CHAPTER FIVE
After the Meal,
Treats That Are Sweet,
Semisweet—and
Powerful

From the Thinnest of Wines,
the Richest Spirit: Cognac

By R. W. APPLE Jr.

“We live very simply,” Winston Churchill wrote to his wife in 1915 from his temporary quarters in Surrey, south of London, “but with all the essentials of life well understood and well provided for—hot baths and cold Champagne, new peas and old brandy.”

Most of us could think of other essentials. But a lot of people in a lot of countries for a lot of years have agreed with at least the last item on the great man’s list. Today brandy, and more specifically Cognac, which is produced here in the Charente region north of Bordeaux, is probably sold in more places than any other spirit.

The leading brands are known all over the world, and have been for centuries, in many cases. Richard Hennessy, the Irish soldier of fortune who founded the firm that bears his name, the largest in the trade, made his first sales trip to the United States in the earliest days of the republic.

Of course other countries, notably Spain and Italy, make brandy, whose name comes from the Dutch word “brandewijn,” meaning burnt or distilled wine. But theirs is not Cognac, and Cognac, properly made and aged, is the best brandy in the world. In the chalky soil of this region, with more than ample rainfall, the ugni blanc grape produces wine that is too thin and acid to drink but ideal for distillation—the chalkier the soil, the better the Cognac.

That’s a big little word, “best,” and there are those who prefer Armagnac or Calvados or Greek or German brandy. But whatever their virtues, those brandies seldom exhibit the satiny sheen and the magical complexity of the very best Cognacs.

As Gilbert Delos writes in The World of Cognac (Chartwell Books, 1999), Cognac “owes its place of privilege not to any miracle of good fortune, nor to the unique climate or soil.” The decisive factor is the skills in distilling, blending and maturing that have been perfected over 300 years.

Merchandising on a global scale has also played a role. The Cognac trade was developed in large part by Dutch, Irish, English, Scandinavian and German entrepreneurs who set up shop here, starting in the 18th century, often marrying into local families. They sold their products in the countries they came from, moving later into the New World and Asia, where Cognac became a symbol of status and a gift with prestige.

You can read the history in some of the brand names in use today—Larsen, Braastad, Hardy, Hine and Meukow.

And also in one of the place names: Jean Monnet Square in the center of Cognac, named for the scion of a local Cognac-making clan whose wide-ranging travels on behalf of the family firm made him a keen internationalist and eventually led him into diplomacy. He helped to found the European Community.

“The great thing about making Cognac,” Monnet said late in a long life, “is that it teaches you above everything else to wait.”

Densely planted vines snake in orderly rows up hill and down dale in the tranquil countryside around the main Cognac towns—Cognac itself, Jarnac and Segonzac. There are 190,000 acres planted in white wine grapes, with more than 4,000 growers working plots that average less than 100 acres each. Some big shippers own no vines at all, most own a few and only a handful control large tracts. Frapin, a small but distinguished house, holds 494 acres of vines.

Cognac and Jarnac are austere and rather forbidding places. But the Charente and its tributaries are pretty streams, overhung by willows in places, garlanded with bright flowers in summertime and populated by flotillas of swans.

Rare is the family in these parts whose livelihood does not depend, directly or indirectly, on the amber liquid that lies maturing in the warehouses, or chais, which are marked by a black fungus, Torula compniacensis, that feeds on the alcohol in the atmosphere. Every year, as the spirit matures, the equivalent of millions of bottles of Cognac disappears into thin air.

The locals like to describe this as “the angels’ share.”

Men like René Gombert, a friendly, leathery farmer with silver hair, a large nose and a vigor rare in a man of 82, form the backbone of the industry, producing most of the grapes, doing much of the distilling and sending their eaux de vie off to the great merchants for blending with others.

My wife, Betsey, and I visited him one steamy afternoon in July at his slightly run-down old chateau near Javrezac, west of Cognac, in the Borderies region.

“Borderies is not always as refined as Cognacs from some other areas,” Mr. Gombert told us with a sly smile. “But it has real character. As the blenders say, ‘Borderies is the salt in our cooking.’”

Like all distillers in the region, he uses the double distillation method. The first run, which lasts 8 to 10 hours, produces a raw spirit known as brouillis; the second, which lasts 12 to 14 hours, rounds off some of the rough edges. Of the resulting bonne chauffe, only the coeur, or heart, is saved, and the tête (head) and queue (tail)—the far less palatable beginning and end of the stream emerging from the still—are discarded.

Mr. Gombert’s is not a big operation, with 57 acres in vines and 100 in wheat. He makes the equivalent of 40,000 bottles of Cognac a year. Most, under contract, goes to Hennessy; some goes to Martell as well.

In recent years, the industry has undergone a tremendous consolidation, with the four biggest houses (Hennessy, Martell, Rémy Martin and Courvoisier) swallowing up many smaller firms and themselves passing into the hands of big international combines. The four behemoths, each with sales between 15 and 30 million bottles a year, control 90 percent of the world market. The biggest independent left is Camus, a distant fifth.

Some of the best Cognac comes from none of these but from niche producers like Ragnaud-Sabourin and Normandin-Mercier.

All the big houses offer costly top-of-the-line Cognacs. Rémy Martin sells only Cognac made from grapes grown in the two choicest districts, known as Grande Champagne and Petite Champagne. (Their chalky soil resembles that of the district in far-off northeast France where the world’s best bubbly is made.) The smaller houses derive the bulk of their sales from relatively youthful and aggressive-tasting products, labeled VS or three-star, which are meant to be diluted with ice and mixers and not sipped straight after meals.

If it were not for lower-priced grades, the hard times that have persisted here for the last five years, with global sales more or less static between 110 and 120 million bottles a year, would certainly be much worse.

Before World War II, France consumed most Cognac, but as digestifs became less popular, whiskey joined other Anglo-Saxon items like jeans and rock ’n’ roll in fashion and Cognac lost its hold. Now 95 percent of Cognac output is exported.

Cognac’s biggest market by far is the United States, where 60 brands out of the registered total of 600 are available. And consumption is growing steadily, reaching 3 million cases in 2001 for the first time, while remaining stagnant in most other countries. As Claire Coates of the Bureau National Interprofessionel du Cognac told me: “Most of that is three-star, and the three-star market is ethnic. African-Americans and Hispanics drink Cognac with Coke or with some other mixer.”

Not surprisingly, Cognac is big in the popular culture these days. Busta Rhymes has a hit record called “Pass the Courvoisier,” and the video for “Without Me” shows the rapper Eminem on an intravenous drip of Rémy Red.

When it comes to Cognac, I’m a traditionalist—strictly an after-dinner man, the older the brandy the better. So I had a field day at La Cognathèque in downtown Cognac, which offers the widest selection in France, including rare vintage Cognacs (at rarefied prices up to $600 a bottle) as well as the products of many smaller distillers.

The region’s gastronomic and Cognac-sampling highlight has to be Patricia and Thierry Verrat’s Ribaudière, on the river at Bourg-Charente. The big dining room was buzzing the night we went there to eat a meltingly delicious tomato-and-goat-cheese tart, a perfectly cooked sole on the bone and glorious mashed Oléron potatoes, before getting down to the real task at hand—tasting a few of the 280 Cognacs tended by François Loretz, the sommelier.

One standout: the bronze, balanced, slightly spicy Grande Champagne Très Rare made by Paul Giraud in the minuscule village of Bouteville.

In the world of corporate Cognac, Delamain stands apart. Its office is in a stone house in Jarnac, built in 1741, with only a modest brass plaque on the door. Patrick Peyrelongue, whose mother was a Delamain, and Charles BraastadDelamain, whose grandmother belonged to the family, run the business in Dickensian style, from antique desks facing each other (with computers on nearby tables).

Yet Delamain is considered by many experts the standard by which other, bigger brands should be measured.

What does it do differently? It buys only Grande Champagne Cognac, and it buys it only after tasting; there are long-term relationships with growers and distillers, but no contracts. It uses only old barrels, in the belief that new oak imparts undesirably harsh tannins. It ages its Cognacs not only before but for two more years after blending. Its bottles are washed and rinsed with Cognac before filling. And it sells only old Cognacs; the youngest, Pale and Dry XO (Extra Old), contains no Cognac less than 15 years old, and the two costlier blends contain none younger than 35 or 55 years old.

A third of the very limited output, which totals only 30,000 12-bottle cases a year, goes to Europe, a third to Asia, a third to the Americas.

As he led us into the riverside cellars beneath Jarnac that Delamain has used for 80 years, Mr. Braastad-Delamain, a lanky 33-year-old, said he tasted (or rather smelled) Cognacs every workday, except when traveling. Like a concert pianist, he needs a daily workout to maintain his form.

“The nose is the key,” he said. “When I get back from a sales trip, it takes several days to get the nose back in shape. I get as much satisfaction from smell as from taste.”

In the sweet- and woody-smelling cellars, I tasted Cognacs ranging from 2001 (71 percent alcohol, with a real sting at the end) through 1986 (60 percent, oaky and lacking in complexity) and 1977 (56 percent, with hints of vanilla, flowers and grapefruit), to 1949 (44 percent, no oak, minimal alcohol taste, notes of dry fruit, elegant—“Fred Astaire,” our host said).

Delamain still sends a few casks most years to England, where years in wood in the damp climate changes the taste of the spirit, making it rounder and more mushroomy. This “early landed” Cognac can be matchless. I still hoard a few bottles of a fruity, gutsy, bright-tasting 1962 Exshaw, landed in 1963 and bottled in 1986 by my chum Bill Baker, an English wine merchant.

In addition, Delamain bottles unblended vintage Cognacs. It is one of the few houses willing to take the trouble of maintaining a special cellar, under lock and key, as required by law, to guarantee the authenticity of these rare stocks. It bottled a cask of 1971 last year and will bottle another in 2003—a total of 2,400 bottles.

Some other merchants, noticing the success of single-malt Scotches, have begun to release single-estate Cognacs, in which all the processes of Cognacmaking—growing the grapes, making the wine and distilling it, aging the spirit and bottling it—must be carried out on one site. One of the pioneers in this field has been the Château de Lignières, a property of Renault Bisquit near Rouillac in the Fins Bois district, northeast of the town of Cognac.

