A Hedonist in the Cellar_ Adventures in Wine - Jay McInerney [36]
Tondonia is one of those secret passwords whereby serious wine wonks recognize their own kind. (Impress your sommelier, or put him on the defensive, by asking for it.) The winery was founded in 1877, and apparently very little has changed in terms of winemaking since. The Tondonia vineyard is beautifully situated on a high south-facing plateau outside Haro. For reasons not entirely clear to me, the winery complex resembles a Swiss or Bavarian village. Inside, it resembles the set of a low-budget horror movie, with ancient and vaguely sinister-looking machinery, huge blackened tinas, and a fluffy black mold blanketing almost everything. Some of the vats are as old as the winery itself, and pixieish María José López de Heredia, great-granddaughter of the founder, is convinced that the petrified sediments and natural yeasts in the tinas are an important part of the distinct flavor profile of the wines.
Far below the fermentation and storage vats, in a series of tunnels carved out of the limestone, tens of thousands of bottles dating from the 1920s slumber beneath the pillowy mold. “The spiders eat the cork flies,” López de Heredia explains cheerfully as I swipe a vast cobweb off my face. Any minute now, I feel certain, Vincent Price is going to jump out at me. The sense of eeriness is gradually dispelled, replaced by a mounting sense of exhilaration and wonder as López de Heredia uncorks bottles in the subterranean tasting room. I start with, of all things, a 1995 rosé—this being her idea of a young wine—and move on to the ′81 Gran Reserva Blanco, made mostly from the indigenous white grape called Viura, which tastes fresh and lively for its age. The tasting of reds begins with the ethereal ′85 Tondonia, which has an amazing nose of cinnamon, clove, leather, tobacco—the whole spice box. While this may sound like one of those annoying instances where you have to listen to a wine writer tease you with descriptions of stuff you will never see or taste, the fact is that all of these wines have been recently released. In this regard, López de Heredia reminds me of Orson Welles’s embarrassing ad for Paul Masson: “We sell no wine before its time.”
Across the street, Muga is releasing its gran reservas on a slightly more accelerated schedule. You can find the ′95 and the ′96 on retailers’ shelves; both have the kind of spicy complexity that develops only with age and both taste kind of like fruitcake, only much better. And if you are lucky, you may find older vintages. A ′76 gran reserva that I shared with the bearish, gregarious thirty-year-old Juan Muga at a restaurant in Haro lingers in my memory as one of the best old Burgundies I never drank. Marqués de Riscal, Marqués de Murríeta, and Bodegas Montecillo are also good sources of traditional Rioja. Next time you’re feeling palate fatigue from trying to chew the latest superextracted New World Merlot, you might consider checking out the subtle and delicate charms of an old gran reserva.
THE MYSTERIOUS BEAUTY OF
SAGRANTINO DI MONTEFALCO
If you haven’t heard of Sagrantino di Montefalco you’re in excellent company. “I’ve had sommeliers from Italy come into the restaurant who don’t know about these wines,” says Roberto Paris, the urbane, soft-spoken manager and sommelier of Il Buco, in New York’s East Village. Paris had the advantage of being born a few miles from the town of Montefalco, about halfway between Perugia and Spoleta in Umbria. “The very first bottled wine I ever drank was a Sagrantino,” he says, wincing at the memory. “It was terrible.”
A few years ago, when Paris poured me my first Sagrantino,