Commis chef James Syhabout discovers his roots in Hawker Fare

As a teenager in Oakland in the 1990s, James Syhabout saw a television show featuring the great French chef Michel Troisgras and, Syhabout writes in his new cookbook cum memoir Hawker Fare: Stories and Recipes from a Refugee Chef’s Thai Isan and Lao Roots, “I was mesmerized.” The kitchen in his mother’s Thai restaurant looked nothing like Troisgras’s. Syhabout started reading food magazines at a local newsstand, stumbled across an article about The French Laundry and thought, “I need to do this.”
He did. For five years, he commuted an hour each way from Oakland to Los Gatos, where he rose to the position of chef de cuisine at Manresa, like The French Laundry one of the best restaurants in the U.S. In 2009, Syhabout opened Commis in Oakland and within months received the validation of a Michelin star for his intricate, inventive cuisine. While he flourished, his mother struggled at her own restaurant. After seeing her break down in tears one night, he took over the lease on her place and told her to move back home to the small town in the Laotian part of Thailand where she had grown up.

Syhabout took the new venture as an opportunity to “learn something deeper about my own heritage.” In going to culinary school in San Francisco and honing his craft at Manresa and some of Europe’s greatest restaurants, Syhabout writes, “I ran away from my past. Being Lao embarrassed me.” He remedied that by cooking his own version of the food he’d grown up eating at Hawker Fare, the restaurant he opened in his mother’s old space and continues to run on Valencia Street in San Francisco’s Mission district.

“Lao cuisine favors umami,” he writes. “The flavors are salty, bitter and herbaceous, fragrant with fresh dill and heavy with spice,” and the cuisine is based on sticky rice and padaek, a fermented fish sauce. This is the food he introduces in the book’s recipes: Pork rib stew with pepper wood, dill and squash vines. Sour fermented pork sausage. Fried red peanuts with garlic, lime leaves, chiles and iodized salt. For many of Syhabout’s customers, these are exotic, delicious dishes. For him, they’re a taste of childhood and home.   

A tough business in a beautiful place: The World of Sicilian Wine

This piece initially ran on the website of The Deal, www.thedeal.com, and reappears here with the permission of its editors.  

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Making wine in Sicily may sound idyllic, but it’s a challenging business. Grapevines have been cultivated on the island since the 8th century B.C., resulting in a wide range of native varieties and wine styles, but fragmented production, a lack of commercial sophistication and the European economic crisis have made it hard for many Sicilian producers to prosper.

Frances Di Savino is well suited to understand both the history and the contemporary realities of the Sicilian wine industry. A venture capital lawyer in the Boston area and a longtime aficionado of Italian culture, Di Savino and her husband, Bill Nesto, one of 300 or so people in the world who hold the Master of Wine title, recently published “The World of Sicilian Wine” (University of California Press, $34.95). The book tells the story of Sicilian viniculture and describes the important producers currently at work there. The couple combined on the first part of the book, while Nesto wrote the second based largely on research that he and Di Savino did on 10 trips to Sicily between 2008 and 2012.

“No one else has done the analysis that was done in this book,” said Antonio Rallo, co-owner of the producer Donnafugata Srl and head of Assovini Sicilia, an association of the island’s premium winemakers. “This is the first book that is so complete in speaking about the Sicilian producers and in going back to the roots of Sicilian wine.”

Di Savino was born and grew up near Boston but took a roundabout path to practicing law there. She studied classical Greek and Latin in high school and picked up Italian at Wellesley College, from which she graduated in 1981 with a degree in both medieval and renaissance studies and Italian culture. Di Savino spent a year studying in Florence after college and a summer working at the Milan law firm Pavia e Ansaldo while she was a student at Columbia Law School. She considered a career in international business, but instead became a corporate associate at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP in New York after graduating from Columbia in 1985. 

She moved to Mabon Securities Corp. in 1992, the year after Italy’s IMI Group bought the brokerage, and became general counsel two years later. She moved to San Francisco in 1996 to take a position as associate general counsel at technology investment banking boutique Montgomery Securities, an experience she calls her “professional year abroad.” NationsBank Corp. bought Montgomery the next year, and Di Savino consulted for rival Hambrecht & Quist before moving back to Boston and opening the boutique law firm InCounsel with her brother, Sam, in 1999.

In 2000, the Di Savino siblings helped structure a Cambridge, Mass.-based venture fund with close ties to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They’ve worked with a number of tech companies since then, including Virtusa Corp., a Westborough, Mass.-based information technology outsourcing company that went public in 2007; Lightlab Imaging, a medical device manufacturer spun out of MIT that was sold in 2002 to Goodman Co. Ltd., which in turn sold Lightlab to St. Jude Medical Inc. in 2010 for $90 million; and I-logix Inc., which was sold to Sweden’s Telelogic AB for $80 million in 2006. IBM Corp. paid $745 million for Telelogic two years later.

Di Savino and Nesto met through a Wellesley alumnae event in 2002 and married in 2005. Nesto, a 1973 graduate of Harvard College who founded the wine studies program at Boston University and is currently a senior lecturer there, has a deep knowledge of Italian wines, and the couple first travelled together to Sicily in 2008 when he was researching an article for the online wine magazine Sante, an assignment that became the genesis of their book “The World of Sicilian Wine.” Di Savino researched and wrote the book’s opening chapter on the origins of Sicilian wine and culture, and Nesto picked up the narrative in 1770, when Englishman John Woodhouse arrived at the port of Marsala in western Sicily and saw the possibility of imitating the success of his countrymen who’d developed the Madeira wine trade. He seized the opportunity and began exporting Marsala wine to Great Britain.

Woodhouse and the Britons who followed him to Sicily brought with them “the spirit of enterprise, the understanding of commerce, the knowledge of markets and the ethos of industry and collaboration,” Nesto writes, traits that were rare in Sicily at the time and have remained so since then.

Now greatly diminished in popularity, Marsala was a very successful premium export product and thus an anomaly in Sicily, where today only 20% of the wine produced on the island is bottled there, with the rest shipped to mainland Italy to be packaged and sold as bulk wine. That’s true even though Sicily’s vineyard surface area fell by 21% from 2001 to 2011—“a trend that probably needs to continue,” Di Savino said, since Italian consumption of wine continues to fall and most of the island’s producers have found it difficult to compete with more efficient rivals in Australia and the Americas. She added that the 80 or so cooperatives that produce about 80% of Sicily’s wine will need to consolidate as well.

Sicily’s midsized and small producers also face daunting challenges. “The middle class is struggling in the EU, and a great wine industry cannot exist without a solid middle class,” Nesto said. The U.S. is an attractive export market, but a difficult one for many producers to enter because of the country’s byzantine regulation of wine.

Nesto identifies three Sicilian producers as “essential for the future because they can surmount the current economic downturn:” Donnafugata, Planeta and Tasca d’Almerita. Diego Planeta in particular is “a tremendous entrepreneur,” Nesto said. Not only did he excel at running a cooperative and launch his own highly successful winery; from 1985 to 1992 he was the president of Sicily’s Instituto Regionale della Vite e del Vino, a state-owned company formed in the early 1950s to promote improved viticulture, wine production and marketing techniques.

Planeta’s ability to strike a balance between competition and cooperation is one that most successful entrepreneurs have and that Sicilian winemakers would do well to emulate, Di Savino said. “Regardless of industry type, a company enters into a web of important contractual and business relationships with competitors, some of whom become investors, partners and customers,” she said. “History has shown that Sicilian entrepreneurs have found it difficult to collaborate. In the wine industry, there are a lot of producers and only so many foreign importers.”

Variety Anxiety: Jancis Robinson's Wine Grapes

Producers and consumers of wine historically spent little time worrying about the grape varieties of the wines they made and drank. Europeans enjoyed the wines of their region; even today, if you go to a restaurant in, say, La Rioja or Burgundy, most of the wines will be from there. Producers worked with the materials at hand, though they could propagate vines with favorable traits by taking cuttings from those vines and replanting them, which in any case was how farmers developed new vines, as opposed to growing them from seed. Now known as clonal selection, the practice has a long history; Pinot Noir has immense clonal diversity, starting with Pinot Blanc and Pinot Gris.

The ancients realized there were different kinds of grapes from which wine could be made, and European scholars began trying to identify them systematically at least two centuries before Carl Linnaeus developed his system of biological taxonomy in the 1700s and included Vitis vinifera, the grape species from which virtually all wine is made. Despite these efforts, the knowledge of ampelography—the cataloging of the numerous varieties of that species—seems to have had a minimal effect on what went on in most vineyards before the mid-1800s. 

