Steven Grubbs

10 Things I Learned By Working La Paulée de New York

2015-03-12T11:44:00Z

Last week, I had my second experience working La Paulée, the annual Burgundy festival organized by sommelier Daniel Johnnes. The Paulée now alternates location each year between San Francisco and New York, and—having worked in San Francisco last February—I was curious to see what small bits of Burgundy wisdom the reputedly bigger, wilder, even-more-gratuitous iteration in New York might be able to supply. Here is a sampling:

1. La Paulée didn’t start with Daniel Johnnes.

The roots of the festival exist with the old, common practice of harvest celebrations in France, and in Burgundy the idea took the form of “three glorious days”—Les Trois Glorieuses—in the third weekend of November, with Saturday being a banquet hosted by the Confrerie des Chevaliers du Tastevin, Sunday an auction at the Hotel-Dieu in Beaune, and Monday an opulent lunch at the Château de Meursault. The latter was the party in its original form—La Paulée de Meursault. Winemaking great Jules Lafon officially began handling the event in 1923, and it became a yearly tradition, with vignerons, workers, and Burgundy fanatics coming together, all bringing loads of wine, and making a melee of the thing. Daniel’s version started in 2000 as tribute to the one in Meursault, and each year it serves as a high-water mark for serious eating and drinking.

2. There have been three basic stages for America’s experience with Burgundy producers.

Smaller specialized dinners and tastings happen all week during the Paulée, but the first event bringing the core team of traveling sommeliers together with their New York counterparts was on Thursday evening, at the Standard Hotel adjacent to the West Side’s Highline. Last year was a similar routine, the weekend kicking off with a pretty riveting lecture by Volnay hero Guillaume d’Angerville, during which he spoke at length about the causes of the extreme drops in yield over the last few vintages, as well as the various attempts to solve them (one of which included tales of some manner of dust cannon designed to block the creation of large hailstones by abundantly providing a smaller base around which the stones might form—thereby making lots of harmless hail instead a short fusillade of the really damaging stuff).

This year, the opening lecture and tasting was delivered by Charles van Canneyt of Domaine Hudelot-Nöellat. Whereas Guillaume d’Angerville cut the ideal silhouette of the aging gentleman—slender, tall, and wool-suited; so much resembling actor Ian McKellan that in my memory the image of a resonant, coiffed Magneto has now entirely replaced the real man—instead, young Charles van Canneyt gave the impression of a vigneron still working into the meat of the role. Charles took over for his grandfather, Alain Hudelot, in 2008, making him only the second generation for the surprisingly young domaine, which was created in 1964 by the marriage of Alain to a granddaughter of Charles Nöellat. An intense, drawn-out family dispute ensued over both her dowry and the distribution of some of Charles Nöellat’s prized holdings around the Côte de Nuits, particularly those in Nuits-Saint-Georges and Vosne-Romanée (in no minor part involving rows of Richebourg and Romanée-Saint-Vivant). By 1978, however, the dispute was resolved and the domaine was ready to fill out an identity.

That tale of family wrangling is a common one in Burgundy, as noted by co-panelist Doug Barzelay, who also introduced Hudelot-Nöellat as an example of the third wave of very fine domaines that have made their way to US market. Initially, most of these small growers’ work was absorbed into the larger négociants, and the négociants dominated what was available until roughly the middle part of last century, when really just a handful of smaller domaines—those of Michel Lafarge, Roumier, Mugneret, and the aforementioned d’Angerville—were able to break out from négociant domination and gained renown on their own. Hudelot-Nöellat is a member of the larger group that followed in their wake.

It is a lesson that while the families of Burgundy appear quite eternal (the Hudelots have been in Chambolle for many generations, just as the Nöellats have in Vosne), many of the domaines we venerate as classics are actually temporary beings, entities undergoing constant change, and in their current state might be younger, less concrete than one might think.

3. Some producers are very good at surfing through vintage weirdness.

On Friday, at Colicchio & Sons, a restaurant just two cracked, ice-wrinkled blocks up and over from The Standard Hotel, I was assigned to pour for the second shift of The Verticals Tasting. The “vertical” implied here tends not to be interpreted all that strictly. The vintages presented differ from producer to producer, and they rarely follow in successive order. For instance, Chisa Bize of Domaine Simon Bize presented at ten-year intervals: 1988, 1998, and 2008; and the Lafarges poured 2005, 2007, and 2009 versions of their Volnay 1er Cru “Les Caillerets.”

The pressure created by Burgundy’s disastrous yields in the last few vintages had clearly begun to weigh on the minds of many producers, with many including either difficult-to-sell vintages (like 2003) or fairly abundant ones (like 2009) in their lineup, regardless of how they were showing (the 2003s largely under-furnished with acidity; the 2009s maintaining their ongoing flirtation with being a little mute). My assignment was the table of Domaine Lignier-Michelot, the less-famous cousin domaine to that of Hubert Lignier. Virgile Lignier had made two gutsy selections of his Morey St. Denis 1er Cru “Faconnieres”—2004 and 2005 (they were followed neatly by 2006). As you may know, the reds from Burgundy in 2004 have gained a reputation for being rife with green “potting soil” aromas and flavors, and the 2005s—a vintage of stout, hunkered wines—have served as the highest examples of Burgundy’s capacity to hibernate entirely.

“I wanted to show that it was still possible to make a good 2004,” Virgile told one taster. He explained that meticulous selection of individual berries at the sorting table made the difference in that particular wine—he discarded thirty percent of the fruit that made it onto the table. The wine was among the best 2004s I’ve tasted, lean but remarkably pure compared to most examples of the vintage. It didn’t stop a handful of tasters—most of whom were sommeliers—from writing the wine off as “hmph…2004.”

The 2005—most examples of which have been relative black holes (and here showing from magnum, no less)—surprised even Virgile. Virtually the only thing he said to me the entire time we poured together was, with the standard wan shrug of a vigneron, “The 2005, it is pretty good.” With that also came a subtle, happy bounce of his head.

4. Strangely, sommeliers are now tracked by their own press.

There was a woman at the verticals tasting who is writing a book about sommeliers. A taster alongside her took a stab at the title: “It’s Rise of the Sommeliers, right?” to which she replied, “Yeah, something like that,” with shades of misgiving. I would guess her hesitation had to do with the way the fellow said it, a tone that subtly endowed the title with an incidental image of android wine experts machine-gunning the planet.

5. New York sommeliers have a collective experience of great producers and vintages that never fails to be impressive.

While a few of the sommeliers working the Paulée—myself included—were visiting from far-flung places, the overwhelming majority had been sampled from New York City’s best restaurants, and while it goes without saying that New York is an exceptional place with an unusually gifted wine marketplace, it’s worth noting that something incredible is observable within the sommelier community of that town.

I’d gone to dinner with a handful of sommeliers, half of which work in New York City. I was struck by the their easy navigation of not only the names and styles of premium producers, but also of aged examples of the wines.

“Yeah, the ’90 is good, but the ’91 is showing better. I’d rather have that for the money,” one of them said, referring to the Cote-Rotie wines of Gentaz-Dervieux, an extremely rare and deeply revered producer, the flow of which stopped over two decades ago, when Marius Gentaz retired.

“Yeah the ’91 is better,” confirmed another.

The fact that two people around the same table had ever even tasted Gentaz was unlikely, but the notion that this was a table where people could compare various vintages of one of the world’s rarest wines—and with authority—demonstrates an obviously amazing level of access to prized bottles, but moreover that discussion serves as a glimpse into the way a collective instinct has developed in that community. Those sommeliers work in such proximity and with such discuss-able bottles that the flow of information is non-stop, and word travels fast.

The effect is the creation of what feels like a kind of collective New York somm-brain that is active as its own cultural phenomenon in that city. It is a kind of repository of information on a wonderful, teeming universe of the great, classic producers and how their wines from an array of deep vintages are currently performing. Those sommeliers have access to these wines by virtue of the simple fact that they are actually able to sell them. The demand exists—as does the means and willingness to pay for it. Whether that sommelier community’s own enthusiasm and skill created that demand, or whether the demand—and all of its concomitant bonuses of tasting, allocation, etc.—gave rise to their ilk, one cannot really tell. It’s rather chicken-egg.

6. When it comes to the nuts and bolts of service, even a roomful of the best sommeliers in the world still need to be told to do the sensible thing.

Saturday brought the two major events of the weekend, a grand tasting of the 2012 vintage followed by the Gala Dinner, an intense production augmented by a sizable disco ball, a stage, and a concert-scale PA system cued up with a live, bassy version of “Sympathy For the Devil.”

Between the two events, our charge was to organize and polish a staggering amount of glassware. The third wave of glasses that came out had just been washed, and they—along with the racks—were dripping wet. A small mob of sommeliers descended upon them with cloths.

Having no empty racks, and very little handy table space, we began putting the newly polished glasses back into the slots we pulled them from. This seemed a little weird, because the racks themselves were wet, but that felt like a necessary evil.

“You can’t just put them back in! These racks are soaking wet!” The voice was that of Rajat Parr. It was the second time I’d seen him call out a really obvious technical mistake. “You have to dry the inside of the racks and then put them back in.”

What makes a truly great sommelier? Well, for one, it is the insight to see and execute what will enable great service. In other words, just doing what makes sense.

