If the vineyard deserves most of the credit, the Araujos go to extraordinary lengths to help it along. In the nineties they began farming organically; later, they began to make the switch to biodynamics. After reading an article one day, Bart says, he realized that many of his favorite French estates, including Domaine Leroy, Domaine Leflaive, and Chapoutier, employed the holistic approach to agriculture based on the teachings of Rudolf Steiner. He began to explore the subject and eventually employed Jeff Dawson, who had previously worked as Steve Jobs’s gardener, to make the conversion. In 2002, Araujo was certified by Demeter, the nonprofit biodynamic organization, named after the Greek goddess of the harvest. Bart cheerfully admits that he doesn’t understand all of the intricacies of this arcane field. “But, hey,” he adds, “I’m a Catholic. I’m used to making leaps of faith.” He then notes that the vineyard is far healthier than it was before the switch, and ripens earlier.
Ripeness is all, as Edgar reminds us in King Lear, and this subject is one of the most controversial in the wine world. In the Napa Valley, with its clement, un-European weather, growers have the luxury of ripe fruit year in and year out. But the question remains, how ripe is ripe? In recent years the tendency has been to pick later and later, which results in much higher levels of both sugar and alcohol; the former converts to the latter. Some claim these big voluptuous fruit bombs appeal to the palates of certain influential critics and tend to win blind tastings. But in the twenty years of the Araujos’ stewardship, the Eisele Cabernets have stayed fairly consistently in the 14 percent alcohol range—on the low side by 2010 Napa standards—which might explain why the vineyard’s signature flavors come through from vintage to vintage. There is almost always an earthy component, more common in Bordeaux than in Napa, and an herbal note, which Bart speculates may have something to do with the numerous olive trees that surround the vineyard. Tasting through twenty years of Eiseles with the winemaker Françoise Peschon, who worked at Haut-Brion before coming to Araujo, I was more than once reminded of the earthy, stony character of that great Bordeaux first growth, possibly my favorite. The 1991, the Araujos’ first vintage, was especially complex, with many years of life ahead of it. The 1995 was a Baby Huey of a wine, young and huge. When I commented that the 2005 was a real princess of a wine, Bart said, “Yes, but one with a career.” In other words, it has everything: deeply voluptuous texture with rich mocha flavors as well as the structure to improve for decades. The 2007 and the 2008 are worthy successors.
Coincidentally, less than an hour after tasting the 2007 Araujo, I had lunch with a winemaker who brought along a Cab of the same vintage that had just been given 99 points by Wine Spectator, and it was fascinating to compare them. Absolutely nothing on the menu, except possibly dessert, could have stood up to this jammy, super-ripe, super-rich, high-octane Cabernet. Actually, it was dessert unto itself and tasted a lot like blueberry pie. No doubt there’s an audience for this kind of wine—indeed, the winemaker told me it was already sold out. And it probably doesn’t matter that it might not develop and age gracefully over the next twenty years. I’m all for diversity, and I’ve got nothing against floozy bimbos—I’ve been known to watch the odd episode of Rock of Love—but tasting this wine made me instantly nostalgic for the sophisticated and nuanced Araujo.
I still have a small scar from that harvesting knife. But I’m happy to report that the 2010 Sauvignon Blanc turned out very nicely.
The Woman with All the Toys
I honestly can’t think of many people I envy, but if I had to come back as someone else, I think it would be Ann Colgin. No, wait … on second thought, I think I’d come back as Ann’s husband, Joe Wender. It’s not just that she’s a babe, or that she has houses in Napa and Bel Air, or that she knows practically everybody you’ve ever heard of, or that she’s a serious philanthropist. That’s the least of it.
When Joe met her at an Henri Jayer dinner at Spago, all the Goldman Sachs executive knew about her was that she worked for Sotheby’s as a wine expert. Waiting for the restaurant’s notoriously slow valet parkers, he chatted her up enough to pave the way for a phone call. “Joe’s a Francophile,” Ann says. “He wasn’t much interested in California. He told a friend we’d met, and his friend said, ‘Oh my God, she makes that wine that’s impossible to get.’ Joe had no idea.” The next time he saw her, over dinner at New York’s Le Bernardin, Wender ordered a bottle of Colgin Herb Lamb Cabernet from the wine list. The carte du vin was decidedly French when he proposed to her the following year at Paris’s three-star L’Ambroisie.
