CHAPTER EIGHT
You’re Feeling
Continental?
This Is for You.

In the World of Fine Wine,
There’ll Always Be a France

By ERIC ASIMOV

Permit me to speak briefly in praise of France.

Yes, France, the greatest wine-producing nation in the world.

Don’t look so shocked. I’ve heard about the Judgment of Paris, the famous blind tasting in which French and American wines went glass-to-glass in 1976, and the French lost. I know all about the greatness of California cabernets and shiraz from Australia, and I understand that the French lag in the clever global marketing of instantly recognizable brands of wine.

Nonetheless, no country comes close to matching France, either in setting demanding standards for its wine industry or in producing such a variety of consistently excellent wine. Bordeaux, Burgundy, Champagne and the Rhône go without saying, but those famous regions are simply the most visible. From Jurançon in the southwest to Jura in the east, from Nantes on the Atlantic to Alsace on the German border, France makes wines that are endlessly compelling and should be endlessly inspiring.

Why is it necessary for me to state what should be obvious? Because a prevailing attitude toward France and its wines, in the New World at least, seems stuck somewhere between pity and glee for an industry supposedly rotting from within.

New World producers and journalists like to jeer at the sacred French notion of terroir as a myth constructed to preserve French status in the industry, and they laugh at the rigidity of the French appellation rules, which dictate what French growers can plant, where they can plant it, and how they should tend the vines. The European Union’s recent decision to spend millions of dollars in an effort to diminish a European wine glut by digging up vineyards and turning excess wine into ethanol contributed to a confused perception of industry-wide crisis. The perception springs from an oversimplification of the French wine business, and no doubt a bit of wishful thinking.

The latest chorus of American gloating was heard around the time of the 30th anniversary celebration of the Paris tasting, even as many of these same gloaters were lining up to pay record prices for the heralded 2005 vintage of Bordeaux. When French winemakers were understandably reluctant to participate in yet another re-enactment in May, American wine writers were quick to play the cowardice card. And when the event feebly played out, and the Americans won again, writers exulted.

“Sacré bleu! Make that red, white and blue,” Linda Murphy wrote in The San Francisco Chronicle, which can perhaps be forgiven for boosterish support of an industry in its backyard. In maybe the unkindest blow of all, Hollywood is apparently considering a movie version of the original event, based on the book Judgment of Paris: California vs. France and the Historic 1976 Paris Tasting That Revolutionized Wine (Scribner, 2005), by George M. Taber.

Maybe it’s payback for years of supercilious French sneering at the American wine industry. Or maybe Americans just need to lash out to pump themselves up with competitive energy, like football players pounding their lockers in an adrenalin-fueled frenzy. Any way you look at it, American wine partisans have got themselves a punching bag and they call it France.

Business-oriented types look at the French wine industry as old and tired. Through rigidity, bureaucracy and lack of creativity, they say, once-dominant France clings to old and outdated ways, and can no longer compete with modern wine powers like Australia, the United States, Chile and South Africa.

Those sympathetic to France heave a sigh, shrug their shoulders and say, What can you do? Meanwhile, some of the harshest critics are among the French themselves, particularly growers and winemakers in less prestigious areas, or entrepreneurs who feel hamstrung by French wine laws.

Make no mistake. France’s troubles, as far as the wine business goes, are many. Consumption at home has dropped precipitously as the culture that once prized the long lunch and the arduous construction of a meal has taken a route toward convenience foods, quickly gobbled. The quest for productivity in a globalized economy, no doubt, has also taken its toll on daytime consumption, while stricter drunken-driving laws have also had an effect. Troubled fortunes in the wine economies of Bordeaux and the Languedoc are well known, if not well understood. And France’s share of the wine export market has tumbled as well.

What’s crucial to understand is that France has two entirely different wine economies, and one should not be confused with the other. The first produces oceans of cheap, occasionally palatable wine, sold for immediate consumption under lowly appellations, like plain Bordeaux or Beaujolais, for example, rather than the more prestigious and more specific St.-Julien or Juliénas. This industry is indeed in a deep crisis, with many growers hurting badly. Historically, much of this wine was for domestic consumption, and this segment has taken the biggest hit as the market has shrunk. Producers who would like to sell these wines overseas say they feel hampered because they cannot compete against the cleverly branded bottles of New World producers, who often use winemaking techniques unavailable to French producers.

The other industry makes the middle to high-end wines, those sold around the world, consumed in restaurants and reviewed in publications like Wine Spectator. Producers like Sylvain Pitiot, who makes the seductive, voluptuous Clos de Tart, a grand cru Burgundy, are doing exceptionally well, regardless of how many gallons of French wine the European Union wishes to convert to fuel. Like Clos de Tart, much of the high-quality end of the business is prospering.

In many ways, the French A.O.C. laws, for appellation d’origine contrôlée, which protect quality at the top, are simultaneously responsible for the demise of the low end. In other words, the law that insures the meaning of St.-Julien by dictating what the wine is made of and how it is labeled can stifle the producer of ordinary Bordeaux, who might want to legally blend some syrah into the cabernet sauvignon, or call the wine by a cute, memorable brand name—not Yellow Tail, but maybe Red Head. But while a producer in the Languedoc might wish he could pull out all his grenache and replace it with syrah, a Burgundy producer like Mr. Pitiot would be appalled at the idea of somebody wasting precious pinot noir territory by replacing it with merlot.

It may be that both ends of the French wine industry can only work at cross purposes, with the Old World tradition of exalting specific place names struggling against the New World merchandising power of the brand name. For France to try to accommodate the low end by compromising the standards that have insured its high-end dominance might in the end be catastrophic for the whole industry.

“Europeans should realize they can’t play that New World game,” said Neal Rosenthal, an American wine importer who is devoted to the concept of terroir. “They’re better off protecting what they have and making sure people better understand the reasons behind it.”

Not that the standards can’t be beneficially modified. In a recent column in Decanter, a British consumer magazine, Michel Bettane, the French wine critic, suggested that St.-Émilion would be a fine place to plant chardonnay, which is currently not permitted under A.O.C. rules. Maybe so. And as in any bureaucracy, a stultifying rigidity often makes rational decision making difficult. But on the whole, the A.O.C. rules do far more to protect greatness than to prevent it.

While a further decline on the bottom end of the industry will have a tremendous social and human cost in France, it won’t undermine the greatness of French wines. It’s possible to imagine that France will be joined at the top by countries like Italy and Spain, which produce distinguished, singular wines like Barolo and Rioja, and are working hard to improve the quality in distinctive regions that have long been ignored.

It’s harder to imagine New World countries like the United States and Australia reaching the same pinnacle. Their leading wines, whether made of cabernet, chardonnay, shiraz or pinot noir, will always be measured against the French, and regardless of the blind tasting here or there, few people really take seriously the notion that the New World wines will surpass the French reference points on a large scale. What’s more important about New World wines is how they have improved their quality on the low-to-middle ranks, to the point where today it is possible to say that very few bad wines are produced.

No, France will always set a standard, barring some sort of colossal, selfdestructive move, like gutting its appellation rules. Should that happen, Americans and the rest of the world would then have great cause to jeer.

July 2006

The Paler Shade of Bordeaux

By ERIC ASIMOV

If you prefer a manual transmission, a vacuum tube amplifier or a phone that is just a phone and not a media center, then you understand how it feels to be a fan of good dry white Bordeaux. It’s not at all easy to find what you want.

Almost any fine restaurant will offer a wine list with enough white Burgundies and chardonnays to float an aircraft carrier. But white Bordeaux? It has an archaic ring to it, reminiscent of the days of the British Empire, when the Bordeaux region seemed like one more of the king’s dominions. Back then, fine wines from Graves, historically the most prestigious region for dry white Bordeaux, preceded the claret as surely as the fish course came before the mutton.

Red wine might have always dominated perceptions about Bordeaux, but white Bordeaux was once much more of a presence. A century ago more white grapes than red grapes were planted in Bordeaux, producing wines that included the sweet whites of Sauternes and Barsac as well as the ocean of dry to semidry vin ordinaire that was usually labeled Bordeaux blanc, Entre-Deux-Mers or Graves. Much of it was dreadful stuff, and after World War II growers began shifting to red. Clive Coates, an authority on French wine, estimates that the amount of red Bordeaux produced went from about a third of the harvest in the mid-20th century to more than 85 percent by the end.

Nowadays, white Burgundies outnumber white Bordeaux by roughly 30 to 1 at Cru, which has one of the finest wine lists in New York City. The proportion is slightly lower at Veritas, another wine-oriented restaurant. On lesser lists, you’ll find scarcely any Bordeaux in the white section, which is full of wines from Burgundy, the Loire and California, along with Alsace, Germany, New Zealand and Austria. Even allowing that the producers of fine white Burgundy vastly outnumber the producers of fine white Bordeaux, there’s no denying the fact that Bordeaux is an afterthought for lovers of white wine.

“It is one of my regrets that white Graves in stately maturity is almost unknown today,” Hugh Johnson, the British wine writer, recently rued.

He might mourn as well the appellation Graves, the area south of the city of Bordeaux, which suffers from greatly diminished status. In 1987 the Graves region, the only one of Bordeaux’s top appellations where most leading producers make both white and red wines, was cut in two. The northern end, encompassing the Bordeaux suburbs where many historic Graves vineyards like Haut-Brion and La Mission Haut-Brion are situated, was redesignated Pessac-Léognan, and now Bordeaux’s best whites bear that appellation, although they can still be spoken of as Graves and bear the name Graves on the label as well. Bottles simply labeled Graves tend to be a lower order of wine.

Even when Graves was simply Graves, great white Bordeaux was always rare, yet whites from producers like Haut-Brion, Laville-Haut-Brion and Domaine de Chevalier make indelible impressions. These whites, made of varying blends of the sémillon and sauvignon blanc grapes, can evolve and improve for several decades.

I recently had a 20-year-old Laville-Haut-Brion, the white sibling of La Mission Haut-Brion, that was light-bodied yet dazzling in its intensity, with almost extravagant flavors of anise, buttered hazelnuts, coconut and beeswax. Its former rival, Haut-Brion Blanc (Haut-Brion and La Mission are now owned by Domaine Clarence Dillon), is perhaps a little more finely etched and elegant, yet cut from a similar cloth. And then there is Domaine de Chevalier, a different sort of wine yet profoundly compelling as well, with a rich, almost viscous texture, tightly coiled with great complexity and subtlety, too.

If you can find them in retail shops, Domaine de Chevalier runs about $50 to $60 a bottle, Laville $80 to $100 or so, while Haut-Brion blanc, which is much more scarce, can cost three times as much. Still, it’s much less than white Burgundy of comparable quality.

But you don’t have to spend that much to get a taste of what good white Bordeaux can offer. Producers like Château Carbonnieux, Château de Fieuzal, Château Haut-Nouchet and Château Smith Haut Lafitte make fine, less expensive whites that, if they don’t have the depth of the top echelon, still give a sense of its texture and intensity. Outside Pessac-Léognan, very good Graves whites come from Château du Seuil and Clos Floridène. Even a few chateaus in the Médoc, like Margaux and Talbot, make good white wines, though they lack the grace of the best Graves whites.

What accounts for the absence of white Bordeaux from the American wine consciousness today? Partly, it’s because the wine industry reared a nation of chardonnay drinkers who find it easy to transfer their allegiance to white Burgundy once they understand that it, too, is made from chardonnay. While it is true that Americans, and the world, have grown quite fond of sauvignon blanc, it is a different sort of sauvignon blanc than is produced, for the most part, in Bordeaux.

The sauvignon blanc from the Loire and New Zealand, and, increasingly now, from California and South Africa, is fresh, racy and lip-smacking, vinified in steel tanks and made to be drunk young.

You can find producers that aspire to make this sort of sauvignon blanc in the Entre-Deux-Mers region, that swath of flat vineyard area between the Garonne and the Dordogne Rivers that is the source of so much of Bordeaux’s inexpensive white wine. But what stamps an identity on the best Bordeaux whites is the inclusion in the blend of sémillon, a grape that is little understood outside of Bordeaux, where it is also the crucial component in Sauternes and Barsac, and Australia, where it has always had a following. Sémillon adds richness to the texture and a honeyed, nutlike note that is sometimes described as lanolin.

In most top white Bordeaux, sémillon makes up 30 percent to 70 percent of the blend. Along with sauvignon blanc, which must be at least 25 percent of the blend, a tiny bit of muscadelle and sauvignon gris may be included, too. Of all the top Graves whites, Smith Haut Lafitte uses the smallest amount of sémillon, about 5 percent, and it’s easy to sense the difference. Despite the wine’s aromatic complexity, it lacks the textural presence that comes from sémillon.

The other crucial component of white Bordeaux is fermentation and aging in oak barrels. This, too, contributes a sense of controlled voluptuousness to the wine, though it makes it necessary to wait a few years—or a decade, perhaps, in the case of Domaine de Chevalier—for the wines to become accessible.

Winemakers around the world have followed Burgundy’s lead with chardonnay and Sancerre’s with sauvignon blanc, but very few have sought to make a fine Bordeaux-style white. In the United States I can think of only Clos du Val in Napa Valley, which makes Ariadne, an excellent barrel-aged white of 70 percent sémillon and 30 percent sauvignon blanc with fine mineral flavors and the potential to age. It’s fitting, since Bernard Portal, the longtime winemaker at Clos du Val, is from Bordeaux.

Meanwhile, the rest of us—Luddites of the wine world who still prize those great whites of the Graves—will cling to the hope that fashion will once more swing our way.

March 2006

The Soulful Side of Bordeaux

By ERIC ASIMOV

Compared with the grand chateaus of the Médoc, the tiny Domaine du Jaugaret may seem irrelevant. The critics don’t score its wines, it’s barely mentioned in guides, it doesn’t play in the futures game. The winemaking facility is no more than a series of stone sheds with floors of dirt and gravel and walls covered in a mushroomlike mold. Calling it rustic would be putting it kindly.

Yet for me, the importance of a place like Domaine du Jaugaret in St.-Julien cannot be overstated. In globalized, commercial Châteaux Bordeaux, a world of brand-name products sold like luxury goods, where too many wines seem polished and lustrous yet lacking in character, Jaugaret brims with soul. Its proprietor, Jean-François Fillastre, epitomizes the French vigneron, one who tends the vines and makes the wines.

Vignerons like Mr. Fillastre make up the backbone of wine regions all over France, from Burgundy to Languedoc to the Loire, embodying the essential truth that wine is both agriculture and culture, a centuries-old expression of French character. (Indeed, Jaugaret has been in Mr. Fillastre’s family for more than 350 years.) But in the famous terroirs of the Médoc like St.-Julien, Margaux, Pauillac and Sauternes, such vignerons are the rare exception.

You can still find a few, like Bruno and Pascaline Rey of Moulin de Tricot in Margaux or Francis Daney of Cru d’Arche-Pugneau in Sauternes. They are slightly more common in areas of lesser status, like Canon-Fronsac, where Bénédicte and Grégoire Hubau operate Château Moulin Pey-Labrie, or in Bordeaux Supérieur, where Pascal and Chrystel Collotte make delicious straightforward claret and an excellent rosé at Château Jean Faux.

In the wines of vignerons like these, and none more so than Mr. Fillastre’s, you can taste another side of Bordeaux, one grounded in the fields and the cellars, in cultural tradition rather than in commerce. Yet because of the way the Bordeaux business works, the odds are stacked squarely against small family estates like Jaugaret, which work outside the established mode of commerce.

“I use the methods of my father, natural, no manipulation, no chemicals,” Mr. Fillastre said, as we stood in a room where three vintages sat aging in old oak barrels, illuminated by lamps wreathed in cobwebs. Using a pipette made of glass that he blew himself, he pulled samples from the barrels, wines that were fresh, alive and aromatic.

“I’m not making wines for consumers,” said Mr. Fillastre, who, at 67, still shows in his shoulders and forearms a hint of the decathlete he was in his youth. “I’m making wines for my own pleasure.”

These words might well have been spoken elsewhere by other idiosyncratic winemakers who have gone their own way, like Gianfranco Soldera of Brunello di Montalcino, Bartolo Mascarello of Barolo, Anselme Selosse of Champagneor Henri Bonneau of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. While they are celebrated for their very personal expressions, Mr. Fillastre is lost within a region that many younger American wine lovers perceive as stodgy, dull and lacking authenticity.

If only they could try a bottle of Jaugaret, even from an unacclaimed vintage like 2002, they might feel very different. The 2002 Jaugaret St.-Julien is classically structured yet graceful and elegant, with gorgeous aromas of violets and minerals. These wines have haunted me since I first drank them a little more than two years ago. They recall an era when, as Jaugaret’s American importer, Neal Rosenthal, has said, the Bordelais were modest and the wines were grand.

Even as many estates in the Médoc have planted more merlot to make softer, fruitier and easier wines for drinking young, Jaugaret’s blend is dominated by cabernet sauvignon, which gives the wine structure and freshness but demands aging before it will show at its best. Mr. Fillastre keeps his wines in barrels for 30 months, far longer than most, and he primarily uses older barrels, which won’t add oaky flavors but allow subtle aeration over time.

“I don’t demand of the wine, it demands of me,” he said, dismissing the culture of enologists and consultants who employ the latest in technology to achieve the wines they desire.

What makes the estate so compelling does not end with what’s in the glass. In a land of vast scale and tremendous output, where a great chateau like Mouton-Rothschild farms 280 acres of vines and produces maybe 170,000 bottles of its top wine each year, Jaugaret is a mere 3.1 acres, divided into a half-dozen parcels, making no more than 6,000 bottles of St.-Julien a year.

Setting it further apart, Jaugaret operates outside the négociant structure that dominates Bordeaux commerce. In almost every other region, producers sell their wines directly to importers, who then market the wines in their home countries. Bordeaux still depends on middlemen, négociants, who buy wine from the chateaus and market it worldwide. They sell much of the top Bordeaux as futures, to which importers must commit money as far as two years in advance of delivery.

The system works great for the big chateaus, and for the négociants. But the large upfront expense means that much of the Bordeaux in the United States has been imported by big, wealthy companies.

Small, groundbreaking importers like Mr. Rosenthal, Kermit Lynch and Louis/Dressner Selections don’t have access to the classified growths or, with a few exceptions like Jaugaret, to producers in the most famous terroirs. They confine themselves to a few small estates in satellite appellations of Bordeaux that meet their quality standards and will deal directly with importers.

Instead, they have focused on building intense followings for wines from Burgundy, the Rhône, the Loire Valley and other, more obscure areas. An entire generation of Americans has learned about Old World wines by examining the importer’s label, looking for names they trust enough to take chances on obscure producers. For the most part, Bordeaux has been omitted from this educational process.

This is one reason that the region, particularly among younger drinkers, has become something of an afterthought. Is this a crisis for Bordeaux? Hardly, at least not for its upper echelon. A worldwide audience seems ever-ready to pay whatever rates are required to accumulate bottles.

And to be fair, many people buy Bordeaux because they love it. But many wine fanatics, especially those of a contrarian bent, have turned on Bordeaux as representing all the pomp and pretension they dislike in the wine world.

Sadly, they would miss the wines of Bruno and Pascaline Rey, the fourth generation of their family to operate Moulin de Tricot, which has about nine acres in Margaux and four in Haut-Médoc. Their 2009 Margaux, still in barrels, is rich, pure and light in texture. The 2005 is beautifully perfumed and intense with fresh acidity, while the 2005 Haut-Médoc has great purity but is a bit rougher, befitting the different terroir.

They do most of the work themselves. “It’s a very hard life, working seven days a week with no vacations,” Mr. Rey said.

What’s the motivation? “Once you start to care about the vines, you don’t think about doing anything else,” he said. “It’s not feasible for a small vigneron not to have passion.”

The Reys have two children, 25 and 21, but they don’t want to push them into the business. The lack of a plan for secession threatens vignerons, particularly in top terroirs like Margaux.

“Grand chateaus are looking for estates to snap up, for people who have nobody to leave it to,” Mr. Rey said. “In 10 or 15 years there may not be any more small producers in the Médoc.”

The sweet wines of Sauternes are no longer fashionable, short of the big names like Château d’Yquem, but to taste the Sauternes of Cru D’Arche-Pugneau is exhilarating. A 2001 is honeyed by botrytis and is complex, balanced and perfectly refreshing rather than cloying.

The 2009, still in barrels, is lovely, delicate and alive. Mr. Daney, the vigneron, is the third generation of his family to run the estate. He is a former rugby player, and with his old comrades still gathers to sing folk songs.

Standing behind his small winery, he looks across fields of vines and points at neighboring chateaus.

“That one is owned by LVMH, that one by AXA, that one by Rothschild, that one by Crédit Agricole and that one by Credit Suisse,” he said. “Corporations seek to buy more and more. They have all the money.”

That’s not so much the issue in the area southeast of Libourne, the so-called Right Bank, where the wines are labeled Bordeaux or Bordeaux Supérieur. Many vignerons in these areas of lesser status are struggling, and corporations are not so interested in buying, which leaves openings for couples like Pascal and Chrystel Collotte, who bought and restored the chateau after success in the barrelmaking business.

Now, at Jean Faux, the Collottes live what seems to be a fantasy of the wine-making life. They fill closets with preserved fruits and vegetables, and raise pigs to make hams, sausages and charcuterie, served with their own good red wine and rosé. Mr. Collotte farms his 15 acres, largely of merlot, organically. Asked why, he looked incredulous and said, “Because I drink my wine.”

His commitment drew the attention of Daniel Johnnes, the wine director for Daniel Boulud’s restaurants and an importer known for educating Americans about the joys of Burgundy. Now, he has decided to add a collection of Bordeaux estates to his import portfolio. He wants to work directly with vignerons, which has put him in conflict with the négociant culture.

“All this talk in Bordeaux of classified growths and the futures market and the commerce of wine, that’s not what wine’s all about,” he said. “But I believed there were winemakers who were connected to the traditions and the culture.”

Eventually, he put together what he calls “honest wines” from about a dozen producers like Mr. Collotte, who he believes represents the vigneron culture of Bordeaux. Most will sell for $15 to $30 a bottle beginning this fall.

These are good wines, but it’s safe to say few have the potential of offering the thrills of a Domaine du Jaugaret, which sells for $60 to $100 a bottle. That’s a lot of money, but little compared with Jaugaret’s illustrious neighbors, and perhaps a pittance given all that Jaugaret represents, and all that may one day be lost.

Mr. Fillastre is a bachelor with no children. His younger brother, Pierre, has two daughters, but Mr. Fillastre said they are not inclined to be vignerons. The future is a concern.

“If I’m sick, I could lose everything,” he said. “I worry about that.”

When I mentioned my visit to people in the Bordeaux establishment, not one had ever heard of Domaine du Jaugaret. Mr. Fillastre’s neighbors, though, are fiercely protective. One woman, who had cross-examined me about my intentions when I arrived, accosted me again as I left.

“It’s a domaine, not a chateau,” she said, making sure I got it right. “Very few people do as he does. He’s extraordinary.”

Think Bordeaux Is Stodgy? These 10 Could Change That.

While many estates in Bordeaux are huge operations with enormous staffs, there are also small, family-run places like these 10, all of which I’ve found particularly enjoyable.

CRU D’ARCHE-PUGNEAU Exquisite Sauternes, $50 to $75. (Rosenthal Wine Merchant, New York)

CHÂTEAU ANEY Classically shaped Haut-Médoc, $25. (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchants, Berkeley, Calif.)

CHÂTEAU BEAUSÉJOUR Fruity, earthy Montagne-St.-Émilion, $15 to $30. (Daniel Johnnes Selections/Michael Skurnik Wines, Syosset, N.Y.)

CHÂTEAU DE BELLEVUE Plush, mineral-laden Lussac-St.-Émilion, $25. (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchants)

DOMAINE DU JAUGARET Profound, old-school St.-Julien, $55 to $100. (Rosenthal Wine Merchant)

CHÂTEAU JEAN FAUX Gulpable red and rosé Bordeaux Supérieur, $15 to $30. (Daniel Johnnes Selections/Michael Skurnik Wines)

CHÂTEAU LANESSAN Classic bistro Haut-Médoc, $20. (Fruit of the Vines, Long Island City, N.Y.)

CHÂTEAU MOULIN DE TRICOT Pleasingly raspy Haut-Médoc; perfumed, intense yet graceful Margaux, $30 to $45. (Rosenthal Wine Merchant)

CHÂTEAU MOULIN PEY-LABRIE Plush, earthy merlot from Canon-Fronsac, $25. (Louis/Dressner Selections, New York)

CHÂTEAU LA PEYRE Fresh, minerally St.-Éstèphe, $40. (Rosenthal Wine Merchants)

August 2010

The 1855 Ratings, Etched in Stone (Almost)

By FRANK J. PRIAL

The 1855 classification of the wines of Bordeaux is probably the most important wine list ever written. Yet, few people, even many knowledgeable wine drinkers, know why it is important or even why it was made in the first place.

