Rare Wine Report

WORDS BY JOE GURBA

Many Albertans outside of the drinks business don’t realize how good we have it here for wine selection. We live in one of the best wine markets in the world. Every week we see a new wave of lovely and limited wines appear in our shops, however briefly, until those in the know snap them up.

This is a small sampling of the terroir driven wines you need to hunt down this month, wines made on small farms by true vignerons with that rare gift for gently translating nature into art. These wines are nourishing and artful records of another lap around the sun.

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Rivetto 2017 Barolo di Serralunga d’Alba DOCG

100% Nebbiolo. Barolo DOCG, Italy.

$80-$85

Still available at: City Cellars, Crestwood Fine Wines,

Campbell Liquor Store.

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Enrico Rivetto is considered by his neighbours to be, come si dice… eccentric. And it is not simply that he’s spent the last 20 years, at an immense cost, transitioning to become the first biodynamic certified grower in Barolo. His passion and conviction in the belief that the best and most singular fruit of place can only grow in a biodiverse atmosphere has led him to go further still. As a fourth generation vigneron, he took his inheritance of 50 rolling hectares in one of Barolo’s most highly regarded communes, Serralunga d’Alba, and pulled up several hectares of vines to make room for wild woodlands, a plethora of garden crops, nut trees, orchards, pasture for donkeys, biological corridors for beneficial insects, and permanent cover crops between his rows.

Enrico champions natural, holistic poly-farming. At a time when an average hectare of vines in Barolo sells for 1.2m euros, pulling up vines to return the diversity and self-sufficiency of his land is a price he’s willing to pay to grow the true soul of Nebbiolo in Barolo, without recourse to chemicals or intrusive farming practices. His cover crops aerate the land and draw pests away from the vines. His donkeys eat those

cover crops and fertilize the vines naturally. And the fruit those vines bear is infinitely more complex. In short, Rivetto is trying to restore a complete and largely self-sustaining ecological circle in his vineyards.

In the cellars, Rivetto’s style is deeply classical. He eschews the small French barriques that became fashionable after the eighties, opting instead for the traditional Slavonian oak three thousand litre botti of the yesterage. These vessels age the wine far more slowly, imparting little in the way of oak flavour, instead concentrating the energy of the wine into a glacial unfolding. Rivetto’s Barolos are famously tannic in their youth, equipped with the grip to go the distance, necessary to preserve the wine over decades of development in the bottle. His wines not only reward aging, they demand it. But with a decade or more of cellaring, they reveal the beguiling symphony of notes great nebbiolo is loved for: truffles, roses, tar, tobacco, dried cherry, garden herbs, and wild mushrooms. It’s an authentic window like no other into the heart of Italy’s most beloved appellation.

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Crivelli 2019 Ruché di Castagnole Monferrato DOCG

100% Ruché. Castagnole Monferrato DOCG, Italy

$40-$45

Still available at: Color de Vino

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Ruchè is an exceptionally rare variety indigenous to Piemonte, the Italian province best known by wine lovers for its Barolo and Barbaresco. All in all, there are only 40 extant hectares of Ruché vines. Azienda Agricola Crivelli is one of the highest regarded producers of this rare wine, grown in only seven villages just northwest of Asti: Grana, Montemagno, Portacomaro, Refrancore, Scurzolengo Viarigi, and the titular Castagnole Monferrato.

Ruché is known for being a fleet-footed red variety that drinks beautifully with antipasti, and while Crivelli’s Ruché lives up to that reputation with its lean minerality, this newly released 2019 vintage is nevertheless boozy, hitting 14.5% when their past cuvées would sit around 13 or 13.5%. But this is chalked up to honest winemaking that reflects the vintage for what it was. Year after year, record breaking heat has left its imprint on wine regions the world over. Ironically, this is happening just when taste is actually shifting away from big boozy wines to more refreshing and food-friendly ABVs. But don’t let this

deter you from hunting down this marvelous example of a unique variety just awarded its own DOCG status in 2010. There’s a reason locals call it the Red Prince of Monferrato.

