The Wine Savant: A Guide to the New Wine Culture (17 page)

François Chidaine and Jacky Blot also make stellar Chenins in the neighboring appellation of Montlouis, whose wines display the same floral, deliciously fruity style that you find in Vouvray, along with the same chalky minerality. But another Loire appellation, Savenièrres, shows Chenin in an entirely different light. There the Chenins (they go by the name Savennières) are steely, fairly austere, and intensely mineral. I wouldn't necessarily say that they are challenging wines, but for people who like lots of perky fruit flavors, a Savennières can be something of a shock—a mineral-and-acid bath. It doesn't help that the wines take years to reach full maturity and are even then pretty austere. Jacqueline Friedrich, an American writer residing in France and the author of
A Wine and Food Guide to the Loire
, describes Savennières as “the most cerebral wine in the world,” which is not necessarily a selling point in an era when consumers generally prefer the easy-sippin' stuff. But I like the elusive, almost feline character of Savennières, and the good ones can be superb. The most famous Savennières estate is Coulée de Serrant, which makes a wine from the vineyard of the same name. These days the property is famous for another reason: it is owned by Nicolas Joly, the wine world's best-known and most dogmatic proponent of biodynamic viticulture. But as I noted in Chapter Four, Joly's wines don't live up to the reputation of the estate and don't make a particularly compelling case for the biodynamic approach. If you want to taste good Savennières, look instead for examples from Domaine d'Epiré, Damien Laureau, Domaine du Closel, Jo Pithon, and Domaine des Baumard. These are all terrific Chenins and will, along with those Vouvrays, underscore why this grape deserves its star turn.

T
HE
G
REATEST
C
HARDONNAYS

• Krug Clos du Mesnil (Champagne)

• Salon (Champagne)

• Taittinger Comtes de Champagne (Champagne)

• Jacques Selosse “Substance” (Champagne)

• Domaine François Raveneau Chablis Les Clos (Burgundy)

• Domaine Vincent Dauvissat Chablis Les Preuses (Burgundy)

• Domaine J.-F. Coche-Dury Corton Charlemagne (Burgundy)

• Domaine de la Romanée-Conti Le Montrachet (Burgundy)

• Domaine Leflaive Chevalier-Montrachet (Burgundy)

• Domaine Guy Roulot Meursault-Perrieres (Burgundy)

• Domaine Lafon Meursault-Perrieres (Burgundy)

T
HE
G
REATEST
R
IESLINGS

• Trimbach Riesling Cuvée Frédéric Emile (Alsace—dry)

• Trimbach Riesling Clos Ste. Hune (Alsace—dry)

• J. J. Prüm (Germany—numerous wines, all worth buying; these are off-dry and sweet)

• Willi Schaefer (ditto)

• Helmut Dönnhoff (ditto)

• Keller (ditto—these are dry)

• Schäfer-Fröhlich (ditto—these are dry)

• F. X. Pichler (Austria)

9

QPR

I
DON'T KNOW
if wine geeks have a greater affinity for abbreviations than other hobbyists, but we do toss around our share of them. DRC. ITB. VA. DP. RP. RO. OWC. (See the box below for the meanings.) Probably the most popular one, both in terms of usage and meaning, is QPR, or quality-price ratio. Spend any time lurking on a wine discussion board and you are apt to see this particular abbreviation invoked liberally to describe wines that are thought to offer good value for the money.

It is sometimes used as a backhanded compliment, a polite way of saying that a big selling point is the price. Generally, though, it is a form of high praise, indicating that a wine is not only pleasurable but also an excellent deal for the quality. QPR has become a particularly prized attribute in the years since the economy slipped on a banana peel. Consumers, critics, and retailers alike are all fixated on value these days, and even as the economy recovers, that doesn't appear to be changing. Amid the hard times, a lot of people have made a very pleasant discovery: you don't need to spend much money to drink really well.

Value
, of course, is a relative term, one defined by your personal circumstances and the state of the economy generally. In June 2008, I wrote a column for
Slate
touting what I believed were the world's best-value blue-chip wines. I used $150 as the cutoff point, the price beyond which a wine could not be considered a value play. Suffice it to say, my timing was not ideal. The investment bank Bear Stearns had recently gone under, Lehman Brothers was teetering, and the housing market was starting to buckle. Just six months after that column appeared, the global economy was in freefall, and the article had become an amusing relic of a bygone era. Hundred-and-fifty-dollar value wines? As if! True, the market for the rarest Burgundies and Bordeaux, after briefly swooning, quickly recovered, and those wines have only gotten pricier in the years since the Great Recession hit. But the superaffluent who buy those wines are recession-proof in a way that most of us are not, and for many wine enthusiasts, the prolonged economic downturn has yielded a change in buying habits that is likely to last long into the future. People are no longer so willing to drop $80 on a Napa Cabernet or $50 on a highly rated Australian Shiraz. The sour economy didn't sour consumers on wine; it has just made them much more selective and a whole lot thriftier.

