’ll read about nowhere else, perhaps because those big scores are what scientists call an “irreproducible result.” To see the phenomenon in action, read Lyle Fass diagnose the “99-100 point bender” by the Wine Advocate’s newest reviewer “doing exactly what he needs to do to ‘legitimize’ himself, which is anoint wines with high scores that he ‘discovers.’”

Market Watch, Vol. 2: Jerusalem

2007-07-09T21:49:00.000-05:00

Grand Cru Crash

2007-06-03T00:43:00.000-05:00

William F. Buckley’s recent anthology of autobiographical sketches, Miles Gone By, includes two fascinating chapters chronicling his family’s depletion of his father’s wine cellar and his efforts to replenish it. Evidence of the latter is presented in the graphic form of an invoice from retailer Bill Sokolin, dated October 19, 1971, for the purchase of many dozen cases of wine. But by today’s standards, it doesn’t seem at all extravagant. Buckley bought Château Calon-Ségur 1970 at $44 a case ($3.67 a bottle) and Château Petrus 1966 at $220 a case ($18.33 a bottle). The invaluable inflation calculator estimates that $3.67 in 1971 would equate to $17.46 in 2005 dollars. But a bottle of Calon-Ségur 2005 goes for $99.75 at Sherry-Lehmann, well over a 500% increase. The $18.33 Petrus would cost $87.20 in 2005. Sherry-Lehmann doesn’t have any 2005 on offer, but the 2003 is still available for $2,100 a bottle. The wine market is changing.

The question is what it’s changing into. Talk to a Russian émigré and you will hear stories about how Caspian Sea caviar was as plentiful as water and they snacked on it morning, noon, and night. Now, of course, it’s an emblem of luxury and even the wealthy only enjoy it a dollop at a time. Mounting prices make it reasonable to fear that wine from classic regions might be headed for the same fate. In October 2004, wine critic Robert Parker, Jr. published a much-chattered-about article making a dozen predictions on the future of wine, among which was a “world bidding war” for the finest wines which would drive the release prices of first growths to $10,000 a case within a decade. That prophecy only took three years to come true. But are these prices here to stay, or is it merely “irrational exuberance” destined to collapse like the market for dot-com stocks in the late ’90s?

We know how that latter story ended, and for anyone inclined to think today’s overheated wine market will end any differently, an old book can provide a useful history lesson. Nicholas Faith wrote The Winemasters of Bordeaux in 1978 but the state of today’s market has given it a new saliency. The focus of the book is the boom in claret prices in the early ’70s and the inevitable crash that followed. The boom period is best summed up in two epigraphs to the chapter aptly titled “Blast-Off”:

“Please send me six cases of Bordeaux Rouge,” a Bordeaux négociant was asked by a private customer. “Certainly, but I’m afraid I’ve had to increase the price from Frs. 3 to Frs. 6.” “Better send me twelve cases,” was the immediate and typical reaction.
—Peter Sichel

The day I saw in Time Magazine a photograph of a bank vault with a bottle of Lafite in it I assembled my staff and told them, “The crisis has started.” Indeed from the moment when you start to think of wine as an investment and not as something to be drunk, that’s the end.
—Baron Elie de Rothschild

Things began to fall apart when speculators were unable to deliver on futures contracts, having committed to sell wine they didn’t own on the assumption they could cover their obligations later. Price surges undermined that strategy, since the speculators would have to source the wine at many multiples of what they had sold it for. Meanwhile, dishonest merchants were taking advantage of the boom by trucking in cheap vin ordinaire from the south and re-labeling the plonk AOC Bordeaux, much to the relief of the over-committed speculators. The scandal became known as Winegate and took down some of Bordeaux’s most entrenched aristocrats. That sort of scandal is unlikely to spell the end of the current price surges, which don’t seem motivated by any vice more sinister than simple greed. But that does not make today’s prices any more sustainable.

Faith’s account shows that the rationalizations offered for today’s high prices are the same ones the trade has used to juice the market since time immemorial. When Parker breathlessly predicted a “world bidding war” for the finest wines, he credited the “burgeoning interest in fine wine in Asia” and other developing markets. In eerie similarity Faith recalls “the hysteria which erupted in the first half of 1973” fueled “in particular by the impression, rife that winter, that Japan was poised to replace the United States as the newest and most exciting market for claret.” That tiger still hasn’t roared. But it remains one of the trade’s favorite bogeymen—along with the art of creating artificial scarcities. Perhaps the earliest precedent was the proprietor of Château Rausan-Ségla who sailed to London with casks of his wine to demand a price well in excess of what he could get at home. He gave orders “for one cask after another to be breached and the contents discharged into the river, demanding, as each cask was emptied, the same price for what remained as he had originally asked for his entire cargo which, as the somewhat doubtful story goes, he is said to have eventually obtained.” Today the preferred strategy is simply to hold back half of your production to release at a trickle during future booms, a costless strategy once you double the price of what remains.

So like the doubling cube on a backgammon table, prices continue to climb at exponential rates. But in spite of it all, I find cause for optimism. The one inalterable fact about wine is that another vintage always comes along with its litter of a few million cases that need to find homes. History continues to repeat itself, both the booms and the busts.

The Medium and the Message

2007-04-06T22:26:00.038-05:00

Every outbreak has its Typhoid Mary. If Christy Campbell has it right, the Typhoid Mary of the phylloxera epidemic that laid waste to Europe’s vineyards in the 19th century was a well-meaning American identified only as “M. Carle.” In his book The Botanist and the Vintner, Campbell recounts that in 1862 Carle shipped an assortment of American grapevines to one M. Borty, who tended a vineyard in the hamlet of Roquemaure on the banks of the Rhône. The experiment did not end well:

The young immigrants went cheerfully into the warming soil, and seemed to prosper. The following summer, in a vineyard at the village of Pujaut, perched on a plateau of dry, pebbly soil a few kilometers southwest of Roquemaure, something strange started to happen. A cluster of vines began to show curious symptoms. The leaves rapidly turned yellowy, the edges reddened, the blush spread and, in an eerily accelerated autumn, by August the foliage had dried up completely and dropped. . . . By 1864 Borty’s own Grenache and Alicante vines were shriveling, while some native vines on a patch of sandy soil seemed mysteriously unaffected. The American imports were healthier than ever.

