Pinot Grigio found a niche in part because it’s more versatile and less assertive than oaky Chardonnay. But popularity comes at a price. (Just ask the members of Coldplay.) Most serious wine drinkers shun PG the way they once shunned Soave, and not entirely without reason. One should never underestimate the power of snobbery, but the fact is, 99 percent of what’s called Pinot Grigio from Italy is dilute and flavor challenged, a refreshing, lemonade-like food lubricant and buzz-delivery system.
Like many of my peers, I turned my back on Pinot Grigio early in the nineties and remained slightly embarrassed about my early enthusiasm, much as I did about my earlier reverence for the music of the Monkees. PG seemed like the vinous equivalent of the novels of Paulo Coelho. As its popularity grew and it was planted all over Italy, far beyond its natural home in the northeast, its identity became rather nebulous. Then, about ten years ago, I visited Friuli, and I drank some very good, in fact some really excellent, Pinot Grigio, and then wondered if a reconsideration was called for. After all, PG is a mutation of Pinot Noir, universally acknowledged to be one of the greatest grapes on the planet.
In Friuli, I had really stunning examples from Lis Neris and Vie di Romans, but of course we all know the syndrome of the little country wine that tastes unbelievably great in context, when one is on vacation, surrounded by scenic ruins and charming rustics. But a few years ago I dined at Gramercy Tavern with Alois Lageder, a fifth-generation winemaker from the Alto Adige region, and I was highly impressed by his Pinot Grigios, notably a single-vineyard bottling called Benefizium Porer. More recently on a visit to the Breslin Bar, a fashionable and calorific Manhattan hot spot, I encountered a Pinot Grigio that blew my mind and encouraged me to reopen the question, can PG possibly be serious? The wine was a 2007 Pinot Grigio from Movia, a winery founded a year before Lageder’s in 1823, adjacent to some of the best vineyards of Friuli, just across the border in Slovenia.
I had met Aleš Kristančič, Movia’s winemaker and proprietor, in Friuli and again in New York, and he impressed me as one of the most energetic, not to say manic, characters of my acquaintance. In my notes from that first encounter, I quote him as saying: “We are solar men. Our power is not money. We can find solar energy in a dark place.” I believe he was speaking about marshaling the sun’s energy in the dark recesses of a wine cellar, but who the hell knows. He also makes up a lot of words. At any rate, his wines are incredibly expressive and singular, and already, in his mid-forties, he’s legendary. Like almost everything about Aleš, his Pinot Grigio is larger than life, rich and concentrated with a host of exotic fruit and mineral flavors. Was this a one-off, or was it possible that real men could drink Pinot Grigio again? I started buying and tasting as many PGs as I could find, subjecting myself to the derision of sommeliers and wine store clerks.
I consulted Henry Davar, the wine director at the Manhattan restaurant Del Posto, who helped me to organize a tasting. Davar was enthusiastic about this project, though he informed me, somewhat ominously, “We don’t serve PG by the glass. We don’t want our guests to order something just by default.” We stuck mostly to bottles from northeast Italy, to see if we could find regional as well as varietal characteristics. And I’m sorry to say we had more misses than hits, although the latter gave us hope and a few wines to put into rotation on our drinking cards. We were hard-pressed to find any flavor at all in the 2009 Santa Margherita, maybe the merest hint of lemon drop? But flavor abounded in the 2009 Palmina, the winemaker Steve Clifton’s Cali-Itali project. Or is that Itali-Cali? Whichever—he grows Italian varietals in Santa Barbara, and his Pinot Grigio is really impressive, especially at $20 a bottle.
“I tasted some great Pinot Grigios in Friuli,” he says, “and I wanted to make one that wasn’t just a water substitute. It has to be grown on a good site that expresses minerality, but at its best it’s a bridge between Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay. Pinot Grigio hits the middle for seafood dishes that are too delicate for Chardonnay.”