Three developments changed this state of affairs. Starting in the 1860s, phylloxera devastated the European wine industry. Winemakers searched frantically for solutions, some of which lay in the emerging science of biology. They grafted their vines onto American rootstock, which was immune to phylloxera, and started using pesticides. Scientists also developed new varieties by cross-breeding existing ones. In 1882, for example, the Swiss vine breeder Hermann Müller produced what is now known as Müller-Thurgau by crossing Riesling and Sylvaner; the new grape’s prolific yields and ability to grow almost anywhere made it the most widely grown variety in Germany by the early 1970s, though it now trails Riesling by a good margin.

Finally, as serious winemaking spread to North and South American, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, producers could choose which grape varieties they wanted to cultivate. In some cases, immigrants brought samples from their home countries. In others, producers carefully selected varieties with oenological and commercial potential, as David Lett of Eyrie Vineyards in Oregon did in the 1980s when he planted Pinot Gris cuttings from Oregon, where the variety is now the state’s most widely cultivated light-skinned one. Here, too, scientists have experimented. The South African variety Pinotage is a cross between Pinot Noir and Cinsault developed in 1925 by Abraham Izak Perold, the first professor of viticulture at the University of Stellenbosch.

Today, there are 1,368 grape varieties from which wine is made commercially, Jancis Robinson, Julia Harding and Jose Vouillamoz tell us in their encyclopedia Wine Grapes, which was published last fall and whose 1,280 pages feature at least a brief entry on every one. (Not varietal, they say in the introduction. Varietal is an adjective.) It's a daunting profusion even for those who read only the tag lines on the entries for the minor grapes, which can be quite witty, like Aramon Noir, a “very productive vine once responsible for much of France’s least noble wine.”

The occasional obscure entry contains a great story. Cavus, for example, takes its name from the Turkish word for sergeant, one of whom brought it back from Taif near Mecca in the 1600s to give to the Sultan. In 1720, Sultan Ahmet III sent 37 vines of Cavus to the first Ottoman embassy in France, where Louis XV had them transferred to Versailles. Or the Swiss Completer, which derives its name from completorium, “the evening office during which the Benedictine monks were traditionally allowed to drink a glass of wine in silence.”

Or the Jacquez, now grown mainly in Texas and Brazil, which may come from the town of New Bordeaux near the Savannah River, where French Huguenots settled in the 18^th century and introduced Vitis vinifera varieties. They discovered that grapes from one new seedling were more resistant to disease, and a Spaniard named Jacques apparently took a sample to Natchez, Mississippi, where the grape got its name.

The multiplicity of varieties reflects the history of wine. The obscure ones tend to fall into two categories. Hundreds are varieties developed since the dawn of modern biology, almost none of which have caught on despite the effort involved in developing them. The book includes a fold-out chart of the genealogy of Brianna, a hybrid obtained in 1983 by Elmer Swanson, who crossed 93 varieties to generate the Brianna. There are also hundreds of grapes grown only in a very small region. Most have fallen into oblivion, but a few have enjoyed a modest renaissance, like the Uva Longanesi, which was saved by Antonio Longanesi in 1913 after he discovered a hardy, fungus-resistant vine on a property he had just purchased near the city of Ravenna in the Italian province of Emilia-Romagna.

A handful of varieties dominate the modern wine world because producers want to market products with names consumers will recognize. Some varieties seem to resist travel, most notably Nebbiolo, the Piemontese grape form which Barolo and Barbaresco are produced. Others, like Pinot Noir and Cabernet Sauvignon, do work well outside of their native territories, but only within a certain temperature range (cooler for Pinot, warmer for Cabernet); a few, especially Chardonnay, seem capable of producing good wine wherever they’re planted.

Swings of fashion can dramatically affect a variety’s fortunes. Syrah, for example, was once a minor grape even in France. Planted on only 3,959 acres there in 1958, it now occupied 169,482 acres in 2009. Fellow Rhone variety Viognier has enjoyed a more dramatic resurgence thanks to the dramatic increase of its wines in the 1980s; planted on a mere 35 acres in France a half-century ago, it now takes up 10,869 there, having caught in southern France, and California winemakers have also adopted the variety over the last generation after seeing the prices it can fetch.

The book’s one major omission is a cursory discussion of clones, a failure Robinson and her co-authors justify by pointing to the book’s current length. They suggest in their treatment of the Pinot family how important clonal selection can be, especially for such an old variety. But they note that there are more than 60 clones of Riesling in Germany without offering even the capsule explanation set out in the entry on clonal selection in Robinson’s Oxford Companion to Wine. According to that work, clonal selection for vines was first demonstrated in Germany in 1926, and the country has remained at the forefront of research in the area. In Dijon, researchers at the Université de Bourgogne have spent decades developing virus-free clones of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. It’d be nice to have a little more of this detail, especially since the pervasive influence of modern science in winemaking is a major theme of Wine Grapes.

That quibble notwithstanding, the book is a major achievement and will enrich wine drinkers’ appreciation not just of the major grapes, but of varieties like Arneis and Grignolino, Mencia and Xinomavro as well.  

The mega-tasting

Dogs have a far more powerful sense of smell than humans do, but even they can’t employ endlessly it in a focused way. Dogs trained to sniff out explosives work only four hours a day, after which they need to frolic, run around, rest. Intense smelling is hard work even if you have a brain and sensory equipment that are well designed for it.

The mega-tasting confronts the wine taster with the same problem. Especially in the winter, which is the down time for winemakers in the northern hemisphere, various regions sponsor fairs at which importers and merchant can sample bottles from dozens of producers. Wine professionals say they start suffering fatigue at some point and are unable to make more than broad distinctions among the wines they taste. They need to frolic, run around, rest.

A few weeks ago, I felt a premonition of fatigue when I picked up a list of the wines to be poured at a tasting of selections from Louis Dressner sponsored by Chambers St. Wines, which has had a very close relationship with the importer since the store opened in 2001. The premonition began to be realized with disconcerting speed. I arrived when the tasting began at 12:30, and the person at the reception desk suggested I start in a small room that featured Italian wines, many of which were reds or whites made with skin contact, which imparts more flavor along with some tannins.

I could almost feel my palate start to cramp up as I worked my way through the room. The mere sight of an ambitious wine that would have greater concentration made me wince. Lighter reds meant to be drunk young gave both relief and pleasure, for example the Bera e Figle 2010 Arcese and the Cascina degli Ulivi 2011 Semplicemente Rosso, both about $15. Acidity, which is a good thing in a wine meant to be served with food, became a liability, and I was unsure about my judgment of the more expensive wines, though a 2010 Chianti Classico from Montesecondo and a 2008 Valpolicella Classico Superiore from Monte dall’ Ora in the high $20s both seemed like they would be worth the money.

Whites from the Loire and Germany were like fresh, cold water after a heavy dose of Italian reds – a response that made me question the received wisdom that reds must always follow whites in a meal and never the reverse. Louis Dressner and Chambers Street both champion wines from the Loire, and those from Domaine de la Pepiere, Domaine du Closel, and Francois Pinon, all but one under $25, were worthy of the hype.

For me, though, the Weingut Knebel Rieslings were the revelation of the tasting. Their 2010 Von den Terrassen was a steal at $17, a great introduction to the grape for those who think they don’t like it, and their 2011 Hamm at $37 was as defined and beautiful as a geometric proof, the acidity, the sugar, the nose in perfect balance.

Palate revived, tasting funk averted, I made my way through the rest of the tasting with thoughts of the warmer months in mind, according to the notes I scrawled in the margin of the roster of producers. The 2011 Gaillac from Causse Marines were nice summer porch wines, I wrote, and the two 2010 reds from Zelige-Caravent cried out for a grilled steak, maybe even on July 4.

Afterwards, what could be more patriotic than sniffing a little of Mauro Vergano’s Vino Aromatizzato Americano with its herbal aromatics, or, for more frugal souls, some Cocchi Americano, while listening to Tony Bennett or Frank Sinatra and watching the fireworks with your feet up on the deck? Think of it as a frolic for the palate. 

