Maker's Table

A Trip to the Rhône

Seven years ago on our honeymoon, my husband and I spent a long weekend in the Northern Rhône. We thought of it as a kind of a reconnaissance, a chance to test, and sample, the waters, and to get a sense of what tasting wine in France is like. My new article for Palate Press tells the story; Part I is published today. Read it on Palate Press »

Deirdre Heekin's Bitter Alchemy

“I am une garagiste, a woman who makes wine in her garage, and I am maître liquoriste. I am the would-be parfumeur. I am mistress of alchemy.”

—Deirdre Heekin, Libation: A Bitter Alchemy

Deirdre Heekin smiles a welcome as she hands us each a glass of sparkling Nebbiolo. It’s a glittering Vermont evening in high summer. The sun’s still shining, so the day’s full moon hasn’t yet risen over the rolling fields to our east. We raise a genial toast to her, then carry our glasses from the shelter of this open barn to greet the other guests in the garden.

There’s a group already gathered by the tasting station, lined with the evening’s wines from Tuscany and Campania. Other guests stroll the fledgling vineyard or drape languorously on lawn furniture, savoring this bright moment of our fleeting northern summer.

Deirdre’s husband, Caleb Barber, is at the cooking station, stoking the hardwood fire, furiously toasting bread and grilling eggplant and radicchio for crostini. A slate chalkboard displays the evening’s menu of simple, elegant appetizers contrived to pair with the wines. It’s really just finger food, but no one will leave hungry.

The guests gathered here at Deirdre and Caleb’s home are writers and restaurateurs, publishers and professors, software execs and Aikido sensei. Each has come to enjoy the party in the barn and vineyard the hosts call La Garagista. 

The couple runs a tiny, flawlessly authentic Italian restaurant and wine bar in Woodstock, Vermont, Osteria Pane e Salute. Now in its thirteenth year, the restaurant has won acclaim from such publications as Food and Wine, Bon Appétit, and Travel and Leisure. Its Italian “revivalist” menu of traditional regional dishes is complemented by an extensive wine list.

Caleb commands the restaurant’s kitchen. A master chef who trained in Italy, he emphasizes what’s in season, sourcing provisions locally—even from the couple’s own organic gardens—to craft Italian dishes infused with the flavors of Vermont’s landscape.

Deirdre, meanwhile, runs the front of house, graciously serving as host, maître d’, and sommelier. There is only one seating, so your table is yours for the evening, and Deirdre is your spirit guide through the meal, suggesting wines matched to the menu’s regional cuisines.

She has made it her mission to assemble an archive of rare indigenous Italian wines. “When I choose wines for the restaurant,” she says, “I look for regional varietals, so that when we make an heirloom recipe from that region, I can reach for the wine that traditionally complements that dish.”

The meal, then, becomes a kind of re-enactment, a revitalization of a culinary experience: this way, she says, “we can have a sense of what people have historically tasted three hundred, five hundred, even a thousand years ago. This is what I like about making something that has existed for hundreds of years: I taste history.”

Deirdre is also an exquisite writer. Her food writing has appeared in journals and anthologies, including Gastronomica and Best Food Writing. With Caleb, she has authored a cookbook and, more recently, In Late Winter We Ate Pears, a memoir with recipes of their first year of marriage.

In her latest book, Libation: A Bitter Alchemy, Deirdre recounts her experiences developing her vinous palate, deepening her knowledge, and trying her own hand at the making of wines and spirits. She is driven to understand the role these play in the fabric of culture, and to document her own quest to insert herself, as producer, into the narrative begun centuries ago by old world winemakers and liquoristes.

Deirdre’s exploration has landed her in remote Italian hill villages, country cafés, vineyards tended by nuns, and even dusty bookstores, like the one in the Spaccanapoli neighborhood in Naples where, in the yellowing pages of an old cookbook, she once discovered a recipe for rosolio. That particular formula for the southern Italian liqueur was made from rose petals, using techniques easily mastered by home cooks. Back home in Vermont, Deirdre used roses from her garden to make her own batch of this sweet liqueur.

