Jura Winemakers Seek Breakout Strategy

I just got back from a week in Jura - the French wine region, not the Scotch island - and I met some great winemakers, tasted many fine wines, and ate a lot of lovely traditional and modern food. In short, it's a great place to visit with its panoply of towns and villages stretched out over 50 miles or so of rolling foothills of the Jura Mountains west of Geneva.

Jura's problem is not its wines, but its image, or lack thereof. Many stores in the United States carry no Jura wines, and there are some fascinating Jura winemakers who would love to have an importer to bring their wines into this country. Jura's blessing and curse is that it makes both modern and traditional wines, so a lot of people in the trade have difficulty in wrapping their heads around the challenge of how to present all this to wine drinkers. As a writer, I have the same challenges.

OK - after my week in the wineries and in the vineyards (I still have mud on my shoes to prove it), here is my take about what the "story" should be on Jura the wine region:

A few great wine regions have red, rose, white and sparkling wines. So does Jura. But the others don't have vin jaune.

Vin jaune is the golden, oxidized wine that spends ages in the barrels under a web of flor similar to sherry and is not topped up as the wine evaporates during aging. It's not unusual for a winemaker to have multiple vintages spread over a couple of decades ready to sell - great to taste, but confusing to the uniformed consumer.

Vin jaune is delicious - nutty, apply, dried fruits, great acids - but you have to be mentally ready for it. If you're expecting a fresh Chardonnay or Savagnin and take a sip of vin jaune, then your mind wants to call 911 and report a disaster. Yet, when you are ready for it, vin jaune is delicious with a wide array of foods.

So that is what I'll be writing about over the next week for several publications.

One of the great winemakers whose wines are in the United States is Jean Berthet-Bondet. Jean is the guy in the one photo, and he lives in the village of Chateau Chalon atop the hill in the other photo. (Go to http://www.berthet-bondet.net/). Chateau Chalon is the most famous Jura cru and has perhaps the best wines.

Other wines to look out for in your wine stores are Domaine de Montbourgeau (Nicole Deriaux rocks), Jean-Francois Bourdy, Stephane Tissot, Philippe Tissot, Cabelier and Daniel Dugois.

And don't just look for vin jaune. The fresh Savagnins and Chardonnays are lovely, the cremant de Jura sparkling wine has great quality, and the light reds can have the spiciness of Beaujolais crus but with more complexity.

Drink up!

Until next time...

Roger Morris

Coming November 1: Brandywine Book of Food

Filled with 75 recipes from favorite Brandywine regional chefs. With more than 200 color photos of people, prepared recipes and landscapes. Interesting stories about the farmers, winemakers and chefs who grow and prepare the local bounty. Plus an introduction from food guru Colman Andrews.

For more information or to reserve a copy, e-mail us at londonbritain@msn.com.

Until next time....

Roger Morris

With a Side Order of Baby Fava Beans?

Did you ever wonder what happens to old pets? Polly cat, the housekeeper for our friends Michael and Jennifer Stillabower, and I got in a little practice this weekend at their beach house in South Bethany. When the time comes, I'm thinking about what would go best with aged white meat that probably tastes a lot like rabbit, not too much fat, a little sinewy. Maybe a 5-year-old white Chateauneuf-du-Pape?

Until next time...

Roger Morris

Cultivating Wine & Music at Bouchaine

What is so lovely as a day in July in the Carneros, as the morning fog lifts and sunshine splashes across the vine-covered hills that comprise this cool viticultural area that shares its boundaries with Napa Valley, Sonoma County and San Pablo Bay?

A small group of wine writers were recently guests there of Tatiana and Gerret Copeland, owners of the Burgundian-styled Bouchaine Vineyards, which lays claim to being the oldest continuously operated winery in the Carneros. The facility was resurrected 27 years ago as a partnership, and the Copelands have owned Bouchaine as sole proprietors since 1991.

Although Bouchaine makes a variety of small-lot wines from purchased grapes for sale at the winery tasting room and through its wine club, Bouchaine is best known for its delicious estate-grown Chardonnays and Pinot Noirs, in recent years made under the guidance of Michael Richmond. During the days we were at Bouchaine, my fellow writers and I spent many hours in the back of a flat-bed truck, which served as both a forward observation point and a lecture hall as Richmond, the Copelands, and wine production & sales VP Greg Gauthier discussed the fine points of Carneros history, grape growing and wine production. We also tasted Bouchaine wines by the gallons (no spitting, please), including the 2007 Bouchaine "Copeland" Estate Pinot Noir, possibly the best Pinot that Richmond has yet made. Unfortunately, there are only a few hundred bottles of it, and it has not yet been released. Great food? Yes, there was that, too.

