Full-on full English for the launch of Salon 2002

Corney & Barrow celebrated the launch of Champagne Salon 2002 with a full English breakfast, which of course included shaved truffles and Haricots a la mode Delamotte (baked beans, cooked in Salon’s sister wine, if you really need to ask). The nice upstairs room at Mess at the Saatchi Gallery was flooded with sunlight, on a morning of such luminous gorgeousness (such as only Chelsea can provide) it was no surprise to see London’s finest wine hacks turned out in force. Corney’s even coaxed Decanter’s Sarah Kemp out of her lair in the Blue Fin Building in Southwark. Full-on full English, bacon-wrapped sausages and all, washed down with vintage Champagne at ten o’clock in the morning is what they call a no-brainer.

 

Salon 2002 English breakfast, Corney & Barrow style

Salon, of which the 2002 is only the 38^th vintage since the founding of the house by Eugene-Aimé Salon in 1905, is produced in minute quantities: there are 62,000 bottles and 5000 magnums of this vintage. Compare that with Dom Perignon’s six million plus (according to most best estimates) and you begin to see what ultra-exclusive means. Corney’s share their  allocation with Vineyard Brands in the US, Alfa in Singapore and Paolo Pong’s Altaya in Hong Kong, leaving about a pallet and a half for us, and guests including Matthew Jukes snapped up cases there and then, so that’s a few less already.

Chef de cave and Salon Delamotte president Didier Depond described 2002 as ‘one of the very best vintages in Champagne. I compare it with 1982 for quality.’ 2002 is the first vintage since the 1999 (which was launched in Notting Hill’s fish and chip restaurant Geales in 2011).

According to Depond, Salon is the only house not to produce a 2000 vintage, which he dismissed as ‘very trendy – a perfect marketing vintage.’ Nor a 2012, though of course they have very much less choice of grapes: Salon is made from pure Chardonnay grown exclusively in Mesnil-sur-Oger in the Côte des Blancs, from a one-hectare plot owned by them, and 19 other smaller plots.

Vinification is in stainless steel and there is no malolactic fermentation. The 2002 was disgorged at the end of 2013 after ten years on the lees.

'Say "Haricots"': Didier Depond of Salon

The next Salon releases will be the 2004, 06, 08 and 2013. The 2008 will be released around 2024, only in magnum, ‘to preserve the wine’s intensity and acidity,’ Depond said.

He eulogised the 2002’s ‘pale, yellow green’ colour, and ‘explosion of white flowers’ on the nose. ‘I love the vivacity,’ he said. Rebecca Palmer, Corney & Barrow’s leather-clad associate director and Champagne buyer, said the wine is ‘captivating and enigmatic: gossamer-fine, [its] tiny bubbles seem to skim weightlessly over the palate.’

Indeed. A light-gold hue tinged infinitessimally with green, and – apart from the white flowers, the blossom, the fine acidity – a lovely hint of rain-washed hedgerow. And those bubbles do dance.

Others agree (although not exclusively: a well-known critic did murmur afterwards that he was ‘underwhelmed’). Jukes obviously loved it, and Richard Hemming, who writes for jancisrobinson.com, praised the wine’s ‘quiet authenticity’.

‘It’s convincing,’ he said. ‘At twelve years old, it is just hitting its peak, and will surely keep going for decades. I've tasted quite a few vintages of Salon, and the 2002 is one of the best at a young age, with the potential to be their best ever.’

Champagne Salon 2002 is sold exclusively by Corney &Barrow in the UK, priced at £1,325 per case in bond. One case only per customer.

Noble Rot magazine - giving the middle finger to the wine establishment

‘Fucking hell,’ says Lily Allen, ‘what the fuck is that?' It's the only instance I can think of which pairs the comely balladeer (she's basically Ian Dury as reimagined by William Gibson, if you will, in drag) with a Trousseau from the Jura. The interview is given a further salty tang by the photo, in which the first thing you notice is Allen’s middle finger cheerily saluting the photographer.

