Most Austrian wines resemble the Austrians. They aren’t about frivolity and lightness and obvious pleasures. They’re rarely cheap. Instead, they require the application of patience and thought in order to be understood. They are wines for adults. Even Riesling, the most familiar of the country’s varietals, has neither the Gothic lift and pinpoint focus of the German versions nor the breadth and viscosity of the Alsatians. What are these wines like? If we’re to rely on adjectives, I’d try subtle, inward, stolid, mysterious. And that brings me to Blaufränkisch.

Last month I was happy to be invited to Gramercy Tavern for a  Blaufränkisch tasting organized by the writer David Schildknecht. My experience with the grape was minimal and the little I did know I hadn’t particularly liked. Here’re some things I learned: A) Its name dates back to the time when most people and things in Middle Europe were classified as either “Hunnish” or “Frankish.” The Franks had a better publicity department. B) Blaufränkisch is considered Austria’s most promising red. C) All but  a handful of the best examples come from Burgenland, a region southwest of Vienna that looks like a gopher doing push-ups. Once known as German West Hungary, it’s home to the hottest and sunniest summers in Austria. D) Attempts to impress the winemakers with stories about my visit to their country made them titter politely; it turns out that Carinthia is not exactly renowned for its wine. E) Like Nebbiolo, Pinot Noir and few others, Blaufränkisch is at heart delicate rather than powerful, marries felicitously with oak, tends to improve with age, and can be unusually expressive of the site and climate where it’s grown. And some of it, as it turns out, is fascinating and delicious.

High-quality Blaufränkisch is a work-in-progress. “Only in the late ’90s did Austrian wine lovers really come to respect and appreciate pure Blaufränkisch,” says Schildknecht. “The focus has come as Austria has become increasingly supportive of her own wines and at the same time increasingly active in exporting.” The newness of the project showed in the different approaches used by the winemakers in attendance. Like certain vintners of new-wave Valpolicella, Josef “Pepi” Umanthum adds shriveled grapes to beef up the ripeness and sweetness of his wines. While his is the Blaufränkisch most likely to appeal to fans of big Zinfandels, the approach struck me as counterproductive and steroidal. The charming, self-effacing Sylvia Prieler brought promising, hard-edged reds that, for me, were overpowered by the flavors of small oak barrels. Uwe Schiefer, a pioneer of serious Blaufränkisch, opened wines that, on the other hand, reveled in the grape’s savory flavors, a facet that promoters of the varietal are understandably eager to downplay. After all, vegetal notes are commonly seen as a liability in red wines; for me, they’re an important part of Blaufränkisch’s appeal. (Think of Cabernet Franc.) Schiefer’s ‘07 Reihburg tasted of dried tomatoes and fennel with the stewed notes of an old-school Sicilian red; it came off as loopy and original as an Alice Neel portrait.

The lunch was intended to show off only the most ambitious Blaufränkisch and many of the wines poured turned out to be expensive. Roland Velich of Moric (pronounced Moritz)—probably the best known among the Blau-gers—brought two single-site examples, both ‘02s from old vines in Neckenmarkt and Lutzmannsburg. They were elegant, restrained, complex and stony, already classic somehow, with the leanness and smokiness of Syrah from the Northern Rhône; perhaps not surprisingly, in the current vintage these retail for around $110. Luckily, Velich’s basic bottling from ‘07 can be found for just under $30 and is nearly as pretty, albeit conceived on a more modest scale. I also admired the biodynamic wines of Paul Achs, especially his Blaufränkisch Heideboden ($28); it smelled like a clump of violets growing in damp soil and may have been the least typically Austrian in its exuberance and lighthearted take on the grape.

My far-and-away favorite among these wines came not from Burgenland at all, but from further north, in Carnuntum. When Dorli Muhr decided to forsake PR for a tractor, she travelled widely looking for a suitable plot and even bought land in Tuscany. Eventually she returned to her childhood province and, along with her husband Dirk Van Der Niepoort, of the famous port shipping family, began to work a patch of Blaufränkisch she’d inherited on the steep slopes of Spitzerberg in the foothills of the Western Carpathian mountains. The two are no longer married but their wines show no trace of struggle. The most commonly dropped term at the tasting may have been “Burgundian;” sure enough, the Muhr-Van Der Niepoort ‘07 Spitzerberg was the palest and lightest wine of the bunch, with a texture as delicate as only the very best Burgundies. A glance at the other writers in the room was enough to see that it was among nearly everyone’s favorites. The Spitzerberg costs a very fair $45. For a measly $22, Muhr’s Carnuntum—a fuller yet still ethereal Blaufränkisch—will probably show you more of what good Burgundy is about than a comparably priced bottle from the Côte d’Or. I even poured it for my friend John; he couldn’t remember tasting a better red from Austria. “Most wine drinkers would call this watery and thin,” Dorli Muhr told me, tasting the Spitzerberg. “It’s been my experience that few individuals truly appreciate finesse.” If you count yourself among them, try one of these wines.

]]> http://thefastertimes.com/wine/2010/02/19/fantastic-mr-blaufrankisch/feed/ http://thefastertimes.com/wine/2010/01/30/non-odious-wine-books/ http://thefastertimes.com/wine/2010/01/30/non-odious-wine-books/#comments Sat, 30 Jan 2010 22:50:42 +0000 Alex Halberstadt http://thefastertimes.com/wine/?p=416 Why is it that while books and wine number among civilization’s fondest inventions, most books about wine are as exciting as a teeth cleaning in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey? This Andy-Rooneyesque formulation popped into my head while I was scanning the “wine & spirits” section at the local Barnes & Noble. Nearly every book belonged to one of two categories. The first had titles that contained phrases like “everything you need to know,” “demystified!” and “made simple.” Most publishers appear to have decided that the point of reading about wine is to salve the public’s feelings of inadequacy and resulting panic about the subject, and these books attempt not only to cut the information into bite-size morsels, but masticate them for you as well. They remind me of wine shops that organize their inventory in sections like “fresh,” “rich” and “juicy.” (Imagine walking into a book store where the shelves are labelled “arch,” “quirky” and “plodding.”) Further along this parabola there’re titles that “demystify” not only the topic but the reader. I haven’t read The Downtown Girl’s Guide to Wine or Hip Tastes: The Fresh Guide to Wine, but their covers called out to me. “Try some Riesling, dumbass,” they seemed to be saying, “you’ll like it because it smells like verbena and lemon Pledge.” Lighten up, snob, you may be thinking, not everyone wants to be some kind of cuff-link-festooned wine aficionado. True enough, but conveying basic information isn’t the same as treating the reader as though she’s suffered a mild stroke. And nothing makes culture more boring than reducing it to an accessory. Can The Downtown Girl’s Guide to Mahler be far behind?

