“Latour is not an easy woman,” Engerer told me when we first met. (Indeed, I don’t think it’s a woman at all—I think it’s a man.) “It requires patience. It doesn’t give much up at an early age. It’s a long runner. It often surprises you, even when you think the wine is—theoretically—ready for drinking.” There is, in other words, something terribly anachronistic about Latour; it’s the antithesis of instant gratification. If that doesn’t scare you, consider how forbiddingly expensive it is, as are all of the first-growth Bordeaux. New levels of insanity—over $1,000 a bottle—were reached with the release of futures for all the 2009 and 2010 vintages.
Even Engerer—whose boss can’t be all that sad about this situation—seems a little chastened by what has happened to the price. “My first en primeur campaign was with the ’94 vintage, which we sold for 28 euros a bottle.” (This is the ex-cellar or wholesale price.) “Now we sell the wines at 500 euros a bottle.” As a young man, Engerer and his friends would enjoy the occasional first growth. Now, he admits, they’ve become inaccessible for most wine lovers—a depressing situation for those, like me, who love Latour. True, massive capital investment has been made since Pinault took over. The new winery is spectacular, and production of the grand vin has been cut drastically in order to improve quality. None of this would matter if not for the situation and composition of the land itself.
The main vineyard occupies a rise above the Gironde estuary and is composed of a thick layer of gravel, providing excellent drainage, over a bed of clay. Lafite and Mouton sit on sand. I can’t begin to explain the interaction of roots and soil—and I don’t know that anyone can, except to say that the superb drainage means Latour is good even in rainy vintages—but I can assert with confidence that Latour’s unique terroir creates a unique wine. Over the years it has retained its signature character no matter who has made it, with an unparalleled ability to age and to develop. The 1961, which I tasted for the third time with Engerer, is one of the greatest I’ve ever encountered, a Beethoven’s Ninth of a wine, and is still on its way up. The 1982, for me the wine of the vintage, is still a baby. But they are clearly siblings, remarkably similar in their aromatics and their flavor profiles, despite being made by different teams, twenty years apart. They’re incredibly powerful but nuanced; every sip or sniff yields something new. Even in a poor vintage, like 1964, which I also tasted with Engerer, Latour is similarly complex, just not as powerful or concentrated. I think if Latour were an actor it would be Gregory Peck; the 1961 would be Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird, the 1964 would be that actor in Beloved Infidel. He has many of the same qualities in the latter movie, though he doesn’t quite leap off the screen into archetype as he does in the former.
Is any of this relevant to the average wine lover, as opposed to the wealthy collector? It is, I think, in several ways. Just as developments in Formula One race cars eventually inform the engineering of the cars the rest of us drive every day, the no-expense-spared aesthetic of Latour under François Pinault serves as an inspiration for winemakers in Bordeaux and the world over. Unlike, say, Screaming Eagle, a Napa Valley cult Cabernet that costs more in most vintages, Latour has a proven history; you know that the 2010 vintage, when you or your heirs pop the cork thirty years from now, will be spectacular. It is the ultimate exemplar of the notion of wine improving with age. Interestingly enough, mature vintages of Latour are available at auction for less than later vintages like 2003 and 2005, a market anomaly that reflects the rapid escalation of prices in the first decade of the twenty-first century. It’s generally conceded that Latour went through a bit of a slump between 1983 and 1990, but the latter vintage was a triumph, and the Pinault-Engerer era has produced a string of trophies, notably the 1995 and 1996, the 2000, 2003, and 2005.
There is only one Latour, but happily Pinault and Engerer have extended their vinous empire, together and separately. The man who owns Gucci, Christie’s, and Yves Saint Laurent has very good taste in wine terroir. In 2006, Pinault bought the Domaine René Engel in Vosne-Romanée, much to the delight of Latour’s Burgundy-loving president. Engel owned choice vineyards in Vosne, notably in Grand Cru Clos-Vougeot. Pinault and Engerer rechristened the property Domaine d’Eugénie, and beginning with the 2007 vintage the results have been exciting. In the spring of 2010, Pinault rocked the wine world once more with the purchase of Chateau-Grillet, a spectacular property in the northern Rhône adjacent to Condrieu, which is an appellation unto itself. Long renowned for its unique, long-lived Viognier-based white wines, it has been badly underperforming for two decades, and I know I’m not the only one who’s thrilled that the estate is finally in the hands of the Latour team.
