Lantern’s wine list is always dotted with German
whites, easily identified by their umlauts and
17-syllable multi-word vineyard names that are such fun to pronounce. Schlossböckelheimer Felsenberg, anyone? Or how about a glass of Riesling from the lovely Karthäuserhofberg? Our official line is that Germans are on the list because they do well with Lantern’s menu, but to be honest, they are also here because Lantern employees like to drink them. These wines are at a happy confluence of what we should recommend with steamed black cod and what we’d drink anyway; before, during, and after dinner.
So to start the new year off right we’re adding two
new German Rieslings to the list, an Auslese from Rolf and Alfred Merkelbach and a Kabinett from Peter Gieben at Karlsmühle. The tendency is to group all German wines into a sweet-and-fruity flavor profile, and even the usually very precise German labels lump these two together as part of an untenably vast Mosel-Saar-Ruwer region. I’d encourage you to explore the distinctions in German wine – happily, we can all still afford to
buy enough top-tier Mosel-Saar-Ruwer wine to indulge in a little comparative tasting (unlike, ahem, quality wines from Burgundy, Bordeaux, Napa: I could go on.)
An example: the Merkelbachs tend to a tiny (1.9
hectare) amount of land in Ürzig, at the far northern
end of the good part of the Mosel. They pull fruit
from the massive hillside that frames the town,
an impossibly steep mass of slate and vine that
directly faces the wide, slow-moving Mosel. I spent
four days of my last vacation in Ürzig. What better
way to escape from the rigors of tasting wine for a
living than to hide out in a tiny German village known for only one thing? That thing ain’t quality
restaurants, which is a shame because the three
streets that make up the entirety of Ürzig are dotted
with more than their fair share of exceptional
cellars making excellent food wines.
Peter Gieben’s estate is a two-hour drive south in an entirely different tiny valley near Trier. Don’t
bother with Mapquest to find the Ruwer – you’ll need an English-speaking local and maybe a compass. It is one of those journeys during which you will be utterly convinced that you are on the wrong path, entirely lost until voila! here it is, the Ruwer. On a pothole-filled service road lined with auto dealerships just north of Trier, I was sure we would never find Karlsmühle. Then around a bend and we were in pastoral Germany, watching horses graze, glimpsing vines. Gieben’s great vineyard site is equally impressive and arguably more important to its exponentially smaller region, but the crumbling slate of Kaseler Nies’chen makes wines wholly different from those to be had in Ürzig. How could it not? While less than 90 miles away, the climate here is different, the soil has some clay to it, and the Ruwer is barely a stream whereas the Mosel is grand enough to intermittently rise up and flood pretty Ürzig and the neighboring hamlets.
Simply enjoying these wines with a meal is a fine
thing to do. I think we’ll keep a diverse bunch of them around, so you can taste variations on Riesling from Karlsmühle, Merkelbach, and other traditional grape growers working around the dozens of villages that cling to these rivers.
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Why do we bother ferreting out all these little grower wines? What’s the difference? Why has it become the aim of my store to showcase the work of estates that practice viticulture that adheres to a particular set of tenets? Why do the words sustainable, organic, biodynamic, estate-bottled, family-owned, grower-producer, mean so much to us? Ultimately it’s all about taste.
Our goal is to provide you with the highest quality wine available to us to purchase, and all these key terms are fundamental in the creation of distinct, heterogenous, nuanced, alive wine worthy of sale in a gourmet specialty market. This lecture is about why and how these indicators matter.
The Agriculture
What to Plant: Massale vs. Clonale, or, Why Monculture Can be a Bad Thing
We like Selection Massale. This is a process by which the grower chooses to forgo using modern clonal varities. The grower instead propagates using old pre-clonal stock, theoretically naturally adjusted to their specific terroir.
Massale mean en masse selection ( as opposed to a single “clonal” selection).
“Until the middle of the last century, when a grape grower wanted to plant a new vineyard he had two choices: collect budwood from the best vines in his own vineyard (or surrounding ones), or go outside the immediate area to a grapevine nursery—which had done essentially the same thing, but on a larger scale. The resulting vineyards are called field selections (sélection massale in French), because you are selecting different individual vines from among the many growing in a given vineyard block. These vines can be of a single variety in each block, such as pinot noir in Burgundy. Or they can be different varieties mixed together.
If used with great care and skill in choosing which vines to propagate, this technique can improve the overall quality of a vineyard. Some of the vines chosen might have looser clusters, for instance, and so be more resistant to bunch rot. Another vine might set a larger (or smaller) crop, which might make a better wine in certain years. The biggest drawback of field selection has been the systematic spread of virus diseases in grapes. (One example is leaf roll virus, though infected vineyards provide beautiful fall color.) Typically, these viruses delay ripening, and in some cases cause long-term decline of vineyards. Once in a vine, the virus is always there; if a diseased vine is used for propagation, the resulting "offspring" will also carry the virus. Wide-spread replanting of vineyards in Europe (as well as California) that were destroyed by the phylloxera pandemic of the latter half of the nineteenth century caused these virus diseases to become a serious, chronic problem. Yields were reduced, and quality suffered from the viruses' debilitating effects. Even the best vineyards suffered from poor plant material. You can still see this when comparing old California vineyards: those planted at or before the turn of the twentieth century are relatively healthy; those planted in the 1920s through the 1950s are usually virus-infected.
There has been a relentless push in the last century to improve agriculture - including viticulture - throughout the world. Government agencies collected grape varieties and, using heat treatments, eliminated the most serious viruses. They usually chose just a single vine from a given location, rather than a number of healthy vines, which would have provided diversity. This single vine is called a mother vine; all future vines propagated vegetatively from this mother vine are called clones. Supposedly for the greater good, mother vines were chosen for inclusion in the programs and for release to growers based on high yield and virus-free status - not necessarily wine quality. This is true in both Europe and the U.S.
The net result of this modern approach is that newer vineyards have less genetic diversity than old vineyards. The wines, despite all advances in viticulture and enology, can lack complexity and finesse. To everyone's credit, this mistake has been recognized, and most governments are currently looking for old-vine material to preserve, analyze, and perhaps eventually make available.” David Gates of Ridge Vineyards
So while clonal selections may have removed some disease issues from vineyards, they significantly decreased genetic diversity in modern vineyards. Plants that are the same typically produce wines that taste the same, to the detriment of overall wine quality/product diversity.
What’s wrong with Irrigation?
Have you ever tasted the difference from a garden tomato raised during a dry season versus one grown in a wetter year? The same concept applies to fruit. As rain late in the viticultural cycle is bad for concentration of flavor, so is irrigation. Irrigated vines are more vigorous, and because they struggle less to obtain water, they have more energy in reserve to produce copious amounts of healthy-looking, large, comparably bland/diffuse fruit. Because in a grape, the important stuff flavor-wise is in the skin. By increasing the amount of juice at the center of a grape in proportion to the amount of skin surrounding it, irrigation can be a recipe for weak, characterless wine. Which is why irrigation is banned/looked down upon in many wine regions, sadly/pragmatically often the ones that need it the least.
Where to Plant: Working on this Hill is Hard!
What’s wrong with planting on a flat hot site at sea level? Nothing, if you’re growing prize watermelons to enter at the State Fair gargantuan fruit freakshow. Want wine with character? You’re going to have to do some climbing. In most mesoclimates, a great vineyard site will be fairly steep, with a favorable grade/aspect to the sun, maximizing luminosity/catching the sun’s rays, possessing a type of soil that allows for retiention of heat though the cool evening hours, and chillier weeks of spring and fall, and hopefully this archetype of an ideal vineyard site will also be near a large body of water (river, ocean, Olympic swimming pool) that mitigates heat and cold throughout the year, allowing for a long, hopefully dry ripening season permitting the grapes to achieve true physiological ripeness on the vine. Ripe grapes, stems, and seeds are all important, because the parts of the latter two included in the fermentation process will impart significant tannin. Ripe tannin is pleaseant, green/underripe tanning is best avoided unless you enjoy puckering. So buy some hiking shoes and a donkey, you’re going to develop thighs of steel while working your perfect “Grand Cru” vineyard.
To Prune or not to Prune
Growers concerned with quality want low yields for greater concentration. We look for growers with holdings in old vines when buying wine. Old vines planted in the correct soil (nutrient poor, rich in mineral/rock/calcerous material, w/good drainage) naturally produce small amounts of concentrated, flavorful grapes. That’s what it’s all about. Properly farmed, and by that we mean not excessively fertilized or irrigated, attentively pruned, planted to a vine density that causes competition/stress on the plants and using trellising/vine training systems that put quality concerns in front of quantity, old vines give you a source of raw materials that make creating quality wine possible. If you don’t do this correctly, nothing you do afterwards in the cellar can give the wine back its character. At best you can apply a Band-Aid, and hope to mask the fruit’s flavor/complexity shortcomings. But you won’t get terroir.
Harvesting: The Hand is a Beautiful Machine
Traditional growers, the kind of domaines we wish to promote and nuture because of the flavor options they offer up vintage after vintage, harvest by hand, not machine. We want the ripest fruit to be brought carefully and lovingly into the winery. This is an intuitive thing. Look at a machine harvester. Do you think this lumbering piece of machinery, no matter how state-of-the-art or expensive it is, can work with the same dexterity as the human hand in harvesting pristine, undamaged ripe grapes? Even if that was the case, can a machine assess ripeness cluster by cluster (or even at times berry by berry) and make the decision of which fruit to pick and which to leave on the vine or on the ground, based on a lifetime of experience, in the same way an experienced human picker can?
Sadly the seasoned professional grape harvester is passing slowly into agricultural history in many of the world’s winegrowing areas: we should take advantage of the true ripeness and subsequent wine quality such individuals impart to the wines they help bring to life. Estates that are small enough to harvest their fruit by hand, particularly if this work is carried out by the proprietors or with the help of a trusted team of professional pickers, should be rewarded with our patronage for the extra effort they exert to maintain a high standard of wine quality.
Help Me Sort This Out, or
Not All Triage Occurs in the Hospital
As mentioned above, true triage begins in the fields. An expert harvester leaves behind the damaged or under-ripe fruit they encounter. A second sorting process further insures the removal of rotten or green flavors before the grapes enter a fermentation vessel. This process occurs on a table de tri, a sorting station that allows grape growers a final brief inspection of their raw materials at the first stage of the wine making process. This is a useful tool, but given the limits of how rigorous and time-consuming this triage can be (there’s wine to be made!) it is no substitute for thorough grape inspection in the fields.
Review: What’s in my Picking Basket/Fermenting Vessel, or What are we Drinking (and Not Drinking) with Sustainable/Organic/Biodynamic Wine
Wine without chemicals. Why put up with herbicide and pesticide use at the properties you purchase goods from, when it has been proven repeatedly (for centuries, and in the modern era by many of the worlds top-tier estates) that their use is unnecessary and perhaps even contrary to farming methods that promote a quality end-product. Agricultural philosophy/politics aside, after tasting wines from Domaine Leroy in Burgundy, Zind-Humbrecht in Alsace, Catherine and Pierre Breton in Chinon, Nicolas Joly in Savennieres, Domaine Marcoux and Chateau de Beaucastel in Chateauneuf du Pape, and hundreds of other truly magnificent wines made without chemicals, doesn’t the question of whether or not those chemicals are harmful to the soil, ecosystem or us seem superflouous? Environmentalist or not, these meticulous growers have hit upon a (admittedly harder) path to a quality of wine that stands out from the pack. Shouldn’t we all support the dedicated men and women who choose to take this high road?
The Winemaking
Yeast, For Starters
It’s my premise/experience based on seven years of tasting in Chapel Hill and abroad, looking for wines possessing of special, intricate flavors, that interesting wines are fermented with the natural yeasts on the grapes, in the vineyards and in the cellars. Cultured yeasts rush fermentation or add “enhancing” aromas and flavors that I believe to be unacceptable. We look for wines that express their terroir. So preferably no enzymes and no hormones in the winemaking process, as those things obscure the innate and delicate sense of place all wines possess. This fingerprint is easy to remove through excessive manipulation of the fruit, and cultured starters, “yeast on steroids” to use a touch of hyperbole, are a major culprit in the homogenization of wine.
