A Hedonist in the Cellar (18 page)

I’m not
a
big drinker of spirits these days. Wine provides more nuance and interest at the expense of fewer brain cells. But I happened to acquire an interest in Armagnac during trips to Bordeaux, where it’s often served after dinner at the great châteaux, and at the renowned bistro La Tupina, where wine merchants and châteaux owners savor old Armagnac vintages after washing down a roast chicken with a bottle of Pauillac. Over time I came to appreciate the complexity and variety of France’s No. 2 brandy, as well as the sense of completion and contemplation inspired by an after-dinner snifter. “At its best,” claims British spirits expert Nicholas Faith, “Armagnac offers the drinker a depth, a natural sweetness, and a fullness unmatched by even the finest cognac.”

Everyone in the heavily forested Gascony region, a hundred miles south of Bordeaux, will tell you that Armagnac is France’s oldest spirit, first distilled as early as 1411. Cognac got off to a much later start, but that town’s position on the Charente River allowed for easy transport and eventual international renown. The brandy of Armagnac remained something of a local cult, and it was often credited for the great longevity of the inhabitants. While Cognac production is concentrated in a handful of wealthy firms, Armagnac is still
largely an artisanal product crafted by feisty individuals like Martine Lafitte of Domaine Boingnères.

With her jet-black helmet of hair, her big Valentino tortoiseshell glasses, and her tiger-striped sweater and tight white pants, Lafitte might be the proprietress of a beauty salon or travel agency. Here in the homeland of d’Artagnan and foie gras, I was expecting someone a little more … rustic. One is tempted to say that she is not the typical Armagnac producer, except that the more people you talk to here, the more you realize that this is a region of Gallic individualists who passionately disagree about how to make
le vrai Armagnac.
In this regard, the region is more like Burgundy than Bordeaux—a place of small plots and contentious peasants going their own way, squabbling among themselves about
le vrai Armagnac
even as they insult the integrity of that other French brandy that fills duty-free shops around the globe.

The Boingnères estate, in the Bas-Armagnac region, which has been in Lafitte’s family since 1807, comprises about fifty acres—not much when you consider that her Armagnac is in demand from Tokyo to New York. Half of that acreage is planted with the Folle Blanche grape, which is Lafitte’s particular passion. Folle Blanche is more difficult to raise than Ugni Blanc and Colombard, two more common grape varieties, and hence is on the decline, but to her mind it produces the richest and most aromatic Armagnac. Lafitte’s father was one of the great champions of Folle Blanche, but many of his neighbors disagreed with his strident advocacy of it as the true grape of Armagnac, preferring the more forgiving varieties. One day he arrived at his
chai
to find a cross of flowers from the cemetery in front of the cellar door. “It’s a tough
region,” Martine Lafitte says proudly, getting a last drag on her Craven A before she takes me in to the cellar. “We fight for our beliefs.”

Lafitte shows me the old-style alembic—twin copper towers wherein the wine is heated and evaporated in the winter, following the harvest. She distills to about 49 percent alcohol, producing a more flavorful spirit than the 70 percent typical in Cognac. The spirit gains additional flavor and mellowness in the oak casks, where it may develop for decades. Unlike some makers, Lafitte doesn’t water it down to 40 percent when it’s bottled.

Regulations for the region allow Armagnac to be sold in as little as two years, but these young brandies are to be avoided at all costs. Five-year-old Armagnac can be labeled VO, VSOP, or
réserve.
But the best Armagnacs are the older vintages, which are seldom bottled before ten years of age. Laubade, one of the larger domaines in Armagnac, has thousands of barrels of old Armagnacs mellowing (and evaporating) in a series of cellars on the slope below its tiled 1850 manor house. At Laubade they believe the wood is just as important as the grape, and they get much of their oak from a nearby forest and then stack it and dry it for several years before cooperage. Laubade’s Armagnacs are produced largely from the Baco grape, which many believe has greater aging potential than Folle Blanche. (Even Mme. Lafitte grants Baco the virtue of longevity.) In their first twenty years of life, these don’t show the complexity of Folle Blanche–based Armagnacs, but they really start to sing when they hit the age of majority.

Tasting through vintages back to 1934, I was impressed
by the increasing complexity and depth of the older spirits, although, as with fine wines, some vintages are notably superior to others—the 1947, in this case, being my hands-down favorite.

The practice of vintage dating, which is not followed in Cognac, has made Armagnac increasingly popular, especially on our own vintage-conscious shores. Laubade is one of the few makers that have sufficient stocks of old vintages to make them widely available in the United States, but there are many small makers who are worth seeking out. Most of the best are concentrated in the westernmost Bas-Armagnac region and include some of my favorites: Château de Briat, Laberdolive, Château de Lacquy, and Château du Tariquet. Part of what makes Armagnac so engaging is that there are dozens of makers producing rich and complex brandies that turn up in our restaurants and liquor stores, and any number of these spirits will provide a memorable and contemplative coda to a meal.

