A Hedonist in the Cellar (16 page)

Not the least pleasure of wine is its mnemonic quality—its madeleine-like ability to reawaken previous pleasures, to transport us back in time and place. If I fail, as seems likely, to make it physically to Provence this summer, I will revisit it often in memory—whenever I open a bottle of rosé. Rosé is made in most of the world’s wine regions, but in my mind it will always be evocative of southern France, of the fragrant villages between Avignon and Cannes, and of the food of that region.

Several of my most memorable meals have been washed down with rosé, none more satisfying than a lunch at a tiny restaurant near the village of Apt. I’d just spent two days tasting the ′98 vintage in Châteauneuf-du-Pape—huge red tannic monsters. My mouth was still puckered with tannin as I set out with a friend that morning from Avignon for a little
R & R
— honest, wine tasting is
work
—in Peter Mayle country. Someone had recommended a stop at Mas Tourteron, but I don’t recall any great expectations when we finally disembarked in the dusty parking lot in the midst of a cherry orchard after innumerable wrong turns. (Forget about your Michelin map in Provence—it doesn’t work.) We entered the gate of a walled-in courtyard that dwarfed the farmhouse to which it was attached.

The courtyard was hushed and deserted, a few rough farm tables scattered on the lawn among the trees. Birdcages were mounted on the walls and the trees. The fragrance from scattered flowerbeds was almost narcotic. The pleasant spell was eventually broken with the arrival of Philippe Baique, the deeply tanned, silver-haired husband of chef Elisabeth Bourgeois; he offered us our pick of the tables and returned with the menus and the wine list, which included superstars from such producers as Guigal and Krug. But we were interested in the local talent. We put ourselves in the hands of the proprietor, who brought out a bottle of rosé and advised us to arm ourselves against the sun with one of the many straw hats that were hanging in the trees around us. Hot and thirsty as I was, I found it hard to imagine that anything had ever tasted so good as that rosé. It hardly needed food, given the continuing suspense in the mouth of the sweet fruit dueling with the citrusy acidity. But it played a strong supporting role with my first course—a dish that I hesitate to call tomato soup since it was actually the Platonic essence of tomato, highlighted with basil and other herbs. The wine continued to shine with the salmon with herbs in parchment, and I was loath to give it up even with the arrival of the clafoutis, made from the cherries that had just come into season.

Baique told us that the producer, Domaine de La Citadelle, was just a few miles away in Ménerbes, and he eventually drove us over to the castle that houses the winery to meet the proprietor, the squirish and impeccably tweeded M. Yves Riusset-Rouard, who made his pile, in part, as producer of the salacious
Emmanuelle
movies. In addition to rosé, M. Riusset-Rouard
makes some impressive Cabernet-based reds, but his most distinctive accomplishment may be the creation of the Corkscrew Museum on the premises, which houses the world’s largest collection of these vital implements.

A few days later, at a cliffside restaurant overlooking the Mediterranean in Marseille, I discovered the ultimate food match for Provençal rosé: bouillabaisse. Even if, especially if, you’re the kind of girl who thinks she’s too sophisticated for rosé, you will be converted by this match. Of course, the Marseillaises—included winemaker Jean-Luc Colombo, who was my dinner partner—claim that you can’t get true bouillabaisse outside of the Mediterranean. The good news is that while no wine will ever taste quite as good at home in Des Moines as it will in, say, the lavender-scented hilltop town of Corbierres, in the age of refrigerated shipping containers it should be pretty much the same beverage.

The wine I was swilling with my bouillabaisse, Mas de La Dame, is one of many good Provençal rosés available in the States. It comes from the Les Baux appellation—the hills south of Saint-Rémy. And if the starkly beautiful landscape around the seventeenth-century farmhouse looks familiar, that may be because van Gogh painted it while he was living in Saint-Rémy. The estate employs the consulting services of Colombo, who races between estates up and down the Rhône Valley in his BMW. Like most Provençal rosés, Mas de La Dame is made from a blend of red wine grapes—in this case, Grenache, Cabernet, and Syrah—which are removed from their pigment-bearing skins before fermentation.

The best-known appellation for Provençal rosés is Bandol,
located on the coast between Marseille and Toulon. Domaine Tempier and Château Pradeaux are my perennial favorites. The Côtes de Provence appellation is the home of the famous Domaine Ott, which comes in that funny Greek-urn-shaped bottle and costs almost twice as much as the average Provençal rosé. But at times, with certain foods, it can seem more inspired than a first-growth Bordeaux, as I seem to recall it did over a lunch with English friends at a restaurant called Tetou on the beach at Golfe Juan. We were celebrating my friend’s Simon’s birthday. We ate fish soup and langoustines and the Domaine Ott kept coming as the waves lapped the sand and bathers wandered past a few feet from our table. I haven’t seen Simon for several years, but whenever I open a bottle of Domaine Ott, as I did recently on a cold day in New York, I think about that afternoon on the beach.

