Heirloom Blog

The traveling would be far and wide to visit the three makers of white wine in this month’s holiday 2015 club box. Why not start in Santa Barbara County, where people like Bob Lindquist and Jim Clendenen, who have been plying their trade their for decades, continue to deliver many of California’s best wines at astonishing prices. Otherwise known for his Au Bon Climat wines, here Clendenen is represented (not for the first time) by his boutique family label Clendenen Family Vineyards, and the 2013 Chardonnay ‘Pip.’ ($25)
This wine is made from fruit sourced from young vines at Jim’s flagship vineyard, called ‘Le Bon Climat,’ and as we have come to expect from him, it reminds us that California chardonnay need not be 1) overly rich, nor 2) overly richly priced—in order to be delicious, balanced, terrific with food. From Santa Barbara to the Mediterranean coast of Corsica, the Abbatucci family has been around for centuries and their vineyards for decades. The 2014 Ajaccio Blanc ‘Cuvee Faustine’ ($32), comprised entirely of the Italian coastal grape vermentino, comes from 40 year-old vines that were planted by Jean-Charles Abbatucci’s father Antoine in an effort to retain some of the island’s viticultural history. Vermentino is often associated in the wine world with the sea—it is almost always planted somewhat proximate to the coast—and it’s hard to imagine a bottling being more expressive of salinity and briny citrus than this one. To the northeast of Corsica by about 800 miles, in the western end of Austria’s famed Wachau valley, lies the world-famous winery of Franz Hirtzberger. Synonymous with the very upper echelon of Austrian winemaking, Hirtzberger has been setting the bar for top gruner veltliners and rieslings since he assumed control of his family’s winery in the early 1980’s. These are wines so good that they could be included in every wine club box, but the 2013 Gruner Federspiel ‘Rotes Tor’ ($35) forced our hand because of the extraordinary 2013 vintage in Germany and Austria. The Rotes Tor vineyard sits in a cool spot above the Danube river in the Wachau, and was an irresistible choice to show off the blazing acidity and complexity of these wines and this vintage.
Somewhat more geographically concise are the red selections—nothing here but California and France. I would be remiss if I didn’t lead the red section by introducing our first-ever Heirloom wine, which is the first wine made under our own label: Ringer. The Ringer concept is something I’ve considered for years, and was conceived as way to bring special one-offs from top winemakers to our guests when they become available. Ringer #1 ($26), the inaugural Ringer, was made by Bob Lindquist with fruit from his biodynamic vineyard outside San Luis Obispo called Sawyer-Lindquist. It is 100% syrah from the terrific 2012 vintage, we are deeply proud of it, and what’s more, have high hopes for what this ‘little’ wine will turn into in five or ten years. And while I’m on the subject of aging: herein also lies a wine perhaps more ageworthy than any other that has ever appeared in these boxes: the 2010 Bandol from Chateau Pradeaux ($40). Not a terrible idea to taste this wine now, at the infantile age of five, but it would be quite a safe bet to like this wine’s chances in 2030 or beyond, assuming proper storage. Bandol, the most famous appellation in southern France’s Languedoc region, is itself somewhat famously long lived, and Chateau Pradeaux, managed by the Portalis family since…1752, might well be the greatest producer of the zone. Typically comprised almost entirely of the grape mourvedre, Pradeaux rouge is always severely tannic in its youth and dark as a night in the country, and maybe the greatest ageworthy wine in the world for the money. Not to be underestimated in the aging department is a wine on the opposite end of the flavor spectrum from the Pradeaux—the 2010 Mercurey 1er Cru ‘Veleys,’ from Domaine Meix Foulot ($40). I was introduced to this wine at a dinner with Neal Rosenthal several months ago at which he brought out a magnum of the 1990 version. Stunned I was, to say the least, by the staying power and majesty of this supremely elegant pinot noir from the southern tip of Burgundy. With a vintage like 2010 available until very recently, we bought a few magnums ourselves. In the end, Neal himself would say, it’s not the brawn that makes a great old wine but the balance.

What a terrific grape chardonnay is, how much we love the best white Burgundies and great California chardonnays, and how refreshing it is to assemble a club box without even one wine made from it. The domestic non-chardonnay entrant to this month’s holiday 2015 box is, no kidding, the greatest domestic viognier I have ever tasted. Some of you may have heard of a man named Stephen Singer, who was married to Alice Waters and was the proprietor of a famous North Beach wine shop called Singer and Foy, and who some years ago decamped to Sonoma to grow olives and wine grapes under a label called Baker Lane. I have been impressed by his pinot noirs and syrahs for years, and had never tasted a viognier, perhaps because fifty cases of it are produced each year. This 2014 Viognier ‘Estate’ ($45) amazed me, full of the subtlety one finds in the best French viogniers and also with an unmistakably California girth. The other two whites here for me presented an irresistible opportunity to compare and contrast. News from the 2013 vintage in Austria and Germany began to trickle in months ago, and our first exposure to it was the arrival of the 2013 wines from Klaus-Peter Keller in Germany’s Rheinhessen region. Just as advertised, Keller’s ‘13’s exhibited depth and blazing acidity that I think could rightly be called monumental—white wines for the ages. When I had the chance to buy a small number of bottles from two more of the wider region’s greatest winemakers I jumped at it. Included here is the 2013 Riesling ‘Reserve,’ ($54) from the Boxler family in Alsace, and Franz Hirtzberger’s 2013 Gruner Veltliner Smaragd ‘Rotes Tor.’ ($55) Wines from the small family-run Boxler domaine near France’s border with Germany are always among the area’s finest, and particularly remarkable for their acidity and minerality, which are not always found in white wines from Alsace. The Hirtzberger name is synonymous with the great wines of the Wachau valley in Austria, and with the production of some of the best gruner veltliners and rieslings in the world. Hirtzberger’s American importer Peter Weygandt told me once that what distinguishes the wines for him, apart from the quality of the farming and the situation of the vineyards, is Hirtzberger’s resistance to extended skin contact, and his devotion to what he thinks of as a purer, crystalline expression of these grape varieties.
Considerably more difficult to offer here any sort of common context for the reds, not least because it’s a long way between the famous Hirsch vineyard on the Sonoma Coast and…Greece. I’m sad to say, this 2012 Pinot Noir ‘Hirsch,’ Lioco ($56) is the last Lioco bottling from David Hirsch’s spectacular, Pacific-perched vineyard near Fort Ross, and maybe the great winemaker John Raytek’s last crack at it. In addition to the work on his own Ceritas wines, Raytek has been the winemaker at Lioco for three years, and has imbued those wines with the same expert touch and grace found in his Ceritas bottlings. Lioco’s contract with Hirsch has concluded, and so it may be the last time John works with this particular patch of hallowed land. What Nerantzi Mitropoulos intends in Macedonia I haven’t the faintest idea. But I will tell you that this 2010 wine he has made with a grape called Koniaros—nothing more than the only wine, to the best of everyone’s knowledge, made from this grape in the whole world, seems to me to be exceptionally good. Needless to say, I had never heard of the koniaros grape until this wine arrived at the restaurant courtesy of an old friend in the wine trade. Does it taste something like syrah? It did to me. It’s pretty rare indeed that I taste something entirely new and obviously great—and the truth is that for years I thought Greek wines really didn’t have it. This 2010 Koniaros, Nerantzi ($60) made me change my mind. And all of that happened before my friend told me that Nerantzi’s wife hand paints EACH one of these bottles while she sits on the couch at night. What. If you happen to be on your way to Macedonia to visit Nerantzi Mitropoulos you might think to stop in Tuscany, where there might be a few remaining bottles of 2010 Brunello di Montalcino ($60) from La Torre at the local bar. 2010 is fast entering the pantheon of great vintages (2001, 1996, 1990, 1982) in Tuscany, and I couldn’t help but include some of our slight allocation here. Built to last, and mesmerizingly good already.