In 1851, Britain mounted a spectacular exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London to show off its industrial might. Not to be outdone, the French decided that they, too, would show the world what they could do.

In March 1853, barely three months into France’s Second Empire, a great Universal Exposition was decreed. To be held in Paris two years hence, it would celebrate a return to French grandeur, the wonders of modern industry and, not least, the glorious—if faintly illegitimate—apotheosis of Louis Napoleon, citizen, into Napoleon III, Emperor of France.

It was a time not unlike our own. Money was plentiful, peace reigned and thousands of workmen, driven by Baron Haussmann, the Robert Moses of his day, were carving Paris into an urban jewel.

With chefs as popular as courtesans and the Rothschilds eyeing wine chateaus in Bordeaux, it was decided early on that food and drink would play important roles in the 1855 exposition. The Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce was given the task of choosing the wines and seeing that they got to Paris and were displayed properly.

The chamber invested licensed wine brokers in Bordeaux with the task of selecting and classifying the wines to be shown in Paris. They selected 61, divided into five categories called growths.

The brokers, known as courtiers, were (and still are) go-betweens, working for both the wine producers and the wine merchants, or shippers. Truly expert tasters, the brokers advise the merchants what to buy and how much to pay. For the chateau owners, the brokers find merchants who will buy their wines. Many 19th-century brokers grew wealthy on their commissions, becoming chateau owners and shippers themselves.

In seeking wines for the show in Paris, the brokers did some blind tasting, but, for the most part, classifying the wines had little to do with tasting skills and almost everything to do with past prices. Some wines—many, in fact—had over the years consistently fetched higher prices than others. Thus, chateau owners, by plotting the sales of their wines and others through five or 10 vintages, could easily see which wines were consistently the best or, at least, had been judged best by the market. The 61 that had done the best over the years made it to the honors list.

The emphasis on price helps to explain why no wines from the St.-ÉmilionPomerol region ever made the list. Good as they were (and are), they never commanded the high prices Médoc and Graves did.

Of course, classifications were nothing new, even in the 19th century. One of the earliest classifications had been made more than two centuries earlier, in October 1647. It rated not wines but wine-producing communities within the Bordeaux region. The results showed that the best wines—the wines that fetched the highest prices—were not that different from what they were in 1855 or, for that matter, what they still are in 1998.

The highest ratings went to the Graves and the Médoc for the reds, and to Sauternes, Barsac, Preignac and Langon for whites. A survey done in 1745 showed Château Margaux, Lafite and Haut-Brion selling for up to 1,800 francs a ton, while chateaus like Gruaud Larose and Beychevelle brought only 400 to 600 francs.

Four decades later, in 1787, Thomas Jefferson, the Ambassador to France, made his own classification, selecting Latour, Haut-Brion, Lafite and Margaux his favorite Bordeaux. Today, as they were in Jefferson’s time, these four, plus Mouton-Rothschild, are still the top five, or so-called first growths.

In the 19th century, before the classification was generally accepted, owners often lobbied the local agricultural authorities for a boost into a higher category. But the only elevation of a wine since the creation of the 1855 classification happened in this century, due to Baron Philippe de Rothschild’s long campaign to have Mouton-Rothschild moved up from a second growth to a first growth. In 1973, after 20 years of lobbying legislators, he was successful. Baron Philippe celebrated by putting a Picasso from his collection on the new label.

Why has the 1855 list never been modified? No one knows. It certainly needs it now: chateau owners die, managers move on, vineyards are neglected. In spite of the amazing consistency of many of the Bordeaux wineries over the decades—even centuries—ratings need to be updated regularly.

The engaging history of the 1855 classification is presented in lively form in a new book, 1855: A History of the Bordeaux Classification, by Dewey Markham Jr., published by John Wiley & Sons. Working in the musty libraries of Bordeaux for almost four years, Mr. Markham has unearthed a storehouse of wine history and folklore, including the saga of Monplaisir Goudal.

Mr. Goudal was the manager of Lafite at the time of the 1855 classification, and he worked unendingly to enhance the chateau’s reputation—and his own. To give the 1846 Lafite, one of the wines exhibited at the fair, a bit of age, Mr. Goudal had 50 bottles of the wine sent around the world to, as Mr. Markham said, “subject the wine to the accelerated aging that such sea voyages provoked.” Accelerated aging? Clearly, the man had his own classification.

April 1998

Bordeaux Family Values

By FRANK J. PRIAL

One day in 1992, Lucien Lurton, then the owner of Château Brane-Cantenac, a major estate in the village of Margaux, France, called together his 10 children. Over the previous 40 years, Lurton had become one of the largest and wealthiest landowners in Bordeaux, and now, he told his family, he was going to divide his holdings—11 wine chateaus and their vineyards—among them.

A dramatic gesture, yes, but not for the Lurtons. Little known outside the French wine community, they are perhaps Bordeaux’s last great dynasty. With some 3,000 acres in the region, they are collectively Bordeaux’s largest holder of wine-producing land. They own more than 20 chateaus and manage several of the world’s most famous properties. They also claim thousands of acres of vineyards in Latin America and the South of France. Lucien, 79, and his brother André, 81, are the family’s patriarchs. The majority of Lucien’s estates, now in the hands of his children, are in the Médoc, north of the city of Bordeaux; André’s holdings, about as large, lie mostly south of the city, in the Graves region and in the little-known Entre-Deux-Mers, where the family’s ascendancy began.

Lucien, who still lives at Brane-Cantenac, is quiet, religious and conservative. “History stopped for Lucien in 1789,” said a neighboring chateau owner. André—vigorous, assertive, egotistical—resembles Martin Sheen’s Jed Bartlet on the early episodes of The West Wing.

If Lucien represents old France, conservative and discreet, André embodies a different paradigm: outgoing, charming, often despotic. He bounds up stairs, opens doors for others and, most un-French, says, “Call me André.”

“André defines himself as a peasant,” Jean-François Werner, a journalist, wrote in the wine magazine L’amateur de Bordeaux. “He loves to count the hours he spent driving a tractor more than he loves to count the chateaus he owns.”

The brothers do not get along—more exasperation than enmity. It’s a subject they love to change. “We don’t see much of one another,” Lucien told me, smiling. “We work better that way.” And then he began to show me his wine-book collection (André collects military vehicles). Mention Lucien to André, and the response is likely to be a grimace and a shrug that says, “What can you do with him?” It’s a schism that has done wonders for the family’s holdings and has poised them for even greater success when Bordeaux rebounds from its present downturn.

The Lurtons’ founding father was, in fact, not a Lurton. Léonce Récapet was a prosperous distiller and vineyard owner in Branne, a village in the EntreDeux-Mers, where he was born in 1858. In 1922, Récapet ventured north into the Médoc, Bordeaux’s gold coast, where he bought a major share of the legendary Château Margaux, one of Bordeaux’s famous first growths (the best vineyards), as well as Château Brane-Cantenac. He later traded the Margaux shares for Château Clos Fourtet in St.-Émilion. Léonce’s daughter Denise married François Lurton, whose ancestors had been recruited to the area by the Catholic Church to help offset what was said to be a serious shortage of the faithful in the Bordeaux region. “They were farmers and skilled workers,” Denis Lurton, one of Lucien’s sons, said of his ancestors. “And they were hard workers long before they grew grapes and made wine.” When Récapet died in 1943, he left his properties to François Lurton (Denise had died nine years earlier) and their four children: André and Lucien, along with another son, Dominique, and a daughter, Simone. Lucien inherited Brane-Cantenac and André, Château Bonnet, the family seat at Grézillac, in the Entre-Deux-Mers. Simone inherited vineyards, and Dominique took the Chateaux Martouret and Reynier, also in the Entre-Deux-Mers.

Lucien and André, working together at first and later separately, began to acquire chateaus at a time when the Bordeaux wine trade was in a deep slump. The Depression years had been catastrophic for the vintners, and the post–World War II years offered little redress. Social and political problems, along with the weather, combined to bring Bordeaux to the brink of ruin. A killer frost in 1956 devastated vineyards throughout the region. Then a succession of miserable vintages in the 1960s drove hundreds of growers and winemakers from the land. Chateaus were shuttered or abandoned, and vineyards were left to rot. “The experts said Bordeaux might never recover,” André told me recently, “but we proved them wrong a hundred times over.”

Thanks to their grandfather’s foresight and their own acumen, Lucien and André profited from those lean years. They moved in, as one Bordeaux chronicler wrote in the newspaper Sud Ouest, “with a little money, large bank loans and a lot of hard work.” They were risk takers. Lucien bought Château Durfort-Vivens in 1962, when the Médoc most resembled a wasteland. He bought Château Climens in Barsac in 1971, just after the market for sweet wines had collapsed. André bought one rundown property after another, mostly in the Graves, which had been virtually forsaken as a wine-producing region. One of them, Château La Louvière, is the gem in his diadem. He picked it up in 1965, when, he told me, “there was no roof and four inches of water in the hard dirt basement—it was love at first sight.” Nine years later, he bought the dilapidated 14th-century Château de Rochemorin, and he has spent the last 30 years restoring its vineyards. The chateau, now a ruin, still waits for its makeover. First the vineyard, then the history.

When the 1956 frost wiped out the vineyards at Château Bonnet, André’s original inheritance, he leased fields and, for 10 years, raised corn and alfalfa to recover. “When I could, I bought land and raised grapes,” he said. “In Bordeaux, people use money to grow grapes. I grew grapes to make money.” In due time, Bonnet’s vineyards came back and helped underwrite André’s relentless expansion throughout Bordeaux.

In 2005, Bordeaux is in trouble once again. But it’s not the 1960s revisited. The top chateaus—perhaps I should say the best-marketed chateaus—are doing extremely well, their wines selling from Moscow to Las Vegas at prices unimaginable 40 years ago. It’s the thousands of working-class growers and winemakers who annually produce millions of gallons of cheap Bordeaux who are in trouble. Wine consumption in France has dropped more than 50 percent since the ’60s, while overseas markets, especially the United Kingdom, have been captured by cheaper (and often better) wine from Australia, Spain, Latin America and even the United States.

Twenty years ago, the Lurtons would have been caught up in the present difficulties. Then, they produced large quantities of mostly commercial wine. Now, at every property they own or manage, they work to produce wines that can compete with Bordeaux’s best. At chateaus like Brane-Cantenac, La Louvière, Rochemorin, Bouscaut and Durfort-Vivens, they already do.

For Lucien, turning over his estates to his children struck him as routine. Inheritance, with its complications, is the ghost at every Bordeaux dinner table. Family battles over even small plots of vines can go on for generations, while, these days, newly rich outsiders, eager to buy their way into the chateau aristocracy, stand ready to snap up old properties whose inheritors cannot agree how to run them.

Which is where the Lurtons stand apart. The brothers long ago agreed not to agree—and developed two empires separately. “I had to go my own way,” Lucien said. “It’s worked out reasonably well.”

Unlike his brother, André has kept his holdings intact. “André is afraid to die,” said a chateau owner who insisted on anonymity because he is a competitor. “He clings to his properties. Giving one away would be to acknowledge that he might actually be running out of time.” André has seven children: five daughters who are shareholders in his estates, and two sons (also shareholders) who are hardly waiting around for him to pass on. With their father’s blessing, Jacques and François Lurton have gone global. In 1988 they founded Jacques & François Lurton, S.A., to acquire vineyards outside Bordeaux. Today they produce wine in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Spain and the South of France.

But perhaps the most visible Lurton is Dominique’s son, Pierre. Starting at 24, he spent 11 years running Château Clos Fourtet, in St.-Émilion, for his fractious uncles. In the early ’90s, he moved to Château Cheval Blanc, St.-Émilion’s most prestigious wine estate, as assistant manager. In 1998, when Bernard Arnault, the billionaire head of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, bought Cheval Blanc with the investor Albert Frère, he made Pierre general manager. In 1999, Arnault gained the majority stake in Château d’Yquem, the famous Sauternes estate, from the Lur Saluces family, which had owned it since 1785. Last year, he installed Pierre as chief executive.

Did Arnault give him specific instructions on running two of the most famous wine properties in the world? “He said: ‘Wine is not my field. Do your best,’” Pierre told me.

Like all Lurtons, Pierre is proud of the family name. When he started at Cheval Blanc, the owners at the time, the Fourcaud-Laussac family, expressed some concern about associating the famous name of Cheval Blanc with the Lurtons, who were—and in some quarters still are—considered upstarts. Could he change his name, for business purposes? Perhaps use his mother’s name?

“If you wish,” he told them. “You understand, of course, that my mother’s name is Lafite.”

November 2005

Stealing From Thieves

By FRANK J. PRIAL

Tourists driving through wine country invariably are overcome by an urge to stop the car, get out and pluck a few grapes.

It’s difficult to do in California because most vineyards are fenced in. So are most of the vineyards in Burgundy. But in Bordeaux, in the Médoc, the vines grow right down to the edge of the roadway and there are almost never any fences.

A century ago, there were very few tourists in the Médoc; in fact, there were none. But there were grape thieves, who came in the night in the weeks just before harvest. Unintentionally, those thieves contributed to one of the most important scientific advances in the history of viticulture.

The last half of the 19th century was a troubled time for European winegrowers. Three times in the course of about 30 years they were beset with devastating epidemics of disease and insect damage. The first was oidium, a mushroomlike growth that attacks young vine wood, leaves and grapes. Discovered in England in 1845 on plants that had been shipped from the tropics, it first appeared in Bordeaux in 1851. Sulfur was found to be the best treatment, but not until half a dozen vintages were decimated by it.

Phylloxera was found in the Rhône vineyards in the early 1860s. By 1882, some 80 percent of all the vineyards of the Gironde area had been affected. An aphid native to the eastern United States, phylloxera arrived in Europe on American vines that had been imported for experiments.

The French growers had just begun to control it by grafting their vines on the phylloxera-resistant American roots—a practice they still follow—when the third plague struck: mildew. Mildew first appeared in the southwest of France in the 1870s. By the end of the decade, it had become almost as serious a problem as phylloxera. It affects the leaves of the vine only but causes an imbalance in the plant that in turn affects the quality of the grapes and, ultimately, the wine. Many compounds to combat the problem were tried without success.

One day in late October 1882, Pierre Millardet, a professor of botany at the University of Bordeaux, was driving his carriage along the road in St.-Julien, not far from Château Ducru-Beaucaillou. Later, he wrote: “I was not a little surprised to observe that all along the edge of the road which I was following, the vines all still possessed their leaves, whereas everywhere else in the vineyard they had long since fallen. That was the year of the mildew outbreak and my first thought was that this persistence of the leaves on the roadside was due to some treatment or other. On examination I saw that they were covered almost entirely by a thin layer of a powdery blue substance.”

When he arrived at Ducru-Beaucaillou, then known simply as Beaucaillou, he asked the régisseur, or manager, Ernest David, about the blue substance. “He told me,” Millardet wrote, “that it was the custom in St.-Julien to cover the vine leaves with ‘verdigris’ along the roadside at the time when the grapes were turning purple in order to keep grape thieves away, for these people, seeing the leaves covered with coppery spots, would not dare to taste nor steal the fruit underneath.”

In fact, it was not the first time Professor Millardet had come across this sort of empirical evidence that copper was an enemy of plant disease. Earlier, he had noticed that spores of the mildew fungus would not germinate in water from his well. When he had his well water analyzed by the university’s chemistry department, he found it contained about 5 milligrams of copper per liter. Investigating, he discovered that the water was pulled from his well by an old copper pump.

Millardet and David began experimenting with copper sulfate at Château Beaucaillou and at Château Dauzac, both owned by the famous Bordeaux shipper Nathaniel Johnston and both managed by David. Tests were made in 1883 and 1884. In April 1885, Millardet published the results in the Agricultural and Horticultural Journal of the Gironde. Almost immediately, the other proprietors of the Médoc began treatments with what became known as bouilli bordelaise, the “Bordeaux mixture.” In October 1885, Millardet and David invited the public to witness the benefits of their experiments on the vineyards at Dauzac and Beaucaillou. The crisis was over, or so everyone thought. For two decades, mildew presented no problems. Then, in 1910 and again in 1915, it struck again. It turned out that the growers had simply been too sparing in their application of copper sulfate. They were applying it by hand, sending workers into the vineyards with pails and whisk brooms. The treatment was applied three or four times a year. Today, with mildew still a problem, the copper sulfate solution may be applied 30 times in a particularly wet summer, such as 1977, but it will be done by tractors and, sometimes, helicopters.

While it really didn’t take too many years to figure out how to use the solution to save the vines, no one has yet discovered who first used the mixture to fend off thieves. It may have been a certain Mr. Lacassagne, the régisseur at Château St. Pierre, also in St.-Julien. He was, in fact, given credit by Ernest David for having first made an effective Bordeaux mixture in the Médoc. According to historians, some chateaus did set up temporary fences when the grapes became ripe and at least one, Château Latour, paid two workmen armed with shotguns to guard the grapes for two weeks before and during the harvest. And the old-time cellar master at Château Beychevelle, who knew the Lacassagne family, said a few years ago that he had always heard that the Bordeaux mixture was used by people too lazy to put up a fence or too poor to hire armed guards.

March 1987

Bordeaux Loses Prestige
Among Younger Wine Lovers

By ERIC ASIMOV

The hyperbole over 2009 Bordeaux began building even before the harvest last fall. Ripples of praise grew into waves this spring as critics and the trade descended on Bordeaux for the annual ritual of tasting the most recent vintage from barrels. Their ecstatic reviews reverberated through Britain, which takes its claret extremely seriously. They rang out in Hong Kong, the leading edge of what Bordeaux hopes will be a huge Asian market.

In the United States, the huzzahs resonated with collectors and wine investors, and with high-end restaurants whose clients don’t mind spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on renowned bottles. These people paid attention when Robert M. Parker Jr., the wine critic whose opinions most influence Bordeaux prices, wrote, “For some Médocs and Graves, 2009 may turn out to be the finest vintage I have tasted in 32 years of covering Bordeaux.”

But for a significant segment of the wine-drinking population in the United States, the raves heard around the world were not enough to elicit a response beyond, perhaps, a yawn. For these people, Bordeaux, once the world’s most hallowed region and the standard-bearer for all fine wines, is now largely irrelevant.

What happened? Plenty of Bordeaux is still consumed in the United States. In 2009, 1.29 million cases of Bordeaux wine were imported, accounting for 0.46 percent of all still wines, domestic and foreign, distributed in the country. While this percentage rises and falls year to year, it is still a far cry from its highs in the mid-1980s. Bordeaux shipments accounted for 1.69 percent of all still wines distributed in the United States in 1985, for example.

While the drop stems from far more competition in the lower-priced market, it also reflects a shift in the demographic of Bordeaux aficionados. For young Americans in particular, Bordeaux has become downright unfashionable.

Not so long ago, young wine-loving Americans were practically weaned on Bordeaux, just as would-be connoisseurs had been for generations. It was the gateway to all that is wonderful about wine. Now that excitement has gone elsewhere, to Burgundy and the Loire, to Italy and Spain. Bordeaux, some young wine enthusiasts say, is stodgy and unattractive. They see it as an expensive wine for wealthy collectors, investors and point-chasers, people who seek critically approved wines for the luxury and status they convey rather than for excitement in a glass.

“The perception of Bordeaux for my generation, it’s very Rolex, very Rolls-Royce,” said Cory Cartwright, 30, who is a partner in Selection Massale, a new company in San Jose, Calif., that imports natural and traditional wines made by small producers, and who writes the Saignée wine blog. “I don’t know many people who like or drink Bordeaux.”

But the lack of interest is not just a question of perception. Nor is it solely a reflection of the weak economy, which drove down sales of most higher-priced wines in the last two years.

The more troubling sign for Bordeaux is that it has largely lost the loyalty of people like sommeliers and neighborhood wine shop proprietors, who can help build an audience for wines. The high-end, big-name wines will always have a market, but the less expensive, less familiar names, the natural points of embarkation for young wine explorers, may not fare as well without the support of those crucial intermediaries.

“I don’t know any young sommelier who I’ve encountered in the last 15 years who is a Bordeaux hound,” said Paul Grieco, an owner of the restaurant Hearth as well as two innovative wine bars, Terroir and Terroir Tribeca, all in Manhattan. Mr. Grieco has been a mentor for many young sommeliers. He himself learned about fine wine by drinking Bordeaux. Nonetheless, at his wine bars, he serves 50 wines by the glass, and not one is a Bordeaux. His shift has left him with mixed feelings.

“I think, ‘I’m a history guy, how can I not revere Bordeaux?’” he said. “If even one person came in and said, ‘I want a glass of Bordeaux,’ I might think I really have to serve a Bordeaux. But not one person has said that. Not one! That’s pretty sad.”

For many younger sommeliers and wine lovers, the new standard of excellence is Burgundy.

Unlike Bordeaux, where many of the best-known chateaus are run by corporations or wealthy absentee owners, Burgundy is full of estates, including many of the leading ones, that are essentially small businesses. Dealing with Bordeaux often requires working with middle management and marketing specialists. It’s much easier to visit a Burgundian estate and find the one person who has dirt on the boots, wine on the hands and a name on the bottle.

“For people of my generation, 30 to 50, I don’t think we’ve had the same magical Bordeaux moments, not in the same way we’ve connected to Burgundy or even the Rhône,” said Laura Maniec, who runs the wine programs for more than 15 restaurants in the B. R. Guest group.

She still buys a lot of Bordeaux for restaurants like Primehouse, a Manhattan steakhouse, and Blue Water Grill, a Manhattan seafood restaurant that hosts plenty of corporate parties where Bordeaux is nearly obligatory. “But there’s a passion and a spark and a personal connection that are missing,” she said.

For restaurants 30 years ago, having a serious wine list meant offering a lot of Bordeaux. That’s no longer the case, except for steakhouses and very high-end restaurants. Nowadays, people in the wine trade say, Bordeaux is sold largely through retail establishments like Sherry-Lehmann in New York, Zachys in Westchester and K & L Wine Merchants in California.

“Young people are not exposed to Bordeaux in restaurants as much,” said Clyde Beffa Jr., vice president of K & L, one of the country’s leading sellers of Bordeaux. “Sommeliers, they want to find their own little thing, it drives me crazy. They can have five grüner veltliners or rieslings because they’re discovering these things, and they’re not recommending Bordeaux as much. And, it’s the price thing.”

Good Bordeaux might start at $35 to $50 retail, and $85 to $100 in a restaurant, and soar from there—far more than, say, reds from the Loire, Beaujolais or Alto Adige, darlings of the sommeliers and neighborhood wine shops.

Another significant barrier between young wine drinkers and Bordeaux is the absence of a charismatic advocate for the wines. The audience for Mr. Parker and the other leading wine critics tends to be older and more established. Meanwhile, boutique wine importers and distributors like Kermit Lynch, Neal Rosenthal and Louis/Dressner, who have won passionate followings, do very little business in Bordeaux, which has long been the domain of big companies.

For younger startup importers like Mr. Cartwright, the size and complexity of the business is the reason he is not searching for Bordeaux wines to bring in.

“Everything is too commerce-driven,” he said. “You’re never sure who is making the wine. I think for me and people my age, we’re going back to growerproducers—people who are there the whole way—and Bordeaux seems the opposite of that.”

While Bordeaux may have lost much of its mystique and allure, it still has its defenders, even among the sommelier crowd. Belinda Chang, the wine director at the Modern in Midtown Manhattan, acknowledges that Bordeaux has become a brand name, and that it’s often too expensive, but argues that its intrinsic high quality and classic appeal make it irreplaceable.

“I’m a fan and I’m not afraid to say it,” Ms. Chang said. “Who would not be excited to have a glass of Château Pétrus, if you’re not footing the bill?”

Exactly right.

May 2010

Burgundy Learns to Bottle Consistency

By ERIC ASIMOV

Photo by Owen Franken.

The black clouds gathered last week over the Côte d’Or, the slender 30-milelong swath that comprises the great vineyards of Burgundy. And for at least the fifth day in a row they burst forth, drenching the vineyards shortly before the critical period of flowering, when the grape bunches begin to form on the spindly vines.

Rain is the farmer’s blessing, when it comes at the right time and in the right amount. But when the ground is saturated and the air is warm, the resulting moisture and humidity is a curse that can threaten the grapes with mildew and rot.

In past decades such weather might have spelled doom for the year’s vintage. But nowadays it means something else entirely. “It means more work for us,” said Benjamin Leroux, 33, the manager of Comte Armand, one of the best producers in Pommard in the Côte de Beaune, the southern half of the Côte d’Or. “All the things we’re doing in the vineyard right now, we’re insuring the vintage.”

Twenty years ago nobody could have predicted that Burgundy could be trusted to produce reliably good wines in tricky vintages. As captivating as the great wines of Burgundy could be at their heights, too often they revealed their depths—diluted, overly acidic wines that seemed to vary not just vintage to vintage but almost bottle to bottle. The only thing consistent about the region was its inconsistency.

