The Feiring Line

Belated Valentini

Three days before my European trip I took the subway up to iTrulli where Nicola Marzovilla had prepared a tasting of the legendary Valentini wines. This was a mini-media tour of the wines, a rare chance to taste a vertical. The house in Abruzzo is famously secretive, and it ain't cheap. They rarely allow any one in the cellars and they won't talk technique. But they have a reputation of being one of those old-fashioned sorts and swear that they never vary in the way they make wine. But, who knows. A few weeks back I had a 2000 Trebbiano which had the lees stirred into a souffle--Meursault-like, and I was like, hey guys, what gives? Trebbiano '08 Trebbiano- A lovely purity with ginger and white pepper. Limpid. Nutty. More ginger! And a long, long finish. '05, Lively a bit of a CO2 spritz. Nutty, peach pit fuzz and lacks the '08 focus 1998- Yes! Long and lingering finish, in fact it doesnt finish. Two months later, I can still taste it, and it's great! It even has a food friendly bitterness. 1990- Who squeezed marzipan into the wine? It is stinging and oxidized, a little sherry-jura thing going on with wet wool. I wonder if this is a good bottle. On the other hand, I don't mind it, but it ain't for everyone. Cerasulolo! (this is the famed rose) '08- Some RS, it hurts. A little too much S02? Reduced and brett. Need to see another example before I really understand. '07-- This is LOVE. Poetry. And cinnamon. High alcohol but I forgive. Because the raspberry and cherry hit and finish dry. Montepulciano '02 Root. Radish. Overripe roses. Medium finish with gazpacho! And believe it or not, I loved it. Elegant. how the hell did they do it? '00-- I wasn't fond of the white from this vintage either, correct? Something was going on. It might have been the year that his son took the reigns? But here, it is lactic, reduced, harsh and out of wack. There is something modern here too. Something like syrah and horse and bitter and I register some sort of spoof. Edoardo Valentini died in 2006, and I believe I heard that this was the year, 2000, when his son made the decisions. If this is true, I'm glad to see that some sense has been returned and recent vintages seem in step with the house. But this is total supposition on my part. A guess. Maybe educated, but a guess never the less. And....with sadness the 1985 gave itself over to a dead mouse, but I just knew, underneath it all was a gorgeous wine.