As I recall, she was wearing white shoes, gingham, and a big floppy straw hat when I first met Ann more than a decade ago at the Iroquois Steeplechase in Nashville, Tennessee. A Texan who’d attended Vanderbilt, she seemed right at home with the horsey set on that hot afternoon, when I encountered for the first time her signature brand of earthy, down-home glamour and learned that she was an art and antiques expert who’d fallen in love with the Napa Valley in the late eighties. Coincidentally, I’d recently returned from Napa, where I had tasted the first vintage of her eponymous Cabernet Sauvignon with the winemaker Helen Turley—the first time I’d ever tasted a wine out of barrel and still one of my most vivid vinous memories. I didn’t realize then that I was witnessing the birth of a legend.
That first vintage, the 1992, and several subsequent vintages were made from purchased grapes in a leased cubbyhole of the Napa Wine Company, which was about the size of a sauna—not exactly a grand provenance. It was made by Helen Turley, who was on the verge of being dubbed the Wine Goddess by Robert Parker. I remember being amazed that I could detect olive notes among other flavors in this Cab, which was richer and more concentrated than any I’d ever tasted. I’ve since lost my notes but can still conjure that taste. (That vintage was called Colgin-Schrader, the winery having started as a joint venture with her first husband, Frederick Schrader, who has, since their divorce, launched the highly acclaimed Schrader Cellars.) Since then, Colgin has become famous—along with Bryant Family, Harlan, and Screaming Eagle—as one of the cult wines that redefined the concept of Cabernet in Napa.
Ten years later I find myself racing through a series of steep switchbacks up Pritchard Hill in Ann’s little two-seat Mercedes, with my wife, also an Anne, sitting in my lap, and finally arriving some thousand feet up the side of the mountain at the gate of the new property, its dramatically situated Mediterranean house and adjacent circular winery overlooking Lake Hennessey and the Napa Valley. The winery’s a little bit like a boutique version of Lafite’s round chai in Pauillac. And here’s the other reason I really envy Joe Wender—because beneath the house, with its dramatic views and art treasures, the wine cellar is stocked with not only verticals of Colgin but also drool-inducing, large-format rarities from Burgundy, Bordeaux, and the Rhône.
Ann finally has a facility that seems adequate to her ambitions. (Although I might opt for a more dramatic name than IX Estate; she and Joe were married up here on 9/9/2000.) The 124-acre property has 20 acres of vines, planted in 2000, which will significantly boost the Colgin label’s production without nearly taking care of all the supplicants waiting for a slot on her mailing list.
Ann started out buying Cabernet grapes from the Herb Lamb Vineyards on the eastern hillside above the town of St. Helena. In 1996 she purchased the Tychson Hill, a sloping, five-acre parcel north of St. Helena that was planted in the nineteenth century by the pioneering winemaker Josephine Tychson. She restored the modest nineteenth-century farmhouse, which she now calls home, and replanted the vineyards under the supervision of her superstar vineyard manager, David Abreu. (Honest, there really are superstars of viticulture.) The two-and-a-half-acre plot now produces a brooding, complex Cabernet that always tastes utterly distinct from Herb Lamb, thanks to a unique dark-soil type it shares with the nearby Grace Family Vineyards. A third Colgin bottling, a Bordeaux blend called Cariad, comes mainly from Abreu’s Madrona Ranch vineyard on the steep slopes west of St. Helena. Cariad is usually the
most Bordeaux-like and restrained of these, though it often shows an exotic spiciness early. Finally, there are the incredibly promising Cabs and Syrahs from the new IX Estate property.