Just last month Robert M. Parker Jr., the wine critic, repeated the old saw when he wrote in his column in Business Week, “Red Burgundy is the ultimate minefield of the wine world—notoriously unreliable, often disappointing, and rarely living up to its illustrious reputation.”

In fact, the quality of Burgundy—red Burgundy in particular—has risen strikingly over the last two decades. From the smallest growers to the biggest houses, the standards of grapegrowing and winemaking have surpassed anybody’s expectations. These days, Burgundy has very few bad vintages, and among good producers, surprisingly few bad wines.

The best producers, like Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and Armand Rousseau, always managed to achieve a high standard, but nowadays the bar has been raised for everybody. And it’s not just the Côte d’Or, the heart of Burgundy, that has shown such improvement. Surrounding areas like the Côte Chalonnaise and the Mâconnais, still part of Burgundy, are producing better wine than ever, at not unreasonable prices. Sure, you can still find bad Burgundy. But really, it’s not hard to find bad wines from any fine wine region.

“It’s not so much an improvement as a blooming,” said Becky Wasserman, an American wine broker who has lived in Burgundy since 1968. “It’s a realization of potential.”

I spent five days in Burgundy last week to get a first-hand look at the reasons for the surge in quality. In traveling the Côte d’Or from Marsannay in the north to Santenay in the south, visiting two dozen producers, tasting hundreds of wines and drinking not quite that many, it was easy to see that this leap upward has been 25 years in the making, an eternity in the Internet world but a split second at the rhythmic agricultural pace of viticulture.

Most striking of all was the number of young producers making superb wines, whether they have taken charge of their family domains or started out new. In Marsannay, perhaps the least-esteemed commune in the Côtes de Nuits, the northern half of the Côte d’Or, Sylvain Pataille, 33, is turning out excellent reds, whites and rosés. In the Hautes-Côtes de Nuits, once a backwater in the hills, David Duband, 37, is producing light, fresh regional wines from his ancestral vineyards, along with a series of more ambitious, elegant reds from grand cru vineyards like Échezeaux and Charmes-Chambertin. Louis-Michel Liger-Belair, 35, in Vosnes-Romanée has reclaimed some of the greatest vineyard property in the north, which his family had leased out for years, and is making wines of purity and depth.

Meanwhile, in Meursault in the south, Arnaud Ente, who took over his father-in-law’s vineyards in the 1990s, is turning out small amounts of whites of focus and clarity that show tremendous minerality. Pierre-Yves Colin-Morey, 36, left his father’s domain, Marc Colin et Fils, and set up shop in Chassagne-Montrachet, where he is making light yet intense, mouthwatering whites.

“Half the superstar domains today didn’t exist 20 years ago,” Clive Coates, author of The Wines of Burgundy (University of California Press, 2008), told me in a recent interview. Few could have envisioned such a level of quality back in the early 1980s, a time when Claude Bourguignon, a French soil scientist who, with his wife, Lydia, works with numerous wine estates, famously said that the soil of the Sahara had more life in it than the soil of Burgundy.

“It was a shocking wake-up call,” Ms. Wasserman said, and it was heard by the first wave in the vanguard of the new Burgundy, young vignerons like Dominique Lafon in Meursault, Christophe Roumier in Chambolle-Musigny and Étienne Grivot in Vosne-Romanée.

Their first order of business was to wean the soil off two decades worth of chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. The postwar dependency on science and industry had dealt a severe blow to Burgundy, which more than most wine regions prided itself on its soil. The nuances of terroir, the semi-mystical French term that encompasses earth, atmosphere, climate and humanity, were said to be transmitted to the wines by the qualities of the differing soils throughout the Côte d’Or.

Over the next 20 years a great many producers turned to organic farming, and others adopted biodynamic viticulture, a particularly demanding system that takes a sort of homeopathic approach to farming. These days it’s the rare farmer who still uses chemical herbicides in the vineyard.

“The soils are alive again,” Mr. Bourguignon said by telephone last week. “They’ve really changed, and it’s one of the reasons the wine has changed.”

Burgundy vignerons take pains, however, to make clear that they are not doing anything new. As Mr. Leroux pointed out, organic viticulture is simply a return to the pre–World War II methods.

“We can now understand what our grandparents were doing,” said Jean-Marie Fourrier of Domaine Fourrier in Gevrey-Chambertin. “We’re rediscovering the logic of the past.”

Domaine Fourrier was moribund, with no market for its wine, when Mr. Fourrier took over from his father, Jean-Claude. Fourteen years later he exports wine to 27 countries and has just finished construction on a new fermentation room. His wines are pure and light-bodied, embodying the grace and finesse for which Burgundy’s best wines were always known.

Prosperity is evident all over Burgundy, and every domain seems to be adding on, building a new cellar or a new winery, buying a tractor, or hiring workers. It’s a far cry from 20 years ago when domains were going out of business and sales of Burgundy in the United States were plummeting.

Now, despite the plunge of the dollar, American thirst for Burgundy has never been higher, and the opening in the last few years of new markets like eastern Europe and Asia, along with demand for the widely acclaimed 2005 vintage, has sent prices for Burgundy soaring higher than ever. Much of the profit seems to be going back into the wine.

“It’s a virtuous cycle,” said Jeremy Seysses, who has joined his father, Jacques Seysses, at the helm of Domaine Dujac in Morey-St.-Denis, one of the best producers in the Côte de Nuits. “Our wines have never sold so well or for so much money, which is bad for the consumer, I guess, but we can now afford to invest in the extra worker, the new equipment, in taking the time necessary to make great wine.”

A decade ago you might still find cellars in Burgundy without the equipment to control the temperature in vats of fermenting wine, by then standard in the rest of the winemaking world. Nowadays that’s unthinkable. With increased knowledge has come a premium on hygiene in the cellar and precision in the vineyard. Where once farmers who sold their grapes to négociants were paid by quantity, winemakers who bottle their own production today know that they are judged and paid on quality.

“Everybody is aware that Burgundy has a lot of competition and people don’t buy it because it says on the label, ‘Bourgogne,’” said Véronique Drouhin, who, with her three brothers, has taken over from their father leadership of Joseph Drouhin, one of the biggest and best producers in Burgundy.

Profits and the willingness to put them back into the business have helped to save vintages like 2007, which was marked by rain and hail. Twenty years ago, said Mr. Leroux of Comte Armand, the domain would have played it safe in a vintage like 2007. It would have picked the grapes quickly over the course of a week even though ripening was uneven, both to protect itself against further bad weather and so that the part-time pickers would not have to be paid for so long. “This year it took us 21 days,” Mr. Leroux said. “We stopped for seven days and I had to pay the pickers to do nothing, but the payoff in quality was great.”

Back in the ’80s, a year like 2007 could have been a disaster along the lines of the notoriously poor 1984 and 1975 vintages. Instead, tasted from the barrel, where the ’07s are currently aging, the Comte Armand reds were fresh and minerally, the various crus in Pommard and Auxey-Duresses differing markedly in density and nuance according to where the grapes were grown, yet all lithe and agile. When they are released next year, the ’07s may not be judged among Burgundy’s best, but they certainly will be enjoyable, at least.

Mr. Leroux is typical of younger vignerons in Burgundy today. Unlike previous generations, who often began working in the fields as teenagers and never got far from their homes, they were trained in viticulture and enology. They’ve traveled the world, working in places like California, New Zealand, South Africa and even Bordeaux. Perhaps most importantly, they are not afraid to share knowledge.

“They all know how to taste,” said Dominique Lafon, the Meursault superstar whose domain, Comtes Lafon, is one of Burgundy’s leading estates. “The older generation was only tasting their own wines and were not sharing as much as now.”

As consistently good as red Burgundy has become, white Burgundy still has a thorny issue to solve. The wines, when young, can be delicious and show every indication of being capable of ripe old age. But beginning with the 1996 vintage, some of the best white Burgundies began oxidizing in the bottle after seven or nine years.

Responding first with denial, then consternation, all of Burgundy now concedes the problem, which seems to have waned since the 1999 vintage. Its source has been elusive, although most people seem to blame corks treated with peroxide. Some vignerons are taking the time to hand-wax the tops of their bottles to keep oxygen out.

Regardless of the stability that Burgundy is able to achieve, absolute consistency will never be possible. It’s antithetical to the nature of the pinot noir grape, which is proverbially fickle and troublesome to grow, and to the nature of artisanal winemaking, which takes as a matter of romantic faith that greatness only comes with risks.

“Burgundy is and will always remain the anti-product,” Ms. Wasserman said. “Burgundies react differently according to their age, according to the weather, according to the ambiance. It’s nice to have natural things that react.”

June 2008

An American Hears the Call of Burgundy

By ERIC ASIMOV

Before his 29th birthday, Ray Walker became the first American ever to make Le Chambertin, the grand cru red Burgundy that is one of the most revered names in wine. How Mr. Walker came to make this wine is a story of passion and perseverance, family support and great good fortune, naïveté and surprises, not least of which is that Mr. Walker had never drunk a Chambertin before he made his own.

Happily-ever-after tales are rare in the wine business, which generally operates on the more down-to-earth plane of crafty marketing and cut-throat competition. But Mr. Walker’s entry into the famously insular world of Burgundy, with little money, no connections and virtually no experience in winemaking, seems straight from the annals of fairy godmothers and Prince Charmings.

Today, Mr. Walker—tall and lean with sculptured good looks—and his wife, Christian, are the proud proprietors of Maison Ilan, a small négociant business here in the heart of the Côte de Nuits. It is named after their young daughter, Isabella Ilan Walker.

Up to now, they have made only a little bit of red wine, including two grand crus, Le Chambertin and Charmes-Chambertin. The wines are elegant, fresh, structured and graceful—astoundingly so, given they were made by a novice.

As a younger man, Mr. Walker, who grew up in the Bay Area and worked there in his family’s real estate business, was decidedly not a wine drinker. It was not until he met his future wife, who liked wine, that the subject came up.

“We’d get into heated arguments,” Mr. Walker, now 30, recalled during a recent visit to his small, spotless winery underneath his house here. “She’d say, ‘Adults drink wine with food,’ and I’d say, ‘Only alcoholics do.’ ”

Not until they traveled to Italy, where Mr. Walker proposed marriage, did he see the light. It shined so brightly that he became obsessed with wine.

At first he studied Bordeaux. But early in 2005 he sampled a 2002 Meursault Clos de la Barre from Comtes Lafon, a white Burgundy. Another bright light went off.

“Oh my God, this is nature!” he recalled saying after tasting the wine, his excitement of the moment still palpable. “From that moment on, I was certain I was going to explore Burgundy. And then we got into the reds, and I couldn’t believe it.”

For two years, Mr. Walker carried around Côte d’Or, Clive Coates’s magnum opus on Burgundy. Finally, in 2008, as he was training for a new job at Merrill Lynch, with his wife six months pregnant, he realized he was not happy. With her support, he quit to learn about the wine business.

Before long he was hired at Freeman Winery in Sebastopol, in Sonoma County, to wash barrels and help with bottling and the harvest.

“He’s a really bright guy, and he gets it right away,” said Ed Kurtzman, the winemaker at Freeman. “He was driven and knew exactly what he wanted to do, though I don’t think he knew where he was going to end up.”

At Freeman, Mr. Walker learned the basics of making wine. The ambition was growing to do it himself, but when he was offered some petite sirah grapes to turn into wine, he could not muster enthusiasm.

“My wife said: ‘Don’t do that. We don’t drink wines like that,’ ” he recalled. She asked him what he was most passionate about, and the answer, Burgundy, was obvious. So were the obstacles.

In the real world, people do not leave their jobs, their wives, their new babies because they fantasize about making wine in Burgundy. If the all-too-real logistical and financial difficulties are not enough to swat down such ambitions, certainly the dubious prospects of acquiring grapes and equipment and enough money would do the trick. Yet here was Mr. Walker’s wife and parents urging him to follow his heart. What else was he to do?

Mr. Walker hatched a plan. He would try to buy village-level grapes: good, but not as good as premier cru, and certainly not grand cru, which is exceptionally rare. Working the Internet, he drew up a list of grape brokers.

Meanwhile, Mr. Walker was trying to teach himself French by reading 19thcentury wine texts, like Jules Lavalle’s seminal 1855 work, Histoire et Statistique de la Vigne des Grands Vin de la Côte d’Or, which placed the vineyards of Burgundy in five classes. Finally, in 2009, armed with little more than a firm handshake and $20,000 contributed by a supporter who prefers to remain anonymous, he headed to Burgundy to seek grapes.

Over the course of months, Mr. Walker was rebuffed in his quest for village-level grapes. It wasn’t that he was a nobody; they simply weren’t available.

To his astonishment, though, he was offered some grand cru grapes, from Charmes-Chambertin, adjacent to Le Chambertin. This, in the year following the economic meltdown, was beyond his wildest dreams.

“I learned later that many producers were thinking they’d make their money on village wines because of the economy, and they were dropping grand cru,” he said.

If so, Mr. Walker was ready to catch them. Having read Lavalle’s text, he understood what most novices would not: that the grapes from the upper part of Charmes were considered superior to those from the lower part. He made sure that his grapes were from the upper part, which he thought proved his seriousness to the broker. Not long after he was also offered grapes from Le Chambertin, as well as from three premier cru vineyards.

Two weeks before the harvest of 2009, Mr. Walker had grapes but no place to live, no place to make the wine and no tools. So he called his anonymous investor.

“I think I can put together something that’s never been done,” Mr. Walker told him. “No American has ever vinified Chambertin.”

“How much do you need?” the investor asked.

“$130,000.”

“Is that all?”

Call it what you will, but Mr. Walker has his wine as evidence that it really happened. With funds in hand, he found a producer who was willing to share space and equipment. Now came the actual winemaking, and a feeling that for Mr. Walker, entering the hallowed realm of Burgundy came with a responsibility.

“You’re awed by it,” he said. “You’re kind of stepping into a church.”

Suffice it to say that Mr. Walker made his wine quite successfully, but obsessively, with the driven determination of an innocent purist.

Of necessity, he stuck to the minimalist methods of the past, influenced partly by the pure throwback wines of the legendary vigneron Jacky Truchot, now retired. Using the 19th-century texts (http://blog.maison-ilan.com/burgundy-library/), Mr. Walker employed methods that required few tools and minimal technology: for example, fermenting in big barrels rather than temperature-controlled steel tanks. He didn’t really know what he was doing, yet he thought what he was doing was right.

“I guess being ignorant has its benefits,” he said. “When you think you control things you have more of a chance of messing up. When you have to pay attention, you learn.”

His first vintage, 11½ barrels of wine, was sold out shortly after he finished making it, mostly to 1,000 people on a mailing list who took a chance at least a year before they would ever taste the wine. His wife, he said, was especially impressed.

In 2010, he solidified his success, finding the winery here in Nuit-St.-Georges, where he brought his wife and daughter to join him. Burgundians are a reticent lot, not known for embracing outsiders, but Mr. Walker stepped right into their world as if he were re-entering a past life.

A Who’s Who of Burgundy producers, he said, have gone out of their way to help him, including Mr. Truchot, with whom he has become good friends.

“I’ve felt more at home in Burgundy than I ever felt in California,” he said.

Those in the region attribute his appeal partly to his modesty, to his obvious appreciation and love for Burgundy, and his commitment to the Burgundian notion of terroir, clear to those who have tasted his wines.

“What moves me the most is his respect for Burgundy, and his astonishment at walking in the footsteps of men and women who worked the vineyards for so many centuries,” said Becky Wasserman, another American who found a home in Burgundy, where she has been a wine broker for 40 years, and is helping to export the Maison Ilan wines.

Sadly, few people have tasted the wines, which are made in tiny quantities and sold mostly through the mailing list. For his 2011 vintage, though, Mr. Walker is expanding production, having contracted for more grapes from both grand cru vineyards, as well as two new premier cru vineyards in Chambolle-Musigny and Volnay.

He is looking for a larger production facility, and a new house, as he and his wife are also expecting another child.

“Anybody can do it,” he said, about the winemaking. “You just have to care enough.”

July 2011

For Chablis Fanatics, Ah, 2007

By ERIC ASIMOV

For a wine of great character and long history, Chablis is all too easy to abuse. Often its own producers treat it with colossal disrespect, planting the vines in the wrong places, choosing to harvest quantity over quality and making the wine with broad, careless brushstrokes rather than the meticulous pointillism a pure, transparent wine like Chablis requires.

Then comes the issue of vintage and climate, which greatly and sometimes counterintuitively influences the Chablis you taste in the glass. While Chablis is considered part of Burgundy, it is northwest of the rest of the region. In fact, it’s closer to Champagne than to the Côte d’Or, the heart of Burgundy, and so the vintage judgments for most red and white Burgundies don’t necessarily apply to Chablis.

The best recent vintage of Chablis was 2004, which coincidentally was also very good for white Burgundy but not necessarily for reds. Neither 2005 nor 2006 was exactly bad for Chablis, but the wines they produced were plusher and more sumptuously fruity than classically austere, focused and precise. The ’06 Chablis are fine wines for the most part, but less distinctive, lacking for me the singular qualities that make Chablis stand out among the seven seas of white wines.

The 2007 vintage is another story. If you are a fanatic, as I am, for the purer, clearer style of Chablis, 2007 is a year to get excited about. No, I haven’t spent a week visiting Chablis cellars and tromping through vineyards. But in my scattered tastings of 2007 Chablis here at home, mostly straightforward village-level Chablis at that, I’ve found the sort of beautifully etched wines that can send even the most unimpressionable Chablis lover floating up among aromas and images of oyster shells, crushed rocks, limestone and chalk.

Odd things to find in a wine, to be sure. But Chablis is a remarkable wine. Like so many other white wines around the world, Chablis is made entirely of the chardonnay grape, but no chardonnay tastes like Chablis. The flavors in a glass of Chablis rarely suggest tropical fruits; often they don’t suggest any fruit at all. Flavors of oak are thankfully infrequent. Instead, to an extent beyond other white Burgundies, a good Chablis calls to mind the myriad aromas and flavors often lumped together under the vague-but-useful term “mineral.”

A bottle like the 2007 Première Cuvée Les Pargues from Domaine Servin ($27) epitomizes a classic village Chablis. With its pale yellow color, bordering on green, and its chalky aromas, the Servin brings to mind images of earth—white earth—the sort of limestone soils and fossilized oyster beds found in the best Chablis plots. It is bone dry and has an aroma more savory than sweet.

While all good Chablis share these characteristics, they can be subtly different stylistically, even at the village level, which, in the Chablis totem pole, is near the base, just above Petit Chablis and under the mid-level premier crus and the topof-the-heap grand crus. A 2007 Chablis from Jean-Paul & Benoît Droin ($28) is likewise dry and minerally, but seems riper and richer on the palate than the Servin.

Then you have the 2007 Chablis of Alice and Olivier De Moor, who make two cuvées of village-level wine. The Bel Air et Clardy ($28), made with grapes from two different plots, exudes flowers, lemon and honey, though wrapped in that chalky Chablis minerality. It is pretty and delicious, and maybe a little exotic, but still precise. The other cuvée, Rosette ($33), tastes of flowers, minerals and anise and is ripe and rich, though not heavy by any means. Each of these wines is distinct, yet each is clearly a Chablis.

William Fèvre is one of the Chablis elite. While I haven’t tasted the top-level Fèvre 2007 wines, its ’07 Champs Royaux, made from purchased grapes, is a delicious Chablis for about $25, with mineral flavors that I could think of only as limestone scrapings, along with a bit of lemon, honey and herbs. Joseph Drouhin made a good basic négociant Chablis in 2007, for $22. Domaine Dampt and Gilbert Picq also make fine village Chablis for about $20 a bottle, as well as specializing in the silent final consonant.

As you ascend to the premier cru and grand cru levels, the wines get richer and more detailed, though always with their distinctive chalky minerality.

I found an ’07 premier cru Vaillons from Vincent Dauvissat, maybe my favorite Chablis producer, and though it was really too young to drink now, it gave a hint of what it would taste like in a few years with its aromas of seashells and flowers. Right now, the wine’s great acidity, which makes Chablis seem so lively and at times a bit stern, is very firm, but will soften with time. For comparison’s sake, top Chablis from 2004 are delicious right now, and may well improve for another 10 to 15 years.

Because good Chablis is subtle, it is crucial not to serve it too cold, which will mask the flavors. Barely cool is just about right.

Despite the historical inclusion of Chablis with Burgundy, the wines often remind me more of blanc de blancs Champagne and even Sancerre. The best sites in all three regions share the same chalky Kimmeridgean soil, as do the white cliffs of Dover, for that matter. Despite what sets the wines apart—Sancerre made from the sauvignon blanc grape, and blanc de blancs a chardonnay with fizz—the best versions all seem to display the characteristics of their shared soil more so than their differences.

It occurs to me that I’ve made it this far without the obligatory cautionary note that real Chablis has nothing to do with the cheap jug wines that to this day in the United States are marketed as “chablis.” Somehow, I doubt you need me to tell you that anymore.

May 2009

What’s New in Beaujolais Is Not Nouveau

By ERIC ASIMOV

Photo by Owen Franken.

In the small courtyard cellar of the Morgon producer Marcel Lapierre, the barrels are talking. It’s the gentle but insistent murmur of the juice of gamay grapes fermenting into Beaujolais wine, the yeast transforming sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide, which, with no role to play in the finished product, can only hiss its protest at being left behind.

It is not the only hissing in the Beaujolais, a region long venerated for its bistro wines and now apparently withering on the vine. From the Terres des Pierres Dorées in the south, where the rocks seem to glow a soft gold, to the granite hills of Juliénas, Fleurie and the other crus to the north, the talk is of crisis: of rising costs and diminishing returns, of a public that has turned its back on a gentle wine it once embraced, and of a reputation damaged by decades of mediocrity and symbolized by the yawning response to the annual November announcement, “Le Beaujolais nouveau est arrivé.”

But a different, equally insistent message is also emerging from Beaujolais, and it is a sign of hope for a region that has borne more than its share of condescension and scorn. It comes from the best, most serious producers in Beaujolais, who are making superb wines that bear as much resemblance to mass-market Beaujolais nouveau as a fine, dry-aged steak does to a fast-food burger. In a region known for jolly little knock-back wines to be drunk and forgotten, these are memorable wines of depth and class, thoughtful wines that nonetheless retain the joyous nature imbued in Beaujolais.

Few wines can induce joy the way Beaujolais does, and I would argue that that is an undervalued quality. When you add in the perfume and the nuance of the best Beaujolais wines, and combine them with a little bit of structure, you have a wine that deserves far more credit than it gets.

“People think, ‘Oh, Beaujolais, it’s light, it’s fruity,’” said Jacques Lardière, technical director of Maison Louis Jadot. “But in Moulin-à-Vent you can produce a great wine, a great, great wine.”

The idea that Beaujolais can produce great wine is antithetical not only to the image of Beaujolais but also to the notion of what constitutes great wine. Greatness among red wines is generally equated with power, profundity and aging ability.

Although Beaujolais can sometimes age well—I recently had a delicious 1929 Moulin-à-Vent—it is best enjoyed fairly young. It will never be profound the way Burgundy, Barolo or Bordeaux can be, and notwithstanding young Morgons, which can be tough on tender mouths, Beaujolais tends more toward elegance than power.

Just consider, for example, the purity of those whispering Lapierre Morgons, surprisingly light-bodied and elegant, or the density and balance of a Fleurie from Clos de la Roilette. To taste the fresh yet complex Moulin-à-Vent and Fleurie of Domaine du Vissoux, the pretty, floral Côte de Brouilly of Jean-Paul Brun or the powerful, structured Morgons of Louis-Claude Desvignes is to realize that there is a world of Beaujolais beyond the fatiguingly sappy, candied wines that by comparison taste like tutti-frutti gamay juice.

Great Beaujolais comes in many shapes and sizes. Domaine Cheysson in Chiroubles makes pretty, seductive wines, enticing for their lithe, floral grace. A Juliénas from Michel Tête is completely different, spicy, structured and laden with mineral and raspberry flavors. And then there are the dynamic, finely detailed Moulin-à-Vents of Louis Jadot’s Château des Jacques, like La Roche 2005, smelling of violets and dark fruit, a wine of clarity and finesse.

Even among these fine crus, though, it is hard to find a producer who will not talk about what they all call the image problem. And for that they blame Beaujolais nouveau.

“The nouveau has destroyed our image,” said Jean-Pierre Large, director of Domaine Cheysson in Chiroubles, as we tasted the fresh, fruity 2007 vintage now resting in cement tanks. He winced as I joked that I was the first to taste his nouveau, which Cheysson does not produce. “All of Beaujolais is confused with nouveau,” he said.

The man most responsible for this confusion, of course, is Georges Duboeuf, author of many Beaujolais triumphs. Mr. Duboeuf, who grew up in a farm family just outside the Beaujolais region, was already a successful négociant when he began to mass-market the quaint regional autumn custom of celebrating the arrival of the primeur, the year’s first wine. The Beaujolais nouveau fashion took off in the 1970s and’80s. By 1988, some estimates assert, 60 percent of the basic Beaujolais appellation went into primeur.