Pierre Overnoy and the 18- year -old Ouille

The day started with a train ride from Paris and then to Pupillon and Chez Overnoy, directly outside to his garden, to where he has his own little nursery with baby ploussard, savignin and chardonnay. While late June, the yard had this tender spring green about it. The hour was 11 o'clock. Out came the glasses. A mystery wine was poured. We stood in the breeze, just where Pierre likes to taste, per instructions of his old mentor M. Jules Chauvet. No one had any intention of spitting. "Guess how old it is?" he asked. Jean Paul Rocher & Pierre Overnoy This was a tough one. I usually fail miserably at the games, though I love them. Keeps you sharp. Forces you to think. It was savignin. Got that. It's salty. It's got age. But how much age? It's saline heaven and full of freshness with the sweet sucked out of the caramel. It's long. It whistles. And then more salt. Pass the Maldon. I say 1999. Why? I have no idea why. I have no context for guessing the age of an oxidized wine with its sherried taste. I just don't have enough practice. Pierre gives us a hint and says the wine was ouille. Poetically, this means filled to the eye, (which now I realize must mean to the bung hole) and this topping off is done regularly to protect it from the punch of oxygen. Vin Jaune is made in the opposite manner, sur voile, under the veil of a yeast layer called flor. The result is a wine rich with intense band-aid and nut. Never the less, the wine is not totally immune, especially when it stands in barrel for so long, as the one in our glass had. We were all stumped. Pierre, tanned legs and hiking boots, younger looking I'm sure than his age, flashed a smile. Gangsta gold teeth glinting from the rear of his mouth, he said with great pride, "The oldest wine in this is 1991." Each year they added wine from the last vintage, so it is understandable that I flubbed. It was eighteen years in the barrel and this was the third 1/2 bottle that M. Overnoy ever opened up. Okay. A thrill. "The last wine we topped off with was either 2007 or 2008." He and Manu tasted it every 2-3 years. He said you can't open the barrel, but needs a special pipette. So this was wine was the result of blend of minds, Manu Houillon (who many people refer to as childless Pierre's 'adopted' son, and the man who has taken over the technical aspects and decisions of winemaking). There was something in the wine that defied decay and death. I had the feeling when tasting that 18- year -old, which he only opened three bottles of so far, might change the mind of the angel of death. How do you have the patience to wait for eighteen years? What kind of spiritual life must be in place to command that kind of impulse control? Hell, I don't even have that impulse control to wait until my copy is edited before I post. I am ruled by urgency, but Pierre? Somehow, if you meet Pierre, you understand. Life seems like this amusing journey. He reminds me so much of my grandfather who did not even get old til his 100th birthday. (Please give me an IV of something lethal if I get that old. I just don't want it.) The end of the salty dog came. Our glasses held mere stains. Pierre put his nose into the vessel and said, "Smellng an empty glass gives you a lot of answers." Like great people I have met, Pierre is given to statements worth repeating. Many of them are about the end of life and many cover the same ground. "You are the same jerk at 20 or 80, but at 80, it's the end of it." "In Biodynamie you need a life for experience, even if you die before you have the answer." "Mr. Chauvet said, when he was in his 80's, 'I'm going to die and I don't know anything about wine." We left the