A Hedonist in the Cellar (10 page)

Michel Chapoutier has a quick answer for one of the thorniest food-and-wine-pairing questions ever: what to drink with asparagus. “The perfect match for asparagus is my competitors’ wines,” he says. The point is that asparagus tends to make wine taste metallic and hollow, and this little joke seems to me to illustrate not only Chapoutier’s keen and dry sense of humor, but also his fierce competitive spirit. Opinionated and driven, he’s an inspiring and controversial figure in the world of wine. Even his pronounced limp is a manifestation of his willfulness: he walked around for two months on a broken leg before finally going to the doctor, where an X-ray revealed four different fractures. But though he needs a cane to get around now, he seems anything but debilitated; I found myself at times almost running to keep up with him as he bounced around the winery and down the sidewalk of Tain l’Hermitage.

While some writers have invoked Napoleon in describing the diminutive and fiercely ambitious wine baron, I couldn’t help thinking of Oedipus as Chapoutier described taking control of the family domaine from his father, “a lazy, violent man” who belittled his youngest son’s capacities and was an indifferent caretaker of the extensive vineyards he inherited in
the northern Rhône—most notably on the venerable hill of Hermitage, a terroir whose reputation in the nineteenth century was as celebrated as that of Bordeaux. We sat on the porch of his sprawling farmhouse perched on a ridge high above the Rhône, and Chapoutier’s anger flared and then faded as he sipped a glass of Trimbach Clos Sainte-Hune Riesling, periodically glancing over at his wife, Corrine, a transplant from Basque country; he met her when he was shopping for an engagement present for his fiancée.

The Chapoutier family arrived in Tain l’Hermitage, in the Rhône Valley, two hundred years ago. They gradually accumulated some five hundred acres of vineyards up and down the valley while establishing a negotiant business in which they bought grapes from other growers and vinified them. The reputation of the house languished under the direction of Michel’s father; Michel returned home after oenology school and internships at several California estates to discover the business in a shambles. He took over the winemaking and in 1990, with the help of his American importer, bought the company from his grandfather. (His older brother Marc, who ran the business side, has since been demoted.) Chapoutier consulted with winemakers Gérard Chave in Hermitage and Marcel Guigal in nearby Côte-Rôtie, who introduced the use of new oak barrels in the cellar and lowered yields in the vineyards. Like Guigal, Chapoutier stopped filtering his wines on the principle that it stripped them of character. “Filtering wine,” he says, “is like screwing with a condom.” (He likes sexual metaphors; when one of his guests struggles to identify the components of a wine’s bouquet in the tasting room he
urges him to relax and just enjoy the wine. “If you think about it too much you can kill it. The brain is a pleasure killer. You don’t need to be a gynecologist to make love.”)

Chapoutier went way further than his mentors in his approach to viticulture, virtually banning the use of sprays and chemicals and adopting biodynamics, the radical system of organic farming based on the teachings of Rudolf Steiner. “Biodynamics,” Chapoutier explains, “is homeopathy applied to plants.” While a number of small producers in Alsace and Burgundy have adopted the system, which is based in part on following lunar cycles, Chapoutier is perhaps the biggest and the most vocal proponent of them all.

Beginning with the strong 1989 vintage, the results of Michel’s stewardship were dramatic. In 1996, Robert Parker wrote, “I have never witnessed a more significant jump in quality and change in winemaking philosophy than what has occurred in the Chapoutier cellars since the 1989 vintage.” Chapoutier’s single-vineyard estate wines (those from his own vineyards, as opposed to those he makes from purchased grapes) are among the most sought-after wines of the Rhône, and the exuberant, hypomanic five-foot-two Michel has become a towering figure in the wine world. Along with his neighbor Gerard Chave, he has helped to reestablish the reputation of Hermitage, a domelike hill best known for its powerful and long-lasting Syrah-based reds, although I find myself most in awe of Chapoutier’s white Hermitages, made from Marsanne grapes, wines that are dominated by a striking mineral quality. They don’t taste like any other white wines in the world, which to Michel is the whole point of biodynamics—to let the site
and the soil speak for itself. “Hermitage was first known for its white wine,” Chapoutier says—a claim I haven’t been able to corroborate. But no matter. His single-vineyard red and white Hermitages are stunning, powerful, and earthy wines, even better now that he has dialed back a little on his use of new oak. Of his winemaking evolution he says, “I used to be able to make noise, but now I make music.”

Chapoutier also makes two superb Côte-Rôties from “the roasted slopes” north of Hermitage, and some of the best wines from the less exalted appellations of Saint-Joseph and Crozes-Hermitage, which are far more affordable than the Hermitages, which can sell for as much as three hundred dollars. And his Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Barbe Rac, made from hundred-year-old Grenache, is usually one of the best. All of these wines are made in fairly small quantities; in recent years he has purchased vineyard land in Aix-en-Provence and in Banyuls, and he now has two different winemaking projects in Australia. “I’m a soil discoverer,” he says. He’s been called better—and worse. Somehow I don’t see him slowing down anytime soon, this whirling dervish who seems driven as much by passion as by his demons.

