kermit lynch presorted first class wine merchant u.s.postage PAiD 1605 san pablo ave. san francisco,ca berkeley, ca 94702-1317 permit no.11882 510 • 524-1524 fax 510 • 528-7026 www.kermitlynch.com return service requested new arrivals pre-arrivals the spirit of wine by Jim harrison OPen • tuesday–Saturday 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. clOSeD • Sunday & monday mArch 2007 valUe of the Month: rosÉ 2006 gris de gris • doMaine de fontsainte Value of the Month? Of the Year? Of the Decade? And I don’t single out Fontsainte’s 2006 for special honors. Every vintage I have tasted is right on the mark, deserving a Value of the Year award. Well, except the one I ordered on the beach near Narbonne one sunny afternoon. That one was so-so. I called the winery, but they said not to worry, that it was not the one they sell to us, but a cuvée produced expressly for the summer tour- ists who invade the beaches. When I see that nowadays there is never enough Fontsainte Gris de Gris to last until the next vintage, I remember back to the days when I could barely find customers for twenty-five cases a year. “Rosé? God no, not for me.” That was the attitude we had to overcome. This rosé speaks aromatically, and it seems to say, “Live it up, pleasure is good for you, too.” $12.95 per bottle $139.86 per case 2005 cÔtes dU rhÔne roUge cUvÉe sÉlectionnÉe par kerMit lynch I guess you can have everything. This smells ripe, per- fectly ripe. Rhône ripe. Blackberry, cassis, and black cherries all thrown together, all mingling in the bou- quet with, guess what? Oh, just a gorgeous hit of stony garrigue. The palate is notably ample this year, almost of Gigondas-like proportions. It is loaded with flavor and Provençal character. So why did I say that we can have everything? Because even though it is ample, gener- ous, intense, and stuƒed full to the brim, it seems al- most sort of weightless. $11.95 per bottle $129.06 per case \r h j pre-arrival offer 2004 grange des pÈres T he laurent Vaillé story might as well begin with his family’s vines up on a broiling, impossibly stony terrain near Daumas Gassac. He set out and somehow earned a place working and learning in the cellars of Chave, Trévallon, and Coche-Dury. Then his first release received one of the highest scores Robert Parker has ever awarded a Languedoc wine. Vaillé is quite a connoisseur, a great taster, and easily as opinionated as I am, so my visits always include a robust discussion of what is happening in the world of fine wine. If I refer to a 1995 Raveneau Chablis, for example, he knows what I’m talking about, because he has tasted it, probably with Monsieur Raveneau. 2004 blanc. The Grange des Pères white has always struck me as Hermi- tage-like, so I was pleased when Dixon Brooke wrote to me that this 2004 has “an Hermitage-like grandeur.” The nose is complex with suggestions of honey and honeysuckle, pit fruits, and something resembling volcanic stone. The palate is clean and elegant with a pleasant vein of acidity at the core of the honeyed richness. It is a beautiful creation, a great white with a long future ahead for us. $747 PRE-ARRIVAL PRICE PER CASE 2004 rouge. Vaillé’s red blends Syrah, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Mour- vèdre. Each contributes to the whole, and sometimes describing the bottled wine can sound contradictory. In this case, contradictory is just a plus, a way of saying that there is a lot going on at once. No one has ever accused Vaillé’s red of be- ing simple or uninteresting. He commented that the pure Syrah in barrel seemed Pinot Noir–like. If so, it is the biggest, spiciest Pinot Noir I’ve seen in a long time. It gives tons of fruit to the intense perfume and great length on the palate. The Cabernet’s presence is in the vegetal/smoky complexity, and the rigor to the tannic structure. And then the Mourvèdre crowns it all oƒ beautifully. Ripe, fresh, sweet- smelling, with dark black depths to explore, the Mourvèdre here has velvety tannins that complement perfectly the Cabernet’s more architectural tannins. This is one of Vaillé’s best. $747 PRE-ARRIVAL PRICE PER CASE Pre-arrival terms: Half-payment due with order; balance due upon arrival. More froM soUthern france 2004 saint-chinian “caUsse dU boUsqUet” Mas chaMpart Catastrophe struck when I showed up late and missed the chance to lunch with Isabel and Matthieu Champart. I love her homespun cooking, and I am not let- ting this happen again! A saucisson sandwich (baguette with a skinny layer of sliced saucisson) and a glass of beer in a roadside bar did not compare. Causse means limestone plateau. The cuvée is Syrah (65%), Grenache (20%), and Mourvèdre. It shows a noir-ish aroma with réglisse, ripe black cherry, and something sort of blueberry-ish. Also, hints of fig and plum. Also, hints of black olive and thyme. It has so many flavors, tasting it I felt like a hockey goalie in the midst of a flock of pucks. Well balanced, with an elegance rare for the south. $19.95 per bottle $215.46 per case 2005 cÔtes-dU-rhÔne villages roUge “beaUMes-de-venise” • doMaine de dUrban Don’t forget to appreciate the visuals: bright and deep, dark but not black ink. Wine-colored. The