Now several of the cooperatives have been inspired by the success of the interlopers and are producing wines of character, notably Vinícola del Priorat (Ònix) and Cims de Porrera. And a second wave of ambitious outsiders is investing in the region, led by the Catalonian wine giant Torres, whose purchase of 250 acres in 1994 helped to confirm Priorat’s reputation. The native son and former folksinger Lluís Llach launched his label Vall Llach in 1999.
Among the most promising of the newer estates is Mas d’en Gil, a starkly beautiful property with more than sixty acres of gnarled and wizened old vines that was purchased in 1998 by the wine broker Pere Rovira Rovira and that is managed by his daughters Marta and Pilar. The early vintages of their Clos Fontà are worthy of comparison with first-generation Priorats—and that’s saying a lot.
Another second-generation property that’s producing special wines is Gran Clos, purchased by the Irish-born, ginger-haired entrepreneur John Hunt in 2002, after he sold a software company he’d founded. Hunt’s first big score came when he sold an English chain of coffee shops he’d founded to Starbucks, a neat trick considering that the buyer was the model he’d copied in the first place. As a child in Dublin, Hunt naturally first became interested in beer, which he started to brew when he was fourteen, but he soon turned to wine because the ingredients were cheaper. “Hops were expensive, but I discovered I could make wine out of elderflowers and oak leaves, which were free.” Later, while attending the London School of Economics, he took a summer job on the ground crew for a ballooning company in Burgundy. His great epiphany came one night when he first sipped a glass of Chambertin. He can’t remember the vintage or the maker, but from that moment forward wine became something of an obsession. “I started spending holidays visiting wine regions.” Priorat was the one that finally stole his heart and convinced him to commit. He clearly picked good terroir, with some vines as much as a hundred years old; in 2005, the 1995 vintage from the property won the Priorat Wine Festival’s first prize, beating out the wines of the founding five. Like their neighbors, these are wines that suggest paradoxes: rustic and sophisticated; powerful and nuanced; fruity and earthy.
Fortunately, Priorat is still far from a household word, and almost all these wines cost far less than second- or third-growth Bordeaux. You just have to look a little harder to find them.
Over the Top
His Magnum Is Bigger Than Yours
Big Boy is standing in the middle of the dining room at Cru, a three-star restaurant in Greenwich Village, waving a saber and demanding that everyone shut up and pay attention. It’s not easy to shut this crowd up—they’ve been drinking really expensive wine for four hours and the adrenaline of big spending is in the air. But Big Boy, a.k.a. Rob Rosania, is more than capable of shouting down a roomful of buzzed alpha males. It’s his party, and his magnum is bigger than anyone else’s magnum. He didn’t build a billion-dollar real estate empire by acting like a pussy. Signature sunglasses planted in his curly, dark mane, he’s wearing a natty blue Kiton windowpane sport jacket over an open white shirt showing plenty of chest hair, and while he doesn’t actually pound his chest, he often gives the impression that he’s about to. He’s in the process of selling off $7 million worth of his wine cellar to the assembled company—plus a few absentee bidders—and even though there are forty or fifty more lots to go, he wants to celebrate. After commanding the room’s attention, Rosania hoists a jeroboam of 1945 Bollinger for all to see. Then he lowers the bottle and props it at a forty-five-degree angle as he prepares to saber it—the most dramatic and traditional method of opening Champagne, certainly no less than a $10,000 bottle deserves, and one that Rosania has perfected in the several years he’s been collecting Champagne. For some reason this particular bottle is not cooperating, and it takes Big Boy a few whacks to decapitate it, but no matter. A cheer goes up as the top of the bottle goes flying, and within minutes we’re all drinking a glass of Champagne made from grapes that were hanging on their vines when the Allies stormed Normandy Beach.
