Archive for October, 2009
Great Wine From “The Mondavis Of Chile”
Emiliana Barrel Room
I had the pleasure of having lunch – and more importantly, tasting wines – last week with the winemaker of Chile’s Vinedos Emiliana along with the estate’s owner, Jose Guilisasti.
I was prepared to be underwhelmed, but I was pleasantly, even astonishingly, surprised at how good the wines are. I say this because in my salad days, in college after six years in the Marine Corps, I was only able to afford a meager three or four dollars for what was often a bottle of very, well, “rustic” red from Chile with a label that looked like a kindergarten coloring project. What I tasted last week as a guest of Banfi Vintners at midtown NYC’s Il Tinello restaurant was something very different.
Emiliana was founded only in 1986 as a privately-owned operation producing wines made from organic grapes, and in the case of their super-premium labels Emiliana G and Coyam, produced along biodynamic lines as well. To be honest, I’m not much impressed by wineries claiming bio this or organic that, given that these terms are often misunderstood and not uniformly applied even in this country, let alone across the seas. More than that, they’re frequently bandied about by marketers eager to greenwash their products and tap into a share of the burgeoning environmentally-conscious market. But a little explanation is in order, wouldn’t you say? Organic, Biodynamic…so what?
Organics is an agricultural system that focuses on creating bio-coexistence, namely, that plants and animals inhabit the land and contribute to it in a natural way. For example, instead of using fungicides on weeds growing in the vineyard’s cover crop, farmers allow animals to graze on them. Organics prohibits the use of industrial chemicals including synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, and genetically modified organisms. Now, it’s important to keep in mind that organically-grown grapes don’t necessarily mean organic wine. For example, to label a wine (as opposed to the grapes) sold in the USA as organic means that the wine has 95%+ organically-grown ingredients and that no sulfites were added. Such a wine can then carry the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Certified Organic seal. Of course, this can limit its shelf life, depending on the quality of the grapes and the grapegrowing and winemaking practices used. And remember, sulfites are naturally formed as part of any winemaking process, organic or not.
Biodynamics is a way of farming based on, among other things, a closed system, phases of the moon, and so-called homeopathic principles, originated by the early 20th-century Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner. For grapes, this means the use of natural fertilizers, nine preparations applied to the vines, and cow horns filled with manure and buried in the vineyard. Moreover, you can’t just wake up one day and “go bio” – it requires a prep period of a couple years during which the farmer doesn’t use industrial chemicals and must use organic compounds and practices. There’s certainly an element of mysticism to all this, which many observers scoff at; others say it works, whether or not you understand the reasons behind it.
So, when I received the pre-tasting packet of info, its boast that “Collectively, Emiliana constitutes the single largest source of estate-grown organic wines in the world” didn’t really move me. I was more interested in the quality of the wines, and I certainly wasn’t disappointed.
Before I talk about the wines, I’d like to specifically mention our host winemaker Antonio Bravo, who did a six-year stint at none other than Kendall-Jackson Wine Estates, including three at K-J’s Argentine property Tapiz, and three more in Monterey, California. He’d also spent time as assistant at Concha y Toro and Undurraga in Argentina, and much to my delight, with my good friends the Corley Family/Monticello in Napa. But Antonio was far from an organic or biodynamic winemaker at precisely the time when the Guilisasti family was intent on making Emiliana the largest organic and biodynamic wine operation in the world.
Antonio Bravo
And lest I neglect my other lunch host, Jose Guilisasti is considered one of South America’s top viticulturalists (grape growers). Under his and the family’s leadership, which dates back to the ’50s, Concha y Toro h
as become of the top 10 wine companies in the world. Some even call him “the Robert Mondavi of Chile”! But Emiliana is a totally separate operation with its own vineyards, wineries, winemakers and winemaking philosophy. I tasted some wines from Concha a few weeks earlier, and I’ll write about those next week.
Anyway, when the Guilisastis tapped the then 36-year-old Bravo in 2006, he plunged in despite his training and work experience as a decidedly “conventional” winemaker. And he’s got a lot of organic grapes to work with, grown exclusively on winery-owned vineyards in Maipo, Colchagua, Casablanca, Bio-Bio, Cachapoal and Limari. But while he and the Guilisasti family have embraced organic and biodynamic concepts and practices, they’re not “rabid” about them. Instead, they focus on quality, and organically grown grapes just happen to be their base to make three lines of delicious and (mostly) very affordable wines: their luxury wines “G” and Coyam, their Novas line, and their Natura line.
Antonio, Jose and I talked at length about their quest for quality, and after tasting their wines, I was a believer. Here are the wines I tasted:
G 2005 – Retails around $90
Certified Organic and Biodynamic, made from 30% Carmenere, 30% Syrah, 24% Cabernet Sauvignon and 16% Merlot.
