A Hedonist in the Cellar_ Adventures in Wine - Jay McInerney [47]
The Frank family originally hailed from Alsace, migrating to Ukraine some three hundred years ago at the invitation of Catherine the Great, who wished to repopulate the region after a scorched-earth Turkish invasion. Willy’s father, Konstantin, a botanist, brought his family to America in 1951 and was drawn to the Finger Lakes region, which was already producing vast quantities of sweet plonk—remember Taylor?— from hybrid French-American grapes.
The area was thought to be too cold for the noble Vitis vinifera grape varieties from which the world’s great dry wines are made. But Frank realized that the great depth of the glacially carved Finger Lakes moderated temperatures on the hillsides above them, and he eventually planted sixty varieties of vinifera above Keuka Lake, making wines that astonished critics and connoisseurs. Nelson Rockefeller regularly sent a plane to pick up cases of late-harvest Riesling, and Frank’s wines triumphed in international competitions. A young Robert Mondavi made the pilgrimage to Hammond-sport before starting his own winery in Napa. When Konstantin died, in 1985, his son Willy, a manufacturer’s rep based in Manhattan, inherited a run-down and financially precarious estate.
Willy, who often refers to himself in the third person, explains how he turned his father’s experimental winery into a commercially viable enterprise: “Willy rips up fifty of the varieties and keeps ten. He replants the vineyards. He busts his chops seven days a week.” Switching to first and second person without seeming to pause for breath, he says, “I took a lesson from the theater: I stayed away from New York City till I was ready. You try out in Boston and Philly before you open on Broadway.” Frank’s wines are now ready for the big time. Le Cirque pours his dry Riesling by the glass, and in 2000 the New York Times chose it as best American Riesling—and this is a wine that retails for thirteen bucks.
Frank’s other whites are all worth checking out; his barrel-fermented Chardonnay, made from forty-year-old vines planted by his father, could pass for a village Burgundy from Chassagne. And I’m hoping others will follow his lead and plant Rkatsitelli (pronounced ar-kat-si-TELL-lee), a grape from Mount Ararat, which produces a powerful, spicy white suggestive of a dry, more dignified Gewürztraminer. One wine writer has argued that the area’s future resides in Gewürztraminer, but Frank points out that aside from being cold-sensitive (and not exactly hot in the marketplace), this highly aromatic late-ripening grape is the hands-down favorite of the wild turkeys that outnumber the humans hereabouts. “It’s like they have the latest up-to-the-minute cell phones,” Willy complains. “They call their friends from miles around to come and eat the Gewürz.”
What astonished me on my visit was the quality of the Pinot Noirs, from his fruity twelve-dollar Salmon Run to the herbal and backward forty-dollar reserve, made from forty-year-old vines. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this region could have a great future with this most temperamental, sublime—and lately fashionable—red grape. (Cabernet seems less suited to the climate—although this year Frank’s 2001 Cab won the gold medal at the San Francisco International Wine Competition.)
While a lot of his neighbors are still turning out fermented Kool-Aid from hybrid grapes, the Franks’ example is having an effect. Herman Weimer, a German immigrant who arrived in the area in 1968, produces beautiful Rieslings on the western side of Seneca Lake. The deep-pocketed Fox