The Juice (6 page)

Wineries like Babcock, Foley, Ojai, and Melville gradually followed Sanford’s lead. Greg and Steve apprenticed at several of them before starting Brewer-Clifton in 1996, maxing out credit cards, borrowing from friends, and buying grapes from growers in the valley and nearby Santa Maria, eventually focusing on the Santa Rita Hills. Their Pinots and Chardonnays have achieved cult status and stellar ratings from critics.

I find the Chards particularly compelling, edgy and extreme, sometimes tasting like turbocharged Chablis, and in fact the partners share a passion for Burgundy’s northernmost white. After a 2004 visit to the area, including a quasi-religious-experience tasting in the cellar of Domaine Raveneau, Greg was inspired to start a new Chardonnay project called Diatom. “I wanted to push the limits, to make something really pure and extreme.” While most winemakers in California and Burgundy use some new oak barrels to help oxygenate and mellow their Chardonnays, and encourage a secondary fermentation to soften the malic acids, Brewer has created a minimalist Chardonnay at Melville that was fermented in stainless steel. The result, called Inox, is lean and crisp, utterly lacking the buttery quality of old-school Cali Chard.

With Diatom, Brewer pushed Santa Rita Chardonnay to a new extreme. “I think of Brewer-Clifton as skiing, Melville Inox as snowboarding and Diatom as the X Games. I wanted to push Chardonnay to an absolute extreme.” Extreme, but minimal. He lets the grapes get extremely ripe, which in a hotter area would result in a flabby wine, ferments in stainless steel, and blocks the secondary fermentation. The result is radical indeed, an extreme example of the fat/lean syndrome. “Diatom is so radical it’s deviant,” Brewer says. I agree. My tasting note on the 2009 Diatom
Huber vineyard reads: “Incredible tension and precision. Great flesh and great acidity. A deconstructed margarita—lime and salt and alcohol and even agave. Wowsah!”

Brewer sees heavily oaked Chardonnays as elaborately cooked and sauced dishes. “Diatom is like a piece of toro, fatty but also pure and minimal.” He also believes the minimalist wine-making style lets the characteristics of the vineyards, and the area, shine through. It’s unique, and yet it highlights the family traits of the region. I like to pour these Chards for friends who claim they don’t like California Chardonnay. Even those who aren’t instantly converted tend to be pleasantly surprised.

My first experience with a sparkling pink wine took place on a blanket on the lawn at Tanglewood in the company of a girl named Joan Coughlin. The Who were onstage performing
Tommy
, and the warm summer air was perfumed with incense and cannabis. The wine in question, Cold Duck, was popular with the theater crowd at Taconic High School and was, I learned much later, composed of two parts New York state sparkling wine and one part California bulk red wine. I eventually learned to turn up my nose at Cold Duck, but my fond memories of that evening must have something to do with my abiding enthusiasm for rosé Champagne.

Champagne has long been perceived as celebratory. Its pink version, it seems to me, is less declamatory, more romantic; if great Champagne is the vinous equivalent of a white diamond, then rosé is a pink diamond—rarer and yes, I’m afraid, more expensive. Though it represents just a small fraction of the production of France’s eponymous Champagne region, rosé has exploded in popularity in recent years. “It used to be for stage door Johnnies,” says Beaver Truax of Chambers Street Wines in New York City. “Rosé was fun, but it wasn’t serious Champagne. And that’s definitely changed.” A 2010 tasting with Richard Geoffroy, the winemaker of Dom Pérignon, reminded me of just how great it can be.

If Dom Pérignon is the Porsche 911 Carrera of the wine world, then DP rosé is the 911 Turbo. The inaugural 1921 Dom, released in 1936, was probably the first prestige cuvée—a premium blend of the best vats in the Moët cellars. In 1959, Dom produced its first rosé Champagne, which, weather permitting, has been produced
several vintages a decade since. I happened to be present at a rather raucous New York auction in March 2008 when two bottles of the 1959 DP rosé, from the collection of the über-collector Rob Rosania, went for $85,000, astonishing nearly everyone in the room.

