If this were actually a school of wine making, instead of just a loose band of confederates, the headmaster would be George Vare, who arrives by pickup truck bearing an armload of unlabeled bottles. Tall and silver-haired, Vare is a genial patriarch, at least a generation older than most of the company. He is the cofounder of Luna Vineyards, where some of the company, including Abe Schoener, got their start. He’s also a kind of unofficial ambassador for the wines of Friuli, the northeastern Italian wine region that serves as inspiration for everyone in the group. For the past decade, Vare has traveled to the region with friends, including Schoener and Matthiasson. At Luna, which made a name for itself with Pinot Grigio, he hired John Kongsgaard, a Napa native who would eventually achieve renown with his eponymous wines, especially his Chardonnays. Kongsgaard is definitely an honorary retro Napa dude.
Vare is the owner of California’s only vineyard devoted to Ribolla Gialla, the Friulian white grape, and all of the winemakers assembled here have made wines with grapes purchased from his vineyard. In the hands of such Friulian masters as Stanko Radikon and Josko Gravner, who preside over eponymous wineries in the town of Oslavia, Ribolla produces powerful, age-worthy whites. Early results from Vare and friends have been extremely promising, although as often as not it is in a blend with other grapes—as with Matthiasson’s Napa white or Petroski’s Annia—that the grape finds its perfect home. In Friuli, grape varietals were traditionally interplanted—in part as insurance against the failure of one variety—and blended together in a cask, a practice that was also common among Napa’s Italian-immigrant farmers in the nineteenth century.
Schoener has brought along some teal shot by one of his grape growers, but someone forgets to turn on the oven, and by the time the ducks hit the outdoor picnic table, it’s late, and loud, and the searing heat of the day has long dissipated. But in the meantime I’ve tasted some of the most intriguing and delicious wines in recent memory, some of them bracingly fresh and floral, like Petroski’s 2009 Gemina, a Viognier-Chardonnay blend, or the 2009 Arnot-Roberts Trousseau; some incredibly rich and opulent, like Schoener’s 2005 Scholium Project Cena Trimalchionis, a honeyed nectar made from Sauvignon Blanc infected with botrytis, or noble rot. (Appropriately enough, the wine was named for the banquet/orgy scene in Petronius’s Satyricon.)
Whether the inspiration is European or pre-Mondavi Napa Valley, these friends have rejected some of the technological wine making of the modern era in search of wine authenticity (and presumably drinkability). Matthiasson presses his grapes the old-fashioned way, with his feet. The Arnot-Roberts duo often work with grapes that most modern Napa vintners would consider underripe, as earlier generations of Californians did. Schoener leaves his white grapes in their skins till they turn orange and waits for natural yeasts to induce fermentation (as did all winemakers until recently) rather than introducing artificial yeast, even if it takes years.
It would be hard to pigeonhole these wines, precisely because what distinguishes them is that they don’t really taste like one another, or quite like anything else out there. As someone who sometimes fears he’s in danger of drowning in an ocean of ripe, fruity, oaky, over-manipulated Frankenwine, I think that’s a good thing.
The Rock Stars of Pinot Noir
When I meet the team behind the Anthill Farms label, I have to remind myself several times that I’m writing about wine—and not, as I sometimes do, about music; these guys seem more like members of a garage band on the cusp than like winemakers. Webster Marquez, Anthony Filiberti, and Dave Low are still in their twenties, and they all have day jobs working for other wineries. I spent only a couple of hours with them at their provisional home at Papapietro Perry Winery in the Dry Creek Valley, so I can’t be sure, but I think Web, big and bearded and genial, would be the guy who books the gigs and drives the van and plays rhythm; Anthony, the intense, articulate one who sings and gets a lot of girls; and Dave the one tinkering with new sounds and writing songs. No, wait, sorry, they’re winemakers. They come from Virginia (Web), Sonoma (Anthony), and Kansas (Dave) and met in 2003, when they all worked as cellar rats at Williams Selyem, the pioneering producer that put Sonoma Pinot Noir on the map. And they are part of a second or possibly third generation that’s redefining California Pinot Noir. Most of these winemakers have day jobs at larger wineries and pursue their passion for small-production Pinot Noir on the side. With a few exceptions, they don’t own wineries or vineyards. Some of them make big, jammy Zins and Cabs for their employers, but the new Pinot Noir paradigm emphasizes balance and restraint over power and volume.
