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.
A Debilitating Pleasure: Tavel
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 19
27, 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.
Only traces of Liebling’s Paris remain, but his favorite wine, from the sunny southern Rhône Valley at the edge of Provence, is little changed, although its fame has been diluted by the proliferation of pink wines from other regions. Tavel remains the archetypal rosé, a wine that pairs well with almost anything you might be eating in the summer, from shellfish all the way to grilled lamb. Don’t let the color fool you—it’s a dry wine, although the Grenache gives a slight impression of sweetness, offset by that mid-palate bitterness that Liebling found so appealing. Like all the wines of the southern Rhône, it’s easy to understand and to enjoy, more rock and roll than jazz. “ ‘Subtlety,’ that hackneyed wine word, is a cliché seldom employed in writing about Rhone wines,” Liebling aptly observed. “Their appeal is totally unambiguous.”
The Château d’Aquéria has been making Tavel for more than four hundred years in the southern corner of the appellation. My favorite producer, the Domaine de la Mordorée, is based in nearby Lirac, also a source of fine rosés. It makes three cuvées of Tavel rosé, including the rich and complex Cuvée de la Reine des Bois, which makes the similarly expensive Domaines Ott Château de Selle, from the Côtes de Provence, seem like pinkish plonk by comparison. I like to imagine that it resembles Liebling’s beloved Tavel supérieure. I recommend drinking it, or any other Tavel you can lay your hands on, while reading Between Meals.
Grape Nuts
The Founding Wine Geek
“Life is much more successfully looked at through a single window, after all,” says that famous voyeur Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, a line decanted by John Hailman in his introduction to Thomas Jefferson on Wine. Then again, perhaps viewing a life as multifaceted and eventful as Jefferson’s through the narrow lens of oenophilia is like training an electron microscope on an orgy; one is apt to miss some of the major events, or to see them from a bizarre perspective (as in the section on the American Revolution, titled: “The Revolutionary War: Gross Inflation in the Wine Market”). And yet, that said, for some of us the question of whether or not Jefferson sired children with Sally Hemings is less urgent than whether he preferred Bordeaux or Burgundy.
In addition to being an architect, archaeologist, astronomer, jurist, musician, natural philosopher, slaveholder, statesman, the author of the Declaration of Independence, and the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson was the country’s first wine geek. Most of the founding fathers were deeply fond of good claret and Madeira, but none were as passionate or systematic in their appreciation of the grape as Jefferson, who was utterly compulsive on the subject.
Both a connoisseur and a proselytizer, he planted dozens of grape varieties at Monticello and predicted that someday America would compete with France and Italy as a wine-producing nation. Believing that wine was much healthier than the whiskey and brandy that was being consumed in such vast quantities in our young nation, he pushed for lower import duties. “No nation is drunken where wine is cheap,” he declared, “and none sober where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage. It is, in truth, the only antidote to the bane of whiskey.”
In 1784, Jefferson joined Franklin and Adams as a commissioner in Paris, a position he had long coveted. Though his interest in wine seems to have developed during his student days at William and Mary, it was only after the Revolution, when he went to France, that his oenophilia really metastasized.
“The first thing to be done in Paris,” Adams advised, “is always to send for a tailor, a perukemaker and a shoemaker, for this nation has established such a domination over fashion that neither clothes, wigs nor shoes made in any other place will do in Paris.” Jefferson seems to have followed this advice. The 1786 Mather Brown portrait, painted in Paris, shows him looking fairly dandy in a powdered wig. Practically the next thing he did was to order twelve cases of Haut-Brion, the great first-growth Bordeaux, which was the first brand-name wine to appear in English literature: Samuel Pepys had mentioned it as having “a good and most perticular taste.”
In 1787, after inheriting the title of American minister to the king of France from the ailing Franklin, Jefferson made a trip through France and Italy that he described to Lafayette as “combining public service with private gratification.” Officially, he was checking out prospects for American trade, but his itinerary took him through most of the great wine regions of Europe, starting in Burgundy and moving on to the Rhône Valley, making his way down into Italy’s Piedmont before looping north again to Bordeaux. Most of Jefferson’s widely quoted writing about wine comes from his journal of this journey and a subsequent one to Germany’s Rhine and Mosel regions as well as Champagne. He was a keen observer. While in Burgundy he notes that in Volnay they eat “good wheat bread” whereas in nearby Meursault it’s rye. “I asked the reason of the difference. They told me that the white wines fail in quality much oftener than the red.… The farmer therefore cannot afford to feed his labourers so well.”
Much of what he wrote about the character of the countries and wines he encountered could have been written last week, spelling eccentricities aside. “Chambertin, Voujeau, and Veaune are strongest,” he says of the red wines of Burgundy’s Côte de Nuits; he declares “Diquem” (Château d’Yquem) the best Sauternes—observations that wouldn’t seem terribly out of place in the current issue of Wine Spectator.
It’s hard to imagine any aspect of contemporary life that Jefferson would recognize if he were to suddenly reappear among us, with one exception: he would be very comfortable navigating the wine list of a three-star restaurant in Paris. It is a testament partly to his connoisseurship and partly to the durability and conservatism of European wine traditions that many of the wines Jefferson drank and collected are the same ones that excite the interest of today’s grape nuts. Almost a century before the official classification of the great growths of Bordeaux, Jefferson recorded a hierarchy remarkably similar to the present classification. In addition to Haut-Brion, he ordered multiple cases of Lafite, Margaux, and Château d’Yquem for the cellar of his new residence, the Hotel de Langeac on the Champs-Élysées. He also sent many of th
ese wines to President George Washington, who was happy to be the beneficiary of Jefferson’s growing expertise. When Jefferson occupied the White House himself, he raised the standard of hospitality considerably, spending lavishly on food and wine—one factor in his later bankruptcy. Afterward, at Monticello, he became a budget drinker, substituting the wines of southern France and Tuscany for the great growths of Bordeaux and Burgundy.
Jefferson is usually assumed to be a Bordeaux man, because he wrote the most about it and perhaps because it seems like the wine that best reflects his character; claret, as the English call it, is an Apollonian wine, a beverage for intellectuals, for men of patience and reason. Austere in its youth, it predictably develops great complexity over the years. There are few surprises in Bordeaux. Burgundy, on the other hand, engages the emotions more than the intellect—a wine for the lunatic, the lover, and the poet. So it comes as a bit of a shock to learn here that during his years in Paris, when he had access to all the great growths of France, the sober sage of Monticello stocked his cellar with more Burgundy than Bordeaux, and his taste in it seems to have been impeccable: he was partial to the reds of Volnay, still a connoisseur’s wine; among the whites he liked Montrachet, which remains the most coveted white wine on the planet, though he sometimes chose the less expensive Meursault Goutte d’Or, a robust white Burgundy from a slightly less exalted slope just down the road.
Perhaps Jefferson’s apparent preference for Burgundy will eventually lead to one of those reassessments of his character that seem to arrive every decade or two; having presented the evidence, Hailman—who certainly knows his wines—doesn’t make much of it, perhaps because he is so engrossed in the commercial and bookkeeping minutiae of Jefferson’s correspondence with wine merchants and customs agents, which take up many pages of this volume. True, it was hard work to be a wine lover in those days. “To order wine, Jefferson had to specify in each letter the ship, the captain, the ports of exit and entry, how the wines should be packaged, and how he would get payment across the ocean and determine and pay the customs duties.” As someone who can order his Meursault Goutte d’Or online, I feel for the guy, but dozens of pages of this kind of trivia could drive many readers to hard liquor, which is the last thing the father of American oenophilia would have desired.