The unspoiled little town of Le Mesnil-sur-Oger sits almost smugly in the center of the rolling hills of Champagne’s Côte des Blancs. BMWs and Mercedeses race through the narrow streets, driven by some of the world’s most prosperous small farmers. These happy Frenchmen grow Chardonnay grapes in
grand cru
–designated plots on the chalky hillside, their fruit destined for some of the world’s greatest Champagnes. Hidden in the center of town, behind eighteenth-century houses, is the fossil-strewn Clos du Mesnil vineyard, probably the most hallowed piece of ground in Champagne, owned by the house of Krug.

Blanc de Blancs, literally “white of whites,” is made from Chardonnay grapes. Don’t groan. “A lot of my customers say, ‘But I hate Chardonnay,’” says Charles Stanfield, the tattooed, Sub-Zero-sized chief of sparkling wines at Sam’s Wines in Chicago. “I tell ′em, ‘Hey, get over it, there’s Chardonnay and there’s Chardonnay. Blanc de Blancs is the Chablis of Champagne—very crisp, very dry.’” Stanfield’s customers never disagree with him, at least not to his face. And neither should you. For one thing, he’s a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Côteaux de Champagne. He’s also the Mr. T of wine retailing. He loves Blanc de Blancs. So should you.

The typical Champagne is made from a blend of Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier, and Chardonnay. Not a bad recipe. But if you ever taste a mature Clos du Mesnil or a Taittinger Comtes de Champagne, you will realize that there is something magical about the Chardonnay grapes of this northerly region. Many hard-core Champagne drinkers believe that 100 percent Chardonnay Champagne can achieve greater vinous intensity and longevity than Pinot-heavy blends. Sipping a 1982 Salon or a 1988 Dom Ruinart Blanc de Blancs could forever destroy your preconceptions about white wine being light in body or delicate in flavor. Imagine hearing Beethoven’s Ninth blasted through a stack of Marshall amps. These are wines; they are meant to be aged, and to be sipped with food. Big food. That said, there are lighter, leaner styles of Blanc de Blancs that make the ideal aperitif—for instance, the Blanc de Blancs of Michel Turgy, a small grower in Mesnil, which truly remind me of Chablis, with its chalky minerality. (The Côte des Blancs’ Kimmeridgian chalk is part of the same geological formation that surfaces in Chablis.)

While most of us look to the big, famous Champagne houses for our bubbly, an increasing number of smaller makers have begun to appear in recent years, and American importers have begun to seek them out. Many of the best Blanc de Blancs come from small proprietors like Larmandier-Bernier, Jacques Selosse, A.
R
. Lenoble, De Sousa & Fils, J. Lassalle, and P. Lancelot-Royer. Most of these wines are made in small quantities, from villages like Avize and Cramant, which are
rated
grand cru
, the highest designation in Champagne’s grading system. (If you see that term on the label, it tells you the wine is 100 percent
grand cru.)
While the styles vary, the quality is impeccable, and even wine snobs can appreciate the reverse snobbery of a relatively unknown label. I suspect that boutique Champagnes like these are the wave of the future in Champagne—the bubbly equivalent of cult Cabs.

Midsized producers like Delamotte, Deutz, and Jacquesson also make very good Blanc de Blancs. Delamotte gets first refusal on the grapes rejected by Salon—makers of perhaps the most exotic Champagne in the world. It is produced only in exceptional years from severely pruned, grandfatherly old vines on the midslope of
grand cru
vineyards in Mesnil. (I can’t confirm if the grapes are harvested one at a time by blond virgins dressed in gossamer, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised.) In the ′20s, Salon achieved renown as the house wine at Maxim’s, and has since become a password among true Champagne freaks.

One hundred percent sparkling Chardonnay is made elsewhere, including California. Schramsberg’s Blanc de Blancs has always been the most interesting and Champagne-like example to me. Mumm’s Cuvée Napa makes a pleasant, affordable Blanc de Blancs, but most American versions are too fruity for my palate. Francis Ford Coppola has just put out a Hawaiian Punch of a Blanc de Blancs, named after his daughter Sofia—a nice little quaff for a summer picnic, but a long way from Mesnil.

Like regular bubbly, Blanc de Blancs comes in both vintage bottlings and blends of different years. The vintage to
buy, if you choose to spend the money, is ′96. The ′98 and ’
99
aren’t quite as rich and powerful. The
tête de cuvée
superluxury wines are released much later—the current Clos de Mesnil as of spring ′06 is the mind-blowing ′95. Salon’s latest release seems to be the exquisitely complicated ′96. And I have seen both the ′88 and ′90 Ruinart in stores recently—relative bargains at anything near one hundred dollars. But there are also many excellent nonvintage Blanc de Blancs, starting at around thirty dollars.