Outstanding. This is a really big, full-bodied wine with layers of black cherry, blueberry, plum and cassis; perfectly balanced and nicely structured with a long and surprisingly soft – that is, non-tannic – finish. I finished my pour and asked for another.
Coyam 2005 – Retails about $30
Certified Organic and Biodynamic, made from 34% Syrah, 31% Merlot, 12% Cabernet Sauvignon, 3% Malbec and 3% Mourvedre.
A very different blend of grapes; ripe and spicy, and while not quite as bold as the G, has its own unique charm with a bit of smoke and spice and a satisfying, very persistent finish.
Natura Carmenere 2008 – Retails about $11
Certified Organic, made from 85% Carmenere and 15% Syrah.
A solid effort, with a front-end of blackfruit and spices that moderates a bit and then finishes again powerfully.
Natura Sauvignon Blanc 2008 – Retails about $11
Certified Organic, 100% Sauvignon Blanc.
A lot of the zest of a New Zealand SB, without that over-the-top grapefruit flavor and bell pepper aroma that is off-putting to many. Fresh with a flinty-grassy middle, and a moderately long finish.
Novas Chardonnay 2008 – Retails about $17
Certified Organic, 100% Chardonnay.
An extraordinary good Chardonnay. Coming from me that says a lot, as I’m not much a fan of Chardonnay outside Chablis and Burgundy except for the odd and decidedly un-oaked version from California or Australia. This one has just enough oak to soften it, and it’s so well integrated that the oak just whispers to you. There’s a hint of butter but just, allowing the acid to come through and keep your mouth refreshed. Classic citrus flavors and a long finish. Truly delicious stuff. I don’t do numbers but I’ll say this is one of the best <$20 Chardonnays I’ve had in years.
Natura Cabernet Sauvignon 2008 – Retails about $11
Certified Organic, made from 85% Cab Sauvignon and 15% Carmenere.
Novas Cabernet Sauvignon/Merlot 2005 – Retails around $17
Certified Organic, made from 70% Cab and 30% Merlot.
Novas Carmenere/Cab Sauvignon 2007 – Retails about $17
Certified Organic, made from 80% Carmenere and 20% Cab Sauvignon
Stoutridge Vineyard: A New York Phenom!
Visiting wineries is one of my favorite pastimes, and I suspect, since you’re visiting this site, that it may be one of yours, too.
Usually I go somewhat far from New Jersey to do that – Sonoma or Spain, Sicily or Sancerre. Yet right in my own backyard, or perhaps more correctly my front yard, there’s a winery that is remarkably technologically advanced, but also fun, charming and beautiful. Especially if you live in New York, New Jersey or Connecticut, a visit to Stoutridge Vineyard is well worth the trip.
The current property of Stoutridge goes back to at least the mid 1800s, although it wasn’t always a vineyard and winery – at times it’s been a pig farm, autmobile garage, illegal distillery, orchard, even a training ground for rifle and pistol shooting. This rather eclectic history turned in another direction in 2001, when entrepreneurs Stephen Osborn and Kimberly Wagner bought the place and began returning it to its roots.
Like many other Hudson River wineries, Stoutridge is known for its hardy (and, well, hearty) whites: Pinot Blanc, Vidal Blanc, Muscat and Riesling varieties – and they do a nice job with these. Unlike other area wineries, however, they also produce northern Italian-style reds: Pinot Noir, Sangiovese, Teroldego and Refosco. But most striking of all is how progressive, modern and sophisticated this winery is. You have to see it to understand, but among the highlights: The winery more than powers itself via a 2,000 square-foot solar array that covers the entire south-facing part of the roof. In fact, they’ll soon be selling power back to their local community.
Stoutridge practices what are called “slow-wine” processes, using a tiered architecture that keeps the juice flowing downward naturally. In addition to reducing energy consumption and capital equipment costs, many winemakers swear by gravity-flow techniques, believing that the less the juice is jostled and pressurized, the better. Amazingly, using tailor-made equipment including electric hoists, a single Stoutridge staffer can take a batch of grapes from crush to bottled wine.
It’s not “just” a winery. Stoutridge is also a Vodka distillery, and as you can see, these gleaming stills are impressive (let’s face it, winemaking equipment other than barrels is pretty…ugly). New York and, I think, federal law requires winery and distillery facilities to be physically separated, and here the distillery room is a world unto itself, lined with small barrels in which the vodka ages.
It’s all tied together by a beautiful farmhouse, vineyards, picnicgrounds and tasting room, so even if you’re not into New York-style wines you should consider a visit to Stoutridge.
A Book Journey On The Wine Trail
One of the ways I’ve learned about wine, oddly enough, is to read wine books.
