A Rye for the Road – Part Two: the Tahoe Delicioso

This column is dedicated to the memory of Daniel Hyatt, a good friend and great San Francisco bartender.

 

WHEN IT COMES TO COCKTAILS, I’m a bit of an accidental tourist. Their mixing, I mean, not the imbibing. In this respect, I’m highly intentional. Especially these days.

As we headed out to the West Shore of Lake Tahoe for a week’s vacation in August, I intended to make a drink or two using the ingredients I’d brought along on the trip. The tourist in me would’ve preferred to sip some punch on the dock at Chambers Landing or enjoy cocktails at Sunnyside Lodge’s lively bar, but the pandemic was doing a great job  of sucking the fun out of those time-honored Tahoe traditions (we did manage to get some Chambers Punch to go—this little miracle of an adult beverage could be the subject of its own column).

Arriving at our rental cabin in Tahoe Pines, a century-old community along the West Shore that recedes back into immense groves of white fir and Jeffrey pine, we unpacked for a relaxing week and the temporary escape from reality back home. There was still plenty of reality by the lake: over the next six days, the steady stream of traffic along West Lake Boulevard would be a reminder of Tahoe’s popularity, especially during this coronavirus road trip summer with almost no one getting on airplanes.

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A Rye for the Road – Part One

DRIVING AROUND TOWN ON pre-vacation errands in early August, I dropped by Lawler’s Liquors to check a few items off of the liquid supplies list. This old faithful of Napa bottle shops is one of our little wine city’s go-tos for both grain and grape booze.

Since the onset of these fun pandemic days, Lawler’s owner, Peter Ibrahim, has gone artisanal on his customers. That is, the center aisle of his family’s medium-sized store is still filled most late afternoons with vineyard guys waiting to pay for their 12-packs of Bud or Miller Lite, as was the case six months ago and forever before. Lately, however, the shelves have been lined with a wider and more eclectic variety of spirits labels than I probably ever expected to see. They call out to a different audience.

Standing behind the (now plexiglassed) register, one of Peter’s employees nodded appreciatively as he rang me up for my fancy choices of rye whiskey, London gin, and Spanish vermouth. When I commented on the shop’s diverse range of spirits, he mentioned that the boss was doing his part to support the local liquor distributors. With several beer-toting, thirsty-looking customers behind me, he left it at that. But in this depressing time of closed or struggling restaurants everywhere you look, the implication was clear that retailers were picking up the pieces, some of which were rather shiny and new—or in certain cases, dull and black. More on this in a second.

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Una Copa de Sol (A Glass of Sunshine) – by Phelps Wood

“If I had a thousand sons, the first humane principle I would teach them should be to forswear thin potations and to addict themselves to sack.”Falstaff, Henry IV

 

AS PASSIONS, TRAVEL AND WINE PROVIDE unique opportunities to open one’s mind and, perhaps in the best of circumstances, impart a sense of place that allows a deeper view into the interplay between people and environment. Tradition and authenticity take on new meanings in an ever-shrinking world while seeming to grow only more valuable in their rarity. With this in mind, and with a desire to be transported mentally at a time when physical travel is all but impossible, I opened a bottle of Manzanilla Deliciosa from Valdespino.

Manzanilla is a sherry that comes from Sanlucar de Barrameda. Since 1964, the area surrounding this coastal Andalucian town has had its own DOP (Denominación de Origen Protegida), but it is generally included under the DO of Jerez-Xérès-Sherry y Manzanilla de Sanlucar—a mouthful even to Spaniards! Located where the Guadalquivir River flows into the Gulf of Cádiz, on the Atlantic Ocean, Sanlucar is the northernmost of the “golden triangle” of Sherry towns, with El Puerto de Santa Maria to the south and, inland, sherry’s namesake and most famous town, Jerez de la Frontera. The area has a history of wine production that dates back to the Phoenicians, who founded Cádiz over 3,000 years ago.

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Traboules: A Passage from Beaujolais – Part Four

“The tradition of the mâchon comes directly from the canuts who shared traditional meals in Lyon at dawn after hours of work. The mâchon is simple and friendly.” – Le Wiki

 

SO, IF YOU’VE READ THIS FAR, you might wonder what gives with the title of my recent string of posts.

