Godforsaken Grapes: A Slightly Tipsy Journey through the World of Strange, Obscure, and Underappreciated Wine

I.

THE VINES IN THE SKY

CHAPTER 1

Dangerous Grapes

In the Swiss canton of Valais, melted cheese is serious business. At the 16th-century Château de Villa in Sierre—billed as Le Temple de la Raclette—the evening’s menu was straightforward: raclette. A guy with a long knife, called a racleur, scraped hot, bubbling, gooey raclette from a wheel onto warm plates that were then whisked to our wooden table, where we added small boiled potatoes served from wooden baskets, along with cornichons, pickled onions, chanterelle mushrooms, and rye bread. After that raclette, there was more raclette. For two hours, the raclette kept coming. Each plate featured a different puddle of raw-milk cheese from a different nearby mountain village. When I asked for ice water, I was gently scolded by the waiter: Never drink cold water with raclette. The cheese will congeal into a cheese baby in your stomach.

No water was fine with me. I was at Château de Villa to drink wine with my melted cheese. And not just any wine, but wine made from some of the most obscure grapes in the world. As another round of raclette arrived, Jean-Luc Etievent, my unshaven and pastel-wearing French dining companion, poured a glass of humagne blanche. It tasted strange and big and sexy, full of ripe exotic fruit, surrounded by delicate floral aromas—sort of like mountain flowers picked by a Kardashian wearing a dirndl.

If you’ve never heard of humagne blanche, I don’t blame you. I have been an aficionado of obscure wine and spirits for years, and I’d never heard of this white wine either. Humagne blanche dates to at least the 14th century, and in the mid–19th century it was the most widely grown grape in Valais. Now, only 75 acres of humagne blanche remain in the entire world. By comparison, cabernet sauvignon and merlot each grow on over 700,000 acres worldwide, and chardonnay grows on over 400,000 acres. With a Gallic shrug, Etievent said, Drinking the same wines all the time is really boring.

Before I’d finished with my glass of humagne blanche, I was given a second glass by the other wine sherpa at our table, José Vouillamoz, a short, bespectacled Swiss guy in his mid-40s who wears a flat cap and kicks around his nearby hometown of Sion on a kid’s scooter. We will now taste one of the rarest wines in the world, he said, with a flourish.

Vouillamoz poured me a glass of wine made with a grape called himbertscha, which he’d helped rescue from a forgotten vineyard found high in the Alps. In the entire world, only these two acres of himbertscha exist, from which less than 800 bottles are made each year. Himbertscha is one of the strangest white wines I have ever tasted—like a forest floor of moss and dandelions that’s been spritzed with lemon and Nutella. Vouillamoz took a big sip and said, Critics claim that obscure varieties like this will never be as good as Bordeaux or Burgundy. Well, maybe not now. But what about in 50 years? One hundred years?

We might reasonably call Etievent and Vouillamoz the Indiana Joneses of ampelography—which happens to be the study, identification, and classification of grapevines. Both are explorers on an obsessive hunt for the rarest wine grapes in the world. Vouillamoz is a world-renowned geneticist and botanist, and coauthor of the encyclopedic tome Wine Grapes: A Complete Guide to 1,368 Vine Varieties, Including Their Origins and Flavors (with Julia Harding and Jancis Robinson). His life’s work is the study of vitis vinifera, the European grape species that’s used to make most of the world’s wine. Meanwhile, Etievent is the cofounder of Paris-based Wine Mosaic, a small nonprofit organization that works to rescue indigenous wine grapes from extinction. All over the Mediterranean, from Portugal to Lebanon, Etievent and his similarly obsessed colleagues seek out growers of rare varieties, helping farmers identify what grapes they have, then essentially serving as a support group—organizing tastings and connecting them with importers, university researchers, and wine drinkers.

I found myself in Valais because I’d grown increasingly obsessed with obscure and underappreciated wine grapes, and Etievent had invited me on a harvest-time trip to see and taste some of Wine Mosaic’s most successful projects in the Alps. Here, isolated vineyards, strange microclimates, and decades spent off the traditional wine world’s radar have preserved local grapes and farming traditions. In less than a decade, Wine Mosaic has saved more than 20 traditional Alpine grape varieties from dying out.

