Castor Membership July 2024: Patience, Young Grasshopper and La Tache Grenache
It may not be the Bermuda Triangle, but the municipality of Efringen-Kirchen, on the German side of the Rhine River border with France and an 8-minute train ride to Basel in Switzerland, certainly has the feeling of a place where everything intersects.
“Patience, Young Grasshopper”
Ziereisen Gutedel (Chasselas) “Heugumber”, Baden, Germany 2021
A grape varietal that most scholars agree began in Switzerland. Produced in Germany with a German synonym that is also used in Austria, made in the shadow of France. As Rick Moranis replies to a shameless paragraph of exposition during his madcap turn in Mel Brooks’ Spaceballs, “Everybody got that?”
Virtually all wine pros, from shop to sales to software, are guilty of using the phrase “world of wine”. Count myself as one who is not immune to this disease, but the more I’ve been pondering the idea of a “world of wine” lately, the more it misses the mark in my head, as it implies an isolated view of our civilization’s history where wine is somehow separate. The more one examines the means by which we chronicle life (art, music, religion) is the more often one finds references to wine marking occasions both minute and momentous. We in the trade should, instead, employ the idea of a “world…through wine”. I’m not talking about the worldview one takes as a result of their sixth glass of Pinot Grigio, mind you, but rather celebrating that, particularly in these times, wine connects us in a shared existence, even when that sharing results in multi-national “there’s a quiz later” quandaries like the grape varietal I mention above.
Not to worry-small matters like these are precisely why you’ve engaged wine geeks such as myself, leaving the relaxed enjoyment (read: drinking) of the bottle to you. I will say, however, that as your eyes glaze over from the preponderance of terminology and geography, that this particular wine’s provenance is pretty fascinating, so if you find yourself with a few minutes I encourage all takers to set their modern-made, content-factory brains to Easy Mode. To quote another 80s movie, I’ll invoke my vinous Mr. Miyagi and say “Patience, Young Grasshopper”-and as an added bonus, “Grasshopper” is helpfully also the name of this wine! See? It’s easier already.
The Weingut Ziereisen family table: children Ida and Johann, winemaker Hanspeter, and his wife Edeltraud (“Edel”).
It may not be the Bermuda Triangle, but the German municipality of Efringen-Kirchen in southwest Baden certainly gives the impression of a place where everything intersects: called “Dreilandereck” (“Three-Country Corner”), have your passport at the ready upon arriving, as the town sits directly on the Rhine River, the western side of which marks an international boundary and the region of Alsace, France. Care to travel to Switzerland instead? Well, the train ride to Basel, 10 miles away, takes a mere 8 minutes. Indeed, this community of less than 9,000 people is optimally positioned to tell the story of a world viewed through wine, as the three countries represented here in this area share much more in terms of culture and history than can possibly be represented by a map’s dark lines.
Hanspeter Ziereisen celebrates his German heritage, but the proprietor of his eponymous winery, featuring 25.5 hecatres in total of mostly south-facing vineyards planted to Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Pinot Gris and Blanc, and others, perhaps looks west across the Rhine for his land-driven mission statement: “Quality is made in the vineyard. We work with utmost care to create the conditions for high-class wines. The French swear by their terroir-in this respect I am a Frenchman.” Hanspeter and his wife Edel created the winery over 30 years ago, and now together with children Ida and Johann has become renowned for rigorous selection (double sorting in the vineyards and in the cellar) and the philosophy of “controlled idleness”, allowing wines to rest for extended periods, often on their lees left over from fermentation.
The winemaking tradition in this part of Southern Germany that Hanspeter Ziereisen aspires to can be traced to both France (in the average temperature of 52 degrees Fahrenheit and limestone soils, the area mimics Burgundy) and Switzerland, if only for the varietal that brings us into geekdom today: Chasselas.
The ripening berries of the Chasselas grape.
