The Feiring Line

Coinstot et Prieuré-Roch VR '08

On my first night off the plane, in need of a feed, I headed to the 2nd, to +33 144 82 08 54/26 Passage des Panoramas and to Coinstot Vino.

 I was meeting two friends and their small child, it seemed price friendly, open to a little boy. Paul was supposed to call ahead to reserve. Forgot. The first to arrive, I was received with a dour face and then saved: the darling Guillaume Dupré recognized me and ushered me to a table in the rear.

Coinstot is market-driven. In winter, if you don't eat meat, there's not a lot of choice.  I've never ordered a plat in my life, but with little in the vegetable department as an entree, (except a fab buffalo mozz that we shared) I ordered the wild bass on a bed of endive. Endive! The ways the French have with the fat bud of celadon tipped vegetable. Quite inexpensive in France, it is a peasant indulgence I cannot pass up.  The fish was so perfectly prepared, the sauce on the endive so Sicilian in it's orange, it translated into comfort food. In fact, it remains, other than simple purple mashed and chunky purple potatoes at the new  Le Dauphin, the single most memorable food I've had since arrival.

 

I haven't had anything but the Domaine Prieuré-Roch vin ordinaire in ages. CV offered the  Gevrey at 56 euro and the Les Clous Vosne Romanée at 88 euro, which seems rather high for a blend of three lieu-dits, with vines around 30 years of age from Le Pré de la Folie, La Colombière and Aux Champs-Perdrix, but that's the way the domaine rolls.

 I'm not sure how we ended up going with the VR (well, I do know, they were out of the Gevrey and I thought we were getting the Vin Ordinaire, but then the bottle came along, decanted, tasted, yummy, done deal. An expensive but happy mistake because it was delicious.

 But at first confusing. In fact, still confusing. At first it was absolutely delightful, light, pure, ethereal, angel-like, extremely vibrant and almost texture-less. Where is this sixty-euro more than the Grand Vin, one might ask. For this one needs a magnum.

 Anita immediately said, "This is gorgeous."

Paul and I agreed on gorgeous, but it challenged our idea of Burgundy. In fact it made me rethink the whole idea of Burgundy as it seemed like angles wings and clouds. Also, the wine  seemed very whole cluster/carbonic, full of cinnamon and spice and rose. Fragrant in the Chauvet way, and extremely approachable and sensual, but structure? Back-bone?  Nothing at first. One bottle for three of us was too quickly disposed of.And then.... it started to breathe..and then came some transformation. By  the end of the meal the tannin, very slight and very fine started to strut. The velocity of the fruit started to calm down, like a chatty child who started to concentrate. Oh for a magnum.

 The wine according to Yannick Champ, the winemaker, it is not a 'pure carbonic, but whole cluster (yes to stems) with twice- a- day pigeage, ( it must be extremely gentle pigeage at that, just enough) as Marcel Lapierre discovered, to guard the wine against an lacto bacillic bacteria attack.  There was no new oak on this cuvée in this vintage.

Jaspar Morris just wrote to me this bit from his fabulous book , Inside Burgundy, that is just becoming available in the US, and a must read/buy. Essential in fact. 

"The vines are farmed organically with half an eye on biodynamics. The grapes are vinified with all their stems in wooden vats, with old-style human punching down (rip the clothes off and leap in but be careful of the carbon dioxide). No sulphur is used at all at any stage except once, when the wines are racked. 

The barrels in the cellar in Prémeaux are kept at a tilt that looks untidy to those used to rows of perfectly aligned barrels, but has the practical purpose of encouraging the sediment of the fine lees to gather in one spot, below the tap-hole through which the wine will eventually be racked. At the moment the wines are kept for a maximum of 24 months in barrel because there is not the space for a third vintage in the cellar, but Henri-Frédéric Roch and his right-hand man, Yannick Champ, are evidently tempted. One batch from 2002 was kept in wood for 44 months as a trial. Barrel tasting is no longer allowed, so my experience of the Roch wines is from bottle.

One person will be fascinated by the practices at this domaine, another may mock. Is this cutting edge, or are they out where the buses don’t run? The proof of the pudding is in the wines themselves, once bottled, and if you can afford them. 

Not fully carbonic except in so far as whole bunch, and plenty of oak but perhaps subsumed by the stems."

 

 

 

 

 

 

I'm Here

I’m here in France, I’m here in Paris, I will be here in La Remise, Millisime Bio. I am here in Valaire and I’m here with Amy Lillard. I’m here with Marc Ollivier and I’m here at the Renaissance, Dive and Salon. I’m here. I’m there. I was there at Coinstot Vino and Le Dauphin and I was just there, or here, at Verre Volé with boy wonder, José Pastor, solving the problems that still exists with the vin nature world: those who would rather eat their first born than add sulfur to their wine or even send wine off for analysis.  