The hook was set. Cooking with their own produce, making their own liqueur—it seemed the leap to making their own wine was nearly inevitable. “To be fed by wine or food from our location is the best possible way we can live on our land,” she told me recently.

But a vineyard in Vermont? Yes, it is possible. Cold-hardy, short-season varietals like Frontenac, Frontenac Gris, St. Croix, and Marquette yield reasonably and can survive the -30 degree Fahrenheit winters. So two years ago, Deirdre, with Caleb’s ample help, planted 50 of these vines in their dense clay soil. This year they planted 250 more. Next year she’ll plant another 300, and by 2011 she’ll enjoy the first small harvest. Production will be in full swing by 2013.

She has also begun studying the work of several organic and biodynamic winemakers, and has spent time in the vineyards of like-minded Italian producers. This spring, she hopes to travel to France, learning from some of the great biodynamic growers in the Loire valley. Her aim is to transpose these techniques to her own plot. “Vin de terroir tastes of a place,” she says. “I want to be as non-interventionist as possible. I want to use wild yeast, and to ‘make wine in the vineyard.’ Farming biodynamically is about the cycles of the earth, sky, the plant, and the weather. It’s about keeping the soil healthy, and your vines healthy. It’s about paying attention.”

She’s now in the process of having the property bonded as a winery, but in the meantime, she has been making wine with purchased grapes, her first rough experiments yielding passable results—but real wine—and lots of learning opportunities.

Libation is a kind of memoir of her learning process, and of her circuitous journey through the underworld of spirits. We follow her to Rome, where, on a sultry October evening, she tastes her first Campari. We read of her search to acquire a bottle of the scarlet-hued alkermes, a rare and storied liqueur flavored with cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, coriander, and vanilla. We are with her in an artisanal perfumery in Paris, where she is suddenly struck by the similarities between the work of the master parfumeur and that of the sommelier, both of whom must learn to divine the infinite mysteries of these bright spirits, and to harness them in service of their craft.

Deirdre also weaves deep history into the narrative, recounting her experiences cultivating her sense of smell and taste while providing background on the elixirs we have contrived to beguile us or simply slake our thirst. It’s a book, Deirdre writes, “about soil, vines, fruit, history, scent, taste, chemistry, and memory.”

“Taste is connected to history,” she continues, “the history of the table, which is, after all, a narrative history, an oral history. The tongue experiences; the mouth tells a story.” Our experiences of the table and the glass help seal the memory of a place and its people in our minds. Taken together, these memories constitute a culture’s history.

This work is a kind of alchemy, but the winemaker and the liquoriste are searching for a different kind of gold. I asked her about the title. “Historically, a libation was shared at the altar or at a meal. You drank in remembrance of the dead, and you poured it on the ground to give something back to the earth. It was about the incorporation of food and drink into the routine of our lives. It still is. To me, the word also conjures something more. To make a wine from fruit, or a liqueur from herbs—that’s nothing short of magic.”

Magic aside, cultivating a vineyard means hard work ahead for Deirdre and Caleb. “This is the beginning of the journey,” she says. “There’s so much more to learn. And there’ll be, I hope, another book about where it all has gone.”

Some summer full moon evening, not too long hence, we’ll gather again on the lawn at La Garagista, and raise a toast to Deirdre with a glass of her own wine.

This article originally appeared in Palate Press on 25 October 2009 and is reprinted with permission of the publisher.

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Simple Gifts

A remarkable thing happens to me when I let myself stretch a little, when I take a little risk: the gifts come pouring in. These take many forms: a single blunt compliment, or the simple suggestion of a smile from someone wholly new. Or it might be a new request to work my craft, or to become part of a new enterprise. It might simply be a thing that in itself is just a thing, but is also something more, imbued with intent, an artifact of connecting, of human experience.

