Rod Smith

List-O-Mania

2011-10-28T19:13:00Z

Have been thinking about wine lists lately.

My wife rolls her eyes when I ask for the wine list. Not because she thinks I might spend too much (she already knows that!) but because she’ll be deprived of my sparkling conversation while I try to make sense of the offerings, with two things in mind. Numero uno, obviously: is there anything we might want to drink? Numero two-o, with more at stake: is there an intelligent entity behind the list, an actual author, with a point of view on the restaurant’s cuisine and/or wine in general?

Every wine list tells a story, and I’m an avid reader. It doesn’t necessarily need a beginning, middle and end. Often it’s more impressionistic, the way a painting or photograph communicates all at once, the image conveying a context and back-story, as well. (And yes, she likes to read them too, once I locate the “good parts.”)

Most often, the story is about a proprietor who doesn’t understand wine but knows it’s supposed to be part of the restaurant’s product. That kind of cluelessness frequently results in a kitchen sink compendium that’s more like a wine shop in print than an astute selection complementing the comestibles at hand.

Certainly, the majority of lists are merely serviceable, presenting a lineup of the usual suspects without particular cohesion or bias. Yet the unlikeliest establishments may offer a list with a personality behind it.

Not always a good thing, of course. We’ve all shaken our heads over the list aimed at a pretentious clientele that drinks labels and scores. “Look, I get allocations of Shrader and Marcassin—bow and tremble, unworthy geek!” Yet a list can be a respectable cash machine without the score-whores and hefty markup. For example, it may earnestly represent the tried-and-true classics, or offer an insightful geography lesson with tasty illustrations. Such a list may be curated like a coffee-table book or even an art exhibit, each carefully-considered wine a statement on its own and part of a whole aesthetic.

Sometimes I glance at a wine list and get sucked in immediately. Again, it’s like a good book, where you read the first sentence and suddenly find yourself fifty pages in, thinking you should turn out the light and get some sleep, but you don’t.

That’s what I felt like one evening at Cotogna in San Francisco. I’m told I kind of dropped out of our group for ten minutes or so, then interrupted a perfectly sociable conversation to start blurting names of wines I wanted to try. David Lynch’s selections and descriptions—and, yes, the remarkable concept, every bottle $40 and each to be had by the glass for $10—had me like the first page of Game of Thrones.

Then I read David’s essay on wine lists in the September Bon Apetit (“Goodbye, Big Fat Wine List”). Writing about the trend away from Grand Award-type tomes toward leaner, hipper missives addressing the moment at hand, he concludes by saying, “It may be a book, but it doesn’t tell a story.” My kind of som! And that made me wonder what other sommelliers think about the philosophy and practice of wine list authorship.

Not that a more substantial list is de facto boring. I’ve enjoyed Paul Greico’s rather literary list lists for Hearth and Terroir in NYC, for example. While some diners might cringe at so much information, I’ve gotta love a som who cares enough to tell me, “Many moons ago, monks cut a road through the vineyard, following a differential soil line (part of explaining a Riesling Smaragd, Weissenkirchen Klaus, Prager, 2007, Wachau).

Are you giving the punters what they think they want (what they expect or are used to) or trying to engage their inner Dionysus? Do you specialize in a grape, region, or style? Is a list just a retail shelf in print, or a gateway to exploration and discovery?

Parallel Paradigms?

2009-10-21T14:03:00Z

From where I sit the wine world, especially in California, went totally crazy in the 1990s, to the point where it became rather bizarre to me. In retrospect it seems like that might have been part of a general insanity that led inexorably to where we are today. Now, as we seem to be regaining our collective senses, I’m wondering where wine sensibility might be headed.

That’s not so much a question as a group of related inquiries.

They say the economy is turning around, and every little thing’s going to be alright. Sitting here in limbo with a wine glass in my hand, I’m wondering whether the wine world will simply take up where it left off, or change course. Is it possible that the interim has fostered changes in attitude, if not latitude?

When erstwhile wine buyers again have a pair of dimes to rub together, what kind of wines will they buy—and how will that affect a) the way wines are produced, and/or b) the standards by which wines are judged?

We all know two general types of people in the wine world: those who go for the oppulent, high-alcohol wines that have proliferated over the last decade or so, particularly in New World wine regions such as South Australia and California, and those who prefer the classical European model of expressive regional wines with moderate alcohol. Oddly (or perhaps not, considering that we’re dealing with taste), the two preferences don’t often coexist on the same palate.

