A Hedonist in the Cellar (9 page)

A few years ago I wrote about the impossibility of finding a wine to compliment asparagus. That was before I went to Alsace and before I had lunch with Olivier Humbrecht and his Scottish born wife, Margaret, in the garden of the Domaine Zind-Humbrecht. Margaret, who looks quite a bit like Téa Leoni, apologized for the simplicity of the lunch, which consisted of just-picked local white asparagus and speck—a light, prosciutto-like ham that is a local delicacy—while Olivier, who is big enough to create his own weather, opened a couple bottles of 1990 Zind-Humbrecht Muscat (which looked, in his massive paws, like half bottles). Apparently, everyone in Alsace knows what I was about to discover—that asparagus and Alsatian Muscat are boon companions. And most wine critics and sommeliers know that Alsatian white wines are more versatile and food-friendly than those of any other wine region in the world, even if they haven’t yet convinced the average American wine drinker of this fact.

Alsace has always had a bit of an identity problem, sitting as it does on the border of France and Germany, which have traded it back and forth for centuries. It is in many ways a world unto itself, a north-south ribbon of land studded with medieval villages straight out of Grimm’s fairy tales, separated
from France by the Vosges Mountains and from Germany by the Rhine River. It the only major wine region in France where wines are labeled by grape varietal—the most important of which are Riesling, Gewürztraminer, Pinot Gris, Pinot Blanc, and Muscat.

Oceans of plonk are produced here for the supermarkets of Europe, but several dozen small domaines turn out complex, site-specific wines that can age for decades. Connoisseurs argue late into the night about the relative merits of Ostertag, Kreydenweiss, Boxler, Beyer, Dirler, Barmès Buecher, Trim-bach, Hugel, Marcel Deiss, and Schlumberger. All of these domaines produce great wines. As for me, let’s just say I got goose bumps when I turned in the driveway of Zind-Humbrecht, on the outskirts of the little town of Turckheim.

Zind-Humbrecht is a good place to initiate a love affair with Alsatian wines, because it makes virtually every type— thirty-five different cuvées in the ′99 vintage—almost half of which is exported to these shores. It’s also a showcase for artisinal, natural winemaking; although it doesn’t flaunt the fact, Zind-Humbrecht, like several of its neighbors—including pioneers Barmès Buecher and Ostertag—strictly adheres to biodynamic principles of viticulture, a radical form of organic farming. Just in case you like the idea of a chemical-free wine that’s been nurtured with the ash of butterfly wings.

Olivier Humbrecht is a twelfth-generation winegrower; in 1947 his father, Léonard Humbrecht, stopped selling grapes to the local cooperative and started buying more vineyards and making his own wines. After a stint in the army and a year in London, where he met his wife, Margaret, at a bus stop on the
Kings Road, Olivier returned to the family business, inheriting more than fifty different vineyards in Alsace. Like an indulgent parent, Olivier sees his job as standing back and letting those plots speak for themselves. I could name six Sonoma Chardonnay makers whose wines taste more similar to one another than do Humbrecht’s half dozen cuvées of Riesling, each expressing the soil of its vineyard, fermented by its own local yeasts.

“In twenty years they will make a standardized Chardonnay everywhere,” Olivier complained, the only time I saw him scowl in five hours. “In another twenty years there will only be two strains of yeast.” Except, presumably, in Alsace. Chardonnay is against the law here. Riesling, which can age for decades, is considered by many to be the most noble variety in Alsace; Alsatian Riesling tends to be a little richer and fatter than its German counterparts. It’s also, many of us believe, among the most versatile food wines in the world; though, of course, some pairings are more sublime than others. With his Riesling Herrenweg Turckheim Olivier likes Cantonese food and dim sum; he recommends Gewürztraminer for Vietnamese and Thai food. Essentially unique to Alsace, Gewürztraminer is a rich, heady, and perfumey grape that overwhelms some palates; on the other hand, it can complement powerful flavors like curry and saffron. The third noble grape variety of Alsace is Pinot Gris—which to me often tastes like a smoky cousin of Riesling and which both Olivier and his neighbor André Ostertag recommend as a companion to Peking duck. (Pinot Blanc, a much lighter wine, is better suited to shellfish.)

The three noble varietals are usually fermented till they are relatively dry. However, in certain years good weather allows growers with well-exposed vineyards to leave selected grapes on the vines to produce special Vendange Tardives— late-harvest—wines, which have a higher level of ripeness and sugar. These rich wines fall somewhere between dry and dessert wines. A VT Pinot Gris is excellent with foie gras, less cloying than the average Sauternes, while a VT Gewürztraminer is the perfect companion for Muenster cheese. Every few years the weather suits the production of sublime, extremely late harvest dessert wines called Sélections de Grains Nobles (SGN). These sweet wines will evolve for decades. As for the drier wines—I’m just starting to drink my ′99s, although they were perfectly delicious on release. Last night I popped a ′96 Trimbach Gewürztraminer Cuvée des Seigneurs de Ribeaupierre, which had a fine dialogue with my Szechuan garlic shrimp.

