A Hedonist in the Cellar (4 page)

Back in the 1980s, I remember seeing a graffito in Milan that read no more gray. The slogan was a young fashionista’s battle cry against the muted palette of Armani and his followers, but it might also have applied to the Pinot Grigio (gray Pinot) that was coming out of Italy at the time, which was at least as dull as a gray suit. When I first tasted a great Pinot Gris from Alsace, I didn’t even make the connection between this ambrosia and the stuff we used to swill by the bucket at Elaine’s. Pinot Gris, Tokay (as it is sometimes called in Alsace), and Pinot Grigio are from one and the same grape—although the northern and southern styles vary considerably. Some brilliant PGs have begun to emerge from Friuli, in northern Italy. And, in recent years, the grape has also found a new home in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, alongside Pinot Noir.

Pinot Gris, a.k.a. Pinot Grigio, is, in fact, a mutation of Pinot Noir that probably first appeared in the vineyards of Burgundy. It is so named because the grapes, when ripe, can often appear gray-blue (as well as brownish pink). In rare instances, a producer may leave the juice on the skins long enough for it to pick up some color; but, generally speaking, Pinot Gris makes a food-friendly white wine. Pinot Gris
reaches its apogee in Alsace, where it yields rich, full-bodied, profound wines—some in a sweeter, dessert style—that can age for decades. The average Pinot Grigio is made in a crisper, lighter style. Oregon, where the French name is used, seems to be staking out some middle ground.

Pinot Gris was introduced in Oregon by the same man who first planted Pinot Noir there back in 1965: former philosophy major, dental student, and University of California at Davis oenology graduate David Lett of Eyrie Vineyards. (Lett’s Pinot Gris, like his Pinot Noir, seems to be built for aging, and can be ungenerous in its youth.) Today there are more than a thousand acres planted in the Willamette Valley, and Pinot Gris has surpassed Chardonnay as the signature white grape of the region. The Alsatians don’t seem to be trembling in their boots just yet, and the hype is well ahead of the overall quality, but Oregon Pinot Gris has become popular enough to inspire vintners in California and Washington State to plant the varietal.

At its best, Oregon Pinot Gris tastes a little like ripe pears, with spicy, smoky highlights, and it complements a wide variety of foods, especially when the winemakers lay off the new oak barrels. The food match of choice in the Pacific Northwest is grilled salmon, but Pinot Gris also suits—far better than the average Chardonnay—Dungeness crab, oysters, and even grilled pork and sausages. “It has a unique spicy quality that goes well with Asian and fusion cuisine,” says Mark Vlossak of St. Innocent Winery, in Salem, Oregon. “It works really well with fish and game birds and even vegetarian cuisines. Pinot Gris also transmits the signature of the land better than Chardonnay.” Generally, it is made in a dry
style, in keeping with American tastes, although one or two late-harvest sweet-style wines from the 1999 vintage were available recently, notably at St. Innocent, where Vlossak, a genial and intense native of Wisconsin, is producing Oregon’s finest Pinot Gris.

Vlossak’s love of the grape was inspired back in 1991 by an encounter with a bottle of Livio Felluga’s benchmark Pinot Grigio from Friuli. “We had it with gravlax, and it blew everything else on the table away,” he says. “I spent two years searching for the right vineyard. In ′93, I made the first Pinot Gris. I started making it from this vineyard in a northern Italian style. My distributor in Seattle said to me, ‘You should go to Alsace. You don’t know shit about Pinot Gris in Oregon.’” Vlossak’s trip to Alsace, and his meeting with the charismatic André Ostertag—who has since become a friend—expanded Vlossak’s perception of the potential for Pinot Gris. “I decided it’s possible to make the dry,
grand cru
style of Pinot Gris here,” he says. The problem is that Oregon Pinot Gris is perceived by both winemakers and the public to be an inexpensive Chardonnay alternative. In order to make great Pinot Gris, good sites need to be chosen and yields have to be slashed, which represents a sacrifice. The catch-22 is that growers and winemakers need an economic incentive to raise quality, but until quality improves, it’s tough to sell a bottle of Pinot Gris for more than fifteen bucks, while Oregon Pinot Noir can sell for fifty or sixty dollars a bottle. St. Innocent’s recent Shea Vineyard bottlings—from a site also famous for Pinot Noir— could help change perceptions of the future of this grape in Oregon.

Fortunately, a handful of Oregon wineries—including
Belle Pente, Evesham Wood, and Lemelson—are also making very good Pinot Gris. Oregon winemakers haven’t yet agreed to standardize the bottle shape for this varietal. Some use the slope-shouldered Burgundy bottle, while others favor the long, tall, Alsatian bottle. My unscientific conclusion, after tasting twenty bottles of the 2000 vintage, is that the best makers favor the Alsatian bottle, bravely flying in the face of its negative association—at least in the minds of many American wine drinkers—with cheap German wine. Remember Blue Nun? Forget it. Try a Pinot Gris the next time you grill a fish.

