ALSO BY JASON WILSON
Boozehound: On the Trail of the Rare, the Obscure, and the Overrated in Spirits
Copyright © 2018 Jason Wilson
Cover photography copyright © 2018 Bobby Doherty
Published in 2018 by Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
Portions of this book have been adapted from previously published material in the Washington Post, AFAR, the Smart Set, Table Matters, and Beverage Media.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017949743
ISBN: 978-1-4197-2758-0
eISBN: 978-1-68335-210-5
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To my sons, Sander and Wes, in hopes that they’ll someday discover their own unique tastes (after they turn 21, of course)
A man who was fond of wine was offered some grapes at dessert after dinner. “Much obliged” said he, pushing the plate aside. “I am not accustomed to take my wine in pills.”
— JEAN ANTHELME BRILLAT-SAVARIN
I. THE VINES IN THE SKY
CHAPTER 1 Dangerous Grapes
CHAPTER 2 Château du Blah Blah Blah
CHAPTER 3 Wine and Dada
CHAPTER 4 Alpine Wines
CHAPTER 5 Is Prosecco a Place or a Grape?
CHAPTER 6 When Wine Talk Gets Weird
II. TRAVELS IN THE LOST EMPIRE OF WINE
CHAPTER 7 Wines with Umlauts
CHAPTER 8 The Meaning of Groo-Vee
CHAPTER 9 Blue Frank and Dr. Zweigelt
CHAPTER 10 Gray Pinot, Blueberry Risotto, and Orange Wine
III. SELLING OBSCURITY
CHAPTER 11 Waiting for Bastardo
CHAPTER 12 The Same Port Dick Cheney Likes
CHAPTER 13 Pouring the Unicorn Wine
CHAPTER 14 Looking Forward, Looking Eastward
CHAPTER 15 How Big Is Your Pigeon Tower?
APPENDIX: Gazetteer of Godforsaken Grapes
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX OF SEARCHABLE TERMS
The discovery of a wine is of greater moment than the discovery of a constellation.
The universe is too full of stars.
— BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
In the Swiss canton of Valais, melted cheese is serious business. At the 16th-century Château de Villa in Sierre—billed as Le Temple de la Raclette—the evening’s menu was straightforward: raclette. A guy with a long knife, called a racleur, scraped hot, bubbling, gooey raclette from a wheel onto warm plates that were then whisked to our wooden table, where we added small boiled potatoes served from wooden baskets, along with cornichons, pickled onions, chanterelle mushrooms, and rye bread. After that raclette, there was more raclette. For two hours, the raclette kept coming. Each plate featured a different puddle of raw-milk cheese from a different nearby mountain village. When I asked for ice water, I was gently scolded by the waiter: “Never drink cold water with raclette. The cheese will congeal into a cheese baby in your stomach.”
No water was fine with me. I was at Château de Villa to drink wine with my melted cheese. And not just any wine, but wine made from some of the most obscure grapes in the world. As another round of raclette arrived, Jean-Luc Etievent, my unshaven and pastel-wearing French dining companion, poured a glass of humagne blanche. It tasted strange and big and sexy, full of ripe exotic fruit, surrounded by delicate floral aromas—sort of like mountain flowers picked by a Kardashian wearing a dirndl.
If you’ve never heard of humagne blanche, I don’t blame you. I have been an aficionado of obscure wine and spirits for years, and I’d never heard of this white wine either. Humagne blanche dates to at least the 14th century, and in the mid–19th century it was the most widely grown grape in Valais. Now, only 75 acres of humagne blanche remain in the entire world. By comparison, cabernet sauvignon and merlot each grow on over 700,000 acres worldwide, and chardonnay grows on over 400,000 acres. With a Gallic shrug, Etievent said, “Drinking the same wines all the time is really boring.”
Before I’d finished with my glass of humagne blanche, I was given a second glass by the other wine sherpa at our table, José Vouillamoz, a short, bespectacled Swiss guy in his mid-40s who wears a flat cap and kicks around his nearby hometown of Sion on a kid’s scooter. “We will now taste one of the rarest wines in the world,” he said, with a flourish.
Vouillamoz poured me a glass of wine made with a grape called himbertscha, which he’d helped rescue from a forgotten vineyard found high in the Alps. In the entire world, only these two acres of himbertscha exist, from which less than 800 bottles are made each year. Himbertscha is one of the strangest white wines I have ever tasted—like a forest floor of moss and dandelions that’s been spritzed with lemon and Nutella. Vouillamoz took a big sip and said, “Critics claim that obscure varieties like this will never be as good as Bordeaux or Burgundy. Well, maybe not now. But what about in 50 years? One hundred years?”
We might reasonably call Etievent and Vouillamoz the Indiana Joneses of ampelography—which happens to be the study, identification, and classification of grapevines. Both are explorers on an obsessive hunt for the rarest wine grapes in the world. Vouillamoz is a world-renowned geneticist and botanist, and coauthor of the encyclopedic tome Wine Grapes: A Complete Guide to 1,368 Vine Varieties, Including Their Origins and Flavors (with Julia Harding and Jancis Robinson). His life’s work is the study of vitis vinifera, the European grape species that’s used to make most of the world’s wine. Meanwhile, Etievent is the cofounder of Paris-based Wine Mosaic, a small nonprofit organization that works to rescue indigenous wine grapes from extinction. All over the Mediterranean, from Portugal to Lebanon, Etievent and his similarly obsessed colleagues seek out growers of rare varieties, helping farmers identify what grapes they have, then essentially serving as a support group—organizing tastings and connecting them with importers, university researchers, and wine drinkers.
