Chablis & France's Long, Cold Summer

Two new articles arrived on my doorstep during the past couple of days -- both, not surprisingly, were about France. Above is the opening page of my cover article on Chablis in the June issue of Drinks magazine. The second is a report on the 2008 vintage in France -- "France's Long, Cold Summer" in the June issue of the Beverage Media publications. If you can't lay your hands on one or two, let me know and I'll send you a copy.

Also, don't forget my Top 5 summer wines at www.epicurious.com/articlesguides/drinking.

Until the next time....

Roger Morris

25 Things I Love About the Vineyard

We started going to Martha's Vineyard in the early 1980s, first just Ella and me with a couple of friends who introduced us to it, and then the whole family. Our entry point was a cottage in Oak Bluffs rented from a professor at Syracuse. Later we purchased our own place in Vineyard Haven which we still own -- my brothers Ed (Nashville) and Dave (southern Illinois) and their wives. For a time, when Ella was working in New York City, we went there about twice a month in the summer, usually flying in from Newark or LaGuardia and running about the island in a dilapidated Chrysler convertible -- our beach car -- that we would drive up in the spring from Pennsylvania and drive back in late fall. We close things down in the winter. Usually, my brothers and I will do road trips for opening and closing, arguing the political gamut from refined socialism (Ed) to 60s liberalism (me) to Rush Limbaughism (Dave). We decided after many seasons that road beers are no longer cool and, besides, cause too many pit stops.

Ella and I return less often these days, but there are still many things we love about the place, the first being, in true Vineyarder fashion, that it's not Nantucket.

Let me count the ways:

1. The ferry trip from Woods Hole. A 45-minute ride that caps off a seven-hour drive and gets us slowly re-accomodated to Vineyard culture.

2. Island radio. We turn on WMVY as soon as we get in the door and open up the windows to air out the house. Island radio is not pre-programmed, an indie, so we never know what we're going to hear. But when they play either James (Taylor) or Carly (Simon), we know it's summer again, and we're on the Vineyard.

3. Mid-day drinks at the Harborview in Edgartown. I love this place, even after they remodeled the bar this year. My order is always a Manhattan up, unless I decide to have duck fries (sinful frites cooked in 5% duck fat, 95% oil with melted cheese like/if not Manchego and truffle oil), in which case I'll have a Stella.

4. Browsing the bookstores. The Bunch of Grapes in Vineyard Haven (VH) burned last year but should be back in operation from temp headquarters, but I like even better Edgartown Books, which has a spartan simplicity I love; when I leave there with a new purchase, I feel like a college kid again and want to say, "Gee, that was neat!"

5. Dinners at the BYOBs. There is a contrarian streak at the Vineyard which often slows "progress," which ain't always a bad thing. For some reason, VH, West Tisbury, and Chilmark never repealed Prohibition, so you can drink but not buy there. Favorite BYOBs are Outermost Inn (overlooking Gay Head) and run by James' brother, Hugh, and his wife; Lambert's Cove; Beach Plum Inn (overlooking Menemsha), and Le Grenier in VH.

6. Le Grenier. Jean Dupon steadfastly keeps a menu that might have been served in his native France in the 1970s - rich sauces, lots of organ meat, snails to die for, drenched garlic bread, and, Ella's favorite, creamed spinach. It's a hangout for the VH literati, and it was once common to see Mike Wallace, Art Buchwald and William Styron holding forth. Now, there's only Mike, whom I hope to see some time this year.

7. Letting celebrities go unnoticed. Vineyarders pride themselves on leaving celebrities -- literary or otherwise -- alone. Carly can go shopping without being bugged. Ted Kennedy and his retinue came in once as we were just being seated at the Beach Plum and went through the whole dinner unfawned, except for an exiting diner (not us) who quickly said, "Thanks for all your work," as she walked by. (The only time that I saw people lose their cool was when Bill Clinton was playing golf on a hole fronting the highway at Farm Neck. Several cars stopped, and people started taking pictures.)

8. Shopping Saturday morning at the Farmers' Market in West Tisbury. The farmers look like tie-dyed 60s hippies with their goods displayed on tables, pickup truck beds and Volvo trunks. Cool. The produce is good, it's organic -- and my car smells like fresh basil for a week.

9. Browsing the art galleries. Mainly along Water Street in Edgartown and Main Street in Vineyard Haven plus the Red Barn in West Tisbury.

10. Picking up hitchhikers. The Vineyard is the only place I know where people still "thumb" - something I did during my teen years in West Virginia - and most of the people I pick up are kids, late for their jobs as wait staff at restaurants in another town.

11. Watching sunsets from West Chop. Great view out over the Elizabeth Islands.

12. Lingering over breakfast at the Artcliff. Always bustling, friendly, small. The most-diverse breakfast menu and a good place to become introduced to linguica.

13. The beaches. The great thing about the Vineyard is that it has inlet beaches with baby waves and ocean beaches with granddaddy waves. And, if you're so inclined, there are even nude beaches out around Gay Head. I prefer walking along them in winter to sunbathing, but then I don't have a John Boehner tan.

