But Paso Robles is not so easily pigeonholed as a visitor might wish. Napa is inextricably identified with Cabernet, while Sideways has made Santa Ynez, an hour to the south, almost synonymous with Pinot Noir. When I comment on the lack of Pinot Noir in Paso Robles, Asseo tells me about his friend and neighbor Marc Goldberg, of Windward Vineyard, who makes “a great Pinot, very Burgundian, you must visit him. I give you his number.”
By the time I leave Asseo’s L’Aventure Winery, raising a cloud of dust along Live Oak Road in my borrowed Shelby, it’s after six, and the Windward tasting room is closed, but I take a chance and bang on the door of the house beside it. The diminutive, goateed guy who eventually opens it, amid a pack of barking dogs, has all the signs of having been awakened from a nap and seems none too pleased, but he warms up when I tell him Stephan sent me and leads me over to his tasting room. Marc Goldberg pours me a glass of his 2005 Windward Pinot Noir, and when I express enthusiasm, he breaks out his 2005 Gold Barrel Select, which has the delicate complexity and earthy undertones of a Nuits St. Georges, although it finishes a little sweeter than a classic Burgundy, as do most New World Pinots.
Like many of the area’s finest wineries, Windward produces a limited amount (two thousand cases) and is tough to find outside the region, although many, including L’Aventure, sell much of their wine via mailing list. The best and most enjoyable way to learn about the area’s wines, and to acquire them, is to visit. If you do, be sure to bring a cigar for Stephan.
Kiwi Reds from Craggy Range
New Zealand is still best known for Sauvignon Blanc, but I predict we’ll be hearing more and more about Kiwi reds in the near future. The Pinots, particularly those from the Otago region in the far south, are starting to attract international attention, and if Steve Smith has anything to say about it, New Zealand Syrahs and Merlots will, too.
For those of you who may have missed the first couple of chapters of Kiwi wine history, here’s a short summary: in 1985 the Australian David Hohnen flew to New Zealand, convinced that the cool climate of that country’s South Island could produce great Sauvignon Blanc. In fact Montana, a big wine company based on the North Island, had already planted Sauvignon in the Marlborough area, and the results were promising. Hohnen hired the winemaker Kevin Judd and bought land in Marlborough while producing his first vintage of Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc from locally purchased grapes. The wine was soon creating a buzz and winning prizes in Australia and the United Kingdom. Within a decade Cloudy Bay had spawned numerous imitators and helped to create a new style of wine. For some reason, Sauvignon Blanc grown in cool, sunny Marlborough tastes like nothing else, certainly not the lean, grassy Sauvignons from Sancerre and Pouilly Fumé. They are brash fruit cocktails that put you in mind of grapefruit, lime, mango—just about everything you might find on Carmen Miranda’s hat. The success of Sauvignon Blanc opened the door for Chardonnay, with almost twice as much acreage now devoted to the latter.
Craggy Range, founded in 1997 by Terry Peabody, yet another Aussie with deep pockets, staked out a stunningly beautiful patch of the southern part of the North Island, initially making its mark with a single-vineyard Sauvignon Blanc. For years now its Te Muna Road Vineyard has been my favorite Kiwi Sauvignon Blanc. But the winery has increasingly wagered its future on reds. While they are based in Hawkes Bay, the Craggy Range team has scoured both islands to find ideal vineyard sites for varietals we don’t normally associate with New Zealand, including Syrah, Cabernet Franc, and Merlot.
The winemaker Steve Smith, a founding partner in the venture, recently visited New York and shook up my perceptions with some blind tasting over a dinner at Jean Georges, the flagship of the eponymous Vongerichten’s international empire. I’ve known the towering and gregarious Smith for years, and he has pretty much single-handedly convinced me that New Zealand is capable of producing superb red wines. But that evening was the clincher, when he mixed his own wines in with some of the best from America, Australia, and France in a blind tasting. What was most surprising to me was that while I was usually able to identify the American and Aussie wines as New World and the French wines as Old World, I sometimes mistook the Craggy Range wines for their French counterparts. Which might have been the point. Smith certainly seemed rather pleased when I made this mistake.