I found myself in Valais because I’d grown increasingly obsessed with obscure and underappreciated wine grapes, and Etievent had invited me on a harvest-time trip to see and taste some of Wine Mosaic’s most successful projects in the Alps. Here, isolated vineyards, strange microclimates, and decades spent off the traditional wine world’s radar have preserved local grapes and farming traditions. In less than a decade, Wine Mosaic has saved more than 20 traditional Alpine grape varieties from dying out.
Earlier that day, about 40 kilometers from Château de Villa, Etievent and I visited the most extreme vineyards I’d ever experienced, at a craggy mountain place called Domaine de Beudon. Etievent, perhaps channeling a Parisian version of Indiana Jones, carried a pickax and wore heavy leather boots, along with royal blue pants, a white belt, and a pink scarf. We were joined by yet another rare-grape expert, Jean Rosen, vice president of a Dijon-based organization called Cépages Modestes (literally “modest grapes”). Rosen, short, stocky, and bearded, was himself a modest guy. His nickname is “Petit Verdot,” after the least-known and most finicky grape used in Bordeaux blends—a variety that ripens so late that in some years the entire crop is lost. Before Petit Verdot became immersed in esoteric wine grapes, he’d been an English teacher, then an antique ceramics expert.
The only way up to Domaine de Beudon was by a creaky wooden aerial cable car—like something out of a Wes Anderson movie. After we called up to the mountaintop on an old-fashioned phone, we waited as the cable car slowly wobbled down, and then as boxes of grapes were unloaded. A photographer traveling with us, terrified, refused to get into the cable car. Etievent, Petit Verdot, and I squeezed in, and we quickly jolted upward, suspended from a swaying cable. I could see the ground, hundreds of feet below, through the cracks between the floor and the door. About halfway up, the car lurched steeply, climbing almost vertically over a protruding rock face (the beudon, or “belly”) that gives the winery its name. We all looked at one another wide-eyed. “Don’t look down,” Petit Verdot said.
We arrived at the top to fields of verbena and thyme and flowers and chickens wandering freely. The vineyards rose straight up, almost 3,000 feet above sea level. Domaine de Beudon, with its motto, Les vignes dans le ciel (“the vines in the sky”) is considered to be one of the first and most important bio-dynamic wineries in the world. On the cable car platform, we met Domaine de Beudon’s owner, 69-year-old Jacques Granges, who wore a bushy beard and—I kid you not—a beret. We shook hands. Granges was missing his index finger. It seemed as though we’d arrived for an audience with the mythical wizened hermit on the mountaintop.
As we sat at a table overlooking the sunny valley below, Granges brought out a dozen bottles of wine, and set down two jugs. “This one is for spitting, and this one is for dumping,” he said. “I make vinegar.”
“He’s not going to make much vinegar today,” Petit Verdot whispered to me.
Granges said little as he poured his wines. When we oohed and aahed over the first, a golden amber and chalky wine made from the chasselas grape, he said simply, “This is a wine raised by science, conscience, and a lot of love.”
The next wine, from müller-thurgau grapes, was like drinking snow infused with edelweiss. “This is like magic water,” said Petit Verdot. That was followed by somewhat-known sylvaner (called by the name Johannisberg in Valais) and then relatively rare petite arvine, a Swiss variety with less than 500 acres found in the world. That was followed by totally obscure reds from humagne rouge and diolinoir (each less than 300 acres worldwide).
Finally, we tasted a strange hybrid grape called chambourcin, which was created in the 19th century by crossing a French variety with a wild North American variety. Normally, a hybrid grape like this would not be permitted in a European appellation, but Granges was given special permission a few years before to plant chambourcin. “It grows in a very dangerous, steep plot,” he said. “My wife wanted me to plant something there that didn’t need a lot of care and attention since it’s so dangerous.”
I knew a number of American wineries that produced cloying, fruity, mediocre red wines from chambourcin. This mountain chambourcin was different, and for the Frenchmen with me, it was the most unusual and foreign grape of the day. “Very peculiar,” said Petit Verdot as he sipped it.
As our tasting turned into drinking, fruit flies gently buzzed around crates of fresh-picked orchard fruit. My phone died, and time seemed to stop. Petit Verdot pointed toward the Great St. Bernard Pass in the distance. “This is one of the great historic places to cross the Alps,” he said. “The whole region is divided into valleys. They were isolated. Historically, there wasn’t a lot of communication or exchanges. You can see why each place developed its own grapes.”
Even though it was brisk and cool amid the vines in the sky, all day long a bright sun shone over Valais. Finally, the sun began to set and we watched the cable car climb to meet us again. Earlier, Granges’s wife, Marion, had told us that their first cable car, years ago, derailed with Jacques inside, and he’d plunged down the mountain. He’d been badly injured and spent time in a coma. No one said a word on our descent.
A few hours later, over raclette at Château de Villa, I wanted to know: Why had grapes like humagne blanche and humagne rouge and diolinoir and himbertscha nearly disappeared?