Compendiums of tasting notes, out of date before they’re even published, make up the second least exciting category. These, too, come in two flavors. I’ll call them “Beautiful Dreamer” and “Twilight of the Gods.” Beautiful Dreamers gild their notes with adjectives as though they were ecstatic visions glimpsed from Rimbaud’s opium den. Take this: “Initial whiffs of woodland plants—dried fern and humus—ceding to the scent of black truffles mingling with flowers like freesia, lily, and peony…flavors pervaded with torrefaction of roasted mocha beans mixed with chestnuts, dried fruits, even a touch of grilled pineapple…very fine fantail.” (Michael Edwards, The Finest Wines of Champagne: A Guide to the Best Cuvées, Houses, and Growers, 2009.) It’s not that I doubt Edwards’ ability to discern freesia in his glass (okay, I kind of do), but these descriptors tell me nothing about the broader experience of drinking the wine: what it made him think about, how it made him feel. Instead, this genre piles on chimerical aromas and flavors to glorify the reviewer’s unerring palate. As far as I know, no one has ever walked into a store and asked for a wine that smells like zinnias and wet suede.

Twilight of the Gods writers trade imagination for impact; they amplify their prose until it cuts through ambiguity like a chainsaw through a breadstick. Take this passage from Robert Parker Jr.: “The 1993 [Dalla Valle Vineyards] Maya is a sensational, blockbuster wine of exceptional richness and personality. An opaque purple, with a sweet, cassis aroma, this awesomely concentrated wine reveals well-integrated tannin, acid and wood. A monument in the making, the 1993 Maya should reach full maturity in a decade and last 25-30 years. Amazing!” (Parker’s Wine Buyer’s Guide, 4th edition, 1995.) Besides eliciting groans from the graves of William Strunk and E. B. White, the passage makes it clear that for a reader to dislike the 1993 Maya would mean that his or her discernment must be no better than a parakeet’s—after all, it’s not just a bottle of red wine, but a monument. Twilight of the Gods writers believe that authority comes from positing an opinion with maximum force, a written form of bullying that happens to be incompatible with subtlety or—the quality that repels these pundits like garlic a vampire—humor.

Now that I’ve dragged a razor across the shelf, here’re some wine books I love:

Adventures on the Wine Route, Kermit Lynch, 1988. Lynch’s account of his journey through France’s wine country is a work of equally fervid Francophilia and Francophobia. It’s also no less compelling for being ideological; Lynch’s arguments for an auteurist approach to winemaking—terroir, finesse, unfiltered wine—are the most persuasive I’ve heard. While reading, it’s easy to forget that Adventures is essentially a series of vignettes about the virtuous producers whose goods Lynch exports to the US. Fortunately, his gifts as a writer outweigh even his business acumen. When recently I asked Lynch why he never attempted another narrative book, he simply shrugged. The only book on wine I’ve read that can be called literature. Funny index: Frequently funny and—bonus!—politically incorrect.

The Wine Bible, Karen MacNeil, 2001. A dreaded “complete guide” that manages to pull it off. MacNeil’s writing is unpretentious, personal, and evocative; she manages to cover miles of ground without resorting to reference book clichés or dumbing down the subject. The book imparts regions, styles and grapes with minimal tedium. Instead of wagging a shopping list, MacNeil sketches top producers and their most distinctive wines and leaves out vintages. A model introduction.  Funny index: Not so much.

A Hedonist in the Cellar, Jay McInerney, 2006. McInerney’s second wine book is a collection of columns from House & Garden. They’re chatty, vital, irreverent and read as though they were awfully fun to write. The obsession with starfucking and class in McInerney’s novels is present here, too, and may be the book’s most enjoyable tic. McInerney admits to dropping everything to fly to London when Julian Barnes offers to pour an ancient Bordeaux, and describes arriving late at La Grenouille where an “Asian princess” challenges him to guess the identity and vintage of the red in the carafe, which he nails. You won’t be surprised that it’s ‘82 Haut-Brion. No big thing, the author avers, once you’ve thrown back a couple of cases of the stuff, you won’t forget the haunting aroma. To use a term he’s fond of, McInerney is a slut, but thankfully he’s a catholic slut, enthusing about the low-rent likes of Finger Lakes Rkatsiteli and Malbec. Hedonist can be consumed in dollops or all at once and lends itself well to rereading. Funny index: Very funny. Occasionally bitchy.

Making Sense of Wine, Matt Kramer, 1989. A brief theory of wine by one of the smartest writers on the subject. Lapidary prose—a kind of vinous Plato’s Symposium—that teaches the reader how to think about wine. The chapter on the relationship between critics, winemakers and the trade in the current updated edition is particularly insightful and ruthless. Admirably concise. Kramer: “The simplest, and perhaps best, definition is that a connoisseur is one who can distinguish between what he or she likes, and what is good.”  Funny index: Not even close.

Everyday Drinking, Kingsley Amis, 2008. Collects three books written between 1971 and 1984. Doesn’t deal with wine per se—what wine “advice” there is tends to be fatuous and dated—but with the broader topic of imbibing. The third title (How’s Your Glass?) comprises a bunch of quizzes and isn’t worth your time. The rest, though, is damn funny. Best are the chapters on “How Not to Get Drunk” and “The Hangover.” For the former: “being tall and fat;” to assuage the latter, Amis prescribes reading One Day in the Life of   Ivan Denisovich by Solzhenitsyn. Funny index: I chortled until the laughter turned into a phlegmy cough.

What are some of your favorite wine books?

photo by Robert S. Donovan

I’ve long been curious to find out what the acrimony is about, and there’s no time like the holidays to get sodden with bubbly. This winter, I decided to taste wines from 16 houses most likely to be stocked at the local Liquor Mart, and see how they fared. Importers and publicists provided most of the bottles. To fend of insanity and cirrhosis, I passed on rosés and anything retailing for more than $75 (if you regularly shop for bottles in the three figures, or sit on the board of a large urban museum, you probably get your wine information from the Robb Report anyway). An author, a brewmaster, a blogger, and a half-dozen folks working for importers and retailers here in New York tasted 14 of the non-vintage brut champagnes with me a in a single blind tasting; I didn’t mention the bottles’ big-house provenance until we’d finished. Generally I abhor writing tasting notes, those dismal potpourri satchels of adjectives. I dislike, too, sampling more than five or six wines in one sitting—the experience is like watching two dozen trailers for movies you’d like to see in their entirety—but these proved efficient ways of trying to unravel more than thirty champagnes. We tasted the rest of the wines in smaller groups. Though I received several demi-sec bottles—vinified in the sweeter style common before Louise Pommery’s brut began to catch on in London in the 1870s—I discovered that I simply don’t enjoy them, though the ones from Piper-Heidsieck and Pol Roger struck me as the most palatable. The dollar amounts listed reflect street prices from the better stores; thanks to the innovation of our financial services community, they are lower than they’ve been in years.

