Stuart Pigott's Planet Wine

What is that spooky sound that reminds me of someone breathing through a helmet? Part 3 of my series on red Bordeaux – BDX: Falling in Love Again? –  was just published on GrapeCollective.com and in it I wrote that Michel Rolland is the Darth Vader of wine. Maybe you’ll find it hard to believe, but when I wrote those words I was not attacking the famous consulting winemaker, rather I was trying to adequately describe the way a large section of the wine scene sees him. Undoubtedly the most common perception of Rolland in contemporary New York Wine City (NYWC) is that he is the most dangerous prophet of the Dark Side of the Force in BDX, and a mover and shaker of oenological evil in the dozen other countries Planet Wine where he exerts an influence upon winemaking. But the truth is that’s not at all what he is!

Rolland is an oenological consultant and blender who has an approach to that field of endeavor as distinctive as your, my or his handwriting. The week I spent in January tasting hundreds of 2014 red BDXs with James Suckling proved conclusively to me that Rolland is not responsible for the currently dominant style of red BDX (see JamesSuckling.com for more about the new style), rather he plays a role of varying importance in the making of a small proportion of these wines. My gut tells me that the same applies in all the other countries on Planet Wine where Rolland works. The fact is that if you don’t like Darth Vader wines then there are plenty of alternatives and it is easy to find them. And if you join the Rebels, then you don’t need to worry because this time the Empire will not strike back!

Beyond this, the wines from the producers Rolland consults for are not nearly as uniform as his critics suppose. Château Léoville Poyferré in St. Julien/Médoc is an excellent example of a BDX producer for whom MR consults, but who’s wine does not have the opulent, over-ripe and one-sidedly oaky character the Rebels say all Darth Vader wines have. Unquestionably Rolland exerts some influence upon the wines of this BDX Second Growth, but he is not the decisive factor that shapes them. What he has done is to help the owning Cuvelier family create a style that is completely distinct from those of the other two other Léoville chateaux in St. Julien (Léoville Barton & Léoville las Cases). To my mind this stylistic diversity is one of the strengths of Bordeaux alongside the fact that many Médoc châteaux like these are producing large volumes of very good wine. It is the latter that makes global distribution possible. Read the full story for more about all this.

The one way in I see a negative effect emanating from Rolland is that the Darth Vader profile he has acquired in certain circles has aggrivated the image problems that the region as a whole now has. Today in the West red BDX is widely perceived to be an expensive wine that doesn’t fit into the modern world with its faddy eclectic dining and its fickle social media coolness. However, I fear that if Rolland hadn’t been there, then someone else would have been demonized in much the same way by the same people. Before he became so famous Émile Peynaud – widely regarded as the inventor of modern consulting winemaking – was often accused of having modernized away the true character of red BDX. Through the 1980s and into the 1990s he was the Darth Vader of wine.

The question my story concludes with is a big one that has been too little asked and it  concerns the future of red BDX here in NYWC, America and the West as a whole. I hope that many of you will take the trouble to read the story and the two preceding stories in this series to find out more about all this. Quo vadis Bordeaux?

https://grapecollective.com/articles/bdx-falling-in-love-again-part-3-new-bordeaux-money-secrets-and-michel-rolland

Please note that I selected the image of Darth Vader above that was presented to me as being copyright free. If this is not correct please let me know and I will remove it.

I just made it to New York City (NYC), but of course the photo above isn’t of NYC, or even what I call New York Wine City (NYWC). Instead it shows a particularly spectacular part of what I sometimes call the “other New York”, that is the Finger Lakes (FLX) where many of the most exciting white wines being produced in North America are grown. I’m talking about the new (generally) dry Rieslings of the beautiful FLX region. They are the work of a new generation of winemakers obsessed by this grape (often also Cabernet Franc and sometimes Gewürztraminer too). They are the subject of my major report on the FLX just published on JamesSuckling.com. In fact, I was just about to get on the plane from Frankfurt to NYC when I realized it had appeared. Here is the link to it:

https://www.jamessuckling.com/wine-tasting-reports/new-yorks-finger-lakes-riesling-revolution/?mc_cid=a00824d156&mc_eid=0765a4a47d

