The Feiring Line

Burgundy '10 & Tasting '09 and a Visit to Jean-Marie Fourrier

There was rot in the vineyard in 2006. Selection was one of the ultimate safeguards for the wine in the Loire and in Burgundy, yet 2006 was a favorite vintage for me.

Landing in Beaune and walking out into the mist  it was hard not to reminisce, except for one particular fact, the weather out in the northern part of France was mostly cool with a few spikes of heat, everything was late, just like Northern California.

"In fact, there are still peaches in the market," Russell said to me, while presenting me with the hunk of Comté (there's a new man in the market, he explained. lovely little crystalline bits, aged 34 months. Delicious.)

Welcome to an old-fashioned cool and wet vintage. It was freezing when I arrived. Like 40 degrees. It's shait that the Pinot Noir is the heartbreak grape,  Burgundy has heartbreak weather. Then you taste the grapes, and it's more like heart throb.

This year they are small with great flavor and picked well, selected well, in the right hands of those who safeguard their name, the wines should be impressive, quiet and elegant. But it is too soon to tell.

The millerandage is what they're talking about here rather than what you'd think is the obvious, the rain and the rot in the vineyards. 

   

grapes waiting for the vat at Domaine Fourrier. 

Discarded grapes from Lafarge on the other side of the Cote,  olnay. The grapes they did keep were beautiful, expect a small but beautiful vintage.

At Jean-Marie Fourrier in Gevrey, the vats were barely filled to the half capacity. 

 

It was kind Jean-Marie to accept my visit during the harvest. I had never been to see the winemaker in Gevrey-Chambertin and it is always a privileged visit during this busy time. So walking from vat to vat, he told stories out of school. he revealed that  when RMP jr, came to visit in the 90's and told his father he had to put his wine in 100% new oak, the dad showed RMP Jr. the door.

The domaine never has more than 20% new wood, to rotate in new barrels. There's low sulfur, no racking until bottling. No cold soaking (this year all of burgundy was cold soaked, that was the vintage. ) 99% of his production goes out of France, a shockingly high number of bottles. No wonder few in this country, even in Burgundy seem to know his name, one quite respected in America. Down in the cellar, a friend of mind took over, giving me a smattering of the 2009, a vintage I'm intrigued by for its oddity.

I had just tasted at Pacalet the day before so the '09 was in my palate. Right after the vintage last year his wines seemed lush and formed, now a year later, they've regained a freshness. As always the wines had a profound perfume. The Pommard spicy and in your face, the Gevrey _C always a little backward, the NSG, firm and fresh and masculine. The NSG 1er Cru was positively charming with a touch of sumac.  The Lavaux St. Jacques was highly structures and very jumpy, alive and meaty. And as far as the Echezeaux his first vintage of it, all I wrote was elegance. 

Tasting at Fourrier, the vintage once again reminded me, once again that they seem oddly fully formed at this stage, and I'm quite curious to discover what they will do in barrel. Fourrier is one of those who uses whole cluster, encouraging the carbonic, as he wants the fragrance of the terroir to come out.   One of my favorites were the Combes Aux Moines and the Clos St. Jacques. The former retained lovely acidity with a fresh spice (exotic) and a killer long ride on the end. THe CSJ, was ethereal yet grounded. The Griotte was crazy powerful, will be interesting to see this after bottling and fifteen years down the line.

 

+++

I'm mostly holed up, writing, which is sad because this is the time to pick and poke, I want to be handing my grapes over to the man with the hutte on his back, I want to be slogging along in Wellies, just like the others I see all up the Cote D'or. But at least my Vancouver friend, who was working the vendange at Fourrier, took me for a misty walk in Clos St. Jacques. 

Muddy, difficult with one pair of pants for the rest of my time here, I came out a mess, but worth it. Rousseau and Esmonin still haven't picked, are they waiting for a breeze to blow the humidity away, or is it the, I'm the last to pick game?

Looking For Your Worst Experience

Dear Reader, 

Of late it's been fashionable to cite some bad natty wines as microbial messes.

 I admit, that I did have one with Mr. AntiFlavorElite a few months back, this was a 2004 Dard & Ribo St. Joseph, should have been gorgeous but it had gone to the dogs (most probably because of my less than temperature controlled storage.) The wine had gone cabbagey, and had separated into sludge and silt floating in gaseous waters. We tried to muscle through it but gave up.

