CHAPTER TWELVE
They Don’t Make ’Em
Like That Anymore

His Big Idea Is to Get Small

By ERIC ASIMOV

Photo by Sara Remington.

Randall Grahm is a changed man, again. But this time he thinks he means it.

Those who have followed him on his 25-oddyear journey as winemaker, jester and all-around philosopher king of Bonny Doon Vineyard have gotten used to the periodic pivots that twist his vinous trajectory like one of Escher’s Moebius bands. But then, straight lines never really fit the Bonny Doon aesthetic.

Since its inception in 1983, Bonny Doon often seemed one step ahead of the rest of the California wine industry, yet incapable of prolonged focus. Mr. Grahm began with a fascination with pinot noir. He became a leading voice in California promoting Rhône grapes, and then, just as vigorously, touted Italian grapes, the obscurer the better. There was riesling, too, and delicious sweet wines. At its peak, in 2006, Bonny Doon sold some 450,000 cases of wine, more than 5 million bottles.

But, as anyone so philosophically inclined might wonder, what did it all mean? Mr. Grahm, 56, indeed asked himself that question, just a few years ago, and the answer was not satisfying.

“I took stock of my situation,” he said, as we sat down recently in the new tasting room of his winery, which, not surprisingly, occupies an old granola factory here in this free-spirited university town. “My wines were O.K., but was I really doing anything distinctive or special? The world doesn’t need these wines—I was writing and talking about terroir but I wasn’t doing what I was saying. I wanted to be congruent with myself.”

What followed was a paring back. Mr. Grahm sold off moneymaking labels like Big House and spun off Pacific Rim, under which he sold a lot of riesling. Gone were popular Bonny Doon wines like Old Telegram and, my personal favorite, Clos de Gilroy, a lively, fresh grenache that was as good on a hot summer’s day as it was at Thanksgiving. Production has dropped to 35,000 cases.

As Mr. Grahm saw it, these may have been profitable wines, but not original wines. All told, the lineup of 35 different wines has been reduced to around 10, still a fair number.

“I know, I know, but what can I do?” Mr. Grahm said, throwing up his hands. “Honestly, it doesn’t matter whether we make a few wines or a lot of wines. What matters is that we make wines of originality that have a reason for being.

“The question is, how do you create the conditions for originality?”

For Mr. Grahm, that means owning a vineyard, embracing biodynamic viticulture and farming without irrigation, as the best Old World vineyards are farmed. “Dry farming is absolutely crucial,” he said. “It’s more important than anything—biodynamics, schmiodynamics.”

The last requirement rules out Bonny Doon’s Ca’ del Solo vineyard outside Soledad in Monterey County, where it is so dry Mr. Grahm is obliged to irrigate. “In retrospect, I shouldn’t have planted a vineyard in Soledad, but I did,” he said.

Seeking land that could be dry-farmed and that was in driving distance of his base in Santa Cruz (“It’s my ’hood, and these are my peeps!”) brought Mr. Grahm to some unusual sites for a new vineyard. He settled on 280 acres on a northeastfacing hillside outside San Juan Bautista, a mission town about 35 miles east of Santa Cruz.

It has not been a smooth process, but barring worldwide catastrophe, as Mr. Grahm put it, he is due to close on the parcel within a few weeks. He already has goats grazing the land, while a geomancer has helped ease his fear that the site will not have enough water.

“You could say it’s just a real estate deal, but it’s really been an existential struggle,” he said.

With his frizzy, graying hair tied back in a ponytail, his black-rimmed glasses perched slightly askew on his nose, one tip of his shirt collar lapping over the lapel of a rumpled jacket, Mr. Grahm looks the part of an aging hippie who found a way to prolong graduate school indefinitely, at someone else’s expense.

That’s always been part of his roguish appeal—the ability to entertain, to charm, to fascinate and ultimately to get by, with comic wine labels, cosmic puns, rococo satires and elaborately staged publicity stunts. He was the philosopher as ringmaster. He was also contradictory, or perhaps refreshingly honest, speaking reverentially of terroir, yet rarely finding terroir expressed in his own wines, even if they were usually pretty good. Why original wines? Why now?

In the course of the last six years, since he and his partner, Chinshu Huang, had a daughter, Amélie, their first child, Mr. Grahm has had something of a conversion experience. First he had a health crisis, a bout with osteomyelitis, that left him in a haze of IV drugs and wearing a halo brace for three months.

“It was like getting hit by a meteor,” he said. “You realize you take your body for granted and everything else for granted.”

Taking stock of what he had been doing did not leave him feeling particularly proud.

“I actively resorted to all manner of marketing tricks,” he said, as if standing before the congregation to confess.

“I don’t want to rely on winemaking tricks anymore,” he said, enumerating aroma-enhancing yeasts, enzymes and spinning cones among the modern techniques he’s used to change the composition of a wine. “You can’t make an original wine that way. You can make something clever or artful, but not great.”

In a sense, Mr. Grahm had been on one big business bender since 1994, when his original Bonny Doon Vineyard in the Santa Cruz Mountains succumbed to Pierce’s disease, an incurable bacterial disorder.

“It was definitely a loss of mojo at that point,” he said. “I decided I’ll just sit on the sidelines and buy grapes and think a while.”

Instead, he became a phenomenal negotiant, buying grapes not only from all over California, but from Oregon, and even from France and Germany.

“I think Randall Grahm is the smartest winemaker I’ve ever met,” said Jim Clendenen, a fellow larger-than-life California winemaker who owns Au Bon Climat in Santa Barbara County. “The decisions I’ve made based on advice he gave me back in the ’80s have served me very well indeed.”

He recalled in particular Mr. Grahm’s observation in the mid-’80s that Americans were so obsessed with chardonnay that a winery could make a lot of money if it produced 80 percent chardonnay and less red wine. It was advice Mr. Clendenen followed, even as Mr. Grahm himself never acted on the thought.

“It was the smartest thing I’d ever done,” Mr. Clendenen said. “He didn’t always take his prognosticating as seriously as I did.”

This time, Mr. Grahm seems determined to follow his own muse. Standing on the hillside of his prospective vineyard on a crisp, clear afternoon, he gazed off at the lettuce groves in the valley. “I think this place can make something really distinctive and unusual,” he said. “You have to put your money where your mouth is. Purchased grapes are less risky, but you’re never going to make a vin de terroir.”

Assuming the purchase goes through, it may be six or seven years before Mr. Grahm can make wine from the site, leaving him the challenge of making the intervening time feel vital. Still, he has a winery to run. Cash must flow to finance the plan. And in the meantime, he’s got no shortage of fascinations.

He dreams of growing vines from seeds, unheard of in this post-phylloxera era of rootstocks and cuttings and grafts. He is intrigued by wines made in amphorae, as cutting-edge producers are doing in northeastern Italy. There is the ongoing challenge of screwcaps, used on all his wines since 2002. Changing over from cork has presented a different set of unforeseen problems.

“We’re still mastering the screwcap,” he said. “It’s like the sorcerer’s apprentice. It’s extremely powerful technology and you want to channel it in the proper direction.”

Back at the old granola factory, the winery is divided into two segments. In one are wooden puncheons and tanks—conventional looking, at least. In the other cellar, dozens of glass carboys line one wall. Inspired by Emidio Pepe, a producer in Abruzzo who ages his wines in glass for years, Mr. Grahm is using the carboys to age a portion of his 2008 Cigare Volant, his southern Rhône blend, to be compared with a similar lot aging in wood.

“This is either going to revolutionize everything we do, or not,” he said. “But I think it will.”

Mr. Grahm likes to say that wine is a reflection of the human psyche. No doubt 25 years of whimsical, mercurial wines have been a reflection of his own. Now he is hoping his next adventure will reflect his newfound dedication.

“I’m taking a risk, but it’s a rational risk,” he said. “Maybe it’ll turn out great, maybe not. But I’ll have made a sincere effort to create something new and strange and different, which may be the best you can hope for in the New World.”

April 2009

The Tastes of a Century

By FRANK J. PRIAL

André Tchelistcheff was a teenager when the Russian Revolution began, living on his family’s estate east of Moscow and planning to become a physician. Today, approaching 90, he lives in a modest house here on the edge of California’s wine country.

He never became a physician. He became one of America’s—and the world’s—most prominent enologists, an honor that, by the way, he has no immediate plans to relinquish.

From 1938 to 1972, he was the chief winemaker at Beaulieu Vineyards, where his name became permanently linked with one of America’s greatest wines, Georges de Latour Private Reserve. As a consultant to countless other wineries and mentor to several generations of winemakers over more than 60 years, he had a hand in creating the modern California wine industry.

He spends more time in airplanes and on the road than men who are a third his age. His wife, Dorothy, drives him now; he stopped driving last year after he destroyed his Nissan sports car in an accident near here. He emerged virtually unscathed.

Until recently he had 13 major winery clients in California, Washington State and Italy. Last week, he gave up most of them to return to a job he held 53 years ago, working with Beaulieu Vineyards here in the Napa Valley. Mr. Tchelistcheff (pronounced CHEL-a-chev) was the company’s principal winemaker from 1938 to 1972. Now he will be a consulting enologist.

“I am not looking for a new career, my dear sir,” he tells a visitor; “I am not going back to compete. But I still have work I want to do.” And his remarkable face crinkles into a smile.

Meeting Mr. Tchelistcheff for the first time can be a mild cultural shock. He is a compact man, barely 5 feet tall. His manner is courtly, his dress elegant. Even when he relaxes at home, his sweater is draped modishly around his slight shoulders.

His voice is heavily accented, easier to understand in French than English. “Well, when I think of wine, I think in French,” he says. His long Slavic face recalls portraits of Nijinsky or perhaps an icon of some forgotten Orthodox saint. Slanted eyes seem to close entirely when he smiles, which is often.