Brut Non-Vintage Champagnes

Piper-Heidsieck ($33): Primarily Pinot Noir.  Ripe, big-framed, tropical. One taster picked it as his top wine, admiring the fruit and finesse; others found it too rich. Something about it brings to mind midwestern debutantes sunning on a private beach. Well-made but maybe a bit ingratiating.

Henriot Brut Souverain ($39): Dry, worldly, filigreed, elegant, with real complexity and length. Nearly every taster listed this as a favorite. Wonderful.

Deutz Brut Classic ($34): Brooding, firm and leesy, with dark grapes predominating, though some tasters found it disjointed. To me, classy and involving, like Julie Christie circa McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

Gosset Brut Excellence ($35): Crisp, young, pleasant and dry. Not complex, but quite satisfying.

Taittinger Brut La Française ($38): Mineral, chalky, leesy, lingering. A few tasters found it a touch sweet, but most agreed it was lovely. Terrific winemaking.

Pol Roger Brut Réserve ($34): Supple, yeasty, balanced, with great freshness. “I could get drunk on this,” someone blurted out. They meant it in the best way. Excellent champagne.

Delamotte ($42): Pleasant enough, with a distinctly Chardonnay character, but most found it somewhat simple, grapey and brusque.

Lanson “Black Label” ($31): The first bottle had musty, sherry-like flavors that led most to conclude it was damaged. The second bottle was better, with a tasty, super-dry (Lanson undergoes no malo), slightly bitter finish, but the mousse seemed flat and the wine possibly a bit tired, with an unusual phenolic note on the nose. Odd.

Veuve Cliquot “Yellow Label” ($39): Clean, crunchy, saline, maybe a little hollow, but nearly everyone enjoyed it, which surprised some of them once they realized it was Cliquot. Haters beware.

Laurent-Perrier ($35): Another well-liked champagne; citrusy, creamy, with sharp acidity. Appealing but not terribly interesting.

Charles Heidsieck Brut Reserve ($36): Raspberries and coffee, juicy and absolutely huge, but difficult to find the thread. Heidsieck lists the dates of both the beginning (mis en cave) and end (disgorgement) of the wine’s time on the lees, right on the bottle; this one was based on the boiling 2003 vintage. Impressive materials but muddled.

Louis Roederer Brut Premier ($37): “If I had to show someone what champagne tasted like, I’d give him this,” one taster said. Classic nose, full, crisp, bready, appetizing. Structured, long, with everything in place. Near the top of every taster’s list.

Moët & Chandon Brut Imperial ($36): Oddly woody, caramelized nose, canned-fruit-juice cloying on the palate, with a borderline astringent finish. Discombobulated. Almost everyone rated it dead last.

Alfred Gratien Cuvée Classique ($41): First bottle corked. Second bottle was well-liked, with a cedary nose, broad frame, a strange drop of syrup up front, but real delicacy. Barrel fermented. Deluxe and interesting.

Bollinger Special Cuvée ($55): Rich, with dusty dark grapes predominating, elegant, impeccably balanced. Like a freshly-painted cruise ship coming into port. Fantastic as usual, though recent price hikes have made Bolly nearly vintage-priced.

Jacquesson Cuvée No. 733 ($48): The favorite house of Napoleon, who admittedly didn’t taste the 2005 vintage, on which this is based. The first impression is of reticence and extreme dryness—the dosage is a mere 2.5 grams—along with a mouth-filling yeastiness. With air the wine fills out and grows more intense. Painstakingly elegant, agile, and refined. Along with the Henriot, this is the non-vintage brut I’d buy.

Vintage, Blanc de Blancs, Sans Dosage and Extra Dry Champagnes

Piper-Heidsieck ‘00 ($67): Perfectly proportioned, with plenty of yeast, tropical fruit, nuttiness, toast—a serious, superb, expensive-tasting champagne. Impossible not to like and admire. The rich fruit style gives it a Gwyneth Paltrow personality, though Paltrow in The Talented Mr. Ripley, not on that horrid-funny Batali-in-Spain program.

Henriot Blanc Souverain Pur Chardonnay ($45): Out of the bottle, a model blanc de blancs, with that snowy delicacy and green apple aromas. After twenty minutes it grows unexpectedly rich and lingering while retaining elegance and dryness. The bubbles are tiny and gentle and the mouthfeel like the silk in a Charvet tie. The most memorable and delicious sub-$50 champagne I’ve tasted and the top bargain here, by a mile.

Henriot ‘98 ($75): Another appetizing exercise in the delicate yet rich Henriot style, with Chardonnay in the front and Pinot Noir at the back. Lingering and intense, with a billowy mousse, yet a slightly peaky acidity and a cloying cidery note made this, for me, less impressive than the cheaper Blanc Souverain.

Deutz Blanc De Blancs ‘04 ($75): I’m a blanc de blancs fanatic, but the Deutz, while tasting reasonably pleasant, came off as heavy and lacking acidity. Highly drinkable but admittedly disappointing.

Gosset Grande Reserve ($60): A blend of three vintages, the Gosset smelled and tasted like a warm apple pie spiked with berries. That turned out to be too much of a good thing, because there wasn’t enough acidity, structure and sur lie character to pick up the the slack. Vinous, fascinating, but flabby.

Taittinger Prelude ($73): Chardonnay and Pinot Noir from Grand Cru villages, from the ‘04 vintage, though it doesn’t say so on the label. Beautifully blended, bracing and sapid. The overall effect is cold, like waking up in a loft filled with a few pieces of modern glass-and-chrome furniture. Refined, delicious champagne.

Taittinger ‘02 ($70): Seamlessly blended in the Taittinger style, with aggressive carbonation, flavors of orange zest and cream, yet the impression is of a very young wine that’s somehow unyielding and soulless.

Pol Roger Pure ($61): Sweetness and acidity are balanced masterfully for a no-dosage champagne—you can’t readily tell it apart from a brut. Still, nearly every taster found it uninvolving and thin.

Lanson “Gold Label” ‘97 ($57): The oldest wine here and also the only one with savory secondary flavors; imagine smelling a just-roasted chicken underneath a riot of flowers, honey, oysters, yeast and every variety of fruit. As with all truly great wines, the flavors and aromas come knitted together in a mysterious, non-divisible whole. Every taster chose this as the top wine; I can still taste it weeks later. One of the least expensive vintage champagnes on the market. Superlatives fail me.

Laurent-Perrier Ultra Brut ($65): A sumptuous white-burgundy aroma of hazelnuts gives way to a shockingly dry palate. The mousse is so tight and hard that it feels like you’ve filled your mouth with platinum mesh. More, please. Perversely delicious.

Laurent-Perrier ‘99 ($55): Spends at least seven years on the lees, yet the result is light, pleasant, balanced, short and ultimately innocuous. It tasted roughly the same a year ago. Not a whole lot going on, though I’m not sure why.