Samizdat: Noble Rot

That jaunty digit is what Mark Andrew and Dan Keeling’s Noble Rot magazine set out to give the world of wine writing – stick it to pomposity, verbiage, ‘the mind-warping, shallow dull content of most wine magazines’ as Jamie Goode is quoted on the back cover. And 90% of the time they’re spot on. Each issue (we’re on number 3) aims to be ‘totally different and better than the last,’ Andrew says.

Noble Rot is a fresh and stylish antidote to the established wine press. A disparate bunch of writers, chefs, photographers, artists, wine merchants and winemakers sound off on whatever topic tickles them and the editors. So in this issue we have Richard Hemming on getting pissed (‘the love of wine and the love of inebriation are as intertwined as Muscadet and oysters’), Cave de Pyrene’s Doug Wregg on Georgia, Allen tasting a flight of eclectic goodies like the Philippe Bornard Trousseau and Arnot-Roberts’ North Coast Syrah, a ‘21-year-old illustrator from Omsk’, sommelier Wieteke Tepperna, Neal Martin and so on.

I don’t know Dan Keeling, a former A&R man who signed Allen to Parlophone (so he’s alright by me). Andrew is a polymath whose day job is senior wine buyer for Roberson, the best wine merchant in London. He’s a Burgundy expert, Sonoma, more, can’t utter a sentence about wine without the word ‘structure’ in it, says bracing things like ‘the most boring wine regions in the world are Bordeaux, Napa and Stellenbosch’ because he thinks they’re ossified closed shops. He loves magazines, the physicality of them, and refuses to put Noble Rot online on the basis that 'everything is online, and if everyone's doing it, we want to go the other way.'

He admires Anthony Bourdain - Kitchen Confidential is one of his favourite books, because Bourdain 'contextualises' food and cooking and restaurants.

‘I love context,’ he says. ‘Most wine writing puts wine in a sealed bubble with no attempt to show where its place is in the wider world of art and culture.’ Noble Rot – which is funded through the crowdsourcing site Kickstarter to the tune of £11,607 with 276 backers – tries to prick that bubble.

Mostly, it works. The Lily Allen interview is a delight, capturing the wit and detachment that make her songwriting so brilliant, and ends with a lovely riff on the coolness of Cornettos; Daniel Primack takes a scalpel to the ‘rare wine’ orthodoxy: ‘I might start a new venture called the Even Rarer Fine Wine Company.' There’s a nice interview with Kermit Lynch, and I liked Graham Hodge’s thoughts on wine labels, and getting the designer of the Chemical Brothers album covers to critique labels like Kung Fu Girl and Petrus (didn’t like the first, adored the second).

Cheery salute: Lily Allen

Sometimes you feel it’s a bit self-consciously iconoclastic, or there’s a whiff of too-clever-by-half school magazine writing. Hugh Jones’s grape biographies are just too whimsical – ‘Syrah was sitting in a cherry-red wing-backed leather chair in his study smoking a cigar…’ – I’ve always found anthropomorphism too cutesy for my taste. Then there are the Dolly Parton descriptors, which are no fresher now than when the kids at Wine X magazine were trotting them out a dozen years ago. And the wine and music thing. There’s always someone who’ll tell you that love of music and love of wine go together, especially classical music - the more Teutonic the better – Wagner nuts are particularly tedious on the subject. But it’s a trope that goes through the industry, so while the bloke in red trousers can’t shut up about the Ring Cycle and how it goes wonderfully with Barolo, at the hipper end of the spectrum there’s all these references to Daft Punk and the Stone Roses.

Many wine writers are under the widespread delusion that broadcasting one’s music tastes confers credibility. There are some serial offenders, insisting on telling us what’s on their iPod, or 'turntable' as if they're teenagers on work experience at the NME instead of lauded wine critics. You know who you are. Take it from me – you may be brilliant on trellising systems and much else besides but no one gives a tuppenny fart what you think about the Arctic Monkeys.

But these are cavils. There’s so much to like about Noble Rot. It’s got a nice samizdat feel, Louise Sheeran’s illustrations are superb, it’s authoritative and witty, and you know you can rely on the writers’ opinions because – in the end – Mark Andrew is very, very serious about wine.