7. Michel Lafarge now has 65 vintages under his belt.

At the beginning of the Gala Dinner, having hefted a Salmanazar all the way from rear of the room to the center of the spotlighted stage, the disco ball casting white dots around the otherwise darkened room, Daniel Johnnes paid glittery tribute to one of the more compelling faces in the room—that of Michel Lafarge. Now hunched and snowy-haired, thick with age and many decades of vineyard work, Lafarge seems to physically carry those vintages in his person, and the last few have surely not been easy. The Lafarges lost 80% of production to hail and rot in 2012. At the grand 2012 tasting, they had to show 2011 instead. From the stage, Daniel said his congratulations, the spotlight moved upon Michel, and there was raucous, unrelenting applause.

8. Faiveley makes a Musigny that is among Burgundy’s most rare bottles.

The collectors who attend the Gala Dinner end up supplying most of the wines. It is an epic BYOB. Each table is also dotted with one or two vignerons, and these usually bring special bottles of their own, too. One of the vignerons at my team’s table was Erwan Faiveley, and he had brought something very special: a bottle of his family’s Musigny. While Faiveley might usually be considered a fairly large, somewhat ubiquitous domaine, their Musigny holding is the smallest in the Grand Cru—roughly 400 vines yielding just a half-barrel of wine. The aging barrel is custom-made by François Frères, and the vinification is intimate: 7-9 buckets of fruit, each layered with dry ice, foot-trod, and slow-fermented. Each vintage, Faiveley produces between 150 and 170 bottles of the wine. Our bottle was number 11 of vintage 1999. It even had sommeliers Patrick Cappiello and David Gordon—our grizzled veteran leaders—scrambling for a taste.

9. If you work with older bottles, it’s really necessary to own the following two tools:

This is the Durand. It combines the conventional corkscrew worm with an Ah-so. You’ll never break another cork.

This is a cork retriever. It is for when you’ve pushed the cork inside the bottle. It is a work of great genius.

10. La Paulée: slaughterhouse, schoolhouse, or maybe both.

All of the bottles for the Gala Dinner were collected in a back room, where they had been organized according to the guests’ assigned tables. We logged them into inventory sheets so that nothing would go missing in the shuffle. Many of the bottles were extremely valuable, so security had been posted at the door. A sommelier’s first look around a room like this is pretty dizzying. There are exactly zero other places in the world where you can see and taste this much rare and expensive Burgundy. DRC, Jayer, Coche-Dury—all in greater abundance than they reasonably should be.

A sommelier’s second look around that room, however, raises the question of whether there might be diminishing marginal returns—whether, within a given space of time, it is better to taste more great wines, or fewer.

Very great, very expensive wines are weird, stressful things. They inspire all kinds of odd behavior among wine lovers. One of these tendencies is to open the really special bottles in the presence of many other special bottles. On one hand, it is an act of opulence—some Dionysian version of making it rain—but the tendency also has to do with the fact that wine lovers usually want to drink the special bottles with other wine lovers, and those other wine lovers are going to bring special things, too. And so the circle grows, and pretty soon it’s an orgy.

The problem with that tendency is fairly obvious: the wines don’t get the attention and patience they deserve. One moves from one special bottle to another—reducing the particular value of each individual bottle—while at the same time keeping expectations high. Those high expectations adjust one’s sense of perception (whether to sharpen it or set it up for disappointment, one cannot say).

But, for the sommelier, there is a certain benefit to this behavior, and it is the same effect as that New York somm-brain.

As massive as the wine world is, and as inaccessible as pieces of it might seem to be—rare bottles, far away growing locations, impossible-to-find vintages—wine as a topic actually is finite. Only by experience—normally coming at a dribble—can sommeliers chip away at the mammoth unknown, thereby making the whole subject feel manageable. By tasting a slew of great bottles, all in different places of their life and performance, the interpretive mind begins to see tendencies, to establish an instinct for aging arcs, for individual bottle condition, for producer idiosyncrasy. By the main course of our own Gala Dinner, I myself had begun to notice a certain dimness among practically all the reds. It was strange, and consistent, one of those mysterious behaviors of Burgundy. My friend Stevie Stacionis, who—like me—neither works in New York, nor gets to taste wines like this on the regular, walked up and said, “Huh. The reds really aren’t showing.”

It is precisely how the New York sommeliers can, without pretense, have a casual discussion of ’90 versus ’91 Gentaz. Talent be damned, the great gift is experience. And the Paulée is nothing, if not exactly that.

Weird on Moon Juice: A Guide to the Current State of Absinthe

2013-11-18T14:57:00Z

Miles Macquarrie of Kimball House (Decatur, GA); verte and blanche absinthe

A couple of weeks ago, leaning at a far corner of the grand bar that forms one half of spanking new Atlanta restaurant Kimball House, resident cocktail mind Miles Macquarrie and I got talking about absinthe, its history, the associated lore, and what on earth to do with it.

The spirit carries a lot of baggage from its former heyday, and there seems to be a range of attitudes among those who take an interest in it, from the giggling dabblers to the solemn aficionados, then all the way down to whatever sketchy entities are peddling supposedly drug-like substances that are the distinct hue of Ectocooler from the dim shade of the Internet. We are now just a few years outside the lifting of the nearly worldwide ban on absinthe, a ban that had, for almost a century, placed the drink into that attractive category of the storied forbidden, and we are drinking it once again. No one has gone crazy as a result (although a sector of absinthe’s consumers probably would like to, at least a little bit), nor has anyone seen strange things orbiting their head. In fact, absinthe’s most serious proponents would love to strip it of that old reputation entirely.

Miles seems to have his own particular take regarding its effects. He described a bachelor party in the mountains that he once attended. He had packed a particularly good bottle of the stuff. “At one point in the night,” he said, laughing, “I told myself, I’m gonna go on an absinthe journey, and then I just, like, went out and walked in the woods.”

Miles’ Kimball House is the latest addition to a small cadre of American bars and restaurants that have taken up the absinthe mantle since, in 2007, absinthe became legal again in the US. Kimball House has an expansive bar whose scope is worthy of fin de siècle Paris, but its room has the timbre of an old town hall. Miles has put together an entire menu of absinthes. It is about twelve selections long, and the examples hail from both Europe and the United States. I saw in it a ripe opportunity to learn about the stuff, and move beyond being just another dabbler looking to dip a toe into the extreme.

Miles demonstrated the steps of traditional service. He placed a tall glass with a bulb at its bottom in front of me and poured a verte style from Switzerland, filling the bulb. He then set an ornate perforated spoon across the rim of the glass, and topped the spoon with a sugar cube. He pushed that whole assembly underneath one of the two tall ice water fountains (absinthe is paraphernalia-intense) that punctuate the bar at Kimball House, unscrewed one of the petcocks surrounding the base of the contraption, and dribbled water onto the cube. It began to drop into what was waiting in the bulb.

Slow plumes developed and curled downward into the liquid. This is an important moment for the absinthe, an activity called the louche, where dissolved botanical oils contact the water and emerge back out of solution, forming wispy apparitions that eventually cloud the drink. Observing the louche is one of absinthe’s extracurricular pleasures, and the character of that performance can be an indicator of quality.

Absinthe can likely be traced to the village of Couvet, in the Swiss countryside, late in the 1700s, where it was probably first distilled by a French doctor named Pierre Ordinaire, who sold it as a healing elixir. Soon the recipe—wherein a high-proof spirit is macerated and distilled with herbs, sweet fennel, green anise, and, most importantly, grand wormwood—made its way into other hands, most notably Henri-Louis Pernod, and absinthe began to settle onto the tables and bar tops of Paris. By the latter half of the 19^th Century it had filled a chunk of the void that formed after phylloxera deprived Europe of its wine supply, and the drink became emblematic of the period, with many artists and writers embracing it not only as a source of recreation, but also one of inspiration. Two styles became common: verte, which used a second maceration of chlorophyll-bestowing botanicals after distillation, and blanche, which did not, and was therefore colorless.

At some point, however, the romance soured, and by the first few years of the 20th century some dark, licentious imagery had flowered, with Belle Epoque decadence supposedly leading to addiction, madness, and the removal of an infamous ear. Edgar Degas’ depiction of a slack-faced woman staring out over a glass full of opaque green (the painting was later named L’Absinthe, but not by Degas), was said to be an expression of the toll the drink had taken upon Paris and its community of artists. A temperance movement—likely spurred on by a wine industry that had returned from the brink only to find its market share had diminished—congealed and gained a good deal of steam. The drink was banned in 1908 in Switzerland after a factory worker named Jean Lanfray murdered his family and attempted to kill himself while drunk on two ounces of absinthe (along with many other beverages, to be fair). Other European countries and the US soon followed suit. France held out until 1914.

The ban period served as host to a rampant amplification of absinthe’s reputation as a dangerous, addictive drug, rather than simply an alcoholic beverage. Absinthe continued to be produced in pockets of Europe, most notably Spain and Czechoslovakia, where the quality was often questionable, and which led to a secondary service technique of lighting the absinthe-soaked sugar on fire to caramelize and melt it, thus hiding some of the more uneven aspects of an inferior bottling. The stark, illicit visual helped intensify the mystique.

Mainstream interest in absinthe began to revive in Europe in the 1990s, and by the middle 2000s many European countries began lifting their bans. France had relaxed its own rule much earlier, allowing the drink to be produced but not labeled as absinthe, at least not for domestic sale. In 2011, France eliminated this final restriction, and fell in line with the other countries that were now largely following EU guidelines, which mostly focus upon monitoring levels of a chemical called thujone that is found in the leaves of the grand wormwood plant, Artemisia absinthium.

