Castor Membership January 2023: A Quintessential Quindecennial and Dropping Some Acid(ity)
Ah, the old cell phone cameras-that’s a fuzzy me as an earnest young sommelier, manning the front desk at Michel Richard Citronelle, 2008.
“A Quintessential Quindecennial”
Leth Gruner Veltliner, Steinagrund, Austria 2020
I still remember the email in my inbox as though it were yesterday (although it clearly wasn't, as this whole story is based around the passage of time): “Citronelle Calling”. That subject line was to change the course of my life and lead me on a journey that continues to this day. As 2007 was drawing to a close, I was wrapping up my time in the Midwest (music school, running a wine bar) and in search of my next steps. Should I traipse off to a major city and commence with the starving artist routine? My gut instinct (and the student loan repayment letters arriving at my door) were telling me otherwise. I don’t know if it was fear, or some inner acknowledgment that my talents were good but maybe not good enough, but I had to be honest with myself: I had spent more and more time at that little family wine bar as my music school years passed, and the fact was that the world of wine and hospitality, with its array of flavors, characters, and camaraderie was winning out. And so, I started looking back in order to move forward: although DC was entirely new to me, my sister had also just moved there to begin her professional career, and it was a stone’s throw from the Baltimore area, where we’d grown up and still had family. In his novel “A Separate Peace”, John Knowles used the phrase “in that deep tacit way in which feeling becomes stronger than thought”, and I kept thinking back to that particular snippet from my high school reading list when it came to making this move: on some subliminal level this giant leap just made sense in my mind, regardless of how it went or where I ended up, I just knew intrinsically it was the right thing to do. The only problem was those pesky aforementioned student loan bills, etc.-if I was to greenlight this whole “Mr. Hale Goes to Washington” project, I needed a job.
Longtime Citronelle sommelier and James Beard Award-winner, Mark Slater. Mark’s career spanned four decades and he is responsible for giving me my start here.
Earlier in that year of 2007 I came out to Washington, DC to meet with Mark Slater, the Head Sommelier of the city’s finest restaurant, Michelle Richard Citronelle. How did I, a nobody from Baltimore by way of Indiana, score this amazing opportunity to pick the brain of the grand dowager of the DC Wine Community, fresh off a James Beard Award win for Best Wine Program in the USA earlier that year? Well, I’ll tell you and you tell me if this seems fair: I wrote him to ask if he would consider meeting me, and he wrote back and said sure. That’s Mark for you-he LOVED to meet/text/email/just plain communicate and was always available. When I sat in front of him at Citronelle’s subterranean Chef’s Table and recounted in all honesty my limitations (a distressing habit of mine), which I’d learned over various hotel stints and small family business credentials, he was equally forthcoming: I showed some skill in wine, but Citronelle was on another level, with a cellar of over 11,000 bottles and 1,000 different labels represented. He suggested a few other names and places that might make my quantum leap a little less intimidating, and I dutifully followed up in the ensuing months. By Thanksgiving, I had a few other prospects in place for my migration to the Capital, but Michel Richard Citronelle, with its James Beard Awards, Relais et Chateaux accolades, grand tasting menus, and charismatic Jolly Santa of a chef still burned in my mind. One day at the wine bar I was walking from the hallway through my office on my way to the restaurant floor; passing by my computer, the bold type of a new incoming email caught my eye, with those words: “Citronelle Calling”. There were instructions to call Mark right away-I asked my assistant to head to the floor instead of me, walked outside, and dialed him. “Are you still coming to DC?” was his question; “If I have a job” was my rather cheeky answer-I recovered quickly by reminding him of his summertime concerns re: my lack of seasoning. “You’ll be fine; I’ll teach you and you’ll get up to speed on the job.” Lest I get a swollen head over Mark’s reassessment of my talents, he explained to me that his renewed interest was a matter of desperate need: his assistant sommelier, a gifted yet-how shall one put it-diplomatically challenged young man had just quit with no notice. Could I be on a plane over Thanksgiving weekend to interview? I told him I could without really knowing if that was true, setting off a whirlwind of scrambling to ask my wine bar’s family of