To begin with, let me make a blanket generalization and declare that Champagne goes very well with sushi and most other Japanese food. According to Richard Geoffroy, wine-maker for Dom Pérignon, it’s a marriage based, in part, on the compatibility of the yeast in the Champagne and the yeast in the soy sauce; plus, the wine’s high acidity cuts through the saltiness—as with caviar. For similar reasons, Champagne works well with dim sum. It’s more difficult to make generalizations about other Chinese cuisines, given the many regional styles, but most of us are familiar with a hybrid of Cantonese and Szechuan cooking.
I recently celebrated my birthday at Canton, my favorite Chinese restaurant, located in New York’s Chinatown. One reason I chose the place was that it allows me to bring my own wine. On the other hand, Cantonese food is not exactly a slam dunk when it comes to wine matching. But I had more hits than misses.
One intuition, increasingly confirmed by experience, is that the white wines of Alsace and Germany often make great companions for Chinese and South Asian dishes—Riesling being especially companionable with Cantonese cooking, as the ′99 Barmès Buecher Hengst grand cru proved in conjunction with the minced squab wrapped in lettuce leaf. The most exciting match of the birthday dinner was a Zind-Humbrecht Pinot Gris with Peking duck. (Several Alsatian winemakers, including Olivier Humbrecht, had tipped me off to this one. The slight smokiness of the Pinot Gris is amplified by the smokiness of the long-cooked duck.) One thing that makes these wines so successful with somewhat sweet, somewhat spicy food is their residual sugar. Anyone who is horrified at the idea of sweetness—who thinks that the words dry and sophisticated are synonymous—should get over it. Or drink beer. A touch of sugar, which many Alsatian and German wines have, is the perfect counterpoint to spice; these wines are also inevitably high in acidity, which balances out the sweetness of a sauce like hoisin. When going German, choose a Spätlese, a late-picked wine with good body and ripeness.
I also had a red wine success, pairing a ′96 Martinelli Jackass Hill Vineyard Zinfandel with the Cantonese beef and onions. I have since had almost unerring satisfaction with (red) Zinfandel and Chinese food, especially Ridge’s Lytton Springs (a 70 percent Zin blend), which is widely available. I have no idea why Zinfandel works with such a wide variety of feisty Chinese dishes—like sesame chicken and orange-flavored beef—though I suspect it has to do with the natural exuberance and sweetness of the grape and its low tannins. Try it.
I have always loved Viognier, especially from the Condrieu region of France, but I never really knew what to drink it with—it seems too floral and assertive for most white wine dishes—until I took a suggestion from a waiter at Chiam, a Chinese restaurant in midtown Manhattan. The 2000 Copain Viognier from the Russian River region of California seemed to distinguish itself with every dish—shrimp dumplings, spicy prawns, and sesame chicken—and I have since been converted to Chinese with both French and domestic Viogniers. Indian food is, if anything, even trickier than Chinese. Vindaloo, anyone? (Again, there are many cuisines in the subcontinent, but on these shores generalizations can be made.) I have often drunk Gewürztraminer with Indian food—it’s almost a cliché at this point that Gewürz, with its wacky rose-water and lychee nut character, goes with hot food like curries. The principle of balancing sweet and hot serves as a guideline—think of the wine as serving the purpose of a sweet chutney. A slightly sweet Gewürz, even a Vendange Tardive, can stand up to a hotter curry.
I was introduced to a more offbeat partner for Indian flavors by Richard Breitkreutz, the former wine director at three-star Tabla, which specializes in the cuisine of chef Floyd Cardoz’s native southern Goa. Breitkreutz brought out a ′96 Martinez Bujanda Rioja Finca Valpiedra Reserva with the chicken tikka, eliciting a skeptical hoot from me. But the two seemed made for each other, and the Rioja complemented all the other dishes on the table, including a medium-hot curry. I’ve since discovered that this was no fluke. Breitkreutz thinks it has something to do with the earthiness of the wine.
With its green and red curries and sweet and spicy combinations, Thai food presents similar challenges. Gewürz is a good place to start, particularly with gai pad bai krapow—spicy chicken or beef with onions and basil. Viognier also stands up. And Australian Sémillon from the Hunter Valley seems to work especially well in conjunction with lemongrass and ginger. As for reds, I have had good luck pairing young Australian Shirazes with spicy beef salads and several other dishes. The explanation for this match probably has nothing to do with relative geographical proximity.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about matching wine with Asian food is that it’s a relatively new area of inquiry. Many discoveries await the wine geek and the novice alike. Dial up your local takeout, open a few modestly priced bottles, and be prepared for some pleasant surprises.
