Finding New Stuff

J.R. and I were at the Butcher of Paris. The cat’s out of the bag now, but that was early in its illustrious life, our first time there, and it was pretty great. We chose a Pinot Noir from Ganevat and the men behind the counter introduced us to a bottle of Domaine Chevillard. It was either Altesse or Jacquère and we were about halfway through our first slab of French beef since landing. The wine was so, so good.

In the same way that certain wines can provoke your appetite, the blunt muscularity of grass-fed and finished beef really wants for a glass of wine. Its gaminess, its sourness, its spartan preparation here… all of it calls for juice. And all of it enhances those serial moments of pleasure that a surprising sip of something new can provide. A white canvas flatters its colors; when your mouth is filled with blood and fat, it is primed for fermented grape juice.

This alpine treasure was stately in its polish. Its subtlety and elegance were betrayed by the meat and potatoes such that all its masked tricks were revealed. These fleshy, moutain varieties tend to seduce rather than provoke. The lines are soft but solid, humming without vibrating. I felt very lucky to be sitting in this outdoor market steeped in perfumed tandoori, cigarettes, and suspended rain. It was a few degrees shy of room temperature, our senses were piqued and slowly warming with a full belly at around 5AM New York time.

All of that fails to mention the strange comfortablilty a glass of wine wears so close to its home. The weary, American, “Economy-Light” traveller is the most susceptible person to this phenomenon. In the throws of jet lag, I always think of William Gibson’s romantic explanation from his 2003 novel, Pattern Recognition: “That [one’s] mortal soul is leagues behind […] being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought [you] here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.” It explains so nicely the rawness of my senses in these moments, and also the supremacy of my body in its desires and discursions. Wine, conveniently, puts a label on these conscious moments and the quality of a wine increases in coordination with the length and fidelity of that sustain.

This wine was truly pallid and watery and grey. These grape varieties often give off a touch of green, but nothing like the Gatorade neon of young Chardonnay and more like a murky, blue, bog water. What’s a bog? I think it’s like a cold, British swamp, and so if you distilled that you’d have the clarity and color of this wine.

This very good restaurant subscribes to the philosophy of just kind of leaving its bottles out in plain air (this was March) so the reds are a little colder than usual and the whites are less than “frigid,” which I want to mean ‘of the fridge’. The “aromatic whites’ are properly suited to this decision and the Chevillard’s vespers inhabited our sinuses with honey, ripe mellon, white flowers and sage. Up high in my nose it was concentrated and tropical bordering on citrus. I recall throwing back the small glass and having this pretty sensation of paper whites, lilles, or goldenrod creep up, behind my eyes, and crack my skull open like an egg.

But what was holding the whole thing in suspension? How do these lower-acid varieties make up for the missing skelature? Something in the wine creates a space, transparency, latitude… a means to perceive the finest of grain. Something prevents the wine from becoming some mess of perfume soup. Something prevents it from it becoming a fruit jam. Instead, I’m recalling all of my drives up into the French Alps of Savoie, in diffuse sunlight and mist, catching mountain runoff in empty wine bottles and feeling electrically charged. The experience of distance, depth of field, guessing at which peaks had famous names.

I tasted the quenching sensation of salt. The back of my palate and beneath my tongue there was an ache like recalling a sudden, shameful memory. We can invert the famous Maya Angelou quote to say, “ The salt in your food is like the jealousy in romance.” There is a flooding of limpidity and your mouth waters and you reach for another gulp. It’s a physical reaction. Instead you pause, surprised because the spasm fades and all these delicate fruits light up your imagination, slowly changing like passing clouds.

These are, very simply, the wines I travel to meet. I spent years and years delighting in the most acidic, bracing and electric wines — the wines Andrew Jefford calls “close shaven” — austere, bright, confrontational, and undeniable. There is a poetry in the simplicity of Weiser Kunstler’s Mosel Rieslings or Thomas Popy’s lean Chablis of yore. My generations’ fixation on volatile acidity comes from this fascination with the bluntness of such a sensation and its affronting nature. I still believe there is a lot more information than we yet know how to talk about regarding acidity. When we can more deftly parse character from quantity, we will open a new world of pleasure, but I digress. Before me was a wine whose acidity took a back seat, and structure came from something deep in the soul of the wine.

