The Feiring Line

Is that a ladybug in your 2004 Vosne?

                                                    


2004 is widely regarded as the worst Burgundian vintage of the last decade. There was cold, there was hot, there was wet and there was rot. And, for some reason there was an overabundance of ladybugs.

Some believe that this ladybug taint contributed to the compound called methoxypyrazines found in that vintage. But remember, even without ladybugs, this compound,which causes the pee in sauvignon and the bell in cabernet, often shows up in wet or cool years.  So, how do you separate one from the other. Muddy flavors? Grilled hazelnuts? I've heard that those can be indentifiers as well. In fact the person who told me this actually keeps jars of crushed bugs in his 'fridge' to keep his nose on guard for the offensive smells.  

I loved some 2004s when I first tasted them straight from the cask. I purchased far too few Chandon de Briailles. The village and 1er Crus were drinking early and lushly, but they were all gone by the time I started to ponder the bugginess and the veracity of the theory. 

 As luck had it,  I found myself in the home of Becky and Russell a few weeks back. coinciding with the same June weekend critic Clive Coates held his 2004 ten- year -after tasting. There were to be 100+ examples in front of me. I was going to be well equipped to make my own assessment for this controversial vintage. 

On the morning of the tasting --before 80 or so curious vignerons came to check out the bottles - Paul Wasserman, Clive, Jasper Morris, Ben Leroux and I snuck in a few hours of pre-tasting, tasting.   

We had samples from all of the Côtes enough to construct an overview. Clive  was wise when he summed it up, “It certainly wasn’t a great vintage. And, there was none of the usual bump up in grand terroir. But there’s quite a lot to drink and you don't have to wait on them.”

If you can find the right wines on a list or in a store, remember, this castoff vintage can be a bargain. Volnay (Hello Lafarge!) strutted nicely. Pommard, well, not so much. Savigny did a great job.  (Lucien Jacob, Pavelot, Chandon de Briailles, Simon Bize.) Savigny's close neighbor Corton also did well.  The news from Nuits was mixed. For example, Chevillon (bitter watercress, bugs or just weather?), Barthod (Les Cras), Rousseau (Clos St. Jacques) and  Gouges were startlingly disappointing. Fred Mugnier, on the other hand was yowzerly, plumptuous yet elegant. 

Honorable mention goes to: Jadot, Bouchard, Jean Grivot (the Richebourg) Giboulot.Nicolas Rossignol. Serafin. 

The whites were a significantly different story.  There it was pretty much Grand Cru or bust:  The survivors were; Bouchard Chevallier-Montrachet La Cabotte (Jasmine!), Dujac Monts Luisants (Very balanced), Chandon de Briailles Corton (!) and also from Corton, the simply beautiful Bonneau du Martray. 
 
The standouts of the day? 


  

Côtes de Beaune Village and 1er Cru

 *Rossignol, Volnay Chevrets
cherry, delicate, life and grit 

*Simon Bize Aux Fourneaux
Life, lingering leaf, cocoa, great acidity. 

*Comte Lafon Santenot                                                                                                       Sandy balance corduroy plush. Medium length and lots of pretty.

Côtes de Beaune Grand Cru

*Domaine Chandon de Briailles Corton Maréchaudes
Just simply beautiful. Stunning. Spectacular and once again, plumptuous nose with patchouli.  (Biodynamic in vine and cellar)

Côtes de Nuits, 1er Cru 

 *Frederick Mugnier, Nuits Saint George, Clos Marechal
  This was his first vintage in the Clos and it's terrific. Purely direct but satisfying, entirely a pretty, yet firm wine. There's deep cherry plucked from the tree, slothed over in silk. It's actually kind of sexy.

Côtes de Nuits Grand Cru

* Frederick Mugnier Musigny
This was so Mugnier; that Mugnierness of it all, nit notes of cherry and a direct, drink me-ability, there's a reason he's a star, terribly seductive. Later in the day, it held on to its lovely bones. Young, could take more time, but oh, those roses mixed with the bone marrow of my youth.

* Domaine des Lambrays, Clos de Lambray
Pretty, spice, acid, depth, a mouthful and either some bug or as I saw it, star anise. (Biodynamic in vine and cellar)

* Camille Giroud Latricières-Chambertin
Satisfying, sensible and smart finish to its ride, with a dollop of red clay

*Dujac Clos de la Roche                                                                                                    
  Nice enough, lively, seems young with a touch of paint thinning volatility, with acid and a good deal of pleasant underleaf.