A certain stony element characterized the PGs Davar and I liked the best—and sometimes stone fruits like peaches—most of them from the Collio region of Friuli. The standouts were three successive vintages of Movia’s Pinot Grigio, the 2005–2007, the latter being a spectacular wine with a nose suggestive of a young red Burgundy, reminding us that PG is indeed a relative of that noble grape. “You can drink Pinot Grigio as a thirst quencher on a terrace,” Davar said afterward. “Then there are a few wines like these, which are on a level with the great whites of France.”
Anyone who’s ever had a Zind Humbrecht Pinot Gris will believe that nobility is possible with this grape. The best Italian examples come from small, deeply committed producers in Friuli around the Collio region and Alto Adige, and at $20 to $25 they represent real value. I’m going to seek out Pinot Grigios by Schiopetto, Lis Neris, Lageder, Jermann, Vie di Romans, and Long Island’s Channing Daughters, the sneers of my peers be damned. But I don’t recommend that anyone undertake this course lightly. One of the scents I sometimes imagined in nosing certain Pinot Grigios was hay, which brings to mind the all too apposite maxim about the needle in the you-know-what.
Pop Pop, Fizz Fizz
Champagne don’t hurt me baby
Cocaine don’t drive me crazy
—Eric von Schmidt
You might imagine that the recession would have killed the Champagne market, especially the superpremium brands, the so-called Têtes des Cuvées, all priced above $100. If so, you’ll be surprised to discover that just a year after Lehman tanked, arguably the finest house of all, Krug, released the second vintage of a single-vineyard cuvée at around $3,500 a pop. Fortunately, a lot of great Champagne is available for double digits, and those prices have softened over the past year. In fact, thanks to the explosion of small growers and good weather, there’s probably never been a better time to drink Champagne.
Do I need to explain that by Champagne, I mean the sparkling wine from the eponymous region north of Paris? Many places around the world produce good sparkling wines, but they are not Champagne, and you’ll have to read about them elsewhere. Champagne is the product of a uniquely marginal climate, which in an average year just barely ripens the grapes, and a set of soils based on limestone. The large houses blend wines from different vineyards and grapes, including Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier, and Chardonnay, to create a relatively uniform product year in and year out, and you can hardly go wrong with the nonvintage bottlings from Veuve Clicquot, Pol Roger, Bollinger, Moët, and Perrier-Jouët, although only by tasting will you learn which style most appeals to you. For instance, Bollinger, beloved of the Brits, tends to be heavier and heartier than the more citrusy Perrier-Jouët.
While blending smooths out the deficiencies of inferior vintages and helps maintain a brand’s signature, most houses produce single-vintage bottlings in years that are at least theoretically exceptional. These inevitably cost more, and whether they’re worth it or not is strictly a matter of taste and budget. At the top of the Champagne hierarchy are the luxury cuvées—vintage bottlings from the best vineyards and the best lots, usually, packaged in exotic-looking bottles, Dom Pérignon being unquestionably the most famous. If you can afford it, it’s extraordinarily good, although there is significant vintage variation. Cristal, Dom Ruinart, Veuve Clicquot’s La Grande Dame, Pol Roger’s Cuvée Sir Winston Churchill, and Taittinger’s Comtes de Champagne are all very good and tend to get better with age. They also make a big statement whenever one is required. If you really need to impress somebody, choose DP because it speaks the lingua franca.
For those more interested in quality than image, and whose budgets aren’t unlimited, the real excitement these days comes from “grower Champagnes”—what the importer Terry Theise calls “farmer fizz.” The grapes that go into the vats of the big houses come largely from thousands of small individually owned vineyards throughout the region. In recent years more and more of these growers have begun to bottle their own wine, and several astute American importers have been
scouring the rolling hills around Reims and Épernay to discover the best of them.
Visiting Francis Egly in the village of Ambonnay is a very different experience from visiting the grandee’s corporate offices. When Mrs. Egly finally answers the door of the small Tudor house in the middle of a vineyard, she kicks aside baby toys to clear my path into the living room. It takes her some time to locate her husband, Francis, who’s out on his tractor, and when I shake his hand, he apologizes for the dirt on his fingers. I tell him dirty hands are a good sign on anybody growing grapes. But his winery, in a new concrete-and-steel barn out back, is spotless, and his wines are among the most distinctive in all of Champagne. You’ll find them on some of the best wine lists from Paris to Napa and beyond.
