Encounters With The Surreal At This Summer's Aspen Classic

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.

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