Carmenère is Chile’s secret weapon, a varietal once widespread in Bordeaux that in 1991 was rediscovered in Chile, where for years it had been mistaken for Merlot. Like Cabernet Franc, Carmenère can be a little vegetal and rustic, but when properly ripened it has a silky texture and peppery, raspberry flavor. Whether it can be a solo star for Chile’s wine industry remains to be seen, but the spectacular Clos Apalta, which contains up to 40 percent Carmenère, is testament enough to this grape’s potential as a blending component. The monster 2001 Apalta is already a wine-world legend; the 2002 is slightly less powerful but just as complex, a wine that might be mistaken for a blend of a Napa cult Cab and a first-growth Pauillac.
Seña, a joint venture between Napa’s Robert Mondavi and Eduardo Chadwick, president of the venerable Chilean winery Errázuriz, was the first of the superpremium (i.e., fifty dollars plus) Chilean reds, and is likewise a blend of Cabernet, Merlot, and Carmenère. The New World–style 2001 vintage is the finest offspring of this marriage to date. If any Chilean winery can claim more distinguished bloodlines, it would be Almaviva, the love child of Bordeaux’s Baron Philippe de Rothschild (Mondavi’s Opus One partner) and Chile’s Concha y Toro, the first winery to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The monumental 2001 Almaviva, made by Mouton-Rothschild’s Patrick Léon with Enrique Tirado of Concha y Toro, tastes a lot like a fine Pauillac—a structured (read: slow to evolve), complex, and earthy blend of roughly 80 percent Cabernet Sauvignon and 20 percent Carmenère. The grapes come from a thirty-year-old vineyard located on the outskirts of Santiago in the Maipo Valley, Chile’s traditional Cabernet region; they undergo their miraculous transubstantiation in a beautiful wooden cathedral of a winery designed by Chilean architect Martín Hurtado Covarrubias, best known for his churches.
The young prodigy among Chile’s homegrown wineries is unquestionably Montes, founded in 1988. Montes Alpha “M” is the flagship wine of the estate, a rich, powerful red made from relatively young vines planted on hillsides above the Apalta Valley in Colchagua. My pick for the most promising of Chile’s newer estates is Haras de Pirque, in the Maipo Valley, best known at present for its Thoroughbred stud farm. Founded in 1991 by entrepreneur-equestrian Eduardo Matte, Haras currently produces a Cabernet aptly named Elegance and has recently announced a joint-venture, single-vineyard wine with Italy’s Antinori family.
Most of these new-wave Chilean luxury cuvées are as yet made only in small quantities, but they are worth seeking out, and they bode well for Chile’s future as a source of premium reds. Seventy or eighty dollars may seem like a lot to pay for a Chilean wine—until you compare the best of them with similarly priced New World reds.
MALBEC RISING
I hear that South America is coming into style.
—Elvis Costello
Argentinean Malbec may not quite rank with the tango and the collected works of Jorge Luis Borges as a cultural landmark, but at this point I’d judge it a not-too-distant third—particularly when it is served alongside the fire-grilled, grass-fed beef of the pampas. To experience this combination among the svelte, stylish, late-dining patrons of La Cabaña in Buenos Aires, or better yet at an asado—a traditional outdoor barbecue—in the lean, limpid air of the high Andes, is to flirt with some kind of primordial carnivore bliss.
With its tragic, underachieving history and its malfunctioning political and economic institutions, Argentina is years behind neighboring Chile as a producer of world-class wines. But its natural endowments and its potential are probably greater. And while grape varieties like Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardon-nay thrive on the arid plateaus of the Andes’ eastern flanks, Malbec—unloved and almost forgotten in its homeland of southwestern France—seems to have found its perfect adoptive home here. Not to mention its perfect foil in Argentinean beef.