The culprit was an insect that fed on the roots of the American vines. Accustomed to the insect, they had evolved to coexist with it. The analogy to Typhoid Mary is more than superficially apropos: Mary had become such a promiscuous contagion in the first place because she carried the fever but never got sick herself. But unlike Typhoid Mary, the phylloxera insect would not be quarantined and spent the next several decades expanding the circumference of its devastation outward from the Rhône to envelop France and much of the rest of Europe. Maps of the outbreak have a certain conquistador quality to them not unlike maps charting the expansion of the Roman Empire.

Europe’s many varieties of vitis vinifera could no longer grow in the bug-infested soils. Their American cousins lived but the wine they produced was plainly inferior. History credits Jules-Émile Planchon, the “botanist” of Campbell’s title, for devising the remedy to the crisis. The remedy fits the classic definition of a kludge. Shoots of European vinifera vines were grafted onto American roots—the process entails literally taping the two together. The plant thus concocted proceeded to produce the classic European varieties of grapes on a secure foundation of phylloxera-resistant American roots.

But like any kludge, it has some side effects. Oenologists and winemakers who have worked with both types of vine report that the grafted plants don’t live as long and have a propensity both for higher yields and higher alcohol levels, among other defects. Since low yields from old vines are universally regarded as the most important components of the recipe for great wine, these are serious problems.

Yet the nineteenth-century kludge remains the state of the art. One might think it would behoove oenologists to devise a genetic treatment for phylloxera and thus allow vitis vinifera to stand on its own legs, but anything associated with “GMO” is anathema to technophobic Europeans. So grafting persists. And that’s where Campbell’s account ends.

But that’s where another story begins.

Anyone who has learned to appreciate wine develops a sense of how fluid it is over time. The wine you fall in love with one day will taste different with a few years in the bottle, and its next vintage will be altogether different still. Like Buddha, wine teaches that nothing is permanent. Everything changes. And everything dies. A wine cellar embodies the human compulsion to stand athwart history yelling Stop. It offers the consolation that good things can literally be bottled up to be opened and re-lived when one craves a remembrance of things past. It is impossible to do this without developing a fixation on experiencing history in the most vivid way possible—touching it, smelling it, drinking it in.

But if your taste for history impels you to wonder what the great wines of the past tasted like, the wines made today won’t tell you much. Simply put, they don’t make ’em like they used to. As Burgundy authority Allen Meadows recently told Grape Radio:

A lot of people ask whether or not prephylloxera wines, . . . are those wines different, and I believe they are quite different, but it’s mostly a textural aspect. . . . There is a concentration and a mouthfeel to nineteenth-century Burgundy that I don’t think exists today.

Meadows attributes the difference to the use of inferior, higher-yielding clones in replanted vineyards. But while the relationship between sheer concentration and low-yielding vines is clear, I am not as convinced as Meadows that the differences he observes in mouthfeel and texture can be attributed to yields or clonal selection. Fortunately, this is a theory one can test without spending thousands of dollars per bottle on nineteenth-century wines. There remain a select number of vineyards where ungrafted vines survive. Most are scattered in random pockets of the world that phylloxera never touched—in South America, or the island of Cyprus, for example—but the ones that interest me most are those in classic regions that mysteriously survived the pandemic, or whose proprietors took the risk of planting own-rooted vinifera while knowing they might succumb at any time.

From what I have tasted of these wines, they do have a mouthfeel and texture that is profoundly different from the mass of modern wines, which suggests to me that the difference lies not in clonal selection or winemaking practices but in the basest raw material, the root itself and its ungrafted connection to the vine. Pertinent to this—bear with me here—is an observation that Paul Johnson made about the masterpieces of Vermeer:

We are totally convinced of the existence, close to us, of the people and objects we see, and this appears to have been achieved not so much by brushwork as by magic, as if the paint invisibly floated onto the canvas like snow, then dissolved into it. The painting which perhaps epitomises this extraordinary gift of Vermeer’s (for it is a gift of genius rather than a mere skill) is the tiny Girl with the Red Hat (Washington, National Gallery), where the sensuousness and liquidity of the illusion is so strong as to draw viewers close to the painting to the point where they become dizzy.

The distinctive mouthfeel and texture rendered by ungrafted vines is perfectly analogous to this—including the observation that no amount of technical skill standing alone can impart it. The key point is that they have an uncanny ability to render the attributes of wine while leaving the medium of wine nearly invisible. It isn’t the concentration that’s remarkable, but the noiseless definition, purity, and grace.

Unfortunately, the market does not attach much value to this. A phrase like “Vieilles Vignes” on a label has a certain amount of cachet, but very few consumers take note of the taglines “Pie Franco” or “Franc de Pied,” signifying own-rooted vines. The fact that even the most serious oenophiles are not on the lookout for such wines makes it difficult to keep track of where they exist. But I am confident that once consumers begin tasting these wines and become attentive to the characteristics that differentiate them, demand will build until more and more producers take the risk—or maybe even invest in a twenty-first century solution to this nineteenth century plague.

PRE-PHYLLOXERA AND VINIFERA-ROOTED VINEYARDS IN EUROPE, NORTH AMERICA, AND OCEANIA

France, Champagne
Bollinger, Champagne “Vielles Vignes Françaises”
Chartogne-Taillet, Champagne “Les Barres” more
Roger Coulon, Champagne Brut Millesime Blanc de Noirs * more
Tarlant, Champagne “La Vigne d’Antan” (1962) more

France, Loire
Bernard Baudry, Chinon Franc de Pied
Charles Joguet, Chinon Varennes du Grand Clos Franc de Pied (1986) more
Pierre & Catherine Breton, Bourgueil Franc de Pied
Domaine des Roches Neuves (Thierry Germain), Saumur-Champigny Franc de Pied
Les Caillous du Paradis, Loir-et-Cher “Racines” *
Chateau de Chasseloir, Muscadet Sèvre-et-Maine “Cuvée de Ceps Centenaires”
Domaine de la Charmoise (Henry Marionnet), Jardin de la France “Provignage” cépage romorantin vigne pré-phylloxérique (1800s)
Domaine de la Charmoise (Henry Marionnet), Touraine “Vinifera” gamay
Domaine de la Charmoise (Henry Marionnet), Touraine “Vinifera” sauvignon
Jacky Preys, Touraine “Cuvée de Fié Gris”
Domaine de Montrieux (Emile Hérédia), Coteaux du Vendômois *
Domaine de Montrieux (Emile Hérédia), “Le Verre des Poètes” * pinot d’aunis
Didier Dagueneau, Pouilly-Fumé “Astéroide”
Thierry Puzelat, Vin de Table Français romorantin *

