A Hedonist in the Cellar (19 page)

If you come to my apartment during holiday season, chances are excellent that you will be served a glass of Egly-Ouriet, Larmandier-Bernier, Jacques Selosse, or some other small-grower Champagne. It’s true that my 2005 balance sheet was anything but Cristal-worthy, but, more to the point, these and other small grower-producers are the most exciting trend going in Champagne. If you’re lucky enough to score a table at Thomas Keller’s Per Se in New York, you’ll discover that they’re pouring small-grower Champagnes such as Pierre Gimonnet by the glass.

Here at the dawn of the twenty-first century, it is a principle universally acknowledged among grape nuts that great wine is produced in the vineyard—the product of ripe grapes, low yields, and meticulous viticulture that lets the true personality of the vineyard shine through. Except, of course, in Champagne, where farmers who are paid by the ton grow as much as their poor vines will bear, pick the fruit before it’s ripe, and sell these wan grapes to vast industrial concerns that mix them all together. The Champenois sometimes cite their unique
terroir
as the reason they make the world’s greatest sparkling wine, and yet in practice they usually ignore the nuances of the concept.

After spending
a
day visiting the headquarters of the Grandes Marques Champagne houses in Épernay, it’s refreshing to knock on the door of Francis Egly’s little half-timbered house in the village of Ambonnay, where you literally trip over baby toys in the foyer. Egly’s mother offers cookies while his wife shouts for Francis out the back door. Egly finally turns up, apologizing for the dirt on his hands—he has been in the vineyards.

I had sought out Egly after an epiphany a few months earlier when the then sommelier at Daniel, Jean Luc Le Dû, handed me a glass of Champagne. “Whoa!” I said. “This is wine!” By which I meant it would be good even without bubbles. And what impressed me when I was tasting with Egly in his spanking-clean new
chai
was that, unlike many young Champagnes in their prebubbly stage, his tasted like good wine. Like most great artisanal growers elsewhere in the world—though like very few growers in Champagne—Egly regularly cuts off up to half the fruit from his vines in midsummer to promote the ripening of the rest.

“When I first started importing these small growers, the people I sold small-domaine Burgundies to had no interest in Champagne,” says David Hinkle of North Berkeley Imports. “If we were going to interest these people, it had to be wine first and Champagne second.” Terry Theise, the self-proclaimed Riesling wacko, who added small-grower Champagnes to his portfolio in 1997, puts it this way: “Champagne, like any other wine, is fascinating to the extent that it’s distinctive.” Sounds obvious to me. But the larger Champagne houses would argue that blending the wines of many different villages will create a sum that is greater than its parts.

Champagne is a world unto itself, but some of the best producers are those, like Burgundy-obsessed Egly, who look to other regions for inspiration. Pierre Larmandier, of Larmandier-Bernier, worked in Alsace and Burgundy, where he was surprised to learn that small growers were, if anything, more highly regarded than the large negotiants. With minimal intervention in the cellar, Larmandier-Bernier (not to be confused with Guy Larmandier, another excellent domaine) makes subtle, complex, Chardonnay-based Champagnes, including an all-Chardonnay Blanc de Blancs.

If artisanal Champagne is a movement, Anselme Selosse, also known as “the madman of Avize,” might be regarded as its leader—the Angelo Gaja of Champagne. Selosse farms biodynamically, keeps his yields low, and makes his wine with the goal of expressing the character of his vineyard. Avize is located in the Côte des Blancs, where Chardonnay predominates; like Ambonnay, which is Pinot Noir territory, Avize is one of seventeen villages rated
grand cru.

Jancis Robinson informs me that in this one area at least, we are well ahead of the British: “Americans are lucky to have importers who have scoured the countryside of Champagne in search of these small growers.” At present there are more than 130 small-grower Champagnes imported here. In addition to the aforementioned, my short list includes L. Aubry, Gaston Chiquet, René Geoffrey, Pierre Gimonnet, J. Lassalle, Pierre Moncuit, Alain Robert, Michel Turgy, and Vilmart & Cie.