In recent years the wines have been made by Allison Tauziet, who spent ten years in Bordeaux before returning to the States to work at Napa’s Far Niente. Since 2005 she’s worked at Colgin alongside the oenologist Alain Raynaud, of St. Émilion’s Quinault L’Enclos, who flies over regularly from Bordeaux. Since Helen Turley’s tenure the style seems to have remained relatively consistent. Like all of the Napa Valley cult wines, Colgins are rich and concentrated and voluptuous in texture; compared with traditional Bordeaux or old-style Napa Cabs, the tannins are much softer in their youth. But I usually find Colgin less flashy and flirty in its youth than some of the other cult Cabs, a little more mysterious and reserved on first acquaintance. For pure, decadent pleasure I recommend the new Syrah, which debuted with the 2002 vintage and is so sexy and voluptuous that it should probably be banned.
As enviable as Ann Colgin’s life appears, it might not be quite as perfect as some of her wines. For all of their travel, her frequent-flier husband insists that all luggage be carry-on. “I haven’t checked a bag in nine years,” she says. “I used to have a bag just for my shoes.” Confidential to AC: I’d let you check as many pieces as you liked.
The Whole Spice Rack: Old-School Rioja
Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against fruit. But I sometimes get tired of all this super-extracted, alcoholic grape juice that seems as if it ought to be served on toast rather than in a glass and that tastes as if it doesn’t come from anywhere in particular. These are wines that somehow remind me of a blind date I had in 2005 with a woman exactly half my age. Our conversation had lots of italics and exclamation marks and very few parentheticals or semicolons. Much as I like some of the bold, new postmodern Riojas from producers like Artadi, Allende, and Roda, I sometimes crave the sepia tones of traditional Rioja, which tastes the way old Burgundy should but seldom does—and for a lot less money.
What we now think of as the old-school Rioja was created in the eighteen fifties, when French wine brokers arrived in Spain after odium and later phylloxera had devastated their own vineyards. They introduced oak barrel aging to the region, which had previously specialized in light, fruity, short-lived plonk. Two nobles, the Marqués de Murrieta and the Marqués de Riscal, helped to develop and market this Bordeaux-style Rioja, and both bodegas are still flourishing. The Riojans took to barrel aging the way the Italians took to noodles, substituting American for French oak and developing an official hierarchy that culminates with reserva (at least twelve months in oak, two years in bottle) and gran reserva (at least two years in oak and three in bottle). Crianzas, released after just two years, are apt to have a strawberry-vanilla freshness, whereas the reservas and grandes reservas will exhibit the mellow, secondary flavors associated with age—flavors evocative of autumn rather than summer. And those with bottle age can suggest practically the entire spice rack, not to mention the cigar box and the tack room. Somehow you get the idea that this is how red wine used to taste.
If the old school had a central campus, it would be a series of buildings clustered around the railroad tracks at the edge of the medieval town of Haro, including the bodegas Muga and López de Heredia. Both houses are run by the direct descendants of their founders, and both keep several coopers employed year-round, making and repairing barrels and maintaining the huge tinas—the swimming-pool-sized oak vats in which the wine is fermented and stored. Old oak doesn’t impart a woody flavor to the wine, and both wineries believe it’s superior to stainless steel. In addition to its old-school wines, notably the gran reserva, which spends three years in old American oak barrels, Muga makes a more modern expression of Rioja with French oak under the Torre Muga label, including a new postmodern luxury cuvée called Aro. Not so López de Heredia, the hardest-core reactionaries of Rioja, makers of Viña Tondonia.
Tondonia is one of those secret passwords whereby serious wine wonks recognize their own kind. The winery was founded in 1877, and apparently its practices have changed very little since. The Tondonia vineyard is beautifully situated on a high south-facing plateau outside Haro. For reasons not entirely clear to me, the complex itself resembles a Swiss or Bavarian village. Inside, it looks like the set of a low-budget horror movie, with ancient and vaguely sinister-looking machinery, huge blackened tinas, and a fluffy black mold blanketing almost everything. Some of the vats are as old as the winery, and pixieish María José López de Heredia, great-granddaughter of the founder, is convinced that the petrified sediments and natural yeasts in the tinas are an important part of the wine’s distinct flavor.
