Poured with Pleasure

Who’d have thought we’d ever see Pahlmeyer Chardonnay hawked at 40% off? Yes, some other California Cult wines have seen cuts already, but Pahlmeyer was still a bit of a shock. Yet there it was in my newsletter from Grapevine Cottage: the 2007 Pahlmeyer Chardonnay, $41.99 a bottle (under $38 with the 10% case discount). That’s a shock on the order of the one a few years ago when someone at Mondavi unloaded some remnant cases at a fire-sale price. It was the first time Opus One was offered by Trader Joe’s, and likely the last.

Grapevine Cottage is a little outpost in wine-loving Zionsville in alcohol-hostile Indiana, whose legislature never misses a chance to stick it to retailers. For example, if Grapevine Cottage were to ship the bargain Pahlmeyer—even in-state—it would be a felony (only Indiana wineries are allowed to ship): customers must go to the store. The latest legal irritant: Retailers must check the ID of every customer ordering drink every time or risk a $1000 fine. (Restaurants are exempt, suggesting that the law is aimed at store owners.) Nevertheless, GC’s owner, Doug Pendleton, somehow survives, even thrives through good service, good pricing and a durable sense of humor. It helps that he’s scooped the world on the Pahlmeyer. The winery itself is out of the 2007 (Doug is doubtless stalking the ‘08). Online prices from other retailers run from a little less to a whole lot more—but only and always for Pahlmeyer’s second wine, called Jayson.

The Anecdote

Pahlmeyer was pretty much an insider’s secret until 1994 and a fateful meeting at the intersection of Hollywood and Wine. Here’s what happened: At Spago, two movie bigshots were chewing on lunch and a script problem. The script, titled Disclosure, was from a novel by Dr. Michael Crichton, a reliable hitmaker: his latest, of many, had been Jurassic Park, so Disclosure was obviously going to be a big deal. The script, centered on a newly promoted boss who tries to trap a married subordinate in a career-wrecking sexcapade on the office sofa, has a role-reversal twist: The evil boss is a smoking-hot woman, her victim a man. In the book, her lure is blunt and dull. She says essentially, ‘C’mon, I’ve got condoms.’ Not only dull but vulgar. The movie needed something better, something suggestive that oozed temptation. Something box-office sexy.

About then Wolfgang Puck breezed by. He’d just received his allocation of Pahlmeyer and–as smart hosts of smart restaurants do–he was pouring for his A-List clients. The movie men sipped it and much as they liked the taste they especially liked the name. Pahlmeyer–it sounded classy, arcane, hard to get. And so, just like that, it was in the movie.

Hard to get indeed. During shooting in Seattle the go-fer sent to fetch it couldn’t find a bottle anywhere. Desperate (a go-fer’s job is not merely to go but to come back with), he called the winery in the hope of scrounging a freebie. Jayson was not amused. He said, "My chardonnay costs $25 a bottle." And hung up.

Jayson was brought up to speed a little later: the film’s producer called to gently explain the potential value of product placement. Jayson was skeptical. Even the fact that Budweiser had paid a bundle (said to be between $250,000 and a cool, frosty million) to put a can of their suds into Tom Cruise’s hand in Top Gun didn’t impress him. He told me later that the whole business seemed ridiculous. But anyway, he said, ‘I sent him two cases. What the hell.’

Months later Jayson saw Disclosure—and still he wasn’t impressed. Audiences, however, were. After seeing Demi Moore lick her lips over the Pahlmeyer–and Michael Douglas–they rang Jayson’s phone off the hook as soon as they cleared the theater. They stuffed his mailbox. They cleaned him out. ‘I’d made 400 cases,’ he told me. ‘I could have sold 400,000.’ Later releases of the film—to foreign theaters, video, cable and network television–had the same result. "I had to get a new mailbox," Jayson said. "Mail arrived in huge plastic bins." Even today he still gets a few extra orders after Disclosure airs on late-night cable.

