In a peculiar form of trench warfare, the world of wine is now under assault from the global pressures of homogenization and the infantilization of taste. It may turn out that the looting in the Baghdad museum was nothing near as perilous for our patrimony as what both mass manufacturers at the low end and canny winemakers at the upper end, get away with on a daily basis.
“Where the hell else can you get as much pleasure out of history?,” asks Neal Rosenthal, a passionate New York based importer of artisanal wines who is among those few fighting to resist the destruction of this marginal but vivid part of our cultural heritage. “It’s almost axiomatic that the deeper a wine’s history, the more delicious it’s going to taste.” While this notion may seem unremarkable outside the wine cosmos, Rosenthal is in fact something of a revolutionary.
For the past twenty years, like a book editor or film distributor from another era, he has roamed the world in search of talent that he can nurture to the marketplace. Concentrating in the vineyards of France and Italy, he has ferreted out and then protected those winemakers who’ve resisted the sirens of globalization. That his portfolio is dominated by Burgundy but only fractionally represented by California is a fair reflection of the state of the wine world–in reverse. And that’s an unlikely position for the son of a Lexington Avenue pharmacist who grew up on malted milks.
In 1939, Rosenthal’s father, Bernard, set up the Ardsley Pharmacy on 72nd & Lex. Working side-by-side with his wife Elsie, they kept the business afloat for the next 37 years. Their son Neal vowed he’d never toil as they did in the retail business. So like many of his contemporaries, he propelled himself upwards, graduating from Columbia Law School in 1970. And then spent a miserable seven years as a corporate lawyer. He quit in 1977. “I should’ve rebelled ten years earlier and I didn’t,” he says. “I missed the moment, I was conscious of it, but I didn’t make the steps at that time for whatever reason. I was sympathetic to all of the protest movements, but I never went the hard route of walking the streets and committing to action.”
So Rosenthal went back on his vow to reject his retail origins. “I just happened to fall into the wine business and a miracle happened. I got it right away. I understood where this fight was and what I could do.” Salvaging the last corner of his parents’ defunct pharmacy, he opened a tiny retail wine shop in 1978, not long after meeting his life and business partner, Kerry Madigan. “At first people walked into our store and said ‘you’re going out of business in six months guaranteed,’ because Kerry and I did everything that was supposedly wrong. If someone came in off the street and asked for cynical, commercial stuff, but that sells well, I’d say ‘go down the street and get it.’
Still as combative today, Rosenthal and Madigan parlayed their retail store’s improbable success into a flourishing national import business, Rosenthal Wine Merchants Ltd., that continues to buck the trends. Their achievement is equivalent to starting out by running a single art house movie theater like Film Forum in New York (itself a Herculean challenge in these dark times) and then miraculously expanding to every small town across the country. “A quality importer is someone who edits, observes, selects, but not just because you think, ‘I can sell this.’ You’re putting together a portfolio like someone in the art world who goes out and puts together a group of artists who are stimulating and where there is a common thread. They can–and should have–different styles but there has to be a common aesthetic and politics.” For Rosenthal the decisive factor is that “each wine express its own terroir.”
“Terroir” is the holy grail of the wine world, and surrounded by just as much hooey. But also as much beauty and romance. “Everything from the vineyard to the cellar has to be done with the idea of maximizing terroir,” says Rosenthal, 56. “That’s not precious or effete either. It’s just fundamental agriculture. If you pick up a bottle of Gigondas, it’s got to taste like it came from only that place [in Southern France].” The concept of terroir is defined by the legal parameters for historical winemaking practices and place designations, specific within each region, known in France as AOC and in Italy as DOC.
In a globally Disneyfied world, most expressions of cultural patrimony have long been stripped of their authenticity and vitality–especially where there is a conscious effort to “preserve.” Terroir in wine survives as one of our last truly breathing links to a common history. That said, terroir is a much-abused concept. It’s often mistaken as simply the geology and microclimate of a particular place. By that definition though, terroir can exist anywhere at any time and any place. Soil and weather are critical of course in determining the character and flavors of a wine, just as the script and the cinematography are the most elemental qualities of a film’s expression. However, without a director with a sense of the tradition of filmmaking, word and image alike will remain inert forces with little sense and less pleasure.
For terroir to have meaning, there must be actors–the grapes–to give life to the story. And to shape meaning, there must be a real director. In wine, this is less the actual person, the winemaker, than the accumulated force of a lengthy exchange between man, culture, soil, grape and climate. Even in the history of cinema, there are very few examples of great filmmakers in any country who weren’t deeply steeped in the work of their predecessors, no matter how radical their breaks with tradition.