Wait a Second. . .How do they Afford $500 Allier Oak Barrels for my $7 Oaky wine?
They can’t. That’s sawdust you’re tasting, or oak chips, if you prefer. Or oak extract. Yum! I personally prefer wine that is fermented grapes, and little else. 100% new oak? How ridiculously wasteful! The ego! Oak plays an important role in creating many exceptional wines, but that role should remain a supporting one, affecting the flavor of the fruit primarily through facilitating aeration of wine though its porous staves, and oak should to my mind never step in front of the fruit, masking it from our palates. How boring! The fact that I’m as much of an oak connisseur (Allier,Nivers, Slovenia,Missouri, they all taste different!) as a wine connisseur at this stage in my career speaks volumes regarding the overuse of new oak. Think of it as ketchup, or salt. If you smoke a pack of Luckies a day you might need more, but the rest of us would appreciate it dialed down a bit. Please and thank you, oh Great Wine Style Decider-God.
Wine by Numbers vs. “Cowboy Wine”
We do not want an artificially high degree of alcohol produced by adding sugar to the must. Non- or slightly chaptalized wines are more enjoyable and healthier to drink. A common approach in many wineries around the world is to dial up (or in hot areas, parts of California and Australia among others) spin out alcohol to create a product that has impact (alcohol carries big bold flavor to your palate) but doesn’t singe the eyebrows. This is too much manipulation, and it rarely makes for exceptional wine. It does make for an ocean of pleasantly enjoyable wine, but nowadays you can find anonymous quaffable wines everywhere, so it’s not what we here are about. Wine technicians can do many things, but should they? Shouldn’t the character of a bottled wine be born in the vineyard, not dialed up with acid/sugar additions in the winery? Isn’t a world of wine by numbers rather boring to drink in?
So here’s to the iconoclast, the wine maker sure enough of his vineyards and raw material, and of his vision/ability to trust they will produce a wine of character without manipulation. Ego wine is as boorish as the people who “create” it. A small imprint of a vigneron’s character is inevitable in a bottled wine, and in my mind falls within the concept of terroir. I feel that the best growers realize that what they can impart with science and winemaking knowledge is of little interest in comparison to the infinite complexity and diversity of flavor offered up by nature.
In Defense of Wine Sludge & Flavor Crystals
We prefer wines are either not filtered or minimally filtered. Why strip character from a wine to create greater clarity? (clear wines are an easier sell, dummy!) So you get tartrates, or a bit of wine sludge. These are evidence of win that is alive, complex, possessing all its inherent flavor. As such, you should look for particulate matter in purchasing wine, as opposed to avoiding it. Velveeta may slice easier, but Reggiano Parmesan tastes better, once you make the minimal extra effort to serve it.
Summary: A Defense of Diversity, a Human Scale and Sustainable Agriculture
We prefer a harmony, not an imposed style —wines should showcase their place of origin and varietal character. This is almost always found in our experience at small, sustainable estates. We are not looking for oak flavor, particular fruits or overly done aromatics. This gaudy style of wine is a hallmark of standard agribusiness wine, estates on a scale or of a philosophy that inhibits the exhibition of their true site character. Minimal use of S02 is something I prefer, because SO2 masks flavor and aromatic complexity, and while necessary to make unbalanced or overly processed wines shelf-stable for shipping, it should be superfluous in balanced wine that is naturally and correctly vinified.
A Final Op Ed Piece: Who Makes This Stuff? Lifestyle Wineries, Flying Winemakers, and the Peasant Farmer
I want wines from people whose first obsession is grape growing. Men and women who grew up in a culture of grape cultivation, to whom there is no other path. I don’t have something against the owners of lifestyle wineries, people to whom winemaking is a status/semi-retirement career choice after making billions as captains of industry. Heck, if I made my fortune I’d probably follow them into the role of gentleman winemaker. It’s just that 99% of the time I don’t find wines from that type of operation have anything to say that’s terribly interesting (usually they shout something along the lines of “look at me! I’m rich, and I bought millions of dollars of ultra modern winemaking equipment, half a forest of Allier barriques, and hired the hotshot du jour to be my (6 hours a month) wine consultant. It makes me a little sleepy thinking about the wines I’m lampooning. I want wine from people who grew up among their vines, know them intimately, at times plant by plant, people to whom winemaking is like breathing. Those people make sit-up-and-pay-attention wine. Those people make wine that tastes good with real food, wine that makes you feel great before and after you drink it.
In a society of mind-boggling materialism and bordering on limitless wine shopping options, sadly these are the wines that are hardest for consumers to obtain. Most big importers and brokers have little use for a product that is inherently esoteric and even if it were to resonate with consumers would be impossible to supply to every Costco in America, because it’s hewn from the earth in frightfully tiny quantities. But with bigness comes inevitable standardization/mechanization/a loss of a quality of “thereness”. So if you are bored with wines that taste the same as all their peers, if you ever get a feeling when wine shopping that you’re choosing from many labels masking one internationalized flavor, do a bit of research (or come to us, we’ve done your homework already) and explore the delight-filled natural world of small-grower wine. If you don’t like it you can always go back. The Globalwine-flavored products aren’t in danger of passing into history. . . . [top]
Barolo, Piedmont, Italy ’01
Tastes like: Red cherry aromas. Some spicy, leathery, faintly gamey character. Tannic. Dry.
Pairs well at Lantern with: Shaking beef. Pork shank.
Recommended if you like: Any Italian reds. This is one of the best. Also, Pinot Noir lovers will love the aromas.
It is nice working with growers who produce hundreds of cases of their wines annually, not thousands. I have an easier time believing suitable care and oversight have gone into every bottling when an estate's output can be housed in one reasonably sized building, and their vineyards toured on foot are simply a vigorous morning hike.
This tiny estate (8 acres) sits between Monforte, a village whose surrounding vineyards are revered, even in comparison to neighboring Barolo-producing towns, for ripe complexity and age worthiness, and La Morra, a town whose wines have elegance reminiscent of fine red Burgundy. These are the noble wines of the Italian Piedmont, a region influenced heavily by the culture of neighboring France and regarded in Italy as home to the greatest of Italian red wines.
Alessandria's Barolo is one of the most authentic examples of this classic red wine style available in NC today. What do I mean by that? The wine’s primary characteristic is balance, not size. It is a tannic and ageworthy wine, but it is also an aromatic and food-friendly red, a wine that impresses with drinkability instead of exaggerated richness or darkness.
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Tastes like: Dry. Citrus Fruit Aromas, pleasant mineral/chalk character. No noticeable oak. Very clean, light, elegant.
Pairs well at Lantern with: Bento Box, Calamari Salad, dishes containing shrimp and relatively clean/bright fruit flavors.
Recommended if you like: NZ Sauvignon Blanc, thirst quenching light and dry whites from around the world, maybe even Pinot Grigio devotees.
Cousins Jean-Dominique and Jean-Laurent Vacheron run this estate. The region’s soils are rich with silex, a flinty rock that rests on a bed of clay and limestone. The Vacherons’ silex-rich vineyards are the key to the style of electric/vibrant white they grow.
Domaine Vacheron is the only Sancerre winery with equal parts of limestone and flint in its vineyards. Limestone contributes to balanced acidity, while flint provides good aroma and mineral cut.
The cousins Vacheron farm organically. Yields are controlled; the average yield in the Appellation of Sancerre is 70 hectoliters per hectare, at Vacheron, the average yield for this white is 50 hl/ha.
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Pairs well at Lantern with: Lobster pot stickers, pork dumplings, south Indian courses
Winemaking is a second career for Elena Walch. In 1985 she married into one of Alto Adige’s most historically important winemaking families. Captivated by her new environment, Walch made the decision to abandon architecture and devote her energies to making the best possible wines from her estate’s two “Grand Cru” equivalent sites.
For the growing of Gewürztraminer Elena Walch is blessed with vines in Kastelaz, a steep south-facing site high above the prominent wine town of Tramin (from which the grape derives half of its name: Gewürz = spice, Traminer = of Tramin.) So while many customers may be surprised to see several Italian Gewurztraminers on our wine list, they shouldn’t be. Many believe the grape was originally identified and domesticated in this corner of the Alto Adige. I believe it is the region where Gewurztraminer makes the most drinkable wines.
It is important to understand that while Alto Adige has been politically a part of Italy for over a century, culturally this northern corner of the country, separated by only a few kilometers of mountains from Austria, is a world away from Rome, or even southern neighbor Trentino, with which its wines are often (for no logical reason) lumped. Most of its inhabitants consider themselves Tyrolean first, and speak German. The cuisine shares more with that of neighbors to the north.
When I visited last year we were served plenty of speck (a terrific local version of ham), knodel (big flour/bacon dumplings in broth), apple strudel and many other delicious dishes one would not immediately link to Italian cuisine. I would argue this is the strength of Italy’s culinary tradition- while widely stereotyped it is intensely regional and diverse. This wine makes sense in the context of its Tyrolean homeland.
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Tastes Like: Very old world. Tea, red berry, anise. Lighter, more refined than most reds.
Pairs well at Lantern with: Tea and Spice Smoked Chicken
Recommended if you like: Mature Burgundy or other Pinot Noir
In Luis Buñuel’s classic 1961 movie Viridiana there is a climatic scene in which the street people taken in by the title character leave their dormitory and break into the main house on the estate and stage a dinner party. In the scene’s final moment they are frozen in a “picture” that grotesquely mirrors Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. For that reference alone the movie was banned for the duration of Franco’s rule in Spain. The movie also asks pointed questions about the corruption of ideals in reform. . .and in the dining room, our band of motley outsiders are drinking (what else!) R. Lopez de Heredia! I say if it’s good enough for Buñuel’s antiheroes, it’s good enough for Lantern patrons.
Some (maybe more useful) information. Founded in 1877 by Don Rafael López de Heredia y Landeta, R. Lopez de Heredia is the oldest winery in Haro, and the third oldest in the entire Rioja Region. Haro is the cultural capital of Rioja Alta, an area known for making many of Rioja’s greatest wines. In 1911 Don Rafael began planting Viña Tondonia, a 240-acre site on the right bank of the river Ebro. From the beginning the approach at this winery has been to age wine to perfection prior to its release into the marketplace. Few if any wines from this property are released younger than five years old, and presently A Southern Season has reds, whites and rosés from 2001, 1998, 96, 95, 88, and 1981 in stock. And many older vintages are available.
Heredia is a rarity, a winery whose philosophy and ageing techniques, while once common, are now remarkably out of step with their sleek 21st century counterparts. To use one of many examples of the difference, Lopez de Heredia currently has over 15,000 Bordeaux-size barrels of wine in their cellar. Most wineries, out of necessity or indifference, keep significantly smaller holdings of reserve wine.
In the current vintage Viña Tondonia is 80 percent Tempranillo, ten percent Garnacha and five percent each Mazuelo and Graciano.
To me wines from this estate taste of a different, maybe better, era when wines were more distinct, more subtle, more of a living food and less of a homogenous product. This wine may not be for everyone, but it is a complex and thought-provoking red that I think many adventuresome Lantern patrons familiar with elegant, mature flavors in wine will appreciate.
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“Cuvée Granit,” Loire, France ’05
Tastes Like: Floral aromas. Lighter texture than most reds. Delicate, fruity, refreshing.
Pairs well at Lantern with: Duck Soup. Tea-smoked chicken. I even had it once with a brunch omelet.
Recommended if you like: . . .Merlot. Or Pinot Noir. Or Cabernet Franc. This is a wine that will make friends easily.
