The Feiring Line

Naked Wine errata sheet

Even after rounds of fact checking, trying to get things right, there are some glitches. There are always glitches. It is the curse of publishing. It is a truism of publishing. There will be errors, some even are accidental. Whether they are from my pen, or from the editors or from the fact-checkers, they always feel bloody awful.

 In fact there is nothing more humbling than writing a book and seeing mistakes that shouldn't be in the book and that you cannot fathom how they got there except for some gremlins just trying to stir up trouble, or...or. And there's nothing that makes you (me) more forgiving when I see mistakes in other's books. So, with that preamble.......here are the ones that are most troublesome.

Most of these will be fixed in the e-version and in the French version (circumflex on bâtonnage, for example.) But  when you pick up either the unedited ms or the final book, please note that:

p. 6: The blogger, Josh, has sandy-colored hair, not brown.  

p. 47: the concept that up at VOS, Victor and I joked that Clos de Tue Bouef couldn't be more far away from Dubouef was our joke and not the Puzelat's, (to my knowledge)

p.91: excess of malolactic acid should read malic acid.

P.160: 1977 was not ten years after Woodstock, but 8 years after. The word almost is missing from the sentence.

P. 166: I was eating flour, egg and butter quenelles and not canelle--which doesn't exist as far as I know. 

p.190: the mention of Calera should be removed. It was part of a longer thought that got edited out and it is in the Gavillan mountains not the Santa Cruz.

p.197: Lucien of Domaine Tempier of course, was Peyraud and not Peyrouse. Peyrouse is the name of a no longer in existence Côtes du Rhône maker and the vigneron behind the first case of wine I bought (for $30).

P.216: There are some strange wines in that Provence section that don't belong there.  The wines from the Ardéche, are in the Rhone. Matassa is in the Cote Catalan, in South West.

P. 217:  Cascina degli Ulivi somehow dropped its second C. In Tuscany the estate is Fonterenza and not Fontarezza.

Naked Wine: chapter five

The Saints

There is a devil in every berry of the grape.—koran

Overlooking the almost too-perfect rolling hills in the southern Beaujolais town of Charnay, at the end of a cul-de-sac, rests the home of the Texiers. I’ve known Eric Texier, a lapsed nuclear engineer turned winemaker, for not quite a decade. His vineyards are on the border between the northern and southern Rhone. He commutes an hour to his vines.

Eric and I first clicked over a famed Japanese farmer. We had both read the poetic memoir One Straw Revolution, which recounts how a onetime scientist came to a Zen-like interpretation of farm- ing. People refer to the Japanese farmer’s method as “natural” or “do- nothing” farming, but it is essentially “do-little.” Eric even started a communal vineyard named after the man, Masanobu Fukuoka. This Fukuoka vineyard is just across from his winery, right on the outskirts of town. Then once we latched on to an ongoing debate about Chauvet, we were never at a loss for conversation.

In Argentina's Clarin

Click on this link for an interview with me in Argentina's Clarin.

 

Naked Wine: chapter four

A Wine’s Song

The habit of regarding “art” as a thing apart from life is fatal to the development of taste.—edith wharton

 

That’s a big one,” I whispered to my young friend Pascaline. She was shoulder to shoulder with me down in Nicolas Joly’s cramped vat room. We had just descended the steep stairs beneath the kitchen of La Coulée de Serrant in the Cotswold- esque Loire village of Savennieres. We were stunned to see, among the darkened barrels holding the year’s vintage of Chenin Blanc, a tuning fork big enough to musically align a rhinoceros.

 

 

Christian Ducroux; A farmer who makes farmer wine.

Back in the 80's there was the gang over in Morgon fueled by copinage and working naturally. Some  lone wolfs went about their business like chickens running through vineyards. One of them was over in Regnie, one of the ten crus of the Beaujolais.

Christian Ducroux.

I came late to his wines, but thanks to David Lillie of Chambers Street Wines, better late than never.

The first time I tasted the Ducroux expression of gamay, I had no idea what to expect.  One sip and I had  that smack across the face: recognition of beauty. From the Prologue (his nouveau entry, released in April after the vintage) to the Patience which is released after three years, I love them all. My favorites  are his unsulfured variations. His 2010 Prologue was the wine I took to show to a dinner party in Austria. It was a bold move because there is nothing flashy about it. The wine is a whisper. When Willi Klinger, the host and head of the Austrian Wine Board tasted it, he knew me better, and realized the essence of the kinds of wines I had been writing about.  