“People became ashamed of the old-time grapes, the grapes of grandpa,” Vouillamoz said. “They began planting the so-called ‘noble grapes’ and they would disregard the rest.” Noble is the historic designation for grapes like chardonnay, sauvignon blanc, cabernet sauvignon, merlot, and pinot noir—the ubiquitous international grapes that made Bordeaux and Burgundy famous are now popularly grown everywhere from California to Australia to South Africa to China. “Noble grapes,” Vouillamoz repeated the word with disdain. “I hate this term.” What bothers people like Vouillamoz and Etievent—and me—is that while 1,368 wine grape varieties may exist, the sad truth is that 80 percent of the world’s wine is produced from only 20 grapes. Many of the other 1,348 varieties face extinction.
Another raclette arrived, and it was strong and funky. Throughout dinner, I was taken by how diverse each puddle of cheese had tasted. A few were mild and creamy, one was sharp and piquant, and a couple were stinky and tangy. Much like wine grapes, I’m always surprised by how many cheeses exist in the world. As Charles de Gaulle famously said of France, “How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?” But even de Gaulle underestimated: France has at least 400 varieties of cheese, and probably more than 1,000 if you count subvarieties. And that’s just France: Hundreds of cheeses, each made according to some local tradition, exist in the rest of Europe. Those of us who quest after obscure grapes hope for a world of wine that’s equally raucous and ungovernable. But wine’s diversity is always under threat, and every grape that remains untasted, unknown, and underappreciated faces the risk of extinction.
After pausing only a moment to eat some cheese, Vouillamoz poured yet another rare variety, this one called gwäss. “Gouais?” said Etievent, with a raised eyebrow. Gwäss, better known as gouais blanc in French, has been banned across Europe, by various royal decrees, since the Middle Ages. That’s because monarchs considered it a peasant grape that made bad wine—gou, in medieval French, was a derogatory term to describe something inferior. Its vines were also extremely prolific. Gwäss often took over entire vineyards, and the aristocracy didn’t want a commoner mating with its noble grape varieties.
That’s a curious thing I was learning about grape varieties: Each one has been created by two parents, a father and a mother, that cross-fertilize, just like you’re taught in high school biology. For centuries, we could only hypothesize about a grape’s parentage, but since the advent of DNA testing by scientists like Vouillamoz, we now clearly know the family tree of many grapes. Through DNA testing, for instance, gwäss has been found to be the ancient mother of around 80 varieties, several with noble pinot noir as the father, including chardonnay, gamay, and possibly riesling.
“Yeah, gwäss is kind of a slut,” Vouillamoz said. His girlfriend, who was sitting next to me, shot Vouillamoz an exasperated look. “OK, OK, so we’re not keeping with the times,” he said. “That is a very sexist thing to say. I’m sorry. After all, we call the male grapes ‘Casanovas’ when they father a lot of children.”
I said that it’s really odd to think deeply about the sex life of grapes, especially personifying them to the point of slut-shaming. I told Vouillamoz that I doubted many people wanted to think about reproduction when they spit out an irritating grape seed.
“Yes, but they should!” said Vouillamoz. “A seed is life!”
Clearly, I’d slipped down some sort of rabbit hole into a vast alternate universe of wine geekdom.
I don’t know that I’ve ever really emerged from that rabbit hole. The rare wines from that day at Domaine de Beudon and the dinner in Sierre loomed significantly in my mind for much of the following year. Especially one Saturday during that muggy summer week when everyone lost their minds over Pokémon GO.
All week long, instead of doing work, I’d been wandering, sweatily, around Philadelphia capturing Pokémon on my iPhone. I wasn’t playing this game with my sons. No, the boys were actually away visiting their grandparents in California and I was alone, at loose ends, and I downloaded the app on my own. I found immediate, satisfying success in Pokémon’s world, ignoring the reality of being a guy in his mid-40s trying not to be creepy while meandering through city neighborhoods and parks, eyes glued to the screen, flicking my finger to catch imaginary monsters. I filled my Pokédex with rare species such as the Aerodactyl, the Ponyta, the Venusaur, the Rhyhorn, and the Hitmonchan as they popped up on lawns and benches and garbage cans. After only a few days I was fast approaching Level 18. Needless to say, when I awoke Saturday morning, I was overcome with deep shame about how I’d spent my week.
Yet I couldn’t help but think that Pokémon GO offered some kind of metaphor for my own life as a wine writer. Over the past couple of years, I’d spent weeks and months gallivanting around Europe, seeking out obscure wines made from rare grapes, grown in little-known regions: rotgipfler and zierfandler from Austria’s Thermenregion. baga and antão vaz from Portugal, schiava or lagrein from Italian Südtirol, altesse or verdesse from France’s mountainous Isère. I would sip and taste and consume those wines, then capture my impressions by jotting notes into a black Moleskine. When I thought about my life like this, it was no wonder that many friends and family members didn’t consider my wine writing to be any more serious than Pokémon GO.
In any case, I decided to take a day off from Pokémon. Instead, I paid a visit to the Outer Coastal Plain wine country—which is a pretentious and boozy way of saying that I made a 35-minute drive to the semirural area of southern New Jersey near where I grew up. These days, people endeavor to make quality wine from our sandy South Jersey soil, which always invites snideness, or at least backhandedness: “The Outer Coastal Plain might be the perfect place to make fine wine in America,” said the New York Times in 2013. “The O.C.P. has only one real challenge. It’s in southern New Jersey, a state associated with many things—Springsteen, Snooki, industrial pollution, the mob—but not great wine.”