Thujone tends to be the center of gravity for the absinthe discussion. The compound is in the chemical family of terpenes, and it is also present in strong amounts in sage and tarragon. Although there is little evidence to support its actual role in any potential psychoactive properties of absinthe, it usually collects most of the blame, mostly because it is able to cause seizures in very high doses. Allowable levels are the main aspect of regulation, with the EU permitting up to 35 mg/kg in those beverages that list Artemisia as an ingredient, while the US has limited the range to 10 mg/kg.

Early on, it was assumed that pre-ban absinthes were fully loaded with thujone, with some estimates pushing as high as 260 mg/kg. But recent analysis of vintage, pre-ban absinthes showed that levels in those bottles were no more elevated than in absinthes made in the traditional method today (most of which fall within the US limit of 10 mg/kg).[1] An additional study showed that thujone levels don’t degrade over time in the absinthe solution, so even though the samples of pre-ban absinthe were nearly a century old, the readings were probably true to the period.[2] For those levels to be dangerous one would have to consume so much absinthe that the alcohol would have already proven far more toxic than the thujone. Either way, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to assume that a hallucinatory state, the tales of which have provided absinthe with its most tantalizing stream of myths, would be a conceivable effect.

I spoke with chemist Ted Breaux, one of the lead researchers in those studies. His work was instrumental in getting the TTB to change its attitude on thujone, which effectively legalized absinthe in the US in 2007. Breaux became the first person since 1912 to import and distribute an absinthe in the US, a brand called Lucid, which he distilled himself in France.

Breaux seems eager for absinthe to be rid of the swirling specters of hallucinations, altered states, and the thujone question itself. “The thujone myth has been conclusively debunked by modern science,” he said. “There is no scientific study that demonstrates thujone to be hallucinogenic or of recreational value, which makes notions to the contrary unfounded. It’s hardly worthy of being the focal point of a conversation.” He continued, saying, “Those products that make false claims about thujone in their marketing are almost invariably inferior and undeserving of being sold as absinthe.”

The latter remark is likely aimed at producers like Absinthe Original (www.originalabsinthe.com). The site sells a product called Absinthe King Gold, which claims to tip the scales at 100 mg/kg of thujone. The site also sells a product called Absinthe Original Innocent, which “due to its lower alcohol it is also ideal for women.”

The claims that the site makes for thujone itself, however, are not necessarily far off base:

While once thought to instigate simular (sic) reactions as marijuana's THC, recent research suggests it modulates the neurotransmitter GABAA, which plays a vital role in cognitive thought. Subsequently, absinthe provides a level of clarity not usually associated with alcoholic drinks.

It is true that at one time it was proposed that thujone’s action in the brain might mimic that of marijuana’s THC (this was quickly disproven). And it is also true that a 2004 study entitled Absinthe: Attention Performance and Mood Under the Influence of Thujone showed strong likelihood of an interaction between thujone and alcohol at the GABA type-A receptor, leading to a “stimulating and rousing effect” along with “an increase in fear sensations” (this was at a thujone level of 100 mg/kg, however, well above the common level for absinthe).[3] And even Ted Breaux is quoted elsewhere as saying that with absinthe he achieves “a sensation of clarity” (hence his product’s name, Lucid) distinct from what he gets with red wine, under the influence of which his “mind just drops down”. [4]

It is difficult to say what might be the cause of that sensory distinction. Breaux would probably say the culprit isn’t thujone. I contacted Brian Robinson, an editor and the absinthe reviewer for The Wormwood Society, a website that is the major hub of absinthe-oriented activity online. He echoed Breaux on the topic of thujone, but added “anise does have certain stimulative properties”. He also likened the difference in experience to the difference between, say, beer-drunk and whiskey-drunk.

I can imagine that for the hardcore absinthe enthusiast talking about thujone levels and buzzes must grow tedious over time, and it doesn’t help that interest in these topics emits from absinthe’s more sensational, drug-culture features. I got the feeling that my own probings on these subjects were merely being tolerated, and that the real issues for Robinson and Breaux lay elsewhere. And legitimately so. For the professional taster of absinthe, there is far greater interest in the details of botanical selection, appearance, even, to a degree, terroir. The village of Couvet in Switzerland is currently seeking an official appellation for its product, and at one time even went so far as to try and fully command the word absinthe—à la Champagne and Cognac. The latter attempt was unsuccessful, but producers there still cite the place’s distinct ability to grow high quality botanicals as a natural advantage.

It would appear that the pros would like the botanicals in absinthe to be its true celebrity, and not thujone. Brian Robinson told me that for the seasoned absinthe reviewer, the skill depends upon being able to spot the quality of the herbs used, and Ted Breaux described how a good taster is able to sense differences in cultivar and terroir. Both of them, however, emphasized that an exposure to quality examples of pre-ban absinthe is a must, and that, since the opportunity to do so is rare, very few skilled tasters actually exist.

Breaux has been fortunate. He has tasted dozens of examples of vintage absinthes. “Absinthe differs from most spirits in that it ages in the bottle,” he said. “The stronger flavors tend to oxidize over the years, resulting in gentler honeyed components that integrate everything.” And Brian Robinson’s Review Tutorial for The Wormwood Society describes certain appealing “dead leaf” colors, like deep yellow or brown-gold, that appear as flashes in the older examples.[5]

Robinson admitted that absinthe would probably always remain something of a niche product. But Miles Macquarrie appears to be having some of success at his bar, both with traditional absinthe service and with the spirit as an ingredient in cocktails. Still, it is a challenge for absinthe to find footing apart from the dark mystique that follows it around. So much of the associated imagery is eternally bound to it. Even Ted Breaux’s absinthe, Lucid, sports an eerie black label, adorned with a pair of green peering eyes. And goth-mannequin Marilyn Manson also now produces an absinthe. It is called Mansinthe.

Try as the pros might to exorcise what haunts absinthe and bring it into some kind of standard legitimacy, they may risk removing a piece of its heart. The fact of the matter is that we do feel something different on the stuff. And accounts from writers and painters during the Belle Epoque suggest that something was going on, not just creative minds getting drunk. Whether those details stand to impair absinthe as a valid pursuit, or pull it toward the line that divides boozing culture and drug culture, I can’t really say. Either way, Miles Macquarrie seems to have the right attitude, with his absinthe journey in the woods. It would appear that absinthe is not ready to be done with its mysteries quite yet.

Five Recommended Bottles

Vieux Pontarlier Verte, France, 65% abv

-sea salt, wilted wild herb nose, rockiness on palate

Duplais Blanche, Switzerland, 60% abv

-fennel flesh, cool menthol

Brevans Verte, Switzerland, 68% abv

-stalky forest tones, green leaves, acetone

Leopold Brothers Verte, Batch 61, Denver, CO, 65% abv

-rocks and stems, dill, cilantro, fennel frond, machine oil

St. George Verte, Alameda, CA, 60% abv
-sweet rich anise nose, vanilla, baked fennel

Selected bottles; Miles and the author at work

[1] Chemical Composition of Preban Absinthe with Special Reference to Thujone, Fenchone, and Pinocamphone, Methanol, Copper, and Antimony Concentrations, by Dirk W. Lachenmeier, David Nathan-Maister, Theodore A. Breaux, Eva-Maria Sohnius, Kerstin Schoeberl, and Thomas Kuballa, published in Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemsitry, April, 2008

[2] Long-term Stability of Thujone, Fenchone, and Pinocamphone in Vintage Preban Absinthe, by Dirk W. Lachenmeier, David Nathan-Maister, Theodore A. Breaux, and Thomas Kuballa, published in Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemsitry, Volume 57, No. 7, 2009

[3] Absinthe: Attention Performance and Mood Under the Influence of Thujone by A. Dettling, H. Grass, A. Schuff, G. Skopp, P. Strohbeck-Kuehner and H-Th. Haffner
Published in Journal of Studies on Alcohol, September 2004

[4] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tony-sachs/the-return-of-the-green-f_b_255765.html

[5] http://www.wormwoodsociety.org/index.php/absinthe-review-guide-education-181

Encounters With The Surreal At This Summer's Aspen Classic

2013-08-20T15:20:00Z

A few months ago, perhaps on a random whim, Ray Isle of Food & Wine Magazine invited me to be one of the five sommeliers pouring for the Reserve Tasting tent of Food & Wine’s Aspen Classic, the pinnacle of that organization’s various summer fests. I took it as a real honor. But these kinds of events usually bring a mixed bag of experiences--the good, the bad, and the somewhat, well, grotesque (a number of other adjectival nouns might cram into this trio). Admittedly, I have a rather mixed attitude about this aspect of the trade, this meta-sommeliering. It can get weird. If you can keep your head, however, and not become too entangled in the excess, these things can become high entertainment.

***

Arriving felt as if I had tumbled out of the mountains and into a living directory of celebrity chefs. It reminded me of a very terrible Stephen King short story called “Rock and Roll Heaven”, where two bickering protagonists mistakenly drive down an overgrown forest path and emerge over a secluded town whose population is comprised entirely by dead rock stars. Of course, for some reason, the dead versions of Jim Morrison, the Big Bopper, and pals were very sinister and decided this poor lost couple wouldn’t ever be allowed to leave. Anyway, it’s awful. Don’t read it.

