A Hedonist in the Cellar_ Adventures in Wine - Jay McInerney [39]
Beginning with the strong 1989 vintage, the results of Michel’s stewardship were dramatic. In 1996, Robert Parker wrote, “I have never witnessed a more significant jump in quality and change in winemaking philosophy than what has occurred in the Chapoutier cellars since the 1989 vintage.” Chapoutier’s single-vineyard estate wines (those from his own vineyards, as opposed to those he makes from purchased grapes) are among the most sought-after wines of the Rhône, and the exuberant, hypomanic five-foot-two Michel has become a towering figure in the wine world. Along with his neighbor Gerard Chave, he has helped to reestablish the reputation of Hermitage, a domelike hill best known for its powerful and long-lasting Syrah-based reds, although I find myself most in awe of Chapoutier’s white Hermitages, made from Marsanne grapes, wines that are dominated by a striking mineral quality. They don’t taste like any other white wines in the world, which to Michel is the whole point of biodynamics—to let the site and the soil speak for itself. “Hermitage was first known for its white wine,” Chapoutier says—a claim I haven’t been able to corroborate. But no matter. His single-vineyard red and white Hermitages are stunning, powerful, and earthy wines, even better now that he has dialed back a little on his use of new oak. Of his winemaking evolution he says, “I used to be able to make noise, but now I make music.”
Chapoutier also makes two superb Côte-Rôties from “the roasted slopes” north of Hermitage, and some of the best wines from the less exalted appellations of Saint-Joseph and Crozes-Hermitage, which are far more affordable than the Hermitages, which can sell for as much as three hundred dollars. And his Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Barbe Rac, made from hundred-year-old Grenache, is usually one of the best. All of these wines are made in fairly small quantities; in recent years he has purchased vineyard land in Aix-en-Provence and in Banyuls, and he now has two different winemaking projects in Australia. “I’m a soil discoverer,” he says. He’s been called better—and worse. Somehow I don’t see him slowing down anytime soon, this whirling dervish who seems driven as much by passion as by his demons.
GHETTO BOYS
Greg Brewer and Steve Clifton Get Radical
The Brewer-Clifton winery is unprepossessing, to say the least—located in an aluminum-sided warehouse in a small industrial park at the edge of Lompoc, California, a town best known for its prison. You definitely didn’t see it in Sideways, Alexander Payne’s movie set in the more picturesque stretches of the Santa Barbara County wine country. Call me perverse, or postmodern, but after all these years of visiting hypertrophied, gated châteaus in Bordeaux and Napa, I actually find Brewer-Clifton kind of romantic. The warehouse complex also includes ten other wineries and is affectionately known among its denizens as the “wine ghetto.” Three decades after Richard Sanford and Michael Benedict proved the area’s potential for Burgundian varieties, Steve Clifton, Greg Brewer, and other landless overachievers are working in rented sheds and warehouses to push the limits with radical new stylings of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.
Before he caught the wine bug, Brewer was a professor of French at the University of California at Santa Barbara; Clifton played guitar in a rock band and was part owner of a nightclub in Laguna Beach. Brewer, who is built like a greyhound, thanks in part to a fanatic cycling regimen, is the kind of guy who wakes up at three in the morning to check on his daughters and then his vats. Clifton, who looks like a younger version of CSI star William Petersen and likes to surf, is liable to be climbing