The Feiring Line

Naked Wine: chapter two (1st grafs)

(Funny how reading this, I want to rewrite the whole thing, but it is too late, it's going to be in print before I know it)

The Principle of Nature

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.—alice walker

+

To go ahead with my foolish idea of making Sagrantino in California, I had to do it as Jason Lett had suggested, according to my “principles.” Yet I was queasy with placing too much emphasis on principle. How one treated a wine was not a moral issue, after all. Wine in a vat was not the same as a chicken cooped up in its cage. Wine was not a goose being force-fed to fatten its liver. I didn’t intend to strike up a debate about the “piety” in a wine’s source, as in Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma or Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. I liked my wine free- range, but still, a bottle of Pineau d’Aunis couldn’t stare me in the eyes and lick my face, and if I abused a Gamay grape, its drinker wouldn’t scream in horror. Still, when a wine has been manipulated, I, as the drinker, would scream or at least decline the wine and reach for a reliable alternative, like gin or scotch.

I came to my so-called principles because the wines I enjoyed the most were made under a guiding philosophy based on nothing added and nothing taken away. This actually sounds like a delicious ideal, yet the relevance of the ideal, and the wines, seems to be endlessly debated.

Naked Wine: chapter one (1st grafs)

Naked Wine will be published on Sept 1st. So in the next weeks, I'll be publishing the first grafs of each chapter. The prologue is printed in whole. I'm hoping you'll love it enough to buy it. Well, one can always hope. I'm trying to be an optimist in the next chapter of my own life. 

++

 

Fate or Folly

Levin finished his glass and they were silent for

a while. --Leo Tolstoy

During the summer of  2008 in the midst of a book tour, I found myself driving around California in a rental car. One of my last stops was in the Sonoma town of Healdsburg. So far, the readings and interviews had been fun, but as Healdsburg is packed with wine industry folk, I sensed that I was in for something different. I had been warned that as a mostly French- wine-drinking New Yorker, I would have to defend my recent ed- itorial for the Los Angeles Times, which my editor had titled California Wine? Down the Drain, especially to a hall full of wine professionals. “Today’s wines are overblown, over-oaked, over- priced and over-manipulated” were some of my stated, perhaps radical and unpopular, thoughts on the state’s wine, which I firmly believed

had lost its identity since the early '90s. Expecting the worst, I mused that instead of a thin summer frock, I should have worn a flak jacket.

 

After a scorcher of a day, the cool air had started to blow in re- lief from the ocean, twenty miles away, and I began getting a little buzzed about standing up in front of an audience. As someone who spends most of her days in an introverted state, fixated on a computer screen, I do enjoy the adrenalin that can kick in when I give a reading or a talk. That surge often makes me feel smarter and faster than I ordinarily think of myself. So, feeling in top form, I strolled into the library and waited on the sidelines of the stark auditorium to be introduced.As I watched a mostly grim-faced crowd walk in, I nervously pressed my book into my lap. 

Naked Wine: the prologue

A little offering; an excerpt from the forthcoming book

 
 dedicated to  David Lett and Marcel Lapierre

+++

Prologue

 

When it comes to wine, I can be polarizing. I don’t mean to be; I just have unnaturally strong opinions. Take, for example, the supposedly provocative notion,“Why add anything to wine that isn’t necessary?” Though barely five feet tall, nearly one hundred pounds, that query, out of my lips, can spark forest fires of controversy, inciting far larger people to do battle with me. Yet having resigned myself to this sad state of affairs, I persist, be- cause as Eleanor Roosevelt said,“Do what you feel in your heart to be right, you’ll be criticized for it anyway.”So when I glanced at my phone’s caller ID, saw Oregon, and heard the gentleman introduce himself as Jason Lett, my first re- action was pleasure. I liked Jason, an intense man who was the son of David Lett, the founder of Oregon’s edgy Eyrie Vineyard. If you handed Jason a banjo, he could be Central Casting’s pick for the young Pete Seeger. But my second reaction was, Oh no! Did I do something wrong? Did I say something careless about Eyrie on my blog? Did I somehow screw something up?