A new gift arrived today. This time it took the form of a bottle of Greek wine, an Aivalis Agiorgitiko, sent by someone I didn't even know just a few months ago. But I've been stretching a little recently, reaching out with curiosity and a huge appetite to a community of wine and food loving people, trying to learn more. This is how I met Markus Stolz, a German who lives in Athens with his Greek wife and four kids, and who's trying to elevate the stature of Greek wine abroad. I'd recently edited a piece for Palate Press that mentioned Agiorgitiko, and Markus discovered that although I'd had to fact-check the name, I'd never tried the wine. This was unacceptable, evidently—and bang, a bottle arrived by post two weeks later.

Yes, it was requited. In return, Markus got a quart of maple syrup from a sugarbush a mile from my house. He's thrilled, and his kids are more so. But reciprocity is not the point. A gift like this tells me that I must be doing something right, that I'm taking the right kind of chances. Because now I've found someone on the other side, shouting back through the amber fog—someone I hope will be there for a long, long time.

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The Upside of Doon

Randall Grahm, celebrated winemaker of Bonny Doon Vineyard, is betting the farm on one big, beautiful idea: terroir. In his new book, Been Doon So Long: A Randall Grahm Vinthology, he shares his witty, irreverent, and thoroughly refreshing take on the making of truly great wine.

Photo: Alex Krause

Grahm is the original Rhône Ranger, the Santa Cruz maverick who introduced Rhône varietals to Central Coast viticulture in the 1980s and proceeded to produce quirky, funky wines with huge personality and distinctive, arty labels. Cardinal Zin and Big House were his high-volume hits, but his signature red, Le Cigare Volant, evinced his true Rhônish passion, as did a palette of other wines, including Syrahs, rosés, and Châteauneuf-du-Papish whites.

A technical magus, scientific and intuitive, Grahm experimented with oddball varieties and winemaking techniques. He put Muscat grapes in the freezer to create a pseudo ice-wine he called Vin de Glacière (literally “wine of the icebox”). He tinkered with cryoextraction and microoxygenation. He championed the Stelvin closure, even holding a mock-funeral proclaiming The Death of the Cork.

A playful marketeer, Grahm consigned the wine’s front labels to well-known artists, and recently bucked industry tradition by listing actual ingredients used in the winemaking process on the back labels. By 2004, Bonny Doon was the twenty-eighth largest winery in the United States.

Through it all, Grahm was writing. A self-described vinous enfant terrible, he focused a gimlet eye on pretentiousness and inauthenticity in the wine industry. His commentary made it into his winery newsletters and speeches to industry groups and UC Davis grads.

He was particularly unflinching in his castigation of the false specificity of numeric ranking systems advocated by Robert Parker and Wine Spectator, openly deploring the ratings scramble that drove winemakers to produce blockbuster fruit-bombs lacking character and nuance. This sniping didn’t win him many friends among critics, but no matter; to Grahm, the integrity of the ideas, no less than that of the wine, needed to be expressed.

But if he was hard on the industry, he was equally hard on himself. Throughout Bonny Doon’s fun, wild run, he’d been nursing an idea that there was maybe something deeper, more meaningful, to be found in wine and winemaking. “I was giving speeches and writing about terroir as essentially wine’s best idea, perhaps the only thing that was truly worthwhile and enduring,” he told me. “Yet there was nothing in my practice that supported this idea.”

He had been making what he calls “vins d’effort”—wines that bear the imprint of the winemaker, relying on technical interventions like use of designer yeasts, organoleptic tannins, dealcoholization, even wood chips. A true vin de terroir, meanwhile, relies on something more elemental and balanced: healthy vineyards, ripe (but not overripe) grapes, wild yeasts—and human restraint.