After the Bolshevik victory, he fled to Western Europe. “I saw Communism as a brief cycle in Russian history,” he said the other day. “I knew the country would need agricultural specialists one day so, in exile, I studied agronomy.”

It was as an agronomist that he settled in France, and it was in France that he became interested in wine and the vines that produce it. Georges de Latour, a native of the Dordogne and the founder of Beaulieu Vineyards, returned to France in 1938 to find a new winemaker. Someone suggested the young Russian émigré André Tchelistcheff, and the rest is California wine history.

Mr. Tchelistcheff is quick to dispel myths about his career at Beaulieu and to credit his mentor for the creation of Georges de Latour Private Reserve, California’s first great collectible wine. “I did not create the Private Reserve,” he said; “Monsieur de Latour did. I was not the one who first aged the wine in small oak barrels; he was.”

The first vintage was produced in 1936, two years before Mr. Tchelistcheff’s arrival. The winery recently celebrated the wine’s 50th anniversary by releasing the 1986 vintage.

Just what a winemaker does is unclear to most wine enthusiasts, but they lionize their favorite winemakers, much as experts on food anointed favorite chefs. Mr. Tchelistcheff detests the phenomenon of wine-maker-as-media-star, though he may have been its earliest example. “It means that the winemaker must go out and sell the wine,” he said. “And that is not his or her job.”

Winemakers are chemists and microbiologists who spend most of their time in laboratories, removed from any glamour in the wine business: the harvest, the crush, the fermentation and, of course, the parties.

In fact, to call Mr. Tchelistcheff an enologist is not entirely accurate, even if he has spent much of his life in a laboratory. He believes wine is born in the vineyard, which has long been the most neglected part of winemaking.

“We begin in the vineyard,” he said, “and, always, we must come back to the vineyard. Finally, finally, after so many years, the California winemakers are beginning to come back to the soil.

“I think,” he continued, “that it was a question of prestige. The winemaker wore a white coat; he was a scientist; he knew the secrets. The grower was a dirt farmer. What did he know of fine wines?”

Beginning with the 1930s and ’40s, when scientists were identifying particular climates in California, the weather has always been the primary concern of California winemakers. But in recent years, more and more winemakers have come to appreciate European’s emphasis on soil and plant culture.

The singular qualities of the B. V. Private Reserve have always been born in the soil, Mr. Tchelistcheff said—the special soil of the famous Rutherford Bench region, where the best Beaulieu grapes are grown.

The current phylloxera epidemic, which is ravaging California vineyards, would never have come if the industry had paid more attention to vine selection 20 years ago, he believes. “Commercial interests prevailed,” he said. “There are vines that are completely resistant to the phylloxera, but they don’t produce as well. So now the good producers are being pulled out at enormous cost. It is a real tragedy.”

Mr. Tchelistcheff’s reputation is founded on cabernet sauvignon. Beaulieu Vineyards Private Reserve is 100 percent cabernet sauvignon, a product that he might change now for a more Bordeaux-styled blend.

He may have made great wines from cabernet, the grape of Bordeaux, but he confesses that his own weakness is for pinot noir, the grape of Burgundy. “I don’t drink much wine anymore,” he said. “After tasting 30 or 40 wines in a day, I’m too tired. But when we do drink, my wife and I prefer a good Burgundy.”

Which may help to explain why his own favorites among the many wines he has made over 60 harvests were two pinots noirs, the 1946 and 1947 vintages. He admits he has no idea why those two were so good and subsequent ones were not. But now, at the age of 89, he hopes to find out. “I want to work on pinot noir,” he said. “I would like once again to make a truly fine pinot noir.”

As with the 100 percent cabernet, Mr. Tchelistcheff’s ideas have changed over the years. “So much has happened in the laboratory, in the cellar and in the vineyard,” he said. “I would never take today some of the advice I gave to people 50 years ago.

“For example,” he said, “the first Private Reserves, the two made by my predecessor Leon Bonnet, were aged in French oak, barrels Monsieur Latour had bought in France in the 1920s. I changed over to American oak because I wanted more flavor, a more aggressive wine. Today I dislike the American oak and would go back to French.”

Mr. Tchelistcheff has always had other clients. Over the years, he did work for Robert Mondavi, Louis M. Martini, Franciscan Vineyards, Conn Creek, Clos Pegase, Swanson, Firestone, Jordan, Buena Vista, Villa Mt. Eden and Atlas Peak, in California; Chateau Ste. Michelle, in Washington, Antinori, in Italy.

Why, over the long span of his career, was there never a Tchelistcheff winery? “Because I never had the courage,” he said, with a touch of irony. “There were plenty of offers. People with money who wanted to be my partners. But remember, I am a child of revolution. I know what it means to lose everything overnight.

“No, I am not a rich man, but I enjoy my life this way: independent.”

Few people become rich in the wine business, but some become famous, at least in the industry. Many worked for Mr. Tchelistcheff. Among them: Theo Rosenbrand, who worked at Sterling Vineyards and is now consulting; Joe Heitz of Heitz Cellars, whose Martha’s Vineyard cabernet has long rivaled B. V. Private Reserve; Richard Peterson, who headed Monterey Vineyards and later Atlas Peak; Mary Ann Graf, former winemaker at Simi and now also a consultant; and Jill Davis, the winemaker at Buena Vista.

“There is still another generation of winemakers coming along,” Mr. Tchelistcheff said, “and they will lead California in directions we don’t even think of now.” He predicts that chardonnay and cabernet will fade as the dominant varieties—“I do not believe in the duration of the American market” is the way he puts it—and that there will be more and more interest in other varieties, particularly those of the Rhône Valley in France and of Northern Italy that are now grown in California.

“Ah, but to create a great Hermitage—that will take time. It took many centuries in France. And, too, the soils are so specific in the Rhône. I don’t think there is any way we will ever duplicate a great Côte Rotie here.

“Now the Sangiovese, from Italy, that’s another story. I have tasted the ’86s and ’87s in barrel and they are beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!”

But it takes time to create a great wine, and time is money.

André Tchelistcheff is well aware that he will not be around to see many of the changes he predicts. “I don’t have much time left,” he says, but not in sorrow or anger. He knows he has lived a long life and accomplished most of his goals.

One goal may be beyond his reach: to see his native Russia one last time. “Some friends went,” he said. “They told me the estate is gone but that in the graveyard they found the cross of my grandfather’s tomb. Oh, I would like to see that.”

Once, years ago, he was invited to come to the Soviet Union as a wine consultant but, as an old White Russian, he was denied a visa. Now he is free to go but he worries about his diet. “Perhaps,” he says, smiling. “It may happen. One never knows.”

January 1991

A Twilight Nightcap With Alistair Cooke

By FRANK J. PRIAL

Not so many years ago, but before e-mail, I received a letter, obviously produced on a well-worn typewriter, from Alistair Cooke, the renowned broadcaster and newsman who died last week at 95. How was it, he wanted to know, that The New York Times so rarely devoted any space to German wines? Was it a question of personal distaste, some commercial consideration or just an unfortunate oversight?

I responded promptly, noting that none of his suggestions applied. I suggested a lunch at which this thorny problem could be discussed at length. It’s what reporters do: open the door an inch to them and they insinuate—I hesitate to say “force”—themselves in the rest of the way.

Mr. Cooke was notoriously reluctant to grant interviews, probably because after conducting so many himself, he knew how easily things could go awry. I had no intention of pushing for anything beyond the lunch, but still, one never knew.

We met at the Carlyle, not far from his home at Fifth Avenue and 96th Street, and we did, indeed, share a good riesling. Alas, I can no longer recall its name. Mr. Cooke was well known at the hotel and was treated with the deference due to a legendary figure then in his 80s. I knew it was going to be an interesting day when a Babbitt-like fellow approached the table and, addressing himself to Mr. Cooke, said, “I know you, but I can’t remember your name.”

“Bob Hope,” Mr. Cooke said. He chuckled softly as the interloper backed off in confusion. “I do that all the time. They know I’m not Hope, but they don’t know what to say, and they leave.”

We talked about the old Ambassador liquor store on East 86th Street, which specialized in German wines. We talked about trips through the German wine country, touching on Wagner and Siegfried’s Rhine journey. I explained that enthusiasts like him were as rare as old trockenbeerenausleses. So rare, in fact, that growers in the Rheingau were then desperately planting chardonnay in vineyards where riesling had ruled since the time of Charlemagne.

Of course, some good German wines were around, and we shared a few at subsequent lunches. Alistair—we were on a first-name basis by then—may not have been a willing interviewee, but he was a brilliant raconteur. Imperceptibly, he warmed to the idea of some kind of profile, even supplying the kind of anecdotes that would make it work. He recalled, for example, that H. L. Mencken, an early mentor and lover of all things Germanic, knew a thing or two about the riesling grape as well. But while Mencken, the Sage of Baltimore, enjoyed a good hock when the occasion called for it, he was essentially a beer drinker. Mr. Cooke soon surpassed him in wine sophistication.

Mr. Cooke said that during his middle years, at the height of his popularity, he drank whatever was fashionable in wines and spirits, returning to his early love, riesling, only later in life. After the profile appeared in The Times, in 1999, we saw each other less frequently until two or three years ago, when he called to say he was trapped, so to speak, in his apartment, at his doctors’ insistence. His heart couldn’t take the effort necessary to get out of the house and back. No more lunches, no more riesling—which incidentally, had regained much of its popularity. Would I come by for a drink? I did, and we had Scotch.

One night, with some family members there, he brought out a bottle of a California wine favored by his stepson, Stephen Hawkes, who grows wine grapes in Sonoma County. Everyone had a glass but Mr. Cooke. “Better not,” he said. “I’ll stick with my Scotch.” A single Scotch, not too strong.

Early last month, he called to say that his long career was reaching its end, that his doctors had advised him to stop doing his weekly “Letter From America” for the BBC. The news would be kept secret for several days, but, he said, he wanted to give me time to put something together in advance.

