The tenth annual La Paulée de New York had many satellite events, seminars, tastings, and even an auction, but the main event was the Saturday night dinner, a bacchanal the likes of which my liver hoped not to experience again for at least another week or two. The meal itself, presided over by the great Daniel Boulud, who has been La Paulée’s head chef from the start and since 2005 has employed Johnnes as his wine director, would have brought an appreciative tear to the eye of Diamond Jim Brady. It’s a thoroughly hedonistic experience and a thoroughly communal one. Collectors bring their best and oldest bottles of Burgundy to share with their tablemates. I brought a 1990 Rouget Echézeaux and a 1993 Anne Gros Richebourg—which in most company would’ve been superstars—but I frankly felt like a piker, given some of the other offerings. Early on a jeroboam of 1992 Leflaive Bâtard-Montrachet, a 1992 Coche-Dury Meursault-Perrières, and a magnum of 1985 Ramonet Montrachet appeared at our table. I knew I must be intoxicated to the point of hallucination when I found myself looking at three jeroboams (each the equivalent of four regular bottles) of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti La Tâche from the sixties in front of me—1964, 1966, and 1969, collectively worth more than a brand-new Range Rover. No, they were indisputably real, unlike the magnum of 1989 La Tâche, which was almost certainly a fake, one of more than a few. Like celebrities, great Burgundies breed impostors.
I wish I could tell those of you who weren’t in attendance that these three holy of holies were crappy, or merely okay, but I can’t. Just when I was about to swear off the stuff forever, which I was considering after the collectors’ dinner, I was suddenly wondering how much money I could get for my eight-year-old Audi, or if I could just trade it for a single 750-milliliter bottle of the 1964 DRC La Tâche. Anybody out there in the market for a used Audi TT?
Sitting across from me was the violinist Itzhak Perlman, but the big star at our table was Aubert de Villaine, a.k.a. God, the seventy-one-year-old proprietor of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, one of the few Burgundian vignerons who probably sports a foulard from time to time, although on this occasion he was wearing a very elegant tweed jacket and a green silk tie. But even the aristocratic de Villaine seems to be attuned to the true peasant spirit of Burgundy, clapping his hands to “Je Suis Fier d’Être Bourguignon,” and singing along with les Cadets de Bourgogne, a twelve-man choir of gray-haired bons vivants Johnnes had flown in for the occasion.
When I asked about the lyrics of another song that I couldn’t make out, he winked and said, “Let’s just say in Burgundy there is an affinity between the appreciation of wine and of women.” There was a virtual receiving line to kiss his ring—half of his time, he admitted to me, was spent dodging requests from the rich and famous to visit the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti—so I decided to skip the subject of wine and talk about opera, one of his great passions, and though I know very little about it, I thought I got more and more brilliant as the evening progressed.
If de Villaine was the Angelina Jolie of the night, he was almost upstaged by the arrival of Jean-François Coche of the legendary Domaine Coche-Dury, another superstar farmer who’d just stopped by with some friends to congratulate Johnnes. Hedge fund managers, investment bankers, and heirs to huge American fortunes—and yes, one novelist/wine columnist—almost squealed with excitement, like teenage girls who’d just been informed that Justin Bieber was in the house. And look, there’s Eric Rousseau, the rumpled and taciturn proprietor of Domaine Armand Rousseau, besieged by a bellowing real estate mogul. To most in the room he’s a huge celebrity, but he’s clearly uncomfortable with all the attention. It would be easy to make fun of such star fucking—hey, wait, I think I just did—but I have to say that there’s only one wine region in the world, as far as I know, that inspires this kind of passion, especially among an audience that can afford anything its pampered heart desires.
Sometime in the a.m. many of us repaired to the celebrity chef Tom Colicchio’s latest restaurant, where the details become somewhat fuzzy, although I do remember taking bets with fellow Burgnuts on whether or not a certain sommelier’s dress could continue to defy gravity. Then I realized I was defying gravity. As I was leaving, I saw Daniel Johnnes at a corner table, looking exhausted but not unhappy, and literally the only sober man in the room. For that reason alone, not to mention his great service to Burgundy, they should erect a statue of him in the center of Meursault, or Beaune, or Nuits St. Georges.