I parked my car across from the St. Regis hotel. The head of Jose Andres passed by my passenger window. I ducked into a nearby bar, opting for a Negroni over the wiser selection of a preparatory nap. David Chang and Wylie Dufresne sat at a circular four-top. The room was full of chefs, I realized. You can tell them by their pig tattoos.

***

That first morning came on as a kind of process; me worrying my alarm into existence hours before it was due to go off. My mind flashed through the succession of party scenes I’d witnessed the night before. A miniature speakeasy in the coat closet of a restaurant. A mostly vacant mountaintop mansion with a room set aside for “vaporizing”. A DJ booth in the hallway to its dim, dreamy living room, where a stone hearth had been mounted by cackling, high-heeled woman.

At 7 a.m., I was in the resort lobby, drawing coffee from an airpot. I saw Eric Railsback, formerly of San Francisco’s Burgundy playground, RN74, now of Santa Barbara’s Caveau. He was the only of the other four sommeliers I’d met before. Time with Railsback is a perpetual escapade into the comically obtuse. He has a habit of lapsing into various foreign accents, most of which gravitate toward some kind of cartoonish Bavarian. He speaks this way more than his natural voice. The practice is highly contagious. Those around him pick it up, and soon a brood of accented, amateur Railsbacks, freshly armed with catch phrases, has been spawned. Everyone’s voice going high and ridiculous.

Not far from the coffee pot was Mike Madrigale, Head Sommelier at Bar Boulud, Epicerie Boulud, and Boulud Sud, in New York City. Madrigale is one of the best somms in the city, mostly due to his sense of service. He has a knack for artfully matching bottle to guest, and doing so with a generous, humble personality. His Instagram feed is a procession of mythical bottles in their prime, but it doesn’t feel like he’s being a showboat. It is more like an invitation to participate. Often, they are wines he is offering, incredibly, by the glass.

The three of us boarded an empty shuttle van under the front portico, and were joined by a tall, wiry fellow in a standard black Ramones shirt and thick Buddy Holly frames. This was Patrick Cappiello, sommelier and partner at Pearl & Ash, an explosive young restaurant in the Bowery. The bottle list at Pearl & Ash is a dizzying ramble of nuggets in their prime, and, ever since The New York Times’ Pete Wells stamped them with a pair of stars, specifically praising Patrick himself, the joint has become a free fire zone of Ah-so activity and Champagne sabering. Cappiello described the dynamic: “It has become what I hoped for, that place where collectors and sommeliers would hang out and drink together.” The somms get to drink wines they could never afford, and the moneyed civilians catch insider tips from pros. A place serving that function can be a gleaming asset to a city’s culture. Patrick, however, was beginning to feel the strain of success. “Every night becomes a dance party, “ he said, exhaling. “I need an assistant.” Finding such a person is harder than you’d think in New York. “Everybody wants to run a program, but nobody wants to carry boxes down stairs,” he said. I imagined him, many years hence, still without help, straightening himself upon the bar top, then joylessly knocking the end off a Billiot.

The last of our crew, Jordan Salcito, of Momofuku and Charlie Bird, in New York, met us onsite. She had woken up early and gone for a jog. I admired her resolve. I too had brought running shoes. Mine, however, would remain packed, as they almost always do. I should really stop bringing them. They are becoming too symbolic.

***

The first task of the morning was to taste and double-decant around sixty bottles of Gaja for a seminar with critic Antonio Galloni and Angelo’s homonymously-named daughter, Gaia Gaja. Most of the wines were young, and sturdy, but she asked that we pay special attention to the 1999 Sugarille Brunello. Her caution had some merit. A couple of the bottles did feel a tad weary. We dumped them down the drain. Gaja lovers everywhere experienced a subtle pang.

It should have served as admonition to be far up on our toes when checking the next seminar’s wines, a romp through Rioja Gran Reservas from both 1994 and 1995, prodigious vintages each. The bottles would be old enough that they certainly would be showing variation each-to-each. But the problem would be further compounded by the less-than-squeaky style of the area’s landmark producers, a style marked by oxidative extended barrel aging and high tolerances for volatile acidity. The variability could be immense. Calling bottles flawed or not might just challenge the line of what gets relegated simply to taste.

We began to open bottles. Some of the corks were brittle. Many broke. A few bottles were set aside as slightly corked. We talked about the occasional difficulty of distinguishing TCA in Rioja wines that spend many years in barrel. That sweet coconut mingles with mushroomy cellar tones and emerges as a dead ringer for cork taint. We played it safe, however, and eliminated any bottles that seemed at all close.

Halfway through the seminar, disaster struck. A row of tasters was calling their ’94 Cune corked. Confident of our choices, we hadn’t considered the possibility of being second-guessed. We scrambled. There was no way to know who—of the sixty or so paying guests present—had been served from the questionable bottle. The quickest solution, since we had plenty of wine, was to re-pour. We snapped more corks. We hastily decanted. We swirled. We passed decanters around. We rushed to pour the room.

A few samples of the offending wine came back. It appeared to be fine. Musty, strange, but definitely not corked. As our heart rates began to fall, we started to smile again, loosening back up, when disaster made a second strike. Another row was calling cork. Railsback appeared with a glass in his hand. I sniffed it. Very corked. In all that confusion, we had failed to check a bottle, and had been very unlucky. Now, we really had screwed up. Ray Isle, our host, was seated in the audience. Prominent pundits were on the panel. Jose Andres was on the back row. Zombie Jim Morrison, evil Big Bopper, they all wanted our heads.

Thankfully, only a few guests had been poured the final tainted bottle. But it was a stupid mistake, one that we should have caught. It cast a pall over the rest of the day. Its specter haunted the weekend.

By the end of the third and final seminar of the day we were fairly wrung out. We met at the resort pool. Madrigale had brought some Ulysse Colin Champagne. It was reviving, and very good. Patrick Cappiello had uncorked both Dauvissat Sechet and ’07 Vatan. The sun was descending, and it splashed the mountain slopes in gold. A woman did slow laps in the pool.

***

The next morning I again woke ringing with the strangeness of another night’s party scenery. There was Railsback nailing Raveneau Foret in a blind. Then flashes of a large, overly lit dance floor, some kind of pastry party, where the only things to drink were also sweet, and the music was all from the ‘90s. With Bell Biv Devoe still ringing in my head, I had been at Paul Grieco’s Riesling party. It was in a house that could have been any suburban two-story, as if somebody’s parents were out of town and Grieco was throwing an epic kegger, but with longnecks of Spätlese and Grosses Gewächs. It was incredible. Out on the patio, in the fenced backyard, a friend had offered a taste of an older wine, and I told him it was corked. “What? No way”, he said, “Aldo Sohm poured it.” I guess it happens to the very best of us.

***

The next day was less intense. The morning tasting was 2002 Champagne. The wines were spectacular, and they were a good way to resurrect after the late night. The afternoon seminar was Pritchard Hill Cabernet, and then we finished up with a wide slew of 2006 Brunello. I had pulled a Soldera that I thought felt dim. Galloni, who would be heading up the seminar, concurred. I was glad to have made that call. Weeks later, at another event, I talked to winemaker Ted Lemon about the issue of cork taint, about those times when it seems difficult to say. He said that he once tasted and lab-tested 136 examples of the same wine to try and get a read on the effects of TCA on the bottling. The results were eye opening. In the cases where bottles were especially quiet or dim, but didn’t seem corked, there usually was TCA present, but that it fell below perceptible thresholds. It was enough, however, to notably disrupt the wine. Those tasters may have been right, after all. Who knows.

That night I had a chance to sit across from Ray Isle in the bar at the Little Nell Inn. It would be the last party of the festival that I would attend, and the dining room floor was severely overpopulated by Master Sommeliers, both present and future. There another would go, swirling a decanter and surreptitiously goofing off, making faces. One was pushing a roll cart loaded with ice and Champagne, and ringing a bell, in the manner of the ice cream man. It was good to hang out with Ray in the midst of all that elevated weirdness. He is a kind, genial fellow. “Did you have fun?” He asked, checking in. “Yeah, totally,” I said, the champagne bell going, people slumping in booths. “Yes, I really think I did.”

I had a very early morning drive to make, over the crest of the Independence Pass, with cakes of snow still banking the edges of the road. I would see a grizzly bear poised on the shoulder of the highway, and would pass him within a couple of feet. I swear we made eye contact, a moment of natural solidarity.

20 Interesting Things I Learned About Eastern American Wine (By Trying Only a Little)

2013-05-14T17:25:00Z

There is this woman named Lucie Morton. She works as a viticulture consultant for a number of eastern growers, some of which stretch as far south as the upper lobe of my home state, Georgia. I met her in Virginia, while driving around in the cool Blue Ridge Mountains, checking out wineries. Virginia wines might surprise you these days. They don’t fit the usual profile of eastern wine. On the average, they are neither foxy, nor spastic. Most are sturdy, and thoughtful. Lucie Morton appears to be at-or-near the epicenter of these improvements. Weeks later, I spoke with her over a series of emails. I was seeking a little perspective on the whole thing. She suggested I read a book she wrote almost three decades ago, Winegrowing in Eastern America: an Illustrated Guide to Viniculture East of the Rockies, and an apparently seminal work by a wine historian named Leon D. Adams called The Wines of America.
The Wines of America is teeming with a more entire history than many of us venture to explore. Adams gives the East equal billing with the rest of the American wine scene, emphasizing that although the history of Vinifera in this country begins in Baja, the commercial and cultural history of American wine began in the east.
Adams begins his book by making a few conspicuously optimistic claims. If you read The Wines of America, don’t let this part throw you. They are statements that were probably bold in the 1970s, but which now feel like weird protuberances in the text. Its first sentence informs us that:

"In the quantity of wine it produces, the United States ranks sixth among the winegrowing nations. In the quality of its wines, it ranks first."