People love to crack jokes when I tell them about farms in New Jersey. But Gloucester County is one of the few places where the Garden State nickname still makes sense, though even here McMansion cul-de-sacs gobble up the farmland. My family has worked in the produce business here for decades, and my cousins and I bought summer fruit for our own fruit-and-vegetable stand from the county’s many farmers. Back then, the only wine I can remember in South Jersey was sickly sweet blueberry or peach wines that people bought at summer fairs.
I crossed the Walt Whitman Bridge and merged onto Route 55 right before the exit for the Deptford Mall, where I hung out as a mulleted teenager, listening to Bon Jovi and Cinderella blaring from a friend’s Camaro. As I drove, I was seized by some guilt. Even though Gloucester County is not far at all from where I live and work, I rarely return for a visit. Once off the highway, I took a slightly roundabout scenic route, through Elk Township and the community of Aura, which was once among the best peach-growing areas in the nation. As a teen, I’d learned to drive on country roads like these, steering white-knuckled next to Mr. Pickens, the gym teacher who taught Drivers Ed. wearing polyester coach shorts and a whistle around his neck. In Aura, I grew a little sad when I didn’t see many fruit trees. There was, however, a large housing development called The Orchards. Soon enough, things got more rural, as I turned on to Whig Lane, then Elk Road past the Hardingville Bible Church and Old Man’s Creek Campground. I passed a Christmas tree farm, a used tractor-trailer cab for sale in a front yard, and finally some apple and peach trees. I thought about filling a bucket with some berries or peaches at a U-pick spot called Mood’s Farm, as my family has for years. But this day happened to be Mood’s Farm’s blueberry festival and the place was teeming with crowds eating blueberry pie and blueberry ice cream and drinking blueberry cider. So I just bought an apple cider doughnut and moved on.
Mood’s was just down the road from Heritage Vineyards in Mullica Hill, where I intended to taste wine. When I pulled up at Heritage, there was a guy playing acoustic guitar and singing outside on the patio. Outside, it looked like the kind of place where you’d pick pumpkins or go for a hayride. Inside, the tasting room looked like a country store, with wine tchotkes and knickknacks for sale, including some decorative signs that would not have been out of place on a Jersey Shore boardwalk: “A Meal Without Wine Is Called Breakfast”; “Today’s Forecast 100% Chance Of Wine”; “I Just Rescued Some Wine. It Was Trapped in a Bottle.”
Heritage Vineyards gained some renown a few years earlier at a blind tasting hosted at Princeton University during the annual conference of the American Association of Wine Economists. This so-called Judgment of Princeton pitted New Jersey wines against those from Bordeaux and Burgundy, including top châteaux such as Mouton-Rothschild and Joseph Drouhin. It was closely modeled after the famed 1976 Judgment of Paris tasting in which top critics unknowingly selected California wines over French wines, a heresy at the time that helped establish Napa Valley on the global wine map. After the identity of the wines was revealed, at least one judge, Odette Kahn, editor of La Revue Du Vin De France, demanded her scorecard back. She had rated American wines as her number one and two choices.
George Taber, the same journalist who’d originally reported about the 1976 Paris tasting for Time magazine, was actually the moderator in Princeton, where nine wine experts from the United States, France, and Belgium convened to judge the wines. In keeping with the now-expected “gotcha!” nature of these blind-tasting events, the wine experts gave essentially the same scores to the New Jersey and French wines. The usual controversy ensued. Meanwhile, local news outlets had a hearty populist chuckle at the expense of the Francophile wine snobs.
The Judgment of Princeton was a boon to Heritage Vineyards. Its 2010 BDX Bordeaux-style blend won third place among the reds, scoring just a half-point behind Haut-Brion, the famed Bordeaux château. Heritage’s 2010 chardonnay also finished third, ahead of a few bottlings of Montrachet, the Burgundy grand cru. I’ve tasted both of these Heritage wines and they’re very accomplished, and delicious—and at $50, the Bordeaux-style red blend is at least $500 to $1,000 less than the Château Haut-Brion. Still, I’ve often pondered why up-and-coming wineries and regions still look to Bordeaux and Burgundy as their benchmark. And it’s not just in South Jersey. No matter what wine region one visits—Chile, Australia, Oregon—so many winemakers still aspire to craft wines from cabernet sauvignon and merlot and chardonnay and pinot noir grapes, and so many wine lovers aspire to drink these wines.
There is, of course, nothing intrinsically wrong with trying to replicate the prestige of cabernet sauvignon, chardonnay, or pinot noir. Unless you agree with Jean-Luc Etievent that “drinking the same wines all the time is really boring.” Or perhaps you’re like me, and you’re excited about having new experiences and learning new things. Every new grape you’ve never tasted before, after all, offers the chance to taste a new flavor. In this globalized world, more and more of us seek out the local specialties. These grapes carry with them a taste of place and culture. We endeavor to preserve these grapes, then, for the same reason we save heirloom tomatoes and apples and heritage cattle, and build vast seed banks. Within these organisms may lie clues to solving the challenges of climate and disease, as well as recording the historical record of human taste.