The wine itself may have been a harmless fruity concoction, but its lack of consequence created lasting problems. Growers picked early at minimal ripeness to avoid risks, and compensated by chaptalizing, a legal process of adding sugar to the grape juice to increase the alcohol content, which can result in the impression of artificiality. They would maximize yields, which can dilute the wines, and they would make the wines according to the standardized recipes of the négociants, who bought most of the wine from the growers to be sold under their own labels.

When times were good, nobody much cared. But now that the nouveau fashion has diminished—nouveau is now about 30 percent of Beaujolais production—growers in the lesser regions of Beaujolais are stuck with an oversupply of poor wine. And the public is stuck with an image of insipid wine meant to be drunk immediately.

“Nouveau really contributed to the problems here,” said Mathieu Lapierre, who works here with his father, Marcel, farming about 30 acres of grapes in Morgon. “People overproduced and made really bad wine.”

Mr. Duboeuf does not see it that way. He says the problems in Beaujolais are similar to those faced all over France, where inexpensive wines have been losing international market share to branded New World wines. Increasing production worldwide combined with a stable level of consumption is the reason, he said, that abandoned vineyards can be seen in the southern Beaujolais, still thick with rotting grapes because troubled farmers decided it was less expensive to ignore their fields than to harvest the crops and make wine.

Yet Mr. Duboeuf is optimistic, and feels the region has taken major steps to right itself, reducing the legal maximum for yields and slowing growth. From 1957, he said, when Beaujolais produced 600,000 hectoliters of wine, to 2000, output had more than doubled to 1.3 million hectoliters, but in two years output will be down to one million.

“Growers are making great efforts, and already this year we should be in a more balanced situation,” said Mr. Duboeuf, still slender and ramrod straight at 74, his hair combed back into a white pompadour, blue cashmere sweater draped over his shoulders. “In two years demand will exceed supply, so prices will go up.”

Mr. Duboeuf still believes in nouveau. “Japan today is the biggest market for Beaujolais nouveau,” he said. “Ten years ago it was nothing. It shows you how things can change in just a few years. There is always potential.”

At the spotless Duboeuf headquarters in Romanèche-Thorins, amid the ultramodern bottling lines, pallets of wine stand ready for shipping. Much is not Beaujolais at all, but pinot noir or syrah (labeled “shiraz”) from the Languedoc, in brightly adorned bottles. One line of wines is even encased in blue denim.

“It’s easy to drink for a new generation,” said Franck Duboeuf, Georges’s son.

For a mass-market operation, Duboeuf serves up pretty good wine. But it is a world apart from the vignerons making wine from their own fields, in their own cellars, who are not cutting cloth to fit the fashions but are making the wines that they believe in. Most growers are reluctant to criticize Mr. Duboeuf, who seems to be held in high esteem, but they do not like to be lumped in with his methods.

“Duboeuf is producing a marketing product to give the people what they want,” said Serge Condemine of Domaine des Souchons, who makes dense, balanced Morgons. “We still have honest winemakers who don’t care for marketing or fashion. One day this foolishness will end and we’ll still have the honest, authentic product.”

By contrast, Pierre-Marie and Martine Chermette of Domaine du Vissoux are based in St.-Vérand in the southern end of the appellation, but they also own plots in the higher-status crus of Fleurie and Moulin-à-Vent. Doggedly, they keep yields low and scrupulously sort the grapes. They do not chaptalize, they use only the natural yeasts on the grapes rather than specialized yeasts that emphasize particular flavors and aromas, and they use very little sulfur as a stabilizer.

“You can’t say we don’t have problems,” Ms. Chermette said, “but we’ve been at this since 1982 and we’ve got regular customers and good contacts.”

Indeed, the best producers are not the ones who are hurting. Those with a history of making and bottling their own wine, like the Chermettes or like Michel Tête in Juliénas, are holding their own. But for those who have depended on supermarket sales and négociants to move their wine, prospects are dimmer.

Growers everywhere like to talk about their old vines and their sustainable agricultural practices, but in the Beaujolais it is not always easy to know how to interpret this talk. Do they have old vines because they have guarded a precious holding? Or is it because they cannot afford to replace ones that have deteriorated? Do they practice sustainable agriculture for philosophical reasons? Or is it because they cannot afford to spray against weeds five times a year?

Against the background of crisis, those who have dedicated themselves to making top-quality wines offer a model for the future. They are the ones who, like Jean-Paul Brun, have taken risks and demonstrated that the public will notice. Mr. Brun’s estate, Domaine des Terres Dorées, makes wine as naturally as possible, a process that requires great attention.

“You have to select grapes very carefully,” he said. “You have to smell, smell, smell and taste, taste, taste. There’s always more risk.”

The payoffs are wines of character and depth, and perhaps a public willing to listen to the wines.

“We’re selling more and more,” he said. “I think people are much more interested in Beaujolais, in the good people, at least.”

October 2007

A Potion From a Town Named for Love

By FRANK J. PRIAL

If there was no St. Amour, somebody would have had to make him up. Someone probably did. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

A good part of the world celebrates St. Valentine’s Day tomorrow. Couples exchange greeting cards and gifts, and, if the timing is right, protestations of undying love. There apparently was a St. Valentine. In fact, there were probably three of them, and no one, least of all the Roman Catholic Church, is sure which was which.

Confirming its uncertainties, the church quietly dropped Valentine from its calendar of saints in 1969, leaving him—or them—more in the realm of legend than verifiable church history.

One story about Valentine goes like this: In the third century A.D., the Roman emperor Claudius II banned marriages because he wanted single men for his armies. Valentine, a priest, was caught performing marriages secretly and was condemned to die. On death row, he miraculously cured the jailer’s daughter of some ailment and, as he was led off to be stoned, left her a note signed “Your Valentine.” This was said to have happened on Feb. 14, 270.

In fact, Feb. 15 had long been a Roman festival, called the Lupercalia, during which men and women drew partners by lots, then paired off for sexual games. The church tried to counter the Roman event by asking the faithful to pick a saint and follow the saint’s example for a year. The anniversary of Valentine’s martyrdom, Feb. 14, was chosen for the counterfestival. In medieval times, these games, spiritual and erotic, morphed into what became St. Valentine’s Day.

This is where St. Amour comes in. All we know about him is that he may have been a Roman soldier who may have quit the army in Gaul and settled down. His name may have been Amor, or Amore (just as in the old Dean Martin song). He was a decent sort, so the story goes, and the town where he lived, in what is now the northern part of Beaujolais, was named after him.

If you don’t believe any of this, there is a statue of him near a church in St.-Amour that shows exactly what he may have looked like, if in fact he existed.

Let’s jump ahead many centuries. It’s 1940, and Louis Dailly, who was born in St.-Amour, has returned from Paris after 15 years working in his brother’s bar. With him is his wife, Thérèse, a Beaujolais girl he met in Paris. Each comes from a winemaking family, so they invest their savings in vineyards.

Convinced that St.-Amour wines were equal to, or better than, many of the more famous Beaujolais wines like Moulin-à-Vent and Chiroubles, Mr. Dailly set out to have their rating changed from simple Beaujolais and Beaujolais-Villages to one of the famous “cru” wines that bear the name of the town where they are produced.

In 1946 he succeeded, and St.-Amour was raised to the same level as Morgon, Moulin-à-Vent, Chiroubles, Fleurie, Chénas, Brouilly, Côtes de Brouilly and Juliénas. Not until 1988 was another cru Beaujolais created: Régnié.

Cru status meant more prestige for St.-Amour—and more money for its producers—but it took some years before anyone realized the natural affinity of St.-Amour and St. Valentine. If St. Valentine’s Day originally was for disaffected lovers, what better way for them to spend the day than drinking a wine named both for love and a saint, albeit an elusive one?

St.-Amour is among the least well known of the 10 Beaujolais crus. It’s from the northernmost Beaujolais region, almost touching the Mâconnais, the mostly white wine region just to the north.

St.-Amour’s total production is about 200,000 cases a year, less than half that of some medium-size California wineries.

The soil is principally crushed pink granite, and the wine is soft but well-structured, mirroring the qualities of the great Moulin-à-Vent wines produced a few miles to the south. In fact, a St.-Amour will probably age better than a Fleurie or a Brouilly because it has better acid levels than either of those wines.

Not unexpectedly, Georges Duboeuf, the famous Beaujolais négociant, has a strong presence in St.-Amour and usually bottles at least one wine with a label noting its connection with St. Valentine’s Day. Other prominent négociants, like Joseph Drouhin in Burgundy, also offer wines from St.-Amour.

But I digress from the spirit of the day, however questionable its provenance. Here in Paris, the sky is gray and the rain never far off. But it’s warm, and early bulbs are sprouting in every secret courtyard, daring the sun to appear.

Parisian florists, artists in their own right, have splashed every other street corner with great washes of spring color.

Could Valentine’s Day have anything to do with all this? Let’s give the old boy credit, if only for sentiment’s sake. And if he has had a little help from St.-Amour, so much the better.

February 2002

Surprises From the Jura,
Jagged in a Velvet-Smooth Universe

By ERIC ASIMOV

Towns don’t come much tinier than this quiet hamlet, population 86, northwest of Arbois in the heart of the Jura wine region. You can pass the church, the graveyard and a few farmhouses in about the time it takes one of the dozing dogs to roll over. And yet, within sniffing distance of this thriving metropolis is an even smaller suburb, Petit-Molamboz, which indeed does justice to its diminutive name.

The Jura defies many expectations, nowhere more so than in its wines. The leading whites have a nutty, sherry-like aroma that many people regard as hopelessly oxidized, but they are actually tangy, complex, pure and delicious. The best reds barely have enough color to be called red. They are delicate and graceful, yet with an earthy intensity that can stand up to the smelliest of cheeses. Almost singularly among wine regions, the reds are usually served before the whites in the Jura because they are lighter in texture.

The region’s most profound wine, vin jaune, or yellow wine, is hard to find in the United States. It is traditionally sold in squat clavelin, 62-centiliter bottles, a size that is not sanctioned by the American government, a pity since the saline, mineral force of this wine is extraordinary.

Even in France, the wines of the Jura are little-known, but they are as distinctive as any in the world. The Jura is a bucolic green bowl between Burgundy and Switzerland, where the patchwork of vineyards and hayfields is occasionally interrupted by a village of tile-roofed houses or a herd of cows. Roads came fairly late to the region; canals never did. So the Jura evolved, like the marsupials of Australia, in relative isolation, which permitted the planting of grapes like savagnin, ploussard and trousseau that are grown almost nowhere else, made into wines with techniques that in most places would be regarded as downright peculiar.

The wines are surely not for everyone. Even lovers of vin jaune sometimes describe its flavor as “rancid walnut,” yet this wine is an unmatched partner of regional specialties like chicken with cream sauce and morels, and of course Comté, the famous cheese of the Jura. In a world of smooth, rounded, velvet-lined wines, they stand out as jagged and resolute, like many of the most interesting winemakers.

Jean-Marc Brignot, 37, grew up in Normandy and learned about winemaking working in Beaujolais and Champagne, but when it came time to make his own wine, he chose the Jura, which he had first visited on a holiday as a teenager.

“I really love this area and I love the wine,” said Mr. Brignot, a tall, dark man whose browned arms and permanent squint indicate many hours spent in the sun in his 13.5 acres of vines. After training with Pierre Overnoy, an elder statesman in the nearby town of Pupillin—“Capitale Mondiale du Ploussard,” it says in the town square—Mr. Brignot and his partner, Matilde Vergeau, purchased an ancient stone farmhouse here in Molamboz. They added a concrete floor to the barn, and electricity, and with a budget the size of Petit-Molamboz they jury-rigged a winery.

In 2004, their first vintage, they made 17 different wines in minute quantities. Last year they made 15 wines, all without sulfur dioxide, a preservative that has been used since antiquity, except by iconoclasts like Mr. Brignot, Mr. Overnoy and Emmanuel Houillon, who took over for Mr. Overnoy after he retired. At their best, the Brignot and the Overnoy wines have an unusual freshness and purity, with deep, rich, tangy mineral flavors.

“We make natural wines just with grapes,” Mr. Brignot said. “They are better for people, and they taste better, too.”

By all rights, Mr. Brignot’s wines should be completely unknown outside of the Jura. But at a conference on natural wines last year he met Arnaud Erhart, the owner of 360 restaurant in Red Hook, Brooklyn, who introduced him to Joe Dressner of Louis/Dressner Selections, an importer who brings in the Overnoy wines. Now you can find a little Brignot in the United States, though 360 seems to be the primary recipient.

While Jura wines are never easy to find, more restaurants in New York seem to be carrying them. In addition to 360, Jura wines are sold at Bette, Cookshop and Trestle on Tenth, all in Chelsea, and Balthazar in SoHo. Bottles from Jacques Puffeney, one of the best producers in Arbois, the central city in the region, turn up fairly regularly. Mr. Puffeney, formidably taciturn, bearded and portly, makes wines that have the incisive power of a hard stare combined with the grace of a smile.

He makes a pretty poulsard (as ploussard is known outside of Pupillin), with a delicate fragrance of raspberries, strawberries and earth. He makes a spicy pinot noir, and a tangy chardonnay. Fifty percent of the grapes planted in the Jura are chardonnay, more or less, and they can be very good. But by far Mr. Puffeney’s and the region’s most distinctive wines come from the savagnin grape. His 2002 savagnin is strong and cutting, yet with a light-bodied delicacy, while his 1996 vin jaune is rich and briny with razor-sharp focus.

What makes these savagnin wines so different? When most wines are placed in barrels to age, winemakers assiduously top off the barrels, replacing whatever wine is lost to evaporation and thereby preventing oxidation. But with their best lots of savagnin, Jura winemakers permit evaporation, and as room develops in the barrel a film of beneficial yeast forms over the surface of the wine. In Jerez, where sherry is made, a similar yeast forms called flor. Here in the Jura, the yeast is called la voile, the veil, and the wines are said to be made sous-voile, under the veil. The yeast, along with the oxygen and a forceful acidity, impart the characteristic tangy, salty, nutty flavor. The evaporation gave rise to the 62-centiliter clavelin bottles, which supposedly accommodate all that remains of a liter if it has been left in a barrel for six years.

Jura winemakers tend to bridle at the comparison with sherry. They point out that sherry is fortified, unlike their wines, and prefer to compare savagnin to furmint, the grape of the Hungarian tokay wines, or traminer, a paler-skinned version of gewürztraminer. “Furmint, chenin blanc, traminer, savagnin, we think they are all somehow cousins,” Mr. Brignot said.

Not everybody falls for this sort of wine. Kermit Lynch, a seminal American importer who brought many unusual French country wines to the United States in the 1970s and ’80s, passed on the opportunity to bring in wines from the Jura. “That purposeful oxidation wasn’t to my taste, and I sure didn’t think it was going to be to the taste of Americans back then,” he said.

But Neal Rosenthal, another importer, is a big fan. He brings in the Puffeney wines as well as those from Nicole Dériaux of Domaine de Montbourgeau in L’Étoile, south of Arbois, who makes subtle, elegant chardonnays using the oxidative method. And Jeffrey Alpert, an American who began to import wine just a few years ago, has enthusiastically embraced the Jura, bringing in wines from Jean-François Ganevat with an unusual floral complexity.

“We don’t all eat the same food, we don’t watch the same movies every night, but we’re programmed to drink the same wine,” Mr. Alpert said. “It’s ridiculous, because there are so many great wines out there.”

Edward Behr, who publishes The Art of Eating, a quarterly journal, discovered the Jura wines recently while researching a piece on Comté cheese. He was so fascinated with them that he returned almost immediately to write about the wines.

“There are all these places in France that will never take off, the Jura perhaps being the extreme,” Mr. Behr said, “but they’re such good food wines.”

Not everybody in the Jura is as enthusiastic about the oxidized wines as their American fans. Jean Rijckaert, a Burgundy producer, now makes very clean, Burgundy-style chardonnay and savagnin wines that are increasingly seen in the United States.

And Stéphane Tissot in Arbois, one of the region’s most innovative winemakers, questions whether the oxidation-style chardonnays, at least, are traditional at all.

“I think it is a recent style of the last 50 years,” Mr. Tissot said. “I’m not sure that a century ago that was how chardonnay was made.”

Mr. Tissot, whose label bears his parents’ names, André and Mireille Tissot, makes an excellent, pure, slightly tannic ploussard, and a handful of dry, minerally chardonnays that are Burgundian in spirit if not exactly in flavor. But his vin jaune, with its dense, oxidized, minerally aroma, is his most glorious wine.

Any sommelier or merchant in New York who sells wines from the Jura has a story to tell about customers who had no idea what they were getting. Some were astounded by how good the wines were, while others were befuddled, thinking the wines were flawed.

Mr. Behr recalled how one winemaker explained to him what made the Jura so different.

“He said, ‘The thing about these wines is that they don’t belong to the Old World and they don’t belong to the New World, they are a world apart,’” Mr. Behr said. “What fascinates me is that they don’t refer to anything but themselves.”

August 2006

The Rewards of the Pampered Grape

By ERIC ASIMOV

From a chalky slope high above this little hillside town, a patchwork of vineyards stretches as far as the eye can see, dotted occasionally with a thatch of trees or a cluster of buildings. Only the occasional rush of a high-speed TGV train interrupts the pastoral spell of this bowl-shaped valley in the Mâconnais region of southern Burgundy. Lacking the drama of the impossibly steep vineyards of the Côte Rôtie to the south or the allure of the exalted grand cru vineyards in the Côte d’Or to the north, the Mâconnais has had to get by on the sort of quiet beauty that you see only when you look closely.

For years, the Mâconnais has been known as the land of cheap white wine—innocuous stuff to be chilled for a picnic or dragged behind a boat while fishing. The Mâconnais is in Burgundy and uses the same white grape, chardonnay. But it is apart, joined awkwardly to the southern tip along with Beaujolais, its red wine counterpart. It is an unlikely union. The people here speak of the Côte d’Or as Burgundy, the way people from Queens or Brooklyn call Manhattan “the city.”

But with humility and stealth perhaps typical of this modest region, white wines of the Mâconnais are slowly inserting themselves into the world of fine Burgundies. More precisely, they are drawing attention southward. No, there are no Montrachets or Meursaults in the Mâconnais—not yet, anyway, and that is a blessing, financially speaking.

What you have may be something better: a growing selection of distinctive wines that taste specifically and recognizably of their vineyards—vins des terroirs, as the French say. This sense of place is the precise quality that wine lovers covet in good white Burgundy, but for far less money.

Many of these bottles come from a new wave of Mâconnais winemakers, who have turned their backs on the way the other 90 percent of Mâcon’s wine is produced. Some are recent arrivals, like Jean Rijckaert in Leynes, who came here from Belgium in 1994 and whose wines are beautifully precise and well shaped.

Others, like Daniel Barraud, carry on the winemaking work that has been in their families for generations but combine the wisdom of their ancestors with the latest understanding of winemaking and viticultural techniques. Mr. Barraud produces razor-sharp wines of elegance and grace.

The young Bret brothers, Jean-Guillaume and Jean-Philippe, have brought energy and idealism to their new venture, Domaine de la Soufrandière, which since its first vintage in 1999 has turned out wines of great purity. Olivier Merlin, who acquired a vineyard in 1987, makes wines of concentration and depth. Jean Thévenet, a longtime producer, makes wines of rare richness and body.

Looming above the other Mâconnais winemakers, though, is an idiosyncratic Belgian named Jean-Marie Guffens, who with record-industry chutzpah and an infectious Keith Richards wheeze of a laugh, has barged into the top ranks of Burgundy winemakers. For 20 years he has been producing tiny quantities of exquisite wine from his own vineyards under the label Guffens-Heynen. In 1990, he founded Maison Verget, a small négociant house that offers a collection of stunning wines from the Mâconnais, as well as from Chablis and the Côte d’Or.

Over dinner one night in the town of Chaintré, Mr. Guffens poured a 1994 Guffens-Heynen Mâcon-Pierreclos En Chavigne that was still fresh and lively, coiled with acidity yet offering plenty of depth. He followed that with a ’91 Guffens-Heynen Pouilly-Fuissé Clos des Petits-Croux that was both rich and youthful, with many years ahead of it, ample evidence demonstrating that when made with attention to detail, Mâcon wines can indeed age.

“Mâcon has to be good, because it’s not expensive enough to be bad,” Mr. Guffens said, repeating a well-practiced line that is nonetheless full of perception. The wine-buying public is all too willing to suspend its judgment with expensive wines like Meursaults or Montrachets. The pressure of the investment practically requires people to like them or feel as if they have wasted money. Spend less, and the critical faculties improve remarkably.

Buoyed by the evidence of how successful Mâcon wines could be, the region has drawn some unlikely investors. In 1999 Dominique Lafon, who heads Comtes Lafon, the renowned Meursault estate, bought around 20 acres of vineyard in Milly-Lamartine near La Roche-Vineuse. Last year he bought another 18, in the northern Mâcon near the towns of Uchizy and Chardonnay (where legend has it the grape received its name). Last year, too, Anne-Claude Leflaive of Domaine Leflaive, another celebrated white Burgundy producer, purchased around 20 acres in the Mâconnais.

For Mr. Lafon, the move to the Mâconnais was a natural. “There are no vineyards to buy in Meursault, not that anybody can afford,” he said. “The clay and limestone soil in the Mâcon is the same class as in Meursault, and I already knew and understood the grapes.”

Mr. Lafon’s Mâconnais wines, sold as Les Héretiers du Comtes Lafon, include a simple, inexpensive Mâcon that is fermented in steel tanks and tastes fresh and pure, as well as more complex wines that he ferments in puncheons and foudres, oak barrels that are bigger than those typically used in Burgundy and California. Like many in the Mâconnais, he avoids new barrels, which impart the oaky flavor that dominates so many American chardonnays.

In his fifth year of making wine in the Mâconnais, Mr. Lafon said, he is finally figuring it out. More important, he feels he has gotten control of his vineyards, which when he purchased them, he said, were over-fertilized and under-pampered.

In the past, the grapes from Mr. Lafon’s vineyards, as with 80 to 90 percent or so of the grapes throughout the Mâconnais, were sold to cooperatives, which turned the grapes into indifferent wine. Farmers sold their grapes by weight, a powerful incentive for quantity over quality. They used fertilizers and herbicides to encourage grape production, and they picked the grapes, with mechanical harvesters, before optimum ripeness, because to wait would be too risky.

Grapes from all over the region were pressed together, the standard formula for cheap assembly-line wine all over the world.

“Co-ops led to tractors and machines, and for a long time the word ‘terroir’ was forgotten,” Jean-Philippe Bret said.

The new wave in Mâcon takes an artisanal approach. They plow the vineyards and abhor chemical herbicides, which along with the weeds can kill a multitude of organisms that are beneficial to the soil. Yields are kept low, which concentrates the juice in each grape. Grapes are picked by hand at ideal ripeness and gently pressed in the winery to preserve delicacy and purity. Grapes from different regions, and even from different parts of the same vineyard, are processed separately to preserve their specific character.

These expensive, labor-intensive practices are rare in the region, and the wines are still only a trickle in the vast flow from the Mâconnais. “I am alone in the town of La Roche-Vineuse to pick by hand,” said Mr. Merlin, who supplements his own vineyards by buying grapes from like-minded growers. “When I started, we were maybe three or four winemakers. Now we are 20. It’s not a lot, but it’s a start.”

One possibly daunting obstacle to improvement in the Mâcon is a lack of a vineyard hierarchy. In the Côte d’Or, vineyards are ranked in a pyramid. At the bottom are regional wines, simply labeled Bourgogne rouge or Bourgogne blanc (in fact, a lot of this mediocre white wine comes from the Mâconnais).

Wines from better vineyards might have a village name on the label, like Meursault or St.-Aubin. Even better vineyards might be designated premier cru, while the best are the grands crus.

Mâcon’s system has no such precision. Plain Mâcon and Mâcon-Supérieur form the generally insipid base. A step up are the Mâcon-Villages, wines made in any of 40 or so villages in the region. If all the grapes come from one of these villages, the name can be used on the label, as in Mâcon-La Roche-Vineuse or Mâcon-Vergisson.

Three appellations around the town of Pouilly—Pouilly-Fuissé, Pouilly-Loché and Pouilly-Vinzelles—are often considered superior, but a river of bad, overpriced Pouilly-Fuissé that washed into the United States in the 1970s caused an image problem that persists. Finally, there is Saint-Véran, a collection of villages that border the Pouilly area. And that’s it.

In the hands of good winemakers, though, it’s astounding how specific the aromas and flavors of the Mâconnais can be. Regardless of stylistic differences from one winemaker to the next, and across vintages, the characters of various terroirs emerge. Wines from Vergisson or Milly-Lamartine tend to be minerally, while wines from Bussières or Davayé have a more pronounced fruitiness.