We warmed up with the 2009 Te Muna Road Vineyard Sauvignon Blanc—as usual more restrained and nuanced than the typical Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc, the more extreme examples of which can taste like grapefruit juice filtered through a bed of fresh-mown grass—and moved on to a flight of Pinots. We were tasting blind, so I wasn’t sure if the 2008 Craggy Range Te Muna Pinot was New or Old World, but I really liked it, much more so than I liked what turned out to be the 2006 Armand Rousseau Gevrey-Chambertin Lavaux St. Jacques, which was very lean, austere, and, at $170, expensive. Granted, it takes time for Burgundy to come around, and Rousseau is a great domaine, so I’ll reserve judgment for the moment. If I’d been told which wines were in the lineup, I would have guessed that the 2005 Au Bon Climat Isabelle Pinot Noir was the Rousseau. Given that Au Bon Climat’s Jim Clendenen likes to pick earlier than his California cronies, in part to achieve a Burgundian edge, maybe this wasn’t so surprising. Meanwhile, Craggy Range’s top bottling, the 2006 Aroha, was still young and closed up, but unlike the Rousseau it had masses of fruit in reserve. I picked this one as a Kiwi but was nevertheless surprised by how much structure, acid, and even tannin it had. This was no easy-drinking floozy by any means.
Smith is a firm believer that certain terroirs in New Zealand are ideal for Bordeaux varietals, with which he has been fascinated since he backpacked through that region in 1991. The experience of tasting 1990 Latour out of barrel was more or less his road-to-Damascus moment. The next flight pitted his 2007 Sophia, a blend of Merlot and Cab Franc from the right bank of the Ngaruroro River, against the 2007 Vieux Château Certan, from the right bank (what a coincidence!) of the Gironde, and the 2006 Duckhorn Three Palms Merlot. Not surprisingly, the latter, one of California’s best Merlots, was the most open and opulent, being all Merlot and having an extra year of age. Merlot is generally less tannic and more flirtatious in its youth than Cabernet. The Sophia was much more restrained, yet still powerful and approachable, and I couldn’t make up my mind whether it was Old or New World, whereas the Vieux Château Certan, which was wound up tighter than the inside of a golf ball, was definitely Old World.
The last flight, of Syrah/Shiraz (the former being the French nomenclature, the latter the Australian), presented a real challenge. All the wines were superb, but it was tough to make the New World/Old World calls, in part because the Rhône representative, the 2007 Chave Hermitage, came from a hot vintage and was uncharacteristically forward in style. Chave is generally acknowledged to be the greatest maker of Hermitage, though his wines usually take more than a decade to come around. The 2006 Torbreck RunRig is a New World classic—much more balanced and refined than the big jam bombs; it’s one of Australia’s greatest Shirazes, respected even by certain wine snobs who denigrate the Barossa Shiraz category in general. Suffice it to say that the 2007 Craggy Range Le Sol Syrah was very much at home in this company, and it was tough to pick a winner.
Not hard to pick the best value, though. The Torbreck and the Chave both sell in the $200 range, while the Craggy Range is $70. Still, Steve Smith may have a tough time selling a $70 New Zealand Syrah in this market. California makers have failed in recent years to create much enthusiasm for the variety, while the market for the fruit-bombastic Barossa Shirazes, so popular just a decade ago, has been in serious decline. But I love guys who attack windmills, and I love restrained, aromatic Syrahs like Smith’s Le Sol. Blind tasting, as Smith well knows, is hugely revealing, and this one suggested to me that New Zealand’s wine story is well into its third chapter. If you missed the first, or rather the second, part of the story, try the Te Muna Road Vineyard Sauvignon Blanc, still under twenty bucks most everywhere—an absolute steal.
Spanish Ol
ympian
Most American wine lovers are familiar with the Judgment of Paris, the 1976 tasting in which several Napa wines outscored the best from Bordeaux and Burgundy. The French wine establishment, including the tasters who’d participated in the blind tasting, were not amused. The spit buckets were still wet as they started to explain the results away. Patriotic French wine lovers must have been really pissed off three years later when a Spanish wine bested 1970 Château Latour and other top Bordeaux in another blind tasting sponsored by Gault Millau, the prestigious publisher of French food guides. The ringer was a 1970 Torres Gran Coronas, made from four-year-old Cabernet vines planted in Penedès, an area of gently rolling hills an hour west of Barcelona.
