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Expert rates passion for wine over presentation
Frédéric Mugnier
Michel Joly
Listen to "In the Wine Cellar", Dave's weekly radio show on KQV Radio on the web or your MP3 player.
To determine the availability of wines at PLCB stores near your home, go the PLCB's Product Search Page (www.lcb.state.pa.us) and type in the wine name and then your county name.
Dave DeSimone is a member of the American Wine Society. He can be heard daily on KQV Radio with the Wine Cellar reports. He can be reached via e-mail.
Recommended:
Indicates a well-made table wine ready for immediate enjoyment with everyday meals and offering good value.
Highly Recommended:
Indicates a well-made table wine ready for immediate enjoyment and offering very good value on a particularly well-made example of its type.
Cellar Selection:
Indicates a well-made table wine that requires additional bottle aging in a temperature-controlled cellar to reach peak enjoyment.
Note:
Code numbers and prices refer to the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board system unless otherwise indicated.
A milder climate, however, gives Burgundy the additional advantage of growing superb grapes to produce some of the world's most sublime wines.
Wine shipper Becky Wasserman-Hone credits this striking connection between the agrarian cultures of Pennsylvania and Burgundy with influencing her decision to make Burgundy her home. For the past 25 years, wine lovers around the world have snapped up "Becky Wasserman Selections" from some of Burgundy's best estate wine producers. Yet, she has not forgotten spending summers with relatives on a working farm near Phillipsburg, deep in Pennsylvania's farm belt.
"As a child and a teen, I spent many happy times on the farm," Wasserman-Hone says. "We ate well with wonderful food from a large vegetable garden. We had a cow, too, and once a week we killed an old hen. I still remember the smell of the broth and its deep yellow color.
"I had a highly developed taste for farm-fresh food. When I came to France as an adult, I realized this also was the basis for cooking in France. Once here in Burgundy, I wanted to stay," she adds.
After experiencing early success selling French oak barrels to wine producers in California, Wasserman-Hone pursued wines from small, independent estate producers epitomizing the best in Burgundy. Today, she and her husband, Russell Hone, manage their wine shipping firm, Le Serbet, with a small staff out of offices in the inconspicuous Passage Sainte-Hélène in the heart of Beaune, the ancient wine capital of Burgundy.
In an interview in Beaune, Wasserman-Hone and I recently discussed her philosophy in selecting wine producers to represent.
"First we look for passion, and growers who are attached to the land. Passion is more and more important, because today many winemakers think it is all about clever presentation and fancy labels," she says. "Growers who just talk about marketing and what's going on in the winery tend to make 'manufactured' wines instead of 'natural' wines." "Natural" wines are those that are created with minimal intervention from the winemaker vs. those manipulated into predictable consumer products.
"We are very fond of organic growers as much as possible," Wasserman-Hone says. "We also gravitate to smaller rather than larger estates. This makes us work to always find new suppliers."
Wasserman-Hone and her team do not blindly favor one style over another. Instead, they focus on quality. "Some producers favor highly structured wines and some emphasize fruit, but, in the end, the wines have to please us as a group," she says. "Individuality and personality are keys to Burgundy, and Burgundy cannot be standardized."
She also has little use for numerical ratings of wines. "When a customer asks for 90-point wines, we say we do not sell points, we sell wines. So we tell them to look elsewhere. Numerical ratings make our hard work superfluous and put the control with the point man. Bit by bit, though, people chafe under absolute power."
Eschewing numerical ratings, unfortunately, has its risks.
For example, wines from Wasserman-Hone's producers are not widely available in Pennsylvania, while wines from large wine brokers (called négociants) that regularly receive numerical ratings are easier to find here.
"I would really love to do more business in Pennsylvania," Wasserman-Hone says. Until then, consumers in the commonwealth will have to make a concerted effort to buy wines from outstanding producers such as Domaine Jacques-Frédéric Mugnier of Chambolle-Musigny.
Frédéric Mugnier manages the estate. He inherited prime holdings in Chambolle-Musigny village crus, Chambolle-Musigny premier crus "Les Fuées" and "Les Amoureuses," and Chambolle-Musigny grand crus in "Bonnes-Mares" and "Musigny."
This year, he also will produce Nuits-Saints-Georges premier cru "Clos de la Maréchal." The entire area is only 28 acres -- minuscule compared with most California wineries.
After pursuing early careers in engineering and piloting, Mugnier took the plunge in grape growing and winemaking relatively late by trying his hand on the family domaine in the early 1980s.
He focuses on the vineyards, using no synthetic herbicides, practicing meticulous pruning and exercising rigorous grape selection (called triage) to ensure that only the ripest and best go into the wines.
"We let each terroir speak for itself," Mugnier says. "Burgundy cannot be designed according to a plan. The best Burgundies are magic. We let the wines happen."
He adds, wryly, "We are not in the beverage industry."
Mugnier uses years of experience to determine when grapes are ready to pick. "Laboratory tests don't really tell much," he says. "Touching the grapes, tasting them and chewing tell much more."
Once the grapes are in the winery, he adjusts the frequency of pigeage (punching down of the cap of fermenting grapes) according to the ripeness of the vintage. In the extraordinarily hot 2003 vintage, he reduced pigeage because the grapes already had plenty of ripeness and color.
As a result, Mugnier's wines are consistently elegant and refined, with lovely, complex fruit balanced with superb, fresh acidity and firm yet silky tannins. Mugnier's wines also take on fleshiness as they evolve in the bottle, as shown by the lovely 1993 Chambolle-Musigny "Les Fuées" that he shared from his cellar.
Domaine Jacques-Frédéric Mugnier's excellent 2001s are textbook expressions of terroir and are highly recommended -- while they last -- in select markets around the country. Hold the 2001 wines patiently as they evolve over the next 10 years.
The 2002 wines -- tasted at the domaine -- are superb and will arrive in domestic markets in the fall. Unfortunately, unfavorable exchanges rates may boost prices, which range nationally from about $50 to $175.
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