Wine lovers on wine and the vinous life.
For most of my readers, Ian D’Agata needs no introduction. I consider Ian to be the top Italian wine expert (and author) living today. Not constrained to the Italian peninsula, though, he is extremely well-versed in wines from France, Germany and the world over. Ian is also a Renaissance man, having trained as a medical doctor before coming to the world of wine. He recently moved to Shanghai, China to take the post of Editor-in-Chief of the TS wine review (become a member HERE) and the Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) of TasteSpirit, China’s leading media and education company, including a wine school with centers in eight different metropolitan Chinese cities, a digital wine magazine with 3 Million private users, and international conferences and events on wine and food with world-renowned experts in their field. In essence, Ian is a busy man. But he graciously gave of his time to join us at By the Bottle for this segment.
What wines do you have standing up right now?
Alsace and Franken Sylvaner (both dry and late harvest); dry and especially late harvest Riesling from anywhere in the world but especially the Saar, Mosel and Ruwer; Pinot Noir from Burgundy and Oregon; old Napa Cabs and Bordeaux; Niagara wines; and wines made from Italy’s native grapes. I have a lot of bottles standing because I am tasting and drinking all the time.
What’s the last great wine you drank?
Petrus 1998, but it’s not anywhere near being ready to drink. And a litany of Mosel BAs and TBAs.
Are there any classic wines that you only recently had for the first time?
No. I have been drinking and tasting since the late 70s at a fairly unimaginable clip and so I can safely say there isn’t a single world wine I don’t know well, though clearly there are areas of, for example, Spain, Portugal and South Africa that I do not know as well as those who live there or who work with those wines.
Describe your ideal drinking experience (when, where, what, how).
Professional or non-professional?
Professional: tasting by myself at my own pace sixty to eighty samples from one region over the course of a day, and doing so year after year with each new vintage so as to build up a tasting memory and palate; or with a knowledgeable winery owner discussing his grapes, wines and terroirs, again without anyone else in the room (save for very few exceptions).
Non-professional: in a romantic and really very good restaurant without too many other people around but with a spectacular view (the sea, a mountain lake, a waterfall, a skyline) in the company of my loved one.
(Note: I prefer to taste alone at wineries so I can concentrate on what it is people are saying and because I find they open up more when there’s only one person in the room they know and trust. After hours, I prefer to be myself or just with a loved one because in my work I spend all day surrounded by dozens of people I need to talk with, and listen to and so when I finally have down time, I want it to be pretty intimate and as far away from others as possible…)
What’s your favorite wine no one else has heard of?
Roussin de Morgex (careful, it’s not Roussin, those are two different grapes).
What wine should everybody drink before the age of 21?
A Sauternes or high-quality Mosel BA with some age on it (say 5 years or so, that way it’s still plenty sweet but with the added complexity brought on by a little old age). Unless the individual in question hates sweets, I guarantee it will change his or her life. It did mine: I had a 1976 Mosel Auslese Eiswein (back then German wine law required that the label specify if it was an Auslese, BA or TBA Eiswein; as you know, it was changed in 1981) in 1980 and I’ve never forgotten it.
What wine should nobody drink until the age of 40?
Do the 40 years of age refer to the person or the wine?
I actually love to drink wine when it’s young and then again and again to see how it develops over the years. But I guess Vintage Port would be one wine that I’d let age that long before cracking (literally) it open. Or some Madeiras.
Who in wine — winemakers, winery owners, writers, retailers, collectors — active today do you admire most?
That’s a really tough question to answer, because I run the risk of forgetting someone, and besides the list is almost endless, given how long I’ve been in wine and all the people I’ve met. So, I’ll limit myself to Jean-Claude Berrouet and Aubert de Villaine, but it’s almost unfair to do so with respect to the many other wonderful people I have met and learned from over the years. For example: Maurizio Castelli; Sandro Boscaini; Roberto Conterno; the Rapuzzi family of Ronchi di Cialla; Aldo Vajra; Maurizio Zanella; Lorenza Sebaste and Marco Pallanti (Castello di Ama); Emanuela Stucchi Prinetti (Badia a Coltibuono); Giovanni Manetti (Fontodi); Giuseppe Mazzocolin (Felsina); Emilio Bulfon; Catherine Faller; the Trimbachs; Olivier Humbrecht; Egon Muller; Christine Vernay and Paul Amsellem; Philippe Guigal; Pierre Lurton; Baptiste Guinadeau; Anne-Claude Leflaive; Angelo Pavan and the Pennacchetti family (Cave Spring Winery, Ontario); Jim Warren; Brian Croser; Serena Sutcliffe; Margaret Rand; Stephen Tanzer; Burton Anderson; John MacDonald (past head of the Rare Wine and Spirits store of the LCBO in Toronto); Bruce Levitt, Mark Ball, Charles Knapp, Lian Zerafa, Brad Fine (the last five all friends and collectors); Alessandro Bulzoni; the Trimani family; Clara Viscogliosi, Massimo Comparini, Michele Longo, and others still.