garden and retreated into the darkness of the office, when vineyard fresh, Manu made his entrance. Manu Houillon started to work with Pierre when he was only 15. The connection? Manu's father bought the Overnoy wines. When the father saw that his son just wasn't interested in school, but could be interested in the vine, he asked if Pierre would take on Manu as an apprentice. Manu showed talent and engagement and (along with his sister and brother) is in charge and Pierre is proud. This is the stuff of fairy tale. Of fiction. Of romance. Pierre kissed him six times, not like a father, but with the unconditional love of a grandfather. I recognized the kisses. My own grandfather used to kiss me like that, before he turned away from me when he turned 100. But Pierre doesn't have the underlying anger Pop did. Manu will retain that love from Pierre forever. And from there to lunch. A new one for me. Lovely. Felt odd drinking a non-Arbois wine but this was gorgeous.

Mendall in Terra Alta

I was feeling guilty about being late. But Chris was green and sick and we were...late. He was gracious. We zoomed to his vines, nearby. I let the boys ride in the big JPmobile. I hitched with Laureano. We needed to talk. I really wanted to know how he arrived to this place--ultra -extreme, hardcore in Terra Alta. Truly hardcore natural. Wound up Laureano has a nervous energy and completely endearing quality that infuses his bottles. You might not have tasted the wines, so you'll have to see for yourself, but you'll get the idea in this loosely edited transcript. ++ I started to make wine and for three years I made with sulfur. A friend made liquid for me. I don't like the sulfur. You add it and the wine changes. After, the wine recouperates and it works well. But at the beginning it goes Ouaaa. (hands go out like a bat wings for emphasis) First you have a live color...then it's not live anymore. You make sulfur the color is dead. It comes back. Yes. The wine comes back, but I don't like. One day I read an article that said it was possible to make wine without it. This was 2004, without knowing anyone in France, just with internet, I find out it's possible. Then Benoit from Anima de Vi comes to see me. He comes and says, you work without sulfur! Do you know in France there's a movement! He puts be in touch with Puzelat. This man from the Netherlands, Herman, that beautiful pereson, he says you have a lot of friends in France. Ouaaa (hands fling out the side, bat-like.) He told me I have to go to Remise. This was December 2005. I go there and I drink and then I drive home after the wines? No trouble. After I go to Auvergne and to the Jura to Overnoy. I go with a full car. With me are Giles Azonni, Axel Prufferm Pfifferling. Frenchie! WHOWHOWHOWHO! We go to Overnoy for a meeting. Overnoy! First moment? He makes Bread. He makes bread! And I like bread. I love bread. He takes me to crack nuts and eat bread. Pierre Overnoy. This is my first moment. It's good. Sometimes I see a respect that is not necessary. But Overnoy? Ouaaa! Five-minutes later, we arrived in Finca Caibelles, in Pinell. Once it started, night swooped fast. The sky was impossibly blue and heart stirring. We drove back to taste Well, we didn't have a corkscrew. (thanks to Keven of FarmWine for the documentation) and I was thinking how Laureano came to his specific no sulfur platform without any knowledge of Chauvet, without knowledge of Neauport, without knowledge that there were many like-minded individuals in the world. It was as if the small neonatal movement in Spain invented itself. There is no method. Like Jordi, like Oriol, these folk found their own way. To this group of winemakers, sulfur here is the devil.