The Brewer-Clifton winery is unprepossessing, to say the least—located in an aluminum-sided warehouse in a small industrial park at the edge of Lompoc, California, a town best known for its prison. You definitely didn’t see it in
Sideways
, Alexander Payne’s movie set in the more picturesque stretches of the Santa Barbara County wine country. Call me perverse, or postmodern, but after all these years of visiting hypertrophied, gated châteaus in Bordeaux and Napa, I actually find Brewer-Clifton kind of romantic. The warehouse complex also includes ten other wineries and is affectionately known among its denizens as the “wine ghetto.” Three decades after Richard Sanford and Michael Benedict proved the area’s potential for Burgundian varieties, Steve Clifton, Greg Brewer, and other landless overachievers are working in rented sheds and warehouses to push the limits with radical new stylings of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.

Before he caught the wine bug, Brewer was a professor of French at the University of California at Santa Barbara; Clifton played guitar in a rock band and was part owner of a nightclub in Laguna Beach. Brewer, who is built like a greyhound, thanks in part to a fanatic cycling regimen, is the kind of guy who wakes up at three in the morning to check on his
daughters and then his vats. Clifton, who looks like a younger version of
CSI
star William Petersen and likes to surf, is liable to be climbing into bed at about that time—or so I imagine on the basis of a couple of nights I spent with him over the past few years, including a chance encounter in Friuli, Italy, that lasted about nine hours. This Apollonian/Dionysian contrast is reflected in the wines, which are almost paradoxical in their juxtaposition of ripeness and acidity, of voluptuousness and bone structure—in other words, wines that speak French but also know how to shake their booty on the dance floor.

When I arrived in the middle of harvest last year, both Brewer and Clifton were hopping between tightly packed tanks and barrels to the rhythm of a loud drum-and-bass beat, courtesy of a CD mixed by Clifton’s wife, Crystal, the air thick with the heady funk of fermenting Pinot Noir grapes. Their wine ghetto neighbor Kris Curran, who makes a hot new Pinot called Sea Smoke, stopped by to ask if she could borrow some red wax. (Wax?) Yup, the boys have wax; they use it to hand-seal the corks. Clifton pours me a glass of their Santa Rosa Chardonnay—which starts out deceptively fleshy and round, then zaps me awake with a towel snap of acidity— and explains that the Santa Ynez Valley, with its east-west orientation funneling Pacific air inland, “is a very extreme place; there’s some crazy fruit grown here, and you gotta go for it.”

Go for it they do—the Brewer-Clifton wines are controversial, and extreme. The duo first met at a Rotary Club tasting in Goleta when they were both working for other wineries. Both dreamed about how they would push the limits
if they could make their own wine, and that’s just what they’ve done now that they’re on their own. One extreme practice: whole-cluster fermenting for Pinot—i.e., leaving in all the stems, since stems can contribute a green taste, which they believe gives the Pinots additional texture. The Brewer-Clifton grapes come from steep, cool-weather sites, and only a third of the crop is mellowed in new oak before being blended with the rest, which may partly account for the wine’s vibrancy.

Clifton drives me east from Lompoc to view some of Brewer-Clifton’s sources, the valley getting warmer—as much as a degree warmer per mile, he says. East of the kitschy town of Solvang it’s more than warm enough to grow Syrah and even Cabernet, but it’s the cool, fog-drenched Santa Rita Hills, between Lompoc and Buellton, that are ideal for the Burgundian varietals. The Chards and Pinots of this region usually have greater natural acidity than their north coast counterparts. None has more zing, more precision and tension, than Brewer-Clifton’s. Lovers of fat, buttery Chardon-nays and voluptuous Pinots may find them too high-strung.

Clifton points out Ashley’s Vineyard, owned by Fess Parker, of Davy Crockett renown, from which Brewer-Clifton purchases Chardonnay and Pinot grapes. On the other side of the highway is the mustard-yellow, Tuscan-style winery of Melville Vineyards, where Brewer is the winemaker and from which the dynamic duo also purchase grapes for their own label. Fortunately, for those who love the Brewer-Clifton style, Melville’s Pinots and Chardonnays are made in slightly larger quantities.

As a winemaker, Brewer likes to compare himself to a sushi chef: he’s a minimalist who wants to let the grapes and the vineyard express themselves without interference. Whether consciously or unconsciously, the former professor seems to be echoing Flaubert when he says, “I want to be invisible, I want to get out of the way, I don’t want a stylistic stamp.” The most radical expression of this philosophy is a Melville Chardon-nay called Inox, which gets no oak and doesn’t undergo malolactic fermentation—the secondary fermentation that creates that familiar buttery taste. Naked Santa Rita Chardonnay, as it were.