If you allow though, I’d like to single out five really important people in my wine life who are no longer with us but whom I have never forgotten and are still with me in some measure every day. They are, in alphabetical order: Laurence Faller, Bruno Giacosa, David Lett, Orfeo Salvador, and Steven Spurrier.
Do you count any wine as guilty pleasures?
No, I’m Catholic, so feeling guilty and learning to enjoy it is a way of life.
Has a wine ever brought you closer to another person, or come between you?
Countless friends and I have gotten closer because of wine. By contrast, wine has never come between me and anyone because it is my life’s work: so, should someone not understand or accept that, then they cannot be a part of my life.
What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a wine recently?
I learn something different from wine every time I drink one, but the really interesting/important stuff I learned years ago, so “recently” I mostly gather confirmations of what I learned years before. But like I said, one really learns something new every day, all you need to do is listen to others and taste away.
What moves you most in a wine?
Balance. Which is exactly what moves me (and I look for) in people.
Which styles do you especially enjoy drinking?
Late harvest noble rot-affected white wines (more so than passito/air-dried/passerillé wines).
How do you organize your wines?
In my cellar? By country. Then I just go in there and throw everything up in the air trying to desperately find the wine I want but have no idea where exactly I put it.
What wine might people be surprised to find in your racks?
I will try any and all wines, so my cellar is a real mixed bag. But I guess people would be surprised if they ever were to see a “natural” wine that stinks, because I literally hate them, and view them as an absolute plague born out of ignorance. Like it or not there is a real scientific base to winemaking and if there isn’t then the wine is almost invariably flawed and there is nothing, I repeat nothing, good or redeeming about wine flaws. Grape juice left to its “natural” ways turns to vinegar, not wine. This “natural wine is good no matter what” mentality is just the umpteenth and latest craze to hit the wine world and we’ve all seen shades of this before. Decades ago it was oak and we had all these horrible, caricatural butterscotch/caramel/vanilla-loaded New World Chardonnays laughably getting scored 90+ when they were beyond awful and literally undrinkable. Then red wines made from overripe grapes and a boatload of residual sugar. Or Italian wines supposedly made with 100% of one variety when they were clearly anything but. And so, no, you will have never found and never will find any such wines in my cellar, at no time, ever; and so, yes, you’d be really surprised to find one.
What’s the best wine you’ve ever received as a gift?
I don’t feel comfortable receiving wine as a gift for a variety of reasons and so I shy away from that and most people who know me know not to do so. But to answer your question, though not really a gift in the strict sense of the world, it was more a combination of the two, a wine I gifted to someone and the one he gifted back to me. Many, many, many years ago, when I was just starting out in wine, I brought over to a friend’s house a Barolo 1971 to enjoy together before dinner. My friend’s father, a super-super knowledgeable professional wine person (one of the most important wine-wise in the country I lived in at that time), entered the house and walked past us, headed upstairs. He stopped momentarily to say hi (and probably check up on what we were up to) and we offered him a glass of the Barolo. Well, you need to realize the guy was a bit of a snob, a likeable one, but a wine snob nonetheless so we were really surprised that he sat down with us and talked wine for a while sipping on the Barolo. Now I’ll never know if the Barolo was really that good or if the guy was just tickled pink that these two young whippersnappers were happy to have the old geezer there drinking with us, but anyways, at one point he suddenly gets up and walks away without saying anything. We thought he had something urgent to take care of and that that was the last we’d see of him, but wouldn’t you know it, he comes back about twenty minutes later holding a small green German wine glass of a delicately pale golden yellow liquid, telling us simply: “Ok you two, try this, it’s the best wine Canada has ever made”. It turns out it was one of the earliest vintages of an Ontario Icewine ever made (so you realize I am referring to the late 1970s) and by far the best wine ever produced in the country to that point in time. It was so good that even an eighteen- or nineteen-years old individual could figure it out. It was a marvelous wine and a marvelous moment, for it taught me so much about wine (the camaraderie, the learning, the fact that upstart countries can make amazing wines, that you always need to keep an open mind, etc…etc…). So that wine was a real “gift” because it provided me with a life-defining moment. In more ways than one.
How have your drinking tastes changed over time?
I find most people will tell you that as they aged their tastes veered from the big and burly Cabs to the finer Pinot Noirs. Not me. I have always loved late harvest noble rot-affected wines or good icewines-eisweins from day one and still today they are my favorite wines.
You’re organizing a dinner party. Which three people from the wine world, dead or alive, do you invite?
Henri Jayer, Steven Spurrier and Ferruccio Biondi-Santi.
What wines are you embarrassed not to have drunk yet?
There aren’t any.
What do you plan to drink next?
An authentic Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee or a perfectly aged Islay, Highlands or Campbeltown Single Malt.