The Juice (15 page)

Margaux has the longer history as a wine-producing property. Legend holds that Edward III had a castle on the premises in the fourteenth century, when the British occupied Bordeaux and developed their taste for the wine they called claret. The property itself was owned by a series of noble families, and in 1771 its wine was the first Bordeaux to be listed for sale at Christie’s, when claret was changing from a pale pink beverage to the bolder red wine we know and love today. It was classified as first growth in 1855 and lived up to its rank for most of the next century. But the wine seriously underperformed in the nineteen sixties and seventies, until it was bought by André Mentzelopoulos, a Greek tycoon whose French residency came in handy after the government quashed the proposed sale of the estate to National Distillers, an American company.

The Mentzelopoulos family turned the estate around almost immediately, and their first vintage, the 1978, was the first great wine from the estate in decades. Today, Margaux is owned and managed by the unconscionably glamorous, strawberry-blonde Corinne Mentzelopoulos, with the very able help of Paul Pontallier, one of the most highly regarded winemakers in Bordeaux.

The first time I met Pontallier he was hosing down the winery floor dressed in a Harris-tweed sport jacket over a vest, a knit tie, and knee-high Wellingtons. He arrived here in 1983, which happened to be a very good year in Margaux—better than in the more northern Médoc appellations—and produced a wine that has become legendary (Palmer also made a terrific 1983). Under his stewardship, there have been many great wines since then, including the 1990 and the 2000, although probably none has raised such a buzz of anticipation as the 2009, which is widely touted by early tasters as
the
wine of an extraordinary vintage. Typically, the elegantly modest Pontallier gives credit to the untranslatable French concept that embraces the soil, topography, drainage, weather, and everything else unique about a particular vineyard by saying
that “the 2009 seems to have enhanced the intrinsic qualities of Château Margaux’s
terroir
.” The genius of the place, he believes, “consists in producing wines of inimitable aromatic finesse and complexity, of great density on the palate, and yet of a surprising softness.”

“Margaux wines are recognized to be the most feminine wines of the Bordeaux region,” according to Thomas Duroux, the winemaker at neighboring Château Palmer. “They show less power than the wines of Pauillac or St. Estèphe, but more delicacy, more precision.” While such generalizations don’t always apply across the board, this is usually true of his wines, which sometimes seem almost Burgundian, and at other times like a Pomerol. It’s unique among the wines of Bordeaux’s left bank in its high proportion of Merlot (about half), which might account for its singular, supple character. Margaux, by contrast, is mostly Cabernet Sauvignon, giving it a little more heft but making it less approachable in its youth.

The property is named for Charles Palmer, a wellborn English general who fought under Wellington and was almost as well-known for his success with ladies of the court as for his military victories and his decision to purchase Château de Gascq, which seems to have been sealed during a “turbulent” stagecoach ride with the beautiful Marie de Gascq. He expanded her estate, replanted the vineyards, and was, by all accounts, his own best salesman and worst enemy. His personal charm and his friendship with the prince regent, the future George IV, helped to seal his wine’s reputation among the British aristocracy, even as his extravagance eventually led him to bankruptcy. Palmer was forced to sell in 1843, and the estate was still in turmoil when the 1855 classification was made, which might explain why it was ranked a third growth; its quality since then has long exceeded its ranking, a fact reflected in its price. Palmer made many great wines while Margaux languished in the mid-twentieth century, and the 1961
remains one of the greatest legends of Bordeaux—certainly one of the best wines I’ve ever tasted. Curiously, it often excels in off vintages—like 1999 and 2002—and sometimes fails to dazzle in purportedly stellar years.

In 2004, the Bordeaux native Thomas Duroux took over the wine making at Palmer after serving as the winemaker at Tuscany’s renowned Ornellaia (essentially an imitation of the domaines where he’d grown up). Describing Palmer’s singularity, he credits its
terroir
and its high percentage of Merlot, but also a historical element that he needs to honor. “Our wines are known for their elegance and their Burgundian style, and each team of Palmer winemakers has tried to respect that.” Unlike most of the big boys of Bordeaux, for instance, they seldom use more than 50 percent of new oak barrels for the
grand vin
, aging the remaining wine in casks a year or two old.

