PRIMA’s TOP TEN WINES OF THE YEAR
A Top One Hundred? Are you kidding me?
Ok….let me start off by saying that ‘Wine of the Year’ lists are absurd and a sheer marketing ploy to sell newspapers and magazines. Having said that, with so many calls for one publication’s ‘Wine of the Year’ (a wine that has been sold out for over a year), it dawned on me that this is one shameless marketing ploy that might be fun for us to do too. I threw it out there to my staff….what wines have we sold this year that, for whatever reason, have really resonated with our customers? The debate was, predictably, very lively! In most cases, we still have the wine (unlike some other publications, we are loath to reward a wine posthumously, as it were) so have at ‘em!
And the biggest award we’d like to bestow is ‘Customer of the Year’ and that goes to all of you! Thanks for seeing us through a very ‘interesting’ 2009. Best Wishes for a invigorating, healthy and prosperous 2010!
10) 2007/2008 Maranet Pinot Noir, Russian River $32
DuMOL has been a rock star at PRIMA since its inception but a bear to keep in stock. Thank heavens for Maranet. Here is 80% of DuMOL’s panache for 50% of its price!
9) 2000 Livio Sassetti-Pertimali Brunello di Montalcino $75
This wine, from a so-so vintage, hit its stride this year and just has kept on going! Customers asking for mature Brunello but don’t want to pony up for the 1990 Pacenti or Altesino Montosoli, are rewarded with an outstanding drink! JD is going to be very sorry when this is gone…..by the way, the 2004, also $75, is a world-beater.
TIE: 8) 2007 Ciacci Rosso IGT-2007/2008 Avignonesi Rosso di Montepulciano
This was the year for Tuscan IGTs; sweet, overachieving Sangiovese-based wines that provide a lot of Tuscan sun for not a lot of money. It was toss up here. Both are around $12.50. Take that Chianti!
7) Parr Selection Pinot Noir, Seven Springs Vineyard, Oregon $60
No Pinot Noir this year has so captured our imagination more than this whole cluster fermented beauty with its captivating exotic bouquet made by good friend and famous sommelier Raj Parr.
6) 2007 Vincent Girardin Macon-Fuisse $17
Most wines have a life span of two or three orders and then we move on, but this deliciously aromatic, really luscious white Burgundy has become the most re-ordered white Burgundy in years. We religiously go through 3-4 cases a week in the restaurant and in the store and it remains stunningly under every else’s radar!
5) 2008 Gagliardo ‘Fallegro’ Favorita $16.50
Through sheer force of will we established a market for this absolutely ravishing light, fresh Piemontese white made of the near extinct Favorita grape. Its very faint hint of bubble and minerally mentholly nose is refreshment in a glass and we have several customers so thoroughly hooked, they have a standing order for a case a week!
4) 1999 Delamotte Blanc de Blancs $84
Now when seven seasoned Champagne professionals who have gathered to taste each other’s products go crazy for one wine, you know it’s a stand out. Such was the case at our recent Champagne tasting where the back room talk was all about this amazing orange-peel inflected bubbly of incredible depth and character. We are jealously guarding 2 last magnums of the 1996. Delamotte is Salon’s sister property…..Salon should be ashamed of itself for selling a wine not half as good for four times the price!
3) 2006 Scarlett Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley $50
Not since Neal and Stewart have we had a Cabernet Sauvignon that so captured everyone’s imagination like Scarlett. It’s a beauty with lovely sweet fruit and very suave tannins. It was the hot of our Cabernet event earlier this fall and the restaurant plows through two cases a week like clockwork.
2) 2008 Evodia Garnacha, Calatayud, Spain $9
There were at least a dozen candidates from Spain (Alto Moncayo, Tres Picos and Volver for three) but none matched Evodia’s sheer fun-to-drinkness for freaking $9a bottle! People who forgot the name, asked for ‘the one with the electric blue label.’
1) 2006 Biscerno ‘Insoglio’ IGT Bolgheri $30
The choice for Numero Uno was actually unanimous….the ‘Boar’ wine is simply off the hook. We sell it by the case here in the wine store and in a seemingly endless parade of tastes, glasses and bottles in the restaurant. Tuscan wine lovers love it because it tastes so Tuscan but big Cab lovers appreciate its power and grace that evokes Sassicaia or Ornellaia in an approachable, easy going way. Just lovely.
Honorable Mention
No Room In Our Top Ten But Still Deserving
*2005 Chateau Malartic-Lagraviere, Pessac-Leognan $50
This wine is, to date, the best 2005 Bordeaux I’ve tasted for the money. Very impressive….everything I love about Bordeaux in one bottle.
*2007/2008 Rombauer Chardonnay $32
The official drink of the ‘Lower East Bay.’ We sell it in 750s, magnums, and halves. Now if they only made 187s.
*2007 Southern Rhone Reds
This is a case where there were too many great players on one team making it impossible to choose one as an MVP! This was the Yankees of 2009….a Murderer’s Row of awesome, aromatic wines with tons of personality!
Friday, December 11, 2009
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Going Seasonal On Your A**
In my line of work, informing you about wine I hope you will buy, I write a lot of prose. Most of it is boilerplate stuff; somewhere between 100 and 350 words highlighting what I find exciting and relevant about a particular wine in the hopes you will relate. I don't find the writing hard and I am rarely forced to write about something I am not genuinely passionate about. Marginally harder is writing longer themes that require more general remarks by way of introduction. Conventionally these remarks are prefaced by some reference something to which the reader and the writer both can relate, in my experience, more than anything, the damned seasons. If I see one more wine write-up that begins 'There's finally a fall chill in the air and we are more and more reaching for heartier red wines,' or 'Spring is in the air so a young man's fancy turns to Rose,' I think I'll barf....or, at very least, hit that delete key hard. I mean, I like the seasons as much as the next guy (I actually miss having four real ones like in Japan and Back East) and relish their changes, but if you ever catch me writing about them like that, call me on it!
Importer Kermit Lynch is still my benchmark for wine writing. Talk about selling the 'sizzle' of wine: Kermit's simple, understated and prosaic prose always puts me right there next to him, eating freshly harvested mussels and swilling Cassis Blanc at a beachfront cafe in Marsailles or rummaging through dusty old magnums of Miguoa with the Peyrauds in their cellar in Bandol. It's never about an individual wine so much as it is about what it might be like experiencing that moment in wine. I think this sort of writing most closely taps into my own emotional relationship with the product. I love the romance of wine and when a wine actually fulfills the promise of that romance, I love the wine! Alas, Kermit isn't writing for his newsletter as much these days as the blossoming renaissance of his original career in music seems to be taking center stage and, though he has a stupendous, highly committed staff doing the buying, writing and selling, in this age of Facebook, Twitter and immediate gratification, even the KLWM newsletter seems to have lost its innocence.
Parenthetically, this is a topic with which we find ourselves struggling at PRIMA. How do we stay relevant and fresh in an era where simply having knowledge, passion and commitment are not enough? We've always prided ourselves in our ability to discover interesting and unique wines and articulate our passion for them with integrity and verve, but how do we make that stand out amid the endless background static and constant pulses of wine blurbage shot out by all sorts of newly minted, self-anointed experts that assaults the average consumer every day? If you think you have an answer, let me know!
And while I am on the subject of wine writing, let me take a minute to comment about writers using the clinical 100-point scale to evaluate wine. My basic premise is, and stop me if you've heard this before, that it is futile, if not downright misleading, to attempt to so irrevocably quantify the essentially unquantifiable. I am a sports guy, and as a practicing sports guy, I appreciate statistics. I could calculate batting averages at 8 years old and when sports pundits break down baseball and football games by using numbers to quantify the chances of, say, a guy getting a hit in a particular situation, I get that. And that approach, twenty years ago, made sense to me with wine as well. I felt that knowing a wine's alcohol, pH and TA helped me understand a wine better, but I realized at a certain point, that other than helping me anticipate what a wine might 'feel' like, it didn't help me understand how it actually tasted and if I would even like it or not. And a 'score' didn't mean squat.
