A Hedonist in the Cellar (11 page)

In eight years of writing about wine, I’ve met more than my share of obsessive perfectionists—Angelo Gaja, Helen Turley, and Michel Chapoutier spring immediately to mind. But I’ve never met anyone more fanatic in his attention to detail than Fernando Remírez de Ganuza of Rioja. Remírez de Ganuza has the shrewd expression of a wheeler-dealer who made his living buying and selling small plots of vineyard land from his neighbors until he finally got hooked and decided to keep the best vineyards for himself and start a winery. He is solidly constructed along the lines of a young Raymond Burr, having the build of a man who possibly enjoys food more than he enjoys exercise—and who sensibly insists that his wines be tasted with food. At the Asador Alameda, in the town of Fuenmayor, he pours five vintages to accompany a multi-course orgy that culminates with the entrecôte of a twenty-four-year-old cow—the owner actually shows us the cow’s birth certificate. “Shall we order another one?” Remírez de Ganuza asks me, after we polish off the first platter of meat.
“Si,”
I say. The rare, charred, geriatric beef is possibly the most flavorful I’ve ever eaten, and there’s more wine to go with it. Each vintage is completely distinct—the ethereal 2000 almost Burgundian, the powerful 2001 more like a Châteauneuf;
they show different proportions of
a
spice rack that includes clove, sage, cinnamon, and balsam.

Everyone I talked to in Rioja told me to visit Remírez de Ganuza despite the fact that he doesn’t like anyone else’s wines very much. In fact, he insists he has only recently started to like his own wine, the first vintage of which was produced in 1991; he’ll admit he likes Latour in a good year, and Vega Sicilia, the venerable property in Ribera del Duero.

Once or twice I’ve heard other winemakers refer to the fact that the lower third of the grape bunch, the pointy part, sometimes called the foot, is slightly less mature than the upper part, which gets more sun. But until I visited Remírez de Ganuza, I’d never encountered anyone who actually sliced off this bottom tip. In addition to being less ripe, the foot, Remírez de Ganuza explains, is also likely to contain more residual dust and sulfur from the vineyard. After rinsing the foot with the juice on the bottom of the fermentation tank, Remírez de Ganuza sells off this unwanted fruit to the less fastidious wine-makers of Rioja. Only the upper “shoulder” goes into his top wine, the
reserva
, which since ′98 has been one of the most complex and powerful Riojas. But even before the grapes have arrived at his winery, in Samaniego, they have endured a two-tiered selection process. He harvests the bunches on the southern exposure, those that receive the most sun, first, going back a few days later for the rest.

When it comes time to press his grapes after fermentation is complete, Remírez de Ganuza, who used to be an industrial draftsman, uses a system of his own invention: he inserts a giant rubber bladder in the tank and gradually fills it with
water. The grapes are thus pressed gently enough to avoid crushing the bitter pips, and the wine has as little contact as possible with oxygen—which ages grape juice as it does us.

No matter how much care a winemaker takes in the vineyard and the cellar, the fact is that 5 to 7 percent of his bottles will likely be ruined by corks infected with TCA, a cork-loving compound that makes wine taste like moldy cardboard. So not only does Remírez de Ganuza visit the cork producers, but he orders test batches of five hundred corks, each of which he cooks in a small, water-filled glass jar in his lab oven. Any TCA-infected cork betrays its identity by a stench the moment the lid is removed. If more than three of the five hundred corks are tainted, he starts over again, ordering a new batch of corks. Much of this mad science takes place in the beautiful stone cellar beneath Remírez de Ganuza’s house in the tiny medieval town of Samaniego. The house appears to be many centuries old, but Remírez de Ganuza designed it himself; it was constructed from stones he bought from an old winery nearby. “Old cellars are too damp,” he explains, “and you can’t control the humidity.” Insofar as it’s possible, he’s leaving nothing to chance.