From Estrella Damm to Can Roca

Football is an ideal vehicle for selling beer in Europe as in America, but the televised advertisements for the beverage on the two continents take forms as different as the sports. The Spanish beer Estrella Damm is currently running a 90-second spot that perfectly illustrates the country’s attitudes toward food. A fishing boat bobs along the Mediterranean on a sunny day. There’s a shot of Hideki Matsuhisa, a sushi chef at Koy Shunka in the Barcelona, then one of FC Barcelona star Cesc Fabregas, before the fishermen pull in a net full of shrimp. Matsuhisa pulls out a cutting board, rubs it with wasabi, prepares eight pieces of shrimp sushi , and offers them to the crew. The men enthusiastically consume the shrimp with Estrella Damm, then start kicking around a spherical buoy, which one of the seamen heads into the water. Undaunted, the crew cracks open more Estrella Damm and sits arm in arm on the bow of the ship in the sun.

The ad reflects a culinary culture that obsesses over freshness, is open to influences from around the world, and believes food should be playful and fun, tenets so pervasive that a mass-market beer commercial can celebrate them. For the last decade, the high-end standard-bearer for this approach was El Bulli, the shrine to molecular gastronomy in northeast Spain. Ferran Adria closed the restaurant in 2011, and the mantle has been handed over to Celler Can Roca in the town of Girona, about an hour north of Barcelona.

Founded in 1986 by chef Joan Roca I Fontane and sommelier Josep (younger brother Jordi later joined as the pastry chef), Can Roca has become more experimental over time. When I went four years ago, it offered appetizers, entrees and desserts along with longer tasting menus, but now only the latter are available, one comprised of Can Roca classics, the other of Joan’s current creations. I had the latter and enjoyed it thoroughly, from the white asparagus ice cream with dried ground truffle to the grilled whole prawn – perhaps an homage to Extebarri, the Basque temple of grilling – and sea bream and mullet.

I spent much of the meal reading Josep’s wine list, which shows a love of Burgundy and German Riesling as well as Spanish wines, a diversity you’d rarely see in France or Italy. There are even about ten wines from the Jura producer Jean-Francois Ganevat. Josep pairs wines with each course, and he isn’t afraid to break out some of his older bottles. A 1998 Lopez de Heredia reserva blanco was unexpectedly floral on the nose but had the producer’s customary cleansing acidity on the palate, and the 1973 gran reserva blanco was intensely earthy – one of the sommeliers said it smelled of white truffle – but again with perfectly fresh orange peel on the finish. It reminded me of a scene in the great 1973 Spanish movie The Spirit of the Beehive where a father takes his two young daughters out to pick mushrooms, and it was a little like a sherry bottled in 1966 that Josep poured when I asked him about sherries, a number of which he has on his list.

Can Roca takes reservations many months in advance and is priced like the Michelin three-star that it is, though the wines remain a good value. Bargain-hunters averse to planning can head to Falset, two hours south of Barcelona, where Celler de l’Aspic has a wine list that would do any restaurant would be proud at prices that make a cheapskate salivate, especially when paired with a €30 menu that includes an amuse, four courses, and dessert. Chef and owner Toni Bru is generous in all respects. Beyond the portion sizes, ingredient quality, and prices at his restaurant, when I told him I was going to Can Roca a few days later, he said he was headed up for dinner the day before my reservation and would tell Josep Roca I was coming. Sure enough, Josep was waiting for me when I got to his restaurant. “You are famous in Priorat,” he said with a smile.

For all of its openness to foreign influence, Spain has great food traditions of its own, which Oriol Rovira celebrates at Els Casals, a restaurant, hotel, and farm in the mountains north two hours north of Barcelona. He’s cooked at a number of great restaurants, including Taillevent in Paris, but his model, he said, is cucina povera, the food the peasants eat. My meal at Els Casals began with a delicious curlicue of a chitlin seasoned with a touch of pepper and lemon peel and a fresh pate topped with a white bean puree. A small dish of beautifully prepared chicken accompanied by a huge bowl of leek mousse followed, then suckling pig with a potato puree that was really a delivery device for good melted cheese.

The Spanish affinity for Riesling reached even here; the sommelier/waiter/chauffeur David (he picked me up from the bus stop in a nearby town that morning) smiled when I ordered a 2008 Zusslin, a Riesling from Alsace, and he brought small samples of various wines throughout the meal, ending with a rare Catalonian red that like Madeira is deliberately exposed to heat and tasted like balsamic vinegar, unsweetened chocolate, and tobacco. That may not sound good, but the flavor grew on me, and I could see sipping an ounce of the stuff late on a summer night while sitting on the porch at Els Casals with my feet up, looking at the mountains. 

I also encountered the local cuisine on the €20 lunch menu at Mon Vinic, a wine bar in Barcelona that pours several dozen wines by the glass and had hundreds for sale by the bottle. Their eggs gently scrambled with green onion and morcilla, or blood sausage, was at once comforting and elegant, the kind of dish you could eat once a week for years on end. It went perfectly with an Amontillado sherry that had the complex nose of a good Scotch and the clean finish typical of sherry, but it would also have been great with an Estrella Damm. 

The Paradox of Priorat

For two nights last month, I was the only person at Hostel Elvira in Gratallops, a small village in northeast Spain. Not just the only guest – the only person. When the taxi driver dropped me off at the residence at 6:00 P.M. on a Sunday evening, he used his cell phone to call the number listed on the front door, then drove off. Fifteen minutes later, a car arrived and parked at the agricultural cooperative across the narrow street. A woman hopped out, let me into the hostel, turned on the heat and hot water, gave me the keys to my room and a brief orientation, and left. Fortunately, I was full from a late, large lunch at Celler de l’Aspic in the nearby town of Falset, because none of the four restaurants and three stores in Gratallops is open on Sunday night. I could channel-surf the hostel’s cable television or watch the sun set behind steep hills covered with olive trees, grape vines and almond trees whose white flowers were beginning to bloom. 

The combination of extreme remoteness and modern technology is typical of Priorat, until the last few decades a poor region that for a century had lost population to cities where jobs were in far greater supply. It’s mountainous terrain cold in the winter and brutally hot in the summer, one ungenerous to farmers and often too steep to work by tractor.

The locals have grown grapes for centuries, Grenache and Carignan, from which they made rustic wine for their own consumption. The vines were not trained in rows but planted individually on soft slate through which the roots of the plant burrowed in search of water. As some farmers abandoned their vineyards when they moved, the grapes continued to grow in fields left to wild grasses and trees.

In 1979, René Barbier, the scion of a Franco-Spanish winemaking family that had sold its firm to the cava producer Freixenet, started making wine in Priorat at what became Clos Mogdor, which is about a ten-minute walk from Hostel Elvira in Gratallops. Others followed. They brought with them other varietals and modern wine-making methods. The heat, harshness of the land, and in some cases the age of the native Grenache vines resulted in low yields with high sugar levels that produced intense wines with high alcohol levels.

That style of wine was perfect for the 1990s, when thanks in part to Robert Parker robust red wines were in high fashion. Priorat’s wines bore some resemblance to the Grenache-based Rhone wines such as Chateauneuf-du-Pape that Parker popularized, a similarity that helped drive demand for Priorat.

Parker’s power has receded, and a new generation of Priorat winemakers is emerging. Some have grown up in the region, but land and housing here remain affordable, and aspiring winemakers continue to come to Priorat, bringing with them their own tastes and methods. The one constant is high alcohol; a wine must have at least 13.5 percent to be labeled Priorat, and it would be hard to make a wine with less than that given the conditions here. 

René Barbier’s son, also named René, still makes Clos Mogador with his father, but he’s experimenting as well. The son is about 40, with a wife and four children, but when he was younger he worked harvests in the Southern Hemisphere, which exposed him to other wine-making techniques. The harvest in California occurs at about the same time as it does in Priorat, so he couldn’t go to Napa Valley, but as an 18-year-old he did venture to Lubbock, Texas in August to pick grapes before returning to do the same in Priorat. René is remarkably honest about his winemaking, and he even took from a barrel what he admitted was a bad Grenache, whose shapelessness will destine it for some end other than a bottle of Clos Mogador. The most interesting wine René offered me was a Grenache aged in amphora, or a large clay pot, which was beautifully fresh and tasted of cranberries and orange.

He’s also making wine from White Grenache and Macabeo, a relative novelty in Priorat, where 95% of the wine is red. René makes Mogador with his father, he collaborates with his wife, who runs Mas Martinet, one of the other five original Priorat producers, and he and wife own vineyards with three other couples with whom they make wine, but the whites are his project. That reminded me of Telmo Rodriguez in La Rioja, whose father insisted on making Remelluri reds until a few years ago but allowed the son to make the whites. René smiled with recognition and said he remembered tasting the first Remelluri whites in the mid-1990s; they were a revelation, he said. The next day I visited Mas Martinet, which is also innovating by replacing the Cabernet and Syrah vines introduce in the 1980s with Grenache and making a little rancio, a red wine that’s exposed to oxygen and heat and thus acquires a flavor reminiscent of Madeira.

