A Hedonist in the Cellar_ Adventures in Wine - Jay McInerney [6]
Based in nearby Ampuis, the Guigal family also deserves credit for resurrecting the great wine of Condrieu. While best known for its Côte-Rôties, the domain founded by Étienne Guigal in 1946 and raised to eminence by son Marcel, who appears to have been born with a beret on his head and a glass wine thief in his hand, is now the largest producer of Condrieu. (Marcel’s son Philippe is now working full-time at the domain.) It was a bottle of Guigal Condrieu accompanying a smoked haddock, at the home of novelist Julian Barnes, that initiated my love affair some twenty years ago. In addition to the regular bottling, Guigal produces a luxury cuvée, La Doriane, a rich, decadent bottle of wine that’s perfect with foie gras. Certain labels for me are strangely mimetic and inextricably bound up with my sense memories of the wine: Guigal’s exotic and wildly floral La Doriane is to my mind perfectly conjured forth by the label, with its intricately detailed and colorful faux–Art Nouveau floral design based on a painting by the Italian painter Moretti.
Another contender for most luxurious Condrieu is André Perret’s Coteau de Chéry, from a single vineyard on the Condrieu hillside. The modest and affable Perret has only been making wine since 1983, but the vines for this top cuvée are more than sixty years old. Perret’s neighbor Yves Cuilleron produces four separate Condrieux, which ascend the scale from delicate to decadent. His La Petite Côte is a lighter wine that gets an old-fashioned upbringing in tanks and old barrels, while his full-throttle Vertige, which he suggests is perfect for fish in heavier cream sauces (it’s also great with many Cantonese dishes) gets the full new-oak treatment. Cuilleron also makes a late-picked Condrieu called Les Ayguets, all honey and hazelnuts, which is essentially a dessert wine, though personally I prefer it on its own or alongside stronger cheeses.
Last May, after a morning tasting in his new winery, the forty-something Cuilleron took me to see one of the vine-yards, Les Chaillets, a steep southeast-facing slope looking down over the steely Rhône that was spangled with bright orange poppies. A series of ancient stone terraces seemed to be precariously holding the sandy, granitic soil of the hillside in place. At ten-thirty the sun was just beginning to cut through the morning chill. “They say the Romans built these terraces,” Cuilleron said. Perhaps, I said, but I doubt the Romans ever tasted anything quite as honeyed and peachlike and delicate as Cuilleron’s ′04 Les Chaillets, the memory of which was still vivid an hour after I’d tasted it. It’s possible they might not have really appreciated it, Condrieu being decidedly a wine for lovers rather than for fighters.
FRIULI’S FAVORITE SON
Tocai Friulano
Hidden away in the northeastern corner of Italy between the Alps and the Adriatic, bordered by Austria and Slovenia, Friuli is an anomaly. Part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918, it has a culture and cuisine that seem more Slavic than Latin. Local pasta tends toward dumplinghood; butter and lard are at least as common as olive oil. Friuli’s prosperity is based in part on the manufacture of chairs and, increasingly, wine. So far there’s no monument to the latter, but you can see the world’s largest chair on the road between Cormons and Udine—an unnerving and surreal sight if you first encounter it at one in the morning after a festive night at La Frasca, the taverna owned by winemaker Valter Scarbolo and his wife. Although some interesting reds are made here, Friuli is best known to wine lovers as the source of Italy’s finest white wines, the most distinctive of which is Tocai Friulano.
Friulian wines, unlike most of the wines of Europe, are usually named for their grape varietals. Because of its complicated history and vine-friendly climate, Friuli is home to many French and German varietals, such as Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, and Chardonnay,