Pinot Noirs or Pinots Noir?

If one drinks more than one bottle of Pinot Noir, would he be drinking Pinot Noirs? Or Pinots Noir? The former is correct, though the latter sounds better, like "passers by." In any case, the other night Edith, Gillian, Tracy, and I drank two exceptional Pinots, one from Oregon the other from Burgundy. 

Pinot Noir is perhaps the most fabled contemporary grape, mostly due to, again, the film Sideways. The character Miles, speaking more about his romantic fantasies than actual fruit, explains that Pinot "can only grow in these really specific, little tucked away corners of the world" and "only the most patient and nurturing of growers can do it, really. Only somebody who really takes the time to understand Pinot's potential can the coax it into its fullest expression."

Famously, that little précis of the Pinot Noir grape led to a significant bump in Pinot sales. I have to admit that I was swayed myself. I remember purchasing some decent Pinot Noir the next day, expecting some utterly magical spell to be cast in my mouth. I think I also responded to the romance of the grape, Miles's idea that the Pinot Noir required as much of its caretaker as it gave of itself. It was a description of love.

The Pinot is a magical, delicate, remote, and rewarding grape. And how quiet it is. The flavors are suggestions rather than clear statements. A well-made Pinot murmurs rather than explains. Its pleasures are even self-congratulatory. If you enjoy this wine, you feel like you know what enjoyment is.  If you can lean back and close your eyes and take it all in with the iPod dock on low, you feel like you're beginning to know something you didn't know before, about wine, about taste, about experience. At least, that's what you feel like telling yourself.  

The vineyards of Burgundy, in France, are the world's best-known and most celebrated terroir for Pinot Noir, though in recent decades Oregon has produced wines of equal stature. They're both ideal growing environments for Pinot: rainy skies and chalky soil in Burgundy and long, cool days and volcanic beds in Oregon. And I think that some of the Oregon Pinot growers have modeled their wines on French Burgundies. At least, Paul Gerrie, the maker of Cristom Pinot Noir from the Willamette Valley, sat at the feet of Burgundy winemakers prior to establishing his own vineyards in the States.

The wines we tasted were both exceptionally good. They were:

2006 Cristom Pinot Noir, Sommers Reserve ($41)

2005 Gevrey-Chambertin, Domaine Louis Boillot & Fils ($65)

Cristom

The Cristom was a clear and clean cherry color (Gillian). Tracy called it garnet. In any case, it fell into the glass and shone clear and bright, just like a Burgundy. The nose was pretty harsh at first, and Gillian even said it singed her nose-hairs. We could all notice the harsh attack at first, the high astringency, the sharp tannins. Tracy felt like she could smell the grape seeds themselves. The body of this wine was wonderfully light and feathery. Tracy said it reminded her of balsa wood, though admitted she wasn't sure what that really was. We were all a little taken aback by the wine's assertiveness. But 

then . . .

. . . but then we let it sit for a little while and came back to the Cristom, and things had changed. The wine was a little rounder, a little sweeter--like Twizzlers, said Gillian. It was as if the wine had been slowly undressing and we were earlier tasting some of the garments. Now, flavors emerged: I tasted roses and pepper, and a distinct and extremely pleasant vanilla bean. This wasn't the vanilla that sometimes is imparted by oak--this was more like fresh vanilla itself. And Gillian felt that there were flavors of extracted fruit, like sour cherry. Tracy picked up currant and some kind of wood, though not cedar and not oak. The finish was perhaps what we all liked the most: long, easy, smooth and rising a little before fading away.

Gevrey-Chambertin

In many ways, this wine was similar to the Cristom: it shared the bright, jewel red hue, was light, dry, and tannic in the way Burgundies are. But the aroma was a little funkier. Gillian noticed what she called "fungus and burnt" and Edith got cinnamon and truffle. Tracy and I both detected an oaky smell in the nose, though neither of us could taste it. We also found rhubarb, spice, and leather, bitter but rewarding things. The wine itself was a little drier than the Cristom, a little more rigid and austere. And the finish was much quicker than the Cristom, more modest and withdrawing. It wasn't a wine that was giving up its secrets without a little bit of a fight. You had to push.

In fact, Gillian made an analogy between these wines and skis. The Burgundy was a set of high-performance skis that would reward hard skiing, that would work with you if you pushed them hard and rode them well. The Oregon Pinot--and, by extension, Oregon Pinots in general--was a pair of cruising skis, easier to ride and less requiring of drive on the part of the skier. This seems like a smart comparison.

