Rhode Island Wine Weekend, Part I

You know how you have those weekends where you go out of town to a friend's house where a bunch of serious wine lovers gather over a few dinners to open and share truly great old wines?

Yeah, me neither. But this past weekend was exactly that for me. I spent time with old friends, met some excellent new friends, and drank some incredible things. On Sunday, on the way home in the car, I drowsily told Peter that there were three major things I learned about wine during the weekend. And so, dear reader, I will now present part 1 of what I think likely will become a syndicated sensation known as Rhode Island Wine Weekend...

Big House Champagne and Grower Champagne are very Different from one Anther, and Big House Champagne is Good Too. 

We arrived after a long and traffic-filled drive, washed up, and joined forces with our friends at the Hourglass Brasserie in Bristol. We were visiting a friend from our Burgundy Wine Club. He and several of his wine pals set up a 5-course dinner at Hourglass so that we could enjoy good food and wine together.

These gentlemen are an organized bunch. The very first thing we drank was a bottle of recently released NV Pol Roger Brut Réserve Champagne. Smelling and drinking this wine, I had a mini-epiphany about Champagne. It's not so easy to explain why this felt like a deep thought, but it did: big house Champagne and grower Champagne are very different from one another, and big house Champagne is good too. They are trying to do different things, and both types of wine have value. Sure, I prefer one style over the other, in general, but there are great wines made in each style.

Pol Roger is a grand old Champagne house with a rich history, and a cuvée named after a British former head of state. I do not have a lot of experience with the wines - I've had maybe 4 or 5 bottles before this evening. But I drank this wine and I felt as though I finally understood something about the nature of big house Champagne. The wine is not trying to showcase purity of fruit, as do the wines of Cédric Bouchard, for example. The wines are not trying for a uniqueness in expression of character or terroir. When well made, a big house wine like Pol Roger's NV Brut achieves a striking balance, a focused harmony, a fine-ness of construction. The point of the wine is how well made it is, how fine it is, and that it is made in the Pol Roger house style.

Pol Roger NV Brut did not thrill me (and that is a subjective comment), but I understood immediately that this is a well made wine. It was entirely focused and fine in its texture and flow throughout the palate, well balanced, and chalky and long on the finish. The wine had no deficits, it was not lacking in anything, and it was pleasing. And in this way it is successful. It reminded me of the Henriot Blanc de Blancs I drank in San Francisco a few months ago at Hog Island Oyster Company. A delicious, focused, and classic Blanc de Blancs Champagne. It did not thrill me the way certain other Blanc de Blancs wines thrill me, but its quality was unmistakable. It is classic, and speaks the language of Champage in its focus, balance, finesse, and chalky minerality.

If I were at a wine store or restaurant and faced with a broad selection of non-vintage Champagnes, I would not choose Pol Roger's over Bereche's or Chartogne-Taillet's. But that is because I prefer those other wines, not because Pol Roger's is of lesser quality. This is the thing that became crystal clear for me this weekend at Hourglass. Pol Roger is also a very high quality wine. We've been conditioned in the past decade to think otherwise, as grower Champagnes fought for their place in the US market and as supporters of grower Champagne sought to define their niche. Appreciating these very different styles of wine need not be mutually exclusive.

After we drank Pol Roger, we moved onto a bottle of Lanson NV Black Label from the 1960's - we were not certain of the exact vintage of the base wines. Lanson is another big house with a rich (and rocky) history. These are not wines that I would buy today, but older wines from the 60's and 70's are supposed to be of very high quality. This bottle was a great example - the wine was legitimately great. So well put together, so complex, so long, such great poise and charm. To hear Peter talk about it, he wine is was made in an era when grapes were picked at lower levels of ripeness than they are today, and at higher levels of acidity. And they did not go through malolactic fermentation, so the acidity is untamed, if you will. A wine made like this should age well, and this one has, feeling fresh and vibrant, with a mature and potent character. And by the way, this wine paired beautifully with almost everything we ate, from oysters to duck. It's absurd to think that a modern grower NV Brut would show this same character after 40-plus years in the bottle. But it wouldn't be trying to - they are different, and both have value.

The following evening we began our dinner with a magnum of 1981 Lanson Brut Champagne. Initially I found the toasty notes to be distracting and I was not enjoying the wine so much. But an hour or so later, after letting it relax in the glass, the wine was delicious. It was deeply saline, focused and well balanced, and it felt completely harmonious.