So have a blanc Christmas. And a blanc New Year.

The history of wine and spirits in Europe is inextricably, some would say excessively, bound up with that of the monastic orders of the Catholic Church; by the end of the Middle Ages, asceticism had become nearly synonymous with dipsomania in the popular imagination. The Cistercian, the Benedictine, and the Carthusian orders all contributed to the preservation and development of viticulture, winemaking, and distillation. Among the most glorious examples of the symbiosis of spirits and the spiritual life is the mysterious elixir created by the Order of Chartreuse, the Carthusians, one of the oldest religious orders in Christianity.

The order was founded in 1084 by the scholarly ascetic Bruno in the shadow of the Chartreuse Mountains near Grenoble. In 1605, the monks at a Carthusian monastery in Vauvert received the gift of a manuscript titled “An Elixir of Long Life” from the marshal of artillery for King Henry IV. Already ancient when it came into the possession of the monks, this manuscript has a history as eventful as that of the Ark of the Covenant as narrated by George Lucas. The formula contained therein was so complex that it was more than a hundred years before the apothecary at the order’s headquarters in Chartreuse finally unraveled its mysteries.

The first batch of the medicinal beverage that came to bear the name Chartreuse was created in 1737, and rapidly gained popularity in the region.

In the wake of the French Revolution, members of religious orders were forced into exile. The Carthusians fled in 1793, after making a copy of the manuscript and entrusting that copy to one monk, who was allowed to remain in the monastery, and the original to a second monk, who was eventually arrested by the authorities and sent to prison in Bordeaux. Miraculously, he was not searched and managed to pass the manuscript along to a supporter, who smuggled it back to Chartreuse to a third monk, who was hiding near the monastery. Convinced that the order was finished, this monk sold the manuscript to a pharmacist in Grenoble, who was unable to understand the complex recipe. When Napoleon issued an order that all medical formulas be sent to the minister of the interior, the pharmacist obliged. The recipe was promptly rejected and sent back to him. When he died, his heirs donated the manuscript to the monks, who had returned to the monastery in 1816.

The Chartreuse monks might have hoped that history had finally passed them by, until, in 1903, the French government nationalized the distillery, once again expelling the monks, who repaired to Spain with their precious manuscript. They built a new distillery in Tarragona, and another in Marseille, both of which continued to produce the genuine Chartreuse. The government, meanwhile, sold the Chartreuse trademark to a group of distillers, who marketed a beverage that bore no relation to the original, and who went bankrupt in 1929.
Shares of the now worthless stock were bought up by friends of the order and presented to the monks, who thereby regained possession of the Chartreuse trademark. No sooner had they returned to their monastery, however, than an avalanche roared down the mountainside and destroyed the distillery. A new distillery was built in nearby Voiron, although the selection and blending of the herbs and botanicals is still performed at the monastery by three monks entrusted with the secret recipe.

Chartreuse has inspired a cult of secular devotees over the centuries. Its mystique was probably sealed early in the past century with the endorsement of the ultimate host, Jay Gatsby, who, according to his biographer, Nick Carraway, served the drink at his glittering parties on Long Island. I find it stimulating to contemplate this history while passing a glass of Chartreuse under my nose; the survival of the recipe, with its obscure origins, seems nothing short of miraculous. Equally stimulating are the aromas from the glass, which provide endless opportunities for speculation—one of the reasons that Chartreuse is of interest to wine geeks like myself. The most prominent feature is the anise/fennel/licorice note. Dozens of other nuances tease you as they evanesce on the alcoholic vapors. More than 130 varieties of roots and leaves are allegedly involved in Chartreuse’s production (including, according to rumor, wormwood, the active ingredient in absinthe).

My friend Jim Signorelli, a Chartreuse aficionado and movie director, suggests that it’s enough just to smell the stuff. Hunter S. Thompson, another Chartreuse devotee, presumably swallowed. Alice Waters, also a fan, can probably parse
out more of the herbal aromatics than most of us. Three kinds of Chartreuse are currently produced. Green Chartreuse, the standard, was first adapted from the original recipe in 1764 and weighs in at 55 percent alcohol, slightly mellower than the original elixir of life, which was 71 percent. Milder still is yellow Chartreuse, at 40 percent, first distilled in 1838. A small portion of production is selected for extra aging in wood and is sold in reproductions of the nineteenth-century bottles as VEP
(Vieillissement Exceptionnellement Prolongó)
Chartreuse. Chartreuse benefits from aging. It is possible, especially in France, to find dated bottlings from the distillery in Tarragona, which finally closed in 1989.

Aficionados ascribe various curative properties to the liqueur, which was originally conceived as a life-prolonging medicine. A French winemaker of my acquaintance insists that a blend of one part green and one part yellow Chartreuse is the ultimate hangover remedy, though I haven’t yet summoned the courage to test this theory.