Age in years of the building at 2500 Folsom: 115

Age in years of the design of the William Morris wallpaper at the restaurant: 136

Age in years of the La Marzocco two-group espresso machine at the restaurant: 1

Staff members who have designed desserts at Heirloom since 2010: 2

Staff members who have designed dinner entrees: 2

Staff members who have expedited and managed the dining room: 4

Floral arrangements composed for the front podium by Pat Miller at A Bed of Roses: 247

Reviews of a dining experience at Heirloom on the OpenTable website: 490

Percentage of diners who said in their OpenTable reviews that they would recommend Heirloom to a friend: 98

Epoisses cheeseburgers cooked, plated and served: 19,231

Gallons of water used to raise the meat for those cheeseburgers: 14,799,857

Gallons of water required for each cheeseburger: 770

Gallons of water that would be wasted if every guest left a full water glass on the table at the end of every night at the restaurant for a year: 3600

Heirloom Sunday night cellar dinners with or without winemakers: 37

Wineries from around the world featured in verticals on the Heirloom list: 46

Wineries from the US featured on the list: 14

Different wines on the Heirloom wine list vintage 2008 or older and $100 or less: 46

Different wines on the Heirloom wine list: 347

Vintages of Ceritas Porter-Bass Chardonnay poured by the glass in five years: 8

Current members of the Heirloom Wine Club: 92

Heirloom staff members who resigned their employment and returned: 5

Heirloom staff members who resigned, returned, and also worked in both the kitchen and as servers: 4

Past and present Heirloom staff members with tenures of two years or more: 9

Renditions of Happy Birthday sung to employees by everyone in the dining room: 11

Surprise visits at the restaurant by mariachi bands, so far, to celebrate Jaime’s birthday, which is July 16th: 0

Annual Valentine’s Day candy sent to the restaurant staff by the owner’s mother: 5

Heirloom babies born on opening day or after: 3 (+1 on the way)

Restaurants anywhere in the world enjoyed as much by Financial Times restaurant critic Nicholas Lander in 2013 as Heirloom Café: 9

American restaurants on Mr. Lander’s worldwide top ten list of 2013: 2

Evenings at the restaurant when we really could have used a ceiling fan or two: 16

Individual suggestions made to the owner by the staff that the restaurant could use a ceiling fan or two: 472

I have to confess—the expression ‘natural wine’ has always seemed to me to have a bit of a strange ring to it. Most of us I think have the impression that wine comes more or less directly from the earth, with not terribly much processing, which maybe is the reason that calling wine ‘natural’ has always seemed something like saying that dirt or vegetables are natural. You might scratch your head if someone referred to some natural vegetables, perhaps wondering what other sort of vegetables anyone could have in mind.
Such naivete came crashing to the ground last week with the news that a lawsuit was brought against some large-scale wine producers, and the allegation that eighty-three different wines were shown to contain elevated levels of arsenic. (I wonder if very many people outside the wine industry saw this story.) Whether or not the lawsuit has any legs (at least one very knowledgeable wine professional told me that he’s fairly sure it doesn’t), it is at least a reminder that we should of course take nothing for granted when it comes to what’s in our bottles of syrah and pinot noir.
The natural wine ‘movement’ is sometimes said to have picked up steam a decade or two ago in Beaujolais, when a group of winemakers there wanted, themselves, to be able to drink vast quantities of wine and began to bottle wine for their own consumption with little or no sulfites. For many years there has been an audible suspicion, heard outside the corner wine bar, that sulfites and the human body sometimes do not get along—though Lettie Teague in the Wall Street Journal recently wrote the latest smart debunking of the idea. Sulfites, also, according to a great many winemakers and wine industry professionals, have been known to be essential to the chemical stability and longevity of wines. Perhaps because most of the wines of Beaujolais are not candidates for very long aging anyway, the guys there who started to make wine ‘sans soufre’ (no sulfites) figured: well, nothing to lose by eliminating the extra treatment.
My own suspicion is that headaches caused by drinking wine have much more to do with some other factors, like dehydration, the one-two punch of alcohol and a lot of sugar, and tannins—especially the preponderance of them in red wines, which though I can’t prove it I feel certain take their toll on my body at least. There is an old wives’ tale about sulfites dissipating after seven years in a bottle, but I think it’s much more likely that something chemical happens to the tannins over time. I tell people when they ask that I drink virtually zero very young red wine—outside of an occasional glass of very young Beaujolais. And some of the very young Beaujolais I might drink in the summer, it’s true, has little to no sulfites added, but I think it’s the soft tannic structure of the Beaujolais’ grape, gamay noir, that makes me feel like I could have a glass and throw a frisbee at the same time. For what it’s worth, I can also happily imagine throwing a frisbee while holding a glass of previously-very-tannic 1979 cabernet sauvignon.
So I’m not sure what I think about the march to eliminate sulfur dioxide from the scene, or, for that matter, the push to use only native yeasts in the process of fermenting wine, which together with the sulfite question is either the first or the second most important priority to the proponents of ‘natural’ wine. It sounds like a nice idea to me to rely only on what is ambient in the cellar to get the vinification process going. Though a very reliable source once told me that Bob Sessions’ recipe at Hanzell Vineyards, for all of those years in the 1970’s, 80’s and 90’s when he was making brilliant wines, sometimes involved ‘commercial’ yeasts, which is to say yeasts that were brought in from the outside. I don’t know—I’m not sure that anyone does, exactly what difference it makes, but of course it’s also hard to denounce a practice which was employed in the production of wines which seem in some way to be a gold standard.
From all of these considerations arises a question, perhaps unanswerable, which might be at the crux of a number of health-related concerns: how much can we trust our palates and digestive systems to tell us what’s good for us? In the case of wine, it might not surprise you to hear, I think we can trust a good deal. No matter the technological advances, the viticultural laboratories which have been erected to work towards synthesizing deliciousness, the veritas is still in the vino, and doesn’t show any sign of moving out.

