A Hedonist in the Cellar_ Adventures in Wine - Jay McInerney [55]
After years of being a connoisseur’s wine, Cheval seized the spotlight with the 1998 and 2000 vintage. There have been, alongside the kudos, grumblings that the new regime is determined to become the Pétrus of Saint-Émilion, in terms of price as well as quality. Thanks to Parker and others, the 1998 was a legend almost before it had been pressed, and the 2000 looks like the star of that great vintage. “You can’t make the price stick if nobody wants to buy it,” says Todd Hess, wine director of Sam’s in Chicago, who can’t satisfy the demand from customers who want to pay six thousand dollars for a case of the 2000 vintage.
Unfortunately for those of us who have to ask about the price of things, the days of Cheval-Blanc as the sleeper star of Bordeaux are over. But for those who aren’t hung up on famous vintages, the ′99 is a great claret and a great Cheval for less than half the price of its famous siblings, and the 2001 appears to be another sleeping beauty. Other great vintages can be purchased at auction for far less than the cost of the 2000. Any Cheval-Blanc that you can afford will reward your investment lavishly, and its pleasures will probably outlast your capacity to enjoy them.
THE NAME’S BOND
Harlan Estate was the first of the cult Cabernets that swept into the Napa Valley in the nineties like guerrillas coming down from the hills, challenging the preeminence of such valley-floor aristocrats as Mondavi and Heitz. Less than two decades later it’s a classic, the most consistently celebrated and coveted Napa Cab of them all. Meanwhile, owner Bill Harlan and winemaker Bob Levy have been creating a new wine—or, rather, three new wines—along with what may be a new paradigm or, at the very least, a new name to make connoisseurs and collectors salivate. The name is Bond.
The Harlan team recently released three Bond wines from the great 2001 vintage under the names St. Eden, Melbury, and Vecina. Having tasted them at the winery, I can vouch for the fact that they are all Harlanesque—an adjective Robert Parker defines as “meaning first-growth Bordeaux complexity combined with Napa ripeness and power”—but they are also noticeably different from Harlan and from one another. They are basically single-vineyard wines from special hillside sites around Napa, a fact that reflects the trend of increasing site specificity as you travel up the price-and-prestige scale (a wine labeled “Oakville” being presumably more singular than one that lists California as its provenance). When I say “basically”—well, hold that thought.
Ever since he’d started visiting the great vineyards of France as a wine loving real estate developer, Harlan had dreamed of creating a California “first growth—a property to rival the great domaines of Bordeaux.” Before he created Harlan Estate, stitching together prime hillside parcels overlooking the famed Martha’s Vineyard, Harlan founded Merry-vale Vineyards in 1983. He conceived Merryvale as a learning experience. Harlan and his partners bought grapes from more than sixty different growers in Napa, discovering what they considered some extraordinary grape real estate. “Bob Levy said to me, ‘You know, some of these vineyards are first growths,’” Harlan says. “But I put that behind me for a while.” Not for long, though.
While some critics wondered if Harlan Estate and similarly ultrarich, small-production boutique Cabs that emerged in the nineties were flashes in the pan, Bill Harlan was thinking about the future. “For Harlan to last for generations we had to make sure we didn’t become too insular,” he says. “And we had to groom the next generation. Harlan Estate was too small for that.” Harlan had no desire to expand the production (about fifteen hundred cases) of his estate wine at the risk of compromising quality. But he and Levy hadn’t forgotten about some of those great vineyard sites from their Merryvale days, and they began talking to the owners.
The Bond concept, which Harlan began to develop more than a decade