Soon the $25 price, to quote the poet-pugilist Mike Tyson, ‘faded to bolivian.’ It has been $70 for some time now, so $41.99 is practically stealing.

‘Literature,’ Ezra Pound said, “is news that stays news.” It looks as if the Gulf Spill will stay news for quite some time, so here’s a headline that’s good news:

BOTTLED BOMBSHELL RELEASED TO FRANTIC FANS

Which is only to say that on June 1^st, her birthday, the 24^th vintage of Marilyn Merlot was released ($29, online) to an audience of adoring fans, hopeful speculators (various vintages are offered on eBay at $15 to $482) and possibly even a few people who’ll drink it. (I’m not hinting that there’s anything wrong with it: The wine almost invariably gets enthusiastic reviews, but it is a star on eBay.)

The 2008 Marilyn Merlot label. The image is from a shot issued to ballyhoo the 1950 movie The Asphalt Jungle.

The wines (including Marilyn Cab, Savignon Blonde and others) came about in 1983 when longtime Napa Valley residents Bob and Donna Holder were dining with friends and drinking local Merlot. Here’s the place to put in yada-yada-yada, because next thing you know the idea was broached and events put in train, and by 1985 it was on the market. Good for Bob and Donna, who own Marilyn Wines and actually pay royalties to Monroe’s estate, and who were the first or among the first to put a nifty pun on a wine label. Many have tried for label humor since then. Pity.

A pun is supposed to catch you off guard. It should be flying right by before your brain clicks and wakes up just in time to see its tail lights disappear. Look again: Marilyn Merlot. There’s only one change to the original. The intonation is the same, as is the terminal sound. It’s gone before you know it. Now consider Goats Do Roam. Nice wine, failed name, lousy gag. For one thing, too many changes. For another, you might say ‘Goats roam . . . ’ but surely not ‘Goats do roam . . . ,’ and there’s little hope of making wit from fabricated phrases. As for

Cat’s Pee on a Gooseberry Bush, I’ll say only that anyone who says that what Sauvignon smells like should put his face in a litter box to get closer to reality and farther from strained wit.

I admit to being merely a qualified fan of Marilyn Merlot because as it happens I’ve never tasted it. I admire from afar, as it were. Marilyn is an icon from an age when the word was rarely used. Now it’s used all the time for anybody at all, and it is meaningless to most people. To me it means either someone I’ve never heard of (the intent is to make me think I should have) or someone I’ve heard far too much and wish would go away. For support I turned to The New York Times website and asked a list of stories in which icon had appeared. The site came back with more than ten thousand. From the past 30 days.

I looked at a few of them and concluded that most of the people cited as icons don’t have what Broadway people call legs. No, not the rapper Big Daddy Kane. Not Bobby Plump, despite his Frisbee-sized pork-tenderloin sandwiches; nor even failed NFL quarterback Art Schlichter, even though he was the ‘center of a recruiting competition between Woody Hayes and Bo Schembechler.’

No, Marilyn Monroe is an icon who’s stayed an icon. Wine or no wine, she still means something to a large audience, some of whom hadn’t been born before her death in 1962. If Chad Ochocinco, the showboat pass-receiver of the Cincinnati Bengals, thinks he can match that, he’s welcome to try.

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There never was much money in wine writing and often there’s decidedly less in wine blogging, but blogging is worth the superhuman effort involved when its admittedly few rewards include dining at Convivio on splendid handmade pasta while the beautiful Egle Armani and the relentless Lisa Klinck-Shea fight over me. In my dreams, anyway.