 

++

For a general overview, reds were greatly more yummy than the whites. Grand Cru or village, not that much difference. Many wines had chalky tannins (are those actual tannins or bentonite filtering?).  More were brooding rather than sparky. 

But were the ladybugs the culprits? The best domaines if bothered by a bug plague would have picked off each one by tweezers, whatever it took. Another thought that few bring up: In 2004 many were still reeling from the super-hot vintage of 2003. The vines were still screaming with fatigue.  No one has studied the after effect of extreme weather on the taste of a grape.

Yet, there are some beauties and many fine wines of drinkability. That is why I am always disturbed when I hear other writers/critics warn that a consumer should avoid a vintage.  In a difficult year, be more careful. Yes! But avoid? Erase the 2004 existence? What kind of real wine drinker would you be if you did that? 

Talent was needed in 2004, for sure.  Those who made and picked by recipe were lost. But  no matter who or what you blame, (if you must), Burgundy always delivers its challenges. The highs are highs and the lows are low, even in the best of years. 

 

 

 

Knish, In Search of the Jewish Soul Food

I offer you this knish. 

 

Knish, In Search of the Jewish Soul Food,  by Laura Silver, came out in May from Brandeis University Press. I was impressed.

 Silver's story begins on the one-year anniversary of her grandmother's death when she drove to Brighton Beach in search of her Grandma Fritzy's  favorite, Mrs. Stahl's. She was craving a memorial knish. The storefront was intact, but Mrs. Stahl had dispatched for Florida. Shortly thereafter Silver was further crestfallen to find the shop retrofitted into a Subway franchise.  All was wrong with the world. 

Bereft, she embarked on the sentimental journey, needing to understand the knish in all of parts and history.  Her search lead her to Poland, Israel, France, England, Israel, Minnesota, California and ultimately back to Mrs. Stahl's family,  the legacy and lesson. 

Evidenced from Silver's first line, "The knish situation in Brooklyn is not what it once was," the word for the savory or sweet pastry  can't avoid its punchline power. But to devour a knish? Ah, that's quite a different matter.  That's when this delectable snack shows its poetic side. 

 The knish, you see, is no mere madeleine. It is history, soul and literature. Not only does it tell the tale of the shtetl, to Silver, it is a symbol of strong women. 

Silver's writing makes us care. Her loss is our loss. We crave kasha. We yearn for the potato and onion. We cringe at the idea of the liver. We question the use of shmaltz instead of oil. We marvel at the people who baked and peddled them. Through it all, we learn that the knish is bigger than all of us. 

Unlike  Mimi Sheraton's The Bialy Eaters, which was a pessimistic  death march for the lox-loving disk, Knish ends on an up beat. The knish lives! 

Yet, I mourn.  

The Long Beach Boardwalk had two: one belonged to my cousin's (Paula and Al Gewirtz). That was  Royalty Knish and Donut Izzy's Knishes was the other. Royalty's, hot-out-of-the-oven, became my benchmark. Yet,  there I was at this book's end,  saddened. If only I could have compared them to  Stahl's. When I read how Silver described the Stahl knish, "If you cut it in half, the cross-sections revealed a membrane of dough that split the innards into chambers, like those of a human heart," I closed the book and  said, "Now, that's a knish." 

 

** And what to drink with a potato and kasha knish? They're actually pretty wine friendly and you can go red or white, but what I think is almost brilliant is the new Coup de Foudre rosé pet nat from La Garagista. Read about it in the next issue of The Feiring Line. 

 

 

Slurp Wine, audacious fraud?

Yesterday morning I woke up to a tweet from colleague Simon Woolf who writes The Morning Claret, a worthy blog.

 

His beef that morning was a wine with a ludicrous claim. Slurp, a €4,99 supermarket bottle claiming  100% natural status. 

Its  owner, Ilja Gort, a rather hyperbolic Dutch guy makes wine in France (Michel Rolland is his trusted consultant). From an advertising background, he learned his field well.   All you need is a little bullshit and a false message.

But still, I spent some time trying to figure out what the man could have been thinking, other than a sucker is born every minute. Where  was the morsel of truth in his claim? Perhaps it goes back to a wine unadorned by oak flavors? As in chips or yaourt nature? Plain? Simple? Was his nonsensical defense to be, "I used the word natural perfectly, your honor. I used it to mean no nonsense, in fact it's right there on the label for everyone to see!"

