A Hedonist in the Cellar_ Adventures in Wine - Jay McInerney [35]
The three noble varietals are usually fermented till they are relatively dry. However, in certain years good weather allows growers with well-exposed vineyards to leave selected grapes on the vines to produce special Vendange Tardives— late-harvest—wines, which have a higher level of ripeness and sugar. These rich wines fall somewhere between dry and dessert wines. A VT Pinot Gris is excellent with foie gras, less cloying than the average Sauternes, while a VT Gewürztraminer is the perfect companion for Muenster cheese. Every few years the weather suits the production of sublime, extremely late harvest dessert wines called Sélections de Grains Nobles (SGN). These sweet wines will evolve for decades. As for the drier wines—I’m just starting to drink my ′99s, although they were perfectly delicious on release. Last night I popped a ′96 Trimbach Gewürztraminer Cuvée des Seigneurs de Ribeaupierre, which had a fine dialogue with my Szechuan garlic shrimp.
THE DISCREET CHARMS OF OLD-STYLE RIOJA
Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against fruit. But I sometimes get tired of all this superextracted, alcoholic grape juice that seems like it ought to be served on toast rather than in a glass, and that tastes like it doesn’t come from anywhere in particular. These are wines that somehow remind me of the blind date I had recently with a woman exactly half my age. Our conversation had lots of italics and exclamation marks and very few parentheses or semicolons. Much as I like some of the bold new postmodern Riojas from producers like Artadi, Allende, and Roda, I sometimes crave the sepia tones of old-school Rioja. Todd Hess, wine director for Sam’s Wine & Spirits in Chicago, is one of many who appreciate these discreet charms: “Old traditional Rioja tastes like old Burgundy should taste but seldom does—and for a lot less money.”
What we now think of as the old style in Rioja was created in the 1850s, when French wine brokers arrived in Spain after oïdium and, later, phylloxera had devastated their native vineyards. The French introduced oak-barrel aging to the region, which had previously specialized in light, fruity, short-lived plonk. Two nobles, the Marqués de Murrieta and the Marqués de Riscal, helped develop and market this Bordeaux-style Rioja. (Both bodegas are still flourishing.) The Riojans took to barrel aging the way the Italians took to noodles, substituting American for French oak and developing an official hierarchy that culminates with reserva (at least twelve months in oak, two years in the bottle) and gran reserva (at least twenty-four months in oak and three years in the bottle). Crianzas, released just two years after vintage, are apt to have a strawberry-vanilla freshness, whereas the reservas and gran reservas will exhibit the mellow, secondary flavors associated with age—flavors evocative of autumn rather than summer. And those with bottle age can suggest practically the entire spice rack, not to mention the cigar box and the tack room. Somehow you get the idea that this is how red wine used to taste.
If the old school had a central campus, it would be a series of buildings clustered around the railroad tracks at the edge of the medieval town of Haro, including the bodegas Muga and López de Heredia. Both wineries keep several coopers employed year-round, making and repairing barrels and maintaining the huge tinas—the swimming-pool-sized oak vats in which the wine is fermented and stored; old oak doesn’t impart a woody flavor to wine, and both wineries believe it’s superior to stainless steel. Both houses are also run by the direct descendants of their