owners for the time, flying to DC, crashing at the apartment of an old college friend who was traveling for the holiday, buying a suit in Georgetown to interview in and being fortunate that I was tall enough to hide the still-unhemmed trousers, meeting Michel Richard, his Maitre d’, and Mark for a series of nerve-wracking conversations, discussing wine, service standards, and the fact that although they were desperate I couldn’t start working for them until January because a) I couldn’t do to the wine bar what their assistant somm had just done to them, and b) John Mellencamp lived in our town and had booked us for a NYE party and I wasn’t going to miss it because he’s John Mellencamp. Finally, later that evening and in a prelude of many evenings to come, there I was out on the town with Mark to see his many colleagues in the industry (presumably to size me up). A week after I returned to Indiana, Michel Richard’s Director of Operations phoned: I got the position, we made the money work just enough to get me a studio apartment north of Georgetown that was roughly 300 sf all-in, and on a grey January day right after the New Year, I drove myself and all of my belongings in a rented Penske truck all day from Indiana to DC, arriving in the thick of rush hour and collapsing, believing I had made it and could try to haul a few of my things up to the 9th floor before passing out on the eve of my first day of work. Not so-there on the phone again was the indomitable Mark Slater (I told you he loved to communicate); I had to get down to Citronelle, there were some people he wanted to introduce me to. My feeble protests were useless; wearing the same clothes I’d spent the day in, I left all of my things in the back of the Penske (probably not the wisest notion) and caught my first Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority bus ride to Citronelle, where Mark had arranged a table in the lounge for some of his colleagues from around town, including a future Master Sommelier, giving up their nights off just to meet me-to be clear, they did it not for the excitement of meeting me at all but rather because Mark asked them to-he was (and is) DC sommelier royalty. These new faces were to become, along with Mark, fast friends and mentors as I immersed myself quickly in the burgeoning DC wine scene.
Chef Michel Richard, whom I worked for for nearly seven years, in his kitchen at Citronelle.
Unbeknownst to me, I arrived in DC just as the food and beverage scene was about to explode, and Citronelle was both tradition and trendsetter within this universe, helping the nation’s capital shed a longstanding reputation as a boring food town, replete with old school French and Italian restaurants and little else. I jumped into studying, arriving at Mark’s request two hours earlier than necessary for the shift to read and talk wine. My colleagues let me into their weekly tasting group to practice study for Court of Master Sommelier exams. By the spring, armed with my trusty tastevin and regularly selling, tasting, and serving dozens of wines to guests every evening, I was getting up to speed on the job, just as Mark had said. By the time he went on a three-week vacation to France in April, leaving me to work the floor of Citronelle’s 7-day service week every night in his absence, I felt in control of my new journey. In the years following, I have never stopped learning, from other sommeliers, chefs, wine business pros, winemakers, vineyard workers, importers, and (often most importantly) my guests and clients.
Speaking of guests, what about that assistant sommelier who left Mark suddenly in the lurch and gave me the opportunity to change my life? I later learned that even before he burned a bridge with his impromptu departure, there was blood in the water due to his guest relations; he had, among other infractions, apparently told a guest that they couldn’t have a glass of the Austrian white grape Gruner Veltliner “until they pronounced it correctly”. And so, I would like to acknowledge my arrival in the DC/NOVA area 15 years ago this week while thanking you all sincerely for your support during GWC’s first 10 months in business with a little toast of that wonderful Austrian white wine-I’ll be sure and pronounce it for you when I see you, but you can say it however you’d like-D.
Leth Gruner Veltliner “Steinagrund”, Wagram 2020
Country of Origin: Austria
Places and People: A relative newcomer to the region of Wagram (founded in 1960 in a region where many wineries have been around for centuries), Weingut Leth is located in the village of Kirchengasse in the Fels am Wagram region of Austria, west of Vienna. The Leth family has been running the winery sustainably for over 25 years and beginning in 2021 they will be fully certified as a biodynamic winery.