Charles Heidsieck ‘00 ($70): If Waylon Jennings were a champagne, he’d be this one. Massive, bombastic, coffee-tinged, with a firmness and creaminess that bring to mind Krug, and an exciting, long finish. Its only shortcoming is that it tastes young, with the flavors still separate; in several years this could be mind-bending. Awesomely fun to drink.

Louis Roederer Carte Blanche ($43): This is an extra-dry champagne, a notch sweeter than a brut, but Roederer pulls it off beautifully. After a whiff of SO2 blows off, the extra sweetness comes through on the nose but not on the palate. The wine is exuberant, full-bodied, Pinot-driven, and fresh. Similar to the Brut Premier but a shade richer.

Louis Roederer ‘03 ($68): Roederer champagnes taste unusually alike, and this is the best of the three listed here. Again, the exuberance of the Brut Premier but with more of everything. Unabashed, with lots of up-front fruit, possibly due to the scorching vintage, but restraint and a leesy fullness keep it appetizing and firm. Well priced for the quality.

Ruinart Blanc des Blancs ($60): My friend Justin told me that whenever someone comes into his shop looking for a bottle to bring on a date, he recommends the Ruinart. To quote Billy Dee Williams, it works every time. And why not? The contents of the clear round flask are discreet, gracious, subtly mineral, and completely delicious. I enjoy it so much I may start using it as a fragrance. A go-to champagne for a number of serious winos I’m acquainted with, myself included, this is as good as ever.

If you’ve read this far, you can probably tell that most these champagnes proved delicious. None, with the possible exception of the Moët Brut Imperial, tasted or smelled unpleasant. I would drink any of them if a glass was put in front of me. In absolute terms, however, most tasters came away somewhat underwhelmed with the entry-level non-vintage bruts, finding some unfocused and simple and, for the most part, lacking soil character. With the higher priced champagnes, things got more interesting.

The experience turned up unexpected discoveries. For one, I was surprised that exposing champagne to air, even decanting, improves it more than even most still wines; bringing it up to a reasonable temperature is just as beneficial. If your bottle has spent a few hours or days in the fridge, open it and leave it on your kitchen counter for twenty minutes. Another surprise is that the marques’ claims of blending for a distinct house profile proved largely true: I can now describe the Taittinger or Roederer style and tell you which I prefer. Comparing these wines to those of the growers gets more complicated. With due respect to Jacqueline Friedrich, grower champagnes no longer cost less—if anything, the reverse may be the case. With the exception of Bollinger and Jacquesson, all the non-vintage bruts we tasted can be found for under $40, something that’s simply not true of champagnes from the better-known growers. The big house wines tend to taste sweeter overall; the growers are leading a commendable trend toward less dosage and a drier palate. Yet the best of the grandes marques make original, delicious wines that taste nothing like “lowest-common-denominator pap.” Even if you drink little more than unsulfured biodynamic Pineau d’Aunis from the Loire Valley, try a bottle of Henriot Blanc Souverain or Lanson ‘97; they’re mineral, bristle with personality, and happen to be bargains. One night, as a coda to a vintage champagne tasting, we opened a bottle of Cedric Bouchard’s Inflorescence La Parcelle 2002, a blanc de noir from an admired grower that retails for about eighty dollars. It was stupendous—vinous and brooding, with striking whiff of chalk—but rather than making the preceding wines appear better or worse, it merely provided another vantage onto the appetizing mystery that is champagne. Which leads me to a cautious generalization: while the best big house champagnes can be more seamless, the best grower champagnes tend to reveal more of the character of the soil. Personally, I’ll continue to drink both. Samuel Johnson wrote: “The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love, like being enlivened with champagne.” Happy holidays.

photo by a whisper of unremitting demand

I first noticed Sylvaner on a visit to Marlow & Sons, a restaurant I like in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. The wine list there is unapologetically geeky—Cabernet Franc from Chinon and Borgeuil, in the Loire Valley, occupies the entire first page. I happen to be cheap, especially when it comes to drinking in restaurants, so I sprang for one of the least expensive options, a Sylvaner from the dapper and dependably excellent Alsatian winemaker Charles Schleret. (At $34 it cost more than double what it does at a store, but I could deal.) Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t excited to be ordering Sylvaner, but I had to admit it smelled appetizing. It was cold and in the mouth shifted from white peaches and pears toward something like wax beans, with a tart, mineral bite on the finish. The more I thought about the Schleret the more it seemed the perfect foil for the pork belly I’d ordered. Flavorful, but not heavy. You could almost call it elegant. Brisk and refreshing—the right wine for the job and not a thing more. Not complex, really, but then I’d ridden a bike eight miles and and it was hot out and I wasn’t up to dealing with tannin or extract or Nazarene profundity. In the end, there’s no trick to ordering an old or rare bottle and oohing and ahhing about it while it steals everyone’s attention. Far more satisfying is finding one that works without fuss and provides maximum pleasure. That, I realized, is the magic of crap wines. Of which Sylvaner is quite possibly the king.

My all-time favorite Silvaner (as it’s spelled in Germany) used to be the scandalously cheap ($12) ‘07 from Schloss Mühlenhoff, in Rheinessen. It had been imported by one of the booze world’s most quote-worthy miscreants, the self-styled Wine Avenger, Willie Gluckstern. He named the import business he ran with his wife Miskeit—Yiddish for “ugly child”—and specialized in cheap, good German wine. He even designed the wine’s geisha label (talk about miskeit). Sadly, Willie and his wife split, and the business is defunct. But Willie is ticking. When I told him about my infatuation with Silvaner and the delicious Schloss, he contributed the following bon mot: “When grown with low yields on a good site, poor unloved Silvaner can send a frisson of Gänsehaut up the back of your neck with it’s crisp, minerally, flint-scented charms. Above all, Silvaner makes a sensational (just cerebral enough) white wine for foodies—especially when sourced as young as possible, dry (trocken) only, and at 12% alcohol or less.”

Now I was genuinely excited. Abetted by a couple of bottles contributed by importers, I hit New York’s wine shops in search of Sylvaner, underwhelming sales staff all over the city. The grape’s best-regarded versions grow in Germany, Alsace and Italy’s Alto Adige, so I made sure my unscientific menagerie had some from each. After tasting about a dozen, here’s a handful of high- and lowlights:

Albert Boxler ‘07 (Alsace, $21): From the quaint town of Niedermorschwihr. Decent enough, but just sort of sat there. Maybe Karen MacNeil is on to something after all.

Paul Blanck Vieilles Vignes ‘07 (Alsace, $21): Philippe Blanck is a terrific winemaker, but this tasted watery, flat, and inert. Perhaps an off-bottle, but I’m not going back.

Charles Schleret ‘06 (Alsace, $16): Spectacular (see above). Better yet, the cheapest of the bunch.

Pacherhof Sylvaner ‘08 (Alto Adige, $23): Like a Latter-Day Saint in a Paris disco: buttoned-up, a little uptight, but still tasty. Like most of these, needs a good chill.