At the time of Gault Millau’s so-called Wine Olympiad, Spain was best known for sherry and for the kind of rustic plonk that Sancho Panza and Ernest Hemingway’s expats used to squirt out of wineskins. Torres itself was best known for a mass-produced red with a plastic bull attached to the neck. A few hard-core connoisseurs were aware of a winery called Vega-Sicilia, in Ribera del Duero, as a source of powerful, age-worthy reds, and Rioja produced some fine wines, but the general level of ambition and technical expertise was unimpressive. Thirty years later, Spain is the new Italy (which was, until recently, the new France, if you know what I mean). Every week, it seems, a new boutique wine from a previously obscure part of Spain lands here with a big noise. But no winery is more innovative, or emblematic of recent Spanish history, than Torres.
Soft-spoken, courtly Miguel Torres has light blue eyes and dresses in the tweedy style of the English country gentry, also favored by the chatelains of Bordeaux. At the age of sixty-eight, he seems to retain a youthful sense of curiosity; he has recently taken up Japanese and holds his own in a conversation with his Japanese importer, whose annual visit to the sprawling winery complex in Penedès coincides with my own. He drives a Prius, which seems as much a testament to his modest demeanor as to his passion for environmental issues. He stopped using pesticides in the early nineties, and he’s committed to reducing CO2 emissions at the winery 30 percent by 2020. He’s also bought land in the cooler highlands near the Pyrenees, in case global warming makes the lowland vineyards in Penedès too hot for viticulture in the future.
The Torres family has been in the wine business for several hundred years—although the current company dates back to 1870, when Jaime Torres returned to his homeland after making a fortune in Cuba. Miguel A. Torres (who has two sons and a daughter working with him) took over from his autocratic father, Miguel Torres Carbó, who resisted many of his son’s innovations but also managed to rescue the family business from the ashes of the Spanish Civil War. In the chaos leading up to the war, Torres Carbó was forced to flee the winery. “The anarchists took over in Catalonia,” his son explains, over lunch at the winery, “and killed a lot of factory owners and vineyard owners. My father went to Barcelona and worked as a pharmacist and a chemist producing vaccines for the Republicans. The winery was confiscated, and the ownership went to the workers.” Despite the poisonous atmosphere of class warfare, the workers apparently called the exiled boss on a regular basis to ask for advice. In January 1939, the winery was bombed and largely destroyed by Franco’s air force. “Then at the end of the war,” Torres says, “my father was taken prisoner and sent to a concentration camp. Fortunately, he had a cousin who was a colonel in Franco’s army who managed to secure his release after a few weeks.” Not surprisingly, he decided to get the hell out of Spain, moving initially to Cuba, where Miguel junior was conceived.
Torres Carbó happened to be in New York City when the news broke that the Germans had invaded France. He immediately set about courting anxious American wine importers, assuring them that he could supply Spanish “Chablis” and Spanish “Burgundy” to fill the demand for the French juice. Torres Carbó promptly returned to Spain to expand his negotiant business, buying grapes from local farmers and shipping faux French wine to the States. Miguel junior, who grew up in Barcelona, wanted to know more about the real thing; he studied oenology in Dijon and returned to Spain with a desire to make high-quality wine at home. He experimented with French varietals on a small family plot while buying and blending grapes from the local growers. Then, in 1965, an exceptional sixty-five-acre vineyard called Mas La Plana came up for sale, and Miguel convinced his father to buy it. “I knew we had to plant Cabernet there,” he says. Just five years later, the infant vines produced the wine that would go on to win the Gault Millau tasting.
Not long after Franco died in 1975, Miguel senior dispatched his son to the New World. “There were strikes all over Spain and my father remembered the war. He said, ‘I don’t want to go through that again.’ ” The younger Torres, after touring California, eventually decided that Chile’s Central Valley was a viticultural paradise, a conclusion that has been validated many times over in the succeeding years, though it was far from obvious at the time. In Chile as well as in Spain, they were the first to introduce new technology like temperature-controlled stainless steel fermentation tanks, at a time when locals were still stomping grapes with their feet. In 1984, some years before the area would become renowned for Pinot and Chardonnay, the family bought land in Sonoma’s Russian River Valley, even as they continued to acquire vineyards in Spain, buying in emerging regions like Toro, Jumilla, and Priorat.