France, Bourgogne
Philippe Charlopin, Bourgogne Franc de Pied (2001)

France, Rhône
André Perret, Collines Rhodaniennes Franc de Pied marsanne
André Perret, Collines Rhodaniennes Franc de Pied syrah
Alain Graillot, Crozes-Hermitage coming soon? (2007) more

France, Bordeaux
Château Haut-Bailly, Pessac-Leognan *
Clos Louie, Côtes de Castillon

France, Pays Basque
Domaine Etxegaraya, Irouléguy Cuvée Lehengoa *

France, Catalonia
Domaine Ferrer-Ribière, VDP des Côtes Catalanes “Empreinte du Temps” carignane

Italy, Piemonte
Alfieri, San Germano pinot nero (c.1835) more
Cappellano, Barolo [Gabutti] Otin Fiorin Pie Franco-Michet (1989)
Marcarini, “Boschi de Berri” dolcetto d’Alba
Cozzo Mario, Vigna Pregliasco dolcetto di Dogliani (1986) more

Italy, Valle d’Aosta
D.O.C. Blanc de Morgex et de La Salle prié blanc more & more

Italy, Toscana
Lisini, “Prefilossero” more

Italy, Veneto
Serego Alighieri, molinara

Italy, Campania
Cantina del Taburno, “Bue Apis” aglianico del Taburno more
La Sibilla, Campi Flegrei falanghina
La Sibilla, Campi Flegrei piedirosso

Italy, Sicilia
Gurrida, “Victory” more
Tenuta delle Terre Nere, Etna Guardiola (c.1850) more
Frank Cornelissen, Etna “Magma” (c.1890)

Italy, Sardegna
D.O.C. Carignano del Sulcis

Spain, País Vasco
Ameztoi, Getariako Txakolina “Rubentis” hondarrabi zuri * video

Spain, Castilla y León
Garciarevalo, “Casamaro Blanco” verdelho
Bodega Luzdivina Amigo, Bierzo “Viñademoya” mencia more
Bodega Luzdivina Amigo, Bierzo “Viñademoya” Leiros mencia more
Dominio de Tares, Bierzo “Bembibre” *
Bodegas Naia (Viña Sila), Rueda “Naiades” verdejo
Bodega Numanthia, “Numanthia” Toro tempranillo
Bodega Numanthia, “Termanthia” Toro tempranillo
Pasil, Rueda Pi Franco verdejo
Bodegas Tardencuba, “Autor” tempranillo
Telmo Rodríguez, “G” Pago la Jara tempranillo
Bodegas Valpiculata, “Valpiculata” Toro tempranillo
Bodegas Valpiculata, “Puertas Novas” Toro tempranillo
Viñas del Cenit, Vino de la Tierra de Zamora “Cenit” tempranillo
Viñas del Cenit, Vino de la Tierra de Zamora “Triton” tempranillo
Viñas del Cenit, Vino de la Tierra de Zamora “Venta Mazzaron” tempranillo
Viñedos Nieva, Rueda Pie Franco verdejo

Spain, Jumilla
Bodegas Olivares, “Altos de la Hoya” monastrell
Casa Castillo, Pie Franco monastrell

Spain, Yecla
Bodegas La Purísima, Yecla “Trapío” monastrell
Bodegas Castano, “Solanera” monastrell * [+ cabernet]
Bodegas Castano, “Dulce” monastrell

Spain, Galicia
Do Ferreiro, Rías Baixas Cepas Vellas albariño

Spain, La Mancha
Bodegas Vitis Terrarum, Vino de la Tierra de Castilla tempranillo
Bodegas Vitis Terrarum, Vino de la Tierra de Castilla cabernet sauvignon

Spain, Ribero del Duero
Dominio de Atauta, tempranillo
Dominio de Atauta, La Mala tempranillo
Dominio de Atauta, Valdegatiles tempranillo
Atalaya de Golban, tempranillo
Bodegas Gormaz, “Viña Gormaz” tempranillo

Portugal
Quinta do Noval, Porto “Nacional”
Quinta do Feital, “Auratus” alvarinho, trajadura *
Luis Pato, Quinta do Ribeirinho Pé Franco baga

Germany, Mosel
Joh. Jos. Christoffel, Urziger Würzgarten riesling
Joh. Jos. Christoffel, Erdener Treppchen riesling
Clemens Busch, Pundericher Marienburg “Fahrlay Terrassen” riesling
Clüsserath-Weiler, Trittenheimer Fährfels riesling
Heymann-Lowenstein, “Schieferterrassen” riesling
Dr. Loosen, Bernkasteler Lay riesling more
Dr. Loosen, Erdener Prälat riesling more
Dr. Loosen, Erdener Treppchen riesling more
Dr. Loosen, Graacher Himmelreich riesling more
Dr. Loosen, Urziger Würzgarten riesling more
Dr. Loosen, Wehlener Sonnenuhr riesling more
Lubentiushof, Gondorfer Gans riesling
Alfred Merkelbach, Erdener Treppchen riesling
Alfred Merkelbach, Kinheimer Rosenberg riesling
Alfred Merkelbach, Urziger Würzgarten riesling
Markus Molitor, Zeltinger Sonnenuhr riesling *
Schmitges, Erdener Treppchen riesling
Carl Schmitt-Wagner, Longuicher Maximiner Herrenberg riesling (1896)
Gunther Steinmetz, [Mühlheimer Sonnenlay] Alte Reben riesling
Wein-Erbhof Stein, St. Aldegunder Palmberg-Terrassen riesling
Wein-Erbhof Stein, Klosterkammer riesling
Wein-Erbhof Stein, Himmelreich riesling
Wein-Erbhof Stein, Alfer Hölle riesling

Germany, Saar
Peter Lauer, Ayler Kupp “Senior” Faß 6 riesling * more
St. Urbans-Hof, Wiltinger [Schlangengraben] riesling
Van Volxem, Wiltinger Gottesfuß Alte Reben riesling
Von Othegraven, Kanzemer Altenberg “Ungrafted Vines” riesling
Von Othegraven, Kanzemer Altenberg Alte Reben riesling
Weinhof Herrenberg, [Saarfeilser Marienberg] Alte Reben riesling