Hugh Johnson once remarked that he was surprised that no university had endowed a chair in German wine labeling. For most English speakers, such is the perceived complexity of the Gothic-looking labels, with their information overload and their terrifying terminology, that they make Burgundy seem simple by comparison. Trockenbeerenauslese Graacher Himmelreich, anyone? Even hardened wine wonks ask themselves whether life is long enough to learn the difference between
Spätlese
and
Auslese.
(Admit it—you’re scared already.) German winemakers have long recognized this dilemma without necessarily knowing what the hell to do about it. Lately, though, some of Germany’s best Riesling producers are wooing American consumers with simplified labels.

One technical term that’s worth mastering is
Kabinett
, the lightest of five “predicates” indicating levels of ripeness. For midsummer drinking, a low alcohol, off-dry
Kabinett
from the Mosel region is, to my mind, one of the few beverages that can compete with a nice dry pilsner. And Riesling
Kabinetts
are quite possibly the most versatile food wines in the world— perfect not only for lighter fish, chicken, and pork preparations but also for sweet and spicy Asian, Mexican, and fusion dishes.

Those of you who won’t be able to remember the term
Kabinett
five minutes after you finish this column are not necessarily out of luck. Raimund Prüm, of S. A. Prüm in the Mosel, understands your anxiety about German labels. Prum owns vines in some of the greatest vineyards in Germany, perched on steep, sun-trapping slopes high above the Mosel River, including Wehlener Sonnenuhr, named after the now famous sundial that his great-great-grandfather Jodicus Prüm constructed in the vineyard in 1848. And one of these days, after you’ve developed an appreciation for great Riesling, you may remember the name of this vineyard, planted on blue slate, which is believed to impart a distinctive stony flavor to the wines. In the meantime, you can probably remember the term
Blue Slate
, which is the name of the off-dry
Kabinett-level
Riesling that had its debut in this country with the ′03 vintage, and risk the fifteen bucks to give it a try. Prüm also makes a lighter, slightly sweeter, nicely fruity ten-dollar bottle called Essence, which is my new Chinese-takeout default beverage setting.

Prüm’s roots in the region go deep; he says his family has been in the Mosel for 850 years. His roots also go tall—his grandfather Sebastian A., who served in Kaiser Wilhelm’s Dragoon Bodyguard, stood six foot nine. Prüm himself tops out at a mere six-four, crowned with unruly flaming red hair, which has earned him the nickname “der Specht”—the woodpecker. I suspect the name also derives from the way he bobs his head as he gets excited talking about his wines, which can be pretty damned thrilling at the higher end. (The wines, not his head bobbing.) Every wine lover should eventually
taste a great
Eiswein
(ice wine) like his 1998 from the Graacher Himmelreich vineyard, the frozen grapes of which were picked the morning of December 16.

The affable, puckish Raimund has a slew of relatives in the area who are also making Riesling under various, somewhat confusing Prüm-inflected labels, including the great Joh. Jos. Prüm and Dr. F. Weins-Prüm. (They take their doctorates seriously in Germany, and every other winemaker seems to use the title.) Another great Mosel producer is Dr. Ernst Loosen,
Decanter
magazine’s 2005 Man of the Year. Loosen’s Wehlener Sonnenuhrs are always brilliant, long-lived wines, but he also bottles a
Kabinett-level
wine made from several vineyards, called Dr. L., which is a good value and a great, not-too-serious summertime quaff. In collaboration with Chateau Ste. Michelle, in Washington State, Loosen also makes a very fine Riesling, Eroica.

Simplified labeling, of course, is hardly a guarantee of quality. It was Blue Nun and Black Tower, after all, that created the stereotype of German whites as the vinous equivalent of Dunkin’ Donuts. The most important element on a German wine label is the maker’s name, and in order to experience the torquey and transcendent pleasures of Geman Riesling you need to memorize a few. Lingenfelder’s Bird Label and Selbach’s (of Selbach-Oster) Fish Label are two entry-level Rieslings from serious makers, and both offer good value at about ten bucks.

At a slightly more ambitious level are Dragonstone from Leitz, J. J. Riesling from Christoffel, and “Jean Baptiste” from Gunderloch. Robert Weil’s top Rieslings from the Rheinghau
are among the most sought after and expensive in Germany, but he bottles a
Kabinett
and a wine called simply Riesling, which, particularly in the last three vintages—′02,′03, and ′04— should be approached with caution, lest you find yourself developing a serious Riesling habit. It’s a little like reading
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Next thing you know, you’re neck-deep in
Ulysses
or, God forbid,
Finnegans Wake
, which, come to think of it, is the literary equivalent of
Trockenbeerenauslese.