Would love it if you could share your worst and support it with why?

My Love Affair With Sulfur

(The post that wasn't) 

  I used to bring back as much Amora mustard as I could. 
 

The mustard was loaded Potassium, Metabisulfite, that same stuff that comes in tabs, dropped into wine as a preservative. 

Winemakers find these tabs (Campden)  easier and less toxic to handle than SO2 in liquid.   In theory, I say less is better than more, but when it came to mustard? Well, I was embarrassed--me--natty wine and all of that, but I had such a hard time getting that razor edge on mustard here on home turf and I hated dull mustard. Sure, it might have been loaded with the preservative, but if Potassium, Metabisulfite was my price for strong? So be it.

 I'm a pragmatist, after all. 

The last time  I was in France, on my last minutes of food buying frenzy in Paris, I picked up a jar of that Amora, salivating, thinking about the salad dressings and potatoes I could make with it. Put it in my luggage. Darn, busted once more. 

  So today I saw Roland Extra Strong and the color was a hi yellow, tuned up with sulfur. I had the organic version in my 'fridge, yet,  I thought, that must be strong. Yum. I bought it. 

 

 Then I pulled out my organic  Roland (my Amora substitute) and placed them side by side. 

 

Then I was all prepared to rush to the computer and blog how the organic

  mustard sucked. 

But it didn't. Side by side the organic one had the bite and a little more purity, the color was a little browner but I'm not looking for color, looking for the taste. 

The Roland Organic, unsulfured mustard slayed its own competition.

I'm  just pissed because I really wanted this post to be about how I loved sulfur.

 Oh well. 

Adventures in American Winemaking: Cathy Corison

That mess about the San Francisco Natural wine week, and a constant use of the "Natty" word made me think about Cathy Corison, keeper of the faith,  working towards making terroir driven wines for over three decades. So I asked the Napa winemaker about her thoughts and about her wine. I've asked her whether I could replay her email here. She sweetly said yes, and I'm not even sure she knows that one of the tenets of le monde de la vin au naturel  is transparency. 

This post has stirred some interest, probably because it is rare that a wine maker in this country talks so openly about their practice.  I'm not sure why this has also provoked some thoughts on the 'risks' of no sulfur. This is not for the wine writer or critic to critique but the wine maker and the winemaker alone to decide. Obviously the Corison wines speak for themselves, they are extremely highly regarded by, actually, a wide range of palates.  

There is some extra reading--a round table on the use of sulfur @ WineBuisness. Lots of good stuff! 

 

Hi Alice,

All is well here. I'm expecting a terrific vintage with all this cool weather. Thank you so much for the Portland connection. I've come to love the serendipity of Twitter.

I've been observing the maelstrom of the 'natural' wine discussions from the corner of the room. Like most everything, the truth often sits in the gray area between black and white. (And the truth is different for each person.)

In a day when I am shocked by the manipulation I see in winemaking everywhere, I wonder what happened to growing grapes well in a great vineyard, crushing the grapes and letting Mom Nature do the rest. Our roll should be one of shepherding; we don't want our charges to go over the edge of a cliff.

For me the less manipulation the better. I think of a winemaker's bag of tricks like a doctor's black bag. You hope you don't ever need to use them, and you seldom do, but you're glad they're there. Sadly the tricks have become a routine part of much winemaking.

I don't think anything precludes me from being considered a 'natural' winemaker.

As to specifics, I have not acidulated a Cabernet for nearly 30 years. Fresh out of UCD, over 30 years ago (!), I had been taught that no sound wine could have a pH higher than 3.3. I quickly learned that that was rubbish. That said, I believe that good acidity is one of the most important components of a great wine, both from a winemaking standpoint and wine enjoyment. There are far fewer technical pitfalls in making a wine with a healthy pH. For me, it boils down to growing the grapes well on a great site and picking properly. If I need to wait for flavors to come arounduntil 25°+ Brix and the natural acidity has plummeted, I've failed in the vineyard (or I'm growing the wrong thing in the wrong place).