BABY JESUS IN VELVET PANTS
Bouchard and Burgundy
A great bottle of Burgundy is one of the strongest arguments we have in favor of wine…. The problem for most of us, though, is to find that great bottle of Burgundy.
—Gerald Asher, Vineyard Tales
Back in 1985 I found myself staying at the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood at the expense of a large movie studio. While the Chateau’s room service menu was minimal enough foodwise to satisfy the most demanding anorexics and drug abusers, it listed a couple dozen old vintages of grand cru Burgundy from Bouchard Père et Fils. Visiting repeatedly over the next few years, I helped deplete this cellar and in the process developed an ugly Burgundy habit, which has persisted to this day.
Burgundy is a wine for chronic romantics—those for whom hope perenially triumphs over experience. If you are a sensible person with a family, a full-time job, and a sound belief in cause and effect, you might want to avoid the Côte d’Or. Once you’ve experienced the transport of a great bottle of Burgundy, you may end your days broke, drooling on Burgundy Wine Company catalogs, offering sexual favors to sommeliers—all in the vain hope of re-creating that rapture. Having scared the wimps from the room, let me qualify this gloomy scenario by proposing a reliable source for this particular controlled substance.
Founded in 1731, Bouchard owns more prime vineyards in the Côte d’Or than any other firm. And in many ways, its history is emblematic of the region. Bouchard’s headquarters was built on the ruins of the fifteenth-century Château de Beaune, which the family purchased after the French Revolution; the ancient cobwebbed cellars contain what is undoubtedly the world’s largest library of old Burgundy vintages, extending to the early part of the last century. Long renowned for its magnificent grand crus, by the 1970s the firm was, like Burgundy itself, coasting on its reputation.
In the 1960s and ′70s many of the region’s famous vineyards had been planted with mutant, high-yielding vines and saturated with fertilizers. The feeble wines from these overworked vineyards were routinely turbocharged with sugar and tartaric acid, with little regard to the strict laws limiting these practices. Worst of all, some Burgundian estates and negotiants routinely labeled and sold lesser village wines from the flats as premier crus and grand crus from the more prestigious hillside vineyards, as well as wines from the Rhône Valley and elsewhere, making a mockery of the entire appellation system. Although these practices were widespread, the authorities decided to make an example of the biggest fish in Beaune. In October 1987 they descended on Bouchard’s headquarters, seizing the cellar book, which documented dubious cellar practices. Bouchard ended up paying a $400,000 fine and was subsequently sold to to Joseph Henriot, the suave, impeccably tailored former president of Clicquot Inc., who also runs his family’s domaine in Champagne. Since 1995, Henriot has presided over an extensive overhaul of Bouchard, the results of which were first really showcased in the very good ′99 vintage.
Bouchard’s vineyard holdings have long been concentrated in the Côte de Beaune, the southern half of the Côte d’Or, home of Burgundy’s great whites, including 2.2 acres of Le Montrachet. I was a little disappointed when I first laid eyes
on this gently sloping (five-degree) hillside vineyard, the holiest of holies for Chardonnay drinkers. I think I expected it to resemble the Matterhorn. But my sense of awe was restored later when I tasted the ′99 Bouchard Montrachet in their cellars. Montrachet is never the fattest or fruitiest Chardonnay on the block, but at its best it has a stony purity that resonates and lingers on the palate as a tuning fork does on the eardrum. And it can develop for decades. I recently had a ′61 Bouchard Montrachet at the Manhattan restaurant of the same name; it was incredibly fresh and vibrant and, according to the note I made at the time, reminded me somehow of the prose of Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River.” An authentic, more affordable version of the Montrachet experience— for those of us who balk at spending three hundred dollars and up for a bottle of wine—can be found in Bouchard’s Mersaults and Puligny-Montrachets, which come from neighboring vineyards.
For many years Bouchard’s signature red wine has been the Beaune Grèves La Vigne de L’Enfant Jésus, a premier cru said by the nuns who once owned the vineyard to produce wine as smooth as the baby Jesus in velvet pants—about as weird an analogy as I’ve encountered even in the overheated field of wine descriptors. As a former student of Raymond Carver’s, let me just add: I like it a lot. Among the best values in Burgundy year in and year out is another Bouchard Beaune—the Clos-de-La-Mousse. Henriot extended the firm’s portfolio with the purchase of prime vineyards in the more northerly Côtes de Nuits, home of Burgundy’s most prestigious reds. The grand cru Bonnes-Mares and the Nuits-Saint-Georges Les Cailles are among the standouts of recent vintages.