Far below the fermentation and storage vats, in a series of tunnels carved out of the limestone, tens of thousands of bottles dating from the nineteen twenties slumber beneath the pillowy mold. “The spiders eat the cork flies,” López de Heredia explains cheerfully as I swipe a vast cobweb off my face. Any minute now, I feel certain, Vincent Price is going to jump out at me. The sense of eeriness is gradually dispelled, replaced by a mounting sense of exhilaration and wonder as she uncorks bottles in the subterranean tasting room. I start with, of all things, a 1995 rosé—this being her idea of a young wine—and move on to the 1981 Gran Reserva Blanco, made mostly from the indigenous white grape called Viura, which tastes fresh and lively for its age. The tasting of reds begins with the ethereal 1985 Tondonia, which has an amazing nose of cinnamon, clove, leather, tobacco—the whole spice box, plus the stable and the library. You could sniff this forever. And while this might seem like one of those annoying instances where you have to listen to a writer tease you with descriptions of stuff you will never see or taste, in fact most of these wines were released at fifteen or twenty years of age, and are still possible to find with the help of Wine-Searcher.com. In this regard, López de Heredia reminds me of Orson Welles’s embarrassing commercials for Paul Masson—“We will sell no wine before its time.” (Check it out on YouTube, along with the outtakes featuring a thoroughly sozzled Orson.)
Across the street, Muga is releasing its grandes reservas on a slightly more accelerated schedule. Prado Enea Gran Reserva is a special bottling of the best grapes from the Muga vineyards in the best vintages. You can probably find 2001 and 2004 at retail through 2012; both have the kind of spicy complexity that develops only with age. And if you’re lucky, you might even find older vintages. A 1976 gran reserva that I shared with the bearish, gregarious Juan Muga at a restaurant in Haro lingers in memory as one of the best old Burgundies I never drank. Marqués de Riscal, Marqués de Murrieta, and Bodegas Montecillo are also good sources of traditional Rioja. Next time you’re feeling palate fatigue from trying to chew the latest super-extracted New World Merlot, you might consider checking out the subtle and delicate charms of an old gran reserva.
Zowie!
The very name of the organization, so at home in a comic book speech bubble, is highly evocative of the wine that it promotes, ZAP being the official abbreviation for the Zinfandel Advocates & Producers, which in 2010 celebrated its twentieth anniversary in San Francisco. Judging from my experience of previous festivals, I can assure you it wasn’t pretty. Teeth were stained, voices were booming, wine was guzzled and spilled. Whereas most wine tastings involve spitting discreetly into silver buckets in order to maintain a modicum of sobriety and critical judgment among the tasters, a great deal of wine seems to get swallowed at ZAP’s Grand Tasting at San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center, although one participant claimed it was slightly more subdued than usual in 2009. Similarly, some observers have detected a new wave of more sophisticated Zins, but Zinfandel, like rock and roll, is never going to be subtle.
Generally a big, high-alcohol red, with explosive fruit flavors ranging from raspberry to blackberry, Zin calls out for such all-American fare as barbecue and chili. “No wimpy wines” is the long-standing motto of Ravenswood, a winery that helped put red Zinfandel on the map, and it could
also be ZAP’s rallying cry.
Ravenswood’s founder, Joel Peterson, was a cancer immunologist at San Francisco’s Mount Zion Hospital before he lost funding for his research. His interest in wine had been passed along by his father, Walter, a physical chemist and charter member of the San Francisco Wine Sampling Club. In 1972, Joel started working with Joseph Swan, one of the pioneers in the rediscovery of Zinfandel, which had been widely planted around California in the nineteenth century by Italian immigrants. (It was finally genetically identified as being identical to Primitivo, a southern Italian varietal.) Many of these vineyards survived, partly out of neglect and partly because of the popularity of white Zinfandel, a cloyingly sweet blush wine created at Sutter Home vineyard in 1975. To increase the concentration of its red Zinfandel, its winemaker Bob Trinchero had bled off some of the just-pressed juice before fermentation. A thousand gallons of this pinkish wine was fermented separately, but the fermentation stopped before the sugar was converted to alcohol, resulting in a sweet beverage that soon became the most popular wine in America.