Els Jelipins (part 2)

In the beginning, Oriol who with his wife Gloria and wee daughter Berta make up the GOB of the Penedes wine bottled as Els Jelipins, met Rene Barbier who said to him, "You're crazy like me." The superstar winemaker (Clos Mogador, married to Sara Perez) invited him out to the winery and to learn. Through Rene, Oriol met the whole intense Priorat the -fatter -the- wine- the- better crew and he learned how to make those 92+ point wines. Oriol said, "At first I thought wine was poetry. I realized it often was just the recipe." Part of the recipe was cold soaking up to a week with quite a bit of sulfur. Then, adjust the temperature to about 30-degrees centigrade (pretty hot) for fermentation to kick in and extract. Remember to punch down or/and pumpover often. Give plenty of oxygen into the juice (MOX aka micro oxygenation), rack into new barrels, MOX each month. "That's the low-tech version of a recipe wine," he said. Add the tricks like yeasts and enzymes etc, for the high tech version. Yet, the man grew unhappy using the recipe geared towards the big critic. Until one day, and there is always that one day, Oriol met the head buyer for Lavinia. "She was friends with a lot of people in France and she started to show me those wines and I started to think differently. I also met Maria Theresa Mascarello and she too told me that wine could be different. I realized that making wine in the way I had been trained was depressing me." Even in a bad picture, he and Gloria are lovely. He and Gloria who worked together at the Priorat winery, were by then a couple, and went out on their own, still making conventional wine before 2003 and then they broke out. That was the first year they vinified without yeast. "We were so afraid because everyone told us the wine wouldn't ferment. My wife was crying every day with fear." It fermented as if thumbing its nose at the cautionary tales of yeast and its vices. By then Oriol and I were on the road to rendezvous with three more Americans. We pulled up to a small cafe where wine importer Jose Pastor was waiting, with his two charges, Farm Wine imports Keven Clancy and Chris Barnes of Chambers Street. Chris's eyes were ringed in dark and his face was blending into a reptile green. I looked at the puddle of canned mussels in the middle of the table, next to a beer and I thought, "Uh, oh. Poor guy." Then we took off to the GOB's household and the road was so twisty I almost was reduced to crawling on my knees as well, this was more than just sympathy pains. I get car sick on those roads unless I'm behind the wheel. Note to self. Placed in the wilderness, in the middle of views, and smells, and dogs, was their house and garden and rustic winery, with a spring green wall as a backdrop and there, in front of the olive oil barrel like amphora, some more story was unwrapped. "We used to make Parker wine," Oriol started up his story once more. "In 2002 we were going to leave the wine world. It was depressing. Cynical. The way we worked with yeast and new oak and enzymes and everything was against everything we believed in. It was against our nature."" But now?? No temperature control. No SO2. No cold maceration. No pumps. No racking. Whole cluster (most of the years, but sometimes 20-30%). Some pigeage in small tanks. No battonage and no racking before bottling. Yes to amphora (2006 red and white were done in amphora), they don't like the lifelessness of stainless. "Inox reacts to electricity, it's not good for the wine," was the answer. The wine often macerates for 4-5 months. Sumoll is quite tannic and like Bea's philosophy for sagrantino, long maceration softens aggression. They also do a long elevage because they want their wine to be 1) stable 2) ready upon release. Right now look for the 2004. Upstairs. Gloria cooked chickpeas! Waiting in the bathroom were teensie kittens. I seemed to have an inexplicable draw to the toilet so I could cuddle the kittens. As a self-professed cat hater. Never say never. ++ 2003 Red---70% sumoll, 30% garnacha It's a different silty animal. Etheral and elegant. Brickish notes. Extremely spicy with a tumeric sort of nose and white fruit, something like gooseberries and almost similar to a barolo if the barolo has some dried cherry, Earl Grey Tea and firm expressive tannins. "Sometimes there's even a stem inside the bottle," Oriel says. "We work dirty." 2004: powerful acid punch on the long finish. Veru strong, mica like? Why do I say that? Who the hell knows. Cherry. Skunk, just a touch. But plenty of life and jumps. 2005: Firmer cherry, bluer in color, back to barolo and I'm stretching for something, slate-like nuance on top of a sun-dried tomato, ripe cherry and sangiovese grown on clay. 2006- this puppy had extended maceration up to five months and the result is almost a honeydew aroma and juiciness. 20% of this was made in amphora. But wait! Some puppy breath, or was it kitten breath? Just a hint and it is in conjunction with the cherry. They also do a little parellada which, in the Penedes usually finds its way into cava. The 2006 was bottled directly from the amphora. They make so little of it. One day they want to zoom up to a whopping 2.000 bottles, and maybe, just maybe they can one day quite their day jobs. What are they after? Oriol said as we gathered some wild mint for Chris to take in the car to guard against the bad mussels, "When you drink a wine, and you have an impression, and you are impressed, and you feel something so deeply you can't describe it, that is what I want."

