A Hedonist in the Cellar (14 page)

Harlan Estate was the first of the cult Cabernets that swept into the Napa Valley in the nineties like guerrillas coming down from the hills, challenging the preeminence of such valley-floor aristocrats as Mondavi and Heitz. Less than two decades later it’s a classic, the most consistently celebrated and coveted Napa Cab of them all. Meanwhile, owner Bill Harlan and winemaker Bob Levy have been creating a new wine—or, rather, three new wines—along with what may be a new paradigm or, at the very least, a new name to make connoisseurs and collectors salivate. The name is Bond.

The Harlan team recently released three Bond wines from the great 2001 vintage under the names St. Eden, Melbury, and Vecina. Having tasted them at the winery, I can vouch for the fact that they are all Harlanesque—an adjective Robert Parker defines as “meaning first-growth Bordeaux complexity combined with Napa ripeness and power”—but they are also noticeably different from Harlan and from one another. They are basically single-vineyard wines from special hillside sites around Napa, a fact that reflects the trend of increasing site specificity as you travel up the price-and-prestige scale (a wine labeled “Oakville” being presumably more singular than one that lists California as its provenance). When I say “basically”—well, hold that thought.

Ever since he’d started visiting the great vineyards of France as a wine loving real estate developer, Harlan had dreamed of creating a California “first growth—a property to rival the great domaines of Bordeaux.” Before he created Harlan Estate, stitching together prime hillside parcels overlooking the famed Martha’s Vineyard, Harlan founded Merry-vale Vineyards in 1983. He conceived Merryvale as a learning experience. Harlan and his partners bought grapes from more than sixty different growers in Napa, discovering what they considered some extraordinary grape real estate. “Bob Levy said to me, ‘You know, some of these vineyards are first growths,’” Harlan says. “But I put that behind me for a while.” Not for long, though.

While some critics wondered if Harlan Estate and similarly ultrarich, small-production boutique Cabs that emerged in the nineties were flashes in the pan, Bill Harlan was thinking about the future. “For Harlan to last for generations we had to make sure we didn’t become too insular,” he says. “And we had to groom the next generation. Harlan Estate was too small for that.” Harlan had no desire to expand the production (about fifteen hundred cases) of his estate wine at the risk of compromising quality. But he and Levy hadn’t forgotten about some of those great vineyard sites from their Merryvale days, and they began talking to the owners.

The Bond concept, which Harlan began to develop more than a decade ago, was of “a stable of Thoroughbreds.” The stable would be run by the Harlan team, including Bob Levy and superstar consultant and
Mondovino
star Michel Rolland, but it would be entirely separate from Harlan Estate. It would be a brand with individual stars.

The challenge they faced was that it’s very difficult to create great wine using other people’s grapes, since the buyer’s and seller’s motives are basically at odds. Growers, especially if they are paid by the ton, want to maximize their yields to maximize their profit, and high yields are the enemy of concentrated wine. The solution, as many grape buyers have concluded, is to pay by the acre and not by the ton, encouraging the growers to strictly limit yields. In creating Bond, Harlan seems to have gone a step further than usual by devising a long-term profit-sharing plan with his growers.

The name Bond, besides being a family name on his mother’s side, is intended to convey this idea of a mutual partnership between the Harlan team and the various growers. Harlan speaks of it as “a convenant.” If this sounds a little fervent, all I can say is that great wines are inevitably the result of an obsessive vision. And Harlan has figured out a way to keep these vows intact. “It takes ten to twenty years,” Harlan says, “to build a name, for us to make these vineyards recognized.” Under his agreement with the owners, the vineyard names under which Bond produces the wines can only be used jointly. If a grower and Bond later part ways, neither can use the name again. Even more unusual is that Harlan reserves the right to tinker with the blending of the Bond wines if vintage conditions call for it, in order to maintain a Bond standard. Thus the possibility exists that a future Bond Melbury may be fine-tuned with juice from Bond or Harlan vineyards—a fairly radical concept, since it mixes the seemingly contradictory single-vineyard ideal with the idea of a proprietary house style, making for a kind of a virtual single-vineyard
wine. “It hasn’t happened yet, but we’re allowing ourselves the option to make a better wine,” Harlan says, and hence there is no actual geographical information on the label. Wine purists may balk at this concept. But Harlan believes that “the discerning wine consumer of the twenty-first century wants a consistency of quality.” And he should probably expect it at a hundred and fifty a bottle.

Bond started with two vineyards, Vecina and Melbury, about eight acres each, and added a third, St. Eden, with the 2001 vintage. (The eventual goal is six Bond wines.) Based on the ’01 and ’02 vintages, the only ones I’ve tasted, the Vecina is the powerful, structured, action-film vineyard, the Latour of the group, while the Melbury (my favorite) is more lush and delicate, like a great Pomerol; the St. Eden (which has garnered the highest Parker rating) seems to split the difference. The ′03 wines may be even sexier than the ′02s and are eminently worthy of their illustrious pedigree. Just when I think I’m bored by Napa Cabernets, along comes Bond and its stable of Thoroughbreds. After tasting the wines, I’m thinking that rules are best left to the French.