It’s easy to understand why a grower would be motivated to farm diligently and struggle to make wine of the very highest quality in Burgundy, or Napa. There’s a lots of potential financial reward for ambitious wine folk in those regions, not to mention a fair amount of public recognition for their efforts. But what gets Mark Ollivier out of bed early in the morning? His home region of Muscadet is flat, and extremely machine-harvestable. Human nature being what it is, everyone uses rumbling machinery to efficiently bring in damaged fruit. Except for Ollivier. And maybe three other guys we’re not presently discussing.
Ollivier picks his grapes by hand, and the pristine quality of his raw materials immediately makes Domaine de la Pepiere’s wines stand out in a sea of mediocre Muscadet. By the way, since Muscadet is only an AOC for white wines made of the Melon de Bourgogne grape, this wine is bottled under the larger Vin de Pays du Jardin de la France Marches de Bretagne moniker. Nobody knows where that is, it might as well be labeled simply “wine from France”.
So while this is a region with a distinct soil type that is excellent for growing grapes, in short a region brimming with potential, for decades the western edge of the Loire has been primarily the source of thin, one-dimensional, ridiculously overcropped white wines that at best added some acid to your oyster course. Today most everything from the region is still industrial junk. Ollivier’s wines are the antithesis of a modern commercial “product”. He only uses natural indigenous yeasts to start fermentation. He never uses sterile filtration, only permitting one light filtration prior to bottling. He is the only grower in the whole region to not have a single clonal selection in his vineyards. Over the last century grape growers (like all farmers) have lost a huge proportion of the plant diversity in their fields. It’s a rare treat to be able to buy wine from a grower that still has all original genetic stock in his vines.
I’m happy Mark Ollivier and his ilk are out there. It’s heartening that farmers can take the high road and make wines the correct way, even when there is little financial reason to do so. Look at the price of this wine- no one is getting rich at Domaine de la Pepiere. Ollivier and the rare vignerons like him are protecting the right way of doing things in an era when market forces and general indifference/ignorance to tradition seem likely to remove his type of living wine from store shelves and restaurant lists. A sip of Cuvee Granit demonstrates how well-made affordable wine does not have to taste simple.
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Tastes Like: Ripe citrus fruit aromas. Walks the line between dry and sweet. Light and refreshing.
Pairs well at Lantern with: Calamari Salad, Spicy Shrimp appetizers
Recommended if you like: Extra Dry Champagnes (ex. White Star) Prosecco in general, Riesling Kabinett.
This wine has taken a circuitous path to us. For years New York-based Italian wine importers Dalla Terra have been a valued source of world-class wines for my store. They have an impressive portfolio; including marquee names like Avignonese and Badia a Coltibuono in Tuscany, Alois Lageder in Alto Adige, many others. I knew these legendary estates, but never had the chance to taste the bulk of their portfolio. Happily, in the dead of winter I got a call from Neil Kaplan, sales manager for Dalla Terra. It turns out he is friends with Andrea. His brother Ira is an occasional visitor to Chapel Hill for rock shows with his band Yo la Tengo. So your chef sent Neil my way, and the wines were great.
Lots of gems, many completely new to me. It was nice to taste wine and talk about Lambchop records instead of vine-training systems or ambient yeasts for once. Maybe one day Dalla Terra’s Soave, or their even more fantastic Tocai Friulano will make appearances on the list. But today we start with a new Prosecco by the glass, fresh and a propos to Spring.
In an ancient Veronese dialect Garbèl means pleasantly tart, an apt description for this Prosecco. Often I find bone dry bubblies too austere to pair with Lantern food; they simply don’t work with enough of the intense core flavors utilized in your kitchen. At 13 grams per liter of residual sugar Adami is literally on the line between the Brut and Extra Dry categories. Since most popular Brut Champagnes (Veuve Cliquot, for one) are always on the high end of the residual sugar spectrum for Brut, I believe this sparkling wine will not seem exceptionally sweet to most people. It is balanced – crisp acidity keeps the ripe fruit in check. That ripe fruit comes from a perfectly situated (south facing, bowl-shaped) vineyard in the Valdobiaddene region of Northeastern Italy (think Verona, or Lake Garda) that has been in the hands of the Adami family since 1920. Armando and Franco Adami tend to the vines originally purchased by their grandfather, and worked by their father before them.
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Tastes Like: Pure berry fruit aromas. Light, but not lacking for flavor. Dry. Affordable old school
Burgundy at its best.
Pairs well at Lantern with: Few reds are more versatile at the dinner table. Salmon. Drunken Chicken. Lacquered Catfish in Red Curry Sauce.
Recommended if you like: European Pinot Noirs, Beaujolais, Rioja, Chianti, Nebbiolo.
Vintage charts are such a scam. Completely worthless. I do not own one. I guess a producer chart would bruise too many egos, or would require too many folds to become pocket-size. Think about how many times you drive down 15-501 and it’s raining in Durham, but sunny in blessed Chapel Hill. It’s always raining in Bahama. . . . Even for a relatively small region like the Cote d’Or, a vintage chart is hopelessly simple, as it ignores the most important factor in the finished quality of a wine, the farming. How stringently did a grower prune his vines? Are they old vines with deep root systems? Is s/he harvesting by hand? These and many other “little” decisions in the vineyard play as great a role as radiant heat and rainfall in creating a quality wine.
Even many Burgundy boosters have written off the 2004 vintage for red wines (Chablis is a different story, the wines are as chalky as a 3rd-grade teacher, and totally delicious) and to be fair you could easily fill up your recycling bins with Bourgogne bottles that don’t approach the pure drinking bliss of many of our favorite red Burgundies from 1996, 1999 or 2002. And drinking a lot of (sometimes any) Burgundy makes my wallet wince, so it’s understandable that once wine weathermen raise a red flag drinkers stay away in droves. So it is up to contrarian tasters like your Beverage Director (I like a snappy title) to pick through the junk in such years, and point out to anyone who will listen that lo and behold good winemakers manage to eek out a living (ok, in Burgundy probably a pretty good living) making small amounts of good to great wine in even the most trying of vintages. Generally nobody listens as I beat this point to death; they smile in a polite, slightly frightened way and try to inch out of the room without anyone noticing. I understand, it’s hard to break ranks with conventional wisdom and buy in a “bad” vintage. It’s a leap of faith, and it strains bonds between wine consumers and purported experts. You can see deep in their eyes that customers are wondering if you’re just trying to offload some junk that has to be moved on to make way for the next vintage. And in the case of 2004, the next vintage is being given ridiculous advance fanfare, luring many to sit on their burgundy budget for 12 more months. But if you do buy Burgundy in less hyped years you save money. And you often get to taste lovely wines that all those lemmings doggedly waiting for 2005 will never know. Which adds some sweet evil joy to the experience.
If Claudine Gaunoux makes bad wine, I’ve never run across it. Because I am not immune to media forces my enthusiasm for tasting her 2004 Bourgogne was muted. This is embarrassing, because I should know better. The wine was great with several of my courses (notably swell with the crab and pork spring rolls) and as good or better with the bites I stole from the plates of my Lantern dining companions. Gaunoux has impressive premier cru vineyard sites in Beaune and Pommard, and makes wine in a style I would pigeon hole as traditional or authentic to her region. Nothing overly oaky, heavy or adulterated, wines that are distinctly of their specific sites and region of origin. Wine that works as food, and with food. Dive in and enjoy the amazing 2004 Gaunoux Bourgogne, while supplies last!
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Tastes Like: Delicate. Strawberries, with just a hint of lemon peel. Light and bone-dry. Ridiculously elegant and perfect for spring.
Pairs well at Lantern with: If we were a French restaurant I’d say Bouillabaisse. Fried whole fish (porgy, flounder, etc.) will do nicely.
Recommended if you like: Dry whites. Sancerre.
I trod a familiar path to rosé. After three years in a dark hole of a wine store I set out one June day for what would turn out to be two of the most torrid weeks of summer heat France had ever experienced. The heat couldn’t spoil my much-needed vacation, but it did hasten our departure from Paris for windswept western Provence. Paris may have culture and a thousand perfect places to dine away an evening, but it is not a city that deals well with 100-degree days, or 90-degree nights. Trying to chill precious bottles of Huet Le Mont sec Vourvray or grower Champagne in the tiny sink of our threadbare (but historic!) hotel bathroom with bags of frozen spinach got old quickly. It seems France is unfamiliar with ice. So we left views of Notre Dame at night behind for sunny days in Cassis, Gigondas, Arles and St. Remy. Days spent walking (ok, mostly driving) through windswept, desolate and beautiful landscapes punctuated by evenings of grilled fish and boules on the lawn in front of the old farmhouse we were renting. We were surrounded by tomatoes and melons, frustratingly not quite ripe enough to steal in the dead of night. And being Provence, bordering our arable Gite was a very local, capable rosé producer, the kind that sells most of its production unbottled, directly from the tank to the 3-liter jug of thirsty townies.
Since I hang around wine stores I’ve heard innumerable tourists attribute mythical virtues to the local vines of Spain, France, Italy, other points of interest around the globe. Their story usually begins with "We drank this fabulous local wine all week and never once had a headache." They fail to mention that the wine was 11 percent alcohol rosé, served along with a 3-hour 11 course meal, whereas at home they drink 16 percent alcohol red zin on the couch with microwave pizza. Then, to twist the knife a little, our tourist friends never hesitate to inform me that they paid 2 euros for this nectar of the gods, this best wine they’ve ever tasted. I’ve always been skeptical. But in the ungodly heat of pre-Mistral Provence, on a picnic blanket with local cheeses and duck sausage, nothing could have tasted better than our local wine. Rosé was a defining component of my holiday, as important as the sea air in Cassis or the endless roads lined with plane trees that we zipped down in search of lost villages, antiques and artisianal edible goods unavailable in NC.
Back in America, few rosés have brought these memories back as perfectly as Commanderie de Peyrassol. Maybe Domaine du Bagnol, which we’ll talk about soon. Like me, Francoise Rigord is an outsider that fell in love with Provence, for her it was the back country of the Maures mountains north of St. Tropez that lured her away from a career in Public Relations for wine making. Sounds like a no-brainer to me, particularly when your husband’s family has a sprawling 400-acre estate in the Mediterranean Alps, 150-acres of which are planted to vines. Happily vines are integrated with nature at Commanderie de Peyrassol, both through preserving large expanses of forested land and using only organic foliar sprays to deal with vine pests. Don’t miss out on a bottle of this special seasonal treat!
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Tastes Like: Round. Ripe, but not oaky. Pear and apple. Dry enough for dry white drinkers.
Pairs well at Lantern with: Tea-smoked chicken. Duck Soup.
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Alsace is the driest region of France. The Vosges mountains that sit immediately to the west of Alsace block wind and rain and generally mitigate extreme weather, making the area arguably the best in France for white grape cultivation. Stephane and Mickael are the young and committed winemakers (I met Stephane), representing the latest of four generations of Molteses who have been tending Auxerrois, Pinot Blanc, Pinot Noir, Pinot Gris, Muscat, Gewurztraminer and Riesling in the town of Pfaffenheim since 1880.
Today we turn our attention to their most food-versatile white, the Pinot Blanc. This is actually a high percentage Pinot Auxerrois, which seems to be ok with the Alsatian arm of the INAO (the body that regulates all things Appellation Controlee-related) for labeling as simply Pinot Blanc. They are related members of the easy-to-mutate Pinot family. I'd recommend the wine with pheasant (hey, Bonne Soiree has it, so can you) or other forms of fowl. These wines got to us in a circuitous, if familiar way.
In 2004 I tasted wines in Paris with Gerard Boesch, an independent organic farmer whose family have been working vines in Alsace for 11 generations. Along with being the head of the local grower’s organization he is an evangelist and convincing salesperson for his neighbors. In short, Mr. Boesh convinced us to visit the Moltes clan, and we owe him for the tip. Few of us are willing to promote our (in theory) competition- Gerard Boesch is intelligent enough to realize that good Alsatian wine reaching the U.S. is good for him, and for all of us.
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Tastes Like: Somewhat restrained for Sauvignon Blanc. Some lemon citrus aromas, medium-weight, bright without any painfully sharp acidity.