***

It doesn’t hurt of course to get to know a winemaker a little, to see his grapevines and also his ducks and chickens and sheep, to take a walk in the forest with him and listen to him talk about foraging for wild mushrooms. I did these things recently with Gideon Beinstock, who has for many years been the proprietor of a winery called Clos Saron, which is situated in the Sierra Foothills near Nevada City, about an hour north of Sacramento.
It could be his Israeli childhood or time spent working on kibbutzim, or the years he spent living as a painter in Paris, or his fascination with the science of winemaking, or his sweetly gentle demeanor, or the fact that he slaughters his own lambs—he is probably not the guy behind you in line for a cappuccino. He is a guy who can spot a cluster of mushrooms under a dark pile of pine needles and dirt, and who can tell you rather definitively whether they’ll be delicious in your pasta or they might kill you. In my experience with him, he seems like someone very unlikely to make pronouncements, or to hitch a ride on something faddish.
He is also the first person to have piqued an interest in me regarding ‘natural’ wine. The reason wasn’t that he uses only tiny amounts of sulfites, or that he eschews the use of commercial yeast, or that he doesn’t fine or filter his wine, or that he stomps his grapes with his feet. Apart from the foot-stomping, he has plenty of company locally and abroad with regard to those other practices. Gideon had my attention when he put a short glass of his 2010 Clos Saron ‘Home Vineyard’ Pinot Noir in front of me. I’m sure that at the time he told me a lot of things about the 100 cases or so of the wine he made, or certain things about how it was made, but I was captivated by the wine and have been, upon revisiting it, ever since.
Gideon’s wines, mostly pinot noir and syrah based, seem to me to have the qualities of the greatest California wines. They’re balanced, certainly—quite moderately alcoholic, with lovely acidities and tannic structures, and they also have what is for me the x factor that separates competent domestic wines from great ones. These wines seem to know how to convert the ripe California sun into something feral and wild and delicious, rather than just hot and sugary. It’s almost as though certain winemakers, working with fruit from certain sites, are able to say, “It looks like we’re going to have a little stretch of ninety-five degree weather. Let’s pack it away in the top drawer, maybe pick a few days earlier, and see what happens.” Many of the great California winemakers of the last thirty years—Cathy Corison, Michael Havens, Randy Dunn, Philip Togni, Bob Lindquist and Jim Clendenen, lately John Raytek, have made red wines that obviously grew up under the California sun, but which seemed to channel that brightness into an extra dimension of complexity.
Last week I tasted two wines from Gideon’s slate of releases that were extraordinary, and which in some quantity I would like to offer you: the 2012 ‘Home Vineyard’ Pinot noir and his 2009 ‘Heart of Stone,’ which is 90% syrah and 10% viognier, much like a typical wine from Cote-Rotie in the Rhone valley. Both of these wines offer what seems to me to be a staggering price to quality ratio. The Pinot Noir is a house built of savory materials rather than sweet, and yet still, even at 13.2% alcohol, could hardly be said to be wanting in the pleasure-giving department. The 2009 Heart of Stone is rather more like a coliseum—a wine of massive structure which could, if you let it, command your attention for decades if not centuries.

2012 Clos Saron Pinot Noir ‘Home Vineyard’ $55/btl.

2009 Clos Saron ‘Heart of Stone’ $42/btl.

I love Jacques Puffeney and I hardly know him.

To understand the reason, I need not look any further than his history of, as my old friend Michael Havens once called it, a “commitment to a particular style over an extended period of time.”

Jacques’ particular style, honed and tweaked for decades in a little mountainside town called Arbois in France’s Jura region, has taken me some time to understand. I don’t believe he has ever tried to polish himself for a photograph or thought very much about how to become more widely or easily appreciated. Two winters ago I spent thirty minutes with him in his dank little wine barrel room and he poured tastes of wines for my friend and me.

He wore a threadbare old blue sweater that contoured his belly, and he was short—probably 5’3″ or 5’4″—I didn’t know he would be short. His dark eyes seemed sad to me, or just tired that morning. It was the end of March and it was still cold in Arbois. His gray beard was as bushy as you would expect a mystical mountain man’s beard to be. We understood very little of what he said in French, except that a certain wine had ‘beaucoup acidite,’ or that another wine was ‘doux.’ We also, somehow, understood that his daughter had gone to work for a big hotel company on the other side of the mountains in Geneva.

When we returned from Europe, Neal Rosenthal, Jacques’ American importer for many years, only hinted that his winemaking could be nearing its end. “He doesn’t seem terribly well to me, Neal.” “Well, Jacques is a contemporary of mine,” Neal said, as if to suggest that the two were somehow similar not just in age but also in terms of health or longevity. “But Neal,” I said, suggesting delicately that he had not seemed a model of fitness, “he isn’t a long-distance runner.” “No,” Neal quickly replied. “He’s a long-distance eater!” And he told me that there was no clear successor to Puffeney, that he couldn’t be sure what would become of these winemaking methods that produced such magnificently idiosyncratic wines for all these years, what would become of the famed Savagnin and Trousseau and Poulsard grapevines themselves.