Earlier that day, about 40 kilometers from Château de Villa, Etievent and I visited the most extreme vineyards I’d ever experienced, at a craggy mountain place called Domaine de Beudon. Etievent, perhaps channeling a Parisian version of Indiana Jones, carried a pickax and wore heavy leather boots, along with royal blue pants, a white belt, and a pink scarf. We were joined by yet another rare-grape expert, Jean Rosen, vice president of a Dijon-based organization called Cépages Modestes (literally modest grapes). Rosen, short, stocky, and bearded, was himself a modest guy. His nickname is Petit Verdot, after the least-known and most finicky grape used in Bordeaux blends—a variety that ripens so late that in some years the entire crop is lost. Before Petit Verdot became immersed in esoteric wine grapes, he’d been an English teacher, then an antique ceramics expert.

The only way up to Domaine de Beudon was by a creaky wooden aerial cable car—like something out of a Wes Anderson movie. After we called up to the mountaintop on an old-fashioned phone, we waited as the cable car slowly wobbled down, and then as boxes of grapes were unloaded. A photographer traveling with us, terrified, refused to get into the cable car. Etievent, Petit Verdot, and I squeezed in, and we quickly jolted upward, suspended from a swaying cable. I could see the ground, hundreds of feet below, through the cracks between the floor and the door. About halfway up, the car lurched steeply, climbing almost vertically over a protruding rock face (the beudon, or belly) that gives the winery its name. We all looked at one another wide-eyed. Don’t look down, Petit Verdot said.

We arrived at the top to fields of verbena and thyme and flowers and chickens wandering freely. The vineyards rose straight up, almost 3,000 feet above sea level. Domaine de Beudon, with its motto, Les vignes dans le ciel (the vines in the sky) is considered to be one of the first and most important bio-dynamic wineries in the world. On the cable car platform, we met Domaine de Beudon’s owner, 69-year-old Jacques Granges, who wore a bushy beard and—I kid you not—a beret. We shook hands. Granges was missing his index finger. It seemed as though we’d arrived for an audience with the mythical wizened hermit on the mountaintop.

As we sat at a table overlooking the sunny valley below, Granges brought out a dozen bottles of wine, and set down two jugs. This one is for spitting, and this one is for dumping, he said. I make vinegar.

He’s not going to make much vinegar today, Petit Verdot whispered to me.

Granges said little as he poured his wines. When we oohed and aahed over the first, a golden amber and chalky wine made from the chasselas grape, he said simply, This is a wine raised by science, conscience, and a lot of love.

The next wine, from müller-thurgau grapes, was like drinking snow infused with edelweiss. This is like magic water, said Petit Verdot. That was followed by somewhat-known sylvaner (called by the name Johannisberg in Valais) and then relatively rare petite arvine, a Swiss variety with less than 500 acres found in the world. That was followed by totally obscure reds from humagne rouge and diolinoir (each less than 300 acres worldwide).

Finally, we tasted a strange hybrid grape called chambourcin, which was created in the 19th century by crossing a French variety with a wild North American variety. Normally, a hybrid grape like this would not be permitted in a European appellation, but Granges was given special permission a few years before to plant chambourcin. It grows in a very dangerous, steep plot, he said. My wife wanted me to plant something there that didn’t need a lot of care and attention since it’s so dangerous.

I knew a number of American wineries that produced cloying, fruity, mediocre red wines from chambourcin. This mountain chambourcin was different, and for the Frenchmen with me, it was the most unusual and foreign grape of the day. Very peculiar, said Petit Verdot as he sipped it.

As our tasting turned into drinking, fruit flies gently buzzed around crates of fresh-picked orchard fruit. My phone died, and time seemed to stop. Petit Verdot pointed toward the Great St. Bernard Pass in the distance. This is one of the great historic places to cross the Alps, he said. The whole region is divided into valleys. They were isolated. Historically, there wasn’t a lot of communication or exchanges. You can see why each place developed its own grapes.

Even though it was brisk and cool amid the vines in the sky, all day long a bright sun shone over Valais. Finally, the sun began to set and we watched the cable car climb to meet us again. Earlier, Granges’s wife, Marion, had told us that their first cable car, years ago, derailed with Jacques inside, and he’d plunged down the mountain. He’d been badly injured and spent time in a coma. No one said a word on our descent.