It may help to go back to the beginning, to the fifties, when Joe Rochioli bought the land in the Russian River Valley that his father had farmed. His son Joe junior, out of some genius intuition, persuaded him to plant some Pinot Noir, a finicky and not very productive or fashionable grape. (Rumor has it Joe senior demanded he plant beans between the vines.) Enter Ed Selyem and Burt Williams, two wine-loving friends who decided to make wine in a two-car garage with purchased grapes. They worked on weekends and fermented in dairy tanks. Williams Selyem acquired a devoted following, and in 1987 its Pinot Noir from the Rochioli Vineyard won the California State Fair, and demand has far outstripped supply ever since. Shortly thereafter, Williams and Selyem helped the Rochiolis, their main grape suppliers, make their own wines, and within a few years the two labels were synonymous with Russian River Pinot Noir. Pinot needs a cooler climate than Cabernet, and the Russian River funneled the cool Pacific air into this picturesque valley, with its highly variable geology.
Certain sectors of the wine world went into mourning when Burt and Ed sold their baby to the New York investor John Dyson in 1998, and many had never heard of Bob Cabral, whom Williams designated as his successor, though in fact Cabral was a veteran winemaker who’d been on the Williams Selyem mailing list since 1985, becoming customer number 576 when he was studying oenology at Fresno State. Under Dyson, Williams Selyem has indeed expanded; in 2010 it unveiled a stunning new winery designed by the D.arc Group, on Westside Road south of Healdsburg, at a raucous party that embraced much of Sonoma’s wine-making community. But the wines, especially the Pinots, retain their cult status, and Cabral has become a mentor to a new generation of talent. It might not be too much to say that Williams Selyem is the mother ship to the new acid freaks who practice the same kind of guerrilla wine making pioneered by Burt and Ed.
George Levkoff is one of these sons of Selyem. When I first tasted his wine at Cut in Los Angeles at the recommendation of the sommelier Dana Farner, I knew I wanted to meet him. Born on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, George was a hard-driving bond trader in Los Angeles when a friend who worked at a wine store changed his life. They were dining at Joe’s in Venice, and the friend brought along two bottles of Williams Selyem, the 1991 and 1992 Rochioli Vineyard, which he felt would complement the grilled ahi tuna that was the restaurant’s signature dish. “It was an epiphany,” says George, when I visit him in his rented winery space just down the road from Selyem and Rochioli. (Westside Road, known as the Rodeo Drive of Pinot Noir.) “It was the first time wine had stood out as an equal partner in the dining experience, and I resolved pretty much right there that I’d move to Sonoma and make Pinot Noir.” Levkoff, who reminds me of Buddy Hackett and is still enough of a New Yorker to wear a P. J. Clarke’s T-shirt, actually made the move, eventually finding work with Cabral at Williams Selyem. A one-man operation, George owns no vineyards or winery, but he purchases fruit from five Russian River vineyards, makes bottles, and sells it all by hand. The wines, featured in some of the country’s best restaurants, are superbly balanced, ripe but enlivened with zingy acidity.
Some of the new Sonoma Pinot makers cut their teeth in Burgundy, the holy land of Pinot Noir. The winemaker Alex Davis, of Porter Creek, studied wine making at Georges Roumier, one of the most revered domaines in Burgundy, before returning to his family estate just down the road from Rochioli to make very soulful Pinot Noirs and other varietals. If he ever gives u
p wine making, he could probably make a good living as a Leonardo DiCaprio impersonator, though he seems fiercely devoted to his biodynamically farmed vineyards, and it would take a good many manicures to get the dirt out from under his fingernails. Eric Sussman, of Radio-Coteau, apprenticed at Comte Armand in Pommard and Jacques Prieur in Meursault after studying agriculture at Cornell. Radio-Coteau is his joint venture with Bill and Joan Smith, who make some very fine Pinot under their own name. Radio-Coteau is a colloquialism he picked up in France, meaning broadcasting from the hillside, or word of mouth, which nicely captures the spirit of Sussman’s venture and that of many of his Pinotphile neighbors. A Pinot Noir specialist, he buys grapes from cool-site vineyards, mostly in Sonoma County, and sells his beautifully balanced wines largely via his mailing list.