 

“What’s up?” I asked cautiously. That’s when he propositioned me.“I was talking to Dad. We think it’s time you made your own wine. Come here. Make it exactly like you want it—all natural, nothing added, nothing taken away. Go hardcore on us. Use all the stems, no sulfur, anything!”The Letts share many of the wine values that often get me into trouble when I shoot my mouth off about them. The elder Lett was the pioneer who, in the mid-1960s planted the first Pinot Noir in the Willamette Valley and the first Pinot Gris in America. While not whole hog into the natural-wine thing the way I am, the Letts cut close to it. On their fifty acres in the Red Hills dis- trict, they farm without insecticides or pesticides. They eschew the trendy use of irrigation and opt for dry farming. Instead of an antiseptic, hospital-like environment in their cellar, spongy black mold grows on the walls. They pay no attention to point-giving critics—who, in turn, pay little attention to them. The Letts are my kind of wine guys.

Jason proposed giving me a half ton of grapes to play with. He vowed to leave me and my fruit alone until the first fermentation— the one that converts sugar into alcohol—was completed. At that point, I was free to return home, leaving the Letts to take care of what the French call élevage, holding the wine while it matured and stabilized prior to bottling. They would own the wine. I could buy some, if I wished.

While I recognized this as a rare opportunity, the truth was that I never wanted to make wine. A few years back, I interviewed a California banker for a story. He posed the question “Doesn’t everyone who loves wine eventually want to make it?”

My answer was no.

But I had to admit that Jason’s offer was tempting. With the gauntlet thrown, my competitive side awoke. In no time at all, however, that competitive side disappeared and was replaced by a vision of me as a victim. There sat Alice, trapped in a room, while Rumpelstiltskin waited for her to turn straw into gold. If she failed, he’d swipe her first born.

“If I run into trouble,” I asked,“like stuck fermentation, or if I need help getting it into the barrel, you’ll be there to help me, right?”

Jason laughed. “We’ll be in the middle of crush ourselves. You think we’d have time?”I gulped. My nightmare of being locked in a room until my im- possible task was completed was close to the truth.

Like a flounder in a pail, I flip-flopped with indecision. Yes? No? What to do? Oh, how to torture Alice. The specter of failure was terrifying. Sure, I didn’t want to waste prime Willamette Valley fruit, but what if making wine according to my principles proved to be beyond my reach? I had been so vocal about my belief and love for wines made without any additives, what if I failed? Would the public accept my excuse that I was a writer and not a winemaker and be forgiving? My grandfather’s wine turned to vinegar; so could mine. Conversely, after I stomped, the fruit could stubbornly refuse to ferment or, alternatively, might never stop fermenting. If that happened, I could be stuck in the Willamette Valley for years.

I believed that making wine without additives or industrial enological heroics was absolutely a grape’s given right, but what if? . . . What if? . . . What if I had based my writing reputation on a method of winemaking more difficult than I thought it would be? I began to think that making wine in my bathtub, while not authentic,would be saner. I wasn’t a complete idiot. I had plenty of vinifica- tion book knowledge. But on a practical level, I was stumped when I tried to figure out the mechanics of transferring wine from a fer- mentation tank to a barrel. I had no idea how I was going to press the juice from the skins. When Jason suggested I squeeze out the wine through cheesecloth, I thought he was kidding.

A month later, I had other opportunities on my mind and Jason’s phone call had receded into the shadows.

Voodoo Vintners

The world of biodynamics is a strange, dreamy place and one that has attracted xenophobia, outrage, hostility, distrust, passion, love, devotion and committment. In other words, a compelling topic, one that seduced Oregon writer, Katherine Cole to write a book, perhaps the first understandable one about the hard to pin down form of agriculture.  

 Voodoo Vintners,  Oregon's Astonishing Biodynamic Winegrowers,  is a lovely little book, which, while it may not convince a farmer to take the plunge, or critics to put down their vitriol, all who want to know more about the agriculture's roots and how it flourished, will find plenty of answers as they travel through the vines with Cole as she talks with winemakers; religious devotées, dabblers and naysayers. She also gives good insight into the man who started it all. 