It's important for me to remember that tasting wine is ephemeral; what's in the glass is only a snapshot of its existence at that moment and even if you could draw quantifiable data from it, that data would be valid only as long as the exact conditions under which that wine was tasted could be replicated. The factors that affect one's actual impressions of a bottle of wine are almost too many to mention, the most obvious being the wine's current physical state as well as the taster's own. Giving a wine a numerical score is like trying to create a career's worth of statistics based on one or two at-bats!
Case in point: The other morning I was packing a case of 2007 Cotes du Rhone purchased by a customer in Las Vegas. He had ordered the wine three months or so ago but we held the box here until things cooled off by him a bit. I wondered how that wine, long sold out and un-re-tasted here, would show differently than it did in earlier in the summer if I were to steal one from Ed's case (I resisted) and, in fact, how it was going to show for Ed once he opened it in Nevada, hundreds of miles away, in the desert, in his own personal environment. So, supposing I had scored that wine back in June, maybe an 88. Or was it 89? Is it still an 88 today? Has it graduated to 90 or even 91? And next year? And the year after? Can we take its temperature somehow without opening it? Uh oh.....the Cotes du Rhone is only 86 today. Better drink it all up! But in the wine world, those points matter. No one wants an 88, but give the same wine a 90 (a difference of 2 points, mind you) and watch it jump.
Critics that attach absolute scores to bottles of wine are creating artificial expectations. The recent issue of Robert Parker's very fine Wine Advocate is a case in point. An astounding number of 2007 Chateauneuf du Papes scored 100 points. Tough to improve on that score, ain't it?! And good for them. To a wine, they are at the top of the Southern Rhone quality pyramid. But what of the poor Clos des Papes, by all accounts an incredible wine? It mustered a mere 99+. What did it do wrong? Was the label scuffed? I mean what's a wine to do to get a perfect score around here? Forever it will have live down the fact that it somehow failed where those others didn't. By the way, Mr. Parker and his team do an incredible job with their remarkably well written and consistent tasting notes and I think if you want to get to 'know' a wine, it is far more valuable to read them than to skip to the end and use that number as gospel.
Perfection in wine, to me, has nothing to do with a score: it's drinking that right wine at the right time. Damn, I can't tell you how many times I've had a 'small' wine that showed 'big' because it was opened at the perfect conflux of time and space. That's where the transcendence occurs. And that's what the traditional wine merchant does for you! We say 'this, my friend, may be the perfect wine for you someday. It will take your evening from the merely ordinary to something elevated and sublime.' Go forth and enjoy.
And fuck the score.
Importer Kermit Lynch is still my benchmark for wine writing. Talk about selling the 'sizzle' of wine: Kermit's simple, understated and prosaic prose always puts me right there next to him, eating freshly harvested mussels and swilling Cassis Blanc at a beachfront cafe in Marsailles or rummaging through dusty old magnums of Miguoa with the Peyrauds in their cellar in Bandol. It's never about an individual wine so much as it is about what it might be like experiencing that moment in wine. I think this sort of writing most closely taps into my own emotional relationship with the product. I love the romance of wine and when a wine actually fulfills the promise of that romance, I love the wine! Alas, Kermit isn't writing for his newsletter as much these days as the blossoming renaissance of his original career in music seems to be taking center stage and, though he has a stupendous, highly committed staff doing the buying, writing and selling, in this age of Facebook, Twitter and immediate gratification, even the KLWM newsletter seems to have lost its innocence.
Parenthetically, this is a topic with which we find ourselves struggling at PRIMA. How do we stay relevant and fresh in an era where simply having knowledge, passion and commitment are not enough? We've always prided ourselves in our ability to discover interesting and unique wines and articulate our passion for them with integrity and verve, but how do we make that stand out amid the endless background static and constant pulses of wine blurbage shot out by all sorts of newly minted, self-anointed experts that assaults the average consumer every day? If you think you have an answer, let me know!
And while I am on the subject of wine writing, let me take a minute to comment about writers using the clinical 100-point scale to evaluate wine. My basic premise is, and stop me if you've heard this before, that it is futile, if not downright misleading, to attempt to so irrevocably quantify the essentially unquantifiable. I am a sports guy, and as a practicing sports guy, I appreciate statistics. I could calculate batting averages at 8 years old and when sports pundits break down baseball and football games by using numbers to quantify the chances of, say, a guy getting a hit in a particular situation, I get that. And that approach, twenty years ago, made sense to me with wine as well. I felt that knowing a wine's alcohol, pH and TA helped me understand a wine better, but I realized at a certain point, that other than helping me anticipate what a wine might 'feel' like, it didn't help me understand how it actually tasted and if I would even like it or not. And a 'score' didn't mean squat.
It's important for me to remember that tasting wine is ephemeral; what's in the glass is only a snapshot of its existence at that moment and even if you could draw quantifiable data from it, that data would be valid only as long as the exact conditions under which that wine was tasted could be replicated. The factors that affect one's actual impressions of a bottle of wine are almost too many to mention, the most obvious being the wine's current physical state as well as the taster's own. Giving a wine a numerical score is like trying to create a career's worth of statistics based on one or two at-bats!
Case in point: The other morning I was packing a case of 2007 Cotes du Rhone purchased by a customer in Las Vegas. He had ordered the wine three months or so ago but we held the box here until things cooled off by him a bit. I wondered how that wine, long sold out and un-re-tasted here, would show differently than it did in earlier in the summer if I were to steal one from Ed's case (I resisted) and, in fact, how it was going to show for Ed once he opened it in Nevada, hundreds of miles away, in the desert, in his own personal environment. So, supposing I had scored that wine back in June, maybe an 88. Or was it 89? Is it still an 88 today? Has it graduated to 90 or even 91? And next year? And the year after? Can we take its temperature somehow without opening it? Uh oh.....the Cotes du Rhone is only 86 today. Better drink it all up! But in the wine world, those points matter. No one wants an 88, but give the same wine a 90 (a difference of 2 points, mind you) and watch it jump.
Critics that attach absolute scores to bottles of wine are creating artificial expectations. The recent issue of Robert Parker's very fine Wine Advocate is a case in point. An astounding number of 2007 Chateauneuf du Papes scored 100 points. Tough to improve on that score, ain't it?! And good for them. To a wine, they are at the top of the Southern Rhone quality pyramid. But what of the poor Clos des Papes, by all accounts an incredible wine? It mustered a mere 99+. What did it do wrong? Was the label scuffed? I mean what's a wine to do to get a perfect score around here? Forever it will have live down the fact that it somehow failed where those others didn't. By the way, Mr. Parker and his team do an incredible job with their remarkably well written and consistent tasting notes and I think if you want to get to 'know' a wine, it is far more valuable to read them than to skip to the end and use that number as gospel.
Perfection in wine, to me, has nothing to do with a score: it's drinking that right wine at the right time. Damn, I can't tell you how many times I've had a 'small' wine that showed 'big' because it was opened at the perfect conflux of time and space. That's where the transcendence occurs. And that's what the traditional wine merchant does for you! We say 'this, my friend, may be the perfect wine for you someday. It will take your evening from the merely ordinary to something elevated and sublime.' Go forth and enjoy.
And fuck the score.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
The Salad Days
I was, quite innocently, leafing through the current Food & Wine magazine at the dinner table (usually a no-no in the Rittmaster household, but Anne was doing the sudoku, so sue me) and amongst the 'hey this would be fun to try' recipes (what was up with Bob Foley making wine in Red Hook, Brooklyn last month?) was a lot of wine stuff that both intrigued me (Lettie Teague exposing Gruner Veltliner for what it is....the Emperor's new Riesling) and ho-hummed me (what's up with pizza and Pinot Noir when there are at least a hundred Italian reds that simply scream for pizza). But I'll tell you what I saw that just flat out made my butt pucker.....the Mondavi ads. This poor winery has been raped and pillaged and left to flounder at the hands of some of wine's great Philistines and yet they have the nerve to quote Mr. Mondavi's great bon mots as if he were still still holding forth in the Vineyard Room before Jancis Robinson. Makes me really sad to see his cameo holding a glass of wine in those ads as if he were validating the plonk they are selling under his name these days. OK.....we know you've sold your soul, just quit rubbing my face in it.