Of course the secret didn’t keep. Secrets never do. Someone leaked the story in London, and I had to write something quickly.

I went uptown to see him. We had our Scotch—“the wine of Scotland,” he called it—and chatted for a while, and I left. His health was far more precarious than he had let on over the phone. His doctors had given him three to six months to live. He didn’t want that mentioned.

The article appeared several days later. Mr. Cooke was on the phone that morning, his voice as strong and elegant as it had ever been on television or radio. “I have some problems with your article,” he said sternly. He had in fact identified a minor grammatical glitch, and he objected to having been characterized as “proud” of his accomplishments. He would have preferred “satisfied.” But he was furious about a quotation—“the wine of Scotland.”

“No, no,” he said. “It should be ‘the twilight wine of Scotland,’ a much more beautiful phrase.” As indeed it is. “You must get it right if you use it again,” he ordered. And so, today, I have gotten it right.

It was our last conversation. We began with wine; we ended with whiskey. A good friendship.

April 2004

A Wine Man Who Vowed to Drain the Cup

By FRANK J. PRIAL

Back in the early 1990s Len Evans, the Australian wine man and legend in his own lifetime, gave me some advice.

“I’d say you’re about 60,” he said, “and from the looks of you, you’ll be lucky to make 75. You’ve got about 15 years ahead of you, and it’s time for you to learn my Theory of Capacity.

“You’ve got to make the most of the time you’ve got left, man. You’ve got to calculate your future capacity. A bottle of wine a day is 365 bottles a year. Which means you’ve probably only got 5,000 bottles ahead of you.

“People who say you can’t drink good stuff all the time are fools. You must drink good stuff all the time. Every bottle of inferior wine you drink is like smashing a superior bottle against a wall: the pleasure is lost forever. You can’t get that bottle back.”

Leonard Paul Evans, who died on Aug. 17 at 75, practiced what he preached. For years he made no decision, held no meeting, started no venture without first opening a bottle of Krug Champagne. He switched to Bollinger when that house invested in one of his wineries.

One day in 1984, or perhaps 1985, a winemaker from Burgundy and his wife stopped by Len’s home in Pokolbin, about 75 miles north of Sydney, for lunch. After a meal with some good Australian wines, he took them to his winery, Rothbury Estates, for a tour and tasting. They finished off the afternoon with two or three bottles of Champagne.

Back at the house, just before the guests were to leave, a friend turned up with an enormous fish. A skilled cook, Len prevailed upon the French couple to stay and help eat the fish. More wine was consumed, games were played and, Len recalled for his biographer, Jeremy Oliver, “someone sang all the arias from an opera, doing all four parts and most of the duets and quartets.”

Lunch finished around midnight. The next day, it was determined that the party of 10 had downed 37 bottles of wine and, Len insisted, “none were ever drunk—perhaps a little happy and intoxicated.”

As a boy in England Len was introduced to wine by his father, but it made little impression on him. He was set on becoming a professional golfer. When that did not happen, he moved to New Zealand, where he worked as a forester. Two years later, he moved to Australia, where he ran a duck farm, made auto mufflers, wrote scripts for radio and television and gave golf lessons on weekends.

From washing glasses in a bar in Sydney, he graduated to a job as food and beverage manager of a large hotel there. In 1968 he opened his own restaurant in Sydney, Bulletin Place, which included a retail wine shop and tasting rooms. Soon he formed a Friday Lunch Club, a Monday Lunch Club and, in 1977, the Single Bottle Club, dedicated to drinking very old wines.

The menu of the first Single Bottle dinner was graced with wines like a dry oloroso sherry from 1796, a Clos de la Roche Burgundy from 1921 and, with the beef, a 1928 Château Haut-Brion. After dinner, the guests partook of a tasting that included an 1898 Château Ausone, an 1893 and a 1987 Lafite-Rothschild, an 1825 Château Gruaud Larose and, from Germany, a Rüdesheimer Apostelwein from 1727.

I first met Len in the early 1970s at a lunch Robert Mondavi gave for him at the Mondavi winery in the Napa Valley. A short, compact fellow with an easy grin and a boxer’s athletic grace, he had James Cagney’s pugnacious charm.

Len had brought with him a bottle of Grange Hermitage, long reputed to be Australia’s best wine but still unknown to the winemakers around the table. After tasting it, one guest, André Tchelistcheff, then with Beaulieu Vineyard, bowed deeply before Len as a way to express his feeling about the wine.

Len eventually bought a vineyard in the Napa Valley, along with two chateaus in Bordeaux, only to lose them, and a lot more, when his friend and financial backer, Peter Fox, rammed his Ferrari into a tree and was killed. It took years, but Len paid his debts and prospered once again.

Len was far more than a Rabelaisian show-off, even if he reveled in that role. An indefatigable traveler and promoter, he took his message, and Australian wines, all over the world. He lived to see an Australian wine, Yellow Tail, reach sales in this country of over eight million cases a year in less than five years, and he saw Australian wines, once the target of jokes in Britain, surpass French wines in sales there.

To hear it, Len’s recounting of his Theory of Capacity was a comedic masterpiece. (He estimated in 1976 that he probably had only 8,000 bottles left to him—along with about 2,500 “succulent steaks.” What’s more, he said ruefully, “I might make love only another 5,000 times.”)

But there was a somber side to his merriment. His frantic pace and gargantuan appetites for food, wine and life served to mask the fact that he was beset with, if not particularly hampered by, heart trouble. He had an angina attack in 1976 and a bypass operation in 1988. “If there is a key to me,” he once told Mr. Oliver, “it is my energy. Never ambition; always energy.”

He seemed barely to sleep. He wrote, he painted, he worked with ceramics and tiles. He designed his home and had it built using old ironwood pilings pulled from the Sydney Harbor site where the famous opera house was being built. He sculptured massive pieces resembling the heads on Easter Island. He boasted that he had a collection of the world’s dullest books. (I contributed one of my favorites, The Speeches of Enver Hoxha.) He often said he had no time to lose.

Len died suddenly while parking his car at a hospital where he had gone to pick up a relative who had had surgery.

When he spoke of the end of life, he liked to quote Byron, who once observed that all farewells should be sudden, when forever. His was just that.

August 2006

Remembrances of a
Champion of the Champagne World

By FRANK J. PRIAL

Christian Bizot was a Parisian by birth but a true Champenois by nature. Warm and generous when you came to know him, he was outwardly formal and even a bit austere, like the Champagne country itself.

That’s only fitting, as Mr. Bizot had a long career at Champagne Bollinger, one of France’s foremost Champagne makers. He retired as its chairman in 1998. Mr. Bizot died on July 7 at age 73 at his summer home near Grenoble, France, not long after playing a round of golf.

Mr. Bizot was more than a premier winemaker: he was one of the strongest advocates of ethical standards in the wine industry. Originally destined to be a banker, he was needed elsewhere, specifically at Aÿ, a little wine village near Épernay in the Champagne region. There, when he was a young man, the famous house of Bollinger was presided over by his aunt Elizabeth, widow of Jacques Bollinger, grandson of the founder of the company.

Known as Lily to her family and Madame Jacques to the workers in the vineyards and cellars, she presided over the firm until she retired in 1971. One of her nephews, Claude d’Hautefeuille, ran the company until 1978, when Mr. Bizot took over as president.

Christian Bizot’s mother was Guillemette Law de Lauriston-Boubers, Lily Bollinger’s younger sister. His father was Henri Bizot, president of the Banque National de Paris. Christian attended Jesuit schools in Paris, served in the French Army in Saumur and Morocco, and apprenticed in a Paris bank before switching to the wine business. He worked in the cellars at Veuve Clicquot in Rheims, spent some time in the British wine trade with the wine merchants Corney & Barrow, then went to New York to work for Julius Wile Sons & Company. There, he recounted in later years, he drove 25,000 miles though the United States, selling wine.

He joined Bollinger in 1952, at age 24, and in 1994 became chairman of Jacques Bollinger & Company, a holding company he created to fend off possible takeovers. Bollinger remains one of the few family-owned major Champagne houses.

But perhaps his greatest contribution was serving as standard-bearer for the industry. In the 1980s, the Champagne business was faltering. Its impeccable reputation, which had taken several centuries to create, was suffering from a proliferation of mediocre or poor wine. To many it recalled the time just before World War I when workers rioted because the Champagne houses were importing cheap wine from other parts of France and selling it as their own. Devoted Champagne drinkers were turning to other wines, and importers in London and New York were complaining bitterly.

In 1988, Mr. Bizot created the Madame Bollinger Foundation to promote ethical and professional standards in the industry. The foundation’s first grant was $45,000 to the Institute of Masters of Wine in London, an educational organization supported by the English wine trade.

In 1992, Mr. Bizot released the Bollinger Charter of Ethics and Quality. It was a statement of principle in which the firm committed itself to following the highest winemaking standards and, by implication, challenged its competitors to do the same.

Some winemakers in Champagne derided the charter as a bit of grandstanding, but there was no doubt that too many of them were declaring vintages when the wines didn’t deserve it, and too many were releasing nonvintage wines that were thin and acidic. It may be coincidental, but Champagne quality has improved markedly since the Bollinger Charter was promulgated. Ghislain de Montgolfier, who now runs Bollinger, has said that the charter will stand as a major event in Champagne history.

Champagne is often judged in terms of its strength and power. Some Champagnes are light and delicate (Taittinger), most are medium bodied (Pol Roger) and some are big and robust (Bollinger, Krug, Veuve Clicquot). That is not surprising, considering that the Champagne region encompasses 79,000 acres, about 300 wine villages and five separate subappellations, and produces 200 million bottles a year.

Bollinger’s line includes its nonvintage Special Cuvée, the vintage Grande Année, the vintage Vieilles Vignes Françaises (Old French Vines) and the vintage Bollinger R. D. (Récemment Dégorgé, or recently disgorged). The R. D. is Champagne in which the lees or residue of the original yeast are left in the bottle for many years to add strength to the wine. In most Champagnes, disgorgement takes place about two years after bottling. The 1979 Bollinger R. D. was disgorged in 1999.

