The Juice (16 page)

When I’m at a restaurant with a sommelier I trust, I often ask him to pick something for me. After all, sommeliers are on the front lines, tasting every day, seeking out treasures, and they certainly know their own lists better than I do. Unlike my collector friends, who tend to search out the classics—the known commodities—the somms have their palates primed for what’s new. They are looking for the next great region, the next great maker. Recently, two of my favorites have picked a Cornas—both of which I liked very much. Moreover, I’ve heard several young winemakers express their admiration for Thierry Allemand, the rising star of Cornas. Is this appellation finally having its moment?

Some ten years ago I found myself clinging to the base of a vine in the Les Ruchets vineyard, high above the town of Cornas, with the serpentine Rhône River just beyond, trying not to slide downhill. My luggage had been lost somewhere between New York and Marseilles; for the third day in a row I was wearing Gucci loafers, which didn’t provide much purchase on the steep, rocky hillside as I attempted to assist Jean-Luc Colombo and his crew harvesting Syrah grapes. I could well understand why many of these granitic vineyards, too steep for a tractor, had been abandoned in the early part of the twentieth century.

As far as I can tell, Cornas hasn’t really been fashionable since the era of Charlemagne. Ten years ago, Jancis Robinson wrote a piece describing her failure to fall in love, or even in like, with this wine. “ ‘Virile’ is a favourite description of Cornas with Frenchmen,” Robinson wrote. “ ‘Obdurate,’ I would suggest is nearer the
mark.” She described one wine as having “all the charm of the Reverend Ian Paisley.” I know what she means. Cornas has always been a rustic wine, with formidable tannins and, sometimes, a barnyard funk that suggested a lack of hygiene in the cellar. The first few examples I tasted made me wonder if the grapes had been stomped by someone with very stinky socks.

If it was ever beloved, its reputation was long ago eclipsed by Hermitage and Côte Rôtie to the north. All three appellations make powerful red wines exclusively from the Syrah grape, which has grown here at least since Roman times. The steep granitic vineyards were hard to farm, and many were abandoned, even as Côte Rôtie and Hermitage were gaining international renown and Syrah was being planted everywhere from Stellenbosch in South Africa to the Santa Rita Hills in California. A few hardy growers like Auguste Clape and Noël Verset carried the torch of the appellation, making traditional, earthy Cornas for the faithful. A good Cornas is like the Delta blues, soulful and earthy, though not for everyone.

As is often the case, it took an outsider to cut through the cobwebs in this ancient village. Jean-Luc Colombo, an oenologist from Marseilles, moved here with his wife, Anne, in the nineteen eighties, first establishing a consulting business and later buying vineyards. Like the Chicago players who electrified the rural sound of Charley Patton and Robert Johnson, Colombo introduced modern viticultural methods, including new oak barrel aging and destemming, and created cleaner, more modern versions of Cornas that seduced some critics while outraging some traditionalists. Colombo is the epitome of the modern flying winemaker, a compact dynamo who consults with some hundred-plus clients in the Rhône Valley and beyond. On my most recent visit he started the day with clients in Châteauneuf-du-Pape, met me some seventy miles south for lunch in Marseilles, drove half an hour up the Côte Bleue to tour some vineyards he’s leased near St. Julien
les Martigues, raced two hours north to the Alpilles in Provence to taste through twenty barrels in the cellar of his client Mas de la Dame, stopped off in St. Rémy for dinner, then drove another two hours north to Cornas, where we arrived about one in the morning. “Zis day, she is fairly typical,” he tells me, as we sip Calvados in his living room.

Like his friend Michel Rolland, the famous Bordeaux winemaker and consultant, he has sometimes been criticized for allegedly making internationally styled wines that don’t speak of their place of origin. In recent years Colombo has dialed back on the use of new oak and developed a lighter touch. In the meantime, a new generation of younger winemakers has stepped in, reviving abandoned vineyards and adopting those of retiring winemakers like Noël Verset and Robert Michel. The most influential of these is Thierry Allemand, the son of a factory worker who grew up in the town of Cornas and embraced its wine-making traditions, apprenticing with Robert Michel at the age of eighteen. Allemand bought an overgrown vineyard with ruined stone terraces and gradually rehabilitated it, producing his first wines in 1982.

