A Hedonist in the Cellar_ Adventures in Wine - Jay McInerney [62]
If you’re a red-wine-drinking fish lover, you have a role model in chef Eric Ripert, who trained with Joel Robuchon and Jean-Louis Palladin before joining the late Gilbert Le Coze at Le Bernardin in 1991. Like many of his countrymen, Ripert drinks red Bordeaux with just about everything— much to the exasperation of Couvreux. On the other hand, Ripert did admit to me that a 1972 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti Montrachet he drank recently was the most profound wine he has ever had in his life, so there may be hope for him yet.
WHAT TO DRINK WITH CHOCOLATE
Not far from the spot where Romeo secretly married Juliet, in the Valpolicella hills overlooking Verona, I discovered a more fortunate and successful match. I had just finished lunch with Stefano Cesari, the dapper proprietor of Brigaldara, in the kitchen of his fourteenth-century farmhouse, and I was trying to decide if it would be incredibly uncouth to ask who made the beautiful heather-toned tweed jacket he was wearing, when he put some dark chocolates from Perugia in front of me and opened a bottle of his 1997 Recioto della Valpolicella. One hesitates to describe any marriage as perfect, but I was deeply impressed with the compatibility of his semisweet, raisiny red and the bittersweet chocolates. Cesari later took me up to the loft of the big barn and showed me the hanging trays where Corvina and Rondinella grapes are dried for several months after harvest, which concentrates the grape sugars and ultimately results in an intense, viscous wine that, like Tawny Port, Brachetto, and a few other vinous oddities, enhances the already heady and inevitably romantic experience of eating chocolate.
The Cabernet, Merlot, or Shiraz you drank with your steak may get along well with a simple chocolate dessert, especially if the wine is young and the fruit is really ripe, but real chocoholics should check out the dried-grape wines, many of which are fortified—that is, dosed with brandy, in the manner of Port, a process that stops fermentation and leaves residual sugar. “Fortification seems helpful in terms of matching chocolate,” says Robert Bohr, the wine director at Cru, in Greenwich Village, which has one of the best wine lists in the country, if not the world. Bohr likes Tawny Port with many chocolate desserts, finding Vintage Port too fruity. (McInerney does too, and advises that some of the best Tawnies come from Australia’s Barossa Valley.) But most of all Bohr likes Madeira.
If you were to order the Hacienda Concepción chocolate parfait at Cru, Bohr would direct you to a vintage Madeira like the 1968 d’Oliveiras Boal. Madeira has become so unfashionable in the past century that many putative wine lovers have never tasted it, but I’m sensing the stirrings of a cult revival spearheaded by supergeeks like Bohr. The sweeter Malmsey style seems to be best suited to chocolate desserts. And by chocolate, I mean, of course, dark chocolate. Milk chocolate should be consumed only by day, if at all, and accompanied by milk.
The cough-syrupy Umbrian passito wine is made in the same fashion as Recioto from the mysterious and sappy Sagrantino grape. These powerful, sweet reds seem to have originated as sacramental wines, and they continue to inspire reverence among a small cult of hedonists, myself among them. This practice of drying grapes goes back thousands of years; there are references to drying wine grapes prior to fermentation in Homer and Hesiod. (“When Orion and Sirius come into mid-heaven,” Hesiod advises in Works and Days, “cut off all the grape clusters and bring them home. Show them to the sun for ten days and ten nights.”) I like to imagine that these dried-grape wines resemble those that were drunk at Plato’s symposium or Caligula’s bashes—although chocolate wouldn’t appear in Europe until the sixteenth century, Columbus having stumbled upon a stash of