Mondo Vino: Jay McInerney on the world of wine

Haut-Brion - 'A Good and Most Perticular Taste'

Haut-Brion saved my life. Well, maybe not my life, exactly, but certainly my dignity. I'd arrived late for a dinner at La Grenouille, the stuffy New York temple of haute cuisine.

Eleven other guests were seated. The hostess, an Asian princess, announced, "Here's Jay - he knows wine. He'll guess what we're drinking." Before I could find a heavy object with which to bludgeon her, the sommelier handed me a glass. He stood and smirked, while the other guests looked up at me expectantly.

With a sense of resignation bordering on despair I stuck my nose in the glass. "Haut-Brion," I declared, eliciting a chorus of gasps. I examined the colour, and took a sip. "Nineteen eighty-two," I pronounced.

I sat down and basked in the general admiration without bothering to explain my methods - but now the secret can be revealed. I knew my hostess drank first-growth bordeaux, and I knew she knew her vintages. But I was very lucky that the wine was Haut-Brion - the most aromatically distinctive of all the first growths; as the great diarist and bad speller Samuel Pepys put it, in the first brand-name reference to a wine in English literature, "Ho-Bryan... hath a good and most perticular taste that I never met with before."

To be more specific, a mature Haut-Brion smells like a cigar box containing a montecristo, a black truffle, a hot brick and an old saddle. It's as earthy and complex as a Shakespearean sonnet. Once you've had it you never forget it, and you never stop yearning for more.

In the 17th century, owner Arnaud III de Pontac created the first bordeaux brand, refining wine-making techniques and sending his son to London to tout the product; Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift and Thomas Jefferson were among its early, vocal fans. Contemporary advocates include the Wachowski brothers - the 1959 Haut-Brion makes an appearance in The Matrix Reloaded.

In 1855 Haut-Brion was officially listed as one of the four first growths of bordeaux. In 1935, after a long period of decline, the property was purchased by US banker Clarence Dillon, and has remained in the family ever since.

When I had lunch at the restored 16th-century chateau this past spring with Clarence's granddaughter, Joan, the Duchess of Mouchy, I asked about the legend that Dillon had not even bothered to get off the train in Bordeaux in order to see the property before he purchased it. "That's absurd," she said. "He looked at several properties, including Haut-Brion." He was halfway across the Atlantic on his way home when he got a telegram from his agent saying that Haut-Brion was still available, but that he would have to act fast. He replied: "Act fast."

Joan, who spent some of her formative years in Paris when her father was the ambassador and was formerly married to the Prince of Luxembourg, has a voice evocative of a privileged upbringing, as deep and burnished as an old Vuitton steamer trunk. She also has a cache of anecdotes that would have made Truman Capote jealous - unfortunately, she's probably far too well brought up to write a memoir. Since 1975 she has run the estate with the aid of Jean Delmas, the most respected wine-maker in Bordeaux, who inherited the régisseur duties from his father, George, and claims to have been born "in a vat" on the estate.

The continuity of the Haut-Brion tradition is clearly a sacred duty to the stately, impeccably tailored Delmas, though, like Arnaud de Pontac, he is a pioneer, being among the first to employ stainless-steel fermentation tanks and green harvesting - the pruning of excess grape bunches to ensure concentration.

Haut-Brion's elegant, supple house style is, in my opinion, often undervalued by wine critics, vis-à-vis the more masculine wines of the Médoc (and its former rival and neighbour La Mission-Haut-Brion, which was bought by the Dillons in 1983). For all its earthiness, Haut-Brion has always been more about nuance than power. It is the first growth of poets and lovers, as opposed to, say, CEOs and trophy-collectors.

I have yet to be disappointed by a bottle of Haut-Brion. Unlike its northerly peers, it can be delicious in its youth, and yet it improves for decades, becoming - like a person of strong character, like Joan Dillon or Jean Delmas, I suspect - more idiosyncratic with time, more unmistakably itself. More perticular, as Pepys would say.

Translating German Labels

For most English speakers, such is the perceived complexity of Germany's Gothic-looking labels, with their information overload and terrifying terminology, that they make burgundy seem simple by comparison. Trockenbeerenauslese graacher himmelreich, anyone? Even hardened wine wonks ask themselves whether life is long enough to learn the difference between spätlese and auslese. German wine-makers have long recognised this dilemma without necessarily knowing what the hell to do about it. Lately, though, some of Germany's best riesling producers are wooing consumers with simplified labels.