How green is my valley: French winemakers in Napa

'Purity, precision, structure, texture': Melka

Recent cooler vintages in Napa have encouraged producers to look for restraint in their wines. But how much is the style change welcomed by French winemakers in the region, asks Adam Lechmere

Read the full article here

This article first appeared in The Drinks Business

See also:
Interview: Ann Colgin
Francis Ford Coppola at Inglenook - from Decanter
A visit to Screaming Eagle - from Decanter
Tim Mondavi - The Decanter Interview
The Historic Vineyard Society of Sonoma
Stag's Leap Wine Cellars - Keeping the Faith - from World of Fine Wine
Napa Mountain vs Valley Floor
'We've got two wine OBEs in the audience today' - A Napa masterclass in London

Interview: Ann Colgin

At 9 a.m. on a delicious November morning, with a white mist rolling in the valley, Colgin’s IX Estate vineyard glows in the fall sun. It is a scene drenched in beauty, but it can be deceptive, especially when you remember the quantity of high explosives deployed to blast out the vineyards.

Colgin's IX Vineyard, Pritchard Hill, Napa

"I had been looking for a great piece of untouched hillside property for many many years," says Ann Colgin, who is businesslike, polished, and heralded by two fluffy white dogs (named Corton-Charlemagne and Gevrey-Chambertin to reflect her love of Burgundy). "I just fell in love with this particular parcel." The parcel was the 125-acre IX Estate on Pritchard Hill, which Colgin and her husband-to-be Joe Wender bought in 1998. They spent a year planting 20 acres of cabernet sauvignon with the help of "12 earth-moving machines and a bit of dynamite," completing the winery buildings in 2002.

Colgin’s history is well known. A Christie’s auctioneer with a degree in art history (an unfading passion: her home is filled with art and antiques, and she interrupted our interview to bid – successfully – for a painting by iconic American artist Ed Ruscha), she and her then-husband Fred Schrader started coming to Napa in the late 1980s. A burgeoning interest in wine was fueled by a meeting with consultant Helen Turley, and in 1992 she secured a parcel of grapes from the renowned Herb Lamb vineyard on the lower slopes of Howell Mountain. Robert Parker noticed – and smiled upon – the inaugural Herb Lamb Cabernet Sauvignon, and the Colgin reputation was born. She continued her search for vineyards, in 1996 purchasing the three-acre Tychson Hill north of St Helena. Two years later Colgin alighted on Pritchard Hill.

Her IX Estate sits high on this rocky eminence on the eastern side of the valley, just north of Atlas Peak. Colgin has illustrious neighbors, with some of them – Dalla Valle and Bryant Family for example – existing, as she does herself, in the ultra-rarefied heights of the Napa cult. It’s a term she disdains (she comes from Waco in Texas, where the word has different associations, she is wont to say), but the dictionary definition – "devotion or homage to person or thing" – is apt. Parker, for one, describes the estate as "Nirvana." Prices, while not reaching the stratospheric heights of Screaming Eagle are hefty. Few vintages of any of the cuvées retail at less than $500 a bottle.

One of the main attractions of Pritchard Hill is the extraordinarily poor soil. When a vintner up here tells you he took out rocks the size of Volkswagens, he doesn’t mean VW Beetles but slab-sided vans. There’s nothing unusual about using dynamite to break up the ground. It can cost anything up to $250,000 per acre to prep land for planting. Colgin’s landscaping efforts were comprehensive. The author James Conaway, in his controversial book "The Far Side of Eden," devotes some pages to it: a "scary" rockpile of "Brobdingnagian proportions," boulders rolling down and smashing municipal water pipes, abatement orders issued.

The neighbors claim Conaway "over-dramatized" the situation, but there is no doubt that Pritchard Hill has had extensive cosmetic work. It's all gleaming blacktop and electric gates, and behind them, palatial, rough-hewn wineries with tinkling waterfalls playing artfully down the rocks. Sometimes, the words "theme park" come to mind. There are some big-name consultants up here, crafting wines that for all their polish can lack a certain character.