The guru of the grower movement is Anselme Selosse, another proud farmer with dirty hands who studied in Burgundy and brought back to his father’s domaine in Avize all kinds of new ideas, including the basic insight that everything begins in the vineyards. In Champagne, however, this was a radical idea—the big houses bought grapes in bulk from growers who had little incentive for meticulous viticulture.
Smaller is not always better, but it’s not unlikely that a guy making his own wine with his own grapes is going to take better care of them than someone who sells them by the pound to a corporation. Another argument in their favor is that almost everywhere else, specificity of origin is considered essential to any wine’s character. In a (French) word, terroir: the concept that wine reflects the weather, soil, geology, and topography of the land on which the grapes are grown, and that the most unique and exceptional wines come from a single exceptional vineyard. In Burgundy, for instance, grapes grown in the vineyard of Romanée-Conti produce the most prized reds in the world, while those grown only a few hundred feet away in different soil and at different elevations sell for thousands less. Not all these Champagnes come from a single vineyard—some growers own different patches of land—but most come from specific villages, and experienced tasters distinguish between one from Mesnil and another from Bouzy. “Single vineyards are the future,” says Selosse, whose wines you’re likely to find only on the finest restaurant lists.
The $3,500 release from Krug is from a single vineyard called Clos d’Ambonnay. While the virtues of blending are evident in the company’s superb multi-vintage Grand Cuvée (it’s called “multi” instead of “non” presumably to distinguish it from lesser, cheaper blends), Krug almost single-handedly made the single-vineyard case with its Clos du Mesnil, which it first released in 1979 and which until the release of Clos d’Ambonnay was probably the most expensive Champagne in the world. While Clos du Mesnil is made exclusively from Chardonnay grapes from a medieval vineyard enclosed by stone walls within the very center of the town of Mesnil, Clos d’Ambonnay is made from Pinot Noir grapes from a vineyard that’s barely an acre. I was lucky enough to taste the 1996 vintage with Olivier Krug, the managing director of the firm, in the Oak Bar of The Plaza hotel, which seemed like a suitable grand setting for the most expensive Champagne in history. I have to say it was one of the finest I’ve ever tasted, very pure and precise, a little leaner and more focused than the “regular” 1996, which is itself an awesome wine. If you’re an extremely wealthy connoisseur, the kind of guy who owns a yacht and a jet, it just might be worth it. The 2005 vintages of Petrus and Romanée-Conti sell for a similar price, so in a sense Krug may be trying to lift the whole category to parity with Burgundy and Bordeaux. There’s no question that a ridiculously deep-pocketed market exists; just witness the contemporary art market or real estate prices in London. Olivier told me at the time that all three thousand bottles of the 1996 Clos d’Ambonnay were spoken for.
By comparison, the Armand de Brignac, nowadays the favorite tipple of Jay-Z and A-Rod, is a relative steal at merely $300. It comes in a gold bottle with an ace of spades engraved on it, and while the package is a little gaudy for my taste, the wine itself has won strong reviews from such critics as the esteemed Jancis Robinson and Fine Champagne Magazine. You might recall that Cristal was once the rapper’s choice, until Roederer’s chief, Frédéric Rouzaud, seemed to dis the hip-hop community by telling a reporter, “We can’t forbid people from buying it.” But, he said, the association “brought unwanted attention to the brand.” Sniffing racism, Jay-Z declared a boycott, and the timing couldn’t have been better for Cattier, which created Armand de Brignac. The first release, not a single-vintage bottling like Cristal or Dom Pérignon, but a blend like Krug’s so-called multi-vintage, appeared in 2006, not long after l’affaire Cristal. Jay-Z introduced it to the world in his video “Show Me What You Got” and has continued to promote it, amid much speculation about his financial relationship to Cattier.