Well, in the interest of making own little waves here in Blogland, I've decided to dedicate these next couple of episodes to relating for posterity some of my modest history with the Mondavis. As I have already mentioned, my four years with the 'small, family-owned winery' as we ironically referred to ourselves, coincided with a particularly dynamic period in their long history and, by virtue of my unique position, managed to experience a rather larger cross-section of the winery's activities than many others might have done.
The Robert Mondavi Winery was sort of a breeding ground for winemakers. Just from the top of my head (I have never claimed this to be a research paper- just a blog!) and in no particular order I can name Mike Grgich, Zelma Long, Ric Forman, Helen Turley, Warren Winiarski and Sandi Belcher as some of the figures that at one time or another lugged hoses around the Oakville winery. In my own tenure I got to know Michael Weis, Karen Culler, Jim Moore, Steve Lagier, Charles Thomas, Pat Maheny and a host of others, virtually all of whom have gone on to bigger and better things. In fact, there are few wineries I have visited in the Napa (or even Sonoma) Valleys that have not avowed some debt of gratitude to the Mondavis. I was, in no way, a winemaker, but during my six months in Oakville I helped make plenty of it, including punching down plenty of Pinot Noir, racking (and nearly drowning in) Cabernet and stirring up a boatload of Chardonnay lees. (My only start-to-finish wine was a couple of barrels of Opus One second crop that Greg Imbach and I made in his garage that we called 'Raid Red' thanks to the rather draconian solution we employed to deal with the four inch deep trail of nasty ants that attacked our ferment. Let's put it this way...the wine sucked and we definitely couldn't call it 'organic.' ). But Mondavi in those days was like that. It was a big laboratory for experimentation and there was enough latitude for everyone to advance whatever crazy theory they had. We tested screw tops of longevity, made wine both filtered and unfiltered, whole cluster or no-cluster, harvested early, harvested late. Blending trials were conducted on a round white table in the lab where the winemakers would trot out lot after lot (there were something like 300 distinct lots of Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon alone for example) poured from tiny jars into glasses and anyone that happened by and had the time and knew their way around J-North or Plot P could write their comments with dry-erase marker right on the table. Who knew? You may have just created that year's Cab Reserve blend!
But make no mistake about it.....if your name wasn't Tim Mondavi, you were never going to truly hold sway as Mondavi's winemaker. And that's what made it such a great place to build your resume. Unending funds with which to screw around and nothing to lose.....eventually you'd be scouted and made an exec somewhere else and your resume would be that much richer for your time making Fume in Oakville.
I was scouted in Japan to look after the winery's interests there (and later 21 other countries) thanks to my rather unique skill set that included experience as a teacher ('education' is what they called 'sales' at Mondavi in those days) , Japanese language and total wine geek-dom. The interview process took some six months and included no fewer than three business class flights from Tokyo to Oakville to meet all kinds of people ranging from PR to HR with a bit of National Sales and the winemaking team thrown in, eating four-hour lunches and downing Echezeaux alongside Mondavi Pinot.
It was on the first one of these junkets that I met Gary Ramona, the V-P who pioneered Mondavi's export markets and the man who quickly convinced me that I wanted to torpedo my real career and dedicate the rest of my life to the Mondavis. I mean, I met the Mondavis repeatedly during the interview process, got along well with Tim (and still do), sparred with Michael (and still do) and paid homage to Mister and Margrit ( I ALWAYS will), but it was Gary that brought out the Kool-Aid with the Chardonnay Reserve and made me drink it from Riedel crystal. Gary bled Mondavi Cabernet and would do anything for Mr. Mondavi and it was his sheer passion for all things Mondavi that really turned my head.
But Gary was, I need to say here, dealt with not long after I was hired, in a very shabby manner by the family thanks to some classic Mondavi infighting, when his personal life came tumbling down around him in a singularly bizarre set of circumstances that involved his estranged wife, a for-pay psychiatrist and a set of 'recovered memories'. I am not here to pass judgement on Gary; what the hell do I know? But we had an event at Auberge du Soleil with a bunch of Mondavi importers and I wound up drinking old Cabernet on the balcony of the Auberge private room late at night with Gary, who was being tortured by having to be 'on' for a bunch of European agents who wanted nothing more than to suck down Opus and Mondavi Reserve Cabernet while, at the same time, deal with the events unfolding before him while being handed a resounding FUCK YOU from .....well, one of the family members. He was kind enough to divulge, quite diplomatically, the depth of his disbelief at the circumstances in which he found himself, and it was with utter shock that Gary told me only weeks later that he was 'going on leave' never, of course, to return. (I caught up with Gary a few years after I joined PRIMA, maybe 1995? and he was involved with some Chilean wine venture but I haven't heard from him since).
Anyway, Gary was very much with Mondavi when I accepted their offer and moved my wife and infant daughter from (pre-earthquake) Kobe, Japan to Yountville. By the way, I am deliberately avoiding talking about the V-P Export that actually hired (and eventually fired) me because....well, just because I don't like the guy and in four years at Mondavi he was the only one to whom I never I could relate. What a shame he held such sway over me. But I don't need to write about him. I am sure he is being a phony-ass bastard in New Mexico or where ever it was he went when he was finally axed at Mondavi and I don't care. Besides, it is my blog and if he wants to write one about me, he can.
We moved to a sweet little house on Mount Street (still there- I drive by whenever I have a snoot-full of Rose and fried smelts at Bisto Jeanty) and set about my six months training. Considering my position was newly created and there was no training manual anyway, I was pretty much left to my own devices and created for myself a program that involved lots of winemaking, visiting lots of other wineries, giving tours and tastings to the public (my greatest joy) and entertaining anyone that visited the winery from Asia. I used the Mondavi expense account to drink all of Mustard's 1970 Mondavi Cabernet, lunch at (the now defunct) Piatti's and using the Vineyard Room (and its wine cabinet) to advance the family's aims in the Far East. And in doing so I found an immense community of others passionately involved with the Mondavi cause. The afore mentioned Greg Imbach and good friend William Craig made up the 'Education' section and they spent hours in our trailer behind the winery showing me how winemaking had changed over the past decade. They are still great friends twenty years later. Winemakers like Steve (Lagier-Meredith) Lagier, Jim Moore, Charles Thomas and Karen Culler spent literally hours with me both during and after work hours. Connie, Kurt, Bill, Ralph and Roger (now Opus' director of PR, poor sod) worked me on the tours while Opus' Stu Harrison gave me the keys and the code to the just-built winery so I could sample barrels, pick grapes and lead tours, although it also became my favorite private picnic spot on the weekends when no one was about. I made friends with others selling Mondavi like Greg (T-Vine) Brown, Gary (Coho) Lipp and many others, many of whom I run into now as they try and sell their current wine at PRIMA. And then there were the others around the Valley (Jan Shrem at Clos Pegase was sooooo impressed that I recognized the Hans Hoffman painting above his desk but thanked Mr. Mondavi for helping clear the opposition to his Michael Graves designed winery) that opened their doors to me strictly on the strength of the Mondavi name.
Those were some great times. My daughter spoke English for the first time to someone other than Anne and I at Yountville Elementary and Anne was as relaxed as I've ever seen her. I drove the Mondavi company yacht (some sort of Oldsmobile) and we ate meat loaf at the (now Bistro Jeanty) Yountville Bar and Grill when we weren't shopping at Ranch Market in Yountville or Nob Hill in Napa and cooking for ourselves. It seems like every one of our friends from Japan found a reason to visit Northern California that summer including Rika-chan, a student of ours from Kobe, who thought it would be convenient to get her driver's license while staying with us. I will go to my grave remembering hitting the cantilever on the Pope Street bridge in St. Helena at 60 miles an hour with Rika aiming the Mondavi-mobile and my shitting a pickle. She actually failed her road test four times before being given a mercy license and told NEVER to drive again in the States.