Blame Chasselas’ litany of synonyms on longevity: the grape is centuries old, with written documentation dating from 1539. Early-ripening and with soft, understated flavors of almond, hay or cut grass, and mild citrus, it can be a bit of a throwaway, save for a few of the countless places around the world in which it’s planted. In its homeland of Switzerland, it’s the symbol of white wine and has terroir differentiations and village characteristics so minute that it resembles Burgundy. France’s Savoie region also lays claim to some excellent examples, and the third locale that produces highly-prized Chasselas is this southwest corner of Baden in Germany, where the grape goes by the synonym “Gutedel” (“Good noble”; the Germans doubled down on Chasselas’ quality).
Ziereisen’s Chasselas is indeed an example of a winemaker attempting to make wine classically that results in something wholly original; name-checked by Jancis Robinson in Wine Grapes for his single-vineyard Chasselas bottlings, Hanspeter’s Chasselas, even in the entry level “Heugumber” (“Grasshopper”) cuvee, possess mineral on the nose and acidity on the palate that is not present elsewhere, and feels very Germanic in its focus on the sharpness of texture. The fruit of Chasselas here is more vibrant and almost achieves Chardonnay’s level of tropical citrus. Ziereisen’s instinct for longer periods of lees aging gives this mild-structured wine additional body weight and depth of finish (the “Heugumber” spends 13 months aging on the lees); the total effect is one of rich refreshment and is one of the more unique white wines I’ve tried recently without leaving the “clean and correct” zone.
Patience is a virture that I’m not going to pretend I possess in most cases; the only exception to my hypocrisy are music and wine, where it seems I can spend a whole day as researcher or practitioner and not feel as though time has passed. Understanding that this may in fact just be my problem, however, I leave you with a glass of “Good Noble” and the knowledge that, if nothing else, the comfort that you’ve made a place for wine, not just in your world, but in Hanspeter’s and all of our shared time together. Cheers to that-D.
Ziereisen Gutedel (Chasselas) “Heugumber”, Baden, Germany 2021
Country of Origin: Germany.
Places and People: Hanspeter Ziereisen, his wife Edel, and children Ida and Johann operate their family winery of 25.5 hectares in the town of Efringen-Kirchen in Baden, southwest Germany. So southwest, in fact, that the area is known colloquially as “Dreilandereck”, or “Three-Country Corner”, as the vineyards are located directly on the Rhine River opposite France and the Swiss border less than 10 minutes away. The Ziereisens are known for their devotion to terroir (the often highlight specific sites with single-vineyard cuvees), rigorous selection of the grapes, and extended periods of rest for their wines in the cellar, often on the aged lees, prior to release.
Soil: The Chasselas vines are planted on limestone soil with a substrata of iron-rich clay.
Grape Varieties: 100% Gutedel (Chasselas).
Winemaking: Double sorting in both the vineyard and the cellar, prior to a spontaneous fermentation with native yeasts in stainless steel tanks.
Aging: In keeping with the Ziereisen philosophy of “controlled idleness”, the “Heugumber” spends 13 months aging on the lees in large fuder casks, with frequent battonage to obtain the weight and structure that Hanspeter desires. The wine is bottled without filtration.
Flavors and Foods: In the Member Story for the “Heugumber”, I describe the wine as classically made and yet wholly original, and I really feel it’s an apt appraisal. Chasselas does not usually have either the body, mouthfeel, or acidity that this wine sports, evident in the intensely mineral-driven nose, the fruit profile of preserved lemon, pineapple, and orange together with almond and hay, and the textural note of clotted cream from the lees aging. Pair with lemon confit chicken (dark meat would be better with the creamy textural note), roasted salmon or similarly oily fish, or pork tenderloin with citrus and herb rub (the leaner tenderloin is the best pork cut for the wine). A plate of bloomy and washed-rind cheeses also would be excellent and don’t forget to include almonds amongst the accoutrement, as the wine really shows this element.
