A Hedonist in the Cellar_ Adventures in Wine - Jay McInerney [38]
Vintage conditions in Montefalco are usually similar to those in nearby Chianti. Some producers are raising prices in the wake of several good vintages and the growing cult status of the wines, not to mention the sickening decline of the dollar relative to the euro. Frankly, I’m ambivalent about helping to spread the word and thereby increase the demand—but, hey, that’s my job. Just try not to tell too many of your friends.
OEDIPUS AT HERMITAGE
Michel Chapoutier
Michel Chapoutier has a quick answer for one of the thorniest food-and-wine-pairing questions ever: what to drink with asparagus. “The perfect match for asparagus is my competitors’ wines,” he says. The point is that asparagus tends to make wine taste metallic and hollow, and this little joke seems to me to illustrate not only Chapoutier’s keen and dry sense of humor, but also his fierce competitive spirit. Opinionated and driven, he’s an inspiring and controversial figure in the world of wine. Even his pronounced limp is a manifestation of his willfulness: he walked around for two months on a broken leg before finally going to the doctor, where an X-ray revealed four different fractures. But though he needs a cane to get around now, he seems anything but debilitated; I found myself at times almost running to keep up with him as he bounced around the winery and down the sidewalk of Tain l’Hermitage.
While some writers have invoked Napoleon in describing the diminutive and fiercely ambitious wine baron, I couldn’t help thinking of Oedipus as Chapoutier described taking control of the family domaine from his father, “a lazy, violent man” who belittled his youngest son’s capacities and was an indifferent caretaker of the extensive vineyards he inherited in the northern Rhône—most notably on the venerable hill of Hermitage, a terroir whose reputation in the nineteenth century was as celebrated as that of Bordeaux. We sat on the porch of his sprawling farmhouse perched on a ridge high above the Rhône, and Chapoutier’s anger flared and then faded as he sipped a glass of Trimbach Clos Sainte-Hune Riesling, periodically glancing over at his wife, Corrine, a transplant from Basque country; he met her when he was shopping for an engagement present for his fiancée.
The Chapoutier family arrived in Tain l’Hermitage, in the Rhône Valley, two hundred years ago. They gradually accumulated some five hundred acres of vineyards up and down the valley while establishing a negotiant business in which they bought grapes from other growers and vinified them. The reputation of the house languished under the direction of Michel’s father; Michel returned home after oenology school and internships at several California estates to discover the business in a shambles. He took over the winemaking and in 1990, with the help of his American importer, bought the company from his grandfather. (His older brother Marc, who ran the business side, has since been demoted.) Chapoutier consulted with winemakers Gérard Chave in Hermitage and Marcel Guigal in nearby Côte-Rôtie, who introduced the use of new oak barrels in the cellar and lowered yields in the vineyards. Like Guigal, Chapoutier stopped filtering his wines on the principle that it stripped them of character. “Filtering wine,” he says, “is like screwing with a condom.” (He likes sexual metaphors; when one of his guests struggles to identify the components of a wine’s bouquet in the tasting room he urges him to relax and just enjoy the wine. “If you think about it too much you can kill it. The brain is a pleasure killer. You don’t need to be a gynecologist to make love.”)
Chapoutier went way further than his mentors in his approach to viticulture, virtually banning the use of sprays and chemicals and