Ehren Jordan of Failla vineyards, the tallest man in Napa, also cut his teeth in France. He worked in the Rhône Valley with the peripatetic winemaker Jean-Luc Colombo before serving a brief apprenticeship with Helen Turley, who was around that time anointed the Wine Goddess by Robert Parker. When Helen had a falling-out with her brother Larry, Jordan took over as winemaker of Turley Wine Cellars, Larry’s Napa Valley estate, and helped to seal its reputation as the ultimate source of rich, powerful old-vine Zinfandels. In 1999, Jordan took his first crack at Pinot Noir and quickly became enamored. He started Failla with his wife, Anne-Marie Failla, a recovering investment banker, in 2002 and bought land on a cool Pinot-friendly stretch of the Sonoma Coast near Flowers and Marcassin. While his Turley wines are known for their decadent opulence, the Failla Pinots have a much more restrained aesthetic, and he is not afraid to use the adjective “Burgundian” to describe them.
Basically, the new Pinot paradigm is pretty much the bizarro-world antithesis of planet Napa Cabernet, where power and volume are cardinal virtues. The new generation of Pinotphiles favor adjectives like “restraint” and “delicacy.” Pinotphiles speak reverently about acid and brag about how early they pick their grapes. “I think the pendulum is swinging away from overblown wines,” says Anthill’s Web Marquez. “I feel like now wine making, especially with Pinot, is like learning how to use a recently acquired superpower. We have the ability to do whatever we want (from better vineyarding, technology, cellar practices, and general know-how), and we can make huge wines or very dainty ones. But now we all need to learn how to use and control that power … and just because we have this ability doesn’t mean we need to use it to the nth degree every time. I think the new generation is very attuned to that.”
One way to achieve restraint is to seek out cool sites, which is why Jordan and many of the second-generation Sonoma Pinot pioneers have sought out the Sonoma Coast. Some of the chilliest real estate is within smelling distance of the Pacific, which is why Andy and Nick Peay, along with Nick’s wife, Vanessa Wong, bought a fifty-three-acre ranch in the chilly inversion layer along the coast at Sea Ranch with plenty of fog and wind to moderate the California sunshine. (Vanessa is another French-trained winemaker, having worked at Lafite and Domaine Jean Gros in Burgundy.) In the past decade, they’ve produced increasingly sophisticated and celebrated Pinots while selling fruit to Failla and, yes, Williams Selyem.
Some of the best California Pinot Noirs (and Chardonnays) bear the Sonoma Coast designation. The problem is that this particular AVA, or American Viticultural Area, is so large and climatically heterogeneous as to be almost meaningless. If you look at the AVA on a map, it resembles a gerrymandered electoral district drawn by politicians to preserve a congressional seat. Should the word “coast” really be applicable to vineyards an hour’s drive from the water? “That the appellation is so huge and covers areas with a twenty-degree temperature variation and very different soils makes a farce out of the idea behind appellations,” says Andy Peay.
Many informed observers have started speaking of the true Sonoma Coast, or a west Sonoma Coast. Early pioneers such as Flowers, Marcassin, and Hirsch sought out the cooler westernmost areas of the coast in the early nineties, recognizing the potential for great Pinots and Chards. Matt Licklider, who is making some excellent Pinots and Chards under the LIOCO label, says, “I think the AVA is ripe for multiple secessions.” He’s one of many who would like to see a West Sonoma Coast AVA with the boundary defined by Highway 116. “Any vineyards west of there, we consider to be the Western Sonoma Coast. Wines grown on the true coast possess an undeniable link to their maritime origins—a link wines growing further inland lack.”
Recently, Peay and some of his neighbors (Failla, Freeman, Littorai, Freestone, and Red Car) formed the West Sonoma Coast Vintners, which now has thirty-five members. The lesson here, as in Burgundy, is that the all-important name is the maker’s.