Germany, Ruwer
Erben von Beulwitz, Kaseler Nies’chen riesling *

Austria, Kremstal
Meinhard Forstreiter, Hollenburger Tabor grüner veltliner (c.1900) more

Lebanon
Chateau Musar, Bekáa Valley blanc

New Zealand
Felton Road, pinot noir *
Pyramid Valley, Angel Flower pinot noir
Pyramid Valley, Earth Smoke pinot noir

Australia, Victoria
Best’s, Thomson Family Reserve Great Western shiraz (c. 1860s)
Tahbilk, “1860 Vines” Nagambie Lakes shiraz (1860)

Australia, Barossa
Cirillo, “1850 Old Vine” Barossa Valley grenache (1850)
Hewitson, Old Garden mourvèdre (1853)
Henschke, Hill of Grace Vineyard Eden Valley shiraz (1860s) more
Henschke, Mount Edelstone Eden Valley shiraz (1912) more
Poonawatta, “The 1880” Eden Valley shiraz (1880)

Australia, Clare Valley
Kilikanoon, Attunga Vineyard “1865” shiraz (1865)

California, Paso Robles
Adelaida Cellars, Hoffman Mountain Ranch Estate Vineyard a/k/a HMR pinot noir
Castoro Cellars, Blind Faith Vineyard Paso Robles (c.1990) * more
Castoro Cellars, Cobble Creek Vineyard Paso Robles (c.1970 & 1991) more
Castoro Cellars, Dos Viñas Vineyard Paso Robles (c.1980) more
Castoro Cellars, Hog Heaven Vineyard Paso Robles (c.1986) more

California, Central Coast
Arcadian, Sleepy Hollow Vineyard Santa Lucia Highlands chardonnay, pinot noir (1973) more
Belle Glos, Clarke & Telephone Vineyard pinot noir (c. 1971) more
Calera Wine Co., Mills Vineyard Mt. Harlan pinot noir (1984) more
Calera Wine Co., Mt. Harlan chardonnay (1984) more
Calera Wine Co., Mt. Harlan viognier (1989) * more
De Tierra, Silacci Vineyard Monterey pinot noir
Fess Parker, Santa Barbara County “Big Easy” syrah *
DeRose, Cienega Valley zinfandel (c.1890s) more
DeRose, Cienega Valley negrette (c.1890s) more
Pisoni, [Elias Block] “Estate” pinot noir * more
Talley, Rincon Vineyard chardonnay, pinot noir * more
Talley, Rosemary’s Vineyard pinot noir *

California, North Coast
Cabot Vineyards, Old Mill Vineyard syrah, zinfandel (1998-99) more
Cabot Vineyards, Aria’s Vineyard cabernet, merlot, syrah (2003) more
Cabot Vineyards, Reed’s Vineyard syrah
Turley, Duarte Vineyard zinfandel

California, Sierra Foothills
Clos Saron, Home Vineyard pinot noir
Clos Saron, “Black Pearl”
Clos Saron, “Carte Blanche”
Clos Saron, “Heart of Stone” syrah
Renaissance, Renaissance Vineyard (1975-1981)

California, Santa Cruz Mountains
Kathryn Kennedy, “Estate” cabernet more
Varner, Spring Ridge Vineyard–Home Block chardonnay (1980)
Varner, Spring Ridge Vineyard–Amphitheater Block chardonnay (1980)

Oregon
ANA Vineyards, [Weber Vineyard] pinot noir (1976)
Archery Summit, Arcus Estate pinot noir
Beaux Frères, Beaux Frères Vineyard pinot noir *
Bethel Heights, Bethel Heights Vineyard Southeast Block pinot noir (1979)
Bethel Heights, Seven Springs Vineyard pinot noir (1989) more
Brick House, Cuvée de Tonnelier pinot noir
Brick House, Boulder Block pinot noir
Evening Land, Seven Springs Vineyard “Celebration” gamay (1984)
Evening Land, Seven Springs Vineyard–La Source pinot noir
Evening Land, Seven Springs Vineyard–Summum pinot noir
Eyrie, Original Vines Reserve pinot noir, chardonnay (1966) more
Ken Wright, Elton Vineyard pinot noir (1983) more
Ken Wright, Meredith Mitchell Vineyard pinot noir (1988) more
Ken Wright, Nysa Vineyard pinot noir (1990) more
Ken Wright, Wahle Vineyard pinot noir (1974) more
Patricia Green, Eason Vineyard pinot noir (1984)
Scott Paul, [Maresh Vineyard] “Audrey” pinot noir (1970)
St. Innocent, Anden Vineyard pinot noir
St. Innocent, Brick House Vineyard pinot noir more
Ankeny Vineyard Larmer Block

* combines grafted and ungrafted vines.

Ancient Religion

2006-10-11T22:42:00.002-05:00

On the way to Teobaldo Cappellano’s winery (and house) in Serralunga d’Alba, we got hopelessly lost and had to stop at both ends of the main stretch of Via Alba to ask the locals for directions. In Italian. We don’t speak Italian. The consensus advice was “blah blah blah blah Fontanafredda blah blah blah.” Somehow I managed to put two and two together and found Cappellano’s house, which we had, of course, passed on the way into town. Across the street from Fontanafredda.

We were met outside by Teobaldo Cappellano, a giant of a man in both winemaking accomplishment and physical stature, and his cat. While we knew this would not be any ordinary winery appointment (“Here are our barrels. Here are our vats. Would you like to taste?”), we were truly flattered by how special Teobaldo made our visit. Instead of ushering us into the cellars, he sat down with us at a table in the front hall and talked. And talked and talked and talked, sharing his wisdom on everything from wine criticism to epistemology.

Then the cat moseyed back inside and decided to bring Teobaldo a gift. A garden snake. The cat and the garden snake had a lot of fun together. Okay, the cat was having most of the fun. At first he was stirring the garden snake around on the floor as though it were a tangled strand of spaghetti in a pot of water. Then he proceeded to bat the snake back and forth between his paws as though he were juggling three garden snakes. At one point he decided to see if he could tie the garden snake into a regulation Navy sailor’s knot (an unsuccessful endeavor) and then attempted to see how far he could swat the garden snake across the room, the way you would throw a baseball up in the air before swinging a bat (more successfully). Eventually Teobaldo came to the snake’s rescue and returned it to the garden, leaving the cat to contemplate just what he was going to do for the rest of the afternoon.