I first visited the FLX back in fall 2004 when things didn’t look so good unless you visited one of the handful of genuinely quality orientated producers. I’ve been giving the region my concentrated attention since the summer of 2013, because about then it was like a turbocharger was connected to the region and change suddenly accelerated. I’ve never seen anything quite like that happen before and I humbly recommend you to taste a few of the best new FLX dry Rieslings if you don’t already know these wines. Expect to hear some winemaker names you never heard before, and remember where you read them first!

NYWC, by which I mean the city’s wine scene, is always full of surprises and just hours after I stepped off the plane yesterday I met Steve Matthiasson (pictured above) at Flatiron Wines on Broadway. Steve has the reputation of being an Anti-Napa winemaker in Napa Valley, however, after tasting his wines I would say that he has a radically alternative vision of what the wines of California’s and America’s most famous winemaking region could taste like. Therefore I’m only up for the “Anti-Napa” label if it’s used in the same way as the “Anti-Folk” label that refers to a wide range of music that is rooted in folk, but twists folk in an unexpected direction that hits a nerve regular folk almost never does.

Part of me us most impressed by Steve’s 2013 Cabernet Sauvignon, which he rightly describes as, “being inspired by the Napa Valley Cabernets of the period 1985 – 1995,” something that I can very well identify with having experienced the wines of that period close up in Napa. There’s a gentleness and gracefulness to this wine in spite of its (restrained) ripeness and power, and the aromas (ranging from pencil shavings to redcurrant to plum) are more delicate than the majority of contemporary wines from Napa Valley. I honestly think that the region needs more wines of this kind if it is going to win over a wider audience.

The other part of my was more delighted by the 2015 “Tendu” red for $19.99 at Flatiron Wines, or a shade over a quarter of the bottle price for Steve’s Cabernet. This blend of the Montepulciano, Aglianico and Barbery grapes is light, crisp and juicy with a red cherry note and a hint of something earthy. “I’m trying to recreate the experience I had with Gallo Hearty Burgundy when I was at college,” Steve commented, and the jaws of some wine geeks at Flatiron Wines fell mightily! By the way, this wine and its equally light and crisp white counterpart (a blend dominated by Vermentino and French Colombard) are filled in liter bottles with crown corks. “I’m trying to get the wine ritual our and replace it with something like the beer ritual.” Amen!

This and much, much more all happened within the space of 24 hours in NYWC. Watch this space for more reports from the city too busy drinking wine to ever sleep.

In case there’s any doubt, I wrote the following lines as a friend of America and a strong believer in the principals enshrined in the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Today (Sunday, January 29th) I have added an extra paragraph, the third before last, in order to complete the analysis of our current situation.

 Don’t worry about me, I’m doing just fine. That is as long as I don’t think about the dramatic developments of the last few days in Washington D.C. The latest massive shock came in a story the New York Times published Thursday (January 26^th, 2017) entitled ‘Trump Strategist Stephen Bannon Says Media should, ‘Keep it’s Mouth Shut’’. Reading it convinced me events are already lurching towards a climax the shape and hue of which nobody can yet discern, but which will undoubtedly be fearful and loathsome.

The title of that New York Times story referred to something the former head of the right-wing Breitbart News website said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. He stated that because the media were surprised by the result of the recent presidential election they “should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while.” Silence would be self-censorship, a particularly insidious form of censorship since it is invisible to the reader/viewer/listener. For example the censorship of communist East Germany functioned almost entirely by this method.

To this Bannon added “The Media has zero integrity, zero intelligence and no hard work,” which is tarring thousands of reporters and editors who’s work is extremely diverse, with the same brush. Then he went much further, insisting that, “I want you to quote this. The media here is the opposition party.” My theme may only be wine, but since American wine and wine in America are some of my major subjects I too am pushed into that role.