Off the Beaten Path
Way Down South:
The Great Whites, and Reds, of Hamilton Russell
The last time I visited Hamilton Russell Vineyards, I was still shivering after a morning spent in nearby Gansbaai Bay, submerged in a steel cage, which was periodically rammed by twelve-foot great white sharks crazed by chum. My friend Anthony Hamilton Russell, in the midst of preparing lunch for twelve, handed me a glass of his celebrated Chardonnay while I thawed out on the terrace of his Tuscan-style villa, looking out over the stark, pristine expanse of the Hemel-en-Aarde Valley. I remember thinking how convenient it would be for the visiting wine writer, analogy-wise, if Hamilton Russell’s signature white were one of those big, strapping, take-no-prisoners New World Chardonnays. Alas, Hamilton Russell’s elegant Chards, like its Pinot Noirs, are more suggestive of a brown trout rising to a dry fly than a great white slashing through a school of albacore.
If Hamilton Russell’s wines are restrained and classical in demeanor, the same cannot necessarily be said for the dashing six-foot-four, forty-nine-year-old proprietor. An English wine writer, observing the vintner tearing around his rugged estate on his motorcycle, compared him to Steve McQueen. To American eyes, David Niven seems closer to the mark. Perhaps a combination of the two would be most accurate. Anthony is articulate and gregarious, his manner equal parts European sophistication and colonial exuberance, a guy who seems comfortable on horseback or on a dance floor. The wines made under his name are among the most convincing evidence of the potential of South African viticulture, although they are utterly singular in character.
South Africa’s first vintage was harvested in 1659, and its sweet dessert wines were highly prized in eighteenth-century Europe; more recently, the combination of apartheid-era isolation and restrictive regulations hobbled the country’s wine industry and delayed its entry into the world market.
When the wine enthusiast Tim Hamilton Russell, the director of J. Walter Thompson in South Africa, started looking for vineyard land in the mid-seventies, South African wine production was concentrated in warm Mediterranean climate zones north and east of Cape Town. A French wine enthusiast, Tim ended up buying a derelict farm at the southern tip of Africa, a mile from chilly Walker Bay. The vineyards he planted were farther south, and cooler, than any in Africa. His early vintages, crafted by the winemaker Peter Finlayson, drew favorable notice in South Africa and beyond. (Finlayson eventually bought land just up the road and is making fine Pinots of his own under the Bouchard Finlayson label.) Tim lobbied against crippling regulations and against the predominant dop system—which paid vineyard workers in wine. “He was a vocal opponent,” Anthony recalls, “at a time when this attracted trouble for him within the industry. He also went on record criticizing apartheid and its expression within the industry at the time.”
As a hobby farm, HRV worked fine, but after Tim quit his day job, he found it difficult to make the winery pay for itself. Tim asked his son Anthony, a Wharton Business School graduate then working for a consulting firm in London, to come home and save the farm.
Anthony admits that aside from his business training, his main credential was “helping my father drink down his collection of Bordeaux from the mid- to late-seventies,” but he learned on the job. First off, he decided to specialize in Pinot and Chardonnay, the two varietals with which they’d had the most success. Clearly, the site had an affinity for these grapes. In 1995 it was rare to hear a New World winemaker talking about terroir—the almost mystical French concept of “placeness”—but Anthony believed his father had found a special
piece of ground, and he commissioned a thorough analysis of the soils on the 420-acre estate, finally concluding that 52 acres of clay-rich, shale-based soils were responsible for the best and most distinctive wines.
The Hamilton Russells were not the first to appreciate the qualities of the valley; the land is littered with prehistoric artifacts. Anthony, who is something of an obsessive collector, started accumulating them as a boy and now has a museum-quality collection of Acheulean hand axes made by Homo erectus dating from around 1.5 million years back to 250,000 years old. He’s also found a more recent, late–Stone Age site in the vineyards. You don’t have to be an anthropologist, or a mystic, to feel there’s something incredibly special about this rugged valley.