There is one thing that I've not said about the 1981 or the NV from the 60's (or the Pol Roger). To my inexperienced palate, neither wine expressed much in the way of terroir, not the way some grower Champagnes can. Peter Liem could make a convincing case for how the Pol Roger and the Lanson wines express terroir, and he is correct. But to my palate, relative to today's grower Champagnes of similar quality, the wines are more about other things and less about terroir expression. They are about fineness of construction, and this is a valuable thing too.

During dinner Peter said "Understanding these wines is part of understanding Champagne. Drinking grower wines without drinking and understanding these wines is like looking at modern art without having seem the classics."

More soon - we drank loads of amazing wine and I learned several other scintillating things, which are sure to titillate you. 

A Night in Detroit - Slows BBQ and The Sugar House Bar

I recently spent a day in Detroit. It was a work trip. But two old college friends live in the area and so after work there was an evening of Detroit fun. And we had a great evening, which I will tell you about in a moment. But first, you may have heard something about Detroit in the news recently, something about bankruptcy. It's true, the city filed for bankruptcy. The thing is, and I can say this with only a little bit of familiarity with the city, Detroit has been a mess for at least 15 years now, and probably longer.

Office buildings in the downtown area sit abandoned. Entire office buildings. Neighborhoods are depleted of people, home after home burned out or boarded up, huge weeds and other greenery rising up and reclaiming the space. The new urban jungle. Maybe 600,000 people live in Detroit now, down from 2 million at peak, maybe 50 years ago. There are almost no new jobs. There is no smart way for the city to provide basic services, like picking up garbage, when perhaps only ten families live in a 5 square block radius.

Detroiters like to tell you that their city is so big that San Francisco, Boston, and Manhattan combined would fit within its borders. And yet many of its residents do not own a sea-worthy automobile. But there are new sports stadiums, casinos, and a convention center. I hear about how the South Bronx is the poorest urban congressional district in the US, but it cannot be - it must be Detroit (or New Orleans?). Driving though this city made me feel like I was in a forgotten place, a place that was devastated and then never rebuilt. There is a set of large housing project buildings you see when you arrive from the airport on the main highway, all completely abandoned. Graffiti on top of one reads, in huge white block letters, "Zombie Land."

And yet the people I met at work were people who believe in their city and are working to help rebuild. And my friend from college who now lives in Detroit with his wife and two sons - he loves it. He says that he has learned to appreciate the beauty of the barren cityscape, the bones of the old buildings. He showed me the new park/performance space in the city center, office buildings that are now occupied after sitting vacant for 20 years, and new hotels, cafes, and restaurants. He told me that there are people investing in Detroit, and that there are good things happening, that this place is full of potential. After 24 hours and a bit of a tour, I can feel it in my gut - I agree with my friend. It is an oddly beautiful place. And there is plenty of room for intrepid and creative people to make their dream a reality.  Detroit is urban America at rock bottom, and so there is no where to go but up.

Slows Bar BQ is part of the upswing. We went for dinner on a Thursday night and there was a 90 minute wait for a table. In NYC that would be a big turn off, but here in Detroit we were happy to hang out at the bar and enjoy a few pints of locally brewed pilsner. In NYC, why wait for food - there are 6 gajillion places with interesting food here. In Detroit it felt great to be in this airy and beautiful space bustling with people of all ages and types, woodsmoke in the air, good music and good vibes too. And then the food came, and it was genuinely excellent. Slows is serious BBQ, without question. We ate baby back ribs, tasty sides, and my friend had a pit smoked ham sandwich that was ridiculous. My favorite part of our dinner was when our community table neighbors saw me staring longingly at their St. Louis style rack of ribs, and insisted on sharing with us. Yes, they ripped a hunk of ribs off their own plate and passed it on down. There was also the check, which came to something like 75 bucks for four pints, a big dinner, and a few glasses of good rye whiskey which we shared with our generous new St. Louis ribs friends. Slows. I'm in, hook line and sinker.

After dinner we went next door for a last drink to a bar called the Sugar House. Photo above courtesy of Hell Yeah Detroit. Now, if you've been reading my blog for a little while, you know that I like to poke fun at the whole cocktail craze thing, in all of its hipster insanity. I mean, I like a good cocktail because I enjoy the way it tastes and feels, and I like the act of drinking it with friends. The idea of going to a hipster joint to drink a foodster drink, merely for the purpose of being a foodster...that doesn't excite me. So in NYC I would poke fun at the guy in the picture above, the dude in the top hat. In NYC it would be trying too hard. Although it does have a certain vampirish quality to it that might make it okay.