Then we were led into the cask aging room and tasted the 2004 Barolo Pie Rupestris and 2004 Barolo Pie Franco from cask. I did not realize how small the production was on the latter wine: there is just one cask of Pie Franco. Pie Franco is made from a younger but unique part of the Gabutti cru growing on its own ungrafted roots. But Teobaldo said that if he had to choose one, he would drink the Rupestris. Why? Well, he explained, everyone marries the girl who reminds him of his mother. Elucidating further, he allowed that Claudia Schiffer was very, very beautiful, but nobody ends up marrying Claudia Schiffer. You marry the one who reminds you of your mother. You drink what you know. He’s been drinking Barolo Rupestris for 60 years, since he was a child, so that’s the wine he chooses to marry.

I told him that the Pie Franco was the first Cappellano wine I'd drank but we drink so many different things—Barolo one night, Burgundy the next, then maybe a Riesling. . . . “Aha,” he said. “That’s why you like it. Between the two, this one tastes more like your Burgundies.” Indeed, the Pie Franco is the more streamlined, feminine, lighter wine of the two, with the Rupestris showing more muscle and brutish tannin. The 2004 Rupestris was also showing more herbs and woodspice, the Pie Franco more primary fruit. Then he asked us if we were familiar with his winemaking philosophy. I admitted I didn’t know his methods but knew he tries to follow the traditions of the great old Barolos. “I have no methods,” he corrected me. “My philosophy is, I do nothing. Absolutely nothing.” This, too, was elucidated by another Cappellanesque analogy. God only created man on the last day, he noted but then corrected himself: “Well, I don’t believe in God, but man has been here for thousands of years, nature is millions and millions of years older.” When nature wants to do something, it's futile to try to make it do something else. Not just futile, but a bit egotistical—who am I to come on to this land which has been here since prehistory and try to make its fruits into something else? Well, maybe wine is something else, depending on how you look at it, but in Cappellano’s cellar, as he tells it, the wine makes itself, and he is nothing.

I don’t quite agree. Barolo might make itself but Teobaldo Cappellano is, as I described him, a giant, and also something of a seer. In the car ride back, I felt the way Luke Skywalker must have felt after meeting Yoda. Teobaldo Cappellano might be the last Jedi.

Cartoon posted in Cappellano’s tasting room in Serralunga d’Alba.

Moon Over Alba

2006-10-08T19:09:00.000-05:00

From the sky-high hilltop village of La Morra, a winding road leads through vineyards and picnic areas towards the G.D. Vajra winery. The cellar there is modern and as bright and clean as a laboratory, but the wines are classic Piedmontese in their vinification and feature the whole range of Piedmontese grapes. One bottling that distinguishes Vajra’s lineup from others that have a similar repertoire is the Freisa “Kye,” bearing a generic Langhe appellation. Freisa is a workhorse grape more commonly used to make vermouth than table wine, and many producers vinify it in an off-dry or fizzy style to moderate its rusticity. But Vajra believes it is a close genetic ancestor of the noble Nebbiolo and is determined to make serious wines out of it. The winery confidently states that the Kye bottling can improve in bottle for a decade or more.

All of the wines in the tasting room struck me as solid efforts full of character, but I grew to like them even more in retrospect as we tasted many others over the course of the week. The Vajra style stuck in my head for its sense of freshness and liveliness, the basic wines redolent of bright berry and the long-aging bottlings having a similar sheen but more depth. Even the 2002 Barolo, from a vintage reputed to be disastrous in the region, acquitted itself well. Although it revealed more obvious wood than the 2001, the fruit seemed similarly healthy and balanced. The beautiful Stefania, who showed us around the property and poured the wines for us, insisted that this performance proved that 2002 was not disastrous for everyone, but I think instead it proves that it takes a challenging vintage for a great winemaker to really set himself apart. We only met the winemaker in question, proprietor Aldo Vajra, for a brief moment as he poked his nose into the tasting room. Then we wrapped up with a satisfying Moscato d’Asti, bought some Barolo and Freisa to carry home, and departed.

Later that evening we were looking for a simple, comfortable restaurant for dinner. After a few meals that were a touch too slick—the worst offender being an antipasta of rare, seared tuna which could have come from any of hundreds of trendy scenes in New York—we hoped to find a place a little more worn, preferably one that could plausibly be called a dinosaur. But several candidates were closed. In desperation we plugged some random restaurant addresses into the GPS machine and found ourselves in Priocca d’Alba. From the boarded-up windows facing the street, the restaurant Il Centro looked terrifyingly closed as well, but we rang the doorbell and were quickly ushered through a long corridor into a secluded dining room in the back of the building.

George Orwell wrote an essay about a pub called Moon Under Water, described evocatively as his ideal of what a pub should be. The catch is that it’s just his fantasy. Moon Under Water doesn’t really exist. I thought about this while hoping that Il Centro would not disappear like Shangri-la before we managed to return. It was the perfect meal in the perfect place at the perfect time. The kitchen served us the antipasti of the day, then such classic Piedmontese dishes as agnolotti and beef cheeks slowly braised in Barolo wine. Agnolotti look like simple egg tortellinis stuffed with meat, but behind it is hours and hours of preparation with no possible shortcuts. The stuffing was both meaty and seductively tender. The beef cheeks also took on a tenderness so fragile it would have been possible to slice through them with a plastic fork.

We drank Francesco Rinaldi 1985 Barolo Cannubio. People often talk about an epiphany wine that convinces them of its transcendental properties and the relative inferiorities of all other wines; this Cannubio, a historic vineyard known for its special qualities since the 1200s, was a bona fide Barolo epiphany. The only way I can describe this otherwordly wine is with the word black. It wasn’t the color that was black (actually a nice brick), nor the fruit (since none of the elements left of the wine had anything to do with fruit). Rather it was dark in the sense of being palpably sinister and it almost gave me the shivers. Fishing for metaphors to describe the sensation, the only thing I could think of was the explanation attributed to Frank Miller when asked what real-life cities corresponded to Metropolis (home of Superman) and Gotham City (home of Batman). Miller said he thought of Metropolis as New York during the day, Gotham City as New York at night. Francesco Rinaldi’s ’85 Cannubio is Barolo at night, a black-leather trenchcoat of a wine to wrap around your palate to a Nick Cave soundtrack while letting the Dark Side seduce you.