When he first clued me into the wine called Traboules, during a trip I took to France in early 2018, the conversation with Tim Johnston about this unique French red veered off in an unexpected direction. If my old friend had me at “Rhône Valley gamay,” he further captured my attention explaining where the name came from for the Coteaux du Lyonnais made by his friends at Domaine Clusel-Roch.

After a stopover in Paris, I was headed down to Lyon by TGV, then a bit further south to the very old wine hub of Ampuis. There, I would spend a long weekend at the annual Marché aux Vins, meeting winegrowers and attempting to drink my weight in their Condrieu, St. Joseph, and Côte-Rôtie. Before the trip, I’d never been to Ampuis, nor France’s gastronomic capital of Lyon. I was beyond excited.

Over a jetlag-curing lunch at Juveniles, Tim’s 1st arrondissement wine bar, he told me to be on the lookout during the Marché for a red wine called Traboules, which the Clusels might be pouring at their table. (I’ll note here that I would walk over hot coals to get my hands on their “Grandes Places” Côte-Rôtie; it never came to that during the event in Ampuis, but it’s a wine that certainly pulls in an enthusiastic crowd.) Then, playing remote tour guide for a moment, Tim connected the dots between the Clusels’ Traboules gamay and  the name, which comes from Lyon’s ancient traboules: the semi-concealed public passageways that wind through some of the city’s oldest quarters. They sounded exotic and a bit weird. Right up my alley, so to speak.

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Traboules: A Passage from Beaujolais – «Troisième Partie»

FROM THE PANDEMIC THAT BROUGHT you virtual tastings comes another new addition to the wine lexicon: curbside pick-up.

And it’s quite new—for wine, anyway. As recently as February, “curbside” still implied a transaction likely involving a Chick-fil-A or a Big Mac. Just three or four weeks later, in-person shopping for wine—the quaint, familiar concept of browsing shelves and case stacks, picking up bottles to read their labels, maybe sampling at a tasting bar—had been pandemically turned on its head. A more appropriate metaphor might be kicked to the curb.

Or maybe not.

“It’s almost impossible to emphasize how different this landscape is right now,” my friend Dan Polsby wrote to me in an email in March about Vintage Berkeley, the College Avenue shop he manages and buys for, and now was tasked with converting to a 100% curbside pick-up business. “Some distributors and importers have already stopped shipping. Some are experiencing crazy delays. And for us? Basically every day right now is as busy as what’s usually our busiest day of the year—but at quarter staff, for 12-13 hours—despite letting no customers into the store. Can you imagine?”

Could anyone have imagined such a scenario? Besides that cohort of doctors, scientists, and other infectious disease experts (surely some wine enthusiasts among them) who’d been sounding the alarm to the White House about Covid-19 since January, I mean.

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Traboules: A Passage from Beaujolais – Part Two

IT WAS MID-MARCH, EARLY DAYS for shelter-in-place. No tumbleweeds were blowing across College Avenue yet, but Elmwood was a ghost town.

Stuck at home in Napa and rather desperate for some French gamay that wasn’t the Duboeuf Beaujolais stocked on our (and every) local supermarket shelf, I drove down to this normally bustling pocket of Berkeley to pick up a wine called Traboules, a delicious and unusual bottle of gamay from the Rhône Valley’s Coteaux du Lyonnais that I tracked down last year.

The trip was shockingly quick: fifty-five minutes door-to-door from Napa. Only at 6:00 AM on a Sunday—or, I suppose, during a pandemic. The novel coronavirus had brought the novelty of zero Thursday morning traffic to the usual I-80 parking lot.

Granted, an excursion away from Napa Valley to find wine might sound like leaving Darjeeling to go tea shopping. But if you’re looking for good French wine, you head to Berkeley. And if something unique like Traboules is on your list, you make a beeline for Vintage Berkeley.

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Traboules: A Passage from Beaujolais – Part One

Drink is the feast of reason and the flow of soul. – Alexander Pope, Imitations of Horace

 

RECENTLY, I GOT MYSELF into a predicament that, courtesy of their government, U.S. wine geeks narrowly avoided a couple of months ago: I ran out of gamay.