The fact that Bannon peppered his comments with expletives and ironically referred to himself as “Darth Vader” does nothing to cloud the real reason his attacks on the media and pushing us collectively into the role of the enemy. His anger is stimulated when we report something – absolutely anything at all! – that doesn’t align with President Trump’s vision of America, the world and himself.

In this parallel universe Trump is the sole source of these “alternative facts” as the president’s advisor Kellyanne Conway famously called them last Sunday on NBC television’s Meet the Press. I congratulate the show’s anchor Chuck Todd for correctly and courageously identified them as falsehoods. Bannon regards these as the only “facts” that deserve reporting by the media. Period.

At first glance the last week in Washington D.C. might look like a series of ghastly ad-libs by Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip spin doctors, including the statements of his spokesman Sean Spicer, but there’s nothing haphazard about them at all. They were all made in pursuit of the new administration’s prime goal: the wholesale replacement of the true facts with Trump’s vision of “American carnage” and himself as the messiah come to pull the crippled nation out of the mire and make it great again.

There’s nothing new with the basic idea of circumventing reality like this. Hitler & Goebbels, Stalin & Beria were 20^th century masters of this art, combining it with genocidal goals so far missing from Trump’s white supremacist ideology. In modern America this goes back at least to when President George W. Bush and how his administration sought to radically reshape reality in theatres of action like Afghanistan and Iraq.

It’s worth looking back to October 2004 when Karl Rove, Bannon’s predecessor in the role of chief ideologue to the president, said to Ron Suskind of the New York Times that he belonged to, “what we call the reality-based community,” that is Suskind was part of that group of people, “who believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernable reality…That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

Trump’s vision of American Empire is clearly different to Rove’s, but the family resemblance is clear. “Alternative facts” is simply another way of saying “create our own reality,” meaning substitute a self-serving fantasy for the reality any sane and halfway rational person can easily discern. President Trump doesn’t have a running war with the media, as he’s repeatedly asserted, rather he has a running war with reality.

For President Trump reality is lies and his fantasies are the truth. He’s convinced that they trump (verb) all the cards of every suit that reality could ever play. This is what makes the current situation so dangerous, because regardless of what anybody wants or imagines reality always holds a tall stack of trump cards that it can play at any moment.

For the new administration the media’s “crime” has been to doggedly stick with demonstrably true facts in the face of attacks and intimidation. However, we will soon see that they are only the first group to land in Trump’s firing line for being reality-based. Soon this will extend to other many groups, who will also be demonized as, “amongst the most dishonest human beings on earth.”

I accept this insult, because it clearly places me on the right side of this fundamental divide. Regardless who is posing the question which side I’m on my answer will be the same, “I’m with reality!” From Day Zero that’s been the program of this blog and is the guiding principal of all my work. I’m grateful to have employers like James.Suckling.com and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung who see things the same way.

I’m sitting in an office that looks like countless other offices in rural France – cream colored walls, filling cabinets and desks, a framed map of the company property on the wall – but I’m not just anywhere in rural France, I’m in Bordeaux (BDX), and I’m not anywhere in BDX either. The commune of St.Julien at Château Léoville Barton, one of the elite Grand Cru Classé properties in the Médoc; fame and fortune! I just finished a two-hour tasting of only six wines, Château Léoville Barton of the vintages from 2010 through 2015. What made that tasting absurdly time consuming? Why didn’t I just suck up all that good juice down, then wallow in it, instead of hunkering down and hammering away on my ageing MacBook Air in a corner of this office?

The simple answer is that shortly after I arrived in BDX I resolved I would treat the region and its wines as a blank page. That was at the breakfast early on Monday morning at Château Mauvesin Barton in the AOC of Moulis where I have been staying since Sunday evening. In fact, that isn’t anything else than my regular determination to treat each glass of wine I encounter as just that: another glass of wine that either tastes good or doesn’t. I was once told told by a rather important colleague that this is “empiricism”, a term thrown out with a pejorative tone, as if to say, “OK, young man, you might have a bunch of experience and be reasonably intelligent, but I can’t take you seriously!” For me empiricism means nothing but acknowledging how I experience the world – my truth – also that part of it in the wine glass – my truth in wine.

