A Moment in the Dirt

A result of the rapid and simultaneous conclusion of several DIRT SEARCH investigations at the Lab's Farewell to Los Angeles gala, we've had quite a bit to say about terroir recently.

So I thought it might be worth jotting down a few quick notes on the subject.

Terroir isn't like pornography. You don't always know it when you see it. It's not the minerality. It's not the earthy smell. At least, not always. And drinking different wines from the same and adjoining vineyards only solves a part of the mystery. Because you need to taste longitudinally too; you have to drink the same wine over a span of vintages to really understand that ethereal combination of grape, soil, weather and wine-maker.

You also have to drink other wines from the neighborhood. And wines from across town. Because to understand the specificity of a vineyard, you need to need a good handle on the generality of the grape as well.

If it were possible to produce a neutral example of Pinot Noir or Riesling or any grape, you could start with a "fruit baseline". Then you could compare your baseline to site specific wines. And the divergence would be vineyard, climate, viticulture (terroir) and... manipulation (not terroir). But there's no such mythical grape. So learning to recognize terroir requires a lot of experience. And Dirt Search experiments are a good way to gain it. So is drinking with people who have a lot of their own experience. So is drinking un-manipulated wines -- which helps you learn how to spot wines that are manipulated, as some call them: spoofulated.

But, in the end, why should terroir be this Holy Grail of booze consumption? Why should we work so hard to figure it out? And what do we get if we do?

All fair questions.

And the answer is further complicated by the fact that most people who talk about it don't actually know what it is.

So why should we bother with terroir?

For me, I guess I just love the idea of a moment in time trapped in a bottle. It's romantic, sure. And like all romantic ideas, it's a little bit silly. But the search for that mystical trinity of vineyard, climate and wine-maker, all captured in a single vintage and bottled for safe-keeping seems to me something worth looking for.

A New Year's Eve 10-Year Split

So my New Year's resolution is clearly not about more frequent or timely posts. The month is almost half gone and I'm just getting to this.

With apologies for my lack of punctuality -- about which I hope to have more to say in the near future, but it's a hard topic to tackle because it twists on the one hand on an existential crisis, but rises, on the other hand, on a tide of hedonism... but I digress.

To ring in the New Year, we sent the junior staff home early so we wouldn't have to share and with several senior researchers in attendance, we conducted a very satisfying old/new comparative experiment. We opened two bottles of Pierre Gimonnet & Fils's Special Club Champagne. A 1999 alongside an oenotheque (if it's appropriate to borrow the term. Given I'm borrowing it from a Grand Marque house, I'm sure it's not -- after all these are the people who have sued mustard producers and dog owners to stop them from using the term Champagne) release from 1989. The ten-year split seemed an appropriate way to end the decade (or start it depending on your level of mathematical training).

Pierre Gimonnet & Fils is a medium-sized (25 hectares) winery based in the village of Cuis but with vineyards in Chouilly, Cramant and Oger (a tiny parcel). They grow Chardonnay exclusively. At the forefront of the grower champagne movement (pretend with me that there is such a thing), the winery has the distinction of always being the first entry in Terry Theise Catalog.

The Special Club, or more accurately, the Club Tresors de Champagne, is a sort of casual consortium of small Champagne producers established in 1971 as an early antidote to the Grand Houses of High Fashion & Hip Hop Champagne. The rules are simple and straightforward, to be a member you have to grow your own fruit. Didier Gimonnet, the vigneron in charge of Pierre Gimonnet & Fils, presides as president of the Club. In theory, the Special Club bottling represents a member's top wine. In the case of Gimonnet, it is definitely so. A blend of old-vine fruit from Chouilly, really old-vine fruit from Cramant (80+ years) and the best of the house's Cuis parcels.

The 1999 was brilliant. Fresh and energetic with bright, mandarine acidity. It was enormously linear and deeply mineral, so much so that I was sure you could smell chalk on the nose, along with brioche and almond paste. As the hours counted down to midnight (or 9:30 which was when I went to bed), this got better and better. Until it didn't. Right as the clock stuck twelve (poetic license), I poured yet another glass of this. I got a nose full of sulfury burnt match. No idea where it came from, and by the next morning it was gone. One of the weirdest things... as my eldest child would say... ever!

Without any weirdness at all, the 1989 was just flat out astonishing. It made the very good 99 look like something I might have picked up at the local Piggly Wiggly. It took almost 3 hours to fully open, but then the nose offered up layered and slightly oxidized aromas of nuts, pain perdue, honey and stewed apples. In the mouth, it was elegantly structured and precise. The acidity on the attack was still youthfully vibrant. Mid-palate there was a big, creamy and honeyed malo component, like creme brulee extract might taste. The finish was a lingering mix of chalk and hazelnut that tolled like an ancient but familiar echo of the younger bottle.

Obviously, dialing back the flowery prose also failed to make the list of resolutions.

Happy New Year!

Dirt Search #1: The Battle in Nouy

This is rare opportunity. Two wines. Two winemakers. Same dirt. And celebrated dirt at that. The Clos Baudoin (clos, by the way, means the vineyard is surrounded by a wall) is an ancient vineyard in the Nouy Valley in Vouvray, and widely regarded as one of the best terroirs in the Loire. Until recently, the vineyard was owned by the descendants of Polish royalty. But in 2002, François Chidaine, a young and brilliant winemaker from across the valley in Montlouis, took over maintenance of the vineyards and production of the wines from Prince Poniatowski. In 2007, Chidaine took over the Clos Baudoin completely.