Argentina is a vegetarian’s worst nightmare. Salads can be found in the fashionable restaurants of Buenos Aires, and good French- and Italian-style pastry is widely available, but, generally speaking, beef—with a smattering of pork and lamb—is what’s for lunch and dinner. And lots of it. The fresh, grass-fed beef of the endless pampas is leaner, gamier, and chewier than the aged, corn-finished American product. For centuries, Argentines have washed it down with rustic, oxidized plonk, but in the past decade there has been an increasing emphasis on quality wines for the export market— the most exciting of which are undoubtedly old-vine Malbecs. The best of these spicy, voluptuous reds are made in small quantities, although they are easier to find in the States than high-quality grass-fed beef. And they harmonize brilliantly with a Black Angus sirloin or a USDA prime rib eye. Malbec was once widely grown in Bordeaux and is the main ingredient of the big, tannic, rustic wines of Cahors that enjoyed great popularity in Russia during the reign of Peter the Great but have been struggling to find an identity ever since. Sometime in the nineteenth century the grape made its way to Mendoza, roughly six hundred miles west of Buenos Aires, across the sweeping grasslands of the pampas. The province is crisscrossed with an elaborate network of canals, first developed by the Huarpe Indians, which cools the city and irrigates the surrounding vineyards. As they descend toward the plains, the lower slopes of the Andes foothills provide a series of microclimates that can be matched to the ripening characteristics of different grapes.
At roughly three thousand feet above sea level in the Mendoza region, Malbec seems to find its ideal home and achieve a complexity and richness that make it a candidate for one of the world’s great wine types. Particularly in its youth, Mendoza Malbec tends to be a much friendlier, more cuddly beast than Cahors, and it is almost always rounder, richer, less astringent, and more complete than Cabernet Sauvignon from neighboring Andean vineyards. Not that you’d mistake it for Merlot, which is inevitably less spicy and tannic—a waltz to Malbec’s sultry tango.
So much for generalizations. A tasting of top Malbecs and Malbec blends that I attended at Terroir, a by-appointment-only Buenos Aires wine shop, revealed a multitude of styles, not to mention a wide range of quality, which suggests that Argentinean Malbec is a work in progress. The wines that scored highest were boutique wines crafted by transatlantic winemakers: the 2000 Achával Ferrer Finca Altamira Malbec, made from the fruit of eighty-year-old vines by Tuscan wine-maker Roberto Cipresso, and the 2000Yacochuya, crafted by the ubiquitous, genial genius Michel Rolland from similarly antique, high-altitude northern vineyards. The tiny production makes these wines more of an inspiration to their rivals than a regular libation for American drinkers.
Almost as impressive—and widely available here—are the top Malbecs from Catena Zapata and Terrazas de Los Andes, two of Mendoza’s largest and most innovative wineries. Catena Zapata, which operates out of a high-tech, Mayan pyramid—think I. M. Pei—winery, introduced the world to the concept of luxury Mendoza Malbec in the early 1990s. Its 2000 Catena Alta Malbec is a worthy successor to previous vintages, a full-bodied, earthy spice box of a wine. The Moët Hennessy–financed Terrazas de Los Andes began production in the mid-1990s, although its top bottling, the stunning, sexy Gran Malbec, comes from seventy-year-old vineyards that have managed to survive the frequent hailstorms plaguing the region. In partnership with Bordeaux’s legendary Château Cheval-Blanc, Terrazas also produces a rich, complex, and polished blend of Malbec, Cabernet, and Petit Verdot— Cheval des Andes.
Visiting Mendoza this past spring, bumping into Connecticut wine-store owners and French winemakers in the Park Hyatt, I couldn’t help reflecting that the experience must have been a little like visiting the Napa Valley in the ′70s, at the dawn of a major international wine scene. Not quite as sexy, perhaps, as watching Carlos Gardel revolutionize the tango in the Abasto Quarter of Buenos Aires in the ′20s. But pretty exciting, nonetheless.
PERSONALITY TEST
Julia’s Vineyard
I have yet to meet the young lady in question, although by her mother’s account she is a beautiful brunette, feisty and high-strung—in the best possible way, naturally—all of which
seems appropriate for someone who has a Pinot Noir vineyard named after her. Seventeen-year-old Julia Jackson is the daughter of Barbara Banke and Jess Jackson, of Kendall-Jackson renown. I was fortunate enough to have dinner recently with her mother, her grandmother, and several of the men and women who make wines from the grapes of Julia’s Vineyard, one of the oldest in Santa Barbara County and part of the Cambria estate, which was purchased by her parents in 1987.
