Drink
California Bacchanalia - Inside The World of Pinot Noir
By Adam Leith Gollner
Photo by Gray Hartley, Hitching Post Wines.
Several hundred Pinot people were clustered together in the cellars of Au Bon Climat Winery in Solvang. It was the closing party for California's World of Pinot Noir festival, and everybody was indulging immoderately. Barrels of wine were piled up to the ceiling. There were at least a thousand open bottles to choose from, including old magnums of La Tache, Dom Perignon, and Dr. Loosen. The guy next to me was opening up yet another dust-caked bottle of Grand Cru Bonnes Mares from 1959.
I must've had several thousand sips of wine by that point, and the whole thing was feeling increasingly Dionysian. The crowd of modern-day bacchants was red-faced, disheveled, and happily appeasing the lord of the grapes in the eternal fashion: by drinking glass after glass after glass.
A table covered in open bottles beckoned. Scanning the labels for something recognizable, I picked up a bottle of Arcadian Pinot Noir. The previous evening, John Winthrop Haeger, the author of authoritative books like North American Pinot Noir and Pacific Pinot Noir had mentioned that he considers the winery a personal fave.
Just as I was about to pour myself a glass, I noticed Lindsey Otis across the table. The talented young enologist for Williams Selyem - a cult winery so popular they have a waiting list to get on their mailing list - Lindsey had been seated next to me earlier that day at the luncheon tasting of rare wines from the Domaine Henri Gouges.
"What are we drinking now?" she asked. I splashed some '05 Arcadian "Dierberg Estate" into her Riedel glass, explaining that it's one of Haeger's top picks. Swishing the ruby fluid around, she inhaled deeply. She closed her eyes. She was analyzing the volatile secondary and tertiary aromas with a perspicacity that non-enologists can't even fathom. After taking a swig, she then pronounced the wine "feral."
I tasted it. There was indeed something wild going on, in a nuanced way. As light and refined as it was, the wine still had an untamed edge. It had what the New York Times calls "an almost transparent intensity," that highly sought-after quality of nouveau new world Pinot Noir. Lindsey was inspecting her glass with squinting concentration. "It's quite sauvage," she said. "It tastes like biting into a living-bleeding-furry-mouse." She took another sip. "Yes, definitely raw mouse - with the fur still on it."
Granted, by that point in the evening, we'd both tasted enough wines to lose all sense of time. Our palates weren't exactly dewy fresh. But "bleeding furry mouse" was nonetheless a particularly apt description, given the evening's Dionsyian-revel vibe. It immediately made me think of the classical Greek notion of sparagmos - a ritualistic form of animal dismemberment where limbs, ears, organs - and anything else that can be grabbed ahold of - are manually torn from the beast's body. Frenzied sparagmos sessions often end up with the sacrificed bodies being eaten raw, gore and all. Euripides' tragedy "The Bacchae" features scenes of Maenads ripping goat flesh apart and devouring it saignant - with the fur still on it. In other words, Lindsey's furry-mouse analogy resonated. As far as I could tell, the grape-worshiping mystery cultists around us weren't cloven-hoofed raving ones, but the overabundance of supernacular imbibables lent an ancient, mythical dimension to the proceedings.
We the Thiasus had descended upon the temple of Au Bon Climat for something billed as an American paulee. In Burgundy, the paulee is a communal harvest celebration held every November. "Here the paulee is where you get blotto on the best stuff you've ever tasted," is how one winemaker put it. Beyond sybaritic, it was also a convivial affair. Partygoers mingled with beaming wine professionals. The Hartley-Ostini boys, of Hitching Post fame, were flipping burgers. Vintners from Burgundy were walking around with bottles their grandparents had made. US Pinot legend Jim Clendenen of Au Bon Climat, a Seilen-like figure with flowing white locks, was surrounded by magnums and admirers. He was pouring liberally to anyone with an empty glass. The word "satyr" sprang to mind.