“Shut the fuck up and let’s finish this,” says John Kapon, standing a few feet above the crowd, pounding his gavel on the podium, like a judge addressing an unruly courtroom. Kapon is the thirty-six-year-old president of Acker Merrall & Condit, which bills itself as America’s oldest wine store and under his watch has become the world’s leading auctioneer of fine wine. It’s not often that you hear an auctioneer address a roomful of well-heeled bidders this way—it’s hard to imagine Sotheby’s urbane, British-born Jamie Ritchie doing so—but Kapon knows most of these men personally, and the very few women in attendance are accustomed to the high-testosterone world of competitive oenophilia. The assembled company includes some of the most serious wine collectors on the planet, some of whom have flown from Europe and the West Coast for this particular auction. And none of them remind me of Frasier Crane. Raised pinkies and foppish horticultural analogies have been in short supply all night. Kapon tends to cheerfully mispronounce certain French names; “rock and roll” and “T and A” are among his highest vinous accolades. Unlike Rosania, Kapon doesn’t come across as an alpha dog, at least initially … more like a slacker who borrowed his dad’s suit for the occasion. Once he’s sold off a few trophy lots, though, and downed a few glasses of Champagne, he starts to seem like the man in charge of the store.
Jeff Levy, an L.A.-based film and television director and philanthropist, who bankrolled his wife’s company, Juicy Couture, and sold it a few years ago to Liz Claiborne, is in the process of dropping about $250,000 on vintage Champagne and Burgundy, including a case of 1962 Rousseau Chambertin Clos de Bèze for $80,000. Jeff has a distinctly Goth look—he’s in his customary head-to-toe black, from his shades, formerly owned by Elvis, to his bespoke British crocodile shoes—and when he really wants an auction lot, he keeps his paddle in the air until Kapon tells him he’s bidding against himself. Also in from L.A. is thirty-two-year-old Rudy Kurniawan, who vies with Rosania for the MDC title (Man with the Deepest Cellar) and who’s alleged to spend more than $1 million a month on wine. Kurniawan is supposedly from a fabulously wealthy Chinese family, although his father gave him an Indonesian name in order to protect his privacy. Rudy is widely believed to have had a major impact on the escalating prices of the fine-wine market, and the Rosania auction includes some of his overstock, bottles of Rousseau, Ponsot, and Roumier Burgundies that would constitute the crown jewels of any other collection.
At one of the back booths sits a tall, almost gaunt, middle-aged man whose long hair is tied back in a ponytail and who seems conspicuously out of place, although a few of the cognoscenti recognize Laurent Ponsot, proprietor of one of the most revered domaines in Burgundy. Among the highlights of the auction are some twenty-two lots of old and rare Ponsot from Kurniawan’s cellar. If Kapon were to announce his presence, the group would probably give him a boisterous ovation, but he remains relatively unnoticed and curiously subdued, not to say mournful, reminding at least one observer of Banquo’s ghost. I forget about him until Kapon announces the withdrawal of all the Ponsot lots from the auction, at which point Jeff Levy says “Fuck!” and some of the company turn to observe the man whose grandfather founded the domaine, inscrutable in the back corner. The next time I look he’s no longer in his seat.
While these kinds of multimillion-dollar auctions happen every other week in New York, what made this one unusual was the preponderance of old Champagne, a backwater category until Rosania began collecting with a vengeance after tasting a bottle of 1937 Krug he’d bought as part of a mixed-case auction lot. Tonight’s climax came early, when two bottles of 1959 Dom Pérignon rosé—the never commercially released debut vintage—provoked a telephone duel between two European bidders that quickly escalated from the opening price of $6,000. When Kapon slammed his hammer down three minutes and $64,000 later, a new record had been set for Champagne. With the so-called buyer’s premium (which goes to the auction house) tacked onto the $70,000 hammer price, someone had just paid $84,000 for two for
ty-nine-year-old bottles of pink bubbly that very few people besides Rosania had ever tasted. The room erupted in cheers and applause. Bear Stearns had collapsed the month before, and the subprime crisis accelerated as the dollar continued its precipitous slide, but this, and several other spring auctions, proved that the market for fine vintage wine remained buoyant.
The celebration lasts until well after two, when the exhausted Kapon slips away. More wine is ordered from Cru’s encyclopedic list, and Robert Bohr, the restaurant’s manager, glides around the room like Jeeves, serenely presiding over the chaos. It has been five hours since we finished a three-course meal from the chef Shea Gallante, so Big Boy has six pizzas and six dozen hot dogs delivered, which are washed down with several bottles of 1990 Jaboulet Hermitage La Chapelle.