14. Perusing the Vineyard Gazette. It's a throwback to old-style community newspapers and a bit like an island house - great ambience but needs a paint job.

15. Driving along Middle Road. The essence of the rural nature of the island.

16. The Vineyard airport. It's the cutest small airport, and you can have a good, cheap (for the island) breakfast there -- whether or not you're flying.

17. Ice cream at Mad Martha's. An island institution. Bet you can't eat a cone without it dripping all over you.

18. Walking through Cottage City. Cottage City is a group of Victorian-era, brightly painted small houses at the edge of Oak Bluffs that were part of the summer camp meetings that once flourished here. Great photo stuff.

19. Friday-night lobster rolls. Buy them at the Episcopal Church in VH. Full of great juicy lobster meat.

20. Exploring Chappaquidick. Forget your car - there's a long line in summer to get on the small ferry - and explore the small island off Edgartown by foot or bike instead.

21. Buying fresh fish at Menemsha. This little port is picturesque, but, better yet, you can buy seafood from the island fleet's previous night's catch -- or specially cooked for you.

22. Lying in bed late at night and listening to the fog horns warning ships when the weather gets thick.

23. Returning each year to favorite stores and seeing the new stock. What's up at Midnight Farm and Rainy Day?

24. Island light. It's difficult to describe, but everything seems to glow with a pastel tinge.

25. The just-say-no attitude. Islanders don't do anything they don't want to, no matter how much political pressure there is. No traffic lights, no over-development, no bridge to the mainland. They may need our cash, but we come on their terms.

(PHOTOS by ELLA MORRIS)

Until the next time...

Roger Morris

The Writer as a Portrait Artist

Part of the pleasure of being an independent writer is talking with people and telling their stories, and it seems that I have been doing a lot of these pleasurable word portraits recently.

Chef Andy Little (top) of Sheppard Mansion inn and restaurant in Hanover, PA, is profiled in the current issue of Signature Brandywine, as is artist Sarah Lamb, center, with her pug Weezie. To the left is wine importer Peter Weygandt, who looks through a glass lightly in my article in the current issue of The Hunt.

Not all of my recent writing has been about people, however. Just posted to the epicurious.com site are my tips on 5 great, inexpensive summer wines along with matching recipes from the site's Gourmet and Bon Appetit files.

Also a click away is AppellationAmerica.com, where I do my debut article for AA on the Brandywine Valley winegrowing region.

In Drinks magazine's current issue, I talk about Italy's Great White North, which produces most of the Italy's best bianco, and the February issue of Caviar Affair carries my take on the country's best Prosecco region.

More is in the pipeline from my recent visits to the Rhone Valley and Bordeaux. Next up in June: Italy, Cahors and Bordeaux again for VinExpo 2009.

Until next time....

Roger Morris

Tasting Bordeaux '08 as '09 Budding Starts

Returned from Bordeaux last evening after tasting well over 150 blended barrel samples of the 2008 vintage, including top growths Ausone, Lafite-Rothschild, Latour, Haut-Brion, Mouton Rothschild, Petrus, Margaux, and Cheval Blanc. It was an amazing week, purple teeth and all.

The 2008 vintage is surprisingly good, and will be a great one to buy as futures, as prices are expected to be decreased significantly from the less-impressive '07 due to economic conditions. The overall report on the vintage -- a very long and difficult one in the making -- is excellent fruits and balanced acids producing wines that will be long and velvety as soon as the dusty, chocolate tannins calm down. If there is a knock, it is that not all the tannins are well-integrated in some wines, especially in several second to fourth growths in St. Julian and Pauillac. The dry white Bordeaux were more spotty in their performances.

I'll be writing more on the vintage in a half-dozen publications here and abroad and will give alerts as those appear.

In the meantime, life goes on in the vineyard. Bud break was just beginning at most chateaux during the week of primeurs (Haut-Brion, always early, has young leaves already), and at Chateau Fonplegade (above) farmer Ramone and his horse Ulysse do a shallow turning of the soil on either side of the vine row.

As we celebrate Bordeaux 2008, the 2009 vintage is beginning in the vineyards.

Until next time...

Roger Morris

Me and the Six Degrees of Bottle Shock

I finally saw the movie Bottle Shock on DVD this weekend. Most likely, I was the last American wine writer to do so, even though I had more incentives to do so than most did.

It was early September in 2007 when I went to Sonoma to report on the Buena Vista winery's 150th anniversary party for a couple of publications. At the main press event, we listened to winemaker Jeff Stewart and sommelier Evan Goldberg give information and crack jokes while a fierce, cold wind whipped around the edges of a large tent set up on the highest knoll in the Carneros which overlooked San Pablo Bay. Like the elephant in the room that no one addressed, a couple of hundred yards or so away sat an old shack that seemed out of context to everything else around it. The best explanation I could get then was that it was a prop for some movie. And, as we were leaving the fete, I noticed a car from one of the '60s vintages abandoned beside the road, the driver's door hanging open. A few minutes later, a camera crew -- a very small camera crew -- was shooting a scene in the edges of a vineyard.