For those of us without a recording contract, nonvintage grower Champagnes are a relatively affordable luxury. Because these producers don’t spend millions on advertising, their prices tend to be competitive with the big-house blends. Therefore, exemplars like Pierre Peters, Vilmart & Cie, Cédric Bouchard, Marguet, Michel Turgy, José Dhondt, André Clouet, and Gimonnet, just to name a few, are well worth seeking out. My wife, who drinks nothing but Champagne, replaced one of the major brands with Marguet as her regular tipple.
Not all of the two-thousand-odd artisanal vintners make great juice, but most of those imported to the States are the crème de la crème. Just check to see that the initials RM (for Récoltant-Manipulant) are somewhere on the bottle, which means that the grapes were grown and produced by the same guy. Shun bottles with the letters RC (Récoltant-Coopérateur), which indicate that the grower sent his grapes off to be made by a big cooperative.
Far too many people save Champagne for special occasions or drink it strictly as an aperitif, but in fact it’s one of the most versatile food wines. As Terry Theise says, “Champagne doesn’t require an occasion. Champagne is the occasion.”
German Made Simple
A German wine label is one of the things life’s too short for, a daunting testimony to that peculiar nation’s love of detail and organization.
—Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking
Hugh Johnson once remarked that he was surprised that no university had endowed a chair in German wine labeling. For most English speakers, such is the perceived complexity of the Gothic-looking labels, with their information overload and terrifying terminology, that they make Burgundy seem simple by comparison. Graacher Himmelreich Trockenbeerenauslese, anyone? Even hardened wine wonks ask themselves whether life is long enough to learn the difference between Spätlese and Auslese. (Admit it, you’re scared already.) German winemakers have long recognized this dilemma, without necessarily knowing what the hell to do about it. “The Germans haven’t made it easy for you, me, or anyone else,” says the importer Terry Theise, a passionate advocate of their Rieslings. Lately, though, some of Germany’s best Riesling producers are wooing American consumers with simplified labels.
One technical term that’s worth mastering is Kabinett, the lightest of five “predicates” indicating levels of ripeness. For midsummer drinking, a low-alcohol, semidry Kabinett from the Mosel region is, to my mind, one of the few beverages that can compete with a nice dry pilsner and far sprightlier and lighter on its feet than the average Chilean or Australian Chardonnay. And Riesling Kabinetts are quite possibly the most versatile food wines in the world—perfect not only for lighter fish, chicken, and pork preparations but also for sweet and spicy Asian, Mexican, and fusion dishes. They are also, generally, below 10 percent alcohol, which makes them more refreshing, and less punishing, than a 15 percent Chardonnay. Viewed from another angle—you can drink more.
The typical rap against German wines is that they are “too sweet,” and many of us are under the impression that sweet is somehow bad. Most Kabinetts have some residual sugar, but this is almost always balanced by acidity. I think the German Wine Council should run ads featuring a modified version of the Blue Öyster Cult classic “Don’t Fear the Sweetness.” There is a trend lately in Germany toward dry, or
trocken, wines, though the truth is that Riesling without some residual sugar can be shockingly tart. More and more of the wines from the Mosel, the Rheingau, and the Rheinhessen are being made in a style that’s drier than Dorothy Parker’s wit.
Those of you who won’t be able to remember the word Kabinett five minutes after reading this essay are not necessarily out of luck. Raimund Prüm, of S. A. Prüm in the Mosel, understands your anxiety about those labels. He owns vines in some of the greatest vineyards in Germany, perched on steep, sun-trapping slopes high above the Moselle River, including Wehlener Sonnenuhr, named after the sundial that his great-great-grandfather Jodocus Prüm constructed in that famous vineyard in 1842. And one of these days, after you’ve developed an appreciation for great Riesling, you may remember the name of this vineyard, planted on blue slate, which is believed to impart a distinctive stony flavor to the wines. In the meantime, you can probably recall the term “Blue Slate,” the name of a semidry Kabinett-level Riesling that had its debut in this country with the 2003 vintage, and risk the $15 to give it a try. Prüm also makes a lighter, slightly fruitier $10 bottle called Essence, which is my new default beverage setting for Chinese takeout.