A Hedonist in the Cellar_ Adventures in Wine - Jay McInerney [42]
When Bron died in 2001, the vast outpouring of affection in the English press was puzzling to many who had never met him. He had an extraordinarily diverse and devoted army of friends, and they invariably commented on the disparity between his public and private personae. In person his wit was gentle and self-deprecating; he would sooner have drunk liebfraumilch all night than offend a dinner companion. Having once been the target of his satire in print, I was still stinging when I met him at a Private Eye luncheon in London a few months later. By the end of lunch I was practically apologizing for having written the book that had elicited his parody.
And I subsequently shared several meals and many bottles of wine with him. At dinner parties, he was invariably polite, appreciative, and vague about the host’s wine. He was far more specific, and pungent, in Waugh on Wine, which lovers of the language and the grape should keep at their bedside, to remind us that wine is a subject to inspire passion and polemic.
THE OBSESSIVE
Remírez de Ganuza
In eight years of writing about wine, I’ve met more than my share of obsessive perfectionists—Angelo Gaja, Helen Turley, and Michel Chapoutier spring immediately to mind. But I’ve never met anyone more fanatic in his attention to detail than Fernando Remírez de Ganuza of Rioja. Remírez de Ganuza has the shrewd expression of a wheeler-dealer who made his living buying and selling small plots of vineyard land from his neighbors until he finally got hooked and decided to keep the best vineyards for himself and start a winery. He is solidly constructed along the lines of a young Raymond Burr, having the build of a man who possibly enjoys food more than he enjoys exercise—and who sensibly insists that his wines be tasted with food. At the Asador Alameda, in the town of Fuenmayor, he pours five vintages to accompany a multi-course orgy that culminates with the entrecôte of a twenty-four-year-old cow—the owner actually shows us the cow’s birth certificate. “Shall we order another one?” Remírez de Ganuza asks me, after we polish off the first platter of meat. “Si,” I say. The rare, charred, geriatric beef is possibly the most flavorful I’ve ever eaten, and there’s more wine to go with it. Each vintage is completely distinct—the ethereal 2000 almost Burgundian, the powerful 2001 more like a Châteauneuf; they show different proportions of a spice rack that includes clove, sage, cinnamon, and balsam.
Everyone I talked to in Rioja told me to visit Remírez de Ganuza despite the fact that he doesn’t like anyone else’s wines very much. In fact, he insists he has only recently started to like his own wine, the first vintage of which was produced in 1991; he’ll admit he likes Latour in a good year, and Vega Sicilia, the venerable property in Ribera del Duero.
Once or twice I’ve heard other winemakers refer to the fact that the lower third of the grape bunch, the pointy part, sometimes called the foot, is slightly less mature than the upper part, which gets more sun. But until I visited Remírez de Ganuza, I’d never encountered anyone who actually sliced off this bottom tip. In addition to being less ripe, the foot, Remírez de Ganuza explains, is also likely to contain more residual dust and sulfur from the vineyard. After rinsing the foot with the juice on the bottom of the fermentation tank, Remírez de Ganuza sells off this unwanted fruit to the less fastidious wine-makers of Rioja. Only the upper “shoulder” goes into his top wine, the reserva, which since ′98 has been one of the most complex and powerful Riojas. But even before the grapes have arrived at his winery, in Samaniego, they have endured a two-tiered selection process. He harvests the bunches on the southern exposure, those that receive the most sun, first, going back a few days later for the rest.
When it comes time to press his grapes after fermentation is complete, Remírez de Ganuza, who used to be an industrial draftsman, uses a system