Bollinger wines last. On separate years at the Bizot table in Aÿ, I tasted the 1911 and 1914 vintages, both still alive and well. In 2000, Tom Stevenson, a British writer, described the 1990 Vieilles Vignes as “the beast of Bollinger,” a “hulking great blanc de noirs” and “a massive mouthful of fabulously rich, mind-bogglingly complex fruit.” A bit over the top, perhaps, but you get the idea.

Mr. Bizot is survived by his wife, Marie-Hélène, and five sons, all of them, like their father was, over six feet tall: Henry, Charles, Étienne, Guy and Xavier.

My most vivid recollection of Christian and Marie-Hélène was a day about 10 years ago when my wife and I had driven out to Aÿ from Paris for lunch. They received us warmly, excusing their casual dress and distracted air and only reluctantly explaining that we were a day early. In later years, he would slyly imply that it wasn’t inept scheduling that had got us out of town that day, but rather an intense love of Bollinger Grande Année.

July 2002

The Greatest Vintages of Alfred Knopf, 90

By TERRY ROBARDS

Alfred A. Knopf, enophile, closely resembles Alfred A. Knopf, bibliophile. He is a collector of exquisite works, surrounding himself with the best, indulging a passion for the rare and exceptional, expressing intolerance for the mediocre and, at age 90, still keen about the differences.

“I rarely bought one case of any wine and never bought more than two,” the publisher says, preparing to decant an old bottle here in the Tudor-style house where he has lived since 1928. In the small but exquisite cellar below, behind an oak door that is eight inches thick, lies the evidence of his passion.

In racks and bins are quantities of Château Lafite-Rothschild 1945 and 1959, Château Haut-Brion 1945, Château Latour 1945, 1953, 1959 and 1961, Château Canon 1929, Château Cheval Blanc 1929, 1949 and 1959, Château Pétrus 1959, Romanée-Conti 1964, Richebourg 1961, Clos Vougeot 1961 and other collector’s items.

With one exception, the cellar contains no off-vintages or oddities. It holds only the best, reflecting the same devotion to quality and ability to recognize it that enabled Mr. Knopf to become perhaps the foremost book publisher of his time. Rarely acknowledged in all the accolades he has won over the years is that he was the dominant influence in gastronomic publishing in this country.

He had the temerity to publish P. Morton Shand’s classic Book of French Wines in 1928, during Prohibition, and to come out with Julian Street’s Wines in 1933, the year Prohibition ended, when the public’s interest in wines was sharply curtailed by the Depression.

“We did it anyway,” he says. “I was devoted to Street. We were all set to do that when Prohibition was repealed. The idea that anybody would get in the way of it or that it wouldn’t sell had no bearing.”

The roster of food and wine authors published by Alfred A. Knopf Inc. includes James Beard, Julia Child, M.F.K. Fisher, Marcella Hazan, Maida Heatter, Alexis Lichine and Michael Broadbent. Mr. Knopf himself has belonged to most of the leading gastronomic societies, including the Chevaliers du Tastevin, the Commanderie de Bordeaux, the Lucullus Circle and the Wine and Food Society of New York.

“I find wine is a drink that simply doesn’t work if you sit down and drink a bottle all by yourself,” he says, bemoaning the lack of mobility that has come with advancing age and the paucity of friends and acquaintances sufficiently sophisticated to appreciate what he has in his cellar.

“I always liked good food,” he says. “I had a father who was terribly fussy.” But he says his taste for wine came later: “Remember, you had to go through Prohibition, a very strange period. The only people that gave me a taste for wine were the Berrys and Lichine.” The former was a reference to Berry Bros. & Rudd in London, a wine dealer famous among connoisseurs.

The one oddity in Mr. Knopf’s cellar is a five-bottle cache of Château Lynch-Pontac 1893 given him one at a time by a friend who was unable to come any closer to his birth year. It seems that 1892 was a better vintage for publishers than for Bordeaux. Mr. Knopf has yet to find an appropriate moment to sample any of the wine that is only a year younger than he is.

“It’s amazing,” he says. “I would say that nine out of 10 people who come here don’t want a drink of any kind. This is a big problem. They don’t want a soft drink, they don’t want a drink of water, they don’t want anything.” The impression is strong that the Knopf cellar has remained mostly untapped in recent years.

Within the last month, Mr. Knopf says, he shared a bottle of Pétrus 1959 with his doctor. “It was great,” he says. But somehow he resists the temptation that all of those spectacular wines present. He is comfortable with the knowledge that they are there, waiting for just the right moment.

At the same time, Mr. Knopf has a reputation for responding with disdain when a guest asks for anything stronger than sherry as a cocktail. According to one story that has circulated for decades, a group of dinner guests, knowing of their host’s disapproval of spirits, partook of a ration of martinis prior to their arrival.

The publisher, irked at what he regarded as the prematurely jovial state of his guests, told his butler, Alphonse, to refrain from serving wine with dinner that evening on the grounds that his guests had destroyed their palates.

According to another often-repeated story, a neighbor and close friend in Purchase became frustrated with years of drinking dry sherries at the Knopfs’ in place of the martinis that he preferred. So he bribed Alphonse to lay in a supply of gin and vermouth and became the only guest regularly to receive the cocktail he wanted.

When asked if he still holds the same view about the consumption of spirits in his home, Mr. Knopf throws open the door of a buffet to disclose an array of liqueurs and spirits. He then ambles slowly into the pantry, where he opens a cupboard to disclose a further array of bottles. But they look dusty and unused, and the display does not represent a direct answer to the question.

“He gives them a glass and stares,” says Helen Knopf, his wife. And both cite the example of the neighbor with the predilection for martinis as proof that hard liquor is in fact served in their household. Mr. Knopf himself says rum is an exception to his general aversion to spirits.

He likes to reminisce about his first wine trip to France with Alexis Lichine in 1950, just before he published Wines of France, and about visiting the Burgundy country with Mr. Lichine and Claude Philippe, the late chef of the Waldorf-Astoria. He recalls running out of gasoline en route to the Hotel de la Cote d’Or in Saulieu and having to buy some from a farmer.

He speaks of parties in the Hotel de Crillon in Paris, of drinking Champagne with Lily Bollinger and of sojourns at Château de Saran, the country house of Moët et Chandon that was built for Napoleon. He has kept diaries of his travels, recording the foods, the wines and the people he met during his visits to famous restaurants and vineyards all over the world.

One entry records lunch at the Hotel Bergerand in Chablis, where he ate sole in Chablis sauce, ham cooked in Chablis and an orange souffle. The wines were Chablis Les Preuses 1947, Chablis Blanchots 1947, Chablis Vaudesir 1947, 1948 and 1949, and Chablis Montée de Tonnerre in the same vintages.

Another luncheon, in Beaune, included many of the best-known Burgundy producers of the period, their names carefully recorded in Mr. Knopf’s diary: Baron Thenard, Louis Gros, Henri Gouges, Pierre Damoy, Charles Noellat, René Engel and Claude Ramonet—a blue-ribbon roster.

Each evening Mr. Knopf meticulously wrote down the foods and wines and people encountered, the time dinner was served and often the number of hours at table, frequently adding notations about the weather or the automobile in which he was traveling.

His last trip to Europe was in 1968 (“I can’t go again,” he says). But the trips are all here, on lined paper in notebooks with covers of blue imitation leather, and in calling up those occasions from memory he frequently consults the words he recorded decades ago. His pronunciation of French is flawless as he runs through page after page, relishing the memories.

On this day, Mr. Knopf has an array of bottles on an oak sideboard in the dining room of his house. He is planning to demonstrate how he uses a basket or cradle and a funnel when decanting old red wines that contain sediment, a natural byproduct of aging. He has decided to decant and share a bottle with some guests, under the watchful eye of his wife.

On the sideboard are mostly younger wines, a Château Ducru-Beaucaillou 1971, a Nuits-Saint-Georges Les Perdrix 1971, a Clos de la Roche 1976, a Chateau Montelena 1978 from California and a Volnay-Santenot 1961 produced by René Roy. The Volnay, curiously lacking the final “s” that normally appears on Santenots, is the oldest and clearly the most likely to have sediment, so it is chosen.

It is lying on its side in a basket. As Mr. Knopf peels off the lead capsule covering the cork, he gestures toward a pewter funnel nearly a foot tall and says: “This is my secret. It’s just a funnel, a piece of English pewter.” Then he wields a plastic corkscrew, a Screwpull, which he calls “the best invention after the electric razor.”

Inserting the corkscrew, he gently turns it and the cork begins to emerge. Then suddenly it splits in two, although it is mostly out of the bottle. “Well, not a very beautiful job,” he observes, expertly inserting his little finger into the bottle to make sure no cork remains.

Now he puts the funnel into one of a pair of crystal decanters bearing the emblem of Château Lafite-Rothschild. He grasps the bottle, simultaneously wrapping his fingers around the basket, and pours the wine into the funnel.

“I believe in decanting any red wine,” he says. “You can see when the wine ceases to be clear, and you just stop pouring.” The wine is illuminated by a bulb in a wall sconce and by the wintry afternoon light coming through a nearby window overlooking the macadam driveway.

“It’s got a nice color,” he says and stops pouring. He sets the decanter in an ornate silver wine coaster on an antique harvest table and carefully seats himself on a bench. The aroma of mature Burgundy fills the air. Four of the glasses that Burgundians call “ballons” stand nearby.

“Somebody ought to pour the wine,” he says to one of his guests. “I think you ought to do it.” The Volnay is firm and full and rich, perhaps just a bit past its peak at age 21 but superb. A toast is proposed to a healthier, more prosperous 1983. “I’ll drink to that,” says Alfred Knopf, hoisting his glass.