This past June, on the way from Burgundy to Paris for home, I stopped over in Beaujolais and asked vigneron Eric Texier to come along and after picking me up at the station we drove towards Regnie.   

We drove up to a run down farmhouse and working on a tractor was a lanky man with terribly long limbs, in need of face shaving education, in a Beaujolais apron, working on a tractor's engine. There was an almost ancient, walking into a blacksmith sort of feeling to the setting. The almost rain. The old spreading trees.

Christian Ducroux moves slowly with a fabulous, balletic grace.  He walked to us, almost as if we were unexpected.  When he came up close, I saw that Christian bore close resemblance to  David Lillie.     Separated at birth, I suspected.

 Ducroux has the kind of winery that would give most New World makers apoplexy. Cement tanks from the 1950s, ancient equipment. Probably everything left over from his father's era. Animals and children running around the courtyard, stopping for a sip of Beaujolais when thirsty.

We strolled across to his vines and the talk commenced:  as of 2011 he has been 31 years in organics and 25 years in biodynamics, certified. This was in complete split with his family's history.  His brother also makes wine, but conventionally from conventionally farmed grapes.  But C. Ducroux is an organic/bioD fanatic who also produces his own fertilizer and compost, plows with a horse, and has that animal passion horse plowers seem to have. But he is looking towards an ox. "A horse walks at 2k an hour," he said,  "but an ox is much slower! 1k an hour." So, better for soil health.    

      

Look above at that shot, he has taken out every other row and planted with trees, his attempt to develop greater biodiversity. He doesn't believe that vine age is so important (though his are not so young) what is important is yield. Proving the point, he works on high density, 10,000 vines per hectare and averages 25-30 hectoliters per hectare.  Another obsessions of Christian's is to limit or eliminate the use of copper sulfate. The use of copper is an 'organic' treatment against mildew--often a large problem in the Beaujolais. It  is contentious because of its toxicity and often cited by chemical advocates, offering that their products are safer for the environment. But what is often  ignored by the critics is  that people like Ducroux actively work to limit their use, rarely approaching the legal limit.  In many years, in fact, he has used no copper sulfate. At one time he had a seven year copper -free run. Instead he fools around with sprays of clay as well as fenugreek. He's experimented with  petit lait (whey),  but alas, it doesn't work for him. When asked why he battles the use of copper to this extreme, he says he views it as a personal challenge. 

I have met many humble, hardworking vignerons before but I never met one who admits to being a farmer and wanting to make farmers wine. Nor have I met anyone who believes that to express a wine of terroir, one must make a nouveau. And so he does. Next year to be labeled Vin de Table.

I've added this little video, on which I rival Jonathan Nossiter for the shakieset hand. The material isn't great, and it's meandering, but you'll get a sense of the man and his vines. Those are his small children playing in the background. Meet Christian Ducroux, man and farmer and maker of farm wine. The wines as far as I know it, are Chambers Street Wines exclusives.

 

 

 

Naked Wine: chapter three

 

Chapter 3

It’s Wine

I have trodden the winepress alone, and I know that it is hard to be really useful.—t. s. eliot

 

Once the grapes were dumped into the plastic bin, I changed into disposable clothes, ones that were destined for grape stains. I washed off my legs, got on a ladder, and, much to the amusement of the Pellegrini staff, hopped in. As far as temperature was concerned, jumping into the vat was not much different from plunging into Maine coastal waters. My toes went bloodless. Trying to ward off frostbite, I experimented with stomping techniques, including pacing, circling, zigzagging, all the movements aimed at breaking enough berries to create just enough juice so that the yeast could start to ferment. The fruit flies started to buzz, and after twenty minutes, I hosed myself down and saw an unexpected benefit from the project. My feet and legs were exfoliated smooth; no wonder there’s an explosion of vine health-care products.

Nurselike, Dan the cellar master came by to take the grape’s vital statistics: acidity, pH, and the concentration of sugar (Brix). The higher the Brix, the higher the finished alcohol. We wanted to hit a final alcohol of  14percent, but as the grapes came in at 26Brix we were headed for something more elevated, Kevin said.

“What will we do?” I asked.

He folded his arms against his short-sleeved, plaidshirt.“We’ll figure it out,” he said in a tone that was imbued with “trust me.” I admit, it had the opposite effect.“