nose is a feast of Provençal fruits including cherry, apricot, and peach. The palate is fresh with a lovely texture and a tannin that seems to gently swell and crescendo. For a full-bodied, intensely flavored wine, it shows almost a light touch. Will that be the hallmark of the 2005 vintage in the south? Very long on the palate; good drinking now; can age well. $16.95 per bottle $183.06 per case 2004 cÔtes-dU-rhÔne roUge “bois des daMes” • chÂteaU dU trignon I bought this one on faith last year, even though it wasn’t showing much. It just seemed dense and dumb, yet I had to consider: great vintage, great vineyard, and the stony Bois des Dames character must be buried in there somewhere. It will emerge someday, right? I tasted one recently and gave the order to ship. Here it is. See what you think. $16.00 per bottle $172.80 per case the spirit of wine by Jim Harrison I have long since publicly admitted that I seek spirituality through food and wine. In France, Italy, and Spain, I seem more drawn to markets and cafés than to churches and museums. Too many portraits of bleeding Jesus and his lachrymose Momma make me thirsty. The Lord himself said on the cross, “I thirst” and since our world itself has become a ubiquitous and prolonged crucifixion it is altogether logical that we are thirsty. Yesterday afternoon I was far up a canyon near the Mexican border trying to shoot a few doves to roast when I came upon a calf who was willing to be pet- ted, perhaps because she had no previous contact with brutish humans. While scratching her pretty ears I segued to a tangled group of emotions toward wine. Why does Bordeaux make me feel Catholic, crisp and confident, an illusion indeed; while Burgundy causes an itchy, sexy, somnolent mood? With my day- to-day Côtes du Rhône I am a working writer with vaguely elevated thoughts of my responsibilities, but also with my mind’s eye on a plumpish waitress at a local Mexican restaurant. Heading back down the canyon with the calf following me, I recalled some splendid wines I had drunk at a private home in Malibu during my manic days in Hollywood. The collector’s house red was a 1961 Lafite, a pleasant substitute for a pre-dinner martini. I was in the kitchen one evening preparing dinner and drinking a bottle of Romanée-Conti from the fifties when a fashion model asked, “How can you drink that shit. It makes me dizzy.” She properly mistook me for a servant and asked for a “Jack and coke” (Jack Daniels and Coca-Cola), surely an inscrutable drink, but then so is taste in general. On Friday nights in college two of my best friends would drink an entire case of beer apiece and didn’t seem to mind the ensuing vomiting. I was the driver and of limited means so my weekend binge only meant a seventy-cent bottle of Gallo Burgundy. Both of these friends, of course, are now dead and I’m still on the lid of earth rather than under, and drinking wine daily. During a general state of rebellion in my early teens I went to the Baptist church though our family was Congregationalist, a kind of lower-case Episco- palian. I told my dad who was an agriculturalist that the Baptists claimed that in biblical days the wine was simple grape juice. He said, “Bullpoop,” adding that they had been making true wine in the Middle East for four thousand years, and that non-drinkers liked to spread lies about alcohol. He said that when St. Paul maintained, “A little wine for thy stomach’s infirmities,” he was talking about actual wine, not grape juice. Since then it has occurred to me that if Christianity oƒered a six-ounce glass of solid French red for Communion, churches would be happier and consequently more spiritual places. In the early seventies during a hokum banquet in Ireland I drank several gob- lets of mead and was ill for a week with ravaged intestines. The physical mischief caused by bad forms of alcohol is infinite. I have posited the idea, perhaps fact, that heavy beer drinkers must find a type of sexual release in their relentless pee- ing. One warm day in my favorite saloon in a village near my former cabin in the Upper Peninsula, an old man drank thirty-eight bottles of Pabst Blue Rib- bon. This is clearly too much, and he just as clearly endangered his body during his dozens of walks to the toilet. This amount comprises twenty-eight pounds of liquids which cannot be retained indefinitely by the human body, thus the walks to the toilet were a necessary peril. Another friend in the area, a huge mixed-blood Chippewa, wasn’t feeling well drinking two fifths of whiskey a day and under my wise counsel reduced it to a single fifth. Last summer in Montana I advised an unruly friend that after a hot day of fishing a quintuple martini might be unwise as the alcohol will shoot through the dehydrated body and land on the brain pan like an ICBM. In the remoter areas of the country my advice is sought whereas on our two dream coasts everyone is smart, albeit petulant, and I am considered a bumpkin. Also a slow study. It took me three years of hard work and unfathomable will power to make a bottle of wine last an hour. Sip- ping seemed quite unnatural to a mouth disposed toward gulping. In a lifetime of thousands