Like Pontallier, Duroux is ecstatic about the 2009 vintage, which will start appearing on these shores in the fall of 2012. It’s possible to find the spectacular 2005s here and there, and both Palmer and Margaux are brilliant, though neither is cheap or ready to drink. Less expensive is the 2006, which, according to Pontallier, “is an excellent vintage that may have been considered as a great one should it not be born after 2005.”

Fortunately, after years of underperforming, some of their neighbors in the Margaux appellation have started to produce wines worthy of the illustrious name. Château d’Issan—perhaps best known for its picturesque moated castle, allegedly where Eleanor of Aquitaine was married to Henry Plantagenet—has finally begun to live up to its third-growth ranking. Brane-Cantenac and Boyd-Cantenac have improved steadily in recent vintages, as have stablemates Giscours and du Tertre. They’re worth looking for, particularly since the great 2005 vintage, though it should be noted that these wines often take at least a decade to show their stuff. Château Margaux doesn’t reveal its full glories
for twenty years in a great vintage. In the best of all possible worlds, each of us would be drinking the 1990 Margaux or the 1989 Palmer tonight. But you can experience the signature genius of both properties earlier, for much less money, via their secondary wines, Alter Ego de Palmer and Pavillon Rouge de Margaux.

When they shoved a metal dinner tray through a slot in the door of his room, Benjamin Hammerschlag was beginning to think that he’d probably made a big mistake and that he’d be going back to his day job in a Seattle grocery store. He was staying in what passed for a hotel in the Frankland River region of Western Australia—“a pub full of misshapen humanity, pretty much at the end of the earth,” as he describes it—while seeking out premium wines to import to the States. A week later, with only two prospects in his sights, he woke near dawn in yet another crummy hotel room, this one in the Barossa Valley, to find the walls literally seething with millipedes: “By this time I was pretty depressed.” Fortunately, wine making in both regions was more advanced than the hospitality industry, and Hammerschlag is a persistent and highly competitive son of a bitch with a very good palate. Over the past ten years he has assembled a portfolio, Epicurean Wines, that represents something of a new wave in the Australian invasion.

At the time of his unpromising first visit, Hammerschlag was working as a wine buyer for a supermarket called QFC in Bellevue, a wealthy suburb of Seattle. (Wine would seem to run in his veins; his forebears ran a chain in Manhattan called Flegenheimer’s, the first stores to bring California wines to New York, and they eventually had thirteen branches before Prohibition.) In a few years he almost doubled QFC’s wine turnover, deciding in the process that he had a “popular palate.” Among the crowd-pleasers he discovered for his clients were old-vine Shirazes from Australia’s Barossa
Valley, which had just begun to trickle into this country, thanks to a few boutique importers like John Larchet’s Australian Premium Wine Collection and Dan Philips’s Grateful Palate. “It was a style of wine that Americans loved,” Hammerschlag says, “rich and powerful and generous and all about instant gratification.” Some Aussies, according to Hammerschlag, refer to these big Barossa Shirazes as “leg spreaders.” However, given the sheer size and power of these behemoths, stereotypically masculine metaphors seem more appropriate to me; high-octane potions like Kaesler’s Old Bastard Shiraz remind me more of a muscle car like a Dodge Charger or a Viper than of a starlet, more of Russell Crowe than Naomi Watts.

The only problem with these South Australian reds, it seemed to Hammerschlag, was that they were pretty hard to find. Elderton’s Command Shiraz or Clarendon Hills’ Astralis, for example, were made in small quantities from vines, including Shiraz and Grenache, planted in the early twentieth century. (Old vines, it’s generally conceded, make more intense and powerful wines than younger ones.) Although Grange, Penfolds’s prototype for premium Australian Shiraz, dates back to 1951, when its chief winemaker, Max Schubert, came home from a visit to Bordeaux determined to make a world-class wine, it remained something of a one-off until the eighties, when others began making big, rich Barossa Shirazes. In just a couple of decades, Australia became a wine-making superpower, and Australian winemakers started circumnavigating the globe spreading their fruity high-tech gospel.

Much as Hammerschlag loved the big badasses, he was presumptuous enough to believe there was room for some finesse and a more specific sense of place (Grange uses grapes from all over South Australia) and that he could coax even better wines from the country if he could find the right talent. “I consider myself a talent agent,” he says. Upon arriving in Adelaide in 1999, he made
the rounds of the wine stores and accumulated thirty-six bottles of local reds he then tasted in his bug-infested hotel room and finally started working the phone. He was lucky enough, and early enough, to find a core of extremely talented young winemakers, including Dan Standish, the winemaker at Torbreck; Ben Glaetzer, who was involved with his family’s estate; Ben Riggs, a six-foot-five winemaker who worked in Napa, Bordeaux, and Italy before focusing on making Shiraz on his home turf of McLaren Vale. In the years since he signed them, Hammerschlag has become more and more intimately involved in the wine-making process, a commitment that has nearly ruined his teeth—the result of tasting through thousands of barrels of tannic young reds.