++ If you want to try some of the wines, and they are expensive, Jenny & Francois brings the wine into the country except for California which is Jose Pastor Selections.

I might add that their friendly decision to share them is exemplary and makes me happy. Saying good bye, I started a two day voyage with the boys and who could guess that we were off to another paradise, complete with a disco for the wild boar under the lure of the cherry trees.

The Nuits Kid

On the train and off to Beaune. Pick up the car at Ada, une bonne addresse for a rental car in the area. I hopped into the cutest little red Fiat. Home to Bouilland! The white cliffs. The air. The cows. Becky and Russell! I crashed a White Burgundy symposium and after a class act Russell Cooked dinner and a kick ass assortment of whites, including two Batards, (Gagnard 2001 Batard and a Leflaive) I slept peacefully, dare I say almost happily. The next morning headed to the new kid in town Becky thought was an interesting story, Ray Walker. The young man was quietly cooling his heels on his first vintage, the 2009. So here's his short story. After doing winery grunt work in California in 2008, he was ready to plunge into the 2009. "I went looking for grapes. No one wanted to give me any. I found some petite sirah. My wife said, "We don't even drink petite sirah, are you sure? What do you really want to do" (already I LOVE his wife) She said, "If you really want to do this, do what you want. So where are those grapes? Santa Cruz Mountains? Come on, babe, where are they?' He blurted out, "Burgundy" She was like, that's impossible, isn't it? Isn't it? Maybe it wasn't. So he looked found out what a grape broker was called in France, a courtier (spelling?). His French was infantile so he relied heavily on Google Translate to write transcripts. He was offered no grapes. So, he packed off to Burgundy, and in person he found his man who said he probably wouldn't be able to get more than bourgogne level grapes. Ray said, fine, as long as he could work his way up to the good stuff, he was willing. "Three weeks later I got a call that the guy had some Charmes-Chambertin.' I asked him from which vineyard, Mazoyeres or..Charmes? The broker was amazed that an American could be up on his vineyards, and didn't have the answer. Turns out the grapes were from Charmes on the border of Chambertin. Then he said, interested in some Charmbertin as well?' "Yes, please!" (by the way; price on Chambertin? 3x more than prime California cab costs.) And then, as a bonus, he gathered a little bit of 1er Cru Morey as well. Ray had no idea he was going to be working with great terroir, for the first time. He proceeded thing on trust--trust that he was going to get the grapes he signed on for and not some fruit from the wrong side of N74 (which is now called D974, which seems heretical to me.) He plunged into a very difficult vintage of low acid and high pH. He wasn't going to buy equipment, after all, he had a newborn and he had no job. He just figured it would work out. Renting and borrowing; two tried and true avenues. I want to be 29 again, not that I want to make wine, but I want to just move. Pick myself up and do something brave. I supposed I did something brave, or at least stupid, when I moved back to NYC to write, leaving the 'safe' (hah!) world of dance therapy behindI. Sure, I struggled (struggle) but no foreign dwelling was involved. Is it too late? But this is not about me, this is about Ray. He got on the plane three weeks before harvest with some credit cards and a visa. At that point there was no fruit or a place to stay and then it all fell into place. He stayed at a chambre d'hote looking for a place to move his family to, and ended up in the cutest little place in Nuits, in a home and tiny cuverie that belongs to the Gouge family, down the block from Diane and Jeremy. And in that cave rests his new wine. What I find amazing about Ray's story, is that he just calls people up like Dujac, they yell at him, "This isn't the little leagues!" He shows up again, he's earnest. People respond to the sweetness. Even in Burgundy which is hard-- people are opening the doors, shocked that he had the cojones to just move and vinify. "I look different from most people in Burgundy. And people around here start calling me Obama." There's much more to say about this 29 year old, but what I find inspiring about his story is that he just got up and did it. He learned French. He called up people like Rousseau and just said, hey, can I talk to you about Chambertin? And then there was this statement, "I had no intention of making a modern-style wine in Burgundy.It is humbling to be in France making wine from great terroir." After tasting through his very few barrels from his very first vintage, I can see that was not just lip. Is it beginner's luck or talent? We'll see but right now it's all very promising. His approach to winemaking is this: "I tried to stay out of its way. I went to the vineyards, found my plots. I was there on the day of harvest. I took them over to St. Aubin where I made wines, making sure I got the grapes I was supposed to get. I got a wood tank, couldn't get anymore so I ended up with some stainless. Used a little bit of sulfur, but on the Chambertin, none at all. I wanted to see what happened." He did minimal punching down, not looking for extraction. He wanted native because he didn't want to mess with any expression of the earth. And so far, so good. So how were his three wines? '09 Charmes Chambertin Very nubile and meaty, firm and a nice acidity, though perhaps a tad ripe. But that's the vintage. '09 Le Chambertin Nice stuff. Deep. A conversation with having.The Chambertin, when I tasted it was quite lovely and filled with life. Morey Saint Denis 'Les Chaffots' 1er Cru Partial whole cluster. And he's going to kill me on this one, because I can't find my tasting note. But never the less, who cares. The wines were sensible and filled with potential. "I pay a lot of money for this grapes," he said. "I dont want people to be drinking Ray Walker's wine, I want them to drink great Charmes or Chambertin."

A Morgon Pictorial

Any one who has read me knows that I've got a crush on Morgon. In fact, it's beyond affair and has blossomed into a relationship of depth and intensity. Some crushes are like that. On a brilliant morning in a rain soaked week, Eric Texier, the Rhonester who lives in Charnay, a 40 minute drive from where the Vin Nature movement touched down, headed off for a damned good triple header: Lapierre, Chanudet & Foillard. (sorry about the upside down pictures, I have no idea what's going on with my iphone) Seen in Lapierre's cellar In Lapierre's vines something the BATF won't allow us to do A dandy idea Chanudet, the anarchist Genevieve's dad, was the farmer who never succumbed to the chemicals and yeasts in the first place. On to dinner and tasting with Jean & Agnes Foillard. Agnes is a fantastic cook, and she sure knows how to pick cheese. The next morning I said goodbye to the device that Eric tests sulfur on. though Eric isn't really biodynamic, there is a 'dynamizer.' And of course I couldn't leave without stopping in to see the DuBouef of Charnay, Jean-Paul Brun's, new vineyard. Watch this video for his explanation. Here is Eric talking about his flowworm and his vineyard based on Fukuoka.