When Kapon joined the firm in 1996, after a brief foray into the music business, Acker was a somewhat sleepy operation grossing about four million a year. Sotheby’s and Christie’s pretty much had the fine-wine auction market to themselves, and Rob Rosania and Rudy Kurniawan had yet to become disciples of Bacchus. Like most wine geeks of his generation, Kapon’s first love as a wine drinker was California Cabernets. The Napa Valley was undergoing a renaissance in the nineties, and the big ripe, voluptuous fruit-driven Cabs were easy to love, the vinous equivalent of Seinfeld-era Teri Hatcher. (“They’re real and they’re spectacular.”) So-called cult Cabernets, small-production super-extracted wines like Harlan, Colgin, and Bryant Family, were garnering 100-point scores from über-critic Robert Parker and selling for as much as first-growth Bordeaux. Rosania and Kurniawan also cut their teeth on these Cabs—Kurniawan’s epiphany wine being a 1995 Opus One Cabernet. For many serious collectors, Napa Cabs were the gateway drug that led them to the hard-core, super-addictive stuff, first Bordeaux, the motherland of Cabernet Sauvignon, which provided the inspiration for Napa, and then on to the secret kingdom known as Burgundy. (Kapon and his inner circle, like most true geeks, are Burgundy nuts; at the Rosania auction, several people booed when he announced the Bordeaux portion of the sale.)
In 1997, Acker sponsored an auction with Phillips de Pury. This and several subsequent auctions, according to Kapon, were disasters. But he persisted, even as his taste was beginning to shift toward older wines. Then, sometime in late 2000 or in 2001, Rob Rosania walked into the store on West Seventy-Second Street. Neither man can recall the moment very precisely, but their meeting would eventually prove to be a fine-wine milestone akin to Paul Allen meeting Bill Gates. Both were still in their twenties. Rosania was a partner in a real estate investment firm, a self-made mogul who was ready to spend some of his growing fortune.
Largely by cultivating young collectors like Rosania and Kurniawan—along with established collectors like the real estate baron Ed Milstein and Roy Welland, an options trader and bridge champ who also owns Cru—Kapon has made Acker Merrall the leading vendor of fine wines in America. “John has worked at it,” says Peter Meltzer, author of Keys to the Cellar, who covers the auction scene for Wine Spectator. “I’m very impressed with him. He’s really out there. The traditional houses have not been as aggressive.” Kapon, Rosania, and Kurniawan, all in their thirties, have had a major impact on the international wine market. “You’d think they’d just be buying the best labels to show off,” says Meltzer. “But they really know what they’re doing. They’ve learned empirically. They will be able to tell you the best vintage of La Tâche tasted in the last five years.”
A few years before the Rosania auction, I started receiving e-mails detailing bacchanalian gatherings with elaborate tasting notes about wines that most mortals could only dream about, sometimes dozens of them: 1959 Krugs washed down with 1945 Romanée-Contis. Wine-porn spam that had somehow escaped my spam filter, the notes were studded with references to Big Boy and King Angry and Hollywood Jef. Who the hell were these guys? I wondered. And why were they drinking so much better than I was? The author of the e-mails, I finally learned, was one John Kapon of Acker Merrall & Condit, and his fellow Dionysians were members of his tasting group, the Angry Men. The way they drink, you’d think they’d be the fucking Merry Men.
Having helped to fuel the collecting boom in this country as well as Europe, Kapon has set his sights on Asia. After selling off part of Rosania’s Champagne collection, he presided over three more auctions in the space of five weeks, culminating with a May 31 auction at the Island Shangri-La Ballroom in Hong Kong that brought in $8.2 million, including $242,000 for a case of 1990 Romanée-Conti. That sale put Kapon in a good position to become a leader in the exploding Chinese market. (Acker has since become the top auction house for wine in Hong Kong.) A few years back the Chinese dropped the tax on wine sales from 80 percent to 0, and the center of the rare-wine trade, which shifted from London to New York in recent years, has moved to Hong Kong. In 2010, Acker’s Hong Kong auctions outearned New York by $10 million.