Engerer, meanwhile, has a couple of side projects in his native southwest. In 1996 he and his friend Jérôme Malet acquired a vineyard in the Pyrenees that they planted with Cabernet vines sourced from the heart of Latour. The wine, Marius, has received stellar reviews in the French wine press and sells for about a thirtieth of its genetic parent. Later they bought a property in the southern Rhône called Fontbonau, where the wines are made from old-vine Grenache and Syrah. Both places are already producing very good wine, though Engerer would be the last to compare them with Latour.
Latour is Latour is Latour. In the opinion of some it’s easily the world’s greatest red wine. If you really love wine, you owe it to yourself to find a way to taste a mature example and decide for yourself.
What to Drink with Thirty-Seven Courses:
El Bulli
It begins with a glistening, olive-colored sphere, wobbling on a spoon as you raise it toward your lips, exploding in the mouth to unleash a bath of intense olive-flavored liquid. Then, as the waiter has instructed, you raise the silver atomizer to your mouth and spray the gin-and-vermouth mixture on your tongue. In your case three sprays for good measure. Or seven. (The waiter didn’t specify how many.) This is your martini, as deconstructed by Ferran Adrià. The meal ends some thirty-four courses later—just after the penultimate frozen foam of Parmigiano Reggiano—with another trembling sphere, which turns out to be a reconstituted lychee. You’ve made your way here to El Bulli, Adrià’s remote beachside restaurant in Cala Montjoi, some two hours north of Barcelona, to check off a prominent entry on your list of Things to Do Before You Die, and to try to find out why the world’s greatest chef is shutting down the world’s most celebrated restaurant at the height of its fame.
At a ceremony in his honor at the Madrid Fusión food festival in January 2010, Adrià announced that in 2011 he would close El Bulli for two years. The closing of El Bulli made headlines around the world, including the front page of London’s Financial Times. “It reminds me of how I felt when I heard the Beatles were breaking up,” a gourmand of your acquaintance confessed. Less than two weeks later, as the international fraternity of foodies was absorbing the news and trying to think of how to score a reservation before the hiatus, the forty-seven-year-old chef explained that in fact he would be closing the restaurant permanently. Then he seemed to disappear for several months. Meanwhile, two million people tried to book reservations in El Bulli’s few remaining months.
Assuming that you defied the astronomical odds and were granted one of the forty-eight seats available nightly, five nights a week, in season, possibly because your girlfriend used to date a chef who had once done a stage in El Bulli’s kitchen or you were writing for a well-known publication that had called in a lot of chits, you would probably fly to Barcelona, where if you were unlucky—or just absentminded and careless—your new Prada carry-on bag would be stolen from behind your chair while you paused to eat a sandwich in an airport café. After a fruitless discussion with a policeman, you would proceed to the Avis counter to collect the keys to your rental car and ask the clerk to write down the directions and then proceed with great trepidation into the labyrinth of freeways encircling Barcelona.
Allowing for one wrong turn and twenty minutes of panic—God damn it! How can both directions lead to Gironde?—you arrive in the town of Roses
, a scruffy resort on the Costa Brava, only to realize that your itinerary was in the stolen bag and you don’t remember the name of your hotel, of which Roses has dozens. You have to remind yourself at this point how lucky you are to be one of approximately seven thousand people who got a reservation at the greatest restaurant in the world this year, even as your wife begins to express her skepticism about the whole cost-benefit equation of this quest.
You tell her what Mario Batali said when you asked his opinion of Adrià: “Dudeski, he’s simply the most influential chef for chefs in our time. He has provoked more interest—both good and angry—in food and restaurants than anyone ever. True to his Catalonian roots—like Dalí, Casals, and Miró—he’s created a new way to work with raw materials that challenges a lot of what had previously been considered ‘the rules’ about eating and cooking.”