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against fruit. But I sometimes get tired of all this superextracted, alcoholic grape juice that seems like it ought to be served on toast rather than in a glass, and that tastes like it doesn’t come from anywhere in particular. These are wines that somehow remind me of the blind date I had recently with a woman exactly half my age. Our conversation had lots of italics and exclamation marks and very few parentheses or semicolons. Much as I like some of the bold new postmodern Riojas from producers like Artadi, Allende, and Roda, I sometimes crave the sepia tones of old-school Rioja. Todd Hess, wine director for Sam’s Wine & Spirits in Chicago, is one of many who appreciate these discreet charms: “Old traditional Rioja tastes like old Burgundy should taste but seldom does—and for a lot less money.”

What we now think of as the old style in Rioja was created in the 1850s, when French wine brokers arrived in Spain after oïdium and, later, phylloxera had devastated their native vineyards. The French introduced oak-barrel aging to the region, which had previously specialized in light, fruity, short-lived plonk. Two nobles, the Marqués de Murrieta and the Marqués de Riscal, helped develop and market this Bordeaux-style
Rioja. (Both bodegas are still flourishing.) The Riojans took to barrel aging the way the Italians took to noodles, substituting American for French oak and developing an official hierarchy that culminates with
reserva
(at least twelve months in oak, two years in the bottle) and
gran reserva
(at least twenty-four months in oak and three years in the bottle).
Crianzas
, released just two years after vintage, are apt to have a strawberry-vanilla freshness, whereas the
reservas
and
gran reservas
will exhibit the mellow, secondary flavors associated with age—flavors evocative of autumn rather than summer. And those with bottle age can suggest practically the entire spice rack, not to mention the cigar box and the tack room. Somehow you get the idea that this is how red wine used to taste.

If the old school had a central campus, it would be a series of buildings clustered around the railroad tracks at the edge of the medieval town of Haro, including the bodegas Muga and López de Heredia. Both wineries keep several coopers employed year-round, making and repairing barrels and maintaining the huge
tinas
—the swimming-pool-sized oak vats in which the wine is fermented and stored; old oak doesn’t impart a woody flavor to wine, and both wineries believe it’s superior to stainless steel. Both houses are also run by the direct descendants of their founders. If some evil genie told me I could drink just one producer’s Rioja from now on, I would certainly choose Muga. In addition to its old-school wines, notably the
gran reserva
, which spends three years in old American oak barrels, Muga does make a more modern expression of Rioja with French oak under the Torre Muga
label, including a new postmodern luxury cuvée called Aro. Not so López de Heredia, the hardest-core reactionaries of Rioja, makers of Viña Tondonia.

Tondonia is one of those secret passwords whereby serious wine wonks recognize their own kind. (Impress your sommelier, or put him on the defensive, by asking for it.) The winery was founded in 1877, and apparently very little has changed in terms of winemaking since. The Tondonia vineyard is beautifully situated on a high south-facing plateau outside Haro. For reasons not entirely clear to me, the winery complex resembles a Swiss or Bavarian village. Inside, it resembles the set of a low-budget horror movie, with ancient and vaguely sinister-looking machinery, huge blackened
tinas
, and a fluffy black mold blanketing almost everything. Some of the vats are as old as the winery itself, and pixieish María José López de Heredia, great-granddaughter of the founder, is convinced that the petrified sediments and natural yeasts in the
tinas
are an important part of the distinct flavor profile of the wines.

Far below the fermentation and storage vats, in a series of tunnels carved out of the limestone, tens of thousands of bottles dating from the 1920s slumber beneath the pillowy mold. “The spiders eat the cork flies,” López de Heredia explains cheerfully as I swipe a vast cobweb off my face. Any minute now, I feel certain, Vincent Price is going to jump out at me. The sense of eeriness is gradually dispelled, replaced by a mounting sense of exhilaration and wonder as López de Heredia uncorks bottles in the subterranean tasting room. I start with, of all things, a 1995 rosé—this being her idea of a
young wine—and move on to the ′81 Gran Reserva Blanco, made mostly from the indigenous white grape called Viura, which tastes fresh and lively for its age. The tasting of reds begins with the ethereal ′85 Tondonia, which has an amazing nose of cinnamon, clove, leather, tobacco—the whole spice box. While this may sound like one of those annoying instances where you have to listen to a wine writer tease you with descriptions of stuff you will never see or taste, the fact is that all of these wines have been recently released. In this regard, López de Heredia reminds me of Orson Welles’s embarrassing ad for Paul Masson: “We sell no wine before its time.”

Across the street, Muga is releasing its
gran reservas
on a slightly more accelerated schedule. You can find the ′95 and the ′96 on retailers’ shelves; both have the kind of spicy complexity that develops only with age and both taste kind of like fruitcake, only much better. And if you are lucky, you may find older vintages. A ′76
gran reserva
that I shared with the bearish, gregarious thirty-year-old Juan Muga at a restaurant in Haro lingers in my memory as one of the best old Burgundies I never drank. Marqués de Riscal, Marqués de Murríeta, and Bodegas Montecillo are also good sources of traditional Rioja. Next time you’re feeling palate fatigue from trying to chew the latest superextracted New World Merlot, you might consider checking out the subtle and delicate charms of an old
gran reserva.

