The Juice (11 page)

Friuli, in the northeast, the region from which his parents hailed, is arguably the source of the greatest Italian whites. As Joe puts it in
Grandi Vini
, “In Friuli … the gently rolling foothills of the Julian Alps meet the warm, brackish lagoon of the Northern Adriatic … and the magical mixture of the respective cool and warm breezes—along with the
terroir
—create the climatic magic necessary to make long-lived, structured yet aromatic white wines.” While there he worked with Livio Felluga, one of the best local producers. Before the end of the decade Bastianich would buy one of the area’s historic wine estates, but in the meantime he returned to New York.

“I got into restaurants as a way to get back to wine,” he says, sipping a glass of Barolo at his newest restaurant, Manzo, an Italian steakhouse set in the middle of bustling Eataly. He opened his first restaurant in partnership with his mother. Becco, in the theater district, featured an extensive Italian wine list with all selections priced at $15 (now $25). “But I realized at some point I couldn’t work with my mom.” It was Lidia who introduced him to his future business partner Mario Batali at the James Beard Foundation Awards in 1993. “We used to go out after work, hang out, eat, and drink,” he recalls. They would become the Larry Page and Sergey Brin of the postmillennial Manhattan restaurant scene. Or maybe the Simpson and Bruckheimer, with Bastianich playing the Bruckheimer role—the focused, steady partner. “Joe has
a cool head,” Batali says. “I sometimes get too passionate.” (That, his friends and colleagues would agree, is an understatement.)

In 1997, Joe purchased land in Collio, Friuli, including sixty-year-old Tocai vines planted in a beautiful south-facing bowl that looks like a natural amphitheater, along with an imposing, turreted thirteenth-century structure in the town of Butrio to serve as his winery. The following year he and the winemaker Emilio Del Medico produced his first vintage of Tocai (now called Friulano due to European Union regs), along with a white called Vespa, a blend of Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, and Picolit that would become widely acclaimed. That same year he teamed up with Batali to open Babbo, a groundbreaking restaurant featuring Mario’s inspired interpretations of the Italian classics. Its use of then-unknown ingredients like beef cheeks, wild fennel pollen, and lamb’s tongue titillated the hell out of New York’s foodies. It also featured a staggeringly comprehensive, all-Italian wine list, thanks to Joe, as well as a new serving portion, called a
quartino;
this was based on the
quarto
—quarter liter—common in Italian trattorias, except that instead of house plonk Babbo served serious juice, often from magnums. “Some people got mad and insisted on a glass of wine,” Bastianich recalls. “I had to go to every table and explain that it was a by-the-bottle experience in a by-the-glass format, that it allowed you to control the amount of wine in your glass.” When a bottle was ordered, every single glass was rinsed with a small amount of the wine to be served in order to avoid any chance of soap residue or cooking odors. New Yorkers were intrigued. With only eighty seats, Babbo had four sommeliers on the floor, and it had a huge impact on the wine culture of this country and spawned a new generation of sommeliers and enthusiasts.

As Joe’s Friulian winery started getting serious reviews, he created another, this time in the emerging Maremma region of Tuscany, with Batali and his mother as partners. They produce
a nice Morellino di Scansano (the local name for Sangiovese, of Chianti fame) along with a blend of international varietals on the Super Tuscan model. In 2008, Bastianich attained the ultimate fantasy of Italian oenophilia when he became a partner in Brandini, a winery in the holy region of Barolo—kind of the equivalent of marrying Carla Bruni or finding a perfect 1970 Ferrari Daytona.

Joe produced his first wine book, with Babbo’s sommelier David Lynch, in 2002.
Vino Italiano
is a valuable and comprehensive survey of the country’s numerous wine regions. The new book is a more personal take, his annotated greatest-hits list, and I only wish he’d taken the list all the way to a hundred. Even those who think they know the terrain will make some discoveries. He strikes a fine balance between traditional and new-wave producers, but he’s not afraid to stand up for an unfashionable wine or to criticize conventional wisdom.

Grandi Vini
should start more than a few well-lubricated arguments. Sassicaia and not Ornellaia? Fontanafredda and not Vietti? (Now, them’s fighting words.) And why the hell are there only three wines from Joe’s beloved Friuli? Is Brunello still Brunello? And does Merlot belong in your Chianti? These are questions that deserve to be argued, Italian-style, with lots of shouting and hand waving—or possibly contemplated with a glass of one of Joe’s own wines, or one of his favorite eighty-nine, in hand.