Service and Cellar: I think the upper end of the white wine cellar temperature range is best for the Ziereisen (50-52 degrees); too cold and the texture becomes more astringent with the acidity crackling. Enjoy now through 2026.
A photographer channels their inner Ansel Adams while capturing the vineyards of Dani Landi, in the Sierra de Gredos southwest of Madrid.
“La Tache Grenache”
Viticola Mentridana Grenache “El Mentridano”, Mentrida, Spain 2021
Grenache. One of the most irresistible words for a red wine drinker, conjuring up a slew of famous places and people, and a plethora of styles in the glass. For all of its proliferation (over 160,000 hectares planted worldwide), Grenache still is a bit of an enigma as a varietal. The grape’s propensity to be blended with others (Syrah, et al. ) leaves the consumer with an idea of what Grenache is about, but a real understanding of pure Grenache for both laypeople and wine pros is muddled by the character of other grapes, even when Grenache is leading the blend in terms of proportion. This dilemma is borne out when sommeliers serve a client a 100% Grenache from old vines in Chateauneuf-du-Pape, elegant and perfumed, and watch as the guests turn it over on their palates in curiosity, before nodding appreciatively (begrudgingly?) and saying, “It’s good…it’s…light”. To hear the stories of my peers, this scene has played out on restaurant stages on a nearly continuous run, leading to an issue of a grape that everyone knows and yet remains hidden. To knock off the flowery prose: just what the hell is Grenache, anyway?
Grenache is, for me, first and foremost about ripeness. Like Marilyn Monroe, this grape likes it hot- with early budding but late ripening of the actual berries, Grenache is quite at home in stiflingly warm and dry conditions, its abundant fruit coming through in viscous waves of red berries and currants-the dryness also gives thicker skins and correspondingly darker color to the wine in the glass. Ripe fruit does mean alcohol content, which in most examples of Grenache routinely pushes past 14% to 15% and beyond. Grenache is, also, an aromatic grape, showcasing beautiful notes of freshly ground sweet baking spices that aren’t necessarily derived from oak barrel aging. What Grenache is not, as evidenced by the centuries of blending its been part and parcel to, is overly tannic-the grape is almost singular in its ability to possess ripe, lush fruit and alcohol and yet structurally offer medium tannins and weight. The logic for blending Grenache, then, is obviously sound, and responsible for some of the best red wines in the world (Chateauneuf-du-Pape, Priorat, and bottlings in California and Australia are just a few examples), but what if a winemaker chose to lean into the light, so to speak? If Grenache is naturally ethereal, and made without an eye for over-extracting the fruit and turning the wine into a brochure for bombast, could it be something elegantly subtle, like a riper Burgundy? It would take special conditions: a region of high altitude to mitigate the alcohol content, a distinct terroir that would allow non-fruit and earth notes similar to Grenache’s bedfellow, Syrah, and a detached presence in the cellar to resist turning the wine into an overripe fruit bomb.
Fortuitously, a winemaker from the center of Spain saw that magical alchemy in his hometown, an opportunity to make, for lack of a better term, Grand Cru Grenache.
The Guru of Grenache, Dani Landi, examining the harvest.
Daniel Landi grew up in a winemaking family and knew from an early age that he wanted to follow the path tread before him. A bit of travel around Spain could not avail him of the obsession with his homeland-the serenely rugged mountains of the Sierra de Gredos, southwest of Madrid, and the small villages that abut them; the chief town is also Dani Landi’s birthplace, Mentrida. Mendtrida as a winemaking community is almost Burgundian in its focus; white and red winemaking is based almost entirely on two varietals-Albillo for the whites (one of the most planted grapes in the world because of how much it is grown in and around Madrid), and Garnacha (Grenache) stands virtually alone for the reds.