But the Copelands are also patrons of the arts, both in Napa Valley and at their primary home in Delaware, so we were invited to attend daily musical performances which were part of the rapidly growing Napa Valley Festival del Sole. Bouchaine is a founding sponsor of the festival, with a special interest in its Bouchaine Young Artist Concert program.

Of course, this is just the icing on the cake. I will be writing more about Bouchaine, Festival del Sole, Carneros and the Copelands in various publications and will keep you posted.

"Darioush, Darioush, will you do the fandago?" (Apologies to Queen.) At a lovely performance of Iranian music at the amphiteater abutting Darioush Winery, proprietor Darioush Khaledi dances with his grandaughter (right) while mezzo-soprano Raeeka Shehabi-Yaghmai (lower right) accompanies the work of piano virtuoso Anoushirvan Rohani. Below, Tatiana and Gerret Copeland with young cellist Clark Pang after his performance at the Napa Opera House. Upper left, winemaker virtuoso Mike Richmond is satisfied putting grapes to music.

Until next time...

Roger Morris

Thinking Outside the Boxwood

"I like a challenge," Rachel Martin says, and she has one. We should all be so fortunate.

Martin is director of the (relatively) new Boxwood Winery in Middleburg, Virginia, and she is in New York City on this July midday with the humidity rising on 53rd Street outside The Modern, that delightful - if painfully punctual in not letting anyone in before precisely 11:30 - restaurant that is an adjunct to The Museum, or perhaps the other way around, debuting her wines to large group of writers. With her are her father and mother, John Kent and Rita Cooke, who own Boxwood, and Stephane Derenoncourt, the Bordelaise wine consultant well-known for very carefully choosing his clients. If the name "Cooke" sounds familiar, John's father, Jack, was a sports and communications impressario best known for honcho-ing the Washington Redskins during their heyday.

Rachel's challenge is that she wants to make Boxwood not just a good regional winery, but a great one sold in key U.S. markets and in France, where she studied winemaking in Bordeaux after a hitch in Napa Valley. With a small winery (maximum cases: 5000; vineyard: 16 acres) and what is currently not considered prime-time cru real estate, that is a challenge that other East Coast wineries have attempted, notably Kluge in Charlottesville, with limited success.

There are three Boxwood wines, all Bordeaux in style and grape contents. Topiary is a Right Bank blend, Boxwood is a Left Bank blend, and a Rose is all Cab Franc. Price for the serious wines is $25, and $12 for the Rose. All are certainly worth their prices.

The first vintages of Topiary and Boxwood were from the 2006 vintage, which the group of assembled wine writers taste, along with the bottled 2007 and the 2008 barrel samples. The 2007s are quite nice, but we are not blown away nor do we expect to be. Derenoncourt, who believes in following the terroir and not leading it, cautions that, while the clay-based Virginia soil is very good for wine, it is not suitable for making big wines, so he settled on elegant ones. The two are certainly that, and their charms rise the longer they are swirled and sipped in large- bowled stemware over plates of rare Colorado lamb. But in addition to their understated, well-balanced fruit, they also have substantial tannins, more sensed than tasted, that bodes well for long aging. And we have to remind ourselves that the vines were not planted until 2004, so it may be another year or two before the wine will justify a price increase.

In short, I taste a very good present and a better future for the Boxwood reds - no white wines allowed - as long as Martin, the Cookes and Derenoncourt stay the course.

One of the best lines of the day - well-honed on previous occasions, no doubt - is Cooke's recounting of the family's lack of financial success with prior forays into farming. "My father lost his shirt with race horses," he says above the chuckling, "and I lost my pants raising purebred Angus." He admits that he would not be the first investor to be completely disrobed in trying to make a great wine that returns a profit.

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New Publications: What do winemakers groove on (can I still say that?) when they are making wine, and does it change depending on whether they are crushing or racking? The musical answers are in my front-of-the-book piece in the August issue of The Wine Enthusiast (give me a note, and I'll shoot you a scanned copy)... Appellation America recently uploaded to its site two articles of mine on Long Island wineries - one on the lack of vineyard land mass in The Hamptons, and another on the North Fork's potential engagement to Merlot (photos by Ella Morris)... there is a cameo appearance in Amtrak's Arrive magazine that I wrote about their Acela-grade menu... and The Hunt magazine has features of mine on the Spice Guys (local chefs who dare to go beyond oregano) and one on people who collect fine art.

Follow my columns each Wednesday at http://www.delawareonline.com/, click Life, click Food. Tweet? @Battonage.

Until next time....