One technical term that's worth mastering is kabinett, the lightest of five "predicates" indicating levels of ripeness. For midsummer drinking, a low alcohol, off-dry kabinett from the Mosel region is, to my mind, one of the few beverages that can compete with a nice dry pilsner. And riesling kabinetts are quite possibly the most versatile food wines in the world.

Raimund Prüm, of S A Prüm in the Mosel, understands your anxiety about German labels. Prüm owns vines in some of the greatest vineyards in Germany, perched on steep, sun-trapping slopes high above the Mosel river, including Wehlener Sonnenuhr, named after the now famous sundial that his great-great-grandfather Jodicus Prüm constructed in the vineyard in 1848. And one of these days, after you've developed an appreciation for great riesling, you may remember the name of this vineyard, planted on blue slate, which is believed to impart a distinctive stony flavour to the wines.

Prüm's roots in the region go deep; he says his family has been in the Mosel for 850 years. His roots also go tall - his grandfather Sebastian A, who served in Kaiser Wilhelm's Dragoon Bodyguard, stood 6ft 9in. Prüm himself tops out at a mere 6ft 4in, crowned with flaming red hair, which has earned him the nickname "der Specht" - the woodpecker.

Simplified labelling, of course, is hardly a guarantee of quality. It was Blue Nun and Black Tower, after all, that created the stereotype of German whites as the vinous equivalent of Dunkin' Donuts. The most important element on a German wine label is the maker's name, and in order to experience the torquey and transcendent pleasures of German riesling you need to memorise a few. Lingenfelder's Bird Label and Selbach's (of Selbach-Oster) Fish Label are two entry-level rieslings from serious makers.

Robert Weil's top rieslings from the Rheinghau are among the most sought-after and expensive in Germany, but he bottles a kabinett and a wine called simply Riesling, which, particularly in the vintages '02, '03, and '04, should be approached with caution, lest you find yourself developing a serious riesling habit. It's a little like reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Next thing you know, you're neck-deep in Ulysses or, God forbid, Finnegans Wake, which, come to think of it, is the literary equivalent of trockenbeerenauslese.

How To Impress Your Sommelier

Anyone who has been to the movies in the last 70 years knows that the two stereotypes that represent fine-dining anxiety in America are the snotty maître d' and the snotty sommelier (pronounced some-el-yay). Assuming you get past the maître d', the guy with the silver ashtray around his neck is supposed to be a consumer guide, not a bully or a social arbiter. Waiters with a little bit of wine learning can be far more obnoxious than an experienced sommelier. Should you find yourself in a restaurant with an actual sommelier, chances are the wine list is serious. If you're having trouble getting over your fear of sommeliers, here are a few tips on how to make him think you are cool:

n If sommeliers have a consistent point of snobbery, it's a slight disdain for, or at least weariness with, chardonnay.

n Tease yours by asking about Austrian rieslings. All sommeliers love Austrian rieslings. Then, bring it on home. Ask him to recommend a German riesling.

n Don't roll your eyes. Get over your Blue Nun/Black Tower prejudice. I'd urge you to try German riesling because it's delicious, but I fear you'll be more impressed if I tell you it's cutting edge. That, after all, is what we want to know - what's now and happening. (Do you really think clunky square-toed shoes make your feet look better than those with slimming, tapered toes? You just wear them because that's what fashion dictates, you slut.) Your sommelier knows that German riesling in its semi-dry form currently represents the best white wine value and that it's the most food-friendly wine on the planet. The classic '04 vintage affords a great opportunity to get acquainted with it.

n Let's deal with the allegedly vexing problem of sweetness. Many relatively sophisticated drinkers insist that they only like dry white wines. But the fact is that a super-ripe, low-acid California chardonnay imparts more sweetness on the palate than many German rieslings, in which the residual sugar is balanced by a bracing jolt of acidity - which reminds you, if you've ever had the experience, of inhaling a small electric eel.

Get over your fear of residual sugar. A touch of sugar is the perfect complement to most Asian cuisines, especially those dishes with hot pepper. Dry whites turn nasty and bitter in the presence of lemongrass or sweet-and-sour sauce. Given the way we eat now, German riesling is a far more useful food wine than white burgundy. Concentrate on the kabinetts, spätlesen, and auslesen - the middle three of the seven categories of ripeness.

Kabinetts are excellent aperitifs. Spätlesen and auslesen go well with a tremendous variety of food(the Germans even drink them with beef). Nowhere except in burgundy is the name on the bottle so important. Some of my favourites include Christoffel, Schlossgut Diel, J J Prüm, von Simmern, von Shleinitz, and Robert Weil. Or just ask your sommelier. He'll perk up, as you will when you take that first electric-shock sip.

