SNIFFING AT CALIFORNIA’S YOUNG WINES

‘You can always tell a California wine man. They swirl, they sniff; they never taste it. The French simply gargle the wine.” As he said this the man behind me gestured around a room containing more good food and wine than I have ever seen laid out in one place.

Imagine a large cool room filled with well-laden tables. Imagine a man standing behind each table carving off bits of crisp duck and slices of rare filet of beef. Imagine gorgeous trays of sushi and sashimi that are never more than half empty, and platters filled with petits fours that are constantly replenished. Imagine mountains of clean plates, so many that each time you try a new food you get a clean plate, and each time you tire of it you simply put it down--anywhere--and it is instantly whisked away.

Imagine 7,500 long-stemmed glasses standing before 100 different wines from almost every viticultural area in California, going back as far as the 1975 vintage. Imagine that each time you taste one of these wines, (or simply smell it as the case may be,) you get a clean glass. Imagine great wheels of cheese, and endless oysters, and dessert wines that are so honeyed that a single sip makes your mouth ache.

You have just imagined a wine tasting at the Four Seasons, and if you have a vivid enough imagination you will understand why people who paid $75 a head acted like starving students. It was so astonishing to see those plates and glasses disappearing, you could hardly help testing the system one more time.

The California Vintners Barrel Tasting dinner the following night was even smoother. “When we started the Barrel Tasting in 1975,” says Gerald Asher (wine editor of Gourmet Magazine), “California wines had no social status. Nobody was proud of serving them; they needed cachet. California wine needed an event that had such social status that people really wanted to get there. We did that.”

Indeed, they did it almost too well; more than 2,000 people every year plead for 220 seats, and Asher says that wineries are constantly calling to ask to be included. Picking the wines is no easy task.

“When wineries call I tell them to send me a letter,” Asher says, “and then in October I start riffling the file.” Vintners are asked to send the wine from the last vintage, which is not yet bottled, and the same varietal from an older year. I want to make sure I’ve got a balance of different geographic regions, different kinds of wineries. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle.”

Having chosen the wines, Asher sends the list to Paul Kovi at the Four Seasons. “It’s all done before Christmas,” which leaves Kovi a couple of months to come up with a menu. “This is the first year he’s ever asked me to make a change,” Asher says. “He asked me to move the Merlot. He planned to serve a dish that had to be cooked to the minute, and he wanted it after an intermission so there was a little leeway in the timing.”

There were two intermissions in the course of the meal, which began with the Sauvignon Blanc. Tasted with a wonderful Dover sole filled with lobster mousse and topped with truffle, the dish was delightful, especially with the clean, crisp Wente Sauvignon Blanc, which more than held its own against the Mondavi.

The barrel samples of these smaller wines were far easier to drink than the Chardonnays, (this year from Iron Horse and Acacia), which were mere promises of better things to come. The older vintages, however, provided an interesting contrast between the wines of Napa (Acacia) and Sonoma, and both were wonderful with a seafood risotto. This was followed by a superb, classic oxtail soup--and the first intermission.

There is something astonishing about leaving a messy dining room only to return a few minutes later and find that all the plates, classes, napkins and tablecloths have been replaced. It is like getting up in the middle of the night to get a glass of water and returning to discover clean sheets. In this fresh atmosphere we were served the oddest dish of the evening--salmon that had been wrapped in caul, braised in Merlot and surrounded by tree ears. Served with Merlots from Clos du Val and Firestone, the fish provided an unusual contrast. Merlot is a soft, amiable wine that is easy to like; this character was even more pronounced when served with this difficult dish of chewy textures and oddly lean flavors.

The breast of duck that followed was a resounding hit. The meat, served in a very peppery sauce, was covered with a crisp slice of skin that had been cooked separately. I have never had a better duck; that crackly skin was addictive, and the pepper of the sauce gave the Felton Empire and Trefethen Pinot Noirs some needed sparkle.

Next came Zinfandel, and one of the real surprises of the evening. The barrel wines of both Burgess Cellars and Louis Martini had some of the freshness of a young Beaujolais. As the older wine, Martini chose a 1968; served with a spicy wild boar wrapped in pastry and drenched in orange-enhanced sauce, both food and wine had a distinctly medieval richness.

The final courses were sheer elegance. The 1978 Jordan Cabernet was a silky wine, the 1975 Phelps Cabernet just edging into maturity; both were enhanced by a lean medallion of venison served with an unctuous puree of chestnuts set off by little bits of spicy jalapeno. This was food meant to bring out all the nuances of the wine, and it did just that, displaying the cassis nose of the young Jordan, the slight mintiness of the Phelps.

With the cheeses were two more cabernets--from Ridge and Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars. Then came fruit, coffee and the bombshell announcement that the Barrel Tasting would be moving on to California next year. “The Barrel Tasting isn’t leaving,” said Tom Margittai, co-owner of the Four Seasons, “It’s going home.”

Can a barrel tasting go home again? Gerald Asher thinks it can. As the next carrier of the torch, he has chosen the Stanford Court Hotel, the one establishment in the country equipped to follow the Four Seasons’ act. Meanwhile, Asher is already hard at work, doing his best to see that “it will have as much glitz and glamour on the home base.”

Asked if it really will, Asher recalls a conversation he had with a New York wine writer who talked about the “demise” of the Barrel Tasting. “I said to him, ‘I don’t know why you and Woody Allen think that going West and dying are the same thing.”