Before the Puffeney in my life, I knew what I was talking about. Flavors were familiar, all of them fit in one or another cubby hole in some very manageable context. There were pinot noirs and cabernet sauvignons and chardonnays, and hamburgers and fresh-picked apples and old world lasagna. Some things were sweet, or rich, or sour or salty or spicy. I thought I had a bead on things. Tasting the first few Puffeney wines was like being handed a glass of some something that came from another planet. Before there had been yellows and greens, beeswax and honey, lavender and clover. Now there was something that Rabelais really could have appreciated—a little of which he might have poured down his shirt right in the middle of dinner, just because. It wasn’t very clean to begin with, that shirt. Sure, here are the usual sunshiny yellows and reds, the ripe fruits and agreeable acidities of the world’s most lustrous wines, but this musty, yeasty salinity, this flavor you’ve known all your life but never really knew until now. There had once been a bite of a raw mushroom, and for a couple of seconds upon swallowing it a searing instant of earth and cinnamon and iodine, and now here was the moment making itself available to you not jut for tasting but for revisiting. Keep that stuff coming, please, if you don’t mind—I don’t know where that comes from or how they make it but please don’t let my glass get empty. And yet the wines also have the sort of graceful balance that only things that come straight from the earth can have. When you take a bite from a great apple that just came off a tree you don’t need someone to tell you that it wasn’t made by a 3-D printer. The Puffeney wines, paradigm-shattering and Rabelaisian chest hair evoking as they are, have that same quality. They are straight from the earth, they are seamless, they are like nothing else.

And now it is official that Puffeney, bearer for years of the unofficial title ‘The Pope of Arbois,’ is retiring. There is no succession plan in place—the domain was recently sold to the Burgundy winery Marquis d’Angerville. It’s hard to imagine that the contents of the bottles will have the same magic. The method of the winemaking, generally speaking, is a matter of public record. ‘Sous Voile,’ it’s called, and it means, literally, that wines rest ‘under a veil’ of yeast as they age in old wooden barrels. Puffeney certainly isn’t the only winemaker in the Jura to practice this method, and his retirement certainly won’t mean the end of this particular, uncommon style of winemaking. But neither is it easy to imagine that wines with personalities like these will be produced again. The Jura has plenty of competent winemakers, and none of them but one are the Pope.

In the village of Arbois, which looks a little like what Auburn or Placerville would look like if they were on the way to the Alps instead of the Sierras, every restaurant serves Coq au Vin Jaune. Arbois Vin Jaune—the yellow wine of Arbois, is the great wine of the region, and they use it to braise chicken and mushrooms, which they serve over white rice. Vin Jaune must age for seventy-five months ‘sous voile,’ during which time it acquires a depth of dry rich flavor found virtually nowhere else. Once bottled, it will improve for quite a longer time than you will, unless perhaps you are a newborn or plan to live for 150 years.

My friend Hiram Simon, a man with a very great palate who distributes the wines of another Jura winemaker named Stephane Tissot, confessed to me once that he prefers Tissot’s wines to Puffeney’s. Hiram told me he finds Tissot’s wines more polished, cleaner, finally more compelling. I gained some clarity when he also told me that he prefers Tissot’s chardonnays—not made sous-voile, to his more oxidative savagnins, which are not for everyone.

Savagnin, the grape used to produce Vin Jaune, is for me one of the great gifts of the natural world, at its holiest and most feral after decades of aging. I’ll own bottles of Puffeney’s Vin Jaunes until the day I die.

Popes and their wines don’t retire, they only grow old.

Bob Sessions, who was the winemaker at Hanzell Vineyards in Sonoma for thirty years, passed away on Tuesday at the age of 82. A vineyard photo of Hanzell has hung at the head of the Heirloom dining room for four years since the restaurant opened, but probably only a handful of our guests know how important he and the winery are to me and to the restaurant. I’m grateful to have a chance here to say a few things about one of the greatest men I have ever known.

***

Sometime in 2003, around the time that wine began to shape many of the ways in which I think about food and life, I visited Hanzell Vineyards in Sonoma for the first time. I had known about Hanzell wines for a three or four years, having been introduced to what was probably a 1996 Chardonnay by a young sommelier in Boston who handed me a glass I’ll never forget. Sometimes—often maybe, words don’t offer a lot by way of accompanying the experience of tasting something, and I can clearly remember Christian, his thumb and index finger holding the base of the glass and his arm outstretched, looking at me as though he was waiting to watch something momentous happen to me. When I left Boston and landed in Los Angeles at a restaurant called Campanile, where the wine list was focused mostly on Italian and French wines but where Hanzell bottles were regarded like family heirlooms, I learned that that first delicious sip in Boston had come from a winery with a bit of standing in California’s wine history.

On my first trip to Napa and Sonoma, at the end of a long and winding mountain road that led to the top of the most beautiful vineyard-planted mountain I still have ever seen, I was greeted by Bob and Jean Arnold Sessions, who received me with a warmth—how do I say this? They received me with a warmth that doesn’t seem very common in this world. They had recently found each other after long careers in the wine industry—Jean spent years working at Chalk Hill and for Jess Jackson and Bob had been the winemaker at Hanzell for three decades. It was easy to see that their love had been worth the wait. Jean had become the president of the winery around the time they were married; the man she married was as much a part of the magnificent property as the giant oak tree outside their offices that still stands like a guardian over the rows of mid-century chardonnay and pinot noir vines. I remember an early impression of these two people and their enchanted home that made me think of a sort of bucolic Camelot.

In the years and visits and tastings and meals and walks through the vineyards with Jean and Bob, I came to have a very particular idea about what it means to preside over something with grace and beneficence and excellence for more than thirty years. What was most immediately striking about Bob, besides his length—he was probably 6’3″ (though I always had the sense that he curled his shoulders just a little so I wouldn’t feel short next to him)—and besides his huge hands (me: winemaker, you: restaurateur), was the way he immediately made you feel as though he was as happy to be around you as you were to be with him. I think he was the kindest and most modest person I have ever known. That he was a major figure in the history of California winemaking was a notion that seemed, truly, never to have crossed his mind. People who make wine are sometimes (though less and less often) described as stewards of the land on which they work, like selfless vessels through which the rains pour and the grapes grow and the juice ferments. Ten minutes with Bob was enough time to grasp such a characterization in its entirety.

And in spite of how sweetly self-effacing he was, or more likely because of it, the wines were, and remain, unspeakably transcendent. When I arrived on their doorstep eleven years ago it was because I had located a stash of Hanzell Pinot Noirs from the mid-1970’s, and I had been awestruck by the depth and complexity and youthfulness of each of the bottles I too quickly opened. I thought in those days that I had happened upon the tip of a vinous iceberg—that old Hanzell wines were just my first discovery in what would probably be a line of glorious old wines from California and around the world. I was wrong. The pace of my cork-pulling slowed precipitously as it dawned on me that no more than dozens of most of these wines remain, but bottle after bottle affirmed what had been initially only a vague suspicion: these were among the greatest wines in the world. Having now spent years working in fancy dining rooms, and having been offered my share of sips of old and rare (and priced accordingly) bottlings from Romanee Conti and Roumier and Leroy, I can say with at least some authority that it’s a very rare thing indeed to taste a great Burgundy of comparable age which is fit to warm up the stemware for an old bottle of Hanzell.