The commercial possibilities of Priorat attracted Rhone winemaker Phillip Cambie and Rhone wine merchant Michel Tardieu, who in 1999 launched Mas Alta, a ten-minute drive from Gratallops on steep, winding roads that offer stunning vistas onto the surrounding mountains and villages. The wines are big but not absurdly so, since Mas Alta doesn’t use that much new oak, and well-made if to my taste unexciting. But these wines aren’t made for my taste; they’re made for a specific, well-heeled segment of the export market, and the owners’ expertise in navigating that market is a critical skill given the EU’s heavy regulation of the wine trade.

My last visit in Priorat was with Fredi Torres, a Spanish native who was raised in Switzerland, where he studied oenology in college. Fredi came to Priorat to work for René Barbier and ended up buying vineyards nearby, one of them across a road from one of René’s. Those plots are steep enough that they have to be worked by mule, and Fredi occasionally lets René house his animal in a small stone hut on Fredi’s land. I was surprised to learn that some mules, like the one Fredi worked with for many yeas, can be quite tractable; that animal is pretty much retired, and her successor is younger and more of a challenge. The mule is the only way Fredi can work one of his vineyards, which is covered not with soil but with soft slate stones and is so steep that I worried I would slide all the way down the hill with every step I took.  

Fredi greatly prefers Carignan to Grenache, and he’s one of the few people to make wine entirely from Carginan, which is much more commonly a blending grape. After two days of tasting Grenache, I found that Fredi’s wines had a nerviness that should develop beautifully as they age. He’s recently added capacity, having purchased an abandoned vineyard whose 80-year-old Carignan vines had grown wild for a generation. He wasn’t crowing about their age, though; instead, he was worried about the quality of the grapes they would produce in their first year free of underbrush in a long time. 

A spoonful of sugar

The nineteenth German Riesling I tasted on Saturday – for the record, a 2011 Geltz-Zilliken Saarburger Rausch Spätlese – was, like too many of its antecedents, unremarkable: a vaguely tropical fruit nose with perhaps a little ginger ale aroma, then slightly sweet on the tongue, with little definition of taste. Whatever. But the twentieth glass I sampled, the 2003 vintage of the same wine, was one to quit on. The nose was vivid, orange peel, apricot and petrol (think not of a gas station, but perhaps of the peel of some novel citrus that’s just been squeezed into your cocktail), and the wine had peaks and valleys of acidity, spice and sweetness in the mouth. If the 2011 delivers that kind of experience in eight years, then those who pluck down their $50 for a bottle now will have received good value.

The two pours came at the end of the last of the tastings at the four Manhattan wine stores that participated in Rieslingfeier, an event devoted to the grape beloved by both the hipster wine crowd and the traditionalists. The latter love riesling aging potential, its distinctive aromas and its subtlety, the former the seemingly infinite expressions of the grape that a small plot of land can offer.

A wine like the 2003 Geltz-Zilliken offers ample reason for riesling love. There’s something magical about tasting a vintage that’s starting to come into its own against one too young to show much. It’s like witnessing alchemy, or watching a great golfer hit an iron shot to the back of the 16^th green at Augusta National and then seeing the ball snake back thirty yards to within a putter’s length of the pin. You realize that the winemaker or golfer thinks in completely different terms than you do and is capable of effecting a thought whose possibility you hadn’t even contemplated.

For all that, the veterans on the Manhattan riesling trail whispered that many of the wines weren’t good values, a critique that extended beyond the rieslings being poured. Some of the entry-level wines meant to be drunk young were indeed head-scratchingly high in price at $25 or more. Perhaps the real value is at the higher end, where prices are quite reasonable compared to white burgundy or ambitious California chardonnays.

The lower-end product may also have been hurt by Germans’ preference in the last generation for wines with less residual sugar, which was apparent on Saturday. By the end of the tasting, I felt the acidity of the wines more than I would have liked. A comparison from another tasting showed how much a little sugar can add to a riesling. On Friday, an importer poured the 2011 wines of Hofgut Falkenstein at Chambers Street Wines. One, a trocken, had an intense acidity with little sugar to balance it; the other, a halbtrocken (long story short, more residual sugar than the trocken, or dry), had a much more interesting nose and was livelier on the tongue. I don’t think most Americans would characterize it as sweet. The trocken was not a particularly good value when compared to a a Muscadet from the Loire or an Albarino from Galicia. But the Feinherb – a synonym for halbtrocken meant to avoid that word’s now pernicious implication of sweetness – was distinct from a chenin blanc or a muscat. It demanded some thought and offered some pleasure. A little sugar can go a long way.

Emile Peynaud: Bringing science to the cellar

Emile Peynaud is one of the most important figures in the history of wine. Born in Bordeaux in 1912, he studied oenology at its university in the 1930s and after World War II spread a scientific approach to winemaking as a consultant to many of the great Bordeaux houses and, in later years, to vignerons around France and across the globe.

Critics of Peynaud argue that his advocacy of modern technique and wide-ranging consulting, which became a model for later “flying winemakers,” helped lead to a standardization of wines from different regions in the same way that Robert Parker’s wine scoring has. But while Parker succeeded by publishing a sort of Consumer’s Report of high-end wine and wrote with the all of the stiffness that one would expect from that publication, Peynaud communicated his ideas with style. His books Connaissance et travail du vin and Le Goût du vin are classic works on winemaking and wine tasting, activities that in his view were inextricably linked. They have been translated into English; his collection of essays Le vin et les jours has not, but it evidences the same intellectual rigor, arrogance, and gift for the aperçu.

Peynaud balanced a typically French respect for hierarchy and tradition with a scientist’s willingness to experiment. He worried about losing “the personality of terroir,” and believed that the great wine regions should be wary of changing their styles to appeal to the lowest common denominator – or, as he put it, “to the thirst of other throats or to certain boldnesses in presentation,” which reads like a veiled shot at Parker. But Peynaud also loved the freedom of New World winemaking, where “the future is open to all experiences, and oenology has an open field. I am attracted by these situations without constraints.”

A good chunk of Le vin et les jours is devoted to the history of winemaking, and here the key figure is Louis Pasteur, for whom faulty wine was a model for human disease: “When one sees beer and wine undergo profound alterations because the liquids have given asylum to microscopic organisms,” Pasteur once wrote, “how can one not be obsessed by the thought that events of the same order can and must be present in men and animals.”

That insight animates modern oenology. If a wine tastes off, there must be a flaw in the way the wine was made that can be identified and corrected. An early solution to microbial spoilage, of course, was pasteurization, which also has the effect of removing much of a wine’s subtlety. Later, Peynaud writes, “the rational addition of sulfites emerged as a more effective practice,” since sulfites kill bacteria and unwanted yeast. The use of sulfites has become one of the most controversial subjects in the wine world, but it was adopted to solve a serious problem, and can be minimized by an improved understanding of how wine is made.

Peynaud acknowledges that new styles of winemaking have not always led to a better product and sometimes have degraded a producer’s wine in the process of abandoning older ways of doing things. Mechanization, he emphasizes, is not synonymous with progress.

Despite the influence of science, winemakers are still confronted with many choices, starting with how to train their vines and when to pick their grapes – or which varietals to plant in the first place. Here, the consultant plays a valuable role by accumulating experience that no single producer could. Peynaud writes, “The hundreds of cuvees vinified every year, of all crus and all varietals, have been an unequaled field of observation. Lacking the ability to experiment rationally in this area, I engaged in comparative vinification. In thirty harvests, if one has the chemist’s observant eye and the taster’s trained palate, one will likely have encountered practically every kind of case and be ready from then on for the unforeseen.”

One of Peynaud’s first harvests was 1934, when in the course of an experiment on bottling in a Medoc laboratory he wrote in his own hand labels for bottle of Barsac from Chateau Dudon. One of his friends sends him a bottle of the sweet wine when he’s in a German POW camp in Wurtenberg in 1942. The commanding officer, a model of German humorlessness and efficiency, is nonetheless from Neustadt in Pfalz, a region where Riesling is produced, and understands that Peynaud has helped make the wine, so he gives him the bottle and orders him to consume its contents as quickly as possible.