Lots of other stuff happened. I mapped phylloxera from a hot air balloon, flew in Michael Mondavis new plane to Woodbridge (one of several great trips to Woodbridge....David Lucas...you're the MAN!), met my good friends Donald and Heather (no longer together) Patz at the now defunct Trilogy restaurant where they proudly showed off their very first vintage of Patz and Hall Chardonnay, drank two versions of Joseph Swan Zin- one harvested before and one harvested after the rain with Jim Moore and Charles Thomas and generally immersed myself in the wine current that ran under the Napa Valley. Anne and I genuinely dreaded flying back to Tokyo to start our 'mission' there that November.
Do I miss it now? Well, sure. But those were different times. I like to think it was a lot more innocent in those days. Opus One cost $50 and was the most expensive wine in the Valley. Bill Harlan was still selling real estate and Screaming Eagle was still in the nest. But so what? Though I am older and a helluva lot more jaded, I still get a kick out of seeing Greg Brown when he comes by to deliver his wine or when I bump into Michael Mondavi, out there being, well, Michael Mondavi.
We all knew there was a moment there where anything was possible. And as long as a kernel of that possibility exists, it's all good, man.
Well, in the interest of making own little waves here in Blogland, I've decided to dedicate these next couple of episodes to relating for posterity some of my modest history with the Mondavis. As I have already mentioned, my four years with the 'small, family-owned winery' as we ironically referred to ourselves, coincided with a particularly dynamic period in their long history and, by virtue of my unique position, managed to experience a rather larger cross-section of the winery's activities than many others might have done.
The Robert Mondavi Winery was sort of a breeding ground for winemakers. Just from the top of my head (I have never claimed this to be a research paper- just a blog!) and in no particular order I can name Mike Grgich, Zelma Long, Ric Forman, Helen Turley, Warren Winiarski and Sandi Belcher as some of the figures that at one time or another lugged hoses around the Oakville winery. In my own tenure I got to know Michael Weis, Karen Culler, Jim Moore, Steve Lagier, Charles Thomas, Pat Maheny and a host of others, virtually all of whom have gone on to bigger and better things. In fact, there are few wineries I have visited in the Napa (or even Sonoma) Valleys that have not avowed some debt of gratitude to the Mondavis. I was, in no way, a winemaker, but during my six months in Oakville I helped make plenty of it, including punching down plenty of Pinot Noir, racking (and nearly drowning in) Cabernet and stirring up a boatload of Chardonnay lees. (My only start-to-finish wine was a couple of barrels of Opus One second crop that Greg Imbach and I made in his garage that we called 'Raid Red' thanks to the rather draconian solution we employed to deal with the four inch deep trail of nasty ants that attacked our ferment. Let's put it this way...the wine sucked and we definitely couldn't call it 'organic.' ). But Mondavi in those days was like that. It was a big laboratory for experimentation and there was enough latitude for everyone to advance whatever crazy theory they had. We tested screw tops of longevity, made wine both filtered and unfiltered, whole cluster or no-cluster, harvested early, harvested late. Blending trials were conducted on a round white table in the lab where the winemakers would trot out lot after lot (there were something like 300 distinct lots of Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon alone for example) poured from tiny jars into glasses and anyone that happened by and had the time and knew their way around J-North or Plot P could write their comments with dry-erase marker right on the table. Who knew? You may have just created that year's Cab Reserve blend!
But make no mistake about it.....if your name wasn't Tim Mondavi, you were never going to truly hold sway as Mondavi's winemaker. And that's what made it such a great place to build your resume. Unending funds with which to screw around and nothing to lose.....eventually you'd be scouted and made an exec somewhere else and your resume would be that much richer for your time making Fume in Oakville.
I was scouted in Japan to look after the winery's interests there (and later 21 other countries) thanks to my rather unique skill set that included experience as a teacher ('education' is what they called 'sales' at Mondavi in those days) , Japanese language and total wine geek-dom. The interview process took some six months and included no fewer than three business class flights from Tokyo to Oakville to meet all kinds of people ranging from PR to HR with a bit of National Sales and the winemaking team thrown in, eating four-hour lunches and downing Echezeaux alongside Mondavi Pinot.
It was on the first one of these junkets that I met Gary Ramona, the V-P who pioneered Mondavi's export markets and the man who quickly convinced me that I wanted to torpedo my real career and dedicate the rest of my life to the Mondavis. I mean, I met the Mondavis repeatedly during the interview process, got along well with Tim (and still do), sparred with Michael (and still do) and paid homage to Mister and Margrit ( I ALWAYS will), but it was Gary that brought out the Kool-Aid with the Chardonnay Reserve and made me drink it from Riedel crystal. Gary bled Mondavi Cabernet and would do anything for Mr. Mondavi and it was his sheer passion for all things Mondavi that really turned my head.
But Gary was, I need to say here, dealt with not long after I was hired, in a very shabby manner by the family thanks to some classic Mondavi infighting, when his personal life came tumbling down around him in a singularly bizarre set of circumstances that involved his estranged wife, a for-pay psychiatrist and a set of 'recovered memories'. I am not here to pass judgement on Gary; what the hell do I know? But we had an event at Auberge du Soleil with a bunch of Mondavi importers and I wound up drinking old Cabernet on the balcony of the Auberge private room late at night with Gary, who was being tortured by having to be 'on' for a bunch of European agents who wanted nothing more than to suck down Opus and Mondavi Reserve Cabernet while, at the same time, deal with the events unfolding before him while being handed a resounding FUCK YOU from .....well, one of the family members. He was kind enough to divulge, quite diplomatically, the depth of his disbelief at the circumstances in which he found himself, and it was with utter shock that Gary told me only weeks later that he was 'going on leave' never, of course, to return. (I caught up with Gary a few years after I joined PRIMA, maybe 1995? and he was involved with some Chilean wine venture but I haven't heard from him since).
Anyway, Gary was very much with Mondavi when I accepted their offer and moved my wife and infant daughter from (pre-earthquake) Kobe, Japan to Yountville. By the way, I am deliberately avoiding talking about the V-P Export that actually hired (and eventually fired) me because....well, just because I don't like the guy and in four years at Mondavi he was the only one to whom I never I could relate. What a shame he held such sway over me. But I don't need to write about him. I am sure he is being a phony-ass bastard in New Mexico or where ever it was he went when he was finally axed at Mondavi and I don't care. Besides, it is my blog and if he wants to write one about me, he can.
We moved to a sweet little house on Mount Street (still there- I drive by whenever I have a snoot-full of Rose and fried smelts at Bisto Jeanty) and set about my six months training. Considering my position was newly created and there was no training manual anyway, I was pretty much left to my own devices and created for myself a program that involved lots of winemaking, visiting lots of other wineries, giving tours and tastings to the public (my greatest joy) and entertaining anyone that visited the winery from Asia. I used the Mondavi expense account to drink all of Mustard's 1970 Mondavi Cabernet, lunch at (the now defunct) Piatti's and using the Vineyard Room (and its wine cabinet) to advance the family's aims in the Far East. And in doing so I found an immense community of others passionately involved with the Mondavi cause. The afore mentioned Greg Imbach and good friend William Craig made up the 'Education' section and they spent hours in our trailer behind the winery showing me how winemaking had changed over the past decade. They are still great friends twenty years later. Winemakers like Steve (Lagier-Meredith) Lagier, Jim Moore, Charles Thomas and Karen Culler spent literally hours with me both during and after work hours. Connie, Kurt, Bill, Ralph and Roger (now Opus' director of PR, poor sod) worked me on the tours while Opus' Stu Harrison gave me the keys and the code to the just-built winery so I could sample barrels, pick grapes and lead tours, although it also became my favorite private picnic spot on the weekends when no one was about. I made friends with others selling Mondavi like Greg (T-Vine) Brown, Gary (Coho) Lipp and many others, many of whom I run into now as they try and sell their current wine at PRIMA. And then there were the others around the Valley (Jan Shrem at Clos Pegase was sooooo impressed that I recognized the Hans Hoffman painting above his desk but thanked Mr. Mondavi for helping clear the opposition to his Michael Graves designed winery) that opened their doors to me strictly on the strength of the Mondavi name.