Historically, the Mentrida DO was not immune to Spain’s nationwide view of Garnacha as a workhorse grape; plantings on higher mountain slopes were ignored and left to decline, while lower-lying, higher-yielding areas were pushed to the limit, aiming for Garnacha’s sweet red fruit rather than any sort of structure or complexity. The high ripeness of the Garnacha berries belie the relatively thin skins of the variety, and these high-yield grocery store bottlings often had a translucent color content and drank like cough syrup. Dani Landi saw his homeland as the frontline of a culture war for Grenache, one which he and several like-minded young winemakers could win by revitalizing high-elevation vineyards with techniques such as wider spacing between plants. Forming Bodegas Jimenez-Landi with his cousin, Dani had the advantage of his family’s existing vineyards to work with, but in 2008 he yearned for more control and left to form his own label, as well as the offshoot project Comando G with friend Fernando Garcia. Garcia and Landi have been friends since their collegiate days and soon found themselves working at neighboring vineyards in the Sierra de Gredos. Inheriting some of the family sites along with a few that he leased or purchased himself, Landi soon began to take advantage of another of Grenache’s special traits, long-lived vines, by ecologically farming small plots of 60-80 year old vines, planted in freely-draining soils of sand, slate, granite, schist, and clay. All harvesting across his projects is done by hand. In the cellar, Landi continues his hands-off approach: fermentations are whole-cluster with indigenous yeasts in open-top French oak casks, and aged in larger French barrels, foudre, and clay amphorae. All harvesting across his projects is done by hand.
In 2000, Landi and his family replanted the oldest vineyard holding they owned, in their hometown of Mentrida. This was a watershed moment for Landi-an invitation to explore the terroir and geography of the Sierra de Gredos, high-elevation vineyards and indeed entire villages that had been abandoned, as his fellow villagers sought work in larger cities. When, in 2021, Landi endeavored to focus solely on his Comando G wines and entrust Curro Barreno (a famed winemaker in Spain’s Ribeira Sacra region himself but a Mentrida native and friend of Dani’s since childhood) with his family’s Mentrida sites and meld them with vineyards from Curro’s family as well, a new collaboration was born, one which focused solely on Mentrida DO: Viticola Mentridano.
In a letter to his US customers this year, Dani Landi describes handing over the reins to his most personal project: “I’m giving my friend a beloved son. Vineyards and wines that thrill me, that have seen me grow, a piece of worked land with whom I’m in debt.” This personal note served notice that Barreno’s involvement was not a case of going commercial or selling out, but rather two friends realizing a childhood dream together. The rumors from old-timers about Garnacha’s ability to thrive in high-altitude sites, planted in sandy-granitic soils amongst meadows and holm oak trees, gave Landi and Barreno a vision of cultivating a more Mediterranean expression of both Garnacha and the Sierra de Gredos. Barreno, having produced similarly ethereal wines at Fedellos, was a natural choice to bring this vision to life: like Landi’s other projects, Viticola Mentridano employs hand-harvesting and whole-cluster fermentations. The difference in “El Mentridano” this month’s featured Castor wine, is in the length of maceration-a short 8 days of contact with the skins, followed by aging in large foudres for 7 months.
Friends since childhood, Dani Landi and Curro Bareno have remained close, and now Dani has tapped Curro to take the reins at Viticola Mentridana. This is Dani and Curro in August of 1984.
The results of this work are, as US importer Eric Solomon puts it, startling. Mentrida’s mild and fairly humid climate sees the parameters of Garnacha change: the long ripening period persists, but the milder climate keeps the alcohol levels modest and retains more non-fruit in the finished wine, evoking, incredibly, comparisons to Pinot Noir from Burgundy or the Northern Rhone Valley’s more complex, tempered take on Syrah-the Sardinian synonym for Garnacha, Cannonau, also possesses some of these traits, including the slight tinge of white fruit amongst the red on the palate and the incredible perfumed nose.
To pour a bottle of “El Mentridano” is to be a bit taken aback by the color: the 40 year old vines of Garnacha appear pale in the glass, with a vibrant salmon pink that moves to ruby and is not unlike the wide contrast you’d see in a Cote de Nuits Pinot Noir. La Tache Grenache? Maybe not, but with Viticola Mentridana and its incredible value for the price, it certainly is not from lack of ambition.