January 1983

By Wine Besotted: A Fantasy Fulfilled

By ERIC ASIMOV

All wine collectors, no matter how small their hoards, have cellar fantasies. Whether they keep wines in hall closets, in special coolers, at their parents’ houses or spilling out of basement corners, they harbor the dream of a cellar of their own. For the true believer, a collection is no mere cache of bottles but, even more than the eyes, a window into the soul. In the imagination a cellar is a sanctuary where the tactile act of communing with one’s bottles can border on the religious.

For most people, of course, the wine cellar remains a fantasy. A select few maybe have achieved some portion of their dream, carving out a room to serve as their vinous retreat. But perhaps nobody has realized the vision in details so glorious as Park B. Smith, a textile entrepreneur who is also one of the world’s great wine collectors.

In the limestone and shale beneath the weekend house that he and his wife, Linda, share in this little New England town in northwestern Connecticut, Mr. Smith has constructed a cellar of thousands of fantasies, covering almost 8,000 square feet and holding more than 65,000 bottles. As if that weren’t enough, more than half of Mr. Smith’s collection is in magnums, twice the size of normal bottles, and the count doesn’t include the 14,000 bottles auctioned off by Sotheby’s last November, which raised almost $5.33 million for his alma mater, the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass.

A cellar that size is no simple room. Mr. Smith’s is actually seven cellars built over 25 years or so and joined together, each more elaborate than the last. What began in 1978 as a small, claustrophobic root cellar has evolved into rooms with doubleheight ceilings and columns, filled with Asian art accumulated during his business travels. To fulfill the kid-in-a-candy store fantasy, Mr. Smith added to his domain a full kitchen and bath, and a comfortable dining room with a sound system, all enclosed in smoky glass to protect his guests from the 53-degree chill of the cellar.

“If I’ve had a crummy week, I just come down here for a few hours and talk to my bottles,” Mr. Smith said, giving voice to the desires of frustrated wine lovers everywhere. “Linda said, ‘That’s all right, as long as they don’t start talking back to you.’”

Mr. Smith, 75, is so passionate about wine that he practically pulses with ardor. Still lean with a head of straight white hair and surprisingly white teeth for a man devoted to red wine, Mr. Smith bears a passing resemblance to the actor Jason Robards, especially in his assertive, slightly raspy voice and no-nonsense diction. He’s a Jersey guy, born in Madison, a beer drinker who discovered wine while in the Marine Corps stationed at Camp Lejeune, N.C.

“I went to buy a six-pack and the store had a promotion, Beaujolais for 99 cents a bottle,” he remembered. “So I bought one and tried it, and said, ‘This isn’t bad.’”

Soon he was a civilian again, in the textile business, flying regularly to Asia and enjoying wine. By the early 1970s he was stopping on his way back in California, visiting wineries and befriending talented winemakers like Warren Winiarski of Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars and Dexter Ahlgren of Ahlgren Vineyard. The relationships he made seemed almost as important as the wines.

“Something happens to people who love wine,” he said. “You really discover a camaraderie. It’s not like coin collecting or something cynical. It’s like sharing love in a glass.”

The wines that Mr. Smith essentially gave away in the Sotheby’s auction represent themselves a mind-boggling world-class collection: cases of La Tâche 1990 and 1985, Richebourg 1990 and Montrachet 1985 from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti; cases upon cases of first-growth Bordeaux, including one extraordinary lot of 50 cases of 1982 Mouton-Rothschild, which sold for $1,051,600; vertical collections of Harlan Estate and Araujo; and hundreds of bottles of Mr. Smith’s beloved Châteauneuf-du-Pape, especially those from superstar producers like Château Rayas, Henri Bonneau, Domaine du Pegau and Château de Beaucastel.

But don’t cry for Mr. Smith. It’s true that six cases of Château Margaux 1982 went in the auction, but he still has 12 cases left.

Is it possible that Mr. Smith is a little excessive in his devotion?

“When I like something, I get a little carried away,” he concedes.

No more so than after he discovered Châteauneuf-du-Pape, a wine that transfixes him to this day.

“I don’t know any other wine that is so drinkable early on and ages so well,” he said. “The first I had was a 1978. It was a magnificent year, and those wines are beautiful now.”

Early on, he realized the importance of getting to know the winemakers, and he has established close relationships with even the most reclusive of them, like Mr. Bonneau. As a result, Mr. Smith is able to buy in quantity wines that border on cult objects, like the 2000 vintage of Pegau’s Cuvée Capo, a wine that the critic Robert M. Parker Jr., who Mr. Smith calls “my closest friend in life,” awarded 100 points. Mr. Smith has 135 magnums of the Capo, the equivalent of 22 cases, in addition to myriad regular bottles.

It’s a good thing Mr. Smith is a generous soul with an enthusiasm for opening bottles. A visit to his cellar rarely ends without him opening at least a handful of rare treasures—the count reached 14 over the course of a long lunch for five people late in January.

“Wine to me is an emotional thing—I’ve tried drinking alone but haven’t done too well,” he said. “A bottle of wine and a conversation with someone you like—wow!” He waved his hand over the glossy black dining table, littered with dozens of crystal glasses and the 14 bottles, including one Champagne; two 2003 Chave Hermitages, white and red; and 11 Châteauneufs including Cuvée Capo ’03, ’00 and ’98; Bonneau Réserve des Célestins ’90 and ’89; Rayas ’90, ’89 and ’78; and Beaucastel ’66. “This is what I’m all about,” he said.

Like even the smallest wine collector, Mr. Smith has had a problem outgrowing his storage space. By the time his fourth cellar was done, his first wife, Carol, who died in 2002, asked him a question.

“She said, ‘If you never buy another bottle of wine in your life, and you drink a bottle each night with dinner, how long would it take you to drink up all you have?’” he recalled. “I said, ‘I don’t know, 25 or 30 years?’ She said, ‘Nope, 119 years!’ I said, ‘I got a problem.’ We decided to open a restaurant.”

That restaurant, Veritas, opened in 1998 with an extravagant wine list largely based on the collections of Mr. Smith and another partner, Steve Verlin, whose holdings of Burgundy and Champagne dovetailed with Mr. Smith’s Châteauneufs, Bordeaux and California wines. But opening his collection to the Veritas clientele has by no means alleviated his storage challenge.

“We’ve added three more cellars since Veritas, so it wasn’t quite the panacea we expected,” Mr. Smith said.

February 2007

A Wine Spree Worth Savoring

By FRANK J. PRIAL

I was sitting at my desk in Paris one day in 1988 when the phone rang. It was Jean-Claude Vrinat, the owner and director of Taillevent, the famed Paris restaurant, who died of cancer last week at the age of 71.

Mr. Vrinat was beginning his summer vacation shortly, he said, and perhaps I might enjoy a day or two tasting wines with him in Burgundy. It was an offer no one interested in wine could refuse.

Mr. Vrinat was no ordinary restaurateur. Not only did he own perhaps the finest restaurant in Paris, but he also was a wine expert of long standing.

Most restaurants in France, then as now, were run by chefs, like Paul Bocuse and Georges Blanc. Most chefs started as poor boys hired to chop onions. They knew little about wine when they started, and after years in the kitchens, most still knew little about wine. In many restaurants, the wine stewards were there for the boss’s benefit as much as the customers’.

Taillevent was started in 1946 by Mr. Vrinat’s father, André, who had already won two Michelin stars when his son joined him in 1962. The elder Vrinat was not a chef, nor was his son. As François Simon, the food critic at Le Figaro, said of the younger Vrinat last week, “He didn’t cook, but he knew exactly what good cooking should be.”

Before he took over Taillevent in 1972, Mr. Vrinat served as the restaurant’s wine steward and buyer. His wine knowledge was as vast as his patience with my questions.

I love Burgundy and after his invitation I envisioned two leisurely days in the country, sipping samples here, sharing a bottle or two there, our rustic idyll punctuated by at least one classic Burgundian feed, at Lameloise in Chagny, perhaps, or with Bernard Loiseau at La Côte d’Or in Saulieu. It would be unforgettable.

It was, but not as I had envisioned. We would stay at a motel in Beaune, he said, “and meet the next morning in the lobby at 7 a.m.” Seven a.m.? Yes; there he was in the deserted lobby when I came down at 7:05. “Let’s go,” he said by way of greeting. “We’ll be late.” He had, I discovered, already been tasting for two days in southern Burgundy.

By 7:30 we were tasting in the bone-chilling cellars of François Jobard, a great white winemaker in Meursault, five miles south of Beaune. Mr. Jobard, a Harry Dean Stanton sort of guy, stood by nervous and silent while Mr. Vrinat and I tasted. By 8 a.m. we had been through his 1987 vintage, still in barrels; his ’86s, some bottled, some in barrels, and some of his ’85s, all bottled.

We thanked Mr. Jobard and were back on the road. By lunch time, we had done the Domaines Michelot and Sauzet, both also in Beaune, and, for our first red wine, the estate of the Marquis d’ Angerville, one of the great old men of Burgundy, in Volnay.

In this country a wine tasting is often a social event. In fact, professional wine tasting can be exhausting, sampling small glasses of raw unfinished wine and trying to determine which will be the best two, three or perhaps 10 years hence. Reputations and a lot of money are at stake as the men and women who taste for a living are well aware. The concentration required is immense.

Finally, it was time for lunch. Where, I wondered as we drove north out of Beaune, does the owner of one of the great restaurants of the world stop for lunch? I didn’t have to ask. “We’ll get something to eat at the Rotisserie du Chambertin,” Mr. Vrinat said. I knew the place, in the town of Gevrey-Chambertin, just south of Dijon, near the northern end of the main Burgundian vineyards. Mark Mennevaux and his wife, Céline, who did the cooking, were the owners. She was a great cook and I anticipated a couple of restful hours with good food and wine—out of a bottle, no sips.