Hans Wirsching Dry ‘07 (Franken, $18): Franconia is the one place where Silvaner does better than Riesling, its more talented and better-dressed sibling. Wine here is bottled in a Mateus-flask-shaped bottle called a bocksbeutel (yes, that means goat scrotum). The region’s best-known producer is Hans Wirsching, who makes a handful of Grosses Gewächs (grand cru) Silvaners that cost as much as a serious Bordeaux. The basic bottling is not surprisingly the most extracted among these, with 11.5% alcohol. Delicious, but the style struck me as somewhat heavy and over-rich, without the Schleret’s refreshment.

Hahnmühle “Gäseritsch” Spätlese Trocken ‘07 (Nahe, $22): Like all the Germans, this was richer than the Alsatian versions, but remained shapely; the most complex and mineral of the bunch, too. Well-played.

What have I learned? For one, Sylvaner tastes and smells like Sylvaner. Unlike, say, Müller-Thurgau or Kerner, it has a distinct, easily identifiable flavor. While it easily turns bland and insipid, when it’s vinified dry and made with care, Sylvaner can be as soul-satisfying and brisk as a white gets. And for what it’s worth, it goes really well with salad. With fancy Brunellos and Napa Chardonnays getting all the attention, it’s easy to forget that most of the world’s wines can justly be termed crap wines. Entire countries are planted with them (ever been to Moldova?). Many among these under-loved grapes are wan and best forgotten, but others are original and pure and cost delightfully little—Verdicchio from Matelica or Castelli di Jesi comes immediately to mind. As for Sylvaner, importer Savio Soares promises to bring the Schloss Mühlenhoff back to to the US, but not until 2010. Of the remaining candidates, while the Hahnmühle comes close, the Astaire-like Schleret remains the fleet favorite—the king of the king of the crap wines.

photo by Jo Jakeman

There’s one admittedly subjective caveat: among the legions of cavas, Proseccos, sekts, cremants, and other bubbling wines I’ve found mysterious and delightful bottles, yet none with the grace and medicinal glow of champagne. This is too brief a space to venture into the thickets of its connoisseurship. Wine geeks obsess over some (Selosse) and consider others contemptibly uncool (Veuve Clicquot “yellow label”). Controversies simmer about grower-bottled champagnes versus the Grandes Marques, about the esthetics and ethics of dosage and grape ripeness at harvest, about the politics of corporate winemaking, about the ultimately manipulated way this wine is made. (One of the deepest discussions can be found on Peter Liem’s superb, lamented blog.) The humble observation I’d like to bring to the fray is that nearly every champagne imported into this country is at least palatable, and many are as desirable as the less criminal forms of vice (to misquote Twain writing about pompano). Personally, I’d trade my plasma for Ruinart’s Blanc des Blancs. Nearly as delicious are non-vintage champagnes from Gosset and Bollinger. I still think regularly about the 1995 Laurent-Perrier I opened about a year ago at a dinner party. While I’ve got zero experience with Cristal (or popping it in a stretch Navigator), everything the house of Roederer puts into bottle makes me pleasantly agitated. The excellent choices are nearly limitless: Larmandier-Bernier, Brigandat, Jacquesson, Delamotte, Vouette et Sorbée, Egly-Ouriet, Henriot. I imagine champagnes I haven’t tasted to be my future friends. And, though it may sound clichéd, if I had to drink only one wine for the rest of my life it would be Krug, a category unto itself. (Of course after paying for three or four bottles at retail I’d have to move in with my parents, who’d put an end to it.)

How reactionary, you may think, to advocate sitting at home alone and guzzling champagne in these days of Condé Nast layoffs and epidemic pet abandonment; even a modest non-vintage bottle calls for an outlay of forty bucks. Yet it’s precisely these circumstances that make champagne relevant. Every time I have a glass I feel both a heightened sense of my own dignity and a simultaneous desire to dance. The bubbles build a stairway up my nose while a frigid, chalky squall expands into my head and chest, opening chambers where moments before there were only chagrin and irritation; it feels like ecstatic brain-freeze. Besides, $36.99 plus tax won’t buy much cocaine or a trip to Bali or whatever you do to feel better. If you happen to be rich or simply compulsive, keep in mind that frequent applications of champagne don’t ruin the curative effect. In The Legendary Mizners, Alva Johnston, an originator of the New Yorker profile, wrote about Edward M. (Ned) Greenway, an importer of Mumm’s Extra Dry who in the last decade of the 1800’s boasted of having drunk twenty five bottles of champagne a day, with a beer chaser, and originated the expression “No gentleman ever feels well in the morning.” If that’s too archaic—lamentably, Johnston’s book is out of print—consider a more contemporary pronouncement (Birthdays was the worst days/Now we sip champagne when we’re thirst-ay…). Finally, for those who insist on mucking up champagne with edibles, nothing goes better with sashimi or a fish taco. But don’t. If anything’s more certain than death and taxes, it’s that before long each of us will feel like setting fire to the unfinished novella or walking out on the kids. When that moment inevitably comes, leave the Ativan in the medicine cabinet and walk directly to the fridge.

Photo by Béni Rivière.

To be precise, you’re no longer likely to find anything called Tocai. As of 2007 it’s labelled simply Friulano, after the Hungarians convinced EU bureaucrats that the term Tocai (or Tokay or Tokaji) should be used solely for their dessert wine, leaving the Alsatians and and the Italians in the linguistic doghouse. Friuli-Venezia Giulia—Italy’s northeastern corner, it resembles Lincoln in profile—became renowned sometime in the eighties for complex blends of French varietals like Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay made by the winemakers Silvio Jermann, Mario Schiopetto, and a handful of others. “The market for those wines is dead,” says Joe Bastianich. “Today wine drinkers are looking for monovarietals and indigenous grapes, and Tocai happens to be one of the great noble wines of Italy.” Because of its relative lack of glamour Tocai can be difficult to find in restaurants and on store shelves here in the US; the most common bottles come from Bastianich’s own winery in the hills of Colli Orientali. Barrel-chested and firm, vinified on natural yeasts, his basic blue-label Friulano is a surprisingly ample take on Tocai’s pleasures—surprising, that is, because it can be found for as little as thirteen dollars, a reminder that Italian whites remain some of the wine world’s most head-scratching bargains.