It felt good to make that resolution and I was quietly confident that I wouldn’t find it difficult to keep, because it isn’t difficult for me to do so on a regular basis in Berlin or New York. However, as soon as I started tasting I found it was much more of a struggle here in BDX. The problem is all the baggage in my head. Lugging that around is real hard work. In my case, this is the residue of all the great BDX red wines I drank during the last 35 years on the positive side, and various negative experiences I had in this region and with its wines, on the other side. At almost every moment I felt torn more in one direction or the other, and it was a real challenge to simply merely calm.

There will be more about both those things in the first of my forthcoming series of stories for the Grape Collective website about BDX, but in the meantime let’s continue along this diversion I’ve taken. Watch that space soon!

There’s also plenty of baggage just lying around this place, for example, the famous classification of the wine châteaux of 1855. The proposals various colleagues of mine made for a new classification or for an updating of the existing would only perpetuate the hierarchical structure that pervades the BDX wine industry. Undoubtedly, there are places in the region where it is much easier to make a great wine than others, because some vineyard locations make a sensational grape quality possible that can’t be obtained elsewhere, however well you tend the vines. However, the hierarchy of the 1855 and other classifications of the wines have nothing to do with nature and everything to do with the traditional nature of BDX and French society, in spite of the French Revolutionary principle of Égalité. Although the rigidity of that society has been significantly loosened in recent years you still bump into it. If I look at the way my colleagues are judging these wines, then I have to say most of them are following it some degree.

Given all that it was appropriate that the best discovery I made during this trip was Château Brans Grand Poujeaux in the AOC of Moulis en Médoc. It’s not even a Cru Bourgeois, the lowest rung of the hierarchy of wine estates here, but the wines are rich and subtle. Moulis has a history of bucking the system and to good effect. One of the first exciting young red BDX wines I tasted was the 1978 Château Chasse Spleen, also an unclassified wine estate in Moulis. While exploring Moulis yesterday it was striking how the wines of Chasse Spleen have maintained an astonishing stylistic consistency since then, always being sleek, fresh and dry and the quality slowly inched up too thanks to the work of director Jean-Pierre Foubet (pictured above) and his team. Around the corner at Château Poujeaux quality is also and the wines have a completely different style again, one that’s suave and elegant. With the 2011 vintage Château Mauvesin Barton became the fourth top producer in this AOC. Even the best recent vintage of all these wines can be found for under Euro 30 a bottle, or a slightly higher number if you’re paying in US$. See www.wine-searcher.com.

Another piece of baggage lying around is the global prejudice that BDX reds are expensive wines, but that turns out only to apply to about 3% of the production of this region: the famous and classified growths. However, even there the differences are huge. 2015 is an excellent vintage here (and most of the better wines will be bottled in a few months time) and the Léoville Barton I just tasted has a combination of ripe black fruit aromas, concentrated dry tannin and fresh acidity that creates an elegant and ravishing whole. You can buy it on futures for a little over Euro 60, and although that’s not cheap it’s certainly not wildly expensive.

Let’s put that in the crazy local context though. The rather lusher and slightly softer, more immediately appealing 2015 from neighboring Château Léoville Poyferré is also a very impressive wine in a more “modern” style for perhaps Euro 5 more per bottle. That seems like consistent pricing until you turn to the other Léoville in St. Julien: Château Léoville las Cases. It’s 2015 sells for about Euro 100 more than that per bottle. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you about that vintage, because the Château wouldn’t give me an appointment although I have only written positive things about their wines. That’s not the point here though. In BDX pricing is all about the classification (all three Léovilles are 2eme Grand Cru Classé) and reputation – Léoville las Cases has the highest of the trio. The Médoc Château with the best combination of classification – 1er Grand Cru Classé – and reputation is Lafite Rothschild in the commune of Pauillac immediately to the north of St. Julien. For a bottle of the 2015 vintage of that wine you’ll have to pay another Euro 300 more than the Léoville las Cases of the 2015 vintage. These situations only apply to the top 0.3% of Bordeaux wines though. As Abba famously sung, “Money, money money / Must be funny / In the rich man’s world.”