of visits to country taverns, I have noticed that beer drinking causes fist-fights and wife beating. A French theologian, Michel Brau- deau, has suggested that heavy beer drinking cleared the moral way for Germany to begin World War I and World War II. Beer drinking is at the root of the lugubrious sentimentality that makes murder for an idea logical. Conversely, drinking nothing at all is equally dangerous. Try to imagine Washington D.C.’s infamous Beltway as a moral Berlin Wall within which low-rent chiselers con- coct wars and other forms of our future suƒering. I recently read that there are sixty lobbyists per member of Congress. Think if liquor and beer were forbidden within the Beltway and each day the lobbyists gave each member of Congress a good bottle of French wine. Grace would return quickly to our bruised Re- public. I would also like to remind those teetotaler fundamentalist titans, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who are so enamored of political power, that the Catholic Church has maintained its political power nearly two thousand years no doubt because the leaders drink wine. I well remember a group of bulbous priests at a Roman trattoria quite literally pouring down wine. I asked the waiter what they were celebrating and he said enviously that they did it every day. They were drinking Antinori Vipera which is scarcely cheap plonk. Come to think of it, I would gladly contribute to a church that oƒered a full glass of Côtes du Rhône for Communion. At a wonderful local Mexican restaurant called Las Vigas, I often begin a meal with a shot of Herradura tequila, a Pacifico beer, and an ample bowl of chichar- rones which, of course, are deep-fried intestines, after which I have a plate of machaca and beans (Mexican reconstituted dried beef laden with chiles). I hosted a feast for twenty-five friends last April in this restaurant which included a whole wild pig spit-roasted, giant Guaymas shrimp (eight to a pound), and platters of machaca, Herradura and Pacifico. Wine simply isn’t appropriate for these flavors. We also had a couple of divine mariachi singers who had a dulcet eƒect on the crowd, singing their melancholy plaints about love and death which neutralized any strident eƒects of the beer. Curiously, New York City is the only place on earth where I feel an urgent need for a vodka martini, actually a raving desire. A day of back-to-back insig- nificant meetings and the sight of thousands of nitwits milling around talking on their cell phones deeply enervates me. My soul becomes splenetic and I need to Taser myself before a pre-dinner nap. A bar next to my hotel on Irving Place is kind enough to serve me a martini for only thirteen dollars, a price at which you can buy four in Montana. In New York City, however, you can hear expen- sively dressed career people talking about themselves at a speed that will remind you of the old Alvin the Chipmunk phonograph records. You leave the bar in a hurry, thinking that Castro had some good ideas, and take a snooze after plan- ning the evening’s wines. Life is rarely instructive. One of the wisest and best writers I know, Peter Matthiessen who loves good wine, once said, “I have never learned from expe- rience.” Put that in your pipe and smoke it. Anyway, a Hollywood studio had put me up in the Hôtel Plaza Athénée for a significant meeting about the fate of a hundred-million-dollar movie. I was stressed and jet-lagged over the nastiness of the business world which is as morally compromised as the literary world, and went into the hotel bar for a double shot of V.O. Canadian whiskey which was forty-two dollars, a tad stiƒ price-wise. I’m not comfortable in the Plaza Athénée in Paris or The Ritz in my collection of fifty-dollar sport coats. I’ve been easy- going about taking friends out for a seven-hundred-dollar meal but it would be unthinkable to spend that much on an article of clothing. I said to the Plaza Athénée barman, “Are you f-----g kidding” and he poured me a four-dollar glass of Côtes du Rhône saying that it was the solution to all the problems in life. I rarely feel spiritual in New York or Paris except when I’ve stopped at the old church across the side street from Les Deux Magots on St. Germain and lit candles for the liver of my friend, the renowned gourmand Gerard Oberlé, who caught hepatitis in Egypt and couldn’t drink wine for two years. His suƒering was incalculable and on several occasions I lit five bucks’ worth of candles which brought about his recovery. The other day on a very warm border winter afternoon, I was sitting on the patio with my wife Linda, sharing a bottle of delightful Bouzeron. We were watching a rare pair of hepatic tanagers at the feeder. These birds evidently don’t get hepatitis. It was all very pleasant and I recalled again a passage from the jour- nal of a Kentucky schizophrenic who had escaped from an asylum. He wrote, “Birds are holes in heaven through which a man may pass.” I had this little epiphany that wine could do the same thing if properly used. We all have learned, sometimes painfully, that more is not necessarily better than less. When Baudelaire wrote in his famed “Enivrez-Vous,” “Be