Cognacs from the Fins Bois mature more rapidly and exhibit the aroma of freshly pressed grapes, as we discovered when Jacques Rouvière, the cellar master for Renault Bisquit, offered us glasses of his “baby,” a supple, almondscented blend of three vintages, each at least 10 years old. It occurred to me later that he looks like the great cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, and he has exactly the same charm and contagious enthusiasm as the Russian master.

Unhappily not everyone who makes, sells or drinks Cognac is as endearing a character as Mr. Rouvière.

For some reason, brandy evokes fakery and pomposity as few other drinks do. Unscrupulous dealers are always ready to haul out dusty bottles of “Napoleon” Cognac that they claim was made in the year of the emperor’s death or in 1815, the year he lost at Waterloo. Rest assured, it was not.

Then there are the rituals of consumption. Any balloon or tulip wineglass is just fine, wrote André Simon, the dean of the English wine and spirits trade, in a chapbook published 40 years ago. Only nouveaux riches demanding “the best,” he said, would dream of using “a footed aquarium, without water and goldfish, of course, and making it hot over a spirit-lamp flame, before pouring in it a few drops of a priceless centenarian brandy, which will lose most of its bouquet the moment it comes into contact with the heated glass.”

September 2002

In a Glass, a Swashbuckler Called Armagnac

By R. W. APPLE Jr.

To tell the truth, I don’t remember when I had my first swig of Armagnac, but I know when I really fell for the stuff. It was a rainy day in the fall of 1971, or maybe 1972, at a restaurant in Villenueve-de-Marsan, a little crossroads town about halfway between Bordeaux and the Spanish border. The food was excellent (two stars in the Michelin guide, as I recall) and the wine copious. But it was the encyclopedic Armagnac list that bowled me over.

I was a semiretired war correspondent at the time, a two-fisted eater yet to learn the more recherché points of food and drink. I knew I was in the Armagnacproducing region, but I had no idea I was at the very heart of it, at the nexus, at the epicenter. It turned out that this place, called Darroze, was to Armagnac exactly as the Second Avenue Deli is to corned beef.

I was too green to choose intelligently among the 50-plus offerings, and too thirsty not to ask for help. So the kindly patron, Jean Darroze, picked an Armagnac for me that I found fascinating—bold, yet full of velvety finesse. When I said something subtle and worldly like “Zut alors!” he smiled, suggested I stay the night, and asked me to his cellar.

To Ali Baba’s cave, you might well say. I eyed, sniffed and tasted Armagnacs both young and very old, some dating back 100 years. Mr. Darroze showed me how to shake the bottle and watch the foam that formed; if it lasted too long, that was a sure sign, he said, that the booze had been doctored. “Notice how the aroma lingers in the glass even after the liquid is gone,” Mr. Darroze said after we had sampled one bottle. “C’est un vrai! It’s a real one!”

Today, the Darroze clan is the first family of Armagnac. One of Jean Darroze’s sons, Francis, an international rugby star in his youth, spent three decades building up unrivaled stocks of the best his region has to offer. Armagnacs bearing a plain tan Darroze label slowly found their way onto the drinks trolleys of the best restaurants in Europe, and a few in the United States.

Francis retired recently, and his son Marc, 33, took over the family business. One of Francis’s brothers, Claude, owns a classic restaurant in Langon, south of Bordeaux, offering a vast array of wines and Armagnacs, and his daughter, Helene, owns a chic, innovative place on the Left Bank in Paris. Both have stars in the current Michelin guide.

Hooked by “le Roi Jean,” as his friends called the patriarch, I have been happily tasting Armagnacs ever since. Almost without exception, I have found, the best ones come from the westernmost of the three Armagnac districts, known as BasArmagnac (the other two are called Haut-Armagnac and Ténarèze). The best of the best come mostly from a sandy area only 10 miles from east to west and 20 miles from north to south—from villages with evocative names like Labastide and Arthez, Hontanx and Le Houga, scattered along the border between the two most important Armagnac-producing départements, Gers and Landes.

Although Armagnac antedates Cognac by more than 200 years, having been introduced in the 16th century, it has had to play Avis to Cognac’s Hertz for generations. The Cognac region, north of Bordeaux, is five times the size of the Armagnac region. Worldwide, Cognac sales are 25 times as large as those of Armagnac; in the United States, the ratio is 120 to 1. But in France competition is keener, with Cognac outselling its rival only three to one.

There are fundamental differences between the ways the two brandies are produced. For Cognac, wine is distilled twice, but for Armagnac, it is distilled only once, and at relatively low temperatures, which helps foster robustness of flavor. Cognac is aged in white oak, Armagnac in black oak with more pronounced tannins.

As a result, Armagnac is racier, rounder and fruitier than its cousin from the north, with an earthier, markedly more pungent aroma. Much of the best of it is sold unblended—the product of a single artisanal distiller in a single year, or vintage. Vintage Cognac is rare; skillful blends are the norm, usually produced by large négociants, or shippers. Armagnac, therefore, has more “goût de terroir,” as the French say. It is more rustic, and thus more identifiable with a single piece of land.

If a sip of Cognac transports the drinker to the lounge of a London club, a sip of Armagnac evokes the swashbuckling aura of D’Artagnan and his fellow Musketeers, who, like foie gras, rugby and bullfights, hold a central place in the culture of this part of France, which is known as Gascony.

This is a profoundly rural area, isolated from the main highways and rail lines of France. Its people cling to the old ways, and its undulating landscape has been little touched by the modern world.

As Montesquieu said of his beloved estate, not far north of this area, “Here nature is in its nightgown, just getting out of bed.”

But as we drove west from Condom to Villeneuve-de-Marsan this summer, my wife, Betsey, and I passed fewer fields planted with vines than on past visits. More plots were planted with golden sunflowers, destined for the oil mill, and tall green corn, destined to fatten ducks and geese.

According to some estimates, as little as 15,000 acres are now devoted to growing the grapes used in distilling Armagnac. Thousands of acres, we were told by knowledgeable people, have been ripped out by small farmers in need of more reliable cash crops.

“People make Cognac for profit, but they make Armagnac for love,” said Michel Guérard, the noted chef, as we sat in the garden of his Michelin three-star restaurant, Les Prés d’Eugénie at Eugénie-Les-Bains, just outside the Armagnac zone. “Like Champagne, Cognac is a corporate drink, with tremendous marketing resources behind it. There have been several efforts to assemble big combines in Armagnac, but no luck. Gascons just aren’t joiners.

“More and more, sadly, Armagnac has become an esoteric drink, a drink for connoisseurs who have the patience to smell out good producers.”

In fact, crisis grips the region. Sales of Armagnac are falling steadily.

“With the market in turmoil, Armagnac is becoming a depressing subject for many farmers to talk about,” writes Charles Neal, a California importer of premium wines and spirits, in his excellent, privately printed 1999 study, “Armagnac: The Definitive Guide to France’s Premier Brandy.” “The financial compensations for products of the vine are extremely unpredictable.”

The independent producers and their unblended, carefully aged spirits have been hardest hit; Armagnacs less than five years old now account for 85 percent of worldwide sales. The consumer, Mr. Neal asserts, “wants something that doesn’t exhibit tremendous personality,” so much Armagnac is reduced to 80 proof with water, rather than letting time and natural evaporation do their work, and sugar and other substances are added to “round off” the flavor.

But adulteration has undermined authenticity while helping sales only slightly. Social and political trends have hurt as well.

“For me, Armagnac is the bijou of brandies,” said Michel Trama, who stocks a dozen Armagnacs, including a half-dozen of the very best, at his restaurant, L’Aubergade, in Puymirol, east of the Armagnac region. “Historically, it’s our regional drink. But not many people order it here anymore. If they’re driving, they’re afraid of the cops. And if they’re not, they may order a whiskey after dinner, because it’s chic.

“I sell a Cognac once a night, an Armagnac twice. It’s depressing, but it’s true.”

A few independents have managed to swim against the tide, finding means to distribute high-quality Armagnac reasonably widely and to earn consistent if modest profits.

Among these are the Domaine de Jouanda at Arthez, owned by the de Poyferré family, which once owned part of Château Léoville-Poyferré, a second growth in the commune of St.-Julien in the Médoc; the Domaine d’Ognoas, also at Arthez, owned by the Landes government, where distillation is done in a magnificent copper still, made in 1804; and the Château de Lacquy, in the hamlet of that name, which has been in the de Boisseson family since 1711.

Annual output is small—at the Domaine d’Ognoas, only about 30 barrels of amber liquid, with aromas of vanilla, prune, cinnamon and licorice.

One domaine is linked to another by roads no wider than the driveways in American suburbs, often shaded by plane trees, with their distinctive dappled, two-tone bark. Some villages have unusual pyramid-capped church towers; others have squares surrounded by medieval stone arcades.

We stopped in Labastide, a charming village built in 1291, for coffee with two of the more colorful figures in the Armagnac trade, Marguerite Lafitte and her daughter, Martine. In the jolliest way possible, they teased us with tales of inexplicable Anglo-Saxon behavior—for example, how Armagnac samples sent to the United States were held up on one occasion by customs but cleared the next time when the container was marked “Holy Water from Lourdes.”

Naturally, Armagnac from the family’s Domaine Boingnères was served with the coffee, though it was still early afternoon. One of the most intriguing was a rich, refined 1975 made wholly from colombard grapes, which Martine described as the grape of the future for Armagnac. It is more widely used for wines; ugni blanc, folle blanche and bacco are the more usual Armagnac grapes.

Bacco is the subject of considerable controversy. It is a hybrid, a cross between folle blanche and an American vinifera grape called Noah, developed by and named for a local schoolteacher in the 1930s. European Community officials, hostile to hybrid grapes, are trying to outlaw its use; some producers argue heatedly that bacco alone can give Armagnac the full-blown character they seek. Others have torn out all their vines, as the Lafittes did in 1991.

Although négociants, who buy and usually blend spirits produced by others, are less important here than in Cognac, there are several of consequence, including Samalens and Trépout. Some, like Janneau and Sempé, have undergone wrenching changes of ownership. But none can match Darroze, mostly because of the unusual way the firm does business.