Of course you can read lots of technical books – on home winemaking, wine courses such as Jancis Robinson’s, or tasting books such as Hugh Johnson’s. And for those at the apex of wine geekery like me, there are huge tomes such as Clive Coates’ The Wines of Burgundy, or Vino Italiano – The Regional Wines of Italy, that can take weeks to read and are more appropriate for people studying for their MW rather than casual wine drinkers and even dedicated tasters.
For my money and yours, though, I recommend that you have some fun while you learn, and for that reason I’m going to recommend five books, all narratives, without boring statistics about the number of grand cru vineyards in Burgundy, how many clones of Chardonnay there are, or how long it takes to apply extra toast to a brand-new French oak barrel.
Now, I write about Robert Parker pretty often. He’s a force in the wine industry, to be sure, and called the single most influential wine writer alive. But I think of him more as a wine “rater” than a writer, and I just don’t buy the notion that you can reduce the quality and pleasure of any particular wine to a specific number with mathematical certainty. For that reason, I was eager to get my copy of Alice Fiering’s recent (2008) book, The Battle for Wine or Love or How I Saved the World from Parkerization, and plunge into it.
I gotta tell you, I had a little bit of trouble with the premise to begin with. The truth is that I don’t think Alice has saved the world from Parkerization, and her title, like a lot of the book, is too clever by half. In fact, throughout the book, she laments the fact that winemakers around the world hold their noses to Robert Parker’s grindstone, praying that the Emperor of wine will grant them a 92 or above, pretty much assuring their commercial success. To get his attention as well as those ratings, says Fiering, these vignerons use technology to excess, grossly over-oak, focused absurdly on color, and just generally make a mockery of the “natural” winemaking practices used by their grandfathers. In the bargain, she says, many if not most wines have lost their nuance and finesse and amount to little more than syrupy-sweet plonk, one wine indistinguishable from another. She clearly believes this and makes her case over a couple hundred pages…fair enough. But I suppose in an effort to make her book charming and “full-bodied,” Fiering insists on telling us intimate personal details along the way, especially around her love life and the many men who find their way into and out of her journey along the wine trail from New York to wherever. Worse still, she gives them each a pet name (“Owl Man”) as she does a half-dozen female friends who often accompany her on trips to this symposium or that wine region. Such stuff weighs down the book in much the same way Ms. Fiering says “modern” winemakers weigh down their juice with alcohol, tannin, oak and sweetness.
Still, big parts of the book are a lot of fun – they read like a travel log and give you those rich and interesting back stories about why wines are made the way they are, and what those winemakers are thinking. There are some insights here, and it’s an easy-reading page turner. There’s a little discussion about organic and biodynamic winemaking, but it’s hard to tell whether she’s applauding or making fun of the grape farmer who harvests according to phases of the moon and plants a ram’s horn filled with cow dung in a corner of his vineyard. When all is said and done, my only real complaint is this: she has the opportunity on several occasions to tell Parker what she really thinks: that he’s done huge damage in a quest for wines that appeal solely to his palate. But each time she approaches the line, Ms. Fiering backs off under one pretext or another — not wanting to hurt the great man’s feelings, or provoke him to walk away from the interview. If this is saving us, we ain’t saved.
By contrast, Adventures on the Wine Route – A Wine Buyer’s Tour of France, is pure pleasure: personal but not uncomfortably intimate, written with equal or even greater conviction but with no sign of a chip on his shoulder by Kermit Lynch, a pioneering wine importer who just happens to have a gift for the narrative.
Like Fiering, Lynch is passionate about artisanal wines, but he makes his case more by talking about who is making them rather than who’s not. And his view that “Wine is, above all, pleasure. Those who would make it ponderous make it dull” courses through his chapters and paragraphs, which are by turns funny, absurd, colorful, quirky, and sometimes all at once. I think he’s equally unhappy about the ascendance of ratings as the gold standard for wine consumers, oddly enough given that he’s an importer and a commercially successful one at that. As you might expect, he trumpets as authentic a great many wines on which his own fortunes turn, and in this sense he’s certainly not a disinterested critic like Alice Fiering.
Nonetheless, if you really want to get a feel for old world winemaking I would run out and buy this book. You can read a lot about Bordeaux and Burgundy elsewhere, but you won’t often find these kinds of stories about winemaking and wine styles of the Loire Valley, the Languedoc, Provence, Chablis, or Beaujolais for that matter. And if you really like the culture of wine and not just the taste of it (or the buzz you get from it) this book will enrich both your mind and your spirit.
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From a little closer to home in California’s Sonoma Valley comes A Very Good Year, a truly inside look at winemaking by Mike Weiss. Originally a series in The San Francisco Chronicle where Weiss was a staff writer, this narrative tracks the 2002 vintage of Ferrari-Carano Fume Blanc (Sauvignon Blanc) as it goes from vine to glass, from the field and crush pad to a white-linen restaurant table in Manhattan. Along the way we meet the wealthy owner and his muse, the winemaker and his lieutenants, the vineyard manager, the head of sales and marketing and his sales minions. Most poignantly we meet the ordinary field workers, one a tragic character who takes his own life in Mexico after the ’02 harvest.