Pairs well at Lantern with: Shrimp appetizer. Steamed black cod.
Recommended if you like: Sauvignon Blanc. Dry Riesling. Pinot Grigio.
Michel Reverdy started working at this estate in 1970. He took charge in 1985. If anything, as time goes by his vinification techniques become more traditional- recently he abandoned filtration for a large portion of his wines, as his friends told him they tasted better unfiltered, and after two or three years in bottle his filtered wines throw a sediment anyway. Many wines in Sancerre today are made in a very competent but bland fashion, the wineries themselves looking like some sort of sterile laboratory for biotech research, all spotless tile and stainless steel. And cleanliness is a good thing in winemaking, as long as you don’t scrub away all of a wine’s character in the search for an analytically perfect product. Reverdy is one of a handful of growers in this eastern Loire town to get the balance between tradition and modernity correct. Most of the others that exhibit what I consider to be authentic Sancerre character have already spent time on your list (Crochet, Labaille, Vacheron, Cotat might be next. . . .) If you need proof that terroir exists, take home a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc from Sancerre, and one from across the river in Pouilly Fumé. A few hundred meters separate vineyards producing wines of remarkably distinct character.
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Tastes Like: Just a touch off-dry. Light and lively, with green apple skin and slate/flint aromas.
Pairs well at Lantern with: Lemongrass tofu. Sashimi.
Pairs well at Lantern with: Wines of delicacy and pure fruit, ex. Austrian whites, Loire Sauvignons, whites from Alto Adige or Friuli.
The Saar is a tiny valley that joins the more-famous Mosel in Southwestern Germany, near the Roman city of Trier. Many German Riesling drinkers search out the wines of the Saar because of a distinct, steely, racy quality that is a result of the region’s unique climate and particularly slatey soil. The family that currently owns Maximilian von Othegraven purchased the estate in 1805. Viticulture on the Kanzemer Berg (mountain) can be traced back to 1500. The winery sites at the bottom of the Altenberg vineyard, considered by many to be the greatest site on this slope. Altenberg fruit forms the base for Maria von O, a Kabinett that takes its names from the late widow of Maximilian von Othegraven. When Maria von Othegraven died in 1995 (she lived to be 96, a testament to the healthful properties of good Saar Riesling) the estate was taken over by her goddaughter, the current proprietor Dr. Heidi Kegel.
This estate grows only Riesling, and its vineyards contain more than 2,000 ungrafted vines, a happy thing made possible by the pure grey slate and hard quartz composition of the soil which the Phylloxera root louse finds inhospitable. The excellent drainage and heat-retention capabilities of this soil make Othgraven’s wine special, allowing for high must-weights in an otherwise quite chilly growing region.
The estate house and cellars were rebuilt following World War II, and if you visit today you can spy (but sadly not purchase) bottles dating back to the 1953 vintage.
After several years of a (in my opinion) misdirected effort to make the front label cleaner and easier for American public to understand, with the next (2005) release the word Kabinett will reappear on Maria von O’s front label. The wine has always been a Kabinett (actually declassified dry Spatlese) but the Germans seem to have a love-hate relationship with their Qualitatswein mit Pradikat (QMP) system of wine classification. It’s logical once you get the hang of it; sadly for marketing purposes wineries keep making odd exceptions to the labeling rules, which end up confusing us all.
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Tastes Like: Very hoppy. Dry, clean, refreshing. Aromatic in a hoppy, floral way. Classic US craftbrew IPA style.
Pairs well at Lantern with: Spicy shrimp. Crab and shrimp spring rolls. Calamari salad.
Recommended if you like: Hops. Also a decent choice for lovers of lighter wheat beers who are looking for something a little less fruity.
Is it strange to anyone else that America’s best brewery is in Rehoboth beach, Delaware? I can’t pinpoint why, but it strikes me as odd. This is their flagship beer, by no means their most experimental or extreme, just their most balanced, food-friendly and drinkable. The Dogfish beer I buy by the six-pack, in contrast to the majority of their more whimsical output, which I generally check out one weird beer at a time.
New to the charms of IPA, or India Pale Ale? This style of beer was created by the British to survive the long journey around Africa to the Indian subcontinent. It is a variation on the traditional British Pale Ale style of beer devised by George Hodgson of London’s Bow brewery in the 1750’s. Prior to his invention, British brewers had attempted (generally unsuccessfully) to ship Porter and other popular styles of beer of the era to large numbers of ex-pats living in the colonies, and to trade Pale Ales with markets in Eastern Europe and Russia. Hops are prized for their aromatic qualities, but in the IPA style they are added in great quantities because they act as a preservative and extend the lifespan of ales. Prior to pasteurization or refrigeration, they were (along with alcohol) the only real defense against spoiled, flat and sour beer. The Dogfish Head 60-minute IPA is brewed using big doses of Warrior and Amarillo hops. It has 203 calories, which in my mind makes it a very worthwhile indulgence.
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Tastes Like: This may be my favorite beer. I will arm-wrestle anyone who disputes its incomparable deliciousness. Aromas of coriander, vanilla, white pepper, with faint hints of fig, green apple and caramel. Beer for wine people. Real aromatic complexity, great mouthfeel, a beer that makes you crave another sip.
Pairs well at Lantern with: Bang Bang Chicken. Tea and Spice Smoked Chicken.
Recommended if you like: Franziskaner. Light, refreshing but still flavorful beers in general, for instance Belgian Triples or White Ales. Hoegaarten. Chimay White Label. Duvel.
Foret comes from an artisanal brewery that is also a working farm (eggs are sold in the brewery’s offices!) The Dupont brewery is run by brewer Marc Rosier and his sister, a microbiologist. When not brewing the Rosiers operate the farm, and their interest in sustainable agriculture led to the brewing of Foret, a Saison beer that is the first certified organic beer in Belgium. Foret is 5% abv, has the recognizable Dupont yeast character (much more heterogenous/real than the aroma of beers brewed using standard industrial cultured brewer’s yeast), and is more angular/focused/clear in its taste than your average Belgian brew.
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Tastes Like: Light citrus and white pepper. Fresh, immediately charming and thirst-quenching
Pairs well at Lantern with: Almost your entire menu. For starters, black mushroom and chive dumplings, followed by whole fried flounder.
Michael Moosbrugger is on the long list of people I envy. There he was, a daydreaming twentysomething in some remote corner of Austria (for the purposes of this text, we’ll call all points outside of Vienna remote) who idly hoped to become a wine maker one day. Up to this point it is a story with which I can relate. But one day, fortuitiously, Moosbrugger gets a call from a friend. It is Willi Brundlmayer, Langlois’ (and possibly Austria’s) greatest wine maker, a man who in the last 25 years has done as much as anyone to restore his nation’s reputation as a producer of attention-grabbing, distinct and wonderful white wines.
It seems the monks of Zwettl are selling their estate, a monastery with 40 hectares of the best vineyard sites in the Kamptal. Kaptal is one hour for Vienna, so by my navigating on the edge of the hinterlands. Moosbrugger seizes onto this good fortune and slowly resussitates the grand estate gradually raising the standards at the schloss to a point where people (including both men’s importer) speculate openly about whether Moosbrugger has surpassed Brundlmayer in wine greatness. Like such things matter.
Importer Terry Theise also rightly notes that wine cultivation is not a horse race. What matters more than primacy to me is that Moosbrugger really hits homeruns at the “entry-level” end of the price spectrum. His basic Gobelsburger Gruner Veltliner really breathes out the slate and gravel that it soaked in from the estate’s soil. Try not to be won over by this wine. Too enjoyable. It isn’t often that life offers us the chance to experience something really great, and totally affordable. I hope this isn’t death by hyperbole, but there’s nothing I’d change here, even the price.
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Tastes Like: Pure Riesling fruit, apple and white peach, with good acid/sugar balance. The texture betrays a mastery of Riesling on the part of the winemaker: everything is in place, deftly vinified to define in weight and intensity the Kabinett style.
Pairs well at Lantern with: Cod would be nice. Also good with the drunken chicken, and Thai seafood salad.
Recommended if you like: German/Alsatian/Austrian white wine, or US Riesling.
The von Kesselstatt family started making wine in the Mosel in the 14th century. In the 19th century the estate purchased four monasteries whose vineyards form the core of the current domaine’s 36 hectares. By global standards this is not a large chunk of land, but in the Mosel 36 hectares makes you a notably larger than average estate. As part of its vineyard holdings, Reichsgraf von Kesselstatt has prime sites in the Mosel and its two major vine-growing tributaries, the Saar and the Ruwer.
Few estates in the region have top sites in all three areas. So here curious wine tasters have a rare opportunity to taste the terroir differences between the area’s three valleys without the distraction of variance in producer style. Annegret Reh-Gardner is the current owner of Reichsgraf von Kesselstatt. Her family purchased the estate in 1978. Wolfgang Mertes makes the wines here.
In September of 2006, Megan (the wife) and I went on holiday to Germany and Belgium. It was a truly great holiday, a week away from the office spent riding bikes from village to famous wine growing village along the Mosel, and hiking up and along the steep hillsides that veer up from the river for miles. The most perfect fragment of hours on this vacation was spent at the Palais von Kesselstatt in Trier in the southern Mosel, a city we really visited for its Roman architecture and cathedrals.
We were walking back through the city center looking for where we parked our car when the historic home of the von Kesselstatt winemaking empire appeared. As we sat in their little café garden and drank glasses of Riesling the rainy day turned to warm sun, and the lightness and vibrancy of Mosel wine made absolute sense. It turns out wines do taste better where they come from. We hadn’t booked an appointment to taste at von Kesselstatt, and probably for the wrong reasons.
Wine geeks covet the obscure, the unattainable, and frankly in nerd circles I feel the reputation of these wines suffer because they are, well, available. They are not little gems you must seek out. So they have no indie cred… but they taste good. And the bottle prices at the Palais? Shocking. We bought lots.
Purchased by the von Kesselstatt family in 1858, the Josephshofer vineyard was under cultivation by 596. Megan and I biked past this site and its spired monastery near the town of Graach on our way from Urzig to Berncastel. I took nifty pictures. The site looks basically the same as many others on this stretch of the river (70% grade, but that’s common to the steep Mosel), except for the striking monastery building. The soil here is Devonian slate, common to the region and a defining part of the Mosel wine flavor profile. Often you will hear wines of this area described as slatey, flinty,
minerally.
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Tastes Like: Very light. At its best slightly chilled. Dry, with soft red berry aromas.
Pairs well at Lantern with: Pork and chive dumplings. This is a great lunch/appetizer red.
Recommended if you like: Beaujolais. Valpolicella. Bardolino. French Pinot Noir.
Josepf Niedermayer’s winery is in the wrong part of Italy. The 19th century building is unmistakably Italian in style, but in a nation fragmented into twenty-odd fiercely local, regional cultures the winery looks very Florentine, and aside from that a little absurd stuck between more typical Tyrolean dwellings in the Alpine town of Girlan. Niedermayer’s wife is Austrian, and he seems as (or more) comfortable speaking German than Italian, so the palm tress in front of the building’s façade are out of step with my picture postcard view of Northeastern Italy. Tongue in check humor perhaps from a winery that exists on the northern edge of vinous Italy. Maybe they were planted to emphasize that summers aren’t as cool as one might think in Sudtirol.
It is hard to forget you are on the edge of the Dolomites here. When we stopped for lunch with another winemaker, there was snow on the ground. In April. As dusk approached Niedermayr’s high-elevation vineyards were pretty chilly. The estate owns a total of 15 hectares. No Mourvedre growing here: Muller-Thurgau, Schiava, Pinot Nero (Noir), Silvaner, Muskateller: grapes that thrive in the long, dry growing season and cool spring and fall of Alto Adige. After a brief inspection (it’s hard to know what to say, vineyards all look pretty similar, though the view down onto the town below from Niedermayr’s vines was impressive) it was back to the winery for speck, salami and armloads of grappa. Josepf also has an interesting collection of antique farming equipment in the cellar, tools he can remember using with his father, and his winemaker’s father. The two families have worked in symbiosis for generations. Despite reverence of these agricultural traditions, inside the winery proper modernity rules. Lots of stainless-steel, temperature-control, in fact the whole business end of the winery was made state of the art just a few years back.