Darroze does no distilling. It does no blending. Its trade consists of buying individual barrels from the finest artisan distillers when they become available, sometimes a barrel at a time, sometimes more—as in 1976, when Francis bought the entire stock, about 300 barrels, of the Domaine de St.-Aubin at Le Houga. That was the coup that made him famous.

Once the casks were kept in Francis Darroze’s garage. Now 600 of them from 30 domaines, each chalked with the producer’s name, lie on two levels in a modern chai, the older ones downstairs, where the atmosphere is humid, the younger ones upstairs, where it is drier.

As the Armagnacs are coaxed toward their prime, which he defines as roughly 25 years after distillation, Marc Darroze bottles that for which he receives orders, and no more. The producer’s name goes on the label together with the vintage, as well as the firm’s name. On a separate back label the date of bottling appears—a vital detail because spirits do not improve once they leave wood and enter glass.

“We get good stock,” said Marc Darroze, who spent part of his apprenticeship in Sonoma County, Calif., “because we respect the little farmers who make it. We use their name, we never blend their stuff with someone else’s, we use no water or additives. That’s all very important to these guys.”

Using up-to-date office systems, Mr. Darroze has brought the firm into the new century, strengthening sales in Britain, the United States and, recently, Russia. Two days a month, he drives into the backwoods, looking, as he said, “for barns with dark roofs,” caused by the mold that grows as Armagnac evaporates. Sometimes he finds a widow who sells him a few barrels.

We tasted some old bottles together, including a 1965 from Eauze, which hinted delightfully of cacao and tobacco. That Armagnac, he said, “was the work of my father, and now I work for my son”—Clément, then just 20 months old.

September 2002

Grappa, Fiery Friend of Peasants,
Now Glows With a Quieter Flame

By R. W. APPLE Jr.

Through uncounted decades, grappa was little more than a cheap, portable form of central heating for peasants in northern Italy.

A shot (or two, or three) after dinner helped ward off the damp, misty cold that often settles over the Alpine foothills and the flatlands just beneath them. And a shot in the breakfast espresso—yielding a “corretto,” or corrected coffee—got the motor started in the morning gloom.

Grappa is made by distilling debris left in the press after grapes have yielded up their precious juice. The debris is called pomace and consists of skins, seeds and dry pulp. A fiery, rustic, usually colorless alcohol, grappa (the name derives from the Italian word for grape stalk) has an oily, earthy taste with something of the barnyard about it, and a marked alcoholic kick.

Even at its best, grappa is not subtle. The French writer J. K. Huysmans said, with some justice, that if Cognac’s music resembled a violin’s and gin and whisky “raised the roof of the mouth with the blare of their cornets and trombones,” grappa’s “deafening din” suggested the growl of the tuba.

But properly distilled and served cool (not cold), it has a beguilingly smoky taste, with hints of stone fruits like cherry and plum. Especially if made from the pomace of dessert wines, it can display a slight sweetness.

Grappa used to be made mostly by traveling distillers or by big industrial outfits like Stock, the Trieste brandy manufacturer. Too often it was a cheap, illmade product, an Italian version of white lightning.

Fancier Italians, and most foreigners, disdained it.

But that was before the Noninos of Percoto came to prominence. Here in their native town, a furniture-making center about 75 miles northeast of Venice and only 10 miles from the Slovenian border, they tamed grappa, taught it table manners and gave it mass appeal, not only in Italy but overseas, too.

The United States has become the second-largest export market, trailing only Germany. At Felidia in New York, Obelisk in Washington, Spiaggia in Chicago, Valentino in Los Angeles and dozens of other fine restaurants across the country, grappas are prominently displayed and eagerly consumed after dinner instead of Cognac or some other digestif. Tony May, the owner of San Domenico in Manhattan, said he had sold $50,000 worth this year, not to Italian visitors, but to Americans “who come to Italian restaurants determined to laugh like Italians, eat like Italians and drink like Italians.”

You might say, with a bit of poetic license, that grappa runs in Benito Nonino’s veins. For several generations, stretching back into the 19th century, his family has been distilling in Friuli, the northeastern corner of Italy. A questing, hawk-nosed man, he and his handsome, extroverted wife, Giannola, longed, as he often says, “to turn grappa from a Cinderella into a queen.”

Together, the two of them did it. Instead of a single still, they installed a whole battery of discontinuous copper stills, which allowed them to interrupt the process in the middle of the run, when the spirit was at its peak, and discard the rest—a process known as “topping and tailing.” The pomace could thus be processed faster, while it was fresher, which muted the barnyard taste. While continuous stills are cheaper, they boil the pomace nonstop.

Unlike Cognac and Armagnac, which are made by distilling acidic wines few would care to drink, the best grappa is a byproduct of the best wines. The Noninos contracted for pomace from the stars of Friulian winemaking, including Mario Schiopetto, Josko Gravner, Livio Felluga and Gianfranco Gallo.

But raw ingredients and technique would not have been enough. The Noninos had another idea: instead of lumping all the pomace together, the residue of common grapes mixed with that from the more noble varieties, they would distill each separately, starting with picolit, a variety that produces a sweet, delicate dessert wine. The result was a delicious, highly perfumed grappa.

The Noninos made their first batch in 1973 and bottled it in individually blown flasks with silver-plated caps. The labels, handwritten by Giannola, a budding marketing genius, were tied onto the bottles with red yarn.

If the idea was to call attention to the product and to themselves, it worked. Others soon copied them, but the Noninos demonstrated a rare gift for selfpromotion. In their ads, they used a sunny family photograph of Benito, now 63, Giannola, 59, and their three stunning daughters—Cristina, 34, Antonella, 31, and Elisabetta, 29—which soon became familiar all over Italy. They commissioned special bottles from great glassmakers like Baccarat, Riedel and Venini, and even established an annual literary prize. Most important, they worked tirelessly to insure that the best Italian restaurants stocked their products.

“The picolit is still our best grappa,” Mr. Nonino said with an eloquent shrug. “I know it, the customers know it. I’m satisfied. You can ask for one miracle in life and get it, but to ask for two is ridiculous.”

Nardini, a big semi-industrial concern based in Bassano del Grappa, northwest of Venice, was the first to begin commercial production, in the 18th century. Now, more than 1,000 Italian vintners, including many of the very best, like Bruno Ceretto in Piedmont, Silvio Jermann in Friuli and Antonio Mastroberardino near Naples, either produce their own grappa or have a distiller produce it from their pomace and then send it to market under their own labels.

Although their products do not quite fill the mouth in the same way as the best of the Italian grappas do, American distillers like Clear Creek in Oregon and Germain-Robin in California have leaped aboard the grappa express, as have winemakers like Araujo in the Napa Valley. The French make a grappalike drink that they call marc, with special success in the Burgundy and Champagne regions, and the Spanish also produce a version of their own, called aguardiente.

But Nonino remains the marquee name, and this year, the Noninos will sell almost 1.3 million bottles of grappa. Giannola and Benito Nonino retain a remarkable zest for life and for work. One evening last fall, when my wife, Betsey, and I were visiting Percoto, he said his farewells after a long day at the office, jumped onto his bike and pedaled away, whistling “Sentimental Journey.”

With the exception of a few grappas that are aged in wood, giving them an amber hue, one looks just like another. So how do I distinguish my colorless liquid from yours? Like vodka distillers, grappa makers quickly found an answer in packaging. In addition to Nonino’s flasks, you now find grappa in colored bottles and hand-painted bottles, in containers shaped like a bunch of grapes or a perfume flagon, even in bottles topped with miniature Alpine fedoras.

Some people think that things have got out of hand, like George Lang, the New York author and restaurateur, who remarked tartly not long ago, “I’m afraid that grappa-making has turned into glass blowing.”

But it would be a mistake to conclude that clever packaging is always a ruse to conceal an inferior product. A case in point is Jacopo Poli, who makes grappas with finesse and packages them in elegant, long-necked bottles. I especially like his Amoroso di Torcolato, which has an appealing floral bouquet. Should you ever find yourself in Bassano, you can taste it at his little grappa museum, filled with portraits of Louis Pasteur and Leonardo da Vinci and Catherine de’ Medici, shelves of ancient tomes on distilling technique and old alembics, or stills.

“Distillation, daughter of alchemy, was born in remote antiquity,” a placard announces gravely.

Bassano itself is a pretty, welcoming place, tucked beneath a pre-Alp called Monte Grappa. Some of the fiercest battles of World War I took place there, and it is now crowned with an ossuary holding the remains of 25,000 Italian and Austro-Hungarian soldiers. The neighborhood is dotted with Palladian villas, including Maser, where Veronese painted a delightful set of frescoes, and Palladio is also said to have designed the often-rebuilt covered wooden bridge that crosses the sparkling little River Brenta in the center of Bassano.

The Nardini company operates a smoky, atmospheric grappa bar at one end of the bridge, and one of the best artisan distillers in Italy, Vittorio Capovilla, a muscular man with an evangelical spirit, can be found at the end of a dusty lane just outside the village of Rosa, a half-hour’s drive from Bassano. Armed with the latest in German technology, he makes not only grappa but also uva, which is distilled from the grapes themselves rather than from pomace, and which he considers much easier to digest. The seeds in the pomace used for grappa, he told me, contain essential oils that “stun the gastric juices,” causing trouble.

Mr. Capovilla’s masterpieces, however, are distillates made from cultivated fruits like Gravenstein apples and Saturno pears, as well as rare wild fruits like sour mountain cherries and honey pears that he finds on his hikes in the hills. His products bear comparison to the best in Europe, but they are all but impossible to find; he has yet to master the ropes of commerce.

And then there is Romano Levi, the one and only, the living national treasure, the uncrowned king of Piedmontese distilling. A minute, Hobbitlike figure in a Greek sailor’s cap, he works in a ramshackle old structure in the village of Neive, tending a Rube Goldberg assemblage of antique copper boilers and tubes. It is the size of a one-car garage, this world-famous grappa factory, and every bit as cluttered.

But it works. The grappa is superb, if a bit aggressive.