Into these personal stories are interwoven professional jealousies, seemingly creative decisions based mainly on accounting spreadsheets, the false ostentation of California wine culture, and the inordinate power of a handful of wine writers that would make the personalities in Falcon Crest blush like a dry rose.
Bubbles For Autumn
Champagne isn’t only for New Year’s Eve, weddings of people you love and funerals of, er, people you didn’t. Here’s a quote from Lily Bollinger of the famous producer family of the same name, which perfectly captures all the reasons you should drink it:
You probably already know or at least have heard of the big “marques” - Champagnes made in the millions of bottles annually, such as Veuve Cliquot, Moet & Chandon (and it’s pronounced “mwet,” not “mo-way”), Taittinger, Perrier-Jouet, Krug and Pol Roger. Most of these are non-vintage; that is, they are a blend of wines, typically from many different vineyards across Champagne, and from two or more years. Why? Well, they’re designed to taste the same year over year, so that the buyer always knows what they’re getting. That’s not always true, but that’s the idea. And this consistency, supported by sometimes pretty expensive marketing, is supposed to make you become exclusively a “Krug (or whatever) drinker.” But that’s up to you.
My view? Champagne can be great stuff for a Tuesday night when you’re feeling a little down, or just because, well, it’s Tuesday night!
To help you appreciate Champagne I could write a few pages on how it’s made, about its different styles and relative levels of sweetness, and how some brands are known for toast, others for spice, some for body and richness, and others for a kind of steely austerity. I’ll do that in the future, but for now here’s a quick explanation of what’s in that bottle, and a short glossary that will help you makes sense of what’s on your wine retailer’s shelf. Again, I recommend my good friends at Brian’s Wine and Liquor Emporium in Piscataway, NJ, and CoolVines in Princeton and Westfield, NJ.
Why the Bubbles?
Let’s take a “white” Champagne made from 100% Chardonnay. It starts out as ordinary “still” wine – the juice is squeezed from grapes and placed in a big vat, some yeast is added, and the yeast turns the grape sugars to alcohol – oh, and creates some carbon dioxide, which is ultimately allowed to escape. That’s called the base wine. If we bottle that up at the end of this process, we have…Chardonnay!
But we don’t. Instead, we fill the bottles with that wine, but leave a little space in the neck. Then we add a little solution of sweet, unfermented grape juice and a tiny bit more yeast. The yeast goes to town on the sugar once again, but this time the bottle is capped, so the Carbon Dioxide can’t escape. Those bottles sit around for awhile, and instead of being bored or watching Oprah, the yeast is busy interacting with the wine and making it more complex and interesting.
What could be nicer?
Here’s your glossary. Have a great Autumn, and I really hope you’ll include some Champagne or other sparkling wines in it! If you’re looking for a California wine, look no further than Schramsberg, in my view the best of some very good American sparkling wines.
Blanc de Blancs is white Champagne made from 100% Chardonnay.
Blancs de Noirs is white Champagne made from Pinot Noir and sometime Pinot Meunier grapes. There’s little or no color from those red grapes, though, because the juice is gently pressed and then fermented with no skin contact. Sometimes you’ll see a slight hint of gray or pink in these wines.
Champagne Effect is the heady, romantic feel you get when drinking this great stuff, and there’s a very scientific, non-romantic reason for it, explained here.
Methode Champenoise. A term that describes the way Champagne is made, which was generally applied in the past – and found on bottles of – sparkling wine made in places other than the Champagne region of France. The Champenois (people who live and work there) didn’t like anyone else using this term, either, so you’ll usually see “Methode Traditionelle” on the label of those bottles today.
m grapes pulled from a single, named vineyard. Many grower Champagnes are also mono-cru.
Rose Champagne is a pinkish-colored sparking wine made in one of two ways – either some red wine, generally Pinot Noir is added to white Champage, or less typically, the skins of some pressed Pinot Noir and/or Pino Meunier are left with the juice to extract just a bit of color and flavor.
Sparkling Wine is wine typically made in the style of Champagne, but not from grapes grown there. Some producers such as California’s Korbel refer to their wine as Champagne but it can’t be, by definition. And recent agreements that the US is part of will make it illegal for US producers to call their wine Champagne in the future. So, for example, the house of Moet & Chandon produces Champagne in France, but its US operation produces “California Sparkling Wine” in Napa under the label Chandon.
Vintage Champagne means that the wine was made from grapes from one or more vineyards but from a single year’s harvest. Vintage Champagnes don’t happen every year, but only in years when the crop is deemed to be excellent and then the vintage is formally “declared.”
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