I know I’m not alone. In recent years, there’s been a revived interest in little-known grapes from lesser-known regions. For instance, two decades ago, grapes like carmenère from Chile, grüner veltliner from Austria, or albariño from Spanish Galicia were completely off the radar. Now they’re old hat to many wine enthusiasts. So the quest for even rarer grapes has intensified. While the new generation of sommeliers in the hip, big-city wine bars can often be overbearing, with their disdain for any wine that might be considered mainstream, we can thank them for creating a demand, however small and exclusive, for rare grapes. Often, a sommelier’s love of obscure wines might seem like an embrace of obscurity for obscurity’s sake. But sometimes, it can also serve a higher purpose.
When I arrived at Heritage, ready for a world-class tasting, the woman pouring wines asked, “Sweet or dry?” When I looked around the bar, I was surprised to see many people drinking fruit wines that read Jersey Blue or Jersey Sugar Plum. The pour woman looked relieved when I said “dry” and opted for both the Classic and Reserve tastings.
While I was looking forward to tasting their acclaimed Bordeaux-style wines, I was quickly enamored by how Heritage used the lesser-known Bordeaux grapes. For instance, when I tasted the 2014 sauvignon blanc I commented that it had a fleshy orchard-fruit element that wasn’t typical. The pourer told me that about a quarter of the wine was made from the sémillon grape. This made sense, since sémillon is a classic blending partner with sauvignon blanc in dry Bordeaux whites, as well as sweet Sauternes. But then the pourer swiftly opened a bottle of 100 percent sémillon. “We originally planted this for blending, but it was just so good,” she said. I agreed; this was a surprising, uncommon wine, something you rarely see, even in Bordeaux. Sémillon is “not a fashionable variety,” according to Vouillamoz and his coauthors of Wine Grapes. Worldwide, there is about five times more sauvignon blanc, and about eight times more chardonnay grown than sémillon. That may be because in much of the world, sémillon can be too fat and honeyed and cloying. In fact, the only other place in the world you drink an exceptional dry 100 percent sémillon like this is Australia’s Hunter Valley (one of the “wine world’s enigmas” according to wine writer Oz Clarke). In any case, Heritage’s Jersey rendition of the grape was fresh and lithe and elegant. The unrepentant wine geek in me started to get tingles of excitement.
A similar thing happened when I tasted Heritage’s Bordeaux-style 2011 Estate Reserve BDX, which was a blend of 40 percent cabernet sauvignon, 32 percent merlot, 16 percent petit verdot, 8 percent cabernet franc, and 4 percent malbec. Maybe I was subconsciously toasting Petit Verdot, my drinking companion that day at Domaine de Beudon, but what struck me was the high percentage of actual petit verdot in the bottle. Yes, this all may seem like the pinnacle of wine geekiness: to single out an obscure grape like sémillon or petit verdot. But please stick with me. Since petit verdot is known for its rustic character, dark color, powerful flavor, and strong tannins, it’s traditionally used like a chef would use seasoning. Few châteaux in Bordeaux ever use more than around 3 percent—16 percent is off the charts.
So Heritage’s Estate Reserve BDX boasted quadruple or quintuple the typical seasoning. Why? Perhaps petit verdot grows much better in South Jersey’s soil and climate than it does in Bordeaux, where the grape only reaches full ripeness about once out of every four harvests. Perhaps South Jersey’s petit verdot ripens more fully and therefore has more complex fruit, softer tannins, and maybe some of the coarse rustic character is tamed. Perhaps Jersey petit verdot is, dare we say, more elegant than Bordeaux petit verdot? In any case, petit verdot—an odd-ball grape by any measure—makes a big difference in this very un-Bordeaux Bordeaux blend.
Several years before, I’d actually written one of those typically backhanded newspaper articles about Outer Coastal Plain wine. (Yes, I’ll admit, I, too, made a Snooki reference.) At the time, one winemaker told me, “You can make a good wine anywhere. You just have to pick the right grape.” This, of course, is the fateful decision that every winemaker in every wine region in the world must grapple with. If you happen to be the great-great-great-grandson of a Bordelais winemaker who several centuries ago figured out that cabernet sauvignon vines grew really well on that hill yonder, well then you’re all set. You just tend the grapes your grandfather planted and don’t screw it up. Château Haut-Brion can document grapes being grown as early as 1423. Heritage, on the other hand, planted its vines in 1999. It’s almost 600 years behind Bordeaux in figuring out what works and what doesn’t.
As I tasted the next wine at Heritage, their 2013 cabernet franc, I regretted being so skeptical. I am now convinced that cabernet franc should definitely be South Jersey’s grape. My thinking may be prejudiced in part because I happen to love cabernet franc. For years, I’ve thought, if you are becoming more adventurous in your wine drinking, if you’re curious to explore beyond plump, ripe, and oaky, if you like eating and drinking food and wine together at the same time . . . well then you really should try drinking more cabernet franc. In Paris, Loire Valley reds made from 100 percent cabernet franc have been traditional house reds in bistros for decades, underscoring how well it pairs with so many different dishes. Why cabernet franc remains so unpopular in the United States, however, has perplexed me. Just like cabernet sauvignon and merlot, it’s one the official grapes of Bordeaux blends. In fact, cabernet franc is the parent of cabernet sauvignon, so its origin is even more ancient. Ampelographers consider it to be a so-called “founder” grape. Nowadays, though, it’s mostly an afterthought, and cabernet franc lags far behind its offspring—it’s only the 32nd most planted grape in the world, with less than a fifth of cabernet sauvignon’s acreage.