To the former group, the classical model is simply feeble and insubstantial, while the classicists consider high-octane fruit bombs vulgur and grotesque. The comparison often draws gender-based analogies, but I’m not sure “masculine” vs. “feminine” really encompasses the divide. We’ve all had balls-out, bare-knuckled northern Rhones that would make a Ramey Syrah look like a little old lady despite less alcohol and density. It might be better to characterize the two styles as different types of the same thing. Rather than apples and oranges, Fujis and Gravensteins, Valencias and Navels. Or athletes, say a weightlifter vs. a triathalete, or motorcycles, say a bored-out Harley vs. a BMW touring bike. Or even two takes on the same song—Willie singing “Moonlight in Vermont” vs. Ella & Louis.

In any case, the two types tend not to coexist so much in the Old World, except as manifestations of regional climate (Burgundies tend to be lighter than Alentejo wines, ne c’est pas?). But they definitely co-haibt the New, especially in California. Look, for example, at highly-acclaimed pinots from Kosta-Browne and Brewer-Clifton (hmm, do hyphens tell us anything about style?) next to equally praised pinots from Copain and Littorai.

Are we looking at two different styles of wine—or two different concepts of wine? I’ve come to think it’s the latter: two different paradigms. Parallel universes.

And more and more, I’m thinking that in the last decade or so there may have been a permanent, or at least long-term schism between two primary wine sensibilities in California. I might say the same about Oregon and Washington, although each would require a specific discussion, since I believe we’re past the point where every West Coast wine region could be seen as an extension of California.

To me, the primary point of departure is regionality, the complex identity and image of a place expressed in the way grapes are grown and wine made (manipulation, anyone?). That reflects an essential cultural value that pervades the highly-evolved European wine culture but is merely a subset of the Wine World’s still-rudimentary wine industry.

It’s interesting in this context to note that through this recession the steadiest-selling wines (at retail, anyway) are reportedly the moderately-priced table wines with sensory profiles more akin to traditional table wine (dry, fruity but not ballistically so, ca. 12.5 alcohol) than the ultra-ripe blockbusters populating the higher price points. Might this reset the mass taste so that the high-octane wines begin to seem extreme? As more discretionary income comes into play, might those who return to upscale buying look for more nuanced, expressive high-end table wines rather than syrupy booze?

Will fine wine in the New World, particularly California and Australia, continue to trend toward the current second-party-validation cycle (popular taste influences scores, while scores influence taste)? Will the fruitbomb paradigm continue to co-exist with the classical model, or even gradually oust it? Or will bigger-is-better gradually fade away as the new American wino becomes more sophisticated?

It’s fun to speculate, although it doesn’t matter a whole lot—when the future finally gets here, all will be revealed.

THE SEVEN AGES OF WINE

2009-09-15T18:14:00Z

Back again, with pleasure. I enjoyed the discussion of manipulation, although I feel we barely scratched the surface of perhaps the most vital topic of the moment and would like to take it up again at some point. Meanwhile, have been pondering another aspect of our favorite subject.

I recently braved spiders and bats to get a grip on the shamble of crates and loose glass I call a wine cellar. By the time I gave up I’d unearthed a couple of cases worth of orphan bottles, along with some wines I bought in flusher times and haven’t tasted for awhile. I’ve been opening them at random, and it’s been pretty interesting.

For example, a ’78 Summit Lake Zin was at the end of the line, yet still extremely enjoyable. It was like looking at something through the long end of the telescope. It was smaller than it had been, but not distorted—it still looked like itself. The plump and luscious fruit I remember from the wine’s youth (and mine) had fallen away to reveal its essential elements: real terroir, minerality, soil, echoes of ripe grapes.

Was it nearly a ghost after 31 years? Most definitely. Had it lost its essential beauty? Definitely not. Let’s fall back on the old movie star analogy. Paul Newman in his 70s, selling cookies and salad dressing, did not look exactly like Butch Cassidy or Hud. But he still looked great, like a good-looking old man who had been extraordinarily handsome in youth. More to the point, the elements of his youthful beauty were still apparent. He looked a lot like the young Paul Newman, only older. Same with the ’78 Summit Lake.

