A Hedonist in the Cellar (7 page)

Many of you fashionable diners and sophisticated travelers are probably familiar with the refreshing, slightly bitter rosés of Bandol. From West Hollywood to Sardinia, Domaine Ott rosé is the official summertime beverage of the Prada and Hermès brigades. But fewer are aware that Bandol—a middle-class resort and fishing town between Marseille and Toulon— is home to one of the world’s great red wines.

“Bandol rouge has been the love of my life,” says Alice Waters, one of the great epicures of our time. Indeed, Domaine Tempier rouge has been more or less the house wine at Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, since it opened, some thirty years ago. “They have incredibly long lives and incredible perfume,” Waters says of red Bandols. “I can always pick them out blind in a tasting.” Waters particularly likes them with lamb, strong cheese, and figs. “And a young one slightly chilled can be incredible with bouillabaisse.”

I would add dry-rubbed spare ribs and beef stew to this list.

“Kind of like a cross between Barolo, Brunello, and Châteauneuf-du-Pape” is how Will Helburn of Rosenthal Wine Merchant describes red Bandol. Like Châteauneuf-du-Pape, it is the product of hot Provençal summers, redolent of the wild herbs (known collectively as
garrigue)
that perfume
the hillsides, and probably best appreciated in the cooler months, alongside red meat or wild game. Like Barolo or Brunello, it is stubborn, sulky, and slow to evolve, which may account for its wallflower status.

Two centuries ago, Bandol reds were ranked alongside those of Bordeaux and Burgundy and were prized for their longevity—a quality attributable to the Mourvèdre grape, which is highly resistant to oxidation. However, the vineyards of Provence were replanted with higher-yielding and less-demanding grape varieties after phylloxera wiped out the Mourvèdre late in the nineteenth century, and Bandol never really recovered its luster.

The story of Bandol’s resurrection is murkier than a fermenting barrel sample of young Mourvèdre. (Importer Kermit Lynch, who owns a house in the region, recounts at least two and a half different versions in his classic book
Adventures on the Wine Route)
All that need concern us here is that two or three determined growers worked together to restore the noble Mourvèdre to the hillsides and set strict regulations for the appellation.

“Bandol is about Mourvèdre,” says Neal Rosenthal, who imports one of the finest—Château Pradeaux. While the regulations allow up to 50 percent Grenache and Cinsault, the best wines are mostly Mourvèdre. When young, Bandol Mourvèdre tastes like ripe blackberries squashed up with old tea bags. With age, after growing up in a microbiologically active cellar in Provence, it can smell like old sweaty saddle
leather, dry-aged beef, and even wet fur. And I mean that as a compliment.

Fans of the increasingly expensive great Châteauneuf of Château de Beaucastel will probably love Pibarnon, Pradeaux, or Tempier—three of the top Bandols. Beaucastel is about 30 percent Mourvèdre, and like the other three is made without new oak, which can mask flavors and aromas. Fans of clean, technically perfect, tutti-frutti New World winemaking may well be horrified by the slightly funky herbal characteristics of a great aged Bandol. If you’re the kind of person who would never consider sharing a room with a wet Labrador retriever or a lit cigar, then I advise you to skip the rest of this column.

Like Nebbiolo, Mourvèdre is a late-ripening, tannic grape that doesn’t do well much north of the Mediterranean. “Mourvèdre needs to smell the sea,” claims poetic Randall Grahm of Bonny Doon Vineyard, who has made some fine California versions of Bandol rouge.

Château Pradeaux is a mere three-iron away from the Mediterranean. The vineyard has been in the Portalis family since before the French Revolution, and the big, gamy, backward wines made there may well resemble those of the nineteenth century—what the French call
les vins de garde.
Hold the saliva for a couple of decades; Rosenthal is just now uncorking his ′82s, while waiting for the monster ′89s and ′90s to open up. Not exactly a wine for instant gratification, but worth the wait. “You can actually smell the sun,” says Rosenthal of a mature Pradeaux. “Beeswax and tiger lilies are the high notes, animal fur and saddle leather underneath.”

A little farther from the ocean, Domaine Tempier is a relatively recent creation. As part of his dowry upon his marriage to Lulu Tempier, Lucien Peyraud received several hectares of neglected vines in the hills outside Bandol. By all accounts one of the great personalities of the past century, Peyraud started researching the history of the area and replanting the vineyards with Mourvèdre. By the time he died, he had created a great domaine and a global cult of aficionados for his bold, long-lived reds and his carpe diem rosés—a tradition that continues with his sons François and Jean-Marie. A few years back I shared a bottle of truffly, rosemary- and Montecristo-scented 1969 with Kermit Lynch in the cellar of the domaine and guessed it to be fifteen years younger.

Other excellent Bandols include Domaines Bunan and Château La Rouvière. Prices are generally lower than for Châteauneuf-du-Pape or Barolo. No one would be happier than I to see them remain so. On the other hand, development pressure in the area is so fierce that increasing renown and prices for the wines of Bandol may be the only hope for preserving some of these beautiful hillside vineyards.