Tony Lombardi, a well-known wine PR guy, told me that evening that my observances were of the last day of filming of a movie called Bottle Shock, a low budget indy pic about the Judgment of Paris 1976, at which time the lowly regarded California wines whupped French ass big time. It was being produced, he said, by a Sonoma local, Brenda Lhormer, who also was also in charge of the local film festival. He gave me her contact information.

I later talked with Lhormer, who told me the film was being hurriedly wrapped up in anticipation of being shown at the Sundance Film Festival in early 2008. Sundance is, of course, a reality film event which plucks up talented and lucky independent films and makes stars of its directors and actors, much the same as Dancing with the Stars and American Idol.

A few months later, for a profile of her in La Vie Claire magazine, I enterviewed Heidi Peterson Barrett, the famous Napa winemaker who years ago married into the Barrett family who owned Chateau Montelena. Montelena, along with Stag's Leap Wine Cellars, was one of two Napa wineries suddenly thrust into fame at the Judgment of Paris. Montelena made the winning Chardonnay, and Stag's Leap the winning Cab. Heidi, who explained that she and Bo Barrett hadn't yet hooked up when the 1976 competition took place, said their family had just returned from being guests at Sundance. She liked the movie, she said, and thought it was great fun to see a young, sexy actor playing her husband up on the big screen. Oh yes, she had been an unofficial advisor to the film. A few months later, I interviewed Bo himself for an article for Drinks magazine on today's Napa Chardonnays versus the Chardonays of 30+ years earlier, but for some reason we didn't really talk about the film that much.

It was at the Primeurs tasting of 2007 barrel samples last April in Bordeaux that I ran across Steven Spurrier who, as an young English wine merchant and educator living in Paris, conceived of and staged the contest between the upstart Californians and the established Frenchmen. Over dinner with the folks from Lynch Bages at Chateau Cordeillan-Bages, Spurrier said he had not seen the film, and indicated friends who had seen it had warned him he might not like the rather greasy portrayal of himself by actor Alan Rickman.

As I talked with the somewhat elegant English writer, I remembered the first and only time I had visited Montelena. It was in 1978, I think, on my first trip to Napa, because Montelena and Mondavi were the two establishments singled out as being worthy by my California host.

So with all of these degrees of connection, I finally Netflixed the DVD for our pizza-cava-and-DVD Friday night ritual. As I was watching it, I was hoping that Spurrier would never see himself as portrayed by the very talented Rickman. I thought of how unlike the mountain-enclosed upper Napa Valley the soaring scenes filmed in the broad vistas of Sonoma vineyards looked. And I thought that probably the only elements that were remotely factual were that Spurrier staged a wine smackdown in 1976 in Paris and that Montelena won over the formidable white Burgundies.

And I realized that, by and large, I was enjoying watching this amusing tale --even though its fiction was stranger than real fact.

Until next time...

Roger Morris

Do I Smell the Cork -- Or Kiss It?

Leonard Lauder, the guru of cosmetics, noted that lipstick sales went up during hard economic times -- which could mean that cross-dressing was a way to relieve the stress, or, more likely, we learn to get joy in small pleasures.

Sic semper, wine.

The folks at Ruffino suggest that you not stop drinking (or wearing lipstick, whatever the motivation) when the cash cow is giving buttermilk. Just trade down. So they've done their own index. If you like their Toscana IGT, buy the less expensive Chianti. Like the Lodola Nuova Vino Nobile di Montepulciano, then try the Aziano Chianti Classico, which not only has fewer words, but is less expensive. Greppone Mazzi Brunello? Santedame is the answer. And trade down from the Riserva Ducale Oro to the Riserva Ducale.

They've also matched the wines with lipsticks, which a trick they never teach you in sommelier school. The Ducales, it seems, go well with the Chanel Fire -- classic, alluring, sophisticated.

It's so me!

Until next time...

Roger Morris

Fiddlehead Cellars: Onward, Upward, Sideways

Kathy Joseph started Fiddlehead Cellars 20 years ago on the premise, "It's the grapes, stupid," and decided to go after the ones she liked best whether they were growing in Santa Ynez or Willamette -- just as long as they were Pinot Noir or Sauvignon Blanc.


Terence Livingston, Fiddlehead's national sales manager and general bon vivant, stopped by our neck of the vineyards a few days ago with some open bottles to taste over a lunch of salmon, stuffed rolled chicken breast and beef bourguignon at Susan Teiser's Centreville Cafe on the outskirts of Delaware. It was Fiddlehead's Sauvignon that got the big plug in the movie Sideways, but it was probably the movie's headlong, Limbaugh-like pummeling of Merlot and its flat-out praising of Pinot Noir that helped Joseph's Noir get more national recognition, along with other producers along California's Central Coast.

According to Livingston, Fiddlehead is planning a move soon out of the Lompoc Wine Ghetto into the fresh air of the nearby countryside with the construction of a new winery.

In the meantine, the wines continue to taste delicious, with the three Pinots I sipped reflecting the house style of ripe, but not overly extracted, fruit, with the spicy sassafras/root beer undertones.

And Teiser's food was pretty damn good, too.


Until next time....

Roger Morris