Mr. Levi is a recycler. To fire his still this year, he uses bricks pressed from the residue of last year’s distillation. After they have burned, he returns the ashes to the wine producer who originally supplied the pomace, to use as fertilizer in the vineyard. He calls this the Piedmont life cycle.

He is also an inspired improviser. He offers visitors tastes of his products not by pouring them into glasses from bottles or from a pipette, but by lowering a medicine jar on a string through the bunghole into a Slovenian oak cask, hauling some grappa out and handing it over. You drink from the jar.

“You have to go back to the Etruscans to find anything this rudimentary,” said Burton Anderson, the wine writer, who was with us when we visited the operation. Black eyebrows arched, Mr. Levi professed not to understand how his gear operated; indeed, he told us, “I know nothing at all about grappa.”

Maybe not, but he has the soul of a poet and an artist. Asked how long he had been in business, he replied that he used only one match a year, to fire up his alembic when it was time to begin distilling, and had used 53 matches so far. He makes 6,000 to 10,000 liters a year, using pomace from Angelo Gaja and other Piedmontese winemakers, and he writes all the labels himself—in colored inks on torn pieces of paper, or directly on the bottles with paint.

I am currently working on a bottle produced in 1988, decorated with pictures of flame-red hibiscus flowers. The label specifies that the liquid inside is 48 percent alcohol, and as ever there is a line of enigmatic verse.

“In a dream,” it says, “I dreamt.”

December 1997

A Fine Roughness:
On the Trail of a Spirit Called Marc

By R. W. APPLE Jr.

Hard to find outside the districts where it is produced, with a name that is often mispronounced, marc is a heady, earthy-tasting French relative of moonshine. It makes some people gag. A few nuts like me love it.

Marc (pronounced mahr, rhymes with car) is made by distilling the pips and skins left in the press after juice has been extracted from wine grapes. Some producers use the stalks, too, but they can add an off-putting strawlike flavor. Properly speaking, marc is the mass of pulpy leftovers; officially, the distillate is eau de vie de marc, but people call it marc for short.

It is identical to the grappa produced in Italy, except in one respect: unlike grappa, it is aged in wood, taking on a rich, tawny color. (This being France, there is an exception to the rule: marc de gewürztraminer, made in Alsace, is clear, like the clear fruit eaux de vie of the region. It is usually drunk ice-cold, again like fruit spirits and unlike other marcs.)

Twenty-five years ago, marc was better known and more widely sold in the United States than grappa. But then the grappa producers vastly improved their product and, probably more important, their packaging. In its distinctive (if sometimes silly) hand-blown bottles, grappa elbowed marc off American shelves.

“We used to have 8 or 10 terrific marcs in stock,” said Michael Aaron, chairman of Sherry-Lehmann in New York. “Now we have one, sometimes two.”

Which seems a shame.

In theory, marc can be made from the pomace, as the pips and skins are called in English, of any wine. But in fact, it is made almost entirely in eastern France (Alsace and Champagne, where the marc is often put up in a bottle shaped like a ten-pin) and along the axis running from Burgundy down through the Rhône Valley to Provence.

Marc de Bourgogne is the best and most expensive, a favorite of some redoubtable eaters and drinkers, including the British restaurateur Sir Terence Conran (and, I discover from an article he wrote in The New York Times, James Villas of Town & Country, who likes to end dinner with a marc, a coffee and a cigarette).

I myself like a splash of marc in my espresso some mornings. This is called corrected coffee, maybe because it corrects hangovers. I like the tang that marc gives to Époisses, one of the greatest and gutsiest of French cheeses, whose rind is washed with marc de Bourgogne every day or so during maturation. I like little game birds, like partridges and quail, flamed in marc. And of course I like to sip a fine old marc from a snifter late at night.

Not long ago, at Greuze, a venerable two-star restaurant next to the striking Romanesque cathedral in Tournus, north of Lyon, my wife, Betsey, and I injudiciously began a lunch with snails (with garlic) and frogs’ legs (with garlic), with a roast chicken to follow (with lots of garlic). Before the bird, Jean Ducloux, the chef, sent out a sorbet made with marc and lemon that had magical properties, saving us from indigestion and the dreaded dinosaur breath.

This least-known of the great French digestifs, or unsweetened after-dinner drinks, is usually much coarser and more rustic than its sophisticated cousins, Cognac and Armagnac, which are distilled from wine, and Calvados, which is distilled from cider. But the stuff made by or for the producers of noble Burgundies is something else again—refined, aromatic, complex.

Seeking further enlightenment on the subject, I called one drizzly morning this July on Aubert de Villaine, the patrician manager of the Domaine de la RomanéeConti, the greatest Burgundian estate, which has its headquarters here. He told me right off that he himself was not much of a fan of marc, which he described as “the fifth wheel of the winemaker’s cart.” But he nevertheless has strong views on what makes marc good; quality, he argued, depends largely upon the aging process.

At the domaine, the clear liquid that comes from the still after a single pass (Cognac gets two) goes into new oak for at least 12 years; right now, the marc from 1981–82 is on sale. After two years the barrels are racked, a process in which the liquid is drawn off the solids, or lees, and topped up, then left in a remote corner of the cool, damp cellars to mature.

Before bottling, the marc is fined, or clarified, in the old-fashioned way, with the addition of a small quantity of milk at 175 degrees. The result is pure elegance, but few ever taste it. Annual output is only 600 bottles, each marked with a vintage year, which is highly unusual among marcs. Fewer than 100 are sold in the United States, for $200 a bottle and up.

Why bother? I asked.

“It’s a tradition,” Mr. de Villaine said, “and Burgundy is a traditional place.”

Up the road in Morey-St.-Denis is Domaine Dujac, run by Jacques Seysses and his son, Jeremy, 25, who recently finished his studies at Oxford. One of their wines was served in 1975 by President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing at the famous luncheon at Élysée Palace honoring the restaurateur Paul Bocuse, and they take as much trouble with their marc as with their wines.

Careful handling of the pomace, the elder Seysses said, is one essential, because it is vulnerable to spoilage. So is the quality of the distillation; Dujac uses a distiller with an elderly, wood-burning apparatus. And so are the temperature and the humidity in the cellar where the marc is kept.

“Too humid,” he said, “and as it ages you lose alcohol but no volume, and the marc gets feeble. Too dry, and you lose volume but no alcohol, and the marc is overwhelmed by tannins.”

The marc that I tasted with him suffered from neither of those maladies. Thirty years old, with an elegant, sherry-scented nose, it was a deep brown-red in color, as if it had been matured in mahogany rather than oak. There was not a stalky note in the flavor. Nothing aggressive. No alcohol “sting.” Just an ample, round, fruity flavor.

“Not many people make it,” Jeremy Seysses said. “Not many people make it well, and the market for it is shrinking.”

Does the best wine always make the best marc? Not necessarily. Jacques Seysses thinks that poorer vintages sometimes produce better marc, perhaps because the winemaker exerts greater care in pressing the grapes in the first place. And although he is a maker of great red wines, he believes that the pomace from white-wine grapes tends to produce superior marc.

Steve McCarthy, an Oregon distiller who produces marc, also prefers to work with white-wine pomace. He explains: “Most red wines go through a long maceration process that extracts all the color, tannins and flavor from the skins, and there’s not much left for the distiller to work with.”

At his own wedding, Mr. Seysses told me, he served a marc made by the late Guy Roulot. Mr. Roulot’s son, Jean-Marc, a former actor, now heads the family firm, which is based in Meursault, and still makes a light, bright marc, sometimes available in the United States for about $50.

On our trip through Burgundy and down the Rhône Valley last summer, we kept running into Guy Roulot’s marc. When I asked Thierry Gazagnes, the proprietor of Le Montrachet, an excellent small hotel in the wine-producing village of Puligny-Montrachet, what he would suggest as a digestif, out came the Roulot. Marked “hors d’age” or “ageless,” it was in fact a 1979. Mr. Gazagnes said of it, “I think that it’s the best, or one of the best—no added coloring, no filtering, straight from the barrel.” I detected notes of cedar and maple syrup in the nose, and the flavor was sumptuous.

A few days later, at Troisgros, the extraordinary three-star restaurant in Roanne, we were served a house-label marc de Bourgogne, but the small print said, “Domaine Guy Roulot.”

Every sommelier has his favorite. Jean-Paul Despres, at Lameloise, a three-star landmark in the village of Chagny, on the edge of Burgundy, came up with one of the gems of the trip, a marc, vintage 1968, of remarkable clarity and subtlety, made by Michel Gaunoux, one of the top growers in Pommard. Like many of the very best marcs, it is produced in tiny quantities.

Marcs come in many styles and colors. They are rugged individualists.

In the Rhône Valley, we drank a marc from Château-Grillet, the 9.4-acre vineyard at the heart of Condrieu. Pale and gentle, it had the floral bouquet and ethereal flavor of the viognier grapes grown there. Farther south, at one of Alain Ducasse’s delicious inns in Provence, the Auberge de la Celle, we drank its mirror image, a marc from Bandol, made from mourvèdre pomace, which was dark and powerful, producing a slight catch in the throat on the way down.

I still have, on my bar at home, a fabulous marc de Bugey, from the Savoie hills near Geneva. Somehow, it manages to taste both grapey and woody, both light and unusually full-bodied, in the most satisfying way. It was bottled for the superb restaurant of Georges Blanc, in the countryside north of Lyon, and he gave me a bottle several years ago. There is about an inch left.

When that is gone—and it soon will be, even if I drink only a few drops at a time—I plan to console myself with a little something I picked up in England in May, a marc distilled in 1935 from the pomace of the Marquis d’Angerville’s Volnay Clos des Ducs and bottled for the American market. I took a very modest sip before I bought it. It was an absolute knockout.

But it is also a link between then and now, a kind of time capsule, and not just an old bottle of firewater. Molded into the bottle is the legend “Federal Law Forbids Sale or Re-Use of this Bottle,” and typed onto the revenue label are the words “Leeds Imports Corp., Phila., Pa.” Prohibition had been repealed a mere two years earlier.

One night recently, totally by chance, I ran into Daniel Haas of Vineyard Brands, an importer of French wines, at a Washington dinner party. I asked him whether he had ever heard of Leeds Imports.