“We want to show provenance,” Clifton says. The twelve single-vineyard Brewer-Clifton whites and reds “are treated exactly the same, so that what comes through is the vineyard.” You’d never mistake their Sweeney Canyon Chardon-nay for their Mount Carmel Chardonnay, which comes from a steep hillside dominated by an eerie, unfinished convent overlooking the famous Sanford & Benedict Vineyard. Nor, once you have tasted them a few times, are you likely to mistake Brewer-Clifton’s wines for anybody else’s.

Novelist Evelyn Waugh, in his fiction and correspondence, provided us with some fine observations on wine and its enjoyment, but perhaps his greatest service to the world of wine was to sire Auberon Waugh. Best known as a novelist, columnist, book reviewer, and curmudgeon, Auberon Waugh wrote a wine column for
Tatler
and later for
Harpers & Queen.
His vinous writing is collected in
Waugh on Wine
, which, page for page, is the liveliest and most pungent wine writing of the century. Waugh called himself “a practitioner of the vituperative arts”; an article he wrote about Islam incited an angry mob to burn down the British council building in Rawalpindi. He believed that wine writing should be no less extravagant and intemperate than political commentary.

“The purpose of the aperitif is definitely not to make one drunk,” he says of the first drink of the day. “This should come with the wine, or, failing that, with the port and other delights afterward.” This passage displays Waugh’s rhetorical powers in all their glory, the first sentence misleading us into imagining that Waugh has gone Methodist or politically correct on us, the second putting that idea to rest with a right jab and a quick left hook. This is called humor, for those of you who have been reading too many wine publications.

“Wine writing should be camped up,” he wrote in one essay. “The writer should never like a wine, he should be in love with it; never find a wine disappointing but identify it as a mortal enemy, an attempt to poison him. Bizarre and improbable side tastes should be proclaimed: mushrooms, rotting wood, black treacle, burned pencils, condensed milk, sewage, the smell of French railway stations or ladies’ underwear.”

He made good on this pledge. “A tremendous amount of unnecessary suffering goes on under the name of liebfraumilch,” he declared. “Filthy” and “disgusting” were his favorite descriptors. As the head of a wine club, he once proclaimed an offering “anal,” and was delighted to report that it immediately sold out, a fact that, he felt, said a lot about his countrymen. In a
Tatler
column, he described his cousin’s house wine as a drink of “stupendous horror … the foul beverage itself tasted of vinegar, blue ink, and curry powder.” Not content with this, he said that it reminded him “of a bunch of dead chrysanthemums on the grave of a stillborn West Indian baby,” a remark that got him fired from
Tatler.
(He explained to the press council, who called him up on charges of racism, that it was the curry taste that suggested the image.)

Bron, as everyone called him, was more vivid in insult than in praise, but in his wine writing, unlike his literary criticism, he was always looking for love. He described red Bandol as “a beautiful, swarthy, scorched-earth red, which improves with keeping.” He could wax rapturous about Condrieu and Châteauneuf-du-Pape. His first love was Burgundy or, rather, a swarthy beverage of that name that he remembered from his father’s cellar. He called himself a “jilted lover of
red burgundy.” In his search for this mythical beverage of bygone country house dinners, he resembled Gatsby in his quest for Daisy Buchanan. Anyone reading Waugh’s description of these old Burgundies would imagine he was describing Châteauneuf-du-Papes, and in a sense he was; until the 1930s, Burgundy was regularly beefed up with ripe, two-fisted juice from the Rhône and the Midi. And, naturally, upper-class curmudgeon that he was, he loved port.

Bron’s snobbery was tempered by his maniacal thrift—he liked nothing better than a bargain, a cheap Spanish Cabernet or an Italian Merlot that outperformed the great growths of Bordeaux. In fact, what seemed to drive him as an oenophile was the quest for inexpensive substitutes for the wines of Burgundy and Bordeaux. Although he blamed rich Americans for the rising prices of these treasures, and for many of the ills of civilization, he eventually became a fan of Napa Valley Cabernets.

When Bron died in 2001, the vast outpouring of affection in the English press was puzzling to many who had never met him. He had an extraordinarily diverse and devoted army of friends, and they invariably commented on the disparity between his public and private personae. In person his wit was gentle and self-deprecating; he would sooner have drunk liebfraumilch all night than offend a dinner companion. Having once been the target of his satire in print, I was still stinging when I met him at a
Private Eye
luncheon in London a few months later. By the end of lunch I was practically apologizing for having written the book that had elicited his parody.

And I subsequently shared several meals and many bottles
of wine with him. At dinner parties, he was invariably polite, appreciative, and vague about the host’s wine. He was far more specific, and pungent, in
Waugh on Wine
, which lovers of the language and the grape should keep at their bedside, to remind us that wine is a subject to inspire passion and polemic.