The classic European dishes have their classic wine matches: Bordeaux with rack of lamb, Sauternes with terrine of foie gras, Barolo with
brasato.
But most of us, I suspect, eat moo shu pork and chicken tikka masala more often than we eat beef bourguignonne. Asian cuisines were not developed with indigenous wines, so we can’t rely on tradition, but that doesn’t mean you have to drink beer—or sake—when you go Asian.

To begin with, let me make a blanket generalization and declare that Champagne goes very well with sushi and most other Japanese food. According to Richard Geoffroy, wine-maker for Dom Pérignon, it’s a marriage based, in part, on the compatibility of the yeast in the Champagne and the yeast in the soy sauce; plus, the wine’s high acidity cuts through the saltiness—as with caviar. For similar reasons, Champagne works well with dim sum. It’s more difficult to make generalizations about other Chinese cuisines, given the many regional styles, but most of us are familiar with a hybrid of Cantonese and Szechuan cooking.

I recently celebrated my birthday at Canton, my favorite Chinese restaurant, located in New York’s Chinatown. One reason I chose the place was that it allows me to bring my
own wine. On the other hand, Cantonese food is not exactly a slam dunk when it comes to wine matching. But I had more hits than misses.

One intuition, increasingly confirmed by experience, is that the white wines of Alsace and Germany often make great companions for Chinese and South Asian dishes—Riesling being especially companionable with Cantonese cooking, as the ′99 Barmès Buecher Hengst
grand cru
proved in conjunction with the minced squab wrapped in lettuce leaf. The most exciting match of the birthday dinner was a Zind-Humbrecht Pinot Gris with Peking duck. (Several Alsatian winemakers, including Olivier Humbrecht, had tipped me off to this one. The slight smokiness of the Pinot Gris is amplified by the smokiness of the long-cooked duck.) One thing that makes these wines so successful with somewhat sweet, somewhat spicy food is their residual sugar. Anyone who is horrified at the idea of sweetness—who thinks that the words
dry
and
sophisticated
are synonymous—should get over it. Or drink beer. A touch of sugar, which many Alsatian and German wines have, is the perfect counterpoint to spice; these wines are also inevitably high in acidity, which balances out the sweetness of a sauce like hoisin. When going German, choose a
Spätlese
, a late-picked wine with good body and ripeness.

I also had a red wine success, pairing a ′96 Martinelli Jackass Hill Vineyard Zinfandel with the Cantonese beef and onions. I have since had almost unerring satisfaction with (red) Zinfandel and Chinese food, especially Ridge’s Lytton Springs (a 70 percent Zin blend), which is widely available. I have no idea why Zinfandel works with such a wide variety
of feisty Chinese dishes—like sesame chicken and orange-flavored beef—though I suspect it has to do with the natural exuberance and sweetness of the grape and its low tannins. Try it.

I have always loved Viognier, especially from the Condrieu region of France, but I never really knew what to drink it with—it seems too floral and assertive for most white wine dishes—until I took a suggestion from a waiter at Chiam, a Chinese restaurant in midtown Manhattan. The 2000 Copain Viognier from the Russian River region of California seemed to distinguish itself with every dish—shrimp dumplings, spicy prawns, and sesame chicken—and I have since been converted to Chinese with both French and domestic Viogniers. Indian food is, if anything, even trickier than Chinese. Vindaloo, anyone? (Again, there are many cuisines in the subcontinent, but on these shores generalizations can be made.) I have often drunk Gewürztraminer with Indian food—it’s almost a cliché at this point that Gewürz, with its wacky rose-water and lychee nut character, goes with hot food like curries. The principle of balancing sweet and hot serves as a guideline—think of the wine as serving the purpose of a sweet chutney. A slightly sweet Gewürz, even a Vendange Tardive, can stand up to a hotter curry.

I was introduced to a more offbeat partner for Indian flavors by Richard Breitkreutz, the former wine director at three-star Tabla, which specializes in the cuisine of chef Floyd Cardoz’s native southern Goa. Breitkreutz brought out a ′96 Martinez Bujanda Rioja Finca Valpiedra Reserva with the chicken tikka, eliciting a skeptical hoot from me. But the
two seemed made for each other, and the Rioja complemented all the other dishes on the table, including a medium-hot curry. I’ve since discovered that this was no fluke. Breitkreutz thinks it has something to do with the earthiness of the wine.

With its green and red curries and sweet and spicy combinations, Thai food presents similar challenges. Gewürz is a good place to start, particularly with
gai pad bai krapow
—spicy chicken or beef with onions and basil. Viognier also stands up. And Australian Sémillon from the Hunter Valley seems to work especially well in conjunction with lemongrass and ginger. As for reds, I have had good luck pairing young Australian Shirazes with spicy beef salads and several other dishes. The explanation for this match probably has nothing to do with relative geographical proximity.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about matching wine with Asian food is that it’s a relatively new area of inquiry. Many discoveries await the wine geek and the novice alike. Dial up your local takeout, open a few modestly priced bottles, and be prepared for some pleasant surprises.