The best Tocai grows in the southerly hills along the Slovenian border, an area that’s become fashionable for the often expensive wares of avant-gardists like Gravner, Radikon, Damijan and Vodopivec. Their whites get their rusty hue from unusually long periods spent macerating on the skins; they see no laboratory yeasts, no filters, and little or no sulfur dioxide. These “orange” wines may be the weirdest on earth—Josko Gravner ferments his in amphorae of clay lined with beeswax that he buries outside his winery. Stanko Radikon’s “Jakot” (Tokaj backwards) tastes and smells more like pinot noir than a white—he instructs serving it at room temperature—and its flavors light up in the mouth with the glare of a neon sign. Still, the region’s more conventionally made examples of Tocai can be just as distinctive. Some vintners age theirs in small oak barrels, but aside from Borgo del Tiglio’s Friulano, which tastes a little like a mature Chablis, I prefer Tocai that spends it’s adolescence in cement or steel. One of the richest comes from the small winery of Dario Raccaro. His Vigna del Rollat ‘06 shows off the grape’s oiliness and weight and can smell like an omelet sauteed in butter. Because of Tocai’s vivid acidity it never seems heavy or overripe, even at 15 percent alcohol. The Raccaro reminds me of one of those huge Rubens canvases roiling with unfurled banners and horses and commodious ladies out of Greek mythology.

I discovered my favorite Tocai at Rome’s best and geekiest wine shop, Trimani; it’s made by Edi Keber in Cormons, a few steps from Slovenia. Keber is soft-spoken and affable, and barely drinks, but his Tocai creates an opposite impression. It’s like a burly, sullen cab driver who half-way to the airport mentions that he’s got a doctorate in troubadour balladry. Reticent at first, often better after two days open, with a pronounced taste of rocks and a strong bitter edge, the wine is so pure and lingering that I’d happily drink it every night. (Oddly, Keber discontinued his justly famous Tocai in 2007 and now adds to it the indigenous grapes Ribolla Gialla and Malvasia Istriana; his “Collio” is a blend that has been made in the area since before the first World War and if anything comes across as even more temperamental.)

Luckily, I’m not the only fan of this ornery grape. There must be something to the Russian thing, because fellow Soviet refugee Gary Vaynerchuk—that Rupert Murdoch of the interwebs who recently signed a ten-book, million-dollar deal with HarperStudio—has devoted not one but two episodes (#254 and #471) of his Wine Library TV to Tocai. I’m not big on tasting notes, but in case you’re still wondering what Tocai tastes and smells like, I’ll let Vaynerchuk tell you. Color: “Golden like Hogan’s locks. Golden locks, like the Hulkster had.” Aroma: “I get a baked kasha component…very awesome bouquet…like walking down the aisle in Lord and Taylor’s, especially in that perfume aisle, on your way to the handbags.” Palate: “watermelon peel…this wine is coming at me hard!” Verdict: “Has the thunder.” I couldn’t have said it better.

Photo courtesy of Edi Keber.

I thought about him a few nights ago over a glass of a wine called, simply, “Blonde,” made by an itinerant Czech named Andrea Calek. Like teenagers attempting to navigate a high school afternoon with the central goal of avoiding complete humiliation, most wines aspire to be competent, correct. The more ambitious ones make it to college night and take notes. Maybe they win some medals. Yet more and more of late I’ve been drawn to the outliers: wines that care not a whit for whether they go with Thanksgiving turkey or, for that matter, whether or not you like them. Sometimes they smell and taste a little weird. More often than not they happen to be made without niceties or compromises and for this reason are lumped under the term “hypernatural”—raised and vinified minimally and by hand, with few if any additives, always skating on the precipice of failure. These are wines of intent, unprimped and undeodorized, and their exuberant personalities are sometimes awkward or botched but nearly always fascinating. They are the ones that most often remind me how joyous a thing wine can be—the sequins stitched into the Nudie suit of drinking.

Consider Calek. The man rents a few hectares of grapes near the village of Valvignères, in the Ardèche, and lives among the vines in a trailer. That’s him at the top of the page in the torn T-shirt. He looks a bit like my friend Zach and I bet that like him he’s more than little bit of a freak. I can’t be sure—his importer, Savio Soares, has only met him twice, briefly. “Blonde” is Calek’s first attempt at bottling a commercial wine; it has no year on the label and comes sealed with a beer cap. It’s cloudy, the color of apricot juice, and it doesn’t taste far different. It sparkles in a style the French call pétillant—not with the fine prickly bubbles of champagne but with the soft effervescence of day-old seltzer. The bottom of the bottle has traces of something like clay particles that according to Soares are actually clumps of dead yeast cells. The reason for this is that “Blonde” is an uncommon opportunity to taste fermented grape juice that’s entirely free of human meddling—no fining or filtration, no sulfur dioxide, no commercial yeasts, no barrels. It’s a radical drink that I can’t imagine anyone not liking. Tasting it filled me with such childlike glee that I wanted to run to the turntable and crank up my elementary-school-vintage LP of Journey’s “Escape.” Like Steve Perry’s singing, Calek’s blend of Chardonnay and Viognier disputes moderation. Whether it’s a good or a bad thing that “Blonde” doesn’t come in a gallon jug depends entirely on your perspective.

These days you can find adherents of hypernatural winemaking in nearly every grape-producing country, but many of the oddest and most talented toil in the non-marquee regions of France, places where it’s still feasible to rent or even buy a small piece of a vineyard. (You’re not likely to find anyone with a row of vines in Bâtard-Montrachet aging their juice in clay amphorae.) In Anjou, near a small tributary of the Loire river, a pair of former wine-bar owners from Tours named Agnès and René Mosse bottle a range of sappy, cidery chenin blancs, a tart, earthy red called Boire Rouge, and one of the two rosés I drink regularly. (The other comes from López de Heredia in Rioja.) The Mosses make their fizzy Moussamoussettes with Gamay and pair of local old maids, Grolleau Gris and Grolleau Noir. These last two give it a watermelon note to go with its firm yeastiness. A dinner companion told me it reminded him of Sour Patch watermelon candy he hoarded as a kid. Unfiltered, the stuff is an opaque pink and depending on the bottle can taste a bit like pickled watermelon, too—more than most, living wines are subject to vagaries of temperature and transportation. Yet when a bottle of it is open I find it difficult to think about anything else; the Mosses’ wine is that vibrant. I like to drink it with anything from Lebanese take-out to roast chicken and, when I’m not hungry, accompanied only by a bottle opener, a glass and a lit bulb.

Here in the US an increasing number of bottles from these oenological Donovans are finding shelf space at your local shops: the Beaujolais-like Languedoc reds of Axel Prufer, the violet-scented Cabernet Francs of Pierre and Catherine Breton (my perennial favorite is the unsulfured “Nuits d’Ivresse”), the savory, leesy, brownish-yellow Coenobium made by those drinky nuns at Monastero Suore Cistercensi near Rome. (When in doubt, look for labels with the names of importers like Savio Soares, Louis/Dressner, and Jenny & François.) Many of them cost somewhere between twenty and thirty dollars, a fair price these days for a piece of potable expressionism. More than any others they insist that a wine can communicate clearly only when captured in its whole, living, and unmanipulated guise, no matter how flawed or strange. These are wines that Hart Crane would have loved—the work of modern-day ecstatics.

Photo courtesy of Savio Soares.