Kapon scored another coup a few weeks after the rowdy Cru sale with an auction featuring wine from the cellar of Bipin Desai, a University of California particle physicist, who is one of the world’s most famous collectors, in large part because of the elaborate tastings he organizes. Desai has been popping great corks since Kapon and his posse were in diapers, and he scooped up cases of Romanée-Conti and Petrus back when they were selling for the price of a room at the Ramada. Desai’s sale of half of his cellar seems to be a case of acknowledging his own mortality. So many wines, so little time. As for the younger collectors who are selling, it’s hard to say whether they are locking in profits, hedging against a possible decline, or just editing their holdings so they can buy even more. Probably all of the above. “All I can say is I’ve only seen prices go one way,” says Kapon, as he noses a glass of 1971 Roumier Morey St. Denis Clos de la Bussière. (In fact, prices collapsed in 2009, but they’ve rebounded since, making the 2008 auctions look like bargain fests.)
“Tighter than a fourteen-year-old virgin,” says Big Boy of one of the Champagnes he has brought to the table, and everybody seems to know what he means. By the standards of this group, a forty-four-year-old magnum like this 1964 Salon is still young and not yet fully developed. Most of these collectors are under forty themselves, but they like their wines older. It’s the night before the auction, and we’re seated in the private dining room at Cru, which has become the inner sanctum for New York’s high-rolling wine community. Some of Kapon’s biggest bidders have been invited to preview the wines at tomorrow’s auction, along with select members of the Angry Men—the tasting group that he founded, which includes some of the biggest collectors in town. When I ask about the name, Kapon shrugs and says, “We’re New York guys, and we don’t tolerate bullshit. We’re all busting balls and cracking on each other.”
“Stinky as the crack of a ninety-year-old nun,” says one of the Angry Men, nosing a red Burgundy that is exactly half that age. Curiously, this is intended as a compliment. There are murmurs of agreement and approval around the room. Old Burgundy is supposed to be funky, even fecal, but also elegant. Based on the following night’s hammer price, the bottle in question, a 1962 Rousseau Chambertin Clos de Bèze, is worth $8,000, and it is by no means the most expensive of the wines we will taste that night, some forty in all. We follow it up with several from the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, perhaps the single most resonant name in the world of wine worship, including a 1955 Romanée-Conti and a 1971 Richebourg, which is showing brilliantly. John Kapon’s note on the wine, compiled at an earlier tasting, is a tad more formal than some of the Angry Men commentary: “incredible nose of sweet cherry, roses, wet earth, truffles, candied fruit … solid spice still … catnip, dognip—might as well call it whale bait (forgive me for that one).” He continues for another fifty words, finally concluding with the word “Stellar” and a score of 98 points. No one who tasted it that night was inclined to downgrade it.
Kapon can talk trash as well as the next guy, but he’s also a serious taster who, at this point, has probably sampled—and written about—more rare ol
d wines than almost anyone his age on the entire planet, with the possible exception of Kurniawan and Rosania, and he has the notes to prove it—thousands of them. He knows all the traditional terminology, but he’s added some terms of his own, like “whips and chains,” as he wrote recently of a powerful young Champagne. “T and A” is a frequently used term, and he often invokes the taste of vitamins. Robert Parker is widely considered the world’s most influential wine critic, while Allen Meadows—author of the newsletter Burghound.com and a friend of Kapon’s—is the Pope of Burgundy, but neither of them has tasted some of the rare and old bottles that the Angry Men routinely open at their gatherings.
Unlike some collectors, this group is drinking rather than hoarding. When I dined with the director Jeff Levy on a recent trip to Los Angeles, he invited four other friends along to Spago so we could open more bottles, seventeen in all, ranging from a 1937 Ausone to a 1999 La Tâche from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, with a flight of Petrus—1955, 1971, and 1985—in between. The next night, at Cut, Wolfgang Puck’s Beverly Hills steakhouse, we limited ourselves to a mere twelve bottles, going back to the 1929 Haut-Brion.
“The young collectors today are consumers of wine,” Rosania tells me later over an alfresco lunch at San Pietro, the chic and expensive Upper East Side trattoria. He’s clearly at home here, chatting in Italian with the waiter, and with the owner of the Kiton boutique next door. “Life is short,” he says. “You’ve got to drink it.” When I ask him how many bottles he has in his cellar, he says he has no idea. When I venture a guess of fifty thousand bottles, he says, “Hell, I have fifty thousand bottles of ’96 Champagne.” (The 1996 vintage was a great one, and by all accounts Rosania bought hundreds of cases of the rarest Champagnes as they were released, including most of the 1996 Salon that came to these shores.) When I tell him that one estimate places the value of his cellar at fifty million, he shrugs.