One issue is that wines from cabernet franc’s spiritual home, the Loire Valley, can be very challenging and, well, very French. Give most American consumers a label that reads Chinon or Bourgueil or Saumur-Champigny and their eyes will glaze over. “Are those medical conditions or characters on Game of Thrones?” someone once asked me. No, I said, they’re places in Loire Valley which produce cabernet franc wines. Beyond nomenclature, these wines are known more for their more herbal, savory flavors and aromas, usually with little or no oak barreling. The fruit is subtle; Loire Valley reds don’t loudly announce themselves or smack you over the head. This, of course, is in contrast to the big, fruity wines that plenty of people still favor. Critic Michael Steinberger once wrote about cabernet franc wines: “People accustomed to plusher California wines often find them too austere . . . in the minds of many American consumers, synonymous with words like thin and weedy.” Sadly, those consumers are missing out on some of the most drinkable wines on the planet—drinkable being, in my book, just about the highest virtue of a wine.
An appreciation of savory wines is slowly spreading among younger wine drinkers. Maybe cabernet franc isn’t a wine that finance bros, neckties thrown over their shoulders, will expense at a steakhouse. But if you haven’t been paying attention, here’s a news flash: People are eating fewer warm-blooded animals these days, and so wines have to pair with dishes besides medium-rare meat. While cabernet franc can evoke “green”—olive, pepper, tobacco leaf—there are also plenty of fresh berry notes and the lighter body and unique underlying sensations of graphite, iron, or even pencil shavings. (Again, stick with me; this can be a good thing.) Perhaps surprisingly, a wine with notes of pencil shavings and olive match really well with the foods we actually eat these days.
In any case, the cabernet franc at Heritage, with its notes of dark fruits and thyme and autumnal mulled spices, was special without trying to be special. It was a little softer and plumper than one from the Loire Valley, but still attractive and desirable—a cabernet franc with a dad bod, a comfy plaid flannel, and a beard.
I already was feeling really warm and fuzzy in the tasting room when I saw the final wine on the menu. It was Heritage’s 2013 chambourcin, which was the same wine that Jacques Granges had planted in that steep, dangerous vineyard at Domaine de Beudon. A decade ago, when wine in New Jersey was still a novelty, a number of local winemakers envisioned chambourcin, with its hybrid of European and wild North American DNA, as the state’s calling-card grape. But the wines produced from chambourcin are strange, often with a so-called “foxy” or wet-fur aroma associated with North American grape varieties. Heritage’s inky-purple chambourcin avoided the foxy smell, but it did have a curious nose of Dr Pepper and roasted cashews and tasted of blackberry jam on raisin bread. As Petit Verdot had said of the chambourcin at Domaine de Beudon: Very peculiar. But oddly pleasant.
When I finished my tasting, I paid $25 each for the bottles of the cabernet franc and the chambourcin, and ordered a small presliced meat-and-cheese plate that came wrapped in plastic. I took everything, along with two wine glasses, out to the patio, where the middle-aged guy with the guitar strummed and sang. I unwrapped the plate, and nibbled on sweet soppressata, pepperoni, and prosciutto (or pro-ZHOOT as they say in South Jersey), as well as a hunk of Prima Donna, a popular cheese that’s a hybrid of Parmigiano Reggiano and aged Dutch gouda. I uncorked and poured both wines—an older couple sitting at the next table saw this, and raised their eyebrows. I had no way of telling them that I was a professional and would only be taking a few sips and bringing the rest home. They likely wouldn’t have believed me anyway. So I just let them assume I was a decadent drunk settling in for a solitary two-bottle Saturday afternoon.
I swirled and tasted a little more cabernet franc, then the chambourcin. As if on cue, the musician broke into a rendition of Bruce Springsteen’s classic “The River.” As a native son, I know the Boss’s words by heart. Once, in a whiskey bar in Edinburgh, Scotland, I watched a bumbling singer lose his place and forget the lyrics while performing “The River” live. Immediately, I raised my voice, chiming in to finish the song—as though I’d prepared for that moment my whole life.
Listening to “The River” in the middle of Gloucester County, while drinking local cabernet franc and chambourcin, I suddenly began to feel a profound sense of what wine people call terroir. I’d never thought about a South Jersey terroir before, and now that I did, there was nothing pretentious about the idea at all. Why couldn’t New Jersey be the next Bordeaux or Napa Valley? But there was more to it than that. Drinking these uncommon South Jersey wines made me feel connected to the larger world of wine. The chambourcin, in particular, made me think of my visit to Valais and to Domaine de Beudon, where Jacques Granges, bearded and bereted, worked the mountain-top vineyards.
As I sipped my wine, I grabbed my iPhone. Instead of opening Pokémon GO, I typed “Jacques Granges Domaine de Beudon” into Google. Suddenly, I was shocked to see the headline that popped up: Jacques Granges, pionnier de la biodynamie, meurt dans un accident. I don’t speak French but I didn’t need a translation of accident, and I knew meurt meant he had died. The article had been published in a Swiss newspaper three weeks before. Apparently, Granges had been working in a steep vineyard when his tractor overturned, tragically crushing and killing him.