In a tasting of four vintages of Maison Verget’s Saint-Véran Terre Noires, the characters of each were consistent, full of depth and complexity with persistent mineral and fruit flavors. Yet each was distinctly different from Verget’s other bottlings.

“When people think of the Mâcon, they think of this nice little white wine that’s all the same,” Mr. Lafon said. “But there’s as much diversity of wines and types as in the Côte d’Or.”

To Mr. Guffens, the problem is one of attitude. He senses a modesty in the region that keeps winemakers from reaching their potential. Fifteen years ago, Mr. Guffens said, he took issue against the local trade organization, which used the motto, “Le Mâcon, C’est Bon.”

“I didn’t want people saying I made good wine,” Mr. Guffens said. “My Mâcon, c’est grand!”

June 2004

Modern Love for Ancient Vines
in Southern Italy

By ERIC ASIMOV

Rolling hills carpeted with vineyards surround this tiny village in the Irpinia region of Campania here in southern Italy, where the landscape has hardly changed for centuries. Then it hits your eye, a sleek structure of glass, brushed steel and concrete, Feudi di San Gregorio’s new $25 million winery and hospitality center, as likely a feature of this countryside as an alien spaceship.

Huge diesel buses, miles from the tourist centers of Naples and the Amalfi coast, idle in the parking lot, awaiting the scores of German and Dutch visitors who are touring the building, which was designed by the Japanese architect Hikaru Mori, who lives in Milan. Perhaps the tourists have descended into the chaste white earthquake-resistant cellar, where thousands of barrels are soothed around the clock by 16th-century madrigals written by Carlo Gesualdo, an Irpinian composer infamous for having murdered his wife. Maybe they are sitting in the glass-enclosed tasting room, in sculptured chairs of soft leather. Or maybe they have descended on Marennà, a modern restaurant that has already won wide acclaim for its refined dining.

It’s a huge change for Campania, which for centuries has been a viticultural backwater in a country that is an ocean of wine. While the world discovered the great wines of northern Italy, the Barolos and Barbarescos of Piedmont, and the Brunellos and modern blends of Tuscany, Campania and the rest of the south was given little thought. The prosperous, industrialized northern Italians have always dismissed the southerners’ rustic wines, made from unknown indigenous grapes.

But Campania and the south have never accepted the north’s version of the truth. And in the last decade the rapid pace of progress has transformed Campania and its neighboring province of Basilicata into the most exciting wine-making areas in Italy. And unlike the north, which initially attracted attention with wines made from French varietals like cabernet sauvignon and merlot, Campania is doing it with grapes that were growing in the region even before Vesuvius buried Pompeii.

Crisp, mineral-laden whites, made from grapes that can be traced back to ancient Greece, belie the image of Italian white wines as mere thirst quenchers. Fascinating reds are being produced from grapes so obscure they cannot be found in even the latest wine guides. Most important, though, are the fine red wines made from aglianico (pronounced ah-lee-ahn-EE-co), another grape with origins in ancient Greece.

Like nebbiolo, the grape of Barolo, aglianico can be tough and tannic, with flavors reminiscent of tar and tobacco. But it softens faster and, like pinot noir, the aromas and flavors of aglianico differ markedly depending on the soil and climate in which it grows. North of Naples in the Falerno area near the Tyrrhenian coast, aglianico has a full, earthy, almost floral character. To the south, around the ancient Greek settlement of Paestum, the wines seem tighter, with a light smokiness and herbal quality. Inland in the Taurasi zone, where aglianico is planted on the foothills of the Apennine mountains, and in Basilicata, where vines grow on the slopes of Mount Vulture (pronounced vul-TOUR-ay), the wines are structured and complex, with minerality that comes from volcanic soil.

“I consider aglianico with nebbiolo probably the most important Italian indigenous varietals,” said Riccardo Cotarella, an enologist who has worked with some of Campania’s most important winemakers.

Feudi di San Gregorio, one of Mr. Cotarella’s clients, is the best financed and perhaps the most innovative of the south’s newer winemakers. But while its new facility is a striking addition to the Campanian countryside, Feudi’s high-spending approach is far from ordinary. The most exciting new producers in Campania and Basilicata characteristically come from farm families that have grown grapes for centuries. These families typically sold their grapes for meager prices to big producers, to be made into cheap wine. In tough economic times, when grape prices went down, these families struggled even more than usual.

“We had to try something else,” said Salvatore Fucci, whose vineyard is in the heart of the Vulture area in Basilicata. “Growing grapes, we couldn’t live. Necessity forced us to do this.” With barely enough financing, Mr. Fucci and his family went into the winemaking business. The estate’s first commercial vintage, 2000, was released under the label Elena Fucci, named for Mr. Fucci’s daughter, who is studying winemaking in Pisa. He has received good reviews, though not good enough for Mr. Fucci to feel comfortable in his new life.

“We’re not Tuscan,” he said. “Here, things assume another dimension. We worry about bad things. The weather. We used to have to pay people to take our grapes.”

The litany of landowners turned winemakers seemed endless: Fattoria Galardi, whose austere, complex Terra di Lavoro wines have been rapturously praised by Robert M. Parker Jr., the influential wine critic; De Conciliis and Luigi Maffini along the southern coast; Antonio Caggiano in Taurasi and Villa Raiano in Avellino; Salvatore Molettieri in Irpinia; Masseria Felicia near Caserta. They all began making wine in the 1990s after decades if not centuries of growing grapes.

“In Caserta 10 years ago there were 5 estates; now there are 28,” said Nicola Trabucco, an agronomist who counts 15 properties in northern Campania among his clients. “In Benevento there are 50 new estates in the last five years.”

Before the avalanche of new producers, one winemaker, Mastroberardino, held the torch high for Campania. Since 1878 Mastroberardino has been producing fine red wines from aglianico and whites from grapes like greco, fiano and falanghina. Almost alone it carefully tended the traditions, asserting a place for the wines that the rest of the world seemed to spurn.

“There is a strong conviction that we have an extraordinary patrimony,” said Piero Mastroberardino, who runs the winery with his father, Antonio. “Twenty years ago maybe one or two wineries were making Taurasi. Now there are 30 or 40.”

For elegance and complexity, few wines in Campania can match Mastroberardino’s Taurasi Radici, a tar- and mineral-flavored wine that, like Barolo or Burgundy, can take on the aroma of truffles as it ages and can last for decades. Because Campania was ignored for so long, it is still catching up with the scientific advances that are taken for granted in most of the modern winemaking world. Grapes like chardonnay, pinot noir and cabernet have been thoroughly analyzed, allowing farmers to select clones and rootstocks best suited for particular combinations of soil and climate. But scientists have barely scratched the surface on the grapes of Campania.

“Research on aglianico has been going on for a few years,” Mr. Mastroberardino said, “but for greco, fiano and the others, it is just beginning.”

The transition from small grower to grower-producer has occurred all over the wine-producing world as farmers have figured out where the money is. But it’s happening in Campania and Basilicata decades after regions like Piedmont, which went through its own shakeout in the 1960s and ’70s. In Campania growers saw what happened in the mid-1990s, when Mr. Parker raved about new estates like Galardi and Montevetrano, which have since become the equivalent of cult wineries. But government loans and subsidies, available in the 1990s for existing farms, also encouraged growers to improve vineyards and cellars with new vines and new equipment, and to start bottling their own wine.

Typically for this land of contrasts, where the undulating pastoral beauty of olive groves and tobacco fields is defiled by slag heaps alongside mountains that have been gouged to make cement, the loans that helped so many in the last decade are squeezing these new producers, who must now repay the money they borrowed. With the slower economy, many of these wineries are facing frightening choices.

“Many new estates, with good potential, don’t have the resources to wait out a bad market,” Mr. Trabucco, the agronomist, said. “You need two or three years’ investment to carry you through. They don’t have it, so they look for an immediate return.”

By that they mean high scores from influential critics who can cause a run on a particular wine. Many producers, believing that Mr. Parker’s publication, The Wine Advocate, favors inky, powerful, concentrated wines with plenty of new oak flavor, try to make wines in that style, often at the expense of aglianico’s characteristic medium body and earthy flavors.

Many winemakers were inspired by the success of Montevetrano, in southern Campania, which was started by Silvia Imparato, a photographer who caught the wine bug in the mid-1980s. With the help of Mr. Cotarella and his brother, Renzo, a winemaker for Antinori in Tuscany, she made 1,000 bottles of her first vintage, 1991. She had wanted to make a wine purely of aglianico, she said, but Mr. Cotarella, who is from Umbria, refused. Instead, Mr. Cotarella, who had made his reputation working with Bordeaux varietals, insisted on 60 percent cabernet sauvignon, 30 percent merlot and 10 percent aglianico.

“In the beginning I didn’t trust this region, because there weren’t any important wines,” Mr. Cotarella says now. Ms. Imparato’s wines, plummy yet light-bodied, with scents of cedar and tobacco, are now sought all over the world.

Several years after he began with Montevetrano, Mr. Cotarella began working with Galardi and with Feudi di San Gregorio. With Galardi, he makes one of Campania’s most profound wines, Terra di Lavoro, out of aglianico and piedirosso, an indigenous grape that is often blended with aglianico.

“Montevetrano showed me the potential of the region, and Galardi showed me the potential of the indigenous grapes,” he said. “Both represent what it can mean to work in the region with the right philosophy, the right terroir and the right varietals.”

Montevetrano, with its use of familiar international grapes like cabernet and merlot, is practically unique in Campania. Recently Mr. Cotarella recommended to another client, Alois, that it rip out its small plot of cabernet and instead plant casavecchia, an obscure, ancient red grape that is only now being studied.

Alois, near Caserta, complied and now makes a silky, minerally 100 percent casavecchia, which it calls Trebulanum. Another producer, Vestini Campagnano, specializes in little-known indigenous grapes like casavecchia and pallagrello, which in its bianco form makes soft, supple white, and in its nero form makes powerhouse reds. By many estimates the older vineyards of Campania and Basilicata hold dozens of grape varieties waiting to be rediscovered.

Back at Feudi di San Gregorio, Mr. Cotarella is working on a new project, sparkling wine. Almost every region of Italy produces spumante, though Campania has yet to create a market for its own. Mr. Cotarella has enlisted as an adviser Anselme Selosse, winemaker of Jacques Selosse, a small but important Champagne house, but Mr. Selosse will not be coming to teach the Italians about chardonnay and pinot noir. Instead they will be making sparkling wine with greco, falanghina and fiano.

“The French people,” Mr. Cotarella said with relish, “they are very jealous!”

January 2005

A Rare Tasting of Conterno Barolos

By ERIC ASIMOV

The Barolos of Giacomo Conterno are among the most beautiful wines in the world: gorgeously pure and packed with flavors that feel almost threedimensional. Despite the intensity, the texture is sheer, almost delicate, like silken threads that can suspend bridges.

And yet, with wines like this, the flavors and aromas are really only the start.

Great wines pack history into a glass. Mostly, it’s a natural tale—of calamitous weather or blue skies and sunshine. But the human element pours forth, too—weddings, births and deaths, war, prosperity and depression. Even that is only the beginning, especially if you are Roberto Conterno, the proprietor of Giacomo Conterno.

Mr. Conterno was in New York last month for a dinner at Eleven Madison Park to raise money for rebuilding Haiti. He brought with him seven vintages of both his Cascina Francia Barolo, the normal bottling, and the magnificent Monfortino riserva, plus one older Barolo, from 1937.

For Barolo lovers, this was a rare opportunity to compare the two Conternos in multiple vintages. For Mr. Conterno, this was an occasion to commune with his past, to hear once again the unmistakable voices of his father, Giovanni, and his grandfather, Giacomo, through the medium of the wine.

The voices tell not only the story of the Conterno estate but of the evolution of Barolo from a little-known wine sold largely in barrels and demi-johns in the early 20th century to one of the most prized wines in the world today. Giacomo Conterno, Roberto’s grandfather, was one of the first small Barolo producers to bottle his own wine, beginning in the 1920s. His sons, Giovanni and Aldo, took over the estate in 1961.

Giovanni, who was Roberto’s father, adhered closely to the traditional methods of his father. The just-fermented wine was kept with the skins for a prolonged maceration, imparting structure and texture. The wine then was aged in large, old oak casks—four years for the Cascina Francia and at least seven years for the Monfortino. The estate has never deviated from these methods, even as others turned to small French oak barrels, or barriques, to soften the wines.

Aldo, the younger brother, wanted to establish his own business. In 1969, he established Poderi Aldo Conterno, where he and his family continue to make superb Barolos. Giovanni remained, making wines on his own until Roberto, who was born in 1968, began to make the wine in 1988. Father and son worked side by side until Giovanni died in 2004.

“Whenever I enter the cellar, I feel my father and my grandfather with me,” Roberto Conterno said before the dinner started. “We have them to thank for the wines we drink tonight.”

And what wines. The youngest pair were from the fine 1999 vintage, 11 years old now but, in traditional Barolo terms, still too young to drink. The tight structure of the Cascina Francia restrained the aromas from bursting forth, while the Monfortino was lusher and richer—still better to wait another five years.

I was particularly interested in the next pair, from the superb 1996 vintage. Like other ’96 Barolos I’ve had, it wasn’t ready to drink. But the Monfortino was absolutely delicious, with classic Barolo flavors of tar and roses, plush yet graceful and elegant. It’s still a baby, and will last a long, long time.

All of the Conterno grapes come from the Cascina Francia vineyard, in Serralunga d’Alba, an area of the Barolo region known for its powerful, structured wines. In exceptional vintages, a selection of the best grapes is used to make Monfortino. These grapes are fermented separately, with no effort to control the temperature of the fermentation, no matter how high it gets, and are macerated longer. While the Monfortino’s extended aging results in an even more structured wine than the Cascina Francia, when compared directly, the Monfortinos seem lusher and more generous.

The pair from 1990, another great Barolo vintage, were beautiful in very different ways. The Cascina Francia was the first wine of the evening to show the secondary aromas that come from aging, in this case an earthy, truffly quality. It was also the first wine to show the high-toned flavors of a mature Conterno, which I always experience as skyrockets and colors. The Monfortino seemed younger, and yet was so invitingly graceful I couldn’t put it down.

Now we were moving on to older vintages. For each vintage, Mr. Conterno had brought two bottles of each wine. But for the 1985 vintage, Conterno produced three Barolos: Cascina Francia, a rare Cascina Francia riserva and the Monfortino. Mr. Conterno, who had not intended to bring the riserva, was momentarily perplexed to discover after the wines had been decanted that one of the Cascina Francias was a riserva. Trouble was, he didn’t know which decanter it was in.

So we tasted three wines of this vintage, though we would not know which of the Cascina Francias was the riserva. All three wines had the truffly aroma, while the Monfortino seemed characteristically richer. One of the Cascina Francias seemed a little more structured. Was it the riserva? We’ll never know.

The Conterno wines did not always come from the Cascina Francia vineyard. Before Barolo became well known in the 1970s, the family purchased grapes each year to make their wines. Mr. Conterno said that it was easy for his father to buy the best possible Serralunga grapes until the demand began to rise.

“My father understood how things were changing in the 1970s, and he bought Cascina Francia in 1974,” Mr. Conterno said. The first vintage made from the vineyard was 1978.

Whatever the source of the grapes, the 1971 vintage was a highlight. The Cascina Francia was lovely and subtle. The Monfortino, by contrast, was complex and elegant, powerful and long-lasting, yet still lively and agile, everything a great Barolo, a great Monfortino, could be.

For many of the tasters, the 1971 Monfortino was their favorite wine of the night. Yet the next pair, from 1961, was breathtaking.

The Cascina Francia was unbelievably fresh and graceful, elegant and complete. This is what Barolo strives for, I thought. But somehow, the Monfortino outdid it, absolutely gorgeous, harmonious, long-lasting and complex. This was my wine of the night, while Mr. Conterno said the freshness of the ’61 Cascina Francia made it his favorite.

That was a lot for him to concede, because next up were a pair from 1958, which Mr. Conterno had cited as one of his favorite vintages of all time.

“Some people ask me, ‘Why don’t you use barriques?’” Mr. Conterno said. “I say, I drank 1958, the best wine of my life. Why use barriques?”

This night, however, the 1958s seemed a little past their prime and disjointed. A last Barolo, a 1937, seemed a bit caramelized, yet identifiable as a Barolo. Lovely, considering.

One last voice was to be heard. “I like to remember another person behind the scenes, a sort of shadow, and that is my mother,” Mr. Conterno said.

He told the story of how his father bought Cascina Francia, and of how, the morning the sale was to go through, he had felt doubts.

“He said to my mother, ‘They are going to raise the price at the last minute, what should I do?’” Mr. Conterno recalled. “My mother said, ‘Just go, and come back with the land.’”

“They did raise the price, but he came back with the land.”

Fertile ground for future memories in a glass.

April 2010

An Italian Prince and His Magic Cellar

By ERIC ASIMOV

In a secluded back room of a hotel not far from the Trevi Fountain, a dozen glasses of Italian white wine sat before each of a small group of tasters. All were used to this sort of thing and, really, how exciting are most Italian white wines? Six were made from malvasia di Candia, ordinarily a workmanlike grape not known for producing great table wines, yet these were astonishing.

The oldest, a 1978, was dry and fresh, with aromas of flowers, honey and minerals. The flavors seemed to linger in the mouth forever. The wine in the other glasses was sémillon, the backbone of great white Bordeaux but practically nonexistent in Italy. Yet these wines were even more astounding than the malvasias. The oldest, a 1971, had the lively mineral flavor of a fine Puligny-Montrachet.

The older the wines got, the younger they tasted. They seemed almost magical, and indeed the story of these wines has a fairy tale quality to it.

Once upon a time there was a prince. By most accounts he was not so much charming as eccentric. His name was Alberico Boncompagni Ludovisi, prince of Venosa, and his family, which can be traced back at least 1,000 years, includes two popes.

The prince lived on an estate, Fiorano, on the outskirts of Rome near the Via Appia Antica, the ancient Appian Way. There he grew wheat, raised dairy cows and made three wines, one red and two whites, from a small vineyard. The vineyard had been planted with the local grapes that make the sort of nondescript wines typical of Latium, the region centered on Rome.

But in 1946, when the prince inherited Fiorano, he replanted the vineyard with cabernet sauvignon and merlot, long before these Bordeaux grapes became familiar in Italy, and malvasia and sémillon. The prince practiced organic agriculture in an era when others embraced chemical sprays. He kept his yields ridiculously low, resulting in minute quantities of intense, concentrated wines, and he did not filter them. He aged the wine in large numbered barrels, which he reused year after year. A fine white mold grew naturally in his cellar, covering the barrels and the bottles that he stored in neat stacks. The prince did nothing to remove it; he believed it was beneficial.

Few people knew of the wines, but their reputation was excellent.

“The greatness of Fiorano is a secret shared by a few,” wrote Burton Anderson in Vino, his 1980 guide to Italian wine.

The red made the most profound impression. Italian white wines were thought to be inconsequential, and few paid attention to the prince’s whites, though Mr. Anderson called the sémillon “the most refined wine of its type and a rarity in Italy.”

One who was in on the Fiorano secret was Luigi Veronelli, a leading Italian wine writer who regularly rhapsodized about the wines. He liked the reds well enough, comparing them to Sassicaia, the Tuscan Bordeaux blend that became famous in the 1970s. But he loved the whites. He was among the first to note their potential for aging, and he bemoaned their scarcity. “To obtain his cru is practically impossible,” Mr. Veronelli once wrote. “If I lived in Rome, I would beg for them at the prince’s door every morning.”

By all reports the prince was strong-willed and stubborn. He was elusive and rarely spoke to business associates. Mr. Anderson said he never met him. Neil Empson, who exported Fiorano wines to the United States in the 1970s, also never met him or saw the winery. He dealt only with a secretary.

“He was a rather strange person to do business with,” Mr. Empson said in a telephone interview. “You had to pay him when you made the order, and he would ship whatever he wanted to ship, not what you ordered.”

Mr. Empson said this caused him to stop doing business with the prince, and eventually he lost track of the wines.

The aging prince continued to make his wines until 1995, although he had stopped selling the bottles. After the ’95 harvest he pulled out all the vines in his vineyard, except for a small plot of cabernet and merlot. He offered no explanation, and at the time none was asked.

The prince is now 86 years old, in ill health and living in a hotel in Rome. He had one child, Francesca, who married Piero Antinori, the eminent Tuscan winemaker, at the Fiorano estate in 1966. Mr. Antinori suggests today that the prince was unable to bear the thought of anybody else making his wines when he could no longer do it himself.

“He is so in love with this estate, and when you are very much in love, you are also a bit jealous,” Mr. Antinori said by phone. “When he was not able to do it himself in the old way, probably he preferred to give up.”

And so the vineyards lie fallow. And 14,000 bottles remained in the prince’s cellar, slowly becoming engulfed by the white mold, until 2000, when Mr. Veronelli, seeking to publicize some Roman wines in connection with a bicycle race, sought an audience with the prince. It was then, Mr. Veronelli said, that he learned of the destruction of the vines.

Mr. Veronelli requested a sample of one of the remaining bottles and sent an emissary, Filippo Polidori, a restaurateur and television personality, to pick it up. After being kept waiting for 90 minutes, Mr. Polidori said at the tasting in Rome, a secretary told him that Mr. Veronelli could not have one bottle, but he could have all 14,000—9,500 of the malvasia and 4,500 of the sémillon—if he could disperse them properly.

Mr. Polidori said the prince wanted the bottles to be treated as a legacy, and not consumed right away. But first the bottles, mostly from the 1985 to ’95 vintages, which had lain untended in the cellar for years, needed to be cleaned and cataloged. It took two people almost a year to complete the task.

Mr. Veronelli and Mr. Polidori then held a series of tastings, looking for the right people to disperse the wines. They eventually settled on three: Andrea Carelli, an Italian wine broker, who would handle the European and Asian markets; Paolo Domeneghetti, an importer in New York, who will handle American restaurant sales; and Sergio Esposito, managing partner of Italian Wine Merchants near Union Square, who will handle American retail sales.

Mr. Esposito, who was invited to a tasting, said he had never heard of the wines, and could only find vague references in old catalogs. “At the tasting I was completely overtaken by the wines and fell in love with them,” he said. “To me, they are treasures. They’re wines made from grapes that nobody knew could make wines like that. They had no history. It was one person’s devotion.”

Highlights from the Rome tasting stand out: a 1982 malvasia with flavors of apples, minerals and pears; a 1980 sémillon that tasted of hazelnuts and wax and seemed impossibly young. As the wines aged, the youthful acidity seemed to give way to mineral, earthy flavors. Yet unaccountably, in contrast to most white wines, which get darker with age, the golden colors of the young wines turned pale as they got older. How to explain this?

Mr. Esposito suggests that the prince was correct about the white mold. “He was so in tune with his surroundings that he had confidence the mold was O.K.,” he said. “I think it was much like how blue cheese was discovered. It’s blue and you’re eating it and it’s O.K.”

Mr. Esposito said he plans to sell his allocation slowly over the course of five years, aiming for collectors who allow them to age. He is also planning to hold back bottles from each vintage for charity tastings. “I want to participate in these tastings for the next 20 or 30 years and see how they develop,” he said.

As much as these wines are a legacy of the prince, they are too a legacy of Mr. Veronelli, who died in November at 78. Of these wines, which will never be produced again, he wrote, “They enchant you with the first taste, burrow in your memory and make you forever better.”

December 2004

Some See a Wine Loved Not Wisely,
but Too Well

By ERIC ASIMOV

You need to have your museum legs for a visit to Il Greppo, the historic estate just south of this hillside town, where the Biondi Santi family virtually invented the wine now prized around the world as Brunello di Montalcino. Within minutes of my arrival, Franco Biondi Santi, the family’s 84-year-old patriarch, was opening a glass display case and showing me a rifle carried by his grandfather, Ferruccio, when fighting under Garibaldi against Austria in 1866.

It was Ferruccio who, at a time in the 1880s when his fellow Tuscans preferred light, fizzy, semisweet wines, experimented with different strains of the sangiovese grape, locally called the Brunello, and created a dry, forceful red wine with the intensity to age and improve for decades. As he has with many visitors before, Franco Biondi Santi took me into his cellar to show me his three remaining bottles of the 1888 Biondi Santi, the first great vintage of Brunello. He pointed out the huge fermentation and aging barrels, or botti, made of Slavonian oak, some of which have been in continuous use since the late 19th century. After a lunch that included three vintages of Biondi Santi Brunello, he poured out glasses of 1969 moscatello di Montalcino, a delicate, gloriously fragrant and fresh sweet wine that was among the last produced by his father, Tancredi, himself a celebrated viticulturist, before he died in 1970.

“This is the original wine of Montalcino,” he said, citing references that go back to the 1500s.

With such a family legacy, it is no wonder that Mr. Biondi Santi is troubled with the state of Brunello di Montalcino. Though the 2001 vintage of Brunello, which has just been released, may be one of the best ever, questions abound in Montalcino over what kind of wine Brunello ought to be, how the wine should be made and where the grapes should be planted.

