Small Wines at a Super-Size Tasting

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

LOS ANGELES, Calif. – One of the peculiarities of American wine loving is the grand tasting. Thirty years ago, you considered yourself lucky (and exhausted) to taste 15 or 20 wines of a certain type at one sitting.

But the rise of American wine collecting, as well as the American wine passion, pumped up this puny approach into extravaganzas involving dozens of wines at a sitting and sometimes hundreds of wines across a “wine weekend.”

Just last week, for example, the auction house Acker Merrall & Condit sponsored a blowout Burgundy tasting in New York spanning three days with about 115 wines, including meals at Per Se, Bouley, and Cru. It sold out at $7,999 a person. (Acker Merrall offers numerous “wine workshops” more typically priced between $95 and $395 a tasting.)

Here in Los Angeles, a wine-obsessed physicist named Bipin Desai has for 20 years sponsored similar wine extravaganzas, with meals prepared by Chinois on Main in Santa Monica and Spago in Beverly Hills, both owned by Wolfgang Puck. Floods of Bordeaux and Burgundies have washed through these tastings, which cost thousands of dollars a piece.

This past weekend was unusual, as Mr. Desai acknowledged in his opening remarks, for a first-time-ever featuring of a riesling wine. “In 20 years, I’ve never before presented a riesling,” Mr. Desai said. “And I knew that if I ever did, it would have to be Trimbach’s Clos Ste. Hune.” Mr. Desai admitted that he hadn’t tasted many vintages of Clos Ste. Hune, which is widely seen as Alsace’s single best riesling.

This admission likely could have been echoed by many of the evening’s 43 other participants, if only because so little of Clos Ste. Hune is produced, about 700 cases a year at most, according to vintner Jean Trimbach, who flew in directly from Alsace for the event.

A single vineyard wine, Clos Ste. Hune occupies a mere handkerchief of a vineyard, just 3.2 acres, with the oldest vines dating to the 1950s. All of the wines at the tasting came directly from Mr.Trimbach’s own cellar.

Although Clos Ste. Hune was the star attraction, the tasting also included Trimbach’s other great riesling, Cuvee Frederic Emile, which comes mostly from the grand cru Geisberg vineyard with a small amount drawn from the neighboring Osterberg vineyard. “This is more readily available,” Mr.Trimbach said. “We make about 3,500 to 4,000 cases a year of Frederic Emile.”

In all, 18 vintages of Clos Ste. Hune were offered, from 2000 to 1971 along with 16 vintages of Cuvee Frederic Emile, also from 2000 to 1971. With 34 rieslings in an evening – and not just any rieslings, mind you – this wasn’t your average suburban wine and cheese affair. (Actually, no cheese was served at all, which was a pity.)

Apart from the obvious bragging rights, are tastings such as this really worthwhile? The answer is a grandly equivocal “yes and no.” I’ve done these sorts of tastings before and have always walked away simultaneously awed and depressed at the extravagance of tasting (and spitting out) so many magnificent wines that each deserve a contemplative, lingering dinner of their own. Instead, they’re herded into a beauty contest where their merits are bloodlessly, methodically examined with clinical remove. It’s like a conference on lovemaking with a forensic pathologist as the keynote speaker.

That acknowledged, these tastings do offer insights. For example, it was striking to see not just the sublime quality of these two wines over a span of 35 years, but to recognize something exceedingly rare in today’s wine world: The style of these wines hasn’t changed an iota.

This may not seem at first glance all that significant, yet it’s surprisingly rare. Remarkably few wines from Bordeaux, Burgundy, Italy, Spain, California, Australia, or anywhere else – including each nation’s most famous and prized estates – have remained stylistically unchanged in the past three decades. Nearly all red Bordeaux have changed, sometimes radically, in this time span. Ditto for red Burgundies and practically all of Italy’s best wines.

Yet Trimbach remains true to its exclusive school, nowhere more so than with its two signature rieslings. What’s more, the Trimbach approach is almost a model of what not to do in today’s quivering, market-fearful wine business. For example, neither Clos Ste. Hune nor Cuvee Frederic Emile undergoes malolactic fermentation, where the harsh malic acid is transformed by bacteria into softer lactic acid.

This means that the wines not only retain a zippy acidity but that it requires years, even decades, for the wines to fully mature – a point brought out dramatically in the tasting where most of the wines only approached maturity some 15 years after the harvest date.

Also, neither of these wines spends any time in small vanilla-scented oak barrels. Instead, they are stored in large, flavorless oak casks and even there, not for very long. The wines are put in bottle little more than 18 months after the harvest, the better to preserve their freshness and fruit. Not least, both wines are almost always exceptionally dry, devoid of the palate-seducing sweetness now commonly found in California chardonnays, as well as numerous Alsatian wines.

Which wines stood out? There’s no question that Clos Ste. Hune is the supreme vehicle for finesse and minerality (the soil is 80% pure limestone). It’s also the more long-lived of the two. Only today are the 1985 and ’83 vintages truly mature, with ’79 and ’76 showing only slight signs of decline, evidenced by a slight drying out of the fruit. (The ’71 was, alas, marred by cork taint.)

Cuvee Frederic Emile is impressively close to Clos Ste. Hune in quality, displaying superb minerality and a more generous fruitiness, along with a tangerine scent absent in the more austere Clos Ste. Hune. It also matures a bit earlier: The 1990 Cuvee Frederic Emile was rounding the curve into full maturity while, side by side, the 1990 Clos Ste. Hune was nowhere near as ready.The difference between these two rieslings is like that between the most refined Swiss cotton and silk.

This is reflected in price as well.Where you can buy the 2000 Cuvee Frederic Emile for $35 (recently recommended in this column, it showed brilliantly at the tasting as well, confirming my belief that 2000 is one of Trimbach’s greatest vintages for this wine), the 2000 Clos Ste. Hune will set you back $160. You get what you pay for in each instance, but there’s no doubting that Cuvee Frederic Emile is the steal.


The New York Sun

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