I got a chance to find out in October, when my friend Steve called with a last-minute offer of a $250 ticket to the California Wine Experience—brainchild of the Wine Spectator magazine that promised access to the kind of esoteric wines that store owners sometimes keep behind alarmed glass. Steve and I shot up in the see-through elevator in the vertiginous Times Square Marriott Marquis and bounded into The Grand Tasting; around our necks we wore laminated tags like top-secret government scientists. Nearly every winery in the place was pouring one its most expensive wines and right off the bat we landed in front of the Mondavi table. “Yes please, “ we said in unison. Sniff. Gulp! The Napa cabernet was mouth filling and dense. It began with a pond of blackberry jam and only a hint of acidity followed by a blast of raw oak that was almost cough-syrup-like in the way it coated the tongue. The wine definitely had balls. We made our way down the rows of famous names; there was Staglin and Bond and Niebaum-Coppola and others I’d merely read about, never having been of a buyer of $150-a-bottle reds. To my surprise, the cabernet at the adjacent table tasted identical to Mondavi’s, the next one tasted almost exactly the same, and so on. I don’t mean the wines were stylistically similar—they were pretty much indistinguishable. Nearly all of them had been aged in new oak barrels and many were pushing 16% alcohol.  After tasting six or seven I felt like I’d been drinking straight Scotch—my numb purple tongue curled up in my mouth like a dead minnow. Steve, an admitted wine novice who’d come by the tickets through a well-connected friend, glanced at me wanly. “I can’t drink any more,” he moaned, “lets get some food.”

The night went on like this for another hour—cultured pearls, metallic suits, firm handshakes. So I was happy to spot Jim Clendenen of Au Bon Climat, sporting the tight blond curls of a Renaissance Faire escapee, laughing with Bonny Doon’s Randall Grahm, the two looking like stoners in the back of trigonometry class. Then I glimpsed Paul Draper. He looked like The Most Interesting Man in the World from those beer commercials—I’m pretty sure he was wearing an ascot—and he smiled a cunning, beatific smile. The ruby-colored stuff he was pouring—his Ridge Monte Bello cabernet—smelled of forest and wildflowers and in the mouth its mellow flavors twined around each other like morning glory vines before fading in a long, worrying finish. Even dispensed from a little plastic glass, it was one of the most exciting reds I’d tasted. Draper showed me the label—1978. Under the Marriott’s fluorescent lights there was something undeniably punk in Draper’s quiet posture. He was pouring a thirty-year-old wine—an age at which most of his neighbors’ jammy reds would have long ago turned into expensive vinegar—a cabernet from the Santa Cruz mountains that had been made naturally and vinified at just over 13% alcohol. It was a ringer for a great Latour and stood as a silent reminder of a past that most California winemakers have now chosen to misremember.

Draper, after all, had been one of the Americans whose wine prevailed in the notorious Judgement of Paris, a 1976 blind tasting where a panel of mostly French judges preferred a California cabernet to first- and second-growth Bordeaux. Those West Coast reds tasted little like the ones at the Marriott—they were much lower in alcohol, less bombastic and oaky, more balanced, and aged better. To find out what had happened in the intervening years I called Warren Winiarski, whose Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars 1973 cabernet was chosen as the top wine in Paris. “In winemaking I’ve always believed in the three R’s,” Winiarski told me. “Richness, ripeness and restraint. These days, the last of these has gone missing in California. When you allow grapes to become overripe it makes the differences between the wines insignificant.” Winiarski has sold Stag’s Leap and the new proprietors make cabernet in a style that’s trailing further away from any traditional notion of restraint. His historic trouncing of French is viewed widely in California as a confirmation of the majesty of local wines, even though most of them no longer resemble his own. Talking about the current wine scene seemed to elicit caution and melancholy in Winiarski. “Why don’t you call Paul Draper?” he said.

To Draper I related what more than a few California winemakers have told me: that the climate, especially in Napa and Sonoma, is too hot to make moderate-alcohol wines with good acidity, and that fermentations have to be strictly controlled with laboratory-sourced yeasts and lots of sulfur dioxide, an additive that kills bacteria in the fermenting juice. “Nonsense,” Draper shot back. “All of them used to make balanced wine. It’s not rocket science. You simply pick earlier.” Draper told me that he picks grapes before anyone else in Sonoma’s Dry Creek Valley, that he works with indigenous yeasts and only tiny amounts of sulfur, and that his vineyards are a few years away from being certified organic. But he saved his ire for the winemaking practices that he sees around him. “What goes on in vineyards is benign compared to what goes on in wineries. You wouldn’t believe the devices and chemicals we’re offered.” Then he enumerated a panoply of laboratory products and processes, an arsenal used to wage high-tech warfare on simple grapes: micro-oxygenation, used to zap tannins out of wines, an additive called Mega Purple to sweeten and thicken them, a compound Draper referred to as the “death star” that kills the Brettanomyces yeast, and so on. Winemakers use these widely though few will admit to it. The resulting pinots and cabernets are completely stripped of the living substances that give wine complexity and character. “They taste like they could come from anywhere,” Draper said, “they are dead.” Like gin, they are made year-to-year in an unchanging style designed to get 90-plus scores from critics and appeal to wine drinkers looking for powerful, thick wines meant to be drunk by themselves, because they tend to overwhelm the flavors of food. “The saddest thing,” Draper added, “is that many winemakers here now think of these overripe, sterilized wines as the California terroir, as the unique commodity they have to offer to the world.”

Jancis Robinson has written that more than ninety percent of the world’s wines are industrial. That’s a term usually identified with $8 reds from Chile, and it’s sobering to consider that California is now in the business of making industrial wines that cost as much as a night in a four-star hotel. “Consensus wines,” Draper called them. It made me think of California’s other boom industry. Users of the Internet Movie Database have voted The Shawshank Redemption the greatest film of all time. The Shawshank Redemption has everything—A-list stars, seven Oscar nominations, huge box office returns. It’s a perfect studio movie, a triumph of sound business practices, of giving the public what it wants, of consensus filmmaking. That it isn’t actually any good hardly rates as a problem. There are winemakers in California making natural, delicious, even important wines, and their numbers are growing—more about them later. For the moment, many are still content to launch one Shawshank Redemption after another down the assembly line toward your glass.

For most wine drinkers Bordeaux’s best wines have become nearly unrecommendable. As luxury wine collecting has taken root beyond Western Europe and North America they’ve become increasingly caviar-priced and rare. Before the recession had set in, an owner of a neighborhood wine shop on New York’s Upper East Side told me that he sold most of his Bordeaux allocation over the phone to clients in Russia. Wine geeks and hipsters hate the stuff—while young vignerons in Beaujolais and the Loire boast biodynamic wines bottled without sulfur dioxide, news out of Medoc brings tidings of reverse osmosis machines and designer yeasts, of scandals involving gendarmes hauling away bags of sugar and oak chips. More problematic is the fact that young Bordeaux remains a wine for putting away. Walk into a large retailer like Astor Wines & Spirits in New York and you will see dozens of bottles of it on the shelves, nearly all from the last three or four vintages and nearly all expensive, and among them you will find probably not a single bottle worth opening with tonight’s dinner. In days when drinking well had been the sole province of the gentry, cases of Bordeaux were bought to be laid down in the cellar and remain unharrassed for at least a decade. It’s an appealing notion—the pleasures of an aged red wine are singular. Yet while it may work for Larry Ellison, for most of us apartment dwellers the notion of blowing $80 on a bottle and then waiting until our first bypass to drink it lands somewhere between a fantasy and a bad joke.