Why exactly this is so I can’t say, and not because I’m keeping a secret. It was impossible to get Bob to talk about the singularity of the wines he made, I think because he was convinced to his core that there was nothing to it. Yes, some whole clusters, yes some judicious use of oak, yes, harvesting at the right time. It was all the rhythm of Hanzell, it had been laid out by Brad Webb (the winery’s first winemaker) in the 1960’s, Bob might have told me that all he did was come to work everyday. What the wines almost certainly were—and what I would give to know exactly what a young 1974 Hanzell Pinot Noir tasted like, was very tannic. Bottle after bottle from that era unleashes a preternatural freshness and a structure that simply doesn’t make any sense in forty year-old pinot noir. While I can’t say for sure, I have always been inclined to the supposition that these wines were deeply idiosyncratic in their youth. Legend has it that the entire first vintage of Hanzell Cabernet Sauvignon, which arrived in 1979 for what turned out to be a twelve year trial, was shelved—never released for sale—because Bob thought the wine was too tannic.

What is for certain about Bob, and what for me had come to seem the most salient single aspect of his work and career, was that he hardly seemed to know or care that someone might have been sitting at a desk in New York and assigning a score to one of his wines. It was a different age certainly—when Bob started at Hanzell Marvin Shanken was several years away from launching Wine Spectator, Robert Parker was still in law school. And as the modern age of glossy magazines and flaccid criticism and 90 point scores began to reshape global winemaking in the late 20th century, suggesting to winemakers everywhere that the public prefers this style or that, I believe quite firmly that Bob Sessions was not listening. I believe that he listened for hours instead to Jose Ramos, who arrived at Hanzell shortly after he did and became the property’s vineyard manager, because the love and camaraderie between the two of them, who managed decades of harvests together, was clear as a Sonoma sunrise. I think he listened intently to the vines and the dirt and the fermentation tanks.

It should be said that the economics of the wine world forty years ago, like the economics of every other industry, also hardly resembled the patterns of behavior in our own contemporary age of chasing profit. With not more than a hunch I’ll suggest that Hanzell was never in those days a place where oceans of money were made, and the quietly brilliant work Bob conducted in the vineyard and the cellar was buttressed by a string of owners of the winery who were probably not finally obsessed with triumphant profit and loss statements. Still, one can’t help but wonder about the diversity and relative integrity of wines which are produced in the context of different economic circumstances, and this one can’t help but think that we passed for a minute through a golden age when work for its own sake and modest craftsmanship were ever more prevalent than wine scores and shiny full-page magazine advertisements. Bob marched at the front of that parade, and he did it, as the saying goes, like nobody was watching.

In the midst of the grief and the sympathy I feel for his wonderful Jean, the greatness and sterling character of Bob Sessions and of the wines he made will gently remind me of these and other things for years to come.

I did not enjoy watching the film ‘Somm,’ which was released last year and is about four young men and their breathless pursuit of something called a ‘master sommelier’ accreditation. The film follows them through months of preparations, of studying flashcards about some of the more arcane corners of wine production and geography, of a countless number of late nights spent tasting unknown wines in order to refine their practice of identifying what was made when or where or by whom, without having anything to go on but the smell and the taste. The film seems to invite some quick and ready objections with a shrug, as if to say, for instance, who cares that the story is so unrelentingly male? We should perhaps suspend our disbelief as the quaintly peripheral girlfriends and wives watch the guys cultivate their alpha-dog competitiveness and swing their dicks around; true passion for wine is not something for women. It was hard for me not to squirm through all of the “we can do this!” and the goal-orientation, as though wine is something that with a good push can be summited like a Himalayan peak.

But there are two rough spots in the film which seem more deeply problematic, and which finally are even more central to widely-held, ever-creeping misconceptions about wine. The first was broached by a savvy young New York sommelier named Carson Demmond, who cautioned in an article she wrote for the online journal called Punch that we should hope to remember that to be a sommelier of any level or accreditation is first and foremost to have a particular job. The word sommelier itself actually has quite a lot less to do with expertise than it does with service and stewardship. Nobody with a wine list in her hands at a restaurant or a wine bar wants to be approached by someone who doesn’t know whites from reds, of course. And of course no meal was ever made worse by someone who simply had good information about one Burgundy vintage or another. But good earnest service and simple good taste are foolproof. If you’re nothing but the smartest guy in the room I think I’ll probably come up with a choice on my own thanks.

The restaurant work and guest service which are given little more than the pass of a toreador’s flag in the film are not exactly the same as a summer walk in a vineyard. The hours are long and frequently last late into the night, and serving the public and trying to make everyone in a dining room happy is a kind of grueling challenge that any seasoned professional will describe colorfully without too much of a prod. And while it should be said that some of the 135 earnest souls who have won their master’s lapel pin in North America continue to arrive four or five nights a week for pre-service meetings and be on hand for late-night conversations about whether to drink Vouvray or St. Aubin, a vast number of freshly-minted masters seem to view passing the exam exactly as a quick ticket OUT of the restaurant business. Wineries and sales companies that rely heavily on branding and status, eager to have their luxury brand associated with an aura of expertise so rare, are more than happy to expedite their move to the private sector.

Then there is the question which seems to me to dwarf all the others, which regards the amount of time that it takes to reach this vinous summit, to become the wine expert who finally remains to set our olfactory pathways aglow and flutter our taste buds. One need not have an abundance of experience with wine to surmise that there are a few things to know about it, or that many of the impressions worth having are incremental sorts of thoughts and capacities, the subtle kinds of things that someone who is interested in craft understands tend to arrive on their own schedule. Mastery of this sort is a matter of years and years, and comes not by way of a six or twelve or even twenty-four month course of study. Not since the Karate Kid waxed on and off for two hours to find his Zen has anyone entertained the possibility of a connection between youth and so much wisdom.

