hmmm, well, where to begin. The iPad was charged up, but apparently the plane was not. Mid-flight from Seattle to Paris we were informed that we would be landing in New York, that there was some problem with the plane. Great. I am now in some fleabag hotel at JFK, with the promise of a flight sometime tomorrow. Will likely have to cancel most of my Thursday appointments and reschedule 18 more. Yikes!

Picking up a few hours later… Wonderful fleabag hotel at JFK – room right on the runway, bed sagged like a hammock, no hot water, breakfast buffet fit for a kennel. Yum. Anyway, am now back at the airport and have finally been rebooked to Lyon, and will actually get there pretty early Thursday morning, so will be able to make my afternoon meetings at Mugnier and Pavelot. So things are looking up for a change! More from Paris, if all goes well…

Join us in Carlton on Saturday April 10th for the release of the stunning 2008 Audrey – quite simply our finest wine of the year, from an extremely fine vintage.

For the 2008 vintage, our Audrey bottling is once again comprised entirely of fruit from our blocks of Maresh Vineyard atop the Dundee Hills. This year we selected our favorite eight barrels from our old-vine blocks. Our wines from this outstanding site have proven year after year to be the best in the cellar, and they show their best when on their own. We feel this is one of the rare sites in Oregon truly deserving of “single-vineyard” status.

Maresh vineyard was planted by Jim Maresh in 1970, making it one of Oregon’s oldest (in fact only four vineyards are older.) We have a long term lease on 7.29 acres here, and we farm it Biodynamically.

Only 200 cases were produced, the majority of which were sold as futures last fall. If you missed out on futures, come join us in Carlton on April 10th!

I’m now pretty much organized and ready to take off for Burgundy on Tuesday morning, but first the excitement of the ’08 Audrey release party on Saturday! There is no doubt in my mind that this is the best wine we’ve put into a bottle since we started. It has everything I cherish about Pinot Noir – pretty fruit on a lithe and elegant frame, understated yet complex and seductive, a sense of delicacy, and a bright purity and silkiness that define what this magical grape can do when grown on 40 year-old vines in the sweet-spot of Oregon’s Dundee Hills. In short – it’s nice grape juice, and we hope you’ll like it!

If you tasted it last fall when we were offering it as futures, it should be interesting to check in on it again now with another 6 months of bottle age – the developments have been mostly in the aromatics, with a very pretty swirl of fruits and flowers on the nose, really starting to gain in complexity now. I look forward to seeing you here on Saturday 12-5 for the official release party – it’s a great time to pick up your futures that you ordered in the fall, or to grab some now for the first time. Only 200 cases were produced, and most of that was sold as futures, so it will probably not be around too long. (The 95-point review by Paul Gregutt in Wine Enthusiast just might speed up proceedings a bit as well…)

Looking down over the village of Pommard

I’ll be manning the tasting room by myself on Sunday – the first Sunday we’re open this year, which reminds me to remind you of our new summer hours: 1-5 Friday, Saturday & Sunday, and by appointment other days and times. Then on Monday I’ll be pouring our new releases and a bunch of great Burgs for a few hundred of the top restaurant and retail accounts throughout Oregon – it’s our distributor’s annual spring portfolio tasting, and I look forward to seeing many of our great supporters there!

Then Tuesday I’m off to Burgundy for my spring tasting trip. I’ll be seeing 18 producers this time, including the newest members of the family - Freddy Mugnier, Freddy Lafarge, Comte Armand and Hugues Pavelot. As you may know, I have lusted after the Mugnier wines for years (they make up the largest part of my personal cellar, in fact), so to now have them in our portfolio is monumentally exciting. Then adding Lafarge and Armand – by many accounts the best producers in Volnay & Pommard respectively, and whose wines I’ve collected and adored for eons – is beyond icing on the cake. And the best part may be the addition of Pavelot – for we now will have the best source of the great value wines from Savigny-Les-Beaune – a hole in our portfolio that I’ve been hoping to fill since we started.

Of course I may encounter a good meal or two along the way, and perhaps a nice old bottle – all of which I’ll be reporting on from the road via our Facebook page, Twitter, and this blog. I’m test driving our new iPad this time, and plan to do the whole trip with just the iPhone and iPad, no MacBook this time – so hopefully the somewhat unreliable internet & cell infrastructure in the villages is reliable enough to keep me in timely contact.

I will not indulging my eating or drinking passions too heavily, though – with my training program for the wine-country half-marathon I’m just not as hedonistic as I was before. I’m really enjoying my runs – I’m up to a comfortable 10K jog 3 times a week. This will be the first time I’m seriously running while in Burgundy, and I’m hoping that it may actually help with the jet-lag that often gives me a good whack during my first 48 hours over there. Volnay to Pommard and back about three times should be a good circuit – we’ll see how it goes.