Since the first half of the 20th century, when Il Greppo’s hillside vineyard, 1,600 feet above sea level, was the sole source of Brunello di Montalcino, the appellation has grown explosively. Nowadays, vineyards cover hillsides and flatlands all over the Montalcino zone, in all sorts of soils and at many different altitudes, and producers employ almost as many different techniques for making the wine as there are sausages in a salumeria.

Strict traditionalists like Mr. Biondi Santi and his ally, Gianfranco Soldera, whose Case Basse di Soldera wines may be the greatest Brunellos of all, scorn much of what passes for Brunello di Montalcino today. They say the wine too often is fruity, round and rich, without any semblance of the classic angular, austere sangiovese character of old. Brunellos aged in barriques, or small barrels of new French oak, rather than in botti, they say, might as well be coming from California or Australia for all the distinctiveness they possess.

“If a producer puts wines in barriques, it’s because he has bad wine, without tannins,” Mr. Soldera said. “He must replace the tannins and aromas with what is gained from the barriques.”

Others, however, assert that Brunello di Montalcino has never been better, and point to the high demand around the world as evidence of Brunello’s success. They applauded the relaxing of rules that used to require that wines be aged in barrels for four years before being released. Now, although Montalcino still has the longest aging requirement in Italy, only two of those four years must be in wood, unless it is a riserva, which must be aged for five years, half the time in wood.

“As new producers came on the scene, I would say the average quality has stayed pretty high, and the changes they have made to the laws have been quite beneficial,” said Leonardo Lo Cascio, president of Winebow, an Italian wine importer for more than 25 years.

Many traditionally minded producers accuse others of wanting an even more drastic change: eliminating the rule requiring that Brunello be made only from the sangiovese grape. Indeed, they insist that some producers are already adding wine made from grapes other than sangiovese to darken the color and to make the wine easier to drink at an early age. They point to recent allegations of fraud in the neighboring Chianti Classico region and say it is only a matter of time before such cases surface in Montalcino.

“I think what has happened in the last few months in Chianti is only the tip of the iceberg,” said Francesco Cinzano, chairman of Col d’Orcia, which makes Poggio al Vento, a fine, traditional style riserva Brunello.

Filippo Fanti, a Brunello producer and head of the Consorzio del Vino Brunello di Montalcino, the local trade association, said most producers supported the sangiovese rule and that any discussion of changing it was “theoretical.”

Stylistic conflict, of course, is as much a part of winemaking as corks and barrels. Whether in California, Bordeaux, Burgundy or Barolo, those who adhere to winemaking tradition are always scandalized by those who do not feel bound by it. But the conflict has special resonance in Montalcino, a rare wine region where the origin of the style is still fresh in memory and where the inventor has a direct line to the present in the Biondi Santis. Indeed, the Biondi Santi family might have been quite content back in the 1960s if nobody but themselves had been permitted to call their wine Brunello di Montalcino, and they continue to feel a special sense of guardianship for the wine.

Contrary to the popular perception that European winemaking traditions have been honed over centuries of trial and error, Brunello di Montalcino is a relatively recent phenomenon. Through the first half of the 20th century, only the Biondi Santis made Brunello di Montalcino, and in 1960 only 11 producers were bottling their wine, with about 157 acres planted with sangiovese grosso, the Brunello grape.

But by 1990 more than 3,000 acres were planted, with 87 producers making Brunello, and today, according to the Consorzio del Vino Brunello di Montalcino, the trade association, nearly 4,700 acres are planted, with 183 producers.

With such growth, the Brunello style evolved in different directions. While it is hazardous to speak too generally about styles, wines in the more traditional mode are usually characterized by a ruby color and a lean, spare texture, with good acidity, structure that comes from tannins in the grapes rather than from tannins imparted by oak barrels, and flavors of bitter cherry and smoke. Producers include Il Poggione, Cerbaiona, Poggio di Sotto, Il Palazzone, Col d’Orcia and Lisini.

Wines in the more modern mode tend to be darker, plusher and less acidic, with tannins derived from oak barrels and opulent flavors of fruit and chocolate. Producers in this style include Uccelliera, Camigliano, Fanti, Casanova di Neri and La Poderina. And many producers, like Caparzo, Castelgiocondo, Mastrojanni and Ciacci Piccolomini d’Aragona, toe a middle line.

To taste a traditionally made Brunello like Biondi Santi or Soldera is to wonder why anybody would ever want to make a different sort of wine. The Biondi Santis today are often criticized as too lean and austere and are said to require too much aging, but to my taste they are like precisely cut gems, offering clearly delineated flavors that, even in a relatively young 1999, are simultaneously graceful and intense rather than lush and rich.

Mr. Soldera takes just as extreme an approach to winemaking as the Biondi Santis, perhaps even more so. He keeps his wine in large botti well beyond the required two years. While most producers are releasing their 2001 Brunellos, his 2000 is still in wood—“whatever the wine needs,” he said. He is a decidedly opinionated man who recently constructed a new cellar with walls of crushed rock rather than cement, which he says destroys wine. On a visit to his cellar he laid down the ground rules: “I don’t allow spitting.”

Not that I would want to spit this wine. Even in barrels, it has an unusual purity and grace, tannic perhaps, but with a lacy delicacy as well. Though you may drain a glass, you can’t say the glass is empty. The aroma lingers.

Mr. Soldera points to the wine, the color of polished rubies, and assails those who assess a wine by the depth of color. “Judging wine by a dark color is for stupid people,” he said. “This is the color of sangiovese. You should be able to look through the wine and see your fingernail on the other side.”

Unlike Biondi Santi, Soldera wines have maintained their critical reputation and can command up to $200 or $300 a bottle. But traditional Brunellos are still available at more modest prices, though they are hardly inexpensive. A subtle, stylish Brunello from a producer like Il Poggione can run $50, while a more intense, though equally elegant, riserva might be $75.

Fabrizio Bindocci, the director of Il Poggione, is suspicious of those who stray from traditional methods. He believes that Brunello ought to be a long-aged wine and says that proposals to relax the aging requirements even further come from producers with deficient wine.

“Some Brunellos on the market should age only two years because they’re so thin,” he said. “But ours have such structure they need the time.”

Iano de Grazia, a partner with his brother in Marc de Grazia Selections, a wine brokerage in Florence, counts himself as favoring traditional Brunello, but says the aging rules are too restrictive, and are especially harmful in weak vintages.

“Maybe there should be some limit, but each vintage will tell you,” he said. “It shouldn’t be a stone recipe. That’s crazy.”

Not all changes have been so controversial. Few would dispute that viticulture has improved dramatically in the last 35 years, or that replacing rustic chestnut barrels with oak has been a good thing.

For his part, Mr. Biondi Santi has a proposal of his own. He would like to see the Montalcino zone divided into a series of subzones, each with its own character, rather than having so many contrasting styles lumped together as Montalcino. He points to the communes that make up the Côte d’Or in Burgundy as the perfect example, but acknowledges that this is unlikely to happen as it would not be in most producers’ interests.

What else would he like to see happen? He answers quickly.

“No more vineyards in clay soil, or below 1,000 feet. Return to Slavonian oak. Return to three years in wood. Abolish barriques.

“That would be sufficient.”

February 2006

In Apulia, Emancipation for the Grapes

By R. W. APPLE Jr.

In 1997, Mark Shannon, a California wine consultant, flew to Sicily to help a client trying to complete a bulk wine deal. Traveling around the island by car, he met Elvezia Sbalchiero, another consultant, who comes from Friuli, in the far northeastern corner of Italy. One thing led to another, as it often does, and eventually the two formed a personal and professional partnership.

Now they own a company called Fusione—guess why?—based here in Apulia, in the heel of the Italian boot. Drawing on grapes grown by up to 1,600 small farmers in the area, he makes and she markets wines that have scored an astonishing success all around the globe, with projected sales this year 15 times as big as those in the winery’s first year, 1998. The wines are called A-Mano, meaning handmade, and by far the best-known is a robust red made from a onceobscure grape named primitivo.

“We created or played a large part in creating a clean, modern-style primitivo and taking it around the world,” Mr. Shannon told my wife, Betsey, and me when we stopped at the couple’s whitewashed farmhouse in the ambling hills about 45 minutes south of Bari. “We work with third- and fourth-generation growers, who tend tiny plots of very old, low-yielding vines.”

Ms. Sbalchiero, 41, interjected: “We started a bit of a social revolution here. At first the farmers didn’t get it, but eventually they came to understand and trust us. We paid them cash, and we paid promptly, which no one had ever done before.”

These days, said Mr. Shannon, 46, “all the growers know my car, and they stop me on the road and say, ‘Come to see my grapes—they’re as good as the ones you’re buying.’”

DNA testing by Carole Meredith, a plant geneticist at the University of California, Davis, established a few years ago that primitivo is a descendant of a grape called crljenak kastelanski, widely grown in the 18th and 19th centuries on the Dalmatian coast of Croatia. (A crljenak cross with dobricic, plavac mali, is grown in that area today.) California’s zinfandel, she showed, is genetically the same as primitivo, though how it crossed the ocean remains a subject of considerable dispute.

Apulian primitivo and zin are not twins, of course; climate, soil and vinification all help to shape a wine’s look, aroma and flavor, along with the grape variety. But the two share several characteristics: both are fruit-rich, chewy, sometimes lush wines, a deep violet-red in color, often too high in alcoholic content for comfort (a ferocious 15.5 percent in some extreme cases), but much more subtle if carefully handled.

For years, tank trucks of rough, raisiny primitivo headed north every fall, destined for use, unacknowledged, to add heft to Chianti, Barbaresco and even red Burgundy. But now, tamed into “a gentle giant,” as the wine writer Burton Anderson puts it, primitivo can stand on its own sturdy feet.

Mr. Shannon’s winery, in the nearby town of Laterza, is absolutely immaculate. He uses plastic corks to further minimize the possibilities of contamination. And he uses refrigeration at every step of the way to maintain control, chilling the grapes from the minute they arrive from the fields, chilling the fermenting tanks and shipping the bottled wine in chilled containers. When A-Mano’s huge compressors are fired up, he joked, “the lights flicker all over Apulia.”

The partnership’s big break came when Neil Empson, one of the leading exporters of Italian wines to the United States, tasted A-Mano primitivo and added it to his range. Other A-Mano labels have been added since, including a reserve bottling, Prima Mano, produced only in extraordinary years from two exceptionally old vineyards.

“We take pride,” Mr. Shannon said, “at a time when the American market is awash in mediocre $35 wines, in making a food-friendly bottle that can retail for $10 or $11.”

Fusione is not the only producer of high-quality primitivo. Several of the others are grouped in an unusual organization called the Accademia dei Racemi, not a true cooperative but an association in which each member makes his own wine and joins with the others for marketing support and technical advice. Based in Manduria, between the old cities of Taranto, founded by the ancient Greeks, and Lecce, which dates from Roman times, the group includes value-for-money labels like Masseria Pepe, Pervini and the stylish Felline, made by Gregory Perrucci, son of a bulk-wine producer.

Elsewhere, other changes are afoot, and some of them involve not red but white wines. Traditionally, Apulian whites have been regarded as second-class citizens, although at their best, the vegetal, slightly astringent wines produced around the town of Locorotondo and elsewhere from the little-known verdeca grape can be the kind of partners Apulia’s enticing swordfish, turbot, sea bass and mullet deserve.

Lifting a leaf from the book of Planeta, the Sicilian winery that has demonstrated in recent years that southern Italy is not too hot to make superior chardonnay, several Apulian producers have succeeded lately with that coolclimate grape. One that Betsey and I enjoyed at Il Melograno, a quietly luxurious hotel near Monopoli on the Adriatic coast, was Laureato, a round, beautifully balanced product of the relatively young Vetrere winery, which is run by the sisters Annamaria and Francesca Bruni. Like many good New World chardonnays, it has luscious overtones of banana and pineapple.

Bonny Doon, the California operation of the pun-prone Randall Grahm, markets an Apulian red based on the Uva di Troia variety, called Il Circo “La Violetta.” Its vivid label shows a liberally tattooed woman, and Mr. Grahm has promoted it as a creamy, quaffable yet complex wine that avoids “the indignities of internationalism and the ravages of the new wood order.”

Piero Antinori, the eminent Tuscan producer, has taken the plunge into Apulia as well, under the Tormaresca label, and one of his first big winners is a refined, lightly oaked chardonnay called Pietrabianca. This is produced from grapes grown in the northern part of the region, near Frederick II’s extraordinary eight-sided Castel del Monte, but the Antinori interests stretch farther south as well, with extensive holdings around San Pietro Vernotico, a village near the Crusader port of Brindisi.

Experimenting with varieties relatively little grown in Apulia, like merlot and cabernet sauvignon, Tormaresca has made a major splash. I especially enjoyed the Bocca di Lupo red from the Castel del Monte area, made with cabernet and aglianico, which is used for aristocratic, long-lived Taurasi in Campania. It stood up well to Il Falcone, Rivera’s more traditional longtime leader in Castel del Monte.

“Land is terribly cheap here,” said Matthew Watkins, the wine-loving Canadian husband of Roberta Guerra, who manages Il Melograno. “Antinori will show the way, and other big guys will come in after him. He’s very big and very powerful, and he is making superb wines. I only hope that he doesn’t displace the little guys.”

One morning during our time in Apulia I headed north from lovely Lecce, Apulia’s Baroque marvel, with Giuseppe Malazzini, who works for Agricole Vallone, to learn something about Graticciaia, one of Apulia’s wine treasures. It is made from negroamaro grapes (the name means “black bitter” in Italian) harvested in good vintages from a small plot of 60-year-old vines, unsupported by trellises, that are allowed to grow into bushy, five-foot-high shapes called alberelli, or little trees, with trunks as thick as a grown man’s forearm. Only 10,000 to 20,000 bottles a year are produced.

The key to Graticciaia is a process in which the grapes are dried on reed mats for three or four weeks in the open air, concentrating their aroma and flavor, before they are made into a soft, dark, well-focused red wine, with just a hint of vanilla.

Over lunch at an old bougainvillea-clad masseria, or farmhouse, where the Vallone sisters live, Donato Lazzari, the company manager, told me that the idea for the Amarone-like wine had come to him and to Severino Garofano, the wine consultant who has probably done more than anyone to lift the level of Apulian wine, on a flight south from Milan. Their inspiration, he said, came from a wine made in days of yore for the marriage of a daughter.

Vallone also makes more conventional wines from negroamaro, the most basic of which are designated as Salice Salentino, after the area where they are produced, far down the Apulian “heel.” Francesco Candido is another player in this mass market, as is Leone de Castris, but the dominant Salice Salentino producer, so far as sales in the United States go, has long been Cosimo Taurino, a firm founded by a former pharmacist and carried forward since his death a few years ago by his son Francesco.

Taurino makes two highly acclaimed blends of negroamaro (85 percent) and malvasia nera (15 percent), Patriglione and Notarpanaro—each from a single vineyard. Both are dense, intensely garnet-colored and slow to open in decanter or glass. Although Patriglione costs more and wins higher marks from critics, I find Notarpanaro much less cumbersome with food.

Three more recent introductions compete in the super-premium negroamaro sweepstakes. These are the arrestingly labeled Nero, made by Conti Zecca; Le Braci, produced by Mr. Garofano, the consultant, who works on several of the others, too; and Masseria Maime from Tormaresco.

Some experts see unlimited possibilities for Apulian wines, across the board from the less expensive ones, perhaps best suited to simple trattoria meals, to the top-of-the-line bottlings that aim to stand eventually among Italy’s best. Others are much more skeptical, like Joseph Bastianich, a partner in the restaurant Babbo in New York, a grower and a wine author. He praises Apulian reds as “terrific value, terrific with food,” but doubts that even the best of them will ever loom large in the global market.

New Yorkers and visitors to the city can judge for themselves at I Trulli, a restaurant at 122 East 27th Street, owned by Nicola Marzovilla, an Apulian, which usually has at least a dozen wines from the region on its list. Vino, an all-Italian wine shop across the street, stocks most of them.

July 2004

In Spain, These Hills Are Alive (Again!)

By ERIC ASIMOV

The stone terraces, thick with green vines, rise up the face of a mountain from the River Sil at the impossibly steep angle of a rocket ascending toward space. The only way down, or up, is by foot, and even thinking about the climb in the brilliant heat of the summer sun is enough to make the legs throb, the back protest and the mind boil in rebellion against such seeming insanity.

Yet outside this small town in the heart of the Ribeira Sacra, in the Galicia region of northwest Spain, grape growers have been making that crazy climb day after day for 2,000 years. The Romans first carved these terraces to supply wine for their march to the Atlantic. Over the centuries the locals joined in, led by monks, who cut vineyards into canyons and precipitous gorges of the Sil and two other rivers: the Miño and the Bibei.

For millennia, terraced vineyards have been the face of this land. Farmers tended animals, grew grain and raised grapes—another subsistence crop.

But the 20th century proved disastrous. First phylloxera, a scourge of rootdevouring aphids, devastated the vines. Then the Spanish Civil War ravaged the economy. Young people left in droves, escaping agricultural life. Farmers abandoned the terraces, and forests reclaimed them, the crumbling stones ghostly shadows of an older way of life.

Yet alongside these abandonados, as the old terraces are called, new energy has come to Ribeira Sacra. Old terraces are being rebuilt, vineyards are being renewed and wine is being made again—sometimes stunningly good wine—which, to the astonishment of some older Galicians, is earning raves half a world away.

It is the potential for making great wine that is bringing the 21st century to a region that has barely come to terms with entering the 20th, and has brought Ribeira Sacra to a winemaking crossroads. Here in this isolated region, so obscure it is little known even in the rest of Galicia, the potential for distinction comes from the combination of indigenous grapes, the slate and granite soils, the peculiar microclimates of the rivers and terraces, and the human determination to make singular wines.

But there is pressure against making such wines as well. The local wine bureaucracy prefers squeaky clean, inexpensive wine for high-volume sales. Others argue for planting grapes with proven international popularity, like tempranillo, the grape of Rioja. Dedicated winemakers scoff at that view, calling it “Rioj-itis.”

“There are two types of winemakers: those who want to make money and those who want to make wine,” said Pedro Rodríguez, who makes small amounts of juicy, earthy, exotically-scented red wine under the Guímaro label. “The tradition here is to make your own wine, for yourself to drink. A lot of people say, ‘Make more, make more,’ but why?”

As long as anyone can remember, mencía has been the dominant red grape, as it is in the neighboring region of Bierzo to the east. But where Bierzo produces dark, dense wines, Ribeira Sacra’s are lighter-bodied with a silky balance of fruit and minerality that can sometimes be reminiscent of Burgundy.

“If you look at the great wine regions of the world—Burgundy, Champagne, Bordeaux—it’s very difficult to find similar conditions in the south of Spain, but you can find those conditions here,” said Raúl Pérez, who makes wine from several Spanish regions, including Ribeira Sacra since 2002.

His 2005 El Pecado, made from grapes grown in those terraced vineyards overlooking the Sil, is astoundingly good—graceful and elegant with polished fruit and decidedly mineral flavors. “If I didn’t think that I could make wines that could age, I wouldn’t be here,” he said.

If Dominio do Bibei didn’t think it could make great wines, it would not have come to Ribeira Sacra, either. Dominio is an ambitious, well-financed project that is restoring terraces and vineyards on ridiculously perilous hillsides in the Bibei Valley. On the top of a hill it has built a sleek, minimalist winery, four stark white separate buildings that descend like stair steps, mimicking the terraced hillside.

“Imagine 10 years ago, the entire mountain was abandoned,” said David Bustos, the commercial manager of Dominio do Bibei. “When we arrived in 1999 only a little bit was planted and maintained. The work is very hard, and preparing the soil as well as the terraces, it can take three or four years before a terrace is ready for planting.”

Dotting the old vineyards are lagares, crumbling stone structures that once provided shelter and a place to ferment grapes right in the vineyard. Every family would have a lagar, to which they would carry the grapes at harvest. Sometimes families would sleep there for the duration. Dominio is restoring lagares to use for storage and a place for vineyard workers to eat a meal away from the grueling heat of the sun.

Dominio grows mencía, and a host of other grapes, too, indigenous varieties like brancellao, mouratón, garnacha and sousón that in the old days were interplanted with mencía. The old-timers would ferment the grapes together, but Dominio has adopted modern methods, growing and fermenting the grapes separately. The reds include a light, spicy Lalama, meant for early consumption, and the more serious Lacima, dense yet not heavy, with beautifully balanced spice, fruit and mineral flavors.

“Lacima expresses the Atlantic character of our wines,” Mr. Bustos said. “It’s 100 percent mencía, but we have no rules. If we have something that we think will taste good, we’ll add it.”

Dominio also makes whites, including a fresh, lively Lapola, made of four different white grapes, and the extraordinary creamy, waxy Lapena, made entirely of the godello grape. Godello is little known compared with albariño, the most familiar Galician grape in the United States, but it has the potential to make even more distinctive wines.

If Dominio do Bibei and Mr. Pérez represent a future of wine professionals recognizing the world-class potential of Ribeira Sacra, Ramón Losada exemplifies the centuries-old traditions of the region coming to terms with the present.

For centuries Mr. Losada’s family farmed the terraces and made wine for themselves. If they made extra, they sold it by the barrel to restaurants and bars in Lugo, a city to the north. With no roads until surprisingly recently, the barrels were shipped by river.

Like so many other Galicians in the 1940s and ’50s, Mr. Losada’s grandfather decided the agricultural work was too much. He emigrated to Venezuela. But unlike many others, he returned to Ribeira Sacra and got serious about making wine. With the help of young Ramón, he bought up plots near the family’s vines and set about restoring terraces and vineyards. By the 1990s Mr. Losada was in charge, and he began selling his wine commercially, calling it D. Ventura, after his grandfather.

Today, three red wines, made from three distinct vineyard sites, are exported to the United States. Viña Caneiro, made from a 3.7-acre plot of slate soil on terraces rising steeply from the edge of the Sil, is the most impressive, a beautifully balanced, graceful wine of 100 percent mencía that tastes of exotic red fruit, spices and minerals.

Still, Mr. Losada considers winemaking a hobby. He is a veterinarian, confining his vineyard work to weekends. Indeed, during the workweek, the vineyards are largely empty. But on a Saturday, driving the narrow roads that separate the terraces nearer the river from those higher up the mountain can be hazardous, with cars arrayed willy-nilly on the sides as weekend farmers tend their vines.

“I make money on the wine, but not enough to live on, which gives me the freedom to make wine however I want,” Mr. Losada said. “Some urge me to change, but I won’t.”

He said he has been told his wine might sell better if he aged it in new barrels of French oak, adding a touch of vanilla flavor, rather than in the steel tanks he uses. Some denser wines, like those of Mr. Pérez or Dominio do Bibei, take well to the barrels. But Mr. Losada’s more delicate wine would be overwhelmed.

In the Caneiro vineyard, stepping gingerly from terrace to terrace, chunks of slate underfoot, the River Sil is just below. Breezes coming from the water cool the vines in the heat of the day.

Here in the Amandi Valley, unlike the Bibei Valley, there were no lagares for fermenting the grapes on site. People instead used to carry the grapes on their backs twice a day uphill to the wineries. Now they just carry the heavy loads to the road above, which, incidentally, was paved just last year. Not surprisingly, many growers and winemakers here seem to have back trouble.

Some of the lowest of the original Roman terraces have been swallowed up by the river, since hydroelectric dams raised the water level. Across the river, on another steep hillside, the terraces are empty and overgrown. “The mountain used to be full,” Mr. Losada said.

One can’t help sensing the timeless nature of Ribeira Sacra, of how a bottle of Viña Caneiro can taste of 2,000 years of history. But Mr. Losada said if you really want to understand the wine and the people, you have to visit a small church.

He drives the narrow country roads of this district, known disconcertingly as Sober, passing first an old woman with a stick, guiding a flock of sheep, and then a meadow with a herd of grazing Rubia Gallega, the red cows of Galicia.

“Demographically, this is the oldest province in Spain,” he said. “Young people just left—they didn’t want to farm, and the wine work scared them to death.”

In the tiny village of Pantón he stops at a 12th-century church, San Miguel de Eiré, which is still used for Mass and baptisms. Mr. Losada explained that Ribeira Sacra, translated as “sacred banks,” is derived not from a veneration of the terraced vineyards, as is often suggested, but from the region’s concentration of churches, monasteries and convents. “Monks made the wine, maintained the church and reconstructed all the terraces,” he said. “They kept the tradition alive.”

Mr. Rodríguez of Guímaro, who is 35, is one of those rare young people who returned to the region, after leaving to try law school. His love of the country drew him back. Painstakingly, he has been renewing his family’s terraces, reconstructing the rock walls by hand.

High over the Sil, the heat is intense by day, though the nights are cool. His vines are spread over 15 different sites. The grapes, all mencía, seem to react differently to each bend in the row, each angle of exposure to the sun. “Same grapes, different flavors,” he said.