Those were some great times. My daughter spoke English for the first time to someone other than Anne and I at Yountville Elementary and Anne was as relaxed as I've ever seen her. I drove the Mondavi company yacht (some sort of Oldsmobile) and we ate meat loaf at the (now Bistro Jeanty) Yountville Bar and Grill when we weren't shopping at Ranch Market in Yountville or Nob Hill in Napa and cooking for ourselves. It seems like every one of our friends from Japan found a reason to visit Northern California that summer including Rika-chan, a student of ours from Kobe, who thought it would be convenient to get her driver's license while staying with us. I will go to my grave remembering hitting the cantilever on the Pope Street bridge in St. Helena at 60 miles an hour with Rika aiming the Mondavi-mobile and my shitting a pickle. She actually failed her road test four times before being given a mercy license and told NEVER to drive again in the States.
Lots of other stuff happened. I mapped phylloxera from a hot air balloon, flew in Michael Mondavis new plane to Woodbridge (one of several great trips to Woodbridge....David Lucas...you're the MAN!), met my good friends Donald and Heather (no longer together) Patz at the now defunct Trilogy restaurant where they proudly showed off their very first vintage of Patz and Hall Chardonnay, drank two versions of Joseph Swan Zin- one harvested before and one harvested after the rain with Jim Moore and Charles Thomas and generally immersed myself in the wine current that ran under the Napa Valley. Anne and I genuinely dreaded flying back to Tokyo to start our 'mission' there that November.
Do I miss it now? Well, sure. But those were different times. I like to think it was a lot more innocent in those days. Opus One cost $50 and was the most expensive wine in the Valley. Bill Harlan was still selling real estate and Screaming Eagle was still in the nest. But so what? Though I am older and a helluva lot more jaded, I still get a kick out of seeing Greg Brown when he comes by to deliver his wine or when I bump into Michael Mondavi, out there being, well, Michael Mondavi.
We all knew there was a moment there where anything was possible. And as long as a kernel of that possibility exists, it's all good, man.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Travels With Robert
Much has been written about the rise and fall of the Mondavi empire, including a very good book detailing in every last gory detail, its decay once the venerable winery went public in the early nineties, and its subsequent sale and dismemberment. But my opinions about all issues Mondavi are hardly objective and come from a different perspective, having worked for the family during an interesting part of their history and having the very unique opportunity to spend lots of time with Mister, Margrit, Tim and Michael up close and personal while looking after their interests in Asia and even, occasionally now, as I deal with Michael and Tim in their current incarnations.
Though I could probably write my own book with what I observed during my six-months' training at the winery in Oakville: making wine, using my Mondavi-sized expense account to entertain Asian guests, having the keys to the Vineyard Room wine closet and dealing with the winery's Kremlin-like bureaucracy and Machiavellian in-fighting. Then there was my tenure in Tokyo, shepherding various Mondavis around Japan and the Pacific Rim. Though a lot of it was incredibly frustrating and ultimately proved to be lethal to my career, I make a point of putting on my rose colored glasses when looking back on my days there. More than anything, I was incredibly lucky to have had the opportunity to get to intimately know one of the giants of our industry, a man whose charisma, integrity and vision inspired us all; a man whose warmth and genuineness was the same in private as it was in public. There will never be another like him.
The highlight of my Asian tenure was a two-week junket spent with Robert and Margrit in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Thailand. The ostensible reason for the trip was a five day wine event in Hong Kong that brought together a host of wine luminaries from around the world including Johnny Hugel, the seventh generation owner of Hugel from Alsace, the irrepressible Wolf Blass from Australia, Christian Moueix (in his enfant terrible period) from Bordeaux, glass maker George Riedel and close Mondavi friends the late Barney and wife Bella Rhodes, great wine collectors and owners of the great Bella Oaks Vineyard in Napa. One of the focal points of the Hong Kong stay was a luncheon I helped organize for the Hong Kong Sommelier Association at the Restaurant Petrus at the top of the Hotel Shangri-La. As a spectacle, it was hard to beat this incredible dining room all decked out with massive liveried staff, gorgeous plateware and what looked like a million giant Riedel Sommelier stems, but I was very nervous sitting at the head table with the Mondavis, Riedel and Moueix who, not liking the way his Chateau Petrus 1975 was showing, astounded the assembled sommeliers by whisking the wine in his mile-high Riedel Bordeaux glass with a fork! But, as always when there was an audience, Mister Mondavi and Margrit were in great fettle, Mister holding forth in his high pitched voice on his favorite themes (This was like 18 years ago and I don't remember if he had yet arrived at his patented 'Soft as a baby's butt but with the depth of a Pavarotti' mantra yet, but he always had something pithy to say about his wine) and generally having a wonderful time. Better for me, though, was the outstanding seafood lunch we had the next day on an outlying island with the entire cast of characters. Not only was the relaxed picnic a ton of fun, I spent the hour or so each way on the junk motoring out to the island drinking like seven kinds of Tasmanian Pinot Noir and generally behaving badly with John Avery, the affable scion of the old Avery Wine Merchants in London. But best of all was the off time spent with the Mondavis in Hong Kong, visiting Mister's favorite tailor, testing the limits of the Mondavi American Express card in exclusive buzz-for-admittance Chinese antique galleries and eating dim sum and noodles from street stalls. Margrit picked up a small Tang dynasty painted ceramic 'severed pig's head on a platter' from a dealer's stall in the Stanley Market and gave it to me for my wife. We keep it next to the stove in our kitchen to this day.
From Hong Kong we flew to Taipei (the Mondavis in the front of the plane and me in the back, of course) where we spent an incredible day, first at an unbelievably extravagant luncheon for 400 in full period costume at a giant temple complex also used as the set of countless Kung Fu movies and then at a small, very late dinner in the dining room of Taipei's landmark Grand Hotel, whose incredible airplane hangar sized kitchen was used in 'Eat, Drink, Man, Woman', one of my all-time favorite food movies. At lunch, it was again Robert Mondavi in his glory, sitting on a cinnabar throne alongside Queen Margrit, resplendent in full period regalia, right down to the long pony tail, ever the Mandarin, benevolently bestowing his 400 minions with bottles of Fume Blanc Reserve and older vintages of Cab Reserve from six liter bottles.
After Taiwan, it was Singapore and my one and only (so far) stay at the legendary Raffles Hotel, in the Ava Gardner suite, no less. The Mondavis and I had dinner at the modest apartment of Singapore's most influential individual wine enthusiast, Dr. N.K. Yang. Yang's apartment had one room in his basement digs converted into a wine cellar and I saw more Opus One in it than I had allocated for the entire country. Everything else you could possibly imagine was crammed into that cellar and 12 of us managed to suffer through a catered meal with Yang's French wines to balance each of our Mondavi offerings: DRC Le Montrachet alongside Mondavi Chardonnay Reserve, R-C with the Pinot Noir Reserve (I mean, what else would you drink?), and old vintages of Mouton, Opus and Mondavi Cab Reserve. After putting my exhausted charges (actually, it was very hard to run Mr. Mondavi out of energy....if you wanted to get him- and yourself- to bed before 1 or 2 AM, I learned, the key was keeping him from catching any of the quickie catnaps that quickly recharged his seemingly bottomless battery) to bed, I hung out at the Raffles bar until the wee hours drinking old Armagnac with Singapore's most famous sommelier, Ignacious Chan.