After consuming the lion’s share of local meat on offer (my traveling companion was suffering mightily from too many knodel consumed at lunch) we left Girlan and headed back to comparatively cosmopolitan Verona, a city with a whole different set of wine and food traditions. The real strength of Italian viticulture lies along this short path. An hour in any direction and you’re likely to run into a new wine to try, refreshingly out of step with what’s going on in neighboring areas. My belly likes diversity.
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Tastes Like: Viscous. Textural. Rich. Not oaky, just intense, deep, less fruity than the average Austrian white.
Pairs well at Lantern with: Miso Cod. Tea-Smoked Chicken
Recommended if you like: White Burgundy. White Rhone wines. Tocai Fruilano.
This is a different kind of Grüner Veltliner. Maria and Ludwig Hiedler aim for earthy, concentrated white wines, wines that are less fashionable but perhaps more satisfying than the clean, reductive style currently en vogue from Austria. The wines aren’t simply fruity. They are complex, deep, round- aromatic in a more nuanced and intriguing way. They seem to be more connected to an older style of Austrian white wine, and to my palate they mesh well with Austrian cuisine. Ludwig Hiedler has a vision of how Grüner Veltliner from his vineyards should taste, and he sticks close to his idea of this correct style. To me this conviction and a little bit of stubbornness is a key to making great wine. The wines here are manifested from a point of view, and I think offer a true representiation of Langlois terroir. This is a family estate. Maria and Ludwig work 16 hectares of vines, producing on average 8,300 cases of wines, almost half of it Grüner Veltliner. The Pinot Blanc here is outstanding as well. Maybe we’ll buy some in ’07. . . .
The main soil type at Weingut Ludwig Hiedler is Loess, a form of sedimentary rock that is good for their goal of bottling wines of fullness and ripe fruit. The winery works very naturally, utilizing only natural fertilizers and no herbicides or pesticides. It is important to understand that working without chemical fertilizers causes a severe reduction in yield in most instances, and therefore is a sign that the farmer is concerned enough with wine quality and ecology to take a significant financial hit. As a farmer from Alsace once told me, “Nature only gives so much. To increase this yield, to take more and throw nature out of balance, you must use chemical fertilizers.”
The harvest at Hiedler is performed by hand, in several passes to select only optimally-ripe and undamaged fruit. Fermentation is temperature-controlled, and the wine is aged partly in stainless steel and partly in acacia casks.
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Tastes Like: Limes, green apples
Pairs well at Lantern with: Steamed black cod with ginger, NC flounder
Recommended if you like:
Fruit-driven, light and refreshing whites (ex NZ Sav. Blanc)
Kinheim is a pretty village on the Mosel just north of Urzig and Erden and an hour’s drive south of Koblenz. The vineyards are steep and slatey, the wines have as much vibrancy and racy minerality as you’d get from a Riesling made in Zeltingen or Wehlen, but I suspect partly because of the sleepy village (even by northern Mosel standards) from whence they came these wines are generally a steal. If you wind up in Kinheim one day, hike one village north to Wolf and eat at the restaurant that sits right on the Mosel. Plastic chairs and no frills, but they make (and bottle) their own wine, which is better than average and cheap, and in the context on meat-and-potatoes Mosel cuisine the food is good. Locally made pork products feature prominently. You can work off the calories biking back down the Mosel to civilization, or hiking up Urziger Wurzgarten for a very pretty view of the valley.
Erich Jakoby started working at Selbach-Oster when he was 14. By 24 he was their cellar master. Now in his 40’s, he has returned to his family winery. Jakoby farms 3.6 hectares of Riesling. Kinheimer Rosenberg is his greatest single-vineyard site. The soil is pure slate. The wine is pure Mosel, a wine anyone not allergic to Riesling will enjoy.
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Tastes Like: Peaches. Apricots. Very Full, Broad, and still fresh.
Pairs well at Lantern with: Bang Bang Chicken. Duck Soup.
Recommended if you like: Softer, more lush Rieslings. The texture and concentration should appeal to fans of Chenin Blanc, particularly Vouvray demi-sec.
20 hectares of vineyards in the Pfalz. Some history- Hans-Gunter Schwarz ran this estate for 42 years (ending in 2002) and in that period shaped the landscape of modern German winemaking more than any other single person. His ultra-reductive style of winemaking winnowed everything down to an almost painful clarity, emphasizing sight distinctions and fashioning wines that simply semed to be more alive than those of his peers. Many have adopted his techniques. Today the estate is run by the successor Schwarz picked, Martin Franzen. He is a man under the microscope, as he is taking up where a living legend left off. Other than a preference for longer lees ageing, Franzen is sticking to the classic template for Muller-Catoir wine.
If you want a window into how good white wine can be, come to A Southern Season soon and buy the 2001 Haardter Burgergarten Spatlese that we recently acquired from Terry Theise (the importer). More than worth the $40 price tag. This vineyard site has always been my favorite of the many Muller-Catoir utilizes. The wine has more pronounced lemon character than other single-vineyard bottlings. Another rarity worth tracking down from Muller-Catoir is their Rieslaner Auslese (Riesling crossed with Silvaner), an extravagantly ripe and intensely flavorful white that tastes like candied oranges and apricots. It's hard to know what to say about this estate. I cannot buy enough Muller-Catoir. They make up the largest part of my cellar, and several of their wines have stuck in my memory for years. Really beautiful stuff.
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Tastes Like: Light, chalky, bright and dry. Acidic without being winceably so.
Pairs well at Lantern with: Lantern Pickles. Fresh tomatoes. Spicy pepper-laden courses. Cod.
Recommended if you like: NZ Sav Blanc. Sancerre. Muscadet. Fruit-laden dry whites in general.
Oh, dogma. I try not to be dogmatic in the type of wines I select for Lantern. My taste buds aren’t; they annoyingly often enjoy flavors from foods that exist outside of the political and philosophical parameters that some other part of my food-tasting brain sets up. For Sunday brunch at home I like ketchup on my hash browns. I know that ketchup has the subtlety of an atom bomb, but it makes me happy with the salty herby potatoes. So I use it, and chalk it up to exceptions proving the rule. And I think that if we don’t give in to these anomalies we actually cease being human in some way. We end up fleshy representations of a point of view, mired in a concrete and false set of principles. We become liars, actually, or at least we take a dangerous step away from who we really are.
Wow, what a windup. I’ve blown this a little out of proportion, but I think you’ll see what I’m getting at. I speak to you all regularly about wine needing to maintain its relationship to the place that grew it in order to be more than an intoxicant, about wine of value offering a distilled snapshot of the soil and people and surroundings that shaped it. This often occurs best at small estates, and politically I prefer giving our dollars to smaller farmers, so here exists a happy symbiosis. Except that Willi Brundlmayer isn’t a small farmer. His estate is huge, pushing 200 acres. Ok, not huge by Aussie or San Juaquin Valley standards, but the fact remains that he is one of the biggest grape farmers in the Kamptal, and (annoyingly for my shoebox categorization of wine) also very obviously one of the best. His wines speak very clearly of their terroir and of an attention to detail and commitment to quality production methods rare(r) in large operations.
One of the least mentioned aspects of terroir is the human that works the vines. Willi Brundlmayer has a clear perspective on what makes for quality wine in the fields surrounding his native Langenois. His vineyard sites are a mixture of rocky, dry hillside sites that drain well while ably collecting sunlight to provide wines of a fuller, riper texture, and more fertile, calcerous vineyards closer to sea level that can naturally possess a fine chalky minerality, a soil characteristic that keeps wine from being one-dimensionally fruity.
Brundlmayer is a traditionalist in many ways. The wines here age in deep, cold cellars in oak and acacia casks. This estate offers us a textbook example of appropriate use of wood. The wines are affected but not excessively flavored by this time in barrel. They change into a more wine-like substance, rounder, deeper, more interesting. All vineyard work is performed according to organic principles, meaning no chemical fertilizers, herbicides or chemical sprays. Kamptaler Terrassen is a “lesser site” in comparison to the wines made from this estates’ top cru vineyards Lamm, Heiligenstein and Loiser Berg, but it has a recognizable voice across a span of vintages and to me is one of the more immediately accessible and food versatile wines from Austria.
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Tastes Like: Bright red currant and tangy cherry. Light, dry, some chalky mineral character. Fresh and juicy, with minimal tannin.
Pairs well at Lantern with: Warm Duck Salad. Lemongrass pork tenderloin.
Recommended if you like: Red Burgundy. Beaujolais. Reds of Arbois and Savoie. Niedermayr Santa Maddalena Classico.
The town of Menetou-Salon is in the eastern Loire valley of France, roughly 35 kilometers Southwest of Sancerre, on the way to the city of Bourges. The Gilbert family history here begins in 1768. The towns of Sancerre and Pouilly-sur-Loire dominate discussions of the region’s wine, and for many good reasons. But away from the famous estates and higher prices of Sancerre, growers like Phillipe Gilbert are succeeding in creating wines that show the distinct character of their area while still working generally within the idiom of their acclaimed neighbors.
Whites are still made of Sauvignon Blanc and reds Pinot Noir, in the same soils (in the case of Domaine Gilbert largely Kimmeridgian Marl) and due to their proximity generally sharing the same climatic conditions as in Sancerre. The region may always be burdened with the impression of being the poor relation of Sancerre, but maybe this isn’t such a bad thing. Prices are lower here (only a positive from our point of view) but still on average higher than they would be if Menetou-Salon were not thought of as a related satellite village of Sancerre. Since Menetou-Salon has a whopping total of 840 acres under vine (one-seventh of Sancerre’s total) it is very possible the town would make wine in total obscurity if moved away from the attention of consumers and importers that Sancerre and Pouilly-sur-Loire bring.
In the case of Domaine Gilbert, the wines often profit from these regional comparisons. To my palette only Domaine Vacheron and Lucien Crochet in Sancerre make reds to rival the wine we’re serving, and those wines are a bit more expensive. Locally, along with larger neighbor Henri Pelle, Gilbert is the top grower of Pinot Noir in the region. His 12 hectares of the grape are spread across parcels in the towns of Menetou-Salon, Vignoux and Parassy. Since Philippe took over from his father Jean-Paul Gilbert there has been a move toward natural farming here, with an emphasis on non-chemical preventative measures to control weeds, a green harvest to ensure low crop sizes and completely ripe fruit. Stainless-steel fermentation preserves freshness, and nurtures the bright clean character that makes this Pinot Noir perfect for many Lantern courses.
As a final aside, few things are as well-suited to the Lantern dining experience as Pinot Noir grown in calcareous or limestone-rich soils. Volnay, Sancerre rouge, Menetou-Salon. Limestone allows for wine so fresh you can imagine the taste of the unpicked berries alongside mineral nuances as complex and interesting as anything you could hope to find in reds twice as dense and mouthfilling. This wine just hits the bulls-eye. All the flavors you’d want, nothing extraneous. The flavors seem completely intentional, mapped out, they show up and leave without any off-notes or awkwardness and are often followed by symbiotic secondary and tertiary flavors that add to the impression of intentionality. Like the best Lantern courses the final impression of this wine is one of a food with every flavor calibrated to the correct level to allow for the expression of the totality of the flavors, with no extra fat or bombast. Philippe Gilbert and his oenologist Jean-Phillipe Louis have carefully honed this wine, and in doing so have created an impressively precise archetype of Pinot Noir.
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Tastes Like: Fruity, bright and pleasantly sweet. A bit fuller than most sparkling wine.
Pairs well at Lantern with: Salt and pepper shrimp. Wasabi. Panna Cotta. Fruity desserts.