——
When Hans Schilling and his wife, Marketta, discovered the cove called Cala Montjoi in the nineteen fifties, the hills and the shoreline were untouched except for a small house from which the Civil Guard watched for smugglers. Schilling was a German doctor who fell in love with the rugged Costa Brava and eventually bought five and a half acres above the beach. They built their home above the treacherous road from Roses and constructed a mini golf course to attract tourists as well as a beachside snack bar. The golf course was a failure, but the Schillings, who were prototypes of the species known as foodies, decided to turn the snack bar into a real restaurant, the kind that might someday attract people like themselves to the remote cove. The restaurant was named after Marketta Schilling’s beloved French bulldogs, bulli being a French slang term for that bat-eared breed. Meanwhile, Hans Schilling took up with his German housekeeper, but he continued to visit his wife and subsidize the restaurant.
In 1975, the year that Franco’s death signaled the beginning of the end of Spain’s cultural isolation, the Schillings hired Jean Louis Neichel, an Alsatian-born French chef with an impressive résumé. In 1976 he won El Bulli its first Michelin star, although how the inspectors found the place is a bit of a mystery. There was no telephone, and the road from Roses was so bad that vendors from the town, seven miles away, refused to deliver supplies. One early customer—the British pop artist Richard Hamilton, who first visited El Bulli with his neighbor Marcel Duchamp—used to pilot his Zodiac from nearby Cadaqués and land on the beach.
In 1981 the Schillings hired Juli Soler, who would later become Adrià’s business brain, to manage the restaurant. A Rolling Stones fanatic, he’d previously run a discotheque and enjoyed a brief career as a concert promoter. El Bulli got a new French chef, JeanPaul Vinay, in 1982, and the next year his nouvelle-cuisine menu won a second Michelin star. That same year, a young naval recruit named Ferran Adrià decided to spend his summer leave in the kitchen at El Bulli. Adrià, who’d had some restaurant experience before being called up for his military service, had been assigned to work in the admiral’s kitchen, where he eventually met Fermí Puig, another young chef, who would become his best friend. When Puig arrived in the admiral’s kitchen with a collection of French cookbooks, they set about teaching themselves the techniques therein. It was Fermí who suggested they try a stint at El Bulli.
“He told me it was one of the best in Spain and that it had two Michelin stars,” Adrià wrote in his book A Day at El Bulli. “At that time I had no idea what that meant.” Ferran was more interested in the restaurant’s proximity to the beach and the nearby resort town of Roses, which attracted Swedish and German tourists. A high school dropout who had hoped to play professional soccer, Adrià had taken his first restaurant job as a dishwasher at the seaside Hotel Playafels so that he could finance a summer in Ibiza. He would often show up at the chef Miguel Moy’s kitchen only an hour or two after he left the bars and discos, but he demonstrated a remarkable aptitude for cooking. In his biography Ferran: The Inside Story of El Bulli and the Man Who Reinvented Food, Colman Andrews reports that one day Moy called Adrià’s father, who had arranged for his job, and said, “Please take your son back, because now this boy knows more than me.”
When he finished his military service in 1984, Adrià returned to El Bulli and, when Vinay left to start his own restaurant, became the chef de cuisine. Adrià was joined by his younger brother the following year, and Albert would go on to become the pâtissier, responsible for most of the exotic and bizarre desserts that were an important part of the menu. Ironically, it was a traditional French chef who provided Adrià with his road-to-Damascus moment, his conversion to the avant-garde. In the early days El Bulli’s menu reflected French traditions as well as the innovations of nouvelle cuisine, but in 1987 Adrià decided to try to invent his own style after listening to a lecture by the Chantecler chef Jacques Maximin. “Creativity means not copying,” Maximin had declared in answer to a question. “This simple sentence was what brought about a change in approach to our cooking,” Adrià wrote later, “and was the cut-off point between ‘re-creation’ and a firm decision to become involved in creativity.” That year he decided to close the restaurant for five months in the winter—a period later extended to six months—and devote the hiatus to experimentation. One early innovation, created with the help of a whipped-cream siphon, was the famous “foam”—essentially a superlight mousse—that has since become something of a gastronomic cliché, imitated from Toulouse to Topeka. Adrià’s first foam, made of white beans and served on a sea urchin, appeared in 1994. He even made a foam infused with wood smoke. At about this time he began his “deconstructions” of traditional recipes such as his “chicken curry”—chicken sauce over curry ice cream. This new cuisine would eventually be tagged with the label “molecular gastronomy,” a phrase Adrià is weary of, though he may never escape it. He prefers “avant-garde cuisine.”