Photos courtesy of World of Pinot Noir
Part of the lure of Pinot oenophilia is the challenge of finding a truly exceptional bottle. Connoisseurs, affectionately known as "Pinot wienies," can go on and on about the ways in which quality varies from vintage to vintage, from vineyard to vineyard, and from bottle to bottle (even in the same year). "Pinot Noir takes a lot of education to understand," Mike Sinor (Sinor-LaVallee), a founder of the World of Pinot Noir, told me. "And 80% of it sucks."
As intricate as the wine is, it's pretty easy to tell when it sucks. "You can't hide the flaws," explained George Bursick, the vice president of winemaking at J Vineyards. "Pinot Noirs are unforgiving. There's no margin of error. Skilled winemakers can fix bad Cabs, but you can't do that with Pinots. They're so pure. It's all purity. It's such a difficult grape to bring to consumers in an elegant way."
Burghound's Allan Meadows, a former CFO of Fidelity National who now spends a third of the year tasting countless Burgundies, was also at the event. Earlier on, at a workshop, he'd explained how it's impossible to understand the nuances of the grape without understanding the context in which it's grown. He then furrowed into a technical exegesis of soil types that was about as esoteric as Maimonides' Guide for The Perplexed. Midway through Meadows' presentation, the guy sitting next to me tapped me on the shoulder and said, "If you aren't into tractors I can see how this might be hard to follow."
Elusive, expensive, and often subpar, wines made with Pinot Noir can be the best you'll ever taste, although it's far more common for them to be frustratingly pedestrian. The ease with which one can burn through an inheritance chasing primo Pinot has even earned it a sobriquet: "the heartbreak grape." Pinot is "not obvious," adherents say. They all insist that good Pinot doesn't just offer itself up to you - you have to pursue it. In the recent film 'Mondovino', Burgundians Hubert de Montille and his daughter Alix elucidate the problem with what they call "slut" wines:
Alix: Un vin pute, il vient tout de suite a vous.
Hubert: Ce sont des vins qui bluffent.
Alix: Ce sont des vins qui vous en foutent plein la gueule des le depart.
Ou qui sont tout en rondeur, et qui vous lachent d'un seul coup.
Hubert: Qui vous lachent. Tac, Ca tombe! Il y a plus rien.
Alix: Ce sont des vins traitres, en fait.
Hubert: Mais le monde moderne, parce qu'il n'a plus le temps de rien,
est habitue, il aime se faire bluffer.
Or, as one blonde Burgundy-lover explained to me: "If I'm on a date and the guy's throwing down big Brunellos and Amarones, I'm like 'that's a small-dick move.' He's overcompensating. It's all status. Nothing against those wines, but drinking them is like listening to loud music all the time. If he orders a Burgundy, I think it's a much more sophisticated move. He's not afraid, and that shows confidence."
True Pinot lovers often speak of a Pinot moment - that particular bottle or sip that enslaves you for life. For me, the vampire's bite was a Chassagne-Montrachet on a trip to the Seychelles. Britain's Jancis Robinson recalls a bottle of Les Amoureuses. A number of attendees at the event said their Pinot Noir moment involved wines produced by Williams-Selyem (especially their bottlings of Rochioli grapes). That's why I was stoked to be tasting wines with Lindsey - a nose who knows. As the French say: le nez sait.
Even though winemakers at the festival complained of some recessionary angst, the past few years have been particularly kind to Pinot producers. Much of the success can be traced back to what people here refer to simply as "The Film." Sideways, Alexander Payne's story of a wine-soaked pilgrimage to these vineyards, helped sales of Pinot Noir increase by over 83% after it's release. And despite the antipathy in the film towards Merlot, sales of that varietal haven't suffered too much. I heard stories of producers having torn out their Merlot vines over the past few years, but Merlot still sells more than Pinot Noir. As hard as I tried, I couldn't locate any Pinot professionals who detested Merlot as much as Myles in Sideways. "Nobody here really detests merlot," explained Sinor. "We all have it in the cellar. It's just that we really, really love Pinot Noir."