A few hours later, over raclette at Château de Villa, I wanted to know: Why had grapes like humagne blanche and humagne rouge and diolinoir and himbertscha nearly disappeared?

People became ashamed of the old-time grapes, the grapes of grandpa, Vouillamoz said. They began planting the so-called ‘noble grapes’ and they would disregard the rest. Noble is the historic designation for grapes like chardonnay, sauvignon blanc, cabernet sauvignon, merlot, and pinot noir—the ubiquitous international grapes that made Bordeaux and Burgundy famous are now popularly grown everywhere from California to Australia to South Africa to China. Noble grapes, Vouillamoz repeated the word with disdain. I hate this term. What bothers people like Vouillamoz and Etievent—and me—is that while 1,368 wine grape varieties may exist, the sad truth is that 80 percent of the world’s wine is produced from only 20 grapes. Many of the other 1,348 varieties face extinction.

Another raclette arrived, and it was strong and funky. Throughout dinner, I was taken by how diverse each puddle of cheese had tasted. A few were mild and creamy, one was sharp and piquant, and a couple were stinky and tangy. Much like wine grapes, I’m always surprised by how many cheeses exist in the world. As Charles de Gaulle famously said of France, How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese? But even de Gaulle underestimated: France has at least 400 varieties of cheese, and probably more than 1,000 if you count subvarieties. And that’s just France: Hundreds of cheeses, each made according to some local tradition, exist in the rest of Europe. Those of us who quest after obscure grapes hope for a world of wine that’s equally raucous and ungovernable. But wine’s diversity is always under threat, and every grape that remains untasted, unknown, and underappreciated faces the risk of extinction.

After pausing only a moment to eat some cheese, Vouillamoz poured yet another rare variety, this one called gwäss. Gouais? said Etievent, with a raised eyebrow. Gwäss, better known as gouais blanc in French, has been banned across Europe, by various royal decrees, since the Middle Ages. That’s because monarchs considered it a peasant grape that made bad wine—gou, in medieval French, was a derogatory term to describe something inferior. Its vines were also extremely prolific. Gwäss often took over entire vineyards, and the aristocracy didn’t want a commoner mating with its noble grape varieties.

That’s a curious thing I was learning about grape varieties: Each one has been created by two parents, a father and a mother, that cross-fertilize, just like you’re taught in high school biology. For centuries, we could only hypothesize about a grape’s parentage, but since the advent of DNA testing by scientists like Vouillamoz, we now clearly know the family tree of many grapes. Through DNA testing, for instance, gwäss has been found to be the ancient mother of around 80 varieties, several with noble pinot noir as the father, including chardonnay, gamay, and possibly riesling.

Yeah, gwäss is kind of a slut, Vouillamoz said. His girlfriend, who was sitting next to me, shot Vouillamoz an exasperated look. OK, OK, so we’re not keeping with the times, he said. That is a very sexist thing to say. I’m sorry. After all, we call the male grapes ‘Casanovas’ when they father a lot of children.

I said that it’s really odd to think deeply about the sex life of grapes, especially personifying them to the point of slut-shaming. I told Vouillamoz that I doubted many people wanted to think about reproduction when they spit out an irritating grape seed.

Yes, but they should! said Vouillamoz. A seed is life!

Clearly, I’d slipped down some sort of rabbit hole into a vast alternate universe of wine geekdom.

I don’t know that I’ve ever really emerged from that rabbit hole. The rare wines from that day at Domaine de Beudon and the dinner in Sierre loomed significantly in my mind for much of the following year. Especially one Saturday during that muggy summer week when everyone lost their minds over Pokémon GO.

All week long, instead of doing work, I’d been wandering, sweatily, around Philadelphia capturing Pokémon on my iPhone. I wasn’t playing this game with my sons. No, the boys were actually away visiting their grandparents in California and I was alone, at loose ends, and I downloaded the app on my own. I found immediate, satisfying success in Pokémon’s world, ignoring the reality of being a guy in his mid-40s trying not to be creepy while meandering through city neighborhoods and parks, eyes glued to the screen, flicking my finger to catch imaginary monsters. I filled my Pokédex with rare species such as the Aerodactyl, the Ponyta, the Venusaur, the Rhyhorn, and the Hitmonchan as they popped up on lawns and benches and garbage cans. After only a few days I was fast approaching Level 18. Needless to say, when I awoke Saturday morning, I was overcome with deep shame about how I’d spent my week.