“He even gave me a corkscrew,” writes Peynaud, who shared the gift with French and Belgian friends. “This wine from the past, I was sure, had come to revive me in my exile by speaking to me of liberty, of the future, and by rekindling hope within me. They all awaited me at home, my friend and others, to write works of oenology together. For a long time – believe it if you will – I could not taste a Barsac without a little emotion. It is the only wine which once made me weep with joy.”

John McPhee, Edward Behr and Natural Winemaking

“Natural winemaking” is one of the wine world’s most prominent slogans. Its advocates favor grapes that are grown sustainably with minimal fertilizer and wines made in a “non-interventionist” way – that is, without new oak, which can overpower the flavor of the wine, and with minimal sulfur, which helps preserve wine but can also be an easy way to mask flaws in it. The natural winemaking crowd wants a product that expresses “terroir,” the unique qualities of the precise place in which the wine was made. Its bogeyman is mass-produced wine, particularly big reds with lots of oak, from Yellow Tail at the low end to Bordeaux at the high end.

Natural winemaking is a subset of the slow and organic food movements. Every ideology needs its popularizer, and Michael Pollan filled that role for slow foodies with to his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Behind Pollan lies Edward Behr, who moved to Vermont in the early 1970s to become a carpenter and in 1987 launched The Art of Eating, a quarterly magazine devoted to the search for the truest possible ingredients from vanilla to coffee to pork, which was the subject of a 1999 Behr essay that moved Chipotle founder Steve Ells to source his meat from the most agriculturally honest producers possible. In 1992, the Atlantic Monthly Press published a collection of Behr’s essays, and coincidentally or not, over the next generation various authors have produced a series of popular books focused on a single foodstuff.

Behind Behr’s work and its progeny is John McPhee’s 1967 essay Oranges, about the fruit of that name and the juice produced from it. McPhee became most famous for his books on geology and the environment, culminating in the 1998 book Annals of A Former World, which won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. Oranges is the third of McPhee’s 25 or so books and the first to focus on the concerns that would dominate much of his writing. He recorded a key inflection point in American agriculture and, while he was at it, a consumer mentality against which today’s environmentally conscious eaters are reacting.

Behr’s essays are often charming, and it’s a shame there aren’t more of them in book form so that the reader can track the development of his writing. Some of his best work comes in his shortest essays, on bay leaves or sorrel or various kinds of mint (a biological class that includes hyssop and lavender, we learn). Behr had read the classics of food writing and cookery and placed himself squarely in that tradition with the title of his quarterly, a nod to M.F.K. Fisher’s collection of that name. “Don’t worry about thieving The Art of Eating,” she reassured him in a letter; “I think I thieved it too, because it’s taken from something said by Brillat-Savarin, something about how men and animals may eat, but very few of them know the art of it.”

Behr is among that select group. In an age before bloggers posted photos and absurdly detailed descriptions of long tasting menus at Michelin-starred restaurants, he knew that Paris chef Alain Senderens favored a preparation of lobster with vanilla. He hunted down ingredients all over the U.S., including the dried Greek oregano and sage sold at Kalustyan’s on Lexington between 28^th and 29^th in Manhattan. (He doesn’t mention the deli, though, purveyor of my favorite sandwiches in New York.)

Behr is fundamentally an aesthete rather than an environmentalist and a cook rather than a scientist, but his obsessive focus on quality aligns him with the opponents of mass-produced food. That orientation comes to the fore in his essay on pork, which has became leaner in the 1990s as food companies sought to brand the meat as a healthy alternative to chicken. Not only is such meat flavorless; the pigs from which it comes are raised in an unnatural, unhealthy way that requires they be pumped full of antibiotics and cooped up in buildings that generated a horrible smell and immense amounts of waste, all to generate standardized food that gives no joy to those who consume it.

Behr takes endless delight in the diversity that comes with small-scale farming. He expresses the sentiment best in the final paragraph of his essay “A Multiplicity of Apples,” where he writes, “If you sample different varieties from one orchard to another, you come to understand that an essential apple virtue is its unexpected variety of flavor, its surprises from apple to apple, tree to tree, and especially from year to year – produced largely by the imperfectly understood influences of soil, cultural practices, climate, and weather. They are filters through which the flavor of each variety is expressed. And, in fact, it is the surprises – the unending variety, not only the high points – that goad you on.”

Variety is the enemy of the process McPhee explores in Oranges. Florida producers want their concentrate to taste the same from can to can to can. Even in a motel in the heart of Florida orange country, a waitress tells McPhee, customers want consistency. “Fresh is either too sour or too watery or too something,” she tells him. “Frozen is the same every day. People want to know what they’re getting.”  They want the same predictability in their fruit – no blood oranges, and oranges must be that color, even though the ripe fruit may be completely green. Whole processing plants are devoted to achieving that color after the oranges are picked.

But most of the oranges grown in Florida go into concentrate, and “an individual orange means nothing” in making it. Instead of selling oranges, growers sell “pounds solid,” especially sugar, as in the years to come Perdue will sell white rather than dark chicken meat and Iowa farmers will be paid more to produce lean pork. “We are growing chemicals now, not oranges,” one grower tells McPhee, a sentence that could stand for the course of big agriculture generally after World War II, and for the standardization of American life more broadly. Even in the mid-1960s McPhee could write, “Gas stations, Burger Queens, and shopping centers so dominate the towns of central Florida that the overall effect on a springtime visitor can be that he is in Trenton during an August heat wave.”

Surprisingly to the modern reader, wealthier, more educated consumers led the move to concentrate. “Farmers, craftsmen, and laborers buy the least concentrate,” McPhee writes, while “doctors, dentists, lawyers, and corporate executives are the heaviest consumers.” That relationship has been inverted. People like Behr and Pollan have helped change attitudes among the wealthy, while the ever-declining cost of industrialized food has made obesity and diabetes serious public health problems in America. The oenological debates about natural winemaking techniques often sound tinny and intellectualized, but they mirror more serious issues elsewhere in the world of food. 

An encyclopedia worth reading

When I mentioned to a friend last month that I was reading the Oxford Companion to Wine, he replied that the task sounded like reading the encyclopedia, the paradigm of boredom, a pointless, mindless, joyless march through the alphabet. And he hadn’t even seen the book, which weighs eight pounds and is 800 pages long. Though not titled an encyclopedia, the OCW aspires to be as thorough as one, with entries on countries and regions from France to Pakistan (“where one of the richest resources of ancient, genetically varied plant material may still be found”) and grapes from Chardonnay to Grignolino.

More than once, I shared my friend’s assessment of the task I was undertaking, and of the implications for my own sanity. Planta Fina, Planta Nova, Plant cell diversity, Plantet. Why am I doing this to myself?

Far more often, though, I was enthralled and entertained. “Reading the encyclopedia” has a dismissive tone because it suggests someone who’s working through a long book only to finish it rather than because of curiosity or interest. It’s unattractive intellectualism taken to its extreme. But any broad subject contains within it interlocking universes; it’s the approach to cataloguing those realms that determines the value of the exercise.

Jancis Robinson, who edited the OWC, crafted a work that’s authoritative and deeply informed, as any reference work should be, but also witty, humane, and deeply aware of the contingency and subjectivity of its subject. In this sense, the most OWC’s significant entry may be “fashion,” which one would not expect to see in a definitive work. But tastes have always changed, and, “what has been most remarkable about fashions in wine consumption in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries has been how rapidly wine production has reacted to them, and in some cases created them (see wine brands, rose wines, pale cream sherry, low-alcohol wine, and wine boxes among others.” Or Sauvignon Blanc, which we learn was only the 13^th most planted grape in France in 1968 but had risen to third in 2000. The OWC gives extensive coverage to the scientific and technical advances have that also transformed the way grapes are grown and wine is made in recent decades, which along with the sensitivity to changing tastes gives the subject a dynamism not generally associated with encyclopedias, whose heft alone suggests stasis and completion. 

The acknowledgement of change in the wine world allows for a focus on the people who have fostered it, starting with the Burgundian monks who “had several advantages over lay growers: they had cellars and store rooms in which to mature their wine; and, most importantly, they kept records and had the time and a degree of organization necessary to engage in systematic improvements.” Or, more decadently, King Henry IV, who favored wines from Givry in Burgundy “perhaps because it was the birthplace of his mistress Gabrielle d’Estrées.”