always drunk on wine or poetry or virtue,” he likely didn’t mean commode-hugging drunk. Wine can oƒer oxygen to the spirit, I thought, getting oƒ my deck chair and going into the kitchen to cook some elk steak and dietetic potatoes fried in duck fat, and not incidentally opening a bottle of Domaine Tempier Bandol because I had read a secret bible in France that said to drink red after dark to fight oƒ the night in our souls. Jim Harrison has recently published a novel, Returning to Earth, with Grove Atlantic. As surely as any celebrity chef touting extra virgin olive oil to the masses, the novelist and poet Jim Harrison has made a vocation out of appetite. But the hungers he addresses are as much those of the spirit as the belly, not that he makes much of a distinction between the two. For Harrison, to tuck into a slab of bacon is to feed the soul. His books glisten with love of the world, and are as grounded as Thoreau’s in the particulars of American place—its rivers and thickets, its highways and taverns. Bawdily and with unrelenting gusto, Harrison’s forty years’ worth of writing explores what constitutes a good life, both aesthetically and morally, on this planet. Will Blythe, The New York Times Book Review 2005 kUentZ-bas hUsseren-les-chÂteaUX We were blessed last year by the discovery of several new domaines in France and Italy, plus the continuing progress in quality at Kuentz-Bas. Tasting through the young winemaker’s 2005s, I was starstruck. Why? His style or imprint is invisible. You will enjoy fresh fruit and pristine varietal character, impeccable balance, purity, and integrity. I’d call his style timeless and classic. 2005 pinot gris “collection” I don’t mention our wines’ medals and scores and awards much, but this one I like: Most Typical Pinot Gris of the Year award. The competition takes place in Alsace every year, and the judges are local wine people. Indeed, the smoky, peaty aromatics that attract us to the grape variety are in abundance here. $30.00 per bottle $324.00 per case 2005 pinot gris “collection rare” The above is dry and fabulous; this one is sweet and fabulous. Treat it as the centerpiece of an evening with like-minded tasters. Serve it all by itself. No distractions. The grapes were produced biodynamically. Kuentz-Bas is busy converting all their vineyards. $35.00 per bottle $378.00 per case 2005 riesling “collection” Don’t worry about getting what you pay for. This is loaded with class, the best Kuentz-Bas Riesling since I’ve been working with them (fifteen years). The noble bearing might be due to the presence of grands crus in the blend. It is dry, full-bodied, with backbone and length. Great Riesling character. $23.00 per bottle $248.40 per case 2005 gewUrZtraMiner “collection” Loads of fruit, floral and spice perfume, all presented with unusual freshness. How can it seem so deep and electric at once? Elegantly balanced (rare for the Gewurz) and a haunting, never-ending aftertaste. $29.00 per bottle $313.20 per case (In order to tempt you to try the new Kuentz-Bas style, buy all four bottles and receive a 20% discount.) h j pre-arrival offer 2005 white bUrgUndies doMaine brUno colin W hen the two Colin brothers decided to work separately, I felt bad for Michel, their father, because I know how hard he worked to build a domaine large enough to support three families. When I discovered his cellar in 1976, he only had three wines—Chassagne, Chassagne les Vergers, and Puligny les Demoiselles—and enlarged the holdings slowly over three decades. But it turns out I am happy with the situation because we have wine now from three Colins, each with talent and individuality. As for Bruno’s 2005s, I have only one advice, buy as much as pocketbook and cellar permit. Both Raveneau and Coche told me that 2005 is one of the all-time Burgundy vintages. Bruno Colin’s 2005s? BEAUTIFUL. That’s the best word, as long as it does not exclude the words pretty and gorgeous. These are picture-perfect, definitive renditions of each terroir, seductive as wine can ever be, with toasty Chardonnay fruit, minerality, depth, and aging potential. per case 2005 Bourgogne chardonnay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .$168.00 2005 Saint-Aubin Premier Cru “le charmois” . . . . . . . . . 309.00 2005 chassagne-montrachet Premier Cru “la Boudriotte” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 516.00 2005 chassagne-montrachet Premier Cru “les chenevottes” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 516.00 2005 chassagne-montrachet Premier Cru “les chaumées” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 516.00 2005 chassagne-montrachet Premier Cru “la maltroie” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 516.00 2005 chassagne-montrachet Premier Cru “en remilly” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 546.00 2005 chassagne-montrachet Premier Cru “les Vergers” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 546.00 2005 chassagne-montrachet Premier Cru “morgeot” . . . 516.00 2005 Puligny-montrachet Premier Cru “la truffière” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 756.00 Pre-arrival terms: Half-payment due with order; balance due upon arrival.