My running route in Burgundy

The semi-finals of the Champions League soccer tournament will kick-off while I’m over there, with three of my four favorite teams still in it. Thiébault Huber of Domaine Huber-Verdereau and I share a love for the team from Lyon, and we’ll definitely get together at his house in Volnay to watch the match when they play Bayern Munich. Barcelona should win it all again, but it’s a funny game where anything can happen, so I’m looking forward to some exciting matches.

See you here in Carlton this weekend!

As I’ve alluded to in some recent posts here and on FB & Twitter – we’ve just made the exciting addition of four new growers to our Scott Paul Selections portfolio. Jacques-Frédéric Mugnier, Michel Lafarge, Comte Armand and Domaine Pavelot are not only four of the strongest and most respected names in all of Burgundy, they are each run by people I respect immensely, and are estates I named on my “most-wanted” list when we started this business years ago. To actually have them in our program now is an absolute dream come true. Stay tuned for more on each of these great growers as their wines start to arrive over the coming months.

Domaine J-F Mugnier in Chambolle-Musigny

One of the questions I’m asked most often is “how do you find the the producers you work with?” There’s a different story and a different route taken for every one of them (and there are 20 now – wow/yikes!), but let me start to answer that by introducing you to our most recent addition to the team – Chateau des Rontets in Fuissé. To start – I was not looking for another producer in the Mâconnais region. We are having great success with Domaine Thibert there, and the St. Véran, Mâcon-Prissé and Pouilly-Fuissé we bring in from them have been some of the strongest sellers in our portfolio. Christophe Thibert and his sister Sandrine are running a superb estate, turning out consistently excellent wines, and they are one of the few producers that have enough volume of wine to sell us to satisfy the demand. So, no need for anyone else in the Mâconnais, right?

And then I got a note from a friend in the business, whose opinion I respect greatly, that I really must taste the wines at Chateau des Rontets in Fuissé. This friend does not step forward to recommend growers very often. When he has in the past, he’s always been right. So OK, I will go taste at Chateau des Rontets.

Via email I asked for an appointment on my next visit to the region (this would have been for last November.) Attached in the welcoming reply was a photo of 700 naked people standing in the vineyards of Chateau des Rontets! (American photographer Spencer Tunick organized the shoot as part of a protest against the effect of global warming – on behalf of Greenpeace. Here is some video of the project.)

700 nudes at Chateau des Rontets atop the village of Fuissé

Intrigued, to say the least, I also noticed that the proprietor of the estate was a man named Fabio. Fabio Montrasi to be exact. To my knowledge there are no Frenchmen named Fabio. So what is an Italian doing in the hills of the Mâconnais with a bunch of naked people? I figured to get some answers at our first meeting, which we set for last November 19th.

The night before our scheduled meeting, I was invited for dinner at the elegant Domaine Taupenot-Merme in Morey-St. Denis, and there ran into the Burghound himself, Allen Meadows, who was just finishing up his tastings of the 2008 Taupenot-Merme wines. I asked Allen for directions to Fabio’s place – as I could tell from GPS and Google-Maps that the Chateau was just a bit “off the grid” – i.e. on an unmarked road in the middle of nowhere (and I’ve found from experience that GPS and Google-Maps are often useless once you get off the beaten path in rural France.) Armed with a confident “jog left, then a quick right, and when you think you’ve gone too far, keep on going” from Allen, I took off from my base in Volnay the next morning having a fairly good idea where I was headed.

Or close enough, anyway. I overshot it a bit and went straight when I should have jogged right, and ended up in the village of Chaintré. Knowing I was fairly close, I pulled over and got out to ask at the Mairie (mayor’s office) in Chaintré if they could point me to the correct road to to the Chateau des Rontets. The response was so typically and wonderfully French – “Chateau des Rontets? Is it in Chaintré?” said the receptionist. “No”, I replied, “it is up here in the hills, but technically it is in Fuissé.” “It is in Fuissé?” – she says – “Then I could not tell you. You’d have to ask someone in Fuissé”!  Fuissé and Chaintré are all of a mile and a half apart…

At any rate, a quick cellphone call to Fabio got me pointed in the right direction, and two minutes later I was pulling through the gates and into one of the most magnificent vineyard vistas I’ve ever encountered in all my travels. (The Mâconnais and Beaujolais are the two most picturesque parts of greater Burgundy, with tiny, ancient hill towns, just hundreds of meters apart, dotting the horizon in every direction, and lush vineyards covering every inch of available hillside.)

