🍷 NWR Weekly: How Alinea Does Wine Pairings, Jon Bonné Speaks His Mind, Shifting Chablis

WHAT’S HAPPENING TO THE CHABLIS MARKET?

With many drinkers leaning towards lighter, fresher wines, Chablis is enjoying a moment in the sun. But the increased consumer interest isn’t all sunshine: Chablis is becoming increasingly expensive.

This poses a challenge to consumers, who are used to Chablis as a reliable source of value — but it’s also frustrating some Chablis producers, who don’t necessarily reap the benefits of those higher prices. A sampling of what industry insiders are saying about the changes:

• “We’ve seen wholesale Burgundy pricing going up 30 to 40% year-over-year for the last few years. Chablis village has reached wine list-only placements. Village wines now go for $80-90 in a restaurant. You can’t pour them by the glass anymore.”

• “What I find really quite frustrating is that we don’t have a solution for this. The demand is so inelastic because there will always be a small group of people that will pay. The good stuff only gets rarer and rarer. And even the wines that aren’t good are still expensive.”

• “Buying Chablis, as well as most French wines, in the last few years has been caught up in a perfect storm of everything. The Trump taxes [25% on most French wines and many other European wines] were a start. COVID followed with its shortages of everything. Then came the invasion of Ukraine, which impacted glass prices. Plus, there were a lot of really short [low harvest volume] vintages mixed in, too.”

IRELAND’S WATER OF LIFE

Whiskey critic Susannah Skiver Barton has a new whirlwind tasting of 30 Irish Whiskies. Though there are plenty of boldfaced brands here, it’s well worth going out into the deep end. Among the highlights:

• The Limavady Single Barrel, a single-malt steal at $50, “flaunts its maturity with a nose dripping in tropical fruit.

• Glendalough 7-Year-Old Mizunara Finished scores 94 points and retains great liveliness beneath its leather, sandalwood, woodsy spice, and generous brown sugar.

• Teeling Blackpits and The Legendary Silkie Midnight headline some of the smokier picks

For a cool $50,000, you can splash some Midleton Very Rare Silent Distillery Collection Chapter 3 into a glass whenever the, uh, spirit moves you.

JON BONNÉ HAS SOME THOUGHTS

Jon Bonné spoke with NWR about his two-volume doorstopper “The New French Wine.” But he didn’t stop there. Bonné’s takes remain among the smartest, freshest and most candid anywhere in the world of wine:  

• “The New French Wine was always about who’s doing the hard work. But in this case, it’s doing the hard work in places that are not terra incognita. It’s seeing the big players doing really risky, radical stuff—as if all of Hollywood’s A-list suddenly decided they’re just going to do indie films, the Marvel universe begone.”

• “A lot of wines that people had undervalued are spectacular. Muscadet is the perfect example. Great Muscadet today drinks like Grand Cru Chablis without costing what Grand Cru Chablis costs. It has undergone an enormous quality revolution. It has its own crus, it has terroir specificity. They outshine a lot of what was once considered the Grand Cru or Premier Cru of white wines in France.”

• “Producers are pricing themselves out of relevance. There’s no point in connoisseurship when you tighten the criteria so far that almost no one can actually engage in connoisseurship. People will look for new benchmarks. Some of these new benchmarks might be questionable. In the book I call it the Nicolas Joly-led era of of natural wine where the more ‘fucked up’ a wine was, the more people liked it. And that’s still kind of happening in Paris.”

HOW ALINEA PAIRS WINES WITH ITS WILDLY CREATIVE TASTING MENU

In a new series, we talk to wine directors and sommeliers at leading restaurants about how they pair wines with tasting menus. The first installment features Chicago’s incomparable Alinea.

In it, Wine Director Jon Leopold explains how he pairs wines with chef Grant Achatz’s remarkably creative tasting menus. Here’s just one of the (13) pairings he analyzes, for a dish called “Squeaker”:

"This course is very much inspired by Victorian era formal dining or Bridgerton, which I think Chef and his fiancée were watching . . . There's a squab thigh rillettes with smoked blueberries and lots of brown spices. The Aigre-Doux sauce has a squab jus, but also a heavily reduced ruby port wine element with flavors like cinnamon and clove. Then there are biscuits that we make brushed with honey with a blueberry compote and foie gras mousse.

“We’re definitely going red here. The richness of that ruby port wine sauce and the Aigre-Doux needs some pretty assertive, more red flavors. I came across a vertical of Turley’s “Hayne Vineyard” and we've been pouring those. The idea is big, jammy fruit on the wine to match up with the very intense flavors of the blueberry and the Aigre-Doux sauce. At the same time, squab is not a super fatty bird. It's not like duck, which has a lot more fat content."

WHAT WE’RE DRINKING AND LIKING RIGHT NOW

🍎 Brittany welcomed fall with a crisp sip of Lares Disco Made Me Do It–a blend of 70% Pinot Noir/30% apple cider(!)–at The Airliner in L.A.

🏺  Becca tasted through nine Greek wines at a pairing dinner. Her favorite? A Lacomatia Robola de Cephalonie from Sclavos Wines, the 2019 Harvest.

🍂  Mike threw the doors open to fall with a deep, rich 2011 Bussola Amarone della Valpolicella

VALUES, BARGAINS AND FINDS*

• A black-fruited Spanish steal for $10.

• A 2015 Domaine Vigneau-Chevreau Vouvray Sec for $13.

• A Racines Chardonnay from the Sta. Rita Hills for $30.

*NWR is not compensated for the links in this section

AROUND THE WINE (AND WHISKEY) WORLD

💻 AI takes a swing at wine tasting to see if it can pinpoint exactly what flavors consumers are most attracted to.

🍻  WSET, the Wine & Spirit Education Trust, will branch out into beer certifications in 2024.

💰  A yearly WineBusiness survey found a modest bump in salaries as 2023 winds to a close.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

Santé!

The NWR Editors

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