Adams goes on to cite a “more hospitable climate” and “the scientific approach to quality” as advantages over the Old World, with all of its “traditions, cobwebbed cellars, and primitive methods”. These claims mostly act as reminders of how young and spindly American fine wine culture really still is, since Adams’ book is an account of that culture up until the point where it was just coming into bloom, when everything seemed to be possible (Adams penned its first incarnation in 1973; my Fourth Edition dates to 1990). That too-broad shirk of tradition may actually help to sharpen up a vista for those romantic sommeliers (myself included) who constantly champion the old ways over the new, since we have been mostly shielded from how the old methods did once go occasionally awry. It is also interesting to note that Adams was also a powerful advocate for lighter-style table wines, conceiving of them as instruments of moderation, as Jefferson had before him. Adams’ image of domestic wine was likely something notably different than the blockbuster style assumed here in the late ‘90s and early aughts, and the distinction he was drawing was likely opposite that of the fortified sweet wines that had become popular after Prohibition’s repeal, wines that provided the ‘winos’ with their sad, enduring moniker.
Early colonists were amazed at the strange medley of wild vines they found when they ventured into the forests of the eastern seaboard. They imagined a new wine economy would just crop up around them. At some point between 1562 and 1564, French Protestant Calvinists called Huguenots made wine from Scuppernong grapes in the area that is now Jacksonville, Florida. In 1609, the colonists at Jamestown tried their hand with native grapes, as did the Plymouth Pilgrims, in 1623. The colonists were disappointed with the results. The following generation brought Vitis Vinifera vines from Europe, hoping to make wines that more closely resembled what they drank back home.
There is a pheromone called o-aminoacetophenone, which works to repel honeybees. It is present in many native American grape varieties, and it creates a strange, woody musk in their wines. It is this note that garnered the descriptor foxy, and it is one of the reasons why early colonists had trouble enjoying the wines they made from native grapes. I talked to Jenni McCloud, of Chrysalis Vineyards, in Middleburg, Virginia, about the Norton grape. She drew a distinction between what gets called foxy and what is simply grapey, like the fruit tone of Concord. Norton, she says, is grapey but not foxy. Grapey tones come from methyl anthranilate. Apparently, many native (and hybrid) grapes have a lot of both methyl anthranilate and o-aminoacetophenone, which is why the two get conflated, but they are very different things.
Easterners tried and tried to grow vinifera, but without any significant success. The vines would just wither and die. They guessed the issue was cold hardiness, but invisible pests (well, phylloxera, mostly) and rot were probably more to blame. Native vines were immune to these troubles. Today, eastern winemakers usually keep vinifera healthy by using grafted rootstock and by spraying. Lucie Morton told me that if you plant smart, with the correct varieties in the right places, you don’t have to use any more chemicals than any other conventional farm would. She shrugs off the humidity issue. I asked if the problem of humidity had been overstated, and she said, “Well it is part of the story, but [it] has been overplayed in the bad old days before planting away from trees and strict canopy management came into play. No worse than other places where it rains in the summer.”
One struggle the early colonists had with many native varieties is that they tended toward low must weights and high acidity. The wines worked toward a natural balance that was unlike that of vinifera. Matthieu Finot, winemaker at King Family Vineyards, in Crozet, VA, told me that although the vinifera vines take a lot of work in the vineyard to keep them healthy in the east, native vines require a lot of effort in the cellar to make wines that are palatable. They just don’t seem to want to make wines that match our ideal of balance. On the other hand, there are those who propose that our palates could simply adjust to what the native DNA wants their wine to be, and that one might perceive North American wine on its own terms. Unfortunately, for the universe of taste, it isn’t easy to speculate on the realm of the possible.
During the 1800s, a rivalry of sorts developed between the wine producers of the east and those of the west. Adams describes how “eastern vintners accused the California shippers of selling their wines under French and German labels (which was often true) and of putting California labels on eastern wines.” Wine sellers in the northeast responded by putting California labels on spoiled European wines, then affixing European labels on the best of what had come from the west coast.
Early on in Winegrowing in Eastern America, Lucie Morton provides an easy taxonomy of native grapevine species: Vitis aestivalis likely possesses the best winemaking genes. We now believe it is a parent of both Norton and Herbemont. Vitis labrusca is the grapey, often foxy category that includes Concord and Niagara. It created a spontaneous hybrid called Catawba, which most likely arose along the banks of the Carolina river that provided its name. Morton points out that the fruit character of Labrusca has been “chemically synthesized for use in items ranging from bubble-gum to lip gloss”. Vitis riparia is an “herbaceous, high-acid grape” blessed with “excellent rootstock”. Its most famous progeny is Baco Noir, a cross with Folle Blanche. And then, there is the rustic Vitis rotundifolia, the species of Muscadine. Rutundofolia gives us Scuppernong and Magnolia (among others), and it grows well in the oppressive heat and humidity of the deep southeast. Its berries are large, its skins are very thick, and it is foxy.
Some hybrid varieties exist because vinifera vines would live long enough to crossbreed spontaneously with wild varieties. But others were cultivated, and much of this cultivation took place in (of all places) France. Examples include: Seyval Blanc, Chambourcin, and the würz-y Traminette.
Adams implies that the lack of a strong eastern wine culture led to a lack of sensible drinking, with the void being filled first with applejack, then whiskey, the eventual national beverage. The blowback was Prohibition, and it nearly killed off America’s fledgling wine industry. Wineries all over the nation buoyed themselves by either changing over to table grapes or by selling what were essentially home winemaking kits, packages that provided both directions on how to create wine and a cursory written warning that one should not attempt to do so.
According to Adams, even after repeal, Prohibition continued to stunt the American wine culture that was trying to rise up in its wake. He names a few “appalling legacies” that led wine to make a poor impression on American drinking culture. First, it caused a gap in understanding about wine quality. Few palates could discern the difference between a spoiled bottle (of which there were many) and an intact one. Next, a flood of dilettante-ish books and articles emerged issuing loads of social rules for wine, which did more to scare drinkers away than to educate them, so that “most native-born buyers of alcoholic beverages stuck to beer and hard liquor”. Third, there was a lack of suitable grapes after repeal, since during prohibition many growers switched over to sturdy ‘juice grapes’ that would ship and preserve easily, such as Alicante Bouschet in California, and Concord in the east. Finally, exorbitant taxes on liquor meant that fortified wines were the cheapest way to get drunk, thus birthing the image of the ‘wino’. Adams says the American wine industry was “reborn in ruins.” He goes on:

"It was making the wrong kinds of wine from the wrong kinds of grapes for the wrong kind of consumers in a whiskey-drinking nation with guilt feelings about imbibing in general and a confused attitude toward wine in particular."
There are also a few encouraging success stories in the history of eastern wine, each with a compelling character: Nicolas Longworth, Captain Paul Garrett, Philip Wagner, Charles Fournier. One might now like to commence Googling.
In 1957, a Ukrainian named Dr. Konstantin Frank planted Vitis vinifera varieties with grafted rootstock in the cold, erect hillsides along New York’s Finger Lakes. He had been told many times that it couldn’t be done, and was largely treated as a joke. His work provided new contexts and new thought about what was possible with vinifera.
Not all of the eastern states have made the recent strides that Virginia has. I can’t say very much for what I encountered as I drove up the eastward curve of the Blue Ridge slope toward Virginia. Most Georgia and North Carolina wines had been pretty misguided, aesthetically speaking. The problems ranged from difficult label design (cow-print patterns, excessive fonts), to enigmatic faults (a ubiquitous note of melted plastic) and surreal winemaking strategies (re-fired barrel parts dropped into tanks, wine containing other things than grapes). It was a strange land to trip in.
If humidity has served as a kind of scapegoat for eastern quality woes, then there must be a better explanation for why the east lags so far behind the west. From what Lucie Morton told me directly, and from I gleaned in her book, I think the account would be twofold. First, they are still striving to match the right grape variety, clones, and vineyard practices to the right growing locations. Second, the extremity of the eastern climate, with all of its unpredictable vacillations, its uneven spurts of damp summer heat blazes and bitter winter cold shots, its pests, its strains of Black Rot, Pierce’s Disease, and Leaf Roll, all serve to make the process of matching site and viticulture even more of an extraordinary, daunting challenge than it would otherwise be. European wine took thousands of years to get where it is today. Perhaps the east needs more than just a few decades to sort out its hand.
In the high hills that surround the town of Elkin, overlooking the deep center of North Carolina’s Yadkin Valley, there is a producer named Carolina Heritage Vineyards. Founded in 2005, the winery is the retirement project of Clyde and Pat Colwell, former school principal and IBM exec, respectively. Their goal was to work without chemical pesticides or herbicides, and they chose to use native DNA to accomplish this, so they grow only hybrid and native varieties. They are the southeast’s lone USDA-certified organic winery. The wines feel unseasoned and raw, but they spark hope in the mind for some future thing, some new American incarnation.