 

Conversation was terse over a very stable and structured, edgy, lush and oily black olive drenched with veins of lime lilt and 12% alcohol Jean Michel Stephan’s '07 Cote Rotie, Coteaux de Tupin, might have been the perfect wine for such discourse, I love his wines, and had the pleasure of being his dinner companion during a dramatic electric storm at Pey-Labrie in 2007. Drinking Cote Rotie, talking to Jean Michel as the storm wrecked the party was an epic experience, his wines are even more amazing coming from someone who was an assistant at Guigal. These are wines at the opposite end of the spectrum of the unstable and unfinished natural wines that still, yes, still show up and I can expect to see over the next few days, whether in barrel sample or not.

Boy Wonder and I talked about a problem that still exists with the vin nature world: those who would rather eat their first born than add sulfur to their wine or even send wine off for analysis.  

I remembered the early days of the Loire's Pat Desplats (aka Pat de Griottes). The wines were pretty on the French side of the Atlantic, but once in New York City,  they were fizzy and popping their cork. The problem wasn't only improper temperature control, but because some who wanted to rush their wines to market didn't actually do their chemistry analysis. Two strikes against them/him. One of the problems with Pat or others who hadn't learned from his early missteps was that bottle before malolactic fermentation and wines can start to referment and pop their corks at inopportune times. Working with no sulfur needs to be respected, the laws of care must be obeyed.

Dressner dropped him.

Pat did some soul searching,more analysis, did more elevage. He waited for stability before bottling.  He is well regarded now in France and in Japan but in the United States there are those who still remember the issues of stability. Their loss, but a reputation must be rewon after its lost.

One bad bottle and the whole case gets thrown out by naysayers. Yet, allowing for stability takes time; money out of the winemaker’s pocket. But like writing, people don’t make wine to make a killing.  

By 2:30,  after half of the wine world we knew tried to lunch at VV (moral of the story, when in France reserve, when working with naturel be prudent.) we left, talking of the problems of the world alongside the Canal St. Martin on the way to the station.  I kissed him on both his furry cheeks in front of Gare de l’Est.  I headed to Gare de Nord and  took my seat next to a large women who never seemed to stop huffing and puffing and sopping her beads of sweat (it was about 30 degrease outside) until I fell asleep and she started to emit strange and large noises. I woke from a drugged-like sleep, cows on either side I pulled out this seasons Art of Eating and plowed into Ed Behr’s article on   cheese maker Soyong Scanlan.  “Passion is cheap,” she told him. “There’s a lot of amateurism in the name of enthusiasm and passion.” 

 Synchronicity. Passion is a word that gets bandied about in the vin nature world, in fact, I’ve been responsible for playing fast and loose with the word as well. Words are poor replacements for facial nuance.

Passion is important. To work naturally, one has to be a bit crazy, devoted and persistent. But great wine does not get produced by intention alone. Art must meet nature must meet skill and talent.

I remember when I was a teenager and wrote poetry I thought my first draft came from God (even though I seemed to always have been an agnostic). When I learned structure and editing and , and only learning to rewrite endlessly, did I really grow into being a writer.  

Tomorrow, La Remise. New crop, old crop, those who ride nature like a bronco and those who would rather ride a wave. Let the games begin.

 

  

How the '02 Les Clos Sacrés survived....

 
 

 

---I'll never know.

Last night David Lillie read me the riot act on my pathetic wine cellar.

meaning shelves in my living room and boxes under my bed, with no temperature control. I was going to do something about it this year, get a little wine fridge. Found one for about $350. Looked great and I had Fred Tregaskis' approval.

Then Alex Halberstadt warned that I'd probably ruin the wine because of the vibrations unless I got the top models.

Lillie is trying to steer me to off-site storage. I swore off big purchases until I can figure out a way to get health insurance, I might have to do something about...soon. 

But then, when I have experiences like the one the other night ,with a seemingly perfectly intact and utterly delicious nine-year -old Savennieres, I wonder; can I continue surviving on A/C economy control?

Les Clos Sacrés is Nicolas Joly's basic Savennieres,  preciously called Becherelle, presently  labelled as Les Vieux Clos in Europe and Les Clos Sacrés for the US market. (Why?  I have no idea, let me ask Virginie and get back to you.)

The wine is sourced from four separate plots of vines planted on a jumble of quartz, schist and sand soils. Domaine Select is the importer, but back when I acquired the bottle,  Lauber was the broker. That was back in the days when they still had some good wines, before Southern took it over and started to scratch their heads with confusion how to sell wines that weren't 'brands.'

The wine, cracked with my friend Dr. J. was sublime in the way Savennieres can be. Wet wool, honey, old apples in a crate and I kept on coming up to depth, incredible depth. A little miracle. A big miracle. This was sort of a ricola candy without the sweetness and then it was deep into chamomile. Acidity nice and bright. It was also a little young. A true miracle. 

The bottle was stored not in the living room, on the shelves, but in my bedroom, in the dark. I've often wondered if light was more of a threat to the life of a wine than above 56 degrees. Or is it just the indestructiblity of a well-made chenin.