Recommended if you like: Mosel Spatlese. Moet & Chandon White Star, or Nectar Imperial.
French wine is riddled with exceptions to the general rules which wine people like to use to give some sense of a framework to what would otherwise be (actually still kind of is) an overwhelming amount of information. Here we encounter a geographic exception. Villers-Marmery is a town in the Montagne de Reims sub-region of Champagne, one of three areas (this one near a mountain, near the city of Reims) that writers shoehorn Champagne into. Really there are five areas at least, and we’ll discuss them all in our Champagne staff training. But for our purposes today, know that this region is thought of as a Pinot Noir growing area. The other two grapes that it is permissible to plant in Champagne are Chardonnay, the major partner in the wines of the Côte des Blancs (a region of chalky limestone hills) and Pinot Meunier, the workhorse grape of the Vallée de la Marne. Which is, of course, a valley around the Marne river. Beyond these there are actually three more grapes some people have and can legally use, but cannot replant. Isn’t this fun!
Thousands of people are at work within this larger construct, growing grapes and/or making Champagnes. And they don’t feel any compulsion to stick strictly to my organizational principles. In some instances there is an economic or indisputable quality factor involved which compels growers to plant what their village in known for, but over time small fissures in the larger organizational system grow into exceptions to the rule. Which is the case in Villers-Marmery, a village in the Montagne de Reims known for the proliferation of quality Chardonnay. It’s all the fault of one grower, who planted some over a century ago. And it was good. A. Margaine’s 6.5 hectares (think small) are 90% Chardonnay, and happily these grapes are of high quality. They do not mimic the character of Champagnes from Chardonnay in the Côte des Blancs, instead they surprise drinkers with earthiness and depth of flavor rarely seem in the elegant ethereal wines of this region’s major Chardonnay growing area. So a parcel of Chard, surrounded by a sea of Pinot. Sadly for the beginner, Champagne is full of these exceptions.
Arnuad Margaine is dedicated. He makes less than 5,000 cases per year of truly crafted small-grower Champagne. These are generally mono-cru Champagnes, wines that can have a lot to say about the parcels of land on which they are farmed. The demi-sec, has all kinds of interesting little facets to its flavor. Complex as you could possibly desire. There is chalk in the soil here, but it exists below far more topsoil than in the Côte des Blancs, one potential reason for the slightly broader mouthfeel.
Champagne quality is assessed village by village, with Grand Cru villages being given a rating of 100%, a number that used to be significant as an indicator of how much of the officially set price for a vintage’s fruit that the town’s growers would receive. Villers-Marmery is a Premier Cru rated village, with a very respectable rating of 95% for its Chardonnay fruit. The rating can vary according to the grape, for instance the Pinot Noir from this village could be rated 80%. That would encourage conformity by giving growers economic and prestige incentives to grow Chard. These ratings are periodically revisited, and to me it seems at these reviews too many villages get upgrades, leading us toward major grade inflation and the presence of a handful of really false Grand and Premier Crus. It is in the short-term economic interest of the industry here for this to be the case, but these soft evaluations do risk weakening Champagne as a brand name heralded as the world’s best sparkling wine. Talk to me in person if you want more ranting about this sort of politically-motivated nonsense.
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Tastes Like: Aromas of honey and fresh herb. Full-bodied and fresh. Sweet.
Pairs well at Lantern with: Panna Cotta. Sourwood honey nougat. Indian spiced doughnuts.
Recommended if you like: Sauternes. Eiswein. Muscat a Beaumes de Venise.
Neusiedlersee-hugelland is an area south of Vienna, near Eisenstadt. Ms. Schrock inhabits a town called Rust. For an 8-hectare estate, she sure does grow a wide variety of vines! Weissburgunder, (Pinot Blanc) Furmint, Muscat, Grauburgunder (Pinot Gris) Welschriesling (not actually Riesling, but the same as Riesling Italico grown in Italy) Zweigelt and Blaufränkish are all planted here. The estate is small and its owner enjoys a reputation inside Austria as being among the country’s top growers, so finding little amounts of the wines in the US is basically all we can hope for. So don’t get too attached. This dessert wine is as perfect as any I’ve tasted this year for Lantern desserts, particularly custardy or soufflé-like creations. Like a good panna cotta her wines make you aware of their richness while forgetting their heaviness. Total production at this estate is 3,300 cases, divided among at least 10 bottlings depending on the vintage.
Be they dessert-style wines like this one or one of the range of dry wines Heidi Schrock produces, the wines at this estate balance clean pure fruit with a sense on the earth, of the farm that grew them. They don’t shoot deliberately for any sort of old or traditional style, but they do taste “traditional” in the sense of an intangible rootedness in this historic wine growing region of southern Austria.
In summary, they are never about one-dimensionally flashy fruit. There is a feeling of substance, tangibility to the wines. I know that’s rather squishy. Wines so often are special because of the inference of the natural world communicating to us through them, as impossible as it is to quantify that. Others put this concept more succinctly than I, but to me the core value of wine is not understandable through hard data, and barely more so through linguistic descriptors, but in some instances it is true that a sense of the profound or the special comes out of tasting wine. And at those points it’s best to sit back, shut up and listen to something that isn’t solely about your enjoyment of it. Schrock’s wines sometimes do that “there’s a bigger connectedness of things in nature that I’ll never understand” thing to me. And I’m atheist.
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It’s easy to understand why a grower would be motivated to farm diligently and struggle to make wine of the very highest quality in Burgundy, or Napa. There’s a lots of potential financial reward for ambitious wine folk in those regions, not to mention a fair amount of public recognition for their efforts. But what gets Mark Ollivier out of bed early in the morning? His home region of Muscadet is flat, and extremely machine-harvestable. Human nature being what it is, everyone uses rumbling machinery to efficiently bring in damaged fruit. Except for Ollivier. And maybe three other guys we’re not presently discussing. Ollivier picks his grapes by hand, and the pristine quality of his raw materials immediately makes Domaine de la Pepiere’s wines stand out in a sea of mediocre Muscadet. By the way, since Muscadet is only an AOC for white wines made of the Melon de Bourgogne grape, this wine is bottled under the larger Vin de Pays du Jardin de la France Marches de Bretagne moniker. Nobody knows where that is, it might as well be labeled simply “wine from France”.
So while this is a region with a distinct soil type that is excellent for growing grapes, in short a region brimming with potential, for decades the western edge of the Loire has been primarily the source of thin, one-dimensional, ridiculously overcropped white wines that at best added some acid to your oyster course. Today most everything from the region is still industrial junk. Ollivier’s wines are the antithesis of a modern commercial “product”. He only uses natural indigenous yeasts to start fermentation. He never uses sterile filtration, only permitting one light filtration prior to bottling. He is the only grower in the whole region to not have a single clonal selection in his vineyards. Over the last century grape growers (like all farmers) have lost a huge proportion of the plant diversity in their fields. It’s a rare treat to be able to buy wine from a grower that still has all original genetic stock in his vines.
I’m happy Mark Ollivier and his ilk are out there. It’s heartening that farmers can take the high road and make wines the correct way, even when there is little financial reason to do so. Look at the price of this wine- no one is getting rich at Domaine de la Pepiere. Ollivier and the rare vignerons like him are protecting the right way of doing things in an era when market forces and general indifference/ignorance to tradition seem likely to remove his type of living wine from store shelves and restaurant lists. A sip of Cuvee Granit demonstrates how well-made affordable wine does not have to taste simple.
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Tastes Like: Perfectly fresh. Light, thirst-quenching.
Pairs well at Lantern with: Summer rolls. Steamed halibut.
Recommended if you like: Pinot Grigio. Vernaccia. Sardinian or Sicilian whites. Sancerre.
Oh boy, we’re in the Greek wine business. Names nobody can pronounce, fractured geographic regions that many career wine people barely understand, an international reputation for mediocre and frankly often flawed products more often than not from gigantic industrial wineries. And don’t get me started on the shipping. But change has to start somewhere, and in Greece it began quite a few years ago with the quiet emergence of wineries like Domaine Sigalas. Little quality estates have been returning to the Greek wine scene for a couple decades, and in Britain (usually an indicator of what’s coming our way) Greek wine sales have been brisk for a number of years.
I can’t remember being offered any Greek wine to get excited about in NC until maybe 2002 or 2003, but I earnestly believe Sigalas will be the estate that breaks open the market today for Greek wine in our town, and not just because we’re about to sell it. It’s just too good. The price is decent, the wine really smells of a summer afternoon on a Mediterranean island with some fresh seafood and citrus fruits. . .it bangs the nail squarely on the head. With the exception of an eye-popping Marche white from a producer called Rio Maggio this Assyrtiko may be the most exciting white I’ve tasted in 2007. It’ll blow your mind, man.
Paris Sigalas founded this winery with two partners in 1991. He worked out of his house for seven years while saving capital to construct a relatively modern winery. This wine is fermented at controlled cool temperatures in stainless steel. Today the estate bottles 20,000 cases of organically farmed wine (certified by DIO as organic since 1994) annually in the northern town of Oia. Incidentally, Santorini is an island. Sigalas grows 14 hectares of (ungrafted – the sandy soil has never been impacted by phylloxera) Assyrtiko on the plain of Baxedes, a region surrounding Oia. I told you this would get confusing. Take comfort in knowing Assyrtiko is a big deal in Greece, and familiarity with this one grape, along with a small handful of others, Athiri, Robola for whites, Agiorghitiko, Mavrodaphne, Xinomavro for reds, will go a long way toward a working understanding of Greek wine.
Santorini is southeast of Athens and more or less directly north of Crete. It is considered a part of the Aegean islands. The entire island was covered in volcanic ash after a huge eruption in 1620 BC. The compaction of this material along with pumice stone created a unique type of soil called aspa, which makes possible quality viticulture on the island. This soil retains water (including moisture from evening fogs that roll in from the sea) extremely well, making survival possible during the particularly dry heat of summer in Santorini. There is evidence (seeds, amphorae, tools) of vines being grown on the island even before its blanketing with volcanic material, making the region one of the first in Europe definitively involved in wine production. By the way, if you feel like daydreaming, these vines face directly west onto the Aegean sea. Picture the postcard. . . .
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I’m very jaded regarding wine. I taste just too many wines from estates operating at a high level to get overly enthusiastic about particular products. For wines I consider drinking with meals at home or would consider serving at Lantern, very good has become the norm. I’m very spoiled. There are far more mediocre wines out there, and a decent amount of truly horrible products, but the last eight years of my work life have been about buffering my senses and hopefully protecting my customers from those strata of quality, so in my tasting life they mostly exist in the abstract. It’s only human to lose enthusiasm for something that you are constantly exposed to, which is one fair argument against Salon Champagne and Osetra caviar for breakfast, among many others. Pity us in the food business, constantly exposed to a quality of products most people consume infrequently. But ennui is a tangible thing.
I’m very excited about Rio Maggio, so excited that I sold six cases of the wine at my store in the first two weeks we had the product. And really we could have sold more. We were out of stock most days thanks to our overenthusiastic promoting. This is a very special wine, from a winery that is new to me. Admittedly it’s easier to get a thrill out of the totally new, and I do wonder a little if I would be over the moon if the wine was made by a producer I’d tasted a dozen times in the past. But I think I might be. There’s a moment of “wow” in tasting Rio Maggio, when the citrus/saline aromas intensify into a very exceptional ripe/fresh overload that sort of wipes out the possibility of not paying attention. The wine steps over the line of what should be possible from a food product with a kind of hypernatural vividness. It’s saying “I’m made of really perfect fruit, dammit, and you’re going to be aware of me.” Talking wines, wow. Maybe time to look at some hard facts.
Simone and Tiziana Santucci are the proprietors at Rio Maggio. Giancarlo Soverchia is their consulting oenologist. Simone’s father Graziano originally planted the vines here, which have a perfect southereastern exposition in this hilly area between the provinces of Ascoli Piceno and Macerata, an area of the southern Marche north of the town of Montegranaro. The family bottle 1,100 cases annually of this vibrant white. They feel that 2005 was a particularly successful vintage for the property, and I can’t argue with them. Being the first vintage from Rio Maggio that I’ve encountered I do not know if the obvious quality in the glass is a sign of enlightened winemaking or perfect weather, but either way the wine offers a lot of immediate appeal and charm.