This guy, Yani Frye is his name, made us our drinks at Sugar House. He was disarmingly friendly and he exuded this happy-as-a-clam aura. He is a guy who is genuinely happy to be making serious cocktails for Detroit. And without a trace of attitude, regardless of what the top hat might lead you to expect. His bar has no fewer than 6 big game busts on the wall including several bucks with complicated antlers. The lighting is mason jars, the vibe is unmistakably Brooklyn. But why shouldn't Detroit have a spot that uses this atmosphere (and top hat style costuming) to communicate its aspirations as a serious cocktail bar? It's all part of the Detroit upswing.The drinks were really good, by the way, by any standard.

And then we walked past the abandoned train station to our car and I slept in a hotel connected to a casino. Slows was my idea, by the way. My friend tells me there are other places that I would love. Next time I'm in Detroit, which I hope is soon, I will take him up on that.

Wine Glasses and Champagne

Warning: I am about to write about an expensive wine glass, and I will suggest to you that it is the best of its type, and worth the money. And furthermore, that if you pay good money for good wine, you should buy this glass if you have not already.

Why the warning? A lot of folks think that wine glasses don't matter, and that appreciating good glasses is snobbery or snake medicine. These people are wrong - there's no other way to say it. It's not entirely their fault, though. There is an unfortunate snobby culture that has been part of the modern history of wine appreciation and people might mistake the idea that some glasses are better than others with the false notion that you must use a certain glass to drink wine correctly. This is obviously not true. We have all had memorable experiences drinking wine out of bad wine glasses. It is not necessary to have the best glasses in order to enjoy a wine.

That said, some glasses really are better than others. A good Burgundy glass, for example, allows a good Burgundy wine to show more of what makes it a good Burgundy wine. If you drink a wine out of different glasses, the wine will show best in one of those glasses - there is a difference. And I'm not suggesting this in a snobby way - there is no "right" way to drink wine, and you should do whatever makes you happy. But there is something to this, this glassware thing. If you are someone who will spend $75 on a bottle of Champagne, for example, you might consider experimenting with different glasses. You might find that the wines you care about actually show better, given certain glasses.

There are few instances in which I feel that I know which glasses are best. Here is one instance: Champagne shows best out of Riedel Sommelier Series Vintage Champagne glasses. In the above photo the Riedel Champagne glass is on the left. It is a flute, basically, and this is not the fashionable way to drink Champagne these days. People like to drink Champagne from wider bottomed glasses like the Zalto (the middle glass in the above photo), or even from a Burgundy bowl. To me, the flute is the riskiest way to drink Champagne. Bad flutes (which to me are most flutes) restrict the aromas and flavors. But this is no ordinary flute. It is wider everywhere, and widens even more above the glass's halfway point. I cannot say that I understand the science here, but I appreciate the results.

This is not my discovery, by the way, Peter Liem first told me about this. The photo above was taken at his house in December as we drank 2002 René Geoffroy Cuveé Volupté out of three different glasses. I went in with an open mind and there was no mistaking it. The aromas were more focused in the Riedel glass and yet still expansive and complex, and it just moved onto the palate better, feeling more balanced. I had tried drinking Champagne out of this glass before, but after this experiment I literally refused to open a bottle until I bought a set of these glasses for myself. This, my friends, is an expensive proposition - they are about $75 a stem. But I own some decent Champagne, and the value this glass adds to the experience of drinking Champagne makes the glass worth more than its dollar value.

The first Champagne I drank from my new glasses was the 2008 Marie-Noëlle Ledru Rosé de Saignée. It's not a wine that emphasizes fruit, instead feeling very mineral and earthy. In the Riedel glass the wine's subtle fruit flavors mingled with the more intense minerality, and the wine showed perfect balance.

Since then I've used these glasses quite a few times and always with great results. It makes sense to me that wines based on Chardonnay would show beautifully from this glass. I've tried several times now and the pinnacle for me was this:

The 2002 Pierre Peters Blanc de Blancs Les Chétillons is a stunning wine, and in this glass the aromas were positively regal and flowing. Incisive chalk, green tea, and floral aromas, just beautiful and complex aromatically, and very finely detailed on the palate, which builds in complexity through the finish. Amazing wine, and although I did no empirical testing, it's hard to imagine a wine glass that would be a better medium through which to experience this Champagne. 

What about Champagne made from red grapes - would a Pinot Noir based Champagne also show as well? From what I've seen, the answer is emphatically yes. It's not about displaying the fruitiness of one kind of grape. What makes this glass special is the way it amplifies detail of aroma and flavor while facilitating balance, and this is not grape-specific.

Not long ago a few friends and I cracked a bottle of 2008 Marie-Noëlle Ledru Blanc de Noirs Cuvée Goulté, you know, just to see where it is. Although young and tightly wound, in this glass the wine's bright and energetic fruit shows through brilliantly, as does the vibrantly chalky floor on which everything rests. The next day I poured a small bit into a Burgundy bowl and a Zalto universal and in both cases, the aromas were more diffuse and the overall experience less pleasing.