This attention to detail is hardly the norm in Rioja, although the 1990s witnessed a revolution in the area, with many new boutique bodegas like Remírez de Ganuza’s pushing the Tempranillo grape to new heights of expression. New wineries like Allende, Artadi, Remelluri, and Roda have reinvented the concept of Rioja and have won fans around the world, even as older houses like Muga and Sierra Cantabria have started to produce powerful, fruit-driven Riojas along-side
the more traditional and mellower
reservas
and
gran reservas.
The latter, aged in oak for at least two years and in bottle for three more, evoke for me the library of an old house scented with leather volumes and pipe smoke, a style that is faithfully represented by López de Heredia, whose winemaking style hasn’t changed since the 1870s, when Rioja rose to prominence after phylloxera devastated the vineyards of Bordeaux.

Remírez de Ganuza has no patience for this mellow old-school stuff His wines do have some of the same hints of leather and tobacco, along with a medley of spices, but even in a lesser vintage they are packed with fruit—cassis, plums, black cherries, as well as the kind of preserved plums you get in Chinatown. It’s as if he both put a massive stereo system in the old library and shelved some copies of García Márquez alongside the Cervantes. Me, I’m happy to live in an era that offers both styles, and that has room for fanatics like Fernando Remírez de Ganuza.

“Why is it,” asks Kermit Lynch, “that most men don’t like fat women, but they think they like fat wines?” We’re tasting in the cellars of Domaine Tempier in Bandol, near his home in Le Beausset, France, talking about the tendency of the American wine press to celebrate big, superripe wines at the expense of those demonstrating delicacy and finesse. His choice of metaphors reflects the way wine is spoken about in the cellars of Burgundy and the Rhône, though it might not go down so well in liberal Berkeley—where his eponymous wine shop is located, and where he lives half the year.

Lynch is a contrarian of long standing, a California native who doesn’t stock a single California wine at his store on San Pablo Avenue, a wine-mad Francophile who thinks Bordeaux has gone to hell, and an admirer of Robert Parker who thinks the man has a fat fetish.

His name alone, encountered on the labels of some of the greatest wines of France, piques curiosity. His appearance is just as distinctive. There is something elfin about the features: the prominent, outthrust ears; the high forehead; the Gothically pointed arches of his eyebrows, which give him a perpetually quizzical, skeptical, leprechaunish mien. His friend Olivier Humbrecht describes him as inscrutable. Lynch claims
to be antisocial, though he and his wife, Gail, along with their two children, live a kind of Gerald and Sara Murphy life between Provence and Berkeley, entertaining friends like Boz Scaggs, Alice Waters, and Aubert de Villaine.

As a retailer, importer, and author, Lynch has followed his nose and his palate, discovering and introducing Americans to some of the greatest, most distinctive wines of France. Zind-Humbrecht, Raveneau, Vieux Télégraphe, Mas de Daumas Gassac—these are among his finds. And he has memorably described his quest in
Adventures on the Wine Route
, to my mind one of the best books on wine in the English language, with its uncommon combination of poetic insight and skeptical common sense.

He is a pioneer in his appreciation of the regional traditions of French wine, and his position in the wine world might almost be described as reactionary. Of California wines he says, “I taste them and I wonder, Can a white man sing the blues?” As for the Bordelaises, he thinks they are trying to imitate the Californians. “Bordeaux doesn’t taste like Bordeaux,” he says over a lunch of grilled vegetables. “It tastes like California Cabernet. The last real Bordeaux vintage was ′81. Now they dress their wines up with lipstick and high heels.” (Less metaphorically, he thinks the Bordelaises are growing too much, and tarting up the juice with sugar and gimmicks like reverse osmosis, which removes water from the juice.) Describing the old style, he quotes Cardinal Richelieu, who commended the wines of Bordeaux as having “an indescribably sinister, somber bite that is not at all disagreeable.” Lynch misses the sinister bite with today’s flirty Bordeaux. He gives
Marcel Guigal credit for reviving interest in Côte-Rôtie, while criticizing his heavily oaked blockbusters as lacking regional and varietal character. Opinions like these, not to mention his tendency to corner the market on certain desirable wines, have made Lynch a somewhat controversial figure in the wine world.