I must stress that I don’t include Colgin’s wines in that bracket. They are universally admired – Robert Parker recently handed out 100 points to the 2010 Estate Syrah, the 2010 Cariad and the 2010 IX Estate (that makes nine perfect scores since the first vintage) – and it would be absurd to suggest they are anything but excellent. I haven’t tasted the 2010s, but I can vouch for the purity and freshness of the 2009 IX Estate, its dense, tar-and-nettle nose, the peppery, plummy rush of the palate and the beautiful precision of the tannins. Moreover, tasting back through the years to the 1995 Herb Lamb Vineyard, Colgin’s fourth vintage, you can see a consistency in the breathy earthiness, the minerality and the balance.

That the wines should remain consistent through changes of winemaker is key to Colgin’s vision. When one considers the nature and ego of top-end Napa consultants, this can be a difficult proposition. Her first winemaker, Turley, was described by Jay McInerney as "Valkyrie-like"; her second, Mark Aubert, left Peter Michael Winery to join Colgin and then took off in 2006 for Bryant – by all reports with little warning. He was replaced by his assistant, Allison Tauziet, the current winemaker. Also employed is Bordeaux consultant Alain Raynaud, a controversial figure in many circles for championing riper styles. A constant presence has been veteran viticulturalist David Abreu, who looks after all the vineyards.

While Colgin may be a Napa cult in any accepted sense of the term, its admirers insist it is different from many of its peers. Joss Fowler, fine wine director at London merchant Fine + Rare, calls it a "serious" wine. "The price of some boutique wines rests on their boutiqueness rather than quality, but people see the price of Colgin as commensurate with quality." Lovers of great wine, he says, gravitate naturally from high-end Bordeaux to Colgin.

Sometimes, though, when tasting the highest-end Napa wines, you long for an edge. They are so perfect they leave you slightly breathless, and you find yourself looking for a break in the seamless purity. Sitting in the winery’s handsome tasting room with Colgin, I quote Chris Millard at Newton Vineyards on Spring Mountain, who values "rusticity" in his wines – wild briar blackberry, for example, as opposed to cultivated fruit. The temperature doesn’t exactly drop, but there’s a moment of silence. "There has never been a rusticity in our wines," Colgin says. "What’s happened is we’ve taken it to another level with focus on purity of flavors."

Mist in Napa Valley from Pritchard Hill

Colgin is fluent and frank in interview, with a disarming throaty laugh and a readiness to be amused (as when I suggest there’s a hint of marijuana on the nose of the 2006 IX Estate: "Ha! That's one we haven’t had"). When it comes to her wines, she is keen to get across the intimate, almost claustrophobic focus of her operation. Multiple different parcels are picked and vinified separately. There may be as many as 27 individual picks, sometimes one side of the row, and the other days later. "We’ve taken it to another level with the focus and the purity of our wines," says Colgin. "There is so much precision in what we do. We micromanage. I think of it as more like a bonsai – it’s very dialed in." Indeed, as Colgin’s chief of staff, Paul Roberts, says: "Viticulture here can be on a level that very few people are operating on."

Colgin herself believes that "this project is so dedicated and specific, it sets us, along with a handful of other producers, apart. It transcends the idea of Napa Valley." Is this a sleight of hand, the notion of being at once rooted in the soil, and transcending it? You wouldn’t catch a Burgundian suggesting his wines transcended the Côte d’Or. Colgin’s dedication to terroir is manifest, however. She returns again and again to the primacy of site. "The land trumps the winemaker. Fifty years from now there will be a different winemaker, but he or she will continue to express this site.This area is known as Sage Canyon, and there is that sense of earthiness and herbs de Provence that is inherent in the land. The essence comes through in the wines."

In the end, it all comes down to place. Sitting up here, gazing through the picture windows while the mist disperses and reveals the valley below, you can feel slightly removed from reality. And the wines themselves (let’s not forget how much they cost) can seem not of this planet. But then you taste that spice, earth and perfumed fruit, and feel yes, they do seem pretty rooted.