Soil: The soil in Wagram is famous for its high density of loess-a combination of agglomerated clay, sand, and lime that was blown by glacial winds onto the prehistoric bedrock of the ancient course of the Danube river. The soil for the Steinagrund Gruner Veltliner is stony and gravelly, and depending where you are in the vineyards, is either coated or deeply covered with the famous loess (“Steinagrund” literally translates to “stony ground”).
Grape Varieties: 100% Gruner Veltliner.
Winemaking: Hand-harvested and sorted (importantly in this part of Austria, hand-sorting is done to eliminate grapes with botrytis). The grapes that go into the Steinagrund are left on their skins for a short period of 2-3 hours and then gently pressed. After 12 hours of settling, the fermentation process is begun in temperature-controlled stainless steel tanks.
Aging: After the 5-week vinification period, the wines are racked (with all of their lees) into large Acacia wood barrels and aged approximately six months prior to their bottling in early April.
Flavors and Foods: A lovely nose that thankfully steers clear of some of the more “aspragus and pepper” aspects of the Gruner varietal and focuses on fresh yellow apple, white peach, honeydew melon, and acacia blossom. The palate similarly brings a brightness, with a very distinct texture that brings both a refreshing spritz and a creamy roundness (from the spent yeasts being left on the juice). I love the fact that the Steinagrund is aged in the Acacia barrels, as this makes the wine a bit less of a wallflower than other Gruner in this price range in terms of weight. The nose fruits are echoed on the palate, with hints of fresh thyme and the ubiquitous white pepper, but in this case both are very subtle and don’t overstep their boundaries. The finish has almost a touch of savory baking spices such as cardamom or fresh grated nutmeg. Outside of red meat, the beauty of the Leth is that it has fairly infinite food pairing potential: still refreshing enough to be poured as an aperitif or with mild goat cheeses, a fantastic companion to fresh Belgian white asparagus or other vegetable dishes, perfectly suitable to accompany light flaky whitefish, but above all I think it would show best with white meat-boudin blanc sausages, pork rillettes, herb-crusted pork tenderloin, oven-roasted chicken, or wait until fall and pour it alongside some pork chops marinated in apples (particularly yellow).
Service and Cellar: I think the Leth is best served at white wine cellar temperature (48-52 degrees F). Pulling this wine straight out of a refrigerated environment spoils your chance to catch some of the subtle flavor notes and loses that vibrant textural spritz. Enjoy this wine in the next 2-3 years.
The village of Treiso in Piemonte, home to the Pertinace winery.
“Dropping some Acid(ity)”
Pertinace Barbera d’Asti, Italy 2019
Fear not, this will not be a story about psychotropic drugs (apologies to anyone who wanted it to be, but I’m far too lame to include them as an area of my expertise). This is, rather, a story of an ancient place and correspondingly historic grape varietal, the fourth-most planted red grape in all of Italy, in fact. Finally, this is also a story about a word that often lives in infamy if you’re a quality-minded wine snob like myself: Cooperative. The stigmatic nature of the co-op when used in terms of wineries (i.e. a group of farmers growing grapes and bottling them under a single like-minded brand) can be problematic at best when trying to provide clients with artisanal wines-at worst, you’re the Wal-Mart of wine clubs. Like everything in life, however, there are variations on what it means to be a cooperative; some check every box on what it means to be a soul-crushing, commodity-driven vinous Hades, while others are quite simply some smaller growers who share the same idea about the way wines should be made and use that common denominator to become something they could never have been independently. Furthermore, as we shall see, not every wine that is made under a co-op’s umbrella is given the same big-box treatment. Lastly, as I’ve written often, sometimes “Keeping an Open Wine” means just trusting what’s in your glass, and acknowledging, however begrudgingly, that the team behind the wine knows what they’re doing. I recently found this in spades when tasting the wines of Cantina Pertinace of northwest Italy’s Piemonte region, and chiefly with Piemonte’s “second” red grape, Barbera.