"There are a lot of questions about Steiner, he was a weird dude,"    

said, talking to me the other week, from Oregon.  "I think more of us might be interested in him if his biographers hand't all been so earnest. Most accounts of the man's life were scribbled by starry-eyes disciples, who have nothing but banal things to say about the man."

The strength of this book is the lovely writing as well as the lack of starry eyes, and she succeeds in putting  forth the teetotaling, brilliant, if nutty, professor in full-frontal light. From his not drinking to his talking to spirits on the other side of life, she places him in the sane context of this farming movement that whether you believe in it or not, doesn't deserve the crap and the vitriol that gets slung around. After all, there is Steiner worship, and then there is Biodynamics as it has become today.

After being taken to task for my own title, in my previous book, I am gun shy about taking on use of Voodoo in the title as a selling point. But, here I go. Confusing passages show up on page 83 when Cole draws an analogy to Voodoo as perhaps an attempt to justify the title. "The biodynamic practitioners who describe their discipline as similar to voodoo appear to have a better sense of the religion as it is practiced traditionally in  Haiti.."

 I've talked to scores of Biodynamic practitioners and several consultants and I've never come across any who invoke the word voodoo. The press and editors looking to sex  up the topic, sure. To get the uninitiated to turn the page. After all those shit-stuffed horns and the moon can make for great copy and intrigue. 

In her explanation, Cole calls on the spirit (as the assist to magic here) as the connection between the two. While I am not a student of Steiner, I will say from my extensive conversations with practitioners, mostly in Europe, and from my own readings, biodynamic has less in common with evoking anything magical or spirit than it does rely on an ancient way of agriculture through observation. In the treatments exist man against the elements, treating nature with nature.

Spirit evoking is very different in spiritual connection.

On the great side of the book, is both the pleasure in reading, the straightforward explanation of the preparations and the  stories of those who found failure or salvation through the farming. A great story is the triumph of the method over phylloxera (at Montinore). There's a great illustration of the pepper plant that discovered a pot of biodynamic prep and turned into some bionic nightshade. There are stories such as Alex Sokol-Blosser who sprinted away from BioD during a scary wet season. She gives us both sides.The take away is that there's more than one way to till (or not) the land.

 Some of my favorites quotes are given by Jim Fullmer , executive director of Demeter USA. On page 8, he summed up an often forgotten viewpoint of Biodynamic farming; "We are farmers. We are pragmatic , practical people. We don't take a lot of bullshit. You can't just feed us something; we have to experience it." The roots of biodynamics come from Goethe. It's really simple. Just shut up and observe nature.""

 In the end, this is a cogent presentation of the facts, the myths and the hopes of the farming method, and one that survived the title of Voodoo, which is more tongue in cheek than serious. Even though the narrative is Oregon farmer based, these are universal stories, and an enjoyable read. 

When asked about whether Cole learned anything by the time she wrote the end, however, she responded. "If someone is spending more time in the vines, observing and being kind to the environment, what can be bad?"

 

 

Hi-Matic Hotel, (Paris)

An affordable hotel right on Rue Charonne? Across the street from the new resto  that I didn't go to, Septime? And an eco-minded-organic one, no less, complete  with great wifi access, and designed by Matali Crasset, one of the hottest designer in France who happens to be a nut about vin naturel, for about 100 euros?

                                                   

 The name  Hi-Matic  reminded me of my first almost real camera,
the Minolta Hi-Matic, one of the first gifts my father handed off to me, on a dreary winter ride to Jones Beach, when he was trying to figure out how to be a father to me as he had adopted a new family of his own. Funny how that vision came to me. But as it turns out, this Hi Matic is the new hotel in the 11th. 

On my last night in France, in Paris, I walked up from Bastille and entered what I soon found out was a strictly DYI stay.  

The hotel, dressed in slightly adjusted primary colors jolted me into Matali's universe and I tried to check in.  Well, I tried to. I couldn't quite figure out that I was supposed to check in myself and what I was supposed to do. You see, there's no concierge, per se. But someone quickly showed up to assist. Then my room had no shades, and with the shower in full view of the window, I thought that was a bit much, no problem, they switched my room in a flash.That's the way it is at the Hi-Matic, the people taking care of you are almost invisibile, but if you need help, they're there.But mostly, in the age of smart phones and wifi, who needs a concierge to fuss over you anyway.