These small producers represent less than 2 percent of the domestic market. But they are being noticed. Moët recently launched three single-vineyard Champagnes.

Smaller isn’t always better. I usually have a bottle of Veuve
Clicquot or Perrier-Jouët in my refrigerator, and I happen to be very fond of Krug Grande Cuvée, Bollinger Grande Année, Dom Pérignon, Taittinger Comtes de Champagne, and several other Grandes Marques Champagnes. But this year I’m making more room in my cellar for handcrafted, artisanal Champagnes.

It certainly
feels
illegal—what with all the paraphernalia, the special glasses and spoons, the hookahlike silver-and-crystal fountain at the center of the table, and the ritual aspects of preparation. I’m getting that anticipatory tingle I used to get when drugs were being readied for consumption. We are sitting in a courtyard in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Our connection is Ted Breaux, a compact, muscular New Orleans native with fashionably spiked hair. Breaux is slowly drizzling water from the fountain into a silver funnel balanced on a crystal glass; the emerald liquid in the glass gradually turns milky with the infusion. We are preparing to drink absinthe.

Breaux was cruising the French Quarter one afternoon a decade ago when he spotted some absinthe glasses and spoons in the window of Lucullus, an antique shop dedicated to the culinary arts. “I found it fascinating that there was a special type of glassware and paraphernalia,” says Breaux. “It was evidence that the drink existed.” An environmental scientist whose family arrived in New Orleans in 1724, Breaux had been curious about the outlawed liqueur since college, when a fellow chemistry major had mentioned it. “I looked it up in the Merck Index. It says that the ingestion of absinthe
can cause hallucinations, convulsions, and death. I wondered, What did people get out of it?” That very week he happened to notice Barnaby Conrad’s
Absinthe
in a book catalog. He ordered the book, corresponded with the author, and sought out other researchers. An obsession was being born.

Breaux would hardly be the first to become obsessed by the so-called Green Fairy. Some of the greatest artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came under its spell; writers like Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Oscar Wilde—a roll call of the premodern decadents—not only drank it but wrote about
le Fée Verte.
Painters like Manet, van Gogh, Gauguin, and Toulouse-Lautrec were devotees of the cult. Absinthe was to Symbolism and Postimpressionism what heroin was to Seattle grunge. Absinthe cultists ascribed mystical, meditative, and even halluncinatory powers to their beverage of choice; opponents saw it as an insidious poison. Both sides agreed that it was something more than just another alcoholic beverage. In 1905, when a Swiss farmer killed his wife and children, allegedly under the influence of absinthe, the calls for prohibiton swelled. Within a decade it was banned throughout Europe and the United States.

Outlaw status has only enhanced the mystique of absinthe over the years. Ted Breaux, for one, was haunted by the myth. After discovering a recipe in an old French book on the subject, he decided to make a batch. “I made it and tried it and I was underwhelmed,” he says, sitting in the courtyard behind Lucullus. “It just didn’t taste like something that could be that popular. But then a friend of mine popped up with a bottle of vintage Edouard Pernod absinthe.” It was as if an amateur
paleontologist had suddenly gotten his hands on a live triceratops. “Finally, I could taste it.” At almost the same time, he came across a second bottle, through his friends at Lucullus. After he tasted this one too, he says, “I could definitely see why it was so popular. But the vintage samples were so different from what I made that I got discouraged.” Not for long, however; he had the old samples analyzed in a French lab and started experimenting again. In the meantime, new European Union regulations eventually superseded the old national laws banning absinthe. Through a friend, Breaux got into contact with a Frenchman who’d bought an old distillery in the Loire with original absinthe stills, from which he now produces some three thousand bottles a year.