I had a similar experience a few years ago with a 1921 Pol Roger. It was an incredible Champagne experience despite the fact, or perhaps because, it gave up its ghost within minutes. Why drink a doddering old Champagne when a young one is so wonderful? To quote my own column in the LA Times, “It was not a young wine, no longer fresh. But it was alive, with a measured effervescence and a taut, if somewhat ethereal focus. Even beneath the descending weight of its age, evident in the tawny gold hue and rich toasted nut aromas and flavors, it was brilliant, razor-sharp, balanced on a pinpoint. The glass exuded dignity, wisdom, and a kind of autumnal sadness. We were transported; discussion could wait.” (Read the whole column here if you have nothing better to do: http://articles.latimes.com/2000/jan/19/food/fo-55273 )

Closer to home, I was happily surprised by a Rodney Strong Zinfandel, Knotty Vines 2000, Sonoma County. Not a wine I would expect to age in an interesting way, and yet it was wonderful, fresh yet mellowed in the same way that a dry-aged Porterhouse is wonderful—every bit itself, and itself intrinsically fine, yet altered by time. On the other hand, Silver Pinot Noir, Lake Marie Vineyard 2001 (Santa Barbara) seemed promising but turned out to be oddly flat and syrupy, with a remote taste of chlorine (from watering back with city water, perhaps?)

And brace yourselves for my tasting notes on ’95 Lynch-Bages: “Perfect Bordeaux, let’s grill lamb tonight.”

All that got me thinking about aging: how and why wines age, whether there’s any virtue in a wine that age has rendered more interesting but perhaps not more enjoyable, whether ageworthiness indicates an ability to maintain youthful characteristics for a long time or a mystical capacity for metamorphosis, and whether anyone cares about aging wines anymore.

When I first got involved with wine, the second thing that attracted me (after the gleaming allure of regional typicity and, dare I say it, terroir) was the idea that wine is a living thing with a life of its own.

As luck would have it, my descent into winedom coincided with my brief acting career, and good ol’ Shakespeare provided plenty of fodder for my new fascination. During one memorable run of Henry IV, Part 2, in which I played Falstaff, the stage manager (a fellow novice wine geek) filled my prop flask with a different mystery wine each night, which culminated in my spraying the shocked front row with Ridge Zin during a particularlarly passionate reading of the line, “If I had a thousand sons, the first human principle I would teach them should be to foreswear thin potations, and to addict themselves to sack!”

More to the point, the Bard gave me metaphorical language for what I percieved as wine’s most mystical property, its transmutation in the bottle over time. When I played Jacques in Love’s Labor Lost, I delivered the “Seven Ages of Man” soliloquy while visualizing Chateau Latour ’67, which was then just shy of ten years old and, I thought, at the Lover age, “sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad made to his mistress’ brow.”

That early gift keeps giving. Just the other night we drank a ’93 Pommard-Pezerolles (Ballot-Millot) and I found myself thinking of Ariel’s song, “of his bones are coral made, those are pearls that were his eyes, nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea change, into something rich and strange.” (A positive comment, by the way.)

The thing is, that kind of experience seems to have gone by the wayside in recent years. I frequently hear ***-swinging wine geeks brag about old wines they’ve had, and the observation is almost always to the effect that the wine was either “still drinkable” or “over the hill.” Several times recently I’ve tried to engage people at dinner parties on the subject of an older wine being poured, and it’s been frustrating because there hasn’t seemed to be any interest in describing the experience of the wine. It’s always devolved to how it competes with other wines in the longevity department. Has anyone else had a similar—or opposite—experience?

I find myself thinking that what’s been lost is not so much an ability to percieve the unique beauty of a fine wine in different phases of its life, but the ability to think about and talk about it.

It also strikes me that ageability is no longer as important as it once was. Has there been a sea change in the vinous paradigm, equivalent, say, to the relatively new vogue for syrupy, high-alcohol wines (which, to my taste, don’t so much age as decay)? As we know, most wine is consumed relatively soon after it’s made. A lot of the manipulations we discussed in the last thread are aimed at early drinkability. And the all-important scores are generally obtained by wines that grab the taster’s attention upon commercial release, fresh out of a newly-opened bottle or even a barrel.

So, I’m curious. Is age-worthiness still a viable value? And what wines currently exemplify that?