SO2 seems to be the other bugaboo. First of all, every cell in most people's body produces SO2 as a byproduct of metabolism, so most of us have enzymes in place to deal with it. It is also produced by yeast during fermentation. Some yeast strains produce more than others- a possible tool for winemakers. There IS widespread over- and misuse of SO2 all over the world. One of the things I took away from my academic background in enology is an understanding of how it works. People always say it's added as a preservative. That's true sometimes, but such high levels are sometimes necessary to inhibit microbial activity that the wine is ruined. Making wine from sound grapes and monitoring the health of the wine at all stages allows very minimal SO2 use. For me, the most important reason for SO2 use is to bind up aldehydes that are a byproduct of fermentation (and can occur during cellaring if practices are sloppy, mostly lax topping regimes). High aldehyde levels in wine mask fruit.

Personally, I do something that results in very low total SO2 in the bottle but is frankly very risky. I don't use ANY SO2 at all until after the malolactic fermentation is complete. SO2 added to must to inhibit wild yeasts, gets bound up by acetaldehyde as it is produced during primary fermentation, resulting in a new wine with a basement of significant total SO2 but no free SO2. It is free SO2 that protects the wine in the barrel from spoilage organisms, notably Brettanomyces. This is very risky because of the possibility of a "ferocious" Lactobacillus spoilage (by species related related to the benign ML bacteria) that can produce so much VA during alcoholic fermentation that the wine is spoiled before it goes dry. Again, my best defense is picking sound grapes that don't come into the winery already spoiling. That said, someday I will likely encounter aLactobacacillus spoilage and need that bag of tricks I mentioned. (Though maybe not- I've been doing this for over 30 years.)

This is turning into a tome and I'm out of time. Natural wine is a big subject. After harvest I should have more leisure to elaborate if you want.

 

 

 

 

 

Cheers,

Cathy Corison

Frank Cornelissen: "Naturalness is the road, not its end."

On the second weekend in September, Twitter was out of control with all Frank Cornelissen all the time. I had to contemplate the out of control 'coolness' about these wines (not just Frank's but the 'genre')  and admit to having a moment of annoyance when writers who wouldn't have tolerated these wild wines just a year ago, gushed about them now. 

Can one's palate change so dramatically just because something is 'in.'  Anyway, Frank, who works in Sicily, is definitely in. His wines might be bacterially sound, but they have gone viral.

 The Belgian winemaker from Mt Etna, often referred to as a hard-core natural winemaker, was making the rounds with his importer, Zev Rovine and taking New York City by storm in an incredible three day coming out party. Our meeting had been four (or is it five?) years in the making. 

Finally! I walked into Ten Bells @ 10:30 expecting to get my first sips of Magma #7 and to reacquaint myself with Contadina and  but instead bumped into Lyle Fass heading out, muttering something about acid and having just come back from Germany. Turns out the tasting started @ 8:30 and ended, not started at my witching hour. I did find a little bit of Magma #7-- deeply peonied and exciting. Really exciting. After my sip was gone, I headed home, or tried. That's when, leaving,  I smacked right into  Pierre Breton and posse. We all went in search of scotch and twenty minutes later he reprimanded me about my book over a Laphroaig. 

Pulling myself away from what was sure to be a dawn welcomer, I got myself into bed before 2am. I wanted to be in shape for so I could be fresh for my face time with Frank over at Marlow and Sons.

++

Frank--intense in mind. Intense in body (seems built for competitive biking). Even in lycra he wouldn't show a wrinkle of fat. Frank doesn't seem to like the interview. Slow to warm up, that's okay, I recognize my own quality there.

He also would rather talk about someone else's philosophy then his own. In other words, things looked up when we started to talk Fukuoka. 'm not a farmer

but I do often reread The One Straw Revolution-- never ceases to inspire me. The book is poetry.

We connected even more when we talked about Fukuoka vs. Biodynamics.  

 'There may be no better way than Biodynamics for healing the earth," Frank said, "but once the land has reached its balance, why do the same practice and treatments every year in exactly the same way? At that pont the land should be set free." 

He prefers the   Fukuoka no-till approach for his old vineyards on his basalt soils. Except in youthful vineyards, he does not compost.  He prefers grains to clover, because he doesn't want to add more nitrogen to the land. However we debated clover's ability to open up the soil, so it accepts water with ease.

 There are questions. 