Our choice of the wine from a spectacular list featuring both traditional and barrique producers endeared us to the restaurant’s sommelier, who came from Japan but somehow developed a passion for Barbaresco and found himself in charge of a 15,000 bottle cellar on a hilltop in Piedmont. He gave us a tour of the underground cellar and pointed out a stash of ’76 Barbarescos from a little-known producer. He’s tasted a few of them but mentioned that whenever someone asks if it's going to be a good bottle, he says “Maybe.” Why? Well, he held up two bottles with identical fill levels to the light—one of them was almost clear, the other one still a dark ruby. You win some and lose some.

At one point during our dinner we were discussing the Rinaldi and he remarked on my gravitation towards the old-school producers. I asked him for a few recommendations on others to check out and he asked me what my favorites were. I mentioned the Rinaldis, G. Conterno, Cappellano, and then Vajra. “Vajra?” he said. “That’s Signore Vajra dining right over there.” And he pointed to the adjoining dining room and there—what are the odds of this?—was the gentleman who’d poked his nose into our tasting that morning, dining with his son and an Italian journalist. A few minutes later, having learned of this exchange, the Vajras dropped by our table, flattered by our visit, thankful for our appreciation of his wines, and profusely apologetic he wasn’t able to spend time with us personally. The sheer coincidence of it all was almost too much. Then again, that’s the sort of alignment of the stars that happens all the time at places like the Moon Under Water.

Dolce Far Niente

2006-09-20T23:10:00.000-05:00

The beauty of the Langhe region of northwest Italy defies description, even defies photography. The splendor can’t be framed or cropped or captured on film since the naked imagery is just that, just the skin. The terrain is better understood in the way the landscape unfurls in three dimensions, the undulating hills seeming to morph before the eyes and reveal a new aspect of itself around every bend. Vineyards drape the hillsides like someone ran a giant comb through the thickets; this is where the great wines of Barolo and Barbaresco are grown, along with Dolcetto, Barbera, Moscato, and Freisa.

Vineyard land is typically beautiful but monotonous. In the Langhe the monotony is disrupted by cultivated hazelnut groves, patches of still-untamed forest, and, more than anything, the sheer scale of it all. A gently sloping hill will suddenly become the ridge of an honest-to-God canyon, and to drive along it feels perilously like skating around the rim of a giant teacup. An observation terrace at the summit of La Morra reveals such a vast panorama of vineyards that it seems all of Burgundy’s Côte d’Or could fit inside a sliver of it.

We came to the Langhe for the wine, of course, and for the food that Matt Kramer calls “Italy’s Most Glorious Regional Table.” But more importantly we came for a taste of living at a more sedate pace than modernity customarily requires, what the Italians call dolce far niente. For a New Yorker, there is something deeply hypocritical about this. Like Groucho Marx’s refusal to join any club that would have him as a member, we relentlessly avoid any place we might find other tourists, and seek lodging in places so quaint they’d suffocate us if we ever lived there. The Cato Institute’s Tom Palmer could have been speaking about any nation of “Old Europe” when he told John Stossel: “What they’re doing is turning the whole country into a big theme park. You go to Franceland. You have the cheese, you have the wine, you look at some castles, it’s a lovely place to visit. But does much new come out of France anymore, is it dynamic? No.”

But in the Langhe, one of the most important new things to come out of recent years has been the rediscovery of the past. Traditional winegrowers have fomented a backlash against the techniques in vogue in the ’90s designed to make Barolo taste like it was grown in California. Interestingly, while the oenologically correct in the U.S. still insist that great wines can be made in each style, not much debate rages in the Langhe itself. The spoofulated wines that receive obscene point scores from American wine critics are offered at plonk prices in Piedmontese restaurants, whose proprietors breathe a sigh of relief and treat you with a whole new respect when you prove your worthiness by not ordering one. The Langhe is also the cradle of the Slow Food movement, which, rather than blowing up McDonald’s franchises like, um, the French, predicated itself on the idea that people wouldn’t choose to eat fast food when quality regional specialties were available to them. Slow Food’s founding fathers were radical Communists, but its agenda is deliciously reactionary. In the posts that follow, I’ll offer my account of our quest to feast on the reactionary and the delicious throughout the Langhe.

New Orleans, New and Old

2006-03-28T23:37:00.000-05:00

Sometimes a restaurant becomes so bound in history that it is more appropriately regarded as an institution or landmark than a restaurant as such, a mere place to dine. The myth, of course, sometimes looms larger than the actual place, but I think much of the appeal of these kinds of restaurants lies in their ability to become time capsules, impervious to changing trends and as comfortable as an old beloved sofa. We forgive the consequent quirks and take the rest for granted, putting off visiting when we know we should, like they’re old relatives, banking on the certainty that they’ll still be there for us, unchanged, when we find the time.

And then something happens that reminds us of the mortality of men and institutions alike. In New Orleans, it was a hurricane. And as the country took stock of its human toll, some also began wondering whether the city’s culture, its cuisine and music, would become casualties as well. Contemplating a world without Antoine’s, Galatoire’s, and Commander’s Palace (its slick outpost in Las Vegas doesn’t count) made me resolve to return to New Orleans once the city was ready. So last weekend I did.

Commander’s Palace remains closed, but many mainstays, especially around the French Quarter, have reopened. We dined at Antoine’s and Galatoire’s, temples of classic Creole cuisine situated steps from Bourbon Street reveling. To ask whether they have changed much since before the hurricane is to miss the point. The cooking itself has not changed much for generations. Nor have the dress codes. But there are signs they are still struggling to get it together. The biggest losses are the historic wine cellars. Antoine’s 186-foot-long corridor of a wine cellar is as empty and heartbreaking as a ghost town. The wines got too hot when the power went out, so the restaurant had no choice but to get rid of them. The limited selection of wines on offer now, at Antoine’s and elsewhere, probably reflects what could be acquired and assembled on short notice: mostly corporate brands, with an emphasis on California. But most of the changes wrought by the hurricane are changes in execution, not in tone. Restaurants are having trouble keeping staff, given the depletion of places in the city to live. So aspects of service and preparation are sometimes sloppy. Hospitality, though, never suffers, thanks in great part to the virtually life-tenured waiters.