I once speculated that the grapes for a certain luxury Champagne were harvested individually, by vestal virgins, never suspecting that I would one day witness something close to this whimsical vision. Arriving at the winery of Casa Lapostolle in Chile’s Colchagua Valley one morning in March, I encountered some ninety women lined up on either side of a narrow table about the length of a tennis court, plucking Cabernet grapes one by one from dewy clusters that were handpicked that morning, saving the best and discarding those that were damaged or unripe. High-end winemakers around the world employ sorting tables and manual labor to roughly edit out the leaves from the clusters, but I’ve never seen it done literally grape by grape. The grapes in question were destined for the winery’s Clos Apalta, one of Chile’s new wave of luxury reds. The radically meticulous sorting process was one more piece of evidence, if I needed it, that Chilean wine is not just for swilling anymore.

Chile’s Central Valley—located in the center of this tall, skinny country, and crisscrossed by rivers and subvalleys—is a paradise for grapes. The climate, moderated by the Andes to the east and the Pacific to the west, is often described as being a cross between those of Napa and Bordeaux. Wine grapes
arrived with the missionaries who followed the conquistadors, and the importation of vines (and winemakers) from France in the mid-nineteenth century created an invaluable viticultural resource; what never arrived in Chile was phylloxera, the disease that subsequently devastated most of the world’s vineyards. The raw material was in place, although it remained underexploited until the end of the Pinochet era, when domestic wineries began to look to the international market and foreign wine interests started pouring money into the Central Valley.

Alexandra Marnier-Lapostolle, whose great-grandfather invented Grand Marnier, began scouting Chile in the early 1990s and then brought in Michel Rolland, the renowned and ubiquitous oenologist. In 1994 she and her husband, Cyril de Bournet, founded Casa Lapostolle and secured Rolland’s services as a consultant. As you follow her through a dusty vineyard while she tastes grapes and talks about prephylloxera rootstocks, you keep thinking that Lapostolle is one of those chic, svelte, and devastatingly attractive women you see on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. It seems appropriate that she describes Clos Apalta as her “haute couture wine.” (Lapostolle also produces two lines in the ten- to twenty-dollar range.) The grapes, which are so tenderly plucked at the winery, come from a nearly hundred-year-old vineyard of gnarled Cabernet, Merlot, and Carmenère vines in the Colchagua Valley, which is bounded by a horseshoe of snowcapped mountains.

Carmenère is Chile’s secret weapon, a varietal once widespread in Bordeaux that in 1991 was rediscovered in Chile, where for years it had been mistaken for Merlot. Like Cabernet
Franc, Carmenère can be a little vegetal and rustic, but when properly ripened it has a silky texture and peppery, raspberry flavor. Whether it can be a solo star for Chile’s wine industry remains to be seen, but the spectacular Clos Apalta, which contains up to 40 percent Carmenère, is testament enough to this grape’s potential as a blending component. The monster 2001 Apalta is already a wine-world legend; the 2002 is slightly less powerful but just as complex, a wine that might be mistaken for a blend of a Napa cult Cab and a first-growth Pauillac.

Seña, a joint venture between Napa’s Robert Mondavi and Eduardo Chadwick, president of the venerable Chilean winery Errázuriz, was the first of the superpremium (i.e., fifty dollars plus) Chilean reds, and is likewise a blend of Cabernet, Merlot, and Carmenère. The New World–style 2001 vintage is the finest offspring of this marriage to date. If any Chilean winery can claim more distinguished bloodlines, it would be Almaviva, the love child of Bordeaux’s Baron Philippe de Rothschild (Mondavi’s Opus One partner) and Chile’s Concha y Toro, the first winery to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The monumental 2001 Almaviva, made by Mouton-Rothschild’s Patrick Léon with Enrique Tirado of Concha y Toro, tastes a lot like a fine Pauillac—a structured (read: slow to evolve), complex, and earthy blend of roughly 80 percent Cabernet Sauvignon and 20 percent Carmenère. The grapes come from a thirty-year-old vineyard located on the outskirts of Santiago in the Maipo Valley, Chile’s traditional Cabernet region; they undergo their miraculous transubstantiation in a beautiful wooden cathedral of a winery
designed by Chilean architect Martín Hurtado Covarrubias, best known for his churches.

The young prodigy among Chile’s homegrown wineries is unquestionably Montes, founded in 1988. Montes Alpha “M” is the flagship wine of the estate, a rich, powerful red made from relatively young vines planted on hillsides above the Apalta Valley in Colchagua. My pick for the most promising of Chile’s newer estates is Haras de Pirque, in the Maipo Valley, best known at present for its Thoroughbred stud farm. Founded in 1991 by entrepreneur-equestrian Eduardo Matte, Haras currently produces a Cabernet aptly named Elegance and has recently announced a joint-venture, single-vineyard wine with Italy’s Antinori family.