A hilltop view of Pertinace’s Barbaresco cru vineyard, Marcarini.
The namesake of a Roman emperor and a place with over a millenium to its name, Pertinace is a small area in the commune of Treiso, where the story of Cantina Pertinace begins in 1973. Winegrower and farmer Mario Barbero had a vision of creating a way for smaller farmers like himself to become more recognized. Signing up 12 like-minded friends, Cantina Pertinace was born with an eye towards growing top-quality grapes and then giving the subsequent wines a singular voice with regard to winemaking and aging. The evolution of the property has been steady, including the addition of state-of-the-art winemaking facilities in the 80’s and their own packaging warehouse in the 1990’s. However, permitting new growers to join the firm has been decidedly parsimonious, with just seven farmers joining Pertinace over the nearly 50 years since its birth. These 20 growers now have vineyards that total 110 hectares and produce 650,000 bottles. To a wine professional who prides himself on finding wines that aren’t available everywhere, reading factoids such as this often constitutes a hard stop in my pursuit of a wine. Beating the dead horse of my acid theme, I definitely have colleagues who, if I told them I was featuring a wine from that size of producer, would tell me that I was into some bad drug. But why do we find ourselves taking such umbrage over this? I wonder, would these same colleagues turn up their noses at Bordeaux First Growth Chateau Lafite Rothschild’s 112,000 hectares of vines? I wager they, and most of their clients/collectors, do quite the opposite. A further review of Pertinace reveals that often we can also benefit from a wine region’s own decisions regarding its identity. In the case of Piemonte, that means the red grape Nebbiolo, a robust variety that routinely duels with Sangiovese as the most highly regarded red grape in Italy. The town of Treiso, where Pertinace is based, is within the highly-prized appellation of Barbaresco, and Pertinace’s collective holdings include three different vineyard sites classified as top quality crus for the Nebbiolo vines planted here. The historical emphasis the Piemonte region has placed on Nebbiolo is reflected in the winery’s focus, as nearly 3/4 of their vineyards are planted to Nebbiolo; as such, though total production from the winery is high, the Barbera d’Alba is a relative trifle, comprising just 15% of the total vineyard size. Tasting the Pertinace Barbera, one feels as though not only has one discovered a gem with regard to examples of Barbera in Piemonte, but also a diamond within the co-op rough of even its own winery, a wine that would be a mailing-list -only item if it were made in Napa Valley. So, although I still remain primarily committed to advocating for the little guy, in this particular case the “little guy” is created in part by the grape variety itself-which brings us to the youthful, exuberant yin to Nebbiolo’s yang-Barbera.
Walking the road on some of the Pertinace estate’s 90 hectares of vines.
Long dismissed as an afterthought to Nebbiolo, Barbera has always been thought of as the cocktail party red wine in Piemonte, never allowed in the past to venture past the parlor to the seriousness that was the dinner table. Nebbiolo has always been (rightly) considered more cerebral; as Hugh Johnson writes in the World Atlas of Wine, “demanding of time and attention.” As the twentieth century drew to a close, however, modern winemaking techniques and a demand for more approachable reds gave Barbera a new lease on life. The grape’s origins are unclear; it was long thought to be native to Piemonte but recent research has shown it to be a relative newcomer to the area-it’s overall genetic characteristics, however, are indicative of a long-standing, centuries-old grape. Late-ripening, dense fruit and favorable yields lead the wines Barbera produces to be youthful, exuberant, and a tantalizing combination of inviting medium tannin levels that are offset by food-friendly high acidity. In Piemonte, the best producers of Barolo and Barbaresco have been able to apply their qualitative approach to Barbera with resounding success; Pertinace’s Barbera is produced from some of their oldest vineyards, and in areas that at times overlap with the prestigious Barbaresco appellation. Warm sites and the aforementioned later harvesting help concentrate the fruit and give a new meaning to the term “dropping acid”, bringing the grape’s ripping PH down to palatable levels. The high-yielding Barbera grape allows for elevated harvest figures-Pertinace is able to derive 65 hectoliters of juice per hectare, which seems high when pitted against other areas of the wine world, but consider that the Barbera d’Alba appellation allows for a maximum yield of a staggering 10 tons (283 hectoliters!) per hectare, making Pertinace’s Barbera over 75% less than what is allowed by law. With a glass of the 2019 vintage at the ready, enjoying the great combination of structure and wonderfully “dropped” acid(ity), I must admit experiencing this wine has given me new perspective-certainly, when it comes to cooperatives in wine, there are shades of grey-or (speaking of guys who knew a bit about acid) as Jerry and Bob once said, a “touch”-D.