Egle Capilupi Armani was presenting the wines her husband makes in the Valdadige DOC zone—the valley of the river Adige as it runs south from the region of Trentino-Alto Adige and into the Veneto, where it sweeps east to and through Verona on its way to the Adriatic south of Venice. A wall of low but steep-sloped mountains separates the river from Lake Garda, and the castles thereabouts give this stretch of countryside the name Terra dei Forti, or Land of [the] Fortresses. It’s beautiful territory. I first saw it about two decades ago when I was visiting Masi’s Dottore Sandro Boscaini, [‘the Lion of the Veneto’] and, as with most places in Italy, I’m ready to return any minute. The Illyrians, who originated in Greece, planted the region’s first vines in the 7th or 6th centuries BC and the Ar-manis got in-to the act rather later, but wine is still the fam-ily business.

                 Egle and Al-bino Armani

The current owner (and wine-maker) Albino Armani puts the year 1607 on his labels because that was the year a distant ancestor, Domenico Armani bought a parcel of land with ‘trees and grapevines,’ according to a deed that is the first dated proof of Armani wine-making. There could have been earlier efforts: The land Domenico bought had been his father’s. I mention all this only because here in our still-young republic we often have a short view of historical age, and a little perspective is useful. (I’m thinking of the advertise-ment for a trace-your-roots website in which a delighted customer crows about tracing his family back to ‘before the Civil War!’)

Convivio being known for what the Brits used to call ‘good chop’, I deployed a couple of members of my posse, Al Fresco, the picnic fanatic and outdoor muralist, and Manny Frego, a devil-may-care former cantor in the ghetto of Rome. The pastas were tortelli d’amatrice (wee rectangular ravioli with a sauce of tomato, guanciale [pork cheek], cheese and pepper) and malloreddus (Sardinian saffron gnochetti sauced with crab and sea urchin), and there were rustic fegatini (chicken-liver crostini with onions cooked in marsala). For these Egle unlimbered her husband’s 2009 Pinot Grigio Corvara [single-vineyard] Valdadige D.O.C. (ABV 13%, $20).

It was delightful. Not at all the sort of rinse-and-forget Pinot Grigios produced in  industrial volume in the Veneto, the Corvara owes its firm body and Durante nose (lots of peaches in there) to vines 15 to 40 years old and the use of passito [dried] grapes. Much depends on the weather each year—the percentage (10-20) of the passito grapes used and the manner of drying them. They’re stemmed on the vine and left hanging in fine weather; when humidity threatens they’re laid out in plastic flats and stacked  indoors in the attic-like ventilated drying rooms that are known as frutai.

We went red for the main event–scottadito di agnello [baby lamb chops] and tagliata [sliced steak]. For these Egle brought out the Foja Tonda trio: 2007, 2006 and 2005. The ’07 is D.O.C. Terradeiforti (ABC 13.3%, $20). The ’06 (13.5, $20) and ’05 (13.85%) are I.G.T.s (Indicazione Geografica Tipica), the looser classification that allows for the kind of innovation and experimentation that the French, for example and to their cost, refuse to countenance.

Foja Tonda or Round Leaf is the dialect name of a grape that is only marginally better known as Casetta [Italy has these mystery varieties by the long ton]. This is not the Foglia Tonda found in Tuscany but, says Egle, a variety indigenous to the Adige Valley and cultivated since ancient times until the locals, fed up with its stingy yields, abandoned it. It was Albino who rescued it from extinction.

The 2007—from the first year of D.O.C. status–was pleasing but Al thought it a little shy,  wanting a little more time to develop. The 2006—from the last year of I.G.T.—provided what Manny called ‘a happy glassful indeed.’ The ’05, on the other hand, was pretty much other-planetary, a truly delicious wine that we all kept going back too, even through dessert and coffee, and the little ceremony known to wine scribblers as Someone Else Getting the Check.

And then it was all over—Paradise lost! The bottles werfe empty. Egle and La Klinck-Shea ceased fighting over me; indeed, they declared peace and promised to devote themselves to more constructive activities. I could swear that at least one of them mentioned shopping.

Convivio is at 45 Tudor City Place, basically 100 feet west of First Ave. and one flight up from 42^nd St. The food, décor and atmosphere were fine and the service excellent. And tolerant: No one called Security, even when we got a little jolly.