A Hedonist in the Cellar_ Adventures in Wine - Jay McInerney [43]
No matter how much care a winemaker takes in the vineyard and the cellar, the fact is that 5 to 7 percent of his bottles will likely be ruined by corks infected with TCA, a cork-loving compound that makes wine taste like moldy cardboard. So not only does Remírez de Ganuza visit the cork producers, but he orders test batches of five hundred corks, each of which he cooks in a small, water-filled glass jar in his lab oven. Any TCA-infected cork betrays its identity by a stench the moment the lid is removed. If more than three of the five hundred corks are tainted, he starts over again, ordering a new batch of corks. Much of this mad science takes place in the beautiful stone cellar beneath Remírez de Ganuza’s house in the tiny medieval town of Samaniego. The house appears to be many centuries old, but Remírez de Ganuza designed it himself; it was constructed from stones he bought from an old winery nearby. “Old cellars are too damp,” he explains, “and you can’t control the humidity.” Insofar as it’s possible, he’s leaving nothing to chance.
This attention to detail is hardly the norm in Rioja, although the 1990s witnessed a revolution in the area, with many new boutique bodegas like Remírez de Ganuza’s pushing the Tempranillo grape to new heights of expression. New wineries like Allende, Artadi, Remelluri, and Roda have reinvented the concept of Rioja and have won fans around the world, even as older houses like Muga and Sierra Cantabria have started to produce powerful, fruit-driven Riojas along-side the more traditional and mellower reservas and gran reservas. The latter, aged in oak for at least two years and in bottle for three more, evoke for me the library of an old house scented with leather volumes and pipe smoke, a style that is faithfully represented by López de Heredia, whose winemaking style hasn’t changed since the 1870s, when Rioja rose to prominence after phylloxera devastated the vineyards of Bordeaux.
Remírez de Ganuza has no patience for this mellow old-school stuff His wines do have some of the same hints of leather and tobacco, along with a medley of spices, but even in a lesser vintage they are packed with fruit—cassis, plums, black cherries, as well as the kind of preserved plums you get in Chinatown. It’s as if he both put a massive stereo system in the old library and shelved some copies of García Márquez alongside the Cervantes. Me, I’m happy to live in an era that offers both styles, and that has room for fanatics like Fernando Remírez de Ganuza.
BERKELEY’S FRENCH AMBASSADOR
Kermit Lynch
“Why is it,” asks Kermit Lynch, “that most men don’t like fat women, but they think they like fat wines?” We’re tasting in the cellars of Domaine Tempier in Bandol, near his home in Le Beausset, France, talking about the tendency of the American wine press to celebrate big, superripe wines at the expense of those demonstrating delicacy and finesse. His choice of metaphors reflects the way wine is spoken about in the cellars of Burgundy and the Rhône, though it might not go down so well in liberal Berkeley—where his eponymous wine shop is located, and where he lives half the year.
Lynch is a contrarian of long standing, a California native who doesn’t stock a single California wine at his store on San Pablo Avenue, a wine-mad Francophile who thinks Bordeaux has gone to hell, and an admirer of Robert Parker who thinks the man has a fat fetish.
His name alone, encountered on the labels of some of the greatest wines of France, piques curiosity. His appearance is just as distinctive. There is something elfin about the features: the prominent, outthrust ears; the high forehead; the Gothically pointed arches of his eyebrows, which give him a perpetually quizzical, skeptical, leprechaunish mien. His friend Olivier Humbrecht describes him