Thomas Brown is a new superstar winemaker who crafts some of the most celebrated Cabernets and Zinfandels in the Napa Valley for clients like Schrader, Maybach, and Outpost. But his own pet project, Rivers-Marie, is devoted to the Burgundian varietals of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. He routinely receives scores in the high 90s for his small-production Cabs, but for some wine geeks his most amazing laurel is a 94-point score for his 2004 Rivers-Marie Summa Vineyard Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir from Burghound’s Allen Meadows, who worships at the shrine of Burgundy and generally has a low regard for California Pinot Noir. If you were lucky enough to be on the mailing list, you could have gotten this wine for just $50, far less than the average Napa Cabernet. Unfortunately, Brown only made sixty cases. He and his wife, Genevieve, have just bought the vineyard, though, so we can look forward to many more great vintages of Summa.
Generally speaking, these new-wave Sonoma Pinot Noirs are made in very small quantities, but they are far less expensive than Napa cult Cabernets or top Burgundies—most of them are in the $30 to $60 range—and they are extremely versatile at the table. While Burgundy serves as an inspiration for many of these winemakers, they are blessed with more consistent and clement weather, and you are less likely to get your heart broken by a bottle of Sonoma Pinot than one from the notoriously fickle Côte d’Or.
My Kind of Cellar:
Ted Conklin and the American Hotel
It’s not that I don’t love to pay two or even three times retail for a bottle of wine that’s nowhere near maturity, which is the situation I often find myself in when I open a wine list, even in Manhattan. I’m a New Yorker; I’m used to being hustled. Yes, I know—my restaurant-owning friends have explained the economics to me, the expense of storage, the difficulty of finding mature Bordeaux or Barolo, blah blah blah. But I can’t help dreaming about those old-school restaurant lists like ‘21’ in New York, Bern’s Steak House in Tampa, or Tour d’Argent in Paris, which list hundreds of bottles of mature-vintage wines, some of them with old-fashioned prices reflecting the fact that they were purchased on release. The American Hotel, in Sag Harbor, New York, has one of these drool-inducing lists. Its owner, Ted Conklin, sixty-two, bought and restored the derelict hotel in the former whaling village in 1972, opening a restaurant and gradually accumulating one of the best cellars in the country.
Historical records have nothing to say about the selection of beverages at the tavern owned by James Howell, which stood on the site of the present hotel when British forces occupied Sag Harbor in 1777, although Madeira and rum were at that time the favorite tipples of the colonists. The commanding officer of the redcoats was captured there in a daring midnight raid by Lieutenant Colonel Return Jonathan Meigs, a veteran of Bunker Hill, who crossed over from New Haven with 234 men in thirteen whaleboats. Meigs and his men killed or captured most of the British garrison, seized tons of supplies—including ten hogsheads of rum—and made it back to New Haven without the loss of a single American soldier. Despite the success of Meigs’s raid, it took many years for Sag Harbor to recover from the devastation of the occupation. Ultimately, prosperity arrived as Sag Harbor became a major whaling port in the early part of the nineteenth century, when the American Hotel was built on the site of Howell’s tavern. Its watering holes then were notorious enough
to earn a censorious mention in Moby-Dick: “Arrived at last in old Sag Harbor; and seeing what the sailors did there … poor Queequeg gave it up for lost.”
Sag Harbor’s prosperity ended almost simultaneously with the discovery of gold in California. Whales were becoming scarce, and coal oil was replacing whale oil; most of the whaling ships sailed for San Francisco carrying many of the town’s able-bodied young men. When Ted Conklin bought the American Hotel in 1972, it was a derelict shell with a coal stove and four outhouses. The cellar, now the repository of thousands of great bottles, was knee-deep in coal ash, which Conklin carried up the narrow stairs one bucket at a time. Sag Harbor was a blue-collar town, a dowdy stepchild of the fashionable summer resort towns of Southampton and East Hampton, albeit one with a strong literary tradition stretching back to James Fenimore Cooper’s sojourn. John Steinbeck, Nelson Algren, and Spalding Gray lived here for many years; E. L. Doctorow, Wilfrid Sheed, and Thomas Harris all have homes in Sag Harbor. Conklin envisioned a place where plumbers and writers could mix, although there are probably more of the latter than the former these days, particularly in the summer, when Sag Harbor is invaded by well-heeled New Yorkers.