“Sure,” he said. “My grandfather, Sidney Haas, started it.”

September 2001

Port Is a Welcome Guest at Cocktail Parties

By ERIC ASIMOV

Ask me about port and I’ll tell you I love it. I have fond memories of the sumptuous flavors of a well-aged vintage port, and, even more so, the delicate, subtle pleasures of a 20-year-old tawny. Alas, these delights reside mostly in the past. I almost never drink port anymore.

The urge for a nice after-dinner glass of port or Cognac has largely faded, overcome by the diminished stamina of middle age and the desire to be not only awake and productive the following morning, but eager as well. Port is a fortified wine, after all. You may not taste the 20 percent alcohol in a well-balanced version, but it can quickly catch up with you.

Still, when I put my mind to it, the cinnamon-sweet, nutmeg-spice notes of a 20-year tawny come right back to life. It makes me think that I do need to reacquaint myself with the pleasures of port. Yet, how?

I wish port weren’t consigned to the end of the meal. Other fortified wines are more versatile. Even the sweetest Madeira, with its jolt of acidity, seems much less sweet than port, and therefore more flexible with savory foods. Fino sherry is dry, with far less alcohol, and makes a glorious aperitif. It also works well supporting many dishes in the traditional Spanish canon.

But port? It’s hard to see beyond cheese, especially blue cheeses and aged Cheddar, or chocolate, of course. As for savory dishes, Roy Hersh, who runs the Web site For the Love of Port, rhapsodizes about port with steak au poivre, ahi tuna and leg of lamb. And Fiona Beckett, a British writer who has a Web site called Matching Food and Wine, suggests that tawny makes a fine substitution for Sauternes in the classic pairing with foie gras. She told me she also suspected that it would pair well with caramelized pork, although she hadn’t tried it herself.

Now that’s an invitation I can’t resist. So I tried it—actually sautéed medallions of Berkshire pork with a caramelized onion jam—and a bottle of Taylor’s 20-year-old tawny. The pork-and-onions brought out enjoyable mineral flavors in the port, but the wine was simply too imposing to coexist comfortably throughout the meal. Cheese afterward, alas, was the better bet.

Maybe the impulse to drink port with dinner was wrong. I decided to call Jim Leff, the founder of the Chowhound Web site, who, back in the 1990s, I recalled, was a dedicated port lover.

“I’m still holding the torch for port, but everybody else has forgotten it,” he said. Mr. Leff, who since selling Chowhound in 2006 has reverted to life as a professional trombonist, has a treasured cache of vintage ports, primarily 1983 and 1985, which he bought in the late 1990s.

“They’re my go-to celebration wines,” he said. “Everything since then is too young, and everything older is too expensive. Every time I have a sip, I say, ‘That’s just great,’ and everyone I ever serve it to never fails to be impressed.”

Mr. Leff is interested only in the vintage variety, but port is produced in many different styles. The grapes come from daunting terraces built into impossibly steep, rocky hillsides in the Douro region of Portugal, where they bake in dry, often unrelenting heat. Once picked, the best grapes are still trod by feet in stone lagars, or tanks, while the rest are crushed mechanically. The juice is then fermented about half way until the process is halted by the addition of brandy.

Vintage port, which is bottled after two years or so in barrels, and tawny, which is typically aged longer, are the two best-known styles, for good reason. They are by far the most magnificent expressions of port. Vintage ports are made only in very good years—maybe three every 10 years—and can require decades to soften their fiery, extravagantly fruity character. Tawnies mellow in the barrel, where they acquire their reddish brown color, and are generally a blend of vintages.

Good tawnies generally come with an age statement, indicating the average age in the blend. For me, 20-year tawny is ideal, showing the complexity of age at a still-affordable price. I find a 10-year tawny often to be too sharp and simple, while 30- or 40-year tawnies are too expensive and can lack the vivacity that still enlivens the 20-year-olds.

While I have fond memories of vintage ports, I would pretty much be buying them for my children to drink, so long do they need to age. But Mr. Leff makes a good case for enjoying vintage port—vicariously, at least—and he rejects the notion that they need to be paired with food.

“I’m the kind of guy who doesn’t use soy and wasabi with sushi,” he said. “So I serve it after dinner, on its own. And it needs a relaxed setting—it doesn’t go well with anxiety.”

What, me worry? What could be more calming than a glass of vintage port in the paneled confines of the cocktail lounge at the “21” Club, complete with club chairs and fireplace?

“Port by the glass is one of our more popular items,” said Phil Pratt, the wine director at the restaurant. Still, he said, by-the-bottle sales are not what they once were.

“There was a precipitous drop-off when they changed the smoking laws,” he said. “There’s all this mystique around port, or baggage, if you want to look at it that way.”

While Mr. Pratt says young women do order port, it still has the image of being an old man’s drink. Mr. Hersh, of For the Love of Port, acknowledges this image problem and suggests a simple but direct method of appealing to younger generations: cocktails!

For some cocktail perspective, I checked in with David Wondrich, the mixeddrinks authority.

“It’s one of my favorite cocktail ingredients, along with sherry,” he said. “One of the easiest ways to come up with new cocktails is simple substitution, port for vermouth, for example. Equivalent proof, but new textures and flavors.”

By port, Mr. Wondrich means ruby port, a simpler, fruity, more accessible cousin of vintage port, and a blend of several vintages. Years ago Mr. Wondrich invented the St. Valentine, a blend of ruby port, white rum, Grand Marnier and lime juice that has a wonderfully ripe, round, punchlike refreshing quality. He reserves tawny ports for things like variations on the manhattan.

“I’ll stir it together with a good rye or Cognac, and a dash of bitters, but I wouldn’t use it as much with the sours, because it’s delicate,” he said.

You rarely see port in cocktails, but in the past it was an important ingredient. In his book Imbibe (Perigee, 2007), Mr. Wondrich describes the St. Charles Punch, named for the St. Charles Hotel in New Orleans: a blend of port, Cognac, lemon and sugar.

Audrey Saunders has made another historic punch, the hot port sangaree, a popular cold weather offering at the Pegu Club, her New York cocktail lounge.

These excursions into cocktail history, though, don’t do much for port’s musty image. “The old view of port needs to be modernized,” Mr. Hersh said. “I’ve even seen sushi paired with port wine.”

As eager as I am to drink port more frequently, maybe I’m not that eager.

November 2010

EDITOR’S NOTE:
In conjunction with his column on port, Eric Asimov posted the commentary below on Diner’s Journal, on NYTimes.com.

The Smoke Cleared, Leaving Port Behind

In my column on port, I talk about why I rarely drink port anymore. I’m not alone. Port consumption is way down, but not nearly as low as you might expect.

In 2009, 350,000 cases of port were shipped to the United States, according to the Port Wine Institute, a trade group. That’s considerably down from a recent high of 469,000 cases in 2006, but still, 350,000 cases is nothing to dismiss.

To put that figure in perspective, let’s look back 20 years, to 1990. That year, only 127,000 cases of port were shipped to the United States. The figure dipped down to 103,000 cases in 1991, and back up to 116,000 in 1992. Then, port consumption began a rocket trajectory: 143,000 cases in 1993, 192,000 in ’94, 202,000 in ’95, 311,000 in ’96, 356,000 in ’97 and upwards, with the occasional dip, to the high-port mark in 2006.

What caused the rapid increase? Well, in the mid-1990s three very highly rated vintages of port were released: the 1991, the 1992 and especially the 1994.

“The momentum was building simultaneously with the discovery of port by the affluent young, who were also discovering the pairing of port with cigars for the first time,” Roy Hersh, who runs the web site For the Love of Port, told me in an e-mail.

Ah yes, remember cigars?

“That was the height of Wall Street with the tech boom and the economy was skyrocketing,” Mr. Hersh continued. “The 25-to-45- year-olds were reading Wine Spectator to learn about wine and port was sizzling hot. Cigar Aficionado added fuel to the flames.”

Prices for port shot up then as well. “I remember over an 18-month period, 1977 Fonseca went from a two-year plateau at $49 sailing upwards to $229 per bottle!” Mr. Hersh said.

Clearly, the excitement has worn off, both of port and of cigars. The association of the two was clear to Phil Pratt, the wine director at “21” Club, where port by the glass is still a popular after-dinner ritual. But he said bottle sales of port dropped precipitously after the 2003 ban in New York City of smoking in bars.

But certainly other issues worked against port, too. Jim Leff, the former proprietor of Chowhound.com, who is a confirmed lover of vintage port, has his own theory.

“The 1994 vintage, I think, killed port,” he said. “It was one of the most stupendous port vintages of the century, and everybody went out and bought bottles and cracked them immediately and said, ‘This isn’t so good.’ And of course it wasn’t good—it needs 80 years of aging! You still can’t drink it.”

December 2010

Vintage Madeira’s Enduring Charms

By ERIC ASIMOV

As the wine director of the River Café in Brooklyn for almost 30 years, Joseph DeLissio has gladly sold vintage Champagnes and old Bordeaux, California cult wines and rare Burgundies. But about five years ago a terrible thing happened: he put some rare old Madeiras on the wine list—and sold them, too.

“If you get to the level where you know Madeira and love Madeira, you hoard them,” Mr. DeLissio said. “They are meant for very special, thoughtful moments, and when you see somebody just down a glass, it’s hurtful.”

Few wines stimulate the hoarding instinct like old vintage Madeira, the fortified wine produced on a jagged Portuguese island about 300 miles off the Atlantic coast of Africa. Because no other wines age as well as Madeira, it’s not uncommon to find bottles from the 19th century, or even the 18th. Not only are they still drinkable, they are in their prime. But very little vintage Madeira is produced, and even less leaves the island that gave the wine its name.

Since those painful sales, Mr. DeLissio has stockpiled vintage Madeira, cases of it, from 1978 to 1863. He thinks he has invested $100,000 in old Madeira, $100,000, mind you, belonging to Buzzy O’Keeffe, the River Café’s owner.