If you haven’t heard of Sagrantino di Montefalco you’re in excellent company. “I’ve had sommeliers from Italy come into the restaurant who don’t know about these wines,” says Roberto Paris, the urbane, soft-spoken manager and sommelier of Il Buco, in New York’s East Village. Paris had the advantage of being born a few miles from the town of Montefalco, about halfway between Perugia and Spoleta in Umbria. “The very first bottled wine I ever drank was a Sagrantino,” he says, wincing at the memory. “It was terrible.”

A few years ago, when Paris poured me my first Sagrantino, a ′95 Paolo Bea, I had a very different reaction. I felt kind of like Keats encountering Chapman’s Homer. Or like I did when I first encountered the work of Umbrian painter Piero della Francesca, which was so singular and weird compared to that of his Roman and Florentine contemporaries. The Bea was a dark beauty in a homemade dress—I was thinking of Michael Corleone/Al Pacino’s smoldering, rustic Sicilian bride in
The Godfather.
In an era when Italian wines were starting to taste like Napa wines, this was a wine with soul.

When I went home that night and tried to learn more, my reference library wasn’t much help.
The Oxford Companion to
Wine
devoted an uncharacteristically uninformative inch of column space to the Sagrantino grape, noting that Sagrantino di Montefalco received its DOCG status only in the mid-1990s. (It was 1992, actually.) Oz Clarke’s
New Wine Atlas
covers Umbria in a single paragraph. Paolo Bea wasn’t even listed in
Gamberro Rosso
, the Italian wine bible, although three other makers of the mysterious Sagrantino di Montefalco had entries.

I started looking for Sagrantino on Italian wine lists here in New York and discovered a small, diverse range of wines, most of them fleshy, powerful, bitter, and spicy. Sometimes I was reminded of Syrah, or even Petite Sirah. Sagrantino is fatter, richer, and more tannic than Sangiovese, the dominant grape in neighboring Tuscany. The ideal Sagrantino, to me, tastes like blackberries and bitter chocolate dusted with cinnamon, nutmeg, and clove.

“The origin of the grape is very mysterious,” Paris told me recently. “One theory is that the Crusaders brought it back from the Middle East.” Presumably, if it were of Roman or Etruscan origin it would have been disseminated more widely. For whatever reason, the cultivation of Sagrantino is limited to a tiny area around the town of Montefalco. Until recently most of the grapes were dried to produce a sweet
passito; a
small fraction was used to make communion wine for the
sacgramenti.
The recorded history of the dry red begins in 1971, when Arnaldo Caprai founded his winery. Caprai is the pioneer who essentially created Sagrantino di Montefalco as we know it—if we know it. The relative obscurity of Montefalco is partly a function of small production; as far as I can tell,
there are only ten or twelve serious producers, and most of them are making no more than a couple thousand cases. According to Paris, the other problem—this is Italy, after all— is that “squabbling prevents them from working together.”

Caprai is the only producer turning out enough wine to make much of an impact on the marketplace, and the only one who has really taken a scientific approach, experimenting with clones and rootstock. More to the point, the wines are superb and, unlike those of his neighbors, somewhat consistent in character; the funky wines of Paolo Bea, Caprai’s rival for the esteem of Sagrantino buffs, can taste very different not only from vintage to vintage but even from bottle to bottle. I imagine him stomping the grapes with his feet and bottling by hand—and I prefer to retain those images rather than calling his importer, Neal Rosenthal, to get the actual facts. In matters of the heart, and of the lower appetities, mystery can often be more stimulating than knowledge.

One thing I can swear to: Bea doesn’t use new oak barriques, which is one of the reasons his wines are so je ne sais quoi. Other producers are doing so, and while new oak can round out the rough edges of Sagrantino, it can also, in the wrong hands, make them taste dangerously similar to Tuscan Cabernet or Australian Shiraz. Such is the case with Còlpetrone, which regularly gets the top three-glass award from
Gambero Rosso
(which, scandalously, as of 2005 still has no listing for Bea) and tastes to me like a good Cabernet from, say Stellenbosch, South Africa. Scacciadiavoli switched to new barriques with the ′98 vintage without losing too much funky Sagrantino soul.

This is supposed to be the part of the essay where I tell you what a great value these obscure wines are. Sorry. A good Sagrantino costs more than a famous Chianti, if less than a famous Napa Cabernet. The most reasonable Sagrantino right now is Antonelli, not to be confused with the giant Florentine firm of Antinori. But the big firms are getting into the area—recently the Cecchi family from Tuscany bought Tenuta Alzatura, in Montefalco.

Vintage conditions in Montefalco are usually similar to those in nearby Chianti. Some producers are raising prices in the wake of several good vintages and the growing cult status of the wines, not to mention the sickening decline of the dollar relative to the euro. Frankly, I’m ambivalent about helping to spread the word and thereby increase the demand—but, hey, that’s my job. Just try not to tell too many of your friends.