Yet I couldn’t help but think that Pokémon GO offered some kind of metaphor for my own life as a wine writer. Over the past couple of years, I’d spent weeks and months gallivanting around Europe, seeking out obscure wines made from rare grapes, grown in little-known regions: rotgipfler and zierfandler from Austria’s Thermenregion. baga and antão vaz from Portugal, schiava or lagrein from Italian Südtirol, altesse or verdesse from France’s mountainous Isère. I would sip and taste and consume those wines, then capture my impressions by jotting notes into a black Moleskine. When I thought about my life like this, it was no wonder that many friends and family members didn’t consider my wine writing to be any more serious than Pokémon GO.

In any case, I decided to take a day off from Pokémon. Instead, I paid a visit to the Outer Coastal Plain wine country—which is a pretentious and boozy way of saying that I made a 35-minute drive to the semirural area of southern New Jersey near where I grew up. These days, people endeavor to make quality wine from our sandy South Jersey soil, which always invites snideness, or at least backhandedness: The Outer Coastal Plain might be the perfect place to make fine wine in America, said the New York Times in 2013. The O.C.P. has only one real challenge. It’s in southern New Jersey, a state associated with many things—Springsteen, Snooki, industrial pollution, the mob—but not great wine.

People love to crack jokes when I tell them about farms in New Jersey. But Gloucester County is one of the few places where the Garden State nickname still makes sense, though even here McMansion cul-de-sacs gobble up the farmland. My family has worked in the produce business here for decades, and my cousins and I bought summer fruit for our own fruit-and-vegetable stand from the county’s many farmers. Back then, the only wine I can remember in South Jersey was sickly sweet blueberry or peach wines that people bought at summer fairs.

I crossed the Walt Whitman Bridge and merged onto Route 55 right before the exit for the Deptford Mall, where I hung out as a mulleted teenager, listening to Bon Jovi and Cinderella blaring from a friend’s Camaro. As I drove, I was seized by some guilt. Even though Gloucester County is not far at all from where I live and work, I rarely return for a visit. Once off the highway, I took a slightly roundabout scenic route, through Elk Township and the community of Aura, which was once among the best peach-growing areas in the nation. As a teen, I’d learned to drive on country roads like these, steering white-knuckled next to Mr. Pickens, the gym teacher who taught Drivers Ed. wearing polyester coach shorts and a whistle around his neck. In Aura, I grew a little sad when I didn’t see many fruit trees. There was, however, a large housing development called The Orchards. Soon enough, things got more rural, as I turned on to Whig Lane, then Elk Road past the Hardingville Bible Church and Old Man’s Creek Campground. I passed a Christmas tree farm, a used tractor-trailer cab for sale in a front yard, and finally some apple and peach trees. I thought about filling a bucket with some berries or peaches at a U-pick spot called Mood’s Farm, as my family has for years. But this day happened to be Mood’s Farm’s blueberry festival and the place was teeming with crowds eating blueberry pie and blueberry ice cream and drinking blueberry cider. So I just bought an apple cider doughnut and moved on.

Mood’s was just down the road from Heritage Vineyards in Mullica Hill, where I intended to taste wine. When I pulled up at Heritage, there was a guy playing acoustic guitar and singing outside on the patio. Outside, it looked like the kind of place where you’d pick pumpkins or go for a hayride. Inside, the tasting room looked like a country store, with wine tchotkes and knickknacks for sale, including some decorative signs that would not have been out of place on a Jersey Shore boardwalk: A Meal Without Wine Is Called Breakfast; Today’s Forecast 100% Chance Of Wine; I Just Rescued Some Wine. It Was Trapped in a Bottle.