One thing I am taking away from this is simply how good Pinot Noir from Oregon can be. This was my first one, though Gillian brought me four more. I'll let you know how they ski.

White Burgundy Madness

I split a fantastic bottle of 1996 white Burgundy with my friend Dave on Thursday night. As a 40th birthday gift, Dave took me to Veritas, a restaurant in Grammercy renowned for its wine list--enumerating a purported 196,000 bottles--that focuses on great French wines. We asked the sommelier for a white Burgundy for $250 or less. I drink in the cumulus. This was the cirrus.

The bottom of the cirrus, actually. Examining the wine list, which was as thick as a Dean Koontz, I was surprised to see that most white Burgundies were at least $200, though a few $150 wines popped up here and there. Many of these fine wines cost hundreds more. It seemed that $400 or so would make the selection process a little less, well, dainty. Plenty of wines were over a thousand dollars and there were numerous large format bottles. The list had the feel less of a restaurant's orders from various distributors and more of a private collection. Which, in fact, it is. The owners of Veritas built the restaurant around their pooled wine libraries, which were so large they realized they couldn't consume them in a lifetime.

When I was a kid I would have called a place like this a Fancy Restaurant. In fact, I did feel a little young in that room, and indeed, we were the freshest faces there. I was certainly the poorest, too. Mark Mothersbaugh and Bob Casale from Devo were enjoying a bottle of red a few tables down, so they must be doing okay. But if you begin taking wine seriously, the issue of price and class is unavoidable. Good wine is expensive, and expense itself is a kind of mythology in wine drinking. I had a bottle of $12 white Burgundy on Wednesday night and on Thursday I'm drinking a bottle of $250 white Burgundy. A rationalist would ask, is the second bottle $238 better than the first? Live long enough, I guess, and questions like that become dull. But it's difficult to escape musing on price and value when consuming a $250 bottle of wine, especially as the label sported a clearly discernible number, scrawled in black ink, in the top right-hand corner: 36. I imagine this bottle was purchased in 1996 for 36, what, francs or dollars? Must have been dollars. So we're paying for patience, too.

It's hard to tell yourself that you're going to drink this wine without considering that it cost $250 or that it once cost $36 and that it's inexorably improved over the past 14 years and maybe that means it's really worth what Veritas is asking. It's also difficult to ignore the perky sommelier, who exudes a sense of authority even though she's friendly, spunky, and recently 30 (she volunteered her age after learning mine). She not only helped us locate our bottle, but by dropping small bits of information here and there she seemed to validate the whole idea of expensive wine. In fact, perhaps her most winning move was professing not to know if the bottle we had chosen was drinking well. We had identified three possible bottles, and she could vouch for the first two but not the third, so she consulted another sommelier who knew this wine. In this context, not knowing became a sign of the care and precision authentic knowledge of wine entails. There are limits to the expertise of someone whose main job is to sell the wine listed in this little book, which names wines available just from this one cellar. Even she needed help. Wine was showing us the respect it was due.

And respect was due. The wine was, as they say, something else:

1996 Grand Cru Bâtard Montrachet Jean-Marc Boillot ($250)

In Burgundy wine, there are four classifications (I'm taking this from Neal Rosenthal's most excellent 2008 memoir Reflections of a Wine Merchant, though this is certainly not privileged information). Rouge or blanc country wine, the lowest, is simple wine made by local Burgundian winemakers, usually not for wide sale. Village wine is the next step up, and many affordable Burgundies are Village wines. The two haut classifications are Premier Cru and Grand Cru. As you can see, we were drinking Grand Cru. Dave and I have been friends since the mid-'70s.

The wine itself was much deeper and complicated than most whites I've had. The color was perhaps the most striking thing--golden and calm, rich and deep, but clear as well. Wine writers always talk about the way a wine captures light, and it was true here--the wine glistened and deepened in the light. It was a pleasure to gaze at, or through, the glass. The nose was fairly mellow. I didn't get a burst of typical Chardonnay flavors, though they asserted themselves more gently when we actually tasted the wine, which held little obvious fruit but lots of delicate flavors, including pear and what Dave referred to as "nectar" (I'm not sure if he meant actual nectar or if he was being metaphorical). The dominant flavor palette for me was a kind of vegetal woodiness. It wasn't oak or even the king of cedar "cigar box" flavors you read about, but a musky, loamy, forest floor flavor. I could feel this particular flavor sliding around in my mouth, though it's hard to name it, exactly. It was woodsy, not woody, and gave the wine an intellectual quality. Dave suggested during dinner that the wine was perhaps two or three years past its peak. Perhaps he's right. There was something a little loose about the wine, as if it were relaxing after holding in its breath all those years. I could even taste a slight effervescence, though that faded mostly after 20 minutes. But the finish was beautifully soft and smooth.