Haut-Brion saved my life. Well, maybe not my life, exactly, but certainly my dignity. I’d arrived late for a dinner at La Grenouille, the stuffy New York temple of haute cuisine. Eleven other guests were seated; the hostess, an Asian princess, announced, “Here’s Jay—he knows wine. He’ll guess what we’re drinking.” Before I could find a heavy object with which to bludgeon her, the sommelier handed me a glass and poured from a carafe. He stood back and smirked, while the other guests looked up at me expectantly, as did diners at nearby tables.

The whole setup reminded me of the dream in which I stand naked in front of a classroom. With a sense of resignation bordering on despair I stuck my nose in the glass. “Haut-Brion,” I declared, eliciting a chorus of gasps. I examined the color, and took a sip. “Nineteen eighty-two,” I pronounced.

I sat down and basked in the general admiration without bothering to explain my methods—but now the secret can finally be revealed. I knew my hostess generally drank first-growth Bordeaux and I knew she knew her vintages. But I was very lucky that the wine was Haut-Brion—the most aromatically distinctive and unmistakable of all the first growths; as the great English diarist and bad speller Samuel Pepys put it, in the first brand-name reference to a wine in English literature,
“Ho-Bryan … hath a good and most perticular taste that I never met with before.” To be more specific, a mature Haut-Brion smells like a cigar box containing a Montecristo, a black truffle, and a hot brick, sitting on top of an old saddle. It’s as earthy and complex as a Shakespearean sonnet. Once you’ve had it you never forget it, and you never stop yearning for more.

In the seventeenth century owner Araud III de Pontac created the first Bordeaux brand, refining winemaking techniques and sending his son to London to tout the product; Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and Thomas Jefferson were among its early, vocal fans. Contemporary advocates include the Wachowski brothers—the 1959 Haut-Brion makes a cameo appearance in
The Matrix Reloaded.

In 1855 Haut-Brion was officially listed as one of the four first growths of Bordeaux. In 1935, after a long period of decline, the property was purchased by American banker Clarence Dillon and has remained in the Dillon family ever since.

When I had lunch at the restored sixteenth-century château this past spring with Clarence’s granddaughter, Joan, the Duchess of Mouchy, I asked about the legend that Dillon had not even bothered to get off the train in Bordeaux in order to see the property before he purchased it. “That’s absurd,” she said. “He looked at several properties, including Haut-Brion. He was in the middle of the Atlantic on his way home when he got a telegram from his agent saying that Haut-Brion was still available but he would have to act fast. He sent a two-word reply: act fast.”

Dillon, who spent some of her formative years in Paris
when her father was the American ambassador and was formerly married to the Prince of Luxembourg, has a voice evocative of a privileged transatlantic upbringing, as deep and burnished as an old Vuitton steamer trunk. She also has a cache of anecdotes that would have made Truman Capote wild with jealousy—unfortunately, she’s probably far too well brought up to write a memoir. Since 1975 she has run the estate with the aid of Jean Delmas, the most respected wine-maker in Bordeaux, who inherited the
régisseur
duties from
his
father, George, and claims to have been born “in a vat” on the estate.

The continuity of the Haut-Brion tradition is clearly a sacred duty to the stately, impeccably tailored Delmas, whose son Jean-Philippe seems poised to succeed him, though, like Arnaud de Pontac, he has pioneered many innovations, being among the first to employ stainless-steel fermentation tanks and green harvesting—the pruning of excess grape bunches to ensure concentration. He maintains an experimental garden of some 350 vine clones out behind the château; they are vinified and tested, and the results charted by computer. He tried to explain the process to me, but I got dizzy just looking at the charts.

For centuries, connoisseurs like John Locke, Jefferson, and McInerney have made the pilgrimage to this holy ground in the Graves region, just south of the city of Bordeaux, to examine the sandy glacial soils, full of gravel, which range in color from ash white to espresso brown; today, the vineyards are hemmed in on all sides by the dreary suburban sprawl of the town of Pessac. But the wine retains its subtle, inimitable, lonely majesty.

Haut-Brion’s elegant, supple house style is, in my opinion, often undervalued by wine critics, vis-à-vis the more masculine wines of the Médoc (and its former rival and next-door neighbor La Mission–Haut-Brion, which was bought by the Dillon family in 1983). For all its earthiness, Haut-Brion has always been more about nuance than power. (The 100-point Parker-rated 1989 being a turbocharged exception.) It is the first growth of poets and lovers, as opposed to, say, CEOs and trophy collectors.