Roger Morris

In Bordeaux, VinExpo Calls for VinPartytime

By day, they manned booths, walked miles of exhibit floors, poured wines or tasted them and took part in discussions about the current State of the Vin -- but at night, last week at VinExpo2009, the Bordelaise and their guests from around the world partied on!

Like most guests, I had more invitations than I could accept. I missed some good parties, such as the Grand Crus dinner at Chateau Lafite-Rothschild, because I needed to recoup after a tour of Cahors that bumped into VinExpo week. Nine hours of sleep later I was ready to go again.

But I managed to catch some good times as well. First there were annual induction ceremonies such as the ones held by the St.-Emilion Jurade Fete de Printemps (I was honored to be inducted into the society) and the Commadeurs du Bontemps' Fete de la Fleur at Chateau d'Issan on the last night of the exhbition. During the reception for the fete, I paparazzied my hostess for the week, Anabelle Cruse Bardinet, proprietor and winegrower at Chateau Corbin, the blonde in the shot upper left along with her friend Isabelle Perrin of Chateau Carbonnieux.

Then there was the lovely luncheon hosted by Pierre Lurton at Chateau Cheval Blanc (photos below). While munching and sipping, some of us wondered how many cases more of Cheval could have been produced if the lawn where we were eating had been planted to vines instead. Lunch at Chateau Lagrange featured an excellent show-and-drink presentation by director Bruno Eynard of the terroirs and tastes of the estate's various plots and how he blended wines from them to make 2008 Chateau Legrange, which is still in the barrel.

Olivier and Anne Bernard have the reputation of being among the best hosts in Bordeaux, and they kept their record intact with a rollicking outdoor reception and tented dinner at their Domaine de Chevalier for the annual "Tour de France" event with seven winemaking partners (think Pol Roger, Leflaive, Faiveley) from around the country. At Chateau Lassegue, Pierre and Monique Seillan hosted a Bordeaux barbecue (partner and horseman Jess Jackson was a scratch) with tours of the vineyard in classic American sports cars and country music by the Rusty Pants (it must lose something in translation). The fiddler (upper right) may be pure French, but she sure played great downhome American music.






But the highlight of the week just might have been a private tour of Le Pin by owners Jacques Thienpont and Fiona Morrison. Le Pin is an unmarked, small, unpretentious country house, but its basement cellar helped launch the garagiste movement that was instrumental in changing how Bordeaux grew grapes and made wine and is also the source of one of the world's greatest, rarest, most expensive wines.

I'll diet tomorrow.

Until next time...

Roger Morris

Visiting with the 26th Generation Antinoris

I just returned from a wine writing assignment in Italy where I had the opportunity to visit several of the Antinori estates and discuss wine and food with the three Antinori daughters who will eventually succeed their father, Piero Antinori, and who represent the 26th generation of the famous family that has been making wine since the 14th Century.

Albiera, Allegra and Alessia Antinori all have primary roles in the family business, all are very friendly, unpretentious, smart and attractive, but they are all refreshingly different in their styles and interests. I look forward to writing about them more in the weeks ahead.

Two other writers and I had dinner with Alessia at La Pinetta restaurant on the Tuscan seashore near the family Tombolo Talasso resort and later lunch with her at their Tignanello Estate in Chianti. Next, an alfresco pig-roast lunch with Allegra at Guado al Tasso, where she also raises thoroughbreds. We had two dinners with Albiera, first at Badia di Passignano and then at the Cantinetta Antinori in Florence, the first of a small chain of restaurants by that name, located just downstairs from the family enclave at Palazzo Antinori and a few steps from the city's famous duomo. In between all this, we also stayed at the Antinori's Fonte de' Medici agritourism farmhouse at Montefiridolfi and visited other estates at La Bracessca and Castello della Sala in Umbria. During this time, we had a wide array of excellent wines with matching Tuscan food.

In short, the enterprise Antinori is amazing in its history and its very modern approach to wine, food and travel. As Albiero and Allegra have children already, a 27th generation of Antinori winegrowers seems like a sure bet.

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New Publications: In the June issue of The Drinks Business, my article titled "Barmy Days in Balmy Bordeaux" chronicles the 2008 Bordeaux growing season, the anguish of a late harvest, the elation of the vintage's reception at Primeurs and the wacky campaign that followed.

The May/June issue of Sommelier News carries an article I wrote about three wine tastings that each raised an interesting discussion -- about vintage quinta Ports, the orthodoxy of biodynamics, and Moueix and the return of good shippers' Bordeaux. It's called "Cuvees of the Tete."

Please let me know if you would like a pdf of either article.

Twitterdumb: Follow my tweet life on Twitter at Battonage.

Until next time...

Roger Morris