A young sommelier who is paying attention will commit herself to learning the basics, about regions and appellations and winemakers and varietals and vintages. And one lucky day she will for the first time hold a short glass of Jean-Louis Chave Hermitage, and she will know from smelling it that she’s holding something with explosive flavor. She may have some sense that there is something singular about it. The first taste feels like a tidal wave of ripe complexity—she can hardly catch her breath as she wonders whether those were fine tannins she just swallowed. What she cannot know, through no fault of her own, is how the 2009 Chave she just tasted compares with the 2008 wine from the same address. Neither can she know how the 2009 compares with the 2012, which is still in barrel in France. Neither does she know anything about how a Chave Hermitage from a comparable vintage made ten years ago seems today, but wow she would love to taste the 1999. Neither does she know very much about how Jean-Louis’ wines are stylistically different from the wines his father made for thirty years before Jean-Louis assumed the family mantle, or what broader implications for the wine world could be discerned in a generational handover of the winemaking reins.

And here is the rub, the great and most wonderfully-singular thing about wine: there will be no rushing any of it. Mother Nature allows no shortcuts here, no new technology to help in the quest to ascend faster than everyone else. If you know someone very generous and with a deep cellar of course you could sit and consider five vintages of Chave at once, but it won’t mean much without more context. It’s terrific that you’re fixated by 2010 white wines from the Jura; save your money and go to France and talk with winemakers in Arbois about sous voile winemaking and vintage variation in the foothills of the Alps. Eat Raclette until your skin smells like it. You’ll still have to wait five years to taste the next five vintages of the wines. There’s just no getting around it. The dial comes around every twelve months, my friend, not too much faster or slower. This is something about which to feel inspired and humbled.

Tasting wine and talking with people who have been tasting and talking about wine for ten or twenty or forty more years than I have, whether they have ever heard of carbonic maceration or not, reminds me of everything about wine and tastes and culture that I don’t know. And that is very likely exactly what it is that puts a kick in my step when I’m really enjoying dinner service. You never know what’s under the cork of that old bottle you just pulled from the cellar, or how it’s going to taste with the pizza. I’ve only tasted nebbiolo from the 1970’s twice before. Let’s open it.

So I think I won’t ever be interested in the master’s lapel pin, because I’d rather act the part of the guy who doesn’t know everything, because the old adage about realizing that you know less about wine as you start to know more is true. Because when it comes to wine, it pleases me to say, I have so much to learn.

And it’s not because I haven’t studied my flashcards.

December 3rd, 2013

It is with a good deal of excitement that I write to tell you about the six extraordinary wines which comprise the first-ever delivery of the Heirloom Wine Club. The first installment features four different countries, four different vintages, and, possibly, wines from two of the best American winemakers of whom you’ve never heard.

Graham Tatomer apprenticed himself to the great Austrian winemaker Emmerich Knoll on the hunch that he might like to make wines from gruner veltliner and riesling grapes in California, and it’s lucky for us that he did. His Gruner Veltliner ‘Meeresboden,’ ($24) which means ‘ocean soil’ and is from cool vineyard sites in Santa Barbara county, is the best domestic gruner I’ve ever had. Flinty, supple, dry and taut, it has the balance and nuance we’re used to seeing from famous Austrian bottlings, at a fraction of the price. From dry and Germanic we go to Harald Hexamer’s 2001 Riesling Hochgewachs ‘Meddersheimer Rheingrafenberg,’ ($30) which has more syllables than sweetness but a mind-bendingly copious supply of complexity. How rare it is to find great aged wine at reasonable prices; we’re hard-pressed to remember any wine even half this good for money like this. Take this mildly-sweet beauty with you on a walk through a field of winter vegetables, cheeses, fat sausages, whatever. The modest roster of whites concludes with Philippe Foreau’s 2010 Vouvray Sec ($30), which is one of the world’s greatest dry white wines year in and year out, but which in this vintage is a true vin de garde, or ‘wine for keeping.’ Astoundingly complex and age-worthy though they may be, even the greatest expressions of the Loire grape chenin blanc still don’t command anything like the prices fetched by wines made from the more famous chardonnay grape to the east in Burgundy. Simply put, Foreau Vouvrays—dry and sweet—are my favorite white wines for the money in the world. My cellar is full of them, and if you ever have a chance to taste one which has rested in a bottle for several years, I wouldn’t be surprised if you stash a few away also. I’m very glad to offer this 2010 Sec—a wine I can’t wait to revisit in twenty years—as part of our first box.

Gideon Beinstock’s 2012 Cinsault ‘Out of the Blue,’ was made from grapevines which were planted in 1885 in the Sierra Foothills, twenty years after Mark Twain wrote about a famous jumping frog from those parts. I often tell people: surprises don’t come along very often for me anymore in the wine world. I’ve been buying professionally for ten years, and after a certain point one tends to sort of know what’s out there. Beinstock’s Clos Saron winery has been the very major and very happy exception for me since Heirloom opened. Tiny production, extremely minimalist winemaking, low alcohol levels and extraordinary complexity are the hallmarks of Beinstock’s excellent work. From vines averaging merely 60 years of age comes Gerard Prudhon’s 2008 St. Aubin 1er Cru ‘Sur le Sentier du Clou,’ ($31) a red Burgundy with the depth and pedigree of a wine three times as expensive. St. Aubin is an appellation in the southern part of Burgundy where white wines are king, which accounts for the delivery of a wine this good for a price this reasonable. A 2010 Nebbiolo d’Alba ‘Valmaggione’ from the great Piedmontese producer Brovia ($30) is left to close out the selection of reds, which means that the roster could stay open for business for a decade or more. From a vineyard in Alba about twenty minutes north of Barolo, here is a nebbiolo-based wine with an abundance of the traits we love about great Baroli and Barbaresci—tannic structure, deep red fruit qualities, and the herbaceous and savory aromatics of the best northern Italian reds.

Please enjoy now, or for even more pleasure, further on up the road…best, Matt
(Refer a friend to Heirloom Wines, receive a magnum of wine as thanks!)

In the summer of 2000, I was twenty-seven years old, had said some goodbyes to friends and family in the Northeast, and contemplated, while standing on the overpass at Fourth Street and Ocean Park Boulevard in Santa Monica, a near-term future at least on the west coast.  I possessed in my professional quiver not more than a few years of restaurant work, but there had been a strategy from the beginning, and that was that a little bit of good restaurant experience could be pretty helpful in the pursuit of employment in strange new cities.  Los Angeles could hardly have been stranger to me.  I had one friend who lived there and a couple of  cousins.  I made a list of the eight or ten best restaurants in the city, and submitted applications at all of them.