2009 Beaujolais

Last week's visit to Morgon with Eric Texier seemed a long, long time ago when I walked into a 2009 tasting of the Beaujolais on Rue Rivoli yesterday afternoon. The promoters called it Fabuleux Beaujolais 2009, a tasting through all of the crus. A great opportunity, in theory. Beaujolais. There are so many good ones. The region complains that they cannot get a foothold amongst drinkers but can't they see that the ones that are acclaimed like those from Lapierre, Chanudet & Foillard, Breton, Thevenet, Lapalu, J-P Brun, Coquelet, L&C Desvignes, de la Roilette, G. Descombes, and Ducroux, have no trouble selling? Why instead do they follow the espoofers instead of the true? So I walked into the hotel, through the lobby, picked up a glass and gave a nod of hello to the elegant M. Dubouef (in a dove grey suit) I had a go at it. Now, the 2009 Beaujo is being as heralded as the 2009 Bordeaux and both have the same problem as most of the country did in that year: high pH and low acidity = unstability and plenty of adjustment. Not to say that there aren't a heck of a lot of lovely wines out there, but it is certainly a year to be dedicated to your favorite producers who picked at the best time and didn't make wine according to recipe. But yet---it's the vintage of two -centuries---right? I was assaulted with (wine and after wine) thermo-vinification, banana and bubblegum aromas, and a nuclear burning in my mouth. Acidification is out of control in 2009. Burn, baby, burn, I heard myself thinking and headed off looking for an ice cube..when to my surprise, over at the Morgon table, I saw Mathieu Lapierre, the son of Marcel (who's wife just fed Eric and me some plump white asparagus the week before). "What ever are you doing in this company!" I said as I gave him two kisses. He explained, slyly, as he poured me some of the '09, that the day was the 21st, and as it was the night where all of France was lit up with street music, he wanted to be in Paris. "A good excuse," he said. His excuse was my salvation. The wine (which was not the unsulfured cuvee) was filled with baby powder and crushed roses. Yes, an '09 in heft, but Lapierre in elegance. That night I too headed out into the street to listen to music. It was Paris in all its glow and a 1l2 moon over the Seine. I aimed for the left bank, where the assortment of jazz, vintage, or voices raising up to the stars on blocked off streets, changed with every few steps. The feeling was joyous and innocent, sexual and raunchy. A perfect little nicoise on Rue de Seine at Poisson (creamy walnut-sized quail's eggs, marinated anchois) some young students traveling before they took on the world and presumed adulthood, and for the moment, the burn of the sad wines of '09 left, washed down by some enlivened, unacidified Pascal Franck bubbles and a fierce walk back to the 8th.