Though his instinct may be to lock the Madeira cellar, Mr. DeLissio has had to face the economic consequences of his obsession and must do what he most dreads. And so, starting the day after Thanksgiving, the River Café will offer 40 to 50 vintage Madeiras, a list outdone in this country only by Bern’s Steak House, a wine lovers’ destination in Tampa, Fla. A rotating selection of 10 to 15 of them will be available by the glass, and the rest by the bottle.

“Hopefully we won’t sell any!” Mr. DeLissio said, half-jokingly.

What drives a Madeira fanatic? It’s only partly the romance, knowing that a bottle of 1863 Barbeito bual was made the year Gettysburg was fought.

But when you pour a glass of the 1863 and it is stunningly fresh and refreshing, with aromas of spices and roasted nuts, caramels and chocolate, and the flavors ricochet through your mouth like beams of light off mirrors, then you want to have a lot more of that Madeira to savor.

The same is true of a youthful 1969 Blandy’s, made from rare terrantez grapes, which tastes brightly of lemon, lime and brown sugar before fading to—get this—cream soda. Or of a dry, elegant, perfectly balanced 1929 Barbeito verdelho, smelling of grapefruit and walnuts, changing constantly in the glass.

“Madeira is almost like a conversation,” Mr. DeLissio said. “It’s the most thoughtful wine there is.”

Contrarians must love Madeira, because it turns wine facts on their head. Everybody knows wines must be kept in cool, dark places free of excess vibrations. But Madeiras are purposely heated to more than 100 degrees and were once considered best when subjected to the pitching and rolling of ships on long ocean voyages. In fact, it was in the era of colonization when Madeira’s greatness was first recognized, by accident, as legend has it.

In the early 17th century the island of Madeira was a port for those sailing to Africa, the West Indies and America. Ships would pick up casks of wine for the voyage. One time, the story goes, a cask was somehow misplaced and not discovered until the ship had returned. Amazingly, it was judged to be far better than when it had left. Producers began to send wine on voyages, just for the ride. The best were called vinhos da roda: round-trip wines.

Ocean voyages are no longer a part of Madeira production, but today barrels of the best wines are placed in the attics of warehouses to bake naturally under the island sun. The heat; the slow, controlled oxidation of long barrel aging; the high alcohol content, 17 or 18 percent, after fortification with grape spirits; and the searing acidity of the Madeira grapes render the wine practically invulnerable to the ravages of age. Even opened, a bottle can last months without noticeable deterioration.

Most Madeiras are blends of vintages and grapes. Some can be excellent and more affordable introductions to the pleasures of Madeira, particularly those aged for 5, 10 or 15 years and made with one of the leading noble grapes: sercial, verdelho, bual and malvasia. Sercial is the driest and the lightest of the wines, and malvasia, or malmsey, the richest and the sweetest, though even a malmsey, with its beam of bracing acidity, can sometimes seem dry because it is so refreshing.

But it is the vintage Madeiras, made in minute quantities, that are the most exciting. By law, these wines must be aged 20 years in barrels, although a new category, colheita, or harvest wines, can be released after five years in barrels. In practice, many vintage Madeiras are aged far more than 20 years.

Mannie Berk, head of the Rare Wine Company, a leading Madeira importer, says vintage Madeiras are becoming more expensive. “Between the dollar and its scarcity,” Mr. Berk said, “there’s a growing appreciation that these wines are very valuable.”

While he hasn’t completed his list yet, Mr. DeLissio thinks he will charge $40 to $100 for a one-and-a-half to two-ounce glass and $300 to $1,400 for a bottle. Among his treasures are three terrantez Madeiras and an anise-scented 1927 wine made from the bastardo grape, which is now practically extinct on Madeira.

Mr. DeLissio says he is still searching for old bottles. For the record, Mr. Berk has a few bottles of a 1720 Madeira, which he says is absolutely ethereal. Not surprisingly, he’s not selling.

November 2007

Hidden in Hungary, Treasures on the Vine

By EVAN RAIL

The mold covered every surface of the cellar, coating the walls and ceilings in layers of loose black gauze. On one shelf, sheets of mold had grown so thick that it was nearly impossible to tell what was underneath, making the ancient wine bottles seem like ash-colored homunculi, an army of toy soldiers made from fungus.

Walking farther into the cellar, I ducked under a low ceiling and felt dangling fingers of mold touch my head.

“The mold is fed by the wine that evaporates,” said my guide, Zsuzsanna Szobonya, leading me into a hexagonal tasting room where even the arabesque chandelier overhead was adorned with more black fluff. “Try this,” she said.

Standing in the dim light, I sniffed, then tasted. Though the cellar air was damp and musty, the scent from the glass was richly aromatic and floral. The wine, a Tokaji aszu, was full of citrus blossoms and fruit in the nose. In the mouth, crisp flavors of apricot and orange burst forth, followed by an invigoratingly sharp finish that begged for another quick sip.

Lucky mold, I thought.

“Can you imagine?” Ms. Szobonya asked, taking a sip. “So light and fresh, and yet it’s about 20 percent sugar.”

Though not all wines from the region are quite so saccharine, the legendary aszu sweet wines were a large part of what had brought me to this corner of northeastern Hungary. Known by the name of the region’s main winemaking town, Tokaj, the moist and moldy area at the confluence of two mysterious, slow-moving rivers is the oldest classified wine region in Europe—older than Bordeaux in France, older than Porto in Portugal, older than Chianti in Italy. In fact, many of the stone wine cellars here date to the mid-16th century.

And now, 20 years after the changes that brought democracy, market capitalism and wide-open borders to the former Eastern bloc, Tokaj is emerging as one of the most interesting wine regions in Europe, not just for its sweet aszus and distinctive dry whites, but also for its unusual blend of history and cultures—Jewish, Russian, Hungarian and Greek—and for the low-key experience of a lesstraveled wine trail where the curious and enterprising can easily rub shoulders with working winemakers, often right in their homes and vineyards.

“You can taste the wines right where they’re made,” said Carolyn Banfalvi, the author of Food Wine Budapest, who also provides culinary tours of the Tokaj region. “There’s a real range of wines in Tokaj. There are the sweet wines that everybody thinks about first, but there’s also the excellent dry wines, which are becoming more and more well known.”

That renown seems to have spread faster and farther than the wines themselves, which remain a relative rarity outside their homeland, making a trip to Tokaj a near necessity for travelers who want to taste the full range. So, armed with several tips from Ms. Banfalvi, I made a wine-tasting road trip to the region this spring, driving there in just over seven hours from my home in Prague.

Dusk was falling as I arrived, creating a mysterious twilight zone out of the rolling Carpathian foothills: with tractors often occupying the road and small farmhouses surrounded by vines and impressive oaks, the setting was a far cry from the overtouristed wine trails of Beaune or the Napa Valley. In fact, the wide horizons and tree-lined country roads felt closer to the place where I grew up in rural central California.

What we don’t have a lot of in the long San Joaquin Valley, however, are luxury hotels run by European aristocrats, like the Grof Degenfeld Castle Hotel, a chateaulike property owned by a German-Hungarian family of counts and earls located in Tarcal, a traditional winemaking village on the western side of Kopasz-hegy, also known as Mount Tokaj.

After checking into a surprisingly large room and admiring the view over the well-tended grounds and vineyards, I went downstairs to the Degenfeld wine cellar, where the hotel manager, Pal Visztenvelt, had a selection of the estate’s own bottles waiting for me as part of the wine-tasting package I’d booked.

Though the stately “castle” looks a lot like a chateau, he explained, it was built as a winemaking school in 1873, just 10 years after the Hungarian émigré Agoston Haraszthy founded the Buena Vista Viticultural Society in Northern California, helping to create the wine industry there. Now in the hands of the Degenfeld family, the former school operates as a combination hotel and winery, producing wine from its own vineyards. High-season occupancy at the hotel, he said, can be fairly busy, but the off-season—from October to May—is generally empty, because of the weather.

“In November this isn’t a very nice place,” he said. “We have so much fog you can’t see anything.”

With just a few noticeably elegant Continental couples booked in for wine tastings and vineyard tours during my midweek visit in mid-April, the airy, salonlike public areas of the hotel contributed to the languorous feeling that seemed endemic to the region. The damp was apparent, as well. Set at the meeting of the Tisza and the Bodrog Rivers, the Tokaj region’s microclimate is a haven for fungus: both the black mold, Cladosporium cellare, which thrives in its wine cellars, and Botrytis cinerea, the so-called “noble rot” that attacks grapes in the vineyard, and one of the secrets to Tokaji aszu and some of the area’s other sweet wines.

The majority of the region’s vineyards are planted with furmint, Mr. Visztenvelt said, a varietal especially conducive to the fungus. When botrytis attacks, the grapes dry up, becoming nearly solid. This concentrates the sugars, creating a characteristic flavor. Although the result was delicious, I couldn’t help wondering who first got the idea to produce wine from moldy grapes.

“One story is that it was because of the Turks,” Mr. Visztenvelt said, referring to the era when the Ottoman Empire occupied a large portion of what is today Hungary. “The Turkish border was in the neighborhood, and they used to make raids across the border during which the winemakers had to hide. Afterwards, they came back and they tried to make wine out of the grapes that had rotted while they were gone.”

That sounded as plausible as just about any other explanation. Whatever the cause, it clearly didn’t happen recently: the Hungarian government’s application for Unesco World Heritage status for the region, which it earned in 2002, notes that most of the area’s wine cellars were built between the mid-1500s and the late 17th century.

Though all the samples were excellent, I was most struck by Degenfeld’s 2008 Fortissimo, a sweet, late-harvest wine made from 80 percent yellow muscat, with the remainder coming from two other types of grapes: harslevelu and dried but not botrytis-infected furmint grapes. It had a nose of syrupy, overripe fruit, with lush spoonfuls of melon, apricot and cinnamon-spice in the mouth, followed by a honeyed finish with just a touch of dry minerality.

“The goal was to produce a wine at the same level and with a similar taste every year,” Mr. Visztenvelt said. “With an aszu, that would be impossible.”

For a wine that was supposedly easy to produce, it had a meditative complexity, and I soon found myself asking for another glass, which I carried outside. As the sun was setting, I walked through the parklike chateau grounds and considered my options for the next few days.