Within a few days I received a call from a woman named Jessica at a restaurant called Campanile on La Brea Avenue.  She invited me to come to the restaurant for an interview, and I set about figuring a way to make myself look presentable and began to consider the prospect of landing at this place.  I remember that it seemed in some way alternative to me.  Before I had walked through the front door, whatever I gleaned from the restaurant website or online reviews in the days when those were written mostly by professional critics, gave me the feeling that I was in for something different.

I was at that moment fresh from a job in Boston at a restaurant called the Federalist, where, I was surely proud to say, I had demonstrated my abilities at the highest level of restaurant service.  I had been fitted for a fine waiter’s uniform by one of Boston’s top fashion designers, I had opened and served expensive bottles of wine and set them gently on sterling coasters on beautiful clothed tables.  I had worked to understand and to become comfortable in the ceremonies of dinner service to wealthy people.

About this Campanile place, words were used like rustic, and country, and I remember one expression in particular, “temple of food,” which was used to describe it more than once.  People seemed to talk about it as though it was some kind of fraternity, maybe like an outing club or a bird watching club.  It seemed to me like it might not exactly be up my alley.  I was looking for the place where diplomats dined on caviar and abalone and drank great Meursault, and found gleaming silver cloches protecting their plates when they returned from drying their hands on fine linens in the bathrooms.  But maybe this little hippie spot could help me get a foot in the door in the city.  I could pay my bills while looking for a job at a really great place.

So on a warm and sunny Los Angeles summer afternoon, I walked into a space which indeed felt and looked nothing like any restaurant I had ever seen.  There were skylights and natural light everywhere, old stones and bricks and tiles, a little fountain with a pool and and a few fat red goldfish just inside the front door.  It seemed something like a Mediterranean or North African bazaar, though not because I had ever seen one of those.  It was lunchtime and the space was buzzing with food service.  The colors were softly muted greens and bricks and perfectly juxtaposed, primary, blues and yellows.  The place was a bit of a feast for the eyes.

In an office upstairs, Jessica asked me if I knew about grape varietals.  I had followed her up a staircase next to the bar that was just wide enough for a person, and sat down with her in a little non-descript office.  “Jacques will be up to talk with you in a minute, and he’s going to ask you some tough questions about wine,” she said.  Jacques arrived a minute or two later, looking like a fit, flush-faced adolescent boy in a nice pressed suit.  Smiling, with a Cheshire grin he wore more or less permanently, Jacques wanted to know if I knew the difference between cabernet sauvignon and nebbiolo.

It turned out that I did know the difference, and it was a good thing for me, because a couple of days later I worked my first shift at Campanile.  What was immediately striking, I remember, was that everyone in the restaurant seemed to care about the difference between cabernet sauvignon and nebbiolo.  I had to familiarize myself with just six wines which were being offered by the glass—three white and three red, but the three red wines were wines that might or might not have been remotely recognizable to anyone.

At first I could hardly believe that it worked, that there really were enough guests to fill such a massive space who were happy to choose between a nerello mascalase from Sicily, a cabernet franc from the Loire valley and a zweigelt from Austria.  If I had walked up to the people I had waited on in Boston and offered them a glass of zweigelt at least half of them would have looked at me as though I had just jammed a pencil in my ear.  It didn’t take long for me to learn: in this place, merlot enjoyed no advantage from some arbitrary pole position in the American culinary vernacular.  Here, merlot wasn’t disqualified, but neither was it offered because it had to be.

The approach to wine, as explained by resident scholar and wine director George Cossette, was that the wines we poured needed to be not only delicious, and to represent value, but also to be authentic in some kind of regionally traditional way.  I learned that on the one hand, there was an endless supply of subjectivity in the wine world, and on the other hand that there were real discriminations to be made.  One should certainly discern the delicious and the not-so-delicious, and note the traditional bottle of Tuscan sangiovese as something different than the wine produced by a fledgling Tuscan vanity project winery which had been recently erected by three investment bankers hoping to make world-class cabernet sauvignon and merlot in Tuscany.  George used to say that if there was a certain wine that all the fishermen drank when they came in from their boats to their coastal village in Italy, we wanted that wine.

If it took some time for me to cobble away at the mountain of information and nuance that was the Campanile wine list, the activity and production of the kitchen produced a farily immediate astonishment.  In terms of the pricing of the menu and the sheer volume of dishes prepared I had never seen anything like it.  I had served my share of $35 entrees before, but those were the delicately-constructed, museum-style plates in Boston which were turned out a couple at a time, often by two or three cooks working together on individual components.  On Friday and Saturday nights at Campanile there were sometimes 350 people having dinner and paying those prices, and these plates weren’t half as precise as the ones I had served at places like the Federalist and the Harvest.  I remember, in the early going, feeling as though the whole thing was some kind of Hollywood ruse.

Then I began to taste the food, and to put it plainly, my life changed.  The flageolet beans and bitter greens and olives with the ribeye steak, the Brussels sprouts caramelized in Balsamic vinegar and covered with breadcrumbs and Parmesan cheese, the Copper River salmon with perfect sweet English peas and feather-like cauliflower puree—they all changed my life.  I grew up eating not just junk but certainly my share of fast food and Drake’s cellophane-wrapped coffee cakes.  I hadn’t ever tasted anything like any of these things.  It was like learning a new language, with a vocabulary of things that came from the natural world.  There were flavors and textures more complex than any of the fine and expensive foods I had known on the east coast.  This was the California cuisine that had been made famous by Alice Waters at Chez Panisse and Judy Rodgers at Zuni Café and Mark Peel and Nancy Silverton at Campanile, about which, I soon realized, I had known only very superficially.

The particular word and idea that came to occupy such a big part of my thinking about food, and also about wine, was rustic.  It was a word that I heard tossed around at the restaurant for a few months, and one day I asked Mark what he meant by it.  “A rustic plate,” he said, “is a plate that looks as though it just fell out of the sky and landed on the table and had everything on it jostled around a little.”  There were two implications in this idea that were perhaps the most formative elements in my developing gastronomical sensibility.  The first was that there was no substitute for the finest quality ingredients of every kind.  Whether sourcing English peas or salmon or olive oil, when the intricacy of the plating takes a back seat to the flavors, the quality of the ingredients has to be first-rate.