Located some fifteen miles from the ocean, Julia’s Vineyard sits on the Santa Maria Bench, which, along with the Santa Rita Hills to the south, has proved to be the coolest and choicest Pinot Noir real estate in Santa Barbara County. The bulk of the fruit from Julia’s Vineyard goes into Cambria’s Pinot Noir, making it the answer to the question “Is there such a thing as a good, nationally distributed twenty dollar Pinot?” The Jacksons also sell fruit from these prized old vines to smaller, artisanal producers, including Foxen, Silver, Hartley-Ostini (Hitching Post), and Lane Tanner. Tasting all these wines side by side at the Jackson family’s estate just across the road from the vineyard, in the company of the winemakers, provided me with a number of lessons in winemaking, terroir, and wine writing, as well as a surfeit of social and sensual stimulation.
Seated to my right was hostess Barbara Banke, the guiding force behind Cambria; she reminds me much more of a first-growth Bordeaux—Château Margaux, specifically—than of a Pinot. A former lawyer who once argued in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, Banke is regal and intellectual, but also extremely warm and approachable (unlike, say, Latour). The Cambria Julia’s Vineyard, served with a pumpkin risotto, seemed to me the most delicate and lacy of the 2002 Julia’s Pinots, an observation that I have since confirmed in a blind tasting, although I might have been influenced that night by the soft-spoken aspect and gamine appearance of wine-maker Denise Shurtleff, who kept reminding me of a thirty-something Mia Farrow. By comparing Shurtleff to her wine, I realized, I was committing the crudest form of the imitative fallacy that afflicts wine writers: the tendency to equate wine-makers with their wines.
But, hell, my dinner companion Lane Tanner made it all but impossible to resist these easy analogies between wine and winemaker. “My wine is basically the other woman,” said the earthy, outspoken forty-something Tanner, whose Web site features a picture of her lying naked in a fermentation tank. “It’s definitely not the wife.” Although I listened dutifully while Tanner explained that she picks earlier than the other Julia’s vintners—this would account for the bright tingle of acidity—her description of her wine as “the perfect mistress, someone you’d pick up in a bar,” made a stronger impression than the technical stuff, and I know that when I drink her Pinots in the future, early picking and 23-point Brix sugar levels aren’t what I will be thinking about.
The vintners of Foxen (Bill Wathen) and Hitching Post (Gray Hartley and Frank Ostini) were unable to attend the dinner, so my tasting of their wines was untainted by personal impressions. Yet I’m almost embarrassed to say, looking back on my notes, that I found both wines more “masculine” (in the stereotypical sense of the word) and structured than the Cambria and Tanner: a strong note of bacon in the former and a very leathery bouquet to the latter. Tanner, meanwhile, explained that she once lived with Dick Doré, the coproprietor of Foxen Vineyard, who is now married to Jenny Williamson Doré, seated on my right that night, who is Foxen’s marketing director and who used to work for Cambria. And Tanner was once the winemaker for the Hitching Post, the restaurant that features so prominently in Alexander Payne’s Sideways, about which everyone was talking that night. Hitching Post also buys grapes from Julia’s Vineyard. Got that?
As I listened to Tanner run through the professional and amorous partnerships and breakups of the Santa Maria and Santa Ynez valleys, my head was spinning. I sympathized with Benjamin Silver, the only male winemaker at the table that night (the Hitching Post boys were in New York for the premiere of Sideways), when he said that as a matter of principle he never dated anyone in the close-knit, not to say incestuous, valley wine community. The boyish thirty-three-year-old Silver, who lives in Santa Barbara proper, was clearly something of a pet here among the pioneer winemakers of Santa Maria. His Pinot was the darkest, ripest, and most potent of the evening; whatever happens in his love life, I predict a brilliant future for him as a winemaker.