In recent years the archetypal fantasy of starting a small winery has become more and more fantastic; in Napa the start-up cost for a small vineyard with a winery is now generally reckoned at around seven to ten million dollars and the ATF bonds required to open new wineries are scarcer than magnums of Screaming Eagle. But down the coast in Santa Barbara County there are dozens of tiny new bootstrap wineries operating out of sheds and warehouse spaces in rural industrial parks, and they seem to be multiplying like Kennedys. While Pinot Noir has become the established star of the region, these upstarts are mostly making Syrah, in their aluminum-sided sheds—in part out of necessity, good Pinot grapes having become scarce and expensive, and in part out of a conviction of its great potential in the area, thanks to pioneering Rhône Rangers like Alban and Qupé.

The typical Santa Barbara shedista narrative goes like this: you start working in the cellar of a bigger winery and learn the ropes: the region, the vineyards, and the growers. Eventually you borrow from relatives and max out your credit cards to rent a shed, buy a few tanks and a few tons of Syrah, design a label, and make your own wine. You share equipment and wine notes with friends. And you keep your day job in the meantime.

A classic example is Kenneth-Crawford, started in? I by Joey Gummere and Mark Horvath. (The name combines their two middle names.) “Mark and I met working in the cellars of Babcock,” Gummere told me recently. “You see how things on a smaller scale can be so much better.” Gummere moved on to Lafond, another midsized winery, before teaming up with Horvath in
?I
to produce four barrels of Syrah from the Lafond and Melville vineyards, two relatively cool sites in the Santa Rita Hills appellation. As of the ′05 vintage they are producing fifteen hundred cases—quite a lot on the shedista scale. When I visited a couple of years ago, Kenneth-Crawford was sharing a 2,400-square-foot shed with Jason Drew, another Babcock alum, who started Drew Family Cellars (sounds better than Drew Family Shed, I guess) in 2001 and who has been producing beautiful red monsters ever since.

Benjamin Silver, of the eponymous Silver Wines, identifies 2001 as a watershed vintage for the new landless winemakers; that’s when a number of non–winery affiliated vineyards started producing Syrah in sufficient quantities to sell. “This offered access to Rhône varietals to us smaller guys and gals,” Silver says. Some of these vineyards were planted in ′95, when the ′93 Zaca Mesa Syrah made the No. 6 slot of
Wine Spectators
Top 100 list, at the same time that Manfred Krankl’s first Sine Qua Non bottlings were drawing attention to the potential for Syrah in the Santa Barbara area. Silver, who worked at Zaca Mesa at the time, has since gone on to create his own label, which includes several Syrahs.

“I used to make Pinot under my own label, and then it got
hard to find,” says Santa Barbara native Kris Curran, who turned to Syrah after losing her Pinot sources in the 2000 vintage. Curran made a name for herself as the winemaker for Sea Smoke, the new Santa Rita Hills star. She makes Sea Smoke Pinot and Curran Syrah in an industrial park in Lompoc, which its winemaking denizens refer to as the “ghetto.” The ghetto is home to half a dozen small, ambitious Syrah producers, including Steve Clifton of Brewer-Clifton fame, who makes a Syrah under the Alder label, and Chad Melville, who serves as the viticulturalist for his family’s eponymous winery by day and makes several Syrahs with his wife, Mary, under the Samsara label. Melville shares his shed in the ghetto with three friends: Sashi Moorman and Peter Hunken, who pay the rent with jobs at Stolpman Vineyards, and Jim Knight, whose family owns Wine House, a Los Angeles wine store. Knight, a former rock-and-roll drummer and cellar rat at Lafond, makes a Syrah under the Jelly Roll label, while Moorman and Hunken’s label is Piedrasassi. (Confused yet?) And together they make a wine called Holus Bolus. “We’re all good friends,” Melville says. “We purchased equipment and formed an LLC. Our press and destemmer alone cost us $130,000. None of us could do it on our own, but collectively we could afford good equipment.”

The other HQ for the shedista movement is Central Coast Wine Services, a so-called custom-crush facility in Santa Maria, which provides winery equipment and storage space to many of Santa Barbara County’s low-budget oenologists, including Benjamin Silver and Seth Kunin, a transplanted New Yorker who bailed on med school to work at the Wine
Cask in Santa Barbara, the retail headquarters of the local wine revolution. Kunin fermented his first batch of purchased grapes in a garbage can at the store and later got a job in the cellar at the Gainey Vineyard. As a fan of the northern Rhône, he was drawn to Syrah, and now makes several Côte-Rôtie wannabes under his own label while maintaining his day job at Westerly Vineyards.

You get the distinct feeling that this scrappy communal spirit and note sharing must be good for the wine. Some great juice is coming out of these unglamorous sheds, and at an average price of around thirty-five dollars for a single-vineyard, small-production wine they make cult Cabs seem grossly overpriced. Santa Barbara County in the first decade of the twenty-first century is sort of the oenological equivalent of Silicon Valley in the ′70s or Paris in the ′20s. If you want to get in on a very good thing, get on some of these mailing lists.