“What a French vigneron strives for is typicity—to make a wine that transparently is what it is,” he writes. Here, the winemaker steps aside, letting earth and sun and water and grape speak. The resulting wine becomes a distillation of place; place in a bottle.

The dissonance between Grahm’s output and his insights produced, quite naturally, tension: “your ordinary, garden-variety existential crisis,” he calls it. “I had recently turned fifty, fathered a child, and survived a serious health crisis. The universe was trying to tell me something: it was time to change my ways.”

He sold Big House and Cardinal Zin in 2006 and shrunk the company to focus on trying to produce true vin de terroir—from scratch. He recently closed on a 280-acre parcel in San Juan Bautista, California, about 45 minutes south-east of Santa Cruz, and has begun preparing the land for a biodynamic vineyard.

It was also time, finally, to air the produce of his fertile mind—his essays, fiction, poetry, speeches, and meta-commentary. The result, Been Doon So Long: A Randall Grahm Vinthology, was released this October.

Like a true vin de terroir, the book reveals a man who transparently is who he is: literary, clever and erudite, lavishly satirical, and enormously fond of double-entendres and raucous word play (Grahm can pun in at least four languages). It’s a dense, chewy feast for anyone who’s ever made even glancing contact with the wine industry, whether winemaker, wine salesman, wine writer, passionate blogger, or occasional consumer. It’s the kind of book you can read casually, dipping in anywhere and coming up wet from its funny, irreverent take on all things Wine.

But it’s also a book to take seriously. Reading it cover to cover, you’ll notice its structure describes an arc from ironic satire to more sober essays grappling with Grahm’s life purpose and his quest for terroir. Irony requires detachment, while terroir requires engagement. I asked him if the book’s arc followed his own. “That’s very much to the point,” he said. “I did want the progression of pieces to follow my progression: a personal journey.”

The book reveals a man who is deeply in tune with—and smitten by—the improbability, sometimes folly, and exquisite rapture of coaxing an elixir from rocky soil. His commitment to terroir is not just a commitment to an idea, it’s a commitment to a feeling.

“When you experience vin de terroir,” he says, “there’s a deep emotional connection with the wine, a feeling of wonder and deep delight and deep connectedness. And you don’t get that in tricked-up wines. You don’t get that in wines that are flashy. For me, it’s really a limbic, emotional sensation. It’s an aesthetic, or beyond aesthetic. It’s a recognition of deep order.”

And it takes time. New World winemakers are really just feeling their way, he says, and must be careful about making grand claims about producing a wine that truly expresses terroir.

“Wine is infinitely mysterious,” he says. “It can’t be reduced to point scores, or reduced to anything. It is so totally weird and surprising. The best thing we can do is protect our sense of wonder and awe.”

With Been Doon So Long, we can share that wonder, too.

Order a signed first-edition copy of Been Doon So Long: A Randall Grahm Vinthology.

This article originally appeared in Palate Press on 9 September 2009 and is reprinted with permission of the publisher.

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Deirdre Heekin's Bitter Alchemy

 
Deirdre Heekin is a writer, restaurateur, and sommelier. Her new book, Libation: A Bitter Alchemy, is an exquisite chronicle of her journey through the underworld of spirits as she learned to become liquoriste and winemaker.

Read my article on Deirdre and her new book, published today at Palate Press.

Follow Maker's Table on Twitter: @makerstable

Randall Grahm: Been Doon So Long

Photo: Alex Krause

Randall Grahm, celebrated winemaker of Bonny Doon Vineyard, is betting the farm on one big, beautiful idea: terroir. In his new book, Been Doon So Long: A Randall Grahm Vinthology, he shares his witty, irreverent, and thoroughly refreshing take on the making of truly great wine.

Read my article on Randall and his new book at Palate Press, or order a signed first edition copy from the Been Doon So Long book site.

Update, 1 November 2009: Read the full article, now republished here on Maker's Table.

Follow Maker's Table on Twitter: @makerstable