The next morning, sitting on a hilltop, looking out over the blanket of fog that was gradually receding down the Santa Ynez Valley at about the same rate as the early morning fog in my head, I reflected on the lessons of the previous night. I knew I had discovered a great Pinot Noir terroir. All the wines had impressive structure and balance and shared a certain smoky quality. But the personal signatures of the wine-makers were at least as distinctive as those of the soil and climate, which is by no means a bad thing, particularly when the winemakers have such distinctive personalities.
HOW TO IMPRESS YOUR SOMMELIER,
PART ONE
German Riesling
Anyone who has been to the movies in the last seventy years knows that the two stererotypes that represent fine-dining anxiety in America are the snotty maître d’ and the snotty sommelier (pronounced some-el-yay). Assuming you get past the maître d’, the guy with the silver ashtray around his neck is supposed to be a consumer guide, not a bully or a social arbiter. Waiters with a little bit of wine learning can be far more obnoxious than an experienced sommelier. Should you find yourself in a restaurant with an actual sommelier, chances are the wine list is serious. If you’re having trouble getting over your fear of sommeliers, here are a few tips on how to make him think you are cool:
If sommeliers have a consistent point of snobbery, it’s a slight disdain for or at least weariness with Chardonnay. Tease yours by asking about Austrian Rieslings. All sommeliers love Austrian Rieslings. Then, bring it on home. Ask him to recommend a German Riesling.
Don’t roll your eyes. Get over your Blue Nun/Black Tower prejudice. I’d urge you to try German Riesling because it’s delicious, but I fear you’ll be more impressed if I tell you it’s cutting-edge. That, after all, is what we want to know—what’s now and happening. (Do you really think clunky square-toed shoes make your feet look better than those with slimming, tapered toes? You just wear them because that’s what fashion dictates, you slut.)
Your sommelier knows that German Riesling in its semidry form currently represents the best white wine value and that it’s the most food-friendly wine on the planet. The classic ′04 vintage affords a great opportunity to get aquainted with it.
Let’s deal with the allegedly vexing problem of sweetness. Many relatively sophisticated drinkers insist that they only like dry white wines. But the fact is that a superripe, low-acid California Chardonnay imparts more sweetness on the palate than many German Rieslings, in which the residual sugar is balanced by a bracing jolt of acidity—which reminds you, if you’ve ever had the experience, of inhaling a small electric eel. After years of going back and forth, the best German makers have learned to balance these two elements—and while superdry (trocken) Riesling continues to attract German winemakers playing against their own strengths, it can be mouth-puckeringly unpleasant.
Get over your fear of residual sugar. A touch of sugar is the perfect complement to most Asian cuisines, especially those dishes with hot pepper. Dry whites turn nasty and bitter in the presence of lemongrass or sweet-and-sour sauce. Given the way we eat now, German Riesling is a far more useful food wine than white Burgundy. (German sweet dessert wines are glorious—but that’s another story.)
Concentrate on the Kabinetts, Spätlesen, and Auslesen—the middle three of the seven official categories of ripeness. Kabinetts are light, refreshing, and low in alcohol and range from dry to semidry—I especially like those from the Mosel region. Spätlese grapes are picked later; the wines have more body and richness and are often slightly sweeter. Finally, the even riper, richer Auslesen can also be drunk with your more robust starters or even your main course. Sweetness varies in these
two categories, generally in inverse relation to the alcoholic strength listed on the label. A Spätlese with 8 percent alcohol will have more residual sugar than one of 11 percent. But don’t worry too much about it. Explore.
One of the reasons wine professionals love Riesling is that no grape (other than Pinot Noir) seems to have a greater ability to communicate the differences between individual vineyard sites. (The French call this terroir.) Riesling is the carrier not just of its own grapey DNA but the signature of the soil, subsoil, and even bedrock in which it was raised. Germany’s major wine regions present huge variations in geology, providing endless sources of study and tasting debate among well-lubricated professionals. But anyone with taste buds can easily detect, in various combinations, such fruit flavors as lemon, lime, green apple, grapefruit, apricot, and even pineapple in the glass—the latter flavors more likely in the later-harvest Spätlese and Auslese. But what makes German (as well as Austrian and Alsatian) Riesling profound, like great Chablis, are the permutations of minerality. All have a vibrating, zingy acidity that focuses the other flavors in the wine as well as in your food.