The signature dishes at Antoine’s and Galatoire’s are nearly as iconic as the restaurants themselves: oysters Rockefeller, trout amandine, balloon-like fried potato soufflés. The recipe for oysters Rockefeller is a closely guarded secret of Antoine’s. After presenting the dish, our waiter challenged me to guess some of the ingredients composing the creamy green stuffing in which the oysters are baked. One hint he gave: it does not contain spinach, which many imitators have used in reverse-engineering the dark green hue. Indeed, the color seemed to derive from herbs, most prominently mint, and not vegetables, although I learned it did contain celery. I surmised little else except that the number-one ingredient must be butter (as befitting a dish allegedly named for the biggest tycoon of its era to signify its extreme richness—or perhaps because it’s the color of money).

But here’s the thing. Oysters Rockefeller is a legend without actually being very good. None of the oceanic freshness of an oyster can survive this bath in greens and butterfat. The dish is a living relic of an era when cuisine aspired to richness rather than purity and diners were more attentive to the grandiosity of the creation than the integrity of the ingredients: like the difference between beef Wellington and a simply seared, finely marbled prime steak.

And it’s not always clear where to draw the line between the historic, the traditional, and the canonical on one side, and the stale and dated on the other. Several dishes were characterized by the sort of flourishes that nowadays exists only in pretentious fakery on cruise ships. But sometimes the cliché is redeemed by the realization that the classic Creole kitchens serve up the real thing—such as Antoine’s dramatic baked Alaska for two or more, optionally topped with chocolate sauce. Anywhere else, it would be pure kitsch. But not here. Antoine’s has been baking it since long before cruise-ship waiters in clip-on bow-ties made a parade and a joke out of the dish. So if it seems kitschy, it’s your baggage and mine, not Antoine’s.

Sooner or later, New Orleans forces you to drop your baggage, and draws you in.

Megu-lomania

2006-02-27T00:12:00.000-05:00

To enter the restaurant Megu, you walk up a flight of stairs, turn around 180 degrees, then walk down a flight of stairs. Like a Disneyworld attraction that shepherds the line through a series of appropriately themed anterooms before finally penetrating the inner sanctum of the actual ride, the purpose of the stairwell about-face is to prime the crowd to enter a made-up world of fantasy and illusion. Restaurants practice lots of variations on this. A Michelin-starred oasis of haute cuisine might serve aperitifs and hors d’oeuvres in a comfortable lounge before leading guests to the dining room. At the other end of the spectrum, a place like Mars 2112 will give you a fake space-shuttle ride. In every respect, Megu is somewhere between the two—part virtuoso kitchen and part theme restaurant (though it stops short of employing ninjas).

Megu’s strong suit is artful presentation. A $28 appetizer of “kobe” beef sashimi comes served in an igloo dollhouse of finely sculpted crushed ice, landscaped with a bonsai cherry blossom in the front yard. Just about anything would be anticlimactic to taste after oohing and aahing at such an intricate piece of art, but the beef is pretty good, closer to otoro sashimi than steak in both texture and flavor. Many of Megu’s signature dishes consist of “kobe” beef, including $15 “kobe” filet and skirt skewers as well as a “kobe” beef châteaubriand ($180 a la carte but also included in more diminutive scale in the $150 “umami” tasting menu). I use scare quotes because the meat isn’t actually Kobe beef, which by definition is Wagyu beef from Kobe, Japan and ideally graded a ten on a ten-point Japanese marbling scale. Japanese beef is illegal to import to the United States, and Megu’s version comes from a ranch in Oregon which the waitstaff claims serves Megu exclusively. My Internet research discloses one Wagyu beef source in Oregon boasting that its meat grades between 5 and 8 on the Japanese scale. As one would expect, then, Megu’s beef does not have the buttery marbling of the best Wagyu beef, but it acquits itself well in certain dishes. The “kobe” beef sashimi is delicious, though it would have been perfectly adequate split four ways; the skewers succeed but aren’t perceptibly more flavorful or tender than any other decent prime meat; the flagship châteaubriand is a waste—no beef prized for its marbling should stake its reputation on filet mignon, the leanest and blandest cut of the cow.

Even so, having tasted about twenty-five different dishes, I can say that Megu’s food is wonderful. The problems are the theme-restaurant kitsch and inept service. The waitstaff, almost none of whom are Japanese and decked in wardrobes better suited to the most ridiculous runway models (or perhaps the waitstaff at the Fashion Café), give off the impression that this isn’t exactly their chosen vocation. The first time I dined at Megu, five of six members of the table ordered the tasting menu; the other, burdened by vegetarianism (a ruinous, cult-like dietary restriction), ordered an equivalent dollar value a la carte. No matter; as though to convey her inferior caste, her fancy chopsticks were immediately replaced with the cheap takeout version, and while the table’s dishes were served over a leisurely two or three hours, hers were dropped off nearly all at once. The next visit—in a party of two!—saw the waiter forget all but one of my date’s dishes. Once it became clear they had flown far off the radar, we inquired about one and were assured it was “in the oven.” Twenty minutes later, the dish in question was served, as intended, raw, to be grilled at the table. Oops. The others never arrived. The situation was so uproarious it was hard to hold a grudge.

That about sums up the environment at Megu. If I ran the Food Network, I’d think about licensing the Mystery Science Theater 3000 motif and spinning awful or pretentious dining experiences into comedic gold. If Crow T. Robot and Tom Servo were food critics, they’d have a blast at Megu, since even when it stumbles—especially when it stumbles—it never fails to entertain. The clientele, dense with scenesters, nouveau-riche guidos, and trophy mistresses, provides another amusing distraction, rendering the peoplewatching as compelling as the sushi chefs.

An ice sculpture of the Buddha—crafted anew each day—sits behind a candle in a fountain filled with flower petals in the center of the arena-like dining room. Over the course of the evening, the Buddha melts into a contorted, grotesque nothingness, spurred on by curious diners stopping by to ladle water over it in an eerie ritual. Even if one tried, it would be difficult to conceive of a more haunting contemporary rendition of the golden calf than this idol to materialism, which seems in context the very icon of extravagance. But the band plays on. Well, not a band, really, but an electronic techno dance soundtrack, played far too loudly to maintain the sense of serenity that even lesser cuisine deserves.

