Pollux Membership May 2022: “Fongo Bongo” and the Reverend of Oregon
My late colleague and friend, Chef Andrew LaPorta.
“Fongo Bongo”
Vins Toni Gelabert White Blend “Son Fangos”, Pla I Llevant, Mallorca, Spain 2019
Caller (in a warm rasp that sounds like Cognac filtered through heavy metal): “Mr. Hale, how are you?”
Me: “I’m all good Chef; how may I serve?”
Caller: “David, we need more of the Fongo Bongo-people love it!”.
Me: “Already?”
Caller (with more than a hint of sarcasm): “ Are you kidding? It’s the best Mallorcan white wine we have! What’s the name of it again? I can never get it right.”
Me: “Son Fangos, Chef. Son Fangos.”
Throughout my seven years as a brand ambassador in the DC area, I experienced clients of all kinds: nuanced, knowledgable, shadowy, charlatan, I had seen all the themes and variations on wine buying, be it from chefs or sommeliers. The chef and owner of Pesce in Dupont Circle from his purchase of it in 2017 until his untimely passing last year, Andrew La Porta was a singular character with a singular quality that pervaded everything I saw him do: generosity. Professionally, Chef continued the generous support I’d already known through my friend Regine Palladin, who’d first hired Andrew as chef in 2012. When Andrew took over, he and the staff showed an uncanny ability to sell large quantities of wines that a tiny seafood bistro had no business being able to sell, even if the grapes were from exotic, strange places, and especially if the wines had names that were easy to forget, like the white blend of a fellow renegade-in-spirit, Toni Gelabert from the island of Mallorca: the Son Fangos.
Toni Gelabert in his vineyards.
Toni Gelabert has been in the business of trailblazing since the late 1970s, when he created a winery out of nothing on a relatively flat exposure of land near the Mallorcan village of Manacor. The piece of property had a name, “Son Fangos”, which became the moniker of Toni’s base-level red and white wines. What soon became apparent, however, was that the term “base level” didn’t apply to anything that Toni Gelabert did in viticulture: a rigorous champion of organic and biodynamic winemaking techniques, Gelabert was light years ahead of most when he began bottling wines via the lunar cycle and using all-natural treatments in his vineyards. The Son Fangos wines became household names among wine geeks, the native island varietals being used still an insider’s secret. Single-vineyard, tiny production Pinot Noir and Chardonnay followed, demonstrating the amazing potential of this area of western Mallorca. Almost entirely because of his efforts, the Mallorcan subzone of Pla i Llevant was created in 1999, and now houses other established luminaries of Balearic Island winemaking. The Son Fangos White, a blend of Moscatel with the native grape Prensal, is the real deal: waves of exotic fruits dancing over the palate, a lush, juicy texture, and refreshing acidity that tamed the finish and kept the wine eminently drinkable, dangerously drinkable even. After several years buying Toni Gelabert’s wines for restaurants, I began representing the estate, and looked forward to the shockingly scant quantities of his wines arriving every year. I usually had the Son Fangos earmarked for special clients and they were sold in advance, but once Chef Andrew got a whiff of the intoxicating, citrus-laden palate of the wine (referring to the rarely-seen and even-more-rarely-tried local grape in the blend, Chef dryly noted, “I can really taste the Prensal!”) I began setting all of what we received aside for Pesce. Son Fangos’s ability to complement robust flavors, particularly some of the Thai and Laotian pizazz which permeated Chef Andrew’s cuisine (he’d grown up a military child in southeast Asia) caused a sensation among the staff, and the wine thrived in diners glasses much the way that a fellow maverick half a world away surely intended it to.
The view southeast towards the Balearic Sea and Mallorca from atop the Garaf Massif in Penedes; on a clear day it’s possible to make out the island.
True generosity is subtle; its influence felt in ways not immediately discernible. Chef Andrew’s food was delicious, and he didn’t hesitate to include premium-quality, “luxe” ingredients in his approachable, casually complex plates. When arriving to the restaurant to present some wines for his approval, I always felt as though I was the client and not the inverse, invariably offered tastes of a new menu hopeful or whatever high-end offering was about to land at the bar. Chef’s enthusiasm for seafood was infectious, and be it discussions on provenance, preparation, or presentation, he was exceedingly giving with his time and talents, helping would-be cooks like myself emerge from the shadows of mediocrity when attempting the “play at home” versions of his creations. Although certainly not immune from the stress and tirade-laden manifestation of said that come with owning a small restaurant, Andrew took care of his employees, many of whom stayed with him for years and through the tumult of Covid-19 until he couldn’t afford to pay them any longer, at which time he found other jobs for them from his extensive ties to the Washington, DC restaurant community. Most of all, that raspy voice dripped with generosity when he spoke of his two daughters, Samantha and Emily. I could write volumes on what Pesce as a restaurant means to me professionally and personally, from awestruck stories of its inception at the hands of iconic chefs Jean-Louis Palladin and Roberto Donna to myriad family milestones marked by meals and parties there. For now, I’ll just say that I miss the restaurant Washington Post food critic Tom Sietsema called “DC’s finest fish house”, and I certainly miss the man who ran it for its last four years. Cheers, Chef Andrew, and I hope that your version of Heaven has Thin Lizzy on the stereo and “Fongo Bongo” on the winelist-D.
