A Hedonist in the Cellar_ Adventures in Wine - Jay McInerney [27]
Other excellent Bandols include Domaines Bunan and Château La Rouvière. Prices are generally lower than for Châteauneuf-du-Pape or Barolo. No one would be happier than I to see them remain so. On the other hand, development pressure in the area is so fierce that increasing renown and prices for the wines of Bandol may be the only hope for preserving some of these beautiful hillside vineyards.
THE SPICY REDS OF CHILE
I once speculated that the grapes for a certain luxury Champagne were harvested individually, by vestal virgins, never suspecting that I would one day witness something close to this whimsical vision. Arriving at the winery of Casa Lapostolle in Chile’s Colchagua Valley one morning in March, I encountered some ninety women lined up on either side of a narrow table about the length of a tennis court, plucking Cabernet grapes one by one from dewy clusters that were handpicked that morning, saving the best and discarding those that were damaged or unripe. High-end winemakers around the world employ sorting tables and manual labor to roughly edit out the leaves from the clusters, but I’ve never seen it done literally grape by grape. The grapes in question were destined for the winery’s Clos Apalta, one of Chile’s new wave of luxury reds. The radically meticulous sorting process was one more piece of evidence, if I needed it, that Chilean wine is not just for swilling anymore.
Chile’s Central Valley—located in the center of this tall, skinny country, and crisscrossed by rivers and subvalleys—is a paradise for grapes. The climate, moderated by the Andes to the east and the Pacific to the west, is often described as being a cross between those of Napa and Bordeaux. Wine grapes arrived with the missionaries who followed the conquistadors, and the importation of vines (and winemakers) from France in the mid-nineteenth century created an invaluable viticultural resource; what never arrived in Chile was phylloxera, the disease that subsequently devastated most of the world’s vineyards. The raw material was in place, although it remained underexploited until the end of the Pinochet era, when domestic wineries began to look to the international market and foreign wine interests started pouring money into the Central Valley.
Alexandra Marnier-Lapostolle, whose great-grandfather invented Grand Marnier, began scouting Chile in the early 1990s and then brought in Michel Rolland, the renowned and ubiquitous oenologist. In 1994 she and her husband, Cyril de Bournet, founded Casa Lapostolle and secured Rolland’s services as a consultant. As you follow her through a dusty vineyard while she tastes grapes and talks about prephylloxera rootstocks, you keep thinking that Lapostolle is one of those chic, svelte, and devastatingly attractive women you see on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. It seems appropriate that she describes Clos Apalta as her “haute couture wine.” (Lapostolle also produces two lines in the ten- to twenty-dollar range.) The grapes, which are so tenderly plucked at the winery, come from a nearly hundred-year-old vineyard of gnarled Cabernet, Merlot, and Carmenère vines in the Colchagua Valley, which is bounded by a horseshoe of snowcapped mountains.
Carmenère is Chile’s secret weapon, a varietal once widespread in Bordeaux that in 1991 was rediscovered in Chile, where for years it had been mistaken for Merlot. Like Cabernet Franc, Carmenère can be a little vegetal and rustic, but when properly ripened it has a silky texture and peppery, raspberry flavor. Whether it can be a solo star for Chile’s wine industry remains to be seen, but the spectacular Clos Apalta, which contains up to 40 percent Carmenère, is testament