DP’s rosés are typically held for about ten years; the 2000 vintage hit American store shelves in the spring of 2010, and it appears to be a classic. As if that weren’t reason enough to max out one of your credit cards, the 1990 Dom Pérignon Oenothèque rosé was released almost simultaneously. The Oenothèque series is a kind of ultra-premium DP, vintage juice that’s been mellowing long after the initial vintage release in the chalk tunnels of the Moët & Chandon cellars deep under the town of Épernay. Until now, there’s never been an Oenothèque rosé, and collectors and geeks have been buzzing in anticipation of this one. It really is spectacular, one of the greatest rosés I’ve ever tasted. Among many pleasant sensations it evoked, I thought of Julianne Moore, whose pink-hued beauty had struck me on the street in the West Village earlier that day—but this is the kind of wine that can call forth a thousand associations.

Curiously enough, 1990 was the first vintage created by Richard Geoffroy, who has been the head winemaker at Dom Pérignon for twenty years. He started on a high note with a great, hotter-than-usual vintage that resulted in richer wines. Geoffroy has had many triumphs since then, and I have to say that the only man I’ve ever known who seems to enjoy his job as much as he does is Hugh Hefner. Geoffroy’s no sybarite, but he is messianic about Champagne in general and DP in particular. Born into a family of Champagne growers, Geoffroy tried to escape his destiny by studying medicine; he completed his degree in 1982 but never practiced. Instead, he went to work for Moët & Chandon, starting his career at the Domaine Chandon in the Napa Valley. While I realize there may be those who feel a doctor ranks higher on the scale of social utility than a winemaker, I’m pretty sure they’ve
never tasted the 1990 Dom Pérignon Oenothèque rosé. I suspect that in his twenty years at DP, Geoffroy has lifted more spirits and ameliorated more malaise than most GPs.

I’m not going to pretend that either the 2000 or the 1990 Oenothèque is inexpensive, but look at it this way: the former costs about the same as the tasting menu at Per Se, without wine; the latter the same as the tasting menu for two. (At $700, the Oenothèque is still cheaper than Krug’s 1996 Clos d’Ambonnay, a single-vineyard white Champagne that sells for around three grand.) Fortunately, there are far more more affordable rosé Champagnes out there. Many New Yorkers of my vintage first encountered fine rosé Champagne at Danny Meyer’s Union Square Cafe, where Billecart-Salmon has been on offer since 1985. After a wobbly period Billecart is back on form—a dry, relatively rich rosé I like to drink as an aperitif, though it’s powerful enough to stand up to salmon or even a mild curry.

Most rosés are made by adding 8 to 10 percent of still Pinot Noir to a Champagne base. A very few are made by leaving the Pinot Noir grapes in contact with their pigment-bearing skins for a short period during fermentation, a trickier process. Of these, Laurent-Perrier is a standout and tends to have a deep, rich coho-salmon tint. Color is one of the great pleasures of rosé Champagnes, which can range from faint onion skin to bright raspberry with every imaginable shade of smoked salmon in between, some more orange than pink.

The big-name Champagne houses have been responding to the increasing demand for rosé with varying degrees of success. Bollinger, Moët, and Pol Roger are, in descending order of power and body, among those I like best. The most exciting development in recent years has been the proliferation of small-grower Champagnes, both white and pink. Rather than selling their grapes to the big houses, these producers vinify and bottle their own, the
best of which reflects the individual characteristics of specific regions and soils.

The spiritual leader of this movement is a mad scientist named Anselme Selosse, who studied oenology in Burgundy, where the concept of
terroir
is a religion. “Everything that makes a wine unique is in the ground,” Selosse told me on a recent visit to New York. His rich, orange-hued, nonvintage rosé is worth traveling to France to taste, which you may have to do since it’s very hard to find here. Look for Egly-Ouriet, Savès, Larmandier-Bernier, and Bruno Paillard. As for me, the next time I open a bottle of rosé Champagne, I’m going to raise a glass to Joan Coughlin, who is no longer among us.

During a year at the Sorbonne, very little of it spent in classrooms, A. J. Liebling fell hard for Paris, and for the food and wine of France. Arriving in the City of Light in 1926 and returning often during his life, he would become one of the great gourmands of the era, eventually developing an intimacy with the greatest growths of Burgundy and Bordeaux. But he never lost his affection for the rosés of Tavel, which sustained him during that first year in Paris and which before him had been the favorite beverage of Louis XVI and Honoré de Balzac. When Liebling first landed, Tavel was synonymous with rosé; now that pink wine is produced throughout France and around the world, and is enjoying a period of fashionability, it’s worth revisiting the motherland of rosé, as well as the writings of one of its biggest fans.

