A Hedonist in the Cellar_ Adventures in Wine - Jay McInerney [53]
Grahm’s airship of a career seemed to lose altitude in the ′90s. His vineyards were among the first to be wiped out by Pierce’s disease, spread by a nasty insect called the glassy-winged sharpshooter. (I was clever enough to purchase the last vintage, a case of his 1994 Bonny Doon Syrah, one of the best New World Syrahs I’ve tasted.) Parker stopped reviewing Grahm’s wines for many years—either through lack of interest or because of the Bridges of Madison County parody. The movement Grahm had begun made it harder for him to purchase grapes.
On the other hand, he started Ca’ del Solo, a line of Cal-Ital wines made from Nebbiolo, Barbera, and Pinot Grigio. He planted more than eighty acres of grapes in Soledad, illuminated at night by the prison’s spotlights. And he was the first American winemaker to experiment with microoxygenization, a method of oxygenating wine to soften its tannins and (theoretically) extend its life.
The most innovative move for this inveterate innovator was the creation of his wine club—called DEWN (get it?), for Distinctive Esoteric Wine Network—a new paradigm for marketing wine and a new winemaking concept of one-off creations. The DEWN wines are single-performance tours de force, sometimes made in collaboration with European winemakers. To create his ′99 Fish out of Water Ripasso, Grahm passed Nebbiolo juice over raisiny dried Barbera skins. “Why?” he asks. “Because we could.” The massive, black curranty 2000 Le Monstre was made in the Languedoc in collaboration with a French winemaker, while the voluptuous ′99 My Favorite Marsanne nearly earned its title for this taster. The good news is that anyone can join the club, and the wines are ridiculously reasonably priced. The weird news is that they are made only once—wine as performance art. “Traditionally, winemaking is about tradition and continuity,” Grahm acknowledges. But he seems to believe that life is too short to exhaust all of his winemaking concepts, not to mention his store of wacky names. The labels, by artists such as Ralph Steadman, are just as—how you say?—inventive. As a philosophy major—and a Riesling lover—I can’t resist a wine called Critique of Pure Riesling. But Grahm’s wit has cost him points in snottier corners of the wine world. Show-offs don’t break out a wine called Macho Nacho for client dinners.
For all of his iconoclasm, Grahm is ultimately a wine conservative. He rails against the overuse of new oak barrels and oenological “Viagrafication.” “Both Parker and the Wine Spectator have oversimplified wine,” he says. “It’s all about intensity and power. Valuing a wine for intensity is like judging music on how loud it is. Strangely,” says the posthippie, who regularly gets his chi adjusted, “I’m kind of a Tory about wine.”
Kind of.
FIRST AMONG FIRSTS?
The Glories of Cheval-Blanc
Platonic absolutism ultimately seems foolish in the ecstatic realm of Bacchus. There’s an ineradicable, subjective component to the appreciation of wine. That said, no wines in the world command quite the respect of Bordeaux’s Big Eight. And, speaking strictly subjectively, I can say that no wine has given me more pleasure than Cheval-Blanc.
Lafite, Latour, Margaux, and Haut-Brion were the original first growths in the 1855 classification of Bordeaux; by the time Mouton-Rothschild was added to the list, more than a hundred years later, three other properties—Pétrus, Ausone, and Cheval-Blanc—enjoyed unofficial first-growth status. These three mavericks came from the right bank of the Gironde River—from the communes of Pomerol and Saint-Émilion. Before the Second World War, the right bank was essentially Burbank to the left bank’s Beverly Hills, Brooklyn to the Médoc’s Manhattan.
Although Cheval-Blanc steadily gained recognition after its purchase by the Fourcaud-Laussac family in the mid-nineteenth century, the real fame of the château was established