By his own description, Lynch was a Berkeley hippie when he first became interested in wine. A musician who wrote for the
Berkeley Barb
and made purses out of Oriental rugs, he found a buyer for his handicrafts business and went to Europe on the proceeds. He returned to California in 1972 and borrowed five thousand dollars to open a tiny wine store. Alice Waters, who had just launched Chez Panisse, was one of his early customers. At the time, the California wine boom was barely in its infancy, and the American market for French wines was largely restricted to the top growths of Bordeaux. Lynch created a niche by visiting the less celebrated regions of France and importing distinctive regional wines. He says his decision to concentrate on European wines was almost accidental; the late California winemaker Joseph Swan was a friend, and Lynch loved his Zinfandels. But when Swan ripped up his best Zinfandel vineyard and planted Pinot Noir, Lynch hated the results. “So rather than lose a friend,” he says, “I made a rule: no California wines.” One suspects this isn’t the whole story, but Lynch gives good anecdote.

In another happy accident, Lynch met the legendary expatriate food writer Richard Olney when looking for a translator on one of his wine-buying trips. (He has since become fluent enough to fend for himself.) Olney’s knowledge
of French regional wines was as invaluable as his linguistic skills. “He would listen to a wine to see what it had to say,” says Lynch. “He changed the way I taste.” Like Olney, Lynch believes in context—the context of a wine’s origins, and the context of its consumption with certain foods. He scoffs at blind tastings, vintage charts, and numerical wine ratings. “It’s ridiculous to rate a Muscadet on the same scale as a Montrachet,” he says. “One of the great things about wine is diversity.”
Diversity
is his mantra. Yes, he imports Coche-Dury, the hottest white Burgundy on the planet, but he seems just as excited by the inexpensive wines of Corsica, with their unique native grape varietals and herbal aromatics. He recently acquired Les Pallières, an estate in funky Gigondas, in partnership with the Brunier family of Vieux Télégraphe.

Is Kermit Lynch winning his war against homogeneity or losing it? On the one hand, he helped stem the tide in France toward filtration, which he believes—as most authorities now do—strips wines of their character. French regional wines like Sancerre, Chinon, and Bandol have found a place on American wine store shelves. On the other hand, despite local rebellions, the hegemony of oaky Cabernet and Chardonnay advances apace. If you’re tired of the same old chocolate and vanilla, you might look for that amazing name on a label the next time you’re in a wine store.

“The tension in the ground—do you feel it?” asks Jacques Lardière, his intense interrogatory gaze almost lifting me off my feet. We are standing in the middle of Clos-de-Malte, a walled amphitheater of a vineyard in Santenay. “You can feel the pulse of the earth,” Lardière says, bobbing his head with its wild growth of silver locks while pumping his hands rhythmically in front of his chest. I feel
something
here, looking out at the valley beyond the Romanesque church, basking in the May sunshine and listening to the bees, though it may be the magnetic force of personality of the intensely passionate Lardière, the winemaker for Louis Jadot.

“The minerals,” he says, pointing to the ground with one hand and the sky with the other, “must be connected to the light.” If only on a metaphorical level, this makes perfect sense. “We are seeking,” he says, “the unconscious of the earth.” I don’t understand all of Lardière’s proclamations, but I think he’s a better poet than many Bollingen Prize winners, and a genius of a winemaker.

Maison Louis Jadot is one of the oldest and most respected houses in Burgundy, a beacon of consistent quality in a notoriously unreliable region. Jadot is both a domain, producing and bottling wines from its own estates, and a negotiant, vinifying
grapes purchased from other growers. Since 1985 the firm has been owned by its American importer, Kobrand, and almost half of the wine, luckily for us, comes here. Burgundy snobs sometimes underrate Jadot’s wines because of the firm’s relatively large production, but some of us believe that Jadot Burgundies are among the best and longest-lived in the region. And they represent great value at every level, from the humble Beaujolais to the exalted Musigny. If Domaine Romanée-Conti is the Ferrari of Burgundy, Jadot is the Mercedes.