(This article first appeared on wine-searcher)

See also:
Francis Ford Coppola at Inglenook - from Decanter
A visit to Screaming Eagle
Tim Mondavi - The Decanter Interview
The Historic Vineyard Society of Sonoma
Stag's Leap Wine Cellars - Keeping the Faith - from World of Fine Wine
Napa Mountain vs Valley Floor
'We've got two wine OBEs in the audience today' - A Napa masterclass in London

Interview: Robert Hill-Smith of Yalumba

Robert-Hill Smith of Yalumba in the Tri-Centenary
Block, a Grenache vineyard planted in 1889

An aristocrat of the Australian winemaking industry, Robert Hill-Smith is a scion of one of the country’s most historic winemaking families. However, it’s his vision for the future that has turned Yalumba into a dynamic global success story, writes Adam Lechmere

Read the full interview here

This article is published in Decanter magazine, February 2014, out now

Stag's Leap Wine Cellars: Keeping the Faith?

Stag's Leap Wine Cellars: the Fay and SLV vineyards looking
east to the Pallisades

Five years after its acquisition by current owners Antinori and Chateau Ste Michelle from founder Warren Winiarski, Adam Lechmere visits
pioneering Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars and asks whether its reputation as a beacon
of California elegance has survived the transition to more corporate ownership.

Read the article here

This article is published in current issue of The World of Fine Wine

Stoner, and California wine

Julian Barnes writes an interesting essay in the Guardian on Stoner, the surprise 50-year-old bestseller about an American academic who remains stoic in the face of disappointments. It’s a wonderful book (I’ve just bought half a dozen copies for Christmas presents), written in a minor key. The opening sentences set the tone – ‘Stoner’s colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now…’ – it’s rather like a Victorian watercolour, all washed greys and delicate greens, but no less striking for that. But back to Barnes: he makes the point that the novel’s success in Europe (it was published in 1965 and has taken off in the last six months or so – I bought it when I happened to catch Ian McEwan on the radio praising it) is not matched in America. The short story writer Lorrie Moore patronisingly calls it ‘a terrific little book...but minor’, (pretty rich since it’s vastly better than anything I’ve read of hers). Barnes quotes the novelist Sylvia Brownrigg saying its ‘reticence seems very not American… we’re such a country of maximalists’.

Stoner: 'reticent'

It makes me think that the much-touted ‘style change’ in California, given momentum by the cool and difficult 2010 and 2011 vintages (I’ve written about it as much as anyone else), is never going to take hold. The reasons Americans like the big, fruity style are so much more than Robert Parker, and Jim Laube in Wine Spectator, championing it in the 80s and 90s. Yes, California can and did produce elegant wines. I've had Spring Mountain Vineyard 79, Inglenook 61 and Newton 81 (all Cabernets) that weighed in at 13% or so, were vibrant and fresh and had many years ahead of them. But were they the norm then? Surely their peers were as hot and opulent as they are now, and the reason we don’t see them is because they’ve fallen apart, or indeed were drunk within a few years of being made?

For the style change to become widespread, so much else is going to have to change. American food, for one. I’m not talking about the rarefied Michelin top levels but the mid- to high-end $20-30 main course sort of operation. Ingredients are of the very highest quality but they are so made and each dish is such a cacophony of flavours that a wine has to shout to be heard.

I had a rainbow trout the other night that I imagine was delicious – it was beautifully cooked  –  but it came smothered under a pillow-sized heap of fried vegetables, carrot and bean, cashews, six different kinds of squash, a riot of taste and texture. Anything short of the 15.5%-proof Parador Tempranillo we were drinking would have been swamped.

 

Darioush: not reticent

Brownrigg describes the character of Stoner as passive, and suggests that’s what Americans find difficult. So too with wine – the big California style is active, bold, even strident, the wine shoulders its way onto the table in a bottle that demands attention with its weight and heft and a punt that swallows your fist entire. The contrast is restraint, acidity, structured tannins, austere fruit. Wines that don’t shout.

But. ‘There are always old boys down in Texas that like the big style,’ a Napa winemaker said to me. To paraphrase Julian Cope (talking about a band improbably called Tight Bro’s From Way Back When), ‘These guys don’t do low’. Indeed – and not only Texas. If your wine has a healthy domestic market, why on earth would you change its style? Doug Shafer intimated at a London tasting this year that perhaps to his personal taste the Hillside Select would be more pared-down, but every vintage sold out, so he’d be stupid to do anything different.

Reticence and maximalism are held in the balance; the scale might tip a degree here and a degree there but it’s going to take a lot more than a couple of cool vintages and some quietly striving winemakers to have any noticeable effect.