Andrea Calek and Blue Portuguese

What is fascinating to me about this particular (still entrenched in punk-ism) winemaker-- other than my joke that I never grew out of my bad boy phase? Because the story behind drive is compelling. This man from Prague read Baudelaire and ended up in the south of France. He fell in love, drank Bordeaux left and came back, went to enoschool, met a few men who had a natural sensibility Andrea didn't know he shared. His brush with the band in Morgon changed his attitude about wine and wine life. Which lead him to farming, winemaking, growing slowly (his first vintage was 2007) and being very closed about his winemaking techniques. Calek, too, gives me the, "It's not me, it's the terroir," bullshit. But he knows he's giving bullshit, and that makes it charming. Perhaps it's what comes of growing up in Communism, you learn to be secret, but not without a fierce sense of irony. He has something else. Talent. Spirit. The touch. So far at least. He is a thinker and he doesn't need someone else's opinion. When talk about technique he admits to carbonic--no pigeage, no remontage. Just wine. Why? I ask. I'm lazy, he says. You don't use sulfur? As a rule, no. But if a wine needs it, I use it. He claims to pray, but he doesn't believe in dogma, even with sulfur. He won't go to hell, he knows that for sure. The Sulfatata won't come and knock on his door. I ask his definition of natural wine, he shrugs, he says in his edged Czeched english, 'nothing added, nothing taken away." Hmm..has he been reading my blog? Is he playing to me --but no, I think, he means it. He goes on, it's an ideal, a philosophy, it's not always attainable. There was one year he should have added sulfur, a teensie bit would have saved the cuve from the dumpster. I take a break and go to the toilet. The prettiest w/c I've used in a long time. After having my moment with guilt-- how horrible it was to leave my tissue behind-- I mean, I was traveling with one pair of jeans for three weeks --and there was no way I was going to risk a dribble. Saved by pragmatism, (Pragmatism, in William James' eyes, was that the truth of an idea needed to be tested to prove its validity. ) I buried it next to a gorgeous blue flower and then returned to the plastic table, and tasted some wines. (no tasting note) Chatons de Gardes. It's syrah, puppy breath, sappy with ligaments with threads of patchouli. I like it. Punk Czech: this is his homage to Domaine Peyra--it's an early wine, red wine released less than a year after harvest and it is just that--vin de soig and made from syrah and blue portuguese and...grenache? This is more like Pfifferling meets Perya, very fruit forward, cinnamon. The 2007 Blonde? He didn't think it would have any fizz left, but it did. "That vintage was a mistake," he said. But when 2008 came around, he made sure the bubbles were on purpose. We passed by the pile of beer and headed to dinner.

More Andrea Calek: A day in the Ardeche

Calek has vagabondism in his blood. He came to France as runaway from the Czech army in the late 80's. He wanted to stay but his mother reported him as a bum, and he had to go back east. Thanks mom. When he did return to France, he found wine. Even after listening to my tapes I cannot find the point of entry, but along the way there was a very prime person, Petit Max--Max Breton, one of the Gang of Four in Morgon--which means Chauvet and Neauport. All roads lead to them. The Calek vines are right outside the village of Valvigneres are his vines, bought (about 5 hectares) from Le Mazel's Gerald Oustric. We walked through them as he disparaged a parcel of merlot soon to be grafted over to viognier. A short ride over to a barn in back of a bronzed, bikini-ed body near a pool, we walked through his fiberglass tanks, and talked carbonic maceration, and that he makes about twenty five wines, most of which he does merely for experiment, and then we were onto his Grande Arnaque, the big joke, a fat and slutty syrah he calls une belle pute..(beautiful whore) and then onto Gerald's winery where he and beautiful wolfhound, another belle pute hold court. live in beauty and peace. With me still? (check back running to conference--more on wines you don't see in the US and his philosophy of natural wine--and really--who the hell cares what you call it. Will people stop bickering about the word?)

Rhone Aromatic Secrets

Jet lagged, I teetered out the train station, Matt Kling, Amy Lillard's husband picked me up in Avignon. So far, I've been to the station twice in my life but never set foot in that much touristed city. On the way to their house we stopped off so I could see the progress in the La Gramiere vineyard. All lush, beautiful and happy, the grenache seemed perky and pleased to be luxuriating in their hard limestone habitat. Wild mint, thyme filled the air. And then this curry. The curry I smelled in Chateauneuf when I thought someone was cooking but it was in the air. We went around the vineyards like pigs, rooting around for the culprit. Found! So exciting. Sorry for the inarticulateness, I could barely talk english. I was in need of caffeine, wine and food, but at least I got a good whiff.