Meeting the scholarly and genial Nicolas Joly in the picturesquely cluttered library of the eighteenth-century manor that houses his winery, you would be hard-pressed to imagine him dancing naked and burning rabbit skins in his vineyard at midnight, the image recently purveyed by a major French magazine. Joly is perhaps the world’s leading practitioner of biodynamic viticulture, and as such he engages in some practices that might seem unconventional, although none of them involve naked dancing.

Joly is the proprietor of Coulée de Serrant, a domaine in the Loire Valley that borders the river and encompasses the ruins of an ancient castle destroyed in the wars between the Huguenots and the Catholics. (“Now we just have the war between good farming and bad farming,” he says.) The vineyard was first planted in 1113 by Cistercian monks, and the excellence of its wines has been acknowledged for centuries. Louis XI spoke of “la goutte d’or” (the golden drop) in the wines, and Joly has a picture of Louis XIV touring the vineyards in a chariot. So prized was the spot that it became its own appellation, though it’s contained within the Loire’s Savennières appellation.

His parents bought Coulée de Serrant in 1961, when Nicolas was sixteen. He eventually attended Columbia Business School and worked for Morgan Guaranty in New York and London until something called him back to the land in 1977. “I loved learning about banking,” he says over lunch in the medieval cloister on the property, where he lives with his wife, Coralie. “And it was a great life. But then one day I was finished with it.”

Now, thirty years later, he seems like an unlikely cross between a professor and a farmer as he drives through the vineyards, repeatedly stalling his Pathfinder because he’s in the wrong gear. He stops to taste the grapes, which are almost ready to harvest, as he expounds on the history of the place and the principles of medieval science. He has decided to start picking the day after my visit and will send his pickers through the vines at least five times, selecting only the ripest clusters. He likes to wait until some of the grapes on the clusters are shriveled and is more than happy if a little botrytis, or noble rot, has set in.

When he returned to Coulée de Serrant, he threw himself into the wine business. “I tried modern farming for two years,” he says. On the advice of a consultant, he used weed killers and fertilizers. “Big mistake,” he concludes. He was distressed to observe the effects on the vineyard, which he says had become a biological desert, devoid of microbial and insect life. In 1979, Joly stumbled on a book in English about biodynamics, a holistic approach to agriculture based on a series of lectures given by the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner in 1924. The following year, Joly began applying biodynamic principles in his vineyard. He’s been studying them, writing about them, and teaching them to an expanding band of disciples ever since.

I first encountered his wine more than twenty years ago when I ordered a bottle of the 1982 Coulée de Serrant at the Union Square Cafe in New York. I can still remember the stony intensity of that wine, and I have sought it out ever since, but it’s not easy to find. In a good year Joly produces fewer than two thousand cases, about a quarter of which comes to the States.

As special as it is, Coulée de Serrant exemplifies many of the qualities of Savennières, a tiny appellation (with about a three-thousand-case annual production) in the Anjou region of the Loire, which seems to be superbly suited to the Chenin Blanc grape. Coulée, like all Savennières, is made entirely from Chenin
Blanc, and some connoisseurs think Savennières is the ultimate expression of Chenin Blanc (granted, it’s a narrow field of competition). Quince is a flavor that recurs in tasting notes. The wines are often almost fierce in their youth, but they can age gracefully and improve for years, even decades. Whether Coulée is the finest Savennières or a unique expression of the seven-hectare vineyard—the correct answer is both—Joly is adamant that its quality has almost nothing to do with his wine making. “I really do almost nothing to the wine,” he says. “It pretty much makes itself. Press it, put it in barrels, that’s about it. All the work has been done before, in the vineyard.” He doesn’t add yeast—it’s already there on the grapes—and he doesn’t control temperature.

It’s a cliché of winespeak 4.0, 2012 version, to say that wine is made in the vineyard rather than in the cellar. After years of increasing reliance on technology in the cellar, even New World wizards have started talking more about the importance of good raw material, (that is, grapes) and focusing more on the vineyards. But the cellars of many top wineries from Napa to Bordeaux have some very high-tech equipment designed to whip those naughty grapes into shape. Joly’s cellar, by contrast, is eerily minimalist: a shiny pneumatic press, twenty-five or thirty old oak barrels, a small room stacked with unlabeled bottles of the 2009 vintage. Old school.