The other night, on Peter's birthday, (and because of his generosity - he gave us this gift, on his birthday) I had the opportunity to drink a very special wine.

This is one of Selosse's single vineyard Champages. It comes from the village of Aÿ, from a vineyard called La Côte Faron. Selosse began the mini-solera for this wine in 1994 - there are wines that are19 year old in the blend! Until recently this wine was called Contraste, but Selosse has been releasing a series of single vineyard wines in the past few years and this one is among them, its name now La Côte Faron. The wine is gorgeous and there are many fascinating things about it. One thing I was conscious of as we drank it (over 4 hours) was glassware. We drank it out of the Riedel glass. But this wine is made entirely of Pinot Noir, and is composed of wines from vintages 1994 - 2003 (the current release includes some 2004 I believe - this one was released a few years ago). Would the inherent complexity, the aromatic expansiveness be compromised in the flute-shaped glass?

No, as it turns out. I didn't try the wine from a Burgundy bowl, but drinking it out of the Riedel glass was enough. The wine, especially after a couple hours open, showed incredible breadth, complexity, and detail, but in this glass was also entirely chiseled in its focus.

Here is a wine that I love, but have yet to drink out of the Riedel glass. Éric Rodez Cuvée des Crayères is a wine that comes entirely from Ambonnay, but it is not a Blanc de Noirs. It is a blend of a little more than half Pinot Noir and the rest Chardonnay, and it is a blend of several vintages - in this case the base wine is 2008 and there are reserve wines from 2007 back to 2002 in there. In this way it is reminiscent of the Selosse wine - the wine has an intrinsic complexity due to the high proportion of reserve wines. Okay, it's not Selosse, but it's not trying to be. And it is $55 compared with the $400 you'd spend on La Côte Faron if you could locate a bottle in the US. I look forward to seeing what this wine is like in the Riedel glass - maybe some experimentation with other glasses is in order. 

An Early-Summer Lunch

Mid-Summer Laundry List

I've been meaning to write more, I really have. It's not as though there's been a shortage of interesting food and wine to discuss - it's been an embarrassment of riches. But I am trying to write when I have a story to tell, not simply to blabber on when I eat or drink something interesting. That said, the other day I was in Washington DC and had dinner with my pal Keith Levenberg, and he gently chastised me for not writing so much. He said that I shouldn't worry about writing the occasional "here is what I ate or drank" post.

I still disagree - I want to write when I have a story to tell. But sometimes one needs to get the proverbial juices flowing, and a laundry list post is a fun (for the writer, anyway) way to do that. So, patient reader, here is a mid-summer laundry list for you. Here are some things that I've been doing:

It's been over two years now, but I finally got my grill up and running again. Wow, I love to grill. With hardwood charcoal. The slow way, but the dee-licious and lighter-fluid-free way.

My pizza dough is beginning to be more consistent now too. It turns out that the small details are crucial - punching down, but not kneading the dough after it rises, for example.

I spent some time (and way too much money) with my daughters planting on our deck. For a while, things really looked great. Then it rained everyday for over a week. Then the heatwave came. Plants that like super hot weather are doing okay, like the poppies above. Many other things have simply wilted. Next year I will choose plants more wisely - things that like intense sun and heat. Because NYC in the summer is now essentially the same as Dubai. But there is no climate change, people!

There's been a lot of great wine.

Some of it fabulous and now very expensive wine from iconic vineyards, wines that achieved great heights.

Some of it more humble in terroir and aspiration, but capable of giving a different and also very valuable type of pleasure.

I drank a few wines that are beloved by many wine folk, but that are completely new to me. This one was utterly compelling.

I drank wine by producers I know and love, but wine that is new to me. This one is intensely sweet - a style that is hard for me to appreciate. But the quality here is simply impossible to miss and the wine was delicious and entirely expressive of place, even as a dessert wine. This is not an easy trick.

I am lucky to have generous friends who take pleasure in sharing their treasures.

And I try to do the same. This was my last bottle, and let me tell you - with 3 years of bottle age this wine is a finely tuned symphony of Manzanilla greatness.

It's been a great summer and summer is only a month old. The outlook for the net two months is quite positive. More soon.

Heat Damage - a Brief Addendum

A friend who is visiting her family in Italy sent an email to me yesterday:

"Hey, look what I found in my grandpa's closet... kept for 40-50 years there like this. Standing, no temperature control, forget about humidity... What a pity!"