The trip ended for us in Thailand where, for me, the highlight of the whole journey happened on the way in from the airport, a nearly three hour slog, thanks to Bangkok's famously horrible traffic and some incredibly filthy weather. In the darkened limo, I was sitting in the front seat next to the driver who, to the best of my knowledge, spoke not a word of English, while Mister and Margrit sat in the back, in relaxed, expansive moods, speaking in low tones with each other about the 'kids', the winery, succession and a host of other, very intimate subjects. I swore to myself I would forever keep in confidence what I overheard that night, and I intend to do that, but that doesn't make me very sorry that I didn't have a tape recorder in that car.
I saw the Mondavis again in Oakville after I left their employ: at Mister's various birthday parties, an Opus One event and, by chance, at a restaurant in Yountville, and, though they were very warm to me, it was clear that those halcyon days of travel and indulgence were another era.
So, rest in peace, Mister Mondavi and here's a glass of old Fume to all our collective memories of those wonderful moments in Oakville's own version of Camelot.
Coda: Not too long ago, on a whim, I pulled out a bottle of 1987 Mondavi Pinot Noir Reserve, complete with its Japanese strip label identifying itself as a bottle I had dragged back from my stay there. The Pinot Noir program was a huge point of emphasis during the first few years of my tenure with the winery but I bet very few of us who helped make that wine ever expected it to cellar 12 years. Well, it was fabulous. Complex and truffle-y on the nose and silky and sweet on the palate, it was a stunning wine that reminded me that Robert Mondavi Winery was often guilty of understatement and subtlety in an era where obviousness and bombast were fast becoming the order of the day.
Though I could probably write my own book with what I observed during my six-months' training at the winery in Oakville: making wine, using my Mondavi-sized expense account to entertain Asian guests, having the keys to the Vineyard Room wine closet and dealing with the winery's Kremlin-like bureaucracy and Machiavellian in-fighting. Then there was my tenure in Tokyo, shepherding various Mondavis around Japan and the Pacific Rim. Though a lot of it was incredibly frustrating and ultimately proved to be lethal to my career, I make a point of putting on my rose colored glasses when looking back on my days there. More than anything, I was incredibly lucky to have had the opportunity to get to intimately know one of the giants of our industry, a man whose charisma, integrity and vision inspired us all; a man whose warmth and genuineness was the same in private as it was in public. There will never be another like him.
The highlight of my Asian tenure was a two-week junket spent with Robert and Margrit in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Thailand. The ostensible reason for the trip was a five day wine event in Hong Kong that brought together a host of wine luminaries from around the world including Johnny Hugel, the seventh generation owner of Hugel from Alsace, the irrepressible Wolf Blass from Australia, Christian Moueix (in his enfant terrible period) from Bordeaux, glass maker George Riedel and close Mondavi friends the late Barney and wife Bella Rhodes, great wine collectors and owners of the great Bella Oaks Vineyard in Napa. One of the focal points of the Hong Kong stay was a luncheon I helped organize for the Hong Kong Sommelier Association at the Restaurant Petrus at the top of the Hotel Shangri-La. As a spectacle, it was hard to beat this incredible dining room all decked out with massive liveried staff, gorgeous plateware and what looked like a million giant Riedel Sommelier stems, but I was very nervous sitting at the head table with the Mondavis, Riedel and Moueix who, not liking the way his Chateau Petrus 1975 was showing, astounded the assembled sommeliers by whisking the wine in his mile-high Riedel Bordeaux glass with a fork! But, as always when there was an audience, Mister Mondavi and Margrit were in great fettle, Mister holding forth in his high pitched voice on his favorite themes (This was like 18 years ago and I don't remember if he had yet arrived at his patented 'Soft as a baby's butt but with the depth of a Pavarotti' mantra yet, but he always had something pithy to say about his wine) and generally having a wonderful time. Better for me, though, was the outstanding seafood lunch we had the next day on an outlying island with the entire cast of characters. Not only was the relaxed picnic a ton of fun, I spent the hour or so each way on the junk motoring out to the island drinking like seven kinds of Tasmanian Pinot Noir and generally behaving badly with John Avery, the affable scion of the old Avery Wine Merchants in London. But best of all was the off time spent with the Mondavis in Hong Kong, visiting Mister's favorite tailor, testing the limits of the Mondavi American Express card in exclusive buzz-for-admittance Chinese antique galleries and eating dim sum and noodles from street stalls. Margrit picked up a small Tang dynasty painted ceramic 'severed pig's head on a platter' from a dealer's stall in the Stanley Market and gave it to me for my wife. We keep it next to the stove in our kitchen to this day.
From Hong Kong we flew to Taipei (the Mondavis in the front of the plane and me in the back, of course) where we spent an incredible day, first at an unbelievably extravagant luncheon for 400 in full period costume at a giant temple complex also used as the set of countless Kung Fu movies and then at a small, very late dinner in the dining room of Taipei's landmark Grand Hotel, whose incredible airplane hangar sized kitchen was used in 'Eat, Drink, Man, Woman', one of my all-time favorite food movies. At lunch, it was again Robert Mondavi in his glory, sitting on a cinnabar throne alongside Queen Margrit, resplendent in full period regalia, right down to the long pony tail, ever the Mandarin, benevolently bestowing his 400 minions with bottles of Fume Blanc Reserve and older vintages of Cab Reserve from six liter bottles.
After Taiwan, it was Singapore and my one and only (so far) stay at the legendary Raffles Hotel, in the Ava Gardner suite, no less. The Mondavis and I had dinner at the modest apartment of Singapore's most influential individual wine enthusiast, Dr. N.K. Yang. Yang's apartment had one room in his basement digs converted into a wine cellar and I saw more Opus One in it than I had allocated for the entire country. Everything else you could possibly imagine was crammed into that cellar and 12 of us managed to suffer through a catered meal with Yang's French wines to balance each of our Mondavi offerings: DRC Le Montrachet alongside Mondavi Chardonnay Reserve, R-C with the Pinot Noir Reserve (I mean, what else would you drink?), and old vintages of Mouton, Opus and Mondavi Cab Reserve. After putting my exhausted charges (actually, it was very hard to run Mr. Mondavi out of energy....if you wanted to get him- and yourself- to bed before 1 or 2 AM, I learned, the key was keeping him from catching any of the quickie catnaps that quickly recharged his seemingly bottomless battery) to bed, I hung out at the Raffles bar until the wee hours drinking old Armagnac with Singapore's most famous sommelier, Ignacious Chan.
The trip ended for us in Thailand where, for me, the highlight of the whole journey happened on the way in from the airport, a nearly three hour slog, thanks to Bangkok's famously horrible traffic and some incredibly filthy weather. In the darkened limo, I was sitting in the front seat next to the driver who, to the best of my knowledge, spoke not a word of English, while Mister and Margrit sat in the back, in relaxed, expansive moods, speaking in low tones with each other about the 'kids', the winery, succession and a host of other, very intimate subjects. I swore to myself I would forever keep in confidence what I overheard that night, and I intend to do that, but that doesn't make me very sorry that I didn't have a tape recorder in that car.
I saw the Mondavis again in Oakville after I left their employ: at Mister's various birthday parties, an Opus One event and, by chance, at a restaurant in Yountville, and, though they were very warm to me, it was clear that those halcyon days of travel and indulgence were another era.
So, rest in peace, Mister Mondavi and here's a glass of old Fume to all our collective memories of those wonderful moments in Oakville's own version of Camelot.
Coda: Not too long ago, on a whim, I pulled out a bottle of 1987 Mondavi Pinot Noir Reserve, complete with its Japanese strip label identifying itself as a bottle I had dragged back from my stay there. The Pinot Noir program was a huge point of emphasis during the first few years of my tenure with the winery but I bet very few of us who helped make that wine ever expected it to cellar 12 years. Well, it was fabulous. Complex and truffle-y on the nose and silky and sweet on the palate, it was a stunning wine that reminded me that Robert Mondavi Winery was often guilty of understatement and subtlety in an era where obviousness and bombast were fast becoming the order of the day.