Answers will come.

 He's been doing this since 2001 and needs to make some children so he can be in it for longer than his lifetime to figure it out. 

 Contrary to what is out there in print (or rather on the web)  his wines do not ferment in amphora, they have their élevage in amphora. Big difference.

 The first few vintages were fermented in the epoxy-lined urns as Frank did not yet have tanks. (and he doesn't like beeswax, a common liner as the glaze gives a taste.) 

 Since he does his fermenting in tank (not stainless) his wines seem more focused. They seem to show their life and flavors better.  Is that a function of the container or a function or of Frank's growing experience? 

Contrary to what is written, Frank does not use 'the method.' Echoing my observation about most wines using  cold semi-carbonic fermentation, "Everything tastes the same," he said. "I don't like it. All of these vin de soifs. They're all very "fermentary."

And while he is a fairly hardcore sans souffristinista, he says, "I have the advantage of being free of prejudice," he said to me. "Naturalness is the road, not its end." 

His winemaking seems to have reached a delicious maturity. All are marked by texture. Conventional drinkers should be ready for an experience that could change their perspective on what a wine is.

Magma #7, (2008) was gorgeous as above, very rosy and peony. All nerello  (if quite 'spensive)

Munjabel Rosso #6, 100% nerello (a blend of '09 & '08) has low aromatics, and zingy acidity, angles, raspberries and edge.

Munjabel Bianco #6 (2009). a blend of carricante, grecanico dorato and coda di volpe, subtle, floral with orange juice. Plenty of tannin. It was pressed off before New Year, after two months on the skins.

Contadino #7 (2009) Cloudy, perfumed. Borscht, celery and grit. Mostly nerello. 

A New California: Arnot-Roberts

It was a cool May in Sonoma. I had just pulled a gnarly celery root from Marcy's back yard and felt quite proud of myself (it was a beast.).

 

Guests arrived. The inevitable pile up of wines collected on the marble kitchen island.  I was looking forward to some old Gaglioppo I carried north from Los Angeles. But little did I know, those were not going to be the treat of the evening.  After the beet salad came an Arnot-Roberts. I had heard the buzz. New faces about town.

“This is your wine, the  2008 Clary Ranch syrah? ” I asked Nathan Roberts as I tried to register what this new taste of old California was in my mouth. Alcohol, mint, clover, stem, spice, color and horse.

 “Pretty neat!” I said as I noted that this must have had low alcohol.

 Sure, I found it lovely, delicious but I suspected  that some readers of other blogs would run for a stick of gum.  I  thought to myself, '"If is a direction alternative for California, I'm in-- ready to write a retraction to my 2008 op-ed piece on California wines.

 Then I doubled back to the label...11.5%?  "But how?”  I asked.

The 2006 was picked on November 3rd @ 21.05 Brix and that was the ripest that wine has ever plumped out to. The 2007 never quite made it to ripeness and  the 2008 squeaked through. The 2008 wine was foot -trodden (as was the '07) and had plenty of cola, clover and spice, helped by whole cluster, natural fermentation.

To find out how, I needed to spend some time with the three Ts; thinking and talking and tasting. Last month, I olled in to their old apple processing barn in Forestville, Sonoma. It was the second day of that hot spell, the one that felled so many grapes in the Golden State.

The winery was warm, let's make that hot. We retreated to a narrow packing room with the A/C. There I was, around a barrel with fresh-faced Nathan Roberts and his equally fresh faced boy-hood bud, Duncan Meyers, friends since their Cub Scout days in Napa

 "Napa? You grew up in Napa and make wine like these?” I asked with great admiration.

They were embarrassed by the Cub Scouts but tried to explain to me they grew up around wine and their evolution was nothing unusual. "Napa? And you make low alcohol and low intervention wines? No inoculations, acid or tricks. You've got a chardonnay in there still not finished from 2009. Don’t people think you’re freaks?”

 Turns out this was a relatively new turn of vinous events for them. As Nathan said, "The narrative for me is being rewritten."

 Their first vintage was in 2002. Their real philosophical change came about in the cooler 2005. Other people in California were flipping out but they liked this lean. So they did some soul searching. The wines they admired were high acid, low jam, with some edge and always provoked a reaction. They traveled, they talked to winemakers, unlike so many other winemakers who bow at let's say Thierry Allemand's feet, they actually listened to those wines. They did not mimic, but they listened instead of drinking Allemand and making fruit  bombs.