Fermentation of this white occurs in stainless steel tanks at cool temperatures to preserve freshness. The Marche is stylistically a border zone, with whites that seek to mirror the fresh flavors of northern areas like Friuli and the Veneto, and reds that are often plump in a typically southern Italian way.
The Marche is a region along Italy’s Adriatic coast too often overlooked by drinkers of Italian wine. And to be fair quality is uneven at best in the region: even well-regarded subregions like Piceno and Conero suffering from inconsistency and frequent abuses of oak. Add to that notably poor vintages in 2002 and 2003 and it could seem like the Marche isn’t ready to take a place among the top wine zones of Italy. On the other hand, there are hidden gems, more than enough of them to keep a adventurous drinker busy. And the prevailing mediocrity in the zone has a moderating effect on prices for even the better wines, to our benefit.
Crudo is a specialty in many restaurants along this stretch of the Adriatic coast. Winemakers invariably love to eat, and I firmly believe this white was shaped with raw fish in mind. Tuna, sea unchins, anchovies, swordfish drizzled in olive oil with drops of balsamic. If you’re looking for warm food, a well-made brodeto from the region would also pair nicely here, but personally I think the perfect freshness of Rio Maggio deserves very clean raw flavors.
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Tastes Like: Lemon and fresh hay aromas. Clean and dry, light, fresh.
Pairs well at Lantern with: Salt and pepper shrimp. Flounder.
Recommended if you like: Sancerre, dry Rieslings, Gruner Veltliner.
Generally I consider wines from the large central Loire Appellation of Touraine to be a risky choice. If I don’t know the grower, more often than not I shy away. Many styles of red, white and rosè wine are made here, and median quality is average to low. Touraine AC stretches from Saumur in the west to Sologne in the east and has several standout sub-appellations for white wines, notably Vouvray and Montlouis, but spread across 6000+ hectares of fertile river valleys in an area described by Rabelais as the Jardin de la France, too many vines find life to be a little too easy. Yields are often high, and acidic, diffuse and one-dimensional wines are the common result.
Jean-Francois Merieau chose a more difficult path. After graduation from oenology school this young (early 30s is still young, right?) winemaker took over a 32-hectare property in St. Julien de Chédon from his father and set out to create whites of ripeness and concentration. The dominant soil type of Touraine is argillo-calcaire, a clay-limestone mix, but in such a large region there are many geologic exceptions. The Merieau domaine claims 12 different types of soil on their property. A variety of soil types can lead to more complex flavors in a finished wine. Jean-Francois farms utilizing natural, sustainable methods. Merieau waits to pick his fruit until a point of full maturity is achieved. His 10 hectares of Sauvignon face south and contain many 50+ year old vines. This aspect to the sun is preferable in the Loire because in cooler regions vines often struggle to collect enough radiant heat over the course of a season to fully ripen fruit. Old vines naturally produce smaller quantities of more concentrated, flavorful grapes. Merieau ferments in stainless steel to maintain freshness. The family cellars are carved deep into rock, creating a perfect environment for storage and ageing of component parts prior to the assemblage of their wines. Before bottling, Merieau engages in battonage, a stirring of the lees (yeast cells and other particulate matter left from fermentation) to create the fullness often lacking in Touraine whites.
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Tastes Like: Aromatic in a late-picked, ripe peach and melon way. Viscous, full, with a dry finish
Pairs well at Lantern with: Summer Melon Salad, miso-glazed cod
Recommended if you like: Viognier, Pinot Grigio fans willing to try a fuller white, unoaked white burgundy drinkers
This is a must-taste, benchmark estate in the Veneto. Coffele wines have become an essential reference in understanding the real potential of Ganganega in the D.O.C. of Soave, a relatively vast grape-growing area east of Verona.
Coffele is definitely a family affair. In 1971 Giovanna Visco and her husband Giuseppe decided to retire from teaching to resuscitate her family’s estate, a property that had been dormant for over 30 years. Their 27 hectares are at high elevation (200-350m above sea level) in one plot on a hillside near Castelcerino in the heart of the traditional Soave zone. Today their children Chiara and Alberto do much of the work, labor that includes harvesting the site by hand using multiple passes to extricate the Gargenega and Trebbiano at the perfect moment of ripeness. Gargenega usually ripens more slowly, a trait that allows for exceptional flavor development.
21st-century Soave can be a fine thing. I find that even when compared to the dozen or so promising growers in the zone that could be considered their peers, Coffele’s wines go a step beyond. Ca’ Visco is generally considered their top white, repeatedly winning tre bicchieri from Gambero Rosso. It has a degree of flavor definition that stands apart from even the best whites of the area, floral, mineral notes alongside a pleasant fresh-and-ripe mouthfeel that brings to mind the rare perfect peach, or a floral honey drizzled on fruit. It could probably age, but will older bottles keep this edge of juicy summer fruit? I’d guess tertiary provencal herb aromas will be dominant in Ca’ Visco as it matures. Ca’ Visco combines the area’s two great white grapes, the current bottling consisting of 80% Gargenega and 20% Trebbiano di Soave.
More about the Veneto. I went to this region last year, and after a week of driving and tasting the thing that really stuck with me was the rift in quality between neighboring wine growing areas, estates, even single vineyards. I can’t think of a place I’ve traveled where the industrial and the artisanal were so commingled. It’s easy to pick out a dozen or more legendary (and legendarily hard-to-find) cult growers in the Veneto, but stamped on the wine map of the region are names like Bolla, Santa Margherita, Santi, and Zonin, extremely large companies that keep the Veneto first in quantity of wine produced among Italy’s regions, but sadly 9th in the production of (theoretically higher-quality) D.O.C. wine. In case you are wondering, being first in volume adds up to 230+ million gallons of wine annually for the area. Thirty percent of the D.O.C. wine grown in the Veneto comes from Soave. And despite the popularity of Valpolicella and expensive Amarones made from dried indigenous grapes, 67% of the wines made in the region are white.
For what it’s worth, my coworker Sophie returned from a visit to Coffele in July expressing a desire “to be more like Chiara Coffele.” I completely understand this sentiment. What they’re doing in their bubble of centuries-old pastoral Italy is admirable, and enviable.
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Tastes Like: Dark, dry, relatively full with a whiff of meaty campfire smoke. Not a wine of primary fruitiness, but the fruit notes that are here run toward cassis.
Pairs well at Lantern with: Shaking beef. Pork in its many forms, particularly braised.
Recommended if you like: It’s Cabernet, man. Your chance to transform the world-view of bored Cabernet drinkers begins today. They can see the light thanks to this terroir-driven but incidentally Cabernet-based red wine.
Aimé Guibert was pretty famous even before Jonathan Noissiter’s documentary Mondovino cast him as the manic anti-globalization fly in the Mondavi family’s ointment, an odd role for the wealthy former head of a Paris company that made expensive leather gloves for stores on the rue Sainte-Honoŕe and Fifth Avenue. But Guilbert is an articulate spokesman for terroir, the essentially French philosophical connection between a product and its land, a linking of infinite subvariations of soil and sun and man to the nature of what we often categorize simply as consumables. Terroir as a concept is so obviously relevant to our work that once one gets a grasp of it that I can hardly believe any debate exists surrounding its existence. Consult Mondovino, or Lawrence Osborne’s The Accidental Connisseur for intense doses of the inimitable Guilbert.
Aimé Guibert was not born to make wine, and he never set out to become a winemaker. At 45, when his years as a glovemaker ended, Guibert remembered the warm hillsides of his native corner of the Languedoc, and thought he could go there and make a living growing corn. It pays to have wine nerds as friends. Enologist Henri Englebert visited the farm, and argued that the iron-rich soils of Guibert’s new home were suited to grapes, not corn. Emile Peyraud visited next, and gave the same analysis. Guibert had purchased what would come to be recognized as the equivalent of a Grand Cru to the Languedoc region.
That was 1978. Thirty years of exceptional and ageworthy reds and whites have confirmed the famous oenologists’ suspicions. A quote from Guibert:
“We are in the world of Dr. Strangeglove. . .Science perverted by money! We have become dominators of nature. We observe or we dominate-a basic choice. So there are two types of winemaker, observers and dominators. You know, money is humanity’s curse. Brands are our curse, too.” - The Accidental Connoisseur
Hard to argue with that. The Mas sits high in the La Seranne mountains, with vines on north-facing slopes. Cold evenings and well-drained soils allow for surprisingly elegant wines farmed this far south. Guibert leaves an acre of fallow lavender-and garrigue covered land for every acre he plants to vines. They fertilize using sheep’s dung. Everything is done by hand, and all the vineyards are massale, from a heterogenous mix of genetic stock, not planted using the prevalent modern method of selecting one plant with qualities a grower likec and replicating it thousands of times to create a genetically homogenous vineyard area. This wine is 80% Cabernet Sauvignon, above the legal limit for varietal labellign in the U.S., but the world Cabernet never appears on the front label here. Two of the ten other red grapes planted here are voskehat and kontorni, or Armenian heritage!
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Tastes Like: Light and Dry. Too light for some. Delicate, refreshing, tart cherry/raspberry aromas.
Pairs well at Lantern with: Salmon. Does well with courses containing fresh leaf vegetables and herbs, including basil.
Recommended if you like: Experimentation. White drinkers looking for a favorite red. French Pinot Noir fans, and Beaujolais drinkers. People who like the Niedermayr Santa Maddalena Classico.
Need help getting though the wax seal? Warm the wax up by rubbing the palm of your hand over the top of the bottle for 30 seconds, then go straight through the middle of the wax capsule with your corkscrew. The generally prevents fragments of wax breaking off and ending up in the wine. Not always. . . .
The wines of Jacques Puffeney were (and in many ways remain) seminal to my expanded understanding of what wine can be. Encountering Puffeney’s light, precise reds and oxidative whites went a long way toward understanding the full scope of flavor possible in wine and food. For instance, this wine points out that there is no real relationship between weight and ripeness. Puffeney’s Poulsard is light and fully ripe, completely realized and complex in its flavors in spite of the notable absence of viscosity or darker flavors. The inverse example would be the ubiquitous weedy, vegetal and heavy red wine bulk-grown in the U.S. or Chile, commonly made from Bordeaux varietals and encountered at lowish price-points. (Though sometimes this sort of mouthcoating and alcoholic, yet flavor-retarded wine can also be found in heavy hand-numbered glass bottles for hundreds of dollars.)
Point being, lightness allows for levity and is the farthest thing from a flaw when honed by a master like Jacques Puffeney. “The Pope of Arbois,” as he is apparently known, is one of a dozen quality vignerons left to preserve the distinct traditions of the Jura, a region of Eastern France (directly east of Burgundy) of which the vineyards surrounding the town of Arbois and a neighboring zone to the south known as Chateau Chalons are the most interesting subregions. For trivia buffs, Jura native Louis Pasteur (born in Grenoble, the region’s largest city) first became interested in the properties of bacteria after observing the slow fermentations of white Arbois wines, which often form a protective layer of yeast (similar to fino sherry) that slows detrimental oxidation and bacterial growth in the wines. Just one of many ways in which the wines of the Jura have benefited humanity.
In a New York Times article Eric Asimov summed up Puffeney as a creator of “jagged wines in a silky-smooth world.” Well said. Nothing slick is happening here. No consulting oenologists, no pandering to export markets. Juffeney inherited a sliver of land from his father, which he expanded to 7 ½ acres by earning extra income as a cheesemaker, producing the region’s famous Comte cheese. He hand-harvests all of his vines, including the 1.2 acre parcel of Poulsard farmed to produce this bottling. The wine is fermented in large old oak foudre and then aged in barrel for up to 30 months before bottling. Puffeney does not fine or filter any of his wines.