 Forgotten or longed for items can be had from the Horn n Hardart- like vending machines, including extra hangers, organic snacks and  the  wine guide book RED. If you check out and need a place to stash your bags, there are the spacious lockers. 

Matali's design sense is a scrubbed Scandi-meets Japanese functional Wabi-Sabi and way cute of Kawaii.  The way she blends it comes together in the  Hi-Matic is jungle gym goes hostel aesthetic.

The rooms are pod-like, lean, multi-purpose, shower strong. These aren't rooms you'll want to hang in, but they are serviceable if extremely tiny.  Take a look at these colors and the lounge chairs,   very amusing especially as they reflect the hotels clothing boomerang-ish hangers. In fact the design is always referring back to itself in  unusual ways and just straddling the line of child/adult. Even down to the organic breakfast, 

 

As long as calibrate your expectations for hostel instead of  hotel, you'll be fine.  Except for one crabby, grumbling couple who clearly made a mistake, most around me were amused, happy and curious.

A good address. 

71 Rue De Charonne Paris, Paris 75011 

Naked Wine? Coming to your book shelf soon?

Hint. Hint.   
 

Place vs. Grape vs. Ponsot vs. Suspenders

Want to piss drinkers off?  Hand them a wine like, Sebastien Riffault and tell them the wine they sip is Sancerre.

But get them to try the wine without telling them it is grown in Sancerre.  Go ahead, it's a trick but it works. The wine made without any added sulfur or anything else, is the grape in its natural state, as it wants to be. So, if they don't come to it with preconceived notions of the grape,  if they don't have their reality fucked with because there's no cat piss or cut grass, well they might love it. If they are listening  very carefully, they might sense and correctly identify its  soil, place and using their noodle,they  might even get the grape.

To Sebastien as well as a growing number of vignerons, the earth and terroir, that thing that is debated by scientists as existing or not, is much more important than the variety. Of supreme importance is the correct marriage of the two that makes the difference.

After weeks of hanging with winemakers this past June, from Burgenland, to Styria to Mont St. Denis,  a repetitive theme came into microscopic focus. The moment of revelation hit when standing in the Morey St. Denis vineyard Clos Mont Luisants with its owner, that rascal Laurent Ponsot.

.  who, on June 15th was ready to throw me out down the clay and limestone slope  if I asked one more question about the nature of his old vine aligoté.

The Ponsot monopole, Clos des Mont Luisants is planted with century old aligoté. In past decades the vineyard had flirted with some chardonnay and some pinot gouge, but now it's back to aligoté all the way, because Ponsot believes the oft considered lowly grape with enough acidity to naturally block malo, is the best vehicle to deliver the soil to the glass.  

"It's the place that matters, not the grape." He didn't yell at me, but he might as well have added, you idiot.

 

 on june 15th, 2011 the grapes were very advanced.

"Look. You have many elements side-by-side that makes the wine what it is. In Burgundy we have 1500 different appellations we don't have a wine named, pinot noir or chardonnay. This is Burgundy. The land has to be the victor. From the New World came the fame of  naming a wine according to the grape. In the past, people would plant the best grape to extract the location." 

So why did this wisdom get lost?

"People had time and committment, now they make money."

His disdain for the world of labels was apparent. "In Burgundy we have Burgundy, not a beverage called chardonnay and oak. It is Burgundy. To label a wine by the varietal is like a man holding up his pants with both belt and suspenders. No confidence."

You might well wonder why I bothered to ask how he was going to label his Corton Charlemagne, which is aligoté from Corton-Chuck? (before phylloxera there was mostly aligoté on that famous hill). Will he give some clue to the drinker that it's aligoté?

"Why would I do this?" he said, getting testy, but tempering it with a, okay, a somewhat superior laugh. "Forget the name! It is the place not the grape that matters."

Ponsot might well be a nationalistic terroirist but this notion to nix the grape name is gaining support.   