Bouchard also bottles wines made from purchased grapes, but it is the estate wines, in which the words Bouchard Pére et Fib appear in script on top above the vintage, that are the most exciting, coming from Bouchard’s own vineyards. The winemaking, supervised by the genial Phillipe Prost, is impeccable. (Note that Bouchard Aîné is another firm entirely.) I hesitate to recommend Burgundy to the general public, but if you’re willing to risk your peace of mind in pursuit of one of the most exciting sensory experiences available inside the law and outside of bed, you could do worse than to check in with my old Hollywood friends at Bouchard Père et Fils.
STRICTLY KOSHER
My first buzz was strictly kosher, courtesy of a bottle of Manischewitz Concord grape wine, filched from my neighbor Danny Besser’s parents in Chappaqua, New York. It struck me as a wonderful beverage at the time. I fell into a pond but otherwise emerged from the experience unscathed—even exhilarated. Since then I’ve sampled a few more bottles at seders, and it’s one of those guilty pleasures, like Big Macs, that shouldn’t necessarily arouse our grown-up derision. But as a wine drinker I’ve moved on, and so has kosher wine.
Wine has played an important role in Jewish ritual and was produced for thousands of years in Palestine until the Muslim conquest of A.D. 636. “Wine was the constant thread through Jewish festivals,” according to The Oxford Companion to Wine, “since it is sipped as the Sabbath starts (kiddush) and again when it ends (habdalah) with the blessing ‘Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who creates the fruit of the vine.’”
Of course, other religions used wine in their rituals, so the Jews distinguished theirs by developing the tradition of kosher wine, whereby only observant Orthodox Jews were allowed to be involved in the production and bottling. The hot wrench that got thrown into the winemaking machinery was the insistence of some rabbinical authorities that kosher wine be boiled, so that heathens wouldn’t recognize it as wine and use it in their own rituals. This boiled, mevushal wine, which has lost most of its winelike qualities and all the nuances we talk about when we talk about wine, has for centuries succeeded in scaring off serious wine drinkers.
The kosher wines that are of interest to readers of this column, whether Jewish or gentile, are those that, one way or another, circumvent the mevushal process. (Nonmevushal wines meet strict kosher guidelines, I’m told, provided they’re not opened or handled by a nonkosher waiter or sommelier.) The best advice I can give you is to look at the label, and if the wine is mevushal, pass it over. Walk on by. Or, better yet, run.
For Passover and other occasions, there are dozens of serious kosher wines to consider, including wines made under Orthodox supervision at estates like Bordeaux’s Léoville-Poyferré and those made at kosher properties in Israel and California.
Yarden, in the Golan Heights, Israel’s coolest growing region (we will pass over disputes about sovereignty here), is producing uncooked kosher wines to tempt the heathen palate. Golan is an agricultural paradise, a beautiful and haunted landscape. Site preparation for Yarden’s El Rom vineyard in the so-called Valley of Tears—the scene of a massive armored battle in the Yom Kippur War—required the removal of the hulks of 250 Syrian tanks.
Since 1992, Yarden wines have been made by California-born Victor Schoenfeld, a cheerful, nebbishy University of California at Davis graduate who apprenticed at Mondavi and Chateau St. Jean, and whose wife is a major in the Israeli army. Schoenfeld has been fashioning serious ageworthy kosher Cabernet Sauvignons for the past decade (and has recently taken on Sonoma’s Zelma Long as a consultant). At a recent vertical tasting at New York’s Union Pacific restaurant, the 1985 was still showing well, and several of the later vintages were outstanding. I can’t necessarily recommend the Chardonnay, however—tasting the 2000 vintage, I kept checking my tongue for oak splinters. But Yarden makes a very good Blanc de Blancs, a promising Pinot Noir, and an excellent dessert wine—all of them extremely well priced.
Dalton, based in the Galilee region, makes a beautifully balanced Chardonnay, though I find its reds sweet and cloying. A very promising new source of premium kosher wines in Israel is Recanati, in the Hefer Valley. Cofounded by an Israeli of Italian heritage, the winery is named after the owner’s ancestral village. At about twenty dollars, Recanati’s 2003 reserve Cab is a steal.