It was not to be. The Mennevauxes were excited to see him. Not often does one get to cook for the owner of Taillevent. “Ah, M. Vrinat,” they said. “Welcome, welcome.”

Mr. Vrinat held up his hand, like a cop stopping traffic. “Thirty minutes,” he said. “That’s all we have.” Their disappointment was obvious. Mine, too.

Mme. Mennevaux took up the challenge. In 15 minutes we had before us a delicious poached chicken breast with vegetables probably right out of their garden. With a glass of wine, a bit of cheese and good bread, we were back on the road in the time it would have taken to unfold a starched Taillevent napkin.

That afternoon we took in five red wine producers: Jacky Confuron in Vosne-Romanée; the Domaine Pernin-Rossin in Flagey-Echézaux; the Domaine Boillot in Nuits-Saint-Georges; Barthold-Noëllat in Chambolle-Musigny, and Robert Jayer-Gilles in Magny-les-Villiers in the hills north of Aloxe Corton.

By the end of the day, I was, as the French say, “épuisé”—wiped out. Mr. Vrinat was as energetic as he had been at 7 a.m., already deciding, but not disclosing, which of the dozens of wines we had tasted might eventually show up on Taillevent’s list and at his Paris wine shop, Les Caves Taillevent.

Taillevent offers 3,000 different wines and Mr. Vrinat boasted that he had chosen every one. With his death, the job falls to his daughter, Valerie, who worked for him for 20 years.

January 2008

A Restaurateur Who Bought for Himself

By FRANK J. PRIAL

When Harry Poulakakos locked the door of his restaurant in Hanover Square for the last time on Friday, he left behind a lot of memories and by his estimate about 60,000 bottles of wine. It was one of New York’s best cellars.

Bordeaux? Yes, there was Bordeaux, including 16 vintages of Château Latour; 13 of Margaux; 13 of Haut-Brion, beginning with 1961; 11 of Pétrus, of which the youngest listed was 1988; and 8 of d’Yquem.

California? There were magnums of Beaulieu Vineyards’ Georges de Latour Private Reserve, Shafer Vineyards Hillside Select and Silver Oak Alexander Valley cabernet.

There were hundreds of cases of younger wines, not listed, because in Mr. Poulakakos’s severe judgment, they were not ready to drink.

Five years ago, when the Zagat Survey published its first and, alas, only comparative listing of wine prices in New York City, the top wines at Harry’s at Hanover Square were often half or a third of what they were in luxury Midtown restaurants. And Harry’s, while never inexpensive, was never a luxury place, either. It was a casual, clublike mecca for Wall Streeters who came for the camaraderie, good drinks, no-nonsense food and excellent cigars of unspoken provenance.

It should come as no surprise that few among this extroverted mob—in its prime, in the ’80s, Harry’s served 900 lunches—burst through the doors demanding 1997 Chambolle-Musigny from Domaine Dujac. Nor, quite honestly, did the owner expect them to. Truth be told, he bought his wine for himself.

Few restaurateurs know about wine other than as a profit center. Most came up through the kitchen, hardly a trajectory leading to knowledge of the grape. Arriving from Greece in 1956, Harry Poulakakos did time in greasy spoons but was lucky enough to hook on with Oscar Tucci at Oscar’s Delmonico, a hangout of traders. “He was my boss and mentor,” Mr. Poulakakos said, “and he introduced me to wine.”

As he moved up to bartender and to manager at Oscar’s, Mr. Poulakakos began buying wine, for the restaurant and himself. “I started in the early ’60s—’61 and ’62,” he said. “I fell in love with Bordeaux.”

When he opened at 1 Hanover Square in 1972, he began buying in earnest. “I bought 25 cases of 1971 Pétrus,” he said. Then he smiled and added: “And I drank most of it myself. I still have six bottles left.”

He became obsessed. “It was the ’66 Gruaud Larose,” he said. “I’d never tasted anything that good.” A Second Growth in the Bordeaux rating system, Gruaud Larose is a famous old property in the commune of St.-Julien. The 1966 Gruaud was highly rated. Harry Poulakakos bought 100 cases of it and, again, drank most of it himself.

“At one point, I was up to three, four bottles a day,” he said. “It was good, but it wasn’t good for me. My liver was distended, and the doctor said I had to cut back. I asked him, ‘To what?’”

“He said, ‘Two or three glasses a day.’”

“I said: ‘Three glasses is almost a bottle. How about a bottle?’”

“He said, ‘O.K., O.K., a bottle.’”

“I stuck with that, my liver got better, and I’ve never had any trouble since.”

Unkind friends claim to have seen Mr. Poulakakos push the envelope, so to speak, but only on special occasions. “Like maybe it’s Friday night,” he said with a grin.

It’s tempting to criticize Midtown restaurants for charging twice Harry’s wine prices, or more. Greed is always a factor, but there are special circumstances. If a restaurateur runs out of tomato soup, he can make more or buy more. If he runs out of 1982 Mouton-Rothschild and customers will pay anything for it, he has a problem: there isn’t any more.

His distributor may find a few bottles. The négociant, or exporter, in Bordeaux, may help, or the restaurateur can go to auctions and bid against his competitors. Staggering prices are the result. Because Harry Poulakakos bought his 1982 Mouton in 1984, and didn’t face the demand imposed on Midtown places, he could charge $1,500 for the wine, not $5,000.

The problem is particularly acute for new restaurants. The cellar at Harry’s was stocked with wines bought before some new young owners and chefs were born. Hot new places start with no wine and are expected to have well-stocked cellars the day they open. They cross their fingers and push the pinot grigio.

It’s sad that Harry’s has closed. Mr. Poulakakos said he didn’t want to continue after his wife and partner, Adrienne, died of cancer in August. But in a way it lives on. Harry’s was in the basement of the famous old India House, a private club open during the day to members and before that the Cotton Exchange.

Today, the upper floors of the landmark 1851 building are occupied by Bayard’s, named for the man who lived on the property in the 17th century. Bayard’s, whose chef is the estimable Eberhard Müller, formerly of Lutèce, is owned and run by Peter Poulakakos, Harry’s son. Harry (wink, wink) serves as consultant. Bayard’s serves meals to club members during the day and is a restaurant at night.

Not entirely by chance, Bayard’s has a pretty good wine list of its own, including—quelle coincidence!—most of the same rare Bordeaux in the basement. What’s more, Harry says, with a straight face, he’s thinking of selling a lot of his stock to his son. Well, you can’t just give the stuff away, for heaven’s sake, even to your kid. Family ties don’t count for much with the State Liquor Authority.

Meanwhile, no law says Harry cannot tap into his liquid assets for his own pleasure. Professional boniface no more, he is free to contemplate a life of leisurely dinners with good friends and good wine. Strangely enough—ah, the inconsistency of man after a lifetime of devotion to Bordeaux—he thinks more and more of Burgundy these days. Some of us, of course, recognize this as merely the wisdom of maturity. And we wait anxiously for an invitation.

November 2003

Naked Came the Vintner

By WARREN St. JOHN

When the typical Savanna Samson fan hears her name, the first thing that comes to mind is probably not wine. In fact, wine is probably not even the fourth or fifth thing that comes to mind when fans contemplate Savanna Samson. It’s even possible that no fan of Savanna Samson has ever had the thought, “Savanna Samson: wine,” at any time, ever.

Savanna Samson—her real name is Natalie Oliveros—is a porn star, and a noted one at that. As a Vivid girl, one of the actors whose work is produced and marketed by the goliath Vivid Video, Savanna Samson is a porn celebrity.

She is the star of 25 sexually explicit films, a two-time winner of the Adult Video News Award for best actress, and her work with Jenna Jameson in The New Devil in Miss Jones, a remake of a classic, won last year’s award for the best all-girl sex scene.

But Ms. Oliveros is also an aspiring winemaker. Her first production, a 2004 vintage of an Italian red wine that she calls Sogno Uno (Dream One), makes its debut this week at wine stores and restaurants in Manhattan.

A porn star making wine, Ms. Oliveros readily admits, is a gimmick. But what sets her effort apart from the vanity wines of other celebrities like Madonna and the Rolling Stones is that it is good—extremely good if the wine expert Robert M. Parker Jr. is to be believed.

After tasting a young bottle of Sogno Uno at a Paris bistro last fall, Mr. Parker gave Ms. Oliveros’s wine a rating of 90 to 91 or outstanding, a judgment that quickly became the talk of the wine world.

“It’s a very fine wine—awfully good,” Mr. Parker said by telephone. “It was really opulent and luscious and it had a personality.”

Sipping a glass of Sogno Uno last week at La Masseria, an Italian restaurant in Midtown, Ms. Oliveros said she put the same passion into her wine that she puts into her sex scenes, even as she expected the wine world to turn up its nose.

“People have to be laughing when they hear about it,” she said. “But I didn’t want it to be a joke.” As for the Parker rating, Ms. Oliveros said, “He should’ve given it a 93.”

Peppe Luele, the owner of La Masseria, said he plans to serve Sogno Uno at his restaurant, where it will sell for $70 to $80 a bottle. He said he is also a fan of Ms. Oliveros’s other work.

“Have you seen the movies?” he asked. He shook his head in astonishment. “Incredible.”

Ms. Oliveros insists her winemaking venture is more than just a lark. As a porn star of a certain age—Ms. Oliveros won’t say exactly how old she is—she said she knows she’s running out of runway on her film career. In her relatively short time in the porn industry—Ms. Oliveros shot her first movie in 2000—she said she has seen many in the industry falter when their time in front of the camera is up. She said she sees the wine business as her career parachute.

“I’ve seen so many fallen stars,” Ms. Oliveros said. “I don’t plan to be one of them.”

If there is a such a thing as the “average porn star,” it’s a safe bet that Ms. Oliveros does not fit into that category. For one thing, she lives on the East Side, with her husband and son. She began her career in pornography when her son was 8 months old.