2002 is one of my favorite years for the Loire and at  13.9 alcohol, one to present to those N. Joly naysayers. Just brilliant. 

Clos Roche Blanche '09 Cot and Speckled Trout

 Maybe it's this time of waiting; waiting for my editor to get back to me with his comments. Maybe it's working  on that damned navel, oh I mean, novel, a futile exercise headed for sorrow, but to tell you the truth, I have been enjoying not blogging. 

I don't mind talking to myself, but that is what blogging has become to me, talking to myself and I' not sure if it's the best use of my time. Or anyone's time.

Also, there's vanity involved. I'm not sure if I'd rather do it in public, or down Prince Street behind my wool hat and sunglasses.

True, people read me, from all over the place, and I see the click throughs, and I see the stats so I now I am not as isolated as it seems, but I must tell you, writing on this site feels like one hand clapping. A tree falling in the forest with no one around. A meal without a diner.  I'll figure it out, tomorrow I'll have a different story to tell, a different feeling, but right now? 

I've been in the ether.  I have been  standing in the river waiting to get me a speckled trout. 

Sporting my  diaper-like rubberized waders, I waited for the speckled trout to nibnle, leaf brown or  pea green, swim on.

Waiting, I saw what Beckett fabricated:  Vladimir and Estragon fishing. V&E waited with a bat to bang the beast  between its little bead eyes, to stun it and live bleed it. This is what it was all about. 

But there were no fish. False advertising.

Like a pink pelikan, I stood in the water,  a redhead with one leg up, and still, so still. It was frigid; cold. Snow and ice. In the end nothing to show for it except some shrapnel from some idiot who wanted to do that exploding fish in the water thing, what to they call it? Torpedo fishing? Dynamite fishing? There were the frozen fillets in my freezer, someone else sent to me. And I waited for guests to come. 

I eased the cork on a new vintage of an old favorite, the Clos Roche Blance Cot, vintage 2009. Favorite. What a word. That is a favorite of mine. Seems meaningless and shallow, sort of like name that tune. Favorite. Indeed. When people ask me if I have a 'favorite' color, I have to stop the pity from crossing my eyes. No, I don't have a favorite color. I don't have a 'color.'

Favorite, and i call myself a writer? Is that the best I could do? A writer that is knee deep in the Roscoe River waiting for speckled trout? No wonder I didn't catch anything if I was calling wines like Clos Roche Blanche favorites.

We get sloppy, or I at times get sloppy. Favorite is an inferior word. Who wants to hear a tune when what you really crave is music? Yet, sometimes there's no word for love but the simple love.

I love this wine, the  cot, in any vintage but I didn't know what to expect here. That, sir and madam, was a good thing.

A hint of sparkle, and as M. Chauvet said, one shouldn't be afraid of a little carbon dioxide. In this case it blew off in a few minutes.  I have never heard Didier Barrouillet admit he had a hard year. Even in 2008 he said, it was fine. No problem. Was there a problem? It is a year, and they are all different, it is Didier against the challenges and if he spends every minute in the vineyard making sure the vines usher in the best fruit possible, there are no complaints. There are no problems.

What about 2009?  It was crazy, anything but typical. Hot, cold, hot, wet and hot.  "No problem," he said. He never wants to talk vintage, and he never complained, at least to me. Except he doesn't want to work so hard, but he is a master vigneron. Sly, funny, sly, smart. He just..is.

This cot. I first met this cot in 1999. I first met the vines in 2001. They were 110 years old then and the old ladies had plenty of softball sized yellowed limestones lodged into their winter soil like rosy bones waiting for the soup. I loved them then, and I love them now. Sometimes you just fall for a vine when you least expect it.

The wine, the  '09,  is  packed with unfruited jam,  a cloudy day with the sun shining.  Sweet walnut skin, neat, tannic, 12.5% or so.

I missed the violet, I missed it so damned much. That violet sucked up through a chalk straw? It failed me. Where was that purple flower scented through that limestone straw. I needed it.  I wanted it. Gone.

I had soup. I had brussels sprout sprinkled with hot green sauce, ages old, bought in NOLA in 1996, three years before I sipped the first CRB cot.  I changed the strings on my guitar for the first time in seven years. I went back to the wine, no longer a favorite but a friend who had a new pair of shoes. A lover who had grown a beard.

The chalk straw was there. The tannins, very different, as if the wine had a new haircut, sassy, maybe a pincurl or a two.  And wouldn't you know, the wine was sprinkled with a citrusy, blood orange like freshness. Then it stared at me and laughed so hard, the bottle almost split its seams. 

It's about $21 if you can find it. 

 

++

How about that 6000 year old winery found in Armenia. I guess Genesis got it right, Noah was the first winemaker. What I would like the writer to explain, however, was his supposition that the wine was like nouveau. Thermovinified, malo-blocked wine, yeasted, confabulated plonk. I think he must have gotten that one wrong.  

 

Gault + Millau and me

I

 

Gone Fishing

 

 

Or, is that gone missing?