 

 

That is the pity of the word. As a writer, I struggle with it as many times a day as there are ants in a hill. Message is nearly impossible to control. The food industry had failed to protect the word natural. The fight went on for decades. I don't see the wine world being any more successful. Define the word as relates to wine?

 Made from non-synthetic-chemical-based viticulture. Natural yeast and bacterial fermentation. Nothing added or taken away --including all of the 70 or so government allowed additives, except perhaps up to 20ppm So2. No flavor or texture changing machinery or additives used. Some gentle filtration may be needed, for stability. 

Even if that was the definition, someone like Gort would find the loophole. Promise.

In the twitter conversation, when Simon suggested I take up the whip, I turned my back. I would leave the fight to others.  I dismissed the whole issue. I thought, okay, we knew that was going to happen. People hop on a marketing bandwagon. And this man I never met, this Gort, was the first that I can tell, to be a true jerk about it. 100% so. 

Even though people in the bible with such 'stiff necks'  as mine were swiftly punished, (hello big fish and Jonah),  I had other issues to deal with.  So, I went to bed with schiste on my brain at 1am.  I woke up full of Slurp at 4:30. The thoughts rushed like a nor'easter. Had I gone soft in my old age? Had I gotten lax. Had I grown tired of shaking my tiny paw at big business? 

 But this morning, in a fog of anxiety, I knew I was wrong.  We are in an environment where the EU is allowing Monsanto to control all of the seeds in the world, where heirloom seeds might soon be banned. True shops like  Les Temps de Vendanges in Toulouse are being hauled into fraud court because of using the word naturel for wines that truly are. I cannot do anything about the senseless killings in the schools, the horrifying situation in Iraq, but at least in this tiny sector of agriculture and humanity, that is one area that is small enough that falls into my arena. If we stop crying out, even about a label on a silly supermarket wine, we're all doomed. 

Thanks for slapping me around, Simon. I needed it. 

Olivier Cousin's Lawyer: Eric Morain

Addendum: This post was first published in March 2014. On June 4th 2014, the verdict on the Olivier Cousin case came through; guilty of putting the name Anjou on the label, but his fine? 1 euro. And so to read more about the issues and the attorney who handled his case, I introduce you to Eric Morain. 

 

Impressed by the handling of the Olivier Cousin case, I stopped in to talk lawyer Eric Morain when  in Paris, this past March, 

With a case of Frank Cornelissen 2009s resting against the wall, the avocat  sat behind his desk in his art-filled office. His handsome-cherubic face is angled in by a gently silvering beard. Mail constantly beeped into his computer. With the help of my friend, Alon Rozen who is acting dean of the  ENPC MBA, Paris, we started to talk about life, natural, Voltaire, French and wine.

 

 Fraud was the primary issue in the case. Accused of  sticking the region's name, Anjou on the bottle (as in Anjou Pur Breton), Cousin then removed it from the label and snuck it on the cork.

Because Cousin left the appellation and bottles under Vin de France (wine-can-come- from-anywhere de France) it is forbidden to put his wine's origin on the label.

This might be fine for industrial wine, where the grapes can be culled from anywhere in the country, even from someone's bathtub. But what about wine such as Cousin's,  that come from his own biodynamically grown grapes from land in the family for generations?  After all, his wines are ones that have raised the reputation of Anjou. 

 I was curious whether  this trial could change future wine law. Could the findings, if Cousin was successful, change the laws of Vin de France to permit place on the label? In fact, could the case lead to a way to separate the industrial Vin de France from the artisinal? 

Morain assured me nothing could change. "We are not trying to prove he is innocent, he is not." The lawyer sounded very talmudic  when he added, "Here the argument is about the spirit of the law, not the law itself. We can't win the case, but we can win a reduced fine." 

The irony of the case was prominent for Morain. "I call this the boomerang effect," he said. "Terroir is monopolized by the AOC, and they’re using it as a boomerang against Olivier. They appropriated the notion of terroir, they stole it.  Today Anjou is an artificial notion of the region." Then he added, "Do you know that someone is also being sued for creating Anjou cola?" He shook his head at the absurdity.

The AOC and the Wine Fraud Committee is in attack dog mode of late. Morain knew of ten court cases currently threatening French vignerons and cavistes. He missed representing Emmanuel Giboulot's  (forced spraying case )because he was on vacation at the time. But there are others coming and Morain will be trying four of them before June.

 Take Saint Aubin vigneron Dominque Derain. He is in hot water for bottling his 2012s fifteen days earlier than the AOC allowed. He will most likely have to rebottle his most prestigious bottles, Pommard and Gevrey as a Vin de France and pay a to –be-determined fine.