Heritage Vineyards gained some renown a few years earlier at a blind tasting hosted at Princeton University during the annual conference of the American Association of Wine Economists. This so-called Judgment of Princeton pitted New Jersey wines against those from Bordeaux and Burgundy, including top châteaux such as Mouton-Rothschild and Joseph Drouhin. It was closely modeled after the famed 1976 Judgment of Paris tasting in which top critics unknowingly selected California wines over French wines, a heresy at the time that helped establish Napa Valley on the global wine map. After the identity of the wines was revealed, at least one judge, Odette Kahn, editor of La Revue Du Vin De France, demanded her scorecard back. She had rated American wines as her number one and two choices.

George Taber, the same journalist who’d originally reported about the 1976 Paris tasting for Time magazine, was actually the moderator in Princeton, where nine wine experts from the United States, France, and Belgium convened to judge the wines. In keeping with the now-expected gotcha! nature of these blind-tasting events, the wine experts gave essentially the same scores to the New Jersey and French wines. The usual controversy ensued. Meanwhile, local news outlets had a hearty populist chuckle at the expense of the Francophile wine snobs.

The Judgment of Princeton was a boon to Heritage Vineyards. Its 2010 BDX Bordeaux-style blend won third place among the reds, scoring just a half-point behind Haut-Brion, the famed Bordeaux château. Heritage’s 2010 chardonnay also finished third, ahead of a few bottlings of Montrachet, the Burgundy grand cru. I’ve tasted both of these Heritage wines and they’re very accomplished, and delicious—and at $50, the Bordeaux-style red blend is at least $500 to $1,000 less than the Château Haut-Brion. Still, I’ve often pondered why up-and-coming wineries and regions still look to Bordeaux and Burgundy as their benchmark. And it’s not just in South Jersey. No matter what wine region one visits—Chile, Australia, Oregon—so many winemakers still aspire to craft wines from cabernet sauvignon and merlot and chardonnay and pinot noir grapes, and so many wine lovers aspire to drink these wines.

There is, of course, nothing intrinsically wrong with trying to replicate the prestige of cabernet sauvignon, chardonnay, or pinot noir. Unless you agree with Jean-Luc Etievent that drinking the same wines all the time is really boring. Or perhaps you’re like me, and you’re excited about having new experiences and learning new things. Every new grape you’ve never tasted before, after all, offers the chance to taste a new flavor. In this globalized world, more and more of us seek out the local specialties. These grapes carry with them a taste of place and culture. We endeavor to preserve these grapes, then, for the same reason we save heirloom tomatoes and apples and heritage cattle, and build vast seed banks. Within these organisms may lie clues to solving the challenges of climate and disease, as well as recording the historical record of human taste.

I know I’m not alone. In recent years, there’s been a revived interest in little-known grapes from lesser-known regions. For instance, two decades ago, grapes like carmenère from Chile, grüner veltliner from Austria, or albariño from Spanish Galicia were completely off the radar. Now they’re old hat to many wine enthusiasts. So the quest for even rarer grapes has intensified. While the new generation of sommeliers in the hip, big-city wine bars can often be overbearing, with their disdain for any wine that might be considered mainstream, we can thank them for creating a demand, however small and exclusive, for rare grapes. Often, a sommelier’s love of obscure wines might seem like an embrace of obscurity for obscurity’s sake. But sometimes, it can also serve a higher purpose.

When I arrived at Heritage, ready for a world-class tasting, the woman pouring wines asked, Sweet or dry? When I looked around the bar, I was surprised to see many people drinking fruit wines that read Jersey Blue or Jersey Sugar Plum. The pour woman looked relieved when I said dry and opted for both the Classic and Reserve tastings.

While I was looking forward to tasting their acclaimed Bordeaux-style wines, I was quickly enamored by how Heritage used the lesser-known Bordeaux grapes. For instance, when I tasted the 2014 sauvignon blanc I commented that it had a fleshy orchard-fruit element that wasn’t typical. The pourer told me that about a quarter of the wine was made from the sémillon grape. This made sense, since sémillon is a classic blending partner with sauvignon blanc in dry Bordeaux whites, as well as sweet Sauternes. But then the pourer swiftly opened a bottle of 100 percent sémillon. We originally planted this for blending, but it was just so good, she said. I agreed; this was a surprising, uncommon wine, something you rarely see, even in Bordeaux. Sémillon is not a fashionable variety, according to Vouillamoz and his coauthors of Wine Grapes. Worldwide, there is about five times more sauvignon blanc, and about eight times more chardonnay grown than sémillon. That may be because in much of the world, sémillon can be too fat and honeyed and cloying. In fact, the only other place in the world you drink an exceptional dry 100 percent sémillon like this is Australia’s Hunter Valley (one of the wine world’s enigmas according to wine writer Oz Clarke). In any case, Heritage’s Jersey rendition of the grape was fresh and lithe and elegant. The unrepentant wine geek in me started to get tingles of excitement.