Back in 1985 I found myself staying at the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood at the expense of a large movie studio. While the Chateau’s room service menu was minimal enough foodwise to satisfy the most demanding anorexics and drug abusers, it listed a couple dozen old vintages of
grand cru
Burgundy from Bouchard Père et Fils. Visiting repeatedly over the next few years, I helped deplete this cellar and in the process developed an ugly Burgundy habit, which has persisted to this day.

Burgundy is a wine for chronic romantics—those for whom hope perenially triumphs over experience. If you are a sensible person with a family, a full-time job, and a sound belief in cause and effect, you might want to avoid the Côte d’Or. Once you’ve experienced the transport of a great bottle of Burgundy, you may end your days broke, drooling on Burgundy Wine Company catalogs, offering sexual favors to sommeliers—all in the vain hope of re-creating that rapture.
Having scared the wimps from the room, let me qualify this gloomy scenario by proposing a reliable source for this particular controlled substance.

Founded in 1731, Bouchard owns more prime vineyards in the Côte d’Or than any other firm. And in many ways, its history is emblematic of the region. Bouchard’s headquarters was built on the ruins of the fifteenth-century Château de Beaune, which the family purchased after the French Revolution; the ancient cobwebbed cellars contain what is undoubtedly the world’s largest library of old Burgundy vintages, extending to the early part of the last century. Long renowned for its magnificent
grand crus
, by the 1970s the firm was, like Burgundy itself, coasting on its reputation.

In the 1960s and ′70s many of the region’s famous vineyards had been planted with mutant, high-yielding vines and saturated with fertilizers. The feeble wines from these overworked vineyards were routinely turbocharged with sugar and tartaric acid, with little regard to the strict laws limiting these practices. Worst of all, some Burgundian estates and negotiants routinely labeled and sold lesser village wines from the flats as
premier crus
and
grand crus
from the more prestigious hillside vineyards, as well as wines from the Rhône Valley and elsewhere, making a mockery of the entire appellation system. Although these practices were widespread, the authorities decided to make an example of the biggest fish in Beaune. In October 1987 they descended on Bouchard’s headquarters, seizing the cellar book, which documented dubious cellar practices. Bouchard ended up paying a $400,000 fine and was subsequently sold to to Joseph Henriot, the suave,
impeccably tailored former president of Clicquot Inc., who also runs his family’s domaine in Champagne. Since 1995, Henriot has presided over an extensive overhaul of Bouchard, the results of which were first really showcased in the very good ′99 vintage.

Bouchard’s vineyard holdings have long been concentrated in the Côte de Beaune, the southern half of the Côte d’Or, home of Burgundy’s great whites, including 2.2 acres of Le Montrachet. I was a little disappointed when I first laid eyes on this gently sloping (five-degree) hillside vineyard, the holiest of holies for Chardonnay drinkers. I think I expected it to resemble the Matterhorn. But my sense of awe was restored later when I tasted the ′99 Bouchard Montrachet in their cellars. Montrachet is never the fattest or fruitiest Chardonnay on the block, but at its best it has a stony purity that resonates and lingers on the palate as a tuning fork does on the eardrum. And it can develop for decades. I recently had a ′61 Bouchard Montrachet at the Manhattan restaurant of the same name; it was incredibly fresh and vibrant and, according to the note I made at the time, reminded me somehow of the prose of Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River.” An authentic, more affordable version of the Montrachet experience— for those of us who balk at spending three hundred dollars and up for a bottle of wine—can be found in Bouchard’s Mersaults and Puligny-Montrachets, which come from neighboring vineyards.

For many years Bouchard’s signature red wine has been the Beaune Grèves La Vigne de L’Enfant Jésus, a
premier cru
said by the nuns who once owned the vineyard to produce
wine as smooth as the baby Jesus in velvet pants—about as weird an analogy as I’ve encountered even in the overheated field of wine descriptors. As a former student of Raymond Carver’s, let me just add: I like it a lot. Among the best values in Burgundy year in and year out is another Bouchard Beaune—the Clos-de-La-Mousse. Henriot extended the firm’s portfolio with the purchase of prime vineyards in the more northerly Côtes de Nuits, home of Burgundy’s most prestigious reds. The
grand c
ru
Bonnes-Mares and the Nuits-Saint-Georges Les Cailles are among the standouts of recent vintages.

Bouchard also bottles wines made from purchased grapes, but it is the estate wines, in which the words
Bouchard Pére et Fib
appear in script on top above the vintage, that are the most exciting, coming from Bouchard’s own vineyards. The winemaking, supervised by the genial Phillipe Prost, is impeccable. (Note that Bouchard Aîné is another firm entirely.) I hesitate to recommend Burgundy to the general public, but if you’re willing to risk your peace of mind in pursuit of one of the most exciting sensory experiences available inside the law and outside of bed, you could do worse than to check in with my old Hollywood friends at Bouchard Père et Fils.