The other case Morain referred to was that of the Toulouse caviste and  bar à vin, Les Temps des Vendanges. Very much like the Enoteca Bulzoni case in Rome,  they were hauled in for deceiving the public because of their signage that stated natural wine.   

“We might as well be North Korea. Imagined that this is happening in the country of Voltaire!"

French hero, Voltaire exalted the concept of  human freedom and  argued that argued that no authority should be immune from challenge by critical reason. Ironic indeed.

While Cousin's and Derain's cases are about illegal labeling, the issues as Morain sees it is all about the attack on natural wine. He pointed out that under the European Union, the word nature and natural had been so codified that its meaning has become polluted and destroyed and France has done nothing to protest. In addition, this codification is only extreme for wine. "For example, if  you can write natural on a yogurt  even if its industrial and packed with chemical ingredient.  The word natural is only denied to wine. If the word 'naturel' is going to be allowed for wine,  it is  France who would have to go to Brussels and petition for a change, not the individual."

Listening to Morain, the fashionable Avenue Montaigne was just outside his window,  the image of Kronos eating his sons came to me.

Was  France eating its natural winemakers just as  Kronos ingested his progeny? After all, the Fraud committee, the INAO had been in attack mode. InterLoire the marketing arm of the region had just published a map of the region omitting Bourgueil, Montlouis,  Fiefs Vendéens and Cheverny. Yes,  France as Kronos, it made sense to me. that France was very much like the Titan who ate his sons fearful they would grow up to kill their father. But France has it wrong. The vin naturel folk are not killing French wine, they are saving it.

It is because of  producers such as Cousin that the Loire has become so well known. It is because of those working naturally that depressed areas like the Muscadet have started to proper and thrive. It is why Anjou, dominated by commercial, chemical producers, that the area has new life. It are these wines and producers who have captured a generation that was on the verge of decamping to vodka. Go to Brussels? No, Morain said, it won't happen. 

Morain said that his client was not trying to be a spokesperson of a movement.  He was not trying to attack the AOC. "Look, 10-15 years ago, when the natural wine movement became this 'thing,'  the AOCs looked  internally. "They started to protect  itself from anyone who wanted to do something different, and this meant natural wine."  

Morain said, Cousin had this idea to create a new category for artisinal wines. This thought keeps on coming up. Last week I heard that Claire Naudin in Burgundy is working with the BIVB to form a new definition of wine, one that can have the Appellation but would have a sticker that would say something like not typical for the AOC but worthy. Cousin beliving that was the answer as well,  went to do something about it.

 At the beginning of this court affair he and another vigneron, Bernard Belhassen of Domaine Fontedicto, paid the consumer protection office on the national level a visit. "They walked in to the meeting with seven administrators with magnums of their wines. They wanted to show them what natural wine meant. What it tasted like.The first question the council ask him was how many people do you hire and how many people they  represent?

Morain laughed at this concept. "The administrators used the winemaker's artisinal qualities as a flaw," Morain said. "These people are individuals who don't  have the time to organize into a group. How many people work naturally in France? There's no number. No one is tracking this. They dont represent money so to the council, they don't count." 

But they were not unsympathetic, merely clueless.  Morain said the administrators retorted, "What are you talking about? Bio wine was passed in the EU. Aren't you happy?" 

He saw me look over at the Cornelissen. "Do you know the wine?" He asked. Of course I did.

"We both know," he said, "that once you start hanging out with people who like to drink and make natural wine you understand the difference with the other wines. People who don’t drink natural wine have no idea what it is and they attack it. What is needed is education. But the alcohol lobby is so powerful, they’ll never allow the education. That’s why the confusion between organic and natural is so profound, people aren’t allowed to know." 

The only answer he said, was  an ingredient label. "The wine of France is the only food product that doesn’t have to list ingredients. Even mineral water has to have ingredients. If the five big chateaus had to list what they put in, this could threaten the whole wine establishment."

At  the end of the 45-minutes, as we were leaving, he surprised me by telling me that he had read my books. I was touched and highly flattered. Morain, despite his fancy 8th arrondissement address defends the little guy, the individual who is working with a horse and adds nothing. He himself came to natural wine a few years back though Omnivore food events.  "I met the winemakers, drank the wines and realized that few people were focusing in wine law, an no one was on the side of the small vignerons," he explained.

They might not be his best paying clients, but he does get to drink well and sleep well at night, knowing he's upholding the ideals of Voltaire and the truth of France.