Free The Juice by Jay McInerney Page B

Giselle Strauss.)
    As successful as he was, Lichine was always undercapitalized, according to Sacha, and he had lavish tastes. In the sixties he sold his company to get access to working capital, staying on as president until business disagreements prompted him to walk out after three years. Unfortunately, under the terms of the contract, he was banned from using the name Alexis Lichine Selections. Like Halston, the fashion designer, he’d sold his own name (in fact to the same company, Norton Simon). This clouded his later years, according to Sacha, although he continued to run Prieuré-Lichine and to write about wine, publishing and revising the influential
Alexis Lichine’s New Encyclopedia of Wines & Spirits
and
Alexis Lichine’s Guide to the Wines and Vineyards of France
, his son serving as designated driver on the research expeditions for the latter. “The image I retain is of him tasting, of us tasting together. He disliked mediocrity, which made him a difficult father, but he taught me how to taste.
    “I don’t think the American wine market would be nearly as evolved as it is without him,” says Sacha, who sold Prieuré in 1999 and is the proprietor of a premium provencal rosé estate called Château d’Esclans. By the time his father died at his beloved Prieuré in 1989, his adoptive country was in the grip of a wine boom that shows no signs of abating to this day. And his inevitable advice, when asked how one learns about wine, remains invaluable: “Buy a corkscrew, and use it.”

The Retro Dudes of Napa
    Are we still in the Napa Valley? Certainly not the Napa I’m familiar with. We have turned off Highway 29 into a dense housing development, a maze of nearly identical, recently constructed single-family residences. I’ve spent the day at some of the valley’s iconic wineries, touring cellars gleaming with stainless steel tanks, fragrant with new oak barrels, admiring houses featured in
Architectural Digest
and
Wine Spectator
. My driver, Dan Petroski, works by day at Larkmead, one of Napa’s premier producers, but he’s off duty now. Petroski, who studied wine making in Sicily before moving to Napa, has a personal wine-making project, Massican, named after a mountain range in the southern Italian region of Campania, and produces crisp, intensely flavored white wines from Sauvignon Blanc, Ribolla Gialla, and Viognier. And he has a band of brothers engaged in similarly arcane wine-making ventures.
    It seems as if we have been driving past the same houses for ten minutes when we finally spot the number we’re looking for and turn in to a driveway that leads us through backyards behind the housing development. Finally we emerge, as if through a time warp, into a sprawling vista of vineyards and orchards stretching all the way to the Mayacamas range to the west, foregrounded by a bright yellow nineteenth-century Queen Anne–style bungalow and an unpainted barn that looks as if it’s about to fall over. It’s a real through-the-looking-glass transition, and not a bad metaphor for the new world I’m about to discover. I’m about to meet the Retro Dudes of Napa.
    Napa is known for big Cabernets bred from big fortunes chasing big scores, but there’s another school of wine making here, composed in part of those who work at the big wineries by day and in their spare time pursue their passion for quirky, individualistic, artisanal wines. They produce a few hundred cases, using purchased grapes. And while they have different approaches, they seem to share a common goal of creating wines that express the character of the vineyards of origin and a relative distrust of high technology. The 1903 farmhouse owned by Steve Matthiasson and his wife, Jill Klein Matthiasson, seems like the perfect setting for a gathering of this tribe.
    Matthiasson works as a vineyard consultant for top Cabernet producers such as Araujo and Spottswoode. He seems, in alternating sentences, both intensely earnest and offhandedly