The sweet spot these days is in the $15–$25 range. You can drink very happily never spending more than $25 on a bottle. Drinking well for under $15 is a tougher proposition; there is just not a lot of compelling stuff to choose from below $15. I realize that that might not sit well with some people. A powerful strain of reverse snobbery runs through the wine world. This school of nonthought holds that big-ticket wines are mostly a lot of hype, that the qualitative difference between a $30 bottle of wine and a $5 bottle of wine is negligible, and that anyone who claims otherwise is just drinking the label.

A while back,
Slate
ran a piece by another writer saying that anyone who spends more than $3 on a bottle of wine is a sucker. The author suggested that there is no relationship between quality and price—that the difference between a $3 wine and a $30 wine is completely illusory. He cited studies “proving that our appreciation of a wine depends on how much we think it costs.” He mentioned other studies showing that “laymen actually prefer cheaper wines.” He said that critics might be able to distinguish expensive wines from cheap ones in blind tastings, but that's only because they have “gotten very good at sniffing out the traits that the wine industry thinks entitle them [sic] to more money.” Yep, and there's no difference between a supermarket tomato and a locally grown heirloom, no difference between a McDonald's hamburger and a Lobel's porterhouse, no difference between Bud Light and Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA. Interestingly, the author of the article pointedly refused to recommend any $3 wines, which I took to be an acknowledgment that he knew he was peddling poppycock.

He observed that sales of wines costing $3 and under have dropped sharply since 1995, while sales of wines costing $14 and over have increased dramatically, and suggested that this was proof that the public had been duped into believing that there
is
a connection between quality and price. No, the obvious explanation for these trends is that millions of Americans have become oenophiles in the past two decades, have scaled up as they have gotten deeper into wine, and have discovered that up to a certain point, the more you spend, the better you drink. People who become serious about cycling inevitably gravitate to pricier, better-made bikes; the same is true with wine. The sad reality is that there is no such thing as a great Burgundy or a great Bordeaux for under $20. The good news, however, is that many really compelling wines from many other regions can be had for $15 to $25 these days.

Regrettably, none of those regions are found in California. While a great many inexpensive wines are made in California, the overwhelming majority of them stink. This is a source of frustration for me and many other consumers; it should also be a major source of concern for the California wine industry. A lot of younger Americans are honing their palates on inexpensive imports; they have little, if any, exposure to good California wines because they can't afford the good stuff, and as a consequence, other regions are winning their allegiance. They see California just as they see Bordeaux: as a place whose best wines are meant for rich people. In offering so little in the way of good-quality value wines, California is cutting itself off from its natural constituency, from the consumer base that it is going to need in the future.

The contrast with Europe is striking. Not only do countries such as France, Spain, and Italy offer lots of high-quality value wines; quite a few of these wines come from acclaimed vintners. For instance, Jean-Louis Chave produces Hermitages that sell for hundreds of dollars a bottle, but he also makes a delicious Côtes du Rhône that retails for about $18. Erni Loosen has an excellent $10 Riesling. Aubert de Villaine of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, Christian Moueix of Château Pétrus, and Dominique Lafon of Domaine des Comtes Lafon, venerated names all, produce wines that are within reach of the budget-conscious. Nor is this trend confined to the Old World; Torbreck, one of Australia's finest, puts out a handful of $20 wines.

On these shores, the great Paul Draper of Ridge Vineyards has one such wine: Ridge's Sonoma County Three Valleys, an excellent Zinfandel. But he's very much an exception when it comes to top California winemakers. What's particularly strange is that now would seem like an ideal moment for an acclaimed California winemaker to emulate the likes of Chave and Loosen (or Draper, for that matter) and come out with a stellar bargain wine—something in the $15–$25 range. Producing a wine in that price range would be a shrewd way for a superstar California vintner to earn goodwill and cultivate a following among people who in the future might be willing buy the pricier stuff.

So why has no one done that? This question was the subject of a
Slate
column I wrote several years ago. Among those to whom I put the question was Manfred Krankl, whose Central Coast winery, Sine Qua Non, specializes in Rhône grape varieties and receives gushing praise (“totally profound”) and monster scores from Robert Parker. Krankl suggested that one reason the Europeans were better at value wines is that they were often working in vineyards that had been family-owned for generations and that were paid down long ago. By contrast, many of the better vineyards in California were developed or acquired fairly recently, and land in California is expensive. According to Krankl, an acre of prime vineyard on the Central Coast would cost a minimum of $25,000 and more likely closer to $50,000. When you factor in planting, farming, and labor costs, the road to profitability grows even longer. A $20-or-under wine would really be economically feasible, Krankl said, only if it could be made in large volumes. For this reason, the bargain end of the U.S. market is dominated by big players like Gallo, while boutique wineries like Sin Qua Non focused on higher-end offerings.