Vins Toni Gelabert “Son Fangos”, Pla i Llevant, Mallorca, 2019
Country of Origin: Spain
Places and People: Toni Gelabert’s winery lies just outside the town of Manacor on the island of Mallorca. Almost due east of the mainland city of Valencia, Gelabert’s property has a maximum capacity of 25,000 cases for all of his wines, making each cuvee’s production very small. The Son Fangos white blend takes its name from the land area where Gelabert created the winery.
Soil: Lime-bearing rock (marl) with high clay and limestone content.
Grape Varieties: The Son Fangos blend is 50% of Moscatel and 50% of the native island grape Prensal.
Winemaking: Biodynamic methods are employed in the care of both the vines and the land they grow upon; after rigorous hand-harvesting and hand selection of the grapes that will ultimately go into the Son Fangos, fermentation is carried out in stainless steel vats, with strict temperature controls.
Aging: The Son Fangos is aged for 10 months, once again in stainless steel.
Flavors and Foods: Like a love letter from the Balearic Sea, the Son Fangos instantly grabs you with a tropical nose of passion fruit and guava. The high limestone soil content lends a freshness and stony earth component behind the fruits, but what really makes the wine stunning is the expansiveness with which these elements present themselves on the palate. Round and rich yet showing impeccable balance, the 2018 Son Fangos has great weight in the mouth and finishes very easily (the alcohol is on the wine is a deceptively low 12.5%). Fresh almond weighs in also, along with the Moscatel grape’s trademark white floral notes (acacia, lilies). Food pairings ideally would be seafood with a little marine character yet still capable of some rich presentations-a recent pairing of Son Fangos with Spanish mackerel, roasted in herb butter and accompanied by red onions slow roasted in olive oil with a dash of ground ancho pepper, was a hit. As mentioned above, the Son Fangos also makes a great companion to Asian cuisine, particularly Thai dishes such as mild curries and pad see ew.
Service and Cellar: This exotically complex wine does best served at around 45 degrees (a few minutes out of a refrigerator, or 15 minutes or so in one if you’ve got the wine at room temp). Son Fangos is in a delightful pocket at the moment and should stay that way for another 3 years.
“The Reverend of Oregon”
Freja Cellars Reserve Pinot Noir, Willamette Valley, Oregon 2014
My first experience in Oregon wine country was 16 years ago with my best friend Joel, on the way to a wedding for our friend in the seaside town of Yachats. In fact, I was officiating the wedding, and as Oregon is a rather progressive state in the matters of matrimony, I had recently applied for and received online accreditation as a minister via the Universal Life Church, prompting Joel to call me “The Reverend” the entire trip. Joel had reserved a convertible for our jaunt down the road, so we were a little nonplussed when the rental car company presented him with a Chrysler PT Cruiser-if you don’t remember them, count yourself lucky; it’s sort of a like a miniature sporty-styled hearse. With the top down on the PT Loser (as it was christened), we looked quite the pair, and it wasn’t long before we started to realize that, quite without planning, we were starting to enter wine country. To mark the occasion, we pulled off into a winery parking lot adjacent to Interstate 5; the tourist-laden vibe and rather questionable wines evoked the commercial winery scene from Sideways, and though we both managed to avoid Paul Giamatti’s spit-bowl chugging antics, we were unimpressed and at one point started chatting up some locals about where to drink “real” Oregon wines. Luckily, they didn’t take offense, and one of them said to us, “You’re too far south already-you have to go to the Chehalem Mountains.” Our mid-2000s smart phones weren’t quite up to the task of telling us that the mountain range in question was in fact quite a bit back in the direction from which we’d came, southwest of Portland. They started rattling off producers, some of which, like Ponzi and Lynn Penner-Ash, I’d heard of, and a few that I hadn’t, including a small, out of the way winery tucked into a corner of the AVA; when I heard the name, I thought it might have been spelled “Fray-ya”, or “Fray-ah”, and it wasn’t until I started working at Citronelle in 2008 that I came across the wines, the label with the correct spelling, and what all of the fuss was about: the boutique winery, Freja.