What’s special about the wines is that they bear an unmistakable signature of the place. “Vintage to vintage,” he says, “it’s like reading different books by a favorite author—the story changes, but the style remains, the style being the soul and character of the land.” This proposition was verified at a recent tasting conducted at New York’s Paris Commune: the five vintages of Pinot Noir poured by a bespoke-suited Anthony were each distinct, ranging on a scale of power versus elegance from the rich, tannic, dark-fruited 2006, which to my mind could benefit from a year or two in bottle and called to mind a ripe-year Gevrey-Chambertin Premier Cru, to the delicate, feminine 2008, which did a good imitation of a Village Volnay. The 2009 may be the vineyard’s best vintage yet, although at two years old it was still too young to drink. The 2007 is a gorgeous medium-bodied Pinot that reminds Burg freaks of a Chambolle-Musigny. And yet, as I say, these wines, tasted together, have a family resemblance. The Chardonnays are equally distinct and superb, much leaner and stonier than most South African Chardonnays. While most South African producers seem to look to the fruit bombers of Australia for inspiration, Hamilton Russell clearly has a French palate, and the 2010 Chardonnay reminded me and several sommeliers at the tasting of a Meursault. Unlike most New World wines, they are dominated more by earth (the Pinot) and mineral (the Chardonnay) notes than by pure fruit flavors. “Our wines are more expressive of site and soil,” Anthony says, “than of the variety and the winemaker.”
What’s ironic about this, perhaps, is that South Africa’s most internationally acclaimed winery is renowned for making what some call a European-style wine. “I love Burgundy, red and white,” Anthony admits, and critics consistently liken the wines to those of Burgundy.
Hamilton Russell’s latest venture is unmistakably South African in character. In 1994, he bought an adjacent estate—which he named Southern Right in honor of the whales that visit Walker Bay every year—devoted exclusively to Sauvignon Blanc and Pinotage. The latter is South Africa’s signature red grape, a cross between Pinot Noir and Cinsault, and Anthony has cast his lot with those who believe in its potential. “I don’t want my epitaph to read: ‘He made great copies of Burgundy.’ I want to add something to the world of wine. And there is a chance that South Africa can make something great with Pinotage.” The early results are promising, full-bodied and powerful—any day now some wine writer will be comparing Southern Right Pinotage to its cetacean namesake.
Blending Their Way to an Identity:
Paso Robles
Stephan Asseo had never heard of Paso Robles when he set out for the New World. After twenty years in Bordeaux’s Entre Deux Mers region, he was frustrated by the restrictions of the French Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée system and, to a lesser extent, by the weather. His quest for a viticultural Eden wound through South Africa, Chile, Napa, and Sonoma. “While I am visiting Santa Barbara,” the ruddy, boyish vigneron says, pausing to light the stub of his cigar on a blowtorch, “I keep hearing about Paso Robles.” Presumably, he heard this through a translator, since he spoke no English at the time. Even now, Asseo sticks strictly to the present tense, which suits his manic demeanor, and relies heavily on profanity, which he uses to express enthusiasm.
“I drive north, and I fall in love right away,” he says. Standing in the middle of the rolling, hilly vineyards of his L’Aventure Winery, watching the condors circle overhead and the quail scuttling through the vines, I find it easy to understand this sentiment. “Fucking beautiful,” is the proprietor’s assessment. He clearly loves this land he’s chosen, quite a bit of which is lodged under his fingernails.
Paso Robles is one of the most dramatic and unspoiled landscapes I’ve encountered in fifteen years of writing about wine, particularly in the spring, when the steep hillsides are green from the winter precipitation, sprinkled with purple lupine and yellow buttercups. Justin Vineyards’ founder, Justin Baldwin, who arrived two decades before Asseo, says that the sleepy, prelapsarian vibe reminds him of Napa in the fifties and sixties. Driving along the winding, dusty back roads past grazing cattle, flocks of wild turkey, and Mennonite homesteads shaded by stands of towering live oaks, I feel as if I’ve stumbled onto one of the last undiscovered corners of the Golden State. The best of the wines have a special beauty of their own.
Beauty aside, Asseo’s geological instincts proved astute; research showed that the soil composition on the eastern side of Paso Robles was incredibly complex and similar to Bordeaux, with lots of limestone, and the climate, with its fifty-degree daytime temperature swings, was pretty close to ideal for growing grapes with complex flavors. The Templeton Gap is a gash through the high coastal ridge that allows winds to funnel a cool oceanic influence and moisture into areas that would otherwise be sheltered.