Crivelli’s Ruché is difficult to simply reduce to tasting notes. It is a unique wine with an almost geranium like note that is difficult to describe. The fruit profile is all over the board and belies rote categorization. It’s fair to say the wine is floral and peppery and has a dark berry fruit profile with a slight bitterness on the finish. The tannins are big but well ripened and lend the wine structure. The grape’s parentage remains shrouded in mystery and ampelographic research is ongoing. But despite having no known relation to any other known Piemontese vines, Ruché does have some of that Nebbiolo charm with its lighter colour, robust tannins, and large body somehow disguised by a floral levity. If you swoon for Italian wine, you have to hunt one of these bottles down while there’s still some left just to see if it’s for you.

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Château le Puy 2017 Emilien

Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Malbec, Carménère. Francs Côtes de

Bordeaux AOC, France.

~$50

Still available at: Crestwood Fine Wines,

Highlands Liquor, Prestige Liquor, Color de Vino.

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In my humble opinion, Odilon Redon stands a head above the other painters of Bordelais provenance. You might think a better jumpoff for a wine & art ekphrasis would be Rosa Bonheur with her pastoral themes, painted with jaw-dropping visual accuracy, but her works would be a better fit for the vast majority of 21st century Bordeaux wines. Not Château Le Puy.

Redon, many years ahead of surrealism, wanted to place “the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible.” The Amoreau family vignerons at Château Le Puy, not unlike Redon, seem to eschew the academic aim of depicting nature. Instead, Le Puy wines use the nature outside us to capture and depict something essential within us, rendered in all the dreamy encrusted confusion of colour that marks that transition, waltzing back and forth over the threshold of dream and nightmare, blossom and putrefaction, the moment and the process.

Am I granting a meagre wine a gravitas too lofty, reserved for art and religion? Then you must try Château Le Puy. This is art in a bottle. The Emilien is a desert island wine. This is one of the first wines to unlock my obsession. It is an enigma. Emilien is delightfully complex yet constantly approachable. It stood unwavering

in the face of global taste and the questionable edifications of 20th century winemaking technologies. It is a wine so classic as to have lapped the competition and once again become timely and relevant, recalibrating our compass for taste. This wine is rustic yet pure. It seems to spring from the earth with all of earth’s energy and frankness of sensation. And this wine remains democratic, year after year purposefully kept affordable and accessible despite its now idolized stature (see the manga comic, Drops of God!).

I spent four days in Bordeaux in February of 2016 and had the unshakeable feeling that Bordeaux is jealously hiding something behind its plainness. Bordeaux is an austere town of black wrought-iron accents grappling grey and sandstone facades, the manorial buildings standing shoulder to shoulder, etching out stiff, clean, breezy streets. The countryside is lovely, but it’s only as beautiful as most everywhere else. Even the gently sloping vineyards appear too textbook to be remarkable. You’d be forgiven for not realizing the ludicrous final price some of those precious grapes command as they flutter by your window. But I maintain that Bordeaux has quietly cloaked its invisible greatness behind this restrained appearance.

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If you’ve studied Bordeaux wines you’re already familiar with what I witnessed first-hand, that Bordeaux’s skies are as often overcast with the tired pallor of low clouds as they are endowed with the powder blue azure you see splashed across vineyard websites and tourist pamphlets. In Redon’s Le Cyclope we see this metamorphosis on display: one sky giving over to the other, and we are unsure which is passing the baton and which is grabbing it.

Poking his curious head over the hilltop is Polyphemus the Cyclops in his youth, before Ulysses has blinded him. He’s been transported from the golden hues of Etna to the pallid blues of Acquitane (where here too, locals like Redon have grown up with rumours of one-eyed giants that roam these lands since time immemorial).

In Redon’s masterpiece, the spacial plane is oddly flattened as it is in dreams. The unfixed sizes of the Cyclops, the stretch of land, and the ethereal naiad Galatea make measurement impossible. Each denies the next any meaningful scale by which to measure the other’s height or distance or enormity. These three bodies simply stand in a balanced relationship to one another—not unlike this wine, in balance with itself, yet dreamily unmoored from the familiar rubric. In the foreground, Galatea, the fresh-water nymph stalked by the unrequited love of monstrous Polyphemus, is nestled as one with the terroir of indistinguishable flora. The land explodes in endless colour and abundance, hidden beyond his gaze.