Samuel Pepys makes a cameo appearance, since his “life seems to have been a succession of drinks if his diary provides an accurate record, with references to Tent, Canary, Rhenish, and English wines from vineyards around London.” The 17^th century diarist was also the first to refer “to new French clarets, in particular that of ‘Ho Bryan,’ ” or Haut-Brion, one of the great wines of Bordeaux, an region oriented toward export to Britain since the middle ages. Yellow Tail makes its appearance as a triumph of Australian marketing, as do Ernest and Julio Gallo for their canny domination of the U.S. market. 

These personalities make it easier for the non-specialist to retain focus on the entries describing technical developments, such as canopy management, a method of maximizing the sunlight that the leaves of the vine receive and therefore to make sugar that will be concentrated in the grapes, or refrigeration during the fermentation process, which “more than any other factor has permitted warm and hot regions to produce wine of internationally acceptable quality.” 
The OCW conveys a sense of the magic of wine that its devotees have shared for thousands of years and that the ancient Greek poet Hesiod describes in a passage quoted in book: “I love a shady rock and some wine from Byblos, a cake of cheese, and goat’s milk, and some meat of heifers pastured in the woods, uncalved, of first-born kids. Then I may sit in the shade and drink the shining wine, and eat my fill, and turn my face to meet the fresh west wind, and pour three times an offering from the spring which always flows, unmuddied, streaming down, and make my fourth libation one of wine.”

Crabs the Basque way - but with wine, not Natty Boh

MFWC grew up in Baltimore, so I consider the steamed crab not just a delicacy but a symbol of regional pride. I was befuddled but intrigued when I saw "grilled crab" on the menu at Etxebarri, a restaurant in the Basque country that takes grilling to new heights. Was this grilled crabmeat? No, this was a crab from the waters off of Galicia placed on the grill. Curiosity got the better of me, which was a good thing. The whole animal arrived on a plate with a knife, fork, and pincers to extract the meat from the shell. Among the tools of the Baltimore crabhouse, only the mallet was missing, but crushing these claws would have been an insult to the quality of the meat inside. The crab, of a different species than the Chesapeake Bay blue crab but with a similar anatomy, was delicious, its meat tasting slightly of smoke and lightly and elegantly of butter. At €24 it was by far the most expensive crab I've ever consumed, but also the best, an excellent start to a week's vacation in La Rioja and the Basque country. 

I had Txangurro, a more traditional preparation of spider crab several days later at Rekondo in San Sebastian, famous for a wine list that runs to almost 300 pages and has stunningly low mark-ups on iconic wines from Burgundy, Bordeaux, and La Rioja, among other places. I would have chosen a 1987 Lopez de Heredia Gran Reserva, but the owner was keeping his few remaining bottles for his own consumption, so I opted for Chablis, a 2007 Raveneau premier cru Les Butteaux for €60, significantly less than the $110 or so it sells for here in stores, let alone restaurants. The sommelier recommended the crab as an entree. It turned out to be a far better version of that Baltimore classic crab imperial. The spider crab, he said, was blended with some tomato, Armagnac and Cognac, finished with a little cheese, run under the broiler and served in its shell, which was bigger and deeper than that of even a large blue crab. (A recipe for something similar is here.) The preparation was luxurious without being overly rich and a good match for the wine, which tasted like really clean spring water - more delicious than it might sound even if one might hope for more in a bottle at that price.

The intelligence about the quality of the '87 Heredia came in handy the next day at Kaia-Kaipe in Getaria, which is worth a visit for the beauty of the town, the Txakoli producers in the immediate vicinity, and the newly opened Museo Balenciaga that overlooks the harbor. I opted for the '87 Heredia reserva at €29 to go with grilled squid and cod throats in salsa verde, and it was a terrific bottle, its nose of dried orange and a hint of honey reminiscent of Heredia's very distinctive rosés. Heredia's younger whites have good acidity that bordered on excessive in the '96 that I tasted at their vineyards that week, but the '87 had mellowed without losing its leanness. I can only wonder what the classic 1970 and 1964 taste like.

I visited Heredia on my trip to Spain last fall, and the return trip to the wineries was different enough to be worthwhile, but the best view of their vineyards came on a tour of Remelluri and a few other properties with Telmo Rodriguez, who makes Remelluri's wines and a number of others around Spain. In the 1960s, Telmo's parents bought an abandoned church property several miles outside of Haro where his father began cultivating grapes. The father made the reds himself but allowed his son to produce a white from grapes grown on the property, but Telmo now owns a few other vineyards nearby, one of which affords a view of the Tondonia vineyards, one of the three that Lopez de Heredia owned. Telmo pointed them out to three Portuguese and me from a vineyard he's just starting to develop.

A sense of place is important to him even in the sites he picks; he says he sees the site and imagines the wine he can make from it rather than thinking about which grapes he'll plant. With sites like these it's easy to understand his method; La Rioja is beautiful, with high mountains sheltering more gentle, sloping hills on which grapes, olives, and grains grow. Telmo worked with the famous Rhone producer Jean-Louis Chave when he was younger, an influence that pushed Rodriguez to make more delicate red wines than was the fashion, or than La Rioja is known for. A taste of syrah from one of Remelluri's barrels reminded me of an Arnot-Roberts syrah I tasted this winter and found haunting, perhaps an example of the way young producers in different areas can be influenced by an established winemaker from yet another region. As we were looking toward the Tondonia properties and enjoying some peaches that a local farmer who knows Telmo had given him, he noted that though Heredia has for decades been seen as the epitome of La Rioja winemaking, the man who built it in the late 19th and early 20th century was himself not a traditionalist. There's room for both approaches, just as the same diner can enjoy both the radical simplicity of a grilled crab and the traditional elegance of a classic preparation.         

From albacore to chicken hearts: Wining and dining in the Bay Area

Sloth has gotten the better of the MFWC for the last month, for which I can only plead that the misery of the July heat sapped my energy, while two weeks in the San Francisco Bay Area offered distractions with which sitting in front of a keyboard could not compete, (e.g., Cowgirl Creamery chevre and blueberry jam on an Acme roll at the Ferry Building) though they did provide gist for a blog post.

The epicenter of Bay Area cuisine is Chez Panisse, the ingredient-driven restaurant that Alice Waters opened in Berkeley in 1971 and that has trained and influenced generations of chefs. Numerous notable San Francisco restaurants still show her influence, and Chez Panisse itself remains an excellent restaurant. Critics claim that time has passed it by; perhaps they should sample the peach galette with a scoop of raspberry ice cream that I ate there a few weeks ago after a salad of shrimp, scallops and mussels dressed with a saffron mayonnaise followed by a perfectly roasted albacore. Waters and the wine importer Kermit Lynch have influenced one another since their early days in the food business, but the wine list at Chez Panisse wanders well beyond the realm of Lynch and has relatively low mark-ups. I enjoyed a glass of the 2008 Coenobium, a wine made by nuns in Lazio under the supervision of Paolo Bea, for something like $11.

But there's no need to stick to new American cuisine in the Bay Area, of course. La Ciccia in the Mission focuses on the cuisine of Sardinia, but its wine list ranges all over Italy, and I reached for the Occhipinti 2011 SP68 white, a blend of zibibbo, which is a form of muscat, Moscato di Alexandria, and grillo, which at $40 was a bargain. (It goes for $27 at Chamber St. Wines, for example.) The nose is floral with a touch of citrus but has a backbone of acidity that allowed it to stand up to a delicious octopus stew in a spicy tomato broth that was more than entree sized given that the broth was far too good to send back to the kitchen.

I didn't get to Nopalito in the Panhandle on this trip, a very reasonably priced Mexican restaurant that serves authentic food made with quality ingredients, but I did hit up Comal in Berkeley with a few friends. We could have used a few more mouths to work through the menu, which featured more fish than Nopalito but was of equivalent quality. But the revelations at Comal were the $8 wines on tap, one an Arnot-Roberts sauvignon blanc, the other a trousseau gris from Pax Mahle's Wind Gap, both respected California wineries whose bottles generally cost $25 and up and are oddly enough hard to find in Bay Area wine stores. (The Arnot-Roberts touriga nacional rose is a beautiful, delicate wine, by the way.) The Arnot-Roberts sauvignon blanc was very good, but I erred by not getting a glass of the trousseau gris, which is different from the version that Wind Gap sells by the bottle. That wine, a white, sees extended skin contact and needs a day to breathe; this one, I was told, does not, and it was delicious, subtle, reminiscent of chenin blanc. For $8, I repeat.