The Galicians are known throughout Spain for their stubborn determination to go their own way, and for a somewhat gloomy perspective. Mr. Rodríguez sees hope for realizing the potential of Ribeira Sacra, but he also sees obstacles. He estimates that only 10 percent of the winemakers are serious about what they do.

For those who are serious, like Mr. Pérez, Dominio do Bibei, D. Ventura and Guímaro, which by the way means nonconformist, the wines do all the talking.

“What’s missing,” Mr. Rodríguez said, “is for people to believe in what they have.”

Tastes of Galicia

The best wines from the Ribeira Sacra region are made in small quantities and may be difficult to find. Here are some producers worth seeking out.

ALGUEIRA Polished, substantial reds.

ALODIO Fresh, light, minerally reds.

DOMINIO DO BIBEI Superb wines, both red and white, especially the high-end Lacima and Lapena.

D. VENTURA Three different cuvées, each distinct and delicious, with Viña Caneiro the best.

GUÍMARO Light-bodied, juicy, inexpensive wines with a welcome earthy touch.

RAÚL PÉREZ Ambitious, elegant wines, both El Pecado from the Sil and Socrata from the Bibei.

PEZA DO REI Delicate, distinctive whites and reds.

July 2009

Rooted in Rioja, Traditions Gain New Respect

By ERIC ASIMOV

Abundant wreaths of ghostly mold hang from the ceiling like sentinels, guarding thousands of bottles of gran reserva wine deep in the cellars of the R. López de Heredia winery here in the heart of Rioja. More mold and copious cobwebs are draped over the bottles, some of which have been aging in their bins for decades.

Perhaps no winery in the world guards its traditions as proudly and steadfastly as López de Heredia does, especially in a region like Rioja, which has been swept by profound changes in the last 25 years. And yet, as fusty and as backwardlooking as López de Heredia may seem, it is paradoxically a winery in the vanguard, its viticulture and winemaking a shining, visionary example for young, forward-thinking producers all over the world.

How is this possible? As López de Heredia has stayed true to its time-honored techniques in the 132 years since its inception, the rest of the wine-producing world has spent decades doggedly trying to improve what it does, only to come practically full circle, ending up where López de Heredia has been all along.

I don’t mean that anybody the world over is making wine in the style of López de Heredia. Almost alone, the winery clings to the notion that it must age its wines until they are ready to drink. Rioja requires gran reserva wines to receive a minimum of six years of aging before they can be released. The current vintage for many gran reserva producers is 2001. López de Heredia has just released gran reservas from 1991 and 1987, exquisitely graceful wines that show the lightness of texture and finesse that comes of long aging.

And these are just the red wines. López de Heredia makes white Riojas that age just as well, achieving a beautifully complex, mellow nuttiness that is a special delight. Nobody makes white Riojas like López de Heredia anymore.

Red or white, the wines are great values, starting at $25 to $50 for crianzas and reservas, which can be 10 to 20 years old. Even 20-year-old gran reservas will be under $100, a steal compared to French or Italian wines of similar age and quality.

But while López de Heredia’s wines are almost singular, its ideas about growing grapes and making wines have become increasingly influential, regardless of stylistic concerns.

For more than 50 years after World War II, the great wine regions of the world sought to modernize. Where once backbreaking labor was the only method to grow grapes, science and technology began to offer shortcuts. Growers and producers everywhere seized the chance to mechanize; to deploy chemical pesticides, herbicides and fungicides; to adopt the latest technological recommendations.

Increased knowledge was welcome, and some technology was useful. But, too late, many learned that chemicals were killing the soil and that techniques to increase vineyard yields also diminished the quality of the grapes, just as too much technology in wineries could harm the quality of the wine. All over the wine-producing world, the brightest winemakers have set out to relearn the wisdom and techniques of their grandparents. All, except for one Rioja producer right here in Haro.

“We don’t need to, we never lost it,” said Maria José López de Heredia, who today, with her sister, Mercedes; brother, Julio César; and father, Pedro, runs the winery founded by her great-grandfather. “New technology is fine, but you can’t forget the logic of history.”

But what many in the wine-producing world have seen clearly from afar is coming more slowly to the rest of Rioja, a region in transition, where many producers are debating stylistic and viticultural issues that have long been resolved in other parts of the world.

For decades, Rioja has emphasized brand over terroir. Many of the biggest names bought grapes from different parts of the region, blending them like the big Champagne producers to make wines—often delicious wines—that fit a house style but revealed little sense of place beyond a generic sense of Rioja.

But López de Heredia, and very few others in the old guard, like Marqués de Murrieta, have always owned their own vineyards and grown their own grapes. The López wines, which come from four distinct vineyards, almost always show characteristics of their site. The reds from the Tondonia vineyard, for example, tend to be lighter and silkier than reds from the Bosconia vineyard, which are sturdier and a bit more powerful.

Today, a growing number of smaller and younger producers are, like López de Heredia, trying to show a sense of place in their wines, by gaining control of vineyards, improving their viticulture and becoming more conscious of the ideals of terroir that have long been accepted in other wine regions.

“The old producers wanted to show a brand, not a place,” said Telmo Rodríguez, who produces wine all over Spain and has recently, with a partner, opened a small, sleek winery, made of earth and old barrel staves, in the village of Lanciego, east of Haro. “I want to make a wine that could show a village.”

In some ways, Mr. Rodríguez seems the antithesis of López. He prefers French oak to the traditional American oak found in the López de Heredia cellars, and he no longer uses the traditional terms “crianza,” “reserva” and “gran reserva” to indicate, in ascending order, the aging a wine has received before it has been released. Instead, he uses Burgundian terms—village, premier cru and grand cru—to describe his Riojas: LZ, Lanzaga and Altos de Lanzaga.

His wines are very different, too, fruity, floral and progressively dense moving up the quality scale. The Altos de Lanzaga is marked by the vanilla scent of new French oak.

Yet Mr. Rodríguez clearly respects and venerates López de Heredia. “For me, the only winery that works in an authentic way is López,” he said. “Their vineyards are still worked in a traditional way with direct links to the past.”

Driving through the gently rolling Rioja terrain, where grapes are often planted right up to the edge of the road, it is becoming harder to find vineyards planted in the older bush-vine style, their scraggly canes trained upward from thick, freestanding trunks in the shape of goblets. With the encouragement of agricultural authorities, more and more of the vines are now trained on neat rows of wire trellises, which make vineyards easier to negotiate with tractors and to harvest mechanically. Mr. Rodríguez abhors the changes, and has sought to buy old fields of bush vines, which he says are crucial to good Rioja. “We are more obsessed with authenticity than beauty,” he said.

All the grapes in the López de Heredia vineyards are grown on bush vines, even though, climbing the hill on which Tondonia is planted, one can see occasional rows of grapes on trellises. When asked about them, Ms. López de Heredia explains that tiny parcels of Viña Tondonia are owned by small growers who, over the years, have refused to sell their land to López de Heredia.

“Everything on wires is not owned by us,” she said.

Since the winery was founded 132 years ago by Don Rafael López de Heredia y Landeta, she said, each succeeding generation has adhered to the founder’s guiding principles: “old vines, low yields and careful, gentle handling.” It’s a litany that today can be heard all over the wine-producing world.

While wine has been made in the Rioja region for centuries, Rioja wine as we know it is a relatively recent phenomenon, dating from the mid-19th century. Back then, French vignerons, victimized by phylloxera, the voracious aphid that destroyed vineyards all over Europe, came to Rioja prospecting for new places to make wine.

The Bordelais taught the Spanish how to make wines in the style of Bordeaux, which emphasized long aging in barrels before release.

Today, López de Heredia may be the last Rioja winery still taking those lessons literally. Even venerable Rioja producers like Marqués de Murrieta and La Rioja Alta, which once stood with López de Heredia as bastions of tradition, have tweaked and tinkered in an effort to add a touch of modernity to their wines, hoping that rounding off the edges might make them more appealing to the critics who dispense the scores.

At Marqués de Murrieta’s 741-acre Ygay estate, just outside the city of Logroño, the grapes are planted in a mixture of bush and trellised vines. Today, V. Dalmau Cebrián-Sagarriga, who took over the estate when his father died in 1996, is on a campaign to update his wines stylistically. “We refused to change the identity,” he said. “But we added more fruit to the wine, we release the wines sooner, we use newer oak and we leave the wine in oak less time.”

The reds clearly have become darker and fruitier. Yet the 2001 Castillo Ygay gran reserva remains true to the style, graceful, light-bodied and balanced. It will be a lovely wine in 20 years.

The same cannot be said with certainty about the white Rioja. Only a few years ago, Murrieta made a white Rioja in the traditional style, like López, the wine aged in American oak from which it gained an almost coconut-like character. Now the white is aged in toasty French oak, and while it may be delicious, it is no longer distinctive.

Like many Rioja wineries, Murrieta also makes a red wine in a modern style—darker, richer, with tannins imparted by French oak. It’s called Dalmau, which Mr. Cebrián-Sagarriga calls “a modern concept of Murrieta.” It, too, is balanced and not overripe, like other versions of what many in Rioja call “alta expression” wines. With Castillo de Ygay and Dalmau, Marqués de Murrieta manages to have it both ways.

Not every producer is as careful as Murrieta to stay tethered to its traditions. With its Frank Gehry–designed hotel on its grounds, Marqués de Riscal is the new face of Rioja in many tourist brochures and guides. The winery is a huge industrial operation, making 4.5 million bottles a year. A 1958 Riscal gran reserva today is a beautiful wine, delicate and harmonious. But Riscal doesn’t make these sorts of wines anymore, opting even in its gran reservas for dark colors and big mouthfuls of fruit.

“Our technical director is very keen to protect the Marqués de Riscal identity, which I understand, but business is business,” the commercial director, Javier Ybañez Creus, told me.

At López de Heredia, there is a serenity that comes with adherence to core principles. For many years, the winery was criticized at home for being backward and old-fashioned. Appreciation came instead from its export markets.

“Acceptance overseas has people here in Spain reconsidering our wines,” Ms. López de Heredia said. “There are people who want to go back again, and we are happy to teach.”

Classic, Spicy or Delicate

Here are some of my favorite Riojas. Younger wines, often labeled crianza or reserva, can cost $15 to $25. Gran reservas can rise above $100, but more often can be found for $50 or less.

BODEGAS RIOJANAS Mellow old-school Riojas.

FAUSTINO Look for Faustino I gran reservas.

HERMANOS PECIÑA Fresh, expressive wines.

LA RIOJA ALTA Look for rare Viña Arana reservas.

LÓPEZ DE HEREDIA Classic Riojas in white, red and rosé.

LUBERRI Delicate, pure wines.

MARQUÉS DE MURRIETA Graceful gran reservas.

MIGUEL MERINO Spicy, harmonious wines.

MUGA Prado Enea is spicy; Torre Muga is richer.

TELMO RODRÍGUEZ Exotic Riojas.

August 2009

Txakolina, a Tongue-Twisting Name
for Simple Pleasure

By ERIC ASIMOV

In the terraced vineyards on a steep hillside overlooking this Basque town on the southern edge of the Bay of Biscay, it’s hard not to feel a powerful thirst. With a salty breeze blowing in off the Atlantic, bright sunshine pouring down and a panoramic view that stretches along the twisting shoreline all the way to Biarritz, the mouth begins to tingle in anticipation of fresh seafood and cold white wine.

This is the land of Txakolina, the bracing, refreshing, often fizzy white wine that is enjoyed throughout Basque country. In restaurants and pintxos bars, on terraces overlooking the ocean or in dark, rustic wood-and-stone cellars, you can’t help but notice Txakolina everywhere, especially as it is often poured in an exuberant arc from a bottle held high above the shoulder into tumblers to create a burst of bubbles in the glass.

“In San Sebastián, you wouldn’t believe how much Txakolina is drunk in the month of August alone,” said Ignacio Ameztoi Aranguren, whose family’s winery, Ameztoi, is a leading Txakolina producer. “Here in Basque country, they drink it year-round. They drink it with meat, too. That’s the culture.”

The vast proportion of Txakolina is consumed in Basque country. You find it virtually nowhere else in Spain, except in Basque restaurants, and very little is exported around the world, with one major exception: the United States.

Surprisingly, given its tongue-twisting name, this wine—made from virtually unknown grapes in a light, simple, low-alcohol style—is becoming more and more popular in the United States. As recently as 2001, barely 1,000 cases, or 12,000 bottles, of Txakolina were exported to the United States, according to Wines From Spain, a trade organization. By 2006, that figure had shot up to 76,000 bottles, and by 2009, it was more than 111,000 bottles. Almost all of it is drunk in the summer months, mostly in restaurants where enthusiastic sommeliers preach the culinary benefits of zesty, high-acid whites.

“They’re simple, they’re fresh, they’re easy, and I think that people are starved for something like that,” said André Tamers of De Maison Selections, the leading American importer of Txakolina.

Yet, as with so many things Basque, Txakolina is nowhere near as simple as it may seem, beginning with the identity of the wine itself. In Basque it is mostly rendered as Txakolina (pronounced chock-oh-LEE-nah), but almost as often it shows up as Txakoli (CHOCK-oh-lee). Sometimes you’ll see both words on the same wine label. You might even see it referred to by its Castilian guise, Chacolí.

The fresh, lightly fizzy wine made in the Getaria region of northern Spain—the appellation is Getariako Txakolina—is the most familiar expression, but other Txakolinas are made as well, all worth exploring. In the neighboring appellation of Bizkaiko Txakolina, centered on Bilbao, the wines are less fizzy and a bit fuller and rounder. Bizkaiko Txakolina has many variations, even a little bit of delicious red, made by Doniene Gorrondona, from vines more than 100 years old in the town of Bakio. A third, tiny appellation, Arabako Txakolina, was established in 2003 in the inland region around Álava.

But it is the lightly carbonated Getariako Txakolina that forms the impression many people have of the wine. Txomin Etxaniz, officially established in 1930, but with records dating to 1649, is the granddaddy of Txakolina producers. With nearly 100 acres of vines, it is also the biggest.

Ninety percent of its vines are hondarrabi zuri, a white grape grown virtually nowhere else but in Basque country. The rest are hondarrabi beltza, a red grape that is blended into the wine. The grapes that are grown on terraces overlooking the ocean benefit from the sea breeze, a natural ventilation that helps to prevent mildew and disease in this humid, rainy environment. The vines on flatter areas are trained high on overhead pergolas, and workers constantly trim the vigorous foliage so the grapes will be exposed to the air.

“The grapes have to see the vista,” said Ernesto Txueka, whose family has run Txomin for generations.

Txomin and Ameztoi, and most Txakolina producers, for that matter, are surprisingly high-tech operations. At Txomin, the grapes are hand-harvested and delivered to the winery, where they are immediately chilled down nearly to freezing and blanketed with nitrogen, an inert gas that prevents oxidation, a process that preserves freshness, juiciness and tangy acidity.

The wines are then fermented with native yeasts in steel tanks, also kept cold and blanketed to capture carbon dioxide, which accounts for the fizziness. The carbonation is entirely natural, though it is widely suspected that less scrupulous Txakolina producers illegally inject their wines with carbon dioxide.

Standing on a catwalk in the spotless Txomin winery, one person can monitor the progress of the wines by way of a computer screen. A visitor in July, though, had to use the imagination. After the fall harvest, the first wines are ready to ship by December, and by June, the entire production of 300,000 bottles is sold out. For wine tourists accustomed to seeing last year’s production aging in barrels and the previous year’s settling in bottles, it’s a remarkably swift process, and profitable as well.

The 2009 Txomin Etxaniz is fresh and tangy, with a slightly chalky mineral and lemon flavor. It goes beautifully with the ubiquitous Basque snacks of anchovies and preserved tuna.

If it’s not exactly the image of Old World artisanal craftsmanship, that’s because the Txakolina industry is a relatively recent phenomenon. Wine production was a way of life for centuries in Basque country through the end of the 19th century. Much of the wine back then was red, with some rosés. But phylloxera wiped out the vines around the turn of the 20th century, and the industry was slow to recover.

Not until the 1960s did winemaking stage a comeback, said Andoni Sarratea, one of the principals at Doniene Gorrondona.

“The Basque government encouraged planting vineyards as a way of keeping people from leaving for the cities,” he said. “They pushed for white wines so as not to compete with Rioja.”

While the vast majority of Txakolina today is white, some producers are experimenting with reds and rosés. Gorrondona’s old-vine red, Mr. Sarratea said, was inspired by his study of history. “The real Txakolina of the region is red,” he said. “The old people drink it because it’s what they remember.”

Perhaps. But almost all of the deliciously spicy, herbal, raspberry-scented red goes to the United States, where Mr. Tamers, of De Maison, parcels it out in small quantities around the country.

Similarly, Ameztoi revived the tradition of making a Txakolina rosé a few years ago. This gorgeously zingy, fruity wine was met with indifference in Basque country.

“This is a town that doesn’t like rosé,” Mr. Ameztoi said. “We sell it all to New York.” Mr. Tamers got 14,000 bottles this year, yet the crushing demand for it means he can allocate only a few bottles to a customer.

Despite the output at places like Ameztoi and Txomin, Txakolina has a few artisanal producers as well, like Roberto Ibarretxe Zorriketa of Uriondo, which made about 15,000 bottles of Bizkaiko Txakolina last year in a valley south of Bilbao. Here, on an idyllic south-facing slope amid apple trees and conifers, Mr. Ibarretxe grows not only hondarrabi zuri but txori mahatsa and mune mahatsa, the local names for sauvignon blanc and folle blanche respectively.

The apples distract the wild pigs from the grapes, but do little to dissuade foxes from threatening the vines, said Mr. Ibarretxe, a gentle, precise man dressed in a pale blue shirt and dark blue pants. He wears a Panama hat and has a blue cheesecloth scarf around his neck. A pair of white leather gloves poke out just so from a rear pocket.

“Even if I lose a few vines, I have to let the magic of the forest happen,” he said, speaking quietly but intently. “You can’t treat a vineyard for tomorrow, you have to treat it for the day after tomorrow.”

In his winemaking facility, really just an expanded garage next to his house, he chills the grapes just a bit, not nearly as much as at Txomin or Ameztoi, and he handles them “tranquilo, tranquilo,” as gently as possible.

The wine itself is smooth and mellow—fresh, of course, as Txakolina must be—but tranquilo, like the man, lovely and dry with tangy, long-lasting citrus and mineral flavors.

Txakolina has come a long way in the United States since 1989, when the importer Jorge Ordóñez introduced the wine, bringing in 200 cases of Txomin Etxaniz. Even four years ago, Ron Miller, general manager of Solera, a Spanish restaurant on the East Side of Manhattan, spelled the wine phonetically on his list so people could order it.

Mr. Tamers occasionally fears that American demand for the wine will have to wane. Mr. Ameztoi, however, has no such doubts.

“We’re confident that anybody who tries this will enjoy it,” he said. “A lot of white wines use the same grapes and the same style, and they’re all the same. This is distinctive.”

August 2010

German Rieslings, Light and Dry

By ERIC ASIMOV

The tulips on Park Avenue are blooming in gorgeous yellows, pinks and reds, confirmation that spring has finally arrived in New York City. My own seasonal signpost is an annual thirst for German rieslings.

Usually in spring I find myself drawn to the filigreed, finely etched rieslings of the Mosel, as delicate as the petals of those Park Avenue tulips. Unlike almost any other riesling-producing region, Germany has made a specialty of rieslings with a touch of sweetness.

I’m not talking about the thrilling dessert wines that riesling so famously lends itself to, which are great in their own right. I mean the wines from the Mosel and their bigger brothers from the Rhine that have some residual sugar but are so beautifully balanced that the overall impression is of exhilarating refreshment.

As much as I love these styles of riesling, this year is different. This year I’m craving dry German rieslings.

Dry? Many Americans assume all rieslings are sweet. In fact, most rieslings, whether from Austria, Alsace, Australia or the United States, are dry. Even more surprising is the fact that many German rieslings are dry, too, and that the preference in Germany today and for the last 20 years has overwhelmingly been for dry rieslings. But the most surprising thing to me is how delicious dry German rieslings have become.

When I first encountered the German dry riesling phenomenon on a trip to the Mosel and Rhine wine regions a decade ago I was appalled. So many of the dry wines were tart and shrill, parching the mouth and creating thirst rather than quenching it.

Now, I’m enchanted with dry rieslings like a 2006 Von der Fels from Keller in Rheinhessen, a wine that reveals and frames the great mineral soul of the riesling grape, exalting it yet doing so gently without any of the sharp edges of the dry rieslings I so ruefully remember.

The Von der Fels, which means “from the rocks,” is not even Keller’s top dry riesling. Those include the G-Max, a special old-vine cuvée, and the single-vineyard wines labeled grosses gewäches, a newly devised term that ought to be the equivalent of the French grand cru. If only! Trust the Germans to take simple terminology and render it not only complex but indecipherable. More on that another time. In any case, those Keller wines are hard to find, but I was more than happy with the Von der Fels.

Then there was the light and racy 2006 Grey Slate Kabinett Trocken from Dönnhoff in the Nahe, which had all the wonderful delicacy of a focused, pure kabinett-level riesling while offering a surprising noseful of mineral aromas. And most surprising of all were the dry rieslings from the Mosel-Saar-Ruwer, like the extraordinary—stay with me here—2005 Eitelsbacher Karthäuserhofberg Auslese Trocken “S” from Karthäuserhof, a mineral-laden wine that seemed impossibly light and delicate, rounded and perfectly balanced.

In fact, drinking through almost two dozen dry German rieslings over the last few weeks I was struck by the high quality. How did they get so good?

Terry Theise, a leading importer of German wines, casts something of a gimlet eye over the whole phenomenon, suggesting that the quest for dry German rieslings in the United States owes much to the sacrifices of the few. “Over here, you have importers screening out the many nasty ones,” he said.

Still, he did allow that the wines were greatly improved.

“Ten years ago I’d have said a great dry German riesling was a four-leaf clover,” he told me. “Five years ago I’d have said they were somewhere between sporadic and routine. Now, I’m happy to feel there’s a true community of fine dry German rieslings, but this community is still rather small, and there’s a large chasm between them and the general run of grim, shrill wines.”

Among the first American importers to bring in dry German rieslings was Stephen Metzler of Classical Wines, who began working with Georg Breuer of the Rheingau in 1996. Even back then Breuer was making great dry rieslings, and for years Breuer, along with a few other producers like Dr. Bürklin-Wolf and Koehler-Ruprecht in the Pfalz were the lonely vanguard, carrying the torch in America for dry German rieslings.

Back then, Mr. Metzler suggested, when the German thirst for dry wine was more fad than anything else, many producers simply fermented the sweetness out of their wines and forgot about the importance of low yields, balance and careful winemaking.

Now, a new generation of German winemakers reared on dry wines is pursuing the style with thought and care. Oh, and global warming, which has made it possible to ripen grapes more fully in this extreme northern grape-growing region, hasn’t hurt.

The producers making top-flight dry rieslings are legion these days. They would also include Knebel, von Kesselstatt and A. J. Adam in the Mosel; Schäfer-Fröhlich in Nahe; Wagner-Stempels in Rheinhessen; Ratzenberger in the Mittelrhein; and Rudolf Fürst in Franken.

So strong is the preference for dry wines in Germany these days that Mr. Theise, for one, is concerned that the rieslings with residual sugar will be crowded out.

“Why, when there are other sources for world-class dry riesling,” he asked, “should Germany focus on being a member of an ensemble when with her table wines with residual sugar she is not only a soloist but an all-time great one?”

It’s a good question, and the prospect of losing those wines should be cause for great concern. Still, I can’t help but think that dry German rieslings are singular in their own way, combining grace, delicacy and power in a way that nobody else’s dry rieslings can do. One can only hope that the world’s taste for German rieslings with residual sugar will keep those styles in business, even if Germany itself no longer cares.

April 2008

Austrian Wines Have a Voice, and It’s Excited

By R. W. APPLE Jr.

More than once in the last two decades, Terry Theise confesses, he has felt like Sisyphus as he traveled the country, trying to sell the German wines, especially rieslings, that captivate critics but leave many American consumers cold.

“That was hard enough,” he said recently. “A labor of love, really, pushing that rock up the hill. So about 10 years ago I proposed to strap a grand piano on my back while I did it, and start promoting Austrian wines at the same time.”

They turned out to be an easier sell than he expected. Americans searching for food-friendly alternatives to oak-bomb California chardonnays began discovering grüner veltliners, the peppery white wines, made only in Austria, that can be paired even with legendarily wine-hostile foods like asparagus and artichokes. From them it was a hop and a skip to full-bodied Austrian rieslings and honeyed dessert wines.

To be sure, Austrian wines remain a minority enthusiasm in the United States. According to the Department of Commerce, Austria ranked 13th among sources of American wine imports in 2005, just behind Greece and Israel; Austrian imports totaled 250,000 gallons worth about $7.1 million, compared with 14.8 million gallons from Chile, for example. Still, Austrian imports have increased fourfold since 1998.