In the fine-wine world, of course, bigger is hardly better. Most wine geeks would say the reverse is true. Like teenage music fans who drop their favorite band at the first sign of popular acceptance, connoisseurs and critics—myself included—tend to seek out the newest and the rarest bottlings from boutique producers. I reflexively winced when I heard the production numbers—forty-four million bottles a year, 200 million euros in sales. But unlike his friend Robert Mondavi, who started out as a producer of premium wines and eventually moved down market in a way that many believed compromised the value of the brand, Torres has gone in almost the opposite direction, using the success of mass-market wines to finance the production of luxury single-vineyard cuvées. In 1984 he began a project to reclaim indigenous Spanish varietals, planting them in a beautiful walled vineyard called Grans Muralles, eventually producing one of the most intriguing new wines in Spain. The family’s purchase of 250 acres in Priorat ten years later helped to seal the reputation of that area, and the early vintages are excellent—the 2007 Perpetual, for instance, made from old-vine Carignan and Grenache, is very lusty juice. Their Mas La Plana bottling, from the vineyard that produced that prizewinning Cabernet in 1970, has become a reference point for that varietal in Spain. And if you were to slip it into a blind tasting of cult Napa Cabernets, I suspect that their top Chilean Cabernet, Manso de Velasco, might upset expectations and slay some giants, just as their first Cabernet did back in the era when punk was trying to slay disco.
Location, Location, Location
Besides a little vineyard near Montmartre, in the heart of Paris, Moraga Bel Air may qualify as the unlikeliest patch of vines in the world. “A grapevine doesn’t know its address,” says Tom Jones, the former CEO of Northrop Aviation and current proprietor of Moraga. Which is a good thing, because vines need a hell of a lot of discipline, and if Jones’s Cabernet Sauvignon and Sauvignon Blanc vines knew their address, there would probably be no dealing with them—they’d be getting agents. I almost hate to mention Moraga’s location, because the wines speak for themselves—in very refined tones—and bear comparison with some of the best of Bordeaux. But the fact is these grapes are grown within sight of the Getty Museum on some of Los Angeles’s most desirable real estate, which is, obviously, hugely expensive.
“I’m sick of that Hollywood and Vine stuff,” says Jones, a handsome nonagenarian who would rather talk about his soils than his zip code. Moraga’s wines show a subtle, complex Old World style; he himself has a quiet, patrician demeanor, and his bond with the land is palpable. “My wife and I are California born and raised,” he says, standing at the base of his steep vineyard. Chickens are pecki
ng at the dirt. It’s hard to believe Rodeo Drive is fifteen minutes away. If not for the tennis court cantilevered out over the hillside on a neighboring property, or the Getty Museum across the canyon, you could easily imagine you were in an older, wilder California.
“I was born and raised in Pomona, where it was just agriculture, including vines,” Jones says. “We bought this place because it was a piece of old California, and I saw it disappearing.” It was formerly a horse ranch owned by Victor Fleming, the director of Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz. The hard-boiled director Howard Hawks lived next door. “There used to be a lot of small horse ranches in the canyons. When we bought the property, it had chaparral and a lot of oak trees.”
Jones and his wife are longtime Francophiles; as head of Northrop he regularly attended the Paris Air Show, and he used these occasions to visit some of the great vineyards of France, including Château Margaux, where he had lunch with the legendary French oenologist Émile Peynaud. “We noticed a similarity between our own soils and those of Bordeaux,” he says. “We have calcareous sandstone from ancient ocean floors. The Los Angeles basin was under the ocean for millions of years.” Jones scoops up a chalky fossilized snail shell to illustrate the point. Research also revealed that the canyon enjoyed a unique, grape-friendly microclimate with an average of nine inches more annual rainfall than arid downtown Los Angeles as well as cooler nighttime temperatures than in other parts of the city.