Most of these new-wave Chilean luxury cuvées are as yet made only in small quantities, but they are worth seeking out, and they bode well for Chile’s future as a source of premium reds. Seventy or eighty dollars may seem like a lot to pay for a Chilean wine—until you compare the best of them with similarly priced New World reds.

Argentinean Malbec may not quite rank with the tango and the collected works of Jorge Luis Borges as a cultural landmark, but at this point I’d judge it a not-too-distant third—particularly when it is served alongside the fire-grilled, grass-fed beef of the pampas. To experience this combination among the svelte, stylish, late-dining patrons of La Cabaña in Buenos Aires, or better yet at an
asado
—a traditional outdoor barbecue—in the lean, limpid air of the high Andes, is to flirt with some kind of primordial carnivore bliss.

With its tragic, underachieving history and its malfunctioning political and economic institutions, Argentina is years behind neighboring Chile as a producer of world-class wines. But its natural endowments and its potential are probably greater. And while grape varieties like Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardon-nay thrive on the arid plateaus of the Andes’ eastern flanks, Malbec—unloved and almost forgotten in its homeland of southwestern France—seems to have found its perfect adoptive home here. Not to mention its perfect foil in Argentinean beef.

Argentina is a vegetarian’s worst nightmare. Salads can be
found in the fashionable restaurants of Buenos Aires, and good French- and Italian-style pastry is widely available, but, generally speaking, beef—with a smattering of pork and lamb—is what’s for lunch and dinner. And lots of it. The fresh, grass-fed beef of the endless pampas is leaner, gamier, and chewier than the aged, corn-finished American product. For centuries, Argentines have washed it down with rustic, oxidized plonk, but in the past decade there has been an increasing emphasis on quality wines for the export market— the most exciting of which are undoubtedly old-vine Malbecs. The best of these spicy, voluptuous reds are made in small quantities, although they are easier to find in the States than high-quality grass-fed beef. And they harmonize brilliantly with a Black Angus sirloin or a USDA prime rib eye. Malbec was once widely grown in Bordeaux and is the main ingredient of the big, tannic, rustic wines of Cahors that enjoyed great popularity in Russia during the reign of Peter the Great but have been struggling to find an identity ever since. Sometime in the nineteenth century the grape made its way to Mendoza, roughly six hundred miles west of Buenos Aires, across the sweeping grasslands of the pampas. The province is crisscrossed with an elaborate network of canals, first developed by the Huarpe Indians, which cools the city and irrigates the surrounding vineyards. As they descend toward the plains, the lower slopes of the Andes foothills provide a series of microclimates that can be matched to the ripening characteristics of different grapes.

At roughly three thousand feet above sea level in the Mendoza region, Malbec seems to find its ideal home and achieve a complexity and richness that make it a candidate for one of the world’s great wine types. Particularly in its youth, Mendoza Malbec tends to be a much friendlier, more cuddly beast than Cahors, and it is almost always rounder, richer, less astringent, and more complete than Cabernet Sauvignon from neighboring Andean vineyards. Not that you’d mistake it for Merlot, which is inevitably less spicy and tannic—a waltz to Malbec’s sultry tango.

So much for generalizations. A tasting of top Malbecs and Malbec blends that I attended at Terroir, a by-appointment-only Buenos Aires wine shop, revealed a multitude of styles, not to mention a wide range of quality, which suggests that Argentinean Malbec is a work in progress. The wines that scored highest were boutique wines crafted by transatlantic winemakers: the 2000 Achával Ferrer Finca Altamira Malbec, made from the fruit of eighty-year-old vines by Tuscan wine-maker Roberto Cipresso, and the 2000Yacochuya, crafted by the ubiquitous, genial genius Michel Rolland from similarly antique, high-altitude northern vineyards. The tiny production makes these wines more of an inspiration to their rivals than a regular libation for American drinkers.

Almost as impressive—and widely available here—are the top Malbecs from Catena Zapata and Terrazas de Los Andes, two of Mendoza’s largest and most innovative wineries. Catena Zapata, which operates out of a high-tech, Mayan pyramid—think I. M. Pei—winery, introduced the world to the concept of luxury Mendoza Malbec in the early 1990s. Its
2000 Catena Alta Malbec is a worthy successor to previous vintages, a full-bodied, earthy spice box of a wine. The Moët Hennessy–financed Terrazas de Los Andes began production in the mid-1990s, although its top bottling, the stunning, sexy Gran Malbec, comes from seventy-year-old vineyards that have managed to survive the frequent hailstorms plaguing the region. In partnership with Bordeaux’s legendary Château Cheval-Blanc, Terrazas also produces a rich, complex, and polished blend of Malbec, Cabernet, and Petit Verdot— Cheval des Andes.

Visiting Mendoza this past spring, bumping into Connecticut wine-store owners and French winemakers in the Park Hyatt, I couldn’t help reflecting that the experience must have been a little like visiting the Napa Valley in the ′70s, at the dawn of a major international wine scene. Not quite as sexy, perhaps, as watching Carlos Gardel revolutionize the tango in the Abasto Quarter of Buenos Aires in the ′20s. But pretty exciting, nonetheless.