The Discreet Charms of Old-Style Rioja

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against fruit. But I sometimes get tired of all this super-extracted, alcoholic grape juice that seems like it ought to be served on toast rather than in a glass, and that tastes like it doesn't come from anywhere in particular. These are wines that somehow remind me of the blind date I had recently with a woman exactly half my age. Our conversation had lots of italics and exclamation marks, and very few parentheses or semicolons.

Much as I like some of the bold new postmodern riojas from producers like Artadi, Allende, and Roda, I sometimes crave the sepia tones of old-school rioja. What we now think of as the old style in rioja was created in the 1850s, when French wine-brokers arrived in Spain after oïdium and, later, phylloxera had devastated their native vineyards. The French introduced oak-barrel ageing to the region, which had previously specialised in light, fruity, short-lived plonk. Two nobles, the Marqués de Murrieta and the Marqués de Riscal, helped develop and market this bordeaux-style rioja. (Both bodegas are still flourishing.) The riojans took to barrel-ageing the way the Italians took to noodles, substituting American for French oak and developing an official hierarchy that culminates with reserva (at least 12 months in oak, two years in the bottle) and gran reserva (at least 24 months in oak and three years in the bottle).

Crianzas, released just two years after vintage, are apt to have a strawberry-vanilla freshness, whereas the reservas and gran reservas will exhibit the mellow, secondary flavours associated with age - flavours evocative of autumn rather than summer. And those with bottle age can suggest practically the entire spice rack, not to mention the cigar box. Somehow you get the idea that this is how red wine used to taste.

If the old school had a central campus, it would be a series of buildings clustered around the railroad tracks at the edge of the medieval town of Haro, including the bodegas Muga and Lopez de Heredia. Both wineries keep several coopers employed year-round, making and repairing barrels and maintaining the huge tinas -- the swimming-pool-sized oak vats in which the wine is fermented and stored; old oak doesn't impart a woody flavour to wine, and both wineries believe it's superior to stainless steel. Both houses are also run by the direct descendants of their founders.

If some evil genie told me I could drink just one producer's rioja from now on, I would certainly choose Muga. In addition to its old-school wines, notably the gran reserva, Muga does make a more modern expression of rioja with French oak under the Torre Muga label, including a new postmodern luxury cuvée called Aro.

Not so Lopez de Heredia, the hardest-core reactionaries of rioja, makers of Viña Tondonia. Tondonia is one of those secret passwords whereby serious wine wonks recognise their own kind. The winery was founded in 1877, and apparently very little has changed in terms of wine-making since. The Tondonia vineyard is beautifully situated on a high south-facing plateau outside Haro. For reasons not entirely clear to me, the winery complex resembles a Swiss or Bavarian village. Inside, it resembles the set of a low-budget horror movie, with ancient and vaguely sinister-looking machinery, huge blackened tinas, and a fluffy black mould blanketing almost everything.

Far below the fermentation and storage vats, in a series of tunnels carved out of the limestone, tens of thousands of bottles dating from the 1920s slumber beneath the pillowy mould. "The spiders eat the cork flies," Lopez de Heredia explains cheerfully as I swipe a vast cobweb off my face. Any minute now, I feel certain Vincent Price is going to jump out at me.

The tasting of reds begins with the ethereal '85 Tondonia, which has an amazing nose of cinnamon, clove, leather, tobacco - the whole spice box. While this may sound like one of those annoying instances where you have to listen to a wine writer tease you with descriptions of stuff you will never see or taste, the fact is that all of these wines have been recently released. In this regard, Lopez de Heredia reminds me of Orson Welles' embarrassing ad for Paul Masson: "We sell no wine before its time."

Across the street, Muga is releasing its gran reservas on a slightly more accelerated schedule. You can find the '95 and the '96 on retailers' shelves; both have the kind of spicy complexity that develops only with age and both taste kind of like fruitcake, only much better. And if you are lucky, you may find older vintages. A '76 gran reserva that I shared with the bearish, gregarious 30-year-old Juan Muga at a restaurant in Haro lingers in my memory as one of the best old burgundies I never drank.

Next time you're feeling palate fatigue from trying to chew the latest super-extracted new world merlot, you might consider checking out the subtle and delicate charms of an old gran reserva.