A Moveable Feast

2006-01-27T22:58:00.000-05:00

Last Friday was unseasonably warm; warm enough to dust off the Smokey Joe and feast the way God intended—gathered around an open flame and bloody carcass, flesh and bones sizzling as smoke fills the sky and womenfolk cower in holy dread. In the winter it is vital not to anger the gods and so they must be appeased by a worthy sacrifice. What animal is fit to ensnare to commemorate the lone grill-worthy evening of the season? The sabretooth tiger and woolly mammoth being extinct, I settled on steak. There are many fine beasts in these woods, from Lobel’s in the east to Citarella in the west and south, but for a warm winter night only the most prized and elusive prey will do. It requires a journey to a far-away settlement across icy waters, where the people speak a foreign tongue and dial a strange area code. But the gods are always pleased with Peter Luger.

The great steakhouse Peter Luger is justly revered across the world for its transcendental porterhouse steaks. They are worth the trip to Brooklyn, and they are even worth putting up with the California cough syrups that monopolize the wine list. Luger gets first pick of the best marbled short loins, and they age them until the texture turns to butter. Because the restaurant serves only porterhouses and the filet mignon side doesn’t run the whole way up the loin, they are left with a surplus of New York strip steaks. They occasionally sell them by mail order, and I wondered—is it possible to wander in to Peter Luger and walk out with some meat as though the world’s greatest steakhouse were my friendly neighborhood butcher shop? I called, and it is—sometimes. (I was advised always to call in advance to confirm.)

Within an hour, I had in my kitchen some very fine pieces of meat and was tempted to tear into one then and there, sashimi style, and wash it down with some blood-red wine that came from nowhere near California. Instead, I contented myself with constant canine-like sniffs of the meat. The long dry-aging process had given it a cornucopia of scents ranging from the funk of wild game to the peatiness of aged cheese. But the whole point, of course, was to grill, to sacrifice the tender animal flesh over an open flame.

If steak is the sacrifice, then Lobel’s grilling guide is the liturgy, containing every ritual and incantation necessary to grill the perfect steak. The goal is the ideal sear: the balance between a smoky, crispy, blackened shell and a tender interior still tinged red with blood. Lobel’s recommends grilling in two stages with a brush of olive oil to seal the crust. The flame and the rocks do the work. Each drip of fat to the coals conjures a demonic flame that sears and seals the meat, transmogrifying the animal flesh and infusing its smoky flavor. The result after just a few minutes is a fitting tribute to the gods, though this steak with 1998 La Tour Haut-Brion offers a sublime decadence our caveman ancestors never knew. The unseasonable winter night, warmed further by the fire, suggested the gods had smiled on New York for a little while, but the steak on my plate reminded me the gods are always smiling here.

Cult Wines, Qu’est-que-c’est?

2005-12-18T17:14:00.000-05:00

I don’t much like California wine and so have largely managed to avoid the greed, gluttony, covetousness, pride, and even lust that afflicts those in thrall to the phenomenon of the Napa Valley “cult” cabernet sauvignon. The cult wines are reputed to be tremendous wines—rich, dense, and almost soupy. Wines in that style are easy to find in all corners of the earth, but Napa’s renditions have the added cachet of exclusivity. Try to buy one, and the likely response is “No soup for you!”

There are two major schools of thought on the merits of these wines. Their defenders often concede the wines’ extreme personalities but argue they are every bit as profound as top Bordeaux, except that they show all their charms when still young and so are preferable to Bordeaux because they don’t require patience or careful cellaring. Their detractors often concede the wines’ profundity but argue they are so intense, or so dolled up by oak or overripeness, that they are neither complementary to food nor pleasurable to drink.

Or, to put it another way, are European wines like the painting on the left, and American wines like the painting on the right?

The former arguably requires more connoisseurship to appreciate, but the latter is just plain dazzling. It’s almost hard to imagine taking in all those bold colors and not finding yourself in a good mood.

Of course this analogy smacks of condescension, since there are plenty of people with impeccable connoisseurship in wine who understand both styles and still prefer the New World’s, just as there are eminent art historians who dislike the Mona Lisa. But elitist or not, the analogy is often accurate. The difference between a traditional Burgundy and, say, a Loring Wine Co. pinot noir is almost exactly like the difference between the Leonardo and the Peter Max.

I expected the same would hold true for the Napa cult wines vis-à-vis their Bordeaux predecessors. At the prices they sell for, though, I had no designs on ever buying a bottle to find out, until I received an invitation to a theme dinner at which no fewer than ten such wines would be poured. I justified the tariff for my attendance as a win-win. Either I would taste some great wines, or see that the emperor had no clothes and never squander my curiosity (or money) on a hyped Napa wine again. The roster at the dinner included most of the big names, including Harlan Estate, Grace Family Vineyard, Araujo Estate’s Eisele Vineyard, and Colgin’s Herb Lamb Vineyard.

As it turned out, they were not cartoons. They were neither dazzling nor bold. Some were intense, but not freakishly or prodigiously so; none were weightier than a standard “Super Tuscan” or, for that matter, any number of less august wines from California. Although large-scaled, they certainly did not have the palate-slathering richness that makes many people swoon over the mega-wine style, even as a few of the wines had clearly leaned on their oak to impart a sweet chocolate inflection to the fruit. Other wines were simply generic, with very little to say about them other than that they taste essentially how one might expect a cabernet sauvignon to taste, not noticeably dolled up but not seductive, either. In fact, some were every bit as backwards and austere as Bordeaux can be. Not insignificantly, several of the wines were overtly flawed, with volatile hairspray and aerosol scents surfacing prominently in the ’94 Araujo, ’97 Colgin, and ’97 Harlan; the Harlan also featured a strong stench of band-aids commonly attributed to brettanomyces contamination.

It’s interesting that the richness, seductiveness, and precociousness for which the wines are most often praised, and the cartoonish lack of subtlety for which they are most often disparaged, all failed to manifest themselves. The difference between great Bordeaux and these Napa cult wines was not like the difference between the Mona Lisa and a Pop Art caricature of it. But I can’t say my ultimate verdict was any more flattering. Though the wines were not caricatures of Bordeaux, they still did not approach Bordeaux in class or refinement. And while both types of wines share many constituent elements in common, none of the cult wines channeled those elements into the same harmoniousness and seamless composition that Bordeaux routinely offers. Instead of caricatures, they seemed instead like sloppy reproductions—following similar lines but neither masterful nor dazzling. There will be no more soup for me.

Market Watch, Vol. 1: Beaune

2005-12-08T22:16:00.000-05:00