El Bulli gained a third Michelin star in 1997, but perhaps even more significant was the declaration by Joël Robuchon the previous year that Ferran Adrià was the best cook on the planet. Widely regarded as the best chef in the world, Robuchon ostensibly retired in 1996 and identified Ferran Adrià as his “heir” in a French television interview. That the grand master of the French culinary tradition passed the baton to a Spaniard provoked howls of indignation in France. In fact, l’affaire Adrià was only one of many signs that classical French cooking had stagnated and that Spain now represented cuisine’s creative cutting edge, a perception that was endorsed by a 2003 cover story in The New York Times Magazine headlined “The Nueva Nouvelle Cuisine: How Spain Became the New France.” The Chicago chef Charlie Trotter was quoted in it as saying, “Spain is where the zeitgeist has shifted.” At the center of this shift was Adrià. “Like Elvis or Miles,” wrote Arthur Lubow, the author of the piece, “he is usually known by his first name alone: Ferran.”
Adrià himself acknowledges that the Times article was seminal in the history of El Bulli. “It was the consolidation of our reputation,” he says. “The beginning of the myth.” In 2006, Restaurant magazine named it the World’s Best Restaurant, a title maintained for the next four years. Suddenly Adrià was an international celebrity, and every single gastronome wanted a seat at his table, along with countless heat seekers who didn’t know the difference between a puree and a foam. One can only imagine the frenzy of sharp elbows and conspicuous displays of entitlement that might have resulted if El Bulli had been located in New York, or even Barcelona, which is on everyone’s New Europe itinerary.
Like many before her, my wife couldn’t help wondering why El Bulli was located so far from civilization, a question Adrià answered in the course of a two-hour monologue without my even having to ask it. “We wanted to create a discourse with our diners, to create an experience,” he said, when we met him at the restaurant a few days after the commencement of its final season. We were sitting on the terrace, overlooking the beach at Cala Montjoi and the Mediterranean, the view framed by pines. I had just driven some twenty-five minutes over the still treacherous road—in fact passing an accident scene, where two police cars with
flashing lights were perched at the edge of the road, a banged-up Audi at the bottom of the hillside fifty yards below. By all accounts the road was much improved since the early days. The rugged countryside was extraordinarily beautiful, the steep hillsides covered in olive trees and pines. “The road coming here, getting a reservation, it’s all part of the experience.” But more than that, he added, “this project would only be possible outside a city. For many years almost nobody came, so we had time to grow and experiment. The environment, the peace and tranquillity here, make our work possible.”
The landscape may have been tranquil, but Adrià is anything but. For two hours he talked, answering my first question, waving his arms for emphasis, pausing only when our translator touched his arm to remind him that she needed to do her job, listening intently to her translation, and sometimes repeating a word or nodding in agreement. His plastic, wildly expressive face reminded me a lot of Jackie Gleason’s. I started with a simple question, the one that everyone was asking: Was El Bulli really closing for good?
“A lot of people talk about this, but no one really understands it,” he said. He admitted that even he was taken aback by the international hue and cry occasioned by his announcement at Madrid Fusión that he was closing the restaurant for two years. At the time, his vision of the future was somewhat inchoate, but in the intervening months his plans have become more concrete.
“If you look at the history of El Bulli, you will see that it’s exceptional. This is a logical stage of the evolution of the restaurant. In 1987 we decided to close for six months of the year.” In 1998 he founded the Taller, a kitchen/laboratory in Barcelona where the El Bulli team experimented and created new dishes in the off-season. “In 2001, when El Bulli was becoming very well-known, the logical thing would have been to stay open year-round. But for us the most important thing was creativity. So instead we decided to close for lunch, and the level of creativity kept getting higher. But at some point I realized we wouldn’t be able to continue to evolve as a restaurant.” In other words, in order to save El Bulli, he would have to close it to the public.