Wine did not feature at all in the most memorable meal I had on my west coast swing. Ippuku serves only Japanese spirits and prides itself on the quality of its chicken, which it even serves in a raw preparation. I had the salmonella surprise, as one of my friends called it, last year, but the dish that stuck in my mind was a skewer of grilled chicken hearts, which had the richness of good game with none of the fat. Once again, they were perfect, as were the sardines, both of which were grilled over the oak charcoal Ippuku imports from Japan and good enough to remind me of my trip to Etxebarri in the Basque Country. I began with raw albacore in a sesame mustard sauce that was at least equal in quality to the fish served at Chez Panisse. The only misstep was a slightly oversalted rice in squid ink. But at $53 with a glass of shochu, tax and tip, it would be churlish to complain and down right stupid not to return.          

           
        

Revisiting a classic: Peynaud's The Taste of Wine

Before Louis Pasteur discovered that different yeasts could affect a wine's taste, "Good wine was merely the result of lucky accidents," wrote Émile Peynaud, the great Bordelais vintner who did more than anyone else in the 20th century to understand those accidents and bring them under human control. Born in 1912, Peynaud went to work at age 14 for Calvet, then the leading wine merchant in Bordeaux, and after World War II began advising many of the region's most prominent winemakers, a position that gave him immense influence and allowed him to advocate for advances that he had spent years studying and that he described in his book Connaissance et travail du vin. In later years Peynaud consulted with winemakers around the world, and his critics charged that he like the critic Robert Parker was a key factor in the increasing homogenization of wine around the world, which defenders such as the wine writer Mike Steinberger argued was a gross distortion of Peynaud's real legacy.

Eight years after his death, some of that legacy now rests on his 1983 book Le Goût du Vin, translated into English as The Taste of Wine. It remains astonishingly good; the only book on wine I've encountered that belongs in the same sentence is Kermit Lynch's Adventures on the Wine Route. Peynaud has a deep respect for the place of wine in French culture that is unclouded by sentimentality. In one short section, "The Winetaster is easily influenced," he cites a study by Pasteur, a passage from Rabelais, and a lunch with a supercilious sommelier at an elite Paris restaurant who is sure that all white bordeaux are sweet (they aren't) and when confronted with a dry one says that it tastes sweet to him. The passage is typical both for its erudition and for its recognition of the immense difficulty of tasting well.    

For Peynaud, "Tasting is an act of self-examination where the winetaster stands apart from himself, looking on as his mind's eye scans fleeting impressions of wines already tasted, probing his memory for images and reference points."

Some of those reference points, of course, are smells, and like most writers on tasting Peynaud emphasizes the importance of building a mental inventory of them despite the challenges to doing so, not least the fact that "from childhood on, city life cuts us off from the profusion of tastes and smells that occur in nature."

But for Peynaud, science also provided reference points. In his work as a consultant, he was often asked to diagnose what had gone wrong with a given wine, and the smell told the story: Wine stored too close to insecticide, or made from grapes contaminated by fumes from a nearby dump where garbage was burned, or vinified in a poor process, perhaps at too high a temperature or in old, dirty  barrels. That's how winemakers taste wine now, but not how many of them tasted when Peynaud began in the business, and it remains a sensibility almost impossible for amateurs to acquire, just as football coaches see a totally different game than even very studious fans.

As immersed as Peynaud was in the science of wine, he understood, as one of his friends put it, that "nothing can really be appreciated except in its cultural context." He notes, for example, that French and German drinkers have very different perceptions of sweetness in wine. "There is a national taste, even a regional taste, and each has its own vocabulary," he wrote. "It may also be that the equivalent adjectives in the two languages do not have quite the same meaning." As a result, the ambit of any taster's knowledge is extremely limited. Even 30 years ago he could write, "No one can have studied all the world's wines, and there is no such thing as a universal taster. When judging the wines from different countries together, one ought to take into account the particular tastes of their peoples as well as their eating and drinking habits."

That sounds like something one of today's natural winemakers would say, though some of them would argue that Peynaud ushered in an era of international consultants or "flying winemakers" who inevitably lack such specialized local knowledge. But that knowledge is most valuable - perhaps only valuable - when linked to a thorough scientific understanding of how wine is made. Peynaud's descriptions of older Bordeaux shows that such comprehension need not come at the cost of a more lyrical appreciation of wine. "There is something touching about the lasting character of wine," Peynaud writes. "The bottle which stores and refines it gives it a personality at the same time. For the receptive amateur with something of the poet in him, such a wine becomes a message from the past, a continuation, a milestone, a trace, a memento."

    

The problem of Pinot Grigio

Last month, MFWC picked up a new member(s), the husband of a couple who are both in sales - call them the Sales Couple. SC has a standing order for Pinot Grigio, which created a challenge and raised a question.

The challenge is that the salespeople at MFWC's favorite haunts tend to regard Pinot Grigio as uninteresting, insipid and overpriced and therefore don't carry a lot of it. Fortunately, SC are flexible folk, which has meant that they've taken a crash course in Austrian whites - not a coincidence, it turns out. Astor Wines started them off with a 2009 Grüner Veltliner from the producer Neumayer that they liked, and then I selected the 2011 Christ Gemischter Satz, a crisp wine with a floral nose that's a field blend of grapes including Riesling, Grüner, Weissburgunder, Gelber Muskateller, Welschriesling, Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay. The next week, Chamber St. Wines opted for another Grüner, the 2011 Ott Am Berg. SC seems to have forgotten all about Santa Margherita, the very successful Pinot Grigio that wine geeks love to hate.

That disdain puzzled me, since Pinot Grigio is merely the Italian name for Pinot Gris, a French grape that reaches its apex in Alsace and is also grown in Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Moravia and even Oregon, where it is now the most widely planted white variety and second most widely planted overall after Pinot Noir. Alsace produces full-bodied Pinot Gris, as does Oregon; David Phillips, a sales manager at Astor, mentioned the Ponzi from Oregon's Willamette Valley as a nice, affordable example.  

Historically, Phillips said, Italian Pinot Grigios were similar to their northern cousins. The winemakers often allowed the skins to stay in contact with the pressed grape juice for a time after pressing, which gives the wine more flavor and richness. But in the 1960s and 1970s the popularity in the U.S. of Gavi, a white wine made in the Piedmont, led some Italian winemakers to produce lighter crisper wines. Pinot Grigio was planted primarily in the northeastern provinces of Friuli, Alto Adagio and the Veneto, and those winemakers found models in the wines of neighboring Austria, where Grüner Veltliner is the most commonly grown grape. Santa Margherita was particularly successful at promoting the style in the U.S., where Pinot Grigio became an alternative to Chardonnay or Sauvignon Blanc, a style so light and ineffectual that it was almost wine for people who didn't want to be drinking wine. Planting of Pinot Grigio in Italy almost doubled from 8,600 acres in 1990 to 16,300 a decade later, according to the Oxford Wine Dictionary, and has continued to rise, according to Phillips. As production went up, quality went down.

As SC has discovered, Grüner is an excellent substitute for Pinot Grigio. Phillips suggested Picpoul, w hite from the south of France. Several MFWC members who asked for Pinot Grigio were very pleased with the Ambra Blanco from Ischia, an island off of Naples. But one MFWC member, a man of Sicilian extraction, echoed the geeks' criticism of Pinot Grigio when he said that Ambra Blanco "tastes like water. Italian soda, is what it is." Maybe he needs an old-school Pinot Grigio.    
 

It's all in your mind

Drinking wine with any level of seriousness raises fundamental issues of perception. Is taste objective or subjective? What's the relationship between the locus of sensation and the mind? And so on. Once the province of philosophy, such questions have over the last century become the object of scientific inquiry. Thanks largely to the insights of James Watson and Francis Crick, who discovered RNA and DNA, researchers have been able to study these questions at the molecular level for the last several decades.

Richard Axel of Columbia University won a Nobel Prize in 2004 for his work on the olfactory system and how the brain interprets smell, but he has not produced an explanation of his work for non-scientists. Eric Kandel, a colleague of Axel at Columbia and a Nobel laureate for his own work on the biology of memory, has. In Search of Memory is a surprisingly comprehensible history of scientific research into memory and the workings of the mind. Kandel makes his research on memory in Aplysia, a species of sea slug, intelligible and even engrossing. (He chose the species because its physiology - long, thick neurons, and relatively few of them - made the research into their workings easier.)