The second idea was the paramount importance of diversity in cuisine.  What was possibly the most singularly amazing thing about Mark and Nancy’s plates was how uneven they were and how spectacular they were in their unevenness.  In Mark’s sautéed trenne pasta, in which triangular bits of pasta were sautéed crispy and served over beef and kale Bolognese and covered with shaved parmesan, lucky diners found no two forkfuls alike.  Some pieces of trenne had been sautéed hard on one side, and had two remaining sides that were still supple.  Nancy’s rustic apple tart—built like a medieval throwing star, was intentionally constructed to be just a shade fatter in one or two corners of the gloriously browned crust than others.

There is a premise behind this sort of approach to cooking which has it that an avoidance of uniformity, when executed at a high level, is likely to provide an eating experience which is less predictable, and as a consequence, brimming with vitality and sensory stimulation.  But it bears no resemblance to the kind of provocation one sees frequently at fine restaurants that has to do with the unlikely combination of esoteric ingredients.  It is one thing to be confronted by a plate with monkfish liver and persimmon and cocoa nibs, and to consider such an intersection never before imagined.  It is quite another thing to settle in comfortably to a steaming bowl of pasta Bolognese and to savor each bite for its distinction and particular deliciousness.

To say that this way of thinking has ramifications in the world of wine is something like saying that the farming of grapes has something to do with the world of wine.  How obvious the magnificence of, say, Jacques Puffeney’s weirdly oxidative white wines from the Jura seemed when one approached the tasting of wine looking not just for deliciousness but also for distinction.  How very defensive I felt, after watching Jonathan Nossiter’s groundbreaking film Mondovino after it was released in 2004, on behalf of the regional winemaking in obscure parts of Europe that looked vulnerable to consensus and corporate avarice and globalization.  And how much I appreciated it when Maria Jose Lopez de Heredia from Rioja, conducting a tasting 2006, proudly confirmed the variation found from one bottle to the next in her estate’s wines.  “In my family making wine is like making tomato sauce,” she said.  “They can taste a little different, depending on who is standing at the stove.”

As I write this, in the aftermath of Campanile’s closure late last year, it occurs to me that there has never been any variability in the effect that my two years of work at the restaurant had on my career, or even on the person I am today.  For one thing, I opened a restaurant about three years ago—after working in restaurants for more than twenty years—that has Campanile written all over it.  From the colors to the wine glasses to the wine lists to the cuisine, none of the restaurants on my resume influenced the development of Heirloom even half as much as Campanile did.

But there is also, there has always been, the mindset that was created in me from the time I spent waiting tables at 624 South La Brea Avenue.  Nothing could ever be so important to me now, or to the food we serve at Heirloom, as my recollection of the time Nancy Silverton told me that in the early days of Campanile she would walk up and down the cooking line every night tasting every piece of mise en place in every station.  Where would my wine cellar have gone if George Cossette hadn’t explained the primary importance of a dedicated space for wine storage to me?  I remember, like it was yesterday, the tireless food runner Tomas Martinez poking his head around the corner as I was ordering something at a computer terminal at the back of the restaurant, and saying “Man, you better go talk to Nancy.  She’s pissed off.”

Tomas, if you can hear me now, forgive me, but it never, ever turned out to be the case that Nancy actually was pissed off.  She never wasted any time or energy on being pissed off.  It was always the case that she considered feeding her guests the way a general considers a battle plan—with clarity and purpose, and a focus in her steely brown eyes that conveyed some unmistakable truths: that this was serious business, that nobody should be fooled by the slight asymmetry of an apple tart, and that even though it was just dinner, there was quite a lot at stake.

Matt Straus has been working in food service for the past twenty-three years, beginning with a stint at the neighborhood McDonald’s when he was fourteen. He worked primarily in kitchens until he graduated from college, at which point he began an extended involvement with service and wine. Prior to moving to Los Angeles in 2000, he worked in renowned Boston restaurants such as The Tuscan Grill, The Harvest and The Federalist, as well as with the acclaimed late French chef Sophie Parker, in Saratoga Springs, New York.

In his first five years in L.A., Matt held service positions at Campanile, L’Orangerie, Sona and Grace, where he performed the duties of wine director, managing a service staff of twenty and a wine list of almost 400 labels. In March 2005, Matt returned to the kitchen after studying European cuisine at the Pacific Institute of Culinary Arts in Vancouver, B.C.

Following his culinary education, a return to Southern California and kitchen stints at two Los Angeles restaurants, Matt became wine director of the brand new Wilshire restaurant in Santa Monica–a post he would hold for three years, and one which provided him with the opportunity to apply his skills and experience and build a wine culture from the ground up.

During his time at Wilshire, Anthony Dias Blue honored Matt as the Best Wine Buyer/Sommelier in Los Angeles in Patterson’s Beverage Journal, StarChefs.com named him a Rising Star Sommelier, and Food and Wine Magazine called his wine list at Wilshire one of the Ten Best New Wine Lists in the country.

Matt presently lives in San Francisco, where he owns Heirloom Cafe, a restaurant dedicated to high-quality, simple food and great wine.  He was named one of the top sommeliers of 2011 by Food and Wine Magazine.

review of Reflections of a Wine Merchant by Neal Rosenthal (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008)

It hasn’t always been so, but today it is the great paradox of wine that something so simple as a glass of fermented grape juice should be at the center of such impassioned worldwide considerations of taste and style, history and tradition, craftsmanship and global marketing. In my job as a sommelier, I live in the constant presence of this paradox. I make a living buying and selling wine, gauging levels of quality, weighing in tableside on the latest curiosity, recycling stories about great bottles and the great people who made them.
And yet all of this must seem gratuitous—even silly, to lots of people whose faces conceal none of the stupefaction they seem to feel when people start talking about wine. For many, when the conversation turns complex and philosophical about wine—it’s all much ado about nothing but a simple little drink. But to those who do fall under the mysteriously beguiling captivation wine can conjure, it is a source of never-ending nuance, intrigue and even controversy. From beginning wine drinkers moving through a tasting room schedule in Napa to old hands debating the relative merits of two vintages of Burgundy from the 1970’s, the universe of wine can seem like an interminable series of unanswerable questions. What makes this taste this way? Why does that taste so different? Why is that wine so expensive? Will this bottle be even more spellbinding in ten years than it is now?
Under the surface the considerations seem more momentous and more complicated, some of them cutting straight to the core of how people taste, what sort of work we value, how we regard our relationship with the natural world. Wine is the world’s lone example of an agricultural product, theoretically available in every corner of the globe, which has as much to do with artisanal human stewardship as it does with what the soil and the sun yields. With a little prodding, fields produce wheat and corn and apples and tomatoes, but wine production requires a vastly different quality of human effort—both physically and mentally.

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