The Pinot Noir plot at Ankida Ridge, near Amherst, Virginia. Below the vineyard is a chicken house whose tenants are allowed to run free in the vineyard, along with dogs, cats and sheep.
Speaking of proof of life, there is a very young small producer in the high old mountain stretch northwest of Amherst, VA, above Lynchburg, called Ankida Ridge. Lucie Morton serves as a consultant for proprietor Christine Vrooman and her winemaker son, Nathan. Lucie selected this site, with its southeast exposure and virgin soil, rich in decomposing granite, and she felt very confident that they could grow Pinot Noir here, even hoping they could do it organically. The latter turned out not to be the case, but the former proved radiantly true, and when I tasted it for the first time, from the warm, steadily-ripened inaugural 2010 vintage, produced with three year old vines, it completely reversed all of my assumptions about the potential of eastern wine.
Christine Vrooman later invited me to attend a meeting with Dr. Cliff Ambers, a Virginia geologist who, in his spare time, tinkers with wild grape varieties, both their taxonomy and the wines they can make. He started a label called Chateau Z. The wines taste strange, but intact and challenging, and they are replete with sensations of the wild Virginia high country, with its gnarled trunks, unnamed streams, and populations of black bear and mountain cats. The meeting would be a kind of summit about his attempt to breed a version of Sauvignon Blanc, one shored up with native DNA. I wish I could have made it.

A few head of Ankida Ridge sheep. Their presence helps reduce the need for chemical herbicides.
It is very hard to comment on what exactly is possible. One doesn’t want to be foolish in optimism about places with as many natural challenges as those in the eastern US. But we have been proven wrong before. We have experienced new forms, new standards (Oregon Pinot Noir comes to mind). I won’t try and describe what all is possible, moving ahead. But if the direction of Virginia’s wine scene is any indication, I am increasingly leaning toward all things.

Wrestling with Heavyweights: Ripening and Place

2012-10-25T10:22:00Z

Recently, I opened a bottle of Joseph Roty Marsannay from 2007, and its rim bore that smell of bacon fat that we associate almost exclusively with older, very fine wines from the Cote de Nuits (read: old DRC). But there it was, out of nowhere, that old, fine scent. Like it was making a cameo.

The 2007 Burgundy reds are moving along at a fast pace. It makes them very useful in a restaurant. This faster-than-usual pace is probably explained by softer-than-usual tannins. They also don’t have much color, but the acidity is good and the best examples are gregarious and aromatic. I remember being underwhelmed by the vintage when I first tasted the wines back in 2009. I also remember hearing that ‘07 would be a good vintage to drink young, but I took this to mean Look, we had a weak vintage so please drink it all as soon as possible. As it turned out, I was wrong, the vignerons were right, and they weren’t trying to pull anything. I learned my lesson. I should have bought more ‘07s. I now wish my lists were stocked with them. As far as wines from the 2000s go, their current performance is rivaled only by the upright-and-handsome ‘01s. 1

I’ve been thinking about these wines a lot lately. Their dynamic has grown more and more fascinating the more I’ve tasted them. I began looking for an explanation, and the answer seemed to lie in the way they ripened. A little digging revealed that 2007 had been an unusual growing season with unusual ripening. The spring was very warm, kicking off such a quick start that many growers—who still bore the hot horrors of 2003 fresh on their minds—feared for the survival of their August vacations. By the summer, however, the weather had grown cloudy and cool, and it mostly stayed that way until harvest. 2

The 2007 season was something of a reversal of typical ripening in Burgundy. Things usually go cool and slow until a surge of warmth toward the end of the season. This warmth brings the fruit up to a decent level of ripeness, and producers must soon harvest before the inevitable rainstorms.

I began to wonder how exactly this tale of ripening in 2007 explained the unusual behavior of the wines. As sommeliers, we run into vintage descriptions like this all the time. Their very existence assumes that we readily understand what factors like a warm spring and clouds during ripening should equate to in a wine, and why. But the more questions I asked of other sommeliers and winemakers, the more it appeared that many had a limited grasp on the mechanics and contingencies of ripening. I began to suspect that the topic, like most aspects of wine, might be rife with speculation.

It reminded me of sommeliers’ constant grappling with place. So much of our arena of study is built on an assumption that wines from different places taste different, but we actually have quite a hard time fully answering the question of why. We certainly do our best, and most of the time we do okay. We parrot explanations of soil effects, and maybe we toss around the word mesoclimate. But none of us actually understand the entire operation of the machine of terroir. It isn’t our fault. The scientific community doesn’t understand terroir, either. It’s possible that the whole thing is just the wrong size for human beings to access it empirically.

I set aside my very specific question about 2007 reds in Burgundy and began asking a broader, more primary question: What is it about place that directs ripening? Perhaps we can characterize a place by the way fruit ripens there. I wasn’t so interested in how much the fruit ripens, mind you, but more in simply how. It is not just a matter of must weight. And it is a more specific feature than just climate. 3

I began calling this feature the fruit’s manner of ripening. After all, fruit doesn’t ripen in a linear fashion. It ripens along multiple physiological pathways, and with multiple environmental influences. I spoke with Jason Lett of Oregon’s Eyrie Vineyards, and he described ripening as the result of three factors: light, heat, and time. The influence of their particular combination—as created by the particular arrangements of a given place—probably goes a long way toward explaining the character of the place’s fruit.

The matter is hinted at regularly in our literature. A comparison of the Mosel against the Rheingau might read something like this:

The steep Mosel slopes present the vines to the sun, and this added exposure to sunlight—combined with the moderating effect of the narrow, snaking river Mosel—allows riesling grapes to reach an arched, luminous kind of ripeness in spite of the marginal climate. The resulting wine is endowed with very great litheness, grace, and mineral detail. On the other hand, the much wider Rhine River does more moderating work than does the Mosel, reflecting more sun and acting as a larger heat sink, such that the slopes of the south-facing Rheingau need not be as steep to catch extra sun, and so the Rheingau fruit achieves its greatness in a slightly different way, with more power bred in. 4

It is an illuminating anecdote, but rarely, if ever, would it go on to elaborate the full operation of these effects, and certainly never at the grape level. And so, the account leaves us with an incomplete sense of the machine.

I wanted to find out exactly what these accounts mean to imply about ripening. Hopefully an answer would tell me what is qualitatively different about a ripe grape in Burgundy versus, say, a ripe grape in California’s Central Coast. 5 And perhaps a sense of that difference would help me see into the essential character of those places. At the very least, I hoped to find out what we actually know about ripening, and how it relates to place.

Solvang, California

Happy to have an excuse to get away from muggy Atlanta and into the radiant peaks and valleys of the mild California Coast, I made my way from LAX to Solvang, a compact tourist town northwest of Santa Barbara, situated on a Santa Ynez hilltop. Solvang is that ilk of town that makes a concerted, ongoing effort to express its cultural roots (in the case of Solvang those roots are Danish). Solvang does so with occasional outcroppings of traditional Nordic costume, a bevy of candy shops, and a convenient selection of novelty restaurants with names like Bit ‘O Denmark and The Red Viking.

I would be staying in Solvang as I visited with Joe Davis, of Arcadian Winery, and Bob Lindquist, of Qupé, in the Santa Maria Valley. Davis is well attuned to the subtleties of his region. He tends vines and makes wine from vineyard sites all over the Central Coast, from down in the Santa Ynez Valley all the way up to Monterey. And Lindquist has been an unwavering producer of mostly Rhone varieties for three decades. In both cases, they are winemakers who hold the old world in high esteem and who are proud of the ways that the favorable climate of their own place allows them to pay homage. At the same time, however, their wines still differ notably from their European counterparts.

To explain those differences I might be tempted to start with soil, a subject that is transfixing but that neither sommeliers nor plant scientists actually understand very well on a physiological level. We know that differences in water retention and nutrient levels count for something, and that they can also have an effect on ripening, but the ways in which basic mineral content affects flavor in wine are still an area of mystery. Perhaps this mystery is what attracts sommeliers, keeps us sniffing around. Speculations about the effects of soil are well diffused into sommelier culture, but the best evidence in this very important portion of our study is mostly anecdotal, and sometimes conflicting. Any causal connections are difficult to find. This fact doesn’t take away from its overall salience, but it should make us cautious around general statements about soil (yes, including these). Some empirical data is out there, but it is sparse, and difficult to interpret. Soil is a terrific subject, but it is hard to built into a model.

On the other hand, the ripening differences between eastern France and California’s Central Coast are fairly clear. The main difference is time. The ripening season in the Central Coast is slower, steadier, and longer. Imagine a curve that describes ripening activity. For the Central Coast it would be long and relatively flat, with an extended, gently sloping tail.

This flat, long curve is the result of a favorable combo of abundant sun without a lot of heat. Due to the east-west orientation of many of its valleys, the Central Coast pulls cold air (and commonly also a dose of cold early-morning fog) straight off the Pacific, and as a result the overall climate of much of the region is fairly cool. Those AVAs closer to the ocean stay especially cool, and, according to Bob Lindquist, “Our typical daytime highs during the main part of the growing season are in the 70's. We get some occasional 80's and quite a few days that don't climb out of the 60's. We only get 90's or 100's during heat waves.” It is not unlike the temperature ranges of Burgundy. If anything, Burgundy is the one with the warmer periods.

The Central Coast’s cool, camel-colored hillsides stay active with breezes and sunshine. There is little pressure to pick because, unlike France, there isn’t a dependable barrage of bad weather coming in autumn (although I have heard unconfirmed rumors of occasional late-season storms that plague the Santa Rita Hills). It is a scenario in which a much longer hangtime is natural. Even for producers like Joe Davis, who typically harvests Pinot Noir at a relatively low 22° Brix, the season from flowering to harvest is 18 weeks, or 126 days, nearly a month longer than in Burgundy. For those producers who harvest at higher must weights, say 26° or more, it can be longer still.