A similar thing happened when I tasted Heritage’s Bordeaux-style 2011 Estate Reserve BDX, which was a blend of 40 percent cabernet sauvignon, 32 percent merlot, 16 percent petit verdot, 8 percent cabernet franc, and 4 percent malbec. Maybe I was subconsciously toasting Petit Verdot, my drinking companion that day at Domaine de Beudon, but what struck me was the high percentage of actual petit verdot in the bottle. Yes, this all may seem like the pinnacle of wine geekiness: to single out an obscure grape like sémillon or petit verdot. But please stick with me. Since petit verdot is known for its rustic character, dark color, powerful flavor, and strong tannins, it’s traditionally used like a chef would use seasoning. Few châteaux in Bordeaux ever use more than around 3 percent—16 percent is off the charts.

So Heritage’s Estate Reserve BDX boasted quadruple or quintuple the typical seasoning. Why? Perhaps petit verdot grows much better in South Jersey’s soil and climate than it does in Bordeaux, where the grape only reaches full ripeness about once out of every four harvests. Perhaps South Jersey’s petit verdot ripens more fully and therefore has more complex fruit, softer tannins, and maybe some of the coarse rustic character is tamed. Perhaps Jersey petit verdot is, dare we say, more elegant than Bordeaux petit verdot? In any case, petit verdot—an odd-ball grape by any measure—makes a big difference in this very un-Bordeaux Bordeaux blend.

Several years before, I’d actually written one of those typically backhanded newspaper articles about Outer Coastal Plain wine. (Yes, I’ll admit, I, too, made a Snooki reference.) At the time, one winemaker told me, You can make a good wine anywhere. You just have to pick the right grape. This, of course, is the fateful decision that every winemaker in every wine region in the world must grapple with. If you happen to be the great-great-great-grandson of a Bordelais winemaker who several centuries ago figured out that cabernet sauvignon vines grew really well on that hill yonder, well then you’re all set. You just tend the grapes your grandfather planted and don’t screw it up. Château Haut-Brion can document grapes being grown as early as 1423. Heritage, on the other hand, planted its vines in 1999. It’s almost 600 years behind Bordeaux in figuring out what works and what doesn’t.

As I tasted the next wine at Heritage, their 2013 cabernet franc, I regretted being so skeptical. I am now convinced that cabernet franc should definitely be South Jersey’s grape. My thinking may be prejudiced in part because I happen to love cabernet franc. For years, I’ve thought, if you are becoming more adventurous in your wine drinking, if you’re curious to explore beyond plump, ripe, and oaky, if you like eating and drinking food and wine together at the same time . . . well then you really should try drinking more cabernet franc. In Paris, Loire Valley reds made from 100 percent cabernet franc have been traditional house reds in bistros for decades, underscoring how well it pairs with so many different dishes. Why cabernet franc remains so unpopular in the United States, however, has perplexed me. Just like cabernet sauvignon and merlot, it’s one the official grapes of Bordeaux blends. In fact, cabernet franc is the parent of cabernet sauvignon, so its origin is even more ancient. Ampelographers consider it to be a so-called founder grape. Nowadays, though, it’s mostly an afterthought, and cabernet franc lags far behind its offspring—it’s only the 32nd most planted grape in the world, with less than a fifth of cabernet sauvignon’s acreage.

One issue is that wines from cabernet franc’s spiritual home, the Loire Valley, can be very challenging and, well, very French. Give most American consumers a label that reads Chinon or Bourgueil or Saumur-Champigny and their eyes will glaze over. "Are those medical conditions or characters on Game of Thrones?" someone once asked me. No, I said, they’re places in Loire Valley which produce cabernet franc wines. Beyond nomenclature, these wines are known more for