“I worked out all through my pregnancy,” she said.

Ms. Oliveros said she happened into her pornography career. She grew up in upstate New York, one of five daughters, and came to the city at 17 to pursue a career in ballet. That didn’t happen, she said, “because I wasn’t good enough,” so she took a job dancing at the strip club Scores “to make killer money.” From there it was a short distance to making her first porn movie, which came about when she wrote a letter to Rocco Siffredi, a European porn star, asking if she could work with him.

“I figured I could go to Europe, get this fantasy out of the way, and no one would ever hear about it,” she said. Instead the movie was nominated for best foreign movie at the Adult Video News film awards, and pretty soon Ms. Oliveros was invited to be a guest on The Howard Stern Show.

“So much for that secret,” she said.

News of her career didn’t go over well with family and friends back home, Ms. Oliveros said.

“My parents are devastated by my career choices,” she said. “What really troubles me about what I do is the pain I’ve caused them.”

Ms. Oliveros said that her chief talent is her passion for her work. She said she genuinely enjoys having sex with strangers.

“For those few minutes that I’m working with someone, I love that person,” she said. “For that reason it makes me good at what I do.”

Ms. Oliveros kept dancing at Scores, where she had a strict policy of not dating customers, she said. That rule fell by the wayside when she met Daniel Oliveros, a Manhattan wine merchant who was there with his girlfriend at the time.

“I had to kick her out of the picture,” Ms. Oliveros said.

On their first date Mr. Oliveros invited his future wife to a wine-soaked dinner with friends and colleagues in the wine business. That began their relationship as well as her education about wine.

“I was impressed,” she said.

Ms. Oliveros said her husband is a “very strange breed” who supports her porn career. She makes six sexually explicit movies a year, and can earn anywhere from $20,000 to upward of $100,000 per film, depending on sales. All are shot in California, and each one takes three days to two weeks to make. She said her husband is her toughest critic.

“I know that he’ll be watching, so I just put that much more into what I’m doing,” she said. “If I can just spark a little jealousy out of him, then I would be so happy. But that never happens.”

Mr. Oliveros said: “I was aware she had a skeleton in the closet. But as long as she looks me in the eye and says she loves me, I’m not a jealous person.”

As much as she enjoyed making pornographic movies, Ms. Oliveros said there was something about them that left her unfulfilled. On a vacation in Tuscany last year, she said, she was struck by something akin to an existential crisis. “How can I leave a mark on this world?” she asked herself. “And I thought, ‘Wine.’”

Ms. Oliveros has had some help with her first winemaking venture. Through her husband, she met Roberto Cipresso, a noted Italian winemaker and consultant. She asked Mr. Cipresso to experiment with blends of local grapes to achieve her ideal flavor. She tasted the blends along the way, she said, dismissing merlot and cabernet grapes as boring, and eventually falling for cesanese, an ancient and little heralded grape found mainly in the Lazio region that has a light, but spicy taste.

Ms. Oliveros said she wanted something slightly sweeter, so Mr. Cipresso added sangiovese to the mix. For backbone they added montepulciano, the aromatic grape from the Tuscan hills. Ms. Oliveros said she made her preferences known, even if the language of wine tasting eluded her.

“When they say, ‘leather,’ I think ‘old boots,’” she said. “And when they say, ‘vanilla,’ I think ‘ice cream.’”

Eventually they settled on a blend of 70 percent cesanese grapes, 20 percent sangiovese and 10 percent montepulciano to create a complex wine with hints of pepper, earth and cotton candy.

“This wine will make you think,” Ms. Oliveros said.

Ms. Oliveros ordered 409 cases—“more than I could really afford,” she said—and began working on a label, settling eventually on a design that plays on her notoriety as a Vivid girl. It’s an image of Ms. Oliveros’s naked profile beneath a sheer gown, wearing the type of heels you might expect to see on, say, a dancer at Scores. She plans to introduce the wine with a Venetian-theme mask party tomorrow night at La Masseria.

Ms. Oliveros plans to sell Sogno Uno for $38 a bottle.

She said that the success or failure of her wine venture will be determined in the coming weeks by wine distributors and critics. She said she is optimistic, enough so that she just went to Italy to taste potential blends for a white wine, which she would call Sogno Due. She suggested that potential customers approach her wine the way she approaches some newfangled sexual position on the set of one of her movies.

“Don’t knock it till you try it,” she said.

February 2006

He Can Bring the Wine and the Music

By ERIC ASIMOV

For music and for wine, David Chan says, language has its limitations. He should know.

Mr. Chan is a concertmaster of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, the position traditionally held by the leader of the violin section, and he is also a wine lover and Burgundy fanatic. He is a Harvard graduate who was named concertmaster in 2000, at the ripe old age of 27, and he sees a crucial similarity between his twin passions.

“Talking about wine is like talking about music,” he told me over dinner recently at Bar Boulud, across Broadway from Lincoln Center. “If I could tell you in words, then there wouldn’t be any point in playing it. A great piece of music, and a great wine, holds your attention and has more than you can say in words.”

It’s a piece of wisdom that seems obvious, especially when I find myself trying to describe the sensation of a wonderful 15-year-old Puligny-Montrachet with phrases like “sluicing a mouthful of pebbles.” Yikes! I’m sure describing the effect of a telling passage of music is no easier.

Perhaps it’s the necessity of embracing the nonverbal that so often binds music and wine. Mr. Chan says that almost any orchestra or group of musicians will include a significant minority who are involved in tasting groups or who gather regularly to have dinner and share wines. It was one such group that got him interested in wine in the first place.

Mr. Chan grew up in San Diego. His parents, who came from Taiwan and met as graduate students at Stanford, were not wine drinkers. They had heard that children who studied music did better in math and reading, so they enrolled him in a violin class at age 3. He never stopped playing.

He was first exposed to great wines at a summer music festival in La Jolla, Calif., where a few patrons with extensive cellars were opening bottles for the visiting musicians. But he began to develop his interest when he got to the Met and fell in with a crowd of wine-loving musicians.

At first, it was slow going. “They would talk about wine with all this jargon, and mostly I was kind of lost,” he said. The turning point came in 2002, after he married Catherine Ro, also a violinist in the Met orchestra. His father-in-law, a wine lover, had to give up drinking for health reasons and gave Mr. Chan two dozen special bottles, mostly top Bordeaux and cabernet sauvignons.

While he understood the greatness of those wines, it wasn’t until he started to drink Burgundy that he fell head over heels into wine fanaticism. So began an obsession to get to know the Côte d’Or, the heart of Burgundy, almost vineyard by vineyard.

“As a teenager, if I discovered one Mahler symphony I had to know all of them—one Wagner opera, I had to know them all,” Mr. Chan said. “You can imagine how Burgundy hit me like a ton of bricks. If I had one producer’s Meursault Genevrières one night, I had to have the Perrières the next night. Whatever would advance the knowledge.”

Burgundy, particularly the haunting perfume of red Burgundy, is often thought of as a wine that bypasses the brain to grab the soul. But Mr. Chan is captivated above all by the intellectual appeal of Burgundy, of linking great wines to the earth from which they originated. “It’s not that they’re not hedonistic, but wines of terroir clearly offer an additional level beyond all that,” he said. “Over time you get to know a terroir signature when you encounter it again and again in blind tastings or whatever. I definitely love that analytical element. It’s irresistible to a certain nerdy personality that I have.”

Ah, terroir, that French word with no real English equivalent, pointing to the qualities of a place: the soil, climate, exposure to the sun, the human touch. While some scientists and winemakers outside of France dispute the notion of terroir, Burgundy lovers embrace it religiously.

Mr. Chan sees parallels between music and terroir: “Music that has lasted 100, 200, 300 years, there’s a reason for it. Mostly, we’ve weeded out the music that isn’t worthy. But there’s more: they bring pleasure, they make you think about it, and they bear the stamp of the composer.”

Great composers are like great vineyards, he says. Both require a particular sort of selflessness to bring them to life. “If you seek to only be yourself, that’s what you get, but if you seek to faithfully bring the composer to life, that will happen, and your personality will enter the picture because you’re performing the task,” he said. “I think the same thing happens in wine. If you try to faithfully capture the terroir, inevitably you enter the picture, whereas if you’re not careful, it results in a house style.”

A consequence of Burgundy fanaticism is that one tends to spend a lot of money on wine, and as a new family man (his second child was born a few weeks ago), Mr. Chan sensed his limits. While his wife objected to his traveling to Burgundy solely to buy wine, she acknowledged that if he had a good reason for visiting Burgundy it might make a difference.

So motivated, and feeling as if he wanted to give something back to the wine producers who had embraced him, he came up with an idea for giving a concert in Burgundy. In 2007 he approached Bernard Hervet, a music lover who is the chief executive at Maison Faiveley, a longtime grower and négociant in Burgundy. One thing led to another. Aubert de Villaine, head of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, got involved, and a music and wine festival was born.

A first concert was held in 2007 at the historic Château du Clos de Vougeot, and in 2008 Mr. Chan gave three concerts. “Music and wine are two arts that are able to destroy the language barrier,” Mr. Hervet told me in an e-mail message.

Needless to say, Mr. Chan’s future Burgundy visits are assured.

November 2008

Alois Kracher, Austrian Winemaker
and Advocate, Is Dead at 48

By ERIC ASIMOV

Photo AFP/Getty.

Alois Kracher Jr., a visionary winemaker whose luscious sweet wines and forceful personality were instrumental in restoring the Austrian wine industry’s international reputation after a scandal in 1985, died at his home in Illmitz, in the Burgenland region of Austria. He was 48.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, said Seth Allen, president of Vin Divino, Mr. Kracher’s American importer.

Mr. Kracher’s wines are coveted throughout the world, admired as much for their silky finesse and balance as for the intensity of their sweet, honeyed fruit flavors.