That's all well in good for a region mostly is run by two grapes. After all, one can assume (though not safely) if it's white it's chardonnay and if its red it's pinot. But many drinkers (self-included) have an intellecutal curiosity to know the grape(s) inside, so some info on the back might be welcome. The goal, however to respect a piece of land so much that what matters is that the right grape is matched to the soil, and not a grape matched to a market, is extremely appealing. After all, when is the last time I reached for a bottle that screamed gamay? But show me  Py, and I'm there.

In light of the new labeling laws in which we will see more grape names on the label, as if that meant anything, this is the ripe time for a vigneron push back. 

 I don't know, when is the last time you had sex with someone who wore both belt and suspenders? 

Remember, you can find more straight forward wine recommendations from me @ the New York Wine Salon. 

Night on the Nussberg

The big daddy of the Viennese Vigneron Wine Scene, Fritz Wieninger had a plan, it was a good one. Picnic and taste his wines on one of the Alpine foothill vineyards near Vienna. The Nussberg.

As we were preparing to leave his winery, his  energetic  mother, gone out of her jeep, knee deep in Wellies.

 
 At 7pm, she had come straight from a day in the vines, in fact that Nussberg next destination. Though she wouldn't tell me how old she was, she was certainly less enervated than any 25 -year- old after a day of whipping the vines in shape, under the strong sun.

Turns out that she was the first woman to ever graduate from the local winemaking program studies in 1964! That might make her the first in the world. I'm not sure, but someone give that babe and award. What spirit. What a smile. And I hear she is a slave driver.

As soon as Fritz and I reached  Nussberg, one of the best vineyard sites in sights of Vienna, and yes, that is shell limestone, the sky cracked open.

We took refuge at forever smiling  Stefan Hajszan's snack joint in the middle of the vines. We waited, drinking the 2010 Gemischten Satz and waited.

                                                                            

Best laid plans. 

After it was safe to venture out and the fireworks of nature eased off over Vienna in the near distance, we headed off down the mount.  

Frit,  one of the most generous winemakers I know,   promotes his area ahead of his own wines. He is well known for influencing others to go organic, bioD, or Respect (ful). So, he brought me to a Heuriger (the wine equivalent to a beer hall), to taste wines of another maker. It was more complicated than that, but that's what the shorthand.

I won't tell you the name, but I hated the wines. We were next to a loud accordion player, when the very sweet, though perhaps clueless marketer, poured me a sauvignon blanc and asked me what I thought.

I was pissed off by it, offended by it. I turned tables on him and asked what he thought of the wine, as he had gone to winemaking school.

He started on the marketing speak. I stopped him, mid bite into his sausage. And said, 

"It's a pandering wine made to a market. Why bother making wine like that. What's the point? This is Vienna, why sauvignon blanc?  You're trying to mimic New Zealand and New Zealand is trying to get away from that green bean shit. In fact, why make SB here at all?" Then I said, if he did want to find out the identity of the grape on that soil, take it off it's medication to find its baseline, that was the only way.

It was a moment that I had avoided for the week I was in town. But you push the right button on me, I suppose, I get verbal, acute, and sling the shots. Poor guy. He was sweet and tried to get out of it, but he dug himself in worse. He talked about the careful selection of yeasts, the flavors of the wine that reflect the soil. 

"Don't pull that marketing shit on me," I said. Fritz was nodding his head in agreement. But still, I wonder if there wasn't a better way.

I was in Austria as the guest of the Austrian Wine people, and even though he wasn't there, I had a feeling that this was the reason that Willi Klinger asked me to come over.

 The night was salvaged with the increasingly better  wines of Stefan (at his all organic heuriger on Grinzingerstrasse,) and those of Fritz.

Vienna is an interesting area. The fine hills are riddled with chemical farming, and then there are the ones that Fritz has nudged into happiness. I'll be watching this place for sure.

 

Me on Martha (with Ryan); the audio

 

This download might have a strange name, but it is indeed my conversation with Ryan Brockington on the Sirius Martha channel: chatting about California and the new wine world a-coming. 

 

Download 01 Mémo-Stimulation_ Par La Méta-Relaxation