Duncan Arnot Meyers of Arnot-Roberts, which has gained cult status for its Sonoma Syrahs, cites Allemand as a huge influence. “I think his wines are some of the most expressive bottlings of Syrah on the planet,” he says. It’s a sentiment I’ve heard frequently in the last couple of years. Bearded and bare of pate, Allemand lives with his wife and four children in an old stone house in the town of Cornas and works his vineyards almost entirely by hand. Like many young winemakers around the world, he has looked to the past for inspiration, using whole grape clusters, including stems, and aging in neutral (that is, used) barrels, which don’t impart toasty flavor to the grapes. A leader of the natural-wine movement, he uses very little sulfur to preserve the wines, a risky strategy that seems to work for him—I have yet to taste an off bottle. His wines are very earthy and even rustic—you’d never mistake a
bottle of Allemand Cornas for Australian Shiraz—but they have a freshness and lift that were lacking in most old-school examples.

In the past few years many vineyards have passed from the old guard to a new wave of young winemakers. Among the new kids on the block is Franck Balthazar, who inherited five acres of ninety-year-old vines in 2003, and Guillaume Gilles, a disciple and heir of Allemand’s mentor Robert Michel, who retired in 2006. Vincent Paris, Matthieu Barret, and Gilbert Serrette are rising stars.

Although the young generation seems to be respectful of the traditions, one is less likely to encounter a really stinky bottle of Cornas these days. But a good one will always be more earthy and even gamy than a New World Syrah. Black licorice is part of its flavor profile, and the wines usually show an earthy bass note. Even in lighter vintages like 2006 and 2007 it’s a pretty big wine, requiring red meat or braises to balance its power. It’s not a summer red. The old-school wines often took years to shed their tannin, if indeed they ever did, and even now most Cornas needs at least five years to round out and open up. If you find an older bottle, you might be in for a treat; it will cost you far less than a similar vintage from Hermitage or Côte Rôtie. I had a 1990 Robert Michel La Geynale the other night that was really singing. The blues, of course.

Just outside the walls of the turreted medieval castle that crowns this hilltop village is the gate to the Vietti winery, which clings to the steep hillside. Spreading out below the compound on all sides are vineyards that produce some of the most coveted of Barolos. Made from the difficult Nebbiolo grape in just five villages in the Piedmont region of northwest Italy, Barolo has been known since the nineteenth century as “the king of wines and the wine of kings,” thanks in part to its association with the house of Savoy. Luca Currado, whose family has grown grapes here for centuries, directs my attention to an anomaly on the hillside, an area with slightly darker, redder leaves. “That’s Barbera,” he says. “My secret Barbera vineyard.”

Barbera is a grape usually planted on less expensive real estate, and it’s generally considered a lesser cousin to the Nebbiolo and used for the region’s table wine. “Barbera was the wine of the people,” Currado explains, but thanks to Vietti and a few other determined producers it has in recent years become a star.

It was traditionally grown in cooler, less desirable plots in Alba, the province that encompasses both Barolo and Barbaresco, and in the neighboring province of Asti, best known for bubbly Asti Spumante. Barbera has a very deep ruby color and a full body. For years it played a secret, supporting role in the production of Barolo, where it was often used to supplement the color and body of Nebbiolo, which can be low on both. When Luca joined the family winery, his father wouldn’t let him near the Nebbiolo. The young winemaker worked instead with Barbera from their holdings
outside the Barolo appellation. The more he worked with Barbera, the more he became convinced of its potential, given the right sites and restricted yields. When a patch of Vietti vines in the Grand Cru region of Castiglione required replanting, he took charge of the project, secretly replacing the Nebbiolo vines with Barbera. Eventually, some of the neighbors noticed. “They were laughing,” he says. “They went to my father and asked why we’d planted Barbera in prime Barolo land. My father was pissed off.” But eventually he seemed to forgive his son, due to the quality of the wine from those rogue vines. In fact there was a precedent for Luca’s experiment. His great-grandfather went to America, becoming an engineer, after his older brother inherited the winery. (He worked on the Sumner Tunnel in Boston, among other public-works projects.) When the elder brother died, he returned to Italy to run the family business. He planted a small patch of Barbera on the hill beneath the house for his personal consumption, out of nostalgia for the table wine of his youth. These vines have survived to the present, although many of the Vietti vineyards were confiscated by the Fascists when it was discovered that the family was supporting and sheltering partisans.