What a contest! In one corner, Chidaine, who makes brilliant wines. I've never had a bad one. And some -- like the off-dry 2005 Montlouis Les Tuffeaux -- verge on sublime. And by the 2006 vintage, Chidaine had fully converted the Clos Baudoin to biodynamic viticulture and resurrected the vineyard from a state of disrepair. Unfortunately, in the other corner, the Prince's 2001, was a product of that disrepair. Chidaine found himself in a position to take over the Clos Baudoin in some measure because the Prince was 80 years old, but also because his last vineyard manager had been unimpressive and the vines were diminished. The wines from the late 90s up to the final vintage, the 2001, are generally regarded as sub-par. So it isn't really a fair fight. But that doesn't matter, because we are looking past the wine-making, past the vine-pruning and seeking out the deeper mysteries of Clos Baudoin terroir that surely lurk in these two bottles.

First in the ring: The Prince. Straw colored. On the nose, quince, dry grass and an oddly pleasant petro-chemical smell that seemed to rise and fade and return over time. In the mouth, this drinks like a wine with interesting parts that never really come together. Crisp, if indifferent, pear, an odd spice note (cumin?) and then the acid seems to throw in the towel and flee before a watery, mineral finish. Like gravel juice if there were such a thing.

Then Chidaine. Same straw color. Much bigger, brighter nose. Honey, clover, pear skins and marzipan. Fresh on the attack, with pear and white pepper, followed by a sweet, limestone finish. A little more residual sugar in this, but still dry. Beautifully integrated for a young Chenin. Be nice to have a cellar full of this one.

Very different wines, but quite clearly cousins. There is an unmistakable common character to them, but I would have trouble articulating the relationship with any specificity. Both do seem to have that same dilutive, gravel juice pause before the finish. Though in the Chidaine it is much shallower. And there does seem to be something of the Prince's petro-chemical aroma (as a child, I loved the smell of gasoline, which explains much) in the mineral finish of Chidaine's wine. Gravel juice and gasoline? Are these the characters that make this patch of dirt so famous? I doubt it. I know from reviews that the chemical smell was cited as indication of the Prince's decline, and so, also, of Chidaine's rise in Vouvray.

So where is the terroir? Surely it's there in that shared, cousinly character. But it isn't something obvious. Nor is it something precise and specific. Like Einstein's childhood fascination with a compass, always turning to the polar North, "Something deeply hidden has to be behind things."

Chidaine's 2006 Clos Baudoin was $26. The Prince's 2001 Clos Baudoin was $19. I got them both at K&L Wines in Hollywood.

A Search for Dirt

A definition (from the website www.terroir-france.com):

A " terroir " is a group of vineyards (or even vines) from the same region, belonging to a specific appellation, and sharing the same type of soil, weather conditions, grapes and wine making savoir-faire, which contribute to give its specific personality to the wine.

So that wonderfully ephemeral and elusive component of wine, that particular expression of a precise time (vintage) and place (vineyard) that wine-geeks seek, that magic combination of grape, sun, soil and rain, that thing called terroir, could be boiled down to this simple observation: "My mud tastes better than your mud."

Or so it seems to me. And I'm no cynic. I believe in terroir. I've seen it with my own eyes. I can't say I can always find it, even when it's there. But I believe. Terroir is a vague and mysterious thing and I possess only a vague and mysterious idea of what it is exactly. But I believe.

My very dear friend Mike Weersing (shown here in his own particular mud with his own particular pig in a photo I have unabashedly stolen from his winery's website), first explained the magic of terroir to me while we sat before 5 or 6 unlabeled wines in a gite near Beaune in Burgundy. I had no idea at the time that the education imparted to me on that evening would be so valuable. I also had no idea at the time that I wouldn't get to taste that many great Pinots at one time ever again. But we drank them, and Mike told me about the vineyards where they came from and what I should be looking for in the glass. And in this way, I was initiated into this strange culte à mystère.

I have in mind more than a few experiments designed to suss out this magic mud. And the first will be Friday's feature, an old-fashioned mud-wrestle: The Prince versus The Genius.

I Feel Fine : Joly, Day 5

Day 5: 4:34PM. Wet concrete and toffee. And still some volatile alcohol smells. On the palate, sweeter than before, with dried apricot and diluted pear. Less disjointed. And again that long, mineral, slightly metallic finish. Still fresh, building in power even. Bigger, rounder mouthfeel today.

Conclusions: I don't think there's any question that this wine changed expression over the course of 5 days. And it certainly held up against oxygenation. I would also make the subjective argument that Les Clos Sacrés improved over the period. And while it requires a level of discipline that I generally lack, I'm convinced enough by the results that I will make every effort to vigorously decant and give ample air time to my small, vertical collection of Clos de la Coulee de Serrant (pictured above) when I open them.

But there remains one, perhaps singular, problem to consider. Sure, this Les Clos Sacrés improved. But it wasn't very good to begin with. It was interesting. But not great. And, I suspect, flawed. To people who don't like them, Joly is often defended as making "Old World" wines. But I love Old World wines. And when they're good, I Iove Joly's wines; they can be sublime. But far too often Joly's wines are flawed. Not massively (though I have had a few that were undrinkable, perhaps even "imbuvable") and not always irredeemably, but flawed enough that the character of the fruit is compromised. And therefore, it seems to me, the expression of terroir that Joly and his fans prize (myself among them) is also compromised.

I had a look at the tasting notes for Les Clos Sacrés on CellarTracker. There were seven notes, commencing in September of 2005 and the most recent coming from April of this year. If you read with a predisposition to find flaws, you could imagine that 3 of the 7 bottles were off. They are variously described as, "tainted by the strong smell of petroleum," "coppery/slight chemical elements" and less ambiguously, "a losing number in the Joly lottery."

As a thought experiment, I think we could try to imagine that Rudolf Steiner might possibly accept the use of a small amount of sulfur dioxide to keep wine free of bacterial taint. It might keep me from looking elsewhere for sublime expression of Loire Valley Chenin Blanc.