 As Duncan said, "Our palates shifted westward towards the ocean."

 Which is how they unearthed the Clary Ranch. Writer, Jordan Makay describes that  vineyard close to Tomales Bay  beautifully in a piece for San Francisco Magazine, "Windblown, fog tormented, denuded hillsides ."

 Other wines:

2009 Arnot-Roberts Old Vine White Compagni-Portis Vineyard Sonoma Valley ($30): -Gosh, I love california field blends. This is floral, honeysuckle, lily and a bitter edge.

 

2009 Arnot-Roberts Chardonnay Green Island Vineyard Napa Valley ($30):- Lively and lemon.

2009 Arnot-Roberts Trousseau Luchsinger Vineyard Clear Lake ($30): yes, you read right. Trousseau. A gamay lilt and perfume, berry and bitter. Pretty complex cookie.

 

2007 Arnot-Roberts Cabernet Sauvignon Bugay Vineyard Sonoma County ($80): helped out by the petite verdot and cabernet franc, bell pepper varietal character but sweet fruit and  Reminds me of a cali cab with aging power, like the ones we love now from the 70's? 

 
 

 

Happy New Year..

wishing you all much bread and honey    
 and sweetness and health and sweetness and love and kindness and prosperity and sanity and love and delicious tomatoes and pineau d'aunis and field blends and plenty of feral yeasts fighting to the delicious finish --Alice
 

H2 Hotel, Healdsburg

So, when I was last in town, Marcy told me I should stay at the H2 She has new roommates so my favored couch/bed was taken. I looked at the pictures and said, I dunno.

She said it was better than it looked.

I called. I booked. I loved it. Had no time to get on one of their bikes, anyway, it was 110. I couldn't get a soul to assign me the story, and it's a good one. Yes, they're LEEDS certified  (sustainable) but that's a good thing. 

Family owned hotel. (H. Healdsburg their older, more expensive sister.), friendly, moderately priced (for Healdsburg)--especially with the comfort to price ration. It's luxe without the fuss.

The new spot is right on the main drag of Hbrg, and feels exposed, but inside? The beds are great. If you get the right room you have some private terrace action. You get your choice of bubble of still water. The showers and bathroom are ace (pressure and feels luxe). They've got a free breakfast in the morning--okay--I still walked to the Goat for my morning coffee. At night, the resto Spoon Bar is the new kid on the block, with the trendy wines on tap idea and moderately priced, locally driven food, heavy on the N. African spice. 

For my part, would love to see more imagination in the wine selections but  I'm super-fussy, and I do know that hotel choices can be political, and they must be, because I know the wine geek in charge and I'm sure he's chomping to bring on the Overnoy.

Design hounds,  on your way to the tiny pool out back, check out the meeting room and the flown in from Oregon 'reclaimed' gym floor. (SF's Marie Fisher Interior Designs)

 

Green, white, 50's all over the place. I'd have asked for a sleeping back and curled up, myself.

Perfect for the visitor who wants service but not to be fussed over, in other words, this place has been discovered by the bicycle set. But hey, that's okay. 

219 Healdsburg Ave. 

707 922-5251 

Coturri: A Sonoma Treasure

In August, I arrived from sticky New York into hot Sonoma sun. I couldn't complain, after all it was their first two steamy days of the entire vintage. Ever wilting me,  the arid 110 degre day was far more tolerable than 90 and 100% humidity of New York City.

I would be lying to you if I didn’t say that sitting in dinner party pro,    (Marcy with the worlds best dog)
 
 
 

Marcy Mallette’s Healdsburg backyard, with a fig tree groaning with unripe fruit and  guests  sopping up the last of their Alaskan salmon BLT
 wasn’t a joy, even if everyone wore wearing flip-flops, and Kevin Hamel (my boss on the Sagrantino project and winemaker for Pellegrini) made fun of my trapped shoes. I was outted from the shtettle. That's okay.

I  reached into the pileup of wines we had assembled. "You got to taste this," I said, and  poured  around, then sat down on the stoop, near the long, al fresco dinner table.