Given enough time, I hoped to visit the nearby village of Mad, partly to see the well-regarded Royal Tokaji Wine Company there, partly to see the town’s restored Baroque synagogue from 1795—a focal point for the area’s once vibrant Jewish community and another draw for cultural travelers. In warmer weather, I could hike or bike the many trails on Mount Tokaj or even rent a canoe and spend time on the river. But the dark clouds scudding in from the west made me think that I should get to know the area with an indoor approach: by drinking as well as I could.

The next morning the front desk arranged for a driver to take me to the village of Tolcsva, a 30-minute journey to the northeast made just slightly longer by a slow drizzle. Through the rain I watched vineyards and isolated hilltop farmhouses roll by before we came to the town and stopped in front of Oremus, one of the area’s largest and most famous wineries.

That fame was earned in large part because of its dry white furmint, now called Mandolas after the vineyard where the grapes are grown, which once received a not-too-shabby 89 points from Wine Enthusiast. It was there that I met Ms. Szobonya, who, after giving me a tour of the spotless, laboratory-like winery, led me to the cellar’s hexagonal mold-encrusted tasting room. There, we tried the winery’s three-, five- and six-puttonyos aszu wines. Modern aszu wines are rated on a scale of three to six “puttonyos,” or “baskets,” an old measurement originally designating the amount of botrytised grapes in each barrel, now used to denote the amount of remaining sugar in the finished wine (six being the sweetest). We also tried two vintages of Mandolas from 2006 and 2004.

Tasting the wines in the near-dark, I thought the 2006 was stony and crisply dry, while the vintage from just two years earlier had more peach fruitiness in the mouth and far less minerality.

After a two-hour tasting, it was time to follow up the morning’s liquids with lunch. But after tasting fine wines, where would I find a meal of the same quality?

About a block away, as it turned out, at Os Kajan, a restaurant that also functions as an art gallery and, with just one guest room, a hotel.

Despite the place’s all-trades angle, the food was surprisingly good, merging local ingredients with French techniques courtesy of the Hungarian- and English-speaking French owner, Pascal Leeman, who seemed to have a knack for discovering and presenting the region’s culinary ingredients at their best. As a member of the local mycological society, he explained, he had himself gathered the local truffles for his restaurant’s fragrant ravioli, served just al dente with a large accompanying salad of fresh mâche and boiled quail eggs. The house specialty, sautéed Hungarian foie gras, arrived in a sweetly acidic sauce of honey and aszu wine, whose tartness formed a nice counterbalance to the rich goose liver. Aszu wine even showed up in a dessert, taking the role of the alcohol in what would have otherwise been a baba au rhum.

Floored by the cuisine, I resolved to find a way to stay in Os Kajan’s guest room, if not move in permanently.

The town of Tokaj itself can also feel remarkably homey, provided your home is somewhat monomaniacally focused on wine. That afternoon, I wandered its narrow streets and lanes, stopping into small bottle shops and wine stores, bars and tasting cellars. With just over 5,000 residents, it has an intimate, neighborly feel, though it was hard to find anything not related to the grape. Cherry trees were blossoming next to the town’s tall stone walls, while Mount Tokaj loomed to the west, creating a nestled, well-protected air that felt quite unlike anywhere else I knew in Central Europe.

It seemed as if the town had suddenly moved to the Mediterranean, though with even more neo-Classical architecture: restored masterpieces with tall Doric columns supported sturdy triangles; other, wonderfully decrepit buildings displayed ornate arches and facades that evoked Athens by way of Austria. It was Hungary, to be sure, but it somehow reminded me most of Vilia, my grandmother’s hometown in Greece.

This turned out to be not too far off. As the town’s small but colorful museum recounted, Greek merchants came to dominate the wine trade in Tokaj starting in the early 17th century. They were followed by groups of Jewish and Russian wine merchants who were subsequently supplanted by Communist-era state cooperatives, which were ultimately replaced by the international collectives that control much of the production today.

The two major players are Oremus, which is part of the Vega-Sicilia concern from Spain, and AXA Millésimes, a large French wine company, which owns the Disznoko winery. After seeing several larger wineries, I was especially curious about the smaller vintners in the region, so the next day I arranged to meet Judit Bodo, the owner of Bott Pince, a small winery in the town of Tokaj with a cultish following among connoisseurs in Budapest. One of Ms. Banfalvi’s tips was to schedule meetings with winemakers well in advance, as the undercommercialized nature of the region means that very few wineries have visitors’ centers with regular hours.

This can present challenges for the impetuous: if you don’t plan, you might show up at a winery only to discover no one is there. But as I learned at Bott Pince the payoff is often a more intimate, less touristic experience. As Ms. Bodo set a pair of Riedel wineglasses down on a cask, it became apparent we would be tasting her wines directly atop the 16 oak barrels that contained the entirety of Bott Pince’s current production, a vintage that had been especially limited because of the caprices of Mother Nature.

“Every year we get three barrels of wine from our Teleki vineyard,” Ms. Bodo said. “But in 2009 the birds and the pheasants, they ate everything, and we got just one barrel.”

With just one room and a very small amount of cellar space, Bott Pince gave the impression of a mom-and-pop operation. Most of the bottles I saw didn’t yet have labels.

“I take them home, 100 bottles at a time,” Ms. Bodo said, “and we put the labels on in the kitchen.”

Born in a Hungarian-speaking part of Slovakia, Ms. Bodo recounted how she had arrived in Tokaj after first working for a winery in Austria. A bookish brunette, she could have come from just about anywhere in Europe, speaking a crystalline, slightly academic English inflected with words from various other languages, as when she began talking about her favorite varietal, harslevelu: “Sometimes the furmint is too harsh,” she said, “too ‘gerade’ in German, too ‘straight,’ and harslevelu has more play. It’s more layered, it has more nose, it has more nuance.”

Tasting her winery’s dry furmint-harslevelu cuvée, I thought I got a sense of the difference: while Bott Pince’s 100 percent furmint wine had been stony and sharp, the blend brought out more cantaloupe and sweet melon with less acidity, finishing with just a touch of linden blossom.

The sell-it-now, small-scale nature of her business has meant that Ms. Bodo currently has no archival wine to speak of: she recalled that at a recent wine dinner in Budapest fans of her wine had brought bottles from their own cellars in order to taste and compare earlier vintages. Until this year, Bott Pince had never put out an aszu wine, though she noted that its first, a very sweet six-puttonyos version, was just about ready for release.

Pouring a small glass of aszu, she noted that the wine should age for many years, recounting that the very first aszu she tasted was more than 50 years old at the time.

I sniffed at the wine, then tasted. Despite a light color—Ms. Bodo assured me that it would get darker in time—it had complex layers of flavor, starting out with the taste of candied oranges before revealing notes of pineapple and brown sugar. With such wonderful flavors in the wine, it seemed a pity that the production was so limited: just 480 bottles would be available, she said.

After another sip, I noticed that the mold on the cellar walls was also small-scale; unlike the fluffy strata of fungi at Oremus, Bott Pince’s more modern cellar had but a few flecks of black. But it also appeared to be growing, with bigger clumps visible on the stone arches, and I imagined that there would probably be a lot more of the fungus by the time her wine was also 50 years old.

“It’ll happen naturally,” Ms. Bodo said, pouring another glass. “It’s nice to see what nature can do. That’s why we’re here.”

July 2010

A Dessert Wine That’s a Public Secret

By FLORENCE FABRICANT

The imposing Renaissance Château de Monbazillac, in southwestern France, has a lovely sweet wine to offer, but few Americans, even wine buffs, have tasted it.

Monbazillac (pronounced moh-bah-zee-YAK) is a wine the French have kept largely to themselves, exporting no more than 20 percent of it, mostly to Belgium and the Netherlands, with less than 5 percent going to the United States. Yet Monbazillac is France’s largest late-harvest sweet wine district as gauged by acreage and production.

Though the soil differs from that of the Sauternes region, Monbazillac is made from the same grapes—sémillon, sauvignon blanc and muscadelle—as Sauternes, France’s best-known late-harvest dessert wine, especially the illustrious, costly Château d’Yquem.

Monbazillacs are grown about 60 miles to the east of the Sauternes region, in five districts clustered around the town of Bergerac.

Like a good Sauternes, a fine Monbazillac can become a deep gold, concentrated wine, but it tends to be somewhat less voluptuous, with a spicier, less floral bouquet. Monbazillac delivers exotic touches of honeyed mango, quince, passion fruit and citrus, often with a distinctive nuttiness in the aftertaste.

There’s a bigger difference: the price. “You’ll get a terrific bottle of Monbazillac for what you’d pay for the most ordinary Sauternes,” said Jean-Luc Le Dû, the wine director at Daniel. That’s about $20 or so in a New York wine shop.

Considering the economic downturn, this may be the perfect time for Monbazillac. It has more complexity and character than muscat de Beaumes-de Venise, from the southern Rhône, the usual French sweet wine for budget-minded Americans. The reasonable price also makes it a good candidate for cooking: for poaching pears or making a jelly to serve with a pâté.

In the Dordogne and Bergerac regions of France, a glass of Monbazillac is likely to accompany local foie gras. At Le Centenaire, a Michelin two-star restaurant in Les Eyzies-de-Tayac, there are 10 Monbazillacs on the list, many from La Domaine de l’Ancienne Cure. For Timothy Harrison, Le Centenaire’s English-born sommelier, the sometimes smoky, nutty, quince-paste concentration of older vintages make them a perfect complement for foie gras.

To test the versatility of the wine, and to compare it with Sauternes, Daniel Boulud prepared a number of dishes for me to taste: ceviche of hamachi with clementines, slabs of foie gras both hot and cold, various cheeses and desserts. In general, the Monbazillacs complemented the food more agreeably, even the foie gras. The Sauternes were best only with blue-veined cheese and tarte Tatin.

“Sauternes are heavier in the mouth than Monbazillac,” Mr. Boulud said. They’re a bit higher in alcohol.

There’s no Château d’Yquem equivalent to give luster to Monbazillac. But a number of Monbazillacs, especially the ones made by a new generation of producers like Tirecul la Gravière and Domaine de l’Ancienne Cure, are bound to satisfy a discerning palate, even one that appreciates Sauternes.