“I go for that tightrope quality,” he said, through his dingy choppers one spring evening in 2006 at the Soho Grand Hotel, as we slurped the 2002 Kaesler Avignon Proprietary Red, which would make a really good Châteauneuf-du-Pape. “Pushing the limits, but still maintaining balance and harmony.” To put it another way, Hammerschlag’s Fruit Loops have fiber, and his muscle cars have precise handling and even, sometimes, luxurious interiors. (A car buff, Ben in fact drives a 1968 Dodge Charger around the high-altitude vineyard he purchased in the McLaren Vale.) They have the big ripe flavors and good-day-mate charm that have made Aussie wines so popular. Dan Standish’s 2001 The Standish, for instance, was at that point the most satisfying young Aussie red I’d ever tasted—an old-vine Shiraz that has complex leather and coffee aromatics, an unbelievably voluptuous and viscous texture, and a long, lingering finish that left me alternately giddy and awestruck. Ben Glaetzer’s two old-vine Shirazes, Amon-Ra and Mitolo’s GAM, were already legends in their second vintage, having racked up exceptional ratings in
The Wine Advocate
and elsewhere, although like many of Epicurean’s wines they are made in tiny quantities. All in all, it was an exhilarating tasting, and
when we finally parted late that night and I staggered home to my apartment in the Village, I was as wildly enthusiastic about South Australian reds as everybody else (drunk or not) seemed to be.

I didn’t imagine it would take five years, but when we finally met again at Manhattan’s Gotham Bar and Grill in 2011, the balance of power in the wine world had shifted significantly.

Somehow this boom had gone bust in the last few years, at least in terms of imports to the States. Despite the success of Yellow Tail, or perhaps because of it, Oz lost its mojo. Overall imports dropped by 15 percent in 2010, and the cognoscenti seemed to snub the category, partly out of a shift in fashion toward (buzzword alert!) finesse and elegance, away from sheer power and alcoholic punch. Whatever the reality, Australian wines were perceived as being fruit bombs, unsubtle and overripe. Pinot was suddenly king, and sommeliers—a powerful new force in the wine world over the past decade—were railing against high alcohol. It certainly didn’t help when Robert Parker, previously a big champion of premium South Australian Shiraz, stopped visiting and handed responsibility for the country to a subordinate.

When I met Hammerschlag at the Gotham Bar and Grill, he admitted that his chosen turf was “a category that’s out of fashion right now.” He attributed this fact partly to the strength of the Australian dollar and partly to the shifting tastes of “the gatekeepers,” namely the critics and sommeliers. “Customers still like this stuff,” he claimed, while acknowledging it’s harder to sell Australian wines now than it was five years before. When I asked if his winemakers had modified their practices at all in response to changes in the market, he shrugged. “They’re trying to make wines reflective of their regions, just like they always have.” And the fact is that South Australia is conducive to “rich, dark voluptuous wines.” They ain’t dainty, and they’re not meant to be.

Hammerschlag and others are pinning their hopes on the 2010 vintage, which will soon be heading to these shores, to raise awareness
and help turn the tide. “It was spectacular across the board,” he told me, sipping an amaro at the bar at Gotham. “The best in twenty years.” It will be interesting to see if the vintage can help revive the country’s image. Other areas have recovered their mojo after losing credibility. Red Burgundy was rightfully slumping in the marketplace in the late seventies and early eighties thanks to high yields, lazy wine making, and an overreliance on chemical fertilizers. In 1985 some Austrian vintners decided to beef up their wines with antifreeze, and the resulting scandal nearly destroyed that market. But both regions have come back stronger than ever internationally. And it’s not as if the Australians have done anything wrong, unless it’s a sin to make ripe, rich, high-test reds—the vinous equivalent of a 1966 Pontiac GTO. Presumably, there are still millions of consumers who don’t have any beef against power and opulence. If Hammerschlag has anything to say about it, Aussie reds will soon regain their place at the American table.