If you find yourself among the minority of tasters who fall in love and become obsessed with this type of wine, I would suggest two texts. The New France by Andrew Jefford competently outlines changes in 21st-century French viticulture, focusing on a rapidly growing group of small wineries across that nation who are returning to (or in some instances never left) the heterogenous wine traditions of their distinct homelands. This is often a deliberate response to the accelerating globalization of wine and a sinking feeling that technology (artificial yeasts, clonal strains of varietals, innumerable extracts and adulterations in the cellar) polishes away the character of this infinitely diverse food product, leaving us with a million and one Yellow Tails, or mini-Pomerols bottled from Australia to Yemen. A bible of the best (particularly Loire) wines to buy from among the growing “hypernatural” cult of viticulture is Jacqueline Fredrich’s “The Wines of France.” She reiterates the tenets and divisions of this philosophy (natural, sustainable, organic, biodynamic, low-no sulfur etc.) and frankly catalogs the successes and failures among her favorite winemakers taking this more difficult road.
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Tastes Like: French Pinot Noir. Delicate red berry aromas, surprisingly a wine of finesse from an area that often makes oaky tannic monster wines.
Pairs well at Lantern with: Pork terrine. Pork and chive dumplings.
Recommended if you like: Volnay, Chambolle-Musigny or other elegant reds. Alsatian, German or Austrian reds, particularly those made of St. Laurent or Pinot.
For decades Sicily was Italy’s most productive wine region. In most vintages as much as 50% of the island’s harvest was used in the production of Marsala, particularly fruit grown on the western extreme of the island, near Trapani. Another significant portion of Sicily’s harvest would end up as “cutting wine” adding pigmentation and body to anemic reds from other colder regions of the Italian mainland and France. This fraudulent practice continues into the 21st century, but most likely reached its height in the 1960’s and 70’s. Much of the remaining wine was consumed on the island, and in real contrast to the rich culinary history of the island, which enjoys a cuisine studded with meticulously sourced pristine primary ingredients, was either bland dry white wine from Alcamo on the west coast, or unfocused and rustic reds from Mt. Etna and elsewhere.
This quality dichotomy has more to do with the failures of post-World War II agrarian reform than any desire on the part of Sicilian farmers to make shoddy wine. In 1946 the new Italian republic seized large amounts of land from the historically oppressive patriarchs of the Sicilian latifondo system and gave it to people whose families had for centuries been landless peasants. This land redistributed in the wake of the war was more often than not awarded to farmers in parcels too small to justify the building of a cellar, so cooperative winemaking facilities sprouted across the island to help farmers vinify and bottle their grapes. The main problem with large-scale cooperative winemaking is that it tended to emphasize quantity over quality, paying co-op members by the ton with few controls on the ripeness of tonnage supplied by the grower. Growers planted the most vigorous varietals, and for a while the politicians running the co-ops could find a use for all they produced. As a norm these wines were (and are) technically correct but soulless, one-dimensional with an absence of Sicilian character. Predictably, the anonymity or their wares led to the beginning of what is likely to be a long slow death for the co-op system across southern Europe, as these facilities were poorly positioned to compete with large corporate New World wineries also prepared to churn out inexpensive wines, often with better marketing and a fruitier, more accessible flavor profile. From my point of view Sicilian cop-ops squandered the potential unique character of fruit from their vines, and in the process never created a loyal following of customers in love with Sicilian wine. They remained price-point wines, and as such were easily shuffled off of the world stage.
So in Sicily cultivated acreage and total wine production drops annually. And this is a good thing. Between 1992 and 2002 total production on the island fell by 40%. Much of what is passing into history is plonk, and in the early years of the 21st century it appears possible that Sicily is going to reposition itself in the marketplace as a home for ambitious, quality wine estates. For one thing, it is one of the few areas of Italy where there’s affordable land to buy if you’re interested in starting a wine endeavor. Wine industry people all travel together (eat at the same restaurants, read the same publications, attend the same trade shows) and at VinItaly 2006, the nation’s most important wine trade show, I was shocked at the bustle in the Sicilian pavilion. Except for Tuscany and Piemonte, regions who represent the classical center of the Italian wine universe, no other area was as crowded with buyers and new, ambitious sellers. As a sad but perhaps inevitable sign of the times too many of these new domains opted to use lots of new oak and über-sexy packaging to separate themselves from the bad old days of the co-ops, creating wines that instead of showcasing Sicilian terroir offered buyers reasonable facsimiles of $30-$50 Napa or Aussie wines, for $30-$50. I can’t imagine mimicry of already popular items for a share of the crowded Wine Advocate market pie to be a good idea in the long term.
But away from the bustle a promising new Sicily is emerging. It may seem that the sun-baked region is well-suited to Cali-style bigness, but during my week in Sicily I was surprised by the variety of terrain and climate. Just drive around Etna and you’ll see high-elevation arable land and vines that are as verdant as northern France. Pistachios growing instead of olives. The Baroque hilltop towns of Sicily’s Southeastern corner provide elevation and proximity to cooling sea breezes necessary for the bottling of wines with ripeness and acid structure. In short, the Sicily=Hot equation is too simplified to be useful. Take Ochhipinti – this winery in the southeast bottles Frappato, one of the two grapes traditionally blended into Cerasuolo di Vittoria, which in 2005 became the first style of red in Sicily to achieve DOCG status. Only 2 percent of Sicilian wine even merits DOC status (a tier down from DOCG) and only 15 percent is even bottled on the island. In Cerasuolo wines native grape Nero d’Avola gives darkness, and Frappato adds fragrance. By utilizing native yeasts to begin fermentation, ageing in older and larger oak barrels and farming in adherence to the tenets of biodynamics, Occhipinti finds grace in the fields surrounding Ragusa and Vittoria. As a final note, while Occhipinti is biodynamic, the only confirmation I can find of this is from wine journals, so we won’t give the wine the organic triangle on the list. I prefer to err on the side of caution when announcing that a wine is organic/biodynamic, with certification coming from a reputable U.S. or European certification organization or direct confirmation from the grower as reasonable evidence to support our claim.
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Tastes Like: Crushed black currants. Exotic spice aromas. Dry. Substantial.
Pairs well at Lantern with: Duck congee. Lamb. BBQ spare ribs.
Recommended if you like: Oregon or New Zealand Pinot Noir. A smooth, dark red.
Regis Forey’s hometown of Vosne-Romanee is the center of the Pinot Noir universe. The aristocracy of the Duchy of Burgundy prized these vineyards above all others, and today’s wealthy ruling elite have largely followed suit. Opinions vary (I, for instance, often prefer Chambolle) but more often than not, drinkers with the palate and the wallet for top-end red Burgundy gravitate to Vosne-Romanee, and for several good reasons.
The wines of this village possess an inimitable spice. More of an Asian spice note, obviously well-suited to our purposes and 99% absent in Pinot Noir grown elsewhere, even if that elsewhere is 3 kilometers up the road. These wines wed velvety black fruit notes to precision and structure in a way that never seems fat on the palate but also rarely seems to lack substance. An inept vigneron can create vegetal wine anywhere, probably on the equator, but winemakers with a base level of ability and the inclination can really summon up the true meaning of balance in these vineyards, simultaneous weight and harmony.
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The mix of clay and calcareous material in the soils here is perfect for walking the finesse/power tightrope. More limestone (as in Volnay) would lead to a lighter, more aromatic character, more clay (as in Gevrey) and the rustic/tannic side of the wine could dominate. So, as is often the case in archetypes, these wines are prized for their completeness, rather than for the dominance of any one trait.
And they age well. And five or six of the world’s most famous vineyards (and most expensive wines) are a stone’s throw away. In fact our proprietor Regis Forey vinified the La Romanee grand cru, a 2-acre site owned by the Liger-Belair family and sold by the negociant house Bouchard, for a number of years before returning home to take over from his father Jean in 1989. La Romanee is the rarest in a string of Grand Cru plots that sealed the reputation of this stretch of the Cote de Nuits. This is the northern part of Burgundy’s Cote d’Or – to its south sits the Cote de Beaune, a slope marginally better known for outstanding Chardonnay.
Domaine Forey was created in 1840 by the great-grandfather of the current proprietor. Regis Forey farms 15 separate parcels around Vosne-Romanee, a number of which are Premier or Grand Cru. Domaine Forey harvest all its fruit by hand. The house style here is dark – far from being blushing Burgundy for salmon, this estate routinely offers hearty Pinot for gamey, wintry meals.
The appeal of this region (and this grape) chiefly exists in the variance in style possible from town to town, vineyard to vineyard. Do you remember the Ghislaine Barthod “Les Bons Batons” we poured in the spring? That Pinot was completely different from Forey’s, and the wines are grown only a few kilometers apart, of the same grape planted on the same series of hills. Forey brings the darkness to his red Burgundy through a 3 to 4 day cold-soak prior to fermentation, followed by a long (22 to 26 day) cuvaison during which the cap of grape skins is punched down 3 to 4 times daily for maximum extraction and to facilitate aeration of the juice. The French term for this process is pigeage. The wine is only racked once (moved to remove clear juice from sediment, or lees) and is typically bottled unfiltered after 16 to 20 months in small oak barrels, a varying percentage of which are new. The above techniques lead to a wine that is intense and without some of the rough edges one would expect from young, dark red wine.
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Tastes Like: Soft, mellow, cool red fruit aromas. Medium weight, very precise/clean flavors.
Pairs well at Lantern with: Tea-smoked chicken. Other forms of fowl.
Recommended if you like: Pinot Noir. Tempranillo-based reds, like Rioja. Rhone Grenache, Nebbiolo d’Alba.
Franco Noussan grows a scant few acres of Petit Rouge (and Fumin, Gamay, Petit Arvine and Pinot Noir) in the Vallee d'Aoste. This idyllic region is Italy's smallest, roughly surrounding the Dora Baltea river as it winds through the mountains of Italy's extreme Northwest, an area wedged between France and Switzerland. During the creation of the modern Italian state this region was "traded" with the French republic for the area surrounding Nice, hence the dominance of the French language and culture in the Valle d'Aoste and the proliferation of great pizza joints in Nice. Until I got married and spent a week eating pizza in the Baroque towns of southeastern Sicily the best pizza of my life had been a frutti d'mare pizza in a crowded market in Nice.
Back to the Vallee- A handful of growers continue to work in this area: the relatively small amount of wine made here is mostly vinified by cooperatives. Vines are difficult to cultivate in this terrain: steep terracing is common to fully extract the sun's warmth, and much of the arable land is honestly more suited to grazing livestock. The valley does have a diversity of quality grape varietals to choose from: being at the intersection of Italian, Swiss and French wine culture everything from Nebbiolo and Moscato di Chambave to Pinot Blanc and Grenache has been deposited in the fields of this zone.
In contrast to the co-ops Noussan does everything himself, with a dedication to traditional and natural farming methods. Yields are meticulously controlled to ensure sufficient ripeness for his relatively delicate wines. Franco begins fermentation with yeast indigenous to his vineyards to maintain fidelity to the distinct terroir of the zone, and his vine treatments and fertilizers are never of the chemical/synthetic variety. In short, this is real viticulture, based on farming with a maximum of effort expended to produce smallish quantities of fruit with character.
It should not be a surprise to see another cool-climate wine appearing on the list. I feel the cool (i.e. without alcoholic heat or rough tannin) mouthfeel of wines made at northerly latitudes or higher elevations (Noussan has both variables working in his favor) allows for harmonious matches with Lantern entrees. There are exceptions, and I do hope to find great wines from extreme southerly latitudes (New Zealand, Tasmania) for essentially the same reasons. Food and wine matching is imprecise by design, dozens of variables at play in making a tandem that improves on the component parts, or doesn't. So I say when you can isolate a geographic variable that works in the majority of cases, go for it.
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Tastes Like: Silky brambly fruit, complex and lively aromas, medium weight. Easy to enjoy.
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