An old saying says that the higher you climb the further you can fall, and this is very true of this kind of wines. The effect on me of those highs (in wine prices) and those falls (when the taste doesn’t measure up to expectations) multiplied over 35 years are what I’ve been struggling with. The struggle has been well worth while though, and I managed enough calm to gather a lot of new impressions and get a lot of new ideas. However, time is running out to write the first of my BDX stories for Grape Collective…see you there soon.

Although work on my movie was completed several months ago my thoughts have returned to it, because my producer and I recently submitted it for the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. We feel this would be an ideal venue for it given the unconventional nature of the work. Here is a brief introduction to the project which I began planning in 2013, and for which shooting and editing began in earnest early in 2014. Before leaving New York I did a small private screening for a group of friends and it was encouraging to hear how they found the result funny, but also informative and to see how well they responded to its distinctive style and tempo. Of course, not everyone will love it!

Of course, even the title of the documentary movie I made together with producer, editor and cameraman Klaus Lüttmer of Berlin in Germany will strike many people as abnormal. Either half of the title looks fine on its own, but the combination of the two halves is downright strange. That’s because the 65 minute movie tells a seriously strange story, and we felt it would be cruel to make viewers expecting a regular movie of the kind Hollywood churns out, when it’s actually light years removed from them.

Making this kind of movie wasn’t our intention at the beginning though. Then our goal was to make an entertaining 20-30 minute film about the Riesling grape, its wines and the global network of fans who drink and celebrate them. I’m a British wine journalist living in Berlin and New York and Klaus, who also makes wine in the Ex-East Germany, felt that I would provide a colorful anchor. Believe me, we wanted to tell a seductive tale of wine and food, funky winemakers and beautiful wine regions scattered around the world. However, the unexpected and shocking events that unfolded during the shooting swept us along in a gonzo direction far removed from our original plan. Or would you call it normal that some fans of one kind of wines threaten the lives of certain fans of another kind of wine?

We live in strange times and WATCH YOUR BACK – The Riesling Movie (Part 1) explores this situation with brutal honesty. When Klaus and I began shooting in New York City and Berlin in 2013 Klaus Lüttmer and I were rather naïve, but it wasn’t long before we realized that our movie could only end up being a dark and disturbing tale drenched in fear and paranoia. Sometimes that made it exciting to work on, but at other times I literally feared for my life as a group of fanatical Chardonnay fans pursued me across America from Venice Beach in LA to Manhattan in New York. Were they only trying to frighten me off promoting Riesling, or were they seriously intending to rub me out? It wasn’t clear.

A number of things made that last possibility seem plausible. The booming American wine market of the early 21^st century was the scene of battle for market share and Riesling enjoyed a sustained renaissance there that culminated in a “Summer of Riesling” being celebrated each year in bars and restaurants coast to coast. On the other hand there are almost 100,000 acres planted with Chardonnay in California and the producers of the big brands of these wines form a lobby who didn’t welcomed any of this. No doubt they would have been delighted if all the Riesling advocates had been spooked into silence. Maybe the fanatics making up the self-styled Chardonnay International Army (CIA) were operating without industry support or financing, but their actions appeared to meet with the tacit approval of the Chardonnay lobby.

The prime motive of Klaus Lüttmer and I was to record these events in a form that accurately reflected their nature. Shooting “from the hip” with cameras small enough not to attract attention was often a matter of necessity, but as this strategy developed we quickly came to relish the edgy look it gave our movie. The fact that I ended up shooting large sections of the movie myself – I have a BA in Fine Art from a London art college, but I’m not a trained cameraman – accentuated the grungy aesthetic we locked ourselves into.