The French
appellation contrôlée
system, which came into being in the nineteen thirties to codify hundreds of years of regional practice, is based on the idea that wines should uniquely reflect their place of origin, and Joly fiercely defends it. But he believes that a wine is unlikely to convey the unique aspects of soil and climate—what the French call
terroir
—if you bombard the soil with pesticides and fertilizers and then manipulate the results in the cellar. “There are lots of good wines today,” he says, “but there aren’t that many unique wines.”

The specific practices of biodynamic viticulture can sound a
little wacky—like burying a cow horn packed with manure in the vineyard—although many of them have an intuitive logic. The rabbit skins, for instance. In biodynamics, pesticides are verboten; instead, the pest in question (when large enough) is discouraged by the ashes of its deceased brethren. When Joly developed a rabbit problem, he burned a skin or two and spread the ashes in the vineyard. He says it worked. While Joly emphasizes that these principles need to be adapted to a vineyard’s specific conditions, there are common practices. Teas made of nettle and other plants are sprayed on the vines, and manure is used in lieu of fertilizers.

Critics of biodynamics point out that Coulée de Serrant has always been a highly regarded wine, and some suggest it was an even greater wine before the adoption of the biodynamic regimen. I have tasted only a few of the older wines and would hazard that they were excellent, if leaner and less rich. The two latest vintages I tasted were both wonderful and utterly unique wines: the 2008 was very plush and full-bodied, almost sweet but vibrant, a youthful and powerful beauty like Milla Jovovich in
Resident Evil
. The 2007 was more voluptuous and decadent, with a honeyed quality that put me in mind of Ava Gardner in
The Barefoot Contessa
.

In 2000, Nicolas founded Return to Terroir, a group for likeminded organic and biodynamic producers that includes such heavy hitters as Zind Humbrecht, Domaine Leflaive, Movia, and Araujo vineyards. If this philosophy borders on the mystical, tasting these great wines seems to present fairly compelling empirical evidence of its success. Coulée de Serrant would be on many connoisseurs’ lists of the world’s greatest wines, a white that can combine great richness with piercing intensity, a wine that is a compelling expression of a particular place and the personality of the man who denies he made it.

Burly, heavily bearded Stuart Smith has been tending his vineyard atop Spring Mountain with his brother Charlie for more than forty years. The Smith brothers have gained a quietly loyal following for their Smith-Madrone wines, despite eschewing such Napa conventions as new French oak, irrigation, and Robert Parker raves. Stu, the more loquacious of the brothers, has been known to complain about the alcohol content and prices of many Napa wines—both too high in his estimation. Recently, he has directed his contrarian streak at a fashionable new target: biodynamic viticulture.

Biodynamics is a system of organic agriculture based on the teachings of Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian theosophist, and specifically on a series of lectures he delivered to a group of farmers in 1924. Biodynamics uses many of the basic principles of organic farming—no pesticides or chemical fertilizers—but goes further, relying on practices like planting and harvesting according to solar and lunar cycles. Some of the most revered domaines in France, including Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, Domaine Leroy, Coulée de Serrant, and Zind Humbrecht, adhere to it, and in recent years it has been gaining converts in Napa and Sonoma—Araujo, Benziger, Grgich Hills, Sinskey, and Quintessa among them. In 2009 Stu Smith created a local stir when he published a letter in Santa Rosa’s
Press Democrat
charging that “biodynamics is a hoax and deserves the same level of respect we give witchcraft.” He has continued his assault on a Web site called Biodynamics Is a Hoax.

“Rudolf Steiner was a complete nutcase,” he writes, “a flimflam man with a tremendous imagination, a combination, if you
will, of an LSD-dropping Timothy Leary with the showmanship of a P. T. Barnum.”

In order to demonstrate his point, he quotes Steiner at some length—something he claims proponents are reluctant to do—and there’s some wild stuff to quote, about ghosts, Lemurians, and the jellyish beings who inhabited Atlantis. The most emblematic and controversial practice of biodynamics involves burying a cow horn stuffed with manure at the time of the autumnal equinox; on or around the spring equinox, the horn is disinterred and the manure diluted in water (a mixture known as BD 500) and sprayed over the vineyard.