Fans of Spain’s most well-known exponent of Garnacha, Catalunya’s Priorat region, will no doubt argue that their wines are superior, and I am certainly a fan of the well-made bottlings that reach our market. There is little doubt, however, that Priorat wines are more in keeping with our normal expectations for the Garnacha grape, what with a hotter, drier climate resulting in thicker skins, deeper color, and pushing alcohol levels well beyond 15%. There is also the issue of blending, with Priorat Garnacha almost always blended with Carinyena, Syrah, and others. What Dani Landi and his friends and colleagues are doing in the Sierra de Gredos is an endeavor unto itself, showing that this ancient variety, so often the forward-facing facet of a blend, can be reinvented into an introvert, a wine that beckons you to spend time with it in true contemplative enjoyment. Cheers to Landi imbibing the “workhorse” Garnacha with a little class; I call trademark on “La Tache Grenache”, though-you know, if it ever comes up-D.
Viticola Mentridana Grenache “El Mentridano”, Mentrida, Spain 2021
Country of Origin: Spain.
Places and People: Spanish wine connoisseurs will know the name Dani Landi; a native of Mentrida, near the Sierra de Gredos Mountain range southwest of Madrid, Landi first took over his family’s vineyards prior to starting his own label in 2008. Farming old vines clinging to steep sites in the mountains, Landi almost single-handedly changed the way Garnacha (Grenache), a workhorse grape throughout Spain, was perceived. The Mentridano project was begun by Landi with an eye towards capturing a snapshot of Grenache grown in his home appellation of Mentrida, and for this he handed the reins to longtime Ribeira Sacra winemaker Curro Barreno-the two have been friends since childhood. All of Dani’s wines are highly allocated within our market and the DMV is one of only 6 areas in the US with access to these bottlings. The vineyards are Curro’s family vines in the Tietar Valley (Mentrida DO); the vines are 40+ years of age and production is limited at under 1,500 cases.
Soil: Sand and Granite, two terroirs famous for yielding excellent Grenache.
Grape Varieties: 100% Garnacha (Grenache).
Winemaking: The 40+year-old vines that produce “Mentridano” are hand-harvested and vinified with whole clusters and indigenous yeast fermentation. The maceration period is intentionally brief (8 days) to preserve the freshness and elegance of the wine.
Aging: The 2022 “Mentridano” is aged for 7 months in large French oak foudres-the fining is vegan and the overall oak influence is nasically non-existent in the flavor profile.
Flavors and Foods: It’s not hyperbole to say that if you’ve never had a Dani Landi wine, you’ve probably never tasted Grenache like this before. The combination of old vines, 600 meter elevations, and a very non-interventionist, ecologically-driven mindset makes wines that put the “La Tache in Grenache”. A translucent salmon color gives way to aromas of red apple skin, blood orange, cherries, and fresh peaches. The palate is remarkable in that it’s body and weight are very light, and yet the wine still manages to feel viscous and juicy; the natural ripeness of Grenache means that there is a good bit of red fruit (the cherries and apples, plus currants and grenadine) but also this unique shot of citrus, which along with secondary notes of granitic mineral (nose) and fresh herbs (palate) lends the “Mentridano” a Mediterranean level of expressiveness, not unlike the best of Grenache’s Sardinian synonym, Cannonau. Traditional Grenache food pairings (roasted duck, game birds such as squab, sausages) are excellent and particularly if accompanied by citrus or fruit-based sauces, as the “Mentridano” really does have an uncanny peach/blood orange component baked in.
Service and Cellar: The lower end of the red wine cellar temperature spectrum (56-60 degrees) works well to emphasize the wine’s freshness; the 2022 can absolutely be cellared and will see out the decade comfortably, but honestly, I love the way its drinking now too much to be bothered.