Taking a tentative taste of Coturri’s  2005 Cabernet, Hardy Wallace said, “That sure is some Hippie juice." He was certain the wine had a significant retro taste, within spitting distance of a Haight-Ashbury head shop.

 ripped off from Hardy's facebook page. 
Wallace, you might remember, is the  young cherub who arrived to northern California from the South to live out a dream. The dream had been induced when  he won a very high profile contest to be social media guru for a Kendall Jackson winery. He knocked out the competition with his brains, chops and goofball charm. After his six months, however, he really found his dream job, with Kevin Kelley,
the winemaker whose grapes I had trod, cheated on, really, when my Sagrantino was in process. His palate, as far as I could see was more aligned with 'hippie juice,' than techno-wines. I kept on trying to look into his face to see what he really thought about the wines. I knew if I had the rosé or even the chardonnay he'd have been won over as Marcy and I had been. 

Earlier that day, when it was only ninety-three degrees or so, she and I drove to the Coturri Global Headquarters in Glen Ellen, clear on the other side of the county. We wended on the back lanes, past brush and the spindly copper barked trees. Baking in the heat, the landscape seemed friendlier to cattle ranching than grape farming, I thought. And then there were the zinfandel vines, floppy and unirrigated. 

 Tony Coturri (with brother vineyard manager Phil) had the winery bonded in 1979, aiming to make wine the way their father learned from their Tuscan grandfather. The only difference seems to be fermenting in one-ton redwood tanks instead of two-ton and more whole clusters. They had been in my consciousness since the mid-eighties. I remember back in the day seeing bottles of Coturri relegated to the 'organic' wine section, a pathetic rack of a few wines down the block at Astor Place. The bottles stood upright, in the sun, languishing and bleaching out. Not a good thing for natural wines without sulfur.Perhaps like so many, I discounted them as hippie juice, but was that a bad thing? I mean, I was a little hippie wanabee, too young at the time to be part of the movement, but yearning to grow up to be free.  

It wasn’t until Jenny Lefcourt, (a woman who could look like my dark haired sister, who started to import natural wine in 2000) took them on as her sole-American winery, did I reconsider.

 I was at a party in New York City (not that long ago) and the only wine I could drink there was the 2004 carignan. I didn’t just like the wine, I loved it, earthy, never a touch of new oak, brambly and call me impressionable, but I thought it tasted, like California, whatever that means; wild, unbridled and friendly.The talk on the street was that sometimes the wines were great and sometimes they sucked. But to some, they were cult, before there were cult CEO wines. Tony always made his wines with the credo, organic viticulture,  nothing added, nothing taken away and no sulfur, even at bottling.

This was crazy. Tony was never a hipster. I'm not sure he, even with his wooly, unkempt beard, was ever a hippie, he just cared about land and health and the environment and honesty.

Separated at birth by 6000 miles, the Coturri winery had been organic and sulfur free---that reads ‘hard core natural,’ since the beginning years. Two years before Francois Morel started his sans soufre wine bar in Paris, Tony was an American pioneer. Thirty years later he was just as hard core as Laureno Serres in Terre Alta. The only difference is that the others had a circle of friends, of like-minded people. Until Tony joined up with the Return to Terroir group, he was working in total isolation. He did not have a clan. He didn’t have any idea he wasn’t alone untl he went to Paris around 2000 and a friend told him about a wine store, he can’t remember which one, that had natural wines. He discovered Paolo Bea, sagrantino, as a matter of fact. He was still struggling but maybe he belonged to something bigger. And now he does. 

Some of my favorite wines from that tasting were: 

'09 Coturri Chardonnay: peachy and refreshing.

'08 Carignan; Yes, from the smoky year, and there it is like a lamb smoking on the spit. Sheep, lanolin and currant.

'05 Cabernet; VA alert, if you can't take it, move away, but I think this touch is lively. Old school, not too ripe, earthy with just enough lilt, and berry fresh.

'03 Cote de Cailloux; a blend of Rhone-ishisms, forest and licorice.

 

The next generation: 

 Nick Coturri, "I finally took a look at one of those enological catalogues and was pretty shocked."

(photos, from the generosity of Marcy Mallette) 

Book News From Spain

Cristina Alcala  reviews La Batalla por el vino y el amor

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