“Damn good!” J.R. said, betraying his corn-fed roots. He’s taught me everything I know about wine so on these trips of discovery I like to have him along. I remember him snapping and making two Texas six-shooters with his thumb and fore-fingers when I reminded him we’d be in Savoie. Fate would have it that our journey was planned to end at a wine fair just outside of Chautagne and you might guess who would be there. Mattieu Goury would be presenting Domaine Chevillard’s 3rd vintage, and still in search of an American wine importer (that’s what I do).

J.R. was enthusiastic. I was suspicious to have a win so early on in the trip, but I liked the coincidence and I can’t really stress enough that I really liked the Butcher of Paris. So, I allowed myself to be enamored, which is always a cardinal sin.

From Paris we drove west to visit some of my friends and producers in the Loire Valley. We asked everyone about Chevillard.

“Oh, you haven’t heard of them? The wines are all over Paris.” I kept hearing myself say.

One or two people knew the name. A couple of young winemakers in Vouvray had tasted the wines. Mostly, I was very thoughtfully advised on winemakers known by my collegues and who I should look out for at the fair. I jotted down names and went back to thinking about Chevillard.

From the Loire Valley we shot south towards Bordeaux, all the way stopping in shops like the Terminator with a photo of the bottle we’d had. “Do you know this boy?” We listed to a lot of car music like Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Ray Vaughn, admiring the slick yet classically-styled labels on the Chevillard bottles, their remarkable value, their crossover appeal. You know, the wine sort of tasted like those effortlessly cool labels? We were very good at wine

Finally, at our tried and true caviste in a top-secret location, we met a fellow head. He knew Mattieu and had admired his work from even before the inception of the Chevillard domaine. All he had left in his shop was the single-parcel Roussette (a slightly different value proposition) and the red (Mondeuse). All of this was very fortuitous since we were bounding towards another, very exciting prospect in Cotes du Cadillac who just happened to own a winery and a regenerative cow farm. He promised steaks and we dreamed big, but not big enough. We had chased the dragon down the nights and down the days; once again we were ready to meet that surprising pairing and toast to our good taste.

The steaks at the Chateau were Flinstonian in dimension, a sight I’ve longed to see ever since. Never has the height of a côte de boeuf so rivaled its length. Pretty cool. When the bottle of Roussette impressed the admittedly conservative Bordelaise as much as it did J.R. and I, I felt a bit like Fred Flinstone himself. What a life this was! and the steak!

Our zeal was not to be abated, and after dinner we pulled the Mondeuse from the car, slightly chilled, perfect. Him or I pulled the cork loudly amongst fanfare. I won’t dramatize and say we disliked the wine or that it was in any way bad, but for the first time in a week our feet touched the Earth. I couldn’t recall it now, but the wine was either a bit too extracted, riper than I anticipated, or else just needed a little air. Whatever it was, we forged ahead with our mission unabated. All through the Aveyron, Auvergne, Beaujolais and finally Savoie we kept up our inquiry and so wanted to land this plane and take home this wine and this story.

At the fair I was in typical form: extremely nervous and embarrassed by my clunky French. J.R. is always extremely inquisitive and attentive to all the winemakers. I’m translating, which is great for my French and medium for my anxiety. I needed to taste with 10 or 11 other winemakers before I worked up the courage to speak with Guillemette, the wife and partner of Mattieu who turned red when I asked her about exporting and said that only a week before she had made a deal with another American importer. Damn! Sometimes it goes like that. Actually, most of the time it goes like that, and today I drink the wines whenever I see them and remember this very fun trip and the steaks.

I’m of two minds when I think of this trip and our Chevillard dream. I found it difficult to get excited about some other incredible producers at this fair, some of which I work with today, and some of whom I think make the most fascinating wines in France. I was blinded by the symmetry of this idea coming together, and about the cowboy and I coming home victorious. That was maybe bad.

Had the wines at the tasting held up to our superlatives? Actually, kind of, yes! But like any lineup of wines at any tasting, there were some barrel samples and kind of problem children that firstly speaks to how challenging it is to make wine, and secondly highlights how very good the successful cuvées are. Mostly, what one learns is that the taste from one glass to another isn’t purely relative, but it is relational, and as a result a wine fair is a very bad place to discover something elegant and subtle. The wines that stand out are often the opposite of that. I met some geniuses in that big, oaken Chalet whom I’d visit for years to come, but all of it was spurred on by one brilliant winemaker I had a relationship with in reverse. It’s common. "

“I would rather discover one true cause than possess the kingdom of Persia,” Democritus said. Few people today know that he was talking about salinity in wine and its ability to provide stucture where acidity is lacking. Regardless, I share his sentiment and seek with keenness the next cause hiding in a wine I like too much.