Absinthe is made by distilling herbs in spirits and then distilling the infused spirits again. The color of a properly made absinthe comes from chlorophyll. Breaux’s is far more complex and refined than the other two alleged absinthes I’ve tried—a little bitter, with a strong anise flavor in the middle and a touch of fennel and a bit of mint toward the end. “Some of the herbs are excitatory and some are sedative,” Breaux says. “You combine the two and it’s kind of like a mild herbal speedball.”

This pretty well describes the sensation I am experiencing after a couple of glasses of Breaux’s absinthe, which starts out at 140 proof, before being diluted with water. I feel completely alert and slightly buzzed at the same time, floating a little above the company even as I am thoroughly present and engaged. My scalp and fingertips are tingling, whether because of the slight November chill or the liqueur, I can’t be
certain. I notice for the first time the blond flecks in Breaux’s hair, which look like tiny flames. I feel that something wonderful is surely about to happen. If anything, this state I’m in reminds me of sitting back after doing a couple of lines and a shot of tequila. But it’s somehow different. Breaux is talking about thujone, the chemical compound found in the absinthe plant that is suspected of being the active and potentially dangerous compound in the drink … about how cheap imitation absinthe was responsible for ruining the reputation of the real thing … about how his house was destroyed in the flooding after Katrina.

Sometime later we float over to the Old Absinthe House, the famous if somewhat shabby bar on Bourbon Street, which specialized in absinthe cocktails before Prohibition. Still later we will drive through the desolate streets of flood-ravaged neighborhoods outside the Quarter. But before that, for a perfect hour or so, I am under the spell of the Green Fairy, listening with keen attention to Breaux and listening to myself talking with unusual precision and grace, or at least so it seemed to me then.

Dear Jancis:

Here’s what I drank for my birthday last week. Of course I went through eighteen different plans, several of which involved my cooking. However, when the guest list reached nine I decided to leave the cooking to the pros. I didn’t, however, want to leave the wine to the pros—i.e., I didn’t want to pay a 200 or 300 percent markup on wines that probably wouldn’t be mature anyway—which is the position we find ourselves in when we dine fashionably in New York. So I picked Canton, one of the few places here that I knew wouldn’t mind my lugging in a case of wine, plus Riedel glasses. (Actually, I had thirteen bottles, this being my birth date and lucky number.) The cuisine was a challenge—Cantonese. Not your average oenophile’s first choice. But I like a challenge.

I started us off with a magnum of 1990 Dom Pérignon, a great vintage for them that has been drinking nicely since its release. Even in this big vintage it’s got a feminine delicacy,
especially when you compare it to something like Bollinger. Unfortunately, I compared it to 1990 Veuve Clicquot rosé, which seemed a little clumsy following the DP but which came into its own with the Cantonese lobster—very yeasty, which is a good thing with soy sauce, though one bottle was slightly corked. In retrospect, a Chard-based bubbly would have been better. Next we had the ′99 Zind-Humbrecht Clos Hauserer Riesling, a beauty: appley, very fat for a Riesling, with a long, sweet finish—definite residual sugar. Near-perfect match for the squab wrapped in lettuce leaf—this dish having a fair amount of sugar itself.

I wanted to go red eventually, and the only thing I could think of for this cuisine was Zinfandel—specifically, monster old-vine Zin in the new superextracted style. Martinelli Jackass Hill to be exact—to my mind the best Zin in America. The ′96 was at its peak—the blackberry fruit all still there, tannins melted away. The ′99 by contrast, was a hot, brutal monster on its own, but better with the Peking duck and, especially, with the steak and onions Cantonese style. (I think these wines should be guzzled within six or seven years of birth—chased with aspirin and milk thistle … the alcohol tops 17 percent.) The 1990 Kreydenweiss Riesling SGN was a sweet finish, though I don’t remember it all that well. Two guests were lost for hours in Chinatown after that. Myself and my chef friend Mario Batali went on a tear through the West Village, which was terminated in the wee hours when my girlfriend called with threats and promises. I still don’t know what happened to a box of Riedel glasses or to my birthday presents. A good time was had by all.