Situated across the Rhône from Châteauneuf-du-Pape, just north of Avignon, the small village of Tavel and the surrounding commune have been producing rosé for hundreds of years. Originally, the wines were composed of Cinsault and Grenache, although since 1969 Syrah and Mourvèdre have also been permitted under the rules of the appellation. Typically, the juice from these red grapes is briefly macerated with the pigment-bearing skins, then bled off before the pink juice turns red. Unlike other regions, where rosé is an also-ran, a by-product of red wine production, Tavel produces nothing else. For Liebling, it was “the only worthy rosé.”

The son of a well-to-do furrier, Liebling had previously been working as a reporter for the Providence, Rhode Island,
Evening
Bulletin
when—always a great storyteller—he invented an engagement with a loose woman in order to convince his father to send him to Paris. “The girl is ten years older than I am,” he told him, “and Mother might think she is kind of fast, because she is being kept by a cotton broker from Memphis, Tennessee, who only comes North once in a while. But you are a man of the world, and you understand that a woman can’t always help herself.” When he claimed he intended to marry the girl, his father immediately agreed to finance the trip.

Liebling’s funds arrived monthly, an allowance not so generous as to permit him to indulge his heroic appetite indiscriminately, and he considered this a key aspect of his training as a gourmand. “If,” he wrote later in
Between Meals
, his great memoir of Paris, “the first requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite, the second is to put in your apprenticeship as a feeder when you have enough money to pay the check but not enough to produce indifference to the size of the total.” A rich man would start at the top of the food chain—the most expensive dishes and the most expensive restaurants—without learning about the basics of
la cuisine française
, while the poor man eats only for subsistence.

The same principles applied to learning about wine: “Our hypothetical rich
client
might even have ordered a Pommard, because it was listed at a higher price than the Tavel, and because he was more likely to be acquainted with it. He would then never have learned that a good Tavel is better than a fair-to-middling Pommard—better than a fair-to-middling almost anything, in my opinion.” Pommard, of course, is one of the great communes of Burgundy’s famed Côte d’Or, and Liebling was certainly a fan. But his esteem for Tavel was undiminished even after he could afford the good stuff.

At the Maison Teyssedre-Balazuc, a Left Bank restaurant where he did much of his apprentice eating in 1926 and 1927, the Tavel
supérieure
was three and a half francs. The proprietor bought the wine in a barrel and bottled it in his basement. “The taste is warm but dry,” Liebling wrote later, “like an enthusiasm held under restraint, and there is a tantalizing suspicion of bitterness when the wine hits the top of the palate.” This strikes me still as a fine description of a good Tavel, especially the touch about bitterness, which keeps the wine from being cloying.

Liebling used to torment himself trying to decide between the regular Tavel and the more expensive
supérieure
, but almost inevitably chose the latter. That he hated to deny himself was illustrated by his considerable girth. He once described one of his ideal meals as consisting of “a dozen Gardiners Island oysters, a bowl of clam chowder, a peck of steamers, some bay scallops, three sautéed soft-shelled crabs, a few ears of fresh-picked corn, a thin swordfish steak of generous area, a pair of lobsters, and a Long Island duck.” All of this would presumably be washed down with a bottle of Champagne and at least two or three bottles of Tavel. “No sane man can afford to dispense with debilitating pleasures,” he wrote in
Between Meals
. “No ascetic can be considered reliably sane.” For Liebling, “Hitler was the archetype of the abstemious man.”

He returned to Providence after his year abroad and eventually washed up at
The New Yorker
, with which he remained associated for the rest of his life, returning to France in 1939 to cover the war, only to retreat ahead of the German occupation. He later accompanied the Allied troops who liberated Paris in 1944 and was awarded the Legion of Honor for his war reporting. He wrote about many subjects, including boxing and horse racing, and practically invented modern media criticism, but for me
Between Meals
, his final book, is his most luminous and enduring achievement, a memoir of Paris that bears comparison with Hemingway’s
Moveable Feast
, as the great James Salter suggests in his fine introduction to the 1986 reissue of the book.