I found it significant that given all the vineyards Lardière could have taken me to, he started in relatively obscure Santenay. “We have to have the same approach for the lesser wines as for the
grand crus,”
he said. And as if to prove his point, later, at lunch in the fifteenth-century Counvent des Jacobins in downtown Beaune, he opened a 1971 Gevrey-Chambertin, a so-called village wine, the third ranking in the Burgundy hierarchy, below
grand
and
premier cm.
Conventional wisdom would suggest that such a relatively modest wine (especially in the half-bottle format he opened) would be over the hill, but this wine was not only still vibrant and fleshy but amazingly nuanced.

What Lardière cherishes—and this is the glory of Burgundy—are the differences between the wines from one piece of ground to the next. As we drive from Santenay north through Chassagne-Montrachet, Puligny-Montrachet, and Meursault, he points out the different vineyards: “That’s Combettes … that’s Charmes…
ça c’est
Genevrières.” The untrained eye often can’t see any logical borders, but a thousand years of empirical observation and tasting have drawn
the lines. Later, in the Jadot cellars, Lardière demonstates the indisputable distinctions as we taste the ′04s in barrels. There’s probably no other cellar in Burgundy where the religion of
terroir
can be so effectively illustrated. Lardière makes over a hundred different wines. The ′04 Chassagne-Montrachet tastes much more mellow than the minerally, high-strung Puligny, and the distinctions only become more interesting as we move up the hierarchy. “This is freedom, this is individuality,” Lardière shouts, waving his arms and spraying me with some residual Mersualt Charmes. “The grape disappears. It’s not Pinot, it’s not Chardonnay—it’s about expressing the place.” (He tries to get out of the way of the process by using the least manipulative techniques.) Considering that he started tasting at seven this morning, his enthusiasm, and the precision of his palate, is impressive.

Lardière can seem alternately—and even at the same time—like a mad scientist and an overstimulated poet; his alter ego at Jadot is Pierre-Henri Gagey, who was preceded in the post by his father, André, and who comes across as the most urbane and polished of French diplomats, although he too is a true believer. “Burgundy is a place of great spirituality,” he tells me over a glass of honeyed, minerally ′76 Chevalier-Montrachet at his home in Beaune. “Pinot Noir was here in a wild stage when the monks came in the eleventh century. The key of Burgundy is the mutation of Pinot Noir to the environment.”

Connoisseurs are pretty unanimous in their praise of Jadot’s top whites; in recent years, as I have tasted more and more of the older reds, I’ve become a devotee. They are darker
and slower to blossom than some of their peers because of their long stay in vats and their high fermentation temperature, but they evolve and improve for decades. The ′59 Chambertin that Gagey poured with dinner was still brimming with sweet red fruit and hauntingly complex, somehow reminding me of a Valéry sonnet. (Gagey is a bibliophile and we’d been discussing favorite authors.) “It’s a very emotional wine,” Gagey says—not a bad description. He opened it in part to provide a context for imagining the future development of the 2003 vintage—′59 being a similarly hot and dry year.

The 2003 Jadots were released this past fall—later than most of their neighbors—and I can’t recommend them highly enough, especially the reds. The summer was the hottest on record, and while many growers freaked out and picked as early as August 16, when the grapes were technically ripe in terms of sugar content but deficient in flavor development, Lardière and company waited until August 28 and got amazingly ripe and complex flavors. As great as Jadot’s 2002s were across the board, some of these will be even better and will be more generous in their youth; yet I already envy the lucky few who will drink the ′03 Chambertin Clos-de-Bèze forty or fifty years from now.