Wine at Lucien Le Moine

Lucien le Moine cellar Image from lacavestore.com

    The perfect place for an education on centuries-old wine-making techniques is in a centuries-old wine cellar, such as the one I was standing in—seventeenth-century construction—in Beaune, France, last June. The large wooden beams, stone walls, arched stone ceiling, cool air, and redolence of aged wine gave testimony to what Rotem, co-owner, with her husband, Mourin, of Lucien le Moine winery, was recounting about making wine, 

    At Lucien le Moine, Rotem said, they make wine the traditional way, eschewing (if not actually scorning) faster, more modern methods. "Time is our best ally," Rotem said: the more time, the better the wine. At her winery, wines age long in oak barrels, harkening to the days when parents would buy a bottle of wine at the birth of a child, of that year's vintage, and open it at that child's wedding, many years later. So could it be with a bottle of Lucien le Moine wine. 

     Rotem and Mourin don't use sulfites in their wines because the lees, left to dissolve in the barrel, act as a preservative. Rotem puts it colorfully on the website: "The lees help the wines develop their natural energy and their freshness,…a tranquil and constant energy" that works with its best ally, time, to make a superior wine.

    Was it superior? We moved to the seventeenth-century tasting room to find out. "Inhale the odor of the wine," Rotem instructed, "then swirl it [don't swirl first], then sip it." Savor the taste. Recognize the difference in the second sip. Where did the taste linger? Did it remain in the sensory memory long after (days after) the wine had been drunk? 

    Rotem debunked one myth after another. The "legs" on the glass after the wine has been swirled are meaningless, she said. It doesn't matter what you eat with which wine; the important thing is that the food doesn't overwhelm the wine. Forget analogies ("hints of blackberries, plums, leather…"). "If you want to taste strawberries," Rotem said, "buy a basketful at the market." 

    The important things to consider when buying wine, Rotem instructed, are the date, the cru (the group of vineyards), the winery, and the very vineyard itself. Each vineyard on the spine of mountain above Beaune has a different terroir and therefore a different appellation. In this one wine you can taste the rock of the soil; in this other one you can taste the weather of that couloir. Each knoll, each year, each season produces a different taste. It isn't the name of the grape or the name of the vineyard that is important but the precise name of the village, the cru (go after grand or premiere cru), the aging—look at the date and, if you can remember it, I suppose, the weather at that cru that year. Look for well aged wine. The way they make it at Lucien le Moine.

    It wasn't a bunch of bosh. The wines I tasted at Lucien le Moine that day were superb. The taste of the grand cru wine stayed on my palate—remained in my sensory memory—for two days. It was that good.

[A case of 2019 Lucien le Moine clos St. Denis grand cru sells for $2,296. Just in case you wanted to know.]

    

    

The Slaughter of Owls

     I'm sorry to report that the US Fish and Wildlife Service is slaughtering barred owls in the Pacific Northwest. The barred owl, they say, is an aggressive species native to the eastern side of the United States that is moving into the Pacific Northwest, displacing the northwest-native spotted owl, the notorious icon of the timber wars of the eighties and nineties.

Northern spotted owl. Photo by Frank D. Lospolluto, on savetheredwoods.org 

Spotted owls need old-growth habitat; thus the conservationists' argument that cutting old-growth forests for timber was detrimental to the spotted owl, an endangered species. So timber sales were challenged in court, and again and again, the spotted owl won. Ostensively, the cutting stopped, although in actuality it only slowed.

    And yet the spotted owl has continued its downward spiral, and it seems that those mean bullies, the barred owls, are to blame. 

    So, again we're going to slaughter a species? Think: buffalo, wolves, coyotes. Think: passenger pigeons.

    But Elizabeth Kolbert, environmental writer for the New Yorker, tells us to also think hedgehogs in the Hebrides, rabbits in Australia, mongooses in Hawaii—introduced animals that wrought havoc in native populations of birds and mammals. Where we made the problem, some conservationists say, we have a moral obligation to try to fix it—to rid the Uist Islands of hedgehogs, Australia of rabbits, Hawaii of the mongoose—and the Pacific Northwest of the barred owl. US Fish and Wildlife has concluded that the demise of the spotted owl arose "almost certainly owing to the human transformation of the landscape"—i.e., destruction of old-growth forests, inviting the barred owl into spotted owl territory. 

Barred owl. Photo by Fyn Kynd on savetheredwoods.org 

    So, if we caused the endangerment of the spotted owl, are we not obligated to do what we can to reverse that trajectory?

    My heart, not to mention my mind, doesn't know where it rests because a beautiful barred owl lives in my woods. I cannot bear to think of someone shooting it. I can't bear to think of my nights empty of the barred owl's calls. I can't bear to think of that beautiful bird, that one particular bird, deliberately shot. I love the northern spotted owl in general, but I love the barred owl of my own nights in particular.

    But Fish and Wildlife has identified two main threats to the spotted owl's continued survival: competition from barred owls and habitat loss.

    Nonetheless, both the BLM and the US Forest Service are even now offering timber sales in old-growth and large-tree forests of the Applegate. Wouldn't it be a better solution to the demise of the spotted owl to stop destroying this habitat? Why have we chosen slaughter of birds and of trees instead of keeping the trees and, consequently, perhaps, keeping the owl, as well?

    I recognize the conundrum of invasive species brought into an environment by human acts. I don't know the answer. Still, I say to Fish and Wildlife: Stay out of my woods. Leave my barred owl alone.