The quintessential bad-boy director, Rainer Fassbinder, had Douglas Sirk in person, as mother’s milk. Pier Paolo Pasolini, one of the great junkies of experimental narrative, drew not only from the ‘50’s Neorealism that immediately preceded him but consciously saw the pictorial possibilities of cinema stretching back to the fresco painter Masaccio in the 15th century. Or today, the gifted young Brazilian filmmaker, Karim Ainouz, evolved the emotional and aesthetic feel of his radical debut film, “Madame Sata” (not coincidentally slated to play at the Film Forum in July), from more than a decade of absorbing Fassbinder and Pasolini.
What makes wine singular in cultural expression is that the great wines draw on centuries, in some cases, millennia, of continuously evolving exchange between man, culture and nature. If you drink a Burgundy from the village of Volnay, you are tasting the accretion of two thousand years of efforts to explore the mysteries of a specific but infinitely mutable communal identity.
But with a Volnay crafted by Hubert de Montille or Vincent Bitouzet (Rosenthal’s producer there), just as with a Pasolini or Fassbinder film, it’s not only the more obvious elements of beauty that give the deepest pleasure. Just as critical are all of the mixed motives and human frailties that are naturally present in any human being or work of art.
Rosenthal maintains that “terroir is built on the notion that a certain piece of land and its particular climate is best suited to certain grapes and approaches. But the most delicious and layered wines take time to discover: hundreds, if not thousands of years. “Californian wines may be technically perfect but who cares? I want perfection in my software programs, not my friends or my wine.”
For many wine lovers, Burgundy is the greatest repository of terroir and hence the grail within the grail. In a long, narrow stretch of slopes running south from Dijon, more plots of land have been distinguished and cultivated for winemaking since the Romans invaded Gaul in the first century BC, than anywhere else on earth. Though there were certainly tough times, in say the 5th to the 9th centuries–though Charlemagne did get his favorite vineyard named after him–Burgundy, much more than Bordeaux (essentially arrivistes of the 17th century), is living history.
But buyer beware. It’s not just in the White House that an Orwellian inversion of language has taken place. Today, every wine huckster is plugging his snake oil “terroir”. And most vociferously where it doesn’t exist. As recently as 10-15 years ago, “wine producers in California even denied that terroir existed,” says Rosenthal. In their efforts to create a wine friendly culture in the United States, they barraged us with the idea that wine was only about the grape and how much punch the fruit could pack. Since they realized they didn’t have terroir, this is all they had to sell. It would be like Hollywood reacting against all the maverick films of the ’70s by trying to convince us that a movie star on steroids and a knockout punch to your senses is better than something built on balance and complexity.
“We got bombarded by varietal wine to make us forget terroir in the ‘80’s”, Rosenthal says. “First in the U.S., then everywhere else.” It’s certainly fair to say that the mass marketing of Cabernet and Chardonnay in the ‘80’s was as successful as the transformation of the film industry and the political landscape. And it’s not coincidental that this dangerous fraud took place during the Reagan administration. Just as Hollywood marketing and monopoly distribution have effectively overpowered local filmmaking traditions everywhere in the world, the majority of European wine producers are heeding the sirens of marketing and chucking over the toils of terroir for the botoxed grape and a fast buck.
Most moviegoers today have become understandably skeptical at the sight of yet another authorial “film by” credit at the start of an industrial piece of entertainment concocted (and often now executed) by the marketing team at a studio. Likewise, a wine drinker might think twice before buying into the current fad for a “terroir” pitch from a Napa producer who planted his first vines 15 years ago. Rosenthal noticed that “suddenly in the last couple of years, California producers saw they could create an aura around their product just by talking the terroir talk.” So everyone there, from Gallo at $20 a bottle to Screaming Eagle at $600, is now hawking terroir.
Instead, for only $10 you might want to spend your money on a Peyrassol red from the Cotes de Provence, or $12 on a Domaine Faillenc from Corbieres in the Languedoc-Roussillon region of France or for $13, you can find a Buttafuoco (no relation to Joey) from the Oltrepo Pavese in central Italy. And still for less than $20 you can get an even deeper draught of terroir, a stone’s throw from Charlemagne’s vineyard, with a ‘98 Pernand Vergelesses Blanc from Rollin. In each case, the back label is stamped with the name “Rosenthal Wine Merchant,” a sure indicator of a vigorous defense of cultural dignity and specificity.