Before turning to wine, Mr. Kracher (pronounced KRAHK-er) was trained as a chemist, and he brought the systematic skills of a scientist to his work, with the imaginative reach of an artist and a thorough understanding of the traditions of Burgenland.

“He transformed a beautiful but coarse and rustic style with his technical know-how,” Mr. Allen said. He described Mr. Kracher’s wines as casting “a wave of adolescent vitality upon the reticent and formal domain of world-class wine.”

At least as important as Mr. Kracher’s winemaking was his fierce and determined advocacy for Austrian wines. Not content with the success of his own label, he tirelessly promoted other Austrian winemakers while advising younger colleagues in the industry on techniques and on marketing their wines internationally.

“He was one of the godfathers of Austrian wine without a doubt,” said Aldo Sohm, the chef sommelier at Le Bernardin restaurant in New York, who is originally from Austria.

Today, Austria, one of the world’s oldest wine regions, is much admired for its peppery grüner veltliners; dry, pure, intensely minerally rieslings; and dense, nectarlike sweet wines enhanced by botrytis, the famous noble rot, which concentrates flavors and sugars.

But back in the 1980s it was a different story. Austria’s wine industry, which had been plodding along in relative obscurity, captured attention in 1985 when unscrupulous merchants were caught adding diethylene glycol, a component of antifreeze, to their wines to increase body and sweetness.

The scandal resulted in Austria’s withdrawing from the world market, revamping its wine laws and tightening controls over the wine industry.

In 1981, Mr. Kracher started working with his father, Alois Sr., at the family estate in Illmitz, in the wetland region east of Lake Neusiedl, near the border with Hungary.

While continuing to work as a chemist in the pharmaceutical industry by day, young Alois took over the winemaking in 1986 while his father oversaw the vineyards.

Mr. Kracher was determined that Austria would rejoin the international wine-making community, yet it was not until 1991 that he quit his job as a chemist to devote himself fully to the winery.

“He desperately wanted to communicate the potential of his zone and his country to the outside world,” Mr. Allen said.

Mr. Kracher is survived by his parents; his wife, Michaela; and his son, Gerhard, 26, who had worked closely with his father. The family announced that Gerhard would take charge of the winery.

Mr. Kracher was known for his enormous energy, which was not restricted to his winery. He had joined forces with Manfred Krankl, the Austrian-born founder of the Sine Qua Non winery in California, to make a small quantity of extraordinary sweet California wines, called Mr. K.

He also found time to make sweet wines in Spain with Jorge Ordóñez, a wine importer based in the United States, and to make his own blue cheese soaked in sweet wine, Kracher Grand Cru.

“The guy was always going full speed, very passionate and eager,” said Mr. Sohm, the sommelier. “I never saw him calm.”

December 2007

Nelson Shaulis, 86, Is Dead;
Toiled to Improve Vineyards

By HOWARD G. GOLDBERG

Dr. Nelson Shaulis, whose grape-growing experiments in the Finger Lakes region of New York State revolutionized vineyard practices worldwide, died on Saturday in Newark, N.Y. He was 86 and lived in Geneva, N.Y.

Before Dr. Shaulis retired in 1978 as professor of viticulture—the science and methods of grape growing—at Cornell University’s New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, he developed a vine-training system known as the Geneva Double Curtain. He also worked at Cornell’s Vineyard Laboratory, a station branch in Fredonia, N.Y.

Dr. Shaulis’s trellising concepts “have been applied in every major grape-producing region in the world, and served as the knowledge base that allowed New World winegrowing to emerge as a major factor in international trade in the last 20 years,” said Prof. Robert Pool, who succeeded him as chief viticulturist at the experimental station.

The concepts have been most widely applied in the United States—especially California—Australia and New Zealand.

Dr. Shaulis also worked with Cornell’s department of agricultural engineering to develop the mechanical grape harvester, especially for use with the Double Curtain. Today, harvesters modeled after the Cornell machine bring in grapes everywhere.

Experts in modern viticulture consider Dr. Shaulis the father of canopy management, a term used in the industry for a spectrum of techniques to control vine diseases and improve grape yields and wine quality. The canopy consists of all vine growth above the soil, including trunks, canes, stems, leaves and fruit. The core principle of leading-edge management is to broaden the exposure of leaves and grapes on trellises to the sunshine.

While working with vines that produce Concord grapes, a red variety that once dominated upstate winegrowing and is still most familiar to consumers in sweet kosher wines, Dr. Shaulis observed that excessive shade inside canopies reduced grape yield and ripeness.

He discovered that by separating one thick canopy into two less thick ones, more sunlight (and thus more photosynthesis) could be introduced on leaf surfaces, improving vine maturation and increasing not only grape yields, sometimes by 90 percent, but also quality.

The Double Curtain technique was first tried at Geneva in 1960, and four years later field trials with growers began. Although Concord belongs to a species of native North American grape known as labrusca, Dr. Shaulis’s discovery was quickly applied to vinifera grapes, the classical European variety that produces today’s premium wines. Bordeaux was quick to see its merits.

Late-summer visitors to grape farms who look straight down a Geneva Double Curtain row will see that the vine wood and luxuriant vegetation are trained both to the left and right over wires, supported by cross arms that are four feet apart and five or six feet above the ground.

Seemingly nothing escaped Dr. Shaulis’s investigations. He looked, too, into proper siting of vineyards, the physiology of grapevines, mineral nutrition, root stocks and microclimates.

Virtually every properly educated and trained winegrower in the English-speaking world has a copy of Sunlight Into Wine: A Handbook of Wine Grape Canopy Management, a 1991 book whose principal author is Dr. Richard E. Smart, a renowned Australian viticulturist. Dr. Smart was a student of Dr. Shaulis, and the book’s content owes a significant debt to Dr. Shaulis’s findings.

Dr. Shaulis received a bachelor’s degree in horticulture in 1935 and a master’s degree in agronomy in 1937, both from Pennsylvania State University. He received his doctorate in soils from Cornell in 1941.

Dr. Shaulis’s wife of 55 years, Lillian, died in 1996. He is survived by two daughters, Catherine Shaulis-Santomartino of Scotia, N.Y., and Margaret Harty of Sodus, N.Y.; three grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

January 2000

Joe Dressner, an Importer
With No Use for Pretense, Dies at 60

By ERIC ASIMOV

Joe Dressner once made one of my best friends cry. Joe, an iconoclastic importer of naturally made wines, died on Saturday at the age of 60 after a three-year battle with brain cancer. Even if he did make my friend cry, I’ll miss him sorely.

He would regularly bring a crew of his vignerons from France to the United States, where they would meet members of the trade, offer consumer tastings and raise hell after hours. These visits were important to him. They helped sell wine, of course, but he also believed that it was crucial for the public and the trade to see for themselves that wine—good wine—was made by people who had a vision and philosophy as well as warts and flaws and sometimes bizarre hairstyles.

The problem was that among Joe’s own flaws, he lacked tact and a sense of diplomacy. Or maybe his brusque irascibility was part of a conscious shtick, the same way he was a sentimentalist but pretended to abhor sentiment. I was never sure. In any case, the vignerons were at the Crush Wine Company in Midtown Manhattan when my friend, a doctor, made an innocent jest to Joe that drew such a harsh bark in response that her tears flowed.

But that was Joe, in part: blunt, acerbic, uncompromising and provocative, and not necessarily in control of his ridicule. Yet Joe was also principled, honest, articulate, outrageously funny, and man, did he know wine.

How did Joe know wine? To my knowledge, he never went to a class to learn how to deconstruct a wine into esoteric aromas and flavors. I never saw him try to identify a wine blind, as if that were ever a sign of useful knowledge. He had no formal training. He simply drank a lot of wine. With time he learned to distinguish between what he liked and what he didn’t, and he was sufficiently curious and resolute to work out the reasons for those differences.

It turned out that the wines he liked had much in common. They were generally made by small producers who worked their own plots, who did not use chemicals in the vineyard and kept their yields small, who harvested by hand rather than by machine and who used no additives in the cellar but merely shepherded the grape juice along its journey into wine.

These were the wines he grew to love and sell, made by people whose personal histories often involved generations of dedicated grape growing. Even as these wines came to be known as “natural wines,” a term he occasionally used and often disdained, and wines like these came to be a hot-button topic among the wine lovers of the world, Joe would scorn the notion that he was involved in some sort of movement.

“The natural wine movement is not a movement with a leader, credo and principles,” he wrote just last year. “If you think there is a natural wine movement sweeping the world, triumphantly slaying industrial wineries and taking no hostages, then you are one delusional wine drinker. The natural wine movement thinks that you might want to lessen your alcohol consumption for a few months.’’

Wine for Joe was not about movements or dogma. Despite his predilections, he liked the wines he liked not because they were made according to a certain philosophy, but because he thought the wines tasted better. One of the core beliefs of his company, Louis/Dressner Selections, was that wines should be made with indigenous yeasts that were present on the grapes and in the winery, rather than inoculated with yeasts selected by the winemaker. Yet the wines of Didier Dagueneau, one of the shining domains in his portfolio, are inoculated. Well, you can’t argue with these wines.

Joe represented far more than simply a preferred way of making wines. Whether he would admit to it or not, he represented a culture that does not exalt wine into something overly complicated or turn it into a fetishistic object. His way of thinking did not reduce wine to scores and tasting notes, either, or strain to demystify it. To Joe, wine was a pleasure and a joy, to be shared with friends and family with great food, and, as he once said, if you wanted to drink wretched wine with awful food, who was he to object? That was his way, and everybody else could do as he wanted, so long as it did not intrude on Joe or on his business.

Of course, Joe made such intrusions easy. It was not so much his enemies who disturbed him as his friends, people he thought should know better, and yet who persisted in straying into the realm of the self-important or pretentious. Out came the ridicule, the satire, the absurdities, and if he were on your tail he would pursue with an unholy tenacity. He could make people cry. Now, he’s done it again, by dying.

September 2011