The paucity verged on the political. Had the White House made good in February on its late 2019 threat to increase tariffs from an already egregious 25% on French and other European wines to an industry-wrecking 100%, it would have been bye-bye Beaujolais. And Beaujolais-Villages. And Côtes-du-Rhône Villages and the like. Chablis, Champagne, Château Take-Your-Pick? Adieu to all of them—or at least au revoir for a good, long time.

As if there wasn’t enough government-driven panic going around.

So, when the U.S. Trade Representative, Robert Lighthizer, issued his decision on February 14th not to raise the tariffs, it was a reprieve for my beloved gamay noir à jus blanc, as the wine grape of Beaujolais is properly known.

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La Diligence, Part Two – Marsanne, Remembered

TASTING IN OAKVILLE at Miner Family Winery back in July, it was my French wine importer friend Jack Edward’s comparison of Miner’s 2011 La Diligence marsanne to the Rhône Valley that triggered a flashback to some of the marsanne-based wines I’d tried in the past, especially from the Crozes Hermitage and Saint-Joseph appellations and, when I was lucky enough, from Hermitage. Though they aren’t as widely available in California or the rest of the U.S. as their red counterparts, northern Rhône white wines from producers like Alain Graillot (Crozes-Hermitage) and Domaine Faury (Saint-Joseph) epitomize the particular charms of marsanne-roussanne blends, while the great Jean-Louis Chave’s description-defying Hermitage blanc exists in another universe altogether. Unlike white Hermitage these days, the price of which would inflict feelings of inadequacy on even the most aggressive Napa Valley business manager, Graillot’s and Faury’s bottlings represent some of France’s great white wine values, as do those of their equally accomplished fellow producers.

I remember a couple of road trips to Napa and Sonoma while in college in the late 80s. The white wines on offer in winery tasting rooms (free of charge, no ID checks, lots of pretzels and local mustard) were as much about the two “blancs”—chenin and fumé—as they were about chardonnay. But before I began to develop a sense of what California white wine was supposed to taste like, I was serving and drinking blancs from Saint-Joseph and Crozes-Hermitage (and even Chave’s Hermitage) in Paris in 1991 and ’92, working as a garçon and barman at the iconic first arrondissment restaurant, Willi’s Wine Bar. It was a formative period in my wine career. As much as anything else I recall drinking back then, the distinctive aromas and flavors of northern Rhône white wines etched an indelible impression on my rookie palate. When, years later, I tasted the ’11 La Diligence marsanne at a San Francisco trade show, I experienced a rush of memory to that time.

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La Diligence: A Marsanne Goes Missing – Part One

ON A HILLSIDE ABOVE OAKVILLE, Dave Miner and company sit in cabernet’s catbird seat.

It’s carved into a rocky slope that faces west down to the Silverado Trail, where the Napa Valley floor displays hardly a patch of green canopy that isn’t planted to the traditional varieties of Bordeaux. The neatly divided blocks of Oakville are verdant with cabernet sauvignon, merlot, and cabernet franc, the vines that tie Napa Valley and California to France’s most famous wine region.

Miner Family Winery is perched in the Oakville AVA with a view across a section of the valley that a friend of mine, the wine merchant Rhett Gadke, once called “the Rodeo Drive of Napa Valley.” The analogy fits, since so many of the cabernet-based wines produced here command Beverly Hills prices. Although Dave Miner’s Oakville cabernet sauvignon isn’t exactly cheap, compared to most of his neighbors’ price tags, it’s more Silver Lake bottle shop than Beverly Hills boutique.

On the shelves of said boutiques, or at winery cellar doors, many Oakville cabernets and red blends cost as much as the top wines from Left and Right Bank Bordeaux. Dave Miner doesn’t shy away from the comparison—just the $200-per-bottle prices.

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Smoky Mountain Shop

JUST IN TIME for the summer tourist season in the Smoky Mountains, the Asheville, North Carolina wine merchant James West finally had a sign in place last month for his shop on Merrimon Avenue. It only took 289 days from its opening for James to be able to announce Westlake Wines to passing motorists and the odd pedestrian. “Second from  the top,” he pointed out to me recently. “Hopefully it will finally attract some attention.”

Congratulations, James!