More so than any other first growth, Haut-Brion maintains its unique character from vintage to vintage—look for unheralded vintages like ′81, ′83, ′91, and ′94 on wine lists or at auctions. I have yet to be disappointed by a bottle of Haut-Brion. Unlike its northerly peers, it can be delicious in its youth, and yet it improves for decades, becoming—like a person of strong character, like Joan Dillon or Jean Delmas, I suspect—more idiosyncratic with the passing years, more unmistakably itself. More perticular, as Pepys would say.

Before I’d ever tasted Salon, I was entranced by the name, evocative as it is of the intersection of the social life with the life of the mind—of George Sand entertaining Flaubert and Turgenev, or Gertrude Stein hosting Picasso and Hemingway. The literal fact is that Salon is named for its creator, Eugène-Aimé Salon, who established this tiny Champagne domaine in 1921 after making his fortune as a furrier.

Salon might plausibly claim to be the first cult wine of the twentieth century; it was the house Champagne at Maxim’s in the 1920s and ′30s and has always been made in such small quantities as to make Cristal seem mass-market by comparison. If you’ve even heard of it, you probably qualify as a wine wonk.

Honestly, until recently I don’t think I’d tasted Salon more than three or four times, although I was never less than mesmerized when I did. Certainly, the rarity (and expense) enhances its mystique, but in my experience, the moment you taste it the question of whether any bottle of Champagne could be worth two hundred bucks will probably cease to be an issue. My first glass of Salon (the 1982, in 1996) reminded me in many ways of my first white truffle, and in fact this
pairing is one of the great food-and-wine matches. Risotto, white truffle, Salon. Oh. My. God.

Salon’s singularity is the result of several factors. It was the world’s first Blanc de Blancs Champagne made entirely from Chardonnay grapes from the midslopes of vineyards in Le Mesnil-sur-Oger, the preeminent village for Chardonnay in the region (and also the home of Krug’s Clos du Mesnil). Unlike Krug, the other cult Champagne, it never comes near a barrel, old or new. It is made only in the greatest years. (All the luxury cuvées make this claim, even as they declare vintages in less than stellar years, like ′92.) It’s generally released some ten years after the vintage (the current vintage is 1996) and in the opinion of connoisseurs is at its best some ten to twenty years after that.

“If Dom Pérignon is the Mercedes of Champagne,” says Didier Depond, the effervescent director of Salon, “then Salon is the Ferrari or the Maserati.” Most of us may never get the chance to drive either one, but Salon is a relatively accessible luxury and one that needn’t be framed by pomp and ceremony, a point that Depond probably wanted to emphasize when he invited me to share a couple of bottles with him at J’Go in Paris—a hip, noisy bistro in the Ninth Arrondissement. I was kind of expecting to drink this august nectar at Ducasse or L’Ambroisie, and Depond is a regular at both these places, but he’s also a bullfighting aficionado with a pretentiousness deficit. There’s something really invigorating about a great luxury Champagne in an informal setting.

The ′95 Salon that we started with was something to savor in itself, full-bodied and incredibly silky in texture, with a
mousse of tiny bubbles; but given its stiletto acidity it proved to be a pretty amazing accompanist to a succession of tapas.

Even more intriguing was the 1988, the aromas of which reminded me—nutty as it sounds—of walking through the New England woods in October with a fresh loaf of sourdough bread under my arm. It was incredibly lush in the mouth, younger and fresher than you’d expect from the nose. Depond said we’d be drinking it with the toro course, and I thought tuna belly and Champagne were a very sensible combination. The toro turned out to be a flavorful and earthy piece of bull that had recently perished in the ring. It was first served in a carpaccio version, then sliced and char-grilled, both offerings nicely framed by the toasty, earthy ′88 Salon. I’m pretty sure I’ll never be confronted with this particular pairing again, but I’ll certainly never forget it. Perhaps the point I’m making, courtesy of Depond, is that everything tastes good with Salon—or, perhaps, that in this era of high-low aesthetics, of couture denim and Harley-Davidson motorcycles at the Guggenheim, we shouldn’t be too reverent or prissy about great Champagne.

For most of us, Salon will always be something of a special-occasion wine rather than a breakfast, lunch, and dinner staple. But connoisseurs on a budget can experience the prêt-à-porter version of Salon via Champagne Delamotte, which was founded in 1760. Most years, the grapes that in a great year become Salon go instead to its sister winery, both of which are now owned by Laurent-Perrier. Delamotte Blanc de Blancs is a very satisfying substitute for Salon, and an excellent expression of Le Mesnil Chardonnay at less than
half the price. The nonvintage brut and the rosé are also extremely good. That’s my Christmas present to you this year—the insider’s tip. If you can find one, by all means treat yourself to a bottle of Salon for Christmas. And be sure to lay in a case of Delamotte for the new year.