Some of Bordeaux’s finest wines are available in limited-quantity kosher versions, thanks in part to the influence of the Rothschild family. Probably the best value for the Passover table is the kosher version of Mouton Cadet from the Baron Philippe de Rothschild group; this premium wine is one of the most widely distributed in the world. The 2000 vintage has produced a wine of real distinction and character.
In America, the finest kosher wines of which I’m aware are being produced under the Baron Herzog label. Herzog has adopted a technique of flash-pasteurizing the juice at 165 degrees; this process seems to have very little, if any, deleterious effect on the finished wine and qualifies the wine to bear the mevushal label. The Special Reserve Chardonnay from the Russian River Valley is usually outstanding, and the reds are well made and well priced. Herzog is owned by the Royal Wine Corporation, which also imports a wide range of kosher wines of wildly diverse quality. Some of them will appeal to oenophiles regardless of their heritage; others will undoubtedly please those who look back fondly on the grape syrup of seders past.
BODY AND SOIL
The quaint, red-roofed town of Wettolsheim, in Alsace, rolls up its sidewalks at dark. One wonders what a sleepless inhabitant might think, looking out his window at three a.m., to see a light in the vineyards—his neighbor François Buecher moving between the rows of vines with a spray gun. And what would the neighbors think if they saw him burying a cow horn packed with manure in the vineyard? By now, one imagines, Wettolsheimers must be used to the eccentric habits of Buecher, who practices a radical form of organic viticulture known as biodynamique.
Barmès Buecher is one of dozens of domaines in France that are growing grapes in accordance with the principles of Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian philosopher and polymath, and the founder of the anthroposophical movement. Biodynamic agricultural theory views the farm as a self-sustaining entity within the surrounding ecosystem. A vineyard’s ecological balance is determined by the vitality of the soil and the diversity of the organisms living in it, and is subject to the influence of the moon and stars. It’s easy to make the theory
and some of its practices sound ludicrous, which may explain why many practitioners are reluctant to talk about it. But over the past decade, I’ve noticed that some of the greatest estates in France have gone biodynamic. In Burgundy, Domaine Leroy, Domaine Leflaive, and Comtes Lafon—names on anyone’s top-ten list—are biodynamic. It makes sense that Burgundy is leading the way in this holistic agricultural approach; in the ′60s and ′70s many of the great vineyards of the region were bombarded with chemicals in a misdirected attempt to increase production. In Alsace, Zind-Humbrecht, Ostertag, Marcel Deiss, Marc Kreydenweiss, and more than a dozen other estates follow the system. In the Loire, devotees include Domaine Huet of Vouvray and Nicolas Joly of Savennières; and in the Rhône, Chapoutier has racked up dozens of 90-point ratings since it went biodynamic.
Long a force in New Zealand and Australia, biodynamic practice is just beginning to exert an influence in California, as many growers seek ways to lessen their dependence on agrochemicals and sustain the fecundity of their soil. While many vineyards follow the Food and Drug Administration guidelines for organic farming, some California winegrowers are turning to the more rigorous ideas of Steiner’s. “Organics is about nonuse of chemicals, while biodynamics is about restoring the soil and putting nutrition back in,” says Rob Sinskey, of Robert Sinskey Vineyards, who has adopted biodynamic practices at his Napa vineyards. The Sinskey operation, the Benziger Family Winery in Sonoma, and Frey Vineyards in Mendocino are among a handful of California winemaking estates certified by the Demeter Association, the international body in charge of Steiner’s legacy.
The basic principles of biodynamics are as commonsensical as some of its practices are arcane. Advocates argue that long-term use of agrochemicals destroys the microbial and insect life of the soil. When I visited Buecher, he showed me the abundance of earthworms and beetles in his own vineyards, then moved to a neighbor’s heavily sprayed plot, where we were unable to find a single living thing. It’s the life that we can’t see—microorganisms—that is the most important living component of the soil. Proponents like Buecher plausibly claim that biodynamic practices result in better wines that transmit the unique characteristics of the soil and site. “Soil microorganisms bond a plant to the soil,” explains Mike Benziger, who started to make the switch to biodynamic farming five years ago and was recently certified. “Microorganisms are the chefs that take a combination of organic and mineral elements in your soil and offer them to the plant in a form it can absorb.” Fertilizers short-circuit this process—making the vines act like lockjawed diners at a three-star restaurant, attached to IV drips.