The painting calls to mind a panoply of existential dilemmas, but we are here to talk about wine. Having visited Bordeaux and fallen in and out of love with the overpriced wines over the years, I can’t help but see the Cyclops Polyphemus as representing the all-consuming beast of Bordeaux’s global affluent clientele, sucking up Bordeaux’s wines en primeur and dictating a style of winemaking that is ever bolder and oakier and edited to conform to the beast’s taste (but trend does, at last, seem to be waning). But in Galatea I see the unyielding spirit of the Amoreau family and the other Bordeaux growers that have held out, hiding from that global cyclops, complaining as Galatea complained to Scylla in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Oh! Gentle Venus, how powerful your rule is over us! How that ruthless creature, terrifying even to the woods themselves, whom no stranger has ever seen with impunity, who scorns mighty Olympus and its gods, how he feels what love is, and, on fire, captured by powerful desire, forgets his flocks and caves. […] Your love of killing, your fierceness, and your huge thirst for blood, end, and the ships come and go in safety. As this class of buyers, a sizable portion of whom cannot deny their Cyclops-like myopia and predatorial mode of accumulation, faun over Bordeaux’s beautiful wines, their euphemistic ‘business interests’ can at least go neglected momentarily, to the benefit of the demos who suffer under them. But behold! Telemus warns the heavy hearted Polyphemus: “Ulysses will take from you, that single eye in the middle of your forehead.” Polyphemus laughed, and answered: “O most foolish of seers, you are wrong, another, a girl,

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has already taken it.” So he scorned the true warning, given in vain, and weighed the coast down, walking with giant tread, or returned weary to his dark cave. In this wine-market reading of the myth, the Cyclops, in pursuit of Bordeaux’s hidden greatness, forgets his flocks—his stocks and bonds and covert wars—and tries to buy his heart’s desire. He goes on to offer Galatea all he owns and his vast strength, trying to woo her. She is the one he cannot have. He tries and fails to consume the essence of what he can not buy nor be. And he fails. Nature will not reveal itself in this way.

But to those who look past the inflated labels and find the humble and unfaltering estates of Bordeaux exemplified by growers like Château Le Puy, real wine, affordable and accessible, will reveal itself, and in itself, reveal the glories of nature. Wine that is ripe and pure, ‘more flowery than the meadows / friskier than a tender kid, more radiant than crystal / smoother than shells, polished, by the endless tides / more welcome than the summer shade, or the sun in winter’ as Polyphemus despairingly describes Galatea. This is my own lifted and repurposed ode to this poetic wine, this wine that made me see wine differently, made me see wine as a human expression of nature.

This wine is the long-awaited love letter nature sends back to us. It is the most immediate and unpretentious reason to care about the planet—not for the economy, not for fear, but just for the sake of its untellable beauty. Do you care to hear about ambient yeasts, foregone fining and filtration, or the hard work of biodynamic

farming? Do you care to hear about the complex parade of aromas: red current, tarragon, fresh plum, rose hip, hibiscus, nutmeg, potpourri, star anise, bergamot, potter’s clay, granola, each unfolding in turn..? Or the succinct plum and raspberry laden palate with a hint of prune concentration and fresh cut tomato? No more than Redon cared to hear someone expound on his pastel technique, I’m sure! Shall I tell you the wine is 85% Merlot, 7% Cab Franc, 6% Cab Sauv, 1% Malbec, and 1% Carménère? You might as well explain Le Cyclope to me by rattling off the percentage of different colouring pigments Redon used. I haven’t the money to try Château Pétrus, a fifteen minute drive west from Le Puy, and I am not sure I need to. They produce an artwork so successful, it has eaten its own tail and metamorphosed back into wine qua commodity—more an investment than anything else. I’m sure it’s a treat, but how can I justify spending the equivalent of a kid’s art history tuition on a single case? How can I drink something so vaunted without seeing it as its own end? Wines like Château Le Puy’s Emilien, on the other hand, are the very essence of true art—the art not as an end unto itself, but as a light cast back onto life. As a bridge. The true artwork exists in an ecosystem that makes all the less sense the more you try to make sense of it. It is as simple as it is ineffable. It is quite simply beautiful.

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