The sheer length of this ripening allows a thorough, more comfortable use of the grape’s mechanisms. It produces fruit that retains acidity but often also shows a certain agreeably mature quality. The kind of tension that one might usually expect from a cool climate (and which Burgundy wines typically possess in spades) is generally absent.

For its part, Burgundy’s ripening is more difficult. The best sites are said to rely heavily on cool morning sun, an effect created by the mostly east-facing aspect of the slope. Most seasons involve bouts of cloud cover followed by the aforementioned surge of ripening in the later, warmer part of the season. Burgundy’s curve would be shorter and steeper than that of the Central Coast, and it would cut off abruptly a bit after the surge, since there is usually some pressure to harvest.

I was already familiar with this distinction of ripening style between the two places, but I had not yet connected it at the berry level. On my second afternoon in the Central Coast, Joe Davis picked me up in airy Solvang, his young son Max in the back seat. We passed a number of large signs promoting split-pea soup, and more than a couple of tasting rooms that claimed to be As Seen in Sideways. Davis drove me around the Santa Ynez Valley, stopping the SUV intermittently at vineyard sites, and diverting for an occasional “boonie cruise”. 6 We discussed ripening mechanisms along the way. I had spent most of my time on the plane reading about grapevine physiology, a topic that kept me surprisingly riveted, so I was primed for the conversation. Through that conversation (and a few jargon-rich academic journal articles) I began to see the grape as a small, complex metabolic machine, one whose end goal is ripeness.

The Ripening Machine

It may help to remind you what a berry is. A berry is a way for a vine to move its seed somewhere else. And if I were to use a functional description of ripening, it would be: the method by which a vine makes its fruit attractive to a seed disperser, like a bird or a deer. It is to the plant’s advantage to make the fruit desirable, so the plant fills the grape with energy in the form of sugar and attractors in the form of aromatic phenols and bright pigments. Immature grape berries, on the other hand, are highly concentrated with acidity and tannin, low in sugar, and low in aromatics and color. This ensures that dispersers are not likely to eat these berries before the seeds inside of them are viable. 7

As the seed matures, the berry becomes more alluring using the three physiological processes of photosynthesis, respiration, and secondary metabolite maturation. These processes all work along different axes, and have different environmental influences. Their goal, however, is the same.

Photosynthesis

Photosynthesis is the means by which a plant produces energy for later use. To be more specific, it is the plant taking light energy from the sun using chlorophyll in the leaves and converting it into chemical energy in the form of sugar. The process also forms two by-products, water and oxygen. Pores on the underside of the leaf called stomates release the oxygen, and it soon becomes part of the breathable atmosphere. Before fruit-set, sugars are sent to a number of locations on the plant, often accumulating as starch, particularly in the roots. After veraison, however, which is a key turning point in the life of the grape and really the beginning of true ripening, any new sugars made from photosynthesis are sent into the grape. These sugars begin to accumulate in the vacuoles of the cells of the pulp, which also begin to swell with water. Photosynthesis continues to place sugar in the pulp of the berry throughout the ripening process. Brix, Baumé, Oechsle, and any other measure of must weight are then in a sense also a measure of this activity.

The rate of this activity increases with temperature, so that in warm conditions a berry will accumulate sugar faster than in cool conditions (and therefore potential alcohol levels will rise faster, too). The effect stalls, however, at 95˚F, as the stomates close up, effectively shutting down the plant. The fruit may begin to lose water mass, and berry desiccation may result.

Respiration

Respiration is the process by which the plant releases energy from storage in compounds like sugars and acids. In a sense respiration is just the opposite of photosynthesis. It is the act of using oxygen (which is brought in through the stomates) to break up complex carbon bonds, thereby metabolizing usable compounds into energy, and generating carbon dioxideand water as byproducts. Sommeliers commonly associate lower acidity with very ripe wines and wines from hot vintages. Respiration is the reason why.

I spoke with Professor Douglas O. Adams, a specialist in grapevine physiology at UC Davis, and he helped walk me through some of the technical details of the process. After veraison the vine begins to focus its respiration on malic acid instead of sugar. Both tartaric and malic acids exist in high concentrations at veraison, but as the berry swells, the concentration of these acids declines. The overall level of tartaric acid in the berry stays nearly the same, but malic acid begins to be respired out, or burned up and used as energy.

Adams gave me a picture of this activity within the grape: “At veraison tartrate [or tartaric acid] is distributed evenly from skin to pulp. Malate, however, is high in the skin, low in the vasculature, and exists in a gradient in the pulp, with a high concentration at the center near the seeds. By harvest there is a flatter gradient of malate, with a lower, even level of distribution from the skin to the center.” As the berry ripens, then, the acids are working toward uniformity within it.

Like photosynthesis, respiration accelerates with heat, and this is why malic acid levels may drop quickly in a warm environment, while in a cool environment acid levels typically remain high. 8 Light intensity, on the other hand, seems to have no effect on acid levels. 9 This fact that would seem to at least partly explain why cool morning sun seems to be so valuable for many varieties, particularly a fast-ripening grape like Pinot Noir.

Striking the right relationship of balance between falling acidity and rising sugars might be the winemaker’s primary challenge. As we were rolling along next to Stolpman Vineyard, Joe Davis pulled the SUV over onto a dusty shoulder. He demonstrated with his hands how photosynthesis and respiration have “an inverse relationship, but not directly inverse”. In other words, the two work in opposite directions, and they are influenced by the same accelerant (heat), but they are influenced at different rates. Anticipating that moment where the two are in balance requires the winemaker to maintain a keen sense of both processes.

Secondary Metabolite Maturation

The third dimension of ripening is difficult to label, as it is not really one single process but a collection of small chemical developments, many of which are not well understood. I am calling it secondary metabolite maturation but I might just as easily use the more common umbrella term of physiological ripening.

This is a very complex array of chemical activities. It is probably this aspect of ripening that (along with the alchemic, transformative powers of fermentation) most accounts for the intricate chemical life of a wine solution. Even if a full description of these activities and compounds were possible, I wouldn’t be the one for the job. I’m not able to wield terms like isovaleraldehyde or 1-propanol with any authority, nor would these terms be likely to translate to your experiences.

There are, however, a few classes of compounds worth noting. Most are within the general category of secondary metabolites, compounds the grape produces beyond those—like sugar or amino acids—that are directly necessary for the survival of the plant. The building blocks for these compounds arise early in the berry’s development, before veraison. Not much is known about this very crucial phase. 10

It is clear, however, that before veraison tannins accumulate in a single cell layer of the skin and another layer under the seed coat. Compounds called hydroxycinnamic acids also form at this time. They are precursors to volatile phenols, and they exist in both the pulp and the skin. 11 They are particularly important to white wine quality, since they are the most abundant kind of phenolic compound in free run juice. 12

Also forming in this period are methoxypyrazines, the compounds we commonly encounter in certain grapes as grassy or green vegetal aromas, especially those of the Sauvignon family. The ongoing decline of pyrazines in the grape after veraison is likely related to sunlight levels in the cluster. 13

After veraison, anthocyanins accumulate in red grapes. Anthocyanins are pigmented compounds that account for the color of red wine. They also contribute aromas and flavors. Although they may form without the aid of sunlight, extra sunlight does appear to enhance their accumulation. Their accumulation does not seem to be related, however, to an increase in heat, as was shown by a study of Yakima Valley Merlot grapes in which bunches were shaded, heated, sun-exposed, and cooled, and done so in every possible combination. In fact, the study showed that very high temperatures actually inhibited anthocyanin development. 14

Late in the ripening process many more aroma and flavor compounds begin to accumulate. During this late phase of ripening we find the development of glycosides. Glycosides act as precursors for the later development of more complex aroma and flavor compounds. With time they will become unbound and express themselves. Their period of development is called gustation. 15

Maturity or richness of flavor seems to be related to the extended and ongoing development of secondary metabolites. 16 It is difficult to separate the effects that light and heat have on nurturing these compounds, although light does seem to play the greater role. Time seems to have an effect here, too. Some of these compounds may form of their own accord over time and aren’t influenced heavily by either light or heat. Their chemical world, their encouragement, and their contribution to wine, seems to be an area that remains fairly dim, and about which there is much to be learned.

A Walk-Through

Perhaps—given our three central influences of light, heat, and time, combined with our three dimensions of ripening—a walk-through of general scenarios may still be possible, in spite of all the associated unknowns.

On one fairly intuitive extreme, it seems that ripening in the presence of both plenty of sun and plenty of heat will cause sugar levels in a given plant to increase more quickly than in a cooler environment. Heat will also lead to an increased rate of respiration, which will lead to a drop in malic acid levels. If this occurs then one risks being forced to harvest before secondary metabolites have had a chance to form properly, and an imbalanced wine may result. If one waits for greater physiological ripeness, then the risks are high alcohol and low acid. The scenario seems obvious enough.

Sunlight without high temperatures will allow for sugar accumulation, but at a slower rate. At the same time the sun will also provide anthocyanin development in red grapes and possibly encourage other aromatic and flavor compounds. Respiration will occur slowly, so malic levels will stay relatively high. The cooler temperatures mean a lower rate of both photosynthesis and respiration, allowing for more time on the vine, which in turn allows a denser population of secondary metabolites to form. This description of what happens in a cool, sunny place with a long hangtime (like the Central Coast) seems fairly satisfying.