As recently as 1985 the Austrian wine industry was back on its heels, after a scandal in which some winemakers gave their wines added sweetness by adulterating them with diethylene glycol, a toxic chemical. Four-fifths of the country’s exports dried up overnight. But then passage of rigorous new laws halted the rot, and a long comeback began.

Mr. Theise, 52, has played a leading role in that comeback, at least in this country. He lives in the Washington suburbs with his wife, Odessa Piper, who for many years ran L’Etoile, a much-esteemed restaurant in Madison, Wis. The gems he ferrets out in central Europe are actually imported and distributed by Michael Skurnik Wines in Syosset, N.Y., freeing Mr. Theise to taste, sell and write. And, boy, does he write!

Every year he produces catalogs for each of his specialties, small books packed with anecdotes, opinions, tasting notes and love letters to his growers. An excerpt: “The kinds of people I choose to work closely with are restless truth seekers, viticulturally speaking.” He has no qualms about singing the praises of their products. Austria, he writes, offers “the best values on earth for monumentally structured dry white wines.” It produces “the world’s best pinot blancs.” Grüner veltliner is “the last of the great European white wine grapes”—and do not call it “grüner” for short, as some critics and merchants do, Mr. Theise says; he considers that an ignorant vulgarism.

A fierce foe of the American passion for scoring wines numerically, Mr. Theise also crusades (as you might expect a salesman of off-dry wines to do) against “the idea that sugar is evil.” His argument: “A dash of salt in your soup isn’t to make it taste salty; it is to awaken flavor, to make it taste more like itself. A similar dash of sweetness in a wine both enhances flavor, extends fruit, provides another voice to the dialogue of nuances, reduces alcohol and in many cases makes for a more elegant finish.”

Sometimes, straining to convey his encyclopedic knowledge of his products lures him into prose as overripe as a starlet’s lips, like this description of Nikolaihof wines from the Wachau: “These wines don’t so much meet you halfway as show you a third place that’s neither You nor Them, but somewhere you meet in truth only by dissolving your respective walls. Each of them is like a slow centering breath, a quiet breath, the breath of the world, unheard almost always beneath the clamor.”

Bada-bing! Bring on Doc Gibbs and the Emeril Live band!

Mr. Theise (pronounced theece; rhymes with fleece) is not the only champion of Austrian wines, of course. While he handles big names like Nigl and Brundlmayer, competitors like Weygandt-Metzler of Unionville, Pa., bring in F. X. Pichler’s wines, and Vin Divino of Chicago represents others, like Alois Kracher, king of Austrian sweet wines.

Austrian restaurateurs have played a role as well. David Bouley and Kurt Gutenbrunner in New York promote Austrian wines at Danube and Wallsé. Wolfgang Puck himself once materialized at Chinois, one of his Southern California restaurants, carrying a bottle of Nigl Privat riesling after I complained of the dearth of Austrian drink on the list. And Manfred Krankl, who now makes Mr. K sweet wines near Santa Barbara in California in partnership with Mr. Kracher, was an advocate of all things Austrian during his years as a partner at Campanile in Los Angeles.

The floral, herbal qualities of grüner veltliner—some taste sorrel, others smell mimosa—have endeared the wines to fans of Asian food; the noted San Francisco Vietnamese restaurant, Slanted Door, included a half-dozen of them on a recent list.

But by writing about it, talking about it, selling it and proselytizing for it in every way he can Mr. Theise has established himself as the voice of Austrian wine, its most knowledgeable and articulate (if occasionally overexcited) champion. Who can fail to appreciate a man who says of his favorite wine (grüner veltliner, of course) with perfect concision, “It can be as sleek as a mink or as big as Babe the Blue Ox.”

Another of the great virtues of grüner veltliners, he said over lunch at Vidalia, a Washington restaurant that features several Theise selections, is their availability across a broad price spectrum. Those selling for $50 to $55—top-of-the-line aristocrats from growers like Brundlmayer, which are still much less expensive than blue-ribbon white Burgundies—will always outshine their more proletarian rivals priced from $9 to $13. (Many of the “introductory” grüner veltliners are now produced with screw-top caps.)

But the common lineage is almost always obvious. “The main difference in production is the ripeness of the grapes when picked and the level of cropping,” Mr. Theise said. “The main difference in the glass is richness, complexity and concentration.”

As an example of the bang-for-the-buck species, we tasted a 2005 Grüner Veltliner Renner from Gobelsburg, designed to sell at retail for $27 or $28. With lemony and peppery notes on the nose, medium-ripe, it had plenty of power—“fine-grained,” as Mr. Theise remarked. It reminded me of something he said earlier: “For me, utility and charm are more important virtues than simply blowing your socks off.”

In general, grüner veltliners from the Wachau are the costliest (and some think the best). A steep, almost indecently scenic valley through which the Danube flows with undeniable majesty, about 70 miles west of Vienna, it has two crowning glories: the great clifftop Baroque abbey at Melk and the castle above Durnstein, where Richard the Lion-Hearted was imprisoned after the Third Crusade in the 12th century.

I have a soft spot for the Wachau; decades ago I tasted Austrian wines for the first time at Jamek, a riverside restaurant now almost a century old. The warmhearted Landhaus Bacher in Mautern, where the Italian-inflected food lives up to the spectacular cave, came as a thrilling discovery to my wife, Betsey, and me on a cold, dark night not too many years after that.

But Mr. Theise finds all but the wines at the very pinnacle of quality overpriced, victims of supply and demand; only about 3,500 acres are planted to vines in the entire Wachau, and not all of that is grüner veltliner. So Mr. Theise looks downriver, toward Vienna, to the adjacent districts, the Kremstal and the Kamptal, where the falloff in quality is slight and the prices gentler, and to growers like Hirsch and Nigl.

I’m a Champagne man when it comes to bubbly; with few exceptions, other sparkling wines leave me flat. Mr. Theise added a new item to my list of exceptions with his Gobelsburg nonvintage reserve, a silky blend with a soft mousse, made from grüner veltliner (70 percent), riesling (15) and pinot noir (15). Without prompting, I would have had no clue what I was drinking.

Austrian rieslings are another matter. They are instantly recognizable as riesling but drier than their Alsatian cousins, with a somewhat more refrained floweriness, as Mr. Theise put it, than most of their German relatives. Juicier, too, I would add, with the aroma of yellow mirabelle plums in some cases and of tropical limes in others.

Once again, many of the best rieslings come from the Wachau (Jamek, Prager), which has its own system of nomenclature, just to live up to the Germanic tradition of confusing labels. Wines marked “federspiel” must by law contain between 10.7 percent and 11.9 percent alcohol, for example; higher than that, they command a premium price and are designated with the word “smaragd,” which is the name of a small green lizard that likes to sun itself on the steep vineyard hillsides.

Austrian rieslings can be bargains. The other night, at a Legal Sea Foods outlet, Betsey and I drank a nicely aged federspiel (2001) from Franz Hirtzberger at Spitz in the Wachau, imported by Vin Divino, which cost only $39. With forward fruit flavors, round and clean, it was dry but not bonedry. Perfect with shrimp, clams and scallops, or grilled fish, almost anything from the sea, but not a very good match for oysters.

As always, a sturdy minerality underpins and focuses these wines.

Dry Austrian whites do not stop with riesling and grüner veltliner, the everenthusiastic Mr. Theise wanted me to know, so he brought out several bottles produced by Heidi Schrock in Burgenland, south of Vienna. Her furmint, made from the grape famous as the basis of Hungarian tokay, reminded me a lot of chenin blanc from the Loire Valley; her grauburgunder (pinot gris), gently oaked, struck me as a little too alcoholic (more than 14 percent); her muscat is a creamy, spicy delight.

If Ms. Schrock’s whites constitute one kind of novelty, Austrian reds must represent the height of obscurity, medium-weight wines that are made from grapes few have ever heard of. Zweigelt, anyone? Mr. Theise touts it as a “lush, fine, useful” alternative to syrah. St. Laurent? A bit like an old-time Nuits-St.-Georges, he told me. Blaufränkisch? A hint of Chianti Classico, perhaps, or even of malbec.

Most of the best reds come from the sun trap that is Burgenland, hard by the Hungarian border and the large, shallow, reedy lake called the Neusiedlersee (which is also the region where Mr. Kracher and Willi Opitz make their world-class sweet wines, aided by the mist that rises in the autumn from the three-feetdeep lake).

Here Mr. Theise introduces an uncharacteristic note of caution. “Austrian red wine is to be taken seriously, that much is beyond dispute,” he writes in his 2006 Austrian list. “Yet for every truly grown-up wine there are many others that are silly, show-offy, insipid, even flawed.”

So leave the final word to Doug Mohr, Vidalia’s sommelier, who is bold enough to list 13 Austrian reds with twice that many whites. The reds, he said with a smile, “do not yet have the following of grüner veltliner,” but he still manages to sell them, often a glass at a time, to skeptics.

July 2006

An Honest Day’s Work From Vienna

By ERIC ASIMOV

As a child growing up in Vienna, Carlo Huber would sometimes accompany his father, Rupert E. Huber, to wine bars and heurigen, informal little buffets where Viennese wine estates sold their own produce. When his father had an especially pleasing glass, Mr. Huber recalled, he would exclaim, “Das ist ein ehrlicher wein!”—That is an honest wine.

Mr. Huber never forgot the sentiment, and as he grew up he came to enjoy those delicate, graceful Viennese wines himself. When his work in marketing took him to New York City in 1993, he was disappointed to see that as Austrian wines gained popularity in the United States, wines from Vienna were virtually unknown.

A little more than a year ago, Mr. Huber met another Viennese ex-pat, Paul Darcy, who works in the electrical department of the Metropolitan Opera. Mr. Darcy, too, grew up in Vienna in a wine-loving family and was particularly nostalgic for Viennese wines and wine culture. Though they had no experience in the wine business, they teamed up and made it their mission to supply the United States with some of Vienna’s best wines, and so created their wine import company, Darcy and Huber Selections.

That any wine comes from Vienna seems absurd on the face of it. Great urban centers are not known for their vineyards, beyond a novelty acre here and there. But Vienna is different. Around 1,700 acres of vines are planted within the city limits. Of the great metropolises in winegrowing countries, Vienna alone has its own appellation.

Viennese viticulture stretches back centuries if not millenniums to early Celtic and Roman settlements. But modern Viennese vineyards owe their existence to an environmentally far-sighted mayor, Karl Lueger, who a century ago prohibited development on the green hills that girdle the inner city. Through wars, depressions and shifts in fashions and taste, Viennese farmers and winemakers have continued to toil in their vineyards.

Most of their production was destined for Vienna itself, and most of it, Mr. Huber and Mr. Darcy say, was not very good—too thin, and often heavily manipulated to compensate for poor grapes and poor winemaking. But the memories of those wines were strong and, just as in the rest of the wine-producing world over the last 25 years, a revolution in quality was coming to Vienna, too. In the years since Mr. Huber, 39, and Mr. Darcy, 43, came to New York, a new generation of winemakers in Vienna has committed itself to making wines that can represent Vienna on the world stage.

Of particular interest to the younger winemakers, and to Mr. Huber and Mr. Darcy, were wines made of a mixed array of white grapes. Those are not blended wines, as in Bordeaux, where different grapes are planted and vinified separately, later to be mixed by a winemaker. Instead, these gemischter satz wines are made of grapes that are planted and vinified together, anywhere from three or four different grapes to maybe two dozen, as with field blends in California.

Such blends can sometimes create wines of unusual complexity. Modern winemakers, who tend to prize uniformity in ripening, usually plant different grapes separately because they may ripen at different rates. That way, they can all be harvested at a similar point of ripeness. But when they are planted and harvested together, some can be perfectly ripe, while others can be a little under- or over-ripe.

“The resulting wines are a melting pot of character, not unlike Vienna itself,” Mr. Darcy said.

Let’s not get bogged down in the morass of bureaucratic licensing and the intricacies of container ships and warehouse bonding that are part and parcel of importing wines. That is the price Darcy and Huber Selections must pay for deciding to go into the business. Suffice it to say that by virtue of hard work and the ability to withstand the effects of repeatedly banging one’s head against a wall, Darcy and Huber Selections are now importing small quantities of exquisite Viennese wines.

The gemischter satz wines are particularly noteworthy. Rainer Christ makes two different versions. One is a fresh, light floral wine made of four grapes, with a peppery component that lets you know grüner veltliner is part of the blend. The second gemischter satz is altogether riper and richer, made from a dozen grapes from vines 60 years old or more.

Jutta Ambrositsch makes a dry, earthy gemischter satz from almost 20 different grapes. Richard Zahel’s Nussberg gemischter satz, made from nine different grapes, is rich and almost oily in texture, yet still with light flowery aromas. My favorite gemischter satz, though, is the 2007 Weissleiten from Stefan Hajszan, a gorgeous wine that is both delicate and intense. Perhaps I’m being fanciful, but drinking this wine—and feeling the lacy lightness of its flavors—I could not help imagining myself at a Viennese café, watching the city go by.

The gemischter satz wines may be the most unusual that Vienna has to offer, but most Viennese producers make single varietal wines as well. I also tried a crisp and aromatic gelber muskateller from Christ, which would make a lovely aperitif wine. Hajszan makes a minerally grüner veltliner, while Ambrositsch produces a very floral riesling. Some Viennese producers also make red wines, but the few I have tried seem less compelling—good wines, but not as distinctive as the whites.

While Darcy and Huber Selections is drawing attention to Viennese wines, the producer who many consider the most important in Vienna, Wieninger, is imported by another company, Winebow. I haven’t found those wines in New York yet, but I am going to seek them out.

As for the gemischter satz wines I have tasted, they can run from around $15 or $20 a bottle up to $40 or so. They aren’t cheap, but they are indeed ehrliche wines.

November 2009

Meanwhile, Back in Alsace

By FRANK J. PRIAL

It had been raining for days. The low gray clouds scudded in over the Vosges Mountains, to the west, and dumped their sodden contents on the vineyards, then pushed eastward over the Rhine and the Black Forest. It was a typical winter day in Alsace.

But at Domaine Weinbach, a handsome but understated chateau—more a lived-in country house, actually—just outside this picture-book medieval town, all was warm and inviting. Here in the paneled front parlor, with its heavy, dark furniture and fading family photographs, Laurence Faller was pouring wine. For the last seven years, she has been the winemaker at the domaine, one of best-known wine estates in Alsace.

Disappearing regularly into the kitchen, she would reappear with yet more bottles of her latest handiwork, the 1998 vintage. For comparison purposes, there were a few 1997s, too, along with a couple of 1999s, which were still mostly fermenting juice.

Domaine Weinbach is famous not only for its wines, but also for the fact that it is run entirely by women. Ms. Faller, 32, is studying enology at Beaune, in Burgundy, and has an M.B.A. and a degree in chemical engineering. Her sister, Catherine, who popped in and out during our two-hour tasting, is 43 and handles sales and marketing. Their mother, Colette, nominally the president and chief executive, is better described as the dowager queen. Her age? “Do you have to publish that?” Well, no, probably not.

In the best tradition of French wine widows (Clicquot, Pommery, Bollinger), she took charge on the death of her husband, Theo, in 1979, and transformed Domaine Weinbach into one of northeastern France’s most prominent wine names.

Theo Faller was the winemaker; when he died, Colette took over with the aid of a family friend, Jean Mercky. Photos show her in boots and old sweaters, hard at work in the damp cellars. Laurence joined the business in 1993; Catherine has always been in the business.

Fallers have owned the property here since 1898, but in Alsace they are relative newcomers. Families like the Trimbachs and Hugels had been making wine in Alsace for 300 years when the Fallers, tanners in Kaysersberg, got into the business.

Domaine Weinbach was once part of church-owned vineyards. Augustinian monks acquired the land in the ninth century. In 1612, the Augustinians donated a part of their estates to Capuchin Franciscan friars, who built a convent and church on the land and continued to develop its vineyards and farms. The “home” vineyard, surrounding the house and winery, is known as the Clos des Capucins. Weinbach, in the Alsatian dialect, means “wine stream” and is in fact the name of the small stream that flows past the domaine on its way to the Rhine.

An inventory made by the Capuchin friars in the 17th century listed 14,000 to 15,000 vines, including muscat, “riesselin” (riesling) and “chaselin” (chasselas). The friars also raised snails, and once a year gave a banquet for the local notables, at which one of the important dishes was escargots au riesling. The friars were ousted at the time of the French Revolution, and the property passed through several hands before the Fallers acquired it.

Originally, the estate consisted of the chateau and the 12-acre vineyard within the estate walls, or clos. In the years since World War II, the property has been expanded to about 150 acres, some of it leased vineyards. As an owner-harvester, under French wine regulations, the Domaine Weinbach is not allowed to buy grapes from other growers. But the Fallers can and do rent vineyard property, so long as they grow and harvest the grapes themselves.

Like other French vineyard regions, the best Alsatian vineyards are classified as grand cru, which translates—badly—into “great growth,” and as premier cru, or “first growth.” Domaine Weinbach owns two grand cru parcels, about 40 acres on the Schlossberg, a hilly slope just north of the domaine, and a piece of an adjoining vineyard called the Furstentum. The Schlossberg vines produce the domaine’s best riesling; the Furstentum is the source of its best gewürztraminer. Other vineyards, including the Altenbourg, which is unclassified, turn out pinot blanc, pinot gris and muscat.

The best grape in Alsace is the riesling; the best-known grape is the Gewürztraminer. Gewürztraminer produces a pungent, flowery wine with a taste that some experts compare to litchi nuts. Even when fermented completely dry, it can seem to be sweet, because of the flowery bouquet. Riesling is Alsace’s finest grape. It produces wines that, at their best, display layers of complexity and nuance. A good Alsatian riesling can last 15 years, and late-harvest versions can live in superb condition for 30 to 50 years.

Alsace produces a lot of wine, most of it indifferent stuff that, fortunately, rarely makes it across the Atlantic. Michel Bettane, the French critic, who tasted with me at Domaine Weinbach, contends that in Paris even some of the grand cru wines are watery and sugary. “Less than 10 percent of Alsatian wines are excellent,” he said. “The other 90 percent are sugar water.”

“Michel,” Laurence Faller said, “tends to get carried away.”

At the other end of the spectrum, too many of the best Alsatian wines are being made in the sweet style. Some of the finest producers are turning out wines that make fine aperitifs but very poor companions for most meals. Even Ms. Faller acknowledged that all of her 1998 gewürztraminer could have qualified for the vendange tardive, or late-harvest, designation. Late-harvest wines are invariably much higher in sugar content than dry table wines.

The total Domaine Weinbach production is about 15,000 cases, about half of them exported to 23 countries. The United States is the biggest customer. The domaine sells about a quarter of what it makes to tourists, mostly German.

My favorite Faller wines include the Riesling Schlossberg and the Riesling Schlossberg Cuvée Sainte Catherine Cuvée du Centenaire, both from 1997 and both in the $45-to-$65 price range. Perhaps the best introduction to the Weinbach rieslings is the less subtle Reserve Personnelle, which sells for around $24. The 1998 Riesling CuvéeSainte Catherine is a big, powerful wine that will last and last. It hasn’t been shipped yet, and it will be expensive.

The real gems in the Faller collection are the late-harvest wines. The 1995 Pinot Gris Quintessence des Grains NoblesCuvée du Centenaire, for example, is made from individually picked late-harvest grapes and sells for around $300 a half bottle.

One of the best ways to enjoy good Alsatian wine is with the local cheese, Muenster. After our tasting, Colette Faller, elegant in jewels and eyeliner, swept in to announce lunch. It was simple fare, chicken and noodles and Muenster, accompanied by some of the best Faller wines. Anyone who says no meal is complete without red wine has never sat down to lunch in the big, warm kitchen at Domaine Weinbach.

January 2000

Hungarian Dry Whites? Forge Ahead

By ERIC ASIMOV

Comfort zone? Believe me, I understand. At restaurants, I’m always fighting the impulse to order a beloved dish again and again. I have to struggle against sticking to customary territory in music, books and, especially, in wine.

Habit partly explains the appeal of the familiar. The desire to drink nothing but Burgundy, for example—assuming you can afford such a desire—stems certainly from the titillating satisfaction derived from the wine. Like a laboratory rat touching a button wired to the pleasure center of the brain, you want to repeat the experience endlessly. With time, the quest broadens to the point where you want to learn as much as possible about this complex, nuanced region.

People who are just beginning to grasp wine naturally want to dive deeply into the pantheon regions. They have read such ardent descriptions of the thrills of these wines that they are no longer willing to settle for vicarious enjoyment. Again, with experience, comes the desire to focus and learn. Who can argue with the notion that one can lose oneself forever in the wines of Italy?

Yet no matter how alluring the desire to fixate on a particular set of wines, experimentation has great virtues. Practically speaking, wines from lesser-known regions are often cheaper. But more to the point, drinking wine with blinders on can deprive you of unexpected, deeply satisfying, even thrilling bottles.

Case in point: the dry white wines of Hungary. Who even knew Hungary made dry white wines? The country is best known for Tokaji aszu, gorgeously honeyed, lavishly sweet wines of such balance and precision that they can accompany savory meals. The history of this legendary wine stretches back centuries, and most likely, near the beginning, the wines were more dry than sweet. Now, in the post-Communist age, Hungary is making dry whites again, and some of the wines are stunningly distinctive and delicious.

It was by chance last year, at Terroir, the wine bar and merchant in San Francisco, that I first tried the 2006 dry white from Kiralyudvar, a winery that I knew made wonderful sweet wine. The ’06 was only the second vintage of this dry white, made mostly of furmint, the region’s leading grape, yet it was extraordinary, with a gorgeous aroma of herbs and flowers, and the luscious texture that comes from fermentation in oak barrels.

The wine was absolutely dry and balanced, with the waxy, lanolin quality that I find so alluring in good white Bordeaux. Yet it had an indelible stamp of sweet richness to it, as if botrytis, the fungus that so beautifully intensifies the flavors of Tokaji aszu—and Sauternes, for that matter—had somehow insinuated its way into this wine as well, though I knew it hadn’t.

I’ve had this wine several times since, and have not been let down. Moreover, it has spurred a fascination with dry whites from Hungary that has led to a few highly satisfying bottles, a number that is small because production of dry whites is still in its infancy in Tokaj, and few make it to the United States.

Still, in an Indian restaurant I managed to find a 10-year-old bottle of dry furmint from Tokaj Classic, and its delicate floral flavors complemented the spicy food beautifully. I also found a 2007 furmint from Royal Tokaji, with beguiling aromas of exotic fruit, Asian spices and anise. It, too, had that waxy quality, as did a 2005 from Dobogo, which had gorgeous fruit aromas and an attractive, almost savory mineral flavor.

All these wines come from the Tokaj region, about 130 miles northeast of Budapest in the foothills of the Carpathians. But I also found a bottle of 2006 Szent Ilona Borhaz from Somlo, in the western part of Hungary near the Austrian border. This wine, which had a floral aroma and a tangy apple and mineral flavor to it, was a blend of 30 percent furmint, 60 percent harslevelu and 10 percent juhfark. Talk about leaving a comfort zone!

At least I can pronounce Kiralyudvar—it’s KEE-rye-oohd-var, which means king’s court. Although the estate is historic, with records dating back to the 11th century, it was reconstituted in 1997 when it was bought by Anthony Hwang.

Mr. Hwang, an American businessman, is also the majority shareholder of Huet, the iconic Vouvray producer. His co-owner at Huet, Noël Pinguet, who oversees the winemaking, has worked closely with Kiralyudvar. Fittingly, chenin blanc, the grape of Vouvray, shares with furmint the capacity for making complex dry wines of elegance and finesse, and the versatility to make a range of long-lived sweet wines.

Because dry wine is relatively new to the region, Mr. Hwang wrote in an e-mail conversation, Tokaj producers are still working out the kinks. But he is optimistic about the future.

“Sweet winemaking mind-sets and techniques are at times practiced too often when making dry wines in Tokaj,” he said. “The results are high-alcohol, tannic wines where the wonderful terroirs are obscured. As more producers find their own voices, more precisely made, terroir-expressive dry furmints will be produced.”

Mr. Hwang suggested that most producers consider dry wine to be vital to the region’s future growth, and that the region’s greatest challenge is overcoming the public perception that Tokaj makes only sweet wines.

“The challenge is to get people to taste well-made dry Tokaj furmint,” he said. “Once tasted, the wine speaks for itself.”

That was certainly my experience. I’ve had a few other good dry furmints, like the Oremus Mandolas, refreshing with well-integrated oak flavors—oak and furmint take to each other very well. I’m still looking for a dry white from Disznoko.

Interestingly, Oremus is owned by Vega-Sicilia, the great Spanish producer, and Disznoko is owned by AXA, the French insurance giant, which owns a number of top-flight wineries. Foreign ownership certainly recognizes the potential of Tokaj. It’s up to the rest of us to have a look.

February 2010