On Location...

Windsor, Calif., USA

June 27, 2006

by Bruce Schoenfeld

The wine list at John Ash, off River Road in Sonoma, has earned a Best of Award of Excellence from the Wine Spectator. But I’m certain it hadn’t ever seen wines like these until the other night:

*A sharp, spicy varietal Furmint from Hungary’s Tokaj region;

*A Yellow Muscat with a nose like Chanel No. 5;

*A blend of Furmint, Harslevelu and Moscatel with 46 grams of residual sugar, yet enough acid to serve as a match for almost any food.

A group of eight Hungarians, including the winemaker Laszlo Gerwald of a Tokaj-based winery called Andressy, was traveling through Napa and Sonoma, visiting properties and tasting wines. For many of them, it was their first time in California.

I happened to be in Sonoma on assignment, and we made plans to meet. In 2004, I’d spent time with Gerwald in the Balaton region of Hungary, where he’d once made millions of bottles wine annually under the Communists. He served as my guide in my quest for Hungary’s rare heirloom grapes, oddities like Keknyelu and Zenit that are rarely encountered outside Hungary – or in it, for that matter.

Now I was his guide. For one meal, at least.

The plan was for our party of 12 to sample four Hungarian whites made by Gerwald with the starters, and then four American reds with the main course. For dessert, we’d crack two bottles of sweet Tokaji wine that Gerwald also had stowed in an apparently bottomless case.

The Hungarian wines were just as exotic and delicious as I’d remembered them. The three-grape blend, especially, was wonderfully delicate, yet seemed to pair with anything I put in my mouth, from the sashimi-grade hamachi to the bitter greens served beside it.

Then it was my turn. Off the wine list, I ordered a 1993 Williams Selyem Olivet Lane Pinot Noir ($200) and a 2001 Peter Michael Les Pavots ($190). I wanted to show him both sides of Napa/Sonoma, the elegance and the power.

The Williams Selyem showed beautifully. I’d visited with the property’s winemaker, Bob Cabral, earlier in the day, so I had that property’s quintessential Russian River Valley and Sonoma Coast Pinots on my mind. This wine, made by founder Burt Williams, was lithe and fragrant and very much alive.

The Les Pavots, a Bordeaux blend, was fully ripe and showing every bit and more of its 15.2 percent alcohol. The Hungarians, whose wines typically weigh in at 11 to 12 percent, were flabbergasted. But they agreed they could taste California in every sip. Surprisingly, as the minutes passed, they all decided they preferred the Les Pavots to the Williams Selyem. “We liked the Pinot Noir very much,” said Odon Kiraly, the Hungarian trade commissioner in Los Angeles, who was anchoring the Hungarian-speaking table. “Then we started drinking this,” he pointed to the Les Pavots, “and forgot about that.”

I’d brought two wines with me, so I opened those next. The first was a Dunham Frenchtown Vineyard 2002 Syrah from Walla Walla. The second was a ringer: a 2001 Oreno from Tuscany’s Tenuta Sette Ponti. The Oreno is a Cabernet Sauvignon-Sangiovese blend, but to me it showed as many New World characteristics as the California wines.

The Dunham was my wine of the night, as Washington wines often are for me. Gerwald was impressed but at little baffled by the way it had one stylistic foot in Washington and one in the Rhone. “This wine is like classical music,” he said. “To understand it, you have to listen to it again and again.”

I was baffled that he seemed to like the Pavots and the Oreno better than the Dunham and the Williams Selyem. Clearly, our palates were different, which is suppose is to be expected, considering how different our wine experiences have been. But shouldn’t old-world winedrinkers like old-world wines best?

Some wines can transcend any cultural divide. At the end of the meal, Gerwald opened a bottle of his 2000 Tokaji Essenszia, one of the world’s sweetest wines. The alcohol was 10 percent, which is high for an Essenszia, but the wine smelled and tasted like ripe apricots and flowed like honey.

“This is where the gods live,” Gerwald said. I didn’t disagree.