In that moment, my mind left New Jersey, drifting above as if on cable car toward the vines in the sky. Had Granges been working the dangerous chambourcin vineyard? Who would now carry on the work of cultivating petite arvine and diolinoir and humagne rouge? Even though I’d only spent two hours with the man and didn’t really know him at all, I was distraught in the same way as when I learn that an artist I admire has suddenly died. I thought about what Jean-Luc Etievent, with his pickax and pink scarf, had said that day in Domaine de Beudon: “These sorts of vineyards are treasures. There’s a huge necessity to protect them. Wine can be quaint and romantic, but in the end it’s a business. And you can die in this business.”
The middle-aged Springsteen impersonator, wailing on an out-of-tune harmonica, segued from “The River” to “Atlantic City” and I was almost physically snapped back to South Jersey. A big white SUV limousine pulled up and a shrieking bachelorette party streamed out. I knew it was time to leave. I finished my last pieces of pepperoni and Prima Donna, took a last swig of chambourcin, and made one last silent toast to Jacques Granges. Then I corked my wines, walked to my car, and drove away.
If I wanted to experience as many of the 1,368 grape varieties as I could, I knew I’d need to expand my wine tasting horizons and venture away from my South Jersey terroir for a while. So, several weeks later, I prepared to travel to Europe again.
On the September morning I was due to depart, I found myself eating fresh concord grapes at breakfast with my son Wes, who was then in elementary school. We’d picked these concord grapes near Heritage Vineyards, at Mood’s Farm, where they are only available for a few weeks in late August and early September. Eating fresh, late-summer concord grapes that you’ve picked yourself is a wonderful experience, totally different than eating industrial seedless grapes that have been shipped in from Chile.
Wes was trying to become lieutenant of the fifth grade school safety patrol, and he had to give a speech that day to convince his fellow safeties to vote for him. I’d just asked him to rewrite his speech because he’d spelled lieutenant wrong once (lutendant) and responsible wrong twice (risponsable) and in some spots he couldn’t even read his own handwriting. So, exasperated, he scribbled away at our kitchen table.
Wes suddenly looked up from rewriting his speech. “Do they make wine out of these grapes?” he asked. For my son, this was not an unreasonable question. He’d been exposed to wine from an early age, witnessing his father conduct tastings at this same kitchen table, and having traveled with me to vineyards and wineries in Spain, Italy, and Austria.
“No,” I said. “Not usually this kind of grape. This is a grape they use for juice or jelly.”
He seemed disappointed. And then irritated as he erased another misspelling of risponsable. “Why not?” he asked.
“Well,” I said. “Some people try to make wine out of them. But the wine from concord grapes is usually really bad.”
“But these taste so sweet and so good,” he said. “Why do they make a bad wine?”
My head began to swim with too much information: The concord grape was discovered in 1840, growing wild along the Concord River in Massachusetts. Concord is believed to be the offspring of a native North American species called vitis labrusca, which is completely different from European vitis vinifera, which is much better suited for winemaking. Wines made from vitis labrusca—literally the “fox grape”—usually have a sharp, off-putting “foxy” aroma. Concord grapes are a slip-skin variety, meaning the skins will separate too easily from the fruit, making pressing difficult. Concord grapes are generally too high in acidity to be palatable and too low in sugar to achieve the alcohol levels necessary for wine.
None of this, of course, would make much sense to Wes. So I said: “They just do. They just make bad wine.”
“Well,” he said. “Do you think maybe people just haven’t figured out how to make a good wine from them?” He put down his pencil. Wes may as well have been a police lieutenant continuing an interrogation.
“What level of sommelier are you?” he asked me.
“What?” I said. “What do you mean?”
“We watched that movie about those guys studying to be master sommeliers,” he said. I realized he was talking about SOMM—the documentary that suddenly made being a wine waiter hip and drove lots of young people to seek certification as a sommelier. Wes had recently watched it along with me on the couch. “So what level do you have?”
“I’m not a sommelier,” I said. “I don’t have any level of certification.”
“Oh,” he said with a shrug, and went back to writing his speech. I ate another handful of concord grapes in silence. My son had unwittingly and keenly broached a sensitive topic. I was being authoritative, or perhaps even authoritarian, in my declaration on the poor quality of concord grapes. But who was I to dismiss wines made with concord, or any other grape with vitis labrusca parentage, or any wine made from any grape in the world?
The issue of authority and credentialism crops up again and again in the wine business. Wine is lousy with certifications, dogmas, designations, gatekeepers. I move through this world—sometimes awkwardly—without a framed diploma on my wall declaring me an expert. I am not a famous or powerful wine writer, such as Robert Parker, still the world’s best-known and most influential critic. I am not someone with a lapel pin from the Court of Master Sommeliers. And I am certainly not wealthy enough to be a collector who bids on great vintages at wine auctions.
While I eventually started being paid to write about wine, all my knowledge has come from the seat of my pants, following my passion, traveling and tasting where I could afford—and often where I could not. This is not to say that I don’t have a memory library of thousands of wines, along with in-depth travel to many wine regions, and visits with many winemakers, in my head. But it’s been a wildcat education, unstructured and self-taught. One of my personal mantras has been a quote from Flaubert’s Sentimental Education: “Exuberance is better than taste.”
Still, anyone who’s ever taken even a single wine class has been presented with the idea that wine is an aspirational ladder you must work hard to climb, and at the top of the ladder are the so-called Serious Wines, such as Bordeaux and Burgundy.