Freja Cellars.
The relatively small cellar of Freja belies the winery’s ambition. Established in 1988 with Wadensville, 777, and Pommard clones of Pinot Noir, Freja’s name pays homage to the Norse goddess of love and fertility, and since it was Scandinavian nomads who first settled France’s famed Burgundy region, home to some of the most sumptuous and expensive Pinot on the planet, Freja’s owners decided to name the winery as such in tribute.
Willy Gianpoulos.
Willy Gianpoulous’s first vintage was in 1998, a full decade after he established the vineyards. This kind of devotion to patience, and the investment of time and resources required to do so, is reflected in current operations; indeed the 2014 vintage featured here is still listed on the winery’s website as a current release, along with the 2015s. Raised in Woodstock, NY, Willy’s creative spirit was influenced by that area’s abundance of artists and writers, and a three-year stint in Europe culminating with a time spent in Burgundy sealed Willy’s passion for Pinot. Like many great winemakers, he has both the aforementioned creative influences and a scientific background (in his case, a master’s degree in chemical engineering), and hearing him speak reveals a man who is both aesthetically eccentric and completely committed to what he does. The depth of explanations about the differences in vineyard sites with particular pinot noir clones, ecological methods, and his wines capacity for long bottle aging take on a near religious fervor. The results are astounding: Willy’s stated aim of making wines like Burgundy is achieved, but it is precisely because he avoids the trappings of trying to mimic Burgundy, and lets his own clones and climate do the work for him that the Freja wines evoke France-balanced Pinot Noir with great acidity, an abundance of fruit that is also not cloying or candied, and a resistance to the overly green, herbal notes that many of his Willamette Valley colleagues allow to creep into their wines in the name of staying “Burgundian”, as if ashamed of their climate’s ability to make ripe, silky-textured fruit. Simply put, these underripe notes aren’t Burgundy, they’re bad Burgundy, and trying to appease them only limits the perception of what Pinot Noir is all about, no matter the source.
Tasting his 2014 Reserve in preparation for this month’s Pollux feature, I call Joel to extol the virtues of this wine that aims to mimic great Burgundy yet thankfully doesn’t stop until it achieves something more. We reminisce briefly about the PT Loser and our adventures on that eventful wedding weekend, and I tell him that after this glass of Freja, I need to cede my noble title over to someone else: Willy Gianpoulos is truly the Reverend of Oregon-D.
Freja Cellars Reserve Pinot Noir, Willamette Valley, Oregon 2014
Country of Origin: United States
Places and People: Willy Gianpoulos’ winery is located on the Chehalem Mountains in the Willamette Valley AVA; the winery is in the northern part of the appellation. The Pinot Noir vines of Freja cling to a steep that stretches from 700-800 feet in elevation; exposure is south-southwest.
Soil: Laurelwood (a well-drained reddish silt loam that reaches a depth of 30 feet in the vineyards; the soil was left behind by flooding at the end of the Ice Age).
Grape Varieties: 100% Pinot Noir (the reserve is made solely from the Wadensville clone).
Winemaking: Sustainable viticultural practices with a harvest date of October 4th of the vintage year; the Freja is not fined or filtered prior to bottling.
Aging: 24 months on the lees (spent yeasts left over from fermentation) in French Burgundy barrels, of which 50% are new.
Flavors and Foods: Ruby color moving almost to garnet on the rim of the glass. The nose is all you need to know that you have something stellar on hand; rose petal abounds with jasmine, hydrangea, warm potting soil, fresh basil, and vanilla bean all taking a bow as well. The palate mimics these traits, with an additional layer of red raspberry and Connecticut cigar wrapper adding to all the complexity. The structure/mouthfeel is silky smooth but there is still enough of a tannic presence to remind you that a) you’re not in Burgundy anymore, Toto and b) this wine is just entering its pocket of excellence-truly amazing for a New World Pinot at 8 years old. Absolutely amazing wine that will be equally at home with coq au vin or even a tenderloin-derived steak, such as filet mignon with red wine-braised mushrooms.
Service and Cellar: Given the slight front and mid-palate tannic grip that the wine has, I recommend a short decanting time of 15-30 mins. Due to the lack of filtration in the wine, there will be some sediment at the end of each bottle, so the use of a strainer when decanting or the discipline to not turn this fabulous bottle over at last pour when enjoying the Freja reserve is important to note. Service temperature of 58 degrees is recommended to keep the freshness level up and allow the non-fruit notes to assert themselves. From an Oregon winery that holds wines longer than most before release and also produces long-lived bottles once sent out into the wine-drinking world, it’s no surprise that the Freja Reserve 2014 is just starting to hit its peak and should maintain its excellence for another 5 years.