LA-based wine collector and Parker Board legend Jeff Leve has posted a scoop on a fascinating new project from Chateau Palmer: a blended wine consisting of 85% Bordeaux from Palmer's estate in Margaux and 15% Syrah. Called "Historical XIX Century Wine," this new offering is an homage to the bad old days when Bordeaux proprietors would routinely blend the traditional Bordeaux grape varietals with Syrah for added ripeness and heft. While this practice of adulteration has gone the way of adding ice to the vats to cool fermentation, Chateau Palmer apparently believes that collectors will chase this new offering for a chance to taste history.
As Leve notes, the French AOC laws create an interesting situation for this wine, as it must be labelled a vin de table, rather than Bordeaux, because the grapes come from two different regions. Also, as a vin de table, it cannot be labelled with a vintage year (this offering is from vintage 2004). The Bordeaux varietals are 50% Cabernet Sauvignon and 50% Merlot, but the Chateau is refusing to publicize the source of the Syrah (presumably from somewhere in the Rhone), so as not to adulterate the Bordeaux branding of the bottling and the estate.
Leve, who is famously close with Chateau owners and routinely hosts Bordeaux winemakers at his home, gives this 19th century throwback a favorable tasting note, calling it a fascinating blend of Hermitage and Bordeaux characteristics ("96 Pts"). But with only 100 cases made in 2004 -- and none in the 2005 and 2006 vintages -- few wine collectors will be able to decide for themselves whether this is a worthwhile endeavor or merely a clever marketing gimmick.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Historical XIX Century Wine (at XXI Century Prices)
To Cork or Not to Cork
"The cork is here to stay," says George Taber, author of the forthcoming book To Cork or Not to Cork: The Billion-Dollar Battle for the Bottle. Over the last decade, the debate over the use of cork versus alternative enclosures, like the Stelvin screwcap, has been one of the fiercest in the wine world. As Taber says in a recent interview, "One Australian winemaker compared the issue to the wars of religion and said some feelings are so deep, he lost friends over it."
Proponents hail the screwcap, and other alternatives like glass, as revolutionary innovations that will defeat once and for all the scourge of cork taint (TCA) and other issues related to cork variability. Traditionalists, however, cling to the cork as an indispensable tradition and also argue that screwcaps damage the long-term aging potential of the finest wines. Proprietors of fabled estates like Romanee-Conti have said that if they knew of a better enclosure than cork, they would switch to it right away -- but none thus far have proven themselves superior for extended cellaring. Needless to say there is much invested on both sides.
Taber cites the usual reasons for the persistence of cork despite the strong in-roads Stelvin has made in Australia and New Zealand: the tradition, the romance, as well as laws mandating the use of cork in key wine producing countries like Italy, Spain, and Portugal. ("Americans still like the romance of the cork, and even low priced wine like "Two-Buck-Chuck" uses a cork.")
Yet more significantly, Taber appears to base his conclusion on industry research that he believes has made progress in eliminating TCA, the compound responsible for the foul, wet cardboard stench found in the occasional bottle: "There now are completely new methods for processing corks." Taber believes that cork taint is more prevalent among smaller cork producers without quality control and that these new methods will produce taint-free enclosures. It will be intriguing to read the fruits of Taber's investigation into the subject, as to date, there hasn't been anything close to a guaranteed TCA-free source of cork.
Despite my avowed traditionalist bent, the cork for me is a relic -- one properly consigned to the dust bin of history alongside other former wine enclosures, like rags soaked in olive oil. There is simply too much risk of spoiling a $300 wine with a 50-cent piece of wood. I lose sleep at night -- seriously -- for fear that my lone bottle of 2001 Chateau Ausone, opened on its 30th or 40th birthday, will end up smelling like wet cardboard. For me, the romance of wine is not in any overly elaborate uncorking ceremony (aside from maybe popping Champagne) but rather in the liquid in the bottle that has been lovingly made and cellared for decades. The fascination with cork, to me, is a superficial romanticism. This is a moral imperative -- wine must be saved from the cork.
Scoring Metastasis
Reader ScottS comments that the main problem with Parker and his points is that he's too powerful. He argues that a larger pool of reviewers, each with less power, would lessen the unfortunate market effects of Parker dominance and provide consumers with a more valuable metric for choosing wines.
I think the first is definitely correct. Scoring would be more ambiguous and would develop over time rather than appearing full-formed the day each issue of the Wine Advocate comes out. The crass market responses wouldn't be nearly so overt, and the overall market-driving power of the scores would be reduced because no one score or even compilation of scores would have the authority Parker currently does.
On the other hand, I'm less sure about the second point. When Parker gives a certain score, the consumer knows what it means. Parker has well-defined and well-understood preferences and gives 95's to one sort of wine and 92's to another. Even if you disagree with Parker's metric, a Parker score provides the consumer with information about the wine. A bundle of scores, averaged together, from various reviewers is far less helpful. Who knows what each of their preferences or scoring criteria are.
The fact that I can't accept ScottS's analogy between wine- and movie-reviewing is relevant here. Heavily reviewed movies tend to be mass-market phenomena with large family resemblances. Wines on the other hand differ enormously in very subtle and intricate ways. That, combined with the fact that reliable wine-reviewing requires a certain expertise, makes reliance on average reviews via a movie-esque star system unhelpful.
Of course, there is an enormous market for debased, uninteresting, industrial-style, mass-produced wine--in other words, wine that hardly deserves to be called wine at all--and perhaps the movie approach to reviewing is useful there. But from his comments it doesn't sound like that's the sort of wine ScottS is into, and if that's the sort of wine you're drinking you might as well just drink Smirnoff Ice. If you want to choose between a Lynch-Bages and a Cos de Estournel, conglomerations of reviews aren't going to help you much. The only exception I can think of is in the extremes--if one of them is really out-of-character bad in a particular year.
Books on Wine
If you ask wine geeks to name their favorite wine books, they will often answer as if asked their favorite (i.e., most important, most expensive) wine: they will list the towering, indispensable reference tomes of the wine world, like Hugh Johnson's World Atlas of Wine, or Robert Parker's Bordeaux, or Clive Coates's volume on Burgundy, books that are undeniably great but most fully appreciated by those already in the know. While Johnson, in particular, is a felicitous writer, these are books to dip into for a half hour at a time -- or to quickly look up which vineyard is situated where -- rather than devote an evening's pleasure to. On the other hand, ask the non-specialist reader, and you'll inevitably hear Sideways or A Good Year.
Jamie Ivey in today's Guardian has published his top ten books about wine, and while the list is geared toward the generalist (and predictably features those two books-turned-Hollywood confection), it does have some gems. In particular, readers are directed to Donald and Peter Kladstrup's Wine and War: The French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France's Greatest Treasure, a fascinating account of the Nazi occupation as experienced by vignerons. As Ivey writes, proprietors had to devise ingenious ways of saving their wine, "tricks like ageing young bottles by changing the labels and covering them in cobwebs to fool the Nazis into thinking they were vintage, or building false walls to hide the valuable years."
Yet a book left off Ivey's list that brings a distinctively literary and lyrical sensibility to a rigorous study of wine is Andrew Jefford's The New France: A Complete Guide to Contemporary French Wine. While a reference work ostensibly in the mold of Johnson's Wine Atlas, Jefford's volume is really a book on how to think about wine -- a Tao of wine, if you will. Jefford is an avowed defender of the notion of terroir and brings the soul of a poet to an examination of wine as understood in the context of the land, its history, and the people devoted to it as an agricultural product. It also has some of the best short profiles of the major French wine regions and leading producers to be found anywhere. Highly recommended.