Yup, those wines are from the 1950's and 60's. I wonder if anything in there could be drinkable. The corks have to be dry and shriveled. The wines must be oxidized, right? Who knows though...

Heat Damage

Summer is in full swing here in NYC and we are having a hot one. For the past two weeks it's been in the high 80's to the upper 90's and quite humid. I enjoy this weather, actually. Not for all year round, but for a few high summer weeks I think it's nice. I'm not a fan of air conditioning - much prefer to open windows and use fans to keep air circulating. The kids are used to it, I'm fine with it, everyone is okay.

Except, maybe not everyone.

This is my wine fridge. I have another, larger one too. When I bought the smaller one I did not have enough wine to fill it. But as they say, "if you build it they will come." Now both fridges are jammed to the gills. Funny thing is I feel like my wine collection is woefully imbalanced and that I could double it and only begin to be well represented in the things I care about. It's pretty efficient though - there is very little space devoted to wines that are no longer important to me.

And still, I suffer from an ailment that afflicts many wine lovers. It is commonly known as wine-under-the-bed syndrome. In some areas of the United States it manifests itself as wine-in-the-closet syndrome. The ill effects of this disease are typically felt in the hottest months, and last week I had a major flare-up. 

I should tell you first that I try to contain this problem to the best of my ability. The wines under the bed are almost exclusively meant for near-term drinking. There are, however, some wines that really should be in a temperature controlled environment. I say this because my plan is to age them and drink them years from now, when they mature. Exposure to prolonged heat above 70 degrees is bad for wine. It compromises the sensory experience one can expect from that wine over time. In other words, it is highly likely that a heat-exposed wine will not smell or taste as good as an identical wine that is properly cellared. Here is an interesting piece of writing on this topic, for those of you who want to get academic with it.

The other evening I was rummaging through one of the boxes under the bed and I noticed that a bottle of Riesling I bought with the intention of cellaring had literally blown its top. The top portion of the capsule had been cleanly severed by the cork, which now protrudes from the bottle. It was a separate piece of capsule but the cork pushed it off. This poor wine is the 2011 Schloss Lieser Niederberg Helden Riesling Spätlese. I bought two bottles in the late spring after my umpteenth experience swooning over a mature Riesling and lamenting that I own almost none. Maybe not the most promising vintage for aging, with its plumpness and relatively low acidity, but I drank the basic 2011 Schloss Lieser and it was great, and I know the producer to be top notch. Why not give this well-priced Spätlese a try?

Why these particular bottles showed the effects of the heat and others did not is a mystery to me. I found that both bottles of Schloss Lieser Spätlese were obviously damaged. The one in the photo is the result of excess pressure generated inside the bottle by the heat, I'm guessing. The other one had sticky seepage coming from under the capsule (but I drank it and the wine was delicious). The same producer's 2011 Kabinett - no signs of damage. The bottles of Weiser-Künstler Spätlese and Kabinett in the very same wine box...no problems that I can detect.

So, I looked through the rest of the under-the-bed boxes and found that there are a few bottles whose corks look to be in the opposite state - they seem as though they've been pushed down into the bottle a little bit. Not all of the wines, only a few. But sadly, they include wines that I care about and had hoped to age.

This one is the 2010 Stony Hill Chardonnay. I bought two bottles at the winery and was very much looking forward to drinking them in 10 years or so. Both have corks that feel pushed down. I imagine it would be safer to drink them soon. The other hurt bottles are the 2010 Pépière Granite de Clisson, and again, it's all of them that have the weirdly depressed corks. There must be something about those particular wines (or those corks?). The only other under-the-bed wine that I meant to cellar is the 2011 Gonon Saint-Joseph and it seems completely fine, with free spinning capsules and a normal feel to the cork and the lip of the bottle. But it also seems rational to assume that those wines have been compromised by the same heat that hurt their under-the-bed neighbors. I'll probably keep them and try one in 10 years. If it's no good, I'll serve the others to Richard Nixon while my other guests drink my properly cellared 2010's.

There is a lesson in here somewhere, but not one that I'm willing to accept. Keep less wine in the house - I'd like to but doesn't seem possible. Or, keep the air conditioner on when the temperature rises above 70 degrees - simply not going to happen. Learn to love my great and age-worthy Syrah and Chardonnay while its really young - seems like a waste. Pay a hefty fee every year for offsite storage, and annoying inventory and delivery fees every time I put in or take out wine - already doing it with a pal, but maybe I should invest more in this, and get rid of one of the fridges too. Win the lottery so I can buy a house with a basement and build a real wine cellar - I will start buying tickets immediately.

This is why so many of us continue to suffer from this painful and destructive condition. There are treatments that can offer some momentary relief, but there is no real cure.