Friday, September 4, 2009
Background To A Particular Fall Ritual
Every year around this time I get my ridiculously overwrought, gold embossed Opus One pre-sell application requiring my retina scan and signature in blood to guarantee PRIMA's allocation. The matte finished, high production value pamphlet usually includes the winery's notes on the new (best ever!) vintage of Opus as well as a synopsis of previous vintages (if you count the 2008 vintage in barrel and the 2009 vintage sitting out there waiting to get ripe, now numbering 31 strong). The ceremonial reception of the pre-sell from my Southern Wines and Spirits rep, my barking and balking at the new (never lower) price and my derisive comments about how damned seriously they take themselves at that winery are sort of an annual right of passage for me and I have to admit I look forward to it, even if my poor rep probably cringes outside for an hour before slinking in to deliver the news.
I have a long association with Opus One thanks to my having worked for them for four years selling their wine in Japan and 21 other countries in the Far East, as well as now 15 vintages of buying and selling it here at PRIMA. Well, it wasn't so much 'selling' it in the Far East: it was more like 'controlling' it for, in those days Opus One was an incredibly precious commodity.
Two of the funniest Opus stories I have involve Japan and the winery's unfortunate importation and distribution arrangement. In those days, Robert Mondavi Winery was imported by the beverage giant Suntory, while the stable of wines controlled by the Mouton-Rothschild family (Mouton, Clerc-Milon, Mouton Cadet, etc.) was imported by a very tiny, Euro-centric outfit that also brought in Louis Latour and, if I remember correctly, the wildly idiosyncratic Domaine Ott rose, among a few other interesting French wines. In their wisdom, almost the inevitable result of the constant internecine fighting between the Mondavi and Mouton sides of the Opus equation, it was decided that Opus One should be imported and distributed in Japan by both companies. Dual arrangements are not unusual but rarely were there stranger bedfellows than tiny Barklay Imports, and their decidedly aged, Francophile, Old School sales force and the 400-pound gorilla in the room, Suntory, Ltd. and their legions of young, workaholic sales soldiers. And, being Mondavi's and Opus' sole rep on the ground in Tokyo, it was yours truly that got ground to dust between them.
First there was what I liked to call 'The Queen Alice Bag Caper" that included several of the most awkward moments of my fifteen years in Japan. It involved an Opus One luncheon I arranged at one of the most beautiful and precious French restaurants in Tokyo called Queen Alice. The event was for the Japan Sommelier Association and was arranged because I had Michael Mondavi in town. Starting right from the invitation process, this event spelled trouble. Although I would do the actual inviting, the final list of sommeliers was to be 50% submitted by Suntory and 50% by Barklay. It was my goal to invite many of the up-and-coming Young Turk sommeliers in Tokyo to have them actually taste the Opus they might actually someday sell, but Suntory steadfastly maintained that since there was an actual Mondavi in the house, we had to first invite a score of senior sommeliers, many of whose actual table service days were long past, and could care less about Opus One in particular, and any wine from California in general. And Barklay's list was much the same: doddering octogenarian sommeliers from Tokyo's old guard French restaurants like Maxim's. I had two good friends at Suntory, though, and, together, we stage-managed an end-run, getting invites to many of our 'target' somms and when I 'accidentally' forgot to mail some of those other invites, there miraculously was room for everyone we wanted to attend.
The luncheon was to feature a live telephone hook up between Michael Mondavi in Queen Alice and the Baroness Philippine back at Mouton to share pithy and amusing anecdotes about Opus including the inside scoop of that infamous meeting between the Baron Philippe and Robert Mondavi in the Baron's bedroom where Opus One was first conceived. But, of course, the phone call didn't quite come off that way. What no one in the room knew, Mouton-Mondavi relations were at a particularly low ebb and there was cross-cultural sparring at every level, from the French and American winemaking teams, all the way to the very top of the partnership. With me acting as nervous translator, and Michael grinning like a Cheshire Cat the whole time, he and Philippine had, over a lousy phone connection, one of the most snarky, acrimonious conversations ever, filled with double entendre, veiled threats and general bad will. Of course, Michael and I were the only native English speakers in the room and it was left to me to try and calm the growing unease in the room and say "ha ha, listen to that playful repartee. Don't they love each other?" I was never so happy to see a phone call end in my life. But that, of course, wasn't the end of my no-good-very-bad luncheon at Queen Alice. I had (quite thoughtfully, I imagined) budgeted to give each participant the parting gift of a half bottle of the new vintage of Opus One, and had lugged them across Tokyo and had them at the ready as our testy little luncheon wound to a close. It was my good friend at Suntory, Kikkawa-san, who, at the very last minute, noticed my faux pas. How could we give out gifts without bags? In Japan, NEVER! All of the functionaries were appalled, especially the longtime Japan residing gaijin stupid enough to ignore the so obvious! Anyway, a Suntory flunky was dispatched to the office and returned, just as the final sips of the espressos were being consumed by the distinguished attendees- with wonderful half bottle bags all marked, of course, withSuntory’s distinctive logo. This is when Barklay’s Opus One rep, invisible throughout the entire luncheon and, in fact, throughout the entire process of putting together the event, finally made his presence known. Wasn't this supposed to be a joint venture and didn't those bags say Suntory on them? Short of committing seppuku with one of Queen Alice's oversized forks, I guess there wasn't much I could do and if those Suntory bags swayed any of those sommeliers to buy their Opus from Suntory and not Barklay that vintage, I never heard of it. The arrangement between Opus and those two companies, I understand, didn't last much longer than my own tenure in Japan (about a year or so more) and I don't think Barklay even exists anymore, and Suntory and Mondavi had their own divorce a few years later.
As I await my annual pre-sell to be delivered, one other classic Opus story comes to mind. This involved a very high end resort that was being opened on the island of Shikoku in the early nineties. The resort’s ultra-high end restaurant was planning on having one of the largest wine lists in Japan and the eccentric, well-heeled owner was determined to feature verticals of many of the world's most prestigious wines, including, of course, Opus One. He contacted both Suntory and Barklay and, between the two of them, managed to cobble together most of the vintages he required with the notable exception of the first two: 1978 and 1979, which Opus aficionados will remember were packaged three bottles each to a wooden six pack and presented as Opus' first commercial release. None of these were ever sent to Japan, of course, as very few were made and so one sunny Tokyo afternoon I returned home to two messages on the Mondavi machine: one each from my friendly Barklay and Suntory representatives in Osaka, the nearest branch offices to Shikoku. "Uh, John-san, please have Opus One send us one of those cases of 1978-1979 for X-san at his resort.”
Yeah, right.
And that's basically how I responded. Opus One, first of all, rarely provides library wines to anyone for any reason. I mean if you wanted a bottle of 1983 for The Make A Wish Foundation, maybe. But for some restaurant in Shikoku, Japan? And for the rarest wine in their cellar? I don't theeeeenk so.
And that's when things got ugly. Both of Opus' importers began a steady siege of my answering machine (no cell phones in those days thank goodness) as Mr. X at his resort had resorted to playing dirty, threatening to keep Suntory's booze off his bar and Mouton-Cadet off his list if these two ineffectual companies couldn't supply a few measly bottles of wine for his damned vertical. I, in turn, used all of my powers of persuasion to move the powers-that-be, back in Oakville, to no avail.
Push came to shove, though, when the Big Cheese from Suntory's Osaka branch, a man I had never seen in person and who basically lived in legend, called me on my home phone one evening and mentioned that Mondavi Woodbridge sales were sure down in Western Japan and maybe a few more Suntory resources could be thrown into the fray if only (insert tooth sucking sound)………I didn't need to finish the sentence. The next day, I sat down and wrote what turned out to be a four page pseudo Greek myth inserting Greek God sounding pseudonyms for all the various players in my own tragedy here in Japan and asking the Gods up in the clouds of Mount Oakville to look favorably upon my petition, while painting dire consequences worthy of anything Ares could cook up should Zeus not show some benevolence. Not a week after I posted said missive, an original wooden six-pack consisting of 3 bottles each 1978 and 1979 Opus One arrived via air-Takuyubin on my doorstep. And I was very pleased to be able to deliver them myself, lest Barklay and Suntory squabble over who would get credit for the sale. The managing director in Opus in those days, and a good friend of mine to this day, says he kept the entreaty in his desk until the day he left the company.
