Fancy Lunch, William Fèvre Chablis, and Natural Wine Thoughts

I live in Brooklyn, but I also live in New York City, and from time to time I go to Manhattan, where things can get pretty fantastic pretty quickly. Recently I found myself on the upper east side of Manhattan for lunch, and I cannot remember the last time that happened. I was lucky enough to be invited to a lunch at The Mark Restaurant by Jean Georges (whose new downtown place I recently kvetched about). 77th Street between Madison and 5th Avenue - I'm talking about stately awnings and flags. You would be forgiven for mistaking this place for the Icelandic Consulate, or something of that nature.

The interiors are amazing too. Of course there is the lighting and the stained glass, but notice the rug - that's tiger skin! The Mark staff maintain that no tigers were harmed to make the rugs, but I don't see how that can be true.

So why the fancy lunch on the upper east side on a random Tuesday? Didier Séguier, wine maker at Domaine William Fèvre was in town, and the Henriot people most generously invited me to this lunch and tasting.

I had a ball at this lunch. I sat right next to Didier Séguier and he is a lovely guy, very happy to talk about his wines and Chablis terroir, about his young daughter, or anything else that came up. There were five wines on the table, all from the 2008 vintage, which Séguier said is his favorite of the past 10 years, maybe more. He said that it is a "connoisseur's vintage," one that really showcases the different Chablis terroirs, like 2007, but that the wines have a bit more body than in 2007.

We tasted each of the wines, and then we drank them with lunch! An exclamation point because I thought it was such a smart way to do something like this. Sure, they could have barraged us with 15 different wines, but instead they selected five, and allowed us to get to know them with food.

I liked all of the wines, and of course it is great fun to drink wines from Grand Cru terroirs like Bougros and Les Clos, but on this day the wine that showed best was the 1er Cru Vaulorent, a wine made from a parcel within the 1er Cru Fourchaume vineyards. This wine was ripe and rich, but also very controlled and elegant, and it showed classy white flower and stone aromas and flavors. The finish was rather delicate, and the fruit there was outlined with distinct seashell and iodine notes, quintessential Chablis sensations. The Grand Cru wines were bigger and richer, and also still very much closed, so it was hard for me to truly understand them. I would love to drink them again in 5 years. But they were certainly delicious, and Les Clos in particular seemed to offer tremendous potential. It was more expressive toward the end of lunch with a simple and terrific plate of grilled black bass served with braised fennel, a dish that looked far more lovely before I tucked into it, before I snapped this photo. But you get the idea.

During our lunch I asked Dider Séguier which Chablis wines he liked to drink when he wasn't drinking his own wines. He said that he obviously liked Raveneau and Dauvissat, and then he named a few that I hadn't heard of (and mostly cannot remember now), and said that they were very small producers whose wines he doesn't think make it to the US. It turns out that one of them does, Domaine Collet, whose wines I've not had, but will have to try. I asked if he likes Alice and Oliver De Moor and he said yes, he likes some of the wines very much.

And when he said that about the De Moor wines I had a moment of clarity regarding an issue that's been in the wine news lately - Natural wines. There are Natural wine people out there who would patently dismiss the Fèvre wines because they are not remotely in the Natural wine camp (the fact that Séguier is in the process of converting fully to organic farming notwithstanding). Some of these people would dismiss the wines without ever tasting them, in the manner that in high school the goths dismissed the jocks, and the punks dismissed the stoners, but that's not what interests me here. There are measured and open minded people, real wine lovers, who might dismiss Fèvre wines because they fall under a large corporate umbrella, or dismiss them because they are made conventionally and they don't fit in with the prevailing ethos of Natural wines. I will admit that I have dismissed them too.

But I've had plenty of Fèvre wines in the past few months, and they can be very, very good. And the things is, I also love Alice and Olivier De Moor's wines. For me, there is room for Alice and Olivier De Moor and there is also room for Fèvre, they are not mutually exclusive. Appreciating a Fèvre wine does not dull my enthusiasm for the De Moor's amazing wines or my appreciation of their earth-friendly environmental practices. Nor would my enthusiasm for the De Moor wines be dulled if there were a severe rot problem in one of their parcels, and they were forced to use a chemical spray in order to preserve their income that year.

One of the problems with the natural wine movement, as I see it, is that it has painted itself into a corner, in a way. To acknowledge that Fèvre's wines, for example, can be very good, to drink one and to find it delicious and terroir expressive, would somehow be a betrayal of the Natural wine movement. There are very few things that can wisely be viewed in stark black and white terms, and I don't think that wine is one of them.