Bacchanalian Dreambook - The Wine List at La Tour D'Argent

The most exciting wine book I've read in recent years, without question, is the carte de vin at La Tour d'Argent, the renowned Paris landmark on the quai de la Tournelle in the fifth arrondissement. Founded in 1582, the restaurant is famous for the views of the Seine from the sixth-floor dining room, for its élite clientele, and for its caneton pressé, aka pressed duck, the millionth of which was served last April to great fanfare. I personally consumed duck no. 999,426, and have the commemorative postcard to prove it. The more exciting number, to my mind, is the half million-plus bottles that reside in its wine cellar. The 5lb document that catalogues these riches is pure porn to wine geeks.

The keeper of this legacy is David Ridgway, an Englishman with 25 years of service at La Tour d'Argent, who puts me in mind of Bob Hoskins playing a French sommelier. It's hard to believe anyone younger than Methuselah could have tasted all the wines on the list, let alone have perfect and detailed recall of each of them, but after quizzing him for a few hours last spring I'm inclined to believe Ridgway has and does.

His manner, on first encounter, seemed to combine a bit of British reserve with Gallic institutional pride bordering on hauteur. (No, he will not be shaking your hand and saying, "Hi there, my name's Dave.") After an hour or so, I began to see the passionate fanaticism of a true Bacchanalian initiate.

It was Easter lunch; I had planned to attend Sunday mass at Notre Dame but was discouraged by the throngs. Fortunately, my table commanded an excellent view of the cathedral; I was able to hear the bel ls if not the homily. And the meal, with its accompaniment of wines, was pretty close to a religious experience.

My friend and I were greeted by the late proprietor Claude Terrail, an octogenarian wearing a perfectly draped Huntsman suit and shod in purple velvet slippers with the toes sawed off to reveal his socks - an ensemble that seemed emblematic of his public personality, combining courtly formality with self-deprecating humour. Terrail talks about Clark Gable and Ernest Hemingway as if they had just left the room.

With a certain kind of customer - rich American collectors who come specifically to plunder the stores of rare burgundies from Coche-Dury and Henri Jayer, for instance - one can imagine sommelier Ridgway keeping his own counsel. "Americans can be a little too obsessional," he says. "But when they relax they can be the most knowledgeable." And if you're not knowledgeable, Ridgway shows his softer side.

When an American at a nearby table remarks that the wine list is daunting, Ridgway says, "That's why I'm here," in the sommelier equivalent of a soothing bedside manner. "Tell me how much you want to spend," is his straightforward advice for the novice. And if the sight of Ridgway in his tuxedo intimidates you, keep in mind that this is a guy who told me that what he liked best about school was getting drunk at the end of the term.

With the exception of ports, the cellar at La Tour d'Argent is stocked exclusively with French wines, with a special emphasis on burgundy, that most ethereal and temperamental of all beverages. The list opens with a hundred-odd pages (they're unnumbered) of vin de bourgogne rouge, including 23 vintages of Romanée-Conti stretching back to 1945 and 10 vintages of Jayer's Cros Parantoux, including the 1990 for €410.

"I get more excited by burgundy," Ridgway says, relaxing after lunch with a glass of 1947 armagnac in his tiny windowless office down in the labyrinthine cellars beneath the quai de la Tournelle. "It's a more living wine." It's also a relative bargain since he buys direct from the domaines - something that's not possible in bordeaux, with its long-standing négotiant system. Every Monday Ridgway and some of his staff visit a different wine region to taste and hunt for new treasures.

When I selected the pike quenelles for my first course, Ridgway hooked me up with an '83 Drouhin Puligny-Montrachet Caillerets, all honeyed flesh around a core of limestone. The signature pressed duck, an extremely rich, ancien-cuisine concoction - the sauce is thickened with the blood of three-week-old ducklings - is probably most easily matched with one of the thousands of bordeaux or rhônes on the list, like a '75 Meyney for €136 or an '81 Beaucastel for €184. For a special occasion, there's a '47 Pétrus (€14,680) or '61 Mouton (€8,342).

La Tour d'Argent's dedication to the wine-drinker's pleasure is perhaps best reflected by the number of bottles that are unavailable for immediate drinking; recent, immature vintages are listed without price, alongside the phrase en vieillissement. They are maturing. Want to drink a '96 bordeaux? You'll have to wait. La Tour d'Argent is one of the few restaurants in the world that truly sells no wine before its time.

This is an edited extract from A Heddonist in the Cellar; Adventures in Wine by Jay McInerney, Bloomsbury, £14.99. To order a copy for the special price of £13.50 call Independent Books Direct on 08700 798 897, or visit www.independentbooksdirect.co.uk