So, when is that damned pre-sell going to be delivered? I have this urge to bitch someone out.
I have a long association with Opus One thanks to my having worked for them for four years selling their wine in Japan and 21 other countries in the Far East, as well as now 15 vintages of buying and selling it here at PRIMA. Well, it wasn't so much 'selling' it in the Far East: it was more like 'controlling' it for, in those days Opus One was an incredibly precious commodity.
Two of the funniest Opus stories I have involve Japan and the winery's unfortunate importation and distribution arrangement. In those days, Robert Mondavi Winery was imported by the beverage giant Suntory, while the stable of wines controlled by the Mouton-Rothschild family (Mouton, Clerc-Milon, Mouton Cadet, etc.) was imported by a very tiny, Euro-centric outfit that also brought in Louis Latour and, if I remember correctly, the wildly idiosyncratic Domaine Ott rose, among a few other interesting French wines. In their wisdom, almost the inevitable result of the constant internecine fighting between the Mondavi and Mouton sides of the Opus equation, it was decided that Opus One should be imported and distributed in Japan by both companies. Dual arrangements are not unusual but rarely were there stranger bedfellows than tiny Barklay Imports, and their decidedly aged, Francophile, Old School sales force and the 400-pound gorilla in the room, Suntory, Ltd. and their legions of young, workaholic sales soldiers. And, being Mondavi's and Opus' sole rep on the ground in Tokyo, it was yours truly that got ground to dust between them.
First there was what I liked to call 'The Queen Alice Bag Caper" that included several of the most awkward moments of my fifteen years in Japan. It involved an Opus One luncheon I arranged at one of the most beautiful and precious French restaurants in Tokyo called Queen Alice. The event was for the Japan Sommelier Association and was arranged because I had Michael Mondavi in town. Starting right from the invitation process, this event spelled trouble. Although I would do the actual inviting, the final list of sommeliers was to be 50% submitted by Suntory and 50% by Barklay. It was my goal to invite many of the up-and-coming Young Turk sommeliers in Tokyo to have them actually taste the Opus they might actually someday sell, but Suntory steadfastly maintained that since there was an actual Mondavi in the house, we had to first invite a score of senior sommeliers, many of whose actual table service days were long past, and could care less about Opus One in particular, and any wine from California in general. And Barklay's list was much the same: doddering octogenarian sommeliers from Tokyo's old guard French restaurants like Maxim's. I had two good friends at Suntory, though, and, together, we stage-managed an end-run, getting invites to many of our 'target' somms and when I 'accidentally' forgot to mail some of those other invites, there miraculously was room for everyone we wanted to attend.
The luncheon was to feature a live telephone hook up between Michael Mondavi in Queen Alice and the Baroness Philippine back at Mouton to share pithy and amusing anecdotes about Opus including the inside scoop of that infamous meeting between the Baron Philippe and Robert Mondavi in the Baron's bedroom where Opus One was first conceived. But, of course, the phone call didn't quite come off that way. What no one in the room knew, Mouton-Mondavi relations were at a particularly low ebb and there was cross-cultural sparring at every level, from the French and American winemaking teams, all the way to the very top of the partnership. With me acting as nervous translator, and Michael grinning like a Cheshire Cat the whole time, he and Philippine had, over a lousy phone connection, one of the most snarky, acrimonious conversations ever, filled with double entendre, veiled threats and general bad will. Of course, Michael and I were the only native English speakers in the room and it was left to me to try and calm the growing unease in the room and say "ha ha, listen to that playful repartee. Don't they love each other?" I was never so happy to see a phone call end in my life. But that, of course, wasn't the end of my no-good-very-bad luncheon at Queen Alice. I had (quite thoughtfully, I imagined) budgeted to give each participant the parting gift of a half bottle of the new vintage of Opus One, and had lugged them across Tokyo and had them at the ready as our testy little luncheon wound to a close. It was my good friend at Suntory, Kikkawa-san, who, at the very last minute, noticed my faux pas. How could we give out gifts without bags? In Japan, NEVER! All of the functionaries were appalled, especially the longtime Japan residing gaijin stupid enough to ignore the so obvious! Anyway, a Suntory flunky was dispatched to the office and returned, just as the final sips of the espressos were being consumed by the distinguished attendees- with wonderful half bottle bags all marked, of course, withSuntory’s distinctive logo. This is when Barklay’s Opus One rep, invisible throughout the entire luncheon and, in fact, throughout the entire process of putting together the event, finally made his presence known. Wasn't this supposed to be a joint venture and didn't those bags say Suntory on them? Short of committing seppuku with one of Queen Alice's oversized forks, I guess there wasn't much I could do and if those Suntory bags swayed any of those sommeliers to buy their Opus from Suntory and not Barklay that vintage, I never heard of it. The arrangement between Opus and those two companies, I understand, didn't last much longer than my own tenure in Japan (about a year or so more) and I don't think Barklay even exists anymore, and Suntory and Mondavi had their own divorce a few years later.
As I await my annual pre-sell to be delivered, one other classic Opus story comes to mind. This involved a very high end resort that was being opened on the island of Shikoku in the early nineties. The resort’s ultra-high end restaurant was planning on having one of the largest wine lists in Japan and the eccentric, well-heeled owner was determined to feature verticals of many of the world's most prestigious wines, including, of course, Opus One. He contacted both Suntory and Barklay and, between the two of them, managed to cobble together most of the vintages he required with the notable exception of the first two: 1978 and 1979, which Opus aficionados will remember were packaged three bottles each to a wooden six pack and presented as Opus' first commercial release. None of these were ever sent to Japan, of course, as very few were made and so one sunny Tokyo afternoon I returned home to two messages on the Mondavi machine: one each from my friendly Barklay and Suntory representatives in Osaka, the nearest branch offices to Shikoku. "Uh, John-san, please have Opus One send us one of those cases of 1978-1979 for X-san at his resort.”
Yeah, right.
And that's basically how I responded. Opus One, first of all, rarely provides library wines to anyone for any reason. I mean if you wanted a bottle of 1983 for The Make A Wish Foundation, maybe. But for some restaurant in Shikoku, Japan? And for the rarest wine in their cellar? I don't theeeeenk so.
And that's when things got ugly. Both of Opus' importers began a steady siege of my answering machine (no cell phones in those days thank goodness) as Mr. X at his resort had resorted to playing dirty, threatening to keep Suntory's booze off his bar and Mouton-Cadet off his list if these two ineffectual companies couldn't supply a few measly bottles of wine for his damned vertical. I, in turn, used all of my powers of persuasion to move the powers-that-be, back in Oakville, to no avail.
Push came to shove, though, when the Big Cheese from Suntory's Osaka branch, a man I had never seen in person and who basically lived in legend, called me on my home phone one evening and mentioned that Mondavi Woodbridge sales were sure down in Western Japan and maybe a few more Suntory resources could be thrown into the fray if only (insert tooth sucking sound)………I didn't need to finish the sentence. The next day, I sat down and wrote what turned out to be a four page pseudo Greek myth inserting Greek God sounding pseudonyms for all the various players in my own tragedy here in Japan and asking the Gods up in the clouds of Mount Oakville to look favorably upon my petition, while painting dire consequences worthy of anything Ares could cook up should Zeus not show some benevolence. Not a week after I posted said missive, an original wooden six-pack consisting of 3 bottles each 1978 and 1979 Opus One arrived via air-Takuyubin on my doorstep. And I was very pleased to be able to deliver them myself, lest Barklay and Suntory squabble over who would get credit for the sale. The managing director in Opus in those days, and a good friend of mine to this day, says he kept the entreaty in his desk until the day he left the company.
So, when is that damned pre-sell going to be delivered? I have this urge to bitch someone out.
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