Zinfandel was among the first grapes planted here early in the twentieth century, and these old vines eventually drew the Zin master Larry Turley of Napa’s Turley Wine Cellars to establish a winery here among other Zin specialists like Dusi, Eberle, and Peachy Canyon. In the sixties and seventies Dr. Stanley Hoffman planted some of the first Cabernet, Pinot, and Chardonnay with the encouragement and guidance of the great André Tchelistcheff, one of the pioneers of the Napa Valley.
In the eighties, former banker Justin Baldwin and his wife, Deborah, focused on Cabernet and Chardonnay after they bought acreage from Mennonite farmers right across the ridge from the Hearst Castle. The glamorous couple met when he applied for a mortgage. She turned him down but eventually agreed to go on a date. Justin, who acquired a taste for wine when he was stationed in London, started out as a hobbyist, commuting from L.A. until finally moving to Paso Robles in 1991 to manage their growing estate, now one of the biggest in the area, with a production of forty thousand cases and twelve thousand wine club members, some of whom are always hanging around the special lounge adjacent to the barrel room in the new winery building. Justin Vineyards’ Isosceles Cabernet Sauvignon has become a benchmark for the region, nailing big scores from the critics since the nineties—a rich, concentrated wine with a bright acidity that distinguishes it from the big Napa Valley cult Cabernets.
One of the most significant events in the development of Paso Robles was the arrival of the Perrin family, of Château de Beaucastel in Châteauneuf-du-Pape, which just happens to be my favorite southern Rhône domaine. After scouting the globe for a suitable spot with a Mediterranean climate and soils similar to those at home, they found a hilly site on the western side of Paso Robles and, in partnership with their American importer Robert Haas, began planting vines from France, producing their first vintage of Tablas Creek in 1997. Their excellent Esprit de Beaucastels, both red and white, mimic the blend of their great Châteauneuf-du-Papes—Mourvèdre, Grenache, Syrah, Counoise in the case of the red—but they seem more accessible and less earthy, possibly because of the youth of the vines. For whatever reason, they have a definite California accent, though they would never be mistaken for Chardonnays or Cabernets. At about the same time Tablas Creek went online, the winemakers Justin Smith and Matt Trevisan, of Linne Calodo, were starting to make some great wines with Rhône varietals, which they also blended with old-vine Zinfandel.
Faced with the choice of the Rhône model or the Bordeaux model, the intrepid interloper Stephan Asseo chose
both. He now produces a Châteauneuf-style blend, Côte à Côte, that he calls “my prostitute wine,” presumably because of its floozy sex appeal, as well as a straight Cabernet Sauvignon, which he frankly calls “a marketing concession.” Cabernet being California’s most recognizable varietal, he feels he needs one in the portfolio, but is far more proud of the estate cuvée, his most iconoclastic wine, a blend of Cabernet, Syrah, and Petit Verdot, which he considers the best representation of his terroir and his philosophy. Outside of Australia, Cab and Syrah, like crows and owls, are rarely seen together, although in fact there is a sub-rosa historical precedent: in the eighteenth century, weak vintages of Bordeaux were sometimes illegally beefed up with Syrah from the northern Rhône. Asseo thinks this combination is “pure Paso” and views the blend as his signature wine. Critics seem to agree. Robert Parker called the 2006 “a thrilling, nearly perfect effort.” Other wineries, including the Cab specialists Justin Vineyards, are also producing Cab-Syrah blends.
Matt Trevisan, of Linne Calodo, is garnering praise with his quirky blends, bearing wacky names like Problem Child, Cherry Red, and Nemesis, as is his former partner, Justin Smith, with whom he parted ways. Smith has become a cult star at Saxum, where he specializes in small-production, Syrah-heavy blends, and helped to boost the profile of Paso Robles when Saxum’s 2007 James Berry Vineyard was named Wine Spectator’s Wine of the Year in 2010. This wine is a blend of Grenache, Syrah, and Mourvèdre from a vineyard named after Smith’s father. Blending seems to be the trend on both the drier west side and the east side of Paso Robles, with its proximity to the Salinas River. By contrast, in the Santa Barbara region to the south, single-varietal wines, especially Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, hold sway.