Chateau des Rontets is quite unusual for a Burgundian estate in that virtually all of its vineyard holdings are contained in one large 13.5-acre walled-in parcel – called the Clos Varambon. (As you might know, most Burgundian estates average 12-15 acres, but are comprised of perhaps 10 to 20 or more tiny vineyard parcels scattered across a number of different villages and appellations.) Also, very few Burgundian estates are named “Chateau” – most are “Domaines”. This particular one is named for the handsome 18th-century manor house that sits right inside the walls of the Clos. As is typical for Burgundy, the winery and cellars are underneath the house.

Chateau des Rontets & the Clos Varambon

Fabio greeted me at the gate and walked me directly into the vineyard – a place of absolute jaw-dropping beauty. Fabio speaks French, English, and his native Italian fluently – but I, for those first few minutes, forgot most of my French and English entirely. The Chateau and Clos are at the very top of the hill, looking out over the vineyards and the village of Fuissé below and the magnificent rock outcroppings of Vergisson and Solutré in the distance. The view is simply mesmerizing. I immediately just wanted to move in and figure out how to get my family to pack up and join me there.

The view from the Clos Varambon

Fabio is indeed Italian, and in fact from Milan. Being a huge fan of european soccer, I immediately asked the all-important question – “Milan or Inter?” (The two arch rival teams in Milan.) Fabio turns out to be an Inter man, so I knew he was going to be OK. I liked Fabio straight off, and we got into a long, easy conversation about his life, his family, the land and the wines. Fabio is married to the lovely Claire Gazeau, whose family has owned this estate since 1850. Fabio & Claire moved in about 15 years ago, and live there with their two young children.

Fabio & Claire

Having read Burghound’s reviews, I knew that Fabio produced three different wines from the estate, all of which carry the appellation Pouilly-Fuissé. The oldest sections of the Clos were planted in 1910, and these he keeps separate for a tiny old-vines cuvée named “Les Birbettes” (essentially a slang term meaning “the old ones”.) There is one small piece of vineyard just outside of the Clos on the other side of the road – where the soil is granite-based rather than the limestone of the Clos. This parcel too is kept separate, for a bottling he calls “Pierrefolle”. The bulk of the production is simply named “Clos Varambon”, and is comprised of the “young” vines of the Clos – mostly planted in the 1940s and 1950s. What I didn’t know from reading Burghound is that they also own just over an acre of vines in Saint-Amour – the northernmost village in Beaujolais and one of the ten outstanding sites to be classified as one of the “Cru” Beaujolais.

I followed Fabio down the few stone steps to his immaculate cellar, excited to taste what this lovely piece of ground could produce. Let me begin by saying that I’m a huge fan of Pouilly-Fuissé. Always the best and most complex wines of the Mâconnais, these days they are often eclipsing a lot of the output of Puligny, Chassagne and Meursault – at a mere fraction of the price. The best values in world-class Chardonnay are indeed in Burgundy – they’re just not on the Côte d’Or.  (Not to denigrate for one moment the greatness of the best wines from the holy trinity of Meursault, Puligny & Chassagne. The best are indeed in a class of their own, but for the most part so are the prices.) Give me three great bottles of top Chablis or Pouilly-Fuissé any day over one over-priced bottle of Puligny. (But we digress. More on this in depth in future posts…)

Fabio’s vineyard are farmed organically, certified by EcoCert – Europe’s official body that oversees organic agriculture. His wines are made with great care and passion, all of which jump out of the glass at you immediately. These are wines with personality and character. From the first nose into the first glass I knew there was indeed something special going on here. Sometimes you can tell just by looking at the cellar – even Fabio’s cellar has personality and passion.

I have certainly had mediocre wine that came from pristine cellars, but I’ve never had great wine from a cellar that showed signs of neglect or a lack of respect for the wines. (You’d be amazed at the condition of some Burgundian cellars – it can be truly appalling…) The three Pouilly-Fuissé bottlings from 2007 were each outstanding in their own way. The Clos Varambon bottling the most accessible of the three, with a great nose of white flowers and a great purity and minerality to it, driven by finesse rather than power. This is the first of his Pouilly-Fuissé wines we’re bringing in – it drinks beautifully now, and will be here in-stock by mid-month. The others will come later in the year – and they are each steps up in complexity of aromas and flavors, with the old-vines “Les Birbettes” the clear star of the cellar and a full-on world-class bottle.

I was delighted to taste his 2007 Saint-Amour. I’ve long been a fan of the Cru Beaujolais – the best examples are excellent, complex, and age-worthy Gamay Noir wines that have nothing in common with the often insipid “Beaujolais Nouveau” that has virtually killed the worldwide market for the wines of Beaujolais. (Which is a truly sad state of affairs – hundreds of Beaujolais vignerons have gone broke and have pulled out their vines in recent years.) Fabio’s Saint-Amour is all about elegance and grace, and yummy, slurpable sweet-cranberry tinged fruitiness that is soft, silky and downright yummy. And it’s only $22!  I immediately ordered as much as I could. I was sad to learn that there will be no 2008 or 2009 Saint-Amour however, as hailstorms struck his vineyard two years in a row and wiped out the crop.