Of course the Bordelais have noticed and the wines have changed. In his 1846 Bordeaux: Its Wines, and the Claret Country, Charles Cocks describes the wines of Saint-Estèphe as “light, agreeable, flavoury, highly perfumed.” Of Margaux wines he writes: “they are strong without being intoxicating; invigorate the stomach without affecting the head, and leave the breath pure and the mouth cool.” Then, here’s Robert Parker Jr.’s description of a 100-point Bordeaux: “The wine’s viscosity is reminiscent of 10-W-40 motor oil. It is so sweet, thick, and rich one suspects a spoon could stand upright.” Nowhere else in France has the esthetic influence of California and Australia been felt as keenly. The emphasis is on more up-front fruit, less tannin, and earlier drinking. The elegant, austere claret of the past is no longer the goal, at least not everywhere, and more and more winemakers and consultants are trying to turn Cat Power into Patsy Cline. But has the approach worked? I asked Jim Kuhner, General Manager of Vestry Wines in Tribeca, whether he recommends young Bordeaux to his customers for immediate drinking. He told me that he avoids the tannic, extracted ‘05’s. Instead he steers fans of big, fruity reds towards the hot, lower-acid ‘03 vintage, and those with more Old-World tastes toward the leaner, more classic ‘04s. For early drinking he also seeks out makers with new-school predilections, like Gloria and Valandraud. But like nearly everyone I asked, Kuhner told me that he doesn’t drink a lot of Bordeaux and drinks none of it young. “Personally I only like drinking aged Bordeaux - the young stuff doesn’t do it for me,” he said.

To bone up on the subject, a few months ago some friends and I decided to open a store-bought sampling of recent Bordeaux vintages and see how they did with dinner. We ended up with the following geographically scattered and highly unscientific lineup: Gruaud-Larose ‘99, Prieuré-Lichine ‘00, Duhart-Milon ‘03, Chevalier ‘04 and d’Armailhac ‘05. We decanted the bottles and applied ourselves to the leg of lamb. After two hours—we tasted throughout—most of the bottles were finally showing some fruit and basic cabernet flavors, but they smelled and tasted fairly simple, short and tightly-wound, giving the impression of being abruptly woken in the middle of a formative hibernation. We were committing infanticide. Only the Gruaud-Larose from the modest ‘99 vintage showed the beautiful flavors of tar, tobacco, mint and leather. It was delicate, complex and long, relatively light in body and in color, just turning russet around the edges. Everyone around the table emitted groans and grunts of appreciation; the Gruaud reminded me what a fabulous wine Bordeaux can be and made me want to drink more of it.

And therein lies the rub. You can lay a few bottles away in your apartment wine fridge and hope for the best. Finding a mature bottle at a store is unlikely and fraught with peril: the retailer must have stored the wine immaculately, a chancy proposition, and it will cost plenty. Compare that to a good Rioja from a traditional producer like López de Heredia or La Rioja Alta: when it arrives at the store it will be in good shape and ready to drink, likely cost far less than a Bordeaux, and provide many of the same pleasures. Of course none of this will stall the sales or depress the prices of Lafite, Mouton and the others; they will continue to sail to Estonia and to Singapore in their serene refrigerated containers. Bon voyage, Bordeaux, we barely knew you.

photo by filtran

Right off the bat, there are easy-to-spot signs of abject retail practices that must be considered deal-breakers: store windows occluded with giant cardboard displays for Mionetto; the presence of bottles labeled with the likeness of any former member of the Doobie Brothers or of Dan Aykroyd; sauna-like temperatures or even a single bottle with liquid oozing out from under the capsule; a champagne selection limited to Veuve Clicquot “Yellow Label” and Mumm; any kind of bullet-proof shield or armature; sales associates who look like extras on an episode of Baretta; a high incidence of fake wine with names like “Mommy’s Time Out” and “Sidewards.” Let the Mariah Carey on the sound system be your warning.

A worthwhile proprietor must walk a judicious line between providing what his or her customers already want and wheedling them into buying what they should want. These days just about any retailer would be mad not to carry a pinot grigio or two, but a shelf with ten of them means that someone either stopped caring or never began. The inventory must challenge, cajole, educate. Check the European bottles for the names of importers; a good portion should come from companies bringing in a region’s most natural and ambitious wines—Neal Rosenthal and Mosel Wine Merchant come to mind. If eighty percent of the French wines on the shelves greet you with the emblem of Monsieur Touton, turn on your heels and leave.

The one sure indication of a great wine shop is a large selection of good riesling. No table wine is more versatile, ages more dependably, or offers better value.

A shop here in town is offering a ‘98 premier-cru Chablis from a good producer at cost, about $17, a teeth-chattering bargain. A woman behind the register told me that a customer had bought a case of the wine and then returned it, claiming it was off. The shop owner believed that the wine was completely fine, but was offering it at a steep discount, “just to make sure.” “No returns,” the woman drawled, grinning. Just to make sure, I didn’t buy any. The wine is either fine or it’s not. If it’s fine, the owner wouldn’t be offering it at cost. If it’s not, the Chablis is not worth even a dollar. Too many retailers try to put a happy face on offering merchandise they know is spoiled. Marking down wines that have died of old age on your shelves is simple fraud. Of course, no matter how scrupulous the storekeeper, some fraction of their inventory will be botched. Corked bottles are unavoidable. Other wines simply don’t age the way they are expected. A liberal and courteous return policy is a sign of a smart wine merchant.

The surest way of finding a store’s hidden bargains is befriending or at least chatting up an employee. What are they drinking? Salespeople at good wine shops know the inventory and are almost never rich, so you can be sure they’re not going to saddle you with that $45 Napa chardonnay from two vintages ago. If they like you they may even bring up something from the cellar that hasn’t made it onto the shelves. And whatever else you do, never signal your intention to buy a bottle of rosé by announcing, in a loud voice, that it’s “pink o’clock.”

Back home in New York, my favorite places to stock up on bottles include Moore Brothers Wine Company, Vestry Wines, UVA Wines and Spirits, Prospect Wine Shop, Smith & Vine, the Burgundy Wine Company, and Chambers Street Wines. Try to arrive in the early afternoons, when the crowds are gone and the salespeople are still their better selves, and don’t wait too long after payday.

photo by Joe Shlabotnik