Also, what do you think happens to a wine as it ages? How does a Mosel or Eden Valley riesling age, compared to a Sancerre or a Mersault? What about Bordeaux, and how does that compare to a Napa Valley cabernet?

And would it be fair to paraphrase Jacques--“And one wine in its time plays many parts, its acts being seven ages?”

The Elephant in the Cellar

2009-08-03T18:13:00Z

I’ve enjoyed the Syrah discussion, and am pleased to be asked back for another round. This time, I want to see what the nation’s foremost wine geeks think about an issue that I think is vitally important but never seems to be addressed much beyond eye-rolling shrugs and head shaking.

This elephant in the room—or, if you will, the wine cellar—is viticultural and winemaking practices that subvertly change the nature of wines being marketed as honest expressions of special vineyards.

Here’s where I come from, as simply as I can state it. I started drinking wine for the obvious reasons, long before I got excited about it. What was it that finally engaged me to the point where I’ve now spent thirty-odd years thinking about—no, pondering wine on a daily basis? In a word, truth and beauty (okay, two words, but I’ve always thought they were synonymous).

Most of you will recognize the script: young guy goes to Europe and discovers that each mystical, magical place has its own drinkable essence called wine. This local wine contains the landscape, architecture, culture, and everything else that gives a sense of place. Plus you get a buzz, especially helpful when you decide to, say, sit in a café across from Rouen Cathedral for an entire day to experience the changing light on that iconic façade as recorded by Claude Monet in his amazing 31-painting series.

Honestly, I’ve long since forgotten what wines I drank that day, if I ever knew; they were mostly fresh, local quaffers served proudly in carafes. But I can still clearly remember what some of them tasted like. Ditto the anonymous riesling I drank after hiking along the Mosel near Trier, and the plump, juicy red in that Alentejo hill town. And couldn’t we all go on and on in that vein? (And isn’t it fun to open a few bottles and trade the actual stories?)

My point is that it’s been at least 10 years since I’ve been confident that I was getting that kind of signal impression from wines of the New World, especially California. Truth be known, I’ve come to doubt the truth and beauty quotient of modern European wines, as well.

I’ve put it in terms of confidence because it’s become very difficult to know for sure whether a given wine is telling a real story about a real place, or a fiction that may be based on actual events yet has been cleverly enhanced to be what the producer thinks I want to taste or would be willing to pay for. For example, a cult-stature Pinot Noir which I raved about to anyone who would listen before being told by an informant in a commercial lab that the producer had doctored the wine with Mega Purple, supposedly to make up for “deficiencies” in the fruit. I wasn’t just embarrassed. I felt betrayed.

In fact, I’ve come to suspect that California, in particular, is increasingly a bottled lie. Marketing campaigns that represent wines as pure expressions of special sites are quite often overtly deceitful. I believe that many wines that are represented as pure expressions of exalted sites are concocted, that is, heavily engineered to hit a desired note. And it’s not that I think that every wine has to be from a single block of vines, produced without any technique whatsoever. I don’t doubt that a great winemaker is like the resourceful teacher who knows how to help a child reach her full potential. But plastic surgery? C’mon. Nor do I have a problem with a good appellation or AVA wine. I just want to know that I’m tasting the true essence of grapes grown in a particular place or places.

Most of you are familiar with consulting outfits like Enologix, a firm that helps wineries engineer their wines to get high scores (and actually guarantees higher scores). And many of you either make wine yourselves or have made a point of getting hands-on experience in vineyards and wineries. So I’m not here to break any shocking news, nor to lecture or instruct. My point, rather, is to try to move the conversation toward an objective examination of what a fine is, what it should be, and how various viticultural and winemaking techniques may support or contradict a wine’s stature. And please note that I’m deliberately excluding mass-market table wines from the discussion, although I believe, ironically, that most of them are relatively non-manipulated for economic rather than ethical reasons. Let’s focus on wine that expensive because it’s ostensibly a remarkable manifestation of a given summer in a certain place.

My position going in is that many of the currently accepted winemaking practices (particularly additions such as acid, water, enzymes, tannin, concentrate, etc.) compromise the integrity of the fruit itself, and therefore defeat the ideal of fine wine. They also effectively insult the producers who endeavor to embrace the ideal without cheating. The contrarian might say, “Hey, if Mega Purple is used correctly, not even the most experienced taster can spot it.” Well, maybe not. But is that the point? Hey, if Barry Bonds hits the ball out of the park, who can deny that the ball actually did leave the park? (Yes, yes, I’ve spent long evenings with my redneck wine-geek friends chewing on topics like HGH, Photo Shop, Dolby sound, computers in academics, you name it.)