Thanks, Dave, for this experience. I'm happy that white Burgundies are out there, waiting. I'll be drinking this wine avidly till my death.

Tempranillos

This is a late post. A week late. I was in San Francisco last week, visiting Tracy's family, and we all went to a tapas restaurant in the Mission and tasted two nice Tempranillos, one a traditional Rioja and the other a similarly priced Spanish Tempranillo. Both wines were 100 Tempranillo, which is important to say because sometimes--often?--Temp is blended, much in the same way as Cabernet. In fact, Tempranillo is sometimes referred to as something like "Spain's answer to the Cabernet Sauvignon," though I'm not sure what that means. To me (though please keep in mind, I'm a baby ephebe) Tempranillo is altogether lighter than a Cabernet.

I must say something briefly not just about the wines but about where I purchased them: a store called K&L Wine Merchants, in Redwood City. It confirmed for me the museum-like quality that great wine shops can have. There on the shelves were Bordeaux and Burgundies from the 1960s to the present, arrayed like any old wines (though I noticed a 1965, which I just learned is actually a very poor vintage). They also have a yet-rarer collection of French and California wines in special glass cases against the wall that make you feel special and intimidated. Some of the labels are dirty and weathered. You can almost see the chateau cellar and smell the dank gray stones.

K&L also specializes in large format bottles--Jeroboams, Double Magnums, and even (I think) a Balthazar. Or perhaps it was a Methuselah or Mordechai--or was it a Nebuchadnezzar? These are large, very large, and Super Size Me bottles of wine--the Nebuchadnezzar contains 15 liters of wine.

Or as I call it, lunch.

But seriously, Google "large format wine bottle" and K&L pops right up. Such bottles are not only great sight gags but also age extremely well because, since wine ages due to oxidation, they reduce the ratio of air to wine. They also seem to create the sense of an occasion: to open one of these large bottles
would require a large gathering of some sort. And then, there's the Semitic angle--why are these bottles named after characters from the Old Testament? Did I mention there is also a Melchior (18 liters)? A  Solomon (20 liters)? A Melchizedek (30 liters)?

Anyway, I shuffled over to the forgotten corner where they sell Spanish wine and bought two bottles. They were:

2006 Ovidio Tempranillo La Mancha ($19)
2003 Rioja Alta "Vina Alberdi" Reserva ($20)

Tracy, her sisters Wanda and Jean, her niece Rachel, her stepmother Judie, friend Rosemary Murphy, Paul and I ordered a mess of tapas and tasted the wines. This is what we found out.

Ovidio
This was a deep, dark, almost purple wine, though it lightened considerably at the rim. Odors that we noted included red and black fruits, dark earth, and a general spiciness. The body was "soft and creamy" (Rose), and most of us called it some version of "smooth," though I also found it to be the slightest bit too tangy and sweet on the tongue. It was round and rich, though not as healthily potent as a full-blooded Cabernet. Other flavors we picked up as the wine began to unwind included vanilla ice cream (that was me), strawberries, white sugar, cedar, tobacco, and leather. Tracy also tasted bay leaf, which she's detected in other wines; for her, this means a ghostly spiciness mixed with mild sweetness. The finish to this wine was quite slow. In fact, it began to bother me as I found myself wishing for the last sip to fade before taking the next.

Alberdi
As I was leaving K&L, a clerk remarked that I had chosen a "classic Rioja." I don't know if I know what that means, but I sensed he was right. This wine was, I think, universally liked and rated higher than the slightly pugnacious Ovidio. It was lighter, for sure, almost like a Chianti. There was a hint of oak, but just barely. We picked up pepper but no fruit, none at all. It was actually odd to taste such a restrained flavor. Judie picked up something unique--upon putting her nose to the rim, she said she smelled coconut. She took a few tastes and affirmed it--coconut, clear as glass. Especially against the background of the Ovidio, this Tempranillo showed a lightness and spirit that we all loved.

I'm off to Veritas for dinner, a birthday treat from a friend. This restaurant, in the East 20s, is built around a 196,000 bottle wine cellar. Tune in soon. I think we're going for some white Burgundy.