Modern neuroscience investigates how the brain's molecular physiology enables its plasticity, its ability to learn and change, to respond to experience. In the 1930s, the American scientist Wade Marshall showed that the cortex contains "precise maps of the body's sensory receptors," with the hands, the feet, and the face being larger on that figurative map than they are physically. Michael Merzenich of the University of California San Francisco significantly advanced that research in the 1970s and 1980s by showing that repeated use does increase the sensitivity of a given body part - in other words, increases the area of the cortex devoted to that body part.

That would seem to true for taste buds as well. The more wine you taste, the greater your ability to perceive changes in the wine and, perhaps, to describe them, a problem that Kandel would not have faced with sea slugs or Merzenich with monkeys. It's also true that the brain becomes less plastic as it ages. Does this mean that people "know" the smells they were familiar with growing up better than those they encounter as adults? It would seem so, analogizing to the violinists who began playing the instrument before age 13 and have larger images of their left hand in their cortexes than those who began playing the instrument after that age, but Kandel has other issues to explore.

In the process, he raised a number of fascinating issues in this drinker's mind. I often lament when I drink an unfamiliar wine - Austrian rieslings, for example - that I don't understand the smells the wine emits. In Adventures on the Wine Route, Kermit Lynch recommends that budding connoisseurs buy a case of a wine they like and study it as they drink through the twelve bottles. In doing so, the drinker is training his nose and therefore his brain to perceive certain smells and understand how the wine is constructed, just as children learn how narratives are constructed by hearing the same one over and over and over. But this in turn raises the question of how similar learning a language is neurologically to learning how to recognize a smell (quite similar on a molecular level, I think Kandel would say). The questions multiply quickly, even dizzyingly in reading Kandel's book.

     

Mapping the wine trade

The devastation of the French wine industry by Phylloxera in the 1860s is a central event in the history of wine that affected what was already a global business. Charles Joseph Minard, a key figure in the history of information graphics, offered snapshots of that business in at least two of his works. Minard is most famous for his depiction of the losses that Napoleon's army suffered in its invasion of Russia, a chart hailed as a landmark by observers as distinguished as Edward Tufte. But for the most part Minard focused on the analysis of trade and transportation; in one chart, for example, he showed the almost immediate effect of the American Civil War on European cotton imports.  

In two of the 71 graphics he produced over the course of his long career, Minard analyzed the French wine trade. One shows the French exports in 1864 (see no. 49 in this list of his work); the other depicts the intra-French wine trade, in which pink reflects railroad transportation and green movement of wine along rivers. Paris dominates, of course, and Bordeaux and the southwest produce far more wine than any region and seem to outpace Burgundy by a wide margin. The map was made in 1860, just a few years before the discovery of phylloxera, the pest that devastated the French wine industry in the years after 1875. The concentration of the French wine industry around Bordeaux suggests the immense opportunity that the crisis offered producers in La Rioja, who seized it aggressively. Minard did not survive to chart that development; he died at age 89 in 1870 in Bordeaux, to which he had fled in fear that the Prussians would invade Paris.         

A little aging goes a long way: Aligoté and Lopez de Heredia

As I was tasting through a lineup of roses at Frankly Wines in Tribeca on Wednesday, I asked owner Christy Frank why no one in New York carries the Olivier LeFlaive Aligoté that I'd enjoyed so much the previous day at Aquavit. I mentioned the comparison with the de Moor, and she asked what years they were - 2009 for the LeFlaive, 2010 for the de Moor. Aligoté is meant to be drunk very young, but Frank suggested that the extra year could well have been critical in ridding the LeFlaive of what she called "that battery acid taste," which had displeased one of my coworkers who drank the de Moor on its own. Frank said that within the last year she bought some Aligoté from Domaine A. et P. De Villaine. Aubert De Villaine is the co-owner and co-director of Domaine de la Romanee Conti, whose wines are the most hallowed, and expensive, in Burgundy. Frank bought a few cases of the Aligoté on close-out from the distributor both because they were cheaper and because the extra time in the bottle softened the wine's acidity and made for a much more drinkable beverage. (If you're in Chicago, you can pick up a bottle of the 2009 at Binny's for $24.)

I experienced the difference a few years in bottle can make yesterday in drinking a 2001 Lopez de Heredia Vina Gravonia, a wine entirely of Viura, which is also known as Macabeo. I had the same wine two years ago, probably not long after its release in the U.S. and remember it as being almost unpleasantly sharp. Yesterday, though, it had a beautiful soft gingerbread smell and, one of my friends said, a touch of petrol (a good thing, as in a Riesling, but perhaps one that needs a descriptor more appealing to Americans who don't like gas fumes). The acidity had receded into the background but gave the wine a backbone and allowed it to stand up to a softy, smelly cow's milk cheese.

That same backbone of acidity was present in a 1991 Heredia cosecha, their grand reserve Viura that I bought at the winery in November in a spasm of vacation-induced profligacy and drank at lunch on Friday. It started off smelling like hazelnuts, then rolled into orange zest, lemon zest, light caramel and popcorn with butter and salt. Many of those flavors come courtesy of the Kentucky and Missouri oak barrels in which the wine is aged for years on end. A pea soup brought out the floral quality in the wine, which went perfectly with a Spanish blue cheese. Heredia's best whites can age for decades, but the people at the winery said this one was ready to drink, and they knew their product. If the euro keeps dropping, I may feel less guilty about picking up another one when I go back to Haro this fall.  

 

A softer Aligoté and a cheap LeFlaive for those on the left coast

Aligoté is Burgundy's other white grape, the very poor cousin of Chardonnay. But many of the region's good producers offer affordable wines made from Aligoté. Olivier and Alice de Moor offer one that's about $20 and goes nicely with oysters. One MFWC member thought the de Moor Aligoté went well with a simple spring picnic; another found the acidity unpleasant when he consumed a bottle on its own.

They'd both be happier with the 2009 Aligoté from Olivier LeFlaive, whose Puligny-Montrachet I sampled in January. Aquavit, the outpost of Scandinavian cuisine in Midtown, has the LeFlaive Aligoté for $14 a glass, and it's a winner with the restaurant's herring and bouillabaisse. The wine has enough acidity to stand up to both but is cleaner and rounder than the de Moor, with a touch of oak. Sadly, it doesn't seem to be available in New York, though Frederic Wildman has the 2010 listed on its website. Assuming a per bottle price of $15, it's worth keeping an eye out for: http://frederickwildman.com/national/wine/olivier-leflaive/bourgogne-aligot-1/2010    

Those of you in the Bay Area can cool your heels with another affordable LeFlaive: http://www.klwines.com/detail.asp?sku=1070405

Austrian olfactory overload - and a damn good $15 red

Wine dinners challenge the guest in two ways. The need to remain reasonably sober is obvious; hence the small pours and the spit buckets meant to facilitate the evaluation of a dozen or more wines. But even for those disciplined enough to avoid overindulgence, sensory overload is almost inevitable, not just for the palate, but for the nose. Several hours of swirling and sniffing in search of subtle aromas is in its way as mentally taxing as taking a law school exam.

That's especially true when the smells are unfamiliar, as they were last week at a dinner where the wines of Austria were poured. (See http://brooklynguyloveswine.blogspot.com/ for a description.) Austria is most famous in this country for its whites, particularly Gruner Veltliner, the grape most widely grown in the country, and Riesling. The shorthand description of an everyday Gruner is tropical fruit with some white pepper, but that seemed a woefully inadequate description of a higher order of the species from Rudi Pichler in a magnum that the Austrian Wine Marketing Board sent over for the event along with several others. It had pineapple and white pepper, but there was an almost floral smell I couldn't place, which would be a theme of the evening for me - sort of like the many law school exam questions I couldn't figure out how to unlock. I could only describe many of the wines as herbal in the way a liquor might refract and concentrate the smell of a particular herb, but i couldn't place the herb. My vocabulary of smells was impoverished.

The aphasia reached its apex with a 2007 Blaufrankisch from Paul Achs. The nose was entrancing, and the wine tasted like a very good burgundy, but after three hours of sniffing, that was the best I could manage. A few days later, I wandered into Astor Wines and asked their Austrian expert about Achs. The wine I had isn't imported into the U.S., but I picked up a 2009 Achs zweigelt as well as one from Rosi Schuster, a producer in Burgenland, the easternmost part of Austria. For $15, it was a really good wine, well-balanced, nice, controlled fruit, and just enough tannin to keep you honest. It had the liveliness and lightness of a good Beaujolais but enough complexity to hold my attention. It's a wine that will bring me back to the Austrian red section.