Other practices (such as mechanical de-alcoholization, reverse osmos, and various applications of oak essence) seem to me in poor taste, or contrary to the spirit of fine wine, without necessarily triggering my “foul!” alarm. Still others, including chapitalization, irrigation, temperature-controlled fermentation and sterile filtration, may be considered unacceptable manipulations by some yet are already established beyond the point of practical debate.

And then there’s the whole yeast thing—yikes, where do we start with that?

So: Truth and beauty versus (or enhanced by) Voodoo vinemaking. Any thoughts?

So, Syrah?

2009-06-10T13:19:00Z

SO WHAT’S UP W/SYRAH?

I’m pleased to have a guest spot on this site. Sommeliers have become a powerful positive force in the wine world and I’m glad to participate in your discourse.

I’ve been thinking about California Syrah lately, and how disappointing it’s been. More than two decades ago it was so up-and-coming—but it never really got here. The grape and its wines are wine royalty, yet few California producers hang their hats on it, and fewer still have made consistently strong showings.

I remember when the first “true” Syrahs (as opposed to Petite Sirah or whatever) came out of the gate in the early 1980s. It was really exciting, to a new generation of wine geeks at least. We’d plan dinner parties around new releases from Duxoup or Joseph Phelps. (Fred Dame—do you remember how intense that early Syrah scene was?) In fact, it was Joe Phelps, the inveterate Rhone ranger, who established our first significant true Syrah plantings.

Within a few vintages there were enough varietal Syrahs on the market to mount meaningful comparative tastings. Those early wines were exciting, not just as novelties but as credible echoes of the Rhone. I was particularly interested because I’d been getting Syrah religion at the source in Rhone caves with vignerons like Clape, Guigal, and Jaboulet, tasting with the Druids (that’s how it felt, anyway) through barrels of wine that clearly spoke of varying terroirs and vintages. If California could produce expressive Syrahs like that, I thought, we might actually have a new dimension in California wine.

Then we all watched in horror as the early promise—of a new tool for exploring and expressing different terroirs in our magnificent coastal and mountain terrains—was broken by a flood of rather syrupy, high-octane red wine labeled Syrah for no apparent reason. Many strike me as little more than grape-flavored booze. Perhaps not coincidentally, I’m hearing reports from the field that Syrah is increasingly a tough sell. (Note: I feel like something similar has happened in eastern Washington, although that’s probably a topic for another post.)

Can we count the paving stones on the downward path? Start with indiscriminate planting, overcropping, and excessive manipulation—particularly oak overkill. (Why do so many California winemakers think they have to make Napa Valley cabernet out of every grape variety?) I’m aware through contacts in various cellars that quite a number of highly-regarded winemakers freely doctor their wines with enzymes, tannin, concentrate, etcetera (all of which I consider substance abuse). And of course, these days it’s pretty par for the course to pick the grapes overripe and then add acid and water, which is like trying to balance a table by sawing a little off this leg and a little off that. And then there’s what I consider excessive ripeness. I’ve heard several winemakers say, “Twenty-six brix is the new twenty-four!” Personally, I liked the old twenty-four. If the variety matches the site and the vines are balanced, the grapes will be plenty ripe and the wine won’t taste like a mess of mismatched adjectives.

Voila--there in my glass the other night was an Arnot-Roberts Syrah (Clary Vineyard ’06). It had that whole peppery, leathery, minerally thing going on, intense but not dense, with cut-glass definition and brisk natural acidity that cut right through my friend Sebastian’s pork rillette. All at just 13 percent alcohol, without de-boozing. And I thought of other classically-styled Syrahs I’ve enjoyed recently, from Dehlinger, Edmunds St. John, and the like. I wonder whether Syrahs like that will always be anomalous, or if they finally signal a trend toward the coalescence of some Syrah ideal?

So where’s it all going? Will California Syrah producers continue following the score-mongers toward one size (extra large) fits all? Or will they rally around nuanced expression and distinctive character, perhaps leading the way toward the paradigm shift so many of us have been hoping for?