The wines produced by these very old vines, planted in 1932, are a testament to the potential of Barbera in ideal sites. A 1990 Vietti Scarrone Vigna Vecchia (old vines), which Luca opened for me at the winery alongside a flight of Barolos, pretty much stole the show, even as it demonstrated a family resemblance with its tar, leather, and mushroom notes. Like Currado himself, who wore a very well-tailored bespoke shirt over dirty jeans and work boots, it seemed to oscillate between sophistication and rusticity.

Vietti wasn’t the only producer who saw in Barbera a potential Cinderella; another champion was the late Giacomo Bologna, a motorcycle-riding, jazz-loving bon vivant who inherited a property called Braida some ten miles east of the town of Asti. Like an old Hollywood studio head ordering cosmetic procedures for
a starlet, Bologna set about to reshape Barbera, which is typically very high in acid and low in natural tannins. (The latter, which most of us are familiar with from over-steeped tea, act as a preservative, allowing a wine to develop complexity over time.) He planted Barbera on prime, sun-drenched slopes and picked the grapes later than his neighbors, with the idea of softening the sharp acidity. He aged the juice in new French oak barrels, which further softened the sharp edges while lending some wood tannins. The idea of barrel aging Barbera was first proposed by the famous French oenologist Émile Peynaud, who consulted at a winery in Asti in the nineteen seventies. In 1982, Bologna created Bricco dell’ Uccellone, a barrel-aged vineyard-designated Barbera that changed the perception of the grape in the Piedmont region and moreover achieved international recognition. Unlike the rustic table wine beloved of Piedmontese farmers, poured out of pitchers at kitchen tables, this was a Barbera that had been to college, maybe even graduate school. It was suitable for high-end wine lists.

Other makers have followed the examples of Bologna and Vietti, planting the grape in better real estate and giving it the spa treatment in the cellar, creating premium barrel-aged examples in both Asti and Alba. According to Currado, Barbera d’Alba is typically more feminine and sophisticated, while Barbera d’Asti is more powerful and bold; he likens it to Angelina Jolie and Alba to Grace Kelly. Undoubtedly he knows whereof he speaks, although winemaker styles can sometimes trump terrain.

Some thirty years after Bologna started experimenting with French oak barrels, there are many styles of Barbera, including simple table wines meant to be consumed early. In this category, price is a reliable indicator of quality and ageability. Wines in the $15–$20 range should be easy to appreciate on release, tossed back with a pizza or a simple pasta. Barbera specialists like Bologna and Hilberg-Pasquero inevitably make great juice. But some of
the best come from makers of Barolo and Barbaresco, like Vietti, Giuseppe Mascarello, Sandrone, Giacomo Conterno, and La Spinetta. It’s a great wine to keep in mind when you pick up the list at an Italian restaurant. Even when softened by barrel aging, Barbera is relatively acidic for a red, which makes it the ideal companion for any dish that features tomatoes. The chef Thomas Keller, who honed his pasta-making skills in Luca Currado’s grandmother’s kitchen before opening the French Laundry, became a fan during his stay there. “They’re simple and easy to appreciate,” he says. Currado sees it as a bridge between New World and Old World reds. “It’s sexy but earthy,” he posits, “and Barolo’s more reserved and severe.” And while Barolo can take years and even decades to mellow out and become palatable, even the most sophisticated Barbera is approachable—and downright convivial—in its youth.

Now that the war is over, the Piedmont is thriving. Since 1996, the region has enjoyed an amazing string of successful vintages, and somewhere along the way modernists and traditionalists seem to have signed a truce. Happily for consumers, its great Nebbiolo wines, Barolo and Barbaresco, are still less renowned than Bordeaux and Burgundy, but no less worthy of respect.

Like Burgundy, the historically independent Piedmont is full of proud farmers and small estates. Like Pinot Noir, the signature red grape of Burgundy, Nebbiolo is thin-skinned and temperamental and yields wines of tremendous aromatic complexity. Unlike Burgundy, which seems to get a great vintage every three years or so, the Piedmont has been on a roll since 1996 with only a single washout vintage, the soggy 2002. The 2003 vintage was somewhat mixed, complicated by the hot weather that affected all of Europe. Most of the top wines of Piedmont’s Barolo and Barbaresco districts still sell for well below $100, and many retail for less than $50, even in this era of a pathetically weak dollar. And just in case you’re a pedant, the region is more than complicated enough to absorb a lifetime of study.