A Hedonist in the Cellar_ Adventures in Wine - Jay McInerney [45]
Is Kermit Lynch winning his war against homogeneity or losing it? On the one hand, he helped stem the tide in France toward filtration, which he believes—as most authorities now do—strips wines of their character. French regional wines like Sancerre, Chinon, and Bandol have found a place on American wine store shelves. On the other hand, despite local rebellions, the hegemony of oaky Cabernet and Chardonnay advances apace. If you’re tired of the same old chocolate and vanilla, you might look for that amazing name on a label the next time you’re in a wine store.
THE MAD SCIENTIST OF JADOT
“The tension in the ground—do you feel it?” asks Jacques Lardière, his intense interrogatory gaze almost lifting me off my feet. We are standing in the middle of Clos-de-Malte, a walled amphitheater of a vineyard in Santenay. “You can feel the pulse of the earth,” Lardière says, bobbing his head with its wild growth of silver locks while pumping his hands rhythmically in front of his chest. I feel something here, looking out at the valley beyond the Romanesque church, basking in the May sunshine and listening to the bees, though it may be the magnetic force of personality of the intensely passionate Lardière, the winemaker for Louis Jadot.
“The minerals,” he says, pointing to the ground with one hand and the sky with the other, “must be connected to the light.” If only on a metaphorical level, this makes perfect sense. “We are seeking,” he says, “the unconscious of the earth.” I don’t understand all of Lardière’s proclamations, but I think he’s a better poet than many Bollingen Prize winners, and a genius of a winemaker.
Maison Louis Jadot is one of the oldest and most respected houses in Burgundy, a beacon of consistent quality in a notoriously unreliable region. Jadot is both a domain, producing and bottling wines from its own estates, and a negotiant, vinifying grapes purchased from other growers. Since 1985 the firm has been owned by its American importer, Kobrand, and almost half of the wine, luckily for us, comes here. Burgundy snobs sometimes underrate Jadot’s wines because of the firm’s relatively large production, but some of us believe that Jadot Burgundies are among the best and longest-lived in the region. And they represent great value at every level, from the humble Beaujolais to the exalted Musigny. If Domaine Romanée-Conti is the Ferrari of Burgundy, Jadot is the Mercedes.
I found it significant that given all the vineyards Lardière could have taken me to, he started in relatively obscure Santenay. “We have to have the same approach for the lesser wines as for the grand crus,” he said. And as if to prove his point, later, at lunch in the fifteenth-century Counvent des Jacobins in downtown Beaune, he opened a 1971 Gevrey-Chambertin, a so-called village wine, the third ranking in the Burgundy hierarchy, below grand and premier cm. Conventional wisdom would suggest that such a relatively modest wine (especially in the half-bottle format he opened) would be over the hill, but this wine was not only still vibrant and fleshy but amazingly nuanced.
What Lardière cherishes—and this is the glory of Burgundy—are the differences between the wines from one piece of ground to the next. As we drive from Santenay north through Chassagne-Montrachet, Puligny-Montrachet, and Meursault, he points out the different vineyards: “That’s Combettes … that’s Charmes… ça c’est Genevrières.” The untrained eye often can’t see any logical borders, but a thousand years of empirical observation and tasting have drawn the lines. Later, in the Jadot cellars, Lardière demonstates the indisputable distinctions as we taste the ′04s in barrels. There’s probably no other cellar in Burgundy where the religion of terroir can be so effectively illustrated. Lardière makes over a hundred different wines. The ′04 Chassagne-Montrachet tastes much more mellow than the minerally, high-strung Puligny, and the distinctions only