I was also excited to learn that Fabio had made his ’07 Saint-Amour in a method now coming into vogue with a handful of the top young producers there – using zero sulfur, and in fact zero additions of any kind. No cultured yeasts, no nothing. This is as organic and as natural as it gets – truly letting the vineyard sing its own song without anything else getting in the way. Here’s a quick video clip of Fabio in the cellar telling me about the Saint-Amour.

Et viola, the ’07 Saint-Amour is here now – grab yours and drink it up over the summer. The Clos Varambon ($30) arrives in a couple of weeks, and I am really looking forward to a great future working with Claire and Fabio and their pure, authentic wines. As for the 700 naked people in the vineyard, there were none in evidence on the day of my visit, and Fabio & Claire claim to not have been among the 700…

First, a photo of this really easy, rustic-looking galette that my crew swooned over.  Rustic is code for ugly.  This is a fine place for baking beginners, like me.  I’ll make it again, improvising the ingredients along with the seasons and IOH (ingredients on hand).  I think it would make a fab Easter brunch offering.

Pancetta, Caramelized Onion and Goat Cheese Galette, right out of oven.

This is my absolute favorite kind of culinary exercise — trying something that has intrigued but also intimidated me for years, and then instantly adding it to the repertoire because it is easy and such a hit.  Maybe like me, you’ve longingly eyeballed sweet and savory tarts in bakeries or at farmer’s markets, but never got around to trying your hand.  Pastry is fussy, you thought, or tarts belong to the realm of baking goddesses.  Actually, it’s very simple and I don’t think it would be possible to turn out a bad one.  Really…once you enrobe in a buttery crust any combination of sautéed vegetables, mushrooms, cheese, etc, it’s all good, right?  It’s much lighter than quiche, and a small slice goes a long way when you serve it with a lightly dressed tangle of arugula.

I improvised liberally, from several recipes I looked at, and doubt I would ever make it the same way twice.  The big bonus here is that the basic pastry dough recipe is simpler and more streamlined than others I found.  It couldn’t be any easier.  And since it needs to chill for at least an hour, make it the day or two before.  You can also sauté and prep the toppings the day before, and then the tart can be a simple roll out-top-and-bake deal.

Here’s the recipe.

And more photos.

My grandmother's rolling pin...

top the rolled out dough with a little cheese and sautéed leeks, then...

add other ingredients, such as caramelized onions and cooked pancetta...

sprinkle with more cheese and fold her up...

remove from oven, let it sit for 10 minutes, and serve warm!

For Pastry:
1 ¼ cup all-purpose flour
½ cup unsalted butter, cold, cut into pieces
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon – 1 tablespoon sugar (I did 1 tsp, but would up sugar for fruit tart)
3-4 tablespoons very cold water or non-fat milk

Filling:
5 ounces pancetta, cut into half-inch pieces
3 tablespoons olive oil, or as needed
2 small onions, diced
1 small to medium leek, carefully washed to get rid of soil inside leaves, then sliced thinly
Salt and pepper to taste
2 teaspoons chopped fresh herbs such as rosemary or thyme, or several pinches dried (use judgment here – the pancetta I use is locally made and very flavorful with herbs and seasoning so I don’t need to add much additional herbs.
4 ounces goat cheese crumbled, or 1-2 oz shredded Gruyère
Variations: asparagus, mushrooms and Gruyère; tomato, kalamata olive and goat cheese; onion, scrambled egg and ham; spinach, ricotta, pinenut and lemon zest.

Combine flour, butter, salt and sugar in a food processor and pulse until mixture is a coarse meal. Add water 1 tablespoon at a time just until dough comes together into a ball. Flatten dough into a 5-inch disk and wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate (at least 1 hour).
To prepare the filling, cook pancetta in a skillet until most of fat is rendered, remove bacon from skillet and set aside. Depending on how much fat was rendered, and personal taste, either drain off all but 1 tablespoon of drippings and augment with olive oil, or cook onions and leeks in the pork fat. Over medium-low heat, sauté onion until deeply golden and caramelized, about 20 minutes, season with salt and pepper and herbs. Remove onions from skillet, and then sauté leeks, until soft.
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Place dough on a lightly floured piece of parchment paper, on top of a rimless baking sheet. Let sit at room temperature 10-15 minutes. Gently roll out to 11-inch diameter. Retaining a border of 1 ½ inches, sprinkle pastry with half of the goat cheese crumbles, then top with sautéed vegetables and bacon, then sprinkle with remaining cheese. Fold dough edges. Bake until crust is golden, 25-30 minutes.