A Conversation with Neal Rosenthal - Part 2

More conversation with Neal Rosenthal:

Finished with our tour of the grounds, we went inside the house for a look around. Neal showed me his root cellar, where he grabbed a bunch of his potatoes for our lunch. There were rows of jarred tomato sauce and other preserves, made from the fruits of his farm.

Also many rows of Italian food products - anchovies, honeys, olive oils, and more.

NR: These are food and cooking products that we import from Italy. I haven't figured out how to sell them yet (he shrugs).

BG: (picking up a jar of utterly beautiful rosy pink anchovy fillets) These look beautiful! Are they for cooking or for eating?

NR: I cook with them, but you could just eat them.

Then we passed a large shelf where 50 or more bottles of wine stood.

NR: These are wines that we'll drink soon.

BG: Nice! I have a bottle of that wine, the 2004 Pradeaux.

NR: The Longue Garde?

BG: Yup. I have the regular wine too.

NR: The Longue Garde is a very special wine. It's made only in the best vintages, and it's old vines pure Mourvedre. It's a spectacular wine (he smiles).

At that moment, and via that exchange, I felt like I understood something about Neal Rosenthal that cannot come through simply by reading this dialogue. He was genuinely happy. Perhaps because I have the wine, perhaps because he enjoys telling people about his wine, but it seemed to me, that he was happy just because the wine exists.

BG: You'll taste these all in the next few weeks?

NR: Kerry and I drink a bottle of wine with dinner every night. We have to drink our wines in order to see where they go, to keep up with them. They are evolving constantly and I need to understand them. I've made a career on tasting wines young and having a sense of whether they will age well, or be better young, but I have to check on them to follow their development.

BG: Do you drink wines from outside of your own portfolio?

NR: Of course. It is the height of hubris to think that your own wines are the best or among the best wines if you don't drink the other wines.

Now we walked upstairs and through the living room, into the kitchen. Neal told me to sit down at the table, and he began to make lunch.

He opened a bottle of wine for us to share, the 2005 François Gaunoux Meursault 1er Cru La Goutte D'Or. He began washing and cutting potatoes, and cooking them in a cast iron pan. He seasoned them simply with salt, pepper, and a bit of dried red chili flakes. Neal made the egg batter for our omelets, and we talked some more while he cooked.

I noticed that there were no lights on in the house. There was no need - it was a sunny day and the windows allowed in a lot of natural light. We didn't discuss this, but I'm sure that he enjoys not having to turn on the lights.

BG: So, do you read about wine on the internet?

NR: I do, but not so much. The thing is, I'd rather read online than read the boring repetitive useless stuff that the critics write in those magazines, you know the ones, they come out every three months or so. Their wine vocabulary encompasses 20 descriptors and a point score. That is useless. Wines shouldn't be written about that way. They write only about the physical characteristics of a wine, but they don't discuss the exuberance and joy of drinking the wine.

BG: So what are the internet sites that you like?

NR: There are a few, but you know, on the other hand, a lot of what's online can be fairly uneducated and that can be dangerous. I'm occasionally tempted to write a response when I think that some one is misunderstanding a wine, misinterpreting it. But I don't because once you do that, it becomes argumentative and that's not where I want to be.

BG: So how do you keep building your wine knowledge?

NR: By tasting and drinking. I cannot spend as much time tasting as I used to, there's just not a lot of time. Most of the tasting I do is in Europe with growers, the growers I work with and others who I don't work with too.

BG: I know that you don't do trade tastings. Can you tell me your thoughts about that?

NR: The only way to understand what we do is face to face, not in a mass group tasting experience. We like to get 10-12 people together and drink wine, talk about it. If you have hundreds of people in a room sipping and spitting hundreds of wines, what's the point of that? You cannot understand our wines that way. Not only don't I need to do tastings like that, I despise them. They reduce wine to the most base commercial level.

Neal stopped cooking and looked at me.

NR: We have to protect what's best about wine. It is ancient in our civilization, it is a perfect mix of the intellectual and the sensual, it enriches our lives. The beauty of great wine is that it lives inside of you after you've had it. It's a stimulus for memory. What it tasted like, but more importantly, what it made you feel, why you drank it, what you talked about while drinking it, and with whom. Wine is a social event, not fodder for criticism.

We sat down to lunch. There is no yellow or orange food coloring in that omelet - the eggs were very fresh.

NR: Do you like the wine?

BG: I really do. When you opened it I could smell it before you even poured it.

NR: It's very old-school.


To be continued...

2004 Burgundy Red Wine - How Bad is it?

It is commonly said that 2004 is the worst recent vintage for red wine in Burgundy. The weather was not good - lots of rain and a lot of rot. But that in itself is probably not the biggest problem with the 2004's. As Bill Nanson of Burgundy Report first wrote about, ladybugs were all over the vineyards in 2004. I heard that they were released to combat some or other aphid, but I cannot substantiate that claim. In any case, when ladybugs are trying to attract a mate or are under duress, they release a chemical of a class called methoxy-pyrazines. This chemical can cause off aromas in wine that are often described as green. But not in the unripe sense, in otherwise ripe wines, it is a vegetal, raw cedar, seaweedy, unpleasant aroma and taste. Anyway, the ladybugs, and if not the bugs then the chemicals they released, ended up mixed in with the grapes as they fermented. Not in every wine, obviously, but in some - perhaps as many as 30% of total red wines were affected.