Pertinace Barbera d’Asti 2019
Country of Origin: Italy.
Places and People: Cantina Pertinace was founded in 1973 as a co0perative of 13 grapegrowers who shared a passion for quality-driven fruit and a shared vision of how the wines should be made. Although Pertinace has increased its holdings they have added only 7 growers in almost 50 years, demonstrating a high bar for entrance. The co-op is located in the town of Treiso in the commune of Alba, and its plantings include three excellent Barbaresco crus. The vines for their Barbera d’Alba come from the towns of Treiso, Alba, Neviglie, and Magliano Alfieri, and are some of the oldest in the Cantina, which is reflected in the structure of the wine. Despite their co-op status, the focus of the company is on their Nebbiolo, leaving the Barbera production at a still-manageable 12,200 cases.
Soil: Compact grey marl, alternating with layers of sand.
Grape Varieties: 100% Barbera.
Winemaking: The Barbera from Pertinace’s Guyot-trained vines, once harvested, spends 10-15 days vinifying in stainless steel tanks. Fermentation and Vinification are both temperature-controlled.
Aging: After Vinification is completed, the Pertinace is aged for 9 months in French oak barrels, a now-common practice with Barbera in Alba to soften that ever-present acidity and take advantage of the robust fruit structure that the grape brings naturally.
Flavors and Foods: If you’ve been searching for a winter red that feels substantive, but which makes you equally comfortable opening it casually on a weeknight without a second thought, look no further. The Pertinace is a great example of Barbera’s stellar combination of weight and freshness. Rose petal and potpourri on the nose give way to a palate of red cherries and bright raspberry coulis; the signature acidity of Barbera keeps these fruits very high-toned and fresh without becoming astringent. The crushed and dried rose petals mingle with a mushroomy inorganic earthiness as secondary notes on the palate. Structurally, the Pertinace is medium-full bodied, yet lacks the drying tannins of bigger varietals; the weight of the wine carries the ripeness of those red fruits but the finish is nowhere near warm considering the 14% abv, particularly if served at cellar temp (see note below). The Pertinace’s combination of tastes both round and bright give it versatility; the wine would be at home with braised mushrooms deglazed with a dash of this very bottling, dense charcuterie (any salame with peppercorn or peppered edges), and slow-roasted meats such as the traditional Piemontese bollito misto. Creamy cheeses such as the Piemonte native Paglierina would also be stellar.
Service and Cellar: I have two slightly finicky service observations that you can freely roll your eyes towards, but I swear will dramatically increase your enjoyment of Pertinace: serve the wine at red wine cellar temperature (58-62 degrees F); the fruit and earth components of the wine come together in a harmonious balance if you do, while the finish is devoid of any alcohol element. Secondly, give the Pertinace some time to breathe after you open the bottle, but do not necessarily decant-this is one of the few times I’ll recommend simply opening the bottle and letting the wine gently air, as I feel the freshness of the red cherry and raspberry notes stay more intact this way, rather than the fuller oxygenation of a full decanting. The 2019 vintage shows aging potential; this wine drinks well now and will develop over the next five-six years.