Among the most hard-core are the high-level Pinot Noir collectors who attend events like this, vying to outdo each other with their status bottles. "The big dogs here'll walk around with $100,000 of wine in their suitcase," Sinor said. "And their suitcases aren't that big, either." Well, big enough to hold magnums, as well as trophy bottles of DRC, which were busted out at the paulee. Having tasted more grand crus in the space of half an hour than I had previously in my entire life, I was having trouble determining which I liked more: the 1991 Corton from Prince Florent de Merodes, a 1985 Corton-Charlemagne, or a Louis Latour Grand Cru from some other quadrant of perfection on the mountain of Corton.
Before spiraling into this Burgundelicious haze, I'd spent the afternoon tasting many Californian Pinots at the festival tents in Shell Beach. I don't remember most of it. This much is certain: world-class wines are being made in the sunshine state. Here are my top five, with the adjectives I found in my notebook the morning after:
J - Classic. A holy grail of California Pinot Noir.
Hirsch - Harmonious and perfect.
Foxen - Foxy. The Central Coast at its best.
Patz-Hall - So drinkable. Their bottlings of Hyde grapes = liquid gold.
Arcadian - Raw mouse.
I also loved the wines from Robery Sinskey, Seasmoke, Pisoni, Etude, Fiddlehead, Landmark, Evashem, St. Innocent and Campion. But those are simply my personal picks. In the world of Pinot, opinions vary as much as the wines. Unanimity is as hard to find as older vintages of Williams-Selyem. Some seek the stern rigor of a disciplinarian Nuits-St. Georges, while others swoon before the femininity of a Chambolle-Musigny. Some people love Rochioli's west block of grapes; others prefer the east. Just like in hip-hop.
The ever-shifting quality of Pinot Noir is precisely what Burgundians celebrate, explained Bruno Pepin, the rakish commercial director at Louis Latour. (I later learned he is considered an "enigmatic," high-level figure in Burgundy.) As we tasted bottles from Mazis-Chambertin, Clos de Vougeot, and Vosne Romanee, he gave me some insight into his region's philosophy. "There's one constant in Burgundy. We are always surprised by what's in the glass. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad, but it's always surprising. We like a degree of the unknown. Burgundy cannot be standardized." When I asked about California Pinot, he said something moderately diplomatic about the wines being in their "infancy." He said it's impossible to compare them to Burgundy: "they're doing their own thing."
"The French have had centuries to figure out what grows good where," explained Bursick. "They had 700 years of noblemen and monks killing each other over the best plots of land. The conditions are completely different. Burgundy has decomposing limestone; we have tectonic plates, sandstone, exposed beaches, prehistoric marshes, geysers and all sorts of Pleistocene issues. We don't have time to do trial and error, but we do have technology. We do electromagnetic conductivity tests by sending computerized probes into the soil to measure the parameters. Then we plant rootstock accordingly. Nobody in the world is doing anything like this - it's way trick."
Just before the celebration drew to a close, someone passed me a bottle without a label. I poured a bit and took a sniff - marijuana! A sommelier nearby told me that some Californian winemakers make "marijuana Pinot Noir." I never did find out how it's done, but I imagine it involves tossing a bunch of weed in to age with the pressed grapes. However they do it, the wine's bouquet is the equivalent of a bong hit. I was standing next to a marketing manager from Louis Latour, and passed the wine over to her. She gave it a whiff: "Wow - so smoky!" She passed it over to Bruno Pepin, who inhaled and frowned. "C'est du shit, quoi!"
At that moment, Jim Clendenen howled in our general direction. His long hair flowing white, his face glowing red, he was chugging from a 1982 magnum (the year of his first vintage). The Latour gang, whose entry in the World of Pinot Noir Guidebook noted that they'd been making Pinot Noir since 1797, mustered up some half-smiles. This wasn't their usual paulee, but, despite the way-trick American-ness of it all, they were enjoying themselves. After all, you can't worship the God of Wine without letting loose. These Californians may not be able to replicate Burgundy, but they're certainly having fun - fur and all.
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