I bought some 2004 wines. I was feeling rather pessimistic about their potential until a few months ago when Peter Wasserman told me that the wines are improving, losing the smell. I decided that I wanted to explore the 2004's - are they really as bad as they're supposed to be? So I got together with a group of Burgundy loving friends who all dug deeply into their cellars and we drank a load of wine - top producers, from villages to Grand Cru.

Here are the wines we drank, in the order that we drank them with our dinner:

Jean-Marc Morey Beaune 1er Cru Grèves.
François Gaunoux Pommard 1er Cru Rugiens.
JF Mugnier Chambolle-Musigny.
Ghislaine Barthod Chambolle-Musigny.
Fourrier Gevrey-Chambertin.
Fourrier Gevrey-Chambertin 1er Cru Cherbaudes.
Sylvie Esmonin Gevrey-Chambertin Vieille Vignes.
Robert Chevillon Nuits St. Georges 1er Cru Les Chaignots.
Mugneret-Gibourg Nuits St. Georges 1er Cru Les Chaignots.
Sylvain Cathiard Nuits St. Georges 1er Cru Aux Murgers.
Robert Chevillon Nuits St. Georges 1er Cru Les Pruliers.
Robert Chevillon Nuits St. Georges 1er Cru Les Saint-Georges.
Hudelot-Noëllat Vosne-Romanée 1er Cru Les Beaumonts.
Hudelot-Noëllat Vosne-Romanée 1er Cru Les Suchots.
Hudelot-Noëllat Vosne-Romanée Grand Cru Romanée St. Vivant.
Jean Tardy Echezeaux Vieille Vignes.

I have no tasting notes to share with you because I didn't take any, but you can read Keith Levenberg's notes here. I want to share some thoughts, though.

People generally agreed that the wines showed better than expected. There were a few that I would call excellent wines, wines that lived up to their potential in a difficult vintage. At the same time, people said that they wouldn't run to the stores to buy them. There were some delicious wines that seemed to me to be in perfect place for drinking. The Fourrier Gevrey-Chambertin, for example - I thought it was great. I liked its clarity and purity, its clean and very pretty fruit. I thought it showcased Fourrier's sheer and elegant style. I also thought Morey's Beaune Grèves was in a good spot for immediate drinking. And although the oak was more prominent than I might like, I thought that Mugnier's Chambolle was a lovely wine.

And the thing is, some of the others at the table experienced those wines completely differently. I didn't hear anything negative about the Fourrier wine, but I did hear some say that the Beaune was too oaky, and that the Mugnier wine was clunky, that they preferred the Barthod Chambolle. Hmmm, I found the Barthod wine to be essentially undrinkable. The roasted seaweed and vegetal aromas were just too much for me. But others liked the wine, and I love the fact that this whole thing is complicated enough so that a group of people sharing the same bottles could have such a diverse take on them.

Some of the wines showed the off aromas and flavors that 2004 is accused of. I found the Barthod Chambolle to be the greatest offender, but the two Chaignots and Hudelot-Noëllat's Beaumonts also showed green to me. I thought the Pommard was affected too, but others disagreed, saying that it was just the odd expression of minerality in a good young Pommard Rugiens. I was not convinced. Until I drank the leftovers on day three and the wine was absolutely lovely - crushed stones and flowers, with no traces of green. There may have been others that were affected and I missed them - not everyone agreed with me when I thought a wine smelled or tasted green.

Some of the wines greatly improved over the course of a few days, shedding bulk, gaining definition. For example, I wasn't moved by Sylvie Esmonin's Gevrey Chambertin during our dinner. I found it to be a big wine that didn't show much other than ripe fruit. But on day three it was far more articulate, showing intensity and detail, and a lovely earthy finish. The wines that initially showed green aromas and flavors, however, did not lose those aromas and flavors over the course of several days. Perhaps the 2004 green wines will not lose the green?

The group seemed to agree that 2004 is a vintage in which the quality of the wines very closely adheres to the relative nobility of terroir. For example, as good as the Fourrier villages wine was, its 1er Cru counterpart showed that much more nuance and distinction. I thought this wine was just excellent, and if I owned any I would cellar it for another 8 years or so, the way I would any good 1er Cru from a good producer.

Similarly, Chevillon's 1er Cru Pruliers was good. But Les Saint-Georges was a great wine, a wine that in my opinion was everything Les Saint-Georges is supposed to be - full of ripe and rich dark fruit, perfectly structured and balanced, and with lots of depth and complexity that is just beginning to hint at itself at this early stage in its life.

Hudelot-Noëllat's 1er Cru Suchots was good, especially on days two and three, but the Grand Cru was a very big step up. I thought that it, along with Les Saint-Georges, were the two finest wines on the table.

So, 2004 Burgundy Red Wine - How Bad is it? At this point I would say this: not as bad as you might think. Focus on the wines from the best terroirs. Give the wines time to develop like you would in a typical vintage. And if you have a wine that was affected by the greenies, it might be a simple case of bad luck - doesn't seem like the green aromas are going anywhere, not any time soon, at least.