But how do we describe the kind of ripening that happens along a more compressed curve, like that of Burgundy? One winemaker described this kind of ripening as “more violent”. These wines appear to show more tension. Accounting for this tension requires a little speculation. For me, the effect seems closely related to a greater perception of tannin, but it could also have something to do with a shorter period of secondary metabolite development.

If we assume that this tense quality is related to the tannic character of a wine, then we raise a very important question: what is it about place and ripening that influences tannin in a wine? Red wines from Burgundy, particularly those from the Cote d’Or, are dependably a far more tannic experience than Pinot Noirs from California. And yet the California wine has probably stayed on the vine longer, and had more time for its tannins to develop.

This question of tannin development brought me to a wall. I actually lost sleep over the question (when I revealed this fact to my traveling companions I was sorely mocked). It just seemed to be such a crucial point, an issue that cut directly to the heart of many discussions, even beyond ripening manner, into issues of Old-World vs. New-World dispositions.

Faced with this question, I traveled north up the California coast looking for answers in Sonoma County. I went to Sebastopol on a warm afternoon to Littorai, where I pressed winemaker Ted Lemon until he told me that his Pinot Noir grapes actually have more tannin, and that the sense of Burgundy as more tannic is probably related to more punchdowns (three per day, versus Lemon’s one or two). A protracted, twisting drive at altitude from the Redwood Highway out to the remote growing sites of Peay Vineyards, which lie among the tall alpine landscape of the far-flung northern coast, garnered a different take from Andy Peay. He called it a matter of longer tannin chains forming during hangtime. Implicitly, these would be silkier in texture than shorter, presumably less-mature, tannins. Ross Cobb, winemaker at Hirsch Vineyards, from whose redwood-dotted landscape the cool and foggy Pacific is visible, suggested I think about extracted levels of catechin, one of the bitter molecular building blocks of tannin. He also listed soil type as a probable contributor.

The Trouble with Tannin

It turns out that one of the more challenging physiological stories to tell is the behavior of tannin. Science has not yet described what promotes formation of tannin pre-veraison, nor their molecular lengthening during ripening. We don’t even know where exactly in the berry tannin is made. We know it ends up concentrated in a layer of the skin and in a layer under the seed coat, but we do not know where it is synthesized.

Professor Adams told me that tannin levels are largely fixed at veraison, (although, like tartaric acid, they decrease in concentration as the berry grows) and that during ripening tannins form longer molecular chains. In the lab, their lengths are measured by mean degree of polymerization (mDP). Seed tannins tend to create shorter chains than do skin tannins, and late in ripening many of these tannins oxidize, turn brown, and bind to the seed coat. This likely diminishes their extractability to some extent.

Professor Adams then reversed most of what I thought I already understood about tannin. “I did a study in which I found that in every case where tannins were described as either green, or unripe, short-chained, or astringent, there was always more tannin present in the wine,” he said. He went on to describe another study, conducted in France, where it was found that in every case where tannins were longer chains they were also found to be more astringent. This is the opposite of what many of us have been taught, that long-chain tannins are silkier and more “mature”, and that this behavior continues in a bottle as wine ages and the tannins soften. In reality, Adams continued, “The French study showed that tannin chains form longer and more astringent linear chains of subunits in the berry, but in a wine solution the polymerization is different. In solution we see cross-chain linkages.” The complex shapes taken on by cross-chain linkages of tannins likely accounts for the different sensory characteristics over time.

This was an arresting revelation, but it also saddled me with a problem. If this is the case, if tannin levels by weight are largely fixed at veraison, and the mDP increases with time, forming longer, more astringent chains, then what accounts for the prevailing misconception that riper wines are less tannic? And could an explanation of this phenomenon provide a clue to why wines of fruit that ripened in a compressed manner feel more tannic, more tense? Could it tell us why Cote d’Or Burgundy is so tannic?

Jeremy Seysses of Domaine Dujac, a domaine that has never feared the full embrace of Cote de Nuits tannin, told me that he didn’t believe the difference had to do with the amount of tannin in the grape, but how much of that tannin was extractable. “I think that many US Pinots are picked so ripe that they are picked after their peak in extractability. Past a certain point, it becomes very hard to extract anything but seed tannin from a grape skin.” Seysses also pointed out that his sites with the greatest diurnal shifts also seem to have the hardest tannins to extract, and that this effect may play out in the California wines, as well.

Professor Adams offered three theories to deal with the question. The first theory suggests a sensory explanation. Adams proposed that perhaps wines with lower pH cause us to perceive tannin as more astringent, while fruit that spends more time on the vine typically has a higher pH. This riper fruit also tends toward a higher polysaccharide content, and polysaccharides may also do the opposite work of making tannins feel less astringent.

Adams’ other two theories both harmonize with Seysses’ sense of decreased extractability in riper grapes. In one theory, tannins in the skin become increasingly bound to plant cell walls: “Tannins are known to interact very strongly with plant cell walls making them insoluble and unextractable into wine. Grapes continue to soften during ripening so perhaps there are additional binding sites created for tannins as the berry continues to ripen.” The next theory adds an extra feature, “Recent work shows that plant cell walls bind larger tannins more tightly than small ones. Perhaps the riper fruit presents more cell wall material to the fermentation that is capable of selectively binding the larger (more astringent) tannin.”

Adams went on to point out that this topic is an emerging area of research, and that he suspects in five years science will understand these and other processes related to ripening in a much keener way.

Aspectual Shapes

If we begin to understand more about what happens in the berry before veraison, then perhaps we will begin to better understand ripening, as well. Perhaps that will aid our understanding of place. Even with this help we are unlikely to unlock all the doors. Just as the topic of place is rife with contingencies, so ripening has its share. Soil type, farming methods, training, and canopy management all may have their own impact upon ripening, and describing their effects could fill many more articles like this one.

The answer to my original question about 2007 red Burgundy remains unanswered. It seems that there is just too little known about what directed the vintage’s key features of low tannin and pre-veraison development. One feature seems to make sense, however. The lighter color is likely due to long periods of cloudiness during ripening.

The endowment of a place’s character to its wine will probably always remain a mystery. Places are analogous to human personalities in a way. They are at once both impossible to fully describe and they make for a totally unsatisfying synopsis. There seems to be no appropriate level of description. It is as if the complexity of their character allows them to resist any summary. And so we must rely on the encounter, the experience of the thing, and the aspectual shape that it casts in our mind, in order to define it.

It is an understanding that goes beyond empirical data. And empirical data is something that many winemakers are comfortable to live without. As long as it works, it works. I think of someone like Bob Lindquist, who, in his L.A. Dodgers t-shirt, ventured almost no physiological or chemical speculations, and whose greatest contribution was a willingness to say, “I don’t know”, a capability that is far too rare in our business. I think of the fact that he, without the aid of a high-powered explanatory arsenal, continues to craft some of the Coast’s most beautiful things.

For now it seems that a complete knowledge of the topic isn’t possible. I also don’t think it’s totally necessary. It may be enough just to see how it could work.

1 The 2002s are just barely opening the door. 2003 is, well, 2003. 2004s are very hit-and-miss, and erring toward green. 2005 won’t even look at you; it is a ball of unresolved introspective issues, and in need of therapy. 2006 is still a little loud. 2008 is still a bundle of nerves. 2009 seems dazed, in a beefcake way. And, so far, the 2010s are primary and large.

2 Robinson, Jancis. “Burgundy 2007—The Verdict”. Jancis Robinson. 24 January, 2009 <http://www.jancisrobinson.com/articles/a200901193.html>.

3 Pick times would still be an obvious consideration, but even for those producers in the Central Coast who harvest at 22° Brix, which is roughly equivalent to Burgundy in a moderate vintage, the differences in fruit character are clear.

4 My own approximation, not the work of an actual wine writer.

5 Assuming grape variety (and probably clonal selection) remains constant, that is.

6 Max Davis’s term for 4-wheeling

7 Kennedy, James, “Understanding Grape Berry Development”, Practical Winery and Vineyard Journal, July/August, 2002.

8 I asked Adams what directed acid levels before veraison, particularly of tartaric, since these levels remain fairly fixed, but he said that there seems to be at least a genetic determinant. This may suggest that clones could also play a significant role in differing acid levels associated with various places, but the effect doesn’t seem to have been fully described.

9 Winkler, A.J., et al. General Viticulture, University of California Press, 1974, p.156.

10 Kennedy, James, “Understanding Grape Berry Development”, Practical Winery and Vineyard Journal, July/August, 2002.

11 Ibid.

12 Adams, Douglas O., “Phenolics and Ripening in Grape Berries”, American Journal of Enology and Viticulture, 57:3, 2006.

13 Kennedy, James, “Understanding Grape Berry Development”, Practical Winery and Vineyard Journal, July/August, 2002.

14 Spayd, S.E. et al., “Separation of Sunlight and Temperature Effects on the Composition of Vitis Vinifera cv. Merlot Berries”, American Journal of Enology and Viticulture, 53:3, 2002.

15 Kennedy, James, “Understanding Grape Berry Development”, Practical Winery and Vineyard Journal, July/August, 2002.

16 Clearly, pick times and extraction technique could also affect richness of flavor, irrespective of place. The human factor should really never be ignored. For this reason, that which is traditional or common to a place may also be called a component of terroir.