However discrete I tried to be about that material my activity with the camera was noticed by the thugs who were trying to intimidate me. To our horror this inspired them to send us a series of videos that made their threats gruesomely explicit. Fearing that it would only enrage them further we bit the bullet and included this material in our movie. It makes an extreme counterpoint to the thoughtful analysis of the development of the global wine industry provided by experts like economist Dr. Karl Storchmann of NYU, but this also seemed to say something important about the contemporary wine world. Wanting to include all those facets made the movie stretch and stretch until we reached 65 minutes.

The result is totally different from other recent documentaries on wine subjects such as Somm (dir. Jason Wise, 2013) or American Wine Story (dir. David Baker, 2014). Nor is there much similarity between our movie and the feature films Sideways (dir. Alexander Payne, 2004) or Bottle Shock (dir. Randall Miller, 2008). Our recommendation is that you see it and if you end up cheering for Riesling, then watch your back!

My New York days are numbered and I am busy packing up all my stuff, part of which is going back to Berlin where I will spend the winter and part of which is going into storage here in NYC where I will return to search for a new home in the spring. This unexpected and unwelcome change is thankfully not the only thing happening now. On Sunday November 13th I am flying to BDX (Bordeaux) for a week of research, or as I sometimes call it re-search for a series of articles about BDX for the Grape Collective website. Why?

BDX and I go back a long way. In the spring of 1981 when I was a barman at the Tate Gallery Restaurant in London I tasted my first high-end red Bordeauxs (1971 Château Cheval Blanc was the most decisive experience) and was instantly fascinated. However, my love affair with these wines has been stormy with moments of complete elation, but also some painful shocks leading to periods of virtual abstinence. Of course, the dramatic price rises also dampened my enthusiasm for these wines, but that’s nothing specific to me. Most people have price limits for an everyday bottle and for special bottles, and when your favorite wines break them you either reluctantly abandon them or ration yourself. She who bought herself a 12 bottle case of a particular chateau in every good vintage now either buys a 6 pack (which have become very common since the post 2000 price rises) or buys none at all. This – the erosion of traditional markets and their replacement with nouveau riche markets – is unquestionably a challenge for BDX. The same must also be said of the almost complete disconnect between the market for the top 2-3% of the region’s production and the rest. These are subjects worthy of investigation.

For me there are other, more important reasons that I’ve decided to shortly return to BDX and one of them is pictured above. I got to know Damien Sartorius of Châteaux Léoville Barton, Langoa Barton (both in St. Julien) and Mauvesin Barton (in Moulis) last year in New York and stunned by how much he knew given his age. He is just 26. From the beginning he was asking me when I was coming to BDX and the better I got to know him the more certain it became that I would take him up on his offer to help me write something new about BDX. My goal is to shatter the unquestioned “truths” that are actually just oft-repeated myths and to hang all the boring journalistic clichés out to dry. What Damien is – a winegrower and winemaker with a profound understanding of all the technical issues relating to the production of red BDX with an extremely cosmopolitan appreciation of wine – made me decide in advance to give him a major role in the story.

Of course, every story needs to develop a life of its own, and my story will acquire it’s own dynamic very quickly once I get started. The flights are booked. During the next few days a program for my week in BDX will begin taking shape, then I will start work on the first of the series of stories I will be writing for the Grape Collective website. Of course, that is where my stories about the hipster somms of NYWC  (New York Wine City) appeared. As in that series I won’t hesitate to say exactly what I think, and I shall also adopt an “anthropological” approach to my subject. However, BDX isn’t NYC and the nature of the land and the culture of the region will also shape my story.

To get me thinking I will be tasting and drinking some red BDX, as I did the other day at Racines on Chambers Street with Damien (Thank you Frederick Wildman for the invitation). That first serious taste in a long time immediately connected with my memories of that first Close Encounter of the Third Kind back in the London of 1981, it made me think back to all the sensational bottles that kept my love affair with BDX alive, and made me remember how for decades I yearned for a world in which I could afford to drink top BDX wines at my own expense from time to time. One thing I now know for certain is that this “better” world is never coming. The question at the front of my mind is therefore if there’s also some good news from BDX. Watch this space to find out!