I remember facing this ladder my first time in Bordeaux, several years before. This was after I’d begun publishing regular wine articles, mostly on up-and-coming Italian and Spanish regions, and I decided I needed to make a proper pilgrimage to Bordeaux. I’d begun chasing the topic of wine in earnest after spending more than six years reporting on, and eventually writing a book on, spirits and cocktails. But I’d grown bored of discussions over barrel-aged Negronis and house-made bitters and artisan mezcal and techniques on carving proper ice cubes. I figured my drinks knowledge would make for an easy transition to wine. I had no idea how wrong I was.
Wineries in Bordeaux are still ranked by a classification system demanded by Emperor Napoleon III in 1855 for the Exposition Universelle de Paris. The prestigious premier cru wineries that fetch the highest prices today are the same ones that had prestige and fetched high prices during the Second French Empire 160 years ago. Prior to that, Bordeaux had been the prestige wine exported in the 17th century to Holland during the Dutch Golden Age. And before that, Bordeaux had been exported to Britain since at least the 12th-century wedding of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. So long story short, Bordeaux has always been about power and money.
This all hit me when I found myself sitting uneasily in the tasting parlor of Château La Mission Haut-Brion in the company of Prince Robert de Luxembourg, the château’s royal managing director. Prince Robert told me that the big-time critics like Robert Parker had visited here the week before. During our chitchat, I mentioned this was my first trip to Bordeaux, and the Prince guffawed incredulously. “Never been to Bordeaux? And you write about wine?”
“Um, well . . . yeah?” I said, immediately backpedaling. “I guess I’ve just spent most of my time in places like Italy and Spain and Portugal. And other parts of France? I don’t know. Italy, I guess, is where most of my wine knowledge has come from.”
“Oh,” said the Prince, in a grand princely fashion, “so you are an expert in Italian wines? Ha. Well, we have an Italian wine expert here!” I haven’t felt so foolish since middle school when I forgot to wear shorts to a basketball game, and pulled down my sweatpants to reveal my tighty-whities to the crowd. The message from Prince Robert seemed to be: How the hell did you get an appointment to taste wines with me?
I looked around at the regal tasting room, with the heavy wood furniture and the bust of someone presumably famous, and the high-seated chairs where the important wine critics swirl and spit and opine and move cases of thousand-dollar wine. And I decided to jump right in with a question that may have been impolite: “A lot of wine writers and sommeliers back in the States say that Bordeaux isn’t really relevant anymore. What do you say to those people?”
“The fact is,” said Prince Robert, “that people need to write about something. And Bordeaux is obviously so relevant that they need to write something about Bordeaux. It’s the tall poppy syndrome.”
Prince Robert clearly had answered this question many times before. “I would ask other winemakers around the world and they will tell you that Bordeaux would be the benchmark by which to judge all other wines,” he said. “There are no wines in the world that receive more excitement.”
“But wait,” I said. “Aren’t you worried that younger people are not drinking Bordeaux? That it’s not even on their radar? Aren’t you afraid that when this generation can finally afford your wines, they won’t care about them?”
“Yes, the young wine drinker likes the simplicity of New World wines. Wines that are easy to explain,” he said, and I’m not sure I can properly convey just how much contempt dripped from the Prince’s voice, contempt seemingly for an entire generation of young wine drinkers who could not yet afford his wines.
“Anyway,” he said, “I am confident that people will come back to the great wines of Bordeaux. There has never been more demand for the top-end wines.” This may be true, but the market for Bordeaux wines is now being driven, in large part, by newer collectors in Asia. One might reasonably hypothesize that tastes will eventually change in China and India, too, just as they have in the United States in the decades since the 1980s, when Americans “discovered” Bordeaux (via Robert Parker). Surely by now there is a Chinese Robert Parker? And in the not-so-distant future a backlash against Bordeaux by young, tattooed, hipster Chinese sommeliers will happen?
I didn’t get to ask these questions because, apparently, our conversation bored the Prince. He rose from his chair, bid me adieu, and wished me a good first trip to Bordeaux. “Enjoy those Italian wines,” he said, with a smile and a wink.
I was then left to taste nine wines from the 2011 vintage with the public relations person. How were the wines? Amazing. No doubt about it. The flagship first label wine was as complex and dense and rich as just about anything I’d tasted at that point in my wine education. But at what price? Château Haut-Brion is regularly listed at over $1,000 a bottle. I tasted the only ounce of the 2011 that I will likely ever taste, one ounce more than most of my friends and readers will likely ever taste. Will my description inspire you to drink Bordeaux? I mean, one of my friends drove a Ferrari once and another had a date with a Victoria’s Secret model, but neither of their descriptions has exactly led me closer to the same experience.
Is there any wine that intimidates more than Bordeaux? Even among friends of mine who are Serious Wine drinkers, it feels like the schoolyard bully that no one wants to stand up to. “I am totally, totally intimidated by Bordeaux,” sheepishly admitted one acquaintance, a knowledgeable food writer who’d already passed the first level of the sommelier certification. “I walk past that shelf in the store and all the Bordeaux bottles look exactly the same. Same colors, same script-y fonts, same gold leaf, same illustration of the damn château. It’s always Château du Something Something. Château du Blah Blah Blah. Château du Frenchy French. How do I even know where to begin?”
When I once raised the topic of Bordeaux with another friend, a beverage manager at a fine restaurant, he got seriously angry. “Ugh, why do I even care about Bordeaux?” he nearly shouted. “Who is able to afford it? Why don’t they just sell it all to Chinese billionaires?”
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