It still takes a bit of searching to find Monbazillacs like these on the shelves of New York’s wine shops. Most of the better wine shops have one or two, and prices range from $15 to $50 a bottle. When buying, it’s important to look for a chateau-bottled Monbazillac.

Monbazillacs are scarce in restaurants. Roger Dagorn, the sommelier at Chanterelle, who pours it by the glass with foie gras, said, “I don’t find a huge difference between many Monbazillacs and Sauternes.”

The rivalry between Monbazillac and Sauternes has gone on for more than a century, with Sauternes usually prevailing.

For decades, many Monbazillacs were badly made, from grapes harvested by machine. But since 1990, when machine picking was no longer allowed, the wine has been steadily improving, and it has been shedding its reputation as a poor man’s Sauternes.

As with Sauternes, the overripe grapes, often infected with Botrytis cinerea, or noble rot, are picked by hand, with the harvesters going through the vineyards several times, selecting only the grapes that are ready. At Château d’Yquem there can be as many as 10 pickings.

Monbazillacs of varying quality are made by more than 200 growers and producers. About a third of the wines are made by a cooperative based at the Château de Monbazillac, for which two or three pickings are typical.

Christian Roche, whose grandfather helped found the cooperative in 1935, said that although the quality of the cooperative’s wines has improved, he preferred to control his small production at the Domaine de l’Ancienne Cure every step of the way.

Monks from the Loire Valley first planted grapes around Monbazillac in the 11th century. By 1550, when construction started on the Château de Monbazillac, the production of white wine, notably sweet as tastes at the time insisted, was flourishing.

But Bordeaux, the nearest seaport, gave preferential treatment to its own wines, including Sauternes, a holdover from centuries of control by the English. So winemakers from Monbazillac found markets among the Dutch and Germans instead of the English.

Monbazillac is not made every year. For example, none was made in 1992 because the condition of the grapes was not good enough, and very little was made in 1991, 1993, 1994 and 1996. Wines made in those years could be declassified as Côtes de Bergerac and not labeled Monbazillac.

The wine must have 12.5 percent to 14.5 percent alcohol, but typically Monbazillac is 13 percent, slightly lower than Sauternes. Less sauvignon blanc and more muscadelle is often used in the blend, giving a trifle less acidity but a more exotic fruit flavor. Many, but not all, Monbazillacs are aged for up to two years in small oak barrels.

Like Sauternes, a good Monbazillac improves with age, deepening in color, often to amber, and releasing ever greater concentrations of flavor. Monbazillacs are not only worth discovering and buying, they’re worth keeping.

April 2003

Frozen Vines (and Fingers)
Yield a Sweet Reward

By JULIA LAWLOR

It is 14 degrees above zero as a group of wine lovers converges in a vineyard on the Niagara Peninsula. Frosty bundles of riesling grapes hang on rows of vines in the pale, gathering daylight. A storm the night before has left behind six inches of fresh snow.

Perfect conditions, the winemaker Shiraz Mottiar declares, for picking the frozen grapes that he will soon transform into Canada’s specialty, ice wine, for his employer, Malivoire Wine Company. By law, Canadian ice-winemakers cannot call their product by that name unless it is made from grapes picked off the vine at or below –8 degrees Celsius (17.6 degrees Fahrenheit). So far, so good. Mr. Mottiar is confident that the temperature will hold, at least for a few hours, and instructs the group to get to work. What is ideal for the harvest, though, is not so great for human extremities.

“My feet are very cold now,” said Peter Scott, who woke up at 4:45 a.m. to make the hour-and-10-minute drive from Toronto with his wife, Jessica Dolman. This is the fourth year of picking for the couple, who, like the other 25 or so loyal Malivoire customers bending intently over their work, are not paid for their labor. They will, however, receive a free bottle of ice wine with their names listed among the workers on the 2010 vintage label. After the harvest they’ll also be invited back inside the winery, where the proprietor, Martin Malivoire, has been preparing vats of hot chocolate and chili spiked with ice wine.

“The whole experience is very addictive,” Ms. Dolman said.

Among devotees in North America, this stretch of flat farmland bordered by Lake Ontario to the north and Lake Erie to the south is ground zero for indulging a taste for ice wine, a sweet wine that is often paired with dessert, rich cheeses and foie gras.

Canada vies with Germany for the title of world’s largest producer of ice wine—some years, because of inconsistent weather, Germany’s crop is small or nonexistent. (Austria, Switzerland and New York’s Finger Lakes are among the many areas that also make ice wine.)

More than 75 percent of all the ice wine in Canada comes from Ontario. (The remainder is made in regions like southern Quebec and the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia.) Unlike more temperate parts of the world, Canada has consistently cold winters, which guarantee an annual crop of frozen grapes. Still, ice wine represents just a small percentage of wine being produced here. It’s expensive to make: a ton of grapes yields only one-sixth the amount of ice wine as table wine—hence its nickname, liquid gold—and its prices start at $50 for a half-bottle. Leaving grapes on the vine long past normal fall harvest also is risky.

“There are all kinds of hazards,” said Norman D. Beal, a former oil trader who in 2000 turned a decrepit barn into an opulent tasting room at his Peninsula Ridge Estates Winery on a hill in Beamsville. “There are the birds, mildew, all kinds of diseases.” That’s in addition to the vagaries of the weather, including rain, hail, ice storms and midwinter thaws.

Extreme winemaking, as some call ice-wine production, calls for extreme wine touring. In winter that means lots of layers, and maybe a face mask with an opening big enough for sipping. The trade-offs: there’s plenty of room to belly up to the tasting bars, and it’s easier to get a table at one of the region’s many fine restaurants.

Each tasting inevitably leads to a game of identifying classic ice-wine flavors: lychee nut, caramel, toffee, strawberry jam, crème brûlée, burnt orange, citrus, tropical fruit. Then what follows is a discussion of the improbable alchemy that goes into producing a drink that is said to have been created by mistake in a German vineyard in 1794.

Ice-winemakers here like to leave the grapes on the vine through a series of mild freezes and thaws instead of picking at the first opportunity. That process produces the right balance of sweetness, acidity and the nuanced flavors that separate great ice wine from something that is cloyingly sweet.

“You’re always watching the sugar and acid levels,” Mr. Mottiar said. “Once they peak, then you pick and press.” The ice-wine harvest usually doesn’t occur until well into December, and in some years it has stretched into February.

When the frozen grapes are pressed at just the right temperature, usually immediately after picking, the water is crystallized, and the juice that remains consists of the most exquisitely concentrated sugars and flavors.

“It’s like squeezing marbles,” said Juan Miranda, the assistant winemaker at Peninsula Ridge. (Some wineries have broken their presses when trying to extract the juice from grapes at too low a temperature.) Most ice wine is aged about a year before it is bottled, though it can be aged much longer.

A key to this area’s success in creating some of the world’s best ice wine is its geography. Because Lake Ontario is so deep, the heat that it stores up during the summer months is released over the land as air begins to cool in the fall. During the winter, the constant flow of warm air moderates temperatures in the fields. The Niagara Escarpment, a ridge running through the peninsula close to the lake, plays a similar role. Winds coming off the lake hit the ridge, known here as the Beamsville Bench, then recirculate over the land, acting as natural antifreeze for the vines. Otherwise, typical Canadian winter temperatures of –20 degrees Celsius (–4 degrees Fahrenheit) or below could easily destroy the crops.

Like the wineries in the Finger Lakes, the 65 wineries operating in Niagaraon-the-Lake and farther west in the Niagara Escarpment have had to overcome a reputation for the sickeningly sweet wines made in the days when all that grew there were native labrusca grapes. Those grape vines were mostly replaced by European vinifera vines in the 1970s.

The Finger Lakes have adjusted to their fickle winters by making more sweet, late-harvest wines that don’t require grapes to be frozen on the vine. They also produce “iced wines,” which are made with grapes picked in the fall, then frozen later under artificial conditions. But Canadians tend to dismiss these wines as inferior. “We’re one of the rare regions in the world that has the right soil and cold enough winters for the grapes to freeze,” said Ben Nicks, a sales associate for Stratus Vineyards in Niagara-on-the-Lake.

Canadian winemakers also argue that their strict rules regulating ice wine—inspectors check each winery’s harvest to measure sugar levels and ensure that grapes were picked at the proper temperature—have given them an advantage over other areas.

“We have the ice-wine cops,” said Joseph DeMaria, president of Royal DeMaria in Beamsville, which says that it is the only winery in the world that exclusively makes ice wine. Mr. DeMaria, a Toronto hairdresser who started making ice wine in 1998 with no background in the industry, has earned close to 300 awards for his small winery.

To visit the original makers of ice wine on the peninsula, you must head 25 miles east of the Beamsville Bench to Niagara-on-the-Lake, a quaint tourist town surrounded by vineyards. Just outside the downtown along the Niagara River are Inniskillin Wines and Reif Estate Winery, which were the first to perfect and sell ice wine on the Niagara Peninsula in 1984.

Inniskillin, Canada’s largest maker of ice wines, has seen a big jump in visitors during the cold months. About 40 percent of the 250,000 people who visit the winery each year arrive between November and March, said Deborah Pratt, a spokeswoman for Inniskillin, up from 15 percent a decade ago. Inniskillin has also been a pioneer in making sparkling ice wine.

Every January, as part of Niagara-on-the-Lake’s ice-wine festival, Inniskillin puts up a giant tent and offers an ice-wine tasting at a bar created from—what else?—ice. Ms. Pratt says ice-winemakers are working to convince people that it is not just a drink for special occasions. “Our challenge is to get people to take out that bottle they have sitting in the cupboard, open it up and experiment,” Ms. Pratt said.

Just down the road is Reif Estate Winery, whose president and chief executive, Klaus W. Reif, took over his uncle’s winery here in 1987 after studying winemaking in his native Germany. Winemaking is in his blood—his German ancestors tended vineyards beginning in 1638—but ice wine has been in his heart since he took his first sip 23 years ago.

“There is so much effort and time that goes into it,” he said as